Short Story: “The House of Boredom”

Markus Grady smiled and laughed and slapped backs and thanked people for a gift that he was not happy to get. His employers in the Ministry of Works, women and men whom he neither respected nor liked, had in view of his years of service seen fit through some advancement rule to favor and congratulate him with a promotion and a raise. He was twenty-two years, now, into his work procuring truesilver for the walls around Queen’s Bower. The usual career was thirty. His raise amounted, per year, to seventy ducats.

            Markus Grady was in his opinion the only true man in truesilver procurement. Everyone else now working in the office was either a woman or a fata, and fatae were almost women.

            Markus’s father, Grady Lask, had served with honor in the proud wars; moreover Grady Lask had grown up in one of those villages where everyone of a certain age had served in the great war against the Adamantine Host, including both of Markus’s paternal grandparents and most of his great-aunts and great-uncles. Men had been more manly then, and women had also, he averred.

            “—fourteen years in the Raj, in service there,” someone was prating. “Herbert was lost then, but—”

            Markus sighed and wandered into the kitchen, where Eswral, in her happy-promotion-Markus sash, was fiddling with one of the debugger cassettes for the coffeemaker. “You didn’t like your party much better, did you?” he asked Eswral.

            She flicked her head back and forth no and her funereal cypress-green wood-fata’s eyes looked enormous and exhausted. Before her own promotion she had mimeographed many of the same kinds of documents for the procurers that Markus produced; now she reviewed supposed errors in those documents, occasionally signed off on truesilver research and development for the Ministry’s Office of Futures, and seemed for the most part a lot happier. It surprised Markus to see her look so sad for him, or because of him.

            “You okay, Eswral?” Markus asked.

            Eswral Riel Síreth yanked at the magnetic tape in the debugger, murmured a few incantations, yanked at the tape again, then started winding it back int to left-hand side of the cassette. Once that was done she fed the cassette into the coffeemaker and turned the machine on. A pleasing burbling sound started up. “Feeling a bit better now,” she said.

            “Was it like this when you were younger?” Markus asked her. Then he said “Never mind.”

            “I wonder,” she said. The coffeemaker kept burbling. Out in the big room the person talking about Herbert’s service in Equatorial Albany was still going on and on.

            “Of course it’s Kingsport, on the Kingsflood, when a man is on the throne. Or a few other kinds of things too besides a man, I suppose. Anyway, Herbert when he was stationed in Queensport—”

            “Have you ever read some of Weatherhead’s adventure novels?” Eswral suddenly asked Markus just as their coffee was beginning to be expressed into the office’s battered old copper coffeepot.

            “My dad wouldn’t let me. He’d talk about all the things they got wrong.”

            “He fought in one of the wars against Smier?”

            “Not exactly against Smier. More some of the bush wars in Equatorial…yes.”

            “My parents are a lot like some of the people you hear about resisting Policy in the Equator,” said Eswral meditatively. “They didn’t want electrification, radiofication, water purification, alterenchantment, population policy, health counseling, resource rationalization, monarchism, communism. With them that has to do with their age, though. Mid-three-digits, and that was when I was born.” The coffeemaker dinged. “Hazelnut, right?” she said to Markus, raising her hands over their pair of cups.

            He nodded. Eswral—he looked at her the way he might have looked at a medlar, or at a demitasse, something small and serving mostly as a conduit of a larger force, a vivifying force like food or drink, into his existence. What force that was, in Eswral’s case, was difficult to define. It wasn’t sex; she was a fata, and probably a homosexual, and Markus was in any case mostly-happily married. It wasn’t death; fatae lived practically forever barring misadventure and Eswral’s work had nothing to do with blood magic or with war. It was a comfort, but some kind of public, civic comfort. Eswral was a bite-sized case of it. He supposed—and she would have agreed with them—that they were all bite-sized cases of many things, more or less, here in this office in the Ministry of Works without the grave problems that the Ministry of Cults, for instance, was having.

            “Tide goes in, tide goes out, things get bought, things get sold,” someone was intoning outside the kitchen.

            “They never have much to say, do they?” Markus asked Eswral. She just gave him a wry, tense smile, and continued murmuring the hazelnut incantation as they commenced to sip at the rims of their coffee cups.

 ❦

Neri Gwaient Gwaifin made them choose between lawn games and watching a movie for the “team” part of Markus’s promotion party, which was also supposed to make up for a lackluster birthday party. Everyone other than Markus and Eswral wanted to do both. Neri popped in a videotape of a historical war movie, not about the wars in which Grady Lask and his progenitor and progenitrix had fought but about something much further back, before Maldry had incorporated the fatae or begun establishing the Equatorial Provinces, before the Ministry of Works or the Ministry of Cults. Back when what you had happening in your life, what you were allowed or not allowed or ordered or not ordered to do, was purely a matter of your lord or lady, his or her vicinity. It had some things in common with the nostaliga that Markus and Eswral had just been talking about, but Eswral, seeing it dramatized and flickering, found that it now turned her stomach. She had no interest in telling Markus this, certainly less than no interest in telling Markus why.

            They moved on to croquet. Eswral and Neri, as usual, both played it ungraciously—sending each other constantly, sending Markus or Ledelly or Saran Gom constantly, sometimes even yelling “Fore!” when they did. Saran Gom got petulant about it. Something about his petulant tone of voice made Markus realize that he was the person who had been prating about tides earlier.

            Saran Gom’s job was to cross-check two or three different kinds of receipt that were kept of some of the truesilver procurement deals. There were almost never discrepancies in the receipts; he spent most of his time on the job singing, and he had a good voice, a lovely tenor that the others generally enjoyed hearing when the door to his office was open. It had not occurred to Markus that he might be a sore loser when it came to croquet, any more than it had occurred to him that he might say banal things about the tide when he did not have to.

            Eswral knew Saran Gom a bit better than did Marcus. His behavior surprised her less. The receipt cross-checking had almost a medicinal effect, as far as she had seen, on some of his more obnoxious habits of thought. It soothed him. He got both fatuous and frenetic otherwise, as today. She would offer, she thought, to go home with him—not for the usual euphemistic reason so many had or claimed to have these days—rather to sit with him and watch a movie together or listen to some music, that same lovely style that he liked to sing. He would calm down eventually, in a relaxed evening with a friend from work. They would put on Hold’s Harpers or The Last Auroras, something big and sweeping and dramatic and set in the distant past, and Saran Gom would eat popcorn and Eswral would eat grapes and cheese, and they would doze and he would relax and she would send him home.

            They had, as fatae, at once compressed and extended feelings of time. When she looked in her photo albums at the cat that she had had as a child, she was looking back more than a hundred years; the photos, were they to be taken out from behind the yellowed cellophane, would have been brittle to the touch. She experienced those hundred years as far shorter than a human being would have, yet she did experience them, and she was still young. The cat, Missy or Peachy they had called her, had been dead for eighty-seven years, and had not had a short life. She had suffered towards the end, and it had taken Eswral decades to be able to look at her kitten pictures without tearing up, yet those decades had been as a year or two, maybe, for an entity like Markus.

            “Imagine Maldry before all this, before the Ministry of Works, before the invasions of the Equatorial Provinces…” Neri was saying. “Well there are still older people around, fatae especially, who were there. It’s nice to think about going back to that. Would we really want to? People are more content when they don’t know how much better it could be. That might have been the case back then.”

            “I think it’s the case in some of the Equatorial Provinces even now, Neri,” Ledelly said. She had gotten her croquet ball, the red one, through one of the return hoops, and now stood ready to send Markus’s or Saran Gom’s, blue or yellow, into the tall grass.

            Markus was thinking again of the great war against Smier and the even greater war against the Manzamo Islands a generation before that. The Equatorial Provinces, Smier, Hatsuba, Qanprur, Noriel, Greycester, all those old tyrannical bastions of the monstrous or the divine. He worked in procurement. He worked for the Ministry of Works, not the Ministry of Cults. He was a man, not a woman or a fata.

            “Fore!” said Ledelly, smirking at Neri and Eswral as she sent Markus’s ball.

Short Story: “Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory”

Caveat lector: There’s a lot of deliberately-unsettling sex stuff in this one.

❦

“Female heterosexuality is in crisis,” you hear tell, “and has been since Genesis 3. You know this. I know this. I don’t think we need to discuss it any longer.”

            When you are seven you meet your best friend, snaggletoothed and free. In your early days seventy times sevenfold you love her. When you are fourteen you realize that in certain lights, in certain kinds of clothing (kinds for which you are still, some say, too young), she looks just like Kate Beckinsale in that Van Helsing movie that your teacher put in the DVD player on the last state-mandated classless day of school. That which you thereby realize and that which you by it mean take another seven years to sink in, and by then you can flee from it, you know how to flee from it, and she is tragically not quite inclined enough to stop you.

            And so that desire that you avoid, or that need—but not as separate from yourself as a need; an unintentionality, perhaps, a telos-eschaton—contorts within you, insisting against resistance, a falling stone, a leap from a height, the needle of a compass tearing its way north through your Pauline flesh. Fucking as many guys as possible is your katechon, your Roman Empire, and it takes a lot of effort not to go on a tirade when someone makes a flippantly dogmatic remark (one way or the other) about abortion in your theology classes. Godhead was, for Mechthild, a flowing light—flow implying direction, implying inexorability. You get other images too for that inexorability, from books and movies and television focusing on “homoerotic girlbestfriend situationships” (a new set phrase, apparently—or were people saying this all along, only you, for obvious reasons, were unprivy to it?). The image of a frozen severed ear, a harassing piece of anonymous mail with two cheap dolls in it, a botched murder with a rock in a stocking.

            It stands to reason that there are occasions of sin in flight-from-reality, in trying to escape a facts-full-in-the-face full-bore brute-force understanding of who and what you are. Yet such fair-weather theologians as yours cannot simply discourage anything. Demand they instead that you should simply replace an end or a chirality that is, by their lights, phenomenon only, something that could just as well be something else, even though the replacements and the substitutions never actually work, are only ever phenomena themselves, and always leave you worse than you began. No parasamgateing yourself into a straightforward ataraxic equanimity of wholly compassed and integrated sex and love for you. You take your degree and become some kind of sacristan, and amidst the arma Christi you find for yourself Peter’s cock.

            Chastity impresses itself upon you before reality does, and you adopt it with another series of excuses, another series of motivated sweepings of your demonless inmostnesses. Will you end up worse than you did before, you wonder? That would not be the first time, if it happened. Your friend, your beautiful and kind and loving friend now married to a carpentrix out Bennington way, calls you often, still at least once a week, long luxuriant calls in which she talks to you with the greatest and sincerest worry. She wonders if you are a real person, which could be asked of a lot of people. She wonders if you are judging her, which you are too busy judging yourself to do, comforting yourself in self-condemnation not over the sereness of the present but over the commissions of the past. You are barking up the wrong damn tree, in the middle of the wrong damn desert, and she knows it, and you do not, and your flippant theologians and sunny moralists have put you no closer to learning it. You do think back, you do, to the unriven living self you once had, childish and muddy and free, and with her even then, always with her, if only you would allow her to be a forerunner for anything except deluded devastation.

            From Pimps to Pious: The Confessions of St. Augustine for Barstool Sports Readers, your poorly-considered and not-that-well-intentioned apologetics book, sits on a library bookshelf at a Newman Center that is physically falling apart. The shelf smells of dust, piss, insects; the center, weed, shit, come. You take the book down. It’s very bad. The title was intended as a joke and comes from a Wordle in which you did very badly. You are seven times five. Thus halfway through the days of our lives you are always being splattered with white paint. Father Youngtrad (not his real name) goes on and on about “Christian freedom,” but you are not convinced he knows the meaning of that term, if it has one. Why for that matter would you want to be free, when you cannot even move through the world with stability or with justice? You would only invite more judgment upon yourself, upon the empty house that you will not fill up with love, upon the sinlessness that you now prop up through the same delusion and flight from cooperation with the truth that once propped up the sins upon sins of your early days.

            Your old friend returns one day, into your life, messaging you, asking for a visit, and you say yes, either because you are stupid or because you are not that stupid. She is divorced. She arrives and she puts the moves on you. It is an unreal, flaccid, Carolinian January, and you do not need to be warm.

            “You really think you have to,” she says, “don’t you?”, with a laugh.

            “I do.”

            “You don’t; you didn’t have to face me. You have to face reality,” she says, “reality. Let me tell you about a story I read. It’s in a book of old Swiss folk tales. It’s about the Virgin Mary as a knight who seduces sad maidens.”

            “I don’t want to hear about this.”

            “Yes you do. Leaves ‘em fucked and deserted, as Brother Marquis said. Or was that one of Fresh Kid Ice’s verses? It’s been ages since I heard that song. Anyway. This is in the nineteenth century. And in our own time, I had this idea, a killer idea, so to speak, for a spec script about a hit man. Or he’s an abortion doctor—and I know you’ve had abortions, so I’m sorry about this—but it’s like one of those Luc Besson or John Woo movies about the noble hit man, you know?” She lowers her voice into Don LaFontaine territory. “In a world…where Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided two days ago…”

            You tell her that you, for one, are still a loyal daughter of the Church, and do not appreciate this flippant way of talking. She asks caustically if you really think she isn’t a loyal daughter, the way she is talking. You don’t have a good answer for that.

            And a bit more from her: “The Witch of Endor was a nice old lady who followed the rules, whatever the rules were at the time. Nicer and older than you are.”

            And a bit more from you: “But I haven’t always followed the rules. That’s been hard-fought.”

            And a bit more from her: “Because you made it hard-fought. You broke the rules to prove some stupid point about being ‘normal’—you were against the rules before you were for them, because that is what you cared about, really—and also you’re not a nice old lady.”

            And a bit more from you: “I’m not autochthonous to the nice old lady way of life, maybe, but is anyone?”

            And a bit more from her: “Really, Name? ‘Autochthonous’? Dua Lipa is still not going to fuck you. And you’re not on the royal road to being a nice old lady either, I can tell you that much.”

            And a bit more from you: “I’ve kept on the straight and narrow though. Inwardly anyway. In my mind. Pun intended.”

            And a bit more from her: “Oh dear. You could have salvaged it until that ‘pun intended’ there, Name.”

            And a bit more from you: “Maybe when I’m an old lady I’ll be nice. I’ll be happy.”

            And a bit more from her: “And you’ll just sit there and wait for that to happen? Are you listening to yourself, Name? Are you hearing what you are saying? We’re talking about facing reality, not aging into harmlessness, as if that were really a thing. I’m sure the Witch of Endor had been a nice young lady too, and Saul gets the worst of it…yet he was among the prophets.”

            And a bit more from you: “He was.”

            And a bit more from her: “So again I ask you, Name: Are you hearing what you are saying to me right now?”

            And a bit more from you: “God have mercy on me; I am.”

            That night you have a dream of Christ, the centurion’s spear-wound in His side wet and willing. What does Christ want from you? It’s obvious, but it’s not what you normally give Him, is it, throwing yourself down on your face in front of an altar, distressed and hiding, your face in your arms, your arms on the floor, hiding not from God or even from yourself but from the flippant certainties of the conservative-secular everyday? Yet hiding in God; you are not prostrate in front of this sopping, lickable gash; you are on your knees, but clear-eyed.

            Trembling you part the folds of salmon flesh, and trembling you lap up the saving tide.

Short Story: “The Abomination of Desolation”

Note: “Standalone” tag notwithstanding, this is part of a broader story cycle, but the other stories in it are not going to be made available for quite some time.

“What’s this we’re listening to, Bella?” Sydney Alter asked his granddaughter on the winding two-lane blacktop between two banks of wooded hills. It was a surly afternoon in early July and the summer sun above the Catskills was never quite there and never quite gone. Bella was twenty years old, taking a break from college because of the pandemic, and living with Sydney and his second wife Gloria as a safer alternative to making her way out to Colorado where her parents and sisters were hunkering down.

            “It’s Taylor Swift,” Bella said. “One of the albums she released last year.”

            “Very relaxing,” Sydney said. “Not the pop trash I’d have expected.”

            “Expected from Taylor Swift of from me, Grandpa?” Bella asked. Sydney was worried for a moment that he had offended her, but then she grinned at him in a way that he recognized as a peace offering and as an invitation to be in on the joke, and he was put at ease. She did not look as if she genuinely expected an answer to the question she had asked, but he decided he would give her an answer anyway—and a true and honest answer, to boot.

            “Not from you, Bella,” he said. “You play clarinet, wasn’t it, or something like that?” Bella nodded and steered the car past a waterfall that plunged down to the right-hand side of the roadway. “So you’ve got taste. I just hear most of the names of these newer artists and it makes me expect some kind of song that won’t agree with me. Your parents are probably getting to an age where they’ll start to understand this. I’m sure you will too, some day after I’m long gone.”

            “Hopefully,” said Bella. “Hopefully I’ll get to that age someday, I mean.”

            “Morbid way to put it, wouldn’t you say?” her grandfather said to her.

            “Lots of morbidity going around these days,” Bella said. She turned the car onto another state highway. The weather was getting finer. The leaves, green on the trees that overhung the road, shined with pearlescent golden light that reminded Sydney intensely of his long-ago honeymoon, which had taken place over a span of similar summer days.

            Sydney and Bella were visiting the site of Glickman’s Mountain Resort, which had limped along until 1988 and whose ruins apparently still stood overlooking the little lake in which he had gone skinny dipping after dark with the girl he had lost his virginity to, the better part of a lifetime ago. He had had his first job at Glickman’s as well and his first beer, furnished by his older cousin Alan when Sydney had been sixteen. Bella was doing her thesis about some of those old resorts in the Judaic studies department at a certain university upstate; since Sydney wasn’t driving any longer on account of his bad eyes, she had offered to ferry him out here so that he could regard his past and she could write her future.

            Bella was not necessarily Sydney’s favorite of his five grandchildren. That was probably Rachel, Bella’s first cousin, the middle child of Sydney’s firstborn Alan. Alan was named after Sydney’s cousin, Rachel and Bella after two of Alan’s sisters. Most of these people lived in the Midwest these days; Bella with her upstate university was the only grandkid who was currently in or around New York. She was therefore also the closest to Sydney’s deceased mother’s family up in New England. Bella’s sister Nessa lived with a gang of roommates in a small city in, Sydney believed, Wisconsin; he heard from that part of his family about two or three times a week most weeks and they seemed not to see calling him as too much of a chore.

            Sydney had flown out to visit that side of the family twice, in 2002 and in 2014. In 2002 they had just moved to the Midwest; Alan II had gotten a job at the Port of Cleveland and the family had been able to find a fairly nice place to park themselves that did not suffer from all the recent problems that people were getting liable to think when they thought Ohio. Bella had been barely a year old at this point and Nessa would not be born for another six months. Sydney’s memory for things like this was not what it once had been, but he seemed to recall that it had been during this stay with them, and not before or after, that Alan’s wife Cynthia had found out she was pregnant for the second time. They had all been overjoyed and, maybe unusually for parents of second daughters (Sydney wouldn’t know), Alan and Cynthia had stayed overjoyed throughout Nessa’s life so far. She would have just turned eighteen now, which made it a little weird in this day and age that she was already living with these roommates; Sydney had never really understood the specifics. It was also not entirely clear to Sydney whether or not Nessa was in college or even expected to be college-bound eventually, and Bella also did not have the world’s clearest answer for him when he would ask her, which by the time of this ride through the Catskills together he had done, by his count, three times. Bella claimed to know her little sister well, but not, she said, that well, given that she had not been able to go home for any of this summer.

            “Do any of these roads look familiar to you, Grandpa?” Bella asked him as the gizmo that was telling her where to drive them chirped and purred.

            “A little but it’s just been so long, you understand,” he said. He felt apologetic, like he was imposing on Bela even though the idea to come out here in the first place on a summer’s day like this had been one that she had suggested to him, not the other way around. She spun the steering wheel cautiously.

            “Glickman’s, Grossinger’s, Concord, Katz…” said Bella. “Fantastic names. Fascinating places.”

            “Fantastic like great,” Sydney asked her, “or fantastic like something out of a story?”

            “Both, for someone as young as me,” Bella said, which was the answer that Sydney had been afraid she would give. “It’s—I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that I can explain, really, or even that I ought to explain. You went hiking a lot when you were younger, didn’t you, Grandpa? Dad has told me that you did.” And Sydney indeed had, and Sydney nodded. He almost saw what Bella meant without Bella having to say it outright. Once back in 1974 or so Sydney and his then-fiançée, Bella’s late grandmother, had climbed Mount Washington together as part of a road trip to somewhere in the far north of Maine to visit a college friend of Rita’s who had married someone there. It had been mid-fall and the mountain was already bitterly cold and speckled with unprepossessing hoar above the blazing maple-red treeline. Yet from that chilly peak a vision had unfolded around Sydney and Rita that might as well have been a vision of hundreds of years ago or of hundreds of years from now. Woods beyond woods, New England burning bright in the still flames of its October. It might be that Bella then expected a similar eternity from the stillness and emptiness of this post-Glickman’s Catskill July, a July that Sydney still wished were full of life and motion once again. Of life maybe at least it was indeed still full; the woods that fell away from the road were after all very green, and Sydney could just make out a family of white-tailed deer grazing companionably together in the fields below some reservoir. Bella seemed impressed, even, already, by this quiet and cicada-sedate summer beauty.

            They drove on and on and reached the place where Glickman’s once had been, a country road stretching between rows of unpleasantly new-looking houses. Sydney could see bits of the resort’s overgrown golf course, which his father, a brash hater of that so-called gentlemanly game, had never let anybody in Sydney’s family use back in those days. The lake could not be seen from the road so Sydney figured they would have to get out and walk. Bella said that she had batching suit packed somewhere in her car and Sydney was happy to get into the lake in his street clothes if that was what it took for old times’ sake.

            “‘Old times’ sake’ seems to mean an awful lot to you, Grandpa,” Bella observed.

            “Well yes, it does; of course it does. Live a while; you’ll see why,” Sydney said, not quite intending for Bella to hear it as a warning. “Living for your memories is something almost everyone ends up having to do and finds themselves doing sooner or later. Actually it took it a lot longer to kick in for me than for most, if you can believe that, Bella.”

            “I can believe it, Grandpa,” Bella reassured him as she drove the car past an increasingly ominous-looking chicken wire fence.

            “Stop the car,” Sydney said urgently.

            “What? Now?”

            “Yes. Now. As soon as there’s a halfway decent pull-off.”

            “Why?”

            “Don’t argue,” said Sydney, surprising himself, worrying himself a little. “I know where we are now and you do not. I know what it ought to look like and you do not. I want you to stop the car now, Bella.” Sydney himself was affrighted by how stressed and aggrieved his sounded.

            Bella brought the Subaru to a stop that was a little bit more abrupt, maybe, than Sydney would have preferred it if he had been thinking clearly at the moment. “Okay,” she said, rattled; he could hear her breath coming in more-than-usually labored puffs. “The car is stopped. Take it easy, Grandpa. Grandpa, what’s going on?”

            “There’s a fence—a fence,” Sydney said.

            “Yes.”

            “With the name of a developer.” Sydney pointed at a sign posted on the fence. “Some casino developer. Bryce Entertainment. See?”

            “Yes. I see.”

            Sydney was more and more agitated, struggling without much success to explain to his granddaughter what made this such an enormity in his eyes. He seemed to remember that Bella considered herself an anti-capitalist, but this was not about capitalism; it was about something else, something more original yet more obscene. “Disgusting,” he said. “Abominable. A desecration. A pig in the Temple. A desecration.”

            “Of what, Grandpa?” Bella asked, eyes wide, looking and sounding downright desperate to understand. “A desecration of what? Please; I want to understand. I want to know if I can help.”

            “A desecration” was all Sydney would say. “A desecration” was all he could say. The summer sun beat down impassively on the casino developer’s construction site.

Short Story: “‘Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine’ by F.T. Marinetti (with a Critical Gloss by Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky, of the University of Pennsylvania)”

(Note: I think the translation of Marinetti to which I have access is still copyrighted, so this riff on motivated reading of political texts that makes use of that translation can’t and shouldn’t be. Complete Creative Commons free-for-all. See if I care.)

The foregoing will have prepared you for understanding one of our chief Futurist endeavors, namely the abolition in literature of the seemingly unquestionable fusion of the dual concepts of Woman and Beauty. The effect of this has been to reduce romanticism to a kind of heroic assault, launched by a warlike, lyrical male on a tower that is bristling with enemies, gathered about the divine Woman-Beauty.

Marinetti opposes the objectification of women. Some argue that he himself perpetuates the objectification of women throughout this essay in another form, but he makes it clear at the beginning that this is not his intent, and even though impact matters more than intent, the fact that Marinetti supported women having equal political rights to men as well means that we ought to take him at his word here. Our key to interpreting this must then be that he opposes the objectification of women and their treatment as mere sexual objects.

Novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer or Flaubert’s Salammbô can explain my idea. What we’re looking at is a dominant leitmotif that is threadbare and tedious, and of which we wish to rid literature and art as a whole. That’s why we are developing and proclaiming a great new idea that is circulating in contemporary life, namely the idea of mechanical beauty. Thus we are promoting love of the machine—that love we first saw lighting up the faces of engine drivers, scorched and filthy with coal dust though they were. Have you ever watched an engine driver lovingly washing the great powerful body of his engine? He uses the same little acts of tenderness and close familiarity as the lover when caressing his beloved.

Marinetti, rejecting the oppressive structures of “Western canon” writers such as Hugo and Flaubert, instead exalts the liberated eroticism of the machine—cf. Donna Haraway, Shulamith Firestone, pioneers in the field of AI-enhanced adult entertainment, etc. He strikes a blow against sex-work-exclusionary radical feminism. Before these ideas even existed, he already anticipates and refutes the idea that the social construct of romantic love is the only alternative to sexual objectification.

We know for certain that during the great French rail strike, the organizers of that subversion did not manage to persuade even one single engine driver to sabotage his locomotive. And to me that seems absolutely natural. How on earth could one of these men have injured or destroyed his great, faithful, devoted friend, whose heart was ever giving and courageous, his beautiful engine of steel that had so often glistened sensuously beneath the lubricating caress of his hand?

Marinetti rejects class reductionism and labor chauvinism. His leftism and futurism are not the ossified obsession with structure, routine, and so-called “proven” methods that are so typical of “organized labor.” One is confident that Marinetti today would support workforce flexibilization as a means of social advancement and combating all oppressive power structures. Cf. Kazan, On the Waterfront, et al.

Not an image, this, but rather a reality, almost, that we shall easily be able to put to the test in a few years’ time. You will undoubtedly have heard the comments that car owners and car workshop managers habitually make: “Motorcars, they say, are truly mysterious... They have their foibles, they do unexpected things; they seem to have personalities, souls and wills of their own. You have to stroke them, treat them respectfully, never mishandle them nor overtire them. If you follow this advice, this machine made of cast iron and steel, this motor constructed according to precise calculations, will give you not only its due, but double and triple, considerably more and a whole lot better than the calculations of its creator, its father, ever dreamed of!” Well then, I see in these words a great, important revelation, promising the not-too-distant discovery of the laws of a true sensitivity in machines! We have therefore to prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with his motorcar, so as to facilitate and perfect an unending exchange of intuitions, rhythms, instincts, and metallic discipline, absolutely unknown to the majority and only guessed at by the brightest spirits.

Here Marinetti foresees or foreshadows transhumanism and the abolition of the idea that biology is destiny. The human being for Marinetti is a creature of liberated potential, not oppressed actuality. His lack of interest in “givenness” is freeing; cf. “friendly AI” theorists; Solanas, “full automation”; Yoda, “luminous beings are we”; a Boston Globe article about putting Ted Williams on ice that I can’t find to cite right now. [Ed: How hard can this be, Chris?]

There can be no doubt that, in admitting Lamarck’s transformist hypothesis, it has to be acknowledged that we aspire to the creation of a nonhuman species in which moral anguish, goodness, affection, and love, the singular corrosive poisons of vital energy, the only off-switches of our powerful, physiological electricity, will be abolished. We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and we are not joking when we declare that in human flesh wings lie dormant. The day when it will be possible for man to externalize his will so that, like a huge invisible arm, it can extend beyond him, then his Dream and his Desire, which today are merely idle words, will rule supreme over conquered Space and Time. This nonhuman, mechanical species, built for constant speed, will quite naturally be cruel, omniscient, and warlike. It will possess the most unusual organs; organs adapted to the needs of an environment in which there are continuous clashes.

Marinetti does not put stock in the limitations of oppressive middle-class values. His feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Girlboss! [Ed: if you didn’t call him a girlboss when you brought up On the Waterfront, you shouldn’t be calling him a girlboss now.]

Even now we can predict a development of the external protrusion of the sternum, resembling a prow, which will have great significance, given that man, in the future, will become an increasingly better aviator. Indeed, a similar development can be seen in the strongest fliers among birds. You will easily understand these apparently paradoxical hypotheses if you think of the externalized will that is continually in play during spiritualist séances. What’s more, it’s certain, and you can observe it easily enough yourself, that today, ever more frequently, one comes across people from the lower classes who, though utterly devoid of any culture or education whatsoever, are nonetheless gifted with what I call the “great mechanical intuition” or “a nose for things metallic.” And that’s because those workmen have already had the experience of an education in machinery and, in a certain sense, have identified closely with it. In order to prepare for the formation of the nonhuman, mechanical species of extended man, through the externalization of his will, it is very important that the need for affection, which man feels in his veins and which cannot yet be destroyed, be greatly reduced. The man of the future will reduce his own heart to its proper function of blood distribution. The heart, by some means or other, must become a sort of stomach of the brain, which is fed systematically, so that the spirit can embark on action.

Correctly, and foreseeing the important work done by Foucault, Marinetti identifies philonormativity (not Foucault’s word, but it should have been) as a bourgeois value used as a means of restricting human potential to artificial and constricting relationship-forms. See also the concept of the “eroticism of the journey” as in my book on sexuality in the life and times of Jack Kerouac.

Today, one encounters men who go through life more or less without love, in a beautiful, steel-toned frame of mind. We have to find ways of ensuring that these exemplary beings continue to increase in number. These dynamic beings do not have any sweet lover to see at night, but instead lovingly prefer, every morning, the perfect start-up of their workshops. What’s more, we are convinced that art and literature exercise a determining influence over all classes in society, even over the most ignorant, who by some mysterious process of infiltration absorb them. We can thus either promote or retard the movement of humanity toward this form of life that is free of sentimentalism and lust. In spite of our skeptical determinism that we have to kill off each day, we believe in the value of artistic propaganda against panegyrics favoring Don Juans and ludicrous cuckolds. These two words must be purged entirely of their meaning in life, in art, and in the collective imagination. Does not the ridicule poured upon the cuckold perhaps contribute to the exaltation of the Don Juan? And the exaltation of Don Juan contributes to making the cuckold seem ever more ridiculous? Freeing ourselves from these two motifs we shall also free ourselves from the great obsessive phenomenon of jealousy, which is nothing but a by-product of a vanity that springs from Don Juanism. The whole enormous business of romantic love is thus reduced to the single purpose of preservation of the species, and physical arousal is at last freed from all its titillating mystery, from relish for the salacious and from all the vanity of Don Juanism; it becomes merely bodily function, like eating and drinking. The extended man we dream of will never experience the tragedy of old age!

[Ed: You’re missing an easy layup by not bringing up Alexandra Kollontai here.]

But it is for this reason that young men of this present age, at long last sick and tired of erotic books, of the twofold drug of sentimentalism and lust, and being at last made immune to the sickness of Love, will have to learn to systematically purge themselves of all heartaches. This they can do through daily eradication of their emotions and seeking endless sexual amusement in rapid, casual encounters with women. This frank optimism of ours is thus diametrically opposed to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, that bitter philosopher who so often proffered the tantalizing revolver of philosophy to kill off, in ourselves, the deep-seated sickness of Love with a capital L. And it is precisely with this revolver that we shall so gladly target the great Romantic Moonlight.

cf. Erika Moen, “What the Fuck’s a Cuck?”; various other works in the sex-positive feminist tradition; Eric Anderson, The Monogamy Gap; Nancy Meyers, The Parent Trap; Roderick Featherstonehaugh Brill, The Monogamy Trap; Brandon Wheek, The Parent Gap; W. Braxton Naylor, “Towards a Pornography of Epistemological Liberation”; Alex X. Valli, “Polymorphous Perversity and the Decolonial Imaginary”; Jackie Treehorn, Logjammin’; Budd Starr, Gary the Cable Bi 3: Who’s Up for an Orgy?

Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky is the Distinguished Professor of Intersectional Liberation Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Gay Right: The Anti-Assimilationist Witness of Yukio Mishima; Road Head: Jack Kerouac, Hugh Hefner, and the Pornographization of the American Dream; Inevitable: Why the Sex-Positivity Movement Will Win; and, most recently, Hamas’s Fight is Humanity’s Fight: A Guidebook for Queer Palestine Action. She lives with her Dominant, Pitiless Bruce, in Center City Philadelphia.

Short Story: “Collyridian Remains”

Antonelle Vetiver (not her real name) looked from the chopper in which she sat anticipating the first interesting thing to happen to her in years. She was dressed for the job she wanted (a movie archaeologist) rather than the job she had (a real archaeologist), in a Lara Croftish getup of cropped tank top, short shorts, heavy boots, and heavier sunglasses, with a sort of linen jacket over top of everything. The lone sands that stretched far away below her were not level; they were in a mountainous part of the world, and moreover were in it unlawfully, against the express instructions of the government of a certain country. Antonelle did not care about these things, or perhaps it would have been better and more honest to say that actually she liked them; they made her feel more like Indiana Jones and less like some functionary or stoolie. The man piloting the helicopter, Rodney Clark of Needham, Massachusetts, cared, but Antonelle was paying him a whole boatload of money for this, with an astronomical sum still to come depending on how the next part of the trip went.

Probably part of the reason she and Rodney got along so well, Antonelle thought, was that they were both New Englanders, both Massholes in fact, although other than the name of the state itself the town where she had grown up and the town where he had grown up had very little in common. Needham was a suburb of Boston, fairly affluent as far as she knew; she was from Florida, not the Florida of beaches and bikinis and alligators and hurricanes but the Town of Florida, Massachusetts, a tiny hill town, snowbound in the winter and windswept in almost all seasons, full of dirt roads and whitewashed-steepled churches and birches and beeches and elms. There had been little if anything "to do" as a girl growing up in Florida, Massachusetts, other than asking questions of the trees, or exploring abandoned buildings and the yawning no-thing of the defunct Hoosac Tunnel, or going to town meetings, or standing with the firefighters along Route 2 to get small bills from passing cars during the fire department's periodic fundraisers. Mostly at those her job had been to hand out miniature American flags as thank-you gifts. Rodney, she was sure, had had more "to do" at every stage of his early life, up until quite recently; arguably even now he did, piloting helicopters in dangerous parts of the world for a living. Even so she did feel that they had something in common. (Her old English teacher, Miss Corriveau, who, the last Antonelle had heard of her, had recently started her own makeup line on the internet, had always discouraged the future Antonelle Vetiver from saying that she, or characters in the stories that she would write, “felt” things rather than “thought” or “believed” them. In this case, though, Antonelle felt that “feel” really was the most apposite word.)

The helicopter began its descent to the open stone platform that they were using as a helipad. It predated the existence of helicopters by at least a thousand years; Antonelle’s understanding was that the area in which they were landing, now completely unpeopled and without any sign of past habitation other than a few other rock-tables like these scattered here and there in the arid hills, had last had a town of any size in the first century or two after the early Muslim expansion through the Arabian Peninsula. The wind whipping around her bread-colored hair as she prepared to step out onto proscribed soil was hot and dry, but not quite as hot or as dry as she would have expected. There was a strange and unanticipated balminess to it, especially after a decade of the kind of global warming that even her grandfather’s bridge buddy Jack Glump had to admit really was occurring. Normally she would have appreciated it, but there was something eerie about it when she looked at it in combination with what she was here to do, what she was here to study and try to prove.

There was only one source, formally, for the movement in which she was interested, a single passage in the Panarion of Saint Epiphanius of Salamis. A breadbasket against heresies; surely that was about as High Church as it was possible to get without mobbing the altar and killing and eating the priest at the end of the Eucharistic prayer.

“And who but women are the teachers of this? Women are unstable, prone to error, and mean-spirited. As in our earlier chapter on Quintilla, Maximilla and Priscilla, so here the devil has seen fit to disgorge ridiculous teachings from the mouths of women. For certain women decorate a barber’s chair or a square seat, spread a cloth on it, set out bread and offer it in Mary’s name on a certain day of the year, and all partake of the bread; I discussed parts of this rite in my letter to Arabia. Now, however, I shall speak plainly of it and, with prayer to God, give the best refutations of it that I can, so as to grub out the roots of this idolatrous sect and with God’s help, be able to cure certain people of this madness.”

Apparently Muhammad or someone close to him had believed that Trinitarian Christians held the Virgin Mary as a member of that Trinity, or a “person” of that Trinity since all the serious and intellectually-oriented Christians whom Antonelle knew insisted for some reason on making that distinction. That seemed as good a reason as the passage in Epiphanius to believe that these women, the so-called Collyridians from collyris, the cakes (speaking of bread), really had existed. Better, actually, because of how hostile Epiphanius was to them; the overt misogyny in the passage in the Panarion struck Antonelle as so obviously uncalled-for that it invited the question of whether Epiphanius had made up the crassest and most obvious “girls’ heresy” possible as an excuse to fulminate about it. Muhammad, or whoever it was who had induced him to in a few obscure verses of the fifth surah of the Qur’an imply that Christians worshiped Mary, had not held quite that hostility, not quite as obviously at any rate.

The person who had turned Antonelle on to this site had told her that local lore had it there were still Collyridian inscriptions to be seen here, documentary evidence, a smoking gun if there ever was one. Evidently one of Epiphanius’s unstable, error prone, mean-spirited women, sacrificing the collyris on a barber’s-chair altar, had found spare time in her busy schedule of being a heresiarch to become literate in Greek. Antonelle wished her joy of it, prayed for her joy even, since, as she had heard from many of these same erudite Christian friends, it was possible for God, outside of Time, to hear a prayer and apply it on the past.

Her head, unhelpfully but unsurprisingly, was killing her by the time she with her brush and her notebook and her various recording instruments found anything on the stone surface that seemed like it might be a Greek inscription. The writing was, her source had been very clear, on the edges, not the tops, of these things. Walls of foundations, maybe, whatever sense that made. If she had not known better she would have thought it was a scheme to make her land a helicopter in the middle of nowhere. The Greek did look like it might say “Hagia Maria,” but “Hagia Maria” on its own was conventional, orthodox. She would need to find more. A description of the cakes would help; better still would be an ode or prayer or hymn not to “Hagia Maria” but to something less plausibly deniable, “Thea Maria” maybe, or something including the word “prosopon.”

She sang her favorite aunt Gertrude’s old favorite song as she worked. “The day they laid poor Pancho low, Lefty split for Ohio, and where he got the bread to go, there ain’t nobody knows…”

She finished uncovering the inscription. “"Hagia Maira, ten timioteran ton Cheroubeim, kai endoxoteran asinkritos ton Serapheim, ten adiaphthoros Theon Logon tekousan...”

“Totally fucking orthodox. Motherfucker,” Antonelle breathed.

“You okay there?” Rodney called from the chopper. Poor Rodney, Antonelle thought; he had little investment here, but also little vanity; he was not inspired to refute anyone’s prejudices against him, nor was he inspired to make himself known for answering some old arcane mystery. He just enjoyed flying in the hotter and more dangerous parts of the world, and coming from somewhere where the hottest and most dangerous thing for half the year was a spilled cup of Dunkin, he could, she thought, be easily understood. Sympathy was easy, and even love, for someone in Rodney’s position in this world, who was kind.

“Yeah!” said Antonelle, then, realizing that she had snapped at him, “Yeah. Just disappointed.”

“Not finding what you were hoping for?”

“Does not look that way, no.”

She trudged back over the stone table to the chopper and sat back down beside him with a sigh. “Leaving already?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Okay, well, if you want to just relax here for a bit, we have some snacks I swiped from my hotel room before we left Riyadh, and, if you would like, a little nip of contraband.” He picked up what she had assumed was a water bottle and swirled it around in his right hand demonstratively.

“I’d like to just close my eyes for a few minutes, I think,” Antonelle said.

“Okay. Well, I’m going to have some nuts, and let me know if you’d like any,” said Rodney. She nodded, and the last thing she saw before closing her eyes and attempting to drift off was him happily apportioning a handful of brazil nuts for himself.

In Antonelle’s uncomfortable sun-drenched dream, she saw two women standing dolefully in front of her, in the dress of Eastern Roman imperial times. One was older and one was younger; both had big sad brown eyes, and both were holding cakes, holding collyris.

“What do you think it would prove, if we were real?” the older one asked her.

“If we were much as that man said, as Epiphanius claimed,” said the younger one.

“It would prove that he was wrong to speak so cruelly about you,” Antonelle said. “They would see that there were real people there, not just frivolous self-centered straw women for a bishop from Cyprus to vent about.”

“Is it more wrong to speak cruelly about someone just because that person is real?” the older of the two women in antique dress said then.

“Why would it not be?” Antonelle said. “A real person has rights, has a real life, a real inner life. You can be fair or unfair to a real person, not just about one.” She had a hard time explaining this, less because she had never expected to need to and more because it felt, in this sort of dream, as if they, the dream-emissaries, ought to be explaining it to her, not she to them.

“I agree; but do you think others do?” the younger of the two women in antique dress asked her, her eyes growing even wider, even more dolorous. The lighting in the dream-space was dimmed, as in a basilica; natural, but partly warded away. It was by no means the baked bright heat of the helicopter in which she was fitfully dozing in waking, or undreaming, life. “If you say ‘these people really existed; perhaps do not be so cruel to them’ do you really think others will take that to heart? Maybe they will, but I do not think so, especially since Epiphanius is dead.”

“But were you real?” Antonelle asked. “Your stories should be told for its own sake, even if…”

“Told by you?” the older of the two women in antique dress asked her. Antonelle did not have a good answer to this, especially since it made something clear to her that saddened her deeply, which was that her respect for these women and her respect for the past more generally did not necessarily produce a similar respect for her in them. Neither was that, probably, anything worth wondering at; nobody repaid every single quantum or scintillum of respect and love in kind, and Antonelle Vetiver was not one to inspire most people besides herself. She was a vague, self-contemptuous, posturing young living being, and the dreary regions of the dead could surely find more promising chevaliers.

She stirred. Rodney was peering at her with concern. Nary a twist in his mind, neither thought nor motive other than that concern, crossed the sweaty surface of his diligent, far-eyed face. She wondered if he had ever retained for longer than fifteen seconds her explanations of why they were here or what the Collyridians had supposedly been like. She vaguely hoped not, because that unawareness if anything would make him more deserving of the huge payout that he was getting for taking this kind of risk. It was a risk for her agenda, and she was grateful for it; she wanted to be as grateful for it as it was possible to be without caring about him overmuch.

He let her choose the music on the helicopter ride to their contact in Al-Mazyunah. It was a beaten-up old tape deck and she fished out a beaten-up old tape. She listened to Alanis and, as was traditional, thought about her ex-girlfriend. The next time she dozed off she had an uncomfortable dream about receiving oral sex from the younger of the two Collyridian women from the previous dream, apparently during a performance of Iphigenia among the Taurians. She woke up with the helicopter passing, so to speak, through the purpling surfaces of the ultradeep evening sky.

Short Story: “The Jellyfish Void”

Swimming in warm water that lapped at every dorsal inch in pliant acceptance of her misbegotten backstroke, she realized after a while that jellyfish, tiny and transparent, like minuscule balloons some of which had little bits of brackish-inlet sedge or seaweed floating suspended within them, had begun to swim alongside her. Concerned for a moment, she was becalmed again when one touched her upper arm and proved unable or unwilling to sting. Unable, it must have been—the jellyfish, she remembered, a brainless and almost nerveless scrap of animated water, had no more will than it had pain, there in that warm water that soon would cover much more of the world than it did.

Since she had been six she had come, on and off, to this jellyfish space, this cove at the bottom of a long track down from a rambling extended-family home on a bluff. The extended family was no longer hers, really, for a number of reasons, but it was hers enough that she still came here and still visited them and still lost herself in these waters. The jellyfish were new, or perhaps it was she who was new, so new that she had only just noticed them. One brushed up against one of her hips. The sun was hot enough to bake her belly through the dark fabric of her swimsuit, even though she was wallowing in water and easily able to barrel-roll in the water, to log like a whale if it got too much to bear.

Once she had dreamed about being a river dolphin, in South America or in China, maybe. She had come up out of the river, had come into a village, into a festival—and then back into the river, back to an underwater village, an underwater festival. Up out of the river again, and she was a seal on a North Atlantic skerry now, and it was no longer a river but the surging slate-grey sea. She married, grew old, left her husband, and went back into the sea—a lake now, and she was a bright-scaled carp, swimming hither and thither in the sun-splashed, sometimes-shaded shallows. And then the dream had ended, and she had woken in a start, and sat up in a bedroom in a house cocooned in morning rain.

It felt as if the jellies that were swimming with her now had come to her out of this dream of dreams. The darkness of the dream had sent her out into a dismaying light, and that had always worried her, ever since that so-sudden awakening. The light dismayed her less than usual now. She reached out in this warm and brightly lit reality and touched a jellyfish, a harmless jellyfish, maybe not a cnidarian at all but something that merely looked and acted similar the way she herself looked and acted like an ordinary and healthy person. She wondered if she could be or become harmless in her unordinariness and ill health. Probably she was more harmed than harmful already, she thought, as were the jellies, as was the water.

Short Story: “Her Numerous Progeny Prosper and Thrive”

Note: This short story was an “occasional” satire on the relatively-recent death of Queen Elizabeth II, meant to show how ridiculous some of the standards to which various sanctimonious American leftists claimed to hold her would have been in practice.

It is a well-known story, so famed among those interested in this kind of history. On February 6, 1952, a young woman of twenty-five wakes up in a treetop hotel in Kenya, a loft, an eyrie, looking out over verdant wet-season plains. A grim-faced runner comes and tells her to make her way to the nearest telephone, where she is told that her father has died peacefully over the night and she is now the queen and sovereign of vast swathes of the globe.

            What does that “sovereign” mean? What might she do with that queenhood? Not much, some argue; some people say that she is a figurehead, a pasteboard mask, an avatar of power rather than someone by whom or with whom or in whom power can actually be used. These people will tell you that she can only act according to the so-called “advice” of her servants, who in turn must be able to win votes in a democratically elected Parliament, and it is that Parliament that can do absolutely anything it likes.

            Yet some people say that weasel words are great. In theory the young woman’s powers are vast. And a good thing that she can’t use them, too, many say, given what her ancestors got up to when they could use them. Vast quantities of blood and guts, gold and silver, have been brought to bear for her family over the centuries, first to help them rule the world, then to keep them fed and happy, whatever “happy” means, while Parliament ruled the world for them. Now those blood and guts, gold and silver, are hers. Supposing they were not; supposing she attempted to divest herself of them. She is, after all, her mother’s daughter, and her mother is a woman who is reported to have said that she could only look the poor of London in the face after the family’s palace was struck by a German bomb.

            Let us suppose she does just that. “I will remain Elizabeth,” she says; her father Albert reigned as George, her uncle David as Edward, her great-grandfather Albert also as Edward, her great-great-grandmother Alexandrina as Victoria. (Alexandrina, Victoria, Alexandrina-Victoria, is the one in whose name the entity and process called the empire reached its apogee, the one who wore most famously the brilliant jewels that the poor of the earth die digging from the dark earth far away from England.) “This is my first decision—that I’ll keep my own name. My second decision is to set the world free.”

            “The world is by and large free,” her personal secretary says awkwardly. Her husband looks at her with a vague suspended-judgment sneer, as if he is waiting to see just what foolish things this mere girl whose liege man he now is will say. “The tyranny of the Nazis has been defeated, that of the Soviets is not our concern at present, and if you refer to Your Majesty’s own Empire, its tide is ebbing in most parts of the world.”

            “You are literally enacting colonial violence on black and brown bodies by saying that, Martin,” his sovereign princess warns.

            “I’m not—what does that—what the devil are you talking about? Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Martin splutters.

            “That is a whitecisheteropatriarchal thing to say if ever there was one,” says Her Majesty.

            Martin, desperately trying to wrap his head around this change in the demeanor of his new sovereign and concluding, based purely on explanatory power, that she must have come down with an acute psychiatric case of some kind upon losing her father so young, says “Yes, but…what does that mean, exactly?”

            “The remorseless logic of empire must not be allowed to continue. As I now lead the enterprise of empire, I must stop it immediately. Please prepare papers for an Order in Council instructing all British troops and administrators to withdraw from every station outside the British Isles, with immediate effect.”

            “First of all,” says Martin as patiently as he can manage, “the word ‘empire’ takes a definite or indefinite article, you’ll recall; it isn’t some sort of abstract or mass noun like ‘justice’ or ‘love’ or ‘revenge’ and I am pretty sure that is as Your Majesty well knows.”

            “Do get to the point, Martin,” says His Grace the Duke of Edinburg witheringly; he would rather end the part of the conversation involving Martin as soon as possible so that he can attempt to figure out what on earth is wrong with his wife himself.

            “Yes, of course, Your Grace,” Martin says, balancing his hands on his knees and his knees against each other gamely, or rather, in such a way as to deliberately and falsely indicate gameness. It is best, he has always heard, to tiptoe around mad monarchs when one is actually in their presence. “Second of all, Your Majesty will recall that there are very limited situations indeed in which the Crown can act without the advice of its ministers, and absolutely never against the advice of its ministers. The Conservative Party and Mr Churchill are against further retreats from our imperial holdings unless absolutely necessary, and even were an election to be held as soon as possible and the Labour Party get back in, the policy developing on their end is to withhold independence from colonies that have not adopted majority rule. Particularly with the colonies in Africa, immediate independence, especially without leaving any transitional civil servants in place to manage a peaceful break from the Home government, would result in a whole continent of South Africas or worse. Even His Majesty The King—that is, your late father, ma’am—was horrified by the way the Smuts government handled the color issue in South Africa, and of course the new government there is even worse in that regard. Do we really want Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and the rest—even Kenya!—to go the same way? All of this is, moreover, only to establish that what Your Majesty is proposing is unconstitutional and immoral. Further, it is unwise to boot.”

            “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Her Majesty explains. “Let me illustrate. William?” she calls to one of the black employees of the hotel.

            “Yes, Your Majesty?” he replies. He, like everyone, is still getting used to saying “Majesty” to her rather than “Royal Highness.” He resents it perhaps a bit more than do most.

            “Would you want, upon Kenya’s independence, for there to still be British civil servants in the country?” his Queen asks him.

            “Er…not particularly,” he says. “I suppose early on it might not be so bad. Why do you ask?”

            Her Majesty turns back to her secretary. “You see, Martin, William doesn’t particularly want British civil servants, and so there’s really no need for us to force them upon him. To do so would be to reinscribe the violence of empire on his black body. William?” she calls again.

            “Yes, Your Majesty?” he replies again, noticing a reporter at the door whom he will have to go and let into the lobby once this very strange conversation concludes.

            “You may beat up my husband, if you wish,” says the Queen. “We wouldn’t want to reinforce the black brute stereotype.”

            William says “What? Why would I do that?” at the same time that the Duke of Edinburgh says “No he bloody well may not!”

            “Again,” says the Queen apologetically, “I would offer myself, since I’m at the top of the hierarchy here, were it not for the unfortunate coding that would be involved if we did that.”

            “We won’t be doing anything!” William insists, forthrightly and sternly.

            “Lilibet,” says the Duke, bracing himself against the wall and feeling very much as if he could use a good stiff glass of something naval—rum, even grog in a pinch, “I really would very much like to understand what on earth you’re talking about and who the devil you hope to impress by talking about it.”

            “Oh, spare me the toxic masculinity, Philip,” says his wife and sovereign. “None of us are going to reinforce stereotypes here. Not in my family and not in the Palace. I’ll be explaining that further to you, Martin, once I finish explaining the importance of decolonization and my refusal to be a colonizer and an oppressor.”

            “Your commitment to withdrawing from the Empire is admirable, ma’am,” said Martin, falling back into a lickspittle aspect that this job has not normally required of him so far, “but I’ll point out that a stereotype generally speaking is not reinforced by the person or persons being stereotyped.”

            “Representation,” the Queen informs him in the most withering, wintry, and regal—or reginal—tones, “matters.”

            “Er…all right; we’ll say that; we’ll go with that,” says Martin. “Permission to draw up a draft of this—this edict, or this decree, that might pass constitutional and parliamentary muster?”

            “Yes, very well,” says the Queen with a heavy sigh, as if constitutional and parliamentary muster is a consideration that exists only to distract her servants from the moral rightness that is obvious even to them. Indeed, in fairness, much of it is, or should be, obvious to Martin, to the extent that he knows what is meant by what she says.

 ❦

Martin goes into the next room and calls his superiors in the Palace—might they not be his superiors much longer? Who can say—while the Queen speaks tensely with her husband and William begins, gingerly, to let the reporters file into the hotel.

            “Yes, Tommy,” Martin says over the phone, an international line getting far more use this morning than it has in years, than anybody involved in the phone services in East Africa generally ever though that it would. “Drawing up a general statement of approval for the transformation of Empire to Commonwealth strikes me as a good idea as well.”

            “It does my heart good to hear you think so, Martin.”

            “Supposing Her Majesty declines to sign it as not forceful enough.”

            “A grim supposition,” says Tommy, “but in that event it must be said that I have helped shepherd this family through one abdication, which was really a deposition, constitutionally speaking. It would of course be a matter of deep concern for the entire Empire and Commonwealth—even for the entire world—were things to reach that point again after barely fifteen years. It ought to be avoided if at all possible, by whatever means possible and necessary.”

            “Within reason and the law, I take it,” says Martin.

            “Within reason and the law, yes,” confirms Tommy. “A good day’s work to you, Martin.”

            “And to you. You sound exhausted, sir.”

            “Demise of the Crown is an exhausting thing. Much to consider,” says Tommy, and hangs up.

            Martin jots down two pages’ worth of notes, a first draft of a first draft of the proclamation on which the Queen is insisting, and goes back into the room to present it to her, the room where she and her husband are still arguing on either side of an ottoman made from what looks like the stuffed foot of some big game species or another. Somewhere else in the building they can all vaguely hear William speaking in hushed, hurried tones to someone who has already managed to fly in from the Toronto Star, of all papers. Perhaps the person was already in Africa for some other, one assumes some less august and less impressive story? Martin would not be surprised, and he envies such a person.

            “Your Majesty.”

            “Yes, Martin?” She turns to him with her immaculately made-up smile, her immaculate stiffened curls gleaming in the morning sunlight.

            “I have some first notes for your order, ma’am,” he says, and hands her what might be, in the grand sweep of their island story, a poison pill without recent parallel.

            “One moment, Philip,” she says to her husband, who is about to make some caustic remark. She takes up the paper, clears from her throat some of the tears that she has been keeping from her eyes, and begins to read.

Short Story: “The Thing about HIgh School”

“The thing about high school,” her father said, “is that it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”

And she started high school. She did not find it to be jocks versus nerds, exactly. The jocks, by and large, were the nerds. The first boy who made a pass at her was a lacrosse player. He also got straight As, wore custom, and aspired to go to Harvard Business School, even though their high school was the second-best public high school in the school district. Why the fuck, she wondered, did he wear custom if he was going to public school? She ran this by her father and he shrugged and told her to ask him again when he was done with Better Call Saul for the evening.

A few more weeks into her freshman year, she was invited to a party. The party was in fact hosted by unintellectual good-time buddies who drank light beer and had posters of OnlyFans personalities, but these people were not actually any go keg—and ended up having to go to urgent care.

“Some people who act out at parties,” her father told her, “if they don’t know their limits, can go to the emergency room.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m aware. But one thing confuses me.”

“What’s that?”

“These guys didn’t seem like meatheads. They just seemed like burnouts. I don’t think anybody would have been that intimidated by them, unless she’d been beaten down by life already. I felt sorry for them more than anything.”

Her father thought for a moment. “Well, princess,” he said, “the thing about high school is, it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”

Short Story: “The Cinephiles”

Historical note: I first conceived of and wrote this story in the year 2018. Make of that what you will.

It was an unseasonable afternoon in late winter and Blaise Bondarenko tracked damp grit into the building. He was here to meet with his film appreciation group for the first time in over a month. There had been legal troubles and Blaise had had to come up with some pretty airtight excuses to avoid them. The weather had been brutally cold as little as a week ago and one of Blaise’s friends was still home sick after being out in it for a few minutes.

            The meeting place was new, a tearoom done up in something approximating a British Imperial style, with a Raj theme that steered clear enough of overt triumphalism that Blaise’s friend Nasara had felt comfortable recommending the place. Nasara was the first person he knew whom he saw when he got in. She was sitting at one end of an oblong table in an alcove hung with yellow-embroidered dark blue wall hangings, drinking chai masala and waving enthusiastically at Blaise. It looked like she had already switched to her springtime jacket, at least for today. Her long black hair was lank and Blaise guessed that she had forgotten to shower again.

            “So who else is coming?” Blaise asked as he sat down and shrugged off his own coat. “I heard already that Marcus is still home sick.”

            “Ooh, big oof,” Nasara said. “I actually hadn’t heard that. That sucks.” She raised one hand as if she were showing off an engagement ring and counted off her fingers with the other hand. “Okay, so I know Bruce is coming and I think Tatiana said she’ll be able to make it too. Euphrosyne has to come because she’s the one who has the copy of the Mitchell book. And Tony said he’s going to try his best to make it.”

            “So six, counting us? Not bad.” Nasara handed him a menu and he gave it a cursory glance until he found a tea that looked familiar to him; then, remembering that he did not actually like this familiar tea, he decided to order something that he had never heard of. “After what happened with Randy and Kyle I was a little worried that—”

            “I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss Randy and Kyle,” said Nasara abruptly.

            If you asked Nasara what her problem with Randy and Kyle was, she would probably have just made vague comments about their having poor taste and not having gelled well with the rest of the group. The truth, as everybody actually in the group knew full well, was more painful, even though it reflected much less poorly on Randy and Kyle themselves than the way Nasara talked about them usually suggested. The truth had to do with the most frightening possibilities in Blaise’s life. It also had everything to do with the political situation, and with the fact that the group was still watching movies that Randy and Kyle had recommended.

            Randy and Kyle had legal troubles that had begun with a conspiracy case about some of the work that they had been doing as union organizers. Both were veteran organizers even though Randy was a lot older than Kyle; both had done a lot of work unionizing the dining hall workers at the college that Blaise and Nasara went to. They had come under skepticism, then suspicion, and finally repression. Lots of people who cut the figure that they cut went through that these days.

            Blaise ordered his new unfamiliar tea and began to discuss Nasara’s classes with her since she refused to discuss movies until at least four people were present. Nasara was majoring in botany and wanted to go out to the Midwest and work with corn for a living for some unfathomable reason. “Some unfathomable reason” was her way of putting it, not Blaise’s; Blaise didn’t see anything unusual in someone interested in botany wanting to work with corn.

            For some reason there was a portrait hanging over Nasara’s head of someone it took Blaise an embarrassing amount of time to recognize as Lord Mountbatten. He was really beginning to think that she had suggested this place to be ironic, which, if true, would have been the first inkling of irony he had ever gleaned from her.

            He asked her if she liked this place ironically.

            “No,” she said flatly and honestly. “I like it because it has good tea and good food. The Raj theme is a little weird but it’s part of a general India theme. There’s Mughal stuff too. I’m sort of annoyed that your mind jumped immediately to the India thing when I suggested this place, actually.”

            “Sorry. I just thought—”

            “I know what you thought,” said Nasara. “It’s fine.”

            She did not actually think it was fine. Nasara was a member of a family with the last name Rahman and had grown up in Edison, New Jersey; accordingly, now that she lived in the hardwood-and-slush cranny of the Pioneer Valley it bothered her to be thought of as that Indian girl or that Muslim girl. The idea that she should look at her race or even her religion as central, indispensable features of her personal identity bothered her a little coming from people like Blaise and a lot coming from people like the President. It upset her that the only options people wanted to give her were acting like the fairest flower of a country she had never been to or fully assimilating into whatever culture places like this tearoom actually represented.

            Nasara had played the race card, by her own definitions of playing the race card, only once so far in the existence of this group. It had been when they had deciding which Indiana Jones movie to watch, when they had temporarily been available to them from a certain library. Time had been of the essence with this decision, as it was with so many of the movies they had failed to find online, and the discussion that they had had about this had gotten unusually fraught all around. Eventually she had succeeded in vetoing Temple of Doom and they had gone with what Bruce called “the one, the only” Raiders of the Lost Ark. She had enjoyed that movie more than the most recent one they had watched.

            The others arrived. Bruce, gravelly-voiced with wispy grey hair and glasses that he wore perched halfway down his nose so that both Blaise and Nasara had frequent fantasies of pushing them up for him, sat down first. Euphrosyne, a gangly transgender woman (or drag queen; she had never clarified which but they called her “she” and she didn’t correct them) with hair similar to Nasara’s but more carefully kept, came in next with the Mitchell book, which wasn’t strictly relevant to the movie that they had just watched but might be relevant to choosing the next one. Next came Tatiana and Tony, as a matched set; Nasara didn’t know about Blaise, but she was to this day a little mortified that she had once thought they were dating; in fact they were brother and sister, Tony about six years older than Tatiana and working as a social media consultant for a heavily put-upon legal nonprofit while Tatiana finished her degree at Smith.

            “So,” said Bruce once everybody had ordered, “what did we think of The Blues Brothers? I saw this movie in theaters; didn’t appreciate it as much at the time as I do now. Belushi and Aykroyd were big comedy stars at the time but a lotta people weren’t sure what to make of this movie. It cost a whole boatload, but it did pretty well for itself in theaters.”

            “Lots of coke on the set, from what I’ve heard,” said Euphrosyne. “I guess that was what was in at the time, in terms of drugs.”

            “Any more you can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody with their own pot farm,” said Tony, looking at a part of the menu that advertised things made with CBD oil. “I’m surprised los federales haven’t cracked down on this place yet.”

            “Oh, let’s not mention the feds cracking down on things,” said Tatiana. “Now of all times especially I’m worried somebody might be, you know, looking at us with designs.”

            “In this place?” asked Nasara. “Come on, Tat. Look at the little post-its, for God’s sake.”

            Blaise picked up a clear plastic frame with a picture inside it and a post-it note attached to it, which had been facing away from him. The picture was of a Mughal emperor and the post-it said “Thank you for not assuming our employees’ gender & pronouns,” over a pen drawing of a chibi catamount.

            “Anyway,” said Nasara, “as far as I’m concerned, this movie wasn’t it, chief. There were things about it that I thought were pretty sexist and the car chases were so ridiculous that I just tuned out after a while. The music was great, though, and I did like some of the jokes.”

            Blaise spent the next several seconds mentally readjusting his schema for what Nasara was like to accommodate the fact that she called people “chief.” He sipped his bright red tea feeling self-conscious and a little sorry for himself.

            Bruce, a little uncharacteristically, had ordered a pot of tea that had a flower-like item in the middle that bobbed up and down in the hot water as he poured. It suddenly occurred to Blaise, who was still looking at the post-it note, that he had been in this place once before, a couple of years ago, when they had had a whole wall full of post-it notes that had been written or drawn on in various cutesy ways by the customers. For some reason he seemed to have it caught in his head that at the time this place had specialized in bubble tea.

            “Did you think it was sexist, Sini?” Nasara asked Euphrosyne.

            “Way to put me on the spot. Yeah, I did, actually. I wouldn’t say it stopped me from enjoying the movie, but it did annoy me.”

            “I didn’t really notice any more sexism than I’d expect from a movie from 1980,” said Tatiana with a shrug. She nudged Bruce and he poured her a cup of the tea that he had ordered; she had finished her own in what felt like under a minute.

            “I agree with that,” said Bruce. “I noticed it less then. Could just be because I’m a guy; I didn’t notice it now either very much until you brought it up.” He shrugged. “Good to be able to have these conversations, though, I guess.”

            “Especially in this day and age,” said somebody from another table a few yards away. It was a middle-aged woman who looked utterly inoffensive and unassuming, but Blaise still flinched to think that they were attracting attention. This was part of why he didn’t tend to talk very much once everybody got here for these meetings.

            “I liked, well, what they did with the bad guys, obviously,” said Nasara, “and I liked the delivery of some of the famous lines. ‘We’re on a mission from God,’” she said in a passable imitation of Dan Aykroyd. “‘I hate Illinois Nazis.’” The middle-aged woman flinched. “Anyway, there definitely were things I liked about it.”

            “I did appreciate this movie’s bold, forthright stance against Nazis from Illinois, yes,” said Euphrosyne.

            “Spoken like someone who’s never been to Illinois,” said Bruce.

            “I’ll ignore that,” said Euphrosyne. “Anyway, what’s next? Want me to crack open Mitchell?”

            Nasara held a finger up. “Hold on,” she said, lightly. “I’m not sure we’re done talking about The Blues Brothers.”

            “Well—no, we’re not done talking about it; I was hoping that we could get the business side of things out of the way now so we could discuss the movie more open-endedly.”

            “I just don’t think it’s a very good idea to crack open Mitchell when that woman is still looking at us,” Nasara murmured under her breath in Euphrosyne’s general direction. She had also noticed that the middle-aged woman had herself gotten the attention of somebody else, a man about Bruce’s age wearing a badge that looked distressingly militant.

            “Ugh, you’re probably right,” said Euphrosyne.

            “Blaise,” said Nasara, “what do you think we should watch next?”

            The first thought that popped into Blaise’s head was the question, which he had entertained before, of whether Nasara might have a crush on him. There were not too many reasons to think that she did, but she did have a tendency of putting him on the spot with things like this much more often than she did any of the others. It might just have been that they were the same age, two years younger than Tatiana and almost a decade younger than Tony, to say nothing of Bruce and Marcus. The second thought that popped into Blaise’s head was that they might have an easier time getting a hold of The Prince of Egypt or something than they had with Raiders of the Lost Ark, although The Prince of Egypt might not fly entirely under the radar the way The Blues Brothers almost had.

            “How do we feel about The Prince of Egypt?” Blaise asked. “Did anybody else see that movie as a kid?”

            “I saw that movie with my kid,” Bruce said. “Good movie. Not sure how I feel about watching a cartoon on my own as a seventy-one-year-old man, though…”

            “Oh, c’mon, we all have to branch out sometime or other,” said Euphrosyne, as Tatiana gave Bruce a playful swat on the shoulder.

            “I have a better idea,” said Tony, and Blaise tried to shoot him a glare but could not get himself so to do. “Why not The Sound of Music?”

            Blaise looked over his shoulder. The suspicious woman had gotten up to go. The man with the badge was still there but was focusing on something in another corner of the premises.

            “It’s a classic,” said Tony.

            “It’s utterly inoffensive,” said Nasara, and Blaise could not tell whether or not she meant this as a good thing (as a matter of fact, she did).

            “It was seen that way for a very, very long time,” said Bruce.

            “Is this another movie you saw when it came out?” Nasara asked.

            Bruce nodded. “I was maybe seventeen or eighteen. I was living in Springfield and it came out in a movie theater that I think has since closed. I went to see it with a girlfriend of mine who said she had a crush on Christopher Plummer.” Neither Nasara nor Blaise wanted to push Bruce on why he seemed to disbelieve in his teenage girlfriend’s crush on Plummer. “Great film. Seen it a couple times since. Once, again, with my kid when she was maybe ten or so. Yeah, I’d be up for giving The Sound of Music a try.”

            “You okay with that, Blaise?” Nasara asked.

            Blaise threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said, “but I would like to pick the next one.” He was not quite sure why he was being truculent about this. Maybe it was the fact that he was not much enjoying this tea. It had something to do with cherries or cherry blossoms but he was having a hard time figuring out what, if anything, he thought it actually tasted like. He drank the rest of his cup down and poured himself another from the little glass pot. He felt like a tool. That woman and that man had really hampered his ability to enjoy this meeting.

            He was just about to suggest somewhere else to meet next time when Tony pulled out his phone and started, bold as Blaise had ever seen him, looking for possible ways to download The Sound of Music. Tony was someone who had a sticker on his laptop with a picture of a young 1950s businessman shouting “Good luck; I’m behind seven proxies!” Tony had had this sticker, or previous identical stickers on previous laptops, since way back in the days when everybody had more or less accepted that this was an absurd thing to boast about.

            “Getting back to The Blues Brothers,” Tatiana said, “I have to say, I hadn’t known much about blues music before this. I assume this is a style of music other than what people talk about when they talk about, like, ‘St. Louis Blues’ or ‘St. James Infirmary.’”

            Euphrosyne nodded. “Yeah, that’s from a way earlier period,” she said.

            “W.C. Handy is considered the father of the blues,” Bruce said. “He died in New York City in 1958. Belushi and Aykroyd were about eight or ten years old at that point.”

            “Did you know that about Handy already or did you have to look it up, Bruce?” Nasara asked while with one hand she rang the bell to call over a waiter for a second pot of chai masala.

            “I looked it up,” said Bruce. “I did a lot of reading about the blues after watching the movie. Wanted to see if I’d learn anything. Learned quite a lot, as a matter of fact.”

            “Have any of us ever played blues music?” Blaise asked. Blaise could sort of play guitar but was much more accustomed and attuned to soft rock and indie fare than to jazz or the blues or the dinosaur rock that he associated with people like Bruce and to a lesser extent with people like Nasara.

            Nobody, it turned out, had played blues music, although it turned out Tatiana and Tony had grown up listening to it because their dad was a pianist who had for a long time been deeply interested in the old New Orleans standards. Later he had become interested in enka music, a sort of Japanese torch song genre, and finally Italian folk music. Tatiana and Tony were holding their cards close to their chest about their father. Blaise suspected that he might have recently succumbed to a heart attack or something along those lines.

            Something in the environment or in the way they were thinking or feeling here was beginning to make both Blaise and Nasara feel pretty deeply upset. Neither of them were quite sure what it is. Both of them were happy to watch The Sound of Music but something about the nature of that movie was making them worry about the situation in which they were actually finding themselves. Blaise guessed that it was because the movie was about the beginning of something rather than the aftermath of something; Nasara guessed that it was because it felt like a mockery of the world and of politics that it did what it did with such a joyous lead and with singing and dancing. Sini and Tat would probably tell her that it was sexist of her to be having this problem with it if she brought it up to them, and she thought that maybe they would be right to tell her so.

            Nasara, who secretly felt pretty bad about the way she dressed and the way she groomed herself, could not help looking at another middle-aged woman who had come in and sat down at the table from which the first middle-aged woman had gotten up. This woman was wearing a big fluffy down overcoat in a beautiful shade of green and, underneath it, a wrap dress with quilted leggings. It was probably easy enough for this woman and her family to find work and get taken seriously, much as it had been easy for Nasara’s parents until a few years ago. She tallied up her own mounting debts to the world in her head. It was hard not to feel a certain nihilism about them. She decided to open up her heart and mind to letting The Sound of Music help her with that.

            Blaise made the same decision because he was thinking more deeply on his own reactions to The Blues Brothers. He had a cousin called Dave who loved this movie, even though Dave wasn’t a particularly bluesy guy himself. Dave was a few years older than Blaise and lived in New York City, where he tended bar and sang in some sort of rap collective. He was somebody whom Blaise loved very much and yet while watching the movie Blaise had not found himself thinking of Dave almost at all. He thought for a little while on why this might be and realized that it was because he had mentally cordoned off Dave into a vision of the world in which things were a little kindlier, even if no easier. His film appreciation friends were not part of a kindly world. He decided to let The Sound of Music make him think of the world as a little kindlier.

            “That scene with Carrie Fisher building the pipe bomb or whatever was such a mood,” Nasara was saying.

            “Be careful who you say that around,” said Euphrosyne.

            “I thought it was more of a mood in Indiana Jones when they first meet Marion,” said Tony.

            “Well, you did used to drink way too much,” said Tatiana. “Glad you’ve cut back on that, by the way.”

            Tony shrugged. “The ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality just isn’t cutting it as much for me as it used to. I’d call it burnout, but I’m actually having the time of my life now that I’m trying not to push myself quite so hard anymore.”

            “Good to hear that,” said Bruce. “I was never much of one for ‘work hard, play hard.’ Could just be that I’m given to understand I’m kind of a boring guy by a lot of people’s standards.”

            “Oh, we don’t consider you boring, Bruce,” said Nasara with an affectionate swat of Bruce’s arm.

            “Well I know you guys don’t. If anything it’s more so people my own age who for a lot of my life thought of me as sort of the sad sack. It played into the way I saw myself for a really long time, but I’m thinking a little more kindly about myself now.”

            “I was actually just thinking about kindliness and living in a kind world,” said Blaise, who hadn’t said anything for a while. “Obviously that’s not the world we’re living in these days, but I still think it’s worth thinking about.”

            “Things we can do to be good to one another are always worth thinking about, I agree with you,” said Bruce. “Boy howdy, now that’s a cliché way for me to put it.”

            “There’s something to be said for clichés,” Nasara said. “Although I guess ‘there’s something to be said for’ is just another cliché.”

            “Let’s talk about how we’re going to find The Sound of Music,” said Euphrosyne. “It should be relatively easy, I assume, compared to some of the other stuff we’ve had to look for. Although I don’t think it’d fly under the radar the way Flesh Feast did, since it’s so much better-known.”

            “Oh God, don’t remind me about Flesh Feast,” said Bruce.

            “Hey, the rest of us liked Flesh Feast,” said Tatiana, “even if it was only ironically. But yeah, I don’t think we’re going to have to do a deep dive through Euphrosyne’s book to find The Sound of Music or movies like it. Whether that’ll make it easier or harder to find I don’t know.”

            “I’m sure I can find a download of it with a VPN or something,” Nasara said.

            “It might fly under the radar also since it’s a kids’ movie,” said Blaise. “Or at least a family movie. Which the other things we’ve been watching really haven’t been.”

            “Not at all, no,” said Nasara.

            “Not to cut this off,” said Tatiana, “but I’m actually getting kinda hungry. Want to order some couscous or something? I can pay as long as we can split the check on the tea itself.”

            “Splitting the check on the tea itself was exactly what I was planning on having us do,” said Nasara, “although since a lot of us are sharing I think we should split it evenly.”

            “Sounds good to me,” said Bruce, and Blaise concurred, and everybody else concurred also.

            “At least we’re not trying to find Mrs. Miniver or Casablanca,” said Nasara, casually and without regards to anything else that was being said. “I’d like to, eventually, but those are going to be really hard to find, these days.”

Short Story: “The Comet Watchers”

It was a season of unwanted miracles. The world was reeling and kindness seemed expensive. It was the year of the pandemic and the summer of George Floyd. The world lurched closer and closer to some unknown ultimate destination, and Comet NEOWISE appeared in Northern Hemisphere skies.

            A son and father living in those regions were living together a few years into the son’s adult life. The loved each other but now and then struggled to talk about things they had in common. The son was more religious and read more; the father exercised more and knew more about what may be called the “real world.” Both, however, liked science fiction; they had lately, stuck at home, begun watching Star Trek together; both loved the night sky, and both wanted to see the comet where it hung in the northwestern sky in the evening dim.

            Near their home was a fruit farm, with a store where the son had briefly worked upon finishing school, sorting crates of peaches and apples and showing people where to park on weekend afternoons. He had been let go before long but the family was still on good terms with the people at the farm and so they often found themselves going there still. The store was at the top of a large, steep hill with a commanding view of other hills to the east and to the north. Green and gold in the summer, gold and grey in the autumn, grey and white in the winter, white and green in the spring—such was the view in daylight. At night, they thought, it was likelier than not that much of the sea of stars could be seen.

            There were two ways to get to the farm store from their house, one much more straightforward than the other. The straightforward way involved driving down to the state highway, taking it up into the hills for a few minutes, then turning onto a smaller road that went up the steeper hill on which the farm stood. The less straightforward way involved taking several different back roads, one of them unpaved. In this way one could ape a direct back-roads route that had once been the obvious path to take; this route, regrettably, crossed a small bridge that had been out for about two and a half years. Even before the pandemic the towns in that region had not been made of money to spend on bridge repairs in outlying neighborhoods. Now, they had far bigger fish to fry, and likely would have them for quite some time. “I’m taking Route 2,” the father thus said when he and the son got into the car to go and see the comet. “Safer this time of night.”

            “Better lit,” the son agreed, although he was young and dramatic enough that oftentimes he preferred the romance and mystery of the less straightforward way. He expected that preference to be beaten out of him by life sooner or later, even though he had managed to escape being told sententiously that it would be. But for now…

            They set off into the night. The son had a marvelous app or program on his telephone in which one could see a clear map of the celestial sphere, one that, minute by minute, changed as the sky itself revolved or rotated around Polaris and Sigma Octantis high above the Earth. He had checked to see if this app accounted for the comet. It did not, but the website of a certain newspaper described where the comet was in the sky relative to the familiar northern summer constellations.

            “Shoot,” said the father. “Should’ve brought binoculars.”

            “It’ll be visible in the evening for four or five more days,” said the son. “Maybe we can come back in a few days and bring the binoculars with us then.”

            “Have you ever been up here at night before? Do you know how the view is?”

            The son shook his head. “I haven’t,” he said, “but I’m sure it’s fantastic.” This was a place that—during the day—had one of those old-fashioned coin-operated binocular viewfinders that one was liable to find on mountain overlooks and skyscraper observation decks. One could see dozens of miles to where higher hills and mountains receded into an ambiguous bluish horizon, marching steadfastly rank by rank northeastward. The son was confident that its late-evening sky would be remarkable.

 ❦

Twenty years before, when the son had been living alone with his mother in an old farmhouse (the father was, technically, a stepfather), he had gone through a childhood mania for outer space. At first it had been a purely factual and scientific craze, without the note of science fiction that had grown steadily louder in the polyphony of his interests afterwards. He had had a poster on his robin’s-egg-blue bedroom wall showing one of the famous pictures of Saturn from the Voyager flybys, gracing an expanse above a guinea pig cage. Once he had tried to make a mobile of the Solar System that had the planets to scale in both size and distance; it had been a spectacular failure, with Neptune in the bathroom, Pluto too small to keep safely in the back yard where stray cows might get at it, and the real scales still not replicated. He had known the names of all the northern constellations then, and had been able to make out most of them from the train tracks across the road.

            Then Tolkien and Doctor Who had happened, in that order and a few years apart. His future stepfather had been to credit for his introduction to both of them. This period had spanned the 2000s, a fecund and febrile period for the fandoms for both works. The son was banned from a Tolkien fan forum for lying about his age when he was eleven. Latterly he was given to discussing Doctor Who obstreperously on social media, such as it existed twelve or fifteen years before the pandemic—journals; fora. He became, in fact, a creature of books and media, interested in the fictional and the fantastical. Not unrelatedly, by this time he and his mother had moved to a region from which one could not easily see the nighttime sky.

            He had begun to resent the lack of stars and constellations to be watched above his head almost right away after the move. It had been a move undertaken unhappily, for reasons to do with his education. For that reason he felt a certain degree of guilt about “doing this to himself,” and, for that matter, about everything else that he was doing with his life. Increasingly he was interested in girls, in several different ways, and he projected unhealthy fantasies and resentments into that area of his life, fantasies and resentments that had been developed elsewhere. Through some strange alchemy he found himself transmuting interests that he might share with others into excuses to isolate himself. He had certain illnesses too, and between one thing and another, he spent his mid-teens with few real friends.

            The father, previously a male friend of the family, became his stepfather at around this point. At first the son resented this too. His mother’s previous attempts to date had not gone well, and he was afraid that his closeness to this man would be wounded if this relationship went badly too. The situation also forced him to think of his biological father, a deadbeat junkie whom he had never met. It was not a pleasant road for him to go down, and new resentments did end up arising. It was at this time that son and father began to fear that they did not have as much to talk about as they had had in the past. It was a painful realization, and one that the son, at least, mourned intensely.

            Time passed. The son breasted the turbulent currents of religious and sexual identity, to and fro. After a few years of living with his parents in adulthood upon finishing with school, he began to despair of ever really finding again the easy commonalities that had existed in his childhood. When he had loved, back then, he had been able to merely love, without the outside questions of shared interest or presence of a shared goal that modify and limit the loves of adults. He had assumed that that ability to merely love was gone for him now, at least as far as his bond with his father came into it. He assumed this, and felt a mild despair, the kind of sickly-sweet feeling that decadent French poets of a hundred and twenty years before had managed to transmogrify into beauty. Then, shortly before his troubling twenty-seventh birthday, the pandemic hit, and for the first time in his adult life he and his parents had no way of leaving one another’s presence.

 ❦

The car bumped up the steep hill road to the farm store on the dark hilltop. The trees to either side stood grey and silver in the penumbrae of the headlights. The sky between the branches was darkening minute to minute, now the color of willowware, now the color of deep water.

            In somebody’s house to the left of the road a porch light abruptly burned out as they passed it and the shade of the evening shifted. Now suddenly near the zenith he could see what he thought might be Vega. At the hilltop the Great bear would surely be fully or almost fully visible. It was through the Bear’s paw that the comet was passing evening by evening. Now the only question was the cloud cover, light but striated, which would seem to be covering a good bit of the critical northwestern sky. The idea of not being able to see the comet because of light, passing cloud cover was an unpleasant one. One could even say that there was something morally outrageous about it, even if only mildly so. It would be like looking for a Van Gogh in a museum and finding it through the gift shop, or like looking for a livestreamed religious service and finding it with an unskippable ad. Or perhaps not quite as bad as those cases—clouds were not undesirable or inaesthetic themselves, merely objects of a lesser and less compelling order than celestial bodies.

            The son and the father came to the open country around the hilltop. At one point the road curved sharply to the left with very little warning. Going straight would have taken you right into a certain family’s front yard, possibly even into that family’s front kitchen.

            “I wonder if anybody’s ever missed this turn and driven into these people’s yard, or their driveway,” the father remarked. “I hope not. It’d be tough tot get out of that situation, you know?”

            “For the family whose house it is,” said the son, craning his neck at the house as it faded graciously into the gloaming behind then, “or for the driver who made the mistake? I think it’d be a tricky situation either way, but it’d be tricky in different ways. Depending on who in the situation you were.”

            The father laughed, a short, gentle chuckle. “I’m just imagining that I’m in that house sitting down for a late dinner and then suddenly, wham, you and I come barreling right along the road headed straight for the front door,” he said. “I can’t think it’s an easy house to live in, just in terms of keeping your peace of mind.”

            “I never asked,” said the son, who dimly knew some of the people who lived on the hill thanks to his season working at the farm store.

            “Looks like there’s plenty of other people here,” they both thought and one or the other of them said as they neared the hilltop. Spanning the summit and descending for a while along the road in both directions were maybe fifteen cars, along with tripods and collapsible chairs and other accoutrements of summer-evening stargazing.

            The two got out of their car. It was about a quarter past nine, nautical twilight in July in those latitudes, the time for sailors to take their readings with a clearly visible horizon and clearly visible stars. To the west, over a treeline that obscured the westernmost third or so of the hilltop, Arcturus and Spica shone, ochre and opal. One found those stars, or could find them, with the Great Bear’s tail—arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spica. The son had learned that on some website about six months before, when he had first downloaded that phone app and begun a serious scan of the high heavens. So now he doubled back from Spica to Arcturus, continued, and there was the Dipper, suspended in an almost primary-blue section of the sky. It was three or four handsbreadths above the northern end of the western treeline, so that the comet would be about halfway between it and the horizon. That spot was, horribile dictu, behind a band of cloud, but there was an insistent breeze and the clouds were drifting eastward.

            “It’s like Close Encounters,” the father said. “Remember that scene where they pass all the cars on the highway and they’re all lined up along the side of the road to see the UFO?”

            “Vaguely,” said the son. “The last time I saw that movie I was about thirteen years old, I think. I remember that scene, though. I’d be happy to watch it again with you some time.”

            “Have you seen it yet?” the father asked. “Is it on your app?”

The son shook his head. “I think the way this app works focuses on the models of the sky,” he said. “They just discovered the comet a few months ago so whatever model they’re using probably just doesn’t have it. If there was a supernova I don’t think it’d have the supernova either.”

            “There was a news website that had a picture of it in the sky,” the father said. “It should be there once that cloud passes.”

            And the cloud did pass, and there, dimly, was the comet. It was still faint in the uncompleted twilight, a faint, fuzzy patch of sky that one would have thought was a trick of the light were it not for the telltale tail. That tail, or tale, stretched even fainter a degree or a few up and to the right of the main spot of fuzziness, resolving undramatically into the deepening blue almost directly beneath steady-shining Dubhe. One wanted to stare steadfastly into that darkening northwestern sky in the hopes that that fuzziness would clear, in the hopes that something important would become manifest in a more manifest comet, something to be taught as a piece of knowledge to be guarded and cherished.  And so the son and the father held their gaze into that region of the sky, until after a few minutes, just past nine-thirty on that long Saturday evening, it was obvious to both of them that the comet was as clear as it was liable to get. Then the son took out his phone again, opened its camera, selected a night mode that took in all the light it could, and snapped a few pictures of where NEOWISE hung waveringly. They came out well, a couple of them anyway.

            “Can you still see it?” one of a pair of young women, a pair of sisters, or a couple, or friends, asked his father as he walked ahead of him back to the car.

            He turned. “Sort of,” his father was saying to the women. “You might have better luck another night.”

            “You can see it though,” the son said.

            The father nodded. “You can,” he agreed. “You just have to really look for it.”

 ❦

The drive back home was a little different from what they had expected going out. The father, for reasons of trust best known to himself but dearly appreciated by them both, allowed the son to direct him down the other side of the hill and then through the warren of back roads that circumvented the closed bridge and descended into their neighborhood from the north.

            The father was skeptical about this as a means of getting home and worried that the son, for some irresponsible twenty-seven-year-old reason, was directing him towards the closed bridge itself. Even so, he decided to trust where the son was directing him, and soon enough they were on the right back road after all, one that was gravelly and passed a maple syrup plantation and a small dairy farm. The drive home, which took about fifteen minutes, had for the father the great length common to people’s perceptions of unfamiliar roads. They pulled into their driveway at a few minutes past ten o’ clock and straightway went inside. The sky had turned the blue-black color, with a very faint and debatable greenish tinge, of certain fountain pen barrels. The clouds were a little paler and instead had shades of violet and silver. The Dipper had sunken slightly towards the black treeline and was difficult to make out in the glare of a streetlight that stood at the northwestern corner of their property.

            The mother was watching the news, which, as so often in those days, was largely about the pandemic with a few minutes given over to racial tensions and other enormities of the increasingly heavy-handed administration. She looked up as they came in; she was happy to see them, and, being used to having them in the house for the past few months, had indeed missed them while they were out. “How was it?” she asked. “Were you able to see it?”

            “We did but it was pretty faint,” said the father. “I think he got a couple nice pictures of it, though. That new phone of yours,” he said to the son, “takes really good pictures. I think it was worth the money.”

            “I certainly hope it was,” said the son “But yeah, one of these at least came out really well, maybe two or three. You can see the comet’s tail and everything. While we were walking back to the car I also got some good shots of Arcturus and Antares if you guys are interested.”

            “Antares,” said the father. “Don’t they go there at one point in Star Trek?”

            “I’m not sure,” said the son. “I haven’t seen enough of it yet to say. I do know that there’s a novel from the 1920s called A Voyage to Arcturus that I keep meaning to read. We also saw Vega tonight and that’s where the aliens in Contact were from.”

            “You think there actually are any aliens on Arcturus and Vega?” the father asked.

            “Who knows?” the mother said before the son could. “I hope so.” She turned to the son. “I’d love to see the pictures you took,” she said.

            “All right,” said the son. They turned off the news, and he sat down on the couch between his parents to show them his pictures of the sky.

Short Story: “Critical Lenses on the Film ‘Goncharov’”

Note: This story is a contribution to a fictive body of critical and fan discussion being built around a nonexistent Mafia movie called Goncharov. One can learn the basics of how this discussion came about by searching for the alleged movie’s title. In the Goncharovian spirit of collective authorship and modern myth-making, I’m electing to put this story under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license, the most permissive kind. Anybody can do anything with the material in this story as long as some vague gesture is made towards crediting me with some of the ideas. Many of my own ideas, after all, emerged from the broader atmosphere of improv-like storytelling and mythbuilding that swept the internet in general and the microblogging website Tumblr in particular late last month.

With the recent upsurge of interest in the 1973 Mafia film Goncharov, it behooves the critic to give a brief survey of this film’s previous reception. Critical analysis has focused on several main areas and themes within the film: its sexual elements (in particular the homoerotic undertones between Goncharov and Andrey and between Katya and Sofia) and connected feminist concerns, its religious motifs, its atypicality for an early Martin Scorsese film, and its potential political subtexts, to name just a few. This brief essay will attempt to overview, in an unsystematic way, some of those lenses. Appended are synopses (with much unavoidable repetition) of all cuts and releases of the original film from 1973 through 2003; it remains to be seen whether next year’s fiftieth anniversary release will depart significantly from any of these. Since the focus of this essay is the original film in all its versions, we will not be addressing Quentin Tarantino’s abortive late-1990s remake, or the 1981 Turkish ripoff Moskova’dan dev adam (Mighty Men from Moscow) starring Yavuz Selekman and Cüneyt Arkın. The best treatment of Moskova’dan dev adam in English is a chapter in Yuli Lowe’s 2005 book Remix and Pastiche in Turkish Action Cinema: A Moviegoer’s Guide. Tarantino’s ideas for the attempted 1990s remake, some of which made it in highly variant form into 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, are described in almost all detailed surveys of his oeuvre. Of note regarding the Tarantino concept is that it is generally considered to have a tighter plot than does the cryptic, occasionally slapdash original film.

The sexual dimension of Goncharov has been the subject of much recent attention and as such is perhaps the best place to begin. In particular the relationship between Katya and Sofia has seen many different perspectives over the years. In a manner similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s obsessive reworkings of Galadriel’s backstory to smooth down her hard edges, the first few rereleases and re-edits of Goncharov consistently softened Katya and Sofia’s characters and relationship with each other, mostly as a response to persistent lesbian and feminist critiques of the film throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. This process culminated in the 1993 twentieth-anniversary version of the film, in which Scorsese became an unwitting cinematic pioneer by giving Katya and Sofia a relatively happy and all but expressly lesbian ending. However, feminist critics of the original film later reassessed the rerelease and began to argue that the softer ending had the unintended effect of pedestalizing women and relationships between women. The thirtieth-anniversary rerelease in 2003 was substantially similar to the original cinematic release regarding Katya and Sofia, but followed the 1987 director’s cut in expanding on Icepick Joe’s backstory and role in Goncharov’s second act.

Katya and Sofia are, however, secondary characters, although Katya is one of the three leads and both women are important in all versions of the film’s denouement. What of Goncharov and Andrey? Although the two Soviet gangsters out of their time and place get top billing and the film’s climactic showdown, it takes the bulk of Goncharov’s length for the true importance of their relationship to become apparent. Since Andrey, diegetically, knows Goncharov very well, the core premise of Goncharov’s fundamental unknowability to the viewer necessitates that they spend relatively little time interacting, and when they do interact, they discuss mostly philosophical and abstract subjects. Gene Hackman’s character of Valery, a personal aide to both Goncharov and Andrey who has little independent agency and thus does not appear in most plot synopses but has more screentime and higher billing than many of the film’s better-remembered characters, is the viewer’s main source for the preexisting personal relationship between Goncharov and his betrayer. According to Valery’s interactions with Andrey and with Goncharov, the two men considered each other best friends for most of their lives, had a brief falling-out two or three years prior to arriving in Naples and reconciled several months later, and both helped Valery himself survive his hard teenage years in postwar Moscow. De Niro and Keitel’s unusually homoerotic acting choices combine with this background to create a popular perception of Goncharov and Andrey as former lovers (and perhaps even Valery’s co-parents, although Hackman was visibly older than De Niro and Keitel at the time the film was made).

Goncharov was long thought of primarily as a “dry run” for Scorsese’s career and other films. It was Scorcese’s third film, after the relatively obscure Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Boxcar Bertha, and his second turn as a producer (Boxcar Bertha was produced by Roger Corman). Although Scorsese directed the English-speaking actors and was the name most prominently associated with the film in the United States, the driving force behind much of the screenplay and directing style was the Italian polymath Matteo JWHJ0715, a pseudonym for Matteo Negri. Negri deliberately imitated the dreamlike style of The Godfather, and Goncharov thus “feels” very different from Scorsese’s later gangster epics Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, and The Irishman. In 2016, however, the release of Scorsese’s Silence led to a reappraisal of his religious thinking as represented in Goncharov’s religious motifs, many of which, such as Father Gianni’s theme- and tone-setting sermon and the sole-survivor message bottle at the end, seem derived from Moby-Dick.

Attempts to retroactively insert Goncharov into Scorsese’s so-called “trilogy of faith” aside, however, religion is clearly a secondary concern in the film, and critics who look at it primarily through the religious lens still tend to think of it mostly in relationship with other Scorsese films. Goncharov, The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence do not a coherent tetralogy make except by “reading” the films backwards starting from Silence, at least some of whose themes are present in each of the other three (Last Temptation’s moral tension and divine absence, Kundun’s emphasis on persecution and exile, and Goncharov’s depiction of “individual” attempts to cope with the failure of religious community). The other way in which critics have applied the religious lens to Goncharov is as a supplementary or auxiliary lens in analyses primarily focused on other aspects of the film, such as its political and sexual components. One recently popular combination of the religious and sexual lenses involves Katya’s reaction to Father Gianni’s sermon. Scorsese, directing the Anglophone Cybill Shepherd, has Katya obviously fumble with core aspects of Catholic worship such as the sign of the cross and standing for the Gospel reading; since Katya does not perform the Eastern Orthodox equivalents of these actions either, recent critics have interpreted her as staunchly irreligious and/or Jewish, and her discomfort with the sermon as not necessarily limited to its anti-mafia content.

Despite the film’s ambiguities concerning Russian (and broader Soviet) culture, Katya’s attitude towards religion not least of those ambiguities, perceptions of Goncharov as tacitly pro-Russian make it currently unpopular in much of Central and Eastern Europe. Protests in connection with upcoming fiftieth-anniversary screenings have already racked up thousands of planned attendees in cities like Kyiv, Lviv, Warsaw, and Vilnius; in Lviv in particular local politicians have attempted to get the screenings shut down or moved to smaller venues under wartime emergency provisions. Scorsese has condemned attempts to read a right-wing political salience into the film, the political right currently seeming, or being, pro-Russian in much of the developed world; the idea that Goncharov is some sort of advocacy for Russian culture per se is the only critical lens that its makers have actively and loudly repudiated, but in the current world environment surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine it is morally and emotionally difficult to directly defend the movie around Ukrainian, Polish, or Baltic-states critics.

This concludes our all-too-brief overview of a few select critical lenses on Goncharov. Synopses of all readily available versions of the film are appended below, with, as warned, much unavoidable repetition.

Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky

Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies

Art Department, Smith College

❦

ORIGINAL CINEMATIC RELEASE

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. He goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Il Commendatore sends an assassin after Katya, but Sofia, who is visiting Katya to console her about Goncharov’s death, takes the bullet for her. With her last breath, Sofia offers Katya the cruise ship ticket that she bought with the money Mario and Mariella gave her for precipitating Goncharov’s fall. Katya accepts the ticket, feigns willingness to become il Commendatore’s mistress, and poisons him.

Katya spends most of her time on the cruise ship trying and failing to write the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

1987 DIRECTOR’S CUT

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. The scenes of Icepick Joe at home are intercut with flashbacks showing his life in a mental institution before relocating to Italy, having been declared “feebleminded” by eugenicist doctors when he was a child prior to World War II. In 1960 he is released from the mental institution after a botched lobotomy and groomed into a life of crime by a member of his extended family who is never named, moving to Italy in 1966.

When the flashbacks and cat-feeding sequences conclude, Icepick Joe goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Sofia asks Katya to leave Naples with her on a cruise ship, but Katya insists on staying and working to take down Andrey and il Commendatore; she is last seen walking to her death in a standoff with il Commendatore’s goons. Sofia spends most of her time on the cruise trying and failing to finish the first draft of a novel that Katya had started. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

1993 RERELEASE (INFLUENCED BY LESBIAN AND FEMINIST CRITIQUE IN 1980S AND EARLY 1990S)

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. He goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Katya and Sofia leave Naples together on a cruise ship, but are less comfortable with each other than before. Katya spends most of her time on the cruise trying and failing to finish the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

2003 RERELEASE (RESTORES KATYA AND SOFIA’S ORIGINAL ENDINGS; INCLUDES ICEPICK JOE’S BACKSTORY)

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. The scenes of Icepick Joe at home are intercut with flashbacks showing his life in a mental institution before relocating to Italy, having been declared “feebleminded” by eugenicist doctors when he was a child prior to World War II. In 1960 he is released from the mental institution after a botched lobotomy and groomed into a life of crime by a member of his extended family who is never named, moving to Italy in 1966.

When the flashbacks and cat-feeding sequences conclude, Icepick Joe goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Il Commendatore sends an assassin after Katya, but Sofia, who is visiting Katya to console her about Goncharov’s death, takes the bullet for her. With her last breath, Sofia offers Katya the cruise ship ticket that she bought with the money Mario and Mariella gave her for precipitating Goncharov’s fall. Katya accepts the ticket, feigns willingness to become il Commendatore’s mistress, and poisons him.

Katya spends most of her time on the cruise ship trying and failing to write the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

Short Story: “The Watch and the Windrose”

Once upon a time there was a mechanical watch who fell in love with a rose of the winds. She would visit him at all hours of the day, and she would grace him with her winds in accordance with his hours. Her cold dry tramontanes teased him at midnight and kept him cool at noon; her brisk wet levantes made him worry for his movement in the witching hour and in midafternoon; her siroccos and ostros and libeccios through dawn and through dusk warned him of the dangers of day or of night; at breakfast and dinner her easygoing ponentes entertained him at table and her stiff self-confident mistrals sent him to work or to sleep.

So much love had the watch for the windrose that he tried to be like her as much as he could. He would try his hands at measuring not time but speed and distance, and the results would be multicolored charts that people found difficult to read; he would reach into himself and rearrange his workings and turn himself into a weathercock, but he would still only be the receptor of her winds, still would not become her winds himself.

“Why do you want to become me?” she asked him.

“Is not real love a desire to imitate the person one loves?” he asked her.

“Is it? I don’t know love except from you. I am only the winds.”

“How is it,” he asked, “that you are so unbound by form? You blow here and there, and the whole sky and all who inhabit it greet you and pass through you and around you. Try as I might, rearrange myself as I might, I am metal and glass and gems; gems and glass and metal thus limit my beauty.”

“Why do you think that a beauty that is limited should destroy itself in order to become a beauty that is unlimited?”

“Why do you not think so?” the mechanical watch asked, wroth now, but not at her. He had just now realized that certain things, certain motives, certain desires of his did not admit of explanation, and he hated so to realize.

“It endangers the limited to pursue the unlimited.” The windrose was quoting an old, old book in saying this; her gregales and levantes and siroccos had picked up the scent of the book far, far away, and over seas and mountains that scent had come, had been done from Chinese into Sabir and long ages later from Sabir into English, and had sprung up in her mind now as something to share with the watch by way of warning. The anger on his face—his second hand was whirling and reeling—reminded her of her own most tempestuous rages, and she knew full well with how much fear and remorse she looked back on her own simouns and cyclones.

“There is danger in all things,” said the watch, calming down. Speaking to the windrose always had a way of becalming him in the end, even if it was as a typhoon that the conversation began. And he knew in saying this that he was not a mechanical watch any longer, although what he was now he did not know, and he did not think that he was on his way to being a windrose.

Short Story: “Holding a Battledore”

Note: This story, heavily autobiographical, is the sixth and last in the Haters and Losers cycle.

It was the era of one’s expertise, the century of Obama. The most popular anime in the West was Shingeki no Kyojin and there was still some hope that the Arab Spring might stick the landing. Nicholas Zussman, soon to go into his seventh semester at UMass Amherst and tenth and hopefully final semester of college overall, walked the streets of Hakodate without much care; the personal crises that had beset him in previous years and the terror about the state of the world that would beset him in years to come were, at the moment, nearing the end of what would turn out to be an approximately eighteen-month-long period of equilibrium. No longer did he feel affronted and insecure about his beliefs about the world and about how to behave; not yet did he realize the various hypocrisies and repressions that he had developed to make up for the loss of the affronts and insecurities. Not yet had his relative comfort in his own moral standards given way to ever-stricter philosophy and theology; or, at least, that process had not yet reached its apogee. He knew enough Japanese to have gotten around well enough for the past five weeks and to have been interpreting, as best he could, for his parents, who were with him; Professor Williams would, he hoped, be more or less pleased with him when he got back, even though he had not been doing this through a formal study-abroad program like he had been encouraged to.

            Nicholas, if he was being honest with himself, which on this subject at least he usually was, fervently doubted that he would be able to take a whole year or even a whole semester in Japan, cut off from association in common time with his parents and with his close friends in places like New York and Michigan. Today and tomorrow he was going to spend some time with his friend Sarah, who had been spending the past year at Hokudai and would be returning to America shortly after him to take up her own last year at UMass. They had had a couple of friendly but strained interactions in their first year in the Japanese major; in their second year they had become better acquainted, and they had stayed in touch over the course of Sarah’s time in Sapporo. They had planned this excursion entirely via Facebook message because Nicholas did not have a phone that he could use in Japan; he would just have to trust her bus to arrive in Hakodate when she had said it would.

 ❦

“Watch this with us,” one of his parents had said once, while they were sitting watching a war movie with his ailing grandfather.

            Nicholas’s grandfather had succumbed to Alzheimer’s a few days after the end of Nicholas’s first semester at UMass. The funeral arrangements were difficult because it was scant days before Christmas; eventually they had the funeral over a week after the death, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents; Nicholas had not gone, because it had coincided with his first time ever hosting a certain close friend at his house. He felt a persistent moral anxiety about not having gone even now almost three years later. He supposed he would always feel it.

            They had sat there in his grandfather’s den and watched the movie together. It was one of a few movies about either war or old age that he watched at least part of with his grandfather during his last illness, and watching them was always an oddly arcane task. There was some precise intellectual or emotional connection that Nicholas found himself wanting to make in these instances, and he was never quite able to make it. He would have loved to be able to say, in later years, that the reason he had become a Japanese major was a desire to establish his grandfather’s past, in the Pacific, more firmly as something to be worked from and built upon and (in peacetime) transcended. But in later years, and even now, peace had become more fragile again, and besides, the real reason had had more to do with a girl he had liked at fourteen and a book he had read at sixteen. The book had included repeated references to an instrument called a “battledore” that characters posed with in New Year’s Eve photos. He had looked this up once and discovered that a battledore was a type of antiquated badminton racket; this, regrettably, had reminded him of his one or two experiences being told to play badminton in PE when he was in middle and high school, but the word appealed to him anyway. He was all the same not interested in Japan because of the word “battledore.” He never knew quite what to say when people asked him why he was studying Japanese. Maybe it had something to do with how different it was from English. Studying it made him feel like he was putting a great deal of faith in the possibility of world understanding.

            Shortly after his time in Japan Nicholas would learn that his grandfather had actually acquired a samurai sword at some point during, presumably, his wartime service. The sword ended up living in his family’s attic for the most part.

  ❦

Nicholas and Sarah, when they met up, took the Hakodate streetcars here and there. They were going to go look for a beach to swim at but when they got there the tide had risen almost halfway up the sea-wall. Nicholas exploded in a moment of frustration; irritability, during the period of his late adolescence and very early twenties that he spent not being medicated, was a common problem for him. Later in the evening they hauled ass across the city on foot to be in time for a trip up the ropeway to the top of Mount Hakodate.

            “This is supposed to be one of the three best ‘views of a city from a mountaintop’ in the world,” said Nicholas as he and Sarah pressed through a crowd on the highest level of the mountaintop’s observation turret.

            “I wish it were easier to actually see it,” said Sarah, who was short. Fortunately within a few minutes they managed to press their way forward to a railing. The city spread out fan-shaped before them, spreading along both sides of the hammerhead peninsula of which the mountain was the end. The stars in the dusky sky had fallen to the earth and now shone up back at the heavens. Nicholas would normally consider this insolent; tonight he considered it revealing.

            “The other great views are supposed to be Hong Kong and Naples,” said Nicholas, who was unsure what else to say or do about beauty, other than pointing and clicking.

            In later years he would dimly remember Sarah having said something in response to this, but he was never sure what.

            Earlier that day they had been in a bookstore looking at manga. Nicholas had bought a volume of one, which he hoped to be able to take home and puzzle through later because it was a volume with whose plot he was already more or less familiar by means of English fan translations. The volume would, however, float through time unread until he lost interest in the series. They had gone to a restaurant, a Lucky Pierrot, one of more than a dozen of this chain in Hakodate even though there were none anywhere else, with a friend of Sarah’s who had accompanied her from Sapporo. Lucky Pierrot did burgers and curry and things like that and Nicholas had been to another location of it, further from the station and closer to the harbor, several times with his father since arriving in the city. He had developed a taste for a curry that he would later figure out was probably made with shiokara; he would be glad, once he figured this out, that he had developed a taste for it before he had known what shiokara was, because now his taste could inform his opinion of shiokara rather than having preordained thoughts on shiokara averting his taste. Speaking in a more general sense, he had at least managed to cultivate a deliberate and practiced, yet sincere, neutrality on the subject of nattō.

            Each Lucky Pierrot in Hakodate had a different theme to its décor. The one near the harbor (“Lucy Pierrot—Bay Area,” it was called) had a circus theme—understandable, since the logo was a clown. The one near the station had something like a roaring twenties speakeasy theme, but with a faint fifties greaser diner twist to it that Nicholas could not quite place, account for, or accept. In later days his memory would sometimes place this Lucky Pierrot elsewhere in Hakodate, near the old Goryōkaku fort, for example, and yet on further and more careful remembrance he recalled that it had in fact been some cooler-energied, probably ostensibly higher-end place where they had stopped to eat after visiting Goryōkaku. They had had salad and a conversation that he enjoyed and found meaningful at the time but did not long remember. He would kick himself for “not having gotten enough” out of his time in Japan in general, further on down the road—he had not gone here, he had not done that, he had defaulted to working with a concierge’s limited English rather than soldiering on with his Japanese all over yonder. It was part of the top-heavy and constantly teetering nature of his happiness, of the equilibrium in which he had temporarily found himself and which he foolishly pretend could, or for that matter should, last forever. Yet he would always keep firmly in mind the logo of Lucky Pierrot. He knew that some hack writer or psychologist might judge him for this and take it as a sign of psychic “brandedness.” For once he didn’t care. He made good memories here.

            He kept getting the shiokara curries partially because he did not eat red meat and partially because he wanted to eat Japanese food while he was in Japan, to the greatest extent possible. From time to time he wondered if this was voyeuristic, or touristy rather than pilgrimwise. The taste—sticky, salty, pungent, but feinting at and seeking to remind one of sweetness—appealed to him immediately, and grew on him as his time in Hakodate went on. He had it at least once a day.

  ❦

A few evenings ago, while out with his father, Nicholas had seen a young woman in a duffel coat and newsboy hat cranking out “Country Roads” on a hand organ that spewed downy feathers and bubbles. She had been standing at the edge of a pedestrian streetway by some old redbrick warehouses, which had shops and restaurants in them now, on the edge of the harbor. When Nicholas had taken some video of her with his camera she had seemed a little uncomfortable and possibly even shamefaced, even though she was the one out here in the late summer evening playing this music. It was possible to envision her as a being akin to one of the late-summer fireflies in the book that he loved. It was possible to envision the feathers and bubbles as entities pertaining to the refraction index of the wind and the clouds. It was not a feeling that he had had before. He had laid hold of it for only a moment. He knew that the song was much-loved in Japan, but something about it still seemed a little more playful than he would have thought apposite.

            He guessed it was a good thing, that being the case, that it was not really his opinion that mattered here. He did not want to reduce his own status in his own or anybody else’s eyes, but he wanted to want that. A history of taking actions to make himself impressive would eventually have to all fall down so that a future of self-surrender and sacrifice could take its place. Being here was one way of making himself impressive and humiliating himself at the same time; his height was much remarked-upon, in furtive remarks that the people making them assumed that he as a foreigner could not understand; some of these remarks were impressed or a little frightened and some were obviously derisive. These remarks he would turn into stories, anecdotes about traveling in a country his stature in which would always have been and perhaps ought always to have been athrill with ambiguities.

            There were two young women staying at the same bed and breakfast, which styled itself a bed and breakfast rather than a ryokan, as Nicholas and his father. These young women were Japanese, traveling around the country after some time spent abroad in America, studying at a certain West Coast university. In these women one might have seen a partial answer to Nicholas’s own questions about his status in Japan. They could speak to one another in two languages, but there was not necessarily much about which to talk—less, perhaps, than with the middle-aged obasan who had woken up Nicholas and his parents at seven o’ clock sharp every morning for a feverishly prepared breakfast at the ryokan in which they had stayed near Aomori. The question of his stature in Japan was the question of his stature with people like that, in the same way in which the question of these younger women’s stature in America would have been the question of their stature with people like his aunts and uncle.

            Nicholas was prone to this sort of pontificating and these sorts of attempts to deduce moral and political meaning from his everyday experiences rather than believing in and delighting in the flow of events as they in fact overtook him. A few times in Hakodate, and more before in Aomori and in Kyōto, he had been able to take a step back and let experiences and happinesses flow through his hands as if letting a pearl necklace fall to the floor: On a train ride, a day trip to Nara; snoozing on another train, going over the mountains of Ōu; looking out over Lake Towada from the passenger’s window of a rental car doing a circumnavigation thereof; watching fireflies in a little marsh above a reservoir in the deep blue part of the evening next to the cab driver who had ferried his family thence. The moment at the top of the mountain with Sarah had been a moment like this. He tried as much as possible to savor moments like this and make them the clear, core, cogent parts of the way he understood himself, but had not lived much (in ways that were positive) and in the future he would have too much fear for the world to carry on a love affair with it. He was just at the beginning of trying to live within limits that both he himself and the world were imposing on him. Even future periods spent doubting his religious beliefs, or having agonizing bizarre adventures over his relationship with gender, or what you will, were in their ways attempts to accept limits.

❦

He kept beating himself up for not having been to that fucking funeral. Most of the time he did not think much about it but occasionally it would come roaring back into his head as a betrayal. There had been things not to care for about his grandfather but over the years of his long last illness Nicholas had grown a ferocious fondness for him, hard to explain. “Yeah, apparently he was in the Pacific for three years or so,” he said to Sarah at one point in their two days exploring the city together.

            “Did he know you were majoring in Japanese?” she asked.

            “I’m not sure. I only transferred to UMass half a year before he died so I don’t know how much of it he was able to internalize. I hope he knew that. I’d tell him sometimes and he was always interested to hear it.”
            “That would have been on breaks from our first semester.”

            “Yes. I don’t remember our first semester having gone very well.” Sarah shrugged. “Remember that time I hurt my leg in that game Terayama-sensei had us play?” Nicholas asked.

            “Yeah, I do,” said Sarah, glancing up at the ceiling of the trolley, the trolley that was bedecked for an anniversary year. “I think that’s the first thing I remember about you, actually.”

            “I think you’re not the only one in our major who remembers that about me. There are also probably a few who’ve dropped out of the major. Didn’t Mary say it has the highest attrition rate on campus—like, higher than chemical engineering?”

            “I’ve heard that from a lot of people,” said Sarah. “Come to think of it, you and I aren’t the sorts of people who’d make ‘ideal’ Japanese majors, are we?”

            “By which you mean we’re weebs,” said Nicholas who had become interested in Japan through a girl he had liked at fourteen who had had the word “anime” in her email address.

            “Put it however you like,” said Sarah.

            Nicholas had earlier in the summer lost touch with that girl, Nora, but he did not know yet at the time that he had lost touch with her. His family was preparing, once they got back from Japan, to start the process of moving away from where they had been living for the past decade—near where Nora lived—and rapidly and speedily he would lose touch with quite a few of the people had been to middle and high school with. It did not help that Nora did not have a Facebook. Very charitably and helpfully he might have spent some time wishing that whether or not you were “in touch with” another person did not revolve, these days, so much around online contact. He kept Nora’s phone number, as he remembered it, in years to come. He kept the address of the ryokan in Aomori, too, and his father kept the immigrant owners of an Indian restaurant in Ōdate as Skype contacts.

            He tried to stay in touch with these people in much the same way that he tried to stay in touch with his family in Cape Cod, but the family in Cape Cod was reaching out to him as well so with them he had more success. He had developed a liking for seaside towns during visits to Cape Cod as a child; Hakodate, so much like what he had heard said about San Francisco, for him was also a sort of overgrown Hyannis or Chatham. One New Year’s Eve in Chatham he had had a horrible fight with his mother; in Hakodate he had much less strenuous arguments with his father about where to go to dinner or when to go to sleep. He could take the trolley around Hakodate by himself using a daily pass in which he had written his name and the date “8/13/25,” the “25” referring not to the Anni Domini but to the Heisei Era. This was an improvement over Cape Cod, which he had never actually driven around himself and would not get the chance to drive around himself for another several years. In Cape Cod all he could do was to ask to be chauffeured, something that he had sometimes, in his middle and later teens, wondered whether he should maybe find a little more embarrassing than he did. He certainly found it embarrassing now, looking back.

            On Cape Cod his aunt and uncle lived in a house overlooking a large pond along a tidal river. He could see fancier houses across the pond; in one of them they left their lights on throughout the night. Coming into Hakodate on the train from Aomori he had seen the city itself spread out white and gleaming from across the bay—white and shining, yes, in the distance, too far out and too far behind the glass of the train windows to be smelled or heard. Here was a city that, after his father had had a health scare in Hachinohe the previous week, the doctor at the Hachinohe hospital had had him understand to be bigger, with more amenities and more to do, in those respects perhaps safer, a safer city in which to be sick. He did not know about hospitals on Cape Cod; the entire Cape’s population was less than that of Hakodate, except in the heightened weekends of high summer in which he and his mother had never liked to visit it anyway. He knew there was one in Hyannis. He had never spent much time in Hyannis. He had gotten a Jerusalem Bible with full plate illustrations by Salvador Dali at a used bookstore in Hyannis.

            “You definitely do want to look back at what brought you here, sitting here,” said Sarah on the trolley. “Now that we’re going into our last year.”

            “Yes,” said Nicholas, “even if you were able to come here earlier than I was and for longer.”

            Sarah shrugged. “Do you think you would have had a good time with a year at Hokudai?”

            “There are people I would have missed terribly.”

            “For me too,” said Sarah (referring, potentially, to her girlfriend, all about whom she would tell Nicholas that night as they were schlepping back across the city from the tide-submerged evening beach).

            Normally Nicholas was proud not to feel a need to be entirely like his friends.

❦

Traveling around northern Japan required a lot of hauling luggage around; laundry was an occasional necessity, and Nicholas and his parents had at least two large pieces of luggage each. His mother had actually left Japan before the arrival in Hakodate to return to America to manage the move out of their current house, but he kept thinking of her as somehow still there and he kept wondering what she would think of all the places he and his father were going together. A period of frustration in Hirosaki, a city that he liked not nearly as much as he had expected to, had led to a meltdown and discussion of the possibility of returning home early; but he had turned things around, partially out of the firm hope and desire of seeing another friend in Japan—he had seen another UMass friend, Alba, in Kyōto a little less than a month ago. At one point Nicholas and his father sent his mother some pictures from a public garden that proudly displayed Lythrum salicaria, purple loosestrife, as a characteristically Japanese flower; all three were used to thinking of loosestrife as an undesirable, invasive weed, albeit a pretty one, and had a hard time thinking of this as a place in which it was native and beloved. Later Nicholas would find out that loosestrife was considered one of the premiere biological pest control success stories. By the time he learned that, by which he had long since been ensconced in the United States again, it was hard to go back to thinking of it as pestilential.

            Japan had not afforded Nicholas any opportunity for religious practice, primarily because he had not been trying hard enough to make and keep it a priority. In Hakodate there was a certain intersection, on the lower slopes of the mountain looking down over the harbor towards the station, where there was on each corner a house of worship of a different denomination: A Roman Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, an Anglican church, and (next to a teahouse) a Pure Land Buddhist temple. The first two of these had been founded in the 1860s and 1870s as missionary parishes for the conversion of the people of the raw frontier city and for the benefit of French and Russian soldiers, diplomats, and dignitaries. The Anglican church had a shorter history and a vastly more modern style of architecture. The Pure Land temple was difficult to find out much about.

            There were also great old houses and ambassadorial buildings executed in beautiful Victorian styles in the neighborhoods along the slope, beautiful so differently from the Edo-period townhouse that Nicholas remembered from his week in Kyōto. He and Sarah looked at a few of these on their perambulations throughout the city but did not go inside. Though he thought briefly that he might like to live in a house like that, he decided eventually that it would be too high and mighty, too grandiloquent and authoritative. The bricks and white-trimmed façade of the old Russian consulate, in particular, radiated a feeling of coiled but somehow still kinetic forcefulness.

            “Buildings like that impress me but they also kind of give me the creeps,” he said. “It’s like they have an orbit you get sucked into.”

❦

They went to a junk shop near the harbor while they were in Hakodate. Nicholas in after years couldn’t remember what if anything Sarah had bought, but he remembered his own purchases very clearly. There was a blue-and-white matryoshka for his mother, which put him in mind of the Russian on the public signs and the forceful Russian consulate up on the slopes. There was a little metal cross, with vague ornamentations at the end of each arm—one of the wires of which the cross was made flaring out to either side at each end; this also reminded him of the consulate, and of the Orthodox church at that intersection, even though it was a Latin cross. And there was a little wooden figurine of a Hokkaidō bear.

            He also saw a battledore in the junk shop. It turned out that the Japanese word was “hanetsuki.” It was small, obviously ornamental, and had a painting of small birds eating berries on it. It would appear—so he learned—that Japanese people oftentimes still posed with ornamental battledores in New Year’s Eve photos, even though actually playing the game associated with them had fallen out of custom after the war. He thought of his grandfather coming as an avenger over the sea to stop war criminals and mass rapists from playing battledore and shuttlecock. It was an unexpectedly repellent thing to think about. He did not get the battledore; he decided that the matryoshka, and the cross, and the bear would make a better set of purchases.

            From a house near the junk shop he could hear someone playing one of last year’s Taylor Swift singles. He bopped his head a little to the beat, half-consciously.

❦

The next day he and Sarah looked around a bookstore and squeezed in a tiny bit of window-shopping in a department store before Sarah and her friend had to get on the bus back to Sapporo. They also went to an onsen. Nicholas had been in onsen before, in Aomori, but it had been in a very small ryokan indeed and he had always gone in the middle of the night and been the only one there. At the onsen in Hakodate that they went to he would have to be around a number of other people in variously more or less entire states of undress. If it had been with family members or close friends, or if he had been more acclimated to Japan, he probably would not have had a problem with this; but as it was, the prospect frightened him a little, and he spent the time that Sarah and her friend were in the onsen sitting in a vestibule reading an old copy of Hesperides that he had picked up at a used bookstore just before coming to Japan. He had been toting it around more than any of his books of Japanese poems and stories because it was a durable old clothbound hardcover while the others were trade paperbacks. In after years he would look back on the opportunities that he had had to buy materials from the Edo period and the Meiji era in used bookstores in cities like Kyōto and Hirosaki. It would be a subject of significant regret for him, as would be not trying out this onsen.

            He saw off Sarah and her friend at the station and then took the trolley back to Jūjigai, the closest stop to his and his father’s bread and breakfast. He hit the computer for a few hours—a pastime that had not yet reached its apogee of being a problematic time-suck for him—before it was time to go out for dinner, at Lucky Pierrot again. He had had one non-Lucky Pierrot dinner in Hakodate; it had been at a German-style restaurant and beer hall in or near the redbrick warehouses. Already he could barely remember what he had eaten there; he liked to think it had been a mix of the local and the universal, like a hot soft pretzel with some squid, or flying fish roe with sauerkraut on the side. But for now there was Lucky Pierrot and there was shiokara curry over rice. He ate the curry then and walked to a convenience store later, late at night, to get an ice cream bar. The convenience stores had been a fixture for him since he had been in Japan; the best had been in Kyōto, but there had been good ones in Hirosaki, Ōdate, Hachinohe, and now Hakodate too. His memory flashed back to the hotel in Ōdate where he and his father had stayed for a few days. It was decorated in a style that had probably been impressive thirty or forty years ago and retained some capacity to impress now, and in its lobby there had been a little coffee and tea bar. He wasn’t sure he would be able, if he were asked, to explain what about this moment reminded him of that place, nor what about future moments would remind him, often and again, of Hakodate.

❦

The following day Nicholas and his father left the city for Morioka by way of Aomori. The train bound for Aomori went widdershins around the bay, and it was out of the port side of the car that he watched the gleaming buildings of Hakodate disappear from sight.

Short Story: “Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan”

2008. A moment in spring, a fifteenth birthday party, walking along train tracks.

            It was in a small town, in New Jersey, and only a few people showed. All boys—they had female friends who could not make it—and all of an age to gossip, the crude way boys are liable to gossip, about friends who were absent. A hookup, a breakup (both truer than not), an abortion (scandalous; scurrilous; likely untrue; judgment withheld), rumors of bisexuality (true, but still mildly titillating in those days). The train track ran under the main street. On that main street they had, a few minutes before, stopped in a drugstore to buy candy bars.

            They ascend from the train tracks back to street level and lope towards the McDonalds at the edge of town, across an often-busy highway; they’ll have to dodge cars to get there, but these boys are fifteen to seventeen, and overbold. The spring weather is balmy here, more or less, and they sweat a little as they walk through the sunny afternoon.

            It was at this time still the case that being a “nerd” meant something, even in a high school of mostly “nerds.” YouTube was still fairly new and flash animation was not yet centralized on only a few main websites. Nerd comedy in particular was not centralized. Opinions on the merits of different videos, different websites, and different styles of this nerd comedy were exchanged, sometimes vociferously. The big band at this point is Paramore; boys like it too. The boy whose birthday it is has someone constrained familiarity with the music scene. He knows a little more about movies and TV. His friends do not live nearby, he does not yet have social media (although he does use LiveJournal), and he spends most of his free time reading. Ten or fifteen years later he will look back on all the reading and be sick of no longer reading so much.

            They get to the McDonalds; unable to buy much, and unwilling, at least in some cases, to gorge themselves on French fries right after the candy bars, they take the tiny plastic cups meant for ketchup and use them to take shots of soda from the soda fountain. Nobody stops them. People may or may not be looking at them. Their metabolisms can take it. The birthday boy will end up a little pudgy in his twenties and excoriate himself for it without surcease or mercy.

            There’s something to glory in in this afternoon. At one time, later, it will be said that this was a very normal day for these boys to have. One of them, at the least, will find meaning in that, and a little happiness, a store to draw from going forward into a later adolescence racked with self-sabotage and trauma. He will lack common sense and be overburdened with romance and mental fever for the rest of his minority. There will be a personal history for him to create. He will sometimes, almost, rise to that task.

Short Story: “A Portrait of Rachel”

At almost twenty-seven years old, Marie Boisjoli had still not entirely outgrown the social dynamics of late adolescence. She had a tendency to default to pithy, doctrinaire opinions of the environments of her youth—high school as a place that could have been a contender in her esteem if certain things had been very different; her first college roundly demonized; UMass Amherst, at least as it had been five years ago, as a flawed wonderland that might have been practically perfect in every way had she only been a couple of years older and wiser when she was there. She had not rediscovered the Catholicism of her childhood until after she had graduated, and now overlaid on the social dynamics of the standard Millennial extended adolescence was the spiritual perspicacity, consisting in tumult, of the short sharp adolescence of a hundred years ago or more. She lived in an artist’s loft in North Adams and skateboarded to Mass.

            When Marie had decided to do a minor in studio arts with an aim towards becoming a professional painter, Shelby P., a friend from high school with whom she had rekindled her acquaintance and conviviality at UMass, had said “Why would you do that, Marie? Someone like you could do something with a much better chance of being remunerative.”

            “Like what? Orgo chem? I’ve seen the way people’s brains get blown out when they do orgo chem. And I’m familiar with how things work in CommColl.”

            “Your brain will get blown out eventually no matter what you do.”

            Shelby P. had said many cheerful things along those general lines since she had resurfaced in Marie’s life. The pessimism was bracing and even clarifying in some situations, such as the agonizing that Marie tended to do about the possibility of dating or marrying the wrong person or somebody to whom she would later turn out not to be attracted, but completely unhelpful in many other situations, such as the agonizing that Marie tended to do about whether she would be able to date or get married at all. Marie had only been on one date since deciding a couple of years ago not to date people who didn’t share her religious beliefs. It had been with a man much older than her who had expressed a distaste for “Millennial artiste types” and tried to walk it back by claiming that Marie was different from the others. She obviously had not trusted his ability to establish this even to her satisfaction, much less his own, after only knowing her for an hour and a quarter, so she had left the date (at an Indian restaurant in Williamstown) early and had had to be talked into sending him an “it’s not you, it’s me” text instead of just cutting him off without warning. The text had literally said, in those exact words, “it’s not you; it’s me”—Marie thought that at the very least he deserved better than a comma splice—to communicate her lack of interest in felicities in breaking this off with him.

            Ever since that point, Marie’s life had mostly been filled with taking commissions. She had never resorted to charging people to draw pictures of their favorite television and comic book characters the way some of her friends had done—she had nothing against doing this; it was just that she didn’t want to jump through the hoops required to convince the people asking for the pictures that she had any real knack for or interest in them. Instead, she took commissions for public murals and things of that nature, sometimes things as simple and unartistic as handywoman painting jobs for private homes, and tried to make the larger and more sporadic lumps of money that she got this way last for as long as she could. She had a deal with her parents for help with rent for her loft in return for coming home and doing some social and emotional heavy lifting around the holidays, a deal that had worked out well for the most part for the two and a half years so far that she had been living here, but she tried to pay for as many of her other needs on her own as she could. She didn’t have much trouble with food and clothes, but medical expenses were occasionally tricky. She didn’t have any car payments because she drove a rusty Ford a year younger than she was that still worked fine but that was so hellaciously ugly to look at that it had been hers for well under three thousand dollars. She only drove it occasionally and, other than home for the holidays, never any further than Pittsfield in one direction or Bennington in the other. For painting gigs that were further afield she took the bus or hitchhiked.

            One winter’s evening, a few days before the coldest night of the year, things started to change. Marie got home to her loft and checked the messages on the land line; she had people call the land line for business calls, partly as a hipster affectation and partly because when she was out and about she didn’t want whatever she was doing to be interrupted by her work. (When she went out for work, she gave her cell number to the person for whom she was doing the job, with a firm request that they not call that number again after the job was finished and not give it to anybody else. Once or twice people had broken the promises that they had made to that effect, but they had had more or less valid reasons for doing so.) There were four messages, of which she assumed, based on past proportions of experience, at least three were liable to be telemarketers or people calling from charitable causes she had donated five dollars to five years ago.

            This time, instead, they were all from one person, who introduced herself as Rachel Kellner, lived in Shutesbury just northeast of Amherst, and wanted her portrait painted.

            “I’d appreciate it if you could do it in a more or less traditional and at least semi-formal style, but I’m not going to be picky,” Rachel said in one of the messages. “I know that you mostly do murals and house painting these days but I have a friend who’s a professor in the UMass art department who said I should give you a call. Rick Stafford. Do you remember him?” Of course Marie remembered Professor Rick. He had taught her both figure drawing and color theory in that horrible semester when she had taken twenty-one credits to get a jump start on her minor. She had thought highly of him and was glad to know that he remembered her. Why he thought that she would make a good formal portraitist on the basis of figure drawing and color theory alone Marie wasn’t sure, but probably some of her other professors had communicated her progress to him after that semester.

            Marie made a point of not googling her clients if she hadn’t heard of them or couldn’t place their names on her own, but she was sure that she had at least heard the name Rachel Kellner somewhere before. She had a vague sense that it had been in some sixties counterculture context that she had heard it, and the voice on the phone had definitely been that of an agéd woman. Shelby P. knew a thing or two about the culture of the sixties but the real expert among Marie’s group of friends was a guy called Phil McCourt whom she had met and briefly almost-dated during her first semester at UMass. After taking a shower she called him up and asked if he knew anything about this Kellner person.

            It turned out that Rachel Kellner had been a Joan Baez-type ingénue folk singer early on in the sixties folk revival whose voice had been destroyed by smoking after a few years and who had briefly resurfaced as a producer for some B-plus-list New Wave bands in the mid-eighties. She would be about seventy-six now. Phil had had no idea that she lived in Western Mass. He did a little more research for Marie—he didn’t have the same compunctions about googling her clients that she did—and found out that in between, and after, her stints in the public eye she had languished in obscurity as a pharmacist and been almost-famous in science fiction circles as a matriarch of the Star Trek: Voyager fan base.

            “She lives in Shutesbury, she said?” he asked Marie over the phone the evening after she got the calls from Rachel (she had instructed Marie in the calls to think of her as Rachel).

            “Yeah,” said Marie. “Don’t google her address, okay? I don’t want you to be a creeper any more than I wanna be one.”

            “Relax; I wasn’t going to. I was just wondering—are you gonna be okay getting there with your car?”

            Marie had given this some thought earlier in the day. Phil was right in his implied assumption that she wasn’t likely to be able to get to Shutesbury by public transit. There was no easy combination of routes to take to even get from North Adams to Amherst, unless she wanted to spend all day getting there and get a hotel room for as long as she was doing the portrait, an option for which she really didn’t have the money right now. Then there was getting from Amherst to Shutesbury, for which there did not seem to exist any public transit at all. It seemed there was not any way around her car braving the Hoosac Range and the Cold River’s ungracious curves. She told Phil that she was sure things would be fine; she wasn’t actually as sure of this as she wished she could be, but all the roads that she would take were reasonably well-traveled as far as she knew until the last leg of the trip, when she turned off Route 116 up something called Bull Hill Road. She could probably stay on well-traveled routes longer if she went down through Amherst, then up the Shays Highway from Pelham, but if her car was going to have trouble anyway then it might be best to keep the route as short as she could.

            “I don’t drive a very good car,” she told Rachel over the phone the next day. “Do you have somewhere I could stay if I need to stay overnight, like a fold-out sofa or something?”

            “Wow. I haven’t hosted in a long time now,” said Rachel. “I don’t have a fold-out but my couch should still be deep enough to sleep on depending on your body type. How big are you?”

            “Five-seven, a hundred and thirty-five pounds or so?” said Marie. She had taught herself, she thought more or less correctly, to resent questions like this, but Rachel had a more valid reason for asking than most so she answered anyway despite the queasy feeling that she got.

            “God, I wish that were me,” said Rachel. “I’m five-four and a hundred and seventyish. But, well, I’m old, and after a certain age you actually look younger if you’re fat, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. Yeah, I think my couch will serve you just fine. Don’t feel the need to disguise anything when you paint me, by the way, the weight or the age or anything else; I want a ‘warts and all’ portrait. Did you see that episode of The Crown?”

            “I don’t watch much TV,” said Marie. “But, yeah, as long as you have a sofa I can use if I need to and a driveway big enough for me to park in, it should be fine. My time is flexible, and I’m guessing you’re retired?” Rachel made an affirmative but not particularly happy noise. “So I can come over whenever you’ll have me.”

            They arranged for a time, a time that was coming quickly. Marie would have to set out only a little bit after midday to be sure of getting to Shutesbury before it started getting dark. Even though the afternoons were getting lighter, they were still well within the part of the year in which they carried a sort of lingering premature senescence that suddenly collapsed into night, inevitably before one would have expected it. Rachel offered to burn some incense for her safe travels. Marie was not sure what to make of that; from somebody her own age it would have been manifestly dead serious or close to it, but it was hard to know just how seriously somebody like Rachel did or did not take ideas like that. If Rachel had just been a folk revival ingénue, or had just been a New Wave impresario, that would have been one thing, and Marie would have had something or other to go by, but the fact that her life had taken so many apparent twists and turns complicated matters. In the end Marie told her to feel perfectly free to burn some incense if she thought that that would help. Marie would, she said, reserve judgment on whether or not she herself thought it might.

            The appointed day and time arrived and Marie set out with her art supplies in the back seat and two changes of clothes in the trunk, plus a hopelessly stretched-out old t-shirt to sleep in. Tomorrow was Sunday; she might have to go to Mass at the UMass Newman Center again. She had not been there in a long time; the last time she had been there, she had been unserious about her faith and only putting in a token appearance on Maundy Thursday because she thought that it might look bad to some super-senior whom she wanted to like her if she didn’t. She wondered how the old place was; she wondered if it would be any less flat and unappealing to her now. The design of the place architecturally and liturgically, she remembered, left things to be desired, but in recent months she had finally made her peace with the relative insignificance of that compared to the sincerity with which the Mass was approached, which obviously would depend upon the priest. She doubted good old Father John was still there, and, indeed, looking it up, it appeared to be someone else now. All in all she had high but nervous hopes.

            She got to Shutesbury just as the sun was westering and the bare trees beginning to cast their shadows more heavily than before. She pulled into the short but sinuous driveway at Rachel’s A-frame set back modestly into the woods and parked next to a beaten-up old Subaru. The tree line melted back from the road to encompass it like a bezel. There were a couple of chickens strutting around the narrow and scantily snow-dusted lawn.

            Marie strode confidently up to the house with her box of charcoals in one hand and her easel in the other. She would be taking some studies on a sketchpad that she carried in the same box as the charcoals before, either tomorrow if she stayed over or some other day if she decided to leave after dark after all, breaking out the canvas frames and acrylic paints that she had left in the trunk of the Ford. Rachel had specified that she wanted to be painted in acrylic, possibly as a gesture to the difficulty that Marie was already going to face in getting this commission done. The idea that it was inherently and significantly easier to do good, serious paintings in acrylics than in oils was a myth as far as Marie was concerned, but she couldn’t blame a layperson for believing it, and for all she knew there might be other, fabulously well-thought-out reasons for Rachel to prefer acrylics to which Marie was not privy.

            There was no doorbell—it looked like one might have been there at one time, but if so, Rachel had removed it to make room for a mezuzah—so Marie knocked on the door harder and harder until Rachel answered it. She would appear to have been taking a nap; she was in a nightgown that swept the floor around her and had a sleep mask pushed haphazardly up over her forehead. Her hair was snow-white but beautifully lustrous and the lines on her face were fine and shallow, maybe because of the pudge on her cheeks. “Marie!” she said. “Good to see you; come on in!” She was acting as if their phone correspondence had extended and metamorphosed into a long acquaintanceship; perhaps, in the weird stretches and compressions of time that Marie had heard were for many people a part of old age, that was how it felt. Marie said a few polite words and Rachel led her into the house. In addition to the chickens a dog was in evidence; there was a dog bed with lots of fur shed in it and more moderate amounts of fur shed on most of the other upholstered surfaces in the living room. It looked like there was a kitchen behind this room; one other room on this floor, which looked like an addition to the house off to the left, not readily visible from the driveway; and a screen door that led to an enclosed porch on the other side of the kitchen. The living room had a pellet stove opposite the couch on which Marie guessed she was going to be sleeping. The bathroom must be upstairs.

            “I sure hope you like seitan because we’re going to be having a lot of it tonight,” said Rachel. “I cooked a ton of it up the other day with some mushroom and eggplant and dijon mustard. Of course, none of it’s fresh, but I got it from cold storage at a farm up in Montague so it can’t be nearly as bad as if I’d just gotten it at the supermarket. You okay with that?”

            “Yes, that’s absolutely all right,” said Marie. “It—can I ask, do you drive, Rachel?”

            “Yes, of course I drive; the Subaru’s out there in the driveway, isn’t it?; I live alone and it’s not like I can get around and get done what I need to get done on foot, living out here.” She waved her hand. “At my age there are only a few places I really know how to get to, though; some would say you get stuck in a rut after a while. I would have said that at your age. Now I just say I’ve become set in my ways.”

            They made more small talk of this kind—Marie told Rachel a little bit about her church and Rachel told Marie a little bit about her most recent synagogue. Then Rachel showed Marie around the living room. The pellet stove was burning, though not exactly crackling hot. Next to it was a stack of books with titles ranging from The Trump Prophecies to Zowie! It’s YAOI and from The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World to Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. Marie decided to suspend judgment on Rachel’s reading habits, especially since she suspected that the books’ placement next to the pellet stove might be suggestive of something.

            “That half-wit dog is still upstairs, I guess,” said Rachel. “Normally she sleeps in that dog bed over there but she comes into my room to sleep with me every few days or so. I was taking a nap before you got here, if you couldn’t tell.”

            “I could tell,” said Marie. “—Rachel, can I ask if you have any kids or grandkids who visit?” She hoped that her concern for a seventy-six-year-old woman living alone in a place like this wasn’t too obvious to Rachel. It probably, regrettably, was.

            “I have kids, yes, but we don’t see much of one another,” said Rachel, “which is a shame. Love was free in the sixties but then the cold light of day hit and we all found out that you really do get what you pay for. I’m guessing your generation is realizing much the same thing.”

            Marie considered cautiously how she wanted to respond to this. The psycho-spiritual consensus, which she had heard from both friends and her therapist late in high school and in college, had been that casual sex was fine and potentially even psychosexually clarifying every now and then, but was the sort of thing best not made a habit of. That had been the standard to which she had held herself, generally successfully, until the last four or five years. She had heard that it was technically a more restrained standard than those of the last couple of generations when they had been young adults. “We’ve realized it,” she eventually said, “but I think I’ve probably realized it more than most people.”

            “Could you talk to people at your church about it, maybe?” suggested Rachel.

            Marie rolled her eyes. “Why would people at my church understand…you know what? Never mind. Do you mind if I do some hand and face studies starting in a few minutes? You won’t need to get dressed up for that and I’d like to get it out of the way while there’s still a combination of indoor and outdoor light. It won’t take too long but you will have to sit very still.”

            “Don’t a lot of artists do these kinds of studies from photographs these days?”

            “Some do, yeah, but I’m not one of them. I’d be more willing to do it for your face than for your hands if we end up having to do it; I do have a pretty good Nikon in my car, and hands are trickier to do studies of than faces.”

            “I can believe it. I know my hands have given me a lot more trouble than my face has over the years.”

            “Yes,” said Marie. “Well. In any case. I’ll take my stuff out and then let’s begin, shall we?”

 ❦

Rachel sat admirably still, much stiller than Marie had gone into the day afraid that she was going to. Her concept of an eccentric elderly woman, as a general sort or type or condition of person, could not accommodate an image of this kind of stillness. There was a grandeur to her even in her nightgown with her sleep mask now hanging around her neck.

            At one point Marie paused in the middle of a study of Rachel’s left hand from the right to go to the bathroom. Rachel directed her into the room off to the left, the extension not readily visible from the drive. “There’s a shower in there, a sink, and a bidet,” she said. “If you have to do number two then you’ll have to use the outhouse. It’s up a path about forty feet into the trees. I hope you’re not afraid of the dark.”

            “Not in particular,” said Marie, and went to the outhouse. When she got back, the dog, an Irish setter that she could tell had the characteristics typical of her breed, was lolling with her head sprawled across Rachel’s outstretched feet and her long pink tongue trailing along the floor.

            “This is Rosanna,” said Rachel. “Marie, say hi to Rosie; Rosie, say hi to Marie.”

            “Hi, Rosie,” said Marie. She squatted down to run her hand through the setter’s fur. The fur was silky but did not smell very good. Rosie did not seem ill-served or poorly taken care of, only old and unwell. She wondered how long Marie had had her. She looked at least ten years old—from this angle Marie could suddenly see quite a bit of silver around her muzzle—but with some more-than-residual happiness overlaid on the stupidity. Rosie reached up to lick Marie’s hand, then clambered to her feet.

            “Rosie, shake,” said Rachel, and Rosie proffered her paw for shaking, then lumbered back upstairs. “Dumb as a box of hammers but Lord do I love her,” said Rachel.

            Marie asked something she had been wanting to ask for a while now. “I don’t do much research on my clients,” she said, “so I have to ask—what New Wave band was it, exactly, that you were a producer for?”

            “Mostly Eyes in Their Last Extremity and Tinúviel,” said Rachel, “but I did some work with Patrick Morkan and His Horse right before I retired again. It was a weird world to come back into, twenty years after being the girl who used to be the future of American songwriting.” Marie decided not to pursue the possibility that Rachel might be exaggerating her accomplishments. She was saying this hieratically rather than conversationally.

            This attitude continued when they talked more about Rachel’s past over their seitan dinner. Her tone of voice was technically casual and conversational, but Marie had a hard time shaking the feeling that this tone was itself being dispensed, dolloped out, from some source deep beneath the sea or in a cavern deep in the earth. Rachel had cooked the seitan skillfully and it held the flavor of the mustard very well; the same flavor was a little less thoroughly in evidence in the mushrooms and eggplant, so the dish as a whole tasted a little uneven, but by no means bad. Gradually Marie came to suspect that she was on the verge of being chosen for something. It was not a comfortable feeling, especially since she had already been chosen to be Rachel Kellner’s portraitist, surely an honor worth at least a little more than Marie had assumed at first. She wondered how Rachel would have treated another portraitist, someone older maybe, or male. She liked to imagine it would have been different enough to make it worth comparing notes.

            “Before I started singing in the Village I was in my high school glee club,” Rachel said after dinner with the apparent expectation that this should somehow be reflected in the eventual portrait of her, “and, later, a holiday season sales clerk at a middle-end department store in uptown Manhattan.”

            “Are you a New York City native?” asked Marie.

            “Yes. You could hear it in my speaking voice until about 1982. You?”

            “No,” said Marie, who was disoriented enough to interpret this question as an insinuation that she was also from New York, “I’ve only ever been to the city a couple of times and only ever on day trips. My family’s from Central Mass.”

            “Boisjoli, is that a French Canadian name?” Marie nodded. “During my pharmacist days I would take trips up to Montreal to see Leonard Cohen sometimes before he was Leonard Cohen.” As Marie looked at her while she said this, a shadow played over her opening and closing jaw in a way that she would probably not be able to get any sketches or studies of but might want to try to include or at least allude to somehow in the final painting. “Anyway, it’s a much easier name to wrap your teeth around than Tanizaki or Buxtehude or the other names you encounter all over the place in a place like New York.” This statement, which escaped a firm verdict of being racist mostly because of Rachel’s less-than-invidious tone of voice in saying it, was nevertheless a much more reactive and closed-off sentiment than Marie would have expected from someone with Rachel’s life, septuagenarian or not, but it would have been an abdication of professional virtues and standards for Marie to say so out loud.

            “Rachel, can I ask what your politics are?” asked Marie, who figured it was at least slightly more acceptable to broach this if she did so as a question.

            “My politics are exactly what you’d expect. My opinion of the way those have been put into place is what’s different. Like I said, you really do get what you pay for.” Marie motioned for Rachel to turn her head a little to the left so Marie could get in a sketch of the way a curlicue of her hair fell over her temple. “I dabbled in saying I was ‘politically neutral’ but I realized that that just made me sound complicit rather than wise. I’d love to say it took the Iraq War or something of that sort for me to realize that but, actually, it was Star Trek: Voyager fandom.”

            “May I ask what aspects of Star Trek: Voyager fandom?” asked Marie, who had never resorted to charging people to draw pictures of their favorite television and comic book characters the way some of her friends had done.

            “You don’t know me well enough to ask that question. Let’s just say nobody was focusing enough on our common enemy.”

            “And who was the common enemy?”

            “The people who wrote Star Trek: Voyager. How did you like your seitan? You seemed to be enjoying it but you didn’t actually say.”

            “I liked it pretty well, thank you.”

            Such was the rest of their evening. At a little after nine, Rachel went out to feed the chickens and make sure they had come in from the cold; Rosie ran around the little yard for a little bit while Rachel was out there, barking at the cold and the dark and nothing else in particular, then ran back in just as enthusiastically and flopped down in the dog bed in the living room. Marie, who had already been to the bidet a couple of times since dinner by this point, took the opportunity to take her leave and make her way to the outhouse again when Rachel came back in. The tree-line now was tense, less gracious, and encompassed rather than embracing. The trees that poked up against the long-since-descended night were weird and harshly lit from the lights inside the A-frame, their branches shooting jaggedly up like lighting shooting from the ground up into the sky. Marie decided to stay outside for a few minutes, shivering, with a feeling of defiance that had suddenly and not really explicably come over her. She had no desire to defy her subject, but something about the world in which her subject lived felt stultifying and possibly oppressive despite its countercultural self-presentation.

            When she got back inside, Rachel looked liable to get ready to go back to sleep; when Marie asked, she said that she was doing just that. “I know people your age tend to prefer to stay up later,” Rachel said. “I’m sorry if there’s not that much around to entertain you. I don’t have a TV, just a laptop, or I’d give you my Netflix password.”

            “That’s okay,” said Marie. “I brought reading material. And I can watch Netflix on my phone if I really need to.”

            “Do you get reception out here?”

            “Yeah, like one bar.”

            “Okay.” Rachel shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m sure Rosie’d like it if you could rub her belly a little too. Good night! I’ll try not to wake you up if I come down early.”

            Marie had mostly good but strange and tumultuous dreams on the sofa that night. In one, she was back at a concert in Fenway Park that she had not attended, but had heard from a couple of blocks away, when she had visited friends in Boston about three and a half years ago. The music took shape and color and the notes swarmed around her like friends and enemies. In another dream she was at her first college again talking to a boy whom she had liked from afar while she was there. He was frustrated with her, with the person she had become. He had been a few years older than her—he would not be in any sense a boy any more, really—but a boy he was in the dream nevertheless. She woke up frustrated with him, and with herself. She wondered what Lewis was doing these days. The last she had heard of him had been when she had made an ill-judged remark about his sister over email while he was away in Costa Rica. He had never spoken to her again after coming back.

            The last dream that Marie had, or at least the last one that she remembered upon waking, was of going home for the holidays as a middle-aged woman with a husband and several young children. This one was tumultuous because midway through the dream she realized that the person sitting at the head of the table for the Christmas Eve dinner was not her father but Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Musk told everybody at the table that the world was at a crossroads. Marie took his word for it.

            In the morning, she woke up before Rachel was downstairs, but definitely not before she was awake; she was laughing at something that she was presumably either reading or watching on her laptop. Marie called up the stairs that she was awake and waited for Rachel to come on down. She did not have to wait long; Rachel came down, exchanged polite words, and hopped in the shower. Breakfast, Marie guessed, could wait.

 ❦

After breakfast, they got back to sitting and sketching. Rachel was even chattier this morning than she had been last night. She and Marie discussed “Boisjoli” a little more and Marie mentioned that she had been to both Québec City and the South of France on Spring Break trips—the first in high school, the second when at UMass. Rachel grilled Marie on her impressions of France and Marie, who liked some aspects of French culture but could not stand others, went on a gut instinct that she could be honest with Rachel and got into some depth about it. Rachel developed this weird sneering expression but then settled back into affability and reasonableness.

            Out of the blue she asked Marie if she wanted children and Marie evaded the question rather than giving Rachel the “yes” that she desperately wanted to give. She did not want to get her own or anybody else’s hopes up. Rachel called very small children “anklebiters.” It turned out that she had four of them, by three different fathers, the first of whom she had been married to before his death from some disease about which she was maddeningly vague and the other two of whom she had had loving and sincere but in the final analysis transient relationships with in her late thirties. They had all gravitated towards either Florida or South Carolina, a part of the country that seemed to have a weird gravitational pull on a certain type of person that Marie had noticed several times before in conversations with other people.

            “Some people just can’t stand some stern weather,” said Rachel. “I dabbled in feeling that way myself at one time.” Marie felt this odd and fierce fondness for the way she said that she had dabbled in it, as if it had been a feeling that she could control and deliberately cultivate. Maybe it had been. In that case she definitely hadn’t had the inveterate, physical lapsed constitution in the face of cold that she knew a lot of other people did. Marie had heard from several acquaintances that humans simply had not evolved for this kind of weather, and she could believe it, but she would not have been willing to give up the changes of the seasons for anything, even though this winter being colder and wetter than the last two made it hard for her to get to Mass some Sundays.

            She took four or five pictures apiece of Rachel’s face from five different angles—from the front, full profiles from both sides, and three-quarters profiles from both sides. She used flash, she disabled flash, she put the camera on automatic and let the flash do what it may. She filled up half of her sketchpad with charcoals of Rachel’s hands and a few studies of the way the light hit her face and clothing that the camera couldn’t capture. Rachel wanted a portrait sitting down, from the knees up, with her hands folded in her lap—a more traditional posture than Marie, before meeting her, would have expected from someone with her background and profile.

            “Should I break out the easel?” she asked, finally.

            “Sure,” said Rachel. “Do you think you can finish today?”

            Marie raised her eyebrows. “Do you expect me to finish today?”

            “I’m not sure what to expect. What should I?”

            “You should expect that I’ll be able to get the basic strokes in today, ask you to approve the basic concept of the painting, then leave either later today or tomorrow morning and finish the painting from the sketches and photos I have when I get back to North Adams. I can drive it over to you or ship it to you at some later point and you can pay me the rest of my commission then. Does that sound okay to you?”

            “Sure,” said Rachel, noncommittally but accommodatingly. “By the way, and there’s no reason I really need to ask this so feel free to tell me I’m overstepping my bounds, but shouldn’t you have gone to Mass this morning?”

            “Oh, shit,” said Marie. “Is there anywhere around here that does Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening Masses?”

            “How should I know? I think the Newman Center at UMass might. You went there, didn’t you?”

            “Sure did,” said Marie. “I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

 ❦

They spent the rest of the day discussing the painting together—Rachel wanted a non-naturalistic color scheme for her clothing but wanted her features and hair to be true-to-life, all while not caring very strongly about the lighting and the placement of elements, which Marie thought was a confusing set of prescriptions—and Marie executed as much of it as she could before the sun went down. Then she arranged to spend one more night here—she would take a shower after getting back from Mass—and drove into Amherst, planning to go to the seven o’ clock Mass and then have a late dinner at one of the restaurants on North Pleasant Street.

            She found the Newman Center changed, but not much. The priest was new, and the vaguely unpleasant feeling that she had in the past gotten when she would go to Mass here had lessened considerably, probably due more to changes within her own self-concept than to any changes in the Newman Center. She was not sure how bad some of her sins were so she took communion without having asked for confession before Mass. Then she went to a Tibetan restaurant, of all things, in Amherst Center and had an uncharacteristically sumptuous dinner of boiled bread, dumplings, and a saucy potato dish, paid for with a check that she wrote in anticipation of the down payment going through on her commission like Rachel had promised her before her arrival.

            She drove back to Shutesbury with her high beams on for the whole way once she got out of North Amherst—there were a couple of cars that she passed but she forgot to turn the high beams off when she passed them; one of them honked at her. When she got back she finally familiarized herself with the bathroom, which she had used only very briefly and diffidently earlier in the day, for long enough to take a shower.

            “How was Mass?” asked Rachel.

            Marie shrugged, but she felt like doing more than shrugging. The shower was a peace and a comfort, her third of the night so far. The night wore on and got colder. Rachel put more wood pellets in the stove and snuggled up with Rosie.

Short Story: “A Dog’s Faith”

Note: This story is written, in a strictly limited way, from the point of view of a character who is being a bad friend to somebody in a sensitive situation (questioning one’s gender identity). Due to the writing style, the narration reflects this character’s viewpoints rather than my own. I feel the need to clarify this from the get-go because I know that there are people who find my own approach to issues of sexuality and gender validating or even inspiring, and I do not want to create a nasty surprise or the appearance of betrayal as these readers encounter Hayley Weingarten’s less-than-generous behavior around those topics.

1. 

Hayley Weingarten secretly liked to think of herself as a good person, secretly because she did not want to be thought of as the sort of person who self-identified as a good person. She was sixteen and had never done anything particularly wrong in her life, unlike some. She went to church and youth group, she did well in school, and her classmates liked her; one of the “popular crowd,” she was nevertheless spiritually and culturally out of step with the rest of that group. She never had to be told to take Buster for a walk; only seldom did she have to be told to sweep the kitchen before going to bed or to cook dinner with Dad every Tuesday and Friday.

            Her twin sister Bethany was in the Abstinence Club. Bethany was in fact abstinent as far as Hayley knew. There were those in the Abstinence Club who weren’t—Hayley could think of three pregnancies that she knew of, one for each year she had been in high school so far. The first girl had had an abortion because her parents told her she was “the exception that proved the rule”; the second girl had miscarried relatively early in the going but still told the school about it and damn the opprobrium (Hayley respected her for it); the third girl was going to have her baby any day now and had dealt with all sorts of horrifying social brutality ever since the beginning of the school year (Hayley loved her for it). She supposed this abysmal track record was less because the purity culture people were uniquely hypocritical and more because being in the club put a target on your back for school lotharios like Ryan Rappaport and Jacen Calvert. Hayley had herself kissed Ryan Rappaport at a party once, but nothing more had come of it and the next week she had stomped on his foot for reading her notes over her shoulder in math class.

            Hayley’s pastor, Pastor Dave, liked the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and brought it up at least once every couple of months since the congregation had voted to secede from the Disciples of Christ and thus from having to use the Revised Common Lectionary. Every time Pastor Dave brought up this parable, Hayley felt a thrill of uncertainty about her life. She liked feeling these thrills more than she liked the glib certainties of her time outside of church. This was part of the reason why she was so punctilious about getting to church every week.

            One time Hayley and her best friend, Charlotte Rice (whom some called “Charizard,” much to her delight), went to the Great Escape and Splashwater Kingdom with Charlotte’s goth cousin from the city Amelia Greenberg. Amelia wore this bizarre bathing suit with strips zigzagging all up and down her sides. Hayley spent half the day being concerned about Amelia’s tan lines and the other half racking her brain trying to figure out why Amelia’s suit came across as lewder than her own even though it covered more. “Have some of the Living Water, Charizard,” Hayley said to Charlotte, splashing her in the lazy river. Amelia, whose mother was something called a baalat teshuva, ignored her.

            Another time one of Amelia’s goth friends, Gwendolyn Fisher, stayed over with Amelia at Charlotte’s house and invited Hayley over to watch something called Crimson Peak. Hayley kept wondering what Pastor Dave would think of the movie if he were here with them, but she enjoyed it anyway.

            And still another time, Hayley and her other best friend, Lara Fielding, who was a senior, went on a medium-to-long-distance car journey to an abandoned insane asylum (by this point Hayley had started to suspect that Amelia Greenberg was rubbing off on her). They had only just gotten there when an alarm on Hayley’s phone went off and reminded her that she had to hightail it back home so she could take Buster to the vet for his regular checkup. When she eventually got him to the vet, about five minutes late, the news was not to Buster’s advantage.

            “Buster has liver failure and he has three weeks to live,” said Dr. Chandler.

            “Liver failure isn’t necessarily fatal for dogs, though, is it?” asked Hayley, trying not to freak. “I’ve seen special dog food for such dogs as this at Wegman’s.”

            “I’m sorry that you have to be here to hear this news by yourself, Hayley, but, while it wouldn’t have been fatal if we’d caught it sooner, the timing here seems to have been incredibly bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if Buster’s problems had started within a week or two after his last checkup. If we’d rescheduled that one to be even slightly later, I probably would have been able to catch it in time. As it is…” Dr. Chandler drummed the table gently with her callused fingers. “All I can say is keep him comfortable. If you want to make another appointment to have him put to sleep in a couple of weeks, then, I mean, be my guest, but you don’t have to; if you don’t let him overextend himself he could be reasonably comfortable until close to the end.”

            “I’d rather he die at home, thank you,” said Hayley as politely as she could muster.

            When she got home, she went straight up to her room without telling Mom, Dad, or either of her siblings what was the matter. Her younger brother Josh found her up there when he went to check on her halfway through dinner, over two hours later. She had her fingers knotted in Buster’s tangled fur and her head resting on his big belly, listening to his breathing.

            “We’ll leave a pork chop in the fridge for you if you want to heat it up later,” Josh said gently.

            “Thanks.”

            “Do you want me to leave this light on or…?”

            “No. Turn it off, please. Thanks.”

            Josh turned out the light and left the room. He left the door open the tiniest crack. By eight-thirty Hayley was sound asleep.

            She woke up to seventeen text messages from Lara. The first said:

Lara YESTERDAY 8:55 PM: Hayley, I don’t mean to freak you out but I’ve been giving this some thought for a few months now and I think I might be trans.

Hayley couldn’t deal with this right now. She skimmed through the rest. Lara clearly need help and/or support, and she certainly did not want to leave such an important suspicion to the tender mercies of Pastor Dave, but dealing with Buster was going to be enough of an emotional lift for her for at least the next month or two.

            Never having been sure what exactly to make of “the trans issue” (Hayley thought of all controversial subjects as “the X issue” regardless of whom she knew personally whom they affected), she noted the time—a little before five—and sent Lara one text in response before going back to sleep.

Hayley TODAY 4:52 AM: Not that I don’t sympathize, but is there any particular reason you didn’t bring this up on the road trip?

The possibility that Lara had just started thinking about this since midafternoon yesterday did occur to Hayley, but she would rather not entertain the possibility because she didn’t like to think of Lara lying to her about something like this.

            About three hours after this, her parents came and woke her up. Buster by this point could tell that Hayley was upset, and had started intermittently licking her hand, warm comfort in the half-sleep of morning. She held on to him in a world where there was no Lara and no liver failure. It had been less than a day and already her collapse was almost entire. If she was lucky this meant that she would bounce back from it faster than usual too.

            “Hayley, honey, wake up,” Mom said, sympathetically but reproachfully. “It’s time for church. –and then maybe you can tell us what’s wrong?”

            “Yeah,” Hayley grunted. She got up and pulled off yesterday’s clothes as soon as Mom closed the door. She had not showered, nor had she changed into her nightclothes, nor had she brushed her teeth, nor had she had anything to eat since lunch yesterday. She hoped church would cheer her up at least a little, but she did not think so, and she felt bad for hoping so; that was not what church was for.

            Church did in fact cheer her up at least a little; the music was a little more ceremonious than usual, for one thing. Hayley had a private taste for the rote and ritualized that she could normally only feed on Sundays where she visited the black Baptist church two towns over with her friend Amanda Harwell, but today the music ministry had sprung for “When I survey the wondrous Cross” and “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” so she could get some of it right here at home. The sermon was on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, which had always given Hayley a spine-tingling feeling, a feeling that she had only just recently started to like. She guessed Amelia Greenberg really was rubbing off on her.

            For the rest of the day she did in fact hang out with Lara. Lara, apparently, had taken Hayley on the road trip partially in order to talk about this with her; she had been hoping that Hayley would come up with some sort of Christian rationale for putting her concerns and questions to rest. When Hayley had had to hurry home, though, Lara had driven around for a while by herself and then, looking for some more information on her phone, had decided that there was more to this than she had thought or than she had wanted Hayley to tell her that there was. She had been alarmed, almost frightened, and had decided to tell Hayley before anybody else because she thought that, after the day that they had spent together and after Lara’s own ulterior motives for that day, Hayley deserved to know. She had texted Hayley at around the same time in the evening that she normally did, and had freaked out after not getting a response and kept texting her until she gave up for the evening.

            Such was Lara’s account. Hayley was inclined to take her word for it and apologized for not being there to help her through this. She told her about Buster, but Lara still seemed hurt.

            “Hasn’t Buster been having health problems for a while now?”
            “Yes, but you…when your pet gets a death sentence, you don’t just walk it off just because the pet was already sick or old.”

            Lara looked like she was about to shoot back some rejoinder but instead she let her hands fall to her sides and said “I know. I’m sorry.”

            “Anyway,” said Hayley, as businesslike as she could, “all I feel like I can say for right now is that if you think there’s something to this then it’s totally not my place to contradict you, but, like, I think you might want to wait a little while before making some sort of sudden move here. Because your thoughts here about this, about the likelihood of this, changed pretty radically during one day.”

            “I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. I thought I told you so.”

            “Yes, but had you been going back and forth on it?”

            “Not really. I was just going back and forth on it today.”

            Hayley racked her brains for something that she could say that would be of help. What she came out with was an unbearable cliché but she said it anyway. “‘I praise you,’” she said, “‘for I am wonderfully and fearfully made.’”

            “Thanks,” Lara said unironically after a few seconds of silence. “Can you maybe go ahead and think through how you feel about this a little more before we talk about it again?”

            “Of course I can,” said Hayley, and squeezed Lara’s hand, feeling for a split second firmer and more stable than she was.

2.

Hayley’s first line of attack was talking to her biology teacher, Mrs. Ryder. Mrs. Ryder was about thirty, and Hayley guessed that she counted as “a Millennial,” but she had her life much more together than the media kept bloviating that people that age did or were supposed to. Until late last school year she had been Miss McCarthy; her then-boyfriend and now husband was somebody named Charles who was an accountant in one of the small cities to the north. She had long, pin-straight brown hair and her faculty bio page listed “split ends” as one of her dislikes.

            “I don’t think I’m the best person to be discussing this with,” Mrs. Ryder said, leaning back in her chair and fidgeting with a pencil as Hayley stood supplicant before her desk. “With a lot of these ‘identity things,’ as you call them, there isn’t a whole lot of reliable research being done on biological etiologies because the subjects are so politicized. That’s what makes them identity things.”

            “There are biological, uh, etiologies for homosexuality though, aren’t there?” asked Hayley.

            “There are more firmly established correlations with certain traits that are known to be biological, yes,” said Mrs. Ryder. “It’s possible that these things are epigenetic rather than genetic, or possibly a combination of biological and environmental factors. I don’t think there are comparable studies that have been done on transgender subjects, mostly for ethical reasons; it’s hard to find control groups if all the people you’re studying are undergoing some sort of hormone treatment.”

            Mrs. Ryder seemed to be implying here that she thought that there were people who went through transition who really should not, and that seemed reasonable to Hayley; hadn’t she heard rumors that the Stantons recently considered putting their son on puberty blockers after he said he had a crush on a boy? But April Hooper had been kicked out of the GSA for trying to start a discussion about incident, and April was unpleasant and bigoted enough on a whole host of issues that Hayley could believe that she had had it coming. She hardly thought that Mrs. Ryder was comparable.

            “All right,” said Hayley. “Thanks for listening.”

            “Before you go,” said Mrs. Ryder as Hayley turned to leave, “we need to discuss one of the marginalia that you wrote on your evolutionary development quiz.” Hayley made a little questioning sound in her throat. “You wrote ‘but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to believe this’ next to your answer on question thirteen. I gave you full credit, but I just wanted to check in with you about this—you do know that there’s no ‘supposed’ about believing things, don’t you?”

            “Oh, but there is,” said Hayley.

            Hayley’s next order of business was to get Buster some of the special dog food to see if she could prolong his life or at least prolong his comfort for any longer than Dr. Chandler had said. He enjoyed the car ride over to Hannaford with her (she didn’t have time to make a trip to Wegman’s on a school night). She did not know if he would enjoy a similar car ride again. For several minutes after getting the dog food and before driving home she just sat there with her hands knotted in his fur again, gently kissing him over and over again on his upturned head as he gave long slow laps underneath her chin. Then she drove home, playing one of her old indie rock CDs at what she would normally consider a too-low volume and nursing the holes in her heart and mind with one of the prayers that her youth minister, Dan, had taught her. “Lord, please pour out Your goodness and mercy on my head as You anointed King David’s head with oil…

            “Oh fuck you,” Hayley blurted out as somebody cut her off pulling into her neighborhood. She honked her horn hard, and a girl she recognized from the halls and from the one meeting of the Abstinence Club that she had attended last year glanced at her apologetically across the intersection.

            The next day this girl approached her between second and third period. “You’re Hayley Weingarten, right?”

            “Yeah. Didn’t you cut me off at Hemlock and Hawthorn last night?”

            “I did, yeah, sorry.” The girl proffered her hand. A purity ring flashed on her next-to-last finger. Weren’t those things supposed to go on the left hand? “Teresa Russo. Nice to formally meet you.” Hayley noted with some envy, another sin to pile on top of last night’s swearing, that Teresa was wearing a t-shirt for some mid-2000s anime that, paired with the rest of her outfit, she somehow managed to make look chic.

            “Is there anything in particular that you want?” Hayley asked as politely as she could under the circumstances.

            “Just to apologize and to tell you that your friend Lara Fielding seems pissed at you for some reason. I overheard her crap-talking you to Jacen Calvert. I dunno why.”

            “Jacen ‘CE’ Calvert? Seriously?”

            “On the other hand I think she might have some angle,” Teresa mused. She ran a hand through her obnoxiously thick, fine hair. “She’s probably trying to take herself off Jacen’s hit list or something.”

            “Oh. Well, in that case I can’t say I blame her.” Hayley doubted that this was actually true but it also did not seem like Teresa was misleading her on purpose or trying to spare her feelings. This girl was too good-natured for the Abstinence Club. She was also probably too good-natured to be a teen driver. The reason why Lara might actually be mad at her, of course, did not really bear thinking about, at least not yet. Hayley still had research and prayer to do.

            Hayley did not think about Lara for the rest of the school day, but when she got home she started researching Christian perspectives on this other than the Stantons’, which was self-evidently (at least assuming April Hooper wasn’t full of it) appalling, and Pastor Dave’s, which she was going to leave in reserve as a last resort. She had a taste for greater systematization than the usual Evangelical internet bickering provided, so first of all she looked up what the Catholic Church had to say about this. The first thing that she found was an infuriated headline from a couple of years ago that read: “POPE FRANCIS COMPARES TRANSGENDER PEOPLE TO ATOMIC BOMBS.” She was next to dead positive that this was excessive hyperbole on the headline’s part, and if not, it certainly was on Pope Francis’s; she opened the article in a new tab, bookmarked it, closed it, and moved on. The second thing that she found was that something called the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which Benedict XVI had apparently led before becoming pope, had decided a while back that a specific transgender man in Spain, and possibly transgender people in general, were not suitable candidates to be godparents. (Hayley thought about her own godparents and had to confess that she had no idea what the problem was.) The third thing that she found was that Pope Francis had said—more recently than the atomic bombs thing—that trans people should be fully welcomed in the Catholic Church. But she knew enough about Pope Francis to know that when he said that about a person or a class of people it did not necessarily mean that he approved of them.

Hayley TODAY at 5:45 PM: Hey, are any of your Ab Club friends Catholic?

Bethany TODAY at 5:47 PM: i think terri russo is? idk, sorry, i’m not as into the ab club as i used to be

Hayley TODAY at 5:48 PM: good, they’re haters and losers (as our ~esteemed president~ would say).

Hayley TODAY at 5:48 PM: Terri seems okay, though; I ran into her in the hall today and we chatted for a few minutes. Thanks!

Bethany TODAY at 5:49 PM: np

Bethany TODAY at 5:54 PM: why do u ask?

Hayley TODAY at 5:57 PM: It’s nothing, I just had a question about Catholicism and wanted to ask somebody we know instead of just going to the Church of the Transverberation and asking a stranger

Bethany TODAY at 5:58 PM: makes sense

Bethany TODAY at 6:00 PM: ill text u her #

Hayley TODAY at 6:02 PM: Thanks!

Bethany TODAY at 6:08 PM: np

Hayley spent about an hour and a half doing homework and the rest of the evening after that trying to figure out how to ask Teresa (or “Terri,” evidently) about this without outing Lara. Was it “outing” if the person being outed didn’t know for sure? Either way, it was still a dick move. Eventually she decided to pull the old “asking for a friend move,” let Terri suspect what she may, and explain in person if Terri questioned her.

            She sent a text right before she went to bed, and woke up to Terri’s reply (how early did this girl get up in the morning?! About quarter of six, apparently).

Hayley YESTERDAY at 11:14 PM: Hey, it’s Hayley Weingarten. I got your number from my sister Bethany. I wanted to know if you know anything about the Catholic Church’s positions on transgender issues; I have a friend who’s, I guess the term would be questioning.

Terri TODAY at 5:51 AM: I’m not really an expert on that, I hoope your friend is okay though! Want me to pray for them?

Terri TODAY at 5:51 AM: *hope

Hayley texted Terri to yes, please pray for Lara, then went down to breakfast.

            “I know I don’t have any chores this week ‘cause of the situation with Buster,” she said over breakfast, “but Dad, I was thinking I could help you with dinner tonight anyway?”

            “Actually,” said Mr. Weingarten, “your mother’s cooking tonight. I have to work late.”

            “I’d be happy to have your help, Hayley, as long as you’re okay with pork chops again,” Mrs. Weingarten said.

            Hayley shrugged. “Sure,” she said. At this point Buster came downstairs and started begging. Hayley didn’t have the heart to withhold just a little bit of egg white from him.

            The rest of Hayley’s week, which was the last week before spring break, was mostly centered on Buster. Terri accosted her on Thursday to let her know that she was praying for Lara (Terri did not know it was Lara, so she was just praying for “Hayley’s friend”), and Lara told her later the same day that her feelings were still veering rapidly back and forth and that she had not told anybody else yet. Hayley wondered what that might have to do with the strange incident with Jacen. Jacen himself had started to look at her with an odd glint in his eye, less predatory than judgmental, as if Jacen had any room to judge anyone.

            Buster got worse, but still seemed in good spirits, although it might just be that Hayley wanted desperately to believe that he was. Hayley tried not to think too much about Lara or Terri or Jacen or anybody else when she was with him; she was taking him for two walks a day now, one before school and one after. She knew that it would by no means avail him as she wished it would, but she believed that he deserved at least this much time for joy squeezed into his life before the end. Still he sensed her upset; he kissed her to sleep every night, and woke her up by nuzzling her in the morning. His eyes, deep brown, got deeper and darker, as if he was passing out past the breakers of some shallow twilit sea; when he looked at her, she felt, uncomfortably, as if one eye saw her and the other eye saw the hereafter. Once or twice each day he would whimper piteously for a few minutes and then fall silent, but other than that he was his usual gamboling woofing self, which arrested Hayley’s grief and made it harder for her to accept what she knew intellectually was bound to happen soon. By the time the last bell rang on Saturday, confusion had set in; she knew that she was ignoring Lara, and not only Lara but Charlotte and her other friends too, but she figured they knew, from her or from one another, what was going on, and in any event Lara had asked her to give her some more time on her own before bringing to her what she called her “findings.”

            Finally spring break came and Hayley could devote her whole day to Buster. After service on Sunday she asked Pastor Dave to meet about Buster at some point during the week; he asked her if she wanted advice or comfort, and she told him that she was getting all the practical advice she needed from Dr. Chandler and from her family. “Mostly at this point I just wanna be told that things’ll be all right,” she said.

            “All right,” said Pastor Dave, clapping his hands down on his bejeaned knees as he sat, in a posture oddly close to being prim, across his office from Hayley. “That I can do.”

            “Thank you,” said Hayley, and scheduled a meeting with Pastor Dave on Wednesday afternoon, before the youth group’s Bible study that she sometimes went to. She would have to figure out how to avoid the youth group after the meeting because she really did not feel like getting dragged into fellowshipping with them right now. Maybe in a month or two she would be more inclined towards that sort of enforced joviality again.

            She went for four walks with Buster on Monday and three on Tuesday. She worried that she was tiring him out too much, and Dr. Chandler was noncommittal when she called to ask her whether that might be the case, but she figured that Buster was enjoying himself and would not get to enjoy himself for very much longer, so it was, to her at least, worth their while. She kept cycling back around to that over and over again, that simple brute and brutish fact of the impending absence of Buster. She had been away from Buster for a week or two before—a family vacation to Ireland when she was eleven, a school trip to the nation’s capital over spring break last year. Both of those times somebody had been there to watch Buster and call or email her to give updates on how he was feeling and tell him anything cute or funny that he had done that day. The voyage on which Buster was now embarking would never return to port and he would need to go alone. Hayley had had Buster since he was newly whelped and she was newly four; there had been life before him, but she remembered it only in minuscule snatches, like still snapshots, playing blocks with Bethany or pouring sand on Charlotte’s head in the daycare playground. One of her earliest elaborated memories was of watching Buster eating, sitting there in a row with the rest of John Conway’s Rottweiler mix’s litter, and pointing a stubby little four-year-old finger to him and saying “That one.”

            “He doesn’t have an immortal soul,” she asked Pastor Dave on Wednesday afternoon, “does he?” The question tasted flat and fake in her mouth.

            “Hayley,” said Pastor Dave, “have you ever read Lewis’s The Great Divorce?”

            “I can’t say I have,” said Hayley. “I’ve read some Lewis, but not that one.”

            “It’s a tour of heaven and hell. It’s like The Divine Comedy except instead of Virgil there’s a Victorian writer named George MacDonald. Anyway, in The Great Divorce there’s a character who comes from heaven to try to talk to her husband in hell. Her name is Sarah Smith and she has this whole train of animals following after her, because the love that she had for them, so to speak, hallowed them and brought them up to heaven with her in the form of the feelings that she had towards them. So even though Buster doesn’t have an immortal soul in the same way that you and I do, your love for him might mean that he’s with you in heaven in some way when you get there—according to Lewis, anyway. Does that help at all?”

            “To an extent. You’ve told me in the past that in heaven nobody would want to see anything but God. I’d interpret that to mean that I shouldn’t care.”

            “Well, don’t interpret it that way. I mean, you’re going to want to see your human loved ones in heaven, right? Even if you’re all focusing on God together, I’m sure you’ll be glad that they’re there. I don’t see any reason why God wouldn’t show you Buster again if you wanted to see him too.”

            “Okay. That does help. Thank you.”

            Hayley went from Pastor Dave’s office to the church library to look for The Great Divorce. She found it wedged in between The Weight of Glory and something called Letters to Malcolm, and checked it out for two weeks. She bumped into Dan in the parking lot, started to make some excuses but then decided to be honest with him about the situation and about why she wouldn’t be at youth group for a while, then went home and started reading. When she eventually got to “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them,” she gently shut the book and opened Code Name Verity, which Ms. O’Hare was having them read for their historical fiction unit in English. The book was by any imaginable objective metric way more depressing than The Great Divorce, but she realized as she was reading it that she was using it as a perverse form of escape from the Buster situation, itself almost a welcome distraction from the Lara situation. She felt unkind towards herself for thinking of her dog’s impending demise as a welcome distraction from anything. Her head and heart hurt too much to stay awake, and she lay down to drift off through the dusk.

3. 

To say that Hayley had a long day on the first Monday after spring break would be to say that cutting one’s own head off is awkward. Apparently over break Lara had come to the decision to start telling people about her musings and questionings. Hayley spent half the day trying to get the Ryans and Jacens of the school (Jacen having turned on Lara again) to lay off of her and half the day remonstrating with Lara to keep thinking things through carefully before spreading this like wildfire. “You’re going to get a lot of unthinking attacks and a lot of uncritical support,” she said. “I don’t think either of those things are what you need right now.”

            But Lara seemed to want the unthinking attacks and uncritical support. She had always been comfortable in extremes. In seventh grade she had written a piece of expository writing for history class that seemed to excuse Stalin; when she was told to edit the piece to be more morally responsible, she had said that Stalin was worse than Hitler and there had been no good reason to ally with him at all. In freshman year she had gone from thinking Taylor Swift was a maggot breeding in the body cavities of the dead to thinking she was the best female act ever, and last year she had gone back. She had gone from thinking people who liked exploring abandoned insane asylums were overly-gothic lurid creeps to dragging Hayley to one the other weekend, even if she had had an ulterior motive for so doing. So she would, apparently, rather deal with Ryan and Jacen, or with Rick Neville and Autumn Baker-Noel, than with Hayley. Hayley tried not to find this too offensive or too personally hurtful.

            Over the first half of that week Buster’s health kept declining, but it was a managed decline. He was only in the mood for one walk a day, on which Hayley took him punctiliously every day first thing after school. She called Dr. Chandler and she said that probably his other systems were starting to fail. On Wednesday she squeezed in a short appointment in which Dr. Chandler gave Buster a twice-over and gave him about a week.

            “That’s…what, four days more than your last estimate?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Is it okay if I count those extra four days as a victory?”

            “It’s more than okay. Honestly, I’m not sure that Buster’s physically in any better shape than I thought he was; what’s been keeping him going this long appears to be his love for you.” Hayley wondered how that fit in with what Pastor Dave and C.S. Lewis had said about how Buster might or might not fare in the world to come. She did not see any use in bringing that question up with Dr. Chandler, who she was pretty sure was an agnostic, possibly an atheist. “You know, if it helps,” Dr. Chandler said, “I do believe that people and animals that we love can outlive themselves, so to speak, in the form of the love that we have for them.” She got up and looked out the window over the parking lot; probably she was trying to be mildly, but perhaps only mildly, dramatic. “I would say the same thing to a farm family with a beloved cow,” she said, “or a marine biologist who was very much attached to a whale.”

            Oh. Perhaps there wasn’t so much daylight between Dr. Chandler and Pastor Dave after all. Hayley nuzzled Buster, and smiled a secret smile into his fur.

            On Thursday she ran into Terri Russo again. Some of the same people who were attacking Lara were attacking Terri, apparently.

            “Why?”                                                                                       

            “Just bog-standard racist abuse about my Mexican mom.” Terri shrugged. “I’m used to it by now.”

            “I didn’t realize you were Latina,” said Hayley. She did not want to say so directly, but Terri looked pretty white to her.

            “It’s okay,” said Terri. “I look pretty white to most people. My mom is one of those high-status Mexicans whose ancestry is mostly European anyway. She met my dad when he was studying abroad in Monterrey in college.”

            “What’d your dad go to college for?”

            “Well, Spanish.” Terri laughed a silvery laugh. “I’m thinking of doing pre-med. I had pretty bad tonsillitis when I was a kid and had to be in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for a while, so I kinda wanna be an ear, nose, and throat doctor.”

            “Did you live in Philadelphia?”

            “Until I was ten, yeah. There’s some things I miss but I actually like parts of small-town living better so I don’t mind it up here.” Hayley wasn’t actually sure if she would consider where they lived “small-town” or “the suburbs.” It was an interesting question. “What about you? Do you have any ideas for college?”

            “Don’t tell anyone I said this…”

            “Of course not…”

            “…but I’m not sure college is right for me. I’m sure I’ll end up doing it, just because it’s the only way you can really get ahead comfortably in this country anymore, but if I didn’t feel the need to do it then I’m not convinced I would think to do it on my own.”

            “That’s fair. Would you want to get married straight out of high school if that were still a thing?”

            “I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t really wanna come across as one of those self-absorbed ‘travel the world’ types but…I think there might be a part of me that I don’t really feed or pay much attention to that actually is one of those self-absorbed ‘travel the world’ types.” Hayley laughed a little. “Don’t hold it against me?”

            “I won’t. Don’t worry.” Terri leaned against her locker with a similar sort of restrained drama to her posture that Hayley yesterday had seen in Dr. Chandler. “By the way, your friend wants to talk to you. I’m not sure why but it seemed urgent.”

            “Thanks,” said Hayley. “Which friend?” She was pretty sure this was Lara, but she wanted to make sure.

            “Charizard Rice,” said Terri.

            “Crap,” said Hayley. “I’ll see you later.” She skittered off to talk to Charlotte before the next period started.

            She found Charlotte sitting with her arms folded in the woodshop, her back to the jigsaw. There was a sour expression on her face and Hayley was reminded immediately, without Charlotte having to say anything, of her many and various blowings-off of Charlotte over the past couple of weeks.

            “I’m sorry,” she said before Charlotte could say anything.

            “I accept your apology,” said Charlotte thickly, “but could you not at least have told me that all this stuff was going on for you? Like, the thing with Lara is one thing”—Hayley took as neutral a mental note as she could of the fact that Charlotte was still calling her Lara, as opposed to using her last name like some people had started to—“but could you not at least have told me about Buster being sick?”

            “Buster is dying, not sick,” said Hayley.

            “I know that. I had to hear it from Bethany of all people.” Charlotte leaned forward on her stool. “Hayley, I accept your apology, but I have to say I’m pretty damn pissed. We were going to go grab dinner together at Red Papaya at some point over break, remember? And then ice cream at Carlton’s. You could have at least explained to me what was going on. I know you’ve been blowing off youth group too and that’s fine, I get that, and I’m pretty sure Dan gets it, even. But for crying out loud, Hayley, we’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”

            “I know. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

            “Give me a few weeks and I’m pretty sure I can,” said Charlotte. “We’ve had these fights before.”

            And they had. In fourth grade Charlotte had copied off Hayley’s pop math quiz and they had both gotten detention even though Charlotte had been looking over Hayley’s shoulder without Hayley’s knowledge. They had not spoken for about two weeks after detention ended. In the summer before seventh grade Hayley had yoinked one of Charlotte’s CDs because she was envious that Charlotte got to play it over and over again while Hayley had to wait until her birthday, which was in about three weeks, to get it. That time they had been on the outs until Hayley’s birthday party, at which she had given it back with a tearful apology. (That time, Pastor Dave had actually consented to hear a confession of sin to make Hayley feel better, even though only God could take away her sin.) This was not new, and they were more mature now. Hayley had the utmost trust in Charlotte and in their friendship as they left that room.

            On Friday and over the weekend she realized that the same could not be said of her friendship with Lara or with any of her other friends. Lara started telling people that Hayley was holding up her process by not having gotten back to her yet. On Monday Hayley found a note in her locker that Lara had apparently left there last Wednesday and that Hayley had for whatever reason not seen until now; it had fallen through the grate on her locker down, somehow, towards the back of it, behind her schoolbooks and where she kept her thermos.

Hey, I’m ready to talk about things with you. What have you been finding out? What are your own feelings? –Fielding

Things came to a head on Tuesday of the second week after spring break. Hayley made some time to take a walk around the school tennis courts with Lara during their lunch hour. The tennis courts were not yet in frequent use because the delayed and rainy spring, and there were only a few brave people out practicing their serves. They spoke in low, hushed voices.

            “I still don’t really know what to make of things,” said Hayley. “I’ve been so preoccupied with this thing with Buster, you know.” Lara nodded understandingly. “To be honest, I do still think of you as Lara. I don’t have to anymore if you don’t want me to, but it’ll take some time for me to stop. And I’ll need to figure out how I should think of you on my own. It’d have to be something we’re both comfortable with.”

            “I understand.”

            “I might need to talk to Pastor Dave or at least Dan about it. Although I’ve been trying to avoid discussing it with them because I don’t wanna rock the boat.”

            “It seems to me like you’ve been trying to avoid discussing it period,” said Lara waspishly.

            “I mean,” said Hayley, “I guess I have. And I’m sorry for that, I know this is important to you. But like I told you last week I really think you should give this a little more time yourself. You can’t make these decisions rashly.”

            “Isn’t that just for your own comfort, though?” asked Lara. “I mean, I’m comfortable with this.”

            “You were going back and forth on this as recently as spring break! Look, I’ve got two more days or so with my dog, and then I really want to discuss this a little more with you before either of us comes to any conclusions. I want to discuss it a little more with you, and I do want to discuss it with Pastor Dave or Dan, and I’m sorry about that but I can’t just switch a flip—sorry, I mean I can’t just flip a switch in my brain that—that—”

Lara stared at her for a few seconds, then muttered “Give me a break” in a bizarrely apologetic tone of voice and started walking away. She walked right onto one of the tennis courts and started talking to a girl whom Hayley recognized as Autumn Baker-Noel—one of the popular group to whom she had been closer last semester.

            For the rest of the day Autumn Baker-Noel and the other popular people, with whom Hayley had never exactly been as thick as thieves but among whose number she was aware that much of the rest of the school for whatever reason saw her, avoided her and in some cases glared at her. Given Autumn’s political views and the clout that she held with the rest of them and that Lara had recently begun to hold with her, Hayley was not surprised. And yet it felt odd to have something like a decisive break with these people to whom she had given so little thought anyway over the past month or two. It was as if, upon finding out that she had unexpectedly inherited a small fortune, she had immediately had to spend it all on a sudden health crisis.

            “Sorry to see what’s going on with your friend Fielding,” said Terri to her at the end of the day. The fact that Terri was calling Lara, Fielding, somehow felt like a criticism of and a vindication of Hayley at the same time.

            Hayley shrugged. “It’s going to take a while to sink in. Besides, these are my last days with my dog. I’d do well to take more of my cues from him than from anyone else.”

            “I haven’t met your dog,” said Terri, which seemed like a statement of the obvious to Hayley. “Would you like to introduce us before it’s too late?”

            “Sure. I’m cooking with my dad tonight so it’d be good to have someone over to appreciate it. Do you have any dietary needs?”

            “Not any needs, but I don’t really like seafood besides white fish, and I’m not really crazy about spicy food. Heresy for someone with a Mexican mom, I know.”

            “You’re in luck; we’re cooking up some trout and throwing it in a stew with vegetables and pasta.”

            “Sounds great.” They had to part ways soon, Terri to the school bus and Hayley to her car. “Oh, by the way! You and Charizard Rice are besties, right?”

            “Not at the moment, but I have hope that we will be again. Why?”

            “Nothing, it’s just, my priest knows her cousin Amelia’s mom through this Catholic-Jewish dialogue group they’re in, so I could get in touch with Amelia if you’d like to spend more time with her sometime. I think I once overheard something about you going to Great Escape together?”

            “Sounds great,” threw back Hayley. “I’ll text you my address right now. Do you have a bike or something so you can come over in, say, two and a half hours?”

            “Yep, I have a three-speed bike. See you then.”

            Terri got on the bus and Hayley drove home to spend one of her last nights with Buster.

4. 

Buster started moaning and howling at all hours around midnight on Wednesday night. When Hayley wrapped him in a towel and started giving him some water with an eye dropper, he started feeling a little better. He lingered through Thursday and gave up the ghost in the wee hours of Friday morning, just as Hayley had made up her mind to skip school tomorrow and make an emergency appointment to have Dr. Chandler put him to sleep.

            They buried Buster in the back yard on Saturday. Other than Mom, Dad, Bethany, and Josh, Terri showed up, as did Charlotte, willing to make an overture towards Hayley but now unsure about restoring their old closeness after having heard a possibly exaggerated version of the conversation with Lara (or Fielding) from someone in Autumn’s circle. Terri had loved the dinner on Tuesday and asked if they could make it a weekly thing. Hayley was too inarticulate from tears to say yes right away—homework and other things might get in the way—but she made it clear that she thought it was a nice idea.

            “You’re welcome to sit in on Mass at Transverb sometime,” Terri said to her quietly. “Although I understand that you probably shouldn’t take communion.”

            “And you’re welcome at my Oak Lawn youth group when I start going again,” Hayley managed to say back, “although you might not like it if you’re not up for arguing over whether Stranger Things is ‘more Christian’ than Westworld.”

            “Oh, you bet I have my opinions on that,” said Terri.

            “Great,” said Hayley. “See you there.”

            She did feel badly about Lara (or Fielding). She would be following things assiduously. She would need, moreover, to cling harder to the Gospel now. She was not sure how to feel about that.

Fielding TODAY at 4:44 PM: Hayley Weingarten and Terri Russo are friends now

Autumn TODAY at 4:45 PM: yeah I know

Autumn TODAY at 4:45 PM: what about it?

Fielding TODAY at 4:48 PM: nothing, I’m just glad H. has someone drama-free to be friends with now

Rick TODAY at 4:52 PM: Is it really “drama-free” though? Terri’s in Ab Club, isn’t she? I thought Hayley hated those people.

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: she does but I don’t think terri’s crazy aobu thtem either

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: *abut them

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: *ABOUT them, sry

Autumn TODAY at 4:55 PM: anyway I guess I’m happy for them?

Fielding TODAY at 4:57 PM: yeah, things have worked out pretty conveniently for Hayley from the looks of it

Fielding TODAY at 4:58 PM: even though I don’t think anybody else really likes her very much now (which is reasonable tbh)

Fielding TODAY at 4:59 PM: it kind of pisses me off honestly that the timing here was so bad. What with her dog I mean

Autumn TODAY at 5:00 PM: don’t let it get to you. these things happen.

Fielding TODAY at 5:00 PM: thx

Short Story: “Changeful Northern Skies”

Rot was setting in all over Toby Walker’s house. Evil, blue evil, spread like a flow tide over the wooden wainscotting and along the wooden beams. None of her efforts to get it dealt with had panned out, and even her best friend told her that her front door stank of mildew. It was the end of a very wet October, and her yard was filled with rain-speckled muted-colored leaves.

            Toby’s house, whose pipes groaned and sang with steam on chilly nights in seasons other than summer, had been in her family since 1842 and had last been substantially renovated during her early childhood. Tobias Walker IV, Toby's late father, after whom she was yclept Toby though formally monikered Tabitha, had taken seriously the history of their family and their home. He had spent tens of thousands that he had earned snorting coke on Wall Street making it a fit house for a modern family. That family’s now last-living representative strode out to the mailbox that dove-grey autumn morning over a carpet of yellow birch leaves, pale spears the shape of the population pyramid of a medium-HDI country. Black spots freckled them leprously.

            Toby checked her mail. There were three pieces of it. The first was a card asking her to subscribe to a progressive Christian magazine named Relevant. “If you have to say it about yourself,” Toby muttered, “it’s not true.” The second implored her to vote for the man who had been chair of her town’s select board for fifteen out of the past twenty-one years. “If you were going to lose then you would have by now.” The third was a letter from Rachel Dembitz, an accountant in Dunnet Landing. Toby’s accountant. Estimate $11,500 to repaint the house; $6,000-7,000 to redo the front door; another $7,000-$10,000 for the solar panels that you want. Toby said, “But do not harm the oil and the wine.”

            She sighed. The misty air cleared for a few short seconds; it was not a change for the better. Toby thought about the cost of the solar panels. This was after tax incentives; she had discussed that with Rachel before. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach; she took one cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and lit it, a bad habit that she had picked up from her grandmother. In her grandmother’s days and then in her father’s this house had been part of a farm. That farm had now been sold off, most of it; what was left was an acre and a half. What was, or were, left on that acre and a half were a couple of small yellowish cats and one unpromising-looking goat. Toby called the goat Poor Richard. She associated him, because of his name, with the Old Farmer’s Almanacs that she still bought out of habit every fall. Poor Richard and Poor Toby would, because of these solar panels, likely become poorer before much longer.

            Under a changeful sky, Toby trudged inside and called Rachel. Rachel was the only Jew who lived in Dunnet Landing, and likely the only Jew who had lived there since Stan Roth’s early death twelve years before. It was a Saturday morning, but it was unlikely that she had ventured the ten or twenty miles to drive to synagogue; the pandemic had broken down Rachel’s observance just as it had that of so many other once-religious people. Indeed, Rachel picked up her phone.

            “So we’re looking at thirty thousand or so,” Toby said. It was not a question; there was no need to confirm. Rachel’s numbers either were right or they were not.

            “We are,” said Rachel with a heavy sigh, a sigh much older than her own thirty-one years. Older than her thirty-one. Not as old as Toby’s twenty-nine. Life was full of ironies. “Do you want me to come over?” Rachel went on. “We can discuss this in person. I want to show you how I got to these numbers.”

            “I trust your numbers.”

            “I’d still like to come over, as a courtesy,” said Rachel.

            Toby sighed. “Okay. I’ll put on some tea.”

            She took her time making the tea in her chilly kitchen with its blond wooden floors and six-gas-burnered stove. She lit the gas ring under the kettle and it started to sing just as Rachel’s car pulled up the driveway. The car was silvery with a faint pungent chartreuse undertone that Toby had always found a little alarming. It was an old Subaru, as was Toby’s own car. Toby’s was dark blue.

            Rachel came to a stop and stepped out of the car. A pump-clad toe teased one of the cats as he ran up to nuzzle her. Her cumulonimbus of dark hair looking the exact same shade as her dark conservative professionalistic skirt suit, Rachel treaded over the birch-leaf carpet and knocked on the door to Toby’s mudroom.

            “It’s open,” Toby hollered, and poured two cups of cinnamon tea as Rachel came in and kicked off her shoes. Toby smiled. “You always class up the place,” she said.       

            Rachel shrugged. “I am here on business, technically,” she said. She took a bobby pin from her sleek gunmetal-grey purse and pinned back a corkscrew of blackish hair. “So,” she said. “Thirty thousand dollars.”

            “Thirty thousand dollars,” Toby agreed. “Give or take. It’s not pretty.” She paused, then said, “Do you want to record this?”

            “I guess I should,” conceded Rachel. She pulled her phone out of her purse, set it down on Toby’s many-scarred pinewood butcher’s block, and pulled up some recording app while looking worriedly at the signs of damp that clustered like cobwebs in the corners of the kitchen’s lowish ceiling. “Rachel B. Dembitz, CPA, October 30, 2021,” she intoned. “Meeting with Tabitha M. Walker to discuss price estimates for repairs and climate-proofing on her house.”

            Climate-proofing. What a way to think of it. It horrified Toby even though it was she who had decided that it was needed.

            Rachel and Toby had met in college; they had bonded over their complicated middle names. The M stood for Mehitable, the B for Berenice.

            “The figure we’ve been throwing around is thirty thousand,” Rachel said. “This, of course, is an estimate.”

            “Yes,” said Toby. “Not even a mid-range estimate, necessarily.”

            Rachel nodded and took a sip of her cinnamon tea. It had not steeped for long enough, and the water had been a little too hot when Toby had poured it into the cup. The flavor thus was unbalanced, yet Rachel loved it. She loved visiting Toby at home. Loved, indeed, Toby herself, in ways that Toby did not love anybody. Toby’s first love was the house, the house of which she was both begetter and begotten. She inhabited the house as a place of safety, like a womb; she put work and money and feeling into the house, like a germ plasm.

            “Do your reasons for wanting to do all this work come down to wanting to save yourself and the house more money later, or is it morally imperative to you that we get it done now?” Rachel asked. “If it’s just a matter of foresight, it may be prudent to wait until you have, frankly, a stable career situation and some net worth that isn’t all in the form of the house itself.”

            Toby shrugged, thought for a second, then said, “Morally imperative isn’t how I’d put it but I do think it’s important to get it done ASAP.” She pronounced ASAP as a word rather than as four letters, the way her father and grandmother had pronounced it. “The climate itself sure isn’t waiting till my career is going better.” She reached over the butcher’s block to where the 2021 Old Farmer’s Almanac rested. She picked it up for the first time in over a month. “This thing is the least accurate I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “I only bother to read it for its har-har little articles these days.”

            “Like reading Playboy for the articles?” Rachel asked with a smirk, then, unwilling to let her friend get away with one little jab when two would do just as nicely, “When was the Old Farmer’s Almanac ever accurate anyway?”

            “Not the point,” said Toby. She set the almanac down, almost chivalrously, on the butcher’s block between them. Its off-yellow cover was rippled and pilled a little after ten months of sitting in a dank kitchen, with the rot that wound in the times between Toby’s uses of the sterilizing stove. “I think it’s urgent. Yes.” She gestured at the almanac; the hole drilled in its top right corner looked almost as if a worm had chewed through it. She gestured at the ceiling; the rot in the corners was easier to see now that the light was turning from morning to midday. “Does this not look urgent to you, Rachel?” she asked.

            “It’s not my job to tell you that, only to tell you what it will cost. Please don’t get frustrated with me for that.”

            “I’m not. I’m sorry.” Toby shook her head and lit another cigarette. Rachel noticed that she was allowing her own tea to get cold. “Thirty goddam grand,” Toby said.

            “Thirty goddam grand,” Rachel agreed.

            That should, perhaps, have stymied them, or at least given them more pause. Yet Toby’s attention was stuck, bizarrely, on that full-moon-shaped worm’s-hole bored in the corner of the almanac. It reminded her of a keyhole, a keyhole to be opened with a key to thing she longed for most. Rachel’s eyes tracked Toby’s, followed Toby’s to that hole. To it and almost down it. Two sets of eyes gazed with fixity for several seconds at that dark little corner of the world’s many-sided agony. It was a corner that seemed to hold some better possibility inside it. It felt as if there was something at the bottom, something within the lunar phases and sidereometeorological pseudoscientificities of the almanac, something brighter and sharper than the surface of Toby’s kitchen’s butcher’s block. The hole in the almanac was a black hole with promises of something radiating out of the singularity, but radiating slantwise and obscurely.

            Then Toby picked up the almanac, flipped through it almost as a tic, set it down again, and the moment was lost.

            “You hoping the almanac has some financial advice in it?” asked Rachel, but it did not come out of her mouth as though it were a joke.

            “It’s not that I can’t afford the thirty grand,” said Toby.

            “No. I know it’s not that,” Rachel said.

            “You’ve run the numbers? You’ve made sure that I can, technically, afford it right now?”

           Rachel nodded. “I have and you can,” she said, “although you’re going to have to either pinch pennies or get a much better job.”

            Toby sighed. “That would be the case no matter what I did with the thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “All right. Make a note that we discussed this expenditure and I authorized it. I assume I’ll be recouping some of it come tax season, at any rate.”

            “Have you run this by Tucker and Jordan?” Rachel asked. Tucker Littlepage and Jordan Blackett were the executors of Toby’s father’s estate.

            “I did and they said there wasn’t anything legal that would tie this up,” said Toby. “So we can go ahead.” She stood up and adjusted one of the cuffs of her thick blue-black-orange flannel. “This conversation is tiring me out,” she said.

            “You’ve barely touched your tea,” Rachel said.

            Toby shrugged. “Guess that didn’t even occur to me,” she said, although it had, and she had no explanation for it, really. She picked up her cup, now closer to room temperature than hot, and drank it in three or four quick despairing gulps. She looked down at the surface of the butcher’s block again. The cup had left behind it a damp impression or allegory of a washed-out crescent moon.

            “Is there anything else that you need right now?” asked Rachel, tapping her phone for the time. “If there’s not, I’d like to get going; I want to see if the Hannaford in Deephaven has some yahrzeit candles.”

            “Oh, right, it is that time of year, isn’t it?” said Toby with a plaintive feeling. She had met Rachel’s grandfather only twice and only dimly remembered him, but for Rachel he had been a pillar of the earth for a quarter of a century before the demise.

            Sometimes Toby thought that it seemed Rachel envied her, in between the more frequent moments of pity. Here in this house she was ancestor-named and landed, undisplaceably cocooned in a soggy but history-laden husk. All around them was changing, changing, mixing and changing. Being unstable, changing and decaying. Toby guessed that Rachel might find it easy to see her, falsely, as changeless.

 ❦

Toby did not do much with the rest of the day. She had a one-hour online English class with a twelve-year-old boy in mainland China whose parents were paying her handsomely for it. It felt good to Toby to use her certification, and the boy, Weiyu, was charming and a good learner. If Toby could have had more regular hours doing this, and could have done it in person instead of on video calls, she and Rachel would not be concerned about the state of her career. But the hours were scant and the videos were laggy and Toby ended the lesson with Weiyu far more tired than she had hoped. By this time the sun was setting and it was time to take some butternut squash soup out of her refrigerator and warm it up for dinner. The soup had come out a little thinner than she usually made it, and once warmed up was better with a squeeze or two of hot sauce.

            The pipes by this point had started to sing, groaning into their song far earlier in the evening than they ought. It was usually around midnight that the teakettle-like keening started, or later even, as Toby lay wakeful in the room that had been hers since her father’s penultimate heart attack. For the singing to start at not even eight disquieted her somewhat. It seemed a little too early in the year too; the evening was not particularly cold. She hoped there was nothing wrong with the furnace. That would be the last thing she needed. What would happen to the bills alone would set her other expenses back weeks or months. She pulled out her phone and began to draft an email to Rachel about this. Then she read the email and saw that it looked whiny and put her phone aside. She was sitting on her big old couch now facing the empty table across the living room where her television had been before, on a whim, she had put it upstairs. One of the cats jumped up to sit there.

            Toby’s cats were named Simpkin and Tom Tildrum, on her distant cousin Mattie’s recommendation. Jordan Blackett called them Infer and Imply because he couldn’t tell them apart. Toby could tell them apart because Simpkin was a little lighter in color and behaved somewhat more respectably; Tom Tildrum cavorted and gamboled, not so much almost like a dog as almost like a pony. He was doing just that right now on the ratty rug between Simpkin and Toby, and watching him do it was getting on Toby’s nerves.

            Toby refilled the cats’ dry food and slouched up to her bedroom. There on her narrow bed lay a stack of papers that she had found in the attic yesterday. They were old, from probably around the time she had been thirteen. Aced English assignments, journals from family trips to Disneyland and England, fanfiction where Toby was secretly Maximum Ride or a fourth Baudelaire child or an Eva pilot. All mildewy and smelly. Rank, flecked, sloppily bound and interlaced with evil like the interlaced buriedness of last year’s layer of leaves.

            She went downstairs and came back up again holding the yellowish almanac. She flipped through it a bit. September and October will be cooler and rainier than normal, said the forecast for the Northeast, and Oct. 2021: Temp 44° (4° below avg.); precip. 5.5” (2” above avg.). 1-9 Rainy periods, cool. 10-12 Snow showers, cold. 13-19 Rainy periods, chilly. 20-23 Sunny, cool. 24-31 Periods of rain and snow, cold.

            It was not entirely wrong. It had indeed been a drippy autumn so far, though not a cool one. But there had been no snow showers and no cold to speak of around Columbus Day, and in the middle of the month the temperature had now and then scraped seventy-five. There had been a couple of hard overnight freezes within the past week, but only overnight and only a couple.

            Toby lifted the almanac up in front of her and, through the hole bored in it, looked at the stack of childhood papers on her bed. She wondered if this was the image of the keyhole that she thought she had seen earlier. Perhaps it had had to do with looking through that hole at a part of herself and a phase of her life that she had, so to speak, loved and lost. Yet she did not think so; the papers on her bed just looked like papers, not like the kind of inexhaustible treasure hoard that dragons guarded in old-fashioned picture books.

            She wondered if the almanac itself had more to say, perhaps, about some other world than this. Maybe somewhere far beyond whatever walls separated this universe from void, in some nearby universe some other Tabitha Walker was looking at an almanac identical to this one. It was even possible, Toby thought, or hoped, that her other self in that other world had for the past year been looking out her window or going for walks or bike rides or swims in the weather that that almanac described.

 ❦

And indeed she had. As Toby Walker drifted off to unpleasant sleep on one side of the great divide, the barrier of the walls of spacetime billions of parsecs away, another Toby Walker on the other side of that divide stood out in her front yard in the vague light of a distant telephone pole, smoking a cigarette and peering at the stars. The streetlight was further from her house than from that of her counterpart, and the light it cast was warm and pointed solely at the ground; the stars were brighter where they had just come out from behind the flurrying clouds. The ground under that Toby’s feet was the yellow-and-black carpet of leaves that neither Toby had raked in several days. Yet on this side the yellow and black were freckled with thin silver snow.

            She could see the Andromeda Galaxy, very near the zenith, flanked by Alpheratz and Schedar. Towards it her grey-blue cigarette smoke rose palely. The Andromeda Galaxy was, for Toby, a difficult object; she had to tilt her head back and forth to make sure that it was not a smudge on one of the lenses of her glasses. Alpheratz and Schedar looked brighter than usual, likely because the select board had voted recently to further dim down the streetlights on the roads leading away from town. Toby checked her watch. It was a little before eleven. She thought she should probably go the barn and make sure the chickens were settled in for the night before she went to bed.

            The chickens were at this point the main part of the Walker Farm that was even slightly profitable; most of the rest was either protected wetland or preserved in amber as a sort of petting zoo or living museum of Toby’s grandmother’s time, which suited Toby just fine. The Partial Hydrocarbon Ban Treaty had been controversial in her area for all sorts of reasons, and had indeed had serious negative effects on its agricultural productivity in the traditional sense, but the agrotourism had helped offset that and now that Toby’s house was in a few different guidebooks she could usually count on giving three to five tours of it a week.

            The chickens were good and fed. She went into her yellow kitchen with its flickering lamps and its oven hot with the heat of roasting winter squash. Outside the snow was starting to drift down again. She was glad that Rachel had come to visit earlier in the evening and was probably back at the train station by now; it was not the kind of night to get caught outside late in one of the traps that the train station provided these days. Toby still had a car and would have been able to pick Rachel up and get her back to the train station herself, but it would have been a pain for Rachel to get in touch with her to inform her that she needed her to do so. She anticipated a phone call from Rachel when she arrived back home safe in Dunnet Landing, or from somewhere in Deephaven if she still needed to make a late-night run for a yahrzeit candle there.

            Eventually she did call, but by that point it was very early morning. The sky was as dark as it was going to get and about to start getting lighter. Briefly Toby resented Rachel’s call, but then she remembered that at any rate she would have had to get up in ten minutes anyway if the big rooster Fabio had anything to say about it.

             “I’m in Deephaven,” Rachel said, “safe at Peri Oler’s house for the night. Remember her?”

            “I do,” said Toby. “You used to date her, didn’t you?”

            “That’s the one, yes, although right now she has me on an air mattress, which I think is reasonable,” Rachel said. “I got the yahrzeit candle right before the coast bus stopped running. Now I’m just out in her garden looking at the stars.”

            “Not snowing there like it is here?”

            “No, although it was a few minutes ago. I can see this very faint trail of stars in the middle of a sort of…it looks a little like an L or a right triangle. The trail of stars is the hypotenuse. That’s Coma Berenices, isn’t it?”

            “It sounds like it, yes,” said Toby, and smiled. “The Tress of Berenice is what Joyce calls it in Ulysses. The ‘heaventree of stars’ scene; do you remember?” Rachel made a murmuring, affirmative noise; they had met in a modern Irish lit elective. “Berenice,” said Toby, “like you.”

            “We made a pact!” Rachel said. “I was going to learn to like Berenice only as long as you learned to like Mehitable.”

            “I have learned to like Mehitable. I even put flowers on old Mehitable Smead’s grave in the graveyard on my walk the other day,” Toby said. “Dried annual honesty; seasonable.”

            “Fair’s fair, I guess. Just don’t make that crude joke about Peri’s name.”

            “You were the only one who ever found ‘Peri Oler’s areolers’ funny, Rachel; not me,” said Toby, and Rachel laughed.

            They chatted for a while longer and then Toby went out to the barn to try and make Fabio shut up. Then she went back inside and went through her mudroom into her chilly back-house. There she stood looking east over the fields at a long low line of fluffy sheeplike clouds underneath which the sun soon started to rise. They drifted on, pale dusty purple limned with pinkish gold. Japanese irises under warm-colored stage lights, perhaps, or a rose-gold wedding ring on the finger of a frost-giant bride.

            Pinkish gold, too, was the snow that had fallen during the night. There was about half an inch of it, coming partway up the sere leaves of faded green grass. It was rheumy and so thin that it would all but certainly be gone by the time she went to vote on Tuesday even if the temperature did not rise overmuch. Yet something about having snow on the ground on Halloween morning made Toby think that the world had a seemliness to it at the moment.

            She wondered at the fact that Rachel had been able to see Coma Berenices from Deephaven, especially in the pre-dawn hours. It was possible that the sky had been lightening somewhat even then. More light began to enter the sky before one tended to notice a change in color, and Deephaven was more than dozen miles to the east. On top of all that, Coma Berenices was not a particularly bright constellation, and she remembered that when they had been in that Irish lit class together reading the scene in Ulysses Rachel had remarked that she was astonished that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus had been able to see it from a house in the middle of Dublin. That had been in the days of unrestricted streetlight use and almost-constant nighttime driving even around Orono, in the relative wilds north of Bangor. Toby and Rachel had themselves had to traipse out into the woods and crane their necks right at the zenith to see the Milky Way, back then. They had been good nights, but cold ones.

            Toby glanced up at the clock that she had put up in the back-house back when she had given up on trying to slow it down. It read about seven-thirty, which meant that it was probably about quarter past. At this point it was unlikely that she would get back to sleep. So she traipsed into the kitchen and put on a teakettle. The sweet smell of the purplish gas that her stove now ran on flitted into her ear like a singing bird. It reminded her of an automaton, or of Pinocchio or the Tin Woodman maybe. It was a conquest of nature that was also a surrender to nature, or a return to it anyway. She lit the gas ring with a long wooden match, extinguished the match by waving it around absentmindedly for a few seconds in the kitchen’s chilly air, and lowered the kettle gently onto the flame.

            “Need to buy the new one,” she muttered to herself, looking at the 2021 lunar phase calendar that was thumbtacked to the bulletin board that hung next to the kitchen sink. Toby’s interest in stargazing came and went; it was not as much a part of her life now as it was of Rachel’s, which was another good reason why the stars were so easy to see from Deephaven and from Dunnet Landing now. Even so, when she was interested, it was nice to be able to tell at a glance what the moon be bright enough to drown out, and the moon itself seemed lovelier as she got older. It was loveliest on evenings where it rose full above the sere eastern fields. Toby liked to plan to be home on those evenings.

            Moreover having a calendar like this in the kitchen was something that her father and her grandmother had done, another small piece of whatever heritage she had from them. More and more these days she felt that thin warm line connecting her back through time, and yet more and more she felt almost as if she did not need it, as if feeling that connection made her more herself in a way that lessened her reliance on things past. She guessed that this was what people meant when they talked about “living in the past” versus “living in the moment,” and it surprised her sometimes that she was drifting in one direction rather than the other as she got older. She wondered if she would feel the need for the moon calendars more if she was not such an early bird about getting them, if it would feel less like a mildly obnoxious chore and more like a dangerous and high-stakes imperative if she had started thinking about this in the middle of December rather than at the end of October. It wouldn’t surprise her at this point in her life.

            Rachel had said recently that she too had of late felt calmer, more relaxed, and less like she was on the brink of something disastrous that she was running out of ways to forestall. She felt more at-home in the world too, something that she had once, when younger, despaired of, because it was the backcountry and there was antisemitism around. With Rachel, in addition to whatever social or political peace of mind she had come to nowadays, it maybe had to do with the fact that her career was going pretty well. Todd & Dembitz was now Dembitz & Associates, because Rachel’s mother had been able to talk her out of naming it Go Time Accounting instead.

            At about nine o’ clock, with Toby still musing on Go Time Accounting and what a dumb name it would have been, the phone rang. Toby answered. It was the woman herself. “Did you sleep?” she asked Rachel.

            “Yes, a little,” Rachel said. “I’m on the bus back to Dunnet Landing now. I still need to actually do the…” She stammered a little, tongue-tied probably from the lack of sleep. Toby assumed that what she was trying to articulate was something about the yahrzeit for which she had bought the candle. She had given up trying to understand some of the reasons behind Rachel’s comings and goings. It often seemed that the woman had taken slower and more complicated means of travel as a challenge and a call to adventure rather than an inconvenience. Toby envied that; not even she had been able to do her likewise.

            “Please tell me you’re planning on getting more sleep tonight,” said Toby, feeling a little like a prudish mother, a role that, truth be told, she found it fun to play sometimes. Rachel thought for a theatrical moment, laughed, and told her so. Toby was glad to hear it; she was glad to hear it after the stage pause too. That showed a playful attitude that, until recently, Toby had worried that her friend had lost a long time ago.

            “I probably shouldn’t spend a ton more time on the phone right now,” Rachel said. “I’ll call you when I get home safe.”

            She hung up. Toby spared a moment’s thought, maybe prayer but maybe not, for her safety. She did not normally do it, and Rachel did not require it, but right now it felt appropriate somehow. Then she went out to check on her old car and her gasoline allotment and took a drive into town. The general store was open from nine to one on Sundays and they would probably have the 2022 moon calendar and the 2022 almanac still. It would be good to have those on hand before November started.

            Toby pulled her old green Chevy out of her long gravel driveway with its dusting of morning-lit new snow. She set off down the road between trees with frost-rimmed branches and leaves that were rufous and gold.

Note: June 13, 2022: I gave this story a new title two weeks after running it. It was written, and initially published on this site, as “The Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

Short story: “Strategy of Tension”

One of Becky Zylberberg’s roommates, Rosie Distano, read feminist genre fiction from the eighties and nineties with titles like Nights at the Circus and Tipping the Velvet; she had been in, sequentially, a feminist punk band called Clitemnestra, a Wiccan folk-metal band called Dorothy Clusterfuck, an all-female symphonic metal cover band called Tinúviel, and an agrarian anarchocommunist agitprop band called Tractor Hacker, in addition to putting her own songs on Soundcloud under the name Anni DiPiombo. Raised Italian Catholic among ravioli-battening nonnas and Seaside Heights douchebags (hence the first name, which in full was Rosaria), she had soldiered on through her own doubts about the standard corpus of controversial social teachings into her very early twenties, then bolted from the Church for the neopagan community halfway through her junior-year spring at UMass Amherst because of some quiddity in Pope Francis’s diplomatic relationship with a Southeast Asian dictator Becky had never heard of. These days she described herself as a hopeful agnostic on her good days and a Freudo-Marxist on her bad ones, even though since starting her graduate studies at la Sapienza she had also started going to Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore about once every six weeks. She was nominally working towards a doctorate in international relations with a focus on the European Union, but most of what she actually wrote was a series of thematically linked short stories that she described as satirical but Becky thought of as pretentious.

            Rosie’s current short story was inspired by something she was reading in her coursework about “Operation Gladio,” a NATO stay-behind operation that had been meant to keep Italy in the Western Bloc, ideally with a deeply entrenched center-right government (only some of which had gone according to plan), during the Cold War. The preexisting literary chronicler of this history in Italy par excellence was Umberto Eco, who had been dead for several years but who appeared as a character in Rosie’s short story through the conceit that the British novelist Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and for all Becky knew possibly of Nights at the Circus as well, was contacting him via Ouija board. Waters, as she appeared as a character in the context of Rosie’s story, was exploring a departure from her usual subject matter, which was apparently woebegone British lesbians of past generations, to write a political thriller about a series of unfortunate events in the late 1970s in which Aldo Moro, an Italian political leader who had forged a power-sharing agreement between the Catholic center-right and the Italian Communist Party, had been kidnapped by Marxist hardliners, then abandoned to his captors by the rest of the Italian political establishment. At some point in this series of events a professor at the University of Bologna, Romano Prodi, himself a future Prime Minister of Italy, claimed to have contacted a then-recently-deceased politician named Giorgio La Pira in a séance and obtained from him the address where the Marxist hardliners were holding Moro. Such was the subject matter of Waters and Eco’s book in the context of Rosie’s story.

            Gorging herself on metafiction like this as she did, it was a miracle, Becky thought, that Rosie had time to go to class and do her research on top of these stories and her musical pursuits.

            “La Pira might be a saint one of these days, you know,” Jerry said to Rosie at one point.

            Jerry, Becky’s other roommate, was in full Yirmiyahu Polen. Like Rosie, he was a New Jerseyite by birth and to a certain extent by temperament, but at the time that the three of them had met at UMass he and his family had been living in the Amherst area for about three years and his parents had become heavily involved with a group that styled itself “Ethical Warrior Activists.” Certain other people involved with Ethical Warrior Activists—not Jerry’s parents—drove around a truck festooned with bumper stickers that said things like “Jesus Hearts Wikileaks” and “Hearing Crazy Voices? Turn Off Fox News,” the first of which had aged poorly in relation to the second. Jerry’s birth name was Jeremy; he had changed it to Yirmiyahu, which was the Hebrew form of Jeremiah, to follow through on a promise made to a Chabadnik rabbi over vodka shots on Purim. To this day he was perpetually mildly astonished that somebody named Rebekah Zylberberg was not actually Jewish. He had come to Rome a year and a half after Becky and Rosie, to work for some sort of think tank focusing on Christian-Jewish reconciliation. His music taste extended to “Video Killed the Radio Star” and some but not all music from early-2000s Japanese video games. He voted absentee at his parents’ address and had voted for Ted Cruz in the last Massachusetts presidential primary, then been a Hillary Clinton-Evan McMullin swing voter in November.

            About three days into Rosie’s work on her Sarah Waters Umberto Eco story, she suddenly asked Becky and Jerry to show her how to make a recipe for a sort of fish stew that they had found in a Sephardic Jewish cookbook earlier in the year and more or less regularly made for themselves, Rosie, and on a couple of occasions Rosie’s other friends ever since. They got the fish from a grocery store in Ostia whose regular clientele included seventy-year-old Communist Refoundation Party voters with full beards and man buns, svelte drag queens in lacy black minidresses and six-inch stilettos, and, on one occasion, the distracting lead singer from the band Lacuna Coil. The fish was made with a sauce that had a tomato base and several spices that in American cooking would have been associated with sweet fall flavors like apple and pumpkin. All three of them just called it “the tomato and cinnamon fish” rather than whatever the cookbook called it. Becky and Jerry had memorized the recipe very quickly and now felt comfortable making their own minor alterations to it, some of which they were happy to teach to Rosie if she wanted.

            “Okay, Rosie,” said Becky to Rosie, “at this point you just let it simmer and stir it intermittently. It’s supposed to cook down into a thicker sauce than it is currently. And we should be cooking the fish at the same time, ideally, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if we leave that for later in the process.”

            “Do we add any more seasoning?” asked Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “it’s supposed to taste mostly like the tomatoes and cinnamon. Trust us on this; the flavor combination is better than it sounds.”

            “I know. I’ve had it numbers of times. It’s just that I associate cinnamon mostly with these Christmas cookies my mom’s cousin makes,” said Rosie.

            “Yes, I think all of us have that mom’s cousin who makes Christmas cookies somewhere in our family tree,” said Becky. “Except Jerry—”

            “I do have an aunt on my dad’s side who always overdoes it with the blintzes on Shavuot,” Jerry said. He had, for this project, furnished the recipe, but was currently lounging on the couch in the living room into which the kitchen opened in a natural manner, listening to Billy Bragg, to whom somebody in his think tank (of all people) had recently introduced him, on those earbuds that Becky could never get to sit in her ears properly. “By the way,” he went on, shouting over the music as if the others could hear it too, “did you know that Rosie is in love?”

            “Jerry!” snapped Rosie in a way that confirmed it. She turned to Becky and there was a slight flush rising on her cheeks, visibly spreading over the course of seconds.

            Becky was not too surprised, but she was a little more surprised than she thought she probably should have been. It was a rare thing for Rosie to express strong emotions other than feminist outrage, thirst for love in the abstract without any particular object or target, and something that bore the same surface resemblance to religious ecstasy that dolphins bore to certain smaller and more docile sharks.

            “It’s with Maddalena,” said Rosie. “Maddalena Galluccio.”

            “Yes, I knew which Maddalena,” said Becky fatuously. “How many Maddalenas do we know?”

            This made things stranger, she thought to herself as she continued explaining the stirring and simmering to Rosie. Maddalena Galluccio was a little younger than them; she had just graduated with a baccalaureate in music and dance from some university in Abruzzo earlier this year, then moved to Rome to hack it in the arts scene here, a program of life that had not gone as planned so far in part because she self-described as a “bad Catholic” and made sure everyone knew it. Like many bad Catholics, Maddalena had an ambivalent relationship with the idea of the sanctity of human life; also like more bad Catholics than was commonly supposed, she had apparently been an intense supporter of the center-right coalition at the last election. The idea of Rosie being in love with Maddalena was in and of itself unsurprising and felt what Becky’s junior-year medieval lit professor might have called “behovely,” but it was behovely in the same way as were songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town played in a Polish fusion restaurant. It was a complete mystery to Becky whether or not Maddalena had any interest in women.

            It was while eating the tomato and cinnamon fish for dinner with Roman artichokes and hazelnut candy later that evening that it became clear to Becky from context that Jerry had some pretty fond feelings for Maddalena Galluccio also, and had probably brought up Rosie’s feelings in order to castigate his own.

            “What do you find so appealing about Maddalena, Rosie?” Becky asked as they ate the fish.

            “She just intrigues me,” said Rosie. “She’s an Italian original; I don’t think I could find her even in Seaside Heights.”

            “That’s racist,” said Becky archly.

            “Maybe so but I do feel that only she could be the way she is. Anybody who’s had a weird enough childhood and is afraid of their parents in just the right way can be a Rosie or a Jerry or a Becky, but it takes a special kind of person to be a Maddalena.”

            “If you say so.”

            “The first time I ever really noticed Maddalena,” Jerry cut in, “was that incident with Pedro a couple months ago. Do you remember that, Becky?”

            “All too well,” said Becky.

            “Surely ‘Pietro’?” said Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “his name is Pedro. I think he’s from Valencia. He’s a year older than Maddalena and first met her when she hiked the Camino de Santiago when she was twenty. I think they online dated for a while but the relationship didn’t survive the transition to meatspace when he moved to Rome. I actually wasn’t privy to what exactly happened with the two of them and Jerry, though, only that Jerry went out to Maddalena’s apartment late at night and came back muttering something about how attempting to attribute emotional significance to performing mitzvot is a form of idolatry. I think it behooves Jerry to give us the details.”

            “Well, there’s not a whole lot to tell,” said Jerry. “Maddalena and Pedro were both at a party somewhere near the Piazza Barberini and Maddalena had a little too much to drink and looked like she might hook up with this guy who looked a lot older than her and seemed aggressive. Pedro got really concerned for her so he roofied her.”

            “Oh God,” said Rosie with a revolted look on her face.

            “Hold on,” said Becky. “I’m interested in this ‘so’. He got concerned for her so he roofied her? Is ‘so’ really the word you want here, Jerry?”

            “Yes, actually,” said Jerry. “He took her back to her own apartment, put her to bed fully clothed, then sat in her kitchen and made himself an Aperol spritz and sat there nursing it like Humphrey Bogart while he waited for her to come to. At a certain point I came over because I’d arranged to watch a movie with her that night; she’d made two commitments for the same night, or something. I didn’t know her well yet at that point. She came to and Pedro explained the situation to her.”

            “And how did Maddalena, uh, react to this, this…you know,” said Rosie, so confused and disgusted that abstract nouns failed her.

            “She was a lot calmer and more philosophical about it than I would have expected, personally,” said Jerry. “She acted a little like she was a noble lady and she was giving us an audience.”

            “Oh, God,” said Rosie again.

            “We ended up watching a Rossellini movie and eating jam sandwiches,” said Jerry.

            “Oh,” said Rosie.

 ❦

At this point something in the living room moved, possibly in a draught, in such a way that Jerry’s phone started playing, out of nowhere, a song that he had paused before dinner.

In the Soviet Union, a scientist is blinded

By the resumption of nuclear testing, and he is reminded

That Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell

At the first hurdle.

“Oh, sorry,” muttered Jerry, and went to the living room to turn his phone off.

            “This fish really is very good,” Rosie said to Becky while he was gone. “Not to be self-aggrandizing or anything but I think I did a really good job for my first try.”

            “I do too,” said Becky. “The spices in the sauce actually ended up really well-balanced.”

 ❦

“I know you’re not as stoked for L’Italia del Treno as I am, but will you watch it with me when it airs?” Jerry asked Becky over lunch the next day while, as was supposed, Rosie was reading a book for one of her assignments.

            “Stop saying ‘stoked’ and ‘L’Italia del Treno’ in the same sentence,” said Becky. “It’s making me crazy.”

            “Well, will you?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            “Rosie wants you to tell Maddalena she has feelings for her,” said Jerry a couple of minutes later, with a forkful of puttanesca halfway from his plate to his mouth. A caper slid down to the bottom of a trailing bit of spaghetti and then dropped gently off back onto the plate. “Don’t ask me why.” He took the bite, then another. Becky looked down at her strangozzi alla norcina, a recipe that she had picked up on a weeklong trip to Orvieto with some classmates last summer, with the sudden, unaccountable, barely even excusable, more than slightly queasy feeling that she would move heaven and earth and give up love and sex and morality alike for a milkshake and fries.

            “Rosie,” called Becky, “Rosie!”

            “She’s out,” said Jerry. “I think she’s telling some of her IR friends about that short story she’s writing. I don’t think any of them know who Sarah Waters is but they know Umberto Eco and they definitely know Romano Prodi.”

            “‘Umberto Eco I know, and Romano Prodi I know, but who is Sarah Waters to me?’” snowcloned Becky.

            “I actually read some of that book Fingersmith the other day,” Jerry said. “It’s pretty good, although I wouldn’t recommend it to Maddalena.”

            Becky set down her fork, took a gulp of wine, and said, not doing much to hide her frustration, “Why the Christ is everything in our lives about Maddalena these days?”

            “Maddalena’s an intriguing person.”

            “Maddalena is a berlusconiana. Maybe she should read Fingersmith and then we can see what she makes of Rosie’s short story. Think of it as a Rorschach test for the twenty-two-year-old soul.”

            “Eat your strangozzi, Becky,” said Jerry.

            “Anyway,” Becky said, “I think I’ll give Maddalena a call this evening after my evening class and explain…parts of the situation to her. I’m pretty sure I do have her contact info in my phone somewhere. Do you think that would be a good idea?” Jerry nodded. He seemed a little too enthusiastic about being able to nod at this, an enthusiasm that Becky made a mental note to make a mental note of, but did not actually make a mental note of and had forgotten within thirty seconds. “Do you know if Maddalena is into women?” Becky asked.

            “I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Jerry, “but I think it’s better to go straight to the horse’s mouth for these things. So to speak.” Becky wasn’t sure what was “so to speak” about it, since she guessed Maddalena could be considered a little funny-looking, but not in a John Kerry Sarah Jessica Parker “why the long face?” sort of way.

            This conversation petered off, and Becky did not think about it again until she actually did call Maddalena, at about quarter of ten that night. Maddalena’s phone rang seven times—at each time from the fourth onwards Becky kept expecting it to go to voicemail—but finally Maddalena picked up, and Becky could immediately hear that she was at a party, probably a hipster party given that a song that Becky could place as being by either MGMT or Metric was blasting so loudly that Maddalena had to shout.

            “Pronto?” shouted Maddalena.

            “Buona sera; sono Rebekah Zylberberg. Posso parlare con Maddalena Galluccio, per favore?”

            “Sono Maddalena Galluccio. Scusi—” There was a moment of pure, unadulterated hipster music as Maddalena seemed to move through a crowd to a somewhat quieter place, maybe a coatroom of some sort. “Mi dispiace. La musica è più forte. Lei chi è?”

            “Rebekah Zylberberg, un’amica di Rosaria Distano e Yirmiyahu Polen. Vorrei parlare in inglese, per favore.”

            “Sorry,” said Maddalena after a moment. “Of course. Yes, I remember you now; you are their roommate, right?”

            “Yes, that’s me. Can I ask if you’re at a party, Maddalena? I hear music playing pretty loud; is it Metric? MGMT?”

            “It’s Metric.”

            “Okay.”

            “I don’t think Metric and MGMT sound much alike. Do you?”

            “Okay.”

            “Yes, I am at a party. Why do you ask?”

            “Nothing, it’s just…” Becky sighed and steeled herself for what was for to come. “My roommate Rosie, Rosaria Distano, has a crush on you, it seems like,” she said. “She wanted me to get in touch with you and let you know.”

            Maddalena was silent for about ten seconds, then said, in a placid, contemplative tone of voice, “I’m sorry, but I’m not very interested in women in that way. Besides, shouldn’t someone who is almost twenty-seven years old be past the point of having her friends confess for her?”

            “Okay,” said Becky. Then something overtook her, spiritually speaking, and she said “Did Rosie ever tell you about the short stories she writes?”
            “Not in so many words, no,” said Maddalena, whatever that meant. “Why?”
            “Well, because she’s writing one right now that has—do you know who Sarah Waters is?”

            “No; should I?”

            “That’s for you to decide. You know who Umberto Eco was, though?”

            “Yes, of course; I have a couple of volumes of that history of philosophy that he co-edited sitting on my bookcase at home in Castrovalva. I—you know what?” she asked. “I think I would rather hear about Rosie’s short stories from Rosie, if that is okay with you.”

            “That’s fine with me, of course,” said Becky. “Now—listen, I’d sort of like to get to know you better, since Rosie and Jerry are both so fond of you.” She let this imply what it may. “Would you like to grab dinner tomorrow?”

            “Tomorrow? Sure; it is a Saturday night and I don’t believe I’ll be doing anything. I know a place in the Jewish Ghetto if you’re interested.”

            “Sure. Text me the name of the restaurant and name your best time and I’ll see you there.”

 ❦

They met at the restaurant, which was in a square with the grandiloquent name Piazza delle Cinque Scole Sinagoghe del Ghetto di Roma già Via del Progresso, and sat around for about five minutes looking over the menus after dismissing a smiling waiter who was trying to help them and seemed to love his job.

            “I like this place because it gets a number of totally nondeserved bad reviews online,” Maddalena said. “I don’t know why—maybe the people reviewing it are antisemites or maybe they have just been to much better restaurants elsewhere—but I like it here, it is one of my favorite restaurants in Rome, and there are usually not too many tourists, although on some nights there are.”

            “Isn’t the seventy-fifth anniversary of that Under the Pope’s Windows thing coming up this coming week?” Becky asked.

            “Yes, very much so, it is,” said Maddalena, “and I do sort of wonder, you know, how the Pope might react. It is such a black mark on his predecessor, even if it’s overblown by some histori—sorry, is this making you uncomfortable?”

            “Huh? No,” said Becky. “My Jewish great-grandfather actually had pretty good experiences with the Church during the War. But of course I’m aware that that’s far from universal. Speaking of the Pope,” she said after a stage-managed pause of only a couple of seconds, “what is this ‘spaghetti papali Francesco’ stuff? It’s an interesting thing for a restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto to be serving.”

            “It has ham and parmesan,” said Maddalena. “So it’s doubly not kosher. Triply, even, if they named it after the Pope.” She furrowed her brow as if trying to remember something, then said, with a fluttering giggle, “Don’t tell Jerry!”

            “I won’t,” said Becky. “Anyway, I think I’ll get this baccalà lasagna; that sounds interesting. You?”

            “Puttanesca, probably, for the primo piatto. Let’s split some of the artichokes.”

            “Yes, let’s.”

            “I don’t mean to lead Rosie into delusion or too much romance about what I am like,” said Maddalena when the artichokes got there. “I don’t want to be thought of as a shrinking flower because I am Catholic; honestly I would probably be the hugest slut if enough guys were ever interested.”

            “You mean,” said Becky with the same feeling overtaking her as when she had asked Maddalena about Rosie’s stories, “other than Jerry?”

            Maddalena was silent for almost half a minute before Becky made an inquiring sound in her throat and she finally answered. “Is Jerry also interested in me, then?” she asked.

            “Yes,” said Becky, remembering what she had said so dismissively to Jerry about this young lady the day before. “I think he started to be interested in you around that incident with Pedro and the roofies.” This was calculated to instantiate some sort of feeling in Maddalena, but Becky did not want to admit to herself what feeling that was.

            “I see,” said Maddalena, and then changed the subject to a rambling, unevenly-told story about something she had seen or done or read or danced in high school at whatever bumfuck nowheresville in the Apennines she was from. Becky tried to imagine Maddalena at an American high school, perhaps one in small-town Texas or somewhere like that. She was certain, in a flash, that she would have been one of those rarest and dearest creatures in creation, a cheerleader with an IEP.

            It was at this point that Becky realized that she felt, suddenly, the first stirrings of a sexual attraction to Maddalena of her very own. It was not like how she had felt attraction before; there was in fact something high-school about it; it felt off, like a store brand; it made her feel disproportionate, like a majorette. She listened to Maddalena talk excitedly about a vacation she would be going on in a couple of weeks—on whose dime neither of them seemed quite sure—and then their primi got there.

 ❦

“Maddalena,” Rosie said dramatically, sitting in her favorite chair with her legs at a bizarre angle and a hand flung over her eyes. “You will be in sunlight soon.”

            “She’s going on vacation,” said Becky.

            “Your twisting is done—you have the last thread of my heart.”

            “She’s literally going on vacation. It’s not even that far away. She’s going to spend a week half-conscious in a bikini on some beach in Tunisia, alone, and then she will be back in Rome and you can talk to her then.”

            “Oh, let me be dramatic,” said Rosie, and nursed her cappuccino. “She told me you told her about my story, by the way. And she told Jerry you reminded her of the roofie incident. Why exactly do you do these things to us, Becky?”

            “I’m not doing anything ‘to’ you. I didn’t think it would kill you or her to be told about or reminded of those things, geez. Besides, they’re relevant subjects if either of you want her to date you. They were to have come up sooner or later.”

            “Yeah, on my watch.” Rosie sighed. “It’s whatever. It’s just that this story is very personal to me, and…I guess you wouldn’t understand.”

            “Why this of all stories is ‘very personal to you’? No, I guess I don’t understand, and—” Becky cut herself short. She was trying to be humane and equanimous. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Besides, I think she is after all a little too young for you, anyway.”

            “Maybe so,” said Rosie. “And she’s a far-right Forza Italia fingersmith. But, you know, I love her anyway.” Becky immediately caught the allusion to the, in their circles, semi-set phrase far-right Tory wanker and now was not sure whether she had much more desire or much less desire to read Sarah Waters than she had had before.

            “It’s not the first time a friend of Berlusconi’s has taken an extended leave in Tunisia,” said Jerry, which Rosie laughed at and which went over Becky’s head. “Anyway, did she say anything about—?”

            “She said to take it up with her yourself,” snapped Becky. “She told both of you to take all this stuff up with her yourselves and she’ll decide what to make of it and what to think of you—of us—then.”

            “Becky,” said Rosie, softly enough that Becky could almost believe she was trying not to stir shit, “do you want Maddalena to think highly of us?”

            “Sure I do,” said Becky. She turned the question, and other potential answers to it, over in her head for a little while, then gave up on it and went over to where Jerry was fiddling with his phone trying to expand his musical horizons again. It seemed to be the same Billy Bragg song as before.

It’s a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll

From Top of the Pops to drawing the dole

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

If no one out there understands

Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

“I’m going out,” Rosie said suddenly, frustratedly. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be back mid-afternoon.”

            “Okay,” said Jerry placidly, much as Maddalena would say things placidly. “Have fun.”

            “I’m sure I will,” said Rosie. “You too.” Becky was not sure of the clusivity of this “you too”; she suspected, but as yet it was only a suspicion, that she might be excluded from it more specifically than she would have liked. Rosie left with a jangle of keys and a thud of her thick boots on the staircase. Becky flopped down into the chair in which Rosie had been sprawled and crossed her legs at the ankles.

            “So now what?” asked Becky.

            “What do you mean ‘now what’?” said Jerry, pausing the music. “We wait for Rosie to get back. I’m not going to continue this whole thing with you without her. Sorry to disappoint you if you expected me to.”

            “You’re being uncharacteristically snippy,” said Becky. “You sound a little like her. –I’m sorry,” she said, finally, before Jerry could say anything, then apologized again for not letting him speak.

            “I think I understand what’s going on here,” said Jerry without explaining what that might be. “I’m gonna call Pedro. Might be good to touch base with him again.”

            “Pedro? The Pedro who roofied Maddalena to keep her from having sex with someone?”

            “I mean, in the situation at hand, it was…” Jerry sighed. “Actually, you know what? No. No, it was still inappropriate; you’re right.”

            “I didn’t say anything.”

            “I could tell what you were going to say, and you would have been right.”

            “I’m just saying that if it’s a strong male friendship you’re after then there are much better people out there than this Pedro guy seems to be. Do you even know if you have anything in common with him other than being involved in that, uh, incident?”

            “Look, we all have fondnesses for people we’re not proud of having,” said Jerry. “You’re right that, that it’s…but yeah. You’re right. I’m going to call him anyway, though; there’s probably something in that situation from back then that’s worth repairing that’d be easier to repair talking to him than to Maddalena.”

            “I’m sure that’s true,” said Becky, who developed the sureness that it was true that she was claiming as she was saying the sentence claiming that she was sure that it was true. “Okay, yeah, why don’t you call Pedro?” She could not help but feel, and be unable to shake the feeling, that she was enabling him in something. It was not so much the fact that he was going to call Pedro that bothered her as the fact that he was going to call Pedro, to lead with the same proud-to-be-an-American, hey-ya over-intimacy with which she had led with Maddalena thirty-six hours ago.

            “I think I will,” Jerry said, “this afternoon.” Something in his voice sounded foggy, as if the idea had some sort of implication or connotation that he had not considered and did not want to. Becky contemplated the obvious but did not want to decide on it before Jerry did. Jerry, she suspected, might never decide on it, nor, maybe, should he. In spite of this, she did not feel the need to force something. She would also not tell herself what she would be forcing. Maybe Rosie and her tastes had rubbed off on Becky less than Becky had thought or hoped.

            “Jerry,” Becky asked, “where is Rosie going, anyway? Did she have some sort of power brunch?”

            Jerry boggled. “She’s at the canonization,” he said, and Becky swallowed something in her throat that had more power over her than it ever had before.

❦

This is the second in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.

Short Story: “Finger Food”

It had been about three weeks since his breakup when Thad met Zewditu, and it took another three months or so before they started dating. He met her at Sol Azteca on Beacon Street in Brookline but did not actually see her eating much, merely sitting forlornly at a table with chips and salsa nursing what seemed to be a virgin margarita. Thad normally did not make it his practice to try to start conversations with strange women sitting alone in restaurants, both because he knew that most women did not appreciate it and because he himself did not enjoy it, but he made an exception in this case because Zewditu herself kept looking up at him and his nopalitos with soulful, probing eyes. When he walked up to her and asked her why she was staring, she pointed to a splotch of salsa verde that had gotten onto his shirt just to the left of his necktie, and he had wiped it off madly in deep embarrassment while she stifled a chuckle.

            “Why are you wearing a dress shirt and tie to eat dinner by yourself anyway?” she asked. “Did you come here wanting to impress a stranger?”

            “Business partner stood me up,” said Thad vaguely, wanting anything but to get into the situation with Jason in front of this woman. “Well, are you?” he asked. She raised her long, thick eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Impressed,” he said. “Are you impressed?”

            She stopped trying not to laugh. “I would have been impressed if it weren’t for the salsa verde,” she said.

❦

Over the next few months, and especially when they finally did start dating, Thad learned a lot about Zewditu that distinguished her very sharply from Noriko, and his present with her from his past with Noriko, in his mind. Zewditu was from Ethiopia but had grown up in Washington, DC; Noriko was from Fukuoka and had not left Fukuoka for any length of time until she had come to Boston for graduate school, at which point the winters had descended upon her with almost mechanical ferocity; she had always said during winter that she could never get warm, even in the unseasonable and in the context of world history deeply frightening January and February heat waves of the past two years. He had not been through a winter with Zewditu yet, but she told him that she liked the cold; it distinguished her adulthood from her childhood. And yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that she did not like Ethiopia or being Ethiopian. She listened to Ethiopian pop music, which Thad had not known existed, and took him to Ethiopian restaurants where he somewhat queasily watched her munch away at elaborate dishes with her fingers no more self-consciously than she had eaten the chips and salsa, or than she had eaten burgers and fries on the day they had driven out to the Five Guys in Framingham. Noriko had always been finicky and even when she ate sushi she was always very careful to use chopsticks; it had actually not been until Thad had seen some sort of video about sushi etiquette online that he realized that there were Japanese people, lots of them, who thought that using utensils with some kinds of sushi was a faux pas.

            Noriko was a Japanese Anglican, rare as hen’s teeth, and once she got started you could never shut her up about the self-righteous liberalism of North American Anglicans or the hidebound conservatism of other Asian and African ones. It had taken her and Thad longer than most young couples these days to sleep together but once they had started they had proceeded more or less as normal for their age, although Noriko made it very clear to him that she would choose motherhood if she got pregnant. (She had made, on a few occasions, nonspecific allusions to a miscarriage suffered after a hectic argument with her parents about an accidental pregnancy when she had been in her late teens.) Zewditu, by contrast, even though circumstances in her childhood had led her to be militantly secular as an adult in a way that made Thad vaguely but distinctly uncomfortable, had said outright on their first real date that she had no plans to “put out” any time soon, refused to use hormonal contraception if and when she did, and had never had a very high sex drive anyway. “You have two hands. Pick one of them and use it,” she had said when Thad expressed concern that infrequent sex might lead to an insufficiently close relationship. He tried to imagine Noriko ever encouraging him to masturbate and realized very soon that he could not under any circumstances.

            “He’s dating Noriko Kisui,” he had heard his friends say in awed tones for the first few weeks of his and Noriko’s relationship. They had been similarly awed when it had become manifest to them that breaking up after two and a half years together had been his idea, that her solution to the problem of their divergent career paths had been to get married so that their employers could not justify separating them as easily. He had actually been entirely willing to entertain the idea of marrying her; he had only broken up with her instead because he had an unshakeable suspicion that the real reason why she was suggesting it was to ratify or authenticate her guilt over having had a sexual relationship with him for the past two years, a suspicion that even if false would probably poison their marriage at the root. He had never heard “He’s dating Zewditu Gebremeskel” said in the same tones, and although he really did not mind this, he wondered, and worried for Zewditu’s sake, about the possibility that the reason had too much to do with her bushy eyebrows and jutting jawline.

            Zewditu was a cheaper date than Noriko. In addition to the Five Guys, which she had insisted on going to because it was near one of her bicycle touring friends’ house, she liked walking around Brookline and especially “people-watching” in Coolidge Corner.

            “Honestly,” she said to Thad one warm September day as they were sitting at the Coolidge Corner T station, “I am a little surprised that you didn’t marry her, you know.”

            “Why?” asked Thad, who was not sure that he wanted this brought up right now, especially since before today he had not seen Noriko (he still saw her socially) in more than a week and he and Zewditu had not discussed her at length in almost a month. “I just wasn’t sure she wanted it for good reasons.”

            “I know,” said Zewditu. “But, still, it’s not like it would have taken too much of your time and energy. Just go down to the courthouse and bing-bang-boom, you’re married. I guess she might have insisted on an Anglican church wedding, but even though my knowledge of Episcopalian weddings is rusty I can’t imagine they’re as much of sticklers for discernment as the Catholics or the Orthodox. It’s easy enough to get married these days and there are so few irreversible consequences of doing it that it really does surprise me that you didn’t just go for it.”

            “Do you think it would have been a good thing?”

            “For you? I don’t know; I don’t know Noriko.” Zewditu feel silent for a few moments, then suddenly grasped his hand tightly and turned to him with a wide-eyed, solemn expression. “I am glad you didn’t, you know,” she said. “I am glad you’re with me.”

            This was the sort of conversation he might well have had with Noriko as well. It had taken her longer to open up to him, but once she had, the acidity and incisiveness that was in Zewditu now had been in Noriko also. It was probable that, if their positions had been reversed, if Thad had been first with Zewditu and then with Noriko, then Noriko’s reassurance that she was glad that he was with her now would have come in a somewhat subtler form. She had always harbored a little bit of pride in her harsh tendencies. Thad had never been sure what to make of it or how to feel about it, other than that it definitely neither impressed nor appalled him. As with Zewditu, he had worried then that it was mostly the way Noriko looked that made his friends so awed that he was dating her.

            And what did he himself bring to either of these women? People said he was funny and he understood clothing and makeup, but Noriko had cared about clothing and makeup and Zewditu did not. He had some interest in “trends” and was also stably and almost impressively employed, but Zewditu cared about those things and Noriko had not. The interest in “nerdy” girls that he had had in high school and early in college, girls who had shared the interests that he had had at that time, had given way to his relationships, as a grown man who thought of himself as boring and consoled himself with the fact that it was not his job or his destiny to entertain people, with women who were “nerdy” mostly about things like classic big band music and, in Zewditu’s case, aerobic exercise.

            On this subject, when after a certain point Zewditu had a bit of a crack-up and had to change careers, she found work at a bike shop out in the suburbs in very short order, to the point where Thad had to wonder, at least idly, whether she might have had this bike shop in mind in case something like this happened to begin with. The next time they were together—in his apartment, listening to Gene Krupa at her suggestion—he asked her when and how she had gotten so into bikes.

            “I’ve just never met somebody as passionate about bikes as you, especially somebody who lives in the city.”

            “Really? Don’t more people in cities bike?”

            “I mean the sort of bike touring that you’re really into, not just biking to work. It’s interesting. I kinda like it.” Thad was saying this as someone who himself biked to work when the weather was good for it but didn’t get much use out of his bike otherwise.

            “Well, it’s something I grew up with, obviously,” said Zewditu archly. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. When you think Ethiopia do you not think bike touring?” She grinned anarchically and tilted her chin up a little.

            Zewditu wanted the people who worked at the bike shop and the people who were its customers to call her Judy. She said that the idea that Zewditu was the Amharic form of Judith was a common misconception—Thad had been surprised at first that any misconception about cognates of the name Zewditu was “common” but Zewditu had told him that there had been an Ethiopian empress with her name in the early twentieth century—but she asked people to call her it anyway so as to smooth over some of the possible clashes of culture or understanding that might otherwise befall her in the bike shop.

            “There aren’t too many people your age named Judy anyway,” he said to her.

            “There are some. I’m taking a chance on Newton people being less snooty about someone who’s named like a grandmother than about someone who’s named like a famine victim.”

            “I don’t think they’d’ve been snooty. They might’ve patronized you or pitied you.”

            “That’s another consideration that I have, yes.” Zewditu flopped down on the couch. “Is your work still going okay, Thad? I remember that the last time we discussed this there were some problems but you thought they should be dealt with without too much difficulty. How has that been going?” She turned that probing gaze on him again, and her lips quirked downwards a little. He did not know how he wanted to answer. The truth was that he was almost burnt out. He had, a few years ago, before his current career had begun, done some time as a substitute teacher for the Boston Public Schools, and had subbed mostly for paraprofessionals at the elementary school level. Chanting “I hear talking, I hear talking; I SHOULD NOT! I SHOULD NOT!” at seven-year-olds whom he did not recognize had not been the best job in the world but he found himself pining for it as his current job got further and further out of his ability to adjudicate or see the point of.

            Thinking of his stint in the public education system reminded him of that old Simpsons episode with the “Skinner and the Superintendent” skit (Skinner, with his crazy explanations! The superintendent’s gonna need his medication when he hears Skinner’s lame exaggerations! There’ll be trouble in town tonight!). His own schooling had been private from third grade up through college. There was a certain dirtbag style that he had picked up as a sub that he genuinely felt he had been lacking before, lacking as one lacked something that one should have rather than something that one should not, and he thought that it was this dirtbag style that had appealed first to Noriko, who envied it, and then to Zewditu, who shared it. (Or was it Noriko who shared it and Zewditu who envied it? His preconceptions of them, which might be mildly racist for all he knew, meant that he had a hard time telling.)

            One time he had asked Zewditu if there were any other sports that she was into besides bike touring and she had talked for half an hour about figure skating. Zewditu called hockey rinks “honky rinks,” which Thad strongly suspected was a Simpsons allusion of her very own, but she did like figure skating. He tried to get her to watch I, Tonya with him but she refused because she had heard that the movie took liberties with the music in some of the Historical Tonya Harding’s routines, so instead he had let her show him several hours’ worth of actual early-nineties skating routines on YouTube, all with elaborate running commentary on people whom he recognized no better than the seven-year-olds. “Nancy and Tonya were actually more similar than people think. Both were power-driven skaters rather than artists. Both were huge bitches.” “Surya kept getting underscored because of racism but there was some drama between her coach and her parents too, although part of that could also have been due to racism.” “You might recognize Brian because he’s a recurring character in South Park. At least that’s what I’ve heard; I’ve only seen one episode of South Park in my life.” She had these sorts of comments about everyone other than Kristi Yamaguchi, whom she seemed to hero-worship.

            She had two photographs hanging in her living room; Noriko had had one, of a Japanese Christian leader in the early twentieth century named Toyohiko Kagawa. Zewditu’s were of Vincenzo Nibali, who was an Italian bike racer, and an Ethiopian feminist activist named Bogaletch Gebre. Thad watched some videos of Vincenzo Nibali and had to say that he did see the appeal. He tried to watch some videos of Bogaletch Gebre too but found the subject matter too upsetting, which he was worried made him a little pathetic and unhelpful but which Zewditu said actually reflected pretty well on him. Of videos of Toyohiko Kagawa he had found none but he did still have on his bookshelf a short collection of Kagawa’s meditations on the Bible or on Christian doctrine or on something of that nature, things that Thad did not spend much time thinking about and that Zewditu held in patient but unapologetic contempt and that for Noriko been of supreme importance and well worth every scintilla of attention that one might give them.

            Trying to watch I, Tonya with Zewditu had been after it came out on digital media. When it had been in theaters he had seen it with Noriko, just a couple of months before the breakup. They had gone to the Regal Fenway because it had nice seats and a good selection of snacks and was a quicker ride in along the Green Line than the Tremont Street movie theater was. Neither Thad nor Noriko cared about any sport nearly as much as Zewditu cared about bike touring, bike racing, and figure skating, but Noriko wanted to see the movie anyway, and they had both ended up enjoying it. Somehow it had dripped out of Thad’s mind afterwards. He did not remember much of most movies that he saw anymore. Books stuck a little more firmly in his thoughts and recollections, but not by much, certainly not by as much as he would have wished. In any case he would often remember that something would be “relevant” to Zewditu or to Noriko, or even to Jason or one of his other male friends, but not remember why, beyond very general strokes. I, Tonya was about figure skating so Zewditu would like it. The Remains of the Day was about a butler so Jason, whose great-grandfather had been a butler to some minor Vanderbilt or Vanderbilt-adjacent person, would like it. The Old Man and the Sea was about fishing so Cousin Colin would like it. He was always trying to connect with people this way, but he could barely remember with what he was doing the connecting.

            Zewditu got him to go on a bike tour with her. A couple of days before they left Boston—he had taken a week off, and they were going to try to get up to the Lake Winnipesaukee area before leaving the bikes with a friend of Zewditu’s up there and taking a bus back—he had lunch with Noriko to catch up after hearing that she had started dating someone named Johannes. He did not find out much about Johannes other than that he was Catholic and that Noriko felt more comfortable living her life to his specifications than she had living her life to Thad’s, but he did find out a lot about Noriko. Not least of what he found out was that Noriko had seen herself as “living her life to his specifications,” something that horrified and ashamed him to think about but that he did not know how to dispute if that had really been what she had wanted to do. He wondered if Zewditu lived life to anybody’s specifications. He did not think that she did, but he would not have thought that Noriko did either. Was it something particular about or typical to being a woman, he wondered? He guessed it was; he thought he liked women who were past that, but did he really? Was he even able to say what he liked?

            The other thing that he noticed about Noriko was that she was much more annoyingly religious than he had remembered. She kept talking about things as “providential” or as being about “grace in the world,” grace that came down from on high and lent a sort of significance that she refused to define and claimed not to be able to understand herself to everything that she felt or thought or said or did or was. They were eating at a crappy little restaurant near South Station, a restaurant all the crappier for its strenuous avoidance of the normal aesthetics of crappiness, and she kept saying that everything he was doing with his food was convincing her that there was something important and delightful about the world that was happening to and through both of them. He would pour a few potato chips out onto his napkin before eating any of them. She would say that this was beautiful and spectacular. He would glance up at her with wide, surprised eyes, with his mouth full of second-rate parfait. She would pick imperiously at her salad with the fork with which she was judiciously eating it and, with laughter lines rocketing outward from below her eyes, say that part of her did still envy the people who got to have his graces in their lives every day. He was not sure if she was being sarcastic when she said this, nor was he sure if she thought that “his graces” were really his graces, really things that could be associated with or attributed to him except through at least partly uncalled-for conflation and oversimplifying. She was using the fork on her sandwich also, a characteristically Noriko touch that he realized with a start that he had missed for many months and did not miss anymore.

            “I’m surprised she wouldn’t watch it with you but I’m glad you and she are sharing your interests,” she said at one point, which got Thad to wondering what interests, exactly, it was that he really had to share with Zewditu. “Have you talked to her about your time as a sub? I always really liked the stories you’d tell me about that. That ‘I hear talking’ one was hysterical! I think she’d really like it.

            “I’m interested that it keeps coming up that she’s so sporty,” Noriko went on. “I know I was never really into sports until very recently, but in the past few months I’ve started fencing, just for fun. It wasn’t actually Johannes who got me into it but Kayla—remember Kayla? From the gym I did aerobics at for five seconds?” Thad nodded with recollection whose strength surprised him. “It’s something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but my knees weren’t good enough because of that injury. I’m better able to take the bouncing around now.”

            The injury was a story that, as far as Thad knew, Noriko had pretty much always enjoyed telling. She had been about seven or eight and playing some Japanese variant of duck-duck-goose that she had never really succeeded in explaining to his satisfaction. Something had gone awry and she had ended up chasing a boy her age halfway across the playground and into a thick stand of camphor trees; they had come across a protruding root, he had jumped over it, and she had missed it, caught her foot under it, and fallen on her face with a twisted knee. Such was the story that she had told so many times. This time, over this lunch, she supplied the further knowledge, hitherto unrevealed to him, that this had been the same boy as in the pregnancy a decade later. She volunteered also, and almost convinced Thad that it was related, and succeeded in convincing him that it was important, that she had at that time been strongly leaning towards the name Hikari.

            “Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bike trip,” Noriko said. “I’m not sure if it’s something I would go for personally but maybe if my knees keep holding up after I’ve been fencing for a while I’ll look into biking or running. I think it’s great that Zewditu is sharing so much with you.”

            “It feels a little weird to have this shared with me,” said Thad. “I don’t really know what to make of it, especially since she’s a pretty closed-off person otherwise. She doesn’t seem like she’d make a good shoulder to cry on after a bad day.”

            “And do you think I would have made a good shoulder to cry on, looking back on things?” asked Noriko. She asked it sharply and forcefully, with her forehead wrinkled and her lips slightly curled, but it was clear to Thad after long years of knowing her that it was a sincere question.

            “Honestly, no, I’m not sure I do,” said Thad. “I don’t think I would have either,” he added, to dig himself out of the hole a little, but from the at-peace look that pooled over Noriko’s face he got the distinct feeling that the hole was as deep in her eyes as in his own.

            “Maybe she’s sharing herself more fully with you than you think,” said Noriko.

 ❦

This comment came back to his mind a week later as they sat in a diner in Belknap County munching on poutine after the second-to-last day of biking. They had come up through winsome woods trending towards redness. Their bikes were locked up outside and Zewditu had her jacket tied by the sleeves around her broad, sweat-flecked shoulders. She was chewing more primly than usual, possibly because she had just been ranting at him about the concept of “ethical non-monogamy” and wanted to play the role of propriety some more. (“Ethics are morals for people who think Eliezer Yudkowsky has original insights,” she had said, whatever that meant.) On the table between them was a heavily dog-eared and marked-up copy of selected Zora Neale Hurston essays that Zewditu had been rereading on the road. Thad aspired to understand Zewditu’s political opinions someday.

            “I think I’d like to spend a day or two with Rick and Cara if that’s okay with you,” Zewditu was saying in between bites of poutine, wiping gravy from her hand with a coarse paper napkin.

            “Separate beds, I’m assuming?” said Thad.

            “Separate sleeping bags, yeah. We packed them for a reason. I don’t know that Rick and Cara have a guest room. They live in one of those A-frames you sometimes see thrown up around the edges of ponds in the woods. They’ve been married for longer than we’ve been alive and have been bicycle enthusiasts for longer still than that. They have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in academe.

            “If we did have kids, you know,” she said, completely without sneer, “I’d want them to have one foot in the real world.”

            “I would too,” said Thad. “If we did.”

            “If we might,” said Zewditu with a faint smile.

            He looked at her munching on her poutine again. The hand that she had once told him to use felt still and numb on the tabletop. For the first time he was filled with love for the woman sitting across from him.

❦

This is the first in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.

Short Story: “The Thought of Vinegar”

The child went home each night to a house in the cold hills. There were unseasonable storms and winds in the late evenings, storms and winds on which a witch might fly through an upright window to speak to the little girl in benign but frightening tones. The girl’s uncertainty is an uncertainty that a witch might like to solve, in her necromantic way and for her own fey or devilish purposes. The girl might, then, worry a loose strand of yarn at one of the cuffs of her sweater as she speaks to the witch, telling the witch that in her dreams she has other and better unnatural or supernatural friends.

“My mom says I won’t be seven for much longer,” the girl says. “I just have to wait for a little bit.”

“And how long has it been ‘not much longer’ for, for your mother?” asks the witch. “You’re not tired of being seven until she sees fit otherwise? You don’t wish to start the passage of time yourself, for yourself?”

The questions feel like being poked by pencils, the way the boy who teases her does at school. “It should be any day now,” she insists, “that I’ll turn eight.”

“Who will turn you?” the witch demands. “Who can turn you eight? Who is it who could allow or disallow the passage of time?”

The girl fidgets some more with the dark brown strand of sweater-cuff. “It just happens,” she says, “I think, I guess.” The small piece of off-black chocolate in the witch’s beckoning hand frustrates both of them and looks frustrated itself. For the child it always feels apprehensive to think that her apprehension might vanish. The invitation here is honest and because of this the inviter, the witch, is, for her own part, humiliated and offended, in the power of this child as she might be in the power of that which laughs in the cold marcescent trees.

After an interval the girl says “The lorries will help me get there. To my birthday, I mean.”

Imperiously, the witch declares “How silly! A lorry is a truck, isn’t it?”

“My lorries aren’t. They’re elephants, on dirtbikes. They bike up the stairs and ask me about my day.” The girl smiles at the witch. She is no longer fiddling with her sweater. “They’ll help me with this.”

“Feh,” says the witch—then, realizing to her horror that she really is being sincere with this little girl, “It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?”

Tomorrow the girl will go and take a math test at school, a test for which she will, in fact, have studied. It will be her eighth birthday. She will try to imagine what the witch’s chocolate would have tasted like, but for some reason it will be the taste of vinegar that comes into her mouth instead.