Читать книгу Freeman's: Love - John Freeman - Страница 8
ОглавлениеWhen I was born, the story goes, my young and inexperienced mother was frightened of the sudden and new responsibilities I represented. It was my grandmother who nurtured me and raised us both until we were able to move into our own as mother and daughter. I was named after my grandmother, a fact of my life that filled me with a strange and glorious feeling. Sharing her name brought me close to something transcendent. It made me feel both young and old: a girl living next to a future version of herself, evident in my grandmother’s aged, loving figure. I remember moments of pure delight when a neighbor or a relative would call out my name, and she would answer. That response felt like an answer from my future self to the one in the present. I had no words to articulate this back then, of course. I thought of it as a game, a joyful one.
My grandmother and I were especially close. The first real devastation of my young life was leaving her and my grandfather when my parents, my little brother, and I left Ethiopia for good. She was my first definition of love and compassion, so when she gave me a bracelet when I was twelve years old during one of my visits back, I knew she was giving me tangible, solid proof of our bond. She asked me to wear it all the time to remember her while I was in America.
The bracelet, a thin and delicate band of gold, had faint scratches that spoke of its age. It pressed gently against my palm as I held it, both fragile and durable at the same time. As I balanced it in my hand, I was so moved that I could not speak except to say, “I’ll never take it off, I promise.”
My mother was sitting with us. “Let me have it first,” she said. “I’ll give you the bracelet that your grandmother gave me when I was your age. I’ll melt them together and you’ll have one piece that’s joined and from both of us.”
When the work was done a few days later, my mother slipped the bracelet on my wrist and adjusted it. I stared at it, moving my arm up and down, growing accustomed to the new weight. The bracelet was still delicate, but it was fashioned in a braided design as if two ropes were woven together, then melded into one piece. My mother reminded me of my promise, and I vowed to her and to my grandmother both that I would never take it off. It would be a small reminder of the two of them, of Ethiopia and family and the distance that had forced itself between me and so many whom I loved. It was a path back home, becoming a part of me until, as the years progressed, I could not imagine myself without it. It would be, I once said to my husband, like cutting off my arm.
The bracelet stayed on my wrist. It accompanied me through middle school and high school and college. It graduated with me into the work world. And as the years passed and I returned to Ethiopia for visits, I noticed the way my grandmother would look down at my wrist and nod her head. When she held my hand, I often felt her tap the bracelet and smile. My promise was a silent affirmation of our bond; it was the expression of my gratitude for all she had done for me. I knew that my journey to America did not begin with me. I was well aware that those who leave can do so because of those who stay behind. Every step forward I made came at a cost that was beyond the parameters of money, and often invisible; it was visible in what my American life lacked: those dearest to me. On each trip I made to see my grandmother and grandfather, I felt my conviction strengthen: I would never take the bracelet off, no matter what.
To promise: from the Latin pro (forward) and mittere (to send). To send forward, send forth, to prepare a path before one’s arrival, to push ahead, to charge through, to enter new space, to migrate. A promise is a shift into uncharted territory that we have no way of predicting. It is a claim made on our future selves by the person we are in the present moment. A promise beckons an unshaped world and attempts to control it. It is a willful suspension of disbelief, a naïve assertion that the future will bend in our favor and that what we call our existence is intractable and immutable: predictable. It is hope. It is also foolish.
“What do you mean it doesn’t come off?” a TSA agent asked me in an airport in Italy. “Of course it comes off.” And she grabbed my arm roughly and held it tight as she tugged at the bracelet to pull it off my wrist.
I felt cold air wash across the back of my head. Every word dropped out of existence except one: “No.” I shook my head and tried to pull back my arm but she held on tightly. “No,” I said again, becoming immobile. “No.”
For years, it had been relatively easy to keep my promise. There had never been a need to take off my bracelet. It became a permanent part of me, like a birthmark. But I was in an airport and this was 2016 and the world had new fears and precautions that I could not have predicted when I had made my vow as a child. That day, in that airport in Italy, it wasn’t enough to say, “It doesn’t come off.” It wasn’t good enough to say simply, “No.”
“No? What do you mean, no?” And she called someone else to help her even though I was too stunned and shocked to struggle. Even though the bracelet was delicate and held no weight at all. Even though my wrist was caught in her grip and there was nowhere I could go.
How do you say to two agents holding your forearm and your wrist that there are oaths you will not break, even if your arm does? How do you explain that a promise made in childhood can solidify to become as sturdy as the strongest bone? That it will snap before it bends? That certain vows require more from us than others? That they form us and to undo their bind means to unravel completely?
I cannot remember why the agents stopped their attempt to take off my bracelet. Maybe it was because they recognized my deep, muted terror. Maybe they understood something about precious objects that would mean nothing to someone else. Maybe they realized that there was nothing about me to fear. Maybe they saw what they had become in my eyes. As I kept saying no, they stopped. They dropped my arm and as I held my wrist, they told me to get my luggage and go on. I turned around and looked at the first security agent. I could not speak, but I would like to think that I didn’t need to.
Since then, I have been asked to step aside for other inspections. I have volunteered to do so before I’ve been asked. I’ve said that the bracelet will not come off. I’ve said that it simply does not come off. I’ve said that I cannot take it off, and I have seen how those declarations have sometimes prompted recognition in TSA agents who then wave me on. I have tried to prepare myself, though, for the inevitable because one day it will happen.
I made a promise as a child believing that the world would bend to my oath. I did not foresee the many ways that this world would try to inflict so much damage on those words—my words. Back then, I did not know enough to accommodate for the wreckage that time can exact on everything around me. I imagined that I would stay the same as the moment in which I made that vow: I promise you, I swear to you. And yet: what “I” remains untouched by life?
Several years after my grandmother’s death, I found myself standing on my grandfather’s veranda. He was dying and had begged to see me once more. I could not travel back to Ethiopia in time to see my grandmother before she died, and he wanted to make sure this would not happen with us. When he opened the door and saw me, he began to weep and call out my name. And as he repeated it, bowed by the weight of the word, I knew that he cried for my grandmother. I knew that when he looked at me, he wept for the other Maaza who was dead. The one who was alive and standing at the doorstep was less real than the one who had left him behind. I cannot imagine what it was like for him to stand in front of me, on his way to dying, on his way to our last shattering farewell, and understand that his utterance of my name would also call forth a ghost. As I watched him struggle to regain his composure, all I could do was grip my bracelet and cry. To promise, to send forth, to migrate. To hope.
—Maaza Mengiste
Jonas is sleeping: deeply, obliviously. Not I. With him as with all the others, I am the watcher, the wakeful one. This is our fourth date, and as I watch him sleeping, his back to me, the arc of his right shoulder with its oddly hollow, birdlike blade inches away, the deep furrow that runs down the center of his back, sloping away and disappearing behind the cotton blanket, that landscape that I love so much, I know there will not be a fifth date.
Once again, I have made the same mistake.
For with him as with the others there is not only this landscape, the salty terrain of flesh, the furrows and hills that invite exploration and discovery, there is that other landscape, the one where he cannot join me. As the hours slide through late night to early morning, I feel myself entering this private terrain. First there is the upward slog from the plush dark valley of eleven o’clock, with its dense comfortable underbrush: the magazines piled on the duvet, the whiskey glass gleaming amber on the bedside table, the detritus of the day before, among which I can happily prowl, convincing myself that I am still of the day. But as the little wooden mid-century modern electric alarm clock on the nightstand whirs and clicks and eleven spirals away into twelve I feel myself as if hiking, struggling toward the darkly silhouetted peak of midnight; then, on the other side of that crest, the cautious, icy descent down into the valley of one o’clock—still close enough to midnight to feel connected to the day before and, therefore, to some kind of safety. But as one o’clock creeps toward two and then three and finally three-thirty, it is as if I am skittering across a vast floe of ice: the continent of true insomnia, the white place where the sky is indistinguishable from the horizon and the horizon from the ground, where there are no landmarks, no railings or stanchions, no tracks, not even the scratchy tracks of birds. I know that I am completely alone in this place, and when I finally summon the courage to look down at Jonas (or Bill, or Glen, or Greg, or Jake, or Travis, or Rafaël, whoever it may have been over the decades), it is, I imagine, how someone who finds himself aboard a sinking ship might look down from the juddering deck, as the stern rises toward the moon, at some other passenger who, out of cunning or (more likely) sheer dumb luck, has found safety in a lifeboat and is already curled there at the bottom of the shallow boat in a blanket.
It is like being a ghost and looking at the living.
This is my landscape, the place where I live for seven hours every night of my life. Even when I was a child, I wasn’t able to sleep well. In the crib I would turn over constantly, anxiously; in the narrow wooden bed that my father built for me when I was old enough to have a bed of my own, I would read long after we were supposed to turn off the lights, dreading the moment when I would have to put away my book for good and face the blank night. In the college dormitory room I shared with two other students the deep rising and falling of my roommates’ breathing was like the sound of surf, but even that wouldn’t lull me to sleep; I would count their breaths into the hundreds until, around five-thirty, I would collapse into an hour’s shiftless sleep.
It was at university that I slept with (well) another man for the first time, and I realize now that what I was hoping for more than anything—more than the fulfillment of some adolescent fantasy of perfect like-mindedness, more than the sheer pleasure of sex—that what I was hoping to get more than anything from these lovers was someone to share my sleeplessness with: someone who would, at last, accompany me through the white trackless exile of my insomnia.
And yet, as if by some perfect, cruel asymmetry of the psyche, every youth, every man I was to fall in love with thereafter would be a profound sleeper. One would collapse so totally into an almost coma-like sleep after sex that, the first time we went to bed together, I was afraid he might have had some kind of cerebral embolism, might even have died; another was so hard to wake up that on our first morning together, so as not to miss an important editorial meeting, I had to leave him sleeping there, and wondered as I took the subway downtown just who he was, actually, and whether my apartment would be intact when I returned home. One would softly cry, like a toddler, when I jostled him awake from a nap, so thoroughly did he inhabit his sleep. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful garden and you’re pulling me away from it back onto asphalt,” he once said to me, unforgiving. But whatever their individual habits, they all shared the ability to fall swiftly into sleep, leaving me beside them to watch the wooden clock and begin my awful journey while they remained unconscious through the night. Which is to say, all of them managed to make me feel alone even when I was with them. Unconsciously, instinctively, like water buffalo in a drought that can smell a standing pool twenty miles away and move sluggishly toward the place where they think it is, only to find dried mud where the water was only minutes before, I have managed over the years to find these perfect sleepers, these companions who are not companions, these partners who cannot accompany me where I go each night.
The fact that I continue to make my nightly journey alone suggests to me, at least, that there are never really “lessons” in love; the place in the psyche that is the source of how we love is so deep that our attempts to reach it, to tunnel down to it and bring light and air there, must always fail. I go to a party, a meeting, a bar; I go online. I see a man whom the conscious part of me beholds and begins to desire; whom my conscious self approaches at the party or meeting or bar or the site or the app and talks to and decides is suitable because this man shares my love of swimming or Mahler or gardening; the conscious part of me will do what we all do, will type his number on my iPhone and wait sickeningly for a text or a call and then, when it comes, will grow giddy and anxious until the moment when we go for a drink or dinner and then, when the drink or the dinner leads back to my place or his place, things will unfold as they do. And it is only then, when we go to the bed and get in and he falls soundly asleep, curled in his lifeboat while I scan the familiar horizon, the shrubbery of 23:00 and the silhouetted peak of midnight, the valley of 01:00 and the dread frostbitten plains of 03:30, do I realize that the conscious mind is the fool, the rebellious and ultimately powerless servant of the unconscious mind which wants, in the end, and for whatever mysterious reasons, to be alone.
—Daniel Mendelsohn
LIVES OF THE VISITING LECTURER
Pool
The hotel has a pool. The hotel has no pool. The hotel has a pool but it is three strokes long. The hotel has no pool but there is a university pool. The university pool is closed for a swim meet. The university pool is not closed but requires a keycard. There is no university or university pool but there is an ocean, loch, lake, fjord, river, local spa. These are wildly pounding, freezing cold, rocky, muddy, reedy or crazy-expensive nonetheless all will be well, the visiting lecturer knows as she slides into the water. You too are made of stars, someone is saying later as she passes the breakfast room.
Plato’s Roaring Darkness
Noticing a poster for a talk (by last year’s visiting lecturer) about Plato, she is cast back to the winter as a graduate student she’d fancied herself a demimondaine because her mentor liked to give her suppers at posh restaurants in return for light fondling in his office. He was a large, monumentally ugly man who had written important books on Plato. She was unused to attention. He smelled like dust. She was twenty-two and thought him too old to worry about, anyway that’s how things worked in those days. Together they attended Emeritus Professor George Grube’s “On First Looking into Plato’s Republic.” She remembers now nothing of the lecture except that Professor Grube talked into the microphone and consulted his notes alternately, as he was so nearly blind he had to bring his face right down to the podium to read, thus becoming inaudible. It was later that night or the next day in his office that she and her mentor had a discussion about flesh and to his asking whether or not she “could see her way to being kind to him” she had answered no. Some years later, making notes for a memoir, she will shave the anecdote down. “After dinner I went to hear an old man, nearly blind, who spoke of the frustration and despair he found in the central books of Plato’s Republic.” And she will add, taking things in a different direction, “Men are allowed to decay in public as a woman is not.”
Special Collection
On her free day the visiting lecturer signs up for a tour of the national museum and finds herself in a frigid storage room, not open to the public. The curator situates her at a distance from the paintings stacked around the room, faces to the wall, “each one an insurrection in itself.” The curator gestures. “These, these are insane objects.” The curator has small silver paws atop her notes, very like the paws of the ermine in the painting Lady with an Ermine, now on display in the nation’s other museum, which the visiting lecturer had been told was not worth visiting. After the tour they exit the storage room. An older man walks by the curator’s side whispering, “Stop blushing, just be here.”
Still Green
Migraine may accompany a visit. She has brought with her Beckett’s book on Proust. Sometimes Beckett appears to be just horsing around. But then a sentence is so intelligent she lays the book down, unable to breathe. Flakes fall from her frontal lobes. After the lectures there is Q & A. She hears herself tell the students all storytelling is a cliché, just go down into the lit barking heart of the thing and see how a pineapple is made, to quote Wallace Stevens, and they say, Who’s Wallace Stevens? Much remorse follows such a visit. The bunch of green bananas on her kitchen windowsill at home is still green. This makes her think of T.S. Eliot, his infant vows of chastity while writing “big black knotty penis” in letters to friends.
—Anne Carson
SONG OF THE HIGHEST TOWER
He was sitting on the filthy mattress that served as a sofa on the building’s patio. I was leaving that same night, and I wanted to see him before I left Paris. I remember with great clarity how I thought: I am not in love. I’ve only known him a week. I don’t even know his last name.
Guillaume opened a pack of cigarettes and reached out his hand. I remember how he wriggled his long fingers asking for something, and I intuited what it was: a pen. He didn’t look at me. He wrote his email address on the silver cigarette paper: guillaumejolie1980@hotmail.com. It was the European summer of 2003, and he was wearing a black suit as he sat on that mattress, with his elusive blue eyes, his hair so greasy it looked wet. I put his address in my wallet, and I didn’t tell him ‘I’ll write you,’ and he didn’t reach out again for one last caress. He let me go. The night before had been too excruciating. I went up the five flights of wooden stairs to my friend’s apartment where my suitcases were already packed, and around the second floor I started to cry and I thought, why is it all so dramatic, why do I want to go down and bury my nose in his white shirt that smells like the sweat of weeks and go with him? We’ll explore together, we’ll hunt in the deserts, we’ll sleep on sidewalks of unknown cities, without worries, without sorrow. I took a painkiller, turned on the shower, and told myself again that I was thirty years old, that any love only a week long, overwhelming as it may be, is forgettable, and a boy like that, so young—Guillaume was twenty-three—was a fling, a triviality, a game, something to brag about, the beautiful, gloomy Parisian, Rimbaud on Barbès, my dying boy with his veins dotted with needle tracks and scars from self-inflicted wounds, pale and precise marks, horizontal, recent.
When I got out of the shower and peered out the window, Guillaume was gone from the patio—the cour—and nor was his bag on the mattress. I was glad. When I left for the airport my friend went with me as far as the Metro stop: I looked for Guillaume on every block, his blond hair, his black suit. He wasn’t waiting for me at the station, either, though the previous night he’d promised he’d be there, before he got angry when I said no, that he should let me go alone, that our time together had been nice. Nice, he repeated. Très jolie.
I didn’t mention him to my friend. I didn’t talk about Guillaume for the rest of my trip, not with anyone, not even to lessen the story’s tragic air. I woke up nauseated every morning I spent in Barcelona, my last stop on that trip. From the other side of the bathroom door, the friend I was staying with asked if I was okay, and I said yes, just something I ate, too many planes, leftover anxiety. It wasn’t leftovers: it was an anxious bit of iron caught in my throat, and the memory of Guillame’s legs, oddly hairy for someone so blond—the legs of a faun, of a demon. I looked at myself in the mirror after vomiting phlegm every morning and I downed tranquilizers on an empty stomach.
Still, I didn’t write him. I looked at the metallic paper in my wallet and I let it go. I went to the cyber café and sent messages to everyone who didn’t matter, boss, friends, ex-husband. I’d call my parents with a card—remember that? You scratched off a soft, lead-grey coating over the code: you had to enter it before dialing the number. Guillame happened in that world, before Gmail, before smartphones, when the phone still rang and there were no social networks and life didn’t happen online, when you didn’t travel with your computer unless you really needed it, and search engines wouldn’t pull up résumés or photos or criminal records. I only have three pictures of him, taken with an analog camera. Two were taken at a party. Today, I just can’t understand that world where it was still possible to get lost and where it could also be impossible to find someone again.
I wrote Guillaume the very day I got back to Buenos Aires, exhausted, my suitcase untouched in the middle of the living room. I sat waiting for the reply, picturing him in some all-night cyber café on Rue des Poissonniers, smiling at my message. Refresh. My mouth filled with blood when I saw, in effect, the reply. Too soon. That druggie’s inbox is full, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t understand my message, my triple language—we spoke a little French, a little English, a little Spanish.
The message said the address didn’t exist, that the error was permanent and I shouldn’t try again.
It took me a minute to understand. Had Guillaume written his address down wrong? Was it an error with Hotmail? Maybe I had typed it in wrong? I copied and resent the message. Same result. Sometimes that happens when an inbox is full, I lied to myself. I slept fourteen hours on pills, woke up in a pool of sweat, vomited in the bathroom, and wrote him again with my coffee growing cold beside the keyboard. Same result. Permanent error, a message that you sent could not be delivered.
I remember the vertiginous desperation I felt, so much like panic. I think back to that moment and I’m astonished by the discussions I hear about romantic love, and how if it hurts it’s not love. How do you avoid adrenaline when you’re in an earthquake? How do you control panic in a house fire? How do you check a pounding heart when test results announce cancer or pregnancy? Who wants to live with all that anesthesia?
I called my friend in Paris. I told her what was happening. ‘My emails all bounce back.’ I faked a certain amount of calm although I think she sensed my devastation. She said: ‘When I see him, I’ll ask him for his address again. That kid’s always fucked up.’ Then she told me about her new job in a gallery in the Marais. I kept sending messages to the guillaumejolie address every day. Jolie. Bonito, nice. Très jolie, he’d laughed bitterly on our last night in that endless discussion full of sobbing and sex. He’d tricked me, the Jolie was his revenge. Why? I didn’t ask for his address, I didn’t demand contact. Did his ever-fevered body hold malice? I’d caressed his scars with my fingertips. He was always shaking. A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, I thought. ‘Let’s go to Charleville,’ I said one day. ‘I hate France,’ he replied. He wanted to go to Mali, where the musicians he played with had migrated from.
After several unbearable weeks, my friend wrote me an email full of gossip and news: in just one line she mentioned that she hadn’t seen Guillaume again, nor had he ever come back to Rue Myrha. His friends were used to those disappearances. Sometimes he went back to his parents’ house, in the countryside. Guillaume never returned to the building where my friend lived. She moved to northern Paris. She stopped seeing her old neighbors: the Chileans went back to Chile, the Normans who were Guillame’s friends went back to Rouen, and she didn’t investigate more because I didn’t insist all that much, and after all it was only a week and our lives went on and I never heard from him again. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, I don’t know anything about the Normans, I never again found the band he played with, a search for Guillaume Jolie brings up any number—too many!—of useless and imprecise results, I don’t know if that’s his last name, my friend forgot my intense romance, and anyway it doesn’t matter now. It’s possible he doesn’t remember me. I know I never threw away the metallic paper with his shaky handwriting, but I don’t know where it is: lost somewhere in the house.
I didn’t dare throw it out because I’ll never have another man like Guillaume. Shooting up in the bathroom with the door cracked so he’ll be seen, like a poster child poète maudit. His sand-colored hair on the pillow and that sadness when he told me the little I learned about his family: his schizophrenic father, locked in a room because his mother refused him psychiatric help. A small town. The hugely demanding music classes. His disappointment when I told him I hated jazz. ‘I don’t hate it,’ I backtracked to soften the blow. ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t like it.’ ‘I’m going to explain it to you,’ he said, and I replied no, no need, I’m leaving in a week, and he sighed and his enormous, thin hand took mine and rested it on his skinny chest, and he let me look at him. I’ll never have another man like that, his weak, moribund youth, a puppy who cannot live and doesn’t want to, but who ran away from the mother who should have eaten him and is now a walking suicide, a master in phantasmagoria. ‘I know it’s not healthy,’ he told me one night, after taking a pull of wine straight from the bottle, ‘but if you stay maybe I’ll feel like living.’ That’s how he talked: no shame, no fear, in the intimacy of the toxic night. I never mocked his intensity. I wasn’t cynical yet. I’m no longer fascinated by being near someone who wants to die; I want to be old, I’m no longer attracted to those fierce invalids, I imagine I’m domesticated, I don’t think the best thing is a good drunken sleep on the sand.
Maybe he changed. Or maybe he’s dead, just as he wanted. I was never naked with anyone so beautiful: his sunken belly, protruding hip bones, his back without a single freckle, smooth and soft like a newborn’s, his eyes that shone in the dark, his delicious neck with its little rings of dirt.
I forgot to mention how I met him. It was in Norman #1’s apartment. There was an impromptu party because we had music and alcohol. Guillaume kissed me after I asked him to pass the whiskey. We started a conversation that lasted seven days. At that party he danced naked at the request of a gay neighbor who crowned him the most beautiful man in the city. Then he put on his pants and led me to a corner and pressed me against the wall, I pulled up my skirt, opened my legs, and we had sex right there, in front of everyone. I don’t know if anyone noticed, they were all shouting and I think they were dancing flamenco. I felt tender and sad when, before penetrating me, he wet his fingers with saliva and asked me to help with the condom—best sex practices in the years of plague—and I saw the needle tracks on his arm when he brushed the blond hair from his mouth to kiss me, and we appraised with clear heads the extent of my innocence.
—Mariana Enriquez
Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
Ididn’t know the old woman’s name. I hadn’t asked her. We’d only spoken once during the two years I lived in Shanghai. I passed by her every morning—she’d be seated on a chair outside her shop, and I’d be racing to catch the subway. Her shop didn’t have a name, only a sign that said: “Beijing Style Cotton Shoes for Sale,” which reminded me of home. The space was no larger than a bed, and inside was so crammed with shoes and boxes that customers had to stand on the street and point to the ones they wanted to try on, whereupon the old woman would take a long bamboo hook and retrieve them. Apart from attending to the occasional customer, she was always sewing layers of cloth together to make soles. When she sat, her back arched like an old flower.
The one time I spoke to her, or to put it more accurately, she spoke to me, I was drunkenly stumbling home in the middle of a summer night. I turned the corner onto my street, and there was her shop glowing with fluorescent light. She was perched in front, knees squeezed together, clutching a pair of black shoes. Her left shoulder was lower than her right, like a jacket that had been hung up clumsily.
“Girl,” she called to me, “can you help me up?”
I still remember her voice. It was like my grandma’s: flat and unbreakable. It seemed to me that those from their generation often sounded like that. If the war lived in anything now, I thought, it was in their voices. She spoke with a Beijing accent, much thicker than mine. Years in the south hadn’t weakened it one bit.
I steadied myself first before walking over. Then I bent down and pulled her up from under the arm while she pushed with her legs. Both our bodies were damp with sweat, and she was heavier than I had imagined. Perhaps it was the way she forced her entire weight on me, as though she was trying to say, Look, I’m more than just skin and bones.
“It’s my legs,” she explained. “The weather’s been too humid.”
She dusted off her linen pants.
“I have a granddaughter about the same age as you,” she said. “She’s working in Singapore.”
I told her I’d never been.
“My son’s family immigrated there when my granddaughter was in high school,” she said as she began organizing the shoeboxes.
“They didn’t take you?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Those words came out of her mouth so swiftly that it seemed like she had said them countless times before. I imagined it was what she had told her son, when he asked her to leave this place with them.
She checked each box and carefully made sure the sizes were in order. The skin on her hands was warped like water-soaked paper left to dry. I set my purse down on the ground to help her.
“Do they visit you often?” I asked.
Without answering, she clasped the black shoes under her armpit and reached for the light switch. Then, she pointed to a white brick building down the street.
“That’s my home. On the fourth floor,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
We closed her shop together that night. She directed me as I arranged the shoes, adjusted the price tags, and finally, once she let out a pleased sigh, I pulled down the door. After she locked it, she straightened her back as much as she could.
“Closed for the night. Not a single customer since five,” she said. “Looks like I really need to stay here to take care of this big business of mine!”
She let loose a bright, playful laugh, which had the purity of a church bell. She had a wide mouth and her smile made her look like a bullfrog. Briefly, it seemed as though she had become a child, waiting to be guided home. She picked up her folded chair and handed me the shoes.
“Here, these should fit you,” she said, looking at my feet. “They’re very comfortable.”
I thanked her, and then she waved at me and walked down the street to her building. As she moved away from the streetlight, she was old again, the shape of her body like a passing cloud in the night.
Weeks later, when the leaves had just started turning golden, she disappeared. Just like that. One morning she was there, the next she was gone. After our brief encounter, we didn’t talk again, apart from the occasional greeting. I never found out what happened to her. A few times, I heard neighbors speculating, but to most, her departure seemed as natural as the changing seasons. I went on with my days without much thought until the evening two men came and removed the sign at her shop. They didn’t take long—perhaps five minutes—and they were adept at their work, not showing any hesitation as they knocked down the sign with a hammer. I waited around that place for a while, the shop that was no longer a shop.
I’m not going anywhere. I thought about how resolute those words sounded when she spoke them.
Looking over at the white brick building, I found the fourth floor. Only some of the windows were lit.
—An Yu
The hooks in the nexus of my solar plexus rhyme with what remains when I remove them. All my loved ones who love me wrong float like comic ghost tails in my periphery. I don’t look like them, and don’t look at them directly like I don’t look at the sun but see its loose rays. I love my loved ones wrong too. Then like comic genie third wishes I wish for more wishes and for more of everything and am never fed. Hunger is not the word I would use for what I am, though I eat to it. The bridge over which we span is not as connective as we believe it to be. It is so wide as to not be a bridge at all. The expanse does not connect but makes vague our relation. There can be no water under a bridge that is not a bridge, which means we will never forgive each other for not ever being enough. Split pea soup soul that I have no ham hock, no meat or bone soaked flavor but green green blandness. I used to have taste but became too new again. This is all to say that I’m lost but only now know that I am. This is all to say we are unmade and supposed to be. I fold like cardboard on a daily basis, break silent-soft underfoot of people who don’t know me, who are supposed to know me most. Best? It’s because I’ve always been hiding and show like I’m open, like I’m willing to be vulnerable-open and honest. These are lies. Almost everything can be. I am vulnerable-open but for reasons they can’t see. I am dying. You are too. But I’ll never become a ghost because I’ve always been one. Something is going from me I have begun to early-mourn. Is it more years that I won’t have, because of the way I live my life? Do I deserve them, want them? It’s not that. I’ve known they would leave me for some time now. Leaning back against the wall of my mind, posture like I don’t give a shit because I do so much give a shit, I know not to show that I do, because of what people do with that, when you tell them you love them, when you give them what they want it’s exactly what they want and they want more. I’ll give it all away. I never wanted to keep it. I’ll put their hooks back in my sides. I’ll drag them if I have to. Where? To Guangzhou. Or to wherever we’re all going. Wherever all of what this is has always been going. I’m going too.
—Tommy Orange
Twice a week I play UNO with a gay Egyptian psychiatrist who, inevitably, without fail, calls me a rat-faced piece of cheating garbage in need of hospitalization before he offers to murder my dog.
“Just leave me a key,” he says. “See a movie,” he says. “I’ll take care of it.”
I consider my options and hit him with everything I’ve got, slow-like, deliberate-like, fuck-you-like: like a yellow three. Then I look him dead in his very kind eyes and say something a hate-crimer might say, or a rat-faced piece of cheating garbage in need of hospitalization might say, and then I say, “You can’t kill Seymour. He’s a good boy.”
“Is he, though?” he says and plays a yellow seven. “Is he really?”
“Oh,” I go and blink like a stunned idiot with no arms and dirt in his eyes. “This little dance again?”
“I’m sorry, miss,” he says and two-finger folds his ear at me. “What’s that?”
“I know what you’re doing,” I say.
“What am I doing?” he says.
“Psyops, bro. You’re doing mind games.”
“Am I?” he says in exactly the way that lets me know he is totally doing that. He’s asking me leading questions so that I will connect some dots in my brain and realize that Seymour is not only not a good boy, but is in fact an objectively terrible boy with one eye and no joy who wakes me up at five a.m. every morning by shitting in my kitchen and barking at it. I throw down a green seven and go, “Yeah, you are. What are you gonna ask next? Why there’s blood in his stool, knowing full well it’s because he has a polyp half-an-inch up his colon that the specialist texted me a photo of?” Then I hold up my phone and show him my wallpaper.
He shakes his head and Draw Twos me, then gestures to the pile of cards like it’s a cupcake he made and is proud of, but the only thing he actually half bakes are bullshit theories like that I rescued Seymour because I’m trying to save my father, and while I will acknowledge some similarities, my dad is meaner and has one leg instead of one eye and a touch more continence. Psh, I go. Pfffft. Then I pick up sixes—a red and a blue—and demand to know what lazy, fat-fingered amateur shuffled the deck.
“You did,” he says.
“Oh,” I say, and grimace my way through the quiet. Eventually he plays a green nine and I get the same idea I get every time he plays a nine, which is that maybe I can get away with playing a six, and then I think maybe I shouldn’t do it, but then I go ahead and do it: I play the red six on his green nine and hope he doesn’t notice, but he does notice because I try the same thing every game and he always notices. Then he says I’m disgusting. Then he says I should be ashamed. Then he says he is grossed out by me.
“Honest mistake,” I say, and pick up the five-card cheater penalty and thumb-point at Seymour on the couch looking like a gargoyle fucked a fruit bat with ulcerative colitis. “Let me guess. Next you’re gonna ask if he ever ruined a party by shitting on a lady.”
“Not at all,” he says.
“He did. He diarrhea-ed on Maggie Mull and I wet-wiped her legs. Sensually.”
“Let’s talk about your medication,” he says.
“Oh here we fuckin’ go,” I say and lean back in my chair. “Why? So you can segue into talking about Seymour’s? Because we have nothing to hide: Flagyl and Apoquel, phenobarbital and CBD, special eye drops for his eyeball, prescription low-fat dog food or else he gets pancreatitis and goes fugue and stares at the wall for a few days, and I mix canned pumpkin in there because it’s good for his turds.”
“Sounds expensive,” he says and runs a finger across his neck.
“You fuck,” I say. “You’re probably planning to ask how his seizures are and why his dick is yellow even though you already know the answers are real bad and because he likes to dip it in the pee puddle before he moves on.”
“I want to know—”
“If he ate a battery? Yeah. Nine-volt.”
“—if you’re taking your medication,” he says.
“How dare you,” I say. “The nerve,” I say. “Here’s the thing,” I say and tap my finger on the table a whole bunch. “No.”
Then I avoid eye contact by staring into the ashes in the ashtray for a while, and when I finally glance up he has his cards facedown and his hands steepled and he’s giving me this look like he’s sympathetically judging me so that I’ll question my own choices. But I don’t. Instead I look at him like he’s a spoon I’m trying to bend with my mind, by which I mean that I know that he knows I’m not taking my meds anymore because I can’t afford them because American medicine leverages your pain for your money and I spend all mine on fucked-up dogs that keep dying on me but—I’m gonna keep doing that.
“Why are you making that face,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry. Your arm hair was bothering me.” Then I play a green seven and tell him to choke on it.
He doesn’t but Seymour does; he chokes and snorts and grunts because he is very itchy all of a sudden and starts berserking on the new couch—new because he destroyed the old couch when I left him home alone once for like twenty minutes—rubbing himself up it and down it before flipping onto his back with his little Frenchie legs straight up in the air like he’s dead except his eye is open and looking around. Eventually he attempts to get upright and rolls right off the edge and thumps onto the floor and shakes himself off like he’s wet even though he’s not wet, just stupid. Then he jumps back on the couch and stares at me.
“OK fine,” I say. “He’s the worst dog I’ve ever had.”
“Bingo,” the Doctor says.
“UNO?” I say.
“No,” he says, and holds up two cards.
“Make it four, you furry geek,” I say and mess up his whole deal with a blue Draw Two–blue six power-combo.
Dude doesn’t even flinch. He just picks up his cards and counters with a blue Reverse, a green Reverse, a Draw Four, says UNO, and wins on a red two.
“Are you fucking kidding me? I say and throw my cards down. “It’s a goddamn conspiracy. Seymour! Are you even seeing this right now?!” And right then the little lump starts stalking the potted ponytail palm on my coffee table and growling at it and I am like, yes, that is correct, fuck that plant. “You tell ’em, Seymour!” I say. “You tell ’em we ain’t taking this shit lyin’ down!”
Then I walk over and lie down on the couch with him and flip him over and rub his belly. One nipple (three down, passenger side) is extra-large and weird looking so I pinch it twice and go bweep bweep. Seymour positions his head to better see me, and when I scratch his chin he makes these small, expressive sounds and tries to bat my hand away with his little paws. He’s totally heinous, but his helplessness is endearing so I tell him not to worry. “I’m not gonna let Doctor Kedorkian kill you.”
“It’s just—” the Doctor says, “most people have pets that bring them joy, but you keep adopting grief time bombs that smell like piss and make your life more difficult than it has to be.”
I think about what he says and on some level I know he’s right—that between Seymour and my last few dogs, and my last few relationships, and my father, and my fear of being swallowed up by the bubbling and gurgling wellspring of sadness I feel just underneath the surface of pretty much everything—that maybe I am kind of having a hard time here, and maybe my choices could be better. But the entire reason my choices could be better is because my thinking is bad. I prefer to feel my way through. And what I feel when I look at Seymour, who is looking at me with his lonesome eyeball (it’s like a marine mammal’s eye: oversized and sincere and vulnerable), is a tremendous tenderness for a mini-jerk doing his bad, terrible, no-good best to be OK but who remains a constant danger to himself and carpeting everywhere.
I admit nothing, especially not that my father smells like piss and has survived on a steady diet of microwaved dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and ruining holidays ever since my mom died. Instead I point my pointer finger at the Doctor’s nose, then rotate my thumb up and yell, “The boy lives!”
“Does he even want to?” he says. “Seriously.”
“I don’t know, man.” Did Hamlet? Does my dad? Do I? Occasionally. But here we are in the meantime and the best I can think to do is be there for some doggos that need me. “Nurturers gotta nurch, bro.”
He furrows his eyebrows and tilts his head and nods, and the effect is that he looks confused and demeans me at the same time. In response I tell him that according to the DSM-5 he has every symptom of mind-your-own-fucking-biz-itis. “And besides,” I say, “Seymour can do the best trick I’ve ever even seen.”
I jump up and grab one of his medicated biscuits from the kitchen cabinet, then jog back into the room and yell, “Hey Seymour!” and he immediately perks up and stares at the wall. “He’s deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other so he can’t echolocate,” I say. Then I make kissy noises until Seymour turns and stares at my bookshelf, and then I wave my arms over my head and shout his name until he figures it out and plops off the couch and waddles over.
“How long is this gonna take?” the Doctor says.
“Shut the fuck up and be amazed,” I say, “because Seymour’s about to dial up a little razzle-dazzle. Ready, buddy? Here we go: Uno . . . dos . . . three—”
The biscuit is pumpkin-colored and shaped like a cartoon bone and I watch it freefall flat-side down while—in the blurry background—Seymour’s eye widens with anticipation. What I don’t see is him shift slightly back before he launches himself upwards to expedite the biscuit’s delivery by an inch or two. The reason I don’t see that is because, unlike other, fancier, healthier dogs, Seymour doesn’t do that. What Seymour does do is patiently wait for the biscuit to plonk off his bowling ball head because, while depth perception is possible in monocular individuals, it’s very limited inside of certain distances, which explains why Seymour falls off the couch and down stairs so often and—if we don’t walk the block counterclockwise—why he stumbles off curbs and donks his head on street signs and trash cans. In short, the little guy can’t catch. But what he can do, and what impresses me so much, is he can show the fuck up anyway and let the things he loves hit him in the face before he scrambles around looking for where they bounced to. I think it’s a great trick, maybe even thee trick, to everything, and I laugh and tell him what a good boy he is. “The best boy,” I say. “The number onest guy!”
The Doctor is not entertained. He is already scrolling his phone in search of a horned-up stranger with Magnum P.I. tits. I, on the other hand, announce that I am taking Seymour around the block before he shits on my floor again.
“I’ll walk out with you,” the Doctor says and stops scrolling, and I know that instead of sexing a guy he’s going to his parents’ house, to check on them, which he does on the nights we play cards, because his mom is sick and his dad is depressed and they live around the corner.
We make our way to the front door, on the back of which hangs Seymour’s leash and collar and the collars of all the hard-luck cases I’ve lost over the last few years, each of them sweet and doomed, each of them dealt terrible and unfair hands by whichever lazy, fat-fingered amateur you choose to believe in. Or, if you’re like me, none. Just bad luck. What I do believe in is standing between them and worse luck, and every time I reach for a collar I’m reminded of just how worse it can be.
Bacon’s was purple, Chancho’s blue, Sparkles’s orange, Tink’s red. Seymour’s collar is green, and sometimes I even let him wear it, but most days I mix up which one he gets. I think I do it because I like the idea of taking them with us on our walks somehow, of bringing them back out into a world I liked a whole lot better with them in it.
At the bottom of the stairs the Doctor puts his hand on my shoulder, tells me he’s worried about me. “If I got you some samples,” he says, “would you take them?”
“Probably not,” I say. Because—while often excruciating—I’ve been trying to listen to my feelings instead of bury them. I’m tired of burying things. I do appreciate his offer, though. He’s a good friend to me.
We hug it out and say our goodbyes, and after he exits the downstairs door I give Seymour’s leash a tiny tug, to coax him out onto the sidewalk, but the little guy refuses. Because of course he refuses. Instead he sits down and growls at me or the wall or the night or some other grievance. I almost get mad, but I let him have this one, and instead of dragging him out by a rope around his neck, I sit on a stair and shush him. Tell him it’s fine. Tell him he’s a good boy. Tell him I love him. I just try to comfort him, because if my father’s taught me anything it’s that grievances can keep you going for years.
—Matt Sumell
