The Value of X

“Awright,” said Mrs. Reilly to her eleventh-grade algebra class, “if Y equals thirty-six, who can tell me what X equals?”

Surveying the class slumped in their desks, she could not blame them for their apathy. Though it was only April, the weather was already hinting at another brutal New Orleans summer. For public schools to be without air conditioning in 1990 was a disgrace, but such things were usual in this little corner of the United States that might be more properly called part of the Third World. Mrs. Reilly suddenly felt hopeless and decided to call on her one dependable student. “Gary?”

But this time there was no answer.

“Gary Stubbs? Are you paying attention?”

Gary Stubbs, who in another couple of years would be known to one and all as G-man, didn’t even glance her way. He was a tall, rangy sixteen-year-old with eyes so weak and light-sensitive that he liked to wear dark glasses in class when he could get away with it. Mrs. Reilly did not let him get away with it, and today he wore a regular pair of thick spectacles that only somewhat camouflaged his good looks. Thanks to the clear lenses, she could see where his eyes were aimed. He wasn’t looking at Mrs. Reilly or at the blackboard. He appeared to be staring at his best friend, John Rickey, an indifferent math student who sat across the aisle a few rows ahead of him.

“Gary,” she said again. Some of the other students laughed, but Gary’s gaze never wavered. Magnified behind his glasses, his eyes were soft, almost dreamy. Maybe he wasn’t looking at John Rickey at all. Maybe he was just daydreaming about some girl. He looked very much like a boy in love.
Mrs. Reilly walked to his desk and rapped on it with her knuckles. She expected him to jump, but he only blinked rather slowly, then looked up at her. “Sorry, Mrs. R,” he said. “I kinda forgot where I was for a minute.”

She pointed at the problem on the board. Gary squinted at it, then said, “X equals six.”

He really was an excellent student, and Mrs. Reilly decided to let the matter slide. “Try to pay closer attention,” she said, returning to the front of the room.

Gary looked at the open algebra textbook in front of him. He wasn’t even on the right page—they’d finished with triangles a month ago. Usually he liked math pretty well. Where had his mind been? No, scratch that; he knew where it had been. He flipped to the next chapter and tried to focus on the blackboard. His face felt hot. In another month this classroom would be a furnace. Now it was just warm, tropical … languorous. He found his gaze returning to Rickey’s profile, to his straight nose and strong chin, to the longish light brown hair at the back of his neck. He imagined running his fingers through that hair, imagined putting his mouth there, and he shuddered a little. It was so bad. Every day he sat here and had these thoughts, and every day he hung out with Rickey for hours and hours after school and tried not to show any sign that he was having them. He couldn’t quite believe that Rickey would hate him if he knew, but that was only because he couldn’t conceive of Rickey ever hating him. They’d been best friends since fourth grade. Why was he thinking such things now?

Mrs. Reilly was writing on the blackboard, her back to the class. Rickey turned to look at his friend. Gary wasn’t sure whether the thoughts he’d been having could be seen on his face. He was afraid they could, because Rickey’s eyes widened as they met his. Rickey didn’t look mad, though, only a bit puzzled. Then he smiled. It was a gorgeous, heart-lifting smile, and Gary knew he wasn’t the only one who thought so; adults were always remarking on what a beautiful smile Rickey had. It transformed his already handsome face and lit up his blue-green eyes. You couldn’t help smiling back, and Gary did.

Rickey raised one eyebrow. With the semi-telepathy they’d developed from spending so much time together over the years, Gary understood its message: What’s with you today?

He shrugged, hooked a finger into the collar of his shirt: Don’t know. Hot in here.

Rickey mimed a scrubbing motion, one hand against the other: You want to go wash dishes later? They didn’t have regular jobs, but the owner of a greasy-spoon diner near the school would sometimes pay them a few bucks an hour to work off the clock.

Gary made a little seesawing motion with his hand: Maybe.

“John Rickey!” said Mrs. Reilly, and Rickey swiveled back around in his seat. He couldn’t get away with woolgathering like Gary could; he never knew the value of X.

——

“Sorry, kids,” said Sal Keller. “I ain’t got no work for you today.” Sal had owned the Feed-U Diner in the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward for twenty-three years, and had been cooking there for seven years before that. In all this time, no one could remember seeing him without his dirty white apron or the cigar (currently unlit) that jutted out of his stubble-ringed mouth. He spoke in a gritty baritone that even the bums who frequented the Feed-U didn’t dare argue with.

“We’ll check back tomorrow,” Rickey said.

“You do that,” Sal agreed. He sounded sarcastic, but that was pretty much his normal tone of voice. “Probably I’ll letcha take over the grill tomorrow.”

“Really?” said Rickey eagerly. He was always bugging Sal to give him a crack at the grill.

“Hell, no. Young kid like you, be liable to burn the burgers, bust the yolks on the sunny-side-up, God knows what. Working the grill takes a talent.”

“I got a talent.”

“You got a talent for scrubbing grease out my pots. Come back by tomorrow—if I don’t hear no more of this smart talk, I might have some work for you.”

They left the diner, rode the city bus down St. Claude Avenue, and walked to Rickey’s house near the corner of Tricou and Royal Streets. Rickey’s mother had left a long list of chores under the sugar bowl. The list ended with the words “Fix Supper”—she was a horrible cook, and Rickey was getting to be a pretty good one. Gary offered to help with the chores, but when Rickey told him not to worry about it, he didn’t insist. Truth be told, he wanted to get off on his own and think about things.

His house was only a few blocks away from Rickey’s, over on Delery near the Jackson Barracks prison complex, so he took a roundabout way home. There was never much chance of being alone in the Stubbs household. Gary was the youngest of six children. The older ones had moved out, but last year his second-oldest sister had left her husband and moved back home with her two little kids. It was basically a happy place, but it was kind of a madhouse.

Rickey was an only child whose parents had divorced years ago, so now it was just Rickey and his mom living in the house on Tricou. Gary had always been glad of the refuge. He still was, but lately he felt a little weird at Rickey’s place. Hanging out in Rickey’s room, sitting on Rickey’s bed, made it almost impossible to control these thoughts he’d been having. The last couple of times Rickey had invited him to sleep over, Gary had said no. He didn’t want to hurt Rickey’s feelings, but he’d gotten to the point where he could no longer stand sleeping on a pile of quilts on the floor, listening to Rickey’s breathing, wondering if Rickey was really asleep, wondering what would happen if he just crawled into bed—

Well, this wasn’t helping. He shook his head and quickened his pace on the uneven sidewalk. He needed to keep a better eye on his surroundings anyway. The Ninth Ward wasn’t as dangerous as people elsewhere in the city believed it to be, but when it started to get dark, you had to watch your back. Particularly if you were a scrawny white kid with Coke-bottle glasses, you had to watch your back.
He glanced at the shabby old houses around him, Victorian gingerbread cottages, camelbacks, doubles. Some were decorated with rusting wrought ironwork, some with Christmas lights even though it was April. One house he’d admired since he was very small had shards of colored tile pressed into the cement stoop, forming an intricate design. People who didn’t live here only seemed able to see the trash on the street and the possibility that somebody might ride up on a bike, smash your head open, and steal your wallet. They felt safe in their big Uptown houses and Metairie condo-warrens, but Gary thought his neighborhood was a lot more interesting than Metairie, not to mention friendlier. Everyone here smiled and spoke to you. He’d never seen strangers smiling at each other in the suburbs.

He wouldn’t mind living Uptown, though, someday. He and Rickey could get one of those little shotgun houses near the river; the rent was cheap and they’d only need a one-bedroom place …

Damn. The thing just kept sneaking up on him. Thinking about it rationally didn’t help; giving it free rein always exhausted him; trying not to think about it was about as effective as willing himself to have 20/20 vision. So what was he supposed to do?

He’d always known, in a rather vague and purposeless way, that he liked boys. He’d learned to hide it early on, too: growing up in a tough neighborhood, in a Catholic family, you just didn’t tell anybody that you had a crush on Han Solo or Michael Jordan. He’d even hidden it from Rickey, from whom he’d never hidden anything else. Every kid they knew thought fags were gross; how could he dare to think Rickey might be any different? The height of devastating wit was to accuse another kid of going to a gaybar in the French Quarter—that was how they said it, gaybar, as if it were one word. Insults like homo, queer, and the strangely popular doughnut-puncher had little to do with the perceived sexual habits of the insulted; they worked because that was the worst thing a boy could be. Rickey never said shit like that, but then Rickey had a smart mouth and seldom stooped to garden-variety epithets.

Thinking about it before, when he had done so at all, Gary had told himself he would deal with his sexuality at some unspecified time in the years ahead. His peaceful soul counseled him to watch and wait. He had no taste for conflict; Rickey was the shit-disturber of the pair. Once he got out of school and didn’t have to face the same bunch of people every day, he would figure out what to do. He might even go to one of those gaybars—not necessarily looking for anything, just to see what went on there. When he was still only a theoretical queer, he hadn’t given that much thought to his future.

But his theoretical days were gone—forever, he was pretty sure. There was that line you could only cross once, the line between trying to imagine a thing—in this case, a touch that would thrill every nerve in your body—and actually feeling it. Gary knew it was laughable that he should feel he had crossed that line, because nothing out of the ordinary had even happened. Nevertheless, he was very conscious of the moment he had crossed it.

The thing had happened after they finished work at the Feed-U one day. They had gotten off the bus and were sprinting toward Rickey’s house, excited because of the money in their pockets or maybe just galvanized by one of the last cool spring evenings before another long summer set in. When their feet hit the grass of a little corner park (really just a well-kept vacant lot) near Rickey’s house, Rickey ran up behind Gary and clamped an arm around his neck, pretending to throttle him. It was just horsing around, something they’d done a million times before. Being a little taller, Gary usually leaned forward, lifting Rickey’s feet off the ground until Rickey let go. This time a shock went through him, a powerful wave that was more than mere sensation but too primitive to be called emotion. It was as if two things, previously incompatible, had meshed to form a perfect design: he felt Rickey’s familiar, playful touch, but all at once he was also conscious of another body touching his, a smooth, strong, warm-skinned body that had him securely in its arms, and he didn’t want it to let go.

The feeling ended up somewhere in the pit of his stomach, twisting there in a way that was sort of pleasurable but intense enough to edge toward pain. Instead of leaning forward and pulling Rickey’s feet off the ground, he pretended to stumble and fall, dragging them both down but managing to hide his sudden, appalling boner.

“Dude!” Rickey had said, climbing off him and trying to help him up. “Sorry about that. You OK?”

“Just lemme lay here a second,” Gary had mumbled into the hot grass, wondering if he’d ever be able to get up without giving the whole neighborhood an eyeful of his tented pants.

He’d thought maybe it was just one of those hormone things. His mother was always cracking jokes about hormones, about how foolish they would make him act once he started liking girls. In the past year or so these jokes had taken on a slightly desperate quality. Gary didn’t understand exactly what hormones were, but he gathered that they had to do with sex. Maybe they would have caused him to feel that way if any guy touched him, and he’d just felt it with Rickey because he was around Rickey more than anybody else. But he couldn’t convince himself. He felt that way the next time Rickey jumped on his back. He felt it when Rickey slung a casual arm around his shoulders as they ambled through the grocery store, one of the places they liked to go to escape the afternoon heat. He felt sad all the time. Eventually, certain that he would betray himself, he began shying away from Rickey’s touch. He did this until he saw the puzzled hurt in Rickey’s eyes, and he couldn’t stand that, so he started forcing himself to think of basketball statistics every time Rickey’s elbow so much as brushed his. Pete Maravich had had a career high of 68 points playing against the New York Knicks. Karl Malone had averaged 27.7 points per game last season. That kind of thing.

It worked, sort of. At any rate, he didn’t have to fling himself to the ground again. But now he spent countless hours wondering if the things he thought about before he went to sleep at night, when basketball stats were far from his mind, could ever come true. Was he crazy to think, sometimes, that Rickey might want to be with him? Was anything really there, or was it just wishful thinking?

Only negatives gave him hope. Rickey didn’t talk about fags, homos, or doughnut-punchers. Rickey had never had a girlfriend even though he was unquestionably a good-looking kid. That might have been because most of the girls they went to school with weren’t interested in white boys, but Gary wondered. Unlike the other boys they knew, who were always bullshitting about pussy they’d had or pussy they’d like to have, Rickey didn’t talk about girls. He didn’t talk about boys either, but of course you couldn’t do that even if you wanted to.

Gary rounded the corner of his block and saw his father sitting on the stoop. That was nothing unusual; only a couple of rooms in their big old clapboard house were air-conditioned, and the family often sat outside as twilight fell. It wasn’t the safest habit in the world, but as Elmer Stubbs was fond of saying, you couldn’t let the criminals control your life.

“Hey, Daddy,” he said.

“Hey, Gary. How you doing? Y’all worked at the diner today?”

“Nuh-uh. Sal didn’t have anything for us to do.”

“Where you been, then?”

“Just over by Rickey’s.”

“You seen his momma?”

“She wasn’t home yet.”

“She’s usually home when y’all over there, ain’t she?”

“Not always,” said Gary, wondering at all the questions. “You know she does the books for Lemoyne’s Restaurant. She gets home around six most days, I guess.”

“Huh,” said Elmer, and leaned back on the stoop to light a cigarette. The flaring lighter illuminated his pale blue Irish eyes and picked out reddish highlights in his close-cropped brown hair. For a New Orleanian, Elmer Stubbs was a skinny man. He had wed Mary Rose Bonano, a girl from one of the city’s old Sicilian families, and their first five children had stocky builds, glossy black hair, and a touch of olive in their complexions. Gary looked a lot like his father; all he’d gotten from the Bonanos was his dark eyes.

“How was work?” Gary asked. Elmer managed the shipping department of Tante Lou’s Confections, a candy factory near Bayou St. John.

“Aw, the usual shit. Some squirrel calls up from New York City, says, ‘Hey, Elmer, I need another case of those PRAY-lines—’”

“He said PRAY-lines?” At this point in his life, Gary had not had much contact with tourists, and this pronunciation was as foreign to his ears as Arabic.

“Sure he said PRAY-lines. What, you think that’s how I say it all of a sudden? I say PRAH-lines, like a normal person. Anyway, this squirrel, he goes, ‘I need another case of those PRAY-lines but can you make ’em with macadamia nuts instead of pecans this time? We’re having a luau party and we think that would be really special.’”

“Jeez,” said Gary. “So did you tell him you’d do it?” He knew the answer, but he wanted to keep his father talking about the annoying customer, maybe get him started on customers in general, or his co-workers, or something. Anything would be preferable to another round of questions about whether Rickey’s mother was usually home when they were at Rickey’s house. He hadn’t liked that at all. It gave him an uneasy feeling in his gut, rather like the feeling he got whenever Rickey touched him, but not as pleasant.
Elmer shot the shit with his son for a few more minutes, then said, “Your sister’s making spaghettis. You better go on in, see if she needs any help.” As Gary got up from the stoop, his father caught hold of his wrist and looked up at him. Even in the fading light, Gary could see that Elmer’s eyes were very clear, almost naked-looking. “Son?” he said.

“What, Daddy?”

“You and Rickey don’t go messing around in the French Quarters, do you?”

Oh, shit. “Well,” said Gary, trying to sound as if he had no idea why his father would ask him such a thing. “I mean, we’ve been to the Quarter, sure, but we don’t go a lot. It’s pretty far.”

“Good. Y’all don’t need to be going up there. Your momma doesn’t want you to. It’s … it’s dangerous.”

His father’s eyes had been locked on his. Now Elmer looked away. Feeling released, Gary went into the house and walked down the long hall to the first-floor bathroom. Only when he got to the sink and turned on the water to wash up did he realize that his hands were shaking.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything, all those questions. Nobody’s parents wanted them to go to the Quarter. Black kids weren’t supposed to go because their parents thought they’d get in trouble with the police, who would assume they were there to pick tourists’ pockets. Girls weren’t supposed to go because their morals would be corrupted, or something. It didn’t necessarily mean his folks thought he had been going to gaybars. But when you’d grown up in the Ninth Ward and your father tried to tell you the French Quarter was dangerous, what else were you supposed to make of it?

He briefly considered calling Rickey up and telling him about the conversation. “I think my parents think I’m a homo,” he would say. And then Rickey might say, “Well, are you?” And … what then?

Gary looked down and saw that the bar of soap had turned to mush in his hands. He rinsed it off and went to help his sister finish making dinner. She never put enough seasoning in the red gravy, and it wouldn’t be any good unless he got to it pretty soon.

——

For Rickey, the realization had been somewhat easier. It was not in him to believe he could be completely wrong about anything, and he knew with a clear adolescent fervor that there was nothing wrong in how he felt about Gary.

It was hard to know exactly how to act on his feelings, though. He knew a little more about sex than Gary did—not having been raised Catholic, he had no compunctions about pornography or masturbation—and he had heard about some boys who had gotten drunk and jerked each other off. That much, apparently, could happen. But what if you wanted a lot more than that? Not just in the way of sex, but actual love? There were books about how to be gay; he’d seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren’t any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.

Once or twice he’d almost said something to Gary, but he always stopped at the last possible second, thrown off by a small perverse voice in his head. What if you’re just kidding yourself? the voice said. You think he feels the same way you do, but what if you’re wrong?

He had convinced himself of things before, only to find out that they weren’t true at all and he’d just believed in them because he wanted them so badly. The thing he kept flashing back to—it was so stupid that Rickey cringed whenever he thought of it—was the time he had convinced himself it was Christmas in March. Five years old, and he’d woken up in the middle of the night with that Christmas feeling, wondering how he had missed all the holiday preparations and decorations but purely certain that it must have just slipped by him. His mother had found him in the living room at the crack of dawn, glassy-eyed but determined that the tree, the stockings, and the heaps of presents would be making their appearance at any moment. Only when she showed him the calendar and reminded him of the recent passage of Mardi Gras did Rickey believe he was wrong, and even then he had been one pissed-off kid, sure he’d been gypped somehow.

He was pretty sure this was different. After all, he wasn’t five years old any more. On the other hand, this was a lot more important than Christmas. So beneath his natural confidence was the fear that he might just be kidding himself. He didn’t really believe it, but he believed it enough to keep quiet; saying anything to Gary would be the biggest risk he’d ever taken, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that. Had it been anyone else, Rickey was certain that he would have already made his move, gotten shot down or gotten some action, and dealt with it either way. Sometimes he wished he had fallen for someone besides his oldest friend. He’d even tried to think about other people, but it didn’t work.

Then today he had turned around in math class and seen the look on Gary’s face, a look he’d never seen there before, a look he could interpret in only one way. It wasn’t the look itself that kicked him in the ass, exactly. It was the thought that, if he didn’t do something, Gary might eventually look at another person that way. This was an idea Rickey could not stand, not under any circumstances. He still wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do, but he figured he would recognize his chance when it came to him.
He had finished all the other chores and was chopping onions and celery for a chicken dish when his mother got home. She’d given her hair a fresh color rinse the previous night, bringing it up to a wholly artificial, almost fluorescent orange, and her eyes were nearly as bright as the rhinestones that decorated the upswept corners of her glasses. “Johnnie, guess what!” she said.

Rickey’s mother had dropped her husband’s name years ago, and now went by her maiden name, Brenda Crabtree. Furthermore, she insisted on addressing her son as Johnnie. He was resigned to this but not especially pleased by it. Everyone else had been calling him Rickey since the day he’d started kindergarten and found himself in a class with four other boys named John.

“What?” said Rickey, using the dull side of his knife to scrape the chopped vegetables into a skillet.
“Claude invited me to spend the weekend at Grand Isle. He and his brother got them a beach house out there.” Claude was her new boyfriend, a nice retired man who seemed to have a little money.

“That’s nice, Momma. You gonna go?”

“I sure would like to, babe. I ain’t been out of New Orleans in years. But I hate to leave you all by yourself. You think you could stay by Gary’s for the weekend?”

“You know how crowded their house is,” Rickey said casually. “Why don’t I ask him to stay over here? We’re old enough to stay by ourselves.”

“Well, I don’t know …”

“Sure,” said Rickey, trying to sound as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “We’ll be here to watch the house, and I’ll have it all nice and clean when you get back.”

There might be a little more discussion of the matter before his mother gave in, but seeing the look on her face, Rickey already knew he had won. She loathed housework, and by promising to do it, he had always been able to get almost anything he wanted.

—

From Second Line by Poppy Z. Brite.

Chapter One

Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.
The books he sold were most often the recent property of people who had died. Book lovers never gave up the good ones without cause. But then, the books which people sold willingly were not the ones Henry really wanted. The monthly public library sales were stacked high with those—the usual titles for a dollar apiece, yesterday’s best sellers, last year’s hot topics.
But not always. Occasionally, some relative—often the child who never cared much for Dad’s preoccupation with medieval history or Mom’s obsession with old cookbooks—would drop the burden their parents had so selfishly placed upon them by dying, and there they would be, in great careless mounds on the folding tables in the library basement or conference room. Always dumped too quickly by a “volunteer” from the “friends” committee, with the old dust jackets tearing one against the other.
Like encounters with sin, Henry had occasions of luck at yard sales, though not often enough to waste a weekend which might better be spent at home reading. His favorite haunts were the estate auctions, and the best of these were the ones held at the very house where the old geezer had kicked the bucket. And there was always that thin network of friends who knew Henry was a bookman—who heard of book lots being sold and passed the word on. Albert, of course, had been a regular source for this, simply because his trash-removal business so often involved houses being sold where the books had accumulated over the years and the dead were recently departed.
Henry had spent the half hour since they had first arrived at the Blue Thorn talking about death. Albert had said nothing in response. He would not be provoked. Tim had busied himself counting receipts.
Henry studied Albert’s darker reflection next to his own pale face in the mirror across the bar. There was no visible reaction. Albert’s eyes were down on his glass. Henry knew that look from a thousand glances over a chessboard. That stolid brown face might not give much away, but his eyes were his weakness.
Henry pursued, “You know, the end might come too late for some people. They stay too long. All the good is over for them. With others, killing would be a kindness. I’ve seen them. Dying can be such an ignoble event. I go into their houses afterward. I see the decay of the things that once made them proud. No one really wants to die, I guess, until it’s past their time and all the dodging is over. Dying is just the final alternative.” Then he moved his thought at an angle, like an overlooked bishop from a neglected corner. “Maybe that’s what makes murder the solution to so many problems.”
Albert ordered a second pint before heaving an unhappy breath at the subject matter.
Tim wiped up the tale of the glass after he set the ale down, and then stopped, a frown of thought wrinkling his open forehead. Smaller than either Albert or Henry, he leaned over the bar between them, on his forearms, as if suddenly wanting to express a confidence. Henry looked down on the freckles scattered over the bald center of Tim’s head and thought of islands on a pink sea.
Tim tapped the counter in front of his nose with his crooked index finger. “My uncle Jerry died in an accident on the job. Steel beam caught him the wrong way. But get this. Only the day before, he called my Aunt Deirdre into the dining room and asked for a sheet of the special paper they kept for answering invitations and the like. Then he sits down and, out of the blue, he makes out his will. Even calls my cousin Frankie over to notarize it. Can you believe that? He must have had a premonition.”
The subject of death had only occurred to Henry because everyone seemed to be dropping dead lately—or nearly everyone. He had heard from his dad last week about Mrs. Levine, a childhood neighbor. She was a large-breasted woman Henry always pictured with half-framed glasses hanging on a silver chain around her neck—the glasses in constant danger of being swallowed in her cleavage. And then “little” Greg Dunne, who had run the Gulf station for as long as Henry could remember, had passed away the week before. People had been telling Greg to lose a hundred pounds or so for years. Now Henry’s favorite gas station was closed. Where else was he going to get gas when the book orders were light and he needed credit?
Finally, this morning, Henry had been awakened by a commotion downstairs as they carried away Mrs. Prowder, his landlady. Her arthritis had turned out to be more than just that. In any case, death did not seem like an uncalled-for line of thought while drinking with his friends.
Albert suddenly nudged him with his shoulder and spoke in a scold as Henry fought to keep his balance on the stool. “Mrs. Prowder wouldn’t hold with an attitude like yours, Henry. She knew her time was coming. There was no fear in her eyes. She just enjoyed each day’s chance to observe whatever came her way. She could see the pattern to things. She cared for the living and let death be damned.”
To Henry, Mrs. Prowder was now a piece fallen off the table, where the puzzle of his own life was already in disarray. He was being pushed. Shoved. Like a kid in the schoolyard. He was supposed to be more mature. Grown-up. Adult. Even though the slightly out-of-place, off-center, ill-fitting, everyday discomfort he had first felt as a kid in high school was still with him. He was getting close to forty, for Christ’s sake.
He looked at Albert in the mirror. “Jeez, that’s just like you, Albert. It all makes sense to you. Just a part of life, right? It’s like you have this root that goes down into the earth so deep you never get off balance. Why can’t I see it that way? To me it’s like something was stolen.”
He shut up at the whine in his own voice. But it was true. It was something that had gone missing. Something not where it belonged. What was the pattern to that? He’d spent twenty years trying to stay out of the shadow of the frickin’ Catholic Church and managed to run right into it again and again. Not that he was going religious. No. Not that. He had just turned around and noticed the empty space there behind him and wondered what the hell he was doing with his own life. Yes. It was as if he were living in a dream world. He played with his books and the years went by. And who cared, anyway? Did anybody actually read the stuff? They just collected it. Most of his clients were damned speculators. They didn’t love books, much less what they contained. What good was there in that? His old boss, Barbara, had it all over him on that score. The ones who really loved the books liked to browse, dip into a page here and there, and feel the cloth and smell the paper.
Henry heard the whine in his brain now.
His eye caught Albert’s in the mirror. His friend scanned the scene at the bar for anyone who might hear. The stools to either side had emptied since they arrived.
Albert spoke in a voice that barely reached Henry’s ear. “You remember Patty?”
Henry leaned in. “Your first wife, Patty?”
Albert adjusted himself on the stool. “I got word from her brother that she died last year.”
Henry put down his glass, his mouth open.
Tim moved in close again as well, already speaking. “Albert. You never said anything.”
Henry said, “I’m sorry.”
Albert shook his head. “I had nothing to tell. Alice knows. But I haven’t even told Danny and Junior yet. I don’t know how to tell them.”
Albert sat back on his stool now until the wood popped.
Henry asked, “What happened?”
With Henry’s face just over Tim’s shoulder in the mirror, Albert looked at Tim. “Drug overdose, probably. You don’t want the details. Let me say that .… But that’s not the point. I didn’t bring it up for that reason. Henry thinks I’m the Rock of Gibraltar. The big guy. He’s been coming to me like I’m his stand-in parish priest since we started playing chess together back in the seventies. I’ve always got all the answers, right?”
Henry studied his glass self-consciously.
Albert nudged him again. “He doesn’t remember. Back then it was different. Back then we used to argue politics all the time. I was angry at the world. I was blaming everybody else for what was happening to me. I was a piece of bad work. That was when I was with Patty.”
Henry said, “I remember,” and offered a smile.
Albert turned to him. “You remember. You remember holding me up when she left. You used to babysit Junior at five in the morning so I could do my rounds with the truck.” He wiggled a finger at Henry while looking again at Tim. “This man changed Junior’s stinking diapers. Junior still remembers when Henry walked him to school. …” Albert sat forward on his stool again, looking through the mirror, only at Henry now. “You want answers to things you don’t even have questions for, son. Hear me? And when I have a problem like that, I go ask Alice.… And she tells me to sit on it.”
Tim said, “Alice is a rock.”
Albert said, “Alice is the hard place.” But he let a smile slip after he said it.
There was more to it, though, for Henry. More even than the passing of Mrs. Prowder.
Henry had just gone to another auction the day before, this one in Connecticut. Mostly furniture, but a fine collection of books as well. He had missed out on several lots of mysteries—Hammetts and Chandlers and Cains. He seldom had that kind of money to spend anyway, but he had gotten what he could realistically have hoped for—three lots of lesser-known authors in dust jackets from the same period. The Mission-style table the books had been stacked on had sold for eight thousand dollars. Henry paid eight hundred for the books.
He should have been satisfied. Reasonably satisfied. Resigned, in any case. He could not easily dismiss from his mind seeing Dashiell Hammett hardcovers in that kind of condition. He had never even seen a first printing of The Glass Key in the dust jacket before, much less held it. But the three lots he had gotten were good enough. He was still busy convincing himself of that when he had gotten home the previous evening.
Mrs. Prowder leaned forward from her chair and looked out the open door of her apartment on the first floor as he passed in the hall, the white of her hair like a flag where it had come loose from the comb.
As always, she asked, “You were successful?”
She loved to hear reports of his adventures. She did not care so much for the accounting of books he had found as for descriptions of the homes he had been into and people he had seen.
He had answered, “Not as much as I hoped. Enough, I guess.”
She appeared to be tired. She had asked none of her usual questions, but said, “Don’t be discouraged. It’s more important to keep trying. Sometimes the success is hidden in things, and you only find it out later on.”
Henry’s mind had been on the books, and he was not sure he had even said good night to her. He would miss that.
“Miz Prowda,” as she always introduced herself, owned the narrow four-floor brick on Chestnut Street. It was just one in the row of close single-family town houses built while John Quincy Adams was still president. Henry liked the simple and unpretentious brick faces. They were classic now, but once they were only average in a time when averages were higher. Mrs. Prowder lived alone on the first floor and rented the rooms above to single men. Her door was always open—she had said that the first day—and it was, with a clear view of the front door and the stairs. She appeared to know everything that went on in the lives of her tenants and was not shy with her comments. She was a Yankee, with a touch of Down East in her voice and a no-nonsense approach to any subject.
No more than a week ago she had remarked, “Did Eliot and his acrobatic girl friend disturb you? He’s a lot healthier than he looks, isn’t he? I wish he was more considerate. He kept me awake all night.”
Eliot lived below Henry on the second floor, but thankfully he heard little of that.
Mr. Elwin Prowder had been dead for twenty years but lived on in continued anecdote as Mrs. Prowder compared observations of her tenants to incidents in her husband’s life. Those comments usually involved something small, like a better way to carry the boxes of books Henry was often moving in or out the door to the street where the inclined brick sidewalk passed the bottom of the steep granite steps. The week, years ago, when he first moved in, the comments had started.
Those steps could be a logistical challenge, with Henry’s van parked illegally to the side of the narrow street, blinkers on, and nowhere to leave the books in the close passage of the halls above. Every armload had to be carried all the way to his third-floor apartment.
She studied his frenzied unloading and spoke to him as he passed. “My Elwin would make a pile on the sidewalk first, hikers be damned.” Then, “My Elwin would put the smaller boxes down first so you can level out those stairs to one side and stack quite a bit all at once.” Then, “Once my Elwin used a straight-backed chair to carry up all my mother’s china to the attic after she passed. He put his belt through the slats and held the top rung like this against his back.” She demonstrated, her arm crooked over her opposite shoulder. This suggestion was ingenious, a kind of rigid backpack that might work for large boxes of books as well, and Henry decided to put a version of it to use on some later occasion.
A few years ago Mrs. Prowder had called to him from her chair as he came in the door. Her arthritis was keeping her from getting up that day, but she adjusted some white strands of hair over her ear in a gesture of civility.
“You know, a young man like yourself should be careful. When you hit your thirties you can get lonely without knowing it, because you’re working harder just to keep busy. I know you don’t have a girlfriend. You never go out on Saturday night. You go to the movies alone. If it wasn’t for that friend of yours—Albert, is that his name?—you’d never go out at all.… You know, once my Elwin was set upon by an older woman. She wasn’t as old as I am now. She was fifty or so, the wife of a State Street banker, and they lived just up the way near where the little grocery used to be on the corner of Revere Street. Elwin was a good-looking fellow, much like yourself. Much like yourself in many ways. Same chocolate hair. Always a little surprise in his eye over what the world was offering. And I was awful big just then with Mary, my youngest, and had to be careful. At that time…” She looked toward the window to find the thought. “Truman was having his hissy fit with MacArthur, I believe. Well, some women can just smell a man who hasn’t spent his passion lately. She came to see Elwin at his office. As you know, Elwin was a lawyer and had his office just down on Charles Street, where the liquor store is now. She stopped him in the street on the way to the grocery store to talk, and then she had him in for tea one Saturday afternoon so that he could look at some family papers. She was a marvel. Well, poor Elwin didn’t know what hit him. He was the guiltiest man I ever saw. All the while he was giving me more attention than I could handle. He was as sweet as a puppy. But I knew something was wrong. He started to whistle. Do you whistle? Elwin whistled when he had something on his mind. He was whistling up a storm for the short while it lasted.” Mrs. Prowder pursed her lips and blew a thin note that became a silent mime before she gave it up. “Well, then it all came out about two years later. There was a scandal. Mrs. Sears—oh, I shouldn’t be telling you her name, should I?” She paused with mischief in her eye. “Oh, well. Too late. Mrs. Sears was caught in bed with one of the grocers, by her own husband. It became a scandal because her husband immediately had the grocery shut down for a permit violation. The grocer fought back, and it got into the papers. I read the story to Elwin out of the newspaper over breakfast and saw him turn a shade of color. I knew my Elwin. It didn’t take long to get some details out of him.” She held up her hand like a traffic cop. “This is just a bit of caution. You have to watch out for older women. Especially at your age. They will have their way.”
This was all said to Henry with no real prompting. She could not have known he had been seeing Morgan Johnson. The Johnsons lived blocks away on Marlborough Street. In any case, he had only gone there to deliver the books Morgan purchased at the auctions. With Mrs. Prowder’s caution, Henry could not escape the thought that there was some hidden power possessed by older women—an ability to read a man’s mind—which was passed on through the generations and unbeknownst to mere men.
Sitting in the Blue Thorn, staring at their reflections in the mirror across the bar, Henry reviewed much of this in his head as he had done many times since the morning. Now there was the news of Patty. Poor Patty. Lost Patty.
He felt more than slightly maudlin and tried to shake it off by speaking up loudly. “A good pint of ale is worth living for.”
Tim shouted, “Hear, hear!” from a table where he was serving someone else.
Albert nudged Henry with his shoulder and spoke in lower tones. “All you need is a woman of your own. All you need is a hug, but I’m not about to give you one. Alice would object—” He stopped short and turned to Henry on the stool. Henry could feel Albert’s eyes directly on him. “Shit. This isn’t just about old Mrs. Prowder, is it ? Does all this have anything to do with a woman? Are you having problems with a woman again?”
Henry opened his mouth and let it hang as he tried to find the right words, knowing Albert would interpret them the way he wanted. “Morgan Johnson called me last night. She wants me to look at her husband’s books.”
Albert turned to the reflection in the mirror, then heaved another sigh. “You need a younger woman. At least pick on someone your own age. It’s healthier.”
Henry defended himself. “I’m just looking at the books.”
Albert said, “Then stay away from the books in the bedroom.”

Chapter Two

The books he had purchased at the auction had cost Henry twice what he had wanted to spend, but then they were still worth a great deal more. He would just have to find a way to get his money back a little faster. There were several ways he could think of to accomplish that in how he presented the goods. He had played with this in his imagination as he unpacked them onto what would be called his kitchen table if he had a kitchen and not a kitchenette. He seldom used the space for eating, and his desk was already occupied with the remains of a previous batch.
He first organized the books in short stacks, faceup, directly below the ceiling light which illuminated the whole of his apartment. He could offer them as a group, as authors of the 1930s. Most were women, like Bess Streeter Aldrich, Vicki Baum, Dorothy Canfield, and Fanny Hurst. He could offer those separately as key figures in twentieth-century women’s literature. He could even ignore the content and offer some of them for their Deco dust jackets and design.
He had speculated about this into the late hours, recombining the blunt colors of the covers and the bold typography of the titles for the visual effect that might be most eye-catching on his web site, until he was interrupted by the ringing of his phone.
He had not even said hello before she spoke.
“Henry?”
Her voice was just the same, as if he had spoken to her only the day before.
He managed to say, “Hello.”
Her voice lowered with recognition. “Hello.”
The moment was short, but many thoughts ran together.
“Morgan. How are you?”
She let one of her brief silences go by. She had always been good with silences. “Fine. A little lonely.”
He said the obvious. “I heard. I’m sorry.”
Her husband, Heber Johnson, had died some months before—was it in the early summer? Henry could not remember in the confusion of the moment. He seldom read the newspapers, and someone had told him after the fact. Heber had been eighty-four; once the most fearsome literary agent in Boston at a time when Boston bank money still financed the films made in Hollywood. A bullish figure in a silk suit and black felt fedora, Heber always had the ever-present cigar in hand, and by the late 1950s he had made the New York writers come to him. Even in his old age, his name had commanded respect. His authors were always published, because his authors always sold well.
She said again, “I’m fine.” And then, as if to convince him, “It was a long time coming. How are you?”
“The same. Of course. You sound good.” That was not what Henry meant to say. He added, “It’s good to hear your voice.” But she was not calling for a chat. “Tell me what I can do.”
She might be over sixty now. Henry had never known her age. Heber Johnson had married her when she was still in her early twenties.
She answered, “You can look at Heber’s books.… I’m not selling them. I’m donating them—to Boston University. But I need them appraised. Honestly appraised. Not to scam the insurance company or the IRS. I need to know what they’re really worth. A fellow from the university was over last week, and they have agreed to keep the collection together. It would be an appropriate memorial to Heber . And I hate those weaselly appraisers. The fellow from the auction house who looked at the furniture yesterday turned my stomach. He was practically begging for me to pay him off for a lower estimate so I could cheat on the estate taxes. You know how it is. …” He could hear a weary breath in the pause. “Sure, I’ll be taking a tax deduction. Certainly. But we haven’t been doing well for some time, so there isn’t a lot we need in the deductions department. You know Heber had gotten worse. He was bedridden for the last year.”
Henry told the lie. “No. I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Of course he had known. Why hadn’t he called her? Why hadn’t he offered some moral support, at the least? But she let him get by with it.
“I don’t know exactly why it matters now. I just thought …” Her voice disappeared again.
He could not remember that voice ever sounding weak. The point was that she wanted his advice. She wanted his help, now.
He said, “If you need the money, you should sell them.” He had to say that much. He was pretty sure the money made no difference to her. He waited for her to answer.
Her voice lifted at the thought. “I don’t. Not really. I have some family problems to take care of—nothing I can’t handle. And my son Arthur is doing well. He’s made another film. He’s managed to stay off drugs and stay married, and he has two kids now. I’m a grandmother! How unlikely is that! And he wants me to come out there to live. I put the condo up for sale, and I’m going out to California officially for a visit. If I like it, I’ll stay. When I’ve paid all the bills and the government gets through with me, I’ll still have more than enough, I think.”
Henry had met the son once. More like his father than his mother.
“Okay. Sure. When do you want me to come over?”
Her voice regained the positive control he’d always admired. “Well, that’s the problem. I thought I had lots of time. But I received a good offer on the condo last week. That means I’ll have to be out of there a little sooner. With the holidays coming, it could be confusing if we wait till next month. I’m guessing it would be best done this coming week. Can you manage that?”
He could. Oddly, the first thought which occurred to him was that he should quit smoking immediately, so she would not be disappointed in him. The thought was broken by the sound of a voice in the background.
Henry said, “Where are you now?” His eyes went to the clock by his bed. It was after ten.
She answered, “In the house on the Cape. I haven’t stayed in Boston since Heber died.” But he could tell she was distracted by something else.
It was odd how things happen. He had even been thinking about Morgan at the auction that day. But then, he often thought of her.
He had first met her as Mrs. Johnson when he still worked for Barbara at the bookshop. Morgan had come into Alcott & Poe looking for “yards of books” to fill the shelves in Back Bay condominiums owned by people who did not read. Barbara ran the best used bookshop in Boston and understood the need to sell stock in quantity—she was always struggling with the Newbury Street rents—but she hated interior decorators. She called them “furniture dealers” and passed the job of helping Morgan off on him.
Henry had liked Morgan immediately for her forthrightness.
She directed him to “Skip the best sellers. I want copies of the good books by the midlist authors who earn a living, day in, year out, with their typewriters.”
Henry liked the arch of her eyebrow, which made her skepticism at some of his choices seem so obvious without a word. He had liked the agate green and brown of her eyes. She used them to see and not just look, and this had made him uncomfortable on a few occasions.
Morgan once asked him, “What kind of books do you keep at home?” after rejecting one of his recommendations.
He had fumbled for the right explanation. “Favorite authors—but only in editions I like. Reference books, of course.…  I don’t collect, really. I don’t care much for the untouchable quality of first editions.”
She liked that answer and added, “An untouchable book is worthless. Who do you read? I bet what I’m looking for is exactly what you read.”
No. His habits were rather parochial, he knew. But that was that.
He had confessed his orthodoxy. “Mark Twain. Trollope. Yeats. Robert Graves.” Then he had told her hesitantly, “I’ve just begun to read all the Shakespeare plays, first to last . I’ve always meant to.”
She looked at him very seriously, as if her words should not be ignored. “You must read your Shakespeare out loud. It is the only way to understand the brilliance. There is music in the language that gives it meaning. You don’t want to miss that. Pretend you’re John Gielgud. If it drives your roommate crazy, find a new roommate. Shakespeare is more important.”
Like a teacher, he thought.
He defended himself too quickly. “I live alone, so that’s not a problem. I’ll give it a try. I’ve actually never thought to read it aloud.”
She had backed away then and looked at him from head to toe. “I’m surprised you live alone. You’re smart. You’re a very handsome man. You shave. I notice you bathe regularly. You stand up straight. You laugh at my little jokes. All you need is someone to show you how to dress . Go to London and live for a year. You’ll find a good English girl there who’ll fix your wardrobe right up.”
Morgan was a lean woman, arms slender with muscle showing instead of loose flesh. She stood very straight herself, almost soldierlike, he had thought before learning that her father had been a career naval officer. She was strong and enjoyed showing it, the same way Henry’s sister, Shelagh, used to rebuff his help. Morgan carried her own choices to the register, grasped in stacks between her sagging hands and raised chin. And there was always her voice—her voice so very sure of itself.
The very first day she had explained it all shamelessly. “These people I buy for don’t read. They are cretins. But I have to buy good books for them anyway. I have to make it appear that they have taste. I’ll give them credit for that. At least they want to appear civilized, and they have an idea what that looks like. So that’s my job. If I buy a lot of leather bindings, then everyone will know they’re phonies. They really want to be taken for what they are not. They want the books to look used and appear that they’ve been read, but in a condition that says they take care of them. These are not the intellectual slobs who hold a book with one hand while eating dinner with the other. These are people who buy five-thousand-dollar dresses to go out to fund-raisers for the poor, where they write a check for five hundred bucks so they can congratulate themselves on their generosity. … I’m sorry. I apologize for sounding so cynical. But I need your help. Who knows? Maybe some rainy day, they’ll read one of these books and it will change their lives—or at least make them want to read another. It’s possible.”
He had gotten to know her then, and on her repeat visits, but not well until several years later. After Henry had left Alcott & Poe and was selling books on his own, he had encountered her at an auction. Then it was like meeting a lost friend on the field of battle.
She immediately made her case. “Your old boss, Barbara, wouldn’t help me. She tried, but she doesn’t think like you. She started picking out a bunch of classics. I tried to tell her how that would look artificial. I think she took it the wrong way. So now I’m out here trying to buy books just like you.”
In fact, she had not really been looking for the same kind of lots. He had no use for the common good books. He only wanted the unusual and uncommon things he could sell in his catalogue to other book dealers. When she started showing up at one of the larger auctions in Northampton, they sat together. They began having dinner together after previewing the lots and before the actual auctions began. The auctions were held at the old hotel there, and often ran late.
It was on a rainy night in January, when Henry had worried out loud about driving back to Boston on icing roads, that she had simply stated the fact.
She said, “I’m staying put. I’ve rented a room. And I think it would be very nice if you would stay as well.” With her eyes fixed on his own.
Because of her style, the way she walked, the words she used, he had assumed she had come from old wealth.
He had known people born and raised in wealth all his life. It was the nature of his hometown, divided as it was between the Village and South Brookline. Growing up in Brookline meant that he had been in the homes of the rich with friends from high school long before he was a book dealer. And more importantly, he had seen their books. Henry had observed their indulgences and divided them into two types. There were the ones who reacted against their breeding by becoming rude and arrogant slouchers, who assumed too much and expected everything. Morgan was the other type.
She wore clothes he thought were high fashion until a remark he made about a green dress he liked, when he had learned it had been bought in Paris almost twenty years before. She wore jewelry, a diamond ring which had belonged to her grandmother, and sometimes her mother’s favorite pearl necklace. She wore no perfumes, but he could not forget the scent of her for days after they had been together.
It was an odd and disquieting relationship, which had only lasted a year. He never really saw her in Boston, but often at the auctions. When she ended it, she had done it in the kindest way.
“I love you. You’re a foolish book hound to have gotten involved with an old bitch like me. You’re really too innocent for a man your age. But my first love is my husband. I’ve been selfish enough. Being unfaithful has been a little harder on me than I thought it would.… I’m not saying that to make you feel guilty. This was my doing. I needed you more than you needed me. But it has gotten to be more than I can handle.”
Her husband needed her care. He had suffered another stroke. He was incontinent. They had not slept in the same room for years because of his coughing and fitfulness at night, but Heber needed her to be there now.
In fact, it was Henry who had been wrought with guilt.
He had never really thought about marriage. He had, in fact, purposely avoided thinking much about it. His life was simple and peaceful, and he had liked it that way. He had been in love before—passionately enough to want to be with someone all the time. He had survived those experiences—though he was not really sure he had survived his relationship with Barbara yet. He was still feeling like an escaped prisoner who might be tracked down.
Now he had been responsible for the unfaithfulness of another man’s wife. He could not excuse himself for acting out of love. Not love as he wanted it to be. He certainly liked Morgan more than any woman he had met since Barbara. He liked being with her. And he enjoyed her—like a dessert, he thought. One could live without dessert. One should not break moral codes for the pleasure of dessert.
But his feelings for Morgan had been new to him. He might have loved her if she had wanted him to. She was an extraordinary woman. But she had never allowed any real intimacy beyond the physical. She had kept the greater part of her life separate from him, seldom speaking of it more than was necessary. And he was happy to have her companionship. He had not spent time with a woman since leaving Alcott & Poe.
Unfortunately, they had too little time together. She was always rushed. He never saw her when he delivered the books at her apartment building—only Fred, the useless superintendent, who stood and watched while holding the door—except for the last time, when her son, Arthur, had been there visiting and had helped Henry unload. Arthur had been inquisitive about his mother’s new profession. Henry had said little and played the part of delivery boy.
Henry drove to the auctions in his rusting blue Ford van, arrived early, and examined each lot in the preview carefully, taking notes even on things he knew he would not buy, if only just to learn a little more about them. Morgan arrived in her Jaguar with little time left, walked around the room at a steady pace, and took no notes. It was completely a matter of first sight with her.
At dinner they spoke about films or books they liked, or some gossip she had heard about an author. She enjoyed gossip. She seemed to have read everyone. These were untold stories, some she had witnessed, and others from her husband, about writers and other agents and publishers. He had suggested more than once that she should write a book of her own.
Her opinions were far more defined than his, and always had the sound of finality.
Once, she surprised him with “Updike will be forgotten within a few years of his inevitably overblown obituary notices. The term ‘a writer’s writer’ really means he holds little interest for the general public, and I don’t even think the high-lit types really like him. For a writer so proud of his stylistic control, he seems to have a limited idea of what he’s writing about.”
Henry had read no more than a few short stories by Updike and had little luck over the years selling his work. His own judgments were more practical. Because he had not really gone to college, beyond a few night classes at Northeastern, he had never taken any stock in those authors who were the darlings of academia. And over time he had found, without exception, that the writers he was most passionate about were also the ones he sold most easily.
Another time she said, “Who’s good?” And he had answered without thinking, because it was the book he was reading then.
“Nick Tosches. Have you read him? He’s very good. Edgy.”
“Difficult man,” she answered. “I’ve met him.”
This had sparked him. “The good ones are all difficult, aren’t they? Each in their own way. But they’re difficult for a reason. Tom Wolfe. Harlan Ellison. They’re not alike. They’re fighting for their lives. Everything is FDA-approved now. Homogenized. Pasteurized.”
To Henry’s bewilderment, Morgan found this kind of off-the-cuff criticism enchanting. She seldom argued with his pronouncements, especially after encouraging him to talk about the authors he read and to explain the reasons he liked them. To entertain her—to see the curve of amusement in her eyes—he stretched his opinion in hyperbolic flares of dissatisfaction with the current state of literary affairs, making high crime out of lapses in creative effort, and capital offense from a waste of talent.
One night he had brought a bellman to their door because he had spoken too loudly for too long. “Where is our Dickens? Where is our Trollope? What challenge is there to investing supernatural powers in an automobile when the world is in need of explanations and our religions have failed to answer? Where are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky when the dating habits of an air-head sell in the millions? What pleasure is there in a Cold War fantasy about the life and death struggle of a cardboard spy when the intrigue and game of our time needs a Dumas and the upheaval of history cries for a Victor Hugo? Why are we cursed with mediocrity and obsessed with the dissection of literary mice just as we stand on the doorstep of the stars?”
He could bring the smile to a laugh if he worked at it long enough.
At first she appeared surprised that there was a rationale beyond the accepted judgments of the literary establishment. She took his homegrown opinions as interesting vernacular aberrations—even cute. Why was Kipling so underrated and James so favored by the critics? Why was Thornton Wilder so often ignored? Was it impossible to overrate Mark Twain?
Once when they were together, he had stood up on the mattress above her and posed with his hands in the air as if holding an imaginary book to the light.

Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks,
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.

He had said it to show off his attention to her sincere advice of long ago. He had finished his set of the Yale Shakespeare and had already begun rereading the ones he liked best. Love’s Labour’s Lost had become his favorite. He should have been embarrassed at his poor delivery, but she sat up from the bed, one hand extended dramatically toward him, and hardly missed the beat.

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

He took her hand and kissed it. She was so much brighter than he was ever going to be.
His anger had brought him to his knees then. “Then why read? Why care about them? What does it matter what they write? Isn’t it just for the little pieces of the puzzle that might be found there? For the little pleasure of another voice? Why do books matter at all? If the godfather’s only search is for fame, what does it matter what name they give the stars? It’s all a waste of time. We’re better off wallowing naked in the grass by day and huddling in caves at night. The light of a television is more than enough to have sex by.”
But she had picked up the quote again. “‘How well he’s read, to reason against reading!’”
He was astonished, as he often was. “It’s only wonder, not reason. I’m in awe. I lie on my bed at night and read as if my life depended on it. And it does, even if it’s a mundane life—but I’m talking about what goes on in my head. It doesn’t matter whether it makes me laugh or cry, so long as it fascinates me. It doesn’t even matter if I agree with what the author is saying, so long as I can talk back. There is no conversation with most of them. It’s all one way. ‘Now listen here. Hear me, and shut up!’ But with the good ones, I lie there and wonder at all the things the words have made me think about that I never would have imagined before. I’ve even thought —once, when I was reading a book by Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether, I think; a dark little story—and suddenly he said something. I can’t remember the line exactly, but the old captain sits down with his Bible—no, his dead wife’s Bible, with his finger in the leaves, but closed and held on his knee, and begins to remember her.… I had just done that. The very same thing. I had just been reading Yeats and stopped to hear my own mother’s voice in my head. It’s like having a conversation with someone without the rush of time.”
Soon enough, she became intrigued by his explanations, and then fascinated with the connections she could see between Henry’s dismissal of New York literary judgment and her husband’s dislikes for the people for whom he worked.
She often quoted her husband’s words. She called the literary establishment “The Self-Obsessed” because Heber did, and Henry adopted the term as his own. She held her own opinions as only that—opinion—subjective personal reactions. She never defended them afterward and wasted little time in explanation.
Once she told him that, inexplicably, Heber had always liked Westerns, but she had never developed a taste for them. Henry, who had been introduced to Western fiction by his buddy Albert, tried to convince her to read a few of his favorites, which finally she did, and admitted reluctantly she liked them. Soon he had her reading Elmer Kelton novels, and Clair Huffaker and Jack Schaefer. He had even persuaded her to read Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and then she wanted to talk about it all night, like a girl with a crush. She had a way of suddenly seeming very young.
She had said, “It’s a better world they’re in. It’s a world of men and women and right and wrong. It’s so civilized. It makes me want to cry.”
It interested him when it came out that she seldom saw any manuscripts for Westerns these days—probably because so few Western movies were being made.
“Hollywood matters,” she answered. “What’s good for Hollywood is good for America. The books are not bought for themselves, but because of what they can be used for.”
Morgan Brown had started working for Heber Johnson as a reader soon after getting her master’s in literature at Boston University. She had worked as his assistant for the rest of his life. It had only been in the last ten years, as Heber’s schedule slowed down, that she began to look for other work.
“I really hated being an agent. I hated making decisions about people’s lives. Heber depended too much on me. If I said no, he said no. I never negotiated any deals. I just made the decision that made the negotiations necessary. I think Heber started hating the authors, though he never said so. It wasn’t like the way I feel about the people who own the homes I decorate. That’s more disdain, not hate. Heber simply didn’t want to read the work of his clients anymore, with all the complaining and the moneygrubbing afterward. He would get them a hundred thousand dollars more than they had ever made in their lives, and they would whine about his fifteen percent. Their greed colored his view of them.”
Then her face had changed with an urgency, as if she had not said all that she meant and to get it right mattered. “But Heber hated the publishers who encouraged it all even more. ‘It’s all about the money,’ he said. They could be marketing breakfast cereal. They all used nice words to the feature reporters to explain how they loved books and the romance of publishing and then turned around to their desks and signed another author who could churn out thrillers by the half dozen, or a self-help book which just happened to be like one already on the best-seller list, all the while some sap in Poughkeepsie slaves away at night trying to write the next great American novel, never knowing there is no chance in hell it will ever get published without passing muster in the marketing department—you know, the marketing department: where they tell him that the woman Raskolnikov kills has to be young so the story will appeal to the right demographic.”
Her voice had wavered with the kind of passion he wanted to hear. He could feel it in his spine when she broke through the reserve and her words came more quickly. She paused as if to contain the memory, but could not. “Though I seldom saw all that. I always loved the other part—not talking with the authors—just reading their work when it was still new and no one but they and I knew yet how wonderful it was … or how bad. …” She took a breath, and then another, and the words slowed again. “When he stopped negotiating as often, I had less to read. Getting into a new line of work was natural. And you know, we had moved so often over the years. New York. Beverly Hills. Back to Boston. We even lived in Vermont for two years. I had decorated at least twelve homes just for ourselves. It was the only other thing I knew about. And it has paid so well since.”
Henry knew, from very early on, that theirs was not a permanent relationship. But he had ignored the thought. The kind of matter-of-fact affair he had with Morgan seemed almost perfect to him. Until it was over.
The end had been unexpected. Her announcement had come one morning, after little sleep and much talk. He was not sure he truly understood then, even as she drove away.
Afterward, he endured the first bout of depression he had ever known. He had not wanted to get out of bed in the morning, and was too tired to read at night. His appetite for food disappeared. He stopped going to the Blue Thorn and nursed his bottled beer at home. Albert had shown up at Chestnut Street several times—spending more time talking to Mrs. Prowder than to Henry.
Gently mocking, Mrs. Prowder had frowned at Henry as he passed. “You are getting too thin. And you are smoking again. I thought you had given up that nasty habit. You need to find yourself a good Italian girl … I know that Lisa, who works at the Finnian’s Drug Store. She’s a pharmacist. Very pretty. Very patient. She puts up with me well enough. You must have noticed her. She was dating a doctor, but that’s over. …”
In time, Henry had solved the problem with a daily walk from Beacon Hill to the Blue Thorn in Inman Square, and a liberal application of fresh ale. He had begun to smoke again, and lingered longer at the book sales.
But the thought had occurred to him often since, that he was living an apparently pointless life. Morgan had gone back to caring for her husband, after years of being instrumental in the publishing of the very books Henry sold—and he would continue selling them, making a basic living with just enough left over for gas.
What did he do that could not be done by others? The pleasure he felt before in his job was suddenly ephemeral. He liked to think he had some hand in preserving good literature for future generations. A high cause. But this sounded better than it felt. He never blamed his depression directly on his loss of Morgan. He had always thought of her as a catalyst.

———————–

From Hound, by Vincent McCaffrey, published in hardcover and ebook in September 2009.

“As wealthy as Cambodia.”
Traditional Chinese saying

Awakening

You could very easily meet William.

Maybe you’ve just got off the boat from Phnom Penh and nobody from your hotel is there to meet you. It’s miles from the dock to Siem Reap.

William strides up and pretends to be the free driver to your hotel. Not only that but he organizes a second motorbike to wobble its way round the ruts with your suitcases.

Many Cambodians would try to take you to their brother’s guesthouse instead. William not only gets you to the right hotel, but just as though he really does work for it, he charges you nothing.

He also points out that you might need someone to drive you to the baray reservoir or to the monuments. When you step back out into the street after your shower, he’s waiting for you, big for a Cambodian, looking happy and friendly.

During the trip, William buys fruit and offers you some, relying on your goodness to pay him back. When you do, he looks not only pleased, but also justified. He has been right to trust you.
If you ask him what his real name is in Cambodian, he might sound urgent and threatened. He doesn’t want you think he has not told the truth. Out comes the identity card: Ly William.

He’ll tell you the story. His family were killed during the Pol Pot era. His aunty plucked him out of his mother’s arms. He has never been told more than that. His uncle and aunt do not want to distress him. His uncle renamed him after a kindly English aid worker in a Thai camp. His personal name really is William. He almost can’t pronounce it.

William starts to ask you questions, about everything you know. Some of the questions are odd. Is Israel in Europe? Who was Henry Kissinger? What is the relationship between people in England and people in America?

Then he asks if you know what artificial aperture radar is.

“Are you a student?” you might ask.

William can’t go to university. His family backed the wrong faction in the civil war. The high school diplomas given by his side in their border schools are not recognized in Cambodia.

William might tell you he lived a year in Phnom Penh, just so that he could talk to students at the Royal University, to find out what they had learned, what they read. You may have an image of him in your mind, shut out, desperate to learn, sitting on the lawn.

“My uncle want to be monk,” he says. “My uncle say to me, you suffer now because you lead bad life in the past. You work now and earn better life. My uncle does not want me to be unhappy.”

This is how William lives.

He sleeps in his uncle’s house. It’s on stilts, built of spare timber. His eldest cousin goes to bed late in a hammock under the house, and the candle he carries sends rays of light fanning up through the floorboards. The floorboards don’t meet so that crumbs can be swept through them.

There is a ladder down to the ground. There are outbuildings and sheds in which even poorer relatives sleep. There is a flowerbed, out of which sprouts the spirit house, a tiny dwelling for the animistic spirit of the place.

William and two male cousins sleep on one mattress in a room that is partitioned from the others with plywood and hanging clothes.

William is always the first awake.

He lies in the dark for a few moments listening to the roosters crow. The cries cascade across the whole floodplain, all the way to the mountains, marking how densely populated the landscape is. William is himself in those moments. At every other time of the day he is working.

William looks at the moon through the open shutters. The moonlight on the mosquito net breaks apart into a silver arch. This is his favourite moment; he uses it to think of nothing at all, but just to look.

Then he rolls to his feet.

The house is a clock. Its shivering tells people who has got up and who will be next.

One of his cousins turns over. In the main room, William steps over the girls asleep in a row on the floor. He swings down the ladder into his waiting flip-flops and pads to the kitchen shed. Embers glow in moulded rings that are part of the concrete tabletop. William leans over, blows on the fire, feeds it twigs, and then goes outside to the water pump.

Candles move silently through the trees, people going to check their palm-wine stills or to relieve themselves. A motorcycle putters past; William says hi. He boils water and studies by candlelight.
He has taught himself English and French and enough German to get by. Now he is teaching himself Japanese. He needs these languages to talk to people.

On the same shelf as the pans is an old ring binder. It is stuffed full with different kinds of paper, old school notebooks or napkins taken from restaurants. Each page is about someone: their name, address, e-mail, notes about their family, their work, what they know.

William has learned in his bones that survival takes the form of other people. They must know you, and for that to happen you must know them. Speak with them, charm them, and remember them.

A neighbour turns on her cassette player. Sin Sisimuth purrs a gentle yearning pillow of a song. The working day has begun in earnest. William snaps on the kitchen’s fluorescent light, attached to a car battery.

Sometimes at this quiet hour, William is seized by a vision. A vision in which Cambodia is a top country. Like Singapore, it is a place of wealth and discipline. To be that, Cambodia will need different leaders, people who are not corrupt, and who do things well. Who remember other people.

William is possessed of a thought that is common among the poor, but seldom expressed: I know who I am.

And I am as good as anyone.

He discovered that as he hung around the university students. He had one pair of shoes, but they were spotlessly white. He’d sit down with a group and smile and get their names and give them his own. What do you study? they’d ask. Politics, he’d reply. He would find out what books they had to read for their courses.

The university students talked about fashion and machines and motorbikes, just like anyone else. They looked soft and grumpy and made less effort than country people. Some of them made fun of his regional accent and didn’t listen to what he said. That’s okay, I learn from you, but you won’t learn from me. He kept smiling.

There is a grunt and William’s cousin Meak stomps into the kitchen. William calls him Rock Star. He has long hair and a torn T-shirt that says we’re so full of hope, and we’re so full of shit.

“Hey, coz,” Rock Star murmurs.

William makes a joke and passes him his breakfast. Breakfast is a cup of boiled water. Rock Star is always smiling. He plays air guitar at parties, but he is the one family member who truly loves being a farmer. He loves his pigs. He even looks a little like them, smiling, short and bulky.

“I’m going out towards the Phnom for feed this morning. I could go and pay the families out that way for you.”

William’s uncle and aunt are getting too old to work in the rice fields, so he pays other families a dollar a day to help with the harvest. But he must give them their money all at the same time, or there could be jealousy.

“Cool, cousin, thanks,” he says.

Rock Star grins sleepily. “I know you can’t wait to get to your foreign friends.”

Working for the UN dig team brings in seven dollars a day during tourist season. William has a contract with them; he shows up there first to drive one of them if they need him. That money pays for many things.

Outside, as tall and handsome as William, his cousin Ran goes to wash. He is so proud of his artificial leg. It is one of the best. He goes to wash at the pump wearing only a kramar round his waist so that everyone can see that he is not angry at life and very grateful to William. He waves and smiles. William sold all his ten cows to buy the leg.

William must always prove his value to the family.

Aunty comes next. Even first thing in the morning, she does not wear traditional dress. She is a modern woman, with curled hair and lipstick. She smiles at William and takes over in the kitchen. She is as kind and loving to him as if he were her son. William goes back to learning kanji. Outside on a bamboo pole are his clean clothes for the day, washed by his cousin. In his baseball cap, trousers with big pockets, and track shoes, he will look like a teenager in any suburb of the world.

My family, William thinks with fondness and gratitude. Where would I be without my family?

* * *

You would meet Map easily as well. Or rather, you would not be able to escape him.

He would scare you at first. Map is forty-four years old and smells of war. His face is scarred, and his smile looks like a brown and broken saw.

But he is wearing a spotlessly clean brown police uniform, and he seems to be patrolling Angkor Wat in some official capacity. As if in passing and wanting nothing from you, he starts explaining the pools to you in good English. The four dry basins you see so high up in Angkor Wat symbolize the four great rivers flowing from Mount Meru.

The information is of better quality than you expected. You smile, say thanks and try to edge away, dreading another request for money.

“You’ve missed the main bas-reliefs,” he warns, again as if in an official capacity. “Come this way.”

He leads you down steps, to the bas-relief gallery. The stone is polished, the detail amazing. Map explains scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. He turns a corner and explains that the roof of this gallery is how all the galleries would have looked.

You might ask him if he is a trained tourist guide. He tells you, “I work for Professor Luc Andrade of the United Nations dig team. I do their Web site.”

That throws you for a moment. Who is this guy?

He points to carved soldiers in strange uniforms. “These are mercenaries. Nobody trust those guys,” he says. “Like me. I used to be Khmer Rouge, but I changed sides and joined Hun Sen. They made me march in front, to step on landmines.”

Then he tells you, smiling, that he guarded a Pol Pot camp. It wasn’t a camp; it was a village, in a commune; but Map knows what Westerners expect. He knows he has you hooked.

He takes you on a tour of hell, the long bas-relief of people being tortured. Map lists them all for you.

The frying pan, for people who kill embryos.
Pot baking for trusted people who steal from gurus.
Forest of palm trees for people who cut down trees unduly . . .

“We need that in Cambodia now,” he says and smiles. “People cut down all our forest.”

He points to someone hammering nails into people’s bones. “I was that guy there,” he says.

Howling, for those who are degraded . . .

Today, April 11, Map gets up later than William does, but then he worked all night. He’s a Patrimony Policeman, protecting Angkor from art thieves. He sleeps off and on in a hammock strung across the doorway of the main building.

Then he works all day as well, anything to add to his salary of sixteen dollars a month.

This morning, he has persuaded an adventurous barang to sleep alongside him in another hammock. The foreigner, a German, is swathed in mosquito nets and smells of something chemical. He is pink and splotchy and still has on his glasses.

Map rocks him awake. “Come on,” Map says in German, “it is time to see the sunrise.” The man has paid him ten dollars for the privilege but like all tourists is so scared of theft that he has hidden his tiny digital camera in his underpants. Can you imagine how it smells? Map thinks to himself. I wonder if it’s taken any pictures inside there by mistake.

The German sniffs, nods.

Map chuckles. “You never been in a war.” The German looks miffed; he thinks he’s a tough guy. “You wake up in the morning in a war, pow! Your eyes open, wide, wide, wide, and you are looking, looking, looking.” Map laughs uproariously at the idea of the huge German on Highway 6 pulling up his trousers in the line of fire.

In the early morning mist, the five towers of Angkor Wat look magnified, as if the air were a lens. Map leads the German up steps, past scaffolding to the empty pools. He considerately takes hold of his elbow to lead him up onto the next level.

Then come the long staircases to the top. They taper to give the illusion of even greater height, and they are practically vertical, more like ladders than staircases.

“People say these steps are narrow because Cambodians have small feet.” Map grins. “We’re not monkeys! We don’t like pointing our bums at people. These steps make people turn sideways.” He shows the German how to walk safely up the steps.

Then, as a joke, Map sends him up a staircase that has worn away at the top to a rounded hump of rock with no steps or handrails.

The German finds himself hugging the stone in panic. From here, the drop looks vertical. Map roars with laughter. The German looks back at him, and his eyes seem to say: this wild man wouldn’t care if I fell!

He is not wrong. There is something deranged about Map. He has been shooting people since he was twelve years old.

Map chuckles affectionately and nips around him and up and over the stone on his thick-soled policeman’s shoes. He crouches down and pulls the German up.

“You have a lot of fun! You don’t want to go up the staircase with a handrail.”

“Uh,” says the German, just grateful to be alive. He turns and looks down and decides that, after all, he has just been very brave. Adventure was what he wanted. “Not too many old ladies do that!”

Even at this hour, the pavilion around the main towers is full of people. Other Patrimony Policemen greet Map with a nod and a rueful smile at his tourist catch. A large image of the Buddha shelters in the main tower, robed in orange cloth. Black-toothed nuns try to sell the German incense sticks. He buys one and uses that as an excuse to get a series of shots of an old woman with the Buddha.

Map leads the tourist through a window out onto a ledge high up over the courtyard, which is itself above ground level. It is what, a hundred, two hundred feet down to grass?

The ledge is wide — twenty people could easily sit down on it. The German grins and holds his camera out over the edge to take a picture. Over the top of the surrounding wall, trees billow like clouds, full of the sounds of birds and smelling like medicine.

“So,” says the German, fiddling with his automatic focus. “There are many bas-reliefs on Hindu themes. Did Cambodians become Buddhist later?”

“There was a king,” says Map. The morning is so quiet and bright he wonders if he can be bothered trying to make this foreigner understand who Jayavarman was and what he means to Cambodia.

“When Angkor Wat City is conquered, he takes it back from the foreigners. He make many many new temples. Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Neak Pean, Preah Kahn, all those temples. He make Cambodia a Buddhist country. After there is Hindu revolt, but Cambodians still remember him.”

Map says the King’s name, feeling many complex things: respect, amusement, love. The German asks him to repeat it.

“Jayavarman Seven.” Map can feel his smile stretch with sourness.

He thinks about the five-hundred-dollar bribe he paid a few years ago to get a job removing landmines. He bribed the wrong person and didn’t get the job. He’d sold his motorbike to get the money. Originally he wanted to use it to pay for his wedding, but he thought the job would be a better investment. His fiancee left him.

He thinks of all the so-called leaders and the tangled, self-serving mess they are making of the country. “Now we need Jayavarman.”

The gold leaves have slept for a thousand years.

Two metres down, below the range of ploughs and metal detectors, they lie wrapped in layers of orange linen and pitch.

They were carried at night, hurriedly, jostled under a bridge and plunged down into the mud by the canal to keep them safe. They were cast in imitation of a palm-leaf manuscript, inscribed and inked.

The leaves still yearn to speak, though the ink has long since soaked away.

The canal overhead simmered in the heat, then silted up. The water ceased to flow. The soil was parched and inundated by turns for centuries. Rice reached down, but never touched the leaves or their linen wrappings.

Gold does not rust. Insects and rodents do not devour it. Its only enemy is greed.

On April 11, in a version of 2004, something fiercely invasive drives itself into the Book. A corer grinds its way down through five packets of leaves. Then it hoists part of them up and out of the ground.

For the first time in a thousand years, light shines through the soil, linen, and pitch.

The Book is awake again.

Light shines on a torn circle of gold. It shines on writing. The words plainly say in Sanskrit, “I am Jayavarman.”

There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

But for the rest of your life you’re fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I’d blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I’ve never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn’t a big fucking hole in it?

I grew up about sixty miles north of the city in Kamensic Village, a haunted corner of the Hudson Valley where three counties meet in a stony congeries of ancient Dutch-built houses, farmland, old-growth forest, nouveau-riche mansions. My father was — is — the village magistrate. I was an only child, and a wild thing as the privileged children of that town were.

I had from earliest childhood a sense that there was no skin between me and the world. I saw things that other people didn’t see. Hands that slipped through gaps in the air like falling leaves; a jagged outline like a branch but there was no branch and no tree. In bed at night I heard a voice repeating my name in a soft, insistent monotone. Cass. Cass. Cass. My father took me to a doctor, who said I’d grow out of it. I never did, really.

My mother was much younger than my father, a beautiful Radcliffe girl he met on a blind date arranged by his cousin. She died when I was four. The car she was driving, our old red Rambler station wagon, went off the road and into the woods, slamming into a tree on the outskirts of town. It was an hour before someone noticed headlights shining through the trees and called the police. When they finally arrived, they found my mother impaled on the steering column. I was faceup on the backseat, surrounded by shattered glass but unhurt.

I have no memory of the accident. The police officer told my father that I didn’t cry or speak, just stared at the car’s ceiling, and, as the officer carried me outside, the night sky. Nowadays there would have been a grief counselor, a child psychologist, drugs. My father’s Irish Catholic sensibility, while not religious, precluded any overt emotion; there was a wake, a funeral, a week of visiting relatives and phone calls. Then my father returned to work. A housekeeper, Rosie, was hired to tend me. My father wouldn’t speak of my mother unless asked, and, forty-odd years ago, one didn’t ask. Her presence remained in the framed black-and-white photos my father kept of her in his bedroom. While Rosie vacuumed or made lunch I would sit on his bed and slowly move my fingers across the glass covering the pictures, pretending the dust was face powder on my mother’s cheeks.

I liked being alone. Once when I was fourteen, walking in the woods, I stepped from the trees into a field where the long grasses had been flattened by sleeping deer. I looked up into the sky and saw a mirror image of the grass, black and yellow-gray whorls making a slow clockwise rotation like a hurricane. As I stared the whorl began to move more quickly, drawing a darkness into its center until it resembled a vast striated eye that was all pupil, contracting upon itself yet never disappearing. I stared at it until a low buzzing began to sound in my ears. Then I ran.

I didn’t stop until I reached my driveway. When I finally halted and looked back, the eye was still there, turning. I never mentioned it to anyone. No one else ever spoke of seeing it.

My sense of detachment grew when I started high school, but as my grades were good and my other activities furtive, my father never worried much about what I did. Our relationship was friendly if distant. It was my Aunt Brigid who worried about me on the rare occasions she paid us a visit.

Brigid was like my father, stocky and big boned and red haired. I resembled photos of my mother. Tall and angular, narrow hipped, my mother’s soft features honed to a knife-edge in my own. Pointed chin, uptilted nose, dirty-blond hair and mistrustful gray eyes. If I’d been a boy I might have been beautiful. Instead I learned early on that my appearance made people uneasy. There was nothing pretty about my androgyny. I was nearly six feet tall and vaguely threatening. I wore my hair long but otherwise made no concessions to fashion, no makeup, no lipstick. I wore my father’s white shirts over patched blue jeans or men’s trousers I bought at the Junior League Shop. I wouldn’t meet people’s eyes. I didn’t like people looking at me. It made me feel sick; it reminded me of that great eye above the empty field.

“She looks like a scarecrow, Dad,” Brigid said once when I was sixteen. She and her husband were in Kamensic for a rare visit. “I mean, look at her –”

“I think she looks fine,” my father said mildly. “She’s just built like her mother was.”

“She looks like a drug addict,” Brigid snapped. She was sensitive about her weight. “We see them out where we live.”

I pointed out to the bird feeder at the edge of our woods. “What, like the chickadees? We see them too,” I said, and retreated to my room.

Several months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I’d seen the eye. A figure appeared in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up at him, he extended his hand until his finger touched the center of my forehead.

There was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears ringing. It was the morning of my seventeenth birthday. My father gave me a camera. I sat at the breakfast table, turned it in my hands, and remembered the dream. I saw my face distorted in the round glass of the lens, like a flaw; like an eye staring back at me.

I took an introductory photography class in high school and was encouraged to take more.

I never did. I quickly learned what I needed to know. I liked a slow lens. I liked grainy black-and-white film and never worked in color. I liked the detail work of creating my own photographic paper, of processing then developing the film myself in the school photo lab. I loved the way the paper felt, soft and wet in the trays, then the magical way it dried and turned into something else, smooth and rigid and shining, the images a mere byproduct of chemistry and timing.

I didn’t care if the pictures were over- or underexposed, or even if they were in focus. I liked things that didn’t move: dead trees, stones. I liked dead things: the fingerless soft hand of a pheasant’s wing, mouse skulls disinterred from an owl pellet, a cicada’s thorax picked clean by tiny green beetles. I liked portraits of my friends when they were sleeping. I’ve always watched people sleep. When I occasionally babysat, I’d go into the children’s rooms after they were in bed and stand there, listening to their breathing, waiting until my eyes adjusted to the soft glow of nightlight or moonlight. I liked to watch them breathe.

When I was seventeen I fell in love with a boy from a neighboring village. He was a year younger than me, fey, red haired, with sunken, poison green eyes: a musician and a junkie. I’d hitch to his town and sit on the library steps across the street from his big Victorian house and wait there for hours, hoping to see him but also wanting to absorb his world, clock the comings and goings of his younger siblings, parents, his golden retriever, his friends. I wanted to see the world he knew from inside his junkie’s skin, smell the lilacs that grew outside his window.

One day his sister came out and said, “My brother’s inside. He’s waiting for you to come over.”

I went. No one else was home. We crawled underneath the Steinway Grand in the living room, and I sucked him off. Afterward we sat together on the front porch while he smoked cigarettes. This pattern continued until I left high school. One night we broke into the village pharmacy and stole bottles of Tuinals and quaaludes before the alarm went off then ran laughing breathlessly back to his house, where he pretended to sleep while I hid in his closet. We weren’t caught, but I was too paranoid to ever try it again.

I liked to watch him sleep; I liked to watch him nod out. I took pictures of him and got them processed over in Mount Kisco. At night in my room I’d look at those photographs — his eyes closed, cigarette burning in his hand — and masturbate. I told him I’d do anything for him. A few years later, he got caught burglarizing another drugstore up in Putnam County. His parents bailed him out and he wrote to me, desperate and lonely, while he was awaiting sentencing. I never wrote back. His family moved to the Midwest somewhere. I don’t know what happened to him.

He was the only person I ever really cared about. I still have those photos somewhere.

In 1975 I graduated from high school and started at NYU. I had vague plans of studying photojournalism. That all changed the night I went over to Kenny’s Castaways to hear the New York Dolls. The Dolls never showed, but someone else did, a skinny chick who screamed at the unruly audience in between chanting bursts of poetry while a tall, geeky guy flailed around with an electric guitar.

After that I quit going to classes. I took up with a girl named Jeannie who waitressed at Max’s Kansas City. For a few months she supported me, and we lived in a horrible fourth-floor walkup on Hudson Street. The toilet hung over a hole in the floor; the clawfoot tub was in the kitchen. We put a sheet of plywood over the tub and on top of that a mattress we scrounged from the street. I didn’t tell my father I’d been suspended from NYU. I used the checks he sent to buy film and speed, black beauties, crystal meth. There was a light that fell on the streets in those days, a light like broken glass, so bright and jagged it made my eyes ache, my skin. I’d go down to see Jeannie when she got off work at Max’s and take pictures of the people hanging out back. Some of those people you’d still recognize today. Most you wouldn’t, though back then they were briefly famous, just as I was to be. Most of them are dead now.

Some of them were dead then. I shot an entire roll of film of a kid who’d OD’d in the alley early one morning. No one wanted to call the ambulance — he was already dead, why bring the cops down? So I stood out there, shit-colored light filtering from the streetlamp, and photographed him in closeup. I was nervous about bringing the film to the place I usually went to. I had a friend at the university process the film there for me.

“This is sick stuff, Cass,” he said when I went to pick it up. He handed me the manila envelope with my contact sheets and prints. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You’re sick.”

I thought they were beautiful. Slow exposure and low light made the boy’s skin look like soft white paper, like newsprint before it’s inked. His head was slightly upturned, his eyes half-open, glazed. You couldn’t tell if he’d just woken up or if he was already dead. One hand was pressed upon his breast, fingers splayed. A series of black starbursts marred the crook of his bare arm; a white thread extended from his upper lip to the point of one exposed eyetooth. I titled the photo “Psychopomp.” I decided it was strong enough that I should start assembling a portfolio, and so I did, the pictures that would eventually become part of my book Dead Girls.

People used to ask me what it was like to take those photographs.

“How do you think it feels?” I shot back at the guy from Interview.“How do you think it feels? And when do you think it stops?”

He didn’t get it. No one does. I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead. It’s like sweat or semen or ash, and it’s not just a taste or scent. It shows up in pictures, if you know how to catch the light. It shows up in faces, the way you can tell what a sleeping person’s dreaming, if they’re happy or frightened or aroused. I don’t know why it draws me; maybe because I dream of leaving this body the way other people dream of flying. Not flying to a sunny beach or a hotel room, but true escape, leaving one body and entering another, like one of those wasps that lays its eggs inside a beetle so a wasp larva grows inside it, eating the beetle until the new wasp emerges.

It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course was before I disappeared.

But taking a picture feels like that sometimes. When I’m getting it right, it’s like I’m no longer standing there with my camera, with my eye behind the lens, looking at someone. It’s like it’s me lying there and I’m seeping into that other skin like rain into dry sand.

Sometimes it happens with sex. Once I brought a sixteen-year-old boy back to the apartment. I’d picked him up at a club, dark eyes, curly dark hair, a crooked front tooth, tiny scabs on the inside of his arm where he’d been popping heroin, still too scared to mainline.

The tooth is what got me. I’m still sorry I didn’t shoot him. He was beautiful, one of those Pasolini kids who absorbs light then shines it back into your eyes and blinds you. But I left my camera on the floor, and instead I just fucked him, more than once. Then I lay awake and watched him sleep. When he woke in the morning he looked at me, and I saw what had happened to him: his mother’s death, the small apartment in Queens where he lived with his father and sister, the after-school job at a pet shop. Cleaning fish tanks, measuring out birdseed. He told me all this, but I already knew; I could see the light leaking from his eyes. I wanted to photograph him, but suddenly I felt real panic. I gave him coffee and money for a cab and literally pushed him out of the door. The look he gave me then was crushed and confused, but that I could live with. What I couldn’t deal with was the knowledge that he was so close to dead already. The only thing that had made him feel alive was fucking me.

I tried to explain this to Jeannie. She looked at me like I’d spit in her face.

“You’re crazy, Cass. You’re, like, a nihilist. You’re in love with annihilation.”

“Yeah? So is that a bad thing?”

She didn’t think that was funny. She left me soon after and got a job at a massage parlor. I didn’t care. I stayed in the apartment. By then I’d gotten messed up with a rich girl from Sarah Lawrence who liked slumming with me. She split when the school year ended, by which time my father had figured out what was going on — that I’d been kicked out of school and was no doubt spending the checks he sent on drugs. He was surprisingly calm. He made sure I knew he wouldn’t give me another dollar until I straightened out and earned enough to put myself back through school, but he also let me know I was always welcome back home. I thanked him and kept in touch intermittently, usually by postcard.

I bought a tripod and began doing a series of pictures, black-and-white photographs of me dressed and posed like women in famous paintings. I called the series “Dead Girls.” There was me as Ophelia, wearing a thrift-shop bridal gown and ribbons, floating in a tenement bathtub filled with black-streaked water — dye bled from the ribbons so that it looked as though blood flowed from my dress. There was me topless, sprawled in a Bowery alley on my back as Waterhouse’s dead “St. Eulalia.” For Munch’s “The Next Day” I lay on top of my plywood bed with empty wine bottles scattered around me. I used a similar setup for Walter Sickert’s “The Camden Town Murder.”

It took me five months. I got a job at a wino’s liquor store on the Bowery to get by. There were twenty-three photos when I was done, enough for a show.

My central image derived from a lithograph from Redon’s “La Tentation de Saint-Antoine”: a life-sized human skeleton, a plastic model I had a friend borrow for me from the NYU art department. I draped it with a white sheet and posed beside it, naked, my hand clutching its bony plastic fingers. I set the shutter so that the image was so underexposed as to be almost indiscernible, deliberately out of focus. All you saw was the skeleton, seeming to fall forward through the frame, and floating beside it a face suggestive of a skull: mine. I translated the drawing’s original caption into English.

Death: I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.

I added these to my portfolio, and a few portraits I’d done of Jeannie and her friends hanging out in the apartment and the back room at Max’s. The pictures were harsh and overlit, but they had a scary energy, most of it supplied by Jeannie herself in torn fishnets and smeared eye makeup, her works on the floor beside her, the glare of a naked hundred-watt bulb making Gillette blades glow like they were radioactive.

It didn’t hurt that some of the figures lurking in the background were starting to get written about. Back in January I’d begun seeing flyers stapled to telephone poles around town: PUNK IS COMING. I bought the first copy of the magazine for fifty cents at Bleecker Bob’s not long after. A month later, the first copy of New York Rocker came out, and I bought that too. When I got off my night shift at the liquor store I’d walk over to CBGB’s and get trashed and dance. I’d take my camera and shoot whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth, broken bottles, zip knives. People laughing while blood ran down their face, or someone else’s. Some people didn’t like getting their picture taken while having sex or shooting up. I got good at throwing a punch then running. I started wearing these pointy-toed black cowboy boots that weren’t good for dancing, but I could kick the shit out of someone if he lunged for me and be gone before his knees hit the floor. I loved the rush of adrenaline and rage. It was as good as sex for me.

“Scary Neary!” Jeannie shouted when she saw me coming. By then people were getting used to me. And other people were starting to take pictures too.Punk and New York Rocker didn’t create the scene, but they gave it a name, and we all knew where it lived.

By now I’d made some contacts in the city’s photography scene. I brought my photos to the director of the Lumen Gallery, and he agreed to give me a small show in the back room. Three years earlier, Robert Mapplethorpe had begun to win a following among Warhol acolytes and some prescient artworld types. The same thing was happening now with the downtown scene. I sent out a hundred xeroxed invitations to everyone I vaguely knew and scattered another hundred at the clubs where I hung out. I made sure all the musicians knew they were featured in the photos. Then I bought myself a bottle of Taittinger Brut, got smashed, and went to my opening.

It was the right place at the right time. “Dead Girls” bridged the gap between two camps, photography and punk, my staged self-portraits and documentary images of the downtown scene. The dreamy kitsch of photos like “St. Eulalia” melded into the shock of seeing Jeannie nod out while the lead singer of Anubis Uprising masturbated onto her face. I could hear the buzz as I stumbled into the back room at Lumen.

I was a hit, and I wasn’t yet twenty years old.

WHO ARE THE MYSTERY GIRLS? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. CASSANDRA NEARY’S PUNK PROVOCATIONS. They used a detail of “St. Eulalia,” cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn’t a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.

I didn’t care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB’s. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.

But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they’d seen a ghost with a gun.

This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I’d seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I’d made them, like they’d never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.

You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique; but you didn’t hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it; to see what was left when everything else was torn away.

My story was picked up by the Daily News. Then the Sunday Times Magazine interviewed me for a very brief piece. And there were the “Dead Girls” photos, and there was me, smoking a Kent and wearing beat-up black jeans and red Keds and a MC5 T-shirt filigreed with cigarette burns, my hair a dirty blond halo around a pale face with no makeup. I looked like what your mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don’t come home.

I was actually a little worried about what my father would think. He finally called me after the Times Magazine story ran. He made it clear that he had no interest in seeing the show — a relief to both of us — but he also wanted to make sure I wasn’t in any legal trouble.

“Anything comes up, call Ken Wilburn over in Queens,” he said and gave me the number. “He represents some guys, they’ll help you out if you get into trouble. I don’t know how the hell you can make money out of this stuff, Cass, but I hope to God you do. Especially if you need Wilburn.”

I never did need to call Wilburn. But I didn’t make much money, either. The Times article did its business, and all the photos sold; but I had only set the price at seventy-five bucks a pop. Jeannie bought most of them — God knows where she found the money — but about six months later they were destroyed when her apartment flooded. The girlfriend of Anubis Rising’s lead singer bought the picture of him with Jeannie then proceeded to set it on fire with her Bic lighter in the gallery, screaming “Fucking cunt!” until someone threw her out. John Holstrom bought a picture that had Johnny Thunders in the corner.

And the last photo went to Sam Wagstaff, which is how I got a book deal. I’d met a literary agent at my opening, a petite red-haired woman in a red latex miniskirt named Linda Kalman.

“This is very interesting,” she said, peering at “Psychopomp.” She was older than most of the people at the show, in her mid-thirties, and wore expensive gold jewelry and stiletto-heeled boots. I pegged her for a socialite slumming among the barbarians. She glanced at the crowd drinking white wine in plastic cups, Jeannie and her friends hooting raucously as a reporter took notes. “Do you know which one’s the artist?”

I dropped my cigarette and stubbed it out with my sneaker. “That would be me.”

“Really.” Her eyes narrowed. She gave me a small smile then extended her hand. “Linda Kalman. I’m working on a book right now with Chris Makos. Do you know him?”

“Yeah,” I lied and shook her hand. “Cass Neary.”

“Cass. Are you with a gallery?”

“No.”

“Mmmm.” She looked at me sideways, opened a little red clutch purse. “Well. Here. Take my card. Call me. Let me know who buys your pictures. And good luck.”

As it turned out, she got in touch with me when she read the piece in New York Rocker.

“So.” I could hear her drag deeply on a cigarette on the other end of the line. “Have you sold any photographs yet? Do you know who bought them?”

When I named Wagstaff, she sucked her breath in sharply. “Sam Wagstaff?”

“Yeah.”

“You know who he is, right?”

“Yeah.” A collector and curator with deep pockets; Mapplethorpe’s lover, though I’d heard they were on the outs.

“Well, Cass. Are you interested in putting a book together? Because I have an editor who’s very interested in what’s happening downtown. She can get someone to write an introductory essay, I think she said Macey Claire-Marsden from the Eastman Foundation might do it. It’s not huge money, but it would be good exposure for you.”

She hesitated. “I think you should do it. Not just for me. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come that often, Cass. Not for someone as young as you. You don’t want to blow it.”

“Let me think about it.” I didn’t say anything, didn’t hang up. I counted to five then said, “Yeah, okay. Sure. I’ll do it.

But you know what?

I blew it anyway.

It is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once. And the King, who by now had almost forgotten the old Queen and had scarcely looked at the baby, agreed and thought no more about it. And that would have been the end of that baby girl, but that her nurse, Matulli, came to hear of it. Now this nurse was from Finmark, and, like many another from thereabouts, was apt to take on the shape of an animal from time to time. So she turned herself into a black bear then and there and picked up the baby in her mouth, blanket and all, and growled her way out of the Bower at the back of the King’s hall, and padded out through the light spring snow that had melted already near the hall, and through the birch woods and the pine woods into the deep dark woods where the rest of the bears were waking up from their winter sleep.

Now when anyone changes into a bear, it is bearish they become, and the nurse Matulli was the same. Little Halla crawled around with the bear cubs, and many a knock she got from hard claws and many a lick from rough tongues. She learnt to fight the other cubs, and, having the use of her hands, she would get her own back from time to time, pulling ears and scrambling on to black backs, and sometimes she wondered when her claws would grow. She got to know the thought and language of the bears. It was a language that did what it wanted to do well enough, so that there were many ways of showing the difference between one taste and another, the taste of crunched mice, the taste of many different berries and roots and the taste of honey either on the front, back, or sides of the tongue. It did the same for smells, and the forest was always speaking in smells to the bears. It did much for hearing and something for sight, but there was no way, for instance, to think about clouds or the flying of eagles, because the bears did not look up into the sky. And if anyone had wanted to explain to the bears about Halla and her stepmother, they would just not have been able to do it at all.

There were plenty of other wild beasts in the woods, wolves and foxes and martens, reindeer and elks and roe deer and hares. But most of them kept clear of the bears. In summer the woods were full of tangles and hollows and mosses, scented with crushed ferns, rich earth scooped for sweet shoots and young mushrooms, birds’ nests full of warm eggs, and the thick friendly fur of bears. Matulli-bear looked after Halla-baby as well as any bear can be expected to look after any baby. Halla had plenty to eat, a long tongue to wash her and a warm bear to cuddle against all night. But Matulli was a fine figure of a she-bear and the he-bears all wanted her to keep house for them. It came on for winter, and behind rocks and under fallen fir trees were deep and cozy dens waiting for Matulli and her bear husband. The nights got longer and colder and every morning Matulli found it harder and harder to wake up. But Halla woke and fidgeted and pulled Matulli’s whiskers and wanted her breakfast. And it came back to Matulli that one of the queer things about human beings was that they did not sensibly sleep all winter, but instead went to a great deal of trouble to cut fuel and shear sheep and weave blankets and thick cloaks and make themselves hot soup. And Halla, in spite of her excellent upbringing, was going to take after the rest of them. What was a poor bear to do?

And then a very fortunate thing happened. Matulli and her bear husband were walking through the woods, looking for the last of the wild bees’ honey or a late fledgling from a nest, and Matulli’s husband was grumbling away to himself because he could feel that the snow was not far off and it was time to go home to the den and sleep and sleep. But Halla was running around like a crazy butterfly and clearly had no intention of sleeping. Sometimes the he-bear thought it would be both nice and sensible to eat Halla, but he did not dare because of Matulli.

And suddenly a deer came galloping past them, looking back over its shoulder in a terrible fright. And after that a badger which was in a hurry too. But the badger had time to tell the two bears that there was a dragon coming along and they had better get out of the way. The he-bear turned round at once and went galumphing back; never had his den seemed so desirable. But Matulli sat back among the cranberry bushes in the wet moss and pulled Halla down beside her. Sure enough, in a little while the dragon came along, puffing and creaking and rattling. Matulli in the bushes coughed and said: “My Lord.” For she knew in her mind that dragons appreciated politeness from the rest of the world.

This dragon was somewhat startled and blew out a flame which singed the tops of the cranberry bushes and the tips of the fur all along Matulli’s back. But he had meant no harm, and he stopped and listened very graciously to Matulli’s story about Halla Bearsbairn. Matulli was speaking in the language of humans, since the thing could not be explained in bears’ language. But dragons are, within their limits, very intelligent, and most of them understand, not only the language of several kinds of animals, including the birds who have beautiful feelings but few facts, but also the languages of trolls, dwarfs, giants and human beings.

Now, if there is one kind of human being which dragons dislike more than another, it is the kind commonly called kings or heroes. The reason is that they are almost always against dragons. So when the dragon, whose name was Uggi, heard that the poor little pink human had been so badly treated by a king and a queen, he did not hesitate, but said at once that he would adopt Halla Bearsbairn and see that she grew up in all the right principles of dragonhood. “And you will see that she gets regular meals, my lord?” said Matulli.

“Have you ever heard of dragons going hungry?” said Uggi.

“And you will see that she doesn’t fall into the fire, my lord?”

“I will fire-proof her myself,” the dragon said.

“And you will comb her hair every night, my lord?”

“I will comb it with my own claws,” said the dragon, “for I see that the child has hair the colour of gold, which is the only right colour for hair.”

“And you will dry her eyes when she cries, my lord?”

“I will dry her eyes with the silken scarf of the Princess of the Spice Lands who was so thoughtfully offered to my cousin, the Dragon of the Great Waste. For I see that the child has eyes the colour of sapphires, which is the only right colour for eyes.”

“What happened to the Princess of the Spice Lands, my lord?” asked Matulli, for she thought that this princess might be a nice playmate for her Halla.

The dragon coughed behind his claw. “The Princess of the Spice Lands was offered to my cousin by the populace. It was a very suitable and acceptable idea on their part. Unfortunately there was a hero sent to interfere with everybody’s best interests. In the result the princess – and the hero — perished. My poor cousin had a nasty jag over one eye. He gave me the scarf in exchange for a duplicate bracelet which I had acquired. Yes, yes.” And Uggi the dragon held out a glittering claw to Halla who caught hold and swung.

“And you’ll see she’s warm at night, my lord?” said Matulli, anxious to do her duty but thinking more and more pleasantly of the comfortable den and the uninterrupted sleep that waited for her.

“She will be quite warm, and what is more,” said the dragon, “she will always have a night-light, because I am proud to say that we dragons always breathe out of our noses while we are asleep.” He then put Halla up on to his back, where she held on by the spikes and shouted with pleasure because now she could see right up into the trees.

Suddenly the thought of her den and her husband and her long sleep was too much for Matulli-bear, and she tried to curtsey to the dragon, but that is too difficult for bears. So she just turned her large black back and went crashing back through the cranberry bushes and into the forest. Uggi the dragon raised his eyebrows and looked over his shoulder at Halla and winked slowly from the side of his eye across, in the same way that a crocodile winks, and then quickly up and down, the same way as an eagle, for he had something of the nature of both.

But Halla was delighted with it all and dug her bare heels into the scaly sides of the dragon, who went slithering and crackling off through the forest, every now and then accidentally setting fire to a bush or a drift of dry birch or oak leaves, or singeing the fur of one of the animals which was too proud or too stupid to get out of the way.

Chapter Two
The Dragons

On his way home that evening Uggi took a short flight to the top of Signal Hill, whose summit was all scorched and scarred so that not even the stillest stones grew moss on them. Here he gave a great blast and flames like enormous golden lilies shot out of his nostrils and vanished into sudden dusk. His cousins, Bauk, Gork, Hafr and Hroar, came flying over, creaking with their wings like a thousand flights of geese. They were told the whole story, while Halla Bearsbairn drummed her bare feet on her own dragon’s back. Very sensibly, they decided to fire-proof her at once, before anything awkward could happen.

The ceremony of fireproofing is a very old and beautiful one, which can only be performed by the Goddess Demeter or by not less than three members of the Ancient Order of Dragons, of whom one at least must be a Master Dragon. Halla, who was used to being licked by bears’ tongues, thought nothing of being licked by the forked-flame tongues of dragons. For a short while afterwards everything that she looked at appeared to have a fine fringe of flame, and indeed this would come back to her afterwards, when she was much older, if ever she got angry.

All that evening and far into the night and long after Halla was asleep, the dragons moved and danced round her in an earnest excitement, spiring up from Signal Hill towards the stars, shooting out bursts of flame which reflected from polished scales and claws and multiplied themselves into hundreds of flashes and twinkles. Sometimes they would spring into the air, clapping their wings together and undulating downwards. Sometimes they would shoot away till they were as tiny as rockets and then come thundering back. And they determined that they would bring up the maiden Halla to do credit to every kind of dragonhood and to be a bane to kings and heroes and all such enemies of true dragons. And carefully, before morning greyed the night sky, or dimmed the frosty stars, Uggi the Master Dragon carried back the sleeping child in his great claws, and her pale gold hair swished and feathered in the flame of his breathing, but was never singed.

And so Halla was brought up by the dragons, and year after year she learnt to think of things in the dragonish way. She had long lessons, specializing in geology, arithmetic, especially multiplication, which led in turn to economics, always an important part of dragon history, and also of course in such elements of magic as were thought suitable for her. When lessons were over she was allowed to play with Uggi’s treasure, go sliding down heaps of pearls and build towers of gold and ivory boxes. She could dress herself up in ropes of jewels and look at herself for as long as she liked in polished silver mirrors; these were held up for her by an admiring young dragon with a fiery smile but only recently hatched and still soft-scaled. She wore cloth of gold, or cloth of silver when she went blackberrying. For, try as the dragons would to get rid of such tastes, she was bearish about berries and honey. Still, she learnt to enjoy dinner parties of over-roasted joints, chops grilled hard, blazing plum pudding and ginger snaps. And of course she had as much snapdragon as she liked.*

Dragons like to live on blasted heaths and desolate, snow-capped, igneous mountains, but Bork or Hafr, who were young dragons, not many centuries old, would often take her for rides down to the deep woods or the rivers and, from a distance, they would point out to her the dwellings of men, the halls with the fields and barns and stockades round them at the head of the fjords, and the boats moored at the jetties or drawn up on land in times of storm. The biggest of these were called dragon ships, but the dragons themselves were never certain how to take this. It might, of course, and properly should be, a form of worship, but with the race of men one never knew.

In summer Dragon Mountain was hot and stuffy, and the Desolate Heath made prickly walking. But in winter all was snow-covered and the enormous northern lights drew curtains of shimmer between earth and upper air or stilt-danced round the Pole Star. The dragons rushed through them, crackling with static. In winter, too, they heard the Fenris Wolf howling, far, far away, yet too near for comfort. But Halla knew that nothing could hurt her so long as she was with the rest of the dragons and diligently guarding a treasure.

In her history lessons she learnt, first, about the beginnings of things, the tree Yggdrasil growing above the first dragon’s nest, before the first dragons had chipped their milky eggs: about the weaving of the Norns and the peculiar habits and preferences of All-Father, who had made men in order to amuse himself. And then she learnt about the rebellion of men against dragons: how men had been taught by the Great Dragon to keep sheep and cows for dragon dinners and not to complain if an occasional shepherd was eaten with his flocks, since that was all to the good when looked at the right way. When flocks and herds increased and over-production was threatened, dragons stepped (or more usually flew) into the breach and disposed of the surplus with no trouble at all. Occasionally, and for everyone’s good, mankind were instructed to offer a fresh and juicy princess to their own particular dragon. It was said that the princesses enjoyed the experience. Certainly the dragons did.

But mankind became rebellious. Kings and champions and heroes, unfairly armed with flame-resisting armour and unpleasant lances, were encouraged by certain underground elements and against the wishes and interests of the bulk of the population, to interfere between princess and dragon. Occasionally this resulted in tragedies, as in the case of the good dragon who was killed by the man George, or of the dragon so cruelly done to death by Perseus when about to make the acquaintance of Andromeda. It could be verified that no princess was ever asked whether she wanted to be rescued and carried off by a dragon-slayer to a fate (no doubt) worse than death. Sometimes, too, a dragon was murdered in cold blood, as happened quite recently to the dragon Fafnir, an uncle of Gauk’s and a Master Dragon, who was rudely awakened and brutally stabbed by a young man called Siegfried, who, however, came to no good end himself.

But more often in the stories the dragon made good and all ended for the best. Sometimes Halla played at Princesses and Dragons, pretending to be tied to a tree and then waiting for one of the young dragons to rush at her with his mouth open, drenching her in delightful, tickly flames. And there would be no horrible hero to interfere. Sometimes Halla found herself wishing she was a real princess, so that it could all genuinely happen.

But the economics were more serious. Briefly, they came to this. The dragons gathered gold. The kings and heroes squandered it. Among kings, the shocking name of praise was bracelet-giver. And from where did the golden bracelets come? Why, from the treasure that some dragon had painstakingly amassed, with what care and thought and industry! Then, in some low way, a dragon would be attacked and murdered and the gold dispersed into the hands of those who had done nothing to earn it. Heroes prided themselves on a thing called generosity. And what was generosity? It was the giving away of something to those that had not earned it, and it was usually done by those that had not earned it. What sentiment or practice could be more revolting to dragons of right feeling? It would then be necessary for the robbed dragon to go over the whole process of collecting, storing away and cataloguing and finally guarding — even with his life, remember! — a new treasure. Every dragon had his cave and, in the order of nature, every cave had its treasure; for was not the sparkle of treasure implicit in the velvet darkness of a cave? This was part of the order and pattern of life, as laid down since the beginning of time.

“Where does the gold come from first?” asked Halla, frowning over it, sitting there on a rock with her hands round her knees and her golden, dragon-combed hair pouring down over her cloth of gold school frock with the great rubies round the neck and weighting the hem.

“It is melted out of the rocks by the dwarfs,” said Uggi, “and in the old days it was only the dwarfs who could work it. But now unfortunately they have taught the art to men. Yet it was always the men who won it from the dwarfs by force and trickery, which is the kind of thing mankind is clever at. And it is always through men that it comes to its home and safe-keeping in some dragon’s cave.”

“Why don’t the dragons get it straight from the dwarfs?” asked Halla, “then there needn’t be men.”

“Because,” said Uggi patiently, “dwarfs live in cracks and holes into which dragons, being of a proper size, cannot get. But men, being halfway to dwarfs, wriggle in after them.”

Halla stretched her arms and the bracelets clinked and the rings flashed in the sunshine. “I’m glad I’m a dragon,” she said.

“Never forget, child,” said old Uggi, “not only to think dragon thoughts, but also that you are part of a dragon’s treasure. My treasure. And remember, if a man were to see you, he would immediately try to steal everything you are wearing and carry it away and probably murder you as well.”

“I’d breathe fire on him,” said Halla, “when will you teach me to breathe fire? I’m tired of history.”

“It is very sad,” said Uggi, “but I cannot teach you to breathe fire.”

“Why not?” asked Halla. “Is it because I was a bear once? If only you would show me how to breathe fire, I would try to stop eating berries and getting my paws full of earth!” For the dragons were always speaking to her about these habits.

Uggi sighed, a hot, hot sigh that burnt a small patch of lichen that had survived so far on the side of the rock. He felt that, in spite of the way he had brought Halla up as a dragon, the moment was come when she must learn the facts of life, hard though it would be for him to tell them to her. He went on: “It is time, my child, that I told you something. Have you noticed, when you look at yourself in the shining mirror, that you are not like me nor indeed like any of the dragons?”

“Not very like,” said Halla, admiring her long toes, which were decorated with gold and emerald toe-rings, but which were not quite long enough, nor nearly sharp enough for claws. “Perhaps I shall be more like you when I am older. I think I can feel my wings growing,” she added, looking backwards over her shoulder and scratching her back.

Uggi the dragon wept a sizzling tear. “My child, I am afraid you will never grow to look like a dragon, for the truth is, you are not a dragon.”

“But–” said Halla, and her lip trembled, “I feel like a dragon. You always tell me I’m a dragon. Oh, I know I’m a dragon!”

“Alas!” said Uggi. “That is not enough. Though it is something. I am afraid that what I have to say will upset you very much, my dear. You must be brave, brave as a good dragon. The truth is that you are a child of man and only by adoption one of us. But never mind,” he said eagerly, “you are quite safe. You shall never go back to them. Unless, that is, you want to do so.”

Halla burst into tears and threw her arms round Uggi’s neck. “I could never possibly want to go back, never!” she said. “Why did you have to tell me? Why can’t you turn me into a dragon?”

“Even the Norns, or All-Father himself, could not do that,” said Uggi gravely.

“But why not?” asked Halla. “You taught me magic. I can make magic frogs out of stones, after all! Can’t I?” It was one of her best learned lessons in magic.

“But think,” said Uggi. “Those frogs only do what you want. Unless you say the Word to them, they cannot jump. If I were to turn you into a dragon — and I very much doubt if I could — you would only be able to fly or breathe fire or gather treasure or do any other dragonish thing if I said the Word to you. You would not be a dragon in your own mind and heart — in the way, my dear, that I believe you are now!” And he planted a fiery kiss on her forehead, and then bethought himself of an ancient carved emerald at the very back of his treasure cave which Halla had never seen. They would go and find it together. So she cheered up, for she was dragon-minded enough to find the thought of treasure above all elevating.

* In case you have never eaten snapdragon, this is how it is made. You get a shallow metal tray (real dragons always have gold) and you scatter blanched almonds and raisin clusters on it, then you pour brandy all over and set it alight. Then you pull out and eat as many almonds and raisins as you can. As I remember it, there used to be a lot of nasty juice left at the end, but it is more than forty years since I ate it last, for people have forgotten to honour the dragons.

The answer we arrived at was a qualified yes; some things about writing can be taught. Possibly there were shortcuts, methods to reduce that long learning period. Anyone with fair talent, a great deal of determination and perseverance, and some luck, can become a publishable writer, and what we could do was teach technique. We believed we could help emerging writers become better writers sooner.

Anyone who is literate can write, after all, and if all one wants to do is keep a diary without planning to share it with anyone else, that person does not need help, and studying technique would be wasted effort. Why bother? Write the diary, and be done with it. But as soon as publication is the goal, then technique becomes necessary.

That was our starting point. We talked about the kinds of writers we had met and how they worked. Although possibly there are as many methods of writing as there are writers, there is one dichotomy that cannot be denied. There are natural storytellers and then there are word smiths and their methods are quite different. I walked in on a conversation one time between two professional writers in which one was saying she agonized over the words to use. Even getting someone up from the table and out the door was difficult. The other one said, “Just say he got up and walked out. It’s that simple.” She looked at him in amazement. For her it certainly was not that simple. There was the difference between a storyteller and a word smith on display.

Damon and I made a pretty good team; he was a word smith and I’m a storyteller. I think of it as surface and depth, with the full understanding that it is much more complex than that. But it was a starting point. Damon was a master with the surface, but sometimes if the surface was too bad he failed to see beyond it to the depth. And often I ignored the surface to explore a story I found below it.

We realized early that we had to cope with both kinds of writers at Clarion, and what was effective with one was not necessarily effective with the other.

A good story is one in which the surface and depth are fused into one inseparable whole. Beautiful language, unique imagery, subtle symbolism over nothing is not a good story. Neither is a story obscured by bad word choices, awkward phrases that conceal meaning rather than reveal it, inappropriate symbolism or metaphors. We often encountered both types.

Having a group of twenty-five or more people critique a story, pointing out what was good and what was bad was extremely helpful, of course. But the students needed methods they could apply to achieve fusion after they left the group. Too often at home mother, spouse, beloved other all thought whatever came out of the typewriter–I’m talking BC here, before computers–was wonderful while the beginning writer was contemplating papering a room with rejection slips.

Those who were blind to the prose had to retrain their brains to look at and consider words instead of yielding to the impulse to write as swiftly as possible and think of the story as done when they reached the end. Continue to write at whatever speed is comfortable, we said, but then apply reason. For those who were blind to the fact that no story lay behind gorgeous language the message was harder: use the language you love, but then search for the meaning. We devised methods for each group to try without ever mentioning the dichotomy we had seen and were working with. We wanted everyone to try everything.

There is an adage: the more bitter the medicine the quicker the cure. The exercises that follow are laborious and time consuming; everyone hated doing them, but presumably, after enough doses, they helped cure the problem, or at the very least alleviated it.

Using a finished story, take clean paper and cover everything except one sentence at a time and read that one sentence. Does it say exactly what you intended and nothing else? That’s the test. For example: “Don’t do that!’ he exploded.” Looks okay? Wrong. You can’t explode words. You can utter them, say them, mutter, murmur, yell, shout, whisper, and so on. You can’t laugh words, or giggle words, or ejaculate words, or jump up and down words. Use “say.” If something stronger is needed, go to “yell” or “shout.”

“He looked at the book sitting on the table.” Pretty innocuous? Wrong. Inanimate objects don’t sit. Damon used to draw funny little pictures of things sitting around, books with legs dangling over the edge of the table, coffee cups with legs, plates, papers, guns. . . .

Consider a sentence like: “Her snakelike walk, gliding sinuously among the tables, was alluring.” Look up sinuous. Snakelike? Why repeat it? Rephrase.

Or: “The ringing of the bells, clanging in his head, was giving him a headache, and sent him packing.” Too many sounds. Rephrase.

Consider: “Running down the stairs he put on his shoes and opened the door.” I doubt it.

You can’t do all those things simultaneously.

Forget the story line, the plot, everything about the story except the sentences, and examine them one at a time, and then one word at a time.

Another exercise we tried was meant to curb a tendency toward purple prose, that is prose in which the modifiers–adjectives and adverbs usually–overwhelm the nouns and verbs. Take them out. All of them. Each and every one of them. Not just the immediate modifiers, but also the modifiers of the modifiers. For example: “The full, ballooning moon, glowing as if alive with white-hot fires forged in an unworldly icy hell, rose serenely with its majestically imperial presence over the harsh, frozen and hostile tundra.” Three or four sentences like that in a row can make the reader lose the story line altogether. Sensory overload sets in with too many images, too many contrasting and competing ideas. Where is the focus of that sentence? What does it actually say and mean? The moon rose.Okay, but you might need a little more than that.

After you strip the entire story down to its bare bones, start at the beginning and see just how many of the modifiers you must restore. The full moon rose over the frozen tundra. If that is what you need to convey, stop there. Sensory overload can be more deadly to a story than minimalist prose. You may be surprised to find a much stronger story than you started with once it’s relieved of its overwhelming finery.

If most of your verbs are paired with adverbs, use stronger verbs. They should not need crutches.

Another exercise we tried is as follows. The story has a surface that is as flawless as you can make it, and yet the story is unpublishable. One way to find out why not is to examine it with a different set of tools. Start with the first paragraph, read it several times, just that one paragraph, and then write in the margin what happens in it or what it is about. You may decide it’s a description of the place, the setting. Write “setting.” Next paragraph, do the same thing. More setting? The next and next. You may find that by the end of the story you have written setting over and over. Or perhaps it was character description, or something else repeated time after time with different phrases but the same basic meaning. The story is static, giving the reader more and more of the same thing glossed with beautiful language. Or maybe there is a character moving through the setting. Same diagnosis: a static story, nothing happens.

A walk through a park, no matter how lovely or dreary the park, is not a story. A character study is not a story. Impeccable language, beautiful imagery will not make them turn into stories. Something has to happen; something has to change. Equilibrium must be upset, either within the story, or in the reader experiencing the story. The end of a story signifies that a new equilibrium has been achieved.

Think of a Pooh stick tossed into a stream where you can watch its progress without knowing if it will land or if it will be destroyed, tumbling this way and that, caught in eddies and swept faster, then slower, but moving until it finishes its journey, always in sight. It has arrived at a new destination, achieved a new equilibrium. There is movement, something happens, and there is an end. The motion is visible, the action is within the story.

There is another kind of story, however, where the stick is tossed into a body of water and there is no apparent motion except for a gentle bobbing. But the currents are strong beneath the surface of the water, and when you turn your gaze away, you realize that the movement, the change has been within you, not in the stick. Something happens; at the end of the story you arrive at a new destination, a new understanding or a new insight, a revelation about an event, a world, or a person. The story of revelation can be extremely powerful, and the appearance of stasis is deceptive. The stick is unmoved; the reader is moved instead. Something happens.

Either of the above two examples could be made into stories if the writer knows in advance what is to be revealed by the end. The walk in the park could be a story if it is revealed that without an exit, an escape route, Eden can be a prison. The character sketch could turn into a story if it is revealed that someone altogether different from the public face lives behind the mask the character wears. But you have to know what the story is about and not simply hope that enough lovely prose will cause something to develop. That takes the guiding hand and head of a writer.

Damon and I lived in a huge, unmanageable house: a circa 1890 Victorian, with a huge, equally unmanageable-at-times family. On cold nights with snow piling up deeper and deeper, the thermometer plunging to zero or lower, we sat near a fire in a fireplace big enough to roast a pig on a spit, something we discussed doing now and then but never got around to. We talked about everything, including the twists and turns our lives had taken to put us in the role of teachers. How strenuously we both had worked to avoid what we considered to be the teacher trap.

Immediately after graduating from high school Damon left Hood River, Oregon, the small town where he grew up. His father was principal of the high school, his mother had been a teacher; he fled and joined the Futurians, a group devoted to science fiction, in New York. The group broke up, each member going his own way after a time, but Damon remained a Futurian in spirit for the rest of his life. He had sidestepped the teacher trap. He knew from an early age that he had to become a writer.

All through my childhood I told stories, and then wrote stories in high school. Several different teachers said I would be a writer and I didn’t understand why they did. I knew that writers were magical, god-like, and dead, at least the ones we studied were dead. I did not qualify on any count. Wanting to write stories and becoming a real writer were so far apart I didn’t see how anyone could bridge the gap. I was good in chemistry and math, and I decided to be a chemist until the advisor told me that I would end up as a man’s lab assistant or else I would teach. By then I had a college scholarship, but I didn’t take advantage of it; instead, I got a job, married, started a family and tried to read every book in the Louisville Public Library. Ten years after graduating from high school, I was reading an anthology and finished a story I thought was quite bad. I closed the book and said, “I can do that.” I wrote a story, rented a typewriter to copy it, mailed it, then wrote another one. I sold them both and bought the typewriter with my first check. I’ve been writing ever since. I too had avoided the teacher trap.

Yet, there we were, Damon and I, sitting by the fire, planning our next two weeks as teachers at Clarion, both of us eager to do it again, determined to try harder and do better next time. We had entered the teacher trap unaware; the trap had sprung, and we were captured.

I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. "Guess what color this is."

We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. For example, if you’re sitting on a lawn, you can tell what color green the grass is, with your eyes closed, depending on how silky-rubbery it feels. With clothing, stretchy velvet stuff always feels red when your eyes are closed, even if it’s not red. Natasha was always best at guessing colors, but Natasha is also best at cheating at games and not getting caught.

One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The Garment District with a bunch of girls. The thing about Jake is that he always has a good time, no matter what he’s doing. He likes everything, and he likes everyone, but he likes me best of all. Wherever he is now, I bet he’s having a great time and wondering when I’m going to show up. I’m always running late. But he knows that.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and t-shirts and shoes and handbags involves the Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they’re bad in an interesting way, the Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. You can get eight pounds worth of prom dresses–a slinky black dress, a poufy lavender dress, a swirly pink dress, a silvery, starry lame dress so fine you could pass it through a key ring– for eight dollars. I go there every week, hunting for Grandmother Zofia’s faery handbag.

The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true.

Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. She said that it was over two hundred years old. She said that when she died, I had to look after it. Be its guardian. She said that it would be my responsibility.

I said that it didn’t look that old, and that they didn’t have handbag two hundred years ago, but that just made her cross. She said, "So then tell me, Genevieve, darling, where do you think old ladies used to put their reading glasses and their heart medicine and their knitting needles?"

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. At the funeral, my mother said, half-laughing and half-crying, that her mother was the world’s best liar. I think she thought maybe Zofia wasn’t really dead. But I went up to Zofia’s coffin, and I looked her right in the eyes. They were closed. The funeral parlor had made her up with blue eyeshadow, and blue eyeliner. She looked like she was going to be a news anchor on Fox television, instead of dead. It was creepy and it made me even sadder than I already was. But I didn’t let that distract me.

"Okay, Zofia," I whispered. "I know you’re dead, but this is important. You know exactly how important this is. Where’s the handbag? What did you do with it? How do I find it? What am I supposed to do now?"

Of course she didn’t say a word. She just lay there, this little smile on her face, as if she thought the whole thing–death, blue eyeshadow, Jake, the handbag, faeries, Scrabble, Baldeziwurlekistan, all of it–was a joke. She always did have a weird sense of humor. That’s why she and Jake got along so well.

I grew up in a house next door to the house where my mother lived when she was a little girl. Her mother, Zofia Swink, my grandmother, babysat me while my mother and father were at work.

Zofia never looked like a grandmother. She had long black hair which she wore up in little, braided, spiky towers and plaits. She had large blue eyes. She was taller than my father. She looked like a spy or ballerina or a lady pirate or a rock star. She acted like one too. For example, she never drove anywhere. She rode a bike. It drove my mother crazy. "Why can’t you act your age?" she’d say, and Zofia would just laugh.

Zofia and I played Scrabble all the time. Zofia always won, even though her English wasn’t all that great, because we’d decided that she was allowed to use Baldeziwurleki vocabulary. Baldeziwurlekistan is where Zofia was born, over two hundred years ago. That’s what Zofia said. (My grandmother claimed to be over two hundred years old. Or maybe even older. Sometimes she claimed that she’d even met Ghenghis Khan. He was much shorter than her. I probably don’t have time to tell that story.) Baldeziwurlekistan is also an incredibly valuable word in Scrabble points, even though it doesn’t exactly fit on the board. Zofia put it down the first time we played. I was feeling pretty good because I’d gotten forty-one points for "zippery" on my turn.

Zofia kept rearranging her letters on her tray. Then she looked over at me, as if daring me to stop her, and put down "eziwurlekistan", after "bald." She used "delicious," "zippery," "wishes," "kismet", and "needle," and made "to" into "toe". "Baldeziwurlekistan" went all the way across the board and then trailed off down the righthand side.

I started laughing.

"I used up all my letters," Zofia said. She licked her pencil and started adding up points.

"That’s not a word," I said. "Baldeziwurlekistan is not a word. Besides, you can’t do that. You can’t put an eighteen letter word on a board that’s fifteen squares across."

"Why not? It’s a country," Zofia said. "It’s where I was born, little darling."

"Challenge," I said. I went and got the dictionary and looked it up. "There’s no such place."

"Of course there isn’t nowadays," Zofia said. "It wasn’t a very big place, even when it was a place. But you’ve heard of Samarkand, and Uzbekistan and the Silk Road and Ghenghis Khan. Haven’t I told you about meeting Ghenghis Khan?"

I looked up Samarkand. "Okay," I said. "Samarkand is a real place. A real word. But Baldeziwurlekistan isn’t."

"They call it something else now," Zofia said. "But I think it’s important to remember where we come from. I think it’s only fair that I get to use Baldeziwurleki words. Your English is so much better than me. Promise me something, mouthful of dumpling, a small, small thing. You’ll remember its real name. Baldeziwurlekistan. Now when I add it up, I get three hundred and sixty-eight points. Could that be right?"

If you called the faery handbag by its right name, it would be something like "orzipanikanikcz," which means the "bag of skin where the world lives," only Zofia never spelled that word the same way twice. She said you had to spell it a little differently each time. You never wanted to spell it exactly the right way, because that would be dangerous.

I called it the faery handbag because I put "faery" down on the Scrabble board once. Zofia said that you spelled it with an "i," not an "e". She looked it up in the dictionary, and lost a turn.

Zofia said that in Baldeziwurlekistan they used a board and tiles for divination, prognostication, and sometimes even just for fun. She said it was a little like playing Scrabble. That’s probably why she turned out to be so good at Scrabble. The Baldeziwurlekistanians used their tiles and board to communicate with the people who lived under the hill. The people who lived under the hill knew the future. The Baldeziwurlekistanians gave them fermented milk and honey, and the young women of the village used to go and lie out on the hill and sleep under the stars. Apparently the people under the hill were pretty cute. The important thing was that you never went down into the hill and spent the night there, no matter how cute the guy from under the hill was. If you did, even if you only spent a single night under the hill, when you came out again a hundred years might have passed. "Remember that," Zofia said to me. "It doesn’t matter how cute a guy is. If he wants you to come back to his place, it isn’t a good idea. It’s okay to fool around, but don’t spend the night."

Every once in a while, a woman from under the hill would marry a man from the village, even though it never ended well. The problem was that the women under the hill were terrible cooks. They couldn’t get used to the way time worked in the village, which meant that supper always got burnt, or else it wasn’t cooked long enough. But they couldn’t stand to be criticized. It hurt their feelings. If their village husband complained, or even if he looked like he wanted to complain, that was it. The woman from under the hill went back to her home, and even if her husband went and begged and pleaded and apologized, it might be three years or thirty years or a few generations before she came back out.

Even the best, happiest marriages between the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill fell apart when the children got old enough to complain about dinner. But everyone in the village had some hill blood in them.

"It’s in you," Zofia said, and kissed me on the nose. "Passed down from my grandmother and her mother. It’s why we’re so beautiful."

When Zofia was nineteen, the shaman-priestess in her village threw the tiles and discovered that something bad was going to happen. A raiding party was coming. There was no point in fighting them. They would burn down everyone’s houses and take the young men and women for slaves. And it was even worse than that. There was going to be an earthquake as well, which was bad news because usually, when raiders showed up, the village went down under the hill for a night and when they came out again the raiders would have been gone for months or decades or even a hundred years. But this earthquake was going to split the hill right open.

The people under the hill were in trouble. Their home would be destroyed, and they would be doomed to roam the face of the earth, weeping and lamenting their fate until the sun blew out and the sky cracked and the seas boiled and the people dried up and turned to dust and blew away. So the shaman-priestess went and divined some more, and the people under the hill told her to kill a black dog and skin it and use the skin to make a purse big enough to hold a chicken, an egg, and a cooking pot. So she did, and then the people under the hill made the inside of the purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people under the hill and mountains and forests and seas and rivers and lakes and orchards and a sky and stars and spirits and fabulous monsters and sirens and dragons and dryads and mermaids and beasties and all the little gods that the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill worshipped.

"Your purse is made out of dog skin?" I said. "That’s disgusting!"

"Little dear pet," Zofia said, looking wistful, "Dog is delicious. To Baldeziwurlekistanians, dog is a delicacy."

Before the raiding party arrived, the village packed up all of their belongings and moved into the handbag. The clasp was made out of bone. If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough to hold a chicken and an egg and a clay cooking pot, or else a pair of reading glasses and a library book and a pillbox. If you opened the clasp another way, then you found yourself in a little boat floating at the mouth of a river. On either side of you was forest, where the Baldeziwurlekistanian villagers and the people under the hill made their new settlement.

If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood. That’s where the guardian of the purse (the dog whose skin had been been sewn into a purse) lived. The guardian had no skin. Its howl made blood come out of your ears and nose. It tore apart anyone who turned the clasp in the opposite direction and opened the purse in the wrong way.

"Here is the wrong way to open the handbag," Zofia said. She twisted the clasp, showing me how she did it. She opened the mouth of the purse, but not very wide and held it up to me. "Go ahead, darling, and listen for a second."

I put my head near the handbag, but not too near. I didn’t hear anything. "I don’t hear anything," I said.

"The poor dog is probably asleep," Zofia said. "Even nightmares have to sleep now and then."

After he got expelled, everybody at school called Jake Houdini instead of Jake. Everybody except for me. I’ll explain why, but you have to be patient. It’s hard work telling everything in the right order.

Jake is smarter and also taller than most of our teachers. Not quite as tall as me. We’ve known each other since third grade. Jake has always been in love with me. He says he was in love with me even before third grade, even before we ever met. It took me a while to fall in love with Jake.

In third grade, Jake knew everything already, except how to make friends. He used to follow me around all day long. It made me so mad that I kicked him in the knee. When that didn’t work, I threw his backpack out of the window of the school bus. That didn’t work either, but the next year Jake took some tests and the school decided that he could skip fourth and fifth grade. Even I felt sorry for Jake then. Sixth grade didn’t work out. When the sixth graders wouldn’t stop flushing his head down the toilet, he went out and caught a skunk and set it loose in the boy’s locker room.

The school was going to suspend him for the rest of the year, but instead Jake took two years off while his mother home-schooled him. He learned Latin and Hebrew and Greek, how to write sestinas, how to make sushi, how to play bridge, and even how to knit. He learned fencing and ballroom dancing. He worked in a soup kitchen and made a Super Eight movie about Civil War reenactors who play extreme croquet in full costume instead of firing off cannons. He started learning how to play guitar. He even wrote a novel. I’ve never read it–he says it was awful.

When he came back two years later, because his mother had cancer for the first time, the school put him back with our year, in seventh grade. He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough to figure out how to fit in. Plus he was good at soccer and he was really cute. Did I mention that he played guitar? Every girl in school had a crush on Jake, but he used to come home after school with me and play Scrabble with Zofia and ask her about Baldeziwurlekistan.

Jake’s mom was named Cynthia. She collected ceramic frogs and knock-knock jokes. When we were in ninth grade, she had cancer again. When she died, Jake smashed all of her frogs. That was the first funeral I ever went to. A few months later, Jake’s father asked Jake’s fencing teacher out on a date. They got married right after the school expelled Jake for his AP project on Houdini. That was the first wedding I ever went to. Jake and I stole a bottle of wine and drank it, and I threw up in the swimming pool at the country club. Jake threw up all over my shoes.

So, anyway, the village and the people under the hill lived happily every after for a few weeks in the handbag, which they had tied around a rock in a dry well which the people under the hill had determined would survive the earthquake. But some of the Baldeziwurlekistanians wanted to come out again and see what was going on in the world. Zofia was one of them. It had been summer when they went into the bag, but when they came out again, and climbed out of the well, snow was falling and their village was ruins and crumbly old rubble. They walked through the snow, Zofia carrying the handbag, until they came to another village, one that they’d never seen before. Everyone in that village was packing up their belongings and leaving, which gave Zofia and her friends a bad feeling. It seemed to be just the same as when they went into the handbag.

They followed the refugees, who seemed to know where they were going, and finally everyone came to a city. Zofia had ever seen such a place. There were trains and electric lights and movie theaters, and there were people shooting each other. Bombs were falling. A war going on. Most of the villagers decided to climb right back inside the handbag, but Zofia volunteered to stay in the world and look after the handbag. She had fallen in love with movies and silk stockings and with a young man, a Russian deserter.

Zofia and the Russian deserter married and had many adventures and finally came to America, where my mother was born. Now and then Zofia would consult the tiles and talk to the people who lived in the handbag and they would tell her how best to avoid trouble and how she and her husband could make some money. Every now and then one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians, or one of the people from under the hill came out of the handbag and wanted to go grocery shopping, or to a movie or an amusement park to ride on roller coasters, or to the library.

The more advice Zofia gave her husband, the more money they made. Her husband became curious about Zofia’s handbag, because he could see that there was something odd about it, but Zofia told him to mind his own business. He began to spy on Zofia, and saw that strange men and women were coming in and out of the house. He became convinced that either Zofia was a spy for the Communists, or maybe that she was having affairs. They fought and he drank more and more, and finally he threw away her divination tiles. "Russians make bad husbands," Zofia told me. Finally, one night while Zofia was sleeping, her husband opened the bone clasp and climbed inside the handbag.

"I thought he’d left me," Zofia said. "For almost twenty years I thought he’d left me and your mother and taken off for California. Not that I minded. I was tired of being married and cooking dinners and cleaning house for someone else. It’s better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up. It was harder on your mother, not having a father. That was the part that I minded most.

"Then it turned out that he hadn’t run away after all. He’d spent one night in the handbag and then come out again twenty years later, exactly as handsome as I remembered, and enough time had passed that I had forgiven him all the quarrels. We made up and it was all very romantic and then when we had another fight the next morning, he went and kissed your mother, who had slept right through his visit, on the cheek, and then he climbed right back inside the handbag. I didn’t see him again for another twenty years. The last time he showed up, we went to see "Star Wars" and he liked it so much that he went back inside the handbag to tell everyone else about it. In a couple of years they’ll all show up and want to see it on video and all of the sequels too."

"Tell them not to bother with the prequels," I said.

The thing about Zofia and libraries is that she’s always losing library books. She says that she hasn’t lost them, and in fact that they aren’t even overdue, really. It’s just that even one week inside the faery handbag is a lot longer in library-world time. So what is she supposed to do about it? The librarians all hate Zofia. She’s banned from using any of the branches in our area. When I was eight, she got me to go to the library for her and check out a bunch of biographies and science books and some Georgette Heyer romance novels. My mother was livid when she found out, but it was too late. Zofia had already misplaced most of them.

It’s really hard to write about somebody as if they’re really dead. I still think Zofia must be sitting in her living room, in her house, watching some old horror movie, dropping popcorn into her handbag. She’s waiting for me to come over and play Scrabble.

Nobody is ever going to return those library books now.

My mother used to come home from work and roll her eyes. "Have you been telling them your fairy stories?" she’d say. "Genevieve, your grandmother is a horrible liar."

Zofia would fold up the Scrabble board and shrug at me and Jake. "I’m a wonderful liar," she’d say. "I’m the best liar in the world. Promise me you won’t believe a single word."

But she wouldn’t tell the story of the faery handbag to Jake. Only the old Baldeziwurlekistanian folktales and fairytales about the people under the hill. She told him about how she and her husband made it all the way across Europe, hiding in haystacks and in barns, and how once, when her husband went off to find food, a farmer found her hiding in his chicken coop and tried to rape her. But she opened up the faery handbag in the way she showed me, and the dog came out and ate the farmer and all his chickens too.

She was teaching Jake and me how to curse in Baldeziwurleki. I also know how to say I love you, but I’m not going to ever say it to anyone again, except to Jake, when I find him.

When I was eight, I believed everything Zofia told me. By the time I was thirteen, I didn’t believe a single word. When I was fifteen, I saw a man come out of her house and get on Zofia’s three-speed bicycle and ride down the street. His clothes looked funny. He was a lot younger than my mother and father, and even though I’d never seen him before, he was familiar. I followed him on my bike, all the way to the grocery store. I waited just past the checkout lanes while he bought peanut butter, Jack Daniels, half a dozen instant cameras, and at least sixty packs of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, three bags of Hershey’s kisses, a handful of Milky Way bars and other stuff from the rack of checkout candy. While the checkout clerk was helping him bag up all of that chocolate, he looked up and saw me. "Genevieve?" he said. "That’s your name, right?"

I turned and ran out of the store. He grabbed up the bags and ran after me. I don’t even think he got his change back. I was still running away, and then one of the straps on my flip flops popped out of the sole, the way they do, and that made me really angry so I just stopped. I turned around.

"Who are you?" I said.

But I already knew. He looked like he could have been my mom’s younger brother. He was really cute. I could see why Zofia had fallen in love with him.

His name was Rustan. Zofia told my parents that he was an expert in Baldeziwurlekistanian folklore who would be staying with her for a few days. She brought him over for dinner. Jake was there too, and I could tell that Jake knew something was up. Everybody except my dad knew something was going on.

"You mean Baldeziwurlekistan is a real place?" my mother asked Rustan. "My mother is telling the truth?"

I could see that Rustan was having a hard time with that one. He obviously wanted to say that his wife was a horrible liar, but then where would he be? Then he couldn’t be the person that he was supposed to be.

There were probably a lot of things that he wanted to say. What he said was, "This is really good pizza."

Rustan took a lot of pictures at dinner. The next day I went with him to get the pictures developed. He’d brought back some film with him, with pictures he’d taken inside the faery handbag, but those didn’t come out well. Maybe the film was too old. We got doubles of the pictures from dinner so that I could have some too. There’s a great picture of Jake, sitting outside on the porch. He’s laughing, and he has his hand up to his mouth, like he’s going to catch the laugh. I have that picture up on my computer, and also up on my wall over my bed.

I bought a Cadbury Cream Egg for Rustan. Then we shook hands and he kissed me once on each cheek. "Give one of those kisses to your mother," he said, and I thought about how the next time I saw him, I might be Zofia’s age, and he would only be a few days older. The next time I saw him, Zofia would be dead. Jake and I might have kids. That was too weird.

I know Rustan tried to get Zofia to go with him, to live in the handbag, but she wouldn’t.

"It makes me dizzy in there," she used to tell me. "And they don’t have movie theaters. And I have to look after your mother and you. Maybe when you’re old enough to look after the handbag, I’ll poke my head inside, just long enough for a little visit."

I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he was smart. I’m pretty smart myself. I know that smart doesn’t mean nice, or even mean that you have a lot of common sense. Look at all the trouble smart people get themselves into.

I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he could make maki rolls and had a black belt in fencing, or whatever it is that you get if you’re good in fencing. I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he plays guitar. He’s a better soccer player than he is a guitar player.

Those were the reasons why I went out on a date with Jake. That, and because he asked me. He asked if I wanted to go see a movie, and I asked if I could bring my grandmother and Natalie and Natasha. He said sure and so all five of us sat and watched "Bring It On" and every once in a while Zofia dropped a couple of milk duds or some popcorn into her purse. I don’t know if she was feeding the dog, or if she’d opened the purse the right way, and was throwing food at her husband.

I fell in love with Jake because he told stupid knock-knock jokes to Natalie, and told Natasha that he liked her jeans. I fell in love with Jake when he took me and Zofia home. He walked her up to her front door and then he walked me up to mine. I fell in love with Jake when he didn’t try to kiss me. The thing is, I was nervous about the whole kissing thing. Most guys think that they’re better at it than they really are. Not that I think I’m a real genius at kissing either, but I don’t think kissing should be a competitive sport. It isn’t tennis.

Natalie and Natasha and I used to practice kissing with each other. Not that we like each other that way, but just for practice. We got pretty good at it. We could see why kissing was supposed to be fun.

But Jake didn’t try to kiss me. Instead he just gave me this really big hug. He put his face in my hair and he sighed. We stood there like that, and then finally I said, "What are you doing?"

"I just wanted to smell your hair," he said.

"Oh," I said. That made me feel weird, but in a good way. I put my nose up to his hair, which is brown and curly, and I smelled it. We stood there and smelled each other’s hair, and I felt so good. I felt so happy.

Jake said into my hair, "Do you know that actor John Cusack?"

I said, "Yeah. One of Zofia’s favorite movies is ‘Better Off Dead.’ We watch it all the time."

"So he likes to go up to women and smell their armpits."

"Gross!" I said. "That’s such a lie! What are you doing now? That tickles."

"I’m smelling your ear," Jake said.

Jake’s hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted.

Kissing Jake is like kissing Natalie or Natasha, except that it isn’t just for fun. It feels like something there isn’t a word for in Scrabble.

The deal with Houdini is that Jake got interested in him during Advanced Placement American History. He and I were both put in tenth grade history. We were doing biography projects. I was studying Joseph McCarthy. My grandmother had all sorts of stories about McCarthy. She hated him for what he did to Hollywood.

Jake didn’t turn in his project–instead he told everyone in our AP class except for Mr. Streep (we call him Meryl) to meet him at the gym on Saturday. When we showed up, Jake reenacted one of Houdini’s escapes with a laundry bag, handcuffs, a gym locker, bicycle chains, and the school’s swimming pool. It took him three and a half minutes to get free, and this guy named Roger took a bunch of photos and then put the photos online. One of the photos ended up in the Boston Globe, and Jake got expelled. The really ironic thing was that while his mom was in the hospital, Jake had applied to M.I.T. He did it for his mom. He thought that way she’d have to stay alive. She was so excited about M.I.T. A couple of days after he’d been expelled, right after the wedding, while his dad and the fencing instructor were in Bermuda, he got an acceptance letter in the mail and a phone call from this guy in the admissions office who explained why they had to withdraw the acceptance.

My mother wanted to know why I let Jake wrap himself up in bicycle chains and then watched while Peter and Michael pushed him into the deep end of the school pool. I said that Jake had a backup plan. Ten more seconds and we were all going to jump into the pool and open the locker and get him out of there. I was crying when I said that. Even before he got in the locker, I knew how stupid Jake was being. Afterwards, he promised me that he’d never do anything like that again.

That was when I told him about Zofia’s husband, Rustan, and about Zofia’s handbag. How stupid am I?

So I guess you can figure out what happened next. The problem is that Jake believed me about the handbag. We spent a lot of time over at Zofia’s, playing Scrabble. Zofia never let the faery handbag out of her sight. She even took it with her when she went to the bathroom. I think she even slept with it under her pillow.

I didn’t tell her that I’d said anything to Jake. I wouldn’t ever have told anybody else about it. Not Natasha. Not even Natalie, who is the most responsible person in all of the world. Now, of course, if the handbag turns up and Jake still hasn’t come back, I’ll have to tell Natalie. Somebody has to keep an eye on the stupid thing while I go find Jake.

What worries me is that maybe one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians or one of the people under the hill or maybe even Rustan popped out of the handbag to run an errand and got worried when Zofia wasn’t there. Maybe they’ll come looking for her and bring it back. Maybe they know I’m supposed to look after it now. Or maybe they took it and hid it somewhere. Maybe someone turned it in at the lost-and-found at the library and that stupid librarian called the F.B.I. Maybe scientists at the Pentagon are examining the handbag right now. Testing it. If Jake comes out, they’ll think he’s a spy or a superweapon or an alien or something. They’re not going to just let him go.

Everyone thinks Jake ran away, except for my mother, who is convinced that he was trying out another Houdini escape and is probably lying at the bottom of a lake somewhere. She hasn’t said that to me, but I can see her thinking it. She keeps making cookies for me.

What happened is that Jake said, "Can I see that for just a second?"

He said it so casually that I think he caught Zofia off guard. She was reaching into the purse for her wallet. We were standing in the lobby of the movie theater on a Monday morning. Jake was behind the snack counter. He’d gotten a job there. He was wearing this stupid red paper hat and some kind of apron-bib thing. He was supposed to ask us if we wanted to supersize our drinks.

He reached over the counter and took Zofia’s handbag right out of her hand. He closed it and then he opened it again. I think he opened it the right way. I don’t think he ended up in the dark place. He said to me and Zofia, "I’ll be right back." And then he wasn’t there anymore. It was just me and Zofia and the handbag, lying there on the counter where he’d dropped it.

If I’d been fast enough, I think I could have followed him. But Zofia had been guardian of the faery handbag for a lot longer. She snatched the bag back and glared at me. "He’s a very bad boy," she said. She was absolutely furious. "You’re better off without him, Genevieve, I think."

"Give me the handbag," I said. "I have to go get him."

"It isn’t a toy, Genevieve," she said. "It isn’t a game. This isn’t Scrabble. He comes back when he comes back. If he comes back."

"Give me the handbag," I said. "Or I’ll take it from you."

She held the handbag up high over her head, so that I couldn’t reach it. I hate people who are taller than me. "What are you going to do now," Zofia said. "Are you going to knock me down? Are you going to steal the handbag? Are you going to go away and leave me here to explain to your parents where you’ve gone? Are you going to say goodbye to your friends? When you come out again, they will have gone to college. They’ll have jobs and babies and houses and they won’t even recognize you. Your mother will be an old woman and I will be dead."

"I don’t care," I said. I sat down on the sticky red carpet in the lobby and started to cry. Someone wearing a little metal name tag came over and asked if we were okay. His name was Missy. Or maybe he was wearing someone else’s tag.

"We’re fine," Zofia said. "My granddaughter has the flu."

She took my hand and pulled me up. She put her arm around me and we walked out of the theater. We never even got to see the stupid movie. We never even got to see another movie together. I don’t ever want to go see another movie. The problem is, I don’t want to see unhappy endings. And I don’t know if I believe in the happy ones.

"I have a plan," Zofia said. "I will go find Jake. You will stay here and look after the handbag."

"You won’t come back either," I said. I cried even harder. Or if you do, I’ll be like a hundred years old and Jake will still be sixteen."

"Everything will be okay," Zofia said. I wish I could tell you how beautiful she looked right then. It didn’t matter if she was lying or if she actually knew that everything was going to be okay. The important thing was how she looked when she said it. She said, with absolute certainty, or maybe with all the skill of a very skillful liar, "My plan will work. First we go to the library, though. One of the people under the hill just brought back an Agatha Christie mystery, and I need to return it."

"We’re going to the library?" I said. "Why don’t we just go home and play Scrabble for a while." You probably think I was just being sarcastic here, and I was being sarcastic. But Zofia gave me a sharp look. She knew that if I was being sarcastic that my brain was working again. She knew that I knew she was stalling for time. She knew that I was coming up with my own plan, which was a lot like Zofia’s plan, except that I was the one who went into the handbag. How was the part I was working on.

"We could do that," she said. "Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves."

"Can we please just hurry?" I said.

Zofia just looked at me. "Genevieve, we have plenty of time. If you’re going to look after the handbag, you have to remember that. You have to be patient. Can you be patient?"

"I can try," I told her. I’m trying, Zofia. I’m trying really hard. But it isn’t fair. Jake is off having adventures and talking to talking animals, and who knows, learning how to fly and some beautiful three thousand year old girl from under the hill is teaching him how to speak fluent Baldeziwurleki. I bet she lives in a house that runs around on chicken legs, and she tells Jake that she’d love to hear him play something on the guitar. Maybe you’ll kiss her, Jake, because she’s put a spell on you. But whatever you do, don’t go up into her house. Don’t fall asleep in her bed. Come back soon, Jake, and bring the handbag with you.

I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I’m a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don’t believe in that kind of shit.

We hadn’t been in the library for five minutes before Zofia picked up a biography of Carl Sagan and dropped it in her purse. She was definitely stalling for time. She was trying to come up with a plan that would counteract the plan that she knew I was planning. I wondered what she thought I was planning. It was probably much better than anything I’d come up with.

"Don’t do that!" I said.

"Don’t worry," Zofia said. "Nobody was watching."

"I don’t care if nobody saw! What if Jake’s sitting there in the boat, or what if he was coming back and you just dropped it on his head!"

"It doesn’t work that way," Zofia said. Then she said, "It would serve him right, anyway."

That was when the librarian came up to us. She had a nametag on as well. I was so sick of people and their stupid nametags. I’m not even going to tell you what her name was. "I saw that," the librarian said.

"Saw what?" Zofia said. She smiled down at the librarian, like she was Queen of the Library, and the librarian were a petitioner.

The librarian stared hard at her. "I know you," she said, almost sounding awed, like she was a weekend birdwatcher who just seen Bigfoot. "We have your picture on the office wall. You’re Ms. Swinks. You aren’t allowed to check out books here."

"That’s ridiculous," Zofia said. She was at least two feet taller than the librarian. I felt a bit sorry for the librarian. After all, Zofia had just stolen a seven-day book. She probably wouldn’t return it for a hundred years. My mother has always made it clear that it’s my job to protect other people from Zofia. I guess I was Zofia’s guardian before I became the guardian of the handbag.

The librarian reached up and grabbed Zofia’s handbag. She was small but she was strong. She jerked the handbag and Zofia stumbled and fell back against a work desk. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone except for me was getting a look at Zofia’s handbag. What kind of guardian was I going to be?

"Genevieve," Zofia said. She held my hand very tightly, and I looked at her. She looked wobbly and pale. She said, "I feel very bad about all of this. Tell your mother I said so."

Then she said one last thing, but I think it was in Baldeziwurleki.

The librarian said, "I saw you put a book in here. Right here." She opened the handbag and peered inside. Out of the handbag came a long, lonely, ferocious, utterly hopeless scream of rage. I don’t ever want to hear that noise again. Everyone in the library looked up. The librarian made a choking noise and threw Zofia’s handbag away from her. A little trickle of blood came out of her nose and a drop fell on the floor. What I thought at first was that it was just plain luck that the handbag was closed when it landed. Later on I was trying to figure out what Zofia said. My Baldeziwurleki isn’t very good, but I think she was saying something like "Figures. Stupid librarian. I have to go take care of that damn dog." So maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Zofia sent part of herself in there with the skinless dog. Maybe she fought it and won and closed the handbag. Maybe she made friends with it. I mean, she used to feed it popcorn at the movies. Maybe she’s still in there.

What happened in the library was Zofia sighed a little and closed her eyes. I helped her sit down in a chair, but I don’t think she was really there any more. I rode with her in the ambulance, when the ambulance finally showed up, and I swear I didn’t even think about the handbag until my mother showed up. I didn’t say a word. I just left her there in the hospital with Zofia, who was on a respirator, and I ran all the way back to the library. But it was closed. So I ran all the way back again, to the hospital, but you already know what happened, right? Zofia died. I hate writing that. My tall, funny, beautiful, book-stealing, Scrabble-playing, story-telling grandmother died.

But you never met her. You’re probably wondering about the handbag. What happened to it. I put up signs all over town, like Zofia’s handbag was some kind of lost dog, but nobody ever called.

So that’s the story so far. Not that I expect you to believe any of it. Last night Natalie and Natasha came over and we played Scrabble. They don’t really like Scrabble, but they feel like it’s their job to cheer me up. I won. After they went home, I flipped all the tiles upside-down and then I started picking them up in groups of seven. I tried to ask a question, but it was hard to pick just one. The words I got weren’t so great either, so I decided that they weren’t English words. They were Baldeziwurleki words.

Once I decided that, everything became perfectly clear. First I put down "kirif" which means "happy news", and then I got a "b," an "o," an "l," an "e," a "f," another "i," an "s," and a "z." So then I could make "kirif" into "bolekirifisz," which could mean "the happy result of a combination of diligent effort and patience."

I would find the faery handbag. The tiles said so. I would work the clasp and go into the handbag and have my own adventures and would rescue Jake. Hardly any time would have gone by before we came back out of the handbag. Maybe I’d even make friends with that poor dog and get to say goodbye, for real, to Zofia. Rustan would show up again and be really sorry that he’d missed Zofia’s funeral and this time he would be brave enough to tell my mother the whole story. He would tell her that he was her father. Not that she would believe him. Not that you should believe this story. Promise me that you won’t believe a word.

###

"The Faery Handbag" was also collected in Kelly Link’s second collection, Magic for Beginners.

Chapter 1: Outlandish Changes

There is more matter in the universe than we at first thought.
–CBS newscaster

“The beast changes to a woman or the woman changes to a beast,” the doctor says. “In her case it is certainly the latter since she has been, on the whole, quite passable as a human being up to the present moment. There may be hundreds of these creatures already among us. No way to tell for sure how many.”

The husband feigns surprise. Actually he’s seen more than he’s telling, and right in his own home.

“But they are, it is clear, here among us now in many varied forms and already voicing strange opinions: some in love with water, rain, the tides; breathing heavily (as she does); while others quite the opposite, more like birds or foxes. Yesterday I saw one I thought quite like a giant sloth, upside down in the lower branches of a tree. Some are, you know, on the way up, others the reverse. As I said: woman to beast, beast to woman, and not much point to it all it seems to me. Marcus Aurelius wrote, and I quote: ‘Is the ball itself bettered by its upward flight? Is it any worse as it comes down?’ When did you first suspect your wife?”

“. . . her mouth grown wide, lips dark, her eyes suspicious. She smells — I don’t know — like something from a marsh. Has become irritable. More so than usual. Whimpers. Drops things. Or, on the other hand, like a snapping turtle, sometimes won’t let go. Drinks too much. . . .”

“Of course all this would be perfectly normal in a woman twice her age, but since she’s only thirty-four, I think it’s a good idea to see a psychotherapist at once, both of you. You say she was a fairly good wife and mother, though somewhat irritating at times, and you want her back that way as soon as possible? You must realize, however, that she is at this very moment in a period of profound change, both physical and psychological. Be surprised at nothing. To my mind it is as if they all had eaten an apple from the tree of a different kind of knowledge and have seen with new eyes, not that they are naked, but have seen that they are clothed.”

What the doctor doesn’t mention is how many similar cases he’s seen and just how far some of them have progressed. He doesn’t realize that the husband wouldn’t be a bit surprised, that the husband realizes from personal experience that some of the women are already talking in grunts (if at all), while others, who used to speak only in guttural mutterings, are now mouthing long, erudite words such as teleological, hymenopterology, omphalos, and quagmire.

Christine, for instance, red-headed, plump Christine, who had several times been taken for an orangutan, can now argue her way out of any zoo no matter what the educational level of the keepers. Mona, on the other hand, can almost fly (though it is unlikely that she ever really will). Her husband complains that she makes funny noises, but her children like her all the better for it. John is divorcing Lucille in order to marry Betty (quite bearish still, but evidently what John wants). Mabel has only recently been given a name at all.

This is not the case with Pooch, who has had a name from the start and who now finds herself taking over more and more of the housework and baby-sitting, yet continues to be faithful. Her mistress is deteriorating rapidly — mouth grown wide, eyes suspicious. Her master (the man who visited the doctor, as mentioned a moment ago) has tried all the experts he can afford and they are now, both of them, in psychotherapy, as the doctor recommended, but it looks as though the marriage can’t last.

In other homes, similar dramas are playing themselves out in various ways. A guinea pig named Cucumber (because of her shape, and sometimes affectionately referred to as “Pickle”), although not very smart, is taking over several of the easier tasks in the house next door. Cucumber has spoken to Pooch on several occasions, but Pooch finds it hard to be with her because she feels that she, Pooch, needs to hold herself back. Sometimes she feels she’d like to grab hold of Cucumber by the back of the neck and give her a good shake. And for no reason. Phillip, the king snake down the block, has turned out to be female after all, as has Humphrey the iguana. Neither of them, it is clear, has much maternal instinct, though, and they were last seen heading south on Route 95 with not so much as a good-bye kiss to the little ones who had watched over them tenderly, albeit not very consistently.

On the other hand, Pooch is doing the best she can for her foster family. (The mistress has taken to drink and sleeps a good bit of the day, but bites out viciously if provoked. Not that she hasn’t done something of the sort to some degree all her life, but before it had usually been a quick slap.) Pooch now does the shopping as well as the laundry, diapering, and much of the cooking, though she is hardly as old as the oldest child she’s looking after. Pooch, who had always been smiling and playful, now has become serious and sad, watching over everything with her big, golden-brown, color-blind eyes.

The psychologist has counseled patience and forbearance on the part of the family toward the mistress, wife, and mother. Pooch, who has never been patient, realizes the importance of this and conducts herself with a quiet dignity far beyond her years — always her mouth half open, always a little breathless. It’s not unattractive.

Lately she has been yearning to see the psychologist herself. After all, it is she who has taken on more of the burdens of the family than could ever have been expected. But a visit is out of the question: the therapy is already straining the family’s finances to the limit, even though the therapist is giving them a discount and the first few months were paid for by insurance. But at last the day comes when the psychologist himself asks to see Pooch. He has, no doubt, come to realize that she is a key figure in the dynamics of this tormented nuclear family and that she is probably the most stable element in it.

He understands a lot of things about her just by looking. Right away he senses her suffering (how she sits, demure, her arms around herself, held in, or rather, held together). And right away he guesses that she has been dependent all her life. Guesses, also, that there was some sort of break with her mother at an early age (how her hands hover around her mouth, her bitten nails), and that her toilet training may have been inordinately severe, possibly involving corporal punishment (her guilty look and the fact that, at first, she cannot talk to him at all). Of course these are only conjectures.

He asks her for her dreams. She remembers only a short one of rabbits. He asks her about her hopes and fears. . . . And has she no ambitions, no hobbies, no interests beyond the immediate family? It seems not. He asks about her youthful indiscretions. She says, None, but what she doesn’t tell him is her sudden guilty yet happy memory of having pulled woolen caps and mittens off the heads and hands of small children or grabbing the fringe of their scarves. At the end of the session he tells her to do something for herself every day, if only just one small thing: take half an hour off to do something she wants to do, eat a tidbit of a favorite food, buy a small, inexpensive gift for herself, or perhaps even something expensive. Play a game of frisbee. This is orders, he says, doctor’s orders.

Psychologically he cannot be sure that he is giving her the proper advice. It is clear that Pooch has always wanted to be of service to mankind in any way that she possibly can. From the general look of her, he guesses that her retrieving instincts are strong and that she might be passionately interested in swimming. Perhaps she can have no other joys but these.

For the first few days after this session, Pooch does not dare follow his advice. Besides, she can’t think of anything she wants or wants to do. But on the fourth day, on a whim, she buys herself a three-dollar bunch of daisies.

Had she a room of her own she would have put the daisies there, but she sleeps on the doormat. No one has thought to change this situation. No one has noticed her budding femininity . . . no one in the family, that is. And after all, the house issmall. Hardly enough room for the parents and the three children. So there’s nothing for it but to put the daisies in the kitchen, where she spends most of her time anyway. But later on her mistress comes in and eats the heads off all but one, leaving only an ugly bunch of stems. Pooch blames herself for this, for having been a little late in preparing supper. She props up the remaining flower in a small glass, but it’s too damaged to stand straight. Pooch gives up and eats the last flower herself. She is the one, then, caught with leaves sticking out of her mouth and accused by her master of ruining the whole bouquet. He slaps her several times with a rolled-up newspaper and does not wonder where the flowers came from in the first place.

The psychologist sees Pooch for another session. This time he draws a picture for her of her id, ego, and superego, and explains to her that she should let the id have a little fun now and then. It’s hard for Pooch to understand any of this, but she takes the diagram home and puts it in the only safe place she has, under the doormat. At night, when everyone is in bed, she takes it out and puzzles over the three circles that are supposed to represent herself, and the squiggles under them that are words.Id, then, is one of the first words she learns to read. After that, her reading progresses rapidly.

A few weeks later the mistress bites the baby. Not only bites it, but refuses to let go until Pooch puts a lit match to her neck. Now the baby’s arm has a large, V-shaped wound. Pooch is terrified. First of all, she knows that she will be blamed and that this is a serious offense that calls for more than a few taps on the head with a newspaper — which Pooch has never resented, knowing full well that, in some sense, she deserved them even when she hadn’t done anything wrong. (Of course she deserved no such thing, but low self-esteem has always been one of her main problems, as the psychotherapist well knows.) But now she is sure that a few slaps will not suffice. Also she has heard about neighboring creatures who were taken to the pound and never came back. Recently several of her rapidly changing friends have suffered just such a fate (whatever it is), having become too hard to handle at home in all sorts of ways. However one may enjoy the possession of an intelligent animal, too much intelligence, too many pertinent and impertinent questions, and too much independence are always hard to put up with in others, and especially in a creature one keeps partly for the enhancement of one’s own self-image.

And then, of course, Pooch is worried about the baby. What will the mistress do next? Pooch knows that she must not let the baby out of her sight even for a minute. She has always had deep feelings for the baby, above all the other children. The psychologist would certainly say that it is because she was taken from her own mother at such an early age and that she needs to mother the baby to make up for her sense of loss. A fairly common reaction.

After seeing that the mistress, looking even darker and more bloated than ever, has fallen asleep in the bathtub, as is usual at this time of day, and that the baby, also as usual, is down for its nap, Pooch sits in her master’s favorite chair to think things out. She has, from the beginning, been forbidden the use of this chair, but now she deliberately curls up in it. She longs to lay her head on her master’s knee and to look up at him, letting all her yearning speak out to him from her eyes as she used to do. She wonders if all these new words she’s learned are getting in the way. Life was so much happier before she knew so many of them. It was at just such times as those, her head on his knee, that the master used to talk and talk, stroking her and telling her that she alone understood him and accepted him just as he was. And she did, if not understand completely, at least accept completely, and still does, though it’s been a long time since he has sat here with her on the floor beside him. Perhaps she knows too many words now for him to speak so frankly. Perhaps he suspects that, now that she knows the words, she may not understand and may judge him more severely. But perhaps she, too, has played a part in the fact that this no longer goes on, both of them, on some deep level, realizing the impropriety of the stroking of the head and the scratching behind the ears of a nubile young woman by the man who is, even if not a blood relative, to some degree in the role of her father.

And Pooch is growing into a fine young woman: slender fingers where her paws once were, cheeks covered with little more than a peachy down. She is, after all, pedigreed, which is more than one can say for her adopted family. She was born on a farm, but no ordinary farm — as a matter of fact, a very famous farm in Virginia. Her father was from England and of impeccable bloodlines and her mother’s family had been registered for generations. Also the psychologist is right, she had been torn from her mother at quite an early age by her master and mistress. They had been on a vacation trip to Florida and had stopped off at the farm to pick up Pooch on their way home to Long Island; they could not have been expected to wait until she was of a proper age to leave her mother.

Pooch is aware by now that she has been living not far from a major urban center that is full of opportunities as well as dangers. She thought about this when the psychologist asked her what she wanted to do with her life, because immediately the idea popped into her head that she wanted some sort of career in music and that she lived not far from some of the best singing coaches in the world. She isn’t sure if she has any musical talent, even though from an early age she took every opportunity she had to listen to good music and to sing along with it. Her master and mistress soon put a stop to that, however, commenting on her terrible voice, which made her feel very sad. But the yearning still remains, if anything all the stronger for being suppressed, though she had put it completely out of her mind until the psychologist asked her what sort of (happy) future she envisioned for herself.

What she saw for just an instant was herself as Carmen, all in red, the rose in her mouth, dancing the seguidilla, though Carmen is quite the opposite of Pooch’s general personality, which is basically (and becomingly) modest. (She is also petite; what’s left of her fur, mostly white with flecks of black; long silky ears, one golden; small feet; noble head. She has a slight stutter, though never when she sings. Sometimes the words won’t come at all. It is at these times that her eyes speak most eloquently, as though just by staring and cocking her head she could make herself understood. Her feelings about sexuality and loyalty are decidedly old-fashioned. Once she marries, one can be sure that she will never stray.)

Now, however, it is clear that she must leave her beloved master and it is clear that there is nothing for it but that she take the baby with her.

What Pooch doesn’t realize is that, at this very moment, there is nothing in the bathtub but a very large, very vicious, and very drunk snapping turtle and that when the husband comes back in the evening he will understand the whole situation at a glance and will consider his marriage vows to be henceforth invalid and also his financial obligation to his wife at an end. Their bickerings had degenerated to incomprehensible mouthings anyway, and their lovemaking, though they had kept on with it in spite of increasing difficulties, had become mutually dissatisfying. So it will be with a sense of relief that he will take the creature to the nearest aquarium. And rather proudly, too, to be able to contribute what may be perhaps one of the largest snapping turtles in the world, a gift from him to the community at large. Also he wonders about her dollar value, whether she might be some sort of tax write-off and, if so, how much?

Pooch had run away a few times before, but that was when she was much younger. She had always been found in the neighborhood, her master driving around block after block until he discovered her in some backyard not far from home. After disposing of his wife, he proceeds to search for Pooch in his usual way, little dreaming that she is already in New York. After an hour of fruitless circling, he finally realizes that this time she is not to be found in this manner. His feelings for her begin to change as he realizes that she would no longer, could not possibly any longer, be wandering about in someone’s yard behind the lilacs.

He understands finally that it is a desirable young woman he is looking for, and the more he thinks about it the more desirable she becomes. What’s more, she’s his. He picked her out, bought her, trained her, taught her everything she knows (or so he thinks, anyway), disciplined her, took her — or used to take her — for walks. . . . And what a good hard worker she has turned out to be in the end! How sweet and uncomplaining! Just the sort of wife he always wanted. Never once an argument the whole of her life with him. He is thinking how all might be, at last, harmonious. Life could begin again with her beside him. Perhaps it could be a time of new and strange excesses he never dared even to think about, let alone perform when he was younger or with his wife (who always rather frightened him) for, after all, Pooch is another kind of creature entirely. Courage would hardly be needed with such as her. If, for instance, he wanted to tie her, spread-eagled, to the bed, she would not wonder at this behavior. He decides to call the police as well as missing persons and tell them that it is his wife who has run off with their child . . . his beautiful young wife.

Why is it, the doctor has been wondering (along with many other professional people), why is it that only the females of the various species are affected by all this changing? Why have no males, as far as has been ascertained, been changing too? Surely if extraterrestrial dust or some such substance had dropped from distant stars, the men could not have avoided it. Perhaps it isn’t of stellar origin at all, but atomic radiation, or maybe it’s simply industrial waste. But the doctor and other professionals would rather think about the stars, and do — or else about the moon, for haven’t women always been influenced by it? Perhaps it has changed in some way since being stepped on, especially a giant step by a man. Specialists in women’s problems have been called upon, ad hoc committees set up. The scholarly journals are full of conjectures, but no good answers or solutions have been forthcoming except that perhaps all the women should be inoculated with male hormones.

The doctor thinks it is a simple question of willpower . . . a case of mind over matter (males), or matter over mind (females), and this very lack of willpower, he believes, is a form of aggression. Females, then, the worm in the apple, as ever; or rather, the first bite into it. Always — even before all this happened — in a state of disequilibrium; exaggerating themselves and their plight, sighing, braying, little cries of ai, ai, vey, vey, piu, piu, oh, ow, poo, and so forth. What difference does it make, when all is said and done, he is thinking, that they take the shapes when they already have had the sounds down pat for so long? And what passionate undercurrents in all these voices! (He has often found them downright embarrassing . . . even his own mother, though not, thank God, his wife.) Passion has always been their undoing, while he himself has always been ruled by the intellect. More even than most men, so perhaps (he thinks) he is the one uniquely chosen to return the world to its former comfortable dependability.

A few simple experiments may suffice to prove his willpower theory. Then it would simply be a matter of finding the leaders — those who have instigated the others in this lack-of-willpower behavior — and retraining them with electric shocks or any sort of aversion therapy. Perhaps it can be done in his large, airy basement. Put up a few cages and section off a laboratory. Take in several homeless waifs and wives. Make sure they get a good breakfast. Surely many would be happy with little more than a roof over their heads. It’s spring but it’s still pretty cold outside at night. Certainly they won’t cost much. It’s the equipment that will be the major expense. He decides to apply for a grant at once.

He has read in Marcus Aurelius that “Matter in the universe is supple and compliant, and the Reason which controls it has no motive for ill-doing; for it is without malice, and does nothing with intent to injure, neither is anything harmed by it.”

No, it is clear that it is not the fault of Matter at all, but of the female.

Lincoln Center on a Friday evening. The several audiences are strolling about in front of the fountain; have not, in fact, collected themselves into audiences at all, but still function basically as individuals or as couples. What a wonderful diversity exists among the women! What feathers, scales, and furs! What sounds! Laughs and shrieks that reach the highest C. Seeing them, one might wish also for banana women, apple women, pine-tree women, but one can’t have everything and this suffices to all but the greediest seekers after life.

Pooch, before the splendor of Lincoln Center, watching the elegantly dressed women, is reminded of a Japanese poem:

Butterfly
Or falling leaf,
Which ought I to imitate
In my dancing?

and also a line from another poem: “Very little happiness would be enough.”

She’s had nothing to eat since morning, but, though it certainly would help to lift her spirits, food is not what she hungers for. As it happens, she receives exactly what she wants most of all. Or rather, the second best thing. Someone hands her a ticket he can’t use. Not for the Metropolitan, but for the New York City Opera. Yet even this is beyond her wildest dreams, and by some strange quirk of fate, the opera is to beCarmen.

Pooch thanks God that the baby has had a hard day and is sound asleep. She tucks it under her arm much as one would carry a bunch of books and enters the theater panting slightly, short of breath from the excitement of it all. Her simple elegance belies her inappropriate clothes (ill-fitting jeans and torn, discarded sweater that once belonged to the oldest child of the family). She carries herself well and people notice her, though inside she is feeling small and spotted.

And so the opera begins, Pooch whimpering occasionally with a pleasure that cannot be contained. When Carmen sings: “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle . . . that nobody can ever tame,” Pooch is enraptured. Yes, it’s so true, so true. That’s just the way love is. She is thinking of the only males in her life (not counting the oldest child): her master and the psychotherapist, for whom she already has a full-blown transference.

But of course (as could have been predicted) it is Micaela’s song that moves her most of all, even though her French is rudimentary. “Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante” and “Seule en ce lieu sauvage . . . j’ai tort d’avoir peur; . . .” bring tears to her eyes. Pooch might be said to be in somewhat the same fix that Micaela is in. Suddenly she can no longer contain herself and raises her voice in a mournful obbligato to that of the soprano on stage.

Everyone turns to look at the rear of the balcony, wondering where this strange sound is coming from. Pooch has the words all wrong, but they are emotionally correct and full of homesickness and fear. Her voice is obviously untrained but has a surprising power. Something spellbinding about it. Something wild. It has what Roland Barthes calls “grain”: “(One hears only that),” he writes, “Beyond (or before) the meaning of the words . . . from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages . . .” The audience is, for just a moment, won over. The Micaela on stage stops singing, confused, and Pooch goes on by herself, her trembling audible. But this lasts only a minute, for the baby begins to cry. Of course Pooch is quickly hustled out amid catcalls, boos, and hisses. She hunches over in shame, the baby screaming.

Shortly afterward, and perhaps precipitated by the unforeseen commotion, the Carmen on stage begins to limp and whinny in a very strange manner. It is clear to all that she cannot be counted on to finish the opera. In truth, the impresario has been worried of late, wondering how to replace these highly trained but changing women. He has even, just for a moment, thought of castrating little boys to ensure a crop of sopranos for the future, but now he realizes that there is a better source he hadn’t recognized. He rushes to the lobby to try to intercept Pooch before she can get away. Here, he is thinking, is something wild and new to work with, though will she be able to practice as hard as necessary, and with a baby no less? No doubt she is poor, but he will finance the training. He will put his foot down, though, on helping with day care. She will have to find resources of her own where that is concerned. Yes, there is power here that he has not heard before. But she’s already gone by the time he gets to the door. “Find that woman,” he yells to a ticket taker; but the young man is running off in the wrong direction.

It is unlikely that he would find her, anyway, since she is soon to be netted by the dog catcher; for, as she flies from the scene of her humiliation, she runs unthinking down the middle of the street, hardly aware of the honking. She is booked for chasing cars, though of course that was the farthest thing from her thoughts, but her protests are in vain. The pound is not exactly the place for a trial by a jury of one’s peers, so she is summarily found guilty as charged. And as usual, she does have that guilty look. If only she had twenty-five dollars instead of two seventy-five in quarters (laundry money she hadn’t even meant to take, but found in her pocket after she’d left — she would never take money on purpose, even when running away and even when it might have helped to feed the baby). Twenty-five dollars and she could buy her way out and no problem.

Worse yet, they know who she is and will notify her master first thing in the morning, for Pooch is still wearing her collar with the license on it. Being a law-abiding creature, she had not even considered taking it off.

• Carol Emshwiller
• Carmen Dog

Excerpted from Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller. Copyright 1990 by Carol Emshwiller. All Rights Reserved.

With thousands of like-minded others, I went to the big peace rally in New York City on February 15th, 2003. It was a cold day, and my wife and I walked up Third Avenue from 32nd to 68th Street before we could cut over to First Avenue and join the rally. Which was really a slow march, but since the city government wouldn’t give us a permit to march, let’s call it a rally.

What do we want?
So many things.
When do want them?
It doesn’t seem possible, but now, please.

…March 5th, 2003, Local News: Writer and editor Gavin J. Grant, 33, (picture) of Northampton, Mass., is believed to be one of hundreds of detainees held after police and other government agencies moved in to calm a noisy and potentially-violent peace rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park….

I joined the United for Peace and Justice email list for information on future rallies. I forwarded their email about a march and vigil on the fifth of March to my wife. She had to pick up some freelance work in New York and readily agreed to go.

Tell me what a democracy looks like.
From here, a dictatorship.
This is what a democracy looks like.
This march, or this war? It’s hard to tell.

…March 7th, 2003, Email: Gavin, Dad here. Got a call fromINS (IRS?) saying you had been held (under Patriotic act?) after rally and asking re: marriage and so on. Confirm ok by you to send these? Love, dad and mum. xx….

The march and candlelight vigil on fifth of March was as depressing as the February 15th rally. Thousands of people gathered outside Senator Hillary Clinton’s office and marched to Senator Chuck Schumer’s office to protest their voting to send the USA into war with Iraq. We marched down Third to 42nd Street and then snaked over to Fifth, blocking crosstown traffic. We marched to Washington Square Park and were closely watched by the Fifth Avenue business owners,- some of whom seemed to dither between a desire to join us and a fear of the crowd. But we were no mob. People drummed and danced, sang the usual songs, held or wore signs that were as funny and direct as ever (”The only Bush I trust is my own” was more popular this time), yet, will this stop a war? Hundred of police seemed to think we might start aBattle of Seattle ourselves. Which leads to thoughts of whether we might place some of these police in the White House.

…March 8th, 2003, National News: Detained immigrant Gavin Grant’s website (Internet Archive link) has been taken down by the federal government under suspicions of terrorist links. Grant, a freelance writer who has written for alternative publications such as The Urban Pantheist, Weird Times, and Xerography Debt, recently published altered transcripts of two of President Bush’s remarks on Iraq on his website. Citing freedom of speech and linking to satirical websites such as The Onion, Grant simply switched the President’s name with Saddam Hussein’s in two transcripts. The first transcript made it appear that Hussein was about to attack the USA with 3,000 cruise missiles — with no differentiation of civilian and military targets. The second transcript, however, was perhaps even more threatening and, given the present Orange Alert, is likely the reason Grant was arrested. Grant altered President Bush’s remarks on the possibilities of an internal coup in Iraq and changed them to suggest that generals and others in the U.S. Armed Forces might find themselves well rewarded if they initiated an internal revolt. The White House announced there would be a press conference concerning the latest detainees at 2 p.m. today and referred all questions to John Ashcroft’soffice….

We, The People, Don’t Want This War!
Shame Bush hasn’t noticed.

March 15: The thing is, I haven’t been arrested. I’m not even in hiding. This morning I sanded the ice in my driveway and talked to Jeff, our contractor, about building some bookshelves in a room upstairs. When I opened my email there were 250+ emails — mostly from people I don’t know. 90% were supportive, but some were just vitriolic. I haven’t even posted my articles yet — they were just ideas I was playing with. I was going to contact a lawyer friend and a guy I know who ran a satirical siteto get some advice before I posted. The lines keep moving and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to cross any of the dangerous ones.

…March 12, 2003, NYPD Spokesman: We can confirm arrests of a number of individuals participating in an anti-government rally in Washington Square Park on the evening of March 5th. These individuals are no longer in our jurisdiction. They are being held under the auspices of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 in an undisclosed location….

I don’t like singing and chanting with the other marchers. I think walking quietly is just as important. That way we don’t all look as if we’re being carried away in an ecstatic trance. A few people jangled their keys as they walked. I wondered if it was just an impulse to be rhythmic or if they had read Ursula K. Le Guin’s story about a revolution, “Unlocking the Air.”

Drop Bush, not bombs.
Or at least his lapdog, Blair.

At the end of the February 15th rally when the closely-herded thousands of us were leaving, I went to walk around the outside edge of a phone box. A policeman stopped me and told me I had to stay on the sidewalk. Cold, frustrated by this abject stupidity and niggardliness, I objected.
“That,” and I pointed to the two feet of sidewalk between the phone box and the street, “is the sidewalk.” The policeman declared it was not, and another policeman moved closer to us in case I was trouble. I repeated that the space between the phone and the road was, in fact, sidewalk. The policeman, putting his hand on his billyclub, repeated his determined opinion that it was not. I held my hands up in the air to show I wasn’t about to start anything, could not stop myself from calling him a fascist, and left. I wondered how near to arrest I’d been.

…September 5, 2003, National News: Detainees from the March 5th peace march in New York have now been held for one hundred and eighty days without access to family, legal aid, or media. The Department of Homeland Security refuses to release the number of detainees or any identifying information. Twenty-three of the detained have since been stripped of their citizenship and deported to their countries of origin. Mothers of the Disappeared, a new New York City-based organization claims that the detainees are being tortured and tried in secret courts. White House spokesmanJim Morrell refused to comment on what he called “pure fabulation.”….

The US government declared the war in Iraq over in May 2003. The ongoing reports of killings in Iraq remind me of growing up in the U.K. War was never formally declared in Northern Ireland, but the headlines were often about bombings, murders, and shootings. The peace process in Ireland is one thing that fills me with hope. Perhaps the past can be let go — not forgotten — and a new future can be chosen based on peace and negotiation rather than on the acts of a randomly chosen period one, two, or three hundred years ago.

…March 5, 2004, National News: The one-year anniversary of last year’s national peace rally and the accompanying series of arrests was marked today by rallies, countrywide student sit-ins, and the third masked Black Bloc flashmob appearance (exclusive video) in New York City this week. Although a number of the detainees are known to be serving prison terms, the Department of Homeland Security resolutely refuses to release the original number of marchers detained, or any identifying information. Mothers of the Disappeared claim the detainees have been moved to the US military base inGuantanamo Bay and that, citing Amnesty Internationalinterviews with ex-prisoners from the Afghanistan war of 2001, the conditions in Guantanamo are an abuse of the detainees human rights. White House spokesman Jim Morrellrefused to comment on what he called “pure fabulation.”….

I never carry my green card with me. I know the number, but I don’t want to lose it if my wallet were stolen. So if I were arrested my identity cards would be my New York driver’s license with my old address on it, credit cards, and membership cards for the library, Pleasant Street Video, AAA, and Amnesty International. I look in the mirror and I’m not sure who’s there. There’s a man with lines around his eyes, and a somewhat blank expression. What does he want? When does he want it? Not thisPresident. Not this future.

Originally published in LCRW 13.
Reprinted in the Zine Yearbook 8

More reading

“Foreigners” by Mark Rich
“Other Agents” by Richard Butner
“Prisons”
“The End of a Dynasty” by Angelica Gorodischer

The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branches in the world have names, even if nobody remembers them, or remembers which Frankum they’re named after.

I wanted to know the name when I was planning the trip back to Paris. That’s Paris as in Bourbon kings, not Paris as in Bourbon County. I was writing out my route and Frankum Branch was Step One. I couldn’t afford to fly, so I was going by boat. I didn’t have a boat, so I was going to build one.

I was drinking a lot of wine just then.

I saved the corks.

Before I decided to go back to Paris, I considered using the bottles to build some sort of roadside tourist attraction. I looked into it a little bit, but the math defeated me very quickly. You remember how I am with math.

A boat though-a boat built out of corks-that turned out to be easy. All you need is a roll or two of cheesecloth and some thread and a needle and of course a whole lot of corks. I put it together in a long afternoon in the field behind the trailer.

None of the bottles, full or empty, would break on the corks, so I never did christen it. I’d be happy to hear your suggestions for a name, though, you were always good at that.

The neighbors had that party, set up the game to name their new kitten. Calliope, you suggested, and nobody else even came close. You didn’t go to the party, though. I carried over the note you’d written.

Frankum Branch, that’s a pretty good name. Even if I couldn’t track the provenance, I know there are Frankums around here, know they’ve been here for a long time. Probably a particular Frankum, sure, but here’s a case where ignorance is kind of liberating. Since I don’t know-since nobody knows, not even the people at the courthouse-it could have been a man or a woman, an old lady or a little boy. It could be named for all the Frankums.

The boat behaved at first. It rolled down the hill and settled into the branch, stretching out long because the stream bed is so narrow. It waited for me to throw my bags in and to clamber in myself, and then I headed downstream.

I only moved at the speed the water moved. I only went as fast as the world would carry me.

How far is my trailer from Sulfur Creek? See, that’s a more interesting question than it might seem. There are so many ways to measure it.

If I walk out my front door and follow Creek Bend Drive to the end of my landlord’s farm, down into the bottom and across Frankum, up another hill and then back down to where the blacktop turns to gravel, it’s about two miles. That’s the closest place, I think. Where the road breaks up into gravel is where Frankum Branch flows into Sulfur Creek.

But there are other ways I can go. I can walk through the fields, cross the branch on rocks at a narrow place, climb through some woods. I think it might only be about a mile and a half, that way.

Then there are crows. “As the crow flies.” Do you think that means that crows are supposed to fly in straight lines? Maybe they used to. I watch crows, and I don’t think I’d trust them to give me advice on distance. I don’t think I trust crows or creeks either on much of anything, except to be themselves.

Finally, there’s time. Nobody ever gives distances in miles anymore, but it’s not because they’ve switched to metric. They measure how far it is from here to there with their watches, not their odometers.

That place, that confluence of water and roads both? It’s about two miles from my trailer, it’s about a mile and half, it’s about an hour if you take Frankum Branch in a boat made out of corks.

So then I was on Sulfur Creek, which is broader than Frankum. The boat rounded itself up into a little doughnut. I smelled the water in the creek and I tasted it, searching for rotten eggs, I guess, or hell.

The sulfur must have washed away, though. Sometimes that happens, things wash away and only the names are left.

My hometown-the town I lived closest to growing up and the one I live closest to again-it’s an island, maybe. At the edge of town, you have to cross a bridge over Russell Creek. At every edge of town. Every road leading in and out passes over Russell Creek.

When I was younger, I thought that meant that the creek flowed in a circle. I’d seen illustrations of the Styx in my mythology books.

It’s not, of course. The creek and the town are neither of them circles, and the roads don’t lead out in perfect radials along the cardinal directions, something else I used to believe.

What’s the difference between a creek and a river? Length, just length. Nothing about how much water flows through it, nothing about breadth or depth. In Kentucky, if a rivulet you can step across is at least a hundred miles long, then it’s a river. Russell Creek is ninety-nine miles long. Maybe it’s the longest creek in the world.

When I floated out onto it, I started thinking that maybe I should have dug a trench somewhere at the headwaters or made a long oxbow in a bottom. Maybe instead of building the boat I should have lengthened Russell Creek. But then it would just be a short river.

Russell Creek flows around the town, and beneath the bluffs that line one side of my family’s farm, and then winds, winds, winds through the county to the Green River.

The Green River pretty much named itself.

The Green is deep and swift above the first locks and dams, then shallow and tamed below. Floating through the impounded lake at the county line, the boat began to misbehave. It didn’t want to leave town, after all.

It bunched up in a tight little sphere. I bounced on the top, netting my nylon bags filled with wine bottles and this notebook and a corkscrew into the cheesecloth so they wouldn’t drop down and disturb the muskies. Then the boat stretched out, became narrower and narrower, longer and longer, so it almost looked like it was floating forward.

But I could tell it wasn’t really moving, so I tried to paddle for a while with my hands. I kept getting pushed back by the wakes of fishing boats headed for the state dock. When I gave up, exhausted, the boat finally shuddered or shrugged and drifted on through the spillway, through the dam.

I don’t know the motive force of the boat. Its motivation is a mystery to me.

You have to keep an eye on that boat.

Then it was a John Prine song for four hundred miles.

Here’s a true story. The Commonwealth of Kentucky owns the Ohio River, or used to. We still own most of it. But then counties along the south bank started charging property taxes to the Hoosiers and the Buckeyes who built docks off the north shore. The Hoosiers and the Buckeyes got their states to sue ours and theirs won, a little bit. Now the Commonwealth owns the Ohio River except for a strip one hundred yards wide along the upper bank. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that.

Those counties shouldn’t have tried to charge the taxes. They should have known what would happen.

There doesn’t seem to be much point in owning most of a river.

These are things I saw along the Ohio River.

Below Henderson, where the Green gets muddied into the brown, I saw the carcass of a cow, bloated and rotting, floating in the shallows outside the main current. The boat shied away from it even though I was curious to see what kind of cow it was.

At Owensboro, the water became as clear as air, and I felt like I was flying for a little while. The bed of the Ohio is smooth and broad at Owensboro, unsullied by anything but giant catfish and a submerged Volvo P-1800 in perfect condition.

Ralph Stanley was playing a concert on the waterfront at Paducah. This time I didn’t mind the boat’s dawdling.

At Cairo, I floated onto the Mississippi.

Cairo is pronounced “Cairo.”

Mark Twain’s mother was born in my hometown. She was married in the front room of the big brick house at the corner of Fortune and Guardian. Mark Twain was conceived there. No, Samuel Clemens was conceived there. I think Mark Twain was conceived in San Francisco.

Doesn’t Mississippi mean “Father of Waters”? That’s a great name, in the original and in the translation and in the parlance.

You could make a career on that, I think. “Father of Waters.” If I’d made that up, I would have lorded it over all the other namers for the rest of my life. I would never have named another river.

So, past New Orleans, the first place I was tempted to stop (but didn’t), and into the Gulf of Mexico. The discharge of the father forced me all the way to the Gulf Stream, and it’s easy to cross an ocean when the currents are doing all the work.

The boat was showing a little bit of wear, though. I had to drink more wine and patch a few places with the corks.

It was around then, south of Iceland maybe, north of the Azores, that it occurred to me that I could have used all those bottles to make a boat instead of the corks. It might have been sturdier and I could probably have found some waterproof glue. I think you would have thought of that at the beginning.

But me, I was south of Iceland, very wet and cold, before I hit my forehead with the heel of my palm.

“Bottles!” I said.

The French, in naming rivers and cities and forests and Greek sandwich shops, have the advantage of being French speakers. I only know how to say “I don’t speak French” in French, but I say it with perfect pronunciation and a great deal of confidence. Nobody in France ever believed me. Sometimes even I didn’t believe me.

So, I don’t know what Seine means, and I’m actually a little bit unsure of the pronunciation. I kept my mouth shut through Le Havre, past Rouen.

France was the first place along the trip that other people noticed the boat. The French love boats. I know what you think about that kind of sweeping comment. It’s true though, in all it’s implications. All French people love all boats, even ones made out of corks. They might not like them, all of them, all of the time. But love, sure.

Do you remember when we were on a boat on the Seine together? Cold fog, ancient walls, tinny loudspeakers repeating everything in French, English, German, Japanese?

Do you remember the other boat? The Zodiac moored under the Pont au Double, lashed against the wall below Notre Dame?

A man stood in the boat, leaning back, pulling a bright blue nylon rope. People started watching him instead of the church. What was he pulling out of the water? What was the light rising up from below?

It was another man, a man in a red wetsuit, with yellow tanks strapped to his back, climbing the rope against the current.

Do you remember that?

They were still there.

They waved me over.

We have underground rivers in Kentucky, too. The Echo is famous, in the caves. If I’d thought of it at the time, I would have tried to coax the boat into the caves when I floated past them, tried to spot some eyeless fish.

In Paris, the underground river is the Biévre. It enters the Seine right across from Notre Dame. But then it leaves it again. It’s just a river crossing through another one, not joining it.

I told the man on the boat that I didn’t speak French, in French. He shrugged. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t speak French either. He just pointed at the diver in the water, so I slipped over the side, into the Seine. My boat seemed glad to be rid of me.

The diver took me by the hand and led me down. Down a very long way. He tied himself to a grating in the side of the stones that formed the channel there and showed me how he’d bent the bars wide enough for someone not wearing air tanks to slip through.

So I did. I slipped through.

Then up and out of the Seine, or it might have been the Bivre. I could have been in the secret river the whole time. Up and into a dank passage. I’ve been in dank passages in Paris before, but never any with so few bones.

No skulls and thighs stacked along the walls here, just a dark stone hallway. I followed it and followed it and came to a junction, a place to choose. Left or right.

You remember my sense of direction. You wouldn’t have been surprised to know that I knew where I was: at the center of the Ile de la Cité.

Left was north, then, and I knew that it would take me beneath the police headquarters and up to Sainte-Chapelle, which Louis IX built to store the organs of Jesus after he’d bought them from of one of the great salesmen of the thirteenth century. Right was south, to Notre Dame, where signs remind the pickpockets that God’s eyes are on them.

Notre Dame or Sainte-Chapelle. The lady or the heart.

I stood there.

I am standing there still.

Other than the signs saying that God is particularly aware of petty larceny there, I only remember one thing from inside Notre Dame.

You were so disgusted when we heard the woman with the Maine accent say, “They’re praying. I didn’t think this was a working church.”

There were jugglers outside. I didn’t think it was a working church either. I didn’t tell you that.

When we went to Sainte-Chapelle together, we didn’t go to look for the heart of Jesus. There was a concert, a half-dozen stringed instruments in a candlelit cavern of stained glass. Bach? I don’t remember.

What I remember was leaving, walking out of the cathedral and into the rain. The line was slow because we had to pass through checkpoints in the Justice Ministry, which surrounds the church. Gendarmes with Uzis below and gargoyles with scythes high above.

I tracked a stream of rainwater from the mouth of a gargoyle to the pavement. I leaned out, turned my head up, opened my mouth. I told you that I didn’t know what it tasted like. Like limestone, a little. I said limestone or ash, soot or smog.

You smiled and said, “It tastes like gargoyles.”

You said that from my description. You didn’t catch the rain on your tongue.

A long way to come to choose between places I’ve already been. A long way to come to choose anything at all.

I wonder if I can turn around.

I wonder if I can find my way back to the boat.

I wonder if it’s still there.

O

Trampoline
Bittersweet Creek by Christopher Rowe
“Sally Harpe”
Christopher Rowe interview