Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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RVIEW WITH LISA SHEA
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WINTER 1996-97
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COLUMBIA
A Journal of Literature and Art

Editor-in-Chief
LORI SODBRLIND
Executive Editor
JENNIFER LUCAS
Poetry Editors
JENNIFER FRANKLIN
ELIZABETH STEIN
Art Directors
REBECCA D'ALISE
AURORA WEST
Graphic Design
BRYANT PALMER
Managing Editor
GREGORY COWLES
Prose Editor
KEN FOSTER
Asst. Prose Editor
ELIZABETH HICKEY
Circulation Manager
KEVIN ROTH
Editorial Board
GREGORY DONOVAN, STEVE GLAZER, MARTHA GUILD, MYRONN HARDY,
DAVID SEMANKI, SAM SHORES, AMY SILNA, TRACY SMITH, AND RAEVUKOVICH.
Editor's note: This issue of COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART
presents the winners of our annual Winter Competition in poetry and prose. The
selection was made from an unprecedented volume of highly competitive sub-
missions. The work of prose winner Jason Brown and poetry winner Michelle
Mitchell-Foust appears in a special section. Poetry judge Linda Gregg's most recent
collection of poems, published in 1994 by Gray Wolf Press, is called Chosen By the
Lion. Prose judge A.M. Homes's latest novel, The End of Alice, was published by
Charles Scribner's Sons.
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART is a not-for-profit literary journal
publishing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by new and established writers. It is edited
and produced semiannually by the students of the Graduate Writing Division of
Columbia University School of the Arts and published at 404 Dodge Hall, Columbia
University, New York, NY, 10027. Annual subscriptions are available at $15.00.
Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
1 1996 COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART
Don't forget to drive with your high beams on.
—JAN MEISSNER

The Editors would like to thank those who made this issue possible.
For Financial Support:
JOHN L. BLAND
JACKSON BRYER
MORTIMER LEVITT
ELIZABETH OSBORNE
NICK SCHAFFZIN
SIRI VON REIS
JOANNE WOODWARD NEWMAN
For Advisement and Creative Support: ALICE QUINN
For Benefit Readings: MARY GAITSKILL AND DAVID LEHMAN
For Design Assistance: JOHN EMERSON
For Fundraising: MIKE MCGREGOR AND SOPHIE HOPKINS
Front cover courtesy of ALISON BECHDEL, from "DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR."
Cartoon by EDWARD KOREN reprinted with permission from THE NEW YORKER.
Table of Contents
Fiction
MICHAEL S. MANLEY
JAN MEISSNER
SHEILA KOHLER
ELIZABETH GRAVER
JOSH HARMON
SPECIAL SECTION
Translation
LlLIANA URSU
KOBO ABE
GWYNETH LEWIS
Poetry FROM THE EAST
ELIZABETH MACKLIN
A History of Broken Laws 8
Placedo Junction 15
On the Money 25
A Place Not There 141
Saved From the World 150
Ancient and Beautiful as the Mist
Diana's Shadow
Evening After Evening
Blues
From the Angel's Window
Unforgetting
Spring Circumstance
Way of the Stars
The Key to Mystery
Number IX
Heirophany
Comic Tunnel, Dialogue of Body and Soul
Hand
Whose coat is that jacket?
Whose hat is that cap?
The Secret Note You Were
39
40
40
4i
42
43
43
44
46
47
48
49
50
58
Handed by Lorca 70

ELIZABETH MACKLIN
SAMN STOCKWELL
DAVID LEHMAN
LESLEA NEWMAN
TERESE SVOBODA
WILLIAM LOGAN
JUDITH BAUMEL
CHARLES NORTH
SUSAN WHEELER
JEAN MONAHAN
MARIE HOWE
LAURIE SHECK
Poetry FROM THE WEST
LINDA BIERDS
KAY RYAN
JAMES REISS
NANCE VAN WINCKLE
KIM ADDONIZIO
DANIEL TOBIN
NIN ANDREWS
SCOTT C. CAIRNS
BETH GYLYS
NATALIE KUSZ
The Sadness of Not Knowing
Perihelion
When a Woman Loves a Man
The Return of Buddy
Still Life With Buddy
At the Castle
Thunderstorm
Slugs
Hot
As Moonlight Becomes You
Oldest Psalter
Sleeping Sister
The Concert
Late Morning
The First Gate
One of the Last Days
White Light
Black Night
The Harbor Boats
The Breaking-Aways
Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty
Weakness and Doubt
Failure
Drops in the Bucket
Lowland Level
Cutting Lentils
Prayer
At the Egyptian Exhibit
How You Lost Your Red Hat
Yahweh's Image
How I Was
After Bedtime
7 1
7 2
73
76
77
78
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
88
89
90
9i
93
95
106
108
no
in
112
"3
114
"5
116
117
118
119
120
NATALIE KUSZ Letter to David, My Father's Best Friend 121
Essay
TOM PERROTTA Bumping Into Klaus:
A Cold War Encounter 122
Art
an interview with curators
BRONWYN KEENAN and MEG LINTON
Comics and Cartoons
LESLIE STERNBERGH
JAMES ROMBERGER, MARGUERITE VAN COOK
ALISON BECHDEL
EDWARD KOREN
BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN
Interview
with novelist LISA SHEA and screenwriter JAMES BOSLEY 173
Winter Competition
MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST
JASON BROWN
97
164
166
168
170
172
Five Songs for a Psalmist 185
Halloween 189

MICHAEL S. MANLEY
A History of Broken Laws
Speeding
THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER, the three of us decide to drive up
to Chicago in Johnson's car. Johnson is hung over and refuses to
drive. He sits in the front seat with his eyes shut tight. MJ and I
put the top down, she gets in behind Johnson, and we're gone.
When we hit the Interstate, I keep the car in the left lane and pass
everything on the road. A trucker honks at MJ, her long, bare legs
propped up in the back seat. Johnson holds the sides of his head
and opens his eyes. "I'm giving up drinking," he says. "And I'm
going to take up jogging." I laugh at him. "No, really," he says. "I
feel miserable." MJ leans forward and coos "Poor baby," I think.
Johnson and I have been yelling over the wind, and whatever she
says she says directly into his ear. She reaches over the seat and
begins to rub his temples. He lays his head back. I stomp down
on the accelerator and MJ is thrown back, her black hair flowing
over the seat like a Jolly Roger flag. We rocket past RV's, semis and
a State Police station, punch-drunk from the sun and wind,
howling.
Theft
Johnson works as an orderly at St. Joe's. MJ is a maid at the
TraveLodge. I don't have a job, really, though my half of the six
hundred a month Johnson and I pay for rent does come out of
hard work. First, I invested in- a heavy-duty bolt cutter.
At night, when MJ and I go for walks around campus, she tells
me about her brother who plays AA baseball or her Scientologist
aunt who's living in a car, and I take notes. Her birthday is in
September. She does not like my bright yellow tee-shirt. She
thinks Johnson is a little boy, easily handled. "You're the best
listener I've ever met, Parker." I shrug. "No, really. Most guys
never just let you talk." She has been high twice in her life.
Drunk twice. The next time I go shopping for clothes, she wants
to go with me.
Bikes get abandoned. They get forgotten. MJ and I have a
running joke about which ones look good to steal. In the early
morning, I go back out. My bolt cutter cuts chains and cables like
paper. I am careful: one bike per week, and only machines I can
ride away on. The guy who sells shrimp out of a refrigerated truck
in parking lots around town gives me fifteen dollars a bike. He
tucks them behind bags of seafood and they're never seen again.
"My brother's thinking of leaving the game. It's not at all
what he thought it would be," MJ tells me. "One night they got
paid out of a van in the parking lot. Half the team got checks and
the rest got rolled coins and singles from the concessionaires' trays.
And I guess women with baseball player fetishes are pretty much
mythical. Hey, how about that yellow one over there? It's been
sitting there a couple of days." I point. That one? MJ grabs my
wrist, lifts my arm up to the streetlight. "Open your fist. My God,
Parker, you have perfect hands. I'm not kidding. They're positively
statuesque. I want to draw these hands sometime." Thank you, I
say. Will this be a nude session, or should I wear gloves? "Just don't
scar them up."
I turn the cash into bulk computer disks and copy pirated
software onto them with a disk duplicator that runs all night in my
bedroom. I print out a few hundred labels, give the package to
Amol, who ships them to his brothers in Saudi Arabia. Amol
cracks a new program, gives it to me with my stack of twenties.
MJ tells me how many towels, blankets, Bibles and rolls of
toilet paper disappear from the TraveLodge. Johnson tries to top

IO
her with broken locks on pill cabinets and a vanished hospital bed.
I tell them to trust no one.
Slander
I leave town for three days, and when I come back there are
two bottles of MJ's insulin in the refrigerator. Johnson comes in
from his afternoon jog. "Yeah," he says. "MJ's been staying here
the last couple nights." He raises his eyebrows. You bastard, I say
to him, though I can't keep the perverse smile off my face.
Johnson spreads himself face down on our couch. "You would not
believe the shit I've learned about her, Parker," he says into the
cushions. He rolls over. His eyes hold an expression of exhausted
wonder. "She likes to be tied up, man." Yeah, sure. "I'm not
kidding. And get this: she likes doing it outside, too. We had this
totally weird conversation at dinner last night." It's bullshit, I tell
him. She's just trying to get a rise out of him. She likes to tell
stories to do that. Johnson sits up and wipes the sweat off his face
with his shirt. "Man, I have confirmed the tied up part."
When MJ arrives later, I excuse myself and go to my room to
do my work. All night, whenever I need to go to the kitchen or
bathroom, I tiptoe down the hall past Johnson's room. Most of the
noise I know is in my head, and if I concentrate, if I'm quiet
enough, I won't be able to hear a thing.
Voyeurism
I walk into my bedroom one night and before I turn on the
lights I see a naked woman in a window across the street. It is
eleven o'clock, and I figure she's getting ready for bed. She walks
back and forth in front of the window for several minutes, her
breasts and bare shoulders perfectly visible. She has a fan running
in the window and I realize she must think that because she
cannot see through it from her side, no one can see through it
from the other side either. I focus on my own window, trying to
figure out why it would work the way it does and not the way she
expects, and by the time I think to look up again, she's turned out
the lights. For the next few nights at eleven o'clock, as Johnson
and MJ settle in next to each other on the couch to watch a movie
on TV, I retire to my room and watch the woman across the street.
One evening I watch her playwith a ferret, nuzzling its long, furry
body between her breasts, lifting it up to her face to talk to it. I
believe I have seen everything. A few nights later I see her and
another woman hold each other for several minutes before the
lights go out. I think for a moment I will tell Johnson about this,
but then I remember his claims about MJ, and I decide to keep this
to myself. One night when MJ and Johnson are over at her place,
a storm blows up. At eleven o'clock the woman across the street
is not home. Her window is dark. There is lightning, and for a
moment I see my own reflection in my window: short, dark,
slightly overweight. Johnson is tall and athletic and looks good
standing next to MJ. The thunder rolls and the disk duplicator
chatters in the dark behind me.
Vandalism
Two blocks away they're tearing down a row of houses. MJ
and I watched them rip away chunks of building with a huge, steel
claw on the end of a digging machine. Walls tore and bricks
crumbled, all of it sounding like a billion strands of dried spaghetti
breaking. They sprayed down the piles of debris with a fire hose.
They left two small brick houses standing, one of them with a
dozen leaded-glass windows. Salvageable. MJ thinks she can make
end tables out of them. Several times during our walk she stops
and models with her arms the complex arrangement of mannequin
pieces she'll need for the table legs.
At two in the morning I climb over the orange plastic fence
surrounding the demolition and jog across the mud and shattered
bricks to the shadows between the remaining houses. One window
is ajar, and with just a little prying with a crowbar, the wood frame
creaks away. I catch the heavy glass pane in one hand, somehow
balance it as I dodge the falling wood, and set the window in the
mud. I catch my breath, listen for cars. I put the window outside
the orange fence, lean it against a trash can, then head back for
another.
None of the other windows will swing open. I see then that
one corner of the house has already been knocked once with the

12
giant claw and the walls have shifted, jamming the windows tight.
The window I got isn't big enough to make a large table, and MJ
won't want to make just one end table. She already knows where
they'll go in her apartment. I kick the brick chips at my feet, cuss,
then swing the crowbar into the row ofwindows. Glass flies and
lead seams bend and break. If we can't have them, no one can. I
circle the house, giving each window five sharp bashes with the
crowbar. My skin is hot. My hands tingle from the impact. I bark
Shit! Fucker! Shit! with each swing, then run to the other house
and begin breaking its windows, too.
I am standing on the front porch when I see the police car
coming, a spotlight sweeping over the demolished side of the
street. I jump off and run behind the first house. The spotlight
flashes on my legs. I dive over the thick trunk of tree they've torn
down, land in a pile of branches. My hand scrapes against the
trunk and I feel warm blood well up on my knuckles. The crowbar
jabs my hip. I do not breathe, do not flinch. An ant crawls across
my face. I listen to the blood pound in my ears, watch the clouds
pass overhead, lit up by the city lights. I wait for the cops to find
me stupidly frozen behind this tree trunk, but they never come. I
count to three hundred, then poke my head up. I'm safe. I climb
back over the fence, find the windowpane and head toward home.
In an alleyway I stop under a lightpole and look the window
over. It has been spray-painted almost solid red. One glass square is
missing, two others are cracked. It's worthless. I tuck the window
under my arm like a large book, turn left instead of right at the
end of the alley. I walk to a nearby parking garage, carry the window
to the top level, stand at the edge and hurl the thing into the street.
It tumbles for two seconds, spinning slowly, like a giant nine of
diamonds flicked into the air, then lands flat on the center stripe.
A belly flop. A metallic clap. Glass scatters across both lanes. I think
what torture it would be to walk through it barefoot. It would
sting worse than my bleeding hand. The frame is a twisted thing.
No one sees this but me. I do not go home until almost sunrise.
Excessive Noise
MJ slams the door to Johnson's room, storms down the hall,
slams our front door as she leaves. They have been arguing for an
hour. She wants to go with him to his brother's wedding. He
wants to go alone. I know why: one of the bridesmaids is a highschool
girlfriend he still sees when he visits his parents. I wait
fifteen minutes. Johnson doesn't leave his room. I go outside and
walk down the block to the park bench where MJ is sitting. I sit
down next to her. Trouble in paradise? I say. "He can be such an
asshole," MJ says. "He says he's 'not ready' for me to meet his
parents." She has not been crying. I love her for that. I can smell
her sweat. I want to put my hands on her face. You ought to live
with him, I say. You think he's a jerk about this, you ought to go
grocery shopping with him. He likes crunchy peanut butter, for
Christ's sake. MJ laughs. She leans back. "You know, all he and I
do is watch movies, eat out and fuck." She stands up and brushes
the seat of her pants. "I'm going back in. Coming?" I shake my
head no and watch her walk back up the block. I sit and watch
traffic go by, the sky go orange with sunset, and wonder what role
it is that I have been assigned. I wonder if my face has started to
lose its features, or if I am fading into invisibility. I head back to
the apartment, climb the stairs to the third floor. At the door, I
hear sounds that have become as familiar to me as the purr of my
computer. Sounds I hear from down the hall almost every night.
I open the door. A flash of Johnson leaning over MJ on the couch,
of hands moving under clothing, and I slam the door closed again.
Murder
I am driving home after the seafood trucker pays me and I
stop at an abandoned feed mill near some railroad tracks. I drive
by it all the time. The building is boarded up and surrounded by
weeds as tall as I am. Spray-painted graffiti covers most of the
bricks. EVAN + JUDY COUGARS RULE JESUS SAVES I
look through a gap in the boards. Inside, the building is empty,
dusty and undisturbed. No one comes here. There are no other
buildings for at least a half-mile. This is how it works: while
Johnson is on his evening jog, I hit him with my car. I know just
the stretch of highway. I come at him from the other direction,
cross the center line and clip him with the front bumper. The look

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on his face is priceless; it's the look he had when he found the
moldy potato salad in the refrigerator, his tongue sticking out as
he says bleck. I tie him up in the back seat, bring him to this
abandoned building. "Burning Down the House" plays from his
tape player's headphones the entire way over. Thump him on the
head again if the car didn't kill him. Pour lime over his body, nail
the boards back in place. Take the tape player. I will have to
steal a car so mine isn't recognized, but the way the summer is
progressing, that's not a surprise. MJ will be frantic and I will have
to console her. I'll have to wait for one of the nights when he
doesn't go jogging until after dark. MJ will want to solve his
disappearance herself. Nancy Drew, bondage queen. I leave to go
home and feel my plans unraveling as I weave them.
Perjury
The message on our answering machine is from Donna, the
bridesmaid. She's coming to visit, taking Johnson up on his longstanding
offer of a place to sleep whenever she wants. The purr
she affects for that part of the message makes me want to laugh.
She will arrive tonight, at about midnight. I let the machine erase
the message. When Johnson comes home for lunch, he asks if
there were any calls for him. No, I say. While he is eating, he finally
asks me, "Parker, does it bother you I'm doing MJ? I know you
guys are friends and all." I shake my head. No, I'm OK with it.
No big deal.
JAN MEISSNER
Placedo Junction
WHERE WE LIVED, "Where to tonight?" didn't have many answers.
Home was a mud field, an oil camp where derricks were trees and
the miles between houses meant talk to your own self for someone
to talk to.
Mother said how many days you managed to get through sane
in that heat was a mark of how strong you were getting to be. Or
worn down.
Nothing had a shine in Placedo. Nothing but Earl's, that is, a
roadhouse whose neon made nighttime a darkness you needn't be
lonely because of.
Earl's unopened was dank and boarded and shuttered but
Earl's with the lights on was where you wanted to be. If you'd
never been farther than just up the road or done more than get
through a day, then "Earl's" blinking red in a circle of bloodcolored
gravel caused your heart to beat faster.
Pulling into Earl's meant Mother checked her lips in the
mirror on the back of the visor, said "Look at who's talking," when
Eugene told her it looked as if who she cared how she looked to
was some man other than that sweet-faced husband who'd driven
her there.

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Mother just laughed. She said slicked-back hair and python
boots so high in the heel my father had to stoop when he danced
took the How-do-I-look? prize.
They did like to dance, and I liked to watch them on a
Saturday night, Eugene looking bored and tight and Mother looking
dazed from how she had to wait for signs from Eugene s hands, my
father being a slow smooth dancer with a snakelike style that made
it seem his feet were hardly moving. But they were.
Mother wore slippers that had to be kicked off to dance in,
open-toed, low-vamped red things her younger sister Lona asked
to borrow and her older sister Martha called "sin shoes."
There wasn't much sin in Placedo. Martha said a woman was
a fool to be tempted, everyone watching to see if she was, when
she was, and by whom.
Earl's made it hard not to be. "That long-backed oil field
worker at the end of the bar," Lona said,"the one with a plain gold
band stuffed down in the bottom of his pocket and 'No place to
go but back home' in his eyes? The one who was lifting his glass
up and smiling at you? That oil field worker looked a whole lot
better than a book on a couch and a ceiling you knew every
corrugated inch of."
Lona said romance was just a handful of dimes, some cowboy
with just enough paycheck to buy you a beer, just enough style to
roll you a smoke and light it on the side of his thumb, a rodeo rider
in a hand-tooled belt that read "Sonny," on his way up to Austin
who wanted to know what a sweet thing like you could be doing
in a bad place like Earl's.
It wasn't really that bad. Smoke and drink and the perfume of
women with men they didn't belong with made Earl's offlimits to
some and a magnet to others. Mother said the women looked
lovely because of how wanted they were hoping to be and the
men looked better than they usually did.
Martha didn't buy it. She said nights you reached out and
steadied yourself at the bar, nights Earl helped you into your truck
and pointed which direction your home was, added your name to
that pact Earl had signed with the devil when he opened a road-
house. She said Mother and Eugene shouldn't take their daughter
to a place where the stories-swere lies and the smoke wasn't only
tobacco.
Eugene and Mother got angry. Eugene said Earl was a friend
who gave a man credit when he didn't have any money and held
out a Zippo for a woman when nobody noticed that she needed
a light. Mother said taking her daughter to Earl's was a damned
sight better than leaving her alone with a dog on a chain for a
friend and protection. She said, "Thank God for something at the
end of the day, even if all that something happens to be is a roadhouse
called Earl's."
Martha took it back. She had to since all that she had in this
life was her family. Mother said Martha unloved was a genuine
waste but Lona unloved was just one more roughneck with
cellophane flowers and a box full of candy and a grin on his face
delayed by an engine burned out from how fast he'd been driving
there to give her those things.
Long bare legs hiked up on the dash of a truck pulled over in
the dark—you could make a bet were Lona's. And somebody's
husband was with her. Or a boy raised to be sinless who wasn't
anymore. No one was not good enough. Mother said if Lona
couldn't love you then nobody could. "All it takes is a match held
out to her Lucky. A Stetson lifted up above a genuine smile."
On a bad day, Lona said women love men and men let them.
Good days, close in the evening and kind in the morning, a goodbye
kiss she wouldn't be able to say wasn't love was enough.
It had to be enough. Mother said you never got used to no
sound in Placedo, to no one knocking on your door but a stranger,
the driver of a car left idling who was looking for some place
you'd never heard of, a stranger you'd gladly give a glass of iced tea
to and directions, if you could, and a sandwich and a chair in the
shade and your own life story, if that stranger was willing to listen.
In the place where we lived, small pleasures were worth what
in some other place greater pleasures would have been. Some big
place like Houston. Or Nuevo Laredo.
My father used to go to Nuevo Laredo. But he didn't go by
the time that I knew him. And if he did, he wouldn't take his wife

18
or his daughter. He said north of the border was always much
safer than south. Over the border meant you had to watch what
you ate and take care where you ate it if a hard rubber tube down
your throat and a case of the shakes and the sweats on a narrow
white cot in the critical ward at the Holy Mary convent clinic
wasn't quite your notion of a good time night on the town.
But if ptomaine didn't matter, if sober was something you
weren't able to recall what it felt like to be and your taste buds
were fried from the smoke and the weed and the worms at the
bottom of too many bottles ofTomo Tequila, then my father
had a long list of late-night places he said he'd be pleased to
recommend—and you could say that he sent you—dives with a
room overhead you could rent for an hour—for whatever
reason—back street cantinas where the man behind the bar cut
first class anjeo with grain and spiced his tamales so a patron never
guessed there was greyhound mixed with the beef.
Eugene said, that dog you laid down the bulk of your paycheck
on just a few weeks ago at the dog track, that one-time
first-place runner that had given up sprinting for loping on
arthritic haunches might well be the meat of a red-hot tamale you
were peeling the corn husk back on—that is, if you ate in those
places Eugene recommended.
Higher aspirations in Nuevo Laredo were a gold tipped
Havana boated over from Cuba and a shot of Jalisco mescal from
the wild blue agave to wash down a plate of frijoles borrachos.
But you had to have luck with frijoles borrachos. Not much
business made a cantina owner cut costs, made a cook scrape back
in the pot what another man left in his plate, some cowboy with
serious appetite loss and loose gray skin and a cough he hadn't
been able to kick so that whoever bought his portion of chili and
beans got a little bit more than he paid for. Or more than a little.
Eugene said not even Jesus in fourteen carat on a chain around
your neck, not even the foot of a rabbit you'd tied to the band of
your Stetson made a difference when things stopped going your
way in Nuevo Laredo.
Whether it was dog or it was King Ranch grain-fed beef in
your enchiladas mole depended on whether the run you were on
was a good one or not. Sandbagged cold in an alley with your
pockets turned out and yo-etr belt and boots stripped off meant
luck wasn't yours anymore. But the nails of a perfumed cantina
dancer sunk into the curve of your spine as she whispered,
"Enamorado," meant you had just enough luck left to make it
back over the Cordova Bridge and stay on that side of the Rio
Grande del Norte where nothing bad happened.
Eugene said you had to think real hard before crossing that
border again, certified King Ranch steak being bound to be
better than a greyhound tamale you only had a fifty-fifty chance
of surviving.
Earl's of Placedo was safer, he said, people you'd known all
your life and beer that was bottled and plates of those ribs Earl
swore up and down on a bible were cut from the side of a top
grade longhorn he guaranteed he knew who the breeder of was,
ribs in a sauce that was sweeter or hotter depending on how things
were going with Earl.
Hard times, Earl dumped in Tabasco. Good times, he dumped
in molasses so if you liked it hot, you might find yourself wishing
some small bit of trouble would land on his doorstep. Not much.
Just a little, since Earl in a funk that he couldn't pull out of was
something you didn't want to see. Not if you'd already seen it.
Not if you'd been around when his wife ran off with his partner
and all of his Guadeloupe National savings.
Earl in the red, Earl in debt to the Lone Star brewery and
Southwest Power and Light and the ranch those prime slabs of rib
were trucked down from meant Earl's, as you knew it, was over,
for a time, the juke box strapped to the back of a repossess truck
and the lights turned off when you got there.
Earl said the only way out of a mess like the mess he was in
was through hard work and patience and acts of contrition he
made himself say, Earl being Placedo's only real Catholic, one with
no church to go to since what we had for a church was whatever
preacher on the Gulf Coast Evangelist circuit might set up a tent
in a field and stay until cash in the donation basket had piled high
enough to move on.

All the Catholics that Earl ever talked to were crawlers.
Mother explained, when I asked her, that a crawler was a man on
his knees on his way down south to a pilgrimage church that he
had to pass through Placedo to get to, a Mexican mostly, making
his way to a black ash Madonna that was rumored to sew up your
wounds, if you dropped a drop of the blood from your knees on
the hem of her skirt, a hand-embroidered robe that was stiff as a
board from how much blood there was on it.
Earl took a bucket of water and sprinkled the crawler to cool
him, walked by his side for a bit of the way, asking questions if the
crawler spoke English, crossing himself if he didn't.
Mother said that was a sight. Earl Bodel and a crawler with a
two-by-four cross tied onto his back. She said it looked frcm a
distance like Earl was out walking his dog so if you'd been driving
that interstate road we were on, and you'd come across Earl and a
crawler, you probably would have taken your foot off the pedal,
taken your sunglasses off and turned your head around to see what
the hell what you'd seen really was.
Earl doing his best to get back on his feet was the roadhouse
locked and pads tied onto his knees, not for a crawl but for an all
night burning of candles he told us were blessed by a Monterrey
Padre and sent through the mails, candles with saints painted on
them, bone-thin Sebastions that were run through with arrows,
and a brown-skinned Mary with rhinestone tears glued onto her
cheeks that had streamed one evening, had rolled, Earl swore, in a
copious way, down the pale white beeswax stain of her skin, a sign,
according to Earl, that God wanted Earl's back open. Right away.
To make people happy.
Next day, Earl took a loan out and opened for business.
Mother said a sign like that must have had a little something
to do with the Tomo Tequila, but Eugene said whatever lifted Earl
Bodel from the dumps was okay by him since the lights turned out
when you pulled up in front meant no place to go and no one to
go there with but those with a surname the same as your own.
Nights when Earl's wasn't open, our family had to drive back
home and make a party out of just who we were, my mother Leda
Marie and my father Eugene, me, and Aunt Martha and Lona.
It wasn't much of a party. My father, pitching a ball to
himself in the dark, said a "Brother-in-law argund the place
wouldn't cause any pain—some fellow a fellow could talk to while
Mother was talking with Martha and Lona, whispering in a swing
on the porch so a husband felt lonely and a daughter had to sit
very close if she wanted to hear all the gossip.
You had to scrounge for your gossip in Placedo Junction.
Small things happened. Mother said awful was better than
nothing at all. Third-hand got you through an evening, something
someone in some other town you'd never even been to was said
to have done.
The rest of Placedo had Lona to gossip about.
Martha said, "What would they do without Lona?"
Mother said not even half of those circulating stories had a
basis in fact.
Lona was Baby to Mother and Martha. But Eugene said Lona
wasn't getting any younger.
"Come forty or fifty," he said, "that face, on its way between
lovely and gone, won't look quite as good in the flame of a Zippo.
Over the hill means out of the picture, means no one can see you.
Over the hill means you better find yourself some man to hold
onto, a good man, not one of those roughnecks you like to laugh
in the low light of Earl's with."
Lona said good was a hard thing to find in Placedo.
Eugene had a damned fine idea where to look, he told her. If
she cared to.
"I'll bet he means Earl's," Mother said. "But behind, not in
front of the bar."
Lona just laughed. "Leg to leg on a stool at that bar," she said,
"is a small-time thrill that takes a woman's mind off how lonely
her life would have been without someplace like it. But who'd
•want to live there? Earl's is a roadhouse you go to that you can
come back from. Not stay in. If a woman married Earl, she'd
know every inch of Earl's ceiling. Then where would she go to
forget it?"
Eugene said Earl Bodel needed someone to help get his spirits
back up, and word had it that a woman he knew named Lona was

in charge of the lifted-up-spirits concession in Placedo Texas. At
least among the male population.
Lona kept right on brushing and braiding my hair. She told
Eugene that Earl wasn't really her type.
Eugene didn't know there was such a thing, he said, a fellow
who wasn't her type.
My aunt's aim wasn't good and she missed Eugene with the
brush when she threw it. But he reached out and caught it in the
mitt on his hand so that Lona had to chase him down to get it
back, trip him and land on top of his stretched out body and
pound him, laughing, and screaming.
Martha shook her head, She said neighbors, if there'd been
any neighbors to hear us, would have called us heathens for the
sound of how raucous we were.
Mother just waited it out. She thought nothing of it. She was
used to her sister going after her husband, pinning him down or
backing him up against a wall so that just to get away my father
had to twist Lona's arm behind her back until she begged him for
mercy, until finally, she cried.
That was all that she wanted. Lona had to cross that line now
and then between not quite enough and a good deal too much,
Mother said. After that she was fine, except for how heavy the
breathing she did was.
Eugene didn't go back to pitching a ball to himself. My father
hooked the heel of his boot on the back of Mother's chair and
rested his hands on her shoulders. Mother said, "What is it,
honey?" since Eugene hardly ever came close on a night when the
sisters were talking.
But he didn't say anything. Nobody did. We all just sat in the
dark with the yard lights off, listening to the pumps in the field
until Martha told Lona it was time to go home and let the
Banderas side of the family grab a little shut-eye.
Eugene checked the air in Marthas tires and Mother said,
"Lock all the doors. Don't forget to drive with your high beams
on. Watch out for Lona."
There wasn't any danger. Eugene said, "Nothing to fear" was
the alternate side of the "Nothing to do" coin.
After the sisters were gone, it was quiet, so a girl in her bed
got to hear her mother and-father in a swing on the porch say
things she might not have heard if they'd known their daughter
wasn't sleeping.
Mother told Eugene that Martha had a hard on for Earl.
When Eugene said, "Bull," Mother swore on the head of her
daughter. She'd watched it develop, she said, the blush when Earl's
name was brought into the story, how tongue-tied she was when
she saw him. But Earl wasn't looking at Martha since he was too
busy looking at Lona, watching to see whether Lona might want
anything, a dusted off seat at the bar, or a beer, or a light for a link
in the chain of her Luckies. Mother said why Earl couldn't see
Martha was a mystery that she couldn't fathom.
Eugene said it wasn't a mystery. All Mother had to do was
take a look at the two of her sisters.
That's when Mother said lovely doesn't matter. And ugly
doesn't either. She said, "One arm withered makes the other arm
stronger."
Eugene didn't know about that, he said, but one thing he did
know. And that was that Martha in a union with Earl was a heartstopping
thought. Sun tea. Limeaid. No smoking and the neon
sign and the lights turned out before nine so that nowhere to go
would be all she wrote in a town where a nicotine fit was diversion
and a man had to make something up just to say something
happened.
What he suggested, he said, if Mother wanted life to go on as
she knew it, was just to forget about sisters and give her husband
that kiss he'd been wanting all night.
But she wouldn't do it. She said she had Eugene, and Lona
had cowboys, but Martha needed someone to be with on nights
when a guard dog asleep on the porch of a house you passed in
the dark made you feel it was you locked out and not the
neighbors locked in.
Martha, growing up beside Leda and Lona, was an unfair
thing, Mother said. Boy after long-backed fired-up boy pulled up
to the yard with a rubber in his wallet he was praying was all that
would stand between him and one of Martha's two sisters. Mother

said all Martha got on those nights was a pat on the back and a
"How you doing, Martha," but Leda and Lona, in the cab of a
truck with the engine turned off and the soft white light of a
Placedo moon up above, got to see what a tattooed snake looked
like that could strike when a boy flexed the muscle in an arm he
had dared them to put their sweet little fingertips on.
Eugene said he never had heard about the boys with the
snakes on their arms and why hadn't Mother told him that story.
She said, "Hush, Eugene." She said if he'd help to fix things
up between Martha and Earl, she'd give him that kiss he'd been
wanting.
I couldn't hear anymore after that, except the creak of the
swing on the porch and what sounded like Eugene's boots coming
off, a rustle and a whisper that might have been nothing but a
breeze just over from the coast making noise in the branches of a
chinaberry tree.
Everything was quiet, and dark where we were, so if you'd
been driving that interstate oil field access road, and you'd caught
our house in the beam of your headlights, you might not have
known we were there. You probably would have kept on driving.
Right past us. Like most people did. North. Up to Houston. Or
south. To Nuevo Laredo.
SHEILA KOHLER
On the Money
THE WIFE SAYS, "I don't want to discuss it."
The husband says, "But you said you would. You promised.
You have to."
The wife says, "I told you I don't want to talk about it. It's my
money, after all. I'll do what I think best."
The wife lifts her glass, lets the stewardess fill it with
champagne, helps herself to another salmon canape. The husband
refuses the champagne and canapes. He says to the wife, "Alcohol
is not good for jet lag."
The wife says, "Oh, for God's sake, just relax and enjoy
yourself for once, can't you?"
He shakes his head, says, "You have to honor a promise. We
agreed on the sum, didn't we?"
The wife says, "I don't have to do exactly what we agreed to.
I have thought it over since then. A person can change her mind.
It's just too much. It's a ridiculous amount of money. Besides, I
didn't realize those lawyers would take so much of it, and that
dreadful real estate man, and the taxes. I have never given that
much to anyone. Not even my children."
The husband says, "Well, give some money to your children. I
think that you should give more to your children. Why don't you?"

The wife says, "Oh, shut up, won't you," pushes her seat back,
draws the grey duvet up and over her chest, and pulls her mask
down to cage her eyes.
She spots the caretakers walking through the crowd at the
airport to greet them. They seem smaller than she remembers
them. Gianna is wearing a loose cream sweater. Michelino looks
diminutive, like his name, in well-pressed pleated brown pants and
a pink cotton shirt. They have the elegance of people who live
beside the elegant, dress as the elegant do, but who are not,
ultimately, elegant. The wife thinks the caretakers look young, or
anyway younger than she or her husband, but then, she reminds
herself, the caretakers are younger. She remembers them bringing
out their album and showing her their wedding photos during a
dinner at their house. They shake hands with her respectfully. The
caretakers inquire about the trip. The husband and wife say how
they are pleased to have arrived. Michelino says, "I was afraid you
would never come back."
"But we promised," the wife says, and Michelino lowers his
respectful gaze and looks embarrassed.
They all walk outside into the warm soft air. The wife takes
a big breath. There is that familiar smell of some sweet herb she
has never been able to identify.
In the car the husband sits in front with Michelino, the wife
in back with Gianna. The caretakers offer lunch, their car, their
home. The wife says no, they prefer the hotel, which is in town,
so that they will not need a car. They are here for such a short stay,
she says, and they have business in the town. They must attend to
it immediately, so that they cannot make lunch. They have to go
to the bank, before it closes. Besides, they have eaten so much on
the plane. They will see the caretakers that evening for dinner,
when they have accomplished their business.
There is a respectful silence in the car. The wife looks out the
window. On one side there is the jagged coast line, the dark rocks,
the smooth sea, the glitter blurred by a faint haze, on the other, the
fields of wild juniper, the yellow flowers glistening in the gold
autumnal light. Every year she has come back here, first with one
husband and her children, and now with this one. She has been surprised
each time to find it more beautiful than she remembered it.
The wife asks the caretakers about the German couple who
bought their villa. Gianna raises her hand and puts the tips of her
fingers together like a money bag in the familiar gesture all Italians
use even when talking on the telephone. She frowns and says, "I
don't understand why they let us go. First Michelino and then me."
"Perhaps they did not want anyone full-time," the wife says.
Gianna says, "It's not as though they lacked for money."
"That's true," the wife says and thinks of how the Germans
paid in cash.
Gianna says, "They just wanted their own people, I suppose."
The wife sighs and shakes her head. Gianna begins to tell the
wife about the changes the Germans have made to the villa, but
the wife lifts a hand and says, "Don't tell me. I don't want to hear,"
and shuts her eyes.
The bank director has very blue eyes, thick black lashes, and
an intense stare. He smiles at the wife through the glass door. He
has replaced the director she remembers. He opens the door for
her, and asks if her husband would like to join them, glancing at
him pacing up and down across the green marble floor in the dark
hall. The wife says quickly, "No, no, it's not necessary."
The director says, "I see," and ushers the wife into a small,
sound-proof room with orange walls. She sits down. He sits
opposite her behind the big wooden desk. "What can I do for
you?" he asks. She leans forward in her chair and says in a low
voice, "I would like half the money in lire and the other half in
travellers' cheques."
He nods and spreads his fingers. "As you like, Signora." He
makes a call and goes out of the room for a moment. He comes
back with a pile of Italian notes and the cheques in a silver plastic
folder. He says, "I thought five hundreds would be easier for you
to sign." She nods her head and signs the cheques fast, making her
signature as short as possible. He asks if she would like him to
count the notes. She nods. He starts to count, counting fast in
Italian. She loses count.
27

At her request he puts the bills in a brown paper envelope and
seals it. She puts the envelope and the travellers' cheques in a
pocket of her handbag.
When she walks out of the windowless room, her husband
emerges from the shadows. He walks with the quick impatient
steps of the doctor who has little time. He, too, always surprises
her when she sees him after even a short absence. She never
remembers how youthful he looks, with the smooth cream skin,
the light freckles she associates with his race, which has always
seemed to her both familiar and exotic. Sometimes his skin looks
so smooth she thinks it looks like a mask. He is not tall but slim
with a thick head of dark hair, a nose she thinks of as aquiline and
soft, dark, rather close-set eyes. He smiles a crooked smile and
inquires, "Done?"
"Done," she says, and they walk out onto the piazza, arm in
arm. He squeezes her arm and says, "Good for you."
The sun does not have the strength of summer sun; there is a
soft haze in the air, but the leaves of the olive trees are filled with
gold light. A slight breeze nags at the hem of her dress. She kisses
the husband on his smooth cheek. She says, "Let's just have a look
at the shops, for a minute, and then we'll take a picnic in the
launch to the beach."
The husband says, "The shops can wait until later this afternoon.
We ought to check into the hotel now and put all this money
away. It's not safe to walk around with so much."
She asks the hotel manager if she might put something in the
safe. He, too, says, "Of course, Signora," and ushers her into a small
room with a big blue bowl filled with white lilies. She can smell
their strong, slightly cloying odor.
Her husband waits in the lobby with the luggage while the
hotel manager opens the safe for her and takes out the box. The
wife puts the lire in the box and takes the key. She keeps the
travellers' cheques in her handbag.
The wife looks around their big white-washed room. She
admires the painted iron bedstead, the armchair covered in bright
yellow linen and the embroidered cotton framed on the walls. She
walks out onto the veranda into the sunlight and gazes at the pool
below, which is shadowed by palms, purple bougainvillea, and pink
and white oleander. She says, "It's lovely, so lovely here, isn't it?"
The husband says, "You don/t miss the house at all, do you?"
The wife shakes her head. "No, I don't, actually. Funny isn't
it? I have always preferred hotels, anyway. You don't have to make
your bed," she says. She picks up her handbag with the travellers'
cheques, opens and closes the drawers of the dresser and the
cupboard doors. There is nothing that locks. She hunts in her
handbag for a pen. She says, "I ought to write a postcard. Why
don't you wait for me downstairs?"
The husband says, "Write the postcard later. We'll miss the
boat."
The wife puts the handbag on the yellow chair by the door
and slips on her navy blue swimsuit, her new light blue towelling
shorts, and her expensive, gaily-colored, high-heeled sandals. She
looks at her slim brown legs in the mirror, ties back her blond hair,
and rubs cream into the lines of her upper lip.
The husband watches her and says, "I am glad you are happy."
He picks up the key to the room and the basket with the food for
the picnic. The wife picks up her handbag. The husband says,
"Leave your handbag here. You won't need it on the beach."
The wife smiles nervously and says, "Oh, I think I'll just take
it along with me."
The husband says, "All right, then give it to me," and puts the
handbag into the basket with the key to the safe and the bottled
water and the prosciutto sandwiches for the picnic. The wife takes
the basket from her husband and slings it over her shoulder.
They walk across the wide piazza and down the steps to the
pier where the small motor launch is waiting in the calm, clear
water. The boat-driver wears starched white shorts and a white
shirt and clean white shoes. He smiles at them. He has a
mustache and a healthy, reddish face. He takes the wife's hand to
help her into the launch. She steps unsteadily into it in her high
heels. She turns to take the basket from the husband who passes
it precariously, she thinks, over the water to her. She sways and
29

then sits down, clutching the basket to her chest. The husband and
wife sit closely, side by side, as the launch moves out slowly
through deep blue water. The spray rises in the air. The rocks
glisten. The low scrub glints, grey-green, spotted with yellow
juniper in the mellow autumn light. The wife says, "This is such
fun." She rises and stands with the basket slung over her shoulder,
next to the boat-driver. The husband takes the basket from her and
holds it on his lap. The wife speaks to the boat-driver in Italian:
"What beautiful weather. October is the best time of year here."
The boat-driver asks, "You are English, I suppose, and your
husband is—an American?"
"Yes, an American," the wife replies.
He asks, "Is this your first time here?"
The wife says, "Oh, no. I have been coming here for years. I
used to have a villa, here, but I sold it last year."
The boat-driver says, "You don't have any of the headaches in
a hotel."
The wife says, "Absolutely. I was tied to the villa. There was
always something I had to do to keep it up. I had to pay caretakers
all year round."
The boat-driver opens the throttle and says, "This is more
amusing." The spray rises in the air as the launch speeds through
the water and bumps over the wide white wake of another boat.
The water splashes the wife's face. She laughs and licks the salt
from her lips. Her husband says, "Be careful, darling." The wife
sits down beside him and puts her hand on the basket.
There is a young English couple with a baby in the launch, as
well as an older woman from Texas who films the rocky coast line,
talking into the microphone on her camera. The young
Englishwoman wears a transparent black robe and blood-red
lipstick. She holds her boy on her lap and claps his hands together
as they bump over the swell; he laughs. The Englishwoman says,
"I hear there was a kidnapping here last year."
The wife says, "Yes, a little boy was kidnapped."
The husband says, "Terrible business. The kidnappers held
him for months and months. They even cut off his ear and sent it
to the parents to extort ransom, before finally releasing him."
The Englishwoman clutches the baby to her chest.
The Texan leans across t© tell the wife that she has traveled
widely through Europe and Asia and Africa. She has seen Victoria
Falls. She has seen so many places she cannot keep them straight.
When everyone gets out of the boat and walks onto the white
sand of the small crescent beach, fringed with wild grasses, she
says, "What water is this? Is this the Adriatic or the Atlantic or
what?" The boat-driver says politely, "This is the Mediterranean,
Signora."
Apart from the Texan, the young English couple with the
baby, and a man who sleeps, or seems to sleep, on a deckchair in
the sun, they are the only people on the beach. The boat-driver
pulls out the deck chairs so that they face the sun and retreats to
the shade of a small cane hut up the hill, where he prepares his
lunch. The wife can smell the ragu. It makes her suddenly hungry.
She suggests they eat their prosciutto sandwiches, but the husband
says he is not hungry yet.
The sun is warm, but there is an occasional cloud that passes
and casts a shadow over the beach. The wife stretches out in her
deck chair and takes out a book from her basket. She sighs, "This
is the life." She watches the husband walking fast along the edge
of the languid sea. It is very quiet: only the slight lapping of
waves—hardly waves, little ripples—can be heard and the faint
stirring of the breeze in the long grasses.
The wife slips her finger into her handbag and feels for the
thick wad of travellers' cheques. For a moment she thinks they are
not there. She has not even taken the time to mark down the
serial numbers. Then she finds them. She feels the sun go behind
a cloud and looks up at her husband, whose shadow has fallen
onto her. He says, "Why don't we take a run before we eat—and
think of dinner tonight!"
The wife says, "What about our things? We can't just leave
them here." The husband smiles and shakes his head at her.
He says, "Of course we can. No one is going to touch our
things."

"Well, you never know for sure," the wife says and looks along
the beach at the young couple playing with their baby and the
sleeping man. The Texan has already moved on, taken the boat
back to the hotel. The wife pulls on her running shoes, and when
her husband is not looking, quickly slips the travellers' cheques out
of the handbag and puts them in the pocket of her towelling
shorts. The pocket is not quite large enough for them. She covers
them with her hand, smiles at the husband, and begins to walk up
the hill. He runs ahead of her along the steep white dust path that
leads up into the scrub-covered hills. She follows, running along
the path in the sun. She sweats and finds it difficult to run with
her hand on her pocket. She lets it go, now and then checking to
see if the money is still there. She stops a moment and tries
bending the cheques to fit them better into the pocket but is afraid
of damaging them. She thinks of pushing them down the front of
her bathing suit but fears the ink may run.
At the top of the hill she looks down at another small white
beach below. The water is completely transparent, a pale turquoise
at the edge, and she can see the white sand and the even sweep of
the beach like the smooth arc of a bow. Not a breath stirs, not a
leaf moves. No one is in sight; she could be the first person taking
possession of the place. She is very hot now and sweating heavily.
She runs down the hill to the deserted beach. She takes off the
shorts and leaves them on a rock, plunging into the cool water. It
is very salty and buoyant. She swims out, turning onto her back
from time to time to keep the shorts in view, then strikes out for
the horizon. When she comes back to the beach, she finds her
husband there, waiting for her in the shade of a pine tree. Beside
him lie her shorts with the cheques.
For a moment the wife thinks the sun has simply gone behind
a cloud. Then she realizes it has sunk behind the hills. Under the
arcades the husband and wife walk arm and arm in the gathering
gloom. The day has ended early, still and calm. There is not a
breath of wind. They hear the echo of their footsteps on the stone.
In the dim light the wife notices certain cracks in the whitewashed
walls, and the colors of the paint take on a fake glow. At this season
the place looks what it is, a recent development, ephemeral, in a
perdurable land. They pass the Texan who walks by with her
camera around her neck.--?She waves gaily to them and says loudly,
"I am seventy-two, but I am still having fun."
The shops are garishly lit under the arcades and filled with
expensive goods. The wife says, "You should at least buy yourself
some shoes."
"No, no, I have enough shoes," the husband replies.
The wife sees an expensive black sweater, tailored at the waist;
a bright red scarf, strewn with flowers; a tie with a pattern of blue
boats bobbing on the sea; soft leather shoes in black and blue. She
wants everything she sees. She says to the husband, "Meet me
back at the hotel in an hour. I am going to wander around a bit
on my own." She buys everything she has seen, paying with some
of the travellers' cheques. When she arrives back in her room, she
slips everything except the tie into her suitcase. When her husband
emerges from the shower she gives it to him.
"I'll wear it for the dinner," he says, smiling.
Gianna says, "The glasses are from the villa, Signora. You see
we only use them on special occasions." There are blue wine glasses
from the villa, bottles of white wine, frosted with cold, the starched
white tablecloth, and pink carnations and orange lilies as a center
piece. The wife thinks the colors of the flowers clash but murmurs
how festive the table looks. She sees four places set and asks about
the caretakers' child. Gianna says they have sent her to her cousins
for the night. "An aperitivo," Michelino says.
They sit on the veranda in wicker chairs and stare at the lurid
glare of the orange moon on the dark water, and the distant lights
of the town stirring the thick dark. The wife clutches her handbag
with the bills on her lap. The husband smiles and makes desperate
attempts to speak Italian. The wife sees he is trying to put the
caretakers at ease. She recalls his telling her how uneasy he had
been made to feel as a boy because of his race.
Michelino brings out a tray with tall drinks of something
orange with cherries and mint.
The caretakers speak to one another in local dialect which
neither the wife nor the husband understand.

34
They all drink. The wife's head spins. She asks where the
caretakers' daughter is at school this year. Gianna tells them they
have put the child in an expensive private school to study languages.
"Languages are essential," Gianna says. The wife, who speaks several,
wants to say that languages are no guarantee of success, but instead
nods politely and tells the couple how expensive private school is
in America. She mentions a sum. The caretakers gape.
The wife asks how well the child does at her new school.
Gianna shakes her head and says that she is not stupid, but that she
does not like to study. They do everything they can for her, but
she is never happy. All she wants is to go out with boys. The wife
wants to tell Gianna that she is wasting her money on a child who
is obviously slow and in the wife's opinion spoiled, but she nods
and smiles understandingly, and says all teenagers are the same.
She excuses herself and retreats to the bathroom, clutching her
handbag.
It seems to the wife that the small bathroom has been retiled,
and a shower installed. She lowers the top of the toilet, sits down,
and tears open the long fat brown paper envelope with the notes.
She slips out a thousand note from the others and pushes it into
the pocket of her handbag. No need to exaggerate, she thinks, and
who is to know, after all? She decides to take out another and
pushes that, too, into the side pocket of her handbag. She thinks
of the lovely leather suitcase in the window of the expensive shop
on the piazza and slips out another note.
She rises and goes back to the dinner table.
Gianna is now serving from a heaped dish of risotto. There
are pieces of lobster, prawns, octopi, squid and many other types of
fish in the rice. The wife says, "This looks delicious." Gianna tells
the wife the risotto was cooked in champagne. Michelino fills
the wife's glass with the dry cold local white wine. The wife says
to the caretakers, as she does every year, "You should open a
restaurant."
The husband is still smiling and struggling to speak Italian, but
it sounds increasingly like Spanish, and the caretakers do not understand
what he is trying to say. "What are you trying to say?" the wife
asks the husband in English, but he continues in Italian. Eventually
it becomes apparent that he is talking about the wife's children, a
subject about which the caretakers always politely inquire.
"Excuse me," the wife says, and laughs, "it must be the •wine."
She rises again, walks around the table with the white cloth and
the blue glasses, and slips into the small bathroom. She pulls out a
few more notes. The brown paper packet is beginning to feel
rather light.
Gianna staggers in with a heavy white platter of baked fish
cooked in paper and stuffed with herbs and surrounded by lemons
and parsley sprigs. She serves the husband and wife abundantly
from the tender white flesh. "That's far too much," the wife says.
"No, no it is very light," Gianna insists. The local porcetto follows
the fish. The baby pig has been roasted in rosemary to a crisp
golden brown. "Oh, I can't possibly eat all of that," the -wife
protests, as Gianna serves her a large and tender portion. Sweating,
going in and out of the kitchen to bring clean plates, more knives
and forks, Gianna now offers a salad of tender green leaves and
radicchio. The dessert is a type of local cheese served on paperthin
bread and smothered with honey. Michelino refills the glasses.
He insists on serving a strong liqueur that makes the wife choke
and brings tears to her eyes.
The husband is attempting to convey his interest for the
people of the island, the wife can see. He brings up the subject of
the little boy's kidnapping the previous summer. He asks how the
boy is faring. Gianna says, "The father wrote a book about the
kidnapping and made a lot of money."
Michelino says, "Jewish people, of course."
Gianna glances furtively at the husband and says, "I am not
sure he was Jewish, Michelino. He might have been an Arab, is it
not true?"
Michelino shakes his head, "No, no, he was definitely
Jewish. They are all like that. Made a fortune out of his own
child's kidnapping."
The wife, too, glances at the husband to see if he had
understood, but he goes on smiling. He has not understood, she
is reasonably certain. The wife rises and retreats to the bathroom
and removes a few more notes from the envelope.

Now the husband and wife rise, light-headed, from the table.
The wife holds herself erect with difficulty, choosing her words
carefully. "We can never repay you for what you did for us over
all these years, but we wish to give you a token of our esteem,"
and she slips the thin brown paper packet under a vase on the
mantelpiece. The caretakers smile and blush and look down at the
floor and attempt to mumble their thanks.
Outside the husband says, "You did the right thing darling.
They are good people. They deserved every bit of it."
TRANSLATION
Translation is a form of travel.
—GWYNETH LEWIS

Liliana Ursu, a native of Bucarest, produces a weekly literary
program for Romanian National Radio. She has published six
books of poetry and a book of short stories. Adam Sorkin has
written that, when he met Ursu in 1989, "conditions in
Romania were tense and awful in every conceivable way." When
Ursu met Tess Gallagher at the 1990 International Poetry
Festival in Barcelona, it was less than a year after the overthrow
of the Romanian Communist government, and it was only the
second time Ursu had been permitted to leave her native country.
Political and social conditions have affected the work of Liliana
Ursu, and it is across these barriers as much as differences in
language that Sorkin, Gallagher and translator Bruce Weigel
have brought Ursu's poetry to the English-speaking world.
LILIANA URSU
TRANSLATED BY TESS GAU_AGHER AND ADAM SORKIN
Ancient and Beautiful as the Mist
I dreamed I was home in Bucharest.
All day I've lived inside this dream,
clung to it, wrapped myself in it,
let myself be loved by a landscape.
How am I to convey my dream beyond the night woods
and not lose it to another dream?
Close by the stove you read Cavafy
while outside, the grass yellows under my feet.
The sea has turned white, almost a prisoner in this poem.
Only you and those books of poetry have not grown weary.
From the garden you brought me an apricot
and a butterfly drowned in the lake,
sad, dreaming of its death
on the back of my hand—
on my hand that knows you so well
though it has never caressed you.
The tenderness of your smile when you open a book—
the perfume of a ripe strawberry near which I want
to kneel.

Diana's Shadow
I honor you not with roses plaited in my hair
or with burning flambeaux.
I gather indifferently these few stalks of summer dill
to celebrate you this day.
The Sabbath radiance on my face
is illusion. I turn drowsy
gazing at your huntress' profile,
fall asleep at your feet
until your dogs pursue me into sunrise.
O, like these pressed blossoms still haunted by the sun,
this body once knew happiness.
Evening After Evening
Evening after evening she polishes the stove until it glows.
Then one day somebody whispers something into her ear.
She throws a shawl over her shoulders
and rushes to the river.
Now the stove is black, black
and nobody wants to bathe in that river anymore.
But oh how radiantly the river has begun to shine,
since that certain day.
Blues
A profusion of lilies, these accomplices of your insomnia.
You languish in a house with too many maps,
armored by solitude.
Companioned by the self-portrait in your mirror,
you swear at her, slap her, then clasp her tenderly to your breast.
Too well you know she won't ever let you down.
And the hill, the old steeple and the newborn lambs
more delicate than the grass, but stronger than you—
are they all mere invention? And whose?
In this mood you fling the key
through the one window left open for you.
From now on you will know the sun only
through solitude's eyes.
Those young boys were dancing the syrtaki, syrtaki
in a Timisoara pub. Their dance
gathered momentum in the night, syrtaki,
tipsy and sorrowful,
but we were the night itself.
Between love's sumptuous legislation and the place you left
empty
the deceitful blues of the body once again steal forth,
those torments from which you had just broken free.

De la fereastra Ingerului
Fan, iarba cruda, uger firebinte, fragi,
coridorul verde, ra§ina, catedrale.
Cate un mar mai cade
botez.
Prin galeria cu tablouri trece fata mov.
Tu patlnezf pe on lacrima inghejata.
Da capo
From the Angel's Window
Sweet hay, raw grass, the hot udder, wild strawberries,
a green corridor, pine pitch, the cathedral.
From time to time an apple drops—
a baptism.
Through the art gallery, the girl walks by in mauve.
You skate on a frozen tear.
Da capo
Unforgetting
Between us
I pile up snow,
I pile up silence.
And no one in this city knows
why it's such a hard winter.
My angels
drink whiskey from wine glasses
and forget to forget you.
Music falls
softly onto my eyelids.
This hour, a startled bird
perches as in a monastery,
within walls
you've built
to contain me.
And I,
a soldier, obedient
to my solitude,
sleep a white sleep .. .
Spring Circumstance
a wild cherry fallen into whitewash
or
a dove's egg in a crows beak

LlLIANA LJRSU
TRANSLATED BY BRUCE WEIGAL
Way of the Stars
I live by a poor lake
where in the morning
gray women pick ashes
from the shore beyond fire,
beyond love
hurried between two Sundays.
Then the gray men come
cleaning the moss, the crows silk
from the lake.
"There are no longer any fish"
a man says,
his lip burned by a cigarette.
"We don't even have a sky above us."
Milky Way is a road
reflected in the snow
where Mary nursed the Jesus.
Milky Way, road of slave soldiers used
to guide them
away from their wars.
Ursa Mare, Great Bear
on which Ophelia passed
in the form of a child bearing roses
for the self she had become
in whose hands
they turn to thorns,
the flower's gold
spiraling into the sky
like cold smoke.
In New York
a woman washes dishes
and prepares to play the piano,
a piece she calls
"The Rise and Fall of Mozart.'
On the path I put my feet
into his footsteps.
In my bag I carry bulbs
for the light house
and wild berries
picked from the stars,
and a newspaper
for my love
who lives by the sea.

The Key to Mystery
Hot is my body and my word
before tasting your solitude.
Only poor Europe separates
my door from yours.
Bow towards the window
where the woman makes lace
and without fear,
stretch your hand towards her.
The cat purring on her lap
allows herself to be stroked
like my hair
which flows from the book you are reading.
I have so many things to tell you
I've become blind and mute.
We sat next to each other in the theater,
watching with pity
the two arm chairs on stage, their domestic abyss.
I put on my red stockings
and became the whore in the window.
I was even the wife of Rubens
in his too narrow bed in Antwerp,
but I could never deceive you.
You always found me out
and recognized my eyes, my voice
from the shore of the black sea
and my body from the mountain's path.
I have so many things to tell you
I've become blind and mute.
Number IX
Someone in his despair has disturbed the great domain of the
mist.
Now a green cloak is visible through that crack of light
and I hear the little chimes coming closer.
"Look, henceforth, he will bear fruit."

Heirophany
On this American hill
I am transformed:
sometimes into a loving wife,
sometimes into a witch,
ready to turn this green landscape
into the blackest black,
sometimes into a synthetic cloud,
sometimes into a bare apple tree,
lovers screaming in loneliness
under my forbidden branches.
This hill does not hold the dead in its belly,
nor does it have a tongue in its mouth.
It is simply an expensive creation
where from time to time
I come to take samples of the earth.
It's like the moon's landscape
where the hill of my father's village in Apold
doesn't fit
with its tiny wooden church
pulled on wheels for three weeks,
three days and three nights,
by three young men, three old men
and three boys who dragged it
over three hills, three rivers,
and across three wide roads
to bring it into the light of home.
I have never slept among such innocence
as in the lap of that Transylvanian hill
under apple trees heavy with fruit,
the cemetery earth surrounding my hot thighs,
my dear known, and unknown dead
hung around my neck
like a dandelion chain,
their words floating around me,
the absolute reality
of my Transylvanian hill.
Comic Tunnel, Dialogue of Body and Soul
You pass through me
like a half-human comet
and you imagine
you will get somewhere.

5°
Everything Kobo Abe ever wrote—novels, plays, works of criticism—he
wrote with every power he possessed. He was determined to lead the way
in whatever he did, and although he was familiar with the best of modern
writing in many countries, he was never satisfied with the mere addition
offapanese coloring to an existing foreign model. His writings, popular not
only in Japan but in the many countries where translations have been
made, are monuments of Japanese literature of the twentieth century.
KOBO ABE
TRANSLATED BY TED MACK
Hand
—DONALD KEENE, PROFESSOR EMERITUS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
THAT NIGHT A BLIZZARD raged throughout the town. From far
away, with a roar that seemed to emanate from the earth, the wind
blew the snow, amassing drifts when it stuck against telephone
poles, trees, and walls, mimicking the voices of cats, women, infants
and the infirm, mercilessly blowing through cracks so narrow that
even rain had overlooked them, and thus reminding people of the
inadequacies of their existence.
In the midst of the empty streets, their streetlights wrapped in
white powder, where the whole world seemed a vague, white
void, I stood as always. In the public square at the crossroads where
I was, there was nothing at all to block the wind. Worse, my skin
is almost a perfect conductor of heat and so I was chilled even
colder than the air around me, and the snow that adhered to my
body froze rough like a powder of quartz.
Suddenly, faintly, I saw something move in the midst of this
white void. As it approached, it took on human form. The form
came still closer, to the base of the pedestal on which I stood, and
looked up at me. It was a small man, swollen in a cotton overcoat
with a dog-hair lining,

ankles and he will probably, in between, rub his hands together to
re-warm them, I calculate it will take him roughly five minutes in
all. I will use these five minutes to explain what I am and what sort
of person Hand is.
I was once a military carrier pigeon, and Hand, a soldier
assigned to the pigeon corps, was my master. Now I am a "Dove
of Peace" statue made of bronze, and Hand is cutting through my
ankle with a hacksaw.
When I was a carrier pigeon, I was an exceptionally beautiful
purebred pigeon, as well as a clever one with many meritorious
accomplishments and so, attached to my leg, in addition to the
message tube, was a red aluminum "Medal of Heroism." Of course,
I wasn't aware of these things at the time. For me, there was only
the blue sky, the pleasant feeling of my wings as I soared through
the sky after my comrades, the excited rush of meals, and the
intermittent blocks of extended time. I was a simple, singular
entity. I possessed neither adjectives nor explanations. Now I can
explain about myself but, at the time, I wasn't even aware that there
was an "I."
One day, suddenly, the war ended and my comrades and I
were left abandoned in the pigeon coop, masterless. The person
who blew the whistle to let us know it was mealtime, the person
who changed our straw, and the person who changed the water in
the birdbath every morning disappeared as if by magic, and we
were assailed by confusion and disorder. However, soon, when we
got used to finding food, water, and mates on our own, that disorder
itself became the new order and once again there was only
the blue sky, the pleasant feeling of my wings as I soared through
the sky after my comrades, the excited rush of meals, and
intermittent blocks of extended time.
At that time, since no one took care of the pigeon coop, stray
cats could invade at will through the enclosure where it had fallen
into disrepair, and occasionally we were victims of vandalism by
kids, so our number was decreasing. Of course, there were probably
some who flew off in search of a new nest, closer to food, but I
had only a vague sense of our dwindling number and I don't know
for sure.
One day some months later, the pigeon corps soldier who was
my master unexpectedly* showed up. From that day on he became
my Hand of fate. Hand was, of course, in uniform but his usual
epaulets and belt were missing and his well-ironed creases had
disappeared in a sea of wrinkles. He wasn't wearing a hat, and his
greaseless hair was dusty and had grown long. Hand looked at me
with an expression of both nostalgia and guilt. Suddenly habit
enveloped me like a mist and, without thinking, I flew to his
shoulder, feeling an uneasy familiarity. Hand quietly grasped me
behind my wings. I, as a matter of habit, did not resist. Like old
times, Hand put me in a box and took me somewhere.
That destination was a show tent. My role there was to be
pulled out from the bottom of a silk hat into which I had been
stashed and then to fly out of the tent and return on my own to
the pigeon coop. By the time I got home, Hand would already be
there waiting, and would feed me a cup of birdseed. It was not at
all a bad compensation for the job. From that day on this was my
daily task. I became Hand's livelihood but of course without any
consciousness of this I fell easily into these new habits.
I think this interim lasted quite a long time. This period in the
show tent ended one mild spring afternoon. While I was basking
in the sun and dozing slightly, a strange man approached me. On
the alert, I was poised to fly off if he came one step closer, when
suddenly he stopped, took an envelope from under his arm, and
began moving his pencil on it while occasionally glancing sideways
at me. Because he didn't seem dangerous, I remained still.
Then Hand came. Hand and the man exchanged a few quiet words
of greeting.
Hand was fascinated by what the man was working on and
said, "Fine workmanship, that. He's a fine dove, isn't he? My pride
and joy. During the war he received a medal of heroism, you
know."
The man, surprised, stopped sketching. "Then he must have
been, what? A carrier pigeon?"
"Yeah. Now he is just a prop in a carnival magic act. Come
down in the world."

T.
54
"How ironic," the man said, laughing. "And now he is going
to become the model for a dove statue."
For a while both were silent, the man's hand moving while
Hand peered intently at what he was drawing.
"Damn! Stop moving," the man said.
"He's a living thing," Hand said. "Can't be helped."
"That's your line of work, isn't it? Can't you do something so
he won't move?" the man asked.
"Impossible."
"In that case," the man said, resting his hand and speaking
suddenly in a serious tone, "you can at least grab hold of him, can't
you?"
Hand blinked a few times quickly, as if calculating something
in the process, and then nodded, "Yes."
The two men began consulting in hushed voices.With wrinkled
brows, fingers drawing circles and lines in the air, and looking
around in all directions, they bargained for a long time. With the
clap of the man's hands and Hand's hesitant nods, mouth shut, the
negotiations seemed to conclude.
Hand grabbed hold of me. Even though I hadn't completed
my daily task he took a bag of birdseed out of his pocket and filled
up my feeder. "Eat up," he said in an extremely kind voice.
"Are you sad?" the man said from behind.
"Of course I am," Hand replied, angrily.
I was put into my box as always. However, the place I was
taken to was not the show tent. Instead, it was to a room with a
medicinal odor in a large, dark building. There I was lain face up,
the feathers on my chest were pushed apart, and, with a sharp
scalpel, I was cut open. My insides were scooped out and, like
taking off a shirt, I was reduced to just my skin. My insides were
at once thrown into a pot, boiled, and eaten. Then my skin was
filled with padding, supported by a skeleton of steel wire. I became
a stuffed bird.
I was put in the box again and then carried to the man's studio.
The man placed me on a model's stand and arranged the angle
of my wings and the position of my head. I passively let him do all
of this. The man kneaded and scraped clay while staring at me.
Judging by appearances, one might think that this incident was
really no big deal for me.=fiut, on the contrary, it was a vast change.
Beside the fact that naturally I had lost my life, I had become an
object; not only that, I had become a concept. No, actually, I was
in the process of becoming solely a concept. In the man's hands I
was being molded into a concept. Isn't that a big difference? My
existence, which had been no more than a sum total of sensations,
was being transformed into one comprised solely of meaning.
The completions of the transformation occurred one summer
day due to the hasty, imperfect preservation job done on me. My
skin began to collapse from the inside as maggots began to devour
me. I was thrown into the stove and burned up but, under his
hands, I had become instead the "Dove Statue." Then, suddenly, I
understood the meaning of everything.
I am now the statue "Dove of Peace." I have a clear meaning;
I am meaning itself. However, I, myself, cannot just be myself, by
myself. Simply put, only through the actions of those supporting
me can I exist. For that reason I was erected at this intersection. I
suppose it was also at a crossroads for power politics.
Anyway, let's go back to where we left off. Hand is about to
finish sawing through my second ankle. However, if I don't say
something about how things got this way, Hands appearance may
seem too sudden, too coincidental. Hand must have been feeling
serious regret over having sold my life for a few dollars. After that
he appeared almost every day at the intersection and, for the time
it took him to smoke a cigarette, he would stare at me. Returning
Hands feeble stare I was able to understand many things. Hand was
having more and more trouble getting by. It seemed that he
became exhausted by the delusion that his daily misfortunes were
due to his having sinned against me. Of course, it was no more
than a delusion. But, from his perspective, it was clearly reality. He
finally couldn't bear to keep this secret to himself. Then he would
tell every person he met about my fate. This was to pull me down
from "a symbol of peace" to the level of his fate.
One day this voice of Hand caught the ear of an antipacifist....but
I'll come back to that later. Hand has finished cutting
through both my ankles.

Now, this is a continuation of the beginning of the story. As
I began to fall over, Hand caught me in his arms and, using the
rope he had tied around my waist, gently lowered me to the
ground. I sank completely into the snow and quickly disappeared
from sight. Hand then attached the rope to the pedestal and slid
down. When he got down he dug me out of the snow, lifted me
onto his back and, in the suffocating blizzard, dashed off unsteadily
against the wind. The spirits of the snow howled and wept and the
man stumbled every tenth step.
Hand stopped at the entrance to the basement of a burned-out
building on a corner two blocks away and four or five men
appeared from inside. One man took me while another handed
Hand some kind of envelope, slapped him on the shoulder, and
smiled. Then, leaving Hand behind standing slightly dazed, the
men walked away quickly.
While leaving, one of the men said, "It went well, huh?
Madmen can be useful. That guy thinks he got rid of a curse while
at the same time making some money, and we got rid of our
'curse,' too." Another said," 'Reality' used 'fantasy' Lots of people
knew that guy wanted to steal the statue, and no one will doubt
he is the criminal. And the jerk's crazy. It's as if an alibi came
forward to protect us."
These men were sent by the government. To them, I was an
eyesore. To them, those who brought me into existence are eyesores.
That's why, blinded by this narrow reality, they incited the
crazed Hand into action. My relation to Hand, however, did not
end here. The story continues.
I was carried straight to a secret factory, was melted down, was
then carried to a different factory, was mixed with other pieces of
metal of the same composition as myself, and became an enormous,
diluted lump. After that I was processed into various things, part of
me becoming a pistol bullet. Well, actually, since I had already lost
my single-object state, from my point of view that one part of me
that became the bullet could be considered the essential me. I was
both "that" and "this;" both "a part" and "the whole." Therefore,
from now on, "I" am that one pistol bullet.
Even a pistol bullet has many possible fates. From among them
I was assigned a secret rdle.The purpose for,which I was to be used
had already been determined. I was inserted into the chamber of
a pistol where an enormous energy behind me was ready to push
me out. My head was looking down a small, dark tunnel. At the
end of this tunnel I was able to see pocket lint.
In this condition I must have spent two or three days, together
with the pistol in the pocket, wandering through the streets. One
night, suddenly, I was pulled out into the air. At the end of the
tunnel now was not lint, but a street scene. I saw the form of a
man illuminated by the streetlights. It was Hand. He had been
designated, by the government, as the thief of the "Dove of Peace"
and had been a fugitive for over a month. It was this pitiful Hand
who was now a fatigued, humiliated tumor. The officials had used
him to steal me and now planned to eliminate him. Not only that,
they were going to use me!
The trigger was pulled, a comedic energy exploded, and I slid
a straight line out the tunnel. That was the sole, inevitable path.
There was no other path. I flew straight toward Hand, ripping out
some flesh and blood as I passed right through him, and then was
crushed as I pierced the trunk of a tree by the roadside. Behind
me, Hand groaned and I heard the sound of him falling. With that,
I completed my last transformation.

GWYNETH LEWIS
Whose coat is that jacket?
Whose hat is that cap?
IF YOU'RE TRULY bilingual it's not that there are two languages in
your world, but that not everybody understands the whole of your
own personal speech. Welsh is my first language. I was born to a
Welsh-speaking family living in predominantly English-speaking
Cardiff. I remember not being able to understand the children I
wanted to play with on the street. I know exactly when I acquired
English, as my father taught it to me when my mother went into
hospital to have my sister. I was two and a quarter. A section of
my poem "Welsh Espionage" is a version of that event:
Welsh was the mother tongue, English was his.
He taught her the body by fetishist quiz,
father and daughter on the bottom stair:
'Dy benelin yw elbow, dy wallt di yw hair,
chin yw dy en di, head yw dy ben.'
She promptly forgot, made him do it again.
Then he folded her dwrn and, calling it fist,
held it to show her knuckles and wrist.
'Let's keep it from Mam, as a special surprise.
Lips are gwefusau, llygaid are eyes.'
Each part he touched in their secret game
thrilled as she whispered its English name.
The mother was livid when she was told.
'We agreed, no English till four years old!'
She listened upstairs, her head in a whirl.
Was it such a bad thing to be Daddy's girl?
The details of sitting on the bottom of the stairs and of learning
the parts of the body are true. Later, of course, this made me think
of the scenes in Shakespeare's King Henry V when the French
Princess learns English, using the Lewis technique. The suggestion
of child abuse in the poem is not drawn from my own experience,
although it seemed very important to the piece. I suspect that this
sinister suggestion was a way for me to explore the discomfort I
felt at being born between two cultures. Early on I had an acute
sense of the cultural clash between the social values tied up in both
languages. I suppose that, in some way, I still feel guilty about
being Daddy's girl and writing in English at all.
Let me give a quick cultural outline. The Welsh language is a
Celtic tongue which has, against all the odds, found itself in the
modern world, coining words for "television" and "fast reactor fuel
rods." With half a million speakers and numbers in decline—it's
an "all hands on deck" situation. It is a beautiful language, and to
speak it is to know the sound of a long, unbearable farewell. It's
the key to a literature which goes back to the sixth century.
One of the noteworthy features of this tradition is a system of
strict consonontal alliteration
codified into twenty four meters
My first l^vdwas a i
Beautiful thi ^ingslwere,
Tinv eves/shining at night,
Though mainlyjin the moonlight.
TK A'I"'^)'* ' ! '
Example of Welsh cynghanedd, with
analysis, from Plover hove Song.
and called cynghanedd. Twm
Morys, the travel writer Jan
Morris's son, recently wrote a
wonderful version of one of these
meters in English. Basically, the
line gets divided in half and the
consonants on each side of the
break have to be used in the same
order. That is, when the line's not
divided into three and rhyme
added to the cocktail. Have a
look at this when you're in cross-

o
60
word-puzzle mode—it's good fun. Gerard Manley Hokins used it
and Dylan Thomas certainly had the sound of the cynghanedd ringing
in his ears as he wrote in English.
Of course, living in a largely English-speaking city, Welsh was
handy as a private language for us. We used it as a family code—
to avoid the scrutiny of over-bearing sales ladies in the shops. In
school—I was educated till the age of eighteen through the medium
of the Welsh—we switched languages mid-sentence when
teachers appeared, to avoid punishment for speaking English.
People have asked me often am I a different person speaking
English and Welsh? I always answer no, but what 15 different, of
course, is the cultural context in which words are spoken. When
these political values clash the cultural sensitivities can be acute.
For example, until recently Swan matches had the slogan
"England's Glory" written on the side of their boxes. "Got your
matches ready?" is an innocent enough sentence in English. But
in Welsh, against the background of an arson campaign run by
nationalists who've been burning down second homes owned by
the English in the Welsh heartland, the question "Ydi dy fatsys di'n
barod?" takes on a totally different tenor. The words are the same,
but the meaning totally different.
I had a sense of the cultural traps involved in being bilingual
very early on. But I also knew it could lead to excitements that
rarely came the way of my monoglot friends. A primary school
teacher who taught me at about age six once told us a story about
young Tommy who didn't practice his English reading. One day
instead of learning his vocabulary he was wandering around and
happened across a rocket. Curious, he made his way in. His eye
was immediately attracted by a big red button on the control
panel. Under it, written in bold letters was an unfamiliar word:
DANGER. "Danger?" he puzzled. "Danger?" Not a Welsh word.
So he pressed the button. The doors closed and before he could
count to ten, he was propelled into space. The moral Miss Rees
intended is clear: your life depends on your being able to read
English. The unconscious moral—and the one by which I'm still
fascinated—was that unfamiliar words lead to huge adventures.
Little Tommy might have died a lonely death in space, but think
of the wonders he must have seen before his oxygen ran out.
I have a linguistic equivalent. For some reason I was talking
to a friend who had been conscripted into the Israeli army about
T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." We got to the
lines
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
My friend said that he could never hear that last line without
thinking of a sergeant in the Israeli army whose favourite punishment
for transgressions was making you fill your water bottle (for desert
warfare) a teaspoonful at a time. In the light of this Eliot's line
takes on a felicitous, if unintended new meaning, making the
time and tedium involved in both activities starkly vivid. Words
change according to the background against which you place
them. This is the kind of cross-cultural rocket trip translation can
lead to. Never mind if the voyage is authorized or not, it's bound
to be fertile.
Before I had enough confidence to write in English I spent a
long time translating my own Welsh poems. I've been thinking
about translation for a long time and it seems to me that it's treated,
unjustifiably, as a secondary process in literary life. I'm one of
those who believes that not only is translation possible, it's an
essential element in every nation s culture. Poetry isn't only what's
lost in translation—it's what's gained. In a culture the desire to
translate is always a sign of strength. Only rich cultures are hungry
for news of the outside world—paradoxically, voracity is a sign of
plenitude. It's only cultures who want their members to have a
limited political view that resist promiscuous translation and the
absorption of outside influences. Totalitairan states don't like
translators. Here I take it that the whole point of translation is to
introduce a new element—of rhythm or thought—into a literary
tradition. The point isn't to produce a version so culturally smooth
that nobody would ever guess it was imported. There has to be
something strange, novel and fascinating either about the style or
cast of mind of the new piece.

o <
s
0
o
In his poem, "Strange Meeting," Wilfred Owen took the
Welsh half rhyme the proest and used it in English. In this rhyme
the final consonants of the word stay the same, while the vowels
change, as in "cat" and "kit."
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
Having rediscovered the proest in Owen I've now been using this
rhyme both in English and back in its native Welsh. But, filtered
through Owen's sensibility it's not the same sound, it's been
revivified and made vital again by translation. This is a form of
stylistic translation. But there's more to this question. Poets working
in a tradition are always "translating" the work of their predecessors
and moulding it to their modern-day needs. But what to translate?
Thorn Gunn, for example, in "The Unsettled Motorcyclist s Vision
of his Death" uses the metre and philosophical vocabulary of the
Metaphysical poets to describe a twentieth-century death. The
poem intrigues us because of the initial discrepancy between
subject and style—and this in itself becomes part of the subject of
the poem, a biker forced to contemplate his own mortality, despite
his very modern leathers.
WH. Auden's "Roman Wall Blues," on the other hand,
mimics the subject of a Roman lyric but without the style—old
subject, modern British speech—admittedly, to comic effect:
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.
If so inclined, a writer can easily exploit this latitude in his or
her choice of what to translate of a poem. Cynan, a popular
twentieth-century Welsh poet, gained a reputation as an original
The Snow Party
for Louis Asekoff
Basho, coming
To the city of Nagoya,
Is asked to a snow party.
There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.
Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.
Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares
Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;
But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of Ise.
—Derek Mahon
lyricist. I'm told, however,
that what he sometimes used
to do was translate parts of
modern English poems he
liked into Welsh, taking the
credit for their content himself.
One of my poems takes as its
starting point an old Welsh folk
song which is called "Bugeilio's
Gwenith Gwyn" ("Herding
the White Wheat"). I put my
own spin on the subject, of
course, making my wheat
shepherd a reluctant, resentful
servant. The rest of the poem
was suggested by a line in the
Oxford English Dictionary
which happened to catch my
eye. This smuggling of familiar
material from one language
into another seemed to me, on
reflection, too easy a way of
exploiting a Welsh subject
matter in English. I wanted to
be a full English-language poet when I wrote in English and not
just a translator of material which might not work in Welsh.
Translation is a form of travel. Far from just translating literal
rhyme, it can establish new sets of cultural consonances and
echoes, which resound at a broader level than the individual poem
translated. Derek Mahon's poem "The Snow Party" is a stylistic
tribute to the haiku of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, as
well as a story about him.
The poem sets up an unexpected parallel between the
etiquette-ridden Japanese society and modern Northern Ireland.

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The stunning connection he conies up with is that both societies
are linked by the conjunction within them of rigid codes of
manners and of unbridled violence. This form of translation uses
the differences between two poetic traditions to bring out a
profound and fundamental cultural similarity between the
societies which gave rise to them. Thus, the conjunction of two
literatures in one set of words (the translated text) sets off stunning
new echoes in time between them, rhymes which can both shock
and delight.
As with most figures essential to the well-being of a society,
translators have always been regarded with suspicion. In diplomatic
circles scare stories about situations like the mistranslation of "La
France demande que..." into the belligerent and inaccurate
"France demands that..." testify to the power the traders in
linguistic foreign currency are felt to have in our lives. Indeed, in
the Judaeo-Christian tradition the very origin of translation is tied
up with man's hubris. Genesis recounts the story of the inhabitants
of Shinar who decided to build a tower "with its top in the heavens"
in order "to make a name for ourselves." This, of course, was the
Tower of Babel. God's response to this pride was to "confuse their
language, so that they will not understand what they say to one
another." Australian aboriginal myths of linguistic origin, by
contrast, don't have this idea of multiple languages and sin linked
together. If linguistic variety is a punishment from God, then,
by extension, translators, attempting to repair the broken bowl of
language, can be seen as priests trying to repair the effects of an
original linguistic sin. Our ambiguous feelings towards the idea of
Esperanto, an universal language, shows how we regard the work
of the translator as both deeply virtuous (healing the broken
relationships between men of different cultures) and as potentially
blasphemous ("those whom God has pulled apart, let no man put
together").
I would argue, however, that the translator—who's always
struggling to find the mot juste, and fighting with the incompleteness
of one language to convey ideas from another—actually knows
more about our true condition linguistically than the happy
monoglot who would never dream of touching the Danger
button in a rocket. In this, bilingualism helps. You know that one
language will only take you so far along the route of your
experiential journey. You know that at some time during your
journey on the word bus the driver's going to call the last stop, and
you'll have to walk the rest of the way with your luggage, up the
mountain in the growing gloom, towards the one light left on in
the farmhouse ahead. We all reach that moment sooner or later,
when language will just not take you any further in your experience.
But having made frequent changes of vehicle before means that
the sight of the bus departing noisily down the hill is nowhere
near as shocking or desolating an event as it might be. Indeed, it's
even to be welcomed.
In this sense, being part of a dying culture is, paradoxically, of
great value to a poet, if you're interested in ultimate questions
about language and the nature of reality. It was Lenny Bruce who
said that comedy's not just a matter of telling jokes, it's about
telling the truth. Similarly, poetry isn't about being poetical, it's
about telling things as they are. In Wales, we may soon be facing
the end of a fertile coal seam of language. Having taken for granted
the warmth of prehistoric forests and the patterns of ferns and
insects in our buckets, our shovels will soon be hitting against useless
shale. Some Welsh poets look to England, with its confident,
viable culture—or even to America, which is even more so—with
envy. But the truth is that this is always the situation of language
in the face of eternity—the prospect of utter annihilation.
Cultural success can only serve to disguise this. The challenge in
all cases is to sing as true as possible a song out into the dark before
that final extinction of shimmering consciousness, before the
brightness falls from the air.
In this context nationalism seems to me like a distraction for
a poet. My poem"Welsh Espionage" is based on the language of
spy novels. What amused me was the idea that anybody would
send a spy to Wales, where nothing much happens. Nothing is, I
now know, of course, a great deal. But at the end of the poem I
imagined the death of the last speaker ofWelsh, as a way of asking
myself what my responsibility as a poet was in that situation.

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So this is the man you dreamt I had betrayed.
I couldn't have saved him if I'd stayed.
He's old as his language. On his bony knees
his hands are buckled like wind-blown trees
that were straight in his youth. His eyes are dim,
brimming with water. If you talk to him
he'll mention people whom you never knew,
all in their graves. He hasn't a clue
who you are, or what it is you want
on your duty visits to Talybont.
This is how languages die—the tongue
forgetting what it knew by heart, the young
not understanding what, by rights, they should.
And vital intelligence is gone for good.
I suppose my heretical conclusion was that languages, like people
whose lives are over, should be allowed to go, not kept technically
and artificially alive by machine or government policy. It's not
the poet's primary job to supervise the life-support machine, but
to sing the song of tribute at the funeral. And the great gift is
knowing, fully, that no language, however prosperous or imperial,
is going to be able to put off the day when the decision has to be
made about the life-support machine of each and every one of its
speakers. Translators know that the shapes and outlines of experience
are far more beautiful and real than the drapes of words
which we put over them. Most of us spend our lives admiring the
lovely colors and the material of the drapes. Translators know that
such weak material crumples to nothing without the eternal forms
behind them.
I've defined the nature of translation very broadly, arguing that
cultures survive because of internal translation by their poets and
by sucking in of new air from foreign literatures. I want to take
the idea even further and argue that the very nature of our lives
depends on how good we are as translators. Joseph Brodsky has
written that "Poetry, after all, in itself is a translation." By this, I
understand him to mean that verse is a version of nerve-end
responses to the world, filtered throughout the logarithm of lan-
guage into a construct which is an equivalent, in some way, to that
original experience. In*Buddhist philosophy, it's only by understanding
the true nature of the mind that reality can be seen accurately.
The "I"—that is, me as a person—is a fiction produced by
the mind, a non-existent entity which leads us to misread ourselves
and the world around us. The virtuous life, therefore, is one
which perceives and acts most accurately on the nature of reality.
The price of mistranslating in this realm isn't a bad grade in midterms,
but misery and delusion. Our lives themselves and not just
our art, therefore, can be said to depend on being good translators.
If I've been able to convey one thing here I hope it's my
conviction that translation isn't just a matter of choosing the
right words in English to convey, say,Virgil's hexameters or how to
make one word cover the twenty Innuit nouns for snow. It
permeates the whole range of our dealings with language.
Translation doesn't just happen between languages—it's sometimes
needed within one. In the U.K. a movement for Plain English has
been campaigning to remove the gobbledygook from official
documents so that people can participate in the social contracts
which bind them. This isn't just a matter of simplifying the
vocabulary of these papers; it's part of changing society from one
dominated by the latinate complexity of an imperial power, in
which people don't need to know how they're governed, into a
democracy where all the participants—even the least educated—
understand the structures which protect and bind them together.
Translation is not just a matter of words. It's far more important.
Which brings me to the title of this essay. The Welsh enjoy
their words and play with them often. This may not always be
in the sphere of high culture. I once heard about a train
announcement in Llanelli which was "translated" from official
British Rail-speak into West Walain. It went "Ladies and
Gentlemen, There's been a change of platform. Ev'ryone over b'
ere come over b' there and ev'ryone over b'there, come over b'ere."
Not the Queen's English, but nobody missed their train. "Whose
coat is that jacket? Whose hat is that cap?" is another South Walian
joke. It shows our fascination for the slightly different angles at
which we see the world, according to which word we use to

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describe it. "Coat" and "jacket" refer to the same object, but seen
slightly differently. We're very fortunate in English that its rich
diversity of elements—the Latinate, French and Anglo-Saxon—
allows us to perform these "tracking shots" on even the most
simple objects. In Shakespeare's play, the guilty Macbeth asks:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
His exploitation of the different skeins in English here is the same
kind of attempt to make language stretch to convey a reality
which always, in the end, exceeds its reach. The more languages
you have, the more you can track around the object in question.
The trilingual Jorie Graham captures this very well in her poem
"I Was Taught Three." Here, she argues that the three words she
knows for "chestnut" reveal three different aspects of the tree in
front of her window.
Castagno took itself to heart, its pods
like urchins clung to where they landed
claiming every bit of shadow
at the hem. Chassagne, on windier days,
nervous in taffeta gowns,
whispering, on the verge of being
anarchic, though well-bred.
And then chestnut, whipped pale and clean
by all the inner reservoirs
called upon to do their even share of work.
Using this full range of language's expressiveness, by whatever
means, against the ultimate silence is, in the end, what poetry is all
about. But, in a way, bi- and tri-lingualism only postpone the
inevitable frustration of being defeated. But with translators we
can hope to go that much further before we have to fall quiet and
to see the world for a moment, not in the 2-D of one self-satisfied
culture, but in glorious 3-D before the system crashes and our
cognitive screens go blank.
Poetry East and West of the Mississippi:
EAST

ELIZABETH MACKLIN
The Secret Note You Were Handed by Lorca
It's a song: dormida, sleeping. You're asleep,
and not only "drowsy." The way a true friend
returns after dying—penando, the old dog lost
but returning to leap and to love you: a dream,
not only a daydream, thinking the words
•with leashed feelings.
Was it truly different for you: sun-scorned—lost
in a stolen shadow, as if for a stolen girl,
as if in an envy? He, too, nearly assumed
you'd been longing for something different.
A friend comes back in a dream,
it's funny—the same jacket,
the bright-yellow tie but the same gesture.
And the marvelling wash of the old
affection, humming—a blue-gold snow in between,
like a sun indoors over coolness.
If only—
It's only a dream.
Was it you that hurt him?
The Sadness of Not Knowing
Two years to the minute
(where was I?) when
she was alone, the nurse left, and she
was alone—strong, weakened,
living in hope or
icebound or white-sheet lonely?
I was getting my tickets when this
last minute, last hour
took place. Yes, I see
how it was.
I hope there was a heaven.
"Oh, nonsense" she'd say to the fear
in my thought, she
might have said.
"Don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid
to be sad,
to be there, away
to try, to see."

SAMN STOCKWELL
Perihelion
I am the one that knows better,
the one tired long ago, who eats dry bread
every night. Brandy by my bedside,
a monster on my pillow, long scars
down my face; remnant of a penetrating embrace.
And here I get stumped or stalled.
I do sort through the remains.
The broken lamp, the cracked vase—
still our treasures.
The dirty floor, the empty cupboards—
corridors of a wonderful childhood.
Splayed fingers and creaking hip—
bound to the same rooms.
It was a heavy April morning.
It was raining and the violets were uncurling
in the mud. There was a field nearby.
I could see all of it, it was •warm,
the geese—
It was everyone's time
and-^I flew. Through
the bare, white window
and above the open fields.
DAVID LEHMAN
When a Woman Loves a Man
When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."
He's supposed to know that.
When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in
Virginia
or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,
or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he
is raking leaves in Ithaca
or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate
at the window overlooking the bay
where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on
while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.
When a woman loves a man it is one-ten in the morning,
she is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzels
drinking lemonade
and two hours later he wakes up and staggers into bed
where she remains asleep and very warm.
When she says tomorrow she means in three or four weeks.
When she says, "We're talking about me now,"
he stops talking. Her best friend comes over and says,
"Did somebody die?"

When a woman loves a man, they have gone
to swim naked in the stream
on a glorious July day
with the sound of the waterfall like a chuckle
of the water rushing over smooth rocks,
and there is nothing alien in the universe.
Ripe apples fall about them.
What else can they do but eat?
When he says, "Ours is a transitional era."
"That's very original of you," she replies,
dry as the Martini he is sipping.
They fight all the time
It's fun
What do I owe you?
Let's start with an apology
Ok, I'm sorry, you dickhead.
A sign is held up saying "Laughter."
It's a silent picture.
"I've been fucked without a kiss," she says,
"and you can quote me on that,"
which sounds great in an English accent.
One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it
another nine times.
When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the
airport in a foreign country with a jeep.
When a man loves a woman he's there. He doesn't complain that
she's two hours late
and there's nothing in the refrigerator.
When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She's like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.
When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as midnight is to the moon is sleep to the beloved.
A thousand fireflies wink at him.
The frogs sound like the string section
of the orchestra warming up.
The stars dangle down like earrings the shape of grapes.

LESLEA NEWMAN
The Return of Buddy
Buddy's Back!
I was running out
to get cream for my coffee
when I passed a newsstand and stopped
to see what the Times and the Post
were arguing about this morning
but for once everyone agreed
that the news of the day was Buddy
the mutt from Massapequa
who disappeared a week ago
only to be found this very day
in Denver, Colorado
and flown back to JFK
where his family greeted him
with doggie biscuits
an invitation from David Letterman
and a St. Patrick's Day hat
There are no newspapers in heaven
There are probably talk shows in hell
Buddy, believe me, if you chose to return
I would never meet you at the airport
with something as tacky as a green paper hat
Oh Buddy we love you come back
Still Life With Buddy
mahogany table top
hand-made doily
fluted crystal vase
sprig of forget-me-nots
photo of Buddy dressed to kill
leaning against his ashes

TERESE SVOBODA
At the Castle
To say one thing when your song
means another.
-Ezra Pound, "Near Perigord"
I phone Geneva, thinking Africa,
looking out the window at Italy.
The man who answers says they'll kill
each other, no one can stop them,
the UN demurs. Wine, that dark blood,
stings my nose. I take the phone
to the cliff where Pound said
nothing for ten years. You can't even
call the Sudanese, they can't agree
on a code. I say they're not starving,
the ones who are killing. You have to be
strong to rape and burn boys, the ones
who sing in the dark all night,
troubadours wandering the savannah.
The wind arcs around the keep
and we both hear it. I hold
the receiver out over the battlements
and maybe the sound is someone
dying a European death,
German,Visigoth, Roman, Ice Man,
each stumbling over the bones
of the last, bones with meat
on them, bones Pound's great
grandson's dog fights for,
cur that he is. A paraglider hisses
over the pears, apples, grapes
cantilevering the slopes, taking
an exhausted loop over the spires.
Did you ever notice, I say,
how a city's most crowded cafes
offer cuisines from where the food's
most scarce? All the children under five
have starved in the province England's
size. Well, he says, the big boys
who are left, what they want is guns.
The wind falls in my silence.

WILLIAM LOGAN
The Thunderstorm
The heat. The soiled heat. And then the night.
The painted bugs carved arches through the lights,
moths of the burning prairie, moths of the moon.
Who were we not to pay for our emotions?
That night our dull words echoed afterwards,
A cotton-wool deafness burned the inner ear
into Odyssey of vertigo,
the fire sirens wheedling out their song.
Love filtered through the summer's anesthesia.
The Greeks would have recognized our yellow heat,
the bruises of the mounting thunderheads.
A rough parenthesis. And then the rain—
the corrugated tin erupted like sin.
Slugs
The fallen pastures under slash pine raged
as still as revelation; and blindly came
the lumbering night slugs, their crippled process
beneath the waving horns of the landlord snail.
The houseless cannot but envy the housed.
Our north walls peeled in the sweet-gum's shadow.
I saw the palms fan upward to the sun,
life unto life, as if a soul would agree.
The garden strangled on the blackened husks;
the treefrogs trimmed their voices to oak.
Our tin roof, burning in the wartime forties,
lit up the blackened zones. The attic breathed
of heart pine over charred beam. The flare of a match
and even our harsher world would choke with ash.

JUDITH BAUMEL
Hot
One moment it was hot. Hot. Hot.
It was the only adjective you'd gotten
down, heavy, aspirated, breathy itch
and everything you saw or touched or tasted
was hot. The word to describe all properties
of all things, nature, feeling, your feeling.
A sign. Emotion. Your emotion, caught
in the knot of this word, this listen-to-me. Hot.
But later, instead of murmuring patter
as you toddled, the words began to matter.
One night in a fit of desperation as you
tried to keep us with you in your room,
standing in the crib long after supper,
you discovered talking. Horse.Your eyes lit up,
a brilliant ploy.Yes, horse, now sleep.
Car. Now pointing to the cars on your sheets.
Balloon. And Dog. Looking, pointing, engaging.
Ah, yes, we sigh, if we could only act your age.
CHARLES NORTH
As Moonlight Becomes You
refining the swale for the sake of
ordinary life, which isn't orderly
but does undergo a pattern of resolute change
because you supply the necessity: hence
ordinary life which isn't orderly,
marches on ahead into a swirl of reddening leaves
because you supply the necessity. Hence
the moon is rampant, flitting between you.

SUSAN WHEELER
Oldest Psalter
After the bath, the boxed light nickers
A lurid tale. Beyond the next hill in the streetlamp's spill
Venus clinks its goodly place.
The stratus bank doth overtake.
The comb, sprung by hair, scrapes my breast.
All the diffident noise of the dark arrest
Clamors. A cup, a dish, in the lair of the sink—
The forsythia flaps a palm, a wish—
I could not say that it was mine, before
Switching off the boxed light switch—
The postal clerk who had them stung.
I could not find the phlox, the star
To restorate the overtake.
The sad sack hero of the lot of them.
Sleeping Sister
Stop spacklingfor a minute and listen to me.
I had a dream, and you were its Eve.
The room was leaden from the radiation,
The squirrels on the curtains put up a racket,
He called himself ironing but his arm was limp.
You were more of a vaporous lug, a scheming;
Your varmints—they were yours—double-did
The hall, while the beach waves sound increased
And his hair became your hair, and when he turned—
The avenue at seven is lit like a steel pit.
Still streets, a fire in the sky, bus slow.
Ah, temptress, for that extra sly iamb!
I wanted you so, then, I wanted you so.

JEAN MONAHAN
The Concert
—Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
March 18, 1990
Later, even the courtyard cyclamen
appeared unnaturally bright with omen,
but the truth is, I went to the museum
feeling sad and bored, but nothing more:
upstairs, I imagined falling asleep
on the dark and echoing Moravian tiles.
In the last hour, I stood before Vermeer's
The Concert—a 17th century music room
where three figures had gathered, impromptu.
The pale yellow sleeve of the one who
played was like a caress that falls just short
of abandon, restrained, as it was, by the
rectangle of orange on the back of the man's
chair, and the pale green dress of the woman
singing. I felt I was seeing for the first time:
I stood, ruled by the light, until everything
beyond the frame faded, straining to hit the
right key before the man I had fallen in love
with, the man who sat, staring into the scene
painted on the harpsicord's lid, whose rapture
mocked my own, completely. When the guard
announced the hour of closing, a voice
in my head urged: look again at the painting!
I returned, briefly, before leaving. That
night, The Concert was stolen. Never again
will the tile in that room bear the weight
of us all in one unbroken plane of existence.
I have since learned how the unattainable
draws the strongest of us in, how lost
worlds, painted or imagined, close
the listener in a haze of silence. I have
come to believe that the one who wore
desire on her yellow sleeve reached
up and closed the harpsichord lid
when at last the concert ended.

MARIE HOWE
Late Morning
I was still in my white nightgown and James had drawn me
down
to sit on his lap, and I was looking over his shoulder through the
hall
into the living room, and he was looking over my shoulder, into
the trees
through the open window I imagine,
and we sat like that for a few minutes, without saying much of
anything,
my cheek pressed lightly
against his cheek, and my brother John was dead.
Suddenly close and distinct, it seemed finished, as if time were a
room
I could gaze clear across—four years since I'd lifted his hand
from
the sheets on his bed and it cooled in my hand. .
A little breeze through the open window, James's warm cheek
a brightness in the windy trees as I remember . . . crumbs and
dishes still
on the table, and a small glass bottle of milk and an open jar of
raspberry jam.
The First Gate
Afterwards
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the precise shape of my brother's body. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at 28, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water. ..
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, what?
And he'd say, This.—holding up my cheese and mustard
sandwich.
And I'd say, what?
And he'd say, This. Sort of looking around.

One of the Last Days
As through a door in the air that I stepped through sideways
before reaching for a plate high in the cupboard
I find myself in the middle of my life: May night, raining,
Michael just gone to Provincetown, James making pizzas next
door,
lilacs in full bloom, sweet in the dark rain in Cambridge.
On one of the last days I told him, You know how much you
love Joe?
That's how much I love you. And he said, No. And I said,Yes.
And he said, No. And I said,You know it's true.
And he closed his eyes for a minute.
When he opened them he said, Maybe you'd better start looking
for
somebody else..
LAURIE SHECK
White Light
Seizure of light, white noise,
close-ups, zoom shots,
soundbites whizzing past the ice-white
lake of the cold floor. . .the walls jump with light
and the shadows of blocked light
lifted out of the unbodied world.
As now, on the news, a girl is running,
her hair flaming in the flickering torn flowers
of white light. Then suddenly the screen
just lets her go, the light
just lets her go, and I think of my eyes,
how strange it is to have them,
as they empty themselves so quickly of that girl
as if she were unreal.
There's black rain on the windowpane,
the glittery bits of it ticking.
I get up and stand at the glass,
my face fleshless and secretive in front of me,
holding like a placard
the silvery privilege of my watching.
How queerly flat it seems, this face,
lopped off and hanging in the icy dark,
the mouth hole shut on nothing.
When I step back the window-square is tenantless,
though I can hear the leaves in it,

their almost-lullaby, their calm insistent pressing
into place, such softness as will not be turned back
bending downward in the fissured wind.
How frail my silver glance; and the body of that girl
as she ran through the torn flowers
of white light, the satellite beaming her up into my eyes,
beaming the torn flowers up and up,
the brightness streaming, seething from her skin. . . .
Darkness, we are brief silver coins
thrown into you
as you close austerely over us.
Black Night
Black night as severe as a frock-coat or doctrine,
there is a stiffness in you, a hardness like the moment when the
radio's
switched off, and no car passes by, not a single car at all,
and the trees are stripped and ignorant of the wind.
You are an injunction, a stare, a crow's wing
swerving toward a blinking, rheumy eye.
A crow's wing that will cover it, consume it.
You are the moment when fright freezes over,
fishes trapped and stunned in the black ice.
Unlike you, the days are fraught, confused, all edges and swift
fissures.
I wait for them. They are dangerous but truthful.
They push you away. You with your prosecutor's sneer,
your tactics and coercions. And should I, too, confess?
And her and him and him and her? Is anyone not guilty?
Daylight busies her hands. She is scrubbing the bedposts and
floors
with her candor. I wake from a dream in which willows bend
and bend.
A whole grove of them, like sorrow. Nothing can make them
rise.
And it was sad because the birds tried to lift them
but their bodies had turned to lead.
It's not that the willows wanted to lose their downwardness,

only to lift their branches for one moment to the sun.
You are so cunning, always waiting in the wings, then coming
out
at the necessary moment, an expert campaign manager, a fundraiser.
Bees are swarming round my wicker chair now
as if they, too, had just woken from deep sleep.
Where do you keep them, their buzzes chained like Houdini?
Look, they have escaped. Their mutinous wreaths are teeming in
the sun.
The Harbor Boats
The harbor boats are taciturn. The bells echo down from the
hills
in brief processions of brightness and desire, building their little
songs
the way children construct ladders and cradles
from pieces of elastic string.
The bells come down from the hills like a mission of kindness,
but not to the boats, that do not hear them,
not to the buoys or the rocks. I walk the narrow inlet,
its untrustworthy and precarious calm,
though when it's still like this it seems it must always be so—
there's barely a ripple at all.
These boats don't inflect harm or suffer harm.
Old wood has whitened like salt.
Where do the harbor boats keep their neatly folded sails?
And the barnacles sticking to their hulls—hidden, barbed—
I imagine them like pieces of medieval weaponry, spiked iron
balls,
unnecessary in this passive element.
On calm days such as this the air is quiet until the bells arrive.
I listen for them as for a visitor to interrupt the sameness,—
how they can alter this white sky until it's not just
blanks and blanks and blanks traveling out over the sea,
scented with sea-grass and mixing with the salty farness.

Sometimes the boats seem distant as the rigid bodies of Pompeii,
no longer desiring to unsway themselves.
They don't navigate a dizziness swirling underneath the skin.
If I were one of them, I, too, wouldn't fear the panicked
rush of crimson pulsing wildly through heart and skull.
It's calm, so calm, like a storybook nursery, this sea—
while I, who have feared my own hands, my own brain,
—each sharp unculled intention half-hidden from my overseeing
eyewalk
this rocky beach where the sand roses waver in dryness
and the beach grasses bend slowly downward
like secrets released, bit by bit, into a waiting ear.
INTERVIEW
COLUMBIA talks with
Curators Coast to Coast
When COLUMBIA learned that the Bronwyn Keenan Gallery in New
York had arranged an exchange exhibit with Griffin Linton Contemporary
Exhibitions in Los Angeles, the editors wondered if viewing art from one
coast on the other might create the sensation of a cross-country drive. The
editors approached the following interviews, conducted separately, with
questions about differences, but found that such an exchange instead
demonstrates how much the art world shares, regardless of place.
curate (ky^r'it) noun
1. A cleric, especially one who has charge of a parish.
2. A cleric -who assists a rector or vicar.
[Middle English curat, from Medieval Latin curatus, from Late
Latin cura, spiritual charge, from Latin, care. See cure.]
curate (ky^r"at') verb, transitive
To act as curator of; organize and oversee.
Usage Note: The verb curate is widely used in art circles to mean
"arrange or supervise (an exhibition of art)," as in, She has curated
two exhibitions for the Modern Museum.
—The American Heritage Dictionary, Tliird Edition
Columbia: Does the definition of curate as a verb, to lead or
shepherd, removed from any religious context, apply to your work
in a gallery?
Bronwyn Keenan: I'm not sure a gallery curator is a leader
figure. I'm sure that some curators look at it that way, but I've

98
always looked at curating as collaborative, thinking of a theme and
finding artists who fit that criteria. I'm usually inspired by one
person and it springboards into different ideas. I see associations.
Clues from one person lead to another person.
C: Did that happen with your current show?
BK:Yes, it was pretty much Michael Ashkin and Brad Kahlhamer,
dealing with the landscape and the environment in a certain way.
I think of them as more or less creating their specific worlds and then
populating them. Roxy Paine is much more ironic. They seem to
be surrounding themselves, it's their way of understanding their
world by surrounding themselves with these things.
Untitled, Ellen Berkenblit
COURTESY OF BRONWYN KEENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK
C: What is your responsibility as the curator?
BK: You have to show work in the right context. There's nothing
worse than a show where everything is just put up on the wall, and
there's a certain vibe of "everything must go," like a warehouse.
The purpose of a group show is to have a theme, but not to be
obvious. I don't like themes that hammer you over the head.
C: You've described your role as one of giving artists a "home."
Does that metaphor extend to make you and the exhibiting artists
a family?
BK: That happens at small galleries like mine, but I don't think at
the large, major ones. My purpose is also to find artists. I shownew
artists, people who haven't been exposed, and I really like
taking new people on. There's only so much you can do of that,
but I really like it.
C: Does showing together spur artists to work together?
BK: Definitely. I hear the artists in my show talking about
collaborating, not just showing together but actually doing.
C: Like a bloodline.
BK: Yeah, exactly.
C: What is your vision as a gallery director in New York City,
specifically?
BK: Everything changes so quickly. When I started (last year), I
thought I didn't want to represent particular people, I wanted to
do group shows and show a lot of different work by a lot of
different artists. Then I started to discover that there's only so
much that I really connect to, and I want to work with some
people long term, not have it slip away.
C: How much of your work is affected by being in New York?
BK: You have access to the artists. They're here. You don't have
problems just getting the work. New York is the only place I'd
want to be.
C: You worked at a gallery in London. How did that affect your
perspective here?
BK: Young artists in London are really responding to Damien
Hirst and the whole white cube crowd. It's very different from
what's happening here. They're using different materials, and in

IOO
a sensational way. The work there seems a bit sensational, or
hysterical. That might not be entirely fair. Use of materials may
be a bit on the wane, there may be a return to painting now. But
here, it seems a little more authentic to me, more interior. People
here are in their studios working away, like in a vacuum. There's
a return to painting.
C: You're planning an exchange with the Linton Griffin gallery in
California. How do you predict that work will be perceived on
opposite coasts?
BK: There's a painter I'd like to show, Daniel Manns, whose work
is very Californian, in a way. It's very bright and sun-drenched.
The palette in New York is pretty dark, generally.
C: Will the difference be obvious here, showing Californian
work?
BK: There are artists who just haven't been seen here, and I want
to show them. Tom LaDuke uses such mundane things, like an
antenna. There's something really poetic about his work: to pick
things from everyday life that you might just look at and say how
Untitled, Michael Ashkin
COURTESY OF BRONWYN KEENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK
boring, but he has this passing through sense of things, about how
everything looks the same after awhile; he just sort of isolates these
things and makes them look like something else.
C: How will they perceive New York work in California?
BK: I think the community is so much smaller out there, in terms
of galleries or number of artists who live out there full time, that
they'll welcome the work, to see something new.
COLUMBIA: What are the major differences between East and West?
Meg Linton: After living in New York for four months, I found
the only difference between the cities is density. What New York
City has compacted into eight miles is spread out all over
California, but I still heard the same complaints by the New York
artists I visited: "There are no young galleries showing emerging
artists," or "No one is willing to take the risk," or "No one is
collecting contemporary art, unless it's a proven investment." That
is why Keenan is such a mecca for young artists in New York and
why Griffin Linton is a haven for young artists in Southern
California.
The biggest insight I had into New York was realizing how
traditional, prejudiced (against non-New York or non-European
artists) and conservative the art scene is. ... In California the art
scene is very connected to the University system and people are
less concerned about what something is and more concerned
about the artist's intention. This is a gross generalization, but it is
a strong impression I walked away with from my experience there.
The New York artists we show in L.A. will receive less prejudice
than will our L.A. artists exhibiting in New York. New York sees
itself as the pinnacle of the art world, particularly in the marketplace.
C: Tell us more about how New York artists will be received in
California. What differences are notable?
ML: We have had fabulous response to Michael Ashkin, Leslie
Brack, Manuel Pardo and Ellen Berkenblit's work. There is a
difference in the work, and it is incredibly difficult to articulate the
physical or aesthetic difference, but I do believe a large factor is the
difference in environment: open versus compact space, horizontal

102
structure versus vertical, harsh versus subtle weather changes,
qualities of light, transportation, distance. People in L.A. exist and
move through the world differently than in New York City.
Having lived in other cities and countries, how one operates from
day to day impacts ideas and perceptions, especially those of the
creative mind. The variety of landscape on our planet is what is
saving us from the monotony of the "global village."
C: Is there something in particular you're after in the exhibits
you arrange?
ML: I look for the abstract, such as quality in form and content,
integrity, and sincerity. For example, with Tom LaDuke and
Daniel Manns, I have watched their work develop over ten years
and what I respect most is their constant determination to keep
moving forward, to keep experimenting with different media and
new ideas. . . .LaDuke s present body of work is compelling for
me because it is about California, and the intensity of this place.
He juxtaposes our metallic blue sky with the industrial necessities
of communication or in some cases industrial extinctions like the
RV antenna, which we are trained not to see as interrupting the
landscape. The metal structure disappears into our skyline. LaDuke
points to the beauty and ominous presence of these remnants.
People unfamiliar with our landscape may not understand or
recognize his references, but will feel the electronic hum of the
cable wires or discover the UFO at Palomar.
Jacqueline Cooper, an abstract painter originally from
England, has the same intensity about her work. You never know
where she's going to go next with her imagery or colors. Daniel
Manns uses geometric designs and forms, biomorphic shapes and
collaged fabrics, photographs and found objects. His color palette
is bubble gum pink, light blue, yellows and other colors found on
outdated linens and ice cream wrappers.
C: What is your vision as a curator?
ML: My vision or my desire is to provide artists with opportunity.
My role as a curator is facilitator. I have created an environment for
my artists to display their explorations and to receive support.
Gustave Flaubert's quote applies to my philosophy: "The author in
his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and
COURTESY OF GRIFFIN LINTON CONTEMPORARY GALLERIES, LOS ANGELES
Untitled, Daniel Manns
nowhere visible." I want to disappear from the process—to turn
invisible.
C: What do you think of the idea we put to Bronwyn Keenan,
about the role of curator making you a sort of mother figure in
the gallery?
ML: The gallery is like a family, but I do not feel like a matriarchal
figure. The artists we represent all support each other and the
gallery, but remain individuals with their own visions. I am not
trying to create a clan of artists with the same style or destination,
but a meeting ground for diversity. But we do all socialize a lot.
I get a group of artists together and go gallery hopping once a
month. There is a constant exchange between us all.
—Interview by AURORA WEST

a
c
INTERVIEW
O
su
3

LINDA BIERDS
The Breaking-Aways
—Samuel F. B. Morse
I remember the Town Hill elms, fluid
in the half-dark of evening, then the musk
of the creek I followed. A boy, alone, the riffle
of wings in underbrush. Then a woman's scream
there in the forest, far off to my left, long
and unwavering—but no, a field cat on a flat stone—
but no, larger, thick as a dog,
its sharp, unwavering scream. . .
The wire was bare, a horse-flank sheen,
and I wrapped it, yard by laborious yard,
in cotton—and once for the Hudson River, in tar-black
and pitch. My rooms were dense with pendulums,
magnets, the smoke-sting of solder.
"What hath God wrought!," I tapped, dashes and dots
ticking toward Baltimore, past the hedges
and cowbirds, the cottages, weathervanes, past
broken apples dark in the grasses.
And the sound? Like hail blown over a window.
Greetings. Stop. Regret. Stop. Strike and echo,
word and completion, an eyeblink.
I think of our lives as distinctions, quick
breaking-aways. From some vast, celestial streaming,
we are particles, the splendid particulars.
I was a boy. I remember elms, the paste
of the creek bed. I covered my ears with their cold lobes
to soften the screaming. And just before
backing away, released the lobes, then pressed again,
released, then again—and made from that
scream, from that wondrous outrush,
something apart from wonder.

Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty
Any strong emotion tempers my madnesses.
The death of beloveds. William in his fever-coat.
I reenter the world through a shallow door
and linger within it, conversations returning,
the lateral cycle of days.
I do not know what it is that removes me,
or sets me again at our long table, two crescents
of pike on a dark plate. But memory lives then,
and clarity. Near my back once again,
our room with a brook at the baseworks,
its stasis of butter and cheese. Or there,
in a corner, my shawl of wayside flowers.
Orchids and chickory. Little tongues of birth-wort.
I remember a cluster of autumn pike
and a dark angler on the slope of the weir.
The fish in his hand and the roiling water
brought forth with their brightness
his leggings and waist. But his torso was lost
into shadow, and only his pipe smoke survived,
lifting, then doubling, on the placid water above him.
Often, I think, I encompass a similar shadow.
But rise through it, as our looped initials
once rose over dye-stained eggs.
We were children. With the milk of a burning candle
we stroked our letters to the hollowed shells.
And dipped them, then, in a blackberry bath,
until the script of us surfaced,
pale, independent, the D and cantering W
Then C for Christopher. V—William laughed—for vale.
And P, he said, for Pisces, Polaris, the gimbaling
planets. And for plenitude, perhaps,
each season, each voice in its furrow of air. . .
Once, I was told of a sharp-shinned hawk
who pursued the reflection of its fleeting prey
through three striations of greenhouse windows:
the arrow of its body cracking first into anteroom,
then desert, then the thick mist
of the fuchias. It lay in a bloodshawl
of ruby flowers, while the petals of grass
on the brick-work floor repeated its image.
Again and again and again.
As all we have passed through sustains us.

KAY RYAN
Weakness and Doubt Failure
Weakness and doubt There could be nutrients
are symbionts in failure—
famous throughout deep amendments
the fungal orders to the shallow soil
which admire pallors, of wishes.
rusts, grey talcums, Think of the
the whole palette dark and bitter
of dusts and powders flavors of
of the rot kingdom, black ales
and do not share and peasant loaves.
our kind's disgust Think of licorices.
at dissolution, following Think about
the interplay of doubt the tales of how
and weakness Indians put fishes
as a robust under corn plants.
sort of business; Next time hope
the way we relinquishes a form,
love construction, think about that.
they love hollowing.

JAMES RETSS
Drops in the Bucket Lowland Rebel
At first F act ' s Amsterdam didn't give a damn
each drop
makes its
• Fact is he could've chucked brushes and easel
own pock
mto a canal rafted his last canvases
against the tin.
on tne In time
Zuider Zee & no one would've noticed
there is a he was rubbing his mustache mumbling
thin laquer : which is
something about line drawings of hip boots
layered and < something other than what we've come to remember
relayered F act * s ne was till there's
shadowy hatless not composed
a quantity
as we know him in his self-portraits
of water
with its
Rotterdam The Hague & Leiden held
own skin
no h°P e f° r one who could see all colors
and sense
at of purpose,
once constituting a street scene
shocked at F act ^ s ne was a windmill turning the breeze
each new violation
mto a of its surface.
vortex of feeling a doomed revolution

DANIEL TOBIN
At the Egyptian Exhibit
Thou shalt have power over water, breathe air,
be surfeited with the desires of the heart....
-from an Egyptian sarcophagus
How, you said, you used to sleep—the way
the mummy's hand flared awkwardly, twisted
just so, transposings of the quick and dead
made tractable behind glass. In his day:
tombs stocked full as bombshelters, the soul
beaked and twittering over the body's haunts,
or casting off from rushes in the sun's boat,
^hat scares is how I see you, not cured, gaunt
.. as this shell, but a child curled in your bed,
your small hand in the shape of something gone
but for its remnant. As if someone wedded
these worlds as unalike as skin and stone.
Or as though the wind had stopped to trace
its image in the sphinx's disappearing face.
NIN ANDREWS
How You Lost Your Red Hat
One night my love says to me, Honey, I'm sorry.
You can't love the same woman twice. I should never
have come back. I need to put on my hat and vanish
like an absent mind. He had a red hat
he never wore until that night, though he often said
to me, the soul is nothing but a hat balanced loosely
on your blonde hair. Take it off if you want.
Times like this, his body is all I want. How
easily a love can levitate into the city sky.
And my soul with it, a bowler hat spinning
slowly down until I am caught beneath it
on top of another man's bald head.

SCOTT C. CAIRNS
Yahweh's Image
And God said, "Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness."
—Genesis 1. 26
AndYahweh sat in the dust, bone weary after days
of strenuous making, during which He, now and
again, would pause to consider the way things were
shaping up. Time also would pause upon these
strange durations; it would lean back on its
haunches, close its marble eyes, appear to doze.
But whenYahweh Himself finally sat on the dewy
lawn—the first stage of his work all but finished—
He took in a great breath laced with all lush odors
of creation. It made him almost giddy.
As He exhaled, a sigh and sweet mist spread out
from him, settling over the earth. In that obscurity,
the Lord sat for an appalling interval, so extreme
that even Time opened its eyes, and once, despite
itself, let its tail twitch. ThenYahweh lay back,
running His hands over the damp grasses, and in
deep contemplation reached into the soil, lifting
great handfuls of trembling clay to His lips, which
parted to avail another breath.
With this clay He began to coat his shins, cover His
thighs, His chest. He continued this layering, and,
when He had been wholly interred, He parted the
clay at His side, and retreated from it, leaving the
image of Himself to wander in what remained of
that early morning mist.
BETH GYLYS
How I Was
A day last spring. My hands smelled of carrots.
I don't know where it was I walked or stood—
a hill perhaps, a park. The sky was full
of mood the way it changed—the blue of it,
the blue but also the gray—that mixed and blurred
as light in dreams, as crowds. And I was right then
there, right there, between the carrots and
the pungent smell of green, the trees blown sideways,
their branches twisting, mixing, coming free. It wasn't
truth, but the sky, the wind, the clouds (and they
were not like continents or sheep, but simply white
wisps tumbling past). Imagine having stood,
your hand holding a streetcar's rail, your hair
awash with wind, having heard the clanging bells
and felt the engine churning at your feet.
It's that I mean—the way it moves and moves
at times—your heart and something else. I wanted
nothing, and was nothing, and was fine.

NATALIE KUSZ
After Bedtime
At night, with the coal stove stoked
and banked to burn low, its tea kettle filled and moistening
the air, my mother made the night rounds, visiting
each bed in turn, replacing fallen blankets
and pillows, pulling the thumbs from our mouths,
bending in toward our faces
to confirm that each of us breathed. Sometimes,
now, in my daughter's dark room, when I cover
her stray foot with the sheets, pick up
the book and pen flashlight where she hid them, I know
how our mother must have stood there, desiring
to wake us again on a pretense—some question
about school, a reminder to carry our lunch
or field trip money—anything
to lengthen the day by one more
conversation, spoken at leisure
with the TV off, every errand complete, no bubbling dinner
to distract her. She deliberated—I know it—
then left us sleeping, but occasionally—
if she touched and then left us
and we faded awake for a moment—
we could hear her slow footfalls retreating.
Letter to David, My Father's Best Friend
I am recalling the last homehaircut
he extracted from me: the usual
"I like your way, and its cheap," how the whiteblond
arctic sun bore itself rapidly
winter-ward overhead. His iron
chair readied on the boardwalk, the plum vinyl
hero's cape spread waiting in my hands,
he rested on the steps in half-descent, an apologetic
wheeze to his speech. "Almost," he said,
"but first some air," and my sister lowered
the oxygen tube down the porchway, settling
the soughing cannula in his nose. Finally
two last stairs, a hunching stride, the chair pads
hissed exhale underneath him. I made it
quick: the shrouding plastic, the furrowing comb, the cautious
humming clippers behind each ear. Shoulders,
nape, he received the full trim, requesting by gesture
the sprouted brows. Around us, off the cape
cut white petals slid earthward. David,
they lay there still this summer, settled
between the boardwalk planks, spilled over-edge
on the gravel. You and I walked over them—remember—
those matting curled husks, mementos more surely
than the dead man's shirts we carried away. I
left them—some misplaced
fear of morbidity, perhaps, the styrene
dashboard Madonnas I despise. Yet today
your recorded voice speaks of snowfall, your first
cold-weather check on Dad's house. My trustworthy friend
I write to send thanks, to mention forgotten
leaf rakes along the drive. And tomorrow
if you travel peering past the house, stop
in a minute: there by the porch steps, a low
bank will have blown; skim it away, palmsful
at a time, lift out an envelope's
load of white hair, and preserve it
among the garden seeds till I come.

122
TOM PERROTTA
Bumping Into Klaus:
A Cold War Encounter
ON THE FIRST DAY of August in 1982, after two weeks of sightseeing
in Western Europe—I was a college kid visiting on a summer
traveling fellowship—I said good-bye to my traveling companion
and boarded the night train from Frankfurt to West Berlin,
which passed through mostly East German territory and was
operated by East German personnel.
This journey, my first muffled contact with the Communist
world, was physically miserable and tinged with a vague sense of
menace. The train seemed to have been designed with the maximum
discomfort of its riders in mind. The seats were hard wooden
benches with only a tantalizing hint of padding, spaced so far apart
in the compartment that you couldn't stretch out your legs and
rest them on the seat in front of you, the way you could on cushy
capitalist trains.
To make matters worse, I was the fifth and final passenger to
arrive at my assigned compartment. My fellow passengers had
already staked out the corner seats, leaving me to fend for myself
in the No Man's Land in the middle of the bench, an ill-defined
space without armrests. A headrest was bolted into the wall a full
six inches above the top of my head.
A couple of hours into the journey, when I had finally managed
to close my eyes arid drift off into a state close enough to
sleep to be merciful, a soldier burst into our compartment and
demanded to see our papers. He was young, this soldier, with
apple-red cheeks and a short-barreled assault weapon slung across
his chest. I remembered faces like his from Triumph of the Will.
As the sole American in the compartment, I seemed to merit
extra scrutiny. The soldier scowled at my face and passport photo
with a ferocious diligence I found flattering, ridiculous, and threatening
all at once. Exhausted as I was, I sat up straight on the bench
and scowled right back at him, striking what I thought to be a
small blow for freedom.
II.
Ten days later I paid my first visit to East Berlin. By that point
I'd fallen into a mild depression. My trip wasn't working out as
I'd hoped.
A friend had been kind enough to arrange for me to stay in
West Berlin with a widowed psychoanalyst and her three young
sons. Dr. G. lived in a lovely stone house in Zehlendorf, an upscale
residential district surrounded by lakes and forests, about as far
from the gritty, concrete-and-barbed wire center of the city as you
could get. From Zehlendorf,West Berlin felt more like the Fresh
Air Fund than the epicenter of global conflict.
Dr. G. was an intelligent, forceful, very German woman who
took it upon herself to orchestrate my experience of the city. She
found my interest in the Wall unhealthy and superficial, and
encouraged me to explore the more wholesome side of the city—
its museums and landmarks, its thriving cultural life, its surprising
natural beauty.
"This morning you must visit Charlottenburg Castle," she'd say.
"In the afternoon I've arranged for you to go sailing on the Wannsee."
I usually did what she said, partly out of obligation and partly
because I was at loose ends and wanted someone to tell me what
to do. When I wasn't following Dr. G.'s orders, I was generally
tagging along with her fourteen and sixteen-year-old sons,
precocious hipsters with vaguely anarchist sympathies. They took

Q.
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3
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124
me to visit a squat in Kreuzberg, but all the squatters had left town
for the month of August.
III.
East Berlin was a disappointment, too. The center of the city
was drab and weirdly deserted, an off-season totalitarian theme
park. Most of the people I saw belonged to Russian tour
groups. They moved in sullen clumps, constantly lectured by
their guards.
In the evening, after a long afternoon visit to the museum of
German history, I decided to spend as much of my remaining
Communist money on dinner before returning to the West. (As
the price of admission to East Berlin, western visitors were
required to exchange a substantial sum of hard currency at a
ridiculously inflated, non-refundable rate.)
The problem was, I couldn't find a restaurant. There was hardly
any pedestrian traffic, and buildings rarely identified themselves
with signs. There was no way for me to know if I was passing a
restaurant or a barber shop without opening the front door and
peering inside, something I wasn't prepared to do.
Then I got lucky. A block or two from the train station, I
happened to walk past a crowded bar just as a couple of patrons
were walking out. The burst of human conversation that followed
them out the door struck me like a gust of fresh air. I screwed up
my courage and stepped inside.
My appearance created a momentary stir. The din subsided,
and I found myself being scrutinized by scores of men, many of
them wearing police uniforms. Police hats were everywhere in
the dark, low-ceilinged room—hanging on hooks, resting on
partitions between wooden booths, plopped down like centerpieces
in the middle of tables.
Instantly, I began to perspire. I was wearing Levis, Adidas
sneakers, and a white cotton sweater from the Gap. A 35mm.
Yashica hung from a cord around my neck. I'd never felt so
American in my life.
I thought about leaving, but my adventurous spirit chose at
that moment to assert itself. An employee of the bar greeted me
with a courteous smile and escorted me, in the normal German
fashion, to a table where .three other patrons were seated. Only
one of them was wearing a uniform.
IV.
My tablemates expressed a high regard for my command of
the German language. In the spirit of international goodwill, they
toasted my visit to the German Democratic Republic. With a
combination of earnestness and amusement, my new friends insisted
that I sample the specialty of the house—raw hamburger, raw
egg, and raw onion on bread. They watched closely as I ate, smiling
their approval. I felt as though I'd passed some kind of test.
Still, the atmosphere around the table remained somewhat stiff
and formal until the uniformed man excused himself, leaving me
with Klaus and Karl. Karl was pudgy, bald, and friendly-looking.
Klaus was more striking—a sharp-nosed handsome man with a
deep resonant voice and a crest of reddish hair combed back over
his forehead in the style favored by Beethoven. He wore a complicated
safari-style shirt equipped with an array of useless zippers
and buckles, a bold fashion statement in the pastel and polyester
milieu of East Berlin.
At first we talked about literature. It was fascinating to compare
notes, to find out where our reading intersected and diverged.
They were big fans of Jack London, for example, a writer I'd managed
never to have read a word of, but were mostly unfamiliar
with Thomas Mann and Kafka. Karl frowned when I mentioned
Christa Wolf, the East German novelist.
"We think differently from Christa Wolf," he informed me in
a solemn voice. "For us, Communism is good."
Instead of agreeing, though, Klaus responded with a softly
derisive chuckle. He leaned across the table in my direction and
spoke in an urgent, incredulous whisper: "Do you know that we
can't go to West Berlin?"
I nodded, a bit startled by the question. Did he really think I
could be ignorant of such a crucial fact?
Karl grew visibly uncomfortable as Klaus warned me not to
think I'd seen the reality of East Germany in my day's tour of the

126
city. Compared to the rest of the country, he said, East Berlin
was paradise.
Reluctantly, Karl nodded. "It's true," he said. "Here you see
only the chocolate."
Then, as if sensing he'd gone as far as he could go, Karl abruptly
drained his beer and stood up, reminding us that he had to work
in the morning. He shook my hand and nodded curtly to Klaus.
v.
Ever since I'd sat down, Klaus and I had been sharing episodes
of strangely intense eye contact. Now that we were alone he really
opened up, as though we'd already achieved some degree of
intimacy.
"GDR 15 good," he told me. "But only if you don't think. If
you start thinking, then it's very bad."
"At least East Berlin is better than the rest of the country," I
said, putting my new knowledge to quick use.
Klaus nodded thoughtfully. "You can live good here," he conceded.
"But a pig also lives good and then—" He karate-chopped
the tabletop, as though his hand were the blade of a butcher's ax.
Some men in a nearby booth turned to look.
Klaus lowered his voice. "You can go anywhere you want," he
reminded me. "I can't even go to Hungary on vacation."
When I asked why, he told me he'd been jailed for a year and a
half in the late Sixties, back when he was only a few years older than
I was now. He said he'd spent three months in solitary confinement.
"It wasn't so bad. When you're alone you have time to think."
He spun his finger in a circular motion near his temple. He said
he knew better than his captors, because he believed in the
freedom of the individual conscience. "No man can know what's
right for another man," he declared fiercely, as if daring me to
disagree.
All I could do was nod. We had downed several beers at that
point, and my incipient buzz was compounded by a feeling very
close to awe. Here I was behind the Wall, behind the Iron frigging
Curtain, drinking beer with a dissident, a man who had been jailed
for his beliefs.
Klaus went on to say that he'd lost his job as an engineer as a
result of his troubles, and^ that now he worked for the Lutheran
Church. For the most part the authorities left him alone, but they
still wouldn't let him go to Hungary. They wouldn't let him go
anywhere. He gazed at the table for a while, then looked up. His
eyes were moist and sorrowful.
"Come back next week," he told me. "I'll show you around
the city. Places you'd never see on your own."
Honored and excited by the invitation, I wrote Dr. G.'s phone
number on a beer coaster and slid it across the table.
VI.
I believed him.
I let myself believe that I had wandered into a bar full of uniformed
police officers in one of the world's most repressive police
states, and simply bumped into a dissident, a brave man who was
willing to speak his mind in a public place to a stranger—an
American, no less—even going so far as to liken his fellow citizens
to pigs being fattened for the slaughter.
In my defense, I can at least point out that I was troubled by
the encounter. My journal contains the following entry, written
through a mild hangover on the morning after my visit:
. . .as I headed back to the West, I began to wonder if I should
return when Klaus calls. Here I was, doing just what I'd hoped
when I came here, and it scared me. My typically western
suspicions began to appear. Was he gay? (After all, he had
touched me several times during our conversation.) Would he
get me into trouble for spying?
Despite these concerns, it didn't take much effort for me to
dismiss "my typically western suspicions." Klaus had seemed sincere
to me, if a bit reckless. And so what if he was gay? What did
that have to do with anything? As for the second question, it
seemed to me the height of paranoia to imagine that the Stasi, the
dreaded East German Secret Police, would waste time on me. I
was just a college kid. I didn't know any military secrets or harbor
any subversive designs against the East German state. I hadn't
even voted for Reagan.

128
VII.
Somehow I knew not to tell Dr. G. about Klaus, the way a
teenage girl knows not to tell her parents about the boy with the
leather jacket and jacked-up Camaro. I knew she'd disapprove and
didn't feel like having to argue with her. Instead I casually mentioned
that I was thinking of returning to East Berlin to visit a few
more museums.
Klaus phoned at the pre-arranged time on the night before
our date. Luckily Dr. G. was working. Her eight-year-old son
handed me the phone.
Klaus and I exchanged small talk, confirming the time and
place of our meeting. Then he said something that made me
uneasy.
"I'll be wearing my safari suit. What will you be wearing?"
"I. . . I don't know," I said warily. "Probably jeans and my
white sweater. Why?"
"It's best to be safe," he explained. "I don't want to lose you
in the crowd."
VIII.
Riding the train into East Berlin the following morning, I
couldn't shake off a mild sense of foreboding. Why had Klaus
asked what I was going to wear? Had I made a mistake not telling
Dr. G. about our rendezvous? Was I doing something stupid?
It didn't help when, just moments after my arrival in East
Berlin, as I searched for Klaus in the sparse crowd milling around
outside the Friederichstrasse station, two thugs grabbed me and
shoved me against a wall. It happened so quickly, I wasn't sure if
I was being mugged or arrested.
"What are you doing here?" the dark-haired thug hissed, frisking
me like a policeman.
"Where did you come from?" his blond companion demanded,
clutching a fistful of my white sweater.
"West Berlin," I replied shakily, in my unmistakable American
accent. "Ich komme aus West Berlin."
This ominous chit chat was interrupted by Klaus's sudden
appearance on the scene. He stepped between me and the thugs,
a commanding presence in his freshly pressed safari suit, and
barked at them to leave

I3O
"It's best to do it in winter," he explained. "The sea is so
rough, they don't even bother to patrol it."
I glanced around uncomfortably. The passengers within hearing
range sat stone-faced, like New Yorkers ignoring a beggar.
"If a storm comes up, that's it," he said with a fatalistic shrug.
"But I'm getting older. I can't live like this much longer."
XI.
On the way to his apartment we stopped at another outdoor
cafe and had a few more beers. Then we visited a small grocery
store that seemed to have nothing in stock except for case upon
case of orange soda in unmarked bottles.
Klaus lived on the top floor of a four-story building on
Chopinstrasse. We stopped in the foyer so he could check his mail.
He stared at one particular piece for a long time.
"Oh no," he said softly.
"What?"
"It's from the police."
"What do they want?"
"To talk to me." All the color seemed to have drained from
his face. "They want me to clear something up."
"Is that bad?"
He looked at me for a long time.
"It's not good."
A disturbing thought slowly took shape in my mind.
"Is this about me?"
"I don't know," he said in an unconvincing tone of voice. "It
might be."
XII.
I waited on the couch while Klaus ducked into the bedroom
to change his clothes. The apartment was small but cozy. He
owned a lot of books.
I didn't want to be there—not in Klaus's apartment, and not
in East Berlin. By that point in the afternoon, I was mildly drunk,
thoroughly disoriented, and more than a little frightened.
Concern for my own safety mingled uneasily with guilt that I
might be the cause of Klaus's new round of troubles with the
authorities. All I really understood was that I needed to get back
to West Berlin as quickly as possible.
Klaus's shirt was off when he returned from the bedroom. He
locked eyes with me and slowly removed his belt, as though
performing a striptease. Then he unzipped his pants and let them
fall around his ankles. I remained motionless on the couch, trying
to maintain an expression of polite neutrality as he stood before
me in his skimpy underpants.
"I'm going on a date tonight," he said, long after the silence
had grown untenable. "My girlfriend's a doctor."
XIII.
There was an angel on top of his TV, a two-foot tall porcelain
statue of remarkable delicacy. Klaus lifted the angel off the set and
presented it to me for inspection.
"It's beautiful," I said.
It was, too. The angel's wings were outspread, and a serenity
radiated from its perfect face that seemed wildly out of place,
almost surreal, in that apartment, in that city.
"It belonged to my parents," he said. "I want you to have it."
I was touched and puzzled by the gesture. This angel wasn't
the kind of thing you just gave to someone, especially someone
you hardly knew.
"I can't," I told him.
He seemed startled. "Why not?"
"It's too generous."
"But I want you to have it."
"Klaus, I can't. I'm traveling with a backpack. It'll break."
"Are you sure?"
I imagined myself passing through the checkpoint with a large
white angel in my arms.
"I'm sorry. I really can't accept it."
With apparent reluctance, he took the angel from my hands
and returned it to its place of honor atop the primitive-looking
TV. Then he selected a fat volume from his bookshelf.
"Then take this," he said.

132
It was an illustrated history of German Literature printed in an
unreadable gothic-style typeface that gave me an instant headache.
"This is an important book," he said. "As a student of
literature, I'm sure you'll find it quite useful."
I didn't need or want a five-pound illustrated history of
German Literature, but knew it would be impolite to refuse him
twice.
"Okay," I said. "Thank you."
Klaus seemed pleased. He took the book into his bedroom
for a couple of minutes. When he returned, the book was neatly
wrapped in plain gray paper.
"My gift to you," he said proudly.
XIV.
We took a streetcar back into the center of the city and got
off in an unfamiliar neighborhood of crumbling apartment buildings
and bombed-out ruins from World War II. Klaus said he
wanted to show me something.
The streets were deserted at sunset, except for two husky
guys who appeared to be following at a distance of a block or so.
Klaus glanced over his shoulder and whispered, "Gibt man ein
schlechtes Gefuhl—it gives you a bad feeling." We picked up our
pace, making several turns in rapid succession to throw them off
our trail.
I knew we were close to the Wall, but I hadn't realized how
close until we rounded a corner and there it was, dead ahead at a
distance of maybe fifty yards. Not the graffiti-covered novelty I
knew from the western side, but something else entirely—the
white, white prison wall of East Berlin.
Klaus put his arm around me and walked me right up to the
edge of the forbidden zone, a step or two beyond the signs that
warned us to Halt! Residents of surrounding buildings poked
their heads out of windows to see what we were up to. The guards
in their watchtowers snapped to attention. On the western side, a
group of tourists floated dreamily above the Wall, gazing down at
us from an observation deck.
"Do you see?" Klaus said angrily. "It's like living in a zoo."
I understood his point, but was too nervous to respond. The
camera hung like a stone""around my neck.
Klaus told me that the observation deck was located on
Bernauer Strasse in West Berlin. He said I could go there sometime,
and we could wave to each other across the barbed wire and
land mines.
"Sure," I said, prepared just then to agree to anything.
"You could take pictures, too. So people in America can
know the truth."
"Sure," I said again. This didn't seem like the time to explain
that pictures of the Wall were a dime a dozen in the West.
"You know," he said, as though the idea had just occurred to
him, "if I were to try to escape, I think I would do it here. It's a
very short distance to the other side. It would really help me if
you took those pictures."
"Sure," I said a third time, as though it were my mantra.
xv.
At a bar near the train station, we drank a farewell beer, then
moved on to the ritual exchange of addresses. While searching for
a scrap of paper, I emptied the contents of my pockets onto the
table—wallet, passport, visa, keys, change.
"Can I look at your passport?" he asked.
"Why?"
He might have heard the suspicion in my voice.
"I'm just curious," he said. "I've never seen an American passport
before."
"Okay." With an odd, queasy feeling, I pushed it across the
table.
Klaus studied the cover for what seemed like a long time, then
opened the little book to the page with my picture on it.
"You look frightened," he said with a laugh.
XVI.
He accompanied me to the train station, right up to the edge of
the checkpoint area. He hugged me and told me to keep in touch.
Then he cast a swift, surreptitious glance at the border guards.

134
"If they ask where you got the book," he whispered,"tell them
you bought it at an antiquariat."
"Why?" I said, suddenly alarmed. "Is the book going to get
me in trouble?"
"Forget it," he told me. "If it makes you feel better, just say it's
a gift from your friend Klaus. But don't mention my last name or
where I live, okay?"
A wave of guilt washed over me. Here I was worrying about
myself, when Klaus was the one who was in real danger, the one
who was being watched by the Secret Police. He was the one
who lived here, the one who couldn't leave.
"Thanks for showing me around," I said. "I really enjoyed it."
Klaus nodded. "Maybe someday you can return the favor. If
I ever figure out a way to get out of here."
"That would be great," I said.
He squeezed my shoulder and disappeared through the station
doors.
XVII.
Two guards were on duty at the checkpoint, a man and a
woman, and they seemed unusually relaxed. The man held out his
hand.
"Visa," he said.
I'd been so focused on the business with the book, I'd forgotten
to have my visa ready. I checked my pockets, but couldn't find
it. A feeling of panic seized me. Had I left it in the bar?
"Visa," the guard said again, this time a little more sternly.
"Ein Moment, bitte." I double-checked my pockets. This time
I found it, a flimsy piece of paper wadded up like a gum wrapper.
The male guard smoothed it out with a look of disdain, as
though he were appalled by my lack of respect for such a critical
document. The other guard laughed. She was the first appealing
woman I'd seen all day.
"What happened?" she asked. "Did you take your rage out on
this tiny piece of paper?"
My rage? I didn't know what to make of the question. Was
she teasing me? Did she expect an answer?
"I'm sorry," I said.
The man checked my" passport, then asked to look in my bag.
"Was ist das?" he asked, pointing to my gift-wrapped parcel.
"Ein Buch," I said.
He waved me through the checkpoint.
XVIII.
Back in Dr. G.'s house that night, I unwrapped the book.
Tucked inside of it were two sheets of ledger paper with columns
of numbers written on them in pencil. Some of the numbers were
preceded by dollar signs and pound symbols. I was pretty sure the
papers hadn't been there when Klaus first showed me the book.
I didn't know what the numbers signified, and at that point, I
didn't really care. I was safely across the border, and that was all
that mattered. I was also exhausted. I crumpled up the papers and
tossed them in the garbage. Then I brushed my teeth and crawled
into bed.
A couple of hours later I sat bolt upright in the darkness,
gasping for air, trying to remember where I was.
XIX.
Two days before my scheduled departure from West Berlin, I
took the bus to the American military base to have dinner with
Bob and Joanie Miller and their two kids. Although I'd never met
her before, Joanie had grown up in my hometown; her younger
brother and my older brother were close friends.
Bob was a sergeant in the Army, a brisk, no-nonsense guy with
a barely detectable southern accent. After dinner, he asked me to
tell him a little about my trips to East Berlin, which I'd mentioned
in passing at the table.
"Some strange things happened," I said. "I'm not really sure
how to interpret them."
But as soon as I began putting the experience into words, a
lot of the ambiguity melted away. Now that I was clear-headed
and speaking English, Klaus's behavior seemed more sinister and
calculated than it had during our beer-soaked, bewildering tour
of East Berlin. It occurred to me for the first time that the whole

i36
day might have been some kind of set-up, from the moment
Klaus called to tell me he would be wearing his safari suit—the
thugs outside the train station, the postcards in his mailbox, our
seemingly impromptu visit to the Wall, all of it. Bob interrupted
my story.
"Let me ask you one thing, Tommy. Did he get a hold of
your passport?"
"Yeah. He asked to see it at the bar."
Bob gave Joanie a long look, then reached into his back pocket.
He flipped open his wallet like a TV cop.
"I'm with counter-intelligence," he said. "I think you need to
come down to the Consulate tomorrow."
xx.
When I got home that night, Dr. G. asked to have a word with
me. She seemed slightly agitated.
"Your friend from the East called," she said, putting a distasteful
spin on the word friend. "He wanted to know if you got the
book across the border without too much trouble."
I told her I had.
"Show me the book," she said.
Dr. G. frowned as soon as she saw the title: Geschichte der
Deutschen Literatur, by Paul Fechter. She turned to the title page
and showed me the publication date—1941.
"This is a fascist book," she explained. "You could have gotten
arrested just for having it in your possession."
A sick feeling came over me. I hadn't even wanted the stupid
book. I had only accepted it out of politeness, because the angel
was too absurd.
"All phone calls from the East are monitored," she explained.
"Your friend was trying to get you in trouble for smuggling."
Klaus's treachery seemed clear enough at that point, but his
purpose remained murky. Had I passed through the checkpoint
by pure luck, or was that part of the plan, too? Had he wrapped
the book to help me avoid detection, or to make it look more suspicious?
And what about the ledger papers? If the book itself was
illegal, weren't the papers overkill?
"Listen," Dr. G. said wearily. "There are good people over
there. You're just not going to meet them."
XXI.
At the Consulate, Bob taped my story, then told me he didn't
think I should risk taking the train out ofWest Berlin.
"As soon as you cross the border you're fair game," he said.
"The Stasi will probably pull you off the train and hold you for
questioning. They might even arrest you."
"But why? I didn't even do anything."
He said it looked like I was being set up for a charge of
Fluchthilfe—the crime of helping someone to escape. Bob was
especially concerned that Klaus had asked me to photograph a
particular section of the Wall.
"But I didn't take the pictures," I pointed out.
Bob shrugged. "It's up to you, Tommy. But if they take you,
it's anyone's guess when we'll be able to get you back. And
besides, they could also try and get you for smuggling."
"Do they do it a lot? Yank people off trains?"
"It happens to West Germans all the time," he said. "Hardly
ever to Americans. But it's not worth chancing it. I really think
you should get a plane out of here."
When I said I couldn't afford a plane ticket, Bob told me
about the duty train, the sealed U.S. military train that was off-limits
to the East German border guards. He said he might be able
to get me a spot on the train leaving the following evening.
"Sit tight," he said. "I'll be right back."
A couple of minutes passed. I waited anxiously in the
Interrogation Room, staring at a brown paper bag with the words,
"Classified Waste—Must Be Burned," written on the side. I still
had trouble making myself believe that Klaus had been -working
for the Secret Police. I just couldn't see the point of it. And yet
here I was in the Consulate, making secret arrangements to leave
the city. Bob burst back in the room, grinning.
"You're in luck,Tommy. We got you a bunk on the duty train.
And don't worry. Uncle Sam's picking up the tab."

138
XXII.
And that was how I left Berlin—smuggled, really, inside a
sealed military train, a diplomatic pouch on rails.
I shared a sleeper compartment with three servicemen—a
rangy chaplain named Daryl, a born-again aviator, and a black
enlisted man from Indiana. The chaplain knew lots of horror stories
about East Germany, including one about little kids tricked
into informing on their parents.
"This third grade teacher, she asked the class, 'Hey kids, who
saw the monkey on TV last night?' The monkey was on some
West German nature show. Nothing political, but still forbidden.
The teacher took down the names of all the kids who raised their
hands, and the parents were called in for questioning. Some of
them lost their jobs."
The chaplain also mentioned that the Stasi kept hidden cameras
on the top floors of many East German apartment buildings.
Klaus, I recalled, lived on the fourth floor of a four-story building.
Our conversation faded out, and I lay there in the darkness,
my body rocking along with the rugged thump-thump of the
rails, which, according to the aviator, were not properly maintained
by the East German government. For a long time I couldn't
sleep. I kept visualizing my alternate reality, the events that
might have taken place if I hadn't happened to have dinner with
Bob and Joanie a couple of days after my visit with Klaus. I saw
the apple-cheeked soldier bursting into my compartment, shaking
me awake, demanding to see my passport. I saw my own fear and
the bewilderment of my fellow passengers as I was placed under
arrest and led away at gunpoint. I imagined my parents waiting at
the airport long after the arrival of my flight, wondering what had
happened to me, and I hated Klaus just then like I'd never hated
anyone in my life. Why would he want to hurt me? What had I
ever done to him?
Finally, I must have dozed off. When I opened my eyes, the
chaplain was standing by the window. Outside, the dawn sky and
the countryside were an identical smoky shade of blue.
"Any second now," the chaplain whispered.
Suddenly the clunkythumping below us vanished, replaced by
a soft hum, a whispery gliding sensation. The chaplain clapped me
on the shoulder.
"You made it," he said. "We're back in the West."
XXIII.
After the collapse of the East German government, I read
everything I could about the Stasi, whose presence in the society
turned out to be more pervasive and suffocating than anyone
could have imagined. According to reliable estimates, the Secret
Police kept files on six million citizens, a third of the East German
population. It turned out not to be an exaggeration to say that the
whole country was engaged in an endless routine of spying on
itself.
Some of the spies were full-time agents, but many others were
part-time informers, reporting on the activities and opinions of
their neighbors, co-workers, and even relatives. Some of these
collaborators were apparently willing volunteers, but many of
them had been blackmailed into cooperating, arrested for some
minor, possibly invented transgression, and offered a simple, often
irresistible deal: go to jail and lose everything, or become a Stasi
informer.
I have no way of knowing for sure, but Klaus was probably
an elite agent. Most likely, his behavior in my presence was an
elaborate act, a thoroughly calculated deception. His feelings for
me probably didn't amount to much more than simple contempt.
But there also exists a more complicated possibility. Maybe
some of what he told me was true. Perhaps he really was a former
prisoner, forced into working for the Stasi, cooperating out of
neccessity while still opposing the system in his heart. Maybe he
meant it when he told me that he wanted to escape, that he
couldn't "live like this much longer." Maybe he was even secretly
pleased to learn that I'd slipped through the trap he'd helped
set for me.

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XIV.
He must have been there the night the Wall came down.
It's easy for me to imagine him standing in the crowd, to
picture him taking the sledgehammer from the hand of a fellow
citizen as the crowd cheers him on. I can even imagine him smiling
as he raises the hammer overhead and begins his swing. But
what goes through his mind at the moment of impact, what he
feels as the steel smashes the concrete, and another chunk comes
flying out of the Wall—this is where my imagination falters.
ELIZABETH GRAVER
A Place Not There
A STORE. OR NOT EVEN a store. An arrangement of chairs, stools,
tables in front of a two-car garage with the doors down. She sells
furniture she has painted in overly bright colors. People do not
buy it. She thinks it is because she is charging too much and no
one has money now, but in fact no one walks by, and if they do,
they are on duty, or they are not from this country and cannot
carry much with them. And the furniture hurts their eyes.
In the back, behind the furniture and garage, a child, and in
the child, a wish, and in the wish, a mother. Though she has one,
right out front. She is not a pretty child, not the kind people
would pluck up and squeeze. She is a square little girl with a
sloping, weak chin and short fingers. She went to school once,
before. She was quick at school. She can almost remember it, how
she used to clap the erasers together at the end of the day, black
felt pad to black felt pad, a cloud of white dust, the sticks of chalk
like the bones inside her fingers. A taste without words now, a
coating on her tongue.
She does not miss her father because she cannot remember
him except in the vaguest way, although she pretends to, even to
herself. Her mother remembers. A name: Arthur. A beard, reddish
like the girl's hair. A mole in the crotch of two fingers, the fingers
stained with ink. Breath sweet and pale as milk. Once her mother

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decorated other people's houses part-time, made kids' bedrooms
look like cities, circuses or jungles, detailed murals on walls and
headboards and closet doors. Now she finds furniture instead,
broken things people have thrown away or whole things they have
forgotten, left or been denied. Sometimes she climbs through
open or smashed windows on the block and lifts out a rocker or
a wooden footstool. Getting the paint is easy, a hardware store at
the end of the block gaping open.
She helps herself, paints all day, forgets to speak to her
daughter. She paints one chair red, another blue. All primaries,
no patterns. She paints in exactly the opposite way that she made
murals and her husband made maps, no detail here, just the broad
picture. She covers up the grain of fine woods—red cherry and
knobby walnut and imported teak. The furniture flattens, begins
to look like a drawing in a book. The girl keeps expecting her to
go further, put tiger stripes on the yellow chair or a stoplight on
the blue chair. Nothing feels finished to the girl, but her mother
goes no further, just stacks the furniture in the garage, which is
also where they sleep.
One day she remembers to scavenge a bed for her daughter—
a white youth bed like something she would have bought in a
former life. It has low bars on its sides, a cautious mix between a
real bed and a crib. She leaves it white. She herself sleeps in a red
rocking chair, sitting. Often, after the girl falls asleep, the mother
slides her hand between her own legs and strokes herself. She is
not seeking pleasure and she does not find it; rather she finds some
sort of familiarity, a dim unfolding memory—not of being with
her husband, but of when she was a girl not much older than her
daughter and thought this gesture dangerous and did it anyway.
Her old ideas of danger—electrical outlets near her kids, fast cars,
strong tides, medicine cabinets—are losing air, turning flat and silly
as bad jokes. Thinking of them comforts her and helps her sleep.
They have no blankets, but it is summer, and even in winter it
is the South and the girl, somehow, has not grown thin through all
this. Something is keeping her alive. Her mother is not sure what.
They hardly eat, fruit from a tree sometimes. Overgrown lettuce.
They chew on chives, drink water from a spigot on the side of the
garage, a green hose, the* girl's mouth open, her head tilted back.
A twitch, then, every once in a while, from the mother, who
remembers she loves her child, remembers the other ones—a
second girl and a boy, this one's twin. Come here, she says one
morning to the girl, and she strips her down and washes her with
the garden hose and a clean paintbrush. The girl shuts her eyes.
Her mother paints her with water. The child has no memory of
being this happy and she is sure that if she opens her eyes, she will
find herself behind the garage on a pile of cinder blocks, watching
her mother through two sets of windows.
She does not open her eyes. Her mother paints her. The
brush is yellow and soft on her arched back, on her flat chest
and rounded belly and between her buttocks. She knows she is a
twin but cannot remember the other one and does not want him
back. No room. She will save Come here. And save the paintbrush
and her mother's hands on her back and knees and tucking
her wet hair behind her ear.
This is not the sort of country—these are not the sort of
people—to have a war at home. These are not the sort of people.
Once, the mother drove a nice car, with a metal grid in the back
to keep the dog from jumping over the seat, and a box of toys and
dried apples on the floor for traffic jams. The children had lessons
and believed in things. Somewhere in the dim back of her mind,
the girl knows that the middle note on the piano is C. She knows
that once, in another world, her sister's tooth fell out and a fairy
left a quarter and a book. She knows Head Up and Heels Down
on the pony, how to hold on with both hands to the knob on the
Western saddle as she is led around the ring. She was just getting
old enough to loosen her grip on the knob and hold the reins
herself-—not too tight and not too slack.
Her mother remembers more. How once it was the Cold
War, when she had three babies. How then, after that, it was a
better time—for the world, that is. For her it was more or less the
same time, though she made an effort to keep up. Walls coming
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smiled; she even got a little teary-eyed. A piece of paper folded.
People coming on crutches, in go-carts, people crawling, almost,
to the polls. Invisible ink. In some countries. In other countries
the rivers got clogged with bodies. Parts of bodies.
How after the Cold War it was the Middle War. Her husband
made maps and he was always busy, redoing. She knew some of
his trade secrets. The way, to set a trap for the plagiarists, he always
put in a place which was not there. A small, dead-end street on a
city map. A little made-up island on a world map. He had named
one such island after her. If these things showed up later on someone
else's map, you caught them red-handed. He had the best
sense of direction she had ever seen, must have had a brain like the
globe of a compass, jiggling in water. A patient man. Meticulous.
Spidery green lines, pale yellow lines, dark black. In ink when
they first got married, then later sometimes on a screen. He would
show her since he worked at home. Come see, after the children
were asleep. Where is it? she might ask, but it did not matter. She
wanted to see the colors and how small the world looked, like
something you could plagiarize.
Later she found out that the world was full of secret alliances
and blurry borders, ones not put on any map. She had felt like an
idiot for having believed that because they held each other at
night, she could read her husband's mind. He had known; she is
sure of it now. He had drawn his maps like intricate patchworks—
look, hon, so many tiny countries in the world!—but he had
known all along that the little countries were actually one country
pretending to be many. Or something; she still wasn't sure she had
it straight. Fake countries staging wars between each other while
they gathered their forces underground, pretending to speak many
languages, when really they spoke one. Fake translators, fake
borders, fake maps, fake -wars. Until this one. It surprises her,
thinking back, that people had the energy for double lives. She no
longer cares about much. Care has been leeched out of her,
though in the beginning she found it all exciting. Finally
something close to home, her city on the news. Soldiers. A sense
of living history. She had been brave, gone out at night through
the dark streets to bring canned food to people in the rubble, like
Joan of Arc or Mother Gourage. Stupid. She had been stupid.
When she got back, only the little girl was left. She did not
know if her other children had gone off and were living like mice
in the debris, or if they had been taken away. She did not know
where her husband, the mapmaker, had disappeared to, or her
chocolate labrador dog. She knew her husband had secrets, ones
he kept from her, about ways to draw the earth. She remembered
a story they had read together once, about an uncharted space, a
diamond the size of a mountain, kept by its owner off the maps.
Not so far-fetched, he had said, but he would not tell her more.
When she returned to the house to find him gone, his computer
was missing, too. She had noticed that, though she had not
noticed much.
Just grabbed the girl, who was asleep in her room, grabbed
their passports, left a note, stood in a snaking line and tried to get
money from the bank machine, which said Out of Cash in amber
letters. Sorry Please Come Again. Not logical; it would have been
smarter to stay put in the house. She had gotten lost, had never
had a sense of direction and anyway nothing looked the same. She
had needed to look for them. A year ago, maybe, by now. Two
years ago, maybe, or six months. For a while she had kept track
on the garage wall, marked days in matchstick lines like a prisoner
in a movie, but then she had stopped and painted over the lines in
a fat blue swathe.
Perhaps he had gone somewhere uncharted with the other
children. In the beginning the thought had comforted her, to
picture them away and safe. Then it had begun to make her
angry—to have been left behind that way—and she had imagined
smashing in his computer screen with a hammer and biting teethmarks
into the fine brown film you could see when you slid the
metal back on his diskettes. At some point her daughter's teeth
had started dropping out like rotten fruit. Baby teeth. At first it
had appalled and amazed and excited her, that those teeth would
drop and the other ones, in the midst of all this, would find the
energy to push through.

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Then she stopped noticing. Mindless as a tooth, as a sharp
canine. She pushes through, too, now. Not well, not lovingly, but
like an animal who gets up and looks for food because it has a
heart muscle twitching in its chest cavity, and a stomach spitting
acid, and, at its side, a smaller version of itself. A peach found on
the corner of the street, bitten in two, half swallowed, the rest
handed to the girl. The furniture, which she does not.paint with
pleasure, though it looks bright. Something to do. A way to earn
a little or pretend she might. A way to simplify the room inside
her head.
In her other life, she made children's bedrooms look like the
big, wide world. What do you want? she used to kneel and ask the
children. What do you like? Then she would give it to them. She
painted walls so thick with foliage they made the room hang moist
and heavy as a rainforest. She covered walls with skyscrapers'
jagged tops and golden windows—and tucked between their
shapes, the starry blue dome of a mosque and tiny matchstick
people leading good and pleasant lives. She tried to make the
rooms go on journeys and take the children into the outside
world. Now she does the opposite, though without much
thought. She wants, in her gut, to live inside a children's book
where everything is flat and countable—red, yellow, or blue—and
the stiff pages can be washed clean at the end of the day.
People come by occasionally, journalists from other countries
mostly. Don't know, she says when they bend down to ask her
questions. Don't remember, don't know. If she had ever been able
to imagine this before, she might find some words now. She had
given it no thought. Almost no thought. Only once, on the news,
she had seen a man running from sniper fire wearing Nike sneakers.
Nike sneakers, the curved, wave insignia on the side. A war on the
other side of the world, but he was a man in a blue windbreaker
and she recognized his sneaker brand. A tiny shudder then. An ear
cocked toward upstairs: okay, the three of them, all right. Sound
asleep. The twins just three, then; the older girl almost five. In
sleepers. She had zipped them shut. A brief, untoward fear. Just that.
It did not last long. Even once things had begun, on the other side
of the city, she had carried cans and felt the bright, sharp sap of
bravery as she handed out beans and corn, but she had given it
practically no thought.
The girl has come to thought during these two years or
months, her teeth wiggling, loosening in her mouth. One hanging
for days by a little pink thread. She collects them, though no one
has told her to. She saves them in the hollow of a cinder block
along with orange rinds, peach pits, dimes (useless now) and other
things she finds but cannot identify: a cracked computer diskette
with a lime green label. A diaphragm with a rubbery soft center
and wiry edge, smelling of salt and talc. Some bent nails. Her
teeth. Six so far, small and yellowish. She remembers how to
count, though she does not remember learning in school.
One two three. Four five six. In the early days she had sat
with her mother, but one day she kicked some paint by mistake
and spilled it. Her mother had slapped her with a hand covered
with cracked, drying blue. Still, the girl came back. Squatted. She
had learned, already, the gestures of a streetchild: how to squat
among her mother's many chairs, how to cup water in her hand.
Sometimes in the beginning they sang things: Got two eyes, one
two, and they're both the same size, one two. Or one about I love
trash. Songs she now forgets most of the time. Then her mother
had started saying Quiet quiet. Started eating the whole peach
sometimes, leaving the carved pit on the ground. The girl found
the stack of cinder blocks on the other side of the garage and the
parallel set of windows so she could see through to where her
mother was.
Now the child gives it nothing but thought: How to live in
this world of hers, how to climb up and over, find, hoard, gather,
beg. Not quick, not invisible. She walks like a peasant woman, up
and down the streets. She walks up to soldiers, journalists, whoever is
around. She puts out her hands. She does not remember how it
was before. She is not pretty enough to turn heads, but this also
helps her; they do not touch her too much, only a pat here and
there, only one man, once, who put his finger in her. She stood
still while he did it. She clenched. He gave her beef jerky—salty,
thick like leathery skin.

I48
Mostly things are quiet on the streets, not a lot of people, more
soldiers than regular people. Not a lot of danger. It is a quiet
aftertime. More journalists than soldiers. Some people carry an
oily yellow lotion which they put on their skin so that they always
look slippery, glossy, like their insides have come outside or they
are something about to be cooked. The girl and her mother do
not have any lotion. The child does not know what it is for, and
her mother has not noticed it.
What if I didn't come home? the girl wonders. Home to the
garage. Would she notice?
But she always does come home, is coming home as she thinks
about it now. After an hour or two, following the streets, trotting
like a dog, all of it arranged in her head so that she never
hesitates—left turn, right, straight, across a railroad bridge, left
again, left and then right, to where her mother, this time, is
painting a table yellow.
She steps up and watches, and her mother's gaze flickers
toward her. The girl has two apples and a banana in the pockets
of the man's shirt she wears as a dress.
She might walk up to her kneeling mother, hold out the fruit.
Oh, her mother might say.
Something might wake up in the girl, flutter forward from the
back of her head where, if she grows up, she will try to find things
and be unable to most of the time: before before. Something
might click. One of these things is not like the others, she might
say, and remember dancing animals with skin like bath towels.
One of these things just doesn't belong. Can you tell me which
thing is not like the others, before I finish this song? Her mother
might look at her.
Hi, her mother might say. She might touch her daughter's
brow. I'd forgotten that one, she might say.
The girl puts down the fruit near where her mother is
painting.
Once a day her mother notices her, or once every few days.
She bathes the girl with the hose, or asks where she went when
she wandered away, or hands her a piece of food. Not often, but
the girl is storing things for if she grows up and has to remember
her mother, who she knows, even now, will not stay long in this
world, if any of them do** The girl does not remember the Cold
War or Middle War, but songs keep coming to her out of nowhere:
Minnie and Winnie slept in a shell, Sleep little ladies, and they slept
well.
Her mother finds more and more chairs and speaks less and
less. She never leaves the sidewalk in front of the garage except to
walk half a block up or down, looking for food or furniture. But
the girl has a sense of direction and new, strong, jagged front teeth,
and when a journalist stoops down to ask her questions, she
answers in clipped, clear words: In a garage. My mother. I don't
know. Can I have an orange? I don't know can I have an orange
please?
Until the journalist gives it to her; they always have fruit in
their pockets. They write down her words on thin, creamy pads
she wants to grab and hide inside her cinder block. She is not
surprised by how often she crosses paths with these people, or by
how flawlessly they speak her language. She is not surprised by
anything. At night she does not dream, her sleep too brief and
heavy. Mostly she lies awake and slyly watches things—shadows
on the ceiling, or her mother fingering her own flesh in the chair
or sleeping with her head flung back.
If the girl were able to, she might dream of what her mother
dreams. She is on a flat road in a small, clear country she does not
recognize, a road no one knows about but her husband—who
invented it to trick the plagiarists—and herself, and their three
children, who are strapped on her back like water bottles, their
eyes still shut, their gums still hiding double sets of teeth.

150
JOSH HARMON
Saved from the World
THE LIGHT MADE ME FEEL as if I were underwater—the gray-green
light coloring all of our faces, and the air, damp and stuffy and
smelling like mildew. The thunder seemed to come from the earth
instead of the sky, the way it rolled along the ground and rumbled
through the cellar walls. The rain was a single sound, a roar like
nothing I had ever heard, and over our heads the house creaked in
the wind as if timbers were stretching themselves, had somehow
become trees again and were beginning to grow. We huddled in
the dark, some of the children crying, some of the mothers
whispering. With my eyes closed, I imagined windowpanes shattering,
shutters banging, fields thrashing like the waters of the ocean Roy
said we all came from, every one of us, hundreds and thousands of
years ago.
Roy's radio sat on the floor, its bent antennae duct-taped to
the console, reminding us that he was only as far as the barn. The
radio played static, a noise that faded into the noise of everything
else, a noise that I noticed only when it crackled like a voice
speaking from within a fire. If a voice was speaking through the
static, none of us listened to it. Roy had heard already what it said,
had called everyone out of the fields, waving his arms like a man
on a sinking ship. Jenny and I had seen him, and as I ran toward
that tiny figure, the grass catching at my ankles, she had turned
and run away from the House, away from the sagging barn, toward
the dirt road we knew led to town.
I heard Roy coming down the stairs, and when I opened my
eyes I saw the beam of his flashlight sweeping back and forth. Lily,
Jenny's mother, held her knees to her chin, quiet now as she
rocked on the dusty cement floor, her eyes closed, her head
shaking no, no. Above us, pipes spread like branches in the dark,
dangling scraps of pink insulation.
It was easy to hold my breath—imagining the air as murky
water, and waiting for the house to break apart. Roy talked about
when the end would come, how wind and water would destroy
everything, and how our families would be left, alone in the
empty lands. The mothers believed him, and most of the children,
but Jenny and I knew that a storm didn't pick and choose who it
spared.
I waited, too, for Roy to tell us what would happen next. We
all knew about John-Walter, the skinny older boy who had left last
winter, thin patches of beard on his cheeks and throat, his eyes the
same big brown eyes of most of the children, and of Roy. Faith,
who watched us when we were young, told us that we were all
Roy's children, but we knew that, like Jenny and her mother,
some of us had come here from someplace else—that if Roy
could, he would make the whole world his, whether or not he had
a right to claim it. Jenny told me my eyes were like everyone else's
not because I was Roy's son, but big so I could see everything,
more than the others.
John-Walter had come home in the back of Roy's pickup
truck, covered with tarps and plastic trash bags that fluttered as
Roy drove into the yard. The mothers buried his stiff body
behind the trees, after scraping at the frozen ground with rusted
shovels for two days, trying to make a hole big enough for John-
Walter's long legs and arms. Roy didn't come when Faith said
words over the place John-Walter lay, but he stood in the fields
and watched the knot of us standing there, rubbing our hands
together and stamping our feet. After we left he stayed there, in

152
the grass. I imagined him still staring at loose stones and packed
dirt. John-Walter was gone into the earth that Roy said would
devour us all. That night, Joan stroked my arm while she put me
to bed. "Outside is too dangerous for us," she said, her voice quiet
in the dark. "John-Walter didn't know that, didn't know what he'd
find out there."
Roy shined the beam of his flashlight around the cellar. The
mothers looked at him, into the light, but the children hid their
heads. I tried to look at nothing as the light crossed my face.
Instead, I thought about Jenny's face, her sudden expression as she
turned and ran. I couldn't remember the way her eyes looked, her
eyes that never seemed to blink, that seemed to see right through
me—just the sight of her hair blown away from her face in
tangles by the wind, the grass swishing against her legs, the sleeves
of her shirt flapping, filled with air. In dreams I had seen this many
times, but then always the one running was me—the world
opening before my feet.
"Is she the only one?" Roy said. He pointed the flashlight at
the floor, and the glow pooled by his feet. "Just Jenny and the
chickens? The chickens flew away to one of the trees, but we don't
know where she flew off to."
No one answered. We knew not to speak when Roy's voice
sounded this way, as if it was talking to the clouds, asking them
would it rain. Lily bit her lip, sucking in her breath, and the rest
of us watched her, or else pretended not to see.
Roy reached into his pocket for a cigarette, and then we heard
the sound of the match. He inhaled, and in the glow of the flame
I saw the creases in his face, before he squeezed the match between
his fingers. No one knew how old Roy was, or how long he'd
been here. Some of the older mothers told us how Roy had saved
them from the world, taking them from another life into this one.
But if we asked them when he had co_me7"br where they had lived
before they came here, or how x5ld they were, they would shush
us, saying, "None of that mattejrs anymore. What matters is that
Roy came, that we are here."
I smelled the smoke from Roy's cigarette, the smell that hung
everywhere in our house, the smell that followed me when I
milked Brown and Black, the smell that I noticed just before I
heard the sound of his Teet on the floor. Jenny and I held our
breath, sniffing the air, when we stole food at night. We knew even
as we shoved the crackers and pieces of dried apple into our
mouths that he would somehow find us there, kneeling on the
counters in the pantry, where no one except the mother who
prepared the food was supposed to go.
"The chickens won't last in that wind," Roy said, his voice a
whisper. "If we're lucky, we'll find them lying somewhere in the
fields. Maybe all we'll find are the feathers the wind strips away."
He shut off the flashlight, then squatted on the floor. The light
coming through the casement windows was almost gone, and
everyone stared at the tip of Roy's cigarette, the one point of light.
In the dark near me I could hear breathing, and the wet sound of
the blue-eyed boy sucking his thumb.
"The chickens I'm not worried about," Roy said. "But Jenny,"
he said, and his voice faded away into the static coming from the
radio. He coughed.
"Please, Roy," I heard Lily whisper through her teeth, her
voice so low I wasn't even sure if Roy could hear it.
"We've got to find her, don't we," Roy said, and his words
were not a question at all.
Lily nodded her head—all I could see was her dark hair in her
face. The last time I had seen her like this was when Faith had said
that Lily was becoming too close to Roy again. Those words had
been in the house for days, something we all noticed, like Roy's
smoke, and something we remembered knowing before, like a
dream, like one of the songs Faith had taught us to sing when we
were young. Then one afternoon I had heard the smack of a pot
falling to the floor. In the kitchen, Faith pressed her hands around
Lily's throat while Joan and Maria pulled at Lily's arms, tugging
her to the ground. Some of the mothers came to watch, standing
against the walls with their arms folded against their chests. Lily
covered her face with her hands, her damp hair hiding her eyes,
though we all heard the sounds coming from deep in her throat.
On the floor, a pot of rice steamed. Wet clumps spilled onto the

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wood.
"But first we need to know where to look," Roy said. "Where
did our Jenny go?"
Roy could make his voice sweet and gentle if he wanted. He
did it now, and we'd seen him do it to the mothers, touching their
shoulders or the curves of their stomachs, his eyes nearly closed.
He had done it to Jenny and me, turning on the light in the
pantry, catching us with mouths filled with food. We had both
covered our heads, curled up our chests, tried to become invisible.
The food in my mouth was a paste so thick I thought I would
choke on it, too sticky to swallow. But he had patted our heads,
told us not to worry, and eaten a cracker himself, brushing the
crumbs from his lips and smiling at us, silent for a moment. He
told me to go back to sleep. Jenny he told to stay. When I walked
out of the room, he had one arm around her shoulders, the other
on his knee, as he leaned toward her. A bar of light fell across the
hall behind me.
"She ran away," one of the girls said. "I saw her. She ran across
the field."
"Across the field," Roy said. I turned around, trying to see
which girl it was, but in the dark I couldn't tell. Then Roy looked
at me. I could feel his eyes on me before I knew he was staring at
me, the way the mothers said he saw us, trying to make us behave.
"Do you want Roy to see that?" they would ask. "He can see, he
knows what you do."
"Caleb," Roy said, and I felt my breath stop for a moment, felt
my skin get too tight. "You were working with Jenny."
"Yes," I said.
"And she ran away, across the fields," he said. He sucked on
his cigarette once more, and in that sudden glow I could see his
entire face—dark eyebrows, wrinkled cheeks, thin lips. He
scratched the cigarette across the cement floor.
"We'll have to take the truck, then," he said, exhaling. "You
and I."
We ran across the yard stooped over, the wind tearing at my.
jacket, pulling my arms away from me. Dust swirled in the air, and
I covered my mouth with one hand, narrowed my eyes to slits.
Rain stung where it struck my cheeks.
Roy pulled open the barn door and shoved me inside, then
strained with both hands to shut it. Wind blew through cracks in
the walls, and the air was filled with more dust. Roy pulled off the
tarps covering the truck and threw them on the bales of hay. I saw
Brown in her stall, her eye wild as it looked back at me. Black was
somewhere further back, her lowing echoing in the darkness.
Then I felt Roy's hand on my shoulder.
"Damn you to hell," he shouted. His hair blew back from his
face. "You didn't stop her." He threw me to the ground, then
pulled me back up. We looked at each other, his mouth open a
little. I could feel where his hand had been, like heat creeping
across my skin. My own hands shook.
"Get behind the wheel," he said.
I climbed into the truck. I remembered riding in a car once,
years ago, an afternoon when Roy and Faith had taken some of us
to see a doctor, a tall man who had shined lights in our eyes and
pressed sticks on our tongues. That car sat rotting in the fields
now, most of the parts stripped off it by Roy, the body turning to
rust. Sometimes Roy shot at it with his gun while we hid in the
bushes behind him, watching as his arm jerked back with the
sudden noise that made me blink. Later, I ran my fingers over the
smooth holes in the metal.
I held the wheel in both hands, stretching my feet toward the
pedals on the floor. Roy reached past me and turned a key on the
side of the wheel. The engine rumbled under the wide green
hood. Roy pulled down a metal stick and the truck started to
lurch. "Just tap the gas," Roy said, pointing down at my feet. "Tap
it. Step on the brake when you get through the door. The one
on the left."
I touched the gas with my toe. The truck crept forward. Roy
ran ahead and pushed his back against the barn door to open it,
waving his hands at me. I squeezed my fingers between the knobs
of the wheel, remembering how Roy had driven us into town that
one time, how he had held the wheel in one hand and rested his

156
other on a mother's shoulder. I didn't know the way to town.
The truck was outside. I pressed both feet on the brake and
felt it sink toward the floor as the truck stopped. In a moment
Roy jerked open the door on my side. I slid across the wide seat
and the truck began to roll before he slammed the door shut. We
drove through the yard, bouncing over ruts, the truck creaking.
Dust and stones and branches hit the sides of the truck, and rain
crackled on the glass.
Some of the mothers had started to cry when Roy said he was
going out into the storm, though Lily had been silent. I knew that
when Roy left she would have her face scratched again, and
imagined the sound she had made the last time—except this time
I heard those sounds in the dark, mixed in with the sounds of rain,
static, everyone's quiet breath.
When Lily had come, Jenny a small girl hiding behind her
legs, and said she wanted to stay with us, I had heard the mothers
saying she wouldn't do. She was too small, too weak, they said,
and we didn't have enough food. Too pretty, I heard them
whisper over pots of boiling water. But Roy had let her stay—for
weeks I rarely saw her, and knew only that she was upstairs with
Roy. She lived in the house like a ghost, her pale hands and face
appearing suddenly as she crossed the hall or stepped into a room,
the look of her eyes hanging in the air for a moment after she was
gone.
The other mothers said nothing, not even Lily's name, but
they slapped us if we asked where she was. Jenny hid in closets
and behind chairs those weeks, biting the insides of her cheeks
until they bled, turning away her face when anyone came near.
She was lucky, I told her, to know who her own mother was,
though she didn't look at me, and only cried when I asked her
where she'd come from.
"You've never seen one," Roy said to me now. "Of course you
haven't. If you had, you wouldn't have come with me."
Behind us, the house had disappeared in dust and rain when I
turned to look. Leaves blew off trees suddenly, stripping branches
bare as in winter, and then the branches broke off, showing the
white wood inside the tree.
Inside, the windows filmed over with steam, and the wipers
scraped a sound like a question, over and over. Roy's hands on the
wheel seemed small, pale, the knuckles bright red.
"One minute, you see a dark tail drop from the sky," Roy said.
"The next minute, everything it touches is gone."
He looked at me and I tried to look back at his eyes. Instead
I watched as his mouth shaped more words. "Gone," he repeated,
"just like that."
Roy reached for his cigarettes again and drew another from
the pack with his lips, one hand staying on the -wheel. He
punched a button on the dashboard, and when it popped back out
I saw the glowing coils reflected orange on his skin. Then I
smelled the smoke. Roy sighed. I wondered what would happen
when we found Jenny—if he would turn his voice sweet again as
she climbed onto the seat beside me, if he would pull her close to
him, or if he would be angry with her, twisting her arm.
"I've seen them do strange things," he said, his voice quiet
again, but not gentle. "Drive nails through glass, so that the glass
didn't crack but just made a hole clear through. Flatten one house,
but not even touch the one next to it." Roy was silent for a
minute, peering through the fog on the windshield. He inhaled
on his cigarette, and spoke again, the words coming out with the
smoke in one long stream. "Pretty little wisp like Jenny could get
blown away in this kind of wind," he said.
I didn't answer, tried not to listen to what he said. I had never
been alone with Roy before, except the times he and I would pass
each other somewhere. I wouldn't look at him, and he never said
anything, though we may have passed so close that his arm
brushed against mine. He was a secret, and I watched him when
I thought he wouldn't notice. I hid myself from him, hoping he
didn't see me, so I could become like a secret too. Someday, I
imagined, no one would know where I was, even if I stood in
plain sight.
We ate away from Roy and the mothers. The only times we
heard Roy speak were when he told us to bring him something,
or when he said words each night as the sun fell below the edge
of the earth, his voice a sound like water pouring into a cup. Now

i58
that I was here with him, I wanted to ask him questions, but the
words had left my mouth. My tongue was dry.
We drove through more fields like those surrounding our
house—grass always waving, and trees standing close together,
dark spots in the middle of all that open space. Fences of barbed
wire strung between posts followed the dirt road. I studied this
country I'd never seen, this country exactly like what I saw from
the house, but different because it was outside. The mothers saw
it when Roy took them into town, and again when they came
back. They must have known every tree and rock, must have
counted each fencepost until they were back home, inside our
house. Now I tried to save everything for later, this grass, this
gravel road, the hardness of the wheel I had held in my hands.
I wanted to ask Jenny about this country, ask her again was it
like this everywhere, or was it really different as she'd told me
many times, with the high mountains and desert flats and waves
pounding on rocks. I watched for her, hoping to see her sitting
on a bank, or running along the road ahead of us. She was a part
of outside, I knew—her strange words and stories, the things only
she had seen. That was where we'd find her.
Roy coughed next to me, the sound low in his throat. He
looked at me again, then back at the road. The sky ahead of us was
black now, though I knew it was not yet night, that behind those
clouds the sun was still burning.
Roy slowed the truck and we stopped in the middle of the
road. Dust whispered and hissed against the windows, trying to
find a way in. Only a few big raindrops still fell, smacking the roof
of the truck.
"We're not going to find her here," Roy said. "She couldn't
have come this far." He turned the wheel all the way, and the
truck screeched as we moved in a circle. He backed up and moved
forward again, then pulled the truck into the grass on the side of
the road and turned off the engine.
"Come on," he said. "She's somewhere out there."
Jenny didn't tell me about the outside, about where she'd been
before she'd come here, until she and Lily had lived with us for
longer than a year. She knew to keep quiet, she had seen what
we'd done to the blue-eyed boy, his eyes like twin skies, like pieces
of crystal, so different from our own.
We knew Jenny was different from us, but at first we didn't
know how.
I realized it one day while Jenny and I kneeled in the garden,
pulling up weeds. For a long time the only sound was the snap
the roots made when we ripped them out of the dirt. I heard the
wind in the grass and the noises the swallows made to each other
as they skimmed over the fields. Finally Jenny started to talk.
"I don't think it's any better here," she said.
I yanked out another weed, the leaves coming off in my hand.
"Better than what?" I said.
She didn't say anything for a moment, and I thought we
would go back to working in silence. Finally she threw a handful
of weeds on the pile we had made, their pale roots still clutching
clumps of dirt.
"Better than living in a car, and him hitting," she said. "And
there's still not enough to eat."
"Who hit?" I asked.
"My father."
"Where's your father?"
"I don't know," Jenny said. She looked down at her hands.
Dirt rimmed each fingernail and lined the creases in her
knuckles. "Why do you think we came here?"
I couldn't think of an answer—I didn't know what there was
to come from, what that other world the mothers wouldn't talk
about was like.
Jenny looked into my face, studying my eyes, waiting for me
to speak. But I didn't. I studied her too—her long hair, dark like
Lily's, her pale skin, her eyelashes. I had never known anyone who
had a father. None of us had. I couldn't imagine what one was
like—and why, since she had one, she had lost him.
Side by side we walked into the fields. Roy held one hand to
the top of his head, as if trying to keep an invisible hat from
blowing away. We bent our bodies into the wind, and let it push

o
X
<
If)
160
us from behind. It was everywhere at once—filling my ears with
a sound like the static, tearing the words from Roy's mouth so that
I couldn't hear him. I saw his mouth move and only knew that
he had spoken.
I wondered why Jenny had run. She had not hesitated when
she saw Roy waving to us, had not even waited for me to follow,
but had run as if she'd been planning nothing but that moment—
or as if she'd never thought of it once. She had not even heard
what he said to us when we all reached the door to the house,
panting and holding our sides: "Get down in the basement.
There's a bad storm coming."
Lily had started to shake when Roy left to herd Black and
Brown into the barn, to try to chase the chickens out of the tree.
We had sat in the darkness, waiting, no one moving except Lily.
Her hands beat the sides of her head and tugged at her hair, until
one of the mothers had caught them and whispered in her ear,
words no one else could hear. What Lily said started like one of
Faith's songs, like when we all say words together, Roy standing
inside our circle, his arms held out.
"Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch," Lily said, hugging her knees to her chest.
I watched her in that underwater light, breathing that stuffy air.
Some of the other mothers began to whisper. Then Lily sat up
straight. "Jenny," she said, and I could tell she was crying. Her
voice faded into the static, into the rain and wind we could hear
getting louder, closer. We watched her, waiting for Roy to come
back to us.
Jenny didn't talk to me the day after Roy caught us stealing
food. When I tried to ask her why he'd wanted her to stay, she
pushed past me and walked into the kitchen, where the voices of
the mothers carried over the sounds of running water and
chopping. I didn't follow her in there, among the draped skirts
and steam, where any mother who saw you standing would give
you beans to snap or potatoes to scrub. Jenny was looking for Lily,
I knew, though I also knew that Lily was with Roy. I had seen
them leave the yard that morning in Roy's truck, and the truck
was still gone.
Later, I found Jenny in one of the bathrooms, crouched in
front of the toilet. She-sdidn't look up at me, and I watched her
for a minute. Her back shook, and she sniffed, choking and
coughing into her fist as she cried. I wanted to walk toward her,
touch the curve of her spine, but I couldn't move. Jenny cleared
her throat and spat in the toilet. I shut the door and walked away,
holding my breath, hoping she hadn't known I was there.
The mothers told us that outside was dangerous, but Jenny
had told me that it was no different than here, that trouble was
something that happened anywhere people were. Jenny's stories
about outside were like dreams, things I tried to imagine, but
which floated away from me even as I tried to wrap my hands
around them, making them mine. She told me her stories only at
night, when no one could hear but me.
"In Texas, on the highways, there are water fountains at every
rest stop," she said. "I'd stick nay head under and my mother would
laugh. We splashed each other until he came out of the bathroom.
Then we'd go into the bathroom together. Our faces together in
the mirror. My mother would laugh."
I lay on my back under scratchy blankets, and her voice
seemed to come not from her but from the dark space above me—
a pure voice that told its secrets only to me, a whisper that knew
why everything was, a murmur that followed me into sleep, that
still echoed in my ears when I woke.
Jenny told me that she would leave, but I didn't believe her. She
told me she would hide in the car of the men who sometimes
came from town, their cameras aimed at our faces as Roy shook
his rake at them and shouted, "Private property, private property,
do you know what that is." She told me she would climb on
Brown's back while she stood grazing, and ride her away through
the grass. She told me she would dig a tunnel under the fields,
that even if she was ninety-nine she would keep digging until she
reached the outside.
After the night Roy caught us in the pantry, she said it more
and more often until the words stopped meaning anything, until

0
III
I
h
z
o
>
in
162
they were just another sound—a part of something larger, a part
of something anyone could hear. I only noticed her voice, angry,
shaking as if she was fighting to keep it still. Her words I'd
forgotten, until now.
We climbed to the top of a small hill, bent so close to the ground
that I put my hands down when the wind gusted against me. The
grass lay flat against the curve of the earth, whipping and moving
as if it were a river. At the top of the rise I stretched onto the
ground, holding the grass and letting the wind press me down.
Roy kneeled, and I watched as he cupped one hand over his
eyes and looked at the fields all around us. I saw his pickup truck,
small and far away, and below us, closer, a white house and a barn.
As I watched, a strip of shingles blew off the roof of the house,
lifted into the air, and broke apart.
Jenny, 1 realized, we would never find. She had crossed over,
passed into those places I knew of only from her stories:
mountains, oceans, highways. In my head I heard her voice.
Roy spoke to me, but I couldn't hear what he said. He leaned
closer and gripped my arm, pulling us toward each other. Again I
felt that heat pass through his hand to my skin. He stared into my
eyes, and I saw not his but my own, large and brown, and in them
my own face looking back at me. He pointed and nodded his
head. I saw a line of trees, down the opposite side of the hill, and
when I turned back to him, I saw a cloud like a thick black rope
twisting across the fields far behind him. Then we heard the
sound, both of us at the same time, and he dropped my arm and
turned to look. I picked myself off the ground and ran—every
tree and blade of grass, the roar of wind, all the things in this earth
that I had never seen, rushing toward me.
COMICS AND CARTOONS
ACROSS BORDERS

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LESLIE STERNBERGH
Near the end of 1993, I wrote a script: ten pages to be
sequentially illustrated for a comix anthology to which I'd been
invited to contribute. The story I chose to tell, the events I chose
to describe in this true story from my life, were things that had
haunted me for twenty years, things I'd yet to really deal with.
Failure, mistrust and miscommunication, deviance and denial, a
typical skeleton's closet roster, really, tripping a dark fantastic
through the next three years of my life. It's often been my pleasure
to work autobiographically, but somehow this story was different.
It was more than mere art, no safe encapsulated episode. I could
not finish it. Something was wrong.
This year I will see that piece completed; I've recently
returned to therapy, and spoken about it with people I can trust.
The two-and-a-half years since that script was first written have
been tumultuous, an emotional thrill ride replete with whiplash
and nauseau and yes, thrills. I think I even understand a fair
amount of what's transpired.
I dared call my life art; now I must engage the two in dialogue
long left unspoken. My narrative life should meet the standards of
my visualized art, before it will manifest through a pen in my hand
onto paper.
True stories should not be compromised, any more than
should my life's work, or my life. Twenty years after the end of the
events my narrative evoked, I must make peace with them.
Lately, for me, ink is thicker than blood.

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STORY BY MARGUERITE VAN COOK
Ground Zero was designed to be an adventure in semiotics
where the language and the image, the literal, forced the reader to
make their own determination of reality. Even the obviously
handwritten captions draw the reader into the biographical world of
the writer and the artist.
The story revolves around a genetically engineered "Unit."
She is a government experiment gone awry. In this excerpt, her
"Automate" is pondering his situation, as she, "the Unit," is going
out of control, becoming more confrontational to the "Guardians,"
or hierarchy, who believe they control her.

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ALISON BECHDEL
In the mid-1980s, I started writing and drawing cartoons
about the thriving lesbian subculture I had just entered. Lesbians
were hungry for stories about their lives, and my work had an
enthusiastic reception. I began self-syndicating my comic strip to
gay and lesbian papers around the country and had a collection of
cartoons published by a small feminist press in 1986 (Firebrand
Books).
In my youthful naivete, I assumed that my work would
continue to win over more and more readers, that eventually I'd
be running in alternative weeklies along with Lynda Barry and
Matt Greening, and that straight as well as queer people would
follow the lives of my cartoon characters. But six books and ten
years later, it hasn't turned out that way. I certainly have straight
readers—a small, progressive group—and I've gotten sporadic
coverage in the mainstream media, but I seem to have hit the glass
ceiling in terms of crossover.
I write for a queer audience, but I still want everyone to read
my work. I see no reason why a dyke can't be a universal subject
just as well as Mike Doonesbury or Charlie Brown can. But for
the most part, heterosexual comics readers haven't proved willing
to make the shift of identity that I make routinely.
I feel fortunate to be making my living as an independent
cartoonist, with meaningful work and loyal readers. But I am a
little disappointed that my cartoons haven't reached more people.
Rather than tailor my work to make it more accessible to a broader
audience, though, my instinct is to continue with as much lesbianspecificity
as I can. I think only the minutely particular can ever
be genuinely universal.

"Sure, this is idyllic, but there arejundamentalproblems here that are not being addressed."
DRAWING BY KOREN;© ©9-4/THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE
ED KOREN
I find myself crossing a border every time I succeed in bringing a
little discomfort to what we all experience. The natural habitat for
someone out to explore the visible world is where the habitual,
conventional and unexamined collides with other barriers—good
intentions, self-interest, arrogance, or the silliness in our language,
to name a few. This drawing is a small drama of a cultural border
that cannot be crossed: an intellectual one that defies passage, and
an emotional frontier that can produce only guilt. What makes it
comical (and a touch sad) to me is the language—certain of its
authority and ultimately powerless—an impassable border.

"IF OMUY HE HAt> ONt \NTo THE WU «TE
Li(rHT AMP JTAYEt> THERE."
When asked to tell COLUMBIA in what way his work "Crosses Borders"
Bruce Eric Kaplan submitted a cartoon that speaks for itself.
INTERVIEW
COLUMBIA talks with
Lisa Shea and James Bosley
TREATMENT
A short play based on an interview
ACT I
The scene opens with playwright/screenwriter JAMES BOSLEY (Fun,) sitting
at the front booth of the Film Center Cafe. Enter LISA SHEA, author of
the award-winning novel Hula. Tliey greet each other and begin to discuss
their collaboration of a screen adaptation of USA's novel.
LISA SHEA
There were three other directors who were interested at one
point. One was very interested in horror, and we met and it was
going to be this Canadian deal, but I thought that while her work
had a keen eye for adolescent dilemmas and sensibility, but that she
would very much take it in the direction of a horror film. Then
the two other directors were just student directors. And I wanted
to help them in some way, to be available, but I made the mistake
of routing them through my agent and then they were never heard
from again.

JAMES BOSLEY
When the film Fun was out, the writing was admired by some
people in Hollywood, and I had lunch with an assistant of
J 's and so when they asked if I had any books that I would
be interested in adapting, I said Hula. The assistant said that she
loved the book, but didn't quite see a movie story in it, but if I
could come up with an acceptable treatment. . .
LISA SHEA
I was quite pleased because even with the changing of scenes
and the re-emphasizing of certain events and the downplaying of
other events, really nothing was lost in the translation, or nothing
of significance. It was also strange just to read a variation on
the book. But I didn't feel that the work had been violated or
tampered with.
JAMES BOSLEY
Well, I did add a couple of things. I thought I had to show
the good side of the father. I know that's a weird thing to say, but
I figured there had to be a real reason mom and the kids didn't
split sooner. In the book, you don't have to deal with that so much
because it is from the perspective of the little kids. So I wrote a
scene where they are in church and dad is singing too loud and
they're all kind of laughing at him. So I added a few scenes, I
combined scenes, I combined characters. Mostly it was a lot of
cutting. There's that scene of the babysitter's boyfriend in the
woods, where he sort of comes on to the older sister. I love that
scene, but I couldn't find a place for it in the story as it is now.
Maybe I'll go back and find it. Maybe that's the key to the
whole thing.
I also expanded the idea of the hula show being more of an
event.
LISA SHEA
In the book it never takes place.
JAMES BOSLEY
I thought that was sert of a story in a way. They keep trying
to put on this hula show and dad keeps coming in and ruining it
for one reason or another. But now they actually do finally put it
on, the dad comes home, and that's the beginning of the climax.
LISA SHEA
What was interesting in the case of your making Fun into a
movie script was that on the stage it all took place in this one small
space. In the movie, you had to move out of that and imagine
these girls in all different settings from what we had seen on the
stage...which was like a bed...
JAMES BOSLEY
Right, it was a bed and a couple of chairs. Most of the scenes
were in this girl's bedroom and there were scenes that took place
in a juvenile detention center. But we didn't want to build a
juvenile detention center, so the bedroom was the center of the
story anyway. This counselor and reporter were interviewing the
girls, they'd killed an old lady for fun, that's basically the premise
of the play. So it basically flashes between the interview to the
bedroom and there are a couple of scenes that take place in the
street and the woman's house. But we thought the bedroom was
sort of the soul of the play. What I like about theater is that you
can go anywhere in the audience's minds, you don't have to
represent it on the stage. But in the movie, there are dozens of
locations. On stage, you just need a stage, and people can see it on
their own, which is what I like about theater.
LISA SHEA
Well, that's what I like about books, because you don't even
need a little stage. The little stage is in your head, and the little
film is in your head too, as you're reading the book. When I was
writing it, I had an inkling that someone was interested in taking
it from the page to the stage, and that was because when I was

working on Hula in story form, you were interested in making
one section, "Pinks," into a one-act play.
JAMES BOSLEY (Addressing the audience.)
This was eight years ago.
LISA SHEA
And I guess I didn't encourage you because I was too afraid to
have something pulled out of a work that I was still working on,
and have attention called to it in a way that I didn't think I could
handle. I thought it would be a distraction for me, finishing the
book, to have somebody working on one piece of it.
But you know, since the book's been published, it's been done
as a dance piece at the Dance Theatre Workshop. It was called
"Hula Girl." I brought my sister with me and we sat in the front
row and we really were very moved by it. The choreographer did
a very outrageous, but I think acceptable, interpretation of the
book into a dance. It was a very wild piece. In the book, the
father is this menacing shadow figure, the mother is this dilapidated
shadow figure. They don't really move through the book as fullblooded
characters. Their presence is their pressure on the girls, so
then the focus is on the girls, as narrated by the younger sister. In
the dance piece, you have the two girls, and you have the younger
girl narrating—there are actual lines from the book that this young
girl speaks. Somehow, she combined the mother and the father
into one person, so that the mother not only protects the girls, she
also menaces them with the gun, whereas this is what the father
does in the novel. Then there is a man in this dance piece who is
sort of a walk-off part, who is actually a character in another
section of the book, but seeing him in the dance piece, you're
going to assume he's the father, and I told her if there was a
problem, that's where there was a problem. And he just stands on
the stage and smokes and sort of serves as a prop for the girls to
do some acrobatics off of.
I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was funny and accessible
as its own piece based on her reading and cobbling together
different parts of the book.
JAMES BOSLEY
I saw it with you and was wondering for people who hadn't
read the book, did they get a feeling for what the book was by
having seen it. This is something we're going through in adaptation
of the screenplay. How far away from the book can you get and
will people who see this movie get a feeling for what Hula is?
What would the audience's perception of Hula be, having seen the
dance?
LISA SHEA
It would be, you know, confused. So then you come back to
that main question: How much can the author of the original
work expect there to be a faithful translation of the work into
another medium. I don't think my expectations are pure at all for
what the filmmakers can accomplish. For instance, I think your
script is extremely faithful to the book, even though the progression
of events is completely changed, but in its way it has served some
basic impulse in the story I think very well. It's kept the focus on
the girls, to the exclusion of other parts of the book that you may
have wanted to develop.
And so now we can break it open and say, maybe something
about the discussion I had with the director about a week ago,
who got caught onto this idea of a relationship between the little
girl and one of the convicts. You know the convicts in the story—
there is a chain gang—well he saw this chain gang in the treatment
and just thought that he was very taken with this notion of "What
if one of the convicts escapes? And hides in the garage next to the
girl's house and the little girl finds him?" And, oh, maybe she
brings him some food, because she's not aware that it is a dangerous
situation.
(pause)
Well, that movie has been made. I'm sorry. It was done with
Hailey Mills and.. .uh.. .Alan Bates. It's a British movie where she
established a relationship with this convict hiding in her attic.
So talking with the director, we played the game of "what if."
"What if the convict escapes?" So what happens when this comes
up is you go around and around—that's not the advice my agent

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gave me, which was "Never throw cold water on hot directors.
Let them be as interested as they are going to be with all the ideas
that they have and. . .you know you need the money."
There are degrees of faithfulness, and I think your treatment is
faithful in spirit.
JAMES BOSLEY
I didn't invent any new elements that are so drastic, but at the
same time, I understand where they are coming from with the
prisoner subplot. There's an old saying in the theater, "You never
introduce a loaded gun in act one if you're not going to fire it by
act three." And the prisoners are in a way a loaded gun.
It would be very tempting dramatically to move them into the
story, to move them into the garage. So we're fighting for more
subtlety. The producer's whole thing is "story," and it's the
challenge in such a book of perception. It's a story about growing
awareness of someone who's young and innocent but is surrounded
by corruption. Her whole family is corrupted and rotting at the
core, but it's about her perception of that. Perception is not a visual
thing, whereas film has to be very visual. Trying to make that
subjective story objective has been a challenge.
LISA SHEA
Typically, the director has not read the book and does not
want to read the book, but he's read the treatment—which he
adores—and in your realigning of events, the convicts appear in
the beginning and in the book they appear towards the end. In
the book, they move closer to the house throughout the chapter
in which they are contained, but in the script, they appear at the
beginning and they continue to advance closer and closer to the
house.
JAMES BOSLEY
In their opinion, this growing threat never pays off.
The climax of the book is when the father shoots the gun off
vaguely in the wife's direction and drives off, and the girls and
their mother gather their things and leave. In my version, they're
escaping in the car, and they are stopped by the chain gang,
because they are working on the road, and while they are waiting,
the father is in his car getting closer and closer, and he's wearing
his gorilla mask, which he wore in an earlier scene. Whenever he
gets too blown away, he puts this gorilla mask on. So he's in this
car right behind them and they've stopped at the chain gang. The
guard knows the mother, because she drives by this chain gang
every day. And the guard kind of flirts with her in this mild way.
Then he waves them on, but he stops the father's car and sort of
helps them escape. So they do play a role.
I had to condense the book down to a hundred pages, and I
think one of the reasons the director should read the book is to
get a sense of how the details tell so much of the story—what the
girls' totems are and the sort of amulets to ward off evil around
them, and how they put themselves in this bubble of play, even
though it is cruel play . . .
It's ritual play.
LISA SHEA
JAMES BOSLEY
And so much of their "amulets," the old dolls clothes and the
dog and these little bits of their lives—I mean you can't put every
bit of that into a treatment. You just have to tell the story as sparsely
as possible.
The WAITRESS appears, delivering food and refilling the water glasses.
She lingers silently over the table for a beat, then exits stage right.
LISA SHEA
When I spoke to the director and in talking to you too, this
word "story" has grown to the size of an elephant. We're all sort
of using it for our own purposes. When I spoke with the director,
my impression was that every time he said the word story, he was
talking about action. You can certainly tell a story in a novel
without there being a lot of action. You don't need action to tell
a story novelisitcally.

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Cinematically, there is the requirement of action, although that
may be more of an American idea of film. That was the only way
I could interpret what he was getting at each time, because if he
just said the word story, then I would disagree with much of what
he was saying he felt was missing. You have to have the character
moving through each scene and getting more involved in whatever
it is. You have to have the pressure building against the character.
Which it certainly is for these girls, but not in such a calculatedly
active way. The novel is more elliptical.
JAMES BOSLEY
The girl who is the narrator of the book, that's her role, to be
the narrator of the events, but what they're feeling is you can't have
a character in a film who is just the narrator. Yes, she's affected by
events in the story, but she doesn't have a story of her own. What
is her dilemma from the beginning that carries her through the
plot to the climax? She doesn't have that one through line—that's
another word they use—she doesn't have that one through line
where the audience is wondering, "What is going to happen to her
next?" There's not that major dramatic question the audience is
asking throughout the film. And the obvious solution they came
up with is, "The prisoner escapes and hides in a barn."
LISA SHEA
It certainly would be fun, financially and otherwise, to sell the
rights to the book and treatment and have a movie made. So the
question becomes, is there a way that you—or you and I—could
come up with an idea that doesn't lose the integrity of what we
started with? There might be a way of doing it, for the purposes
of translating the story onto film. I don't really like to make it
seem as though there are deficiencies in the book that need to be
addressed. It's more the problem of translation from one medium
to another. It may be satisfying in a novelistic form but it may not
be satisfying in a filmic form. I think it also depends on the
sensibility of the director as well.
JAMES BOSLEY
We could probably find an independent, low-budget director
to do the story as we envision it. But we're not going to get the
hundreds of thousands of dollars that we would get from . . .
LISA SHEA (To the audience.)
I've got to get my son through private schools! It has to happen.
JAMES BOSLEY
There's also the question of point of view. How much of the
story don't we see in the book, because it's all from the little girl's
point of view. We don't see anything of the parents' lives, other
than what the little girl sees, and I made a commitment to keep it
that way. Still she's the narrator, she's in every scene.
LISA SHEA
This is a treatment, but in my understanding of things, the
treatment then gets fleshed out further in a script.
JAMES BOSLEY
With some adjustments, but this is basically the step by step,
scene by scene, description of what the movie is going to look like.
You brought up in our last conversation Sophie's Choice, that
narrator who is that writer living downstairs from this amazing
couple. That was a sort of hardly involved narrator, talking about
these other people. One thing that carries the story is his love for
Sophie. He's in love with her.
LISA SHEA
Did I bring that up? I don't remember. But I remember
saying that all those roles that Jessica Lange has had where she
wakes up, she puts on make-up, she walks out the door of a kind
of busted-up apartment in a tiny little town, she walks to the end
of the block to get something to eat, you see her in the diner, she
knows there's a guy who kind of has a crush on her and she
finishes her meal, maybe stops in the drugstore on the way back

home and then she puts the laundry out on the line and the whole
movie will go along like that and then she wins an Academy
Award. And I thought, well, they are saturating you with the
essence of who she is more than what she does, so it is possible to
make a movie like that.
JAMES BOSLEY
Well, if Jessica Lange is the producer of the movie, certainly it's
a lot easier to do. In our position, we have to sell the idea of the
movie. We have to do something to make people go "Wow."
LISA SHEA
That's how you have to pitch books too, I'm afraid. Publishers
don't want to hear all of this languorous stuff. When I had to tell
people what my book was about without their eyes glazing over,
I said, "Hula is the story of two young girls growing up in the
Sixties, and some of the more criminal aspects of their family life."
Before that, my publicist was taking me to parties and saying this
is Lisa Shea and her book is coming out and she'd go on for five
minutes, blah, blah. And I finally took her aside and said, "This is
what you have to say," and I wrote it out. Publishers don't want
to have to hear too much.
JAMES BOSLEY
And filmmakers want to hear even less.
LISA SHEA
In the meantime, your agent has the treatment, my agent has
a treatment, and there is a treatment circulating, so it will be
182 interesting to see what happens.
What was that you said to me about someone from the office
saying that J is more interested now in making European
type films? What does that mean?
JAMES BOSLEY
I don't know. I don't know. I mean, after she just made
I feel like if I could just get into her office and show her the
book and show her the treatment, she'd love us.
Blackout. End of ACT I.
Adapted from an interview by KEN FOSTER and SAM SLOVES.

WINTER
COMPETITION
MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST
Five Songs for a Palmist
Let the winter months come,
she says, in the right hand half
of her rooms, under the lantern's
embroidery of light, and I agree
to let them come, heavy as summer.
I make the fist that she asks for,
and she charts over it. This day
hasn't taken on the flavor of the days
nearby. How does she know I'll take
a fossil from the Mission garden,
and blood flowers from the mausoleum
grounds, and press them in an album
of figureheads: Madame's nail is a mere
sliver of the full moon just over
this pier where her shop rests.
She sews the air from oppens
to thumb, and at the first blossom
of my hand, she knows and says
a god has saved you lately,
no one else.
II.
Sun under the railroad trestle,
and gravel, and a crescent moon
still invisible at my feet,
I learned fear outside the house
in the shape of the hand-sized

stone thrown inches from my face
by a lunatic caught in the act
of turning around. I was a woman
on the mouth-breather's journey
through a nightmare by the time
he confronted me, to ask me
what I'd seen in all the warnings
of his slow car driving our roads
to ash: children in the flashes
against a white tile floor,
different pinks, swatches of skin,
more like flowers than children.
What else, but make a frieze
of his butchery?
in.
You send a man I've never met
into my dreams, a sandier
version of you, so when I rise
from inside the warm water
into an embalmed dusk, I say,
"Your brother," his face wet,
head and shoulders showing,
"saved my life." Before he
can respond, the dream
is gone, and in its place
my slow mourning over you.
What are you telling me now:
that there's trouble where you are,
or that you've just come out of trouble,
for a moment, to look around?
IV.
A slate Diana overhangs
the shelf. An oval of her
pale leg shows at the hip's
straining button. A man once
breathed warm air through her
dress there, while he was breathing
her smell in, and even though this
is still life, always the thread of her
leaving the scene, fluttering with leaves,
and coming into the scene, in the past life
of a woman always setting precedents.
I haven't really known a single hunt,
she says, except the one that made
a stone of madness grow in me.
You know the one.
v.
A god loves innuendo,
and the god starlet called
every day back then.
Shouldering the phone, she said,
It's a shame to wash the dress.
Something happened to me last night.
The weather of a gothic evening blowing in,
she was too happy about his story
of a woman who is really two women,
the one who wanders the upperworld
every time he tells it,
and wears a dress that seems
too large for her,

and she looked at him
for hours, and he didn't go anywhere.
And she could have looked at him
all night, and he would not have
disappeared, as in Orpheus' recurring dream
turned nightmare in the morning,
a constellation whose stars
are a burned correspondence
still flaring before the seer's eyes.
JASON BROWN
Halloween
SHE WAS HAVING the best game of her life that day. The tennis balls
were rocketing, starting low, rising just over the net and dropping
in the far corner. Her coach was hungry, his stomach growling,
his arms and legs like rubber bands, and he was bored. The sky
over the training fields had turned orange and violet. The tanks,
half a mile east, killed their engines for the day. Troops marched
in formation right by the courts on their way to the mess hall. She
followed the ball with complete attention as if her life depended
on the perfection of its path.
I am her brother, two years older. Back then I was much more
interested in the meandering path of a daydream than in the perfection
of a single act like a swing. The beaches a mile from the
base looked out over uninterrupted ocean, and the temperature in
October reminded me of summer in Maine where we had lived
until just a year earlier. A friend named Andy, a short kid whose
father, like mine, was a pilot serving in a war thousands of miles
away, lay spread-eagled in the sand with a long stick wedged in his
arm pit. He was playing dead, waiting for his mom to take us
home. I was picking up sticks and half-shells off the beach and
throwing them back into the ocean, dreaming, as always, of the
places I would arrive, and the person I would become far in the
future, though I had no idea how to get there. Olive-green

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Phantoms roared overhead, three in formation, streaking over the
land and finally darting off into the sky. One day, I thought, I
would sit in the cockpit, made anonymous by the oxygen mask,
helmet and dark glasses, serving some higher purpose. But when
I looked back out over the ocean, I pictured myself there, in a small
boat. In dreams, as in life, I have never traveled but always arrived.
And I had never once considered that the world I dreamed was not
the world in which I lived. I picked up a piece of driftwood off
the beach and rushed at my friend Andy, to stab him once more,
the pretend enemy, to make sure he was dead and my child's world,
then and now, safe from a life I have never been able to imagine.
Andy's mom arrived and stood on the dunes, arms akimbo
with the sun behind her, a dark cut-out shape of a woman.
There was nothing more silent at Cherry Point than the
Marines eating dinner. The machines, gunshots, clicking heels and
shouted commands all ceased very suddenly and always at the
same time, even as the days grew shorter into winter. When the
silence hit, my sister Heidi stood up straight and let the tennis ball
bounce by. The tennis coach walked forward hoping to end the
lesson early, but she quickly hit another ball in his direction, which
he smoothly returned, backing up for the full swing so as not to
look bad. Nobody liked the tennis coach. He was always having
some problem.
The empty pangs of the ball against the strings and the
muffled screech of tennis shoes against hard top were the only
sounds. Eleven other courts stood empty, the players gone
home for dinner.
Finally the coach let one of the balls go by and stepped up
toward the net. "Enough for today," he said. She stayed in a
crouch, racket cocked back as if he were a ball coming over the
net. He stopped and tapped the net with his racket, turned around
and started to pick up stray balls. She leaned against the fence. All
the balls were on his side of the net. She could play all night without
eating or sleeping, driving herself straight into her future
which she could see always just on the horizon. The coach walked
around the net waving his racket to get her attention. "Ready?"
he said and headed out the gate.
She followed, leaving her racket against the fence on the court
as if she were coming right back.
"Your mom's late," the coach said in the parking lot.
She wanted to say something but she couldn't. She was
trying to remember something. She had forgotten.
"You told her six, right?" the coach asked while combing the
parking lot and the officer's lot below.
She focused on the back of his head. "Yes," she said. "You can
leave. She'll be here in a minute."
"No, I can't do that," he said. "But I do have to be somewhere.
I bet you do too. What are you going to be?"
"A cat."
"A cat?"
"Yes."
"Do you have a costume?"
"Yes, but it's in the car."
"Your mom's car?"
She nodded. "You can leave," she said, and then remembered
her tennis racket and told him she would be right back. She
watched her shoes moving like two little white-shelled turtles along
the black top. The racket was still there and one of the stray balls.
When she returned to the parking lot the coach was gone. You
couldn't even hear his car anymore he had driven away so fast. No
other cars came down the road, so she went back to the court and
hit the ball over the net. She switched sides and hit it again. She
delighted in the idea of how much faster the ball would travel
when she turned thirteen. Then she would practice into the night,
improving the accuracy of her shot. The ball would land exactly
where she pictured it would. Thirteen seemed like the year.
It would be dark soon because the first soldiers were coming out
of the mess hall, smoking and pushing each other lightly. She stood in
the empty parking lot with the tennis racket and watched them pass
by. Back then you could buy beer out of a machine on the base, so
that's where they were going, to sit around and drink. Heidi watched
them while walking down the parking lot. Then she tripped.
One of the soldiers broke off from the others, walked up to
her and held out his hand, in which an unlit cigarette lay wedged
between two fingers. "Are you OK?" he asked.

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"Come on," another soldier said.
"Yes, I'm fine," Heidi said, picking herself up.
The soldier turned around to frown at his friends, who were
waving for him to hurry up.
"Are you sure," he said. "I'm a medic, you know. It's my job
to fix people."
"My mother's coming to pick me up," she said.
"Where is she?" the soldier asked.
"She's coming to get me."
"I hope soon," he said. "It's getting dark, you know?"
"Yes," she said. "I know."
"You know," he said. "I have a little girl just like you, only she
lives far away."
"Does she play tennis?" Heidi asked.
"Well," he said, "I don't think she does. Maybe a little. Her
name's Wendy."
Heidi nodded and looked up at the soldier with the unlit
cigarette and just as she expected, he was looking somewhere else.
"Good-bye," he said, turning around. "Don't stay out in the dark."
"No," she said.
The tanks at dusk looked a little like elephants resting with
their trunks straight out. Held at attention that way. Half resting,
half scared. Heidi walked to the edge of the parking lot and
turned right down route 77 which led to our house, five miles
away. A cat trotted toward her on the road. It had emerged from
the motor pool, and as it approached, Heidi bent down on one
knee holding her hands out. But the big orange torn cat with the
narrowed eyes and seeming grin trotted right by. A determined
cat. She turned to watch him go and saw a small band of monsters,
ghouls and spirits who lived in houses on the base. All boys
her age carrying shopping bags to be filled with candy. They ran
toward her screaming and gurgling, their arms waving in the air.
They stopped in front of her, dropped their arms and silently
stared at her. She would know each one of them from school, if
she could see under their masks.
"Aren't you scared of us?" Dracula asked.
"Why should I be?" she said. "You're David's brother."
"How did you know?" he demanded, stepping back.
"Your voice," she said.
A boy-soldier dressed in oversize fatigues, a helmet, and a gas
mask said, "What are you supposed to be?" From inside the mask
his voice sounded smothered by distance, as if he were yelling from
a hundred yards away.
"I'm not anything," she said.
"You're Heidi," another one of them said. He looked like a
wolf or a bear.
"Yes," she said, "I am."
All four stood staring at her. Then a woman further down the
road called, "Boys!" and they all fled toward her. She must have
been one of their mothers. She would lead them down to the
other side of 77 where most of the houses sat. Heidi watched
them until they were tiny stumps that blended together and suddenly
bolted off the road to knock on someone's door. The road
was empty again.
Then another speck appeared and moved toward her. After a
few moments, she could see it was an army jeep, driven by the soldier
she had recently been talking to.
"We've been looking for you," he said after pulling to a stop.
"We didn't think you should walk home by yourself." A couple of
the others were sitting in the back seat; one of them had just tumbled
there from the front. "Climb in. We'll give you an escort."
She picked up her tennis racket and walked around front of
the jeep, threw the racket in first and then pulled herself up.
"Where to?" the soldier asked.
"I want to go home," she said.
"I know that," he said, smiling at her. "Where's that?"
"Down the road," she pointed.
"You'll tell me when we're getting close?"
"Yes," she answered.
In a few minutes she would be there, walk down the concrete
path, up the steps, turn the knob, and the smell of baked chicken
would draw her in. This is how it usually happened. I was already
at home sitting on the couch, waiting for her. As always I felt like

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I was living in her future. Not far enough to warn her, just far
enough to know.
A car approached the jeep from a distance. You could see forever
because there were no hills or dips in the road. As it grew
larger she could see the Chevrolet grill and the distinctive square
headlights of her mother's station wagon. Standing up in the jeep
she started waving frantically at the station wagon long before its
driver could have seen her.
"Sit down," the soldier said, but she kept it up, yelling her
mother's name into the forty mile an hour wind.
"Please, sit down!" the soldier yelled, and this time grabbed
her by the waist with one hand and yanked her down hard against
the seat. She banged her arm on top of the windshield as she sat
down. "You'll get hurt," he said as she held her arm.
The station wagon slowed and pulled off the road. So did the
soldier. "It's all right," he said. "She's seen you."
Before the jeep even stopped she had jumped out, hit the
ground scraping her knee and started running for her mother.
Halfway there, tears blurred the familiar shape of the woman stepping
out of the driver's seat. Heidi tripped in front of the car and
a woman's long-nailed, delicately thin but horribly dry hands
pulled her up by the waist and let her stand, wobbling. Heidi
wiped her eyes clean, embarrassed now, wondering what had just
happened, it happened so fast, and looked up to find my friend
Andy's mother. Andy still sat quietly in the backseat, looking at his
feet in the shadows like a criminal. I had said good-bye to him
only a few minutes before. His mother, Mrs. Stevenson, put her
hand behind Heidi's head and stroked her hair. "Did you hurt
yourself?" she asked, stepping back as if afraid of the little girl.
Then, without waiting for an answer, she gently pushed Heidi forward
by the back of the head toward the passenger seat, opened
the door and waited for her to climb in. She went around to the
other side and sat behind the wheel. The car was still running.
The soldier, standing in front of the jeep, looked at Heidi and
at the woman he took for her mother. Heidi knew he was looking
but she would not lift her head up as the car turned around.
She resented everyone's kindness. The soldier remained standing
in the road, still waiting, I -guess, or uncertain.
Neither Andy nor his mother spoke during the short trip
down the road. Mrs. Stevenson reached out once, keeping her
eyes glued to the yellow line, and moved her hand up and down
along the back of Heidi's head. At that time of the evening, the
woods, which line both sides of the road, are darker than peering
down into the open ocean. The tall grass lining the asphalt is the
color of old, yellowed leather and the sky above the trees is on fire.
The moon is above the fire, sitting in the faded blue. I could see
it all from the bay window in our living room, and I could imagine
how Heidi saw it, running before her eyes like a tired commercial.
I wanted to meet her on the front lawn, had seen Mrs.
Stevenson leave and knew about how long the trip would take.
Much shorter than I thought, it turned out. But I could not move
from the couch. I was paralyzed by the slightest idea.
As Mrs. Stevenson pulled into the driveway, Heidi couldn't
look up to see her house because of the guilt she felt for the soldier.
She could imagine how he would have looked if she had
glanced up as they drove away. She imagined him standing there
in the road watching the back of the station wagon vanish, and as
the station wagon pulled to a stop, she wanted to turn back to the
base to find him. To thank him. But the car's engine had been
turned off, and there was something final about that.
Then she remembered her tennis racket still sitting in the jeep,
traveling back to the motor pool to sit there or in the soldier's
room.
Mrs. Stevenson came around to the passenger side of the car,
opened the door and held out her hand. That morning Heidi and
I had made preparations for Halloween. We had tied a bunchedup
towel to the top of a broomstick, covered it in a white sheet
and stuck it in the ground. We had tied a string around the towel
for the neck and colored in eyes and a mouth. Next to that we
had covered two or three milk crates with a sheet and a carved out
pumpkin. At the feet of these creatures sat three smaller uncarved
pumpkins that we would later use for a pie.

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I heard the car door slam and could see Heidi moving toward
the front steps, Mrs. Stevenson hanging on to the passenger door
as if she were about to fall down. Heidi stopped when she saw
that our ghosts had been ripped from the ground and piled at the
head of the driveway near the trash. The carved-out pumpkin lay
next to the ghosts. Two men sat in an olive green military sedan,
having yet to drive away from the scene.
"David!" She screamed my name, angry and afraid. "David!"
I stood up in the living room, buried there, it seemed, and the
front door was just opening. I started for the doorway, am still
rushing there years later, though our mother always arrives first,
looming above the front steps. If I could alter that moment when
Heidi looked up at her drained, white face, blue eyeliner running
down both cheeks, then I still believe we could have the lives we
dreamed of on those long beaches, our hands, half the size they
are now, sifting through the sand for shells. My mother's two
white hands stood in the air, reaching out, and strands of hair
stuck to a chin that moved up and down as if she were speaking.
But no one was speaking for miles around. There was nothing
that could be said.
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
NIN ANDREWS wrote The Book of Orgasms (Asylum, 1995). Her work has
appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Michigan Quarterly.
ALISON BECHDEL has been creating Dykes to Watch Out For since 1983
and has published six collections from Firebrand Books. Her work is
syndicated in fifty publications, including The Boston Phoenix and The
Funny Times.
LINDA BIERDS is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of
which is The Ghost Trio. She has been awarded fellowships from the
Ingram Merrill foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.
She lives in Seattle.
JASON BROWN is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship. His
fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review and is forthcoming in Best
American Short Stories.
SCOTT CAIRNS was born in Tacoma, Washington. His collections of
poetry include The Translations of Babel and The Theology of Doubt.
ELIZABETH GRAVER'S short story collection, Have You Seen Me? (Ecco,
1993), was awarded the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her stories
have been anthologized in Prize Stories:The O. Henry Awards and in Best
American Short Stories. She teaches creative writing at Boston College.
BETH GYLYS teaches at the University of Cincinatti where she is a doctoral
candidate. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The
New Republic, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Poetry East and others.
MARIE HOWE'S first book of poetry, The GoodTliief was awarded the 1987
Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Her poems in this
issue are from her forthcoming book, What the Living Do.
SHEILA KOHLER is the author of two novels, The Perfect Place and The
House on R. Street, and a collection of stories, Memories in America. Her
work has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.
NATALIE KUSZ is the author of a memoir, Road Song, and the recipient of
a Whiting Writer's Award, a Pushcart Prize, and others. She teaches at
Harvard University.

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DAVID LEHMAN'S new book of poems is Valentine Place, published by
Charles Scribner's Sons. He is on the core faculty of the Bennington
College graduate writing program, and teaches at Columbia University
and The New School.
GWYNETH LEWIS writes in both Welsh and English. She has two
collections of poetry, Sonedau Redsa, and Parables and Faxes.
WILLIAM LOGAN has published a collection of poems, Vain Empires. A
collection of essays and reviews, Reputations of the Tongue, is forthcoming.
ELIZABETH MACKLIN has published one collection of poetry, A Woman
Kneeling in the Big City.
MICHAEL MANLEY works as a writer and editor in West Lafayette, Indiana.
He has published book reviews in Sycamore Review and Literary Magazine
Review and has fiction forthcoming in The Long Story.
JAN MEISSNER'S work has appeared in Fiction, The Quarterly, Story and
other magazines. She lives in New York City and is at work on a novel.
MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST'S work is forthcoming from or has appeared
in The Nation and The Antioch Review. She received the Discovery/ Tlic
Nation Award for 1996. She lives in California.
JEAN MONAHAN received her MFA from Columbia in 1987. Her book,
Hands, was chosen by Donald Hall for the 1991 Anhinga Prize.
LESLEA NEWMAN is the author of two collections of poetry, Love Me Like
You Mean It and Sweet Dark Places as well as numerous other books. She
is the recipient of a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship in Poetry.
CHARLES NORTH'S New and Selected Poems will be published this year by
Sun and Moon Press.
TOM PERROTTA is the author of Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies. A novel
is forthcoming from Berkeley.
JAMES REISS, the author of two collections of poetry, The Breathers and
Express, is Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and
editor of the Miami University Press.
KAY RYAN is the author of Strangely Marked Metal and Flamingo Watching,
which was a finalist for the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, awarded
by the American Academy of Poets and the Nation.
LAURIE SHECK was born in New York City. She is the author of three
books of poetry: Amaranth, lo at Night, and The Willow Grove.
LESLIE STERNBERGH'S work appears in Mad magazine, the Twisted
Sisters collections (Kitchen Sink Press), and Juxtapose.
SAMN STOCKWELL'S collection of poetry, Theatre of Animals, was selected
by Louise Gluck as one of five volumes published in 1995 in the
National Poetry Series. She lives in Vermont.
TERESE SVOBODA is the author of the award-winning novel Cannibal, as
well as four collections of poetry: Mere Mortals, Laughing Africa, Cleaned the
Crocodile's Teeth, and All Aberration.
DANIEL TOBIN'S manuscript, Where the World is Made, was a finalist for three
awards. He received the Discovery/ The Nation Award for 1995.
SUSAN WHEELER'S collection, Bag 0'Diamonds was selected by James Tate
for the Norma Farber First Book Award and short-listed for the Los
Angeles Times Book Awards.
NANCE VAN WINCKEL'S second collection of poems, The Dirt, came out in
1994. A second book of short stoires, Quake, will be published in 1997.