Author: Post Road

Eminence

by Gary Lutz

There was a time I would not hear of women, and a time I looked to them as my betters, and months when my heart went out to anyone done up as a person, but it was usually men I suited: men who liked to keep their words a little stepped back from their meanings and mostly wanted to know whether I was still in school or was hard on shoes. I would awaken to the poundings of one or another of them taking his elbowing ease in the shower stall. The bedside table would of course hold quarters, and a lone dime, out of date and valued-looking, and no doubt a patched-up, gadabout ten-dollar bill—I guess the test was simply how much I would be just the sort of person to take. So I would let pocket change of my own drop to the floor in what I counted on adding up to an answering reproof, then top it with a spruce twenty. I would usually think better, though, and pick everything up, his and mine both, and disappear into my clothes and be gone before he was dry. Still, I suspect that I went unrepresented in much of what I ever did, if I get my drift even now. 

There was a father, for instance, who wanted me to help save his daughter from him, or else he wanted to be saved from her—at some point I gave up keeping track of the ones I had been a party to keeping spared. There was a drumble of TV noise from the apartment below; that much is still with me. And he ticked off the points of nervy resemblance: upraised veinage, standout nose, teeth looking stabbed into the gums, arms unfavorable for even the joke sports. A broth of sweat came off him, and I hate it when they talk right into your mouth, but he kept it up until convinced there was nothing set out between my legs other than whichever mishmash he figured on being all hers. (At the time of which I write, circa my youth, there still were glories to be brought out in people behind their backs.) Weeks later I was introduced to the girl at some function I showed for. She was clean-lined, nothing new or unearthly—a desponding thing in a shirtdress, looking care-given and sided with beyond her years. The father was at the steam table, turning over the local foods. He had a tousled smile. “It’s like you never left,” he said. 

I had been staying with four or five others thriving compliably on the top floor of a three-story sublet. Freaks of drapery to keep us from the morning sun, double-strength cosmetics and pills of the moment in handbags nailed shoulder-high to the wall—it hardly helped that this was in one of the little cities that had been thrown down at the approaches to a much bigger one once enough people were pinched for time or too moody for the commute. The town had already run afoul of its original intent, and there was a misgiven majesty to the newer, upstrewn architecture that left people flimsier in their citizenship, less likely to put their foot down. So we walked ourselves into recognizability in and around the plazas, the pocket parks, the foremost shrubberied square. You could run your feelings over one unrested person and get them to come out on somebody else a little distance off. There was no need to even come face to face to be stuck in failing familiarity forever. 

People eventually answered any purpose or were no skin off my nose. 

There was Joeie: clean-tasting but a trace too saline. Colored easily, needed his full eight hours, believed in taking each of his meals in public. His loves were drugstore luxuries and the fitting instant you knew for sure that something was finally finding its way down the wrong pipe. But sometimes the rope I woke up with around my ankles and wrists was only laundry line and the knots weren’t even serious. 

And Tarn: He was either off doing somebody a wonder or having something further burned away from his complexion—you looked for the underlying advisory in his motions and let the whole of it lounge in your understanding for a while. Nights I found the key to his car, there was a minor toll bridge I could have just as soon avoided, but I liked surrendering the warmed quarter to the collection attendant in the booth, his arm a sudden, perfected thing of the open air. 

It was the night Tarn was first threatening to move out that another came across with a car trunk’s worth of guitars. These were junk guitars, folk-singer styles, with the strings raised penalizingly high above the fretboard. He wasn’t satisfied until one was strapped onto me and he had his hand spread over mine to depress my fingers and get a few dud chords going steadily. When he started to sing, the better part of the lyrics reminded you that with a stepmother and a stepsister, the prefixes alone, if you bothered to do even any of the thinking, made it all but expected of you to walk all over these women and, if you were still up to it, climb them stairwise to a height from which their originals might at least look easier to buy for, easier to mistake for two good eggs. It’s not that I mind it when a pack of lies with real effort behind it gets pitched way over my head to somebody reliably cruel at a remove. But the song was going on and on, with too much yellow smile between verses. He later offered to make it up to us by driving everybody to a party in the city. There was a kid there with an isolating refreshment, something he alone had been given to eat. His fingers kept bringing it up from a plastic sandwich bag opaque with condensation. I was among the least encouraged to get an arm landed lankly on his. One or another of us stayed in touch with him months afterward in notes that amounted to mostly “More soon.” 

Some nights, though, we just dosed it out among ourselves. Kept it going round and around our thinned and souring circle. It was illucid and weighed on our speech. There was so much to decide against as one with mouths that stickied! The others would have to doze off before I could begin poring over an iridescence at the inner bend of an elbow, I hoped, or some delicate hingework behind a knee. It was usually Tyner who never fell asleep. I would guide his fingers onto my arm, try to interest them anew in moles so blurry they looked loose, then re-intimate that they were his to slide about to advantage. I was with him the day he won with the instant ticket. I let him use the rim of my bracelet to scratch out the gray antic ellipses, my arm dragging subordinately along. We took the bus to an odd-lots furniture concern for the glass-top coffee table he figured could do the trick. We walked the thing home stretcherwise: there was delight to find in catcalls from the thick civic traffic. The table went to his room, and a tenderness took over in his voice to get the favor finally asked of me. So I got undressed on top of it and tried to be sleepy and unmindful of my petite bowels and bladder while he worked himself up for drawn-out disappointment below. 

I do not want to make it seem as if this is all we ever did. There was a neighbor lady’s dog we agreed to feed when employments she could no longer postpone called her far from where she otherwise would have had no reason to keep speaking to us so brightly half the time. It was one of those full-natured, kerchiefed dogs that liked being bossed around. Days it fell to me to fill the dish, I did not so much call his name as thin it out to the scanty inner vowels, but the thing would still put in a complete, gladdened appearance. I would watch him eat, take advantage of his company, draw myself out about things, any part of life I no longer was any part of, just to get listened to without bias or retention. There were also some weak-willed plants to be doused if I thought of it and dresses that were all too tight on me and seemed to smell of more than just one person, though I wasn’t an authority on who all she thought she might be. But I must have liked it over there—I know I liked mooning over the little that came in her mail, even the same circulars that came to our place but which, withdrawn from her box, seemed to enjoy much more shimmer on the type. 

As for women overall, though, I went along with what Lorn said about how they were set deeper within themselves and moved about reproductively in a world spaciously different from ours but sharing the same sorry places to meet up for a bite. And it’s not as if I had never at least got myself arranged around one of them, though all I was probably doing was trying to show her out of her body and then not act surprised when my hands slipped right off wherever I tried to unload the things. (Even the older ones are truly as smack-smooth as they are made out to look.) But there was nothing to be held against any of them, either singly or in the dissastisfied aggregate, even if you now and then had somebody’s sister coming forward with rundown makeup and a mugginess to her arms to tell you the only reason you were a waiter instead of a grill man was so you could stand over and above people in couples and make a living looking down your nose. (There were only so many things you could say in return that would come across as both the truth and a dig. I had worked up enough of them to put into conservant, fallback rotation, but lately I just pointed to my groin and explained that if we give them names it’s because they spring from us, we bring them up, we’re forever wiping their snotty little mouths.) 

So what’s left? The only other question still worth entertaining should not have to keep being only “Who else?” 

Which I take to mean that the answer can’t be parents, or even brothers and sisters, because we all were done with practically the exact same ones. Mother would signal the end of a conversation by saying she could feel inside her skull the precise contours of the space a headache would require, though she did not yet have the actual headache. Father had grown a beard that was more like a black cloud loitering in front of his face. (The beard was purposely mostly air.) The sister or brother was younger and had to have it drilled into the head again and again that it was one house if you came into it from the back and a different one altogether if you came in from the front: the people were the same, they were nice to you to your face, but nobody was being fooled: no one was living here everlastingly. 

They were all of them buried neck and neck, so help me, in anything left for us to root against when we set ourselves afresh upon the days. 

So that leaves who else to never let you forget the spirit and slants of whichever humidifying proximity must have been solely his? Kittrick? Reese? Malin? 

Kittrick: There was a fine-drawn signature of dark hair on the backs of his hands that I had been after him to let me chase away with a razor, on the ground that there should be such a thing as seeing too much spelled out on people. He was a cherisher, true, but there was always something probationary in his regard for whatever he cherished, and he never let you in on how soon he might be through. It was up to me to hold the pocket lighter when he did the bust-ups of his acne with the pin of the name badge he had to wear for work. 

And Reese: He went about in low-hanging sweaters and was quick to disappear from whatever he understood of one person and then get going in what might be likelier of the next. I saw some valiance in how he raked us all over the coals. He pointed out the ruthless valedictory business I apparently did with my hands at the close of a meal, something he claimed I brought off under clever cover of separating myself from the napkin and getting up from the table. (I have yet to figure out what he might have meant. I have always believed in rectitude and inexertion as long as any food is still set out.) 

But Malin I knew first from only the phone. He had been calling most nights from a wide agricultural county to the north, a modest rural torment in his voice, the voice of a downtaken, suitorly man married full well. My only duty was making sure he dropped off before I finished any cradlesong synopsis I could come up with of a tricky, frugal workshift without deodorant, maybe, or a self-chaperoned tour of the dashier glory holes. But one night he was all revolt and filthied principle. It was suddenly a bone to pick with me that he had married fresh from a haircut, slashes of gloomful hair still on the forehead, down the front of the neck, and that no sooner was the wedding over with than he was less sure than ever of just exactly how he was cut out to be pitted against her, so the two of them had to live first as brother and sister, then as mother and banged-up son, then as women both, with a cuticular bloodiness to whichever hand set the table when neither’s motives were of the best. He must have been making out an invitation in the way I held my tongue, because the next morning he arrived with vague teeth and a tremolant ascension at the end of every sentence: I trailed him to his car when he went for the change of clothes. But before the day was even out, there was a let-up in how he had gone weak around the gauzy waves of my sleeves. I was already expected to shampoo his eyebrows with a tar extract, then see that the minced and runny things he barely ate would crest just so on his plate. 

So is that the one time the question stopped being “Who else?” and became only “What other bones do you have in your body?” or “Where are you going to go with all those clothes?” 

Because the answer could then be nothing more personal than that at the rebounding municipal college I was a figure of considerable scholastic mystique because I looked over my notes before the quiz and tried not to get cross when the chairs had to be pushed back into a circle. The late-afternoon section of the summer course in speech was mostly boys, because it was mostly boys—repeaters, sweet-naturedly tardy, brush-burned in their undershirts—who had trouble sticking to their points and making it even as far as the middle minute of the three-minute impromptus. But when my turn came, I was slower-hearted in walking them all through how I saw it: 

  • that I was not the good listener everyone kept insisting I was, but I liked hearing people out the way I expected balloons to be quick about losing their air—I wanted the breathy, informative smell on their mouths right afterward; 
  • that the busy signal doesn’t really have to sound like bleedbleedbleedbleedbleed, but even if it does, you can always fall back on the variety of brightwork and wrong-endedness in a day already taking after the night before; 
  • and that I could kick myself every time it did not come out to even so much as a syllogism no matter how often I got it stacked up onto the three needful tiers: 
  1. You go with what’s most available on people. 
  2. On men it is an eminence that luckily never lasts. 
  3. The mess it leaves is nothing that ever bespoke too much or took up any room in what you knew of people a pale day later. 

Except there was a farmers’ market open only a couple of nights a week, and I could pick out the one to follow from a produce stand and into the men’s room. There was just the one stall, and the latch was broken: it was up to me to lean against the door to keep up the privacy. Then the unzipping, and we were standing a polite foot apart, my arms retired now behind my back the way his had been first, his eyes already more wishless than mine. We let the things shy off from ourselves, bumble out the way they always did, twinge and dodge and dither a little, until they were kissing unassisted. It was out of our hands, or none of our doing, and then afterward I was at my very best all over again, witnessing the differences from me amassing in him almost instantly.

Two Poems by Wang Jiaxin
(translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

Glenn Gould

by Wang Jiaxin (translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

A pair of hands invisibly
touch the keyboard, and slowly
you step into Canada’s knee-deep snows.
I’m listening: is this still the vast winter day of North America?
No, the scope of silence itself, the music
peacefully rising, entering my body
the moment it stops for breath.
This is the rhythm
set by your trek, each step
longer than a man’s life. This the song
to ears inaudible; only the skull can hear.
A murmur rolling toward us,
played by you, irresistible,
carried off on the fitful shadows of these notes.
Between us, an immense sheet of snow outstretched;
on the scores, your scrawls illegible.
Back from a noisy party, I think of you
in the deepest solitude, not ready yet
to listen. Jammed on a Beijing bus,
or standing forever in a foreign twilight,
wanting to go home,
not knowing how,
you come to me. Who can say
what music’s sought me always?
I hold back, knowing what took you
in the end takes me. Not ready
for death, I hold back as you did,
my angel on its stool, counting silence,
yet still I’m ecstatic, loving life
yet alone. Now that I sit
at last in darkness, is it you there
playing Bach’s fugue—
yes, no, yes,
yes, no.
Such moments startle me,
as if someone uttered “hush”
while the piano’s black bird vanishes, you vanish,
the road to winter vanishes.
This in the end is the music I hear,
arriving like gray hair, or a child born at dawn.
This is winter’s vault, rising in magnificence,
a mother’s love sculpting fog in bitter cold,
a landscape glimpsed en route to the sea and a dead volcano,
the story that begins after all stories end.
This is the pulse of joy,
the forehead burnished by death.
This is the endless telling—you find at last
the one to whom you’ll speak.
This is hymn, in silence the song
loud and resonant,
how I enter a future suddenly broad, open,
crossing the deep snows of time.

Meeting Rain, Wutai Mountain

by Wang Jiaxin (translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

After five hundred li of dusty road,
we drove through a red canyon
as thunder boomed over the mountain,
rain right on our heels.
Mist rose,
the mountaintop temple veiled in the shower.
It came so indulgently, luxuriously,
my teeth chattered.
I recall my parched thirst on the way,
and later, the strange wooden fish in the monk’s hand,
in my dreams a rush
of streaming water.
Awake, last night’s fruit pits tossed out the window
already beaten into muddy earth.
Rain clears, the day’s trees,
the rocks, the temple shining.
Then morning’s windchime,
and across the mountain slope,
a drift of chanted sutras.

Six 100-word Memoirs

Paul Doherty

IRISH

From the sunroom off the parlor, now converted to his sickroom, my father would call out as I left the house, “Remember you’re Irish.”  I believed his good-bye to be ironic.  Unlike his own father, a zealous Fenian, my father was pleased and proud to be American and had no interest in supporting or celebrating Irish causes.

Another of his valedictions was for any family member heading off to Mass.  “Remember me to the Reverend Maurice.” Father Maurice O’Connor was pastor at St. James, classmate and close friend of Cardinal O’Connell.  My dad thought both men too full of themselves. 

WOODWORKER

My father’s hobby was woodworking. I can just barely picture him at his cellar workbench—when I was a child he was a dying man—but several of his wood creations remain—the massive workbench itself, the miniature toolbox he made for me, and the platform, built so that we could share the workbench. For the beach he made a scow and tugboat. That tugboat is a masterpiece—iron keel, dowel smokestack, intricately carved pilothouse and gunwales.  He built a second cellar stair railing, low, at just the right height.  I suppose that it’s still there in my childhood home. 

“MRS. DOHERTY”

My mother called our neighbors by their surnames—Mrs. McCabe, Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Porter.  Her life was circumscribed by my father’s long illness, which kept her homebound.  Groceries were delivered from the Arlmont Market.  When the “Arlmont man” came, he waited in the kitchen until mother had accounted for each ordered item.  One year she did venture from the house, enrolling in a Red Cross home-nursing program. Mrs. Riemer told me later that my mother mastered the hospital tuck better than any of the other women.  I was not surprised, only delighted that my mother’s extraordinary competence was on display.   

IN THE KITCHEN

I was probably seven or eight when I had my tonsils removed by our family physician, Dr. Carl Barstow.  The procedure took place in the kitchen of my home.

Why at home?  To save hospital costs?  A family tradition of home tonsillectomies?

I don’t know.  I do have some clear memories of the day.  I was placed in a kitchen chair, my folded arms tied to it with towels.  Gauze, soaked with anesthetic, ether I suppose, was held beneath my nostrils.  All went well.  Later that day I walked across to Robbins Farm and watched my friends play tag football.   

GLOVE

In 1948 the great Red Sox infielder, Johnny Pesky, conducted a baseball clinic in Arlington.  My brother loaned me his Bobby Doerr glove for the occasion.  At the clinic, we young infielders gathered around Pesky. He asked to borrow a glove.  I held the Bobby Doerr out for him.  Pesky fielded ground balls, emphasizing positioning, balance, and footwork. When the clinic ended he handed the glove back to me. “Nice glove, son.” I ran to where my brother had been watching. “Nice glove, son!”  He would not have heard that.   I was pleased to report Johnny Pesky’s amiable professional judgment.

LITTLE BUILDING

The Little Building, a blocky structure on the corner of Boylston and Tremont, is now an Emerson dorm.  But in its heyday between the wars it was Boston’s largest office building.   Trips to Boston with my Aunt Molly included a visit to the office of her childhood chum, Nora Hurley.  There, in a room cluttered with bolts and scraps of cloth, Nora embroidered—altar cloths, priests’ vestments.  But Nora’s eccentric-ities interested me more than her needlework.  You could not mention FDR in her presence; you could not convince her that her refrigerator light shut off when the door was closed. 

City Kingfisher 

By Marina Richie 

The belted kingfisher I pursued all summer on a wild stretch of Rattlesnake Creek now perches on a high wire above the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula, Montana. 

He’s gone urban this winter. How could he have become such a suave, natty bird who seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word skittish in the environs of crows, pigeons and house sparrows? So many times he eluded me in the labyrinth forests of cottonwood and ponderosa by the cold, clear creek. 

The bird I thought I knew belongs four miles upstream from Rattlesnake Creek’s nearby confluence with the Clark Fork River, a place the Salish (Séliš ) people knew as Nɫʔay, translated “Place of the Small Bull Trout.” Not so long ago, the sizzling fragrance of fresh trout cooking on a fire permeated their camps, as they caught, dried and stored fish for the winter ahead. 

My kingfisher pays no heed to the rumbling cars rattling across Higgins Bridge, the honking of horns, or the thudding passage of walkers and runners. He likely comes from generations of male kingfishers flying downstream in a seasonal pilgrimage to find the ice-free waters with best fishing on a river then unencumbered by a small city of 70,000. 

His mate has flown south and will return by late March or early April to the home nest bank along Rattlesnake Creek. By then, my kingfisher will have flown upstream to guard his prime nesting territory from upstart males. 

I come to see him often, finding some patterns in his movements. If not on the wire, he tends to be poised on a cottonwood tree limb, or he’s patrolling his mile-long winter territory from Madison Bridge by the University of Montana downriver to the Orange Street bridge. 

On one late sunshine day, he scrunches down on the high wire. His feathers appear fleecy gray without a speck of the typical blue. His crest flurries into a peak with that distinctive two-part divide. From a distance, he looks like a baseball impossibly balanced on the wire. Through binoculars, he’s slimmer and alert, snapping his tiny tail and peering at the ice chunks coasting downstream.

He is predictable only in context of the dynamic river and shifting ice. With below-freezing temperatures, the ice expands from the shore outwards. The wire allows him access to the river’s center, where he dives headfirst at an angle to pluck an escaping trout from black waters. 

One day as I watch him on his wire perch, I have the feeling of not being alone. I turn to see an unshaven middle-aged man in a torn jacket standing a few feet away. 

“A kingfisher!” I say and point where my bird has flown to the limb of a young cottonwood leaning out over the river close by. 

“Yes, a kingfisher!” He nods back and we stand together in silent appreciation of the bird with the tousled crest, head cocked forward and bill pointed downward. 

A kingfisher doesn’t stand out like a bald eagle swooping down to nab a duck on the ice, or a great blue heron stalking the shallows with long-legged precision, or the mergansers and goldeneyes rafting the waves. He’s more like the man I met, invisible until you become aware of him. 

This kingfisher I watch does not divide urban from the wild. By the river’s edge are red-osier dogwoods and willows among boulders that harbor a broken whiskey bottle or a torn shirt. Beavers gnaw trees. The wilds nudge into the city. The city nudges the wild. I’m always cheering for the wild to win, yet acknowledge that if a kingfisher could vote, he’d endorse the presence of wires over the river that give the ideal view of the fish below.

Other Moons

by Max Halper

Thus it amounts to the same thing
whether one gets drunk alone 
or is the ruler of nations.
— Jean-Paul Sartre 

I went to rehab with a guy named Mitch who had swastikas tattooed on his hands and neck. This was in Mississippi, about an hour outside Jackson. Mitch was a meth addict and is dead now, as far as I understand. The swastikas scared me at first, but after months of living with him I stopped seeing them. Mitch was just a guy whose life was as fucked as mine. We used to crack each other up. We even cried together once.

#

According to a 1984 article in The Journal of Social Psychology,[i] the single strongest determinant of whether one person will see a UFO is that someone they know has seen a UFO and told them about it. I dated a woman years ago who saw UFOs every time she looked up. I always suspected there was something weird going on between her and her brother.

#


I found a cow skeleton ensnared in barbed wire at the edge of my family’s property when I was a kid. My friend and I collected the bones and stored them in the abandoned doghouse near the garage. I would check on the bones periodically over the next few years to see if anything about them had changed. I found a ball of baby snakes writhing near the doghouse once and took it as instructions to return the bones to where I’d found them, though I never followed through. Sometimes I think that was a terrible mistake. Mostly I don’t think about it at all. 

#

The legend goes that as he lay bedridden in a sanatorium with tuberculosis, unable to eat or drink, every rattling breath an interminable nightmare, Franz Kafka grasped his doctor’s lapel, pleaded for an overdose of morphine, and said: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer.” Thereafter his throat swelled so tightly he could never speak again, and a week later, in the middle of the night, he died from his illness. Outside, the sky was black save the disc of sunlight gathered on the face of the moon.

#

Sometimes I feel paralyzed by the conviction that life is pointless and nothing matters. Other times I feel paralyzed by an overwhelming love for people and their ideas. Occasionally these two paralyses overlap. I have a hard time being productive.

#

I worry that I’ve never really gotten to know anyone. The same way a steak is not the cow, words are not the ideas they purport to signify. I feel like this is a good start.

#

I’ve been on and off anti-depressants my entire adult life. Right now I’m off, and I feel pretty good. But it’s only a matter of time.

#

In 2009, in the Alps, nearly thirty cows leapt from a cliff to their deaths over the course of three days. Occasionally, an otherwise healthy penguin will turn away from its colony and waddle alone into the dark, thundering cold to die. I’ve heard of dogs that drown themselves after their masters die or abandon them. A captive dolphin once suffocated itself in front of its trainer after years of forced performance. Some people argue that there are natural explanations for these incidents, but I don’t understand how that would make them something different than what they appear to be. 

#

There’s another version in which Kafka is in his childhood bedroom surrounded by his friends and family. The gathering of friends and family recedes back into the gray corners of the room. Kafka is more belligerent in this version: at one point he seizes his sister by her hair and draws her close to his chapped lips and rasps something that only she can hear and that sends her reeling from the room, never to return. Another main difference is that in this version Kafka ultimately starves to death, the tuberculosis having clenched his throat shut, making it impossible for him to swallow food. 

#

Sometimes I listen to pop music on the radio while I’m driving, to pretend that I’m like everyone else. Occasionally I’ll stop and get a candy bar and a soda. I even voted once, in 2008. In AA they say they can always spot a newcomer because he or she is the best dressed person in the room. 

#

The phenomenon of alien abduction has been largely categorized in academia as a conflation and misconstruction of sleep paralysis and childhood sexual abuse.[ii] I suppose it’s easier to live in a world in which the monsters have come from faraway than it is to live in a world in which the monsters come from down the street, or from down the hall, or from the paludal swales of our own brains. On the other hand, I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing anything monstrous, or anything that wasn’t abjectly human. If there are monsters, they are entropy and the distance between things.

#

I’ve spent years cultivating an approach that I call “selective sociopathy.” This allows me to feel what I need to feel and shirk the rest. I know we all do this to some degree. You wouldn’t believe the chain of suffering ignited by putting gas in your car. Or by being born in America. It doesn’t matter how you look at it.

#

The happiest people I know tend also to be the horniest, and the laziest thinkers. This makes me nervous.

#

Occasionally I’ll pray for a terrorist attack or a natural disaster to get out of having to do something I don’t want to do. It’s worked a few times.

#

No one’s ever asked me if I believe in god.

#

I think I think about Kafka’s death as a piece of writing in and of itself, as if having produced a body of work so grotesquely organic there was no longer a boundary between his language and his bodily operations.

#

I told Mitch about my Jewish heritage and he didn’t seem to care and he certainly didn’t hate me. He claims he got the swastika tattoos in jail. I asked him once if he’d ever read any Kafka, but I can’t remember his answer. Probably no. I think he would have liked Kafka. They had a similar sense of humor.

#

I saw a segment of a Japanese prank show where they put a PULL sign on the door of a department store that required pushing, and filmed people as they approached and yanked on this fucking door and yanked and yanked and then gave up and walked away. The whole thing felt like something else. I’m not sure how else to explain what I mean. I think about it all the time.  

#

I used to start drinking in the morning. Towards the end it was not unusual that I would pass out by noon, wake up at four or five, and continue drinking until I passed out again. I used to joke that I was getting two days for the price of one. I also frequently blacked out. I once came out of a blackout at a table in some apartment with four or five men I didn’t know. One of them had a gun in my face. “What do you have to say now?” he asked. I told him I wanted to leave. He allowed me to leave, and I started opening doors, not knowing which one was the exit. Behind one of the doors there were some children on a mattress on the floor doing homework. The men at the table laughed at me. I found my way outside and started walking. I don’t remember getting home, and I can’t remember what any of the men looked like. Nowadays, every time I see a man I don’t recognize, I worry it’s one of the men from the apartment. I wonder what I said to upset him so much. I’ll bet it was pretty funny.

#

Here’s a joke Mitch told me about a fisherman who, fishing from his boat in a lake, feels a tug on the line and, reeling in the catch, finds an arm on the hook. He sets the arm in the boat’s hull and recasts. Soon after he feels another tug, and finds a second arm, which he sets beside the first. Next comes a leg, and then a second leg, and then a torso, and, finally, a head—all of which he piles in the hull. The parts roll together and fasten to each other, and a tall body sits up and blinks around. Its eyes are black. It opens its mouth, and from the mouth floats a ball, dripping with slime. The ball hovers in the air. The slime drips away to reveal a white orb. The orb thrums. When the fisherman looks into it he sees the entire universe suspended amid a fathomless emptiness, completely alone in the dark. Terrified, he leaps from the boat and swims ashore. He rushes through the woods to the village, caroms up the street, scrambles into his house and collapses against the door. His wife, feeding the baby, looks up. “How was the fishing?” she asks. The fisherman, finally finding his breath, shrugs. “Meh,” he says.

#

I had a therapist who had a Rothko print on the wall in his office. I’m not sure if the implication was to strive toward the quiet compartmentalization of Rothko’s art, or to strive away from the crass over-simplification of Rothko’s art. I suggested, half joking, that he consider replacing it with one of those inspirational panda posters. As is my experience with most therapists, he was too forgiving of my deflective impulse to philosophize generally about life, and often indulged in that impulse with me so that I rarely if ever spoke about myself. Plus he was very expensive.

#

Sometimes I’ll do this thing when I see a pretty girl where I’ll imagine starting a conversation and asking her out and her saying yes and so going to dinner and hitting it off and we start dating and we fall in love and we move in together and we get married and we have a kid and name her Lily and things are good and we have another kid and name him Jack or Soren or something and we go on vacation to the Caribbean and then return home and carry on with our lives and over time things start to get boring and we start to fight a bit and it’s tiring and then there’s some infidelity and we get separated but we miss each other so we try again but it’s stressful for the kids and so we get divorced and it’s relatively amicable and she starts dating a friend of mine and I pretend to be fine with it though in truth I’m lonely and the kids are grown up and eventually I meet a woman but she’s much younger than me and me and my ex have a long conversation about how dating one of my grad students is not good for me and I agree and end the inappropriate relationship and focus on my work and the years pass and my ex remarries and moves to the Berkshires and I get sick and die somewhat too young on account of the years of drugs and alcohol and all the smoking and she attends my funeral with her husband, who’s the headmaster of a private school or something, and then they return to the bed and breakfast they’re staying at while in town for the funeral and they have brunch and she basically never thinks about me again unless one of the kids brings me up which is rarely because I was always distant and difficult and they feel freer without me in their lives. 

#

Kafka actually published The Metamorphosis during his lifetime, despite popular misconceptions. Before printing, he was approached by his publishers with some cover design options they’d had drawn up, all of which showed a monstrous insect strewn on a bed. Kafka was aghast, and demanded that under no circumstances should they portray the insect; it was precisely the insect’s ambiguity, the shifting and often contradictory descriptions, that drove the novella’s subtext. To portray the insect would harden its image in readers’ minds, and hobble the profound power of the text to manifest uncertainty. His publishers of course nodded and rolled their eyes, then proceeded to print the book with an insect on its cover. I prefer the version where Kafka dies in his bedroom. This feels both less likely and yet more organic.  

#

The world rarely moves for me the way I want it to. I understand this is just THE world and not MY world and that some people feel this stuckness—feel everything I feel—even more profoundly than I do. This does not make it easier. In fact it makes me jealous, which makes it worse. 

#

One of my first sponsors taught me about “radical empathy” as a strategy through which to alleviate some of the “chronic uniqueness” that addicts tend to suffer from. It turns out it has other applications, especially insofar as stoking creativity. If you don’t feel bad for everyone, then you can’t be a good artist. I like to start building all my characters from the same critical conjecture that some day they are going to shit their pants and die, just like everybody else. And that no one asked to be born as far as I know.

#

It’s not unusual in cattle mutilation cases to find a notable absence of footprints within the proximity of the carcass—including even those of the mutilated animal itself. Another common factor is the absence of blood, as well as certain organs including genitals and rectum. The predominant explanation for cattle mutilation—which has been reported on six continents—is natural predation. Some believe it is the work of cults or lone psychopaths. Of course there is the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I’ll also note that I recognize there’s a stark incongruence between “radical empathy” and “selective sociopathy,” and while both are personal tenets both are also outclassed by my central tenet: ambivalence.

#

It’s weird that the word “fiction” is the genesis for the word “nonfiction” whereas “nonfiction” refers to the truth and “fiction” to a lie. It feels like it should be the other way around. Though there is something more living about fiction, something less rigid and more full of blood. Something that needs to eat and drink to survive. Something that dies in different ways. In regards to Kafka, Susan Sontag wrote that “…the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”[iii] It’s bizarre to me that he didn’t kill himself. 

#

There are lengthy memory gaps from my early twenties, due to the drinking. I’ve patched these in as best I can with a combination of other peoples’ testimonies and a little imagination. When I was in the psych ward from DTs after trying to cut my own throat with a steak knife, hallucinating gruesome visions of gore and fiery cataclysm, I became convinced that I had succeeded, that I was dead, and that I was in hell. This despite my carefully curated atheism. Even now with years of sobriety and less suicidal ideation I still sometimes wonder. 

#

They say that in every carton of milk is the milk from over a thousand cows. This is the world. The only people who say they’re glad they botched their suicides are the ones around to talk about it. I enjoy a splash of milk in my coffee, and a glass of milk with my cookies. I’ll bet there’s someone alive right now who will live forever. 

#

I had a dream in which Mitch led me into the woods off the shoulder of a cracked road. There was sky then no sky and damp outcrops pullulating with what I suspect was poison ivy and through which Mitch led me directly and hands of raggy fungus upgroping from the plinths of the oaks and beeches and pines and sinews of web draped expressly at face-level and too-authentic birdsong and Mitch’s deodorant in his path which hemmed west and down along a swollen gulch and a trellis of rotting logs and a cape of ferns thrumming in occasional stains of sunlight. Something all very sad about it. I was short of breath and didn’t own the right shoes, dusting at my mouth and ears and slipping up a knurl in the ground on which Mitch stopped and gestured down at the bed of a swale enclosed in corridors of rigid white birches, everything crackling and dripping as I grinded a heel in the balding grass of the knurl and tried to understand what it was he wanted me to see.

[i] Zimmer, Troy A. “Social Psychological Correlates of Possible UFO Sightings.” The Journal of Social Psychology, 123(2), 199-206, 1984. 

[ii] McNally, Richard J. and Susan A. Clancy. “Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abduction,” Transcultural Psychiatry, Harvard University Press, 2005. 

[iii] Sontag, Susan. “On Style.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, 1966.  

Max Halper’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere. He lives in upstate New York. 

Spring Break at the DMV

by Dalton Day

For Mathias

Author’s Notes

The transitions between each scene can be as smooth or as opposite-of-smooth as possible. Lighting can be used to indicate the end / beginning of a scene, or the actors can just start the next scene without any break at all. 

“//” denotes a line that is interrupted by the one following it.

Italicized text is not verbalized.

Characters

A1, A2, A3: Three friends who are about to go on Spring Break. Though they are college-aged, they should be played by actors in their late 20s. They are going to be friends forever. This isn’t a nostalgic play, though. Because nostalgia is poisonous and honestly?? It’s like, an inch (at most) from being pure, unfiltered sadness. Nobody needs that. With that being said, I miss you, terribly.

DMV EMPLOYEE: They are just doing their job.

DOG: What dog?!

SOMEONE ELSE: You don’t know them. I wouldn’t worry about it. 

SCENE 1 (Or, Prologue)

A dog’s bark is heard.

SCENE 2

A1, A2, & A3 walk onstage, wearing typical beach clothes. A spotlight follows them. They get used to this, but they don’t notice it. They resist it. Perhaps they try to go in separate directions, outside of the diameter of the spotlight. If this happens, three smaller spotlights should appear, one on each of them. But, eventually, they should reconvene at the end of this, in one spotlight, center-stage.

SCENE 3

A1:     I can’t believe we have to come here.

A2:     Come where?

A3:     There’s nothing I can’t believe.

Someone should laugh who isn’t A1, A2, or A3. The play stops here unless someone laughs, ok?

SCENE 4

DMV EMPLOYEE appears onstage. 

A1:     Well we’re here now, so let’s make the best of it.

A2:     Whatever you say, boss.

A3:     Boss?

SCENE 5

A1, A2, & A3 approach DMV EMPLOYEE. They wait to be greeted, but they aren’t.

A1:     Good morning.

A2:     Good afternoon.

A3:     [with fondness] I hope we stay friends forever.

SCENE 6

No lights. A smooth jazz track plays. It should be waiting room music. As the song continues, though, a little more…umph…is added to the mix. Then the sound of someone coming into the sound booth & saying Woah woah woah, that’s not right. Here, play this. Nothing plays.

SCENE 7

DMV EMPLOYEE 

Take a number.

The number 24 is projected on a screen.

A1:     24 it is!

A2:     That’s not that long of a wait.

A3:     This conversation is horrible.

SCENE 8

A1, A2, & A3 are sitting on the floor downstage. DMV EMPLOYEE is still there. DMV EMPLOYEE can be walking around the stage, miming typical office tasks, or they can eat their lunch, or they can pull out a trumpet & play a sorrowful tune. Yeah, that one, eventually. 

A1:     I was reading the other day about memory. 

How memories aren’t stored in a system in the brain, 

that memories ARE the system in the brain.

A2:     Oh, so it’s like, not a window in a room, 

but like, the room itself?

A3:     I’m going to remember this moment, 

right here, 

for as long as I can.

Lights fade as trumpet song comes to an end.

SCENE 9

A1, A2, & A3 are in a different room. There is a window, suspended in air. 

A1:     We should go to the beach for spring break.

A2:     Hell yeah! Sand, sun, &…& uh….

A3:     Salt!

All cheer.

SCENE 10

A dog’s bark is heard, again. 

SCENE 11

Back at the DMV. The number 25 is projected on the wall. 

A1:     Wait a minute. Weren’t we 24? They never called it!

A2:     Oh man, we’re never gonna get out of here.

A3:     I think, when I look back at my life, 

I’m going to be happy. 

Pause. 

Smiling. I hope. 

SOMEONE ELSE walks onstage, & approaches DMV EMPLOYEE.

SOMEONE ELSE

Number 25! I’m number 25 right here!

DMV EMPLOYEE:     Well, hello again! It’s a pleasure to see your face! Let’s get you what you need so you can be on your way! I hope the wait wasn’t too bad.

SOMEONE ELSE

Wait? What wait?

Both laugh, & exit.

SCENE 12

A3’s voice is heard but not seen.

A3:     Isn’t it weird? The way people enter your life? 

Seriously! 

Like, you meet people, 

& then, next thing you know, 

you’ve known them for a year or two & it’s just…

impossible to track how they got here. 

How close you are to them. 

How you’ve shared such a small amount of your life with them,

& yet it’s…I dunno.

Don’t laugh! 

It’s weird! 

& like, how there’s no way you’re going to go back to a life without them. 

You just…

You can’t even picture it.

Try it.

Try to picture it. 

SCENE 13

Only A2 & A3 are onstage. A couple beats before the dialogue starts.

A2:     Laughing. Oh my god! 

A3:     Laughing. I can’t believe you just said that!

SCENE 14

Is that—is that a dog?! There’s a dog walking around the audience. What kind is it? Oh it doesn’t matter, it’s a dog! The dog is probably gonna walk around & sniff a little bit. Probably no accidents. Maybe the dog will go on stage. If that happens, follow it with a spotlight. If it lies down, keep the spotlight on it, but maybe dim it? This will be the remaining length of the play. What a great ending! But probably the dog will wander off-stage, & then the next scene can start. Dang! What a great dog!

SCENE 15

A2:     Yeah, we’ve been here AT LEAST that long, if not longer.

A3:     If not longer.

SCENE 16

A2:     Why don’t you go up there & see where we are in line.

A3:     Couldn’t hurt.

A2 & A3 turn towards DMV employee, but neither get up. A beat.

DMV EMPLOYEE:     You should be next. 

Should.

A2 & A3 turn back to where they were. A beat.

A2:     What did they say?

A3:     Where are we?

SCENE 17

A2:     (thinking) Hmm…lie down on the beach 

& just listen to the waves crash. 

I could do that for hours.

A3:     You could do THAT for hours?

SCENE 18

A2:     Y’all hungry? 

A3:     (clearly to audience) Y’all hungry? 

A beat.

Me neither.

SCENE 19

A2 alone on stage. They are walking around, clearly bored. Eventually they go to the edge of the stage, dangling their legs off the side.

A2:     I remember very well the first time I saw the ocean.

I was scared.

I couldn’t swim well.

& there I was, face to face with so much…muchness.

Whoever I was with told me not to be afraid.

But I was.

But it was beautiful.

& I knew that I would remember everything about that moment until (trails off)

However old I was.

However many people were there.

How long it would take me to finally work up the courage to walk towards—

A beat

To walk towards—

A beat

Uh—

A beat, A2 looks clearly stumped, before smiling.

A2:     It was beautiful. 

SCENE 20

The number 24 is projected on the wall for a moment, before malfunctioning. A technical error should show on the screen. Someone (not Someone else) walks onstage. They look up at the screen, reading the error, & then hit the wall (if they can’t hit the wall for some reason, a clap will do). The error screen disappears, & is replaced with a looped video of the sky. A few clouds, a bird or two. Nothing except sky should be seen in the video. Whoever walked onstage, exits.

SCENE 21

Sky still projected. A1, A2, & A3 walk onstage. They spread out, A1 stage left, A2 upstage center, & A3 stage right. 

A1:     Ok, so remember. Each person says one word at a time, making a story. & there’s no going back, no redos, & you only have three seconds to come up with your word. Ready?

A2:     Yep.

A3:     Alright.

A beat.

A1:     There-

A2:     Once-

A3:     Was-

A1:     A-

A2:     Day-

A3:     That-

A1:     Seemed-

A2:     To-

A3:     Last-

A1 pauses. 

A2:     1-

A3:     2-

SCENE 22

Has anybody seen that dog?

SCENE 23

A2:     Yeah, me too. I’m sick of waiting around. It’s not worth it.

A3:     We should be next.

SCENE 24

A3’s voice is heard. 

A3:     There’s got to be a simpler way to do this.

Like, an extra hand.

Every time you have to say goodbye,

like, a real goodbye,

like, you are leaving my life,

you grow an extra hand.

Simple, right?

A beat.

Though, I guess—

A beat.

Sometimes you’d just grow a hand out of nowhere,

& that’s how you’d find out you’ve said goodbye.

That’d suck. 

Especially if it was the first time.

A beat.

& I guess eventually, you’d have more hands

than people to say goodbye to. 

A beat.

How many hands does someone need?

To say goodbye?

This many?

A beat.

I’m waving.

A beat.

Can you see me?

A beat.

I’m standing right here.

Waving.

A beat.

Either a knocking sound or a clapping sound should happen, whichever one was used to fix the error screen earlier.

SCENE 25

A3 & DMV EMPLOYEE onstage.

A3:     Oh, come on. It hasn’t been that bad. 

SCENE 26

A3:     & hey, at least none of us had to be here alone. 

SCENE 27

A1 walks onstage. They do so hesitantly, looking around a lot, as if to make sure they are alone. When they reach center stage, their face dramatically goes from cautious to thoughtful. They sigh.

A1:     Know who I miss?

SCENE 28

DMV EMPLOYEE alone onstage. They pull out their trumpet again & start to play. No sound is coming out though. They examine the instrument, & try again. Nothing. They are visibly straining to make sound come out of the instrument. They finally stop trying before looking past the audience, using their hand to see in the darkness. They gesture toward their trumpet, shaking it & shrugging their shoulders. A voice says from the sound booth: “Yeah, we’re working on it. Sorry about that.” DMV EMPLOYEE nods, puts their trumpet away.

DMV EMPLOYEE:     I don’t mind waiting.

SCENE 29

A1, A2, A3 on stage with DMV EMPLOYEE:     A1:     I think I’m going to head out. 

A2:     Yeah, me too—//

A3:     //–Wait. 

SCENE 30

A1, A2, A3 onstage with DMV EMPLOYEE. A1 & A2 don’t move or interact. DMV EMPLOYEE moves as they please.

A3:     I need a second.

I need to remember as much as I can.

A beat.

This is like those horses. 

Looks to DMV EMPLOYEE for recognition, gets none.

Those horses. From World War II.  

Nothing.

In World War II, a bunch of horses ran into a lake because they were scared & then–.

A beat.

Shwwwoooooop.

The lake froze solid.

With the horses inside.

A beat.

I mean. 

It’s probably just a legend.

A beat.

But.

This is like that.

(looks to DMV EMPLOYEE) Don’t you think?

DMV EMPLOYEE:     I think—

The projection quickly goes through a series of numbers. Is “24” in there? I think I saw it. Is this over? I don’t want it to be. It can’t be. Not yet. Not yet. It lands on the loop on the sky.

It’s time for my break.

SCENE 31

A3 sits perfectly still while a lot of people walk through the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE is on their break, so will not be in this scene. This should appear fast, the people not spending much time onstage, a few seconds at most. Feel free to just use audio of a lot of steps & human voices, if a lot of people cannot be found.

SCENE 32

A3 sits onstage. DMV EMPLOYEE Returns.

A3:     Ok.

I’m with y’all. 

Let’s get out of here.

A3 starts to get up. 

SCENE 33

Who is your best friend? Have they always been your best friend? How many best friends have there been before them? Who do you miss? Can you tell them? Will you? 

SCENE 34

I miss you.

SCENE 35

A1, A2, A3 enter the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE greets them.

A1:     Hello!


A2:     Hi!

A3:     Hey!


DMV EMPLOYEE:     My thoughts exactly! Right this way!

They all exit.

SCENE 36

A1, A2, A3 enter the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE greets them.

A1:     Hello!

A2:     Hi!

A3:     Hey!


DMV EMPLOYEE:     My thoughts exactly! Right this way!

They all exit.

SCENE 37

A1, A2, A3 enter the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE greets them.

A1:     Hello!


A2:     Hi!

A3:     Hey!


DMV EMPLOYEE:     My thoughts exactly! Right this way!

They all exit.

SCENE 38

A3 enters the DMV. DMV EMPLOYEE isn’t there.

A3:     Do you mind if we sit here for a little while?

A beat.

Thanks.

SCENE 39

The video of the loop of the sky plays. This time, though, there is sound. Seagulls, & the sound of ocean waves. Other sounds typical of a day at the beach. This continues through the end of the play.

SCENE 40

Video continues. Lights up. End of play.