Fiction

“Do you see this man? Alexander Luria?”

Professor Dunn pointed to a black and white photograph pinned to her office wall. The photograph curled at the bottom edge, and the curl had gathered dust. It was a portrait of a man dressed in the fashion of another time: trim suit, narrow tie, black-framed glasses, slick hair. His eyes held a steadfast, distant gaze. Fingerprints marred the gloss, which meant Professor Dunn had pointed to it before. The advice Erica Hashimoto was about to receive would be canned, rehearsed for a troublesome girl who did not live in a black and white world.

Erica was hungry. Crossing the campus on her way to office hours, Erica had passed through a cloud of good aromas. Freshly watered flowers, cut grass, a clove cigarette. Erica had wanted to add sunshine to the list. And more: the cafe on the plaza was cooking up something that smelled amazing. Erica had scurried past in heels, late as usual, but oh, she wanted a bite. Quickly she doubled back and bought a Mediterranean pocket-bread sandwich. Now she carried the cafe’s smell with her. In this sealed office, the smell floated from from her book bag. It stuck to her blouse and hair. Roasted chicken, sesame oil, garlic, tahini. Erica could practically taste it. She was starving.

Professor Dunn began. “Luria was a genius. We cannot imagine the forces arrayed against him in the Soviet Union. The weight of the bureaucracy, the political minders who shadowed him and inspected his notes. And how difficult were his test subjects, the illiterate farmers of the Ukrainian steppe? Exasperating. Lastly, of course, to have been so utterly in love. Perhaps, even in the Soviet system, love was untouchable, although it smacked of impropriety, an underling, after all.”

Erica gazed at the stacks of books climbing the wall. “Was he in Patterns of Language Acquisition?”

“Correct. Schema theory. Esoteric as the back side of the moon. You have to wonder who in the Soviet bureaucracy decided this was important work to do. Well, Luria thought it was important. Asking a farmer hypothetical questions about cutting down a tree—he was testing the use of the subjunctive, the mind’s pursuit of speculation—and farmer replies, ‘But why do I want to cut down the tree? We have plenty of firewood already.’ And thus I ask you, Miss Hashimoto: you seek a letter of recommendation, but I need to know something: why did you carve into my classroom desks, so bored, so restless, so capricious? What was your plan?”

“I didn’t—”

“I saw you.”

Professor Dunn was holding Erica hostage. Erica had come for that letter of recommendation. Now she wanted only to eat that pocket-bread sandwich. She felt torn. There was the promise of a good lunch, sesame chicken with tahini in pocket bread, or a letter that could change the trajectory of her life. She weighed the imbalanced factors tugging at her desire. She clutched her book bag tighter in her lap.

“Do you remember Luria, Miss Hashimoto? How the peasants of the Ukrainian steppe thought the question was so bizarre? Luria just wanted an answer. They couldn’t even grasp the question enough to proceed with one.”

“And?”

Professor Dunn leaned across her desk. “Don’t be dense. You ask me for a recommendation, but instead of accepting or declining, I ask you to tell me why you want this job. Do you know anything about international shipping? Do you know about the Noguchi Concern? You saw the lady at the job fair. Was she wearing white gloves? Did she smile at you? We have talked about context before. Well, this is not a desirable company, Miss Hashimoto, while your Japanese is highly in demand elsewhere. Here is another question for you: Do you even want your fate placed into my hands?”

“What do you mean?”

“You arrived late every day to my class. Don’t you have an alarm clock? A regard for time? Was it a boy? Was it a meal?”

Erica thought about pocket bread.

Professor Dunn’s gaze locked on Erica’s eyes.

Erica said, “I always did the reading. You know that.”

It was a boy.

“You scratched my desks.”

Erica did not say, I ran my fingernail over old scratches, timeworn kanji that translated to For a good time, call… and Just shoot me now.

Dunn looked back at Luria. “Tell me why you want this position.”

“Well, it sounds like a good challenge—”

She held up her hand. “Stock answer.”

“The language is at a high register, in real time, under field conditions, as you say—”

She smacked the desk. “Pandering.”

“There is nuance to negotiation. An art to it. It is—”

“This sounds better. Keep going.”

“—everything I love.”

Pocket bread sandwich.

The professor said nothing.

“My mom said I can make a decent living, like, all these Japanese companies are coming to America and taking over.”

“Your mom actually said that? Christ. Next question: why would you decide on me?”

“Because you’re my advisor?”

Tahini and sesame oil.

“Stock answer again. So let me tell you why you are asking me. You want your current authority figure, me, to approve of your advancement where you’ll work under a different authority figure. Has it occurred to you that I have a stake in this too?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you should fail?” Steeple fingers. Eyes closed. Professor Dunn seemed to be enjoying a private story.

Erica cut off her professor’s enjoyment. “I won’t fail.”

“You always were like a vessel.”

“I won’t fail.”

“What if you fall in love?”

Erica said nothing.

“Listen to me. Akihiko Noguchi’s father owes me a favor. This is how I redeem my favor?”

The professor’s gaze found Erica’s book bag. Could she smell the pocket bread? Did she want what Erica had?

“A favor?”

“Young lady, you don’t understand the world, only the words. There is a second meaning to everything. God what have we taught you women, you girls?”

Erica did not feel like playing along. “You should teach us to say exactly what we mean.”

“Excellent. But are you worth my special favor?”

“You’re confusing me!”

“If I recommend you, a passably competent interpreter, to the Noguchi Concern, is his obligation paid? The last girl—”

Erica said, “Is this about me, or is this about you?”

“It is never about you! The interpreter should be invisible in the room.”

“An interpreter is the sina qua non!”

“A paradox! Beautiful!” Professor Dunn smacked her desk. “I’ll write your damn letter. You’ll be perfect for the job. Perfect for him.”

“Thank you.” Erica didn’t even know what she was thankful for. She estimated escaping this office in five minutes. She shifted the loops of her book bag over her shoulder. She would scurry across the plaza in her heels, find a bench beside some flowers, and eat her pocket bread sandwich.

Professor Dunn held up her hand. “Wait. About Luria?”

“What about Luria?”

Shit.

“Well, there was an issue with his work. Even in Russian, his work wasn’t published until 1974. Sit down. You’re not going anywhere. Luria alludes to the political sensitivity of describing central Asians as having a child-like mentality, being so contented with their simpleton lives as to not even speculate on the hypothetical chopping of a tree. These were satellite republics, mind you, with a testy relationship with Moscow. Well, are you contented, Miss Hashimoto? Does that make you a child? What shall I write in this letter? You certainly had a testy relationship with me.”

“Is this the Soviet Union?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“My parents met in an internment camp, okay?”

“Are you contented, Erica Hashimoto? You’re a Sansei girl becoming a woman, rising to legitimacy, but does that make you content? Let’s zero in on that one.”

Sun and silence tugged at each other, a knotted, motionless tautology in the stale room. Erica’s mind broke free, to the loggia outside, light and shade, brick and stone, her heels echoing across the plaza to the bench beside the flowers where she would devour her meal. White box, pickle on the side. She would eat her sandwich and never come back. How to explain this to her mom. Four years at USC, and she maybe was getting the job? Maybe it would pay this much? She would need new blouses and skirts and shoes. Wear her hair up? No, her hair was so shiny slick, it would only slide loose again.

She really wanted that sandwich. She would gobble it down. Sated, she would wonder what to want anymore.

“Erica, dear, you think you’re supposed to be content, but desire can be swayed. No one is content.”

Erica felt herself loosen at “dear.” An easy word to give away, but the professor seemed to have meant it. The tone in her voice was gentle, not motherly, but gentle, like—

“Of course, there is also the propensity, prominent in Japanese-American culture, to mirror what is presented to you. Your wants and dreams do not come from within. What forms within you derives from without you. Especially true for a young woman.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Erica, you’ll be interpreting for a man.”

Erica said, “If I was contented, I would not be asking for this letter.”

Student and professor locked eyes for a second. Too long. Erica didn’t care about Alexander Luria anymore.

“I said I’ll write your god-damned letter. But international shipping can get gritty sometimes. You’ll have to manage.”

 Erica said, “Kansha.”

Gratitude.

“You have no idea.” The professor waved a dismissive hand.

“So now I am the one owing a favor.” Erica stood, shouldering her book bag. She would never return to this room. She wasn’t even hungry anymore.

“That’s very good. Favors exchanged like coins…”

“The obligation owed to you is transferred to me.” Erica bowed.

Professor Dunn spun in her chair, in and out of the light, stirring the stale air. “Keep going with this. I like it. Favors akin to currency, transactional in nature, debts parlayed…”

“Are you saying that I am the favor?”

“Commodification of the woman? That’s going too far. Just don’t disappoint me.”

“It sounds like I already have.”

“Honey, no…”

Professor Dunn stopped. Another student was peeking in. Book bag, skirt, blouse, nylons, heels. Another pocket-bread sandwich in a little white box

Alexander Luria gazed, steadfast, but Erica wasn’t looking in the same direction.

Erica said, “Well, thank you. I really have to go.”

“Of course you do.” The professor resumed spinning her chair. She did not see Erica leave. Did not see Erica brush past the waiting woman just like her. Did not see Erica run.

     I didn’t realize that some folks thought my momma was crazy until after
she was dead. My small family had just finished our last family meal of ham hock
and beans on that grey early December afternoon along with the last of momma’s
fried squash she had put up that summer before she passed.

     Memaw Maggy had taken over the cooking in our house when momma
started confusing the sugar with the flour. “I remember telling your momma Nell
that a good meal does things for good people. No matter her troubles, she always
had enough sense to keep you fed the way a growing boy should be.” She said as
she sat down beside me in her pastel hummingbird apron.

     Before that day I had never wondered if momma might not have been right
in the head. To my naive eyes we seemed to make out alright on our own. She
saw me through school all the way up until I had started junior high just a year
earlier. Around that same time all the walk had finally gone out of her legs, and
she could no longer get out of bed to go to the county engineering job she loved
so much. She only had a few months left by then.

     Of all the times I had felt like I didn’t belong at our family gatherings, this
was the one to beat ‘em all. Mostly what I remember is an empty house, nothing
left except for the tattered furniture. The years since momma’s passing have
blurred the memory of those that were present at that final family meal. I sunk
low into the egg yolk colored couch as they spoke. Strands of momma’s light
crimson hair had weaved itself into the upholstery.

     “Yes sir, that sure was some mighty fine eatin’.” My grandad Fletch said as
he untucked the napkin from his denim shirt.

     “Say Lloyd, you really oughta go on out to Potter’s garage and see about
that clerking job.” He said to my uncle. “I hear it pays pretty good and there ain’t
a lot of getting up and down that needs done.”

     Fletch, memaw Maggy’s second husband, but just the same as any
grandfather to me, had always been the kind to be more comfortable in the seat
of his Farm All tractor than an easy chair. He was scraping out his pipe into the
ashtray on the cherrywood end table as he marveled over the meal we had just
finished. His Lowry feed and grain hat was already back on his head covering thin
patches of his dull silver hair.

    “Yeah, I oughta.” Said uncle Lloyd as he stared out through the picture
window that framed the barren plains stretching toward the blue lit horizon.

     Lloyd had lost his job down at the auto parts factory a decade earlier when
a rotating turbine took a chunk of important muscle out of his left leg. Worker’s
compensation had taken care of everything except getting him back to a
productive way of life. He still wore his khaki work shirt with the torn pocket most
days of the week. As I had grown taller through my early teenage years his broken
body seemed to grow smaller under the weight of not being useful.

     “That was one thing about your momma, boy, she couldn’t abide sitting
around for too long. She was always after me to make more of myself when we
was younger too. I guess I’ll never understand how she managed to do so well at
that engineering job all them years. Job like that one’s enough to drive anybody
to their sickbed.” He could hardly look in my direction.

     A rainbow of soft blue and yellow threads from momma’s unfinished
sewing streamed over the edge of a basket at the end of the couch. I only realized
later that there were a lot of loose threads in the town where I grew up. In the
end all it would take was the scandalous talk of our neighbors to unravel a mind
like momma’s.

     “She had her own rough start just like anybody else, Lloyd. Thought for a
while there she might not get going in any direction.” Memaw Maggy said. “She
only made it into that county transportation job ‘cause no other man in town had
the education for it like she did. No woman ever could get along working a job like
that before her.”

     She shook her head in disapproval. “The things she told me some of those
dirty old men said out on the job site, enough to make the preacher beat the devil
out of all of ‘em with the good book.”

     “Well, the way she took it is a lot more than I can say for most of the ladies
in this town, that’s for sure. You can be proud of that boy.” Lloyd said.
“She just had more gumption before her sick spells took hold then you did
Lloyd, that’s all.” Memaw raised her chin as she spoke.

     “Was that the same gumption that led her down to the riverbank on so
many occasions?” Lloyd asked “Seems to me that sort of gumption’s the sort a
woman can do without.”

     “Naw, it was her smarts that made her feel like she had to keep looking for
people that felt the way she did about things around here. If she hadn’t felt so
obliged to find the ones with hopes beyond this town, she might have been able to see how close she was to the edge. Sayin’ she had an easy time of it ain’t no
better than them chatterboxes at the beauty parlor sayin’ her troubles was
contagious.”

     The edges of the room seemed to blur as the front door opened. Uncle
Lloyd stood up silently and walked out into the luminous space beyond.

     My Aunt Sue Ann had always felt it her duty to defend the more decent
womenfolk around town. “Now Maggy them ladies was just concerned, that’s all.
If it was just a body sickness well that’s one thing but ailing in the mind scares
people.” She said.

     “Concerned hell, all them petty gossipers was worried about was catching it
themselves.” Memaw said.

     “Well, what’s a body supposed to think when they see a lady they’ve
known since she was a little girl wandering around town at all hours going on
about radios in cars and women flying planes?” Sue said.

     Maggy replied, “Lot worse places she could have ended up. Them women
wagging their tongues about my Nell’s walking spells is what got people to saying
she couldn’t control her impulses at night. What’s a slander like that got to do
with folks’ concern, Sue?”

     “Now Maggy, you can’t expect to keep a thing like that from people. You
expect folks to not be worried about what might be going around?”

     “But it wasn’t catching Sue, the clinic was sure of that. It just got to where
she couldn’t stay still. She said it felt like trying to escape the whole world falling
in on her. Imagine having thoughts that heavy pushing down on you. The
therapies they gave her started to work. She wasn’t crazy, she just couldn’t help
but go to walking when it got so bad.” Memaw said.

     “That clinic didn’t know nothing.” Sue Ann shook her head. “Them shakes she was
having didn’t get much better after the treatments they gave her. Always did
wonder if that place didn’t make the poor dears worse off than they started.”
She adjusted her violet-shaded shirtwaist as she spoke.

     “Seems like the best thing to do for ‘em would be to make sure they get
their home life in order. A right and proper home life is the remedy for any
ailment.”

     “And what was wrong with my Nell’s home life Sue? She was doing just fine
with her important job and raising the boy here on her own.” Maggy said.

     “Plenty wrong if it made her sick in the head. There’s more to keeping a
home than having a roof and a job. A woman can’t do it proper like all by herself
without something coming unraveled eventually.”

     “What’s proper Sue? Staying in the house from dusk ‘til dawn only going
out to get the washin’ and go to the market? She might not a done the right and
proper thing for a woman as far as you’re concerned but don’t go to thinking she
got to ailing just because she worked a hard job and didn’t get married.” Maggy
almost stood up as she gripped the knobby wooden arm rests of the rocker.

     “Well, I guess a woman with all the smarts Nell had could see her way to
doing more than taking care of her family. Not me, the space inside my four walls
was always plenty for me to manage.” The ring on her left hand shone silvery
white where the gold had worn off.

     Aunt Sue’s husband had passed on back in ’43 just before I was born. I had
overheard momma say one time that Sue had taken on the habit of speaking into
the air at any moment as if he was still there. A lot of people she passed by in Falls
Creek had a way of knowing what it felt like to not be heard so they just let her
be.

     “You remember them sewing patterns she used to do Maggy? She used to
make some of the prettiest place mats and embroidered napkins. It’s a wonder
she had the time to do anything like that with working.” said Sue Ann.

     “Well, she only had time for those things once the medication made her sit
still for a while. She never could be kept inside for very long while she was still
working.” Maggy said impatiently.

     “But she was so good at it, Maggy. What a shame she didn’t have more
time for that talent. Might have done her some good and kept her away from
some of them folks that got a hold on her thoughts.” Sue said.

     “Your momma’s thoughts were just too big for this town.” She patted my
leg as she spoke. “If it hadn’t been for her there wouldn’t no more businesses
opening up out along the highway.”

     “My teaching her to sew real young didn’t do near as much for her as her
book learning did later on. I guess some of my lessons did take after all. She
started out making those little half-moons and suns out of my blanket scraps.
Lord knows she was all thumbs and no patience when I would try to help her. And
it’s a wonder she ever made it out of the house dressed proper on account she
couldn’t match colors to please a blind man.” Memaw said.

     She ran her fingers over her apron as her voice struggled to recall the times
before momma could no longer be left alone in the house. As I saw the heavy
expression on her face, I began to fidget with the buttons on my shirt.

     We all looked around the room from one remembrance of momma to
another. I felt like no one else could see the faint limestone streaks tattooed into
the dark brown carpet by the soles of momma’s work boots. The old upright
piano with a songbook of her favorite forties jazz tunes waited to be picked up by
the movers. The threadbare burgundy throw rug was still in front of the kitchen
sink where she had stood and washed the dishes on Saturday mornings as she
told me all about how the rest of the world was so much bigger than our little
town. She was she still present in so many ways.

     The door opened again. Aunt Sue pushed her tired body up from the couch
and took more color from the room as she passed through to the outside.

     “Your momma sure was good help on the farm too, boy.” Grandpa Fletch
remarked. “Yes sir, I remember when she was coming up we always had more
chicken and tomatoes than anybody could ever eat thanks to her. Your momma
plucked every one of them chickens herself too. She always saw to it that some
poor soul in need would get our extra crop. We didn’t run out on anybody that was hurting like they do nowadays that’s for sure.” I saw the pride displayed on
his face as he adjusted in his chair.

     Fletch had left his first wife in the next county over one steamy august
night to marry my Memaw Maggy. He never did say exactly why he left, only that
she had made him the happiest man this side of Dixie.

     “Now Fletch, you know Nell never had no talent at plucking chickens. Quit
trying to make her out to be the farm hand she wasn’t. She never could learn to
milk the goats right either.”

     Fletch threw up his hands. “She tried is all. More than I can say for a lot of
folks her age.”

     Memaw continued, “A girl as smart as Nell wasn’t meant for no farming
labor. I’m afraid she learned to hate the life it took to live off this land. Besides,
being on the farm with the chickens and the pigs kept her off the dance floor with
the young men.”

     Maggy dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her bawled up tissue. Her
hands held together as if they were threading a needle in supplication to a spirit
only she could discern.

     “I hated that for her. No mother wants to see her only daughter grow up to
be alone.”

     “She sure didn’t end up celibate on account of us.” Fletch said.

     “Well, we didn’t help none either, Fletch. You’re forgetting about the
decent young man she brought home from college that one time. I thought he
was nice enough, but he was just too big city for you.”

     “Now I liked him fine Maggy, but she had plenty of opportunity with the
boys around town here if she just hadn’t been so worried about what they would
think because of her troubles. Poor thing lost all her self-confidence when she
started gettin’ sick.” The corners of Fletch’s mouth turned down.

     “I hate that it took her the way it did but them nervous spells just got too
strong for us to go chasing after her every time she ran off. We just couldn’t do
nothing more for her Maggy.” Fletch had taken out his handkerchief.

     The thick aroma of the after-supper custard pie still hung in the air. Fletch
got up, and when the door opened, he departed.

     Memaw Maggy looked at me. I saw momma’s sparkling reflection carried in
her eyes as she stood up.

     “You were the one she needed.” She folded the grass green afghan and
place it gently back on the rocking chair. The door held open as she stepped out
into the open space. The colors all faded then as yellow dots of light swallowed up
the edges of all that was left.

     As I gathered up the loose strands from the sewing basket on the floor and
placed it back on the table, I didn’t understand why they all had to leave that day,
but momma’s memory remained.

I

            Once upon a time there was a world of great beauty here in the High Arctic. I was part of that world.

            Let me describe it for you, though you’ll likely not believe me. For what’s been lost is unimaginable. And sheer description? Oh, how does one describe the indescribable? The hues of the last glacier? Epic blues—turquoise, cerulean, cobalt, sapphire, indigo—striating the brilliant white folds of snow-covered ice, itself so much like the weathered skin of a wizened human face? Nests of needle ice so clear they disappear against the pellucid cover of pristine snow? The scale—your insignificance against time itself, eternity? The language of a sudden calving—the thunder of ice dissevering into water . . . the whisper of crystalline powder rising, pluming, cascading . . . the consequent shush and huff of a great wave enveloping the sea?

            What called to you in the glaciers’ disintegration and you didn’t hear, didn’t listen?

            Now it’s too late for anything but conjuring a lost world.

            So, like the embryonic wave forming in a calving’s aftermath, I begin again: Once upon a time there was a world of great beauty here in the High Arctic.

II

            I calve.

            From a cave in my belly an iceberg shears, cartwheels, bursts up from the black water into a mist of ice vapor and snow cloud. Kittiwakes, unsettled from their bergs by the tumult of sea and sky, whirl and glide, their collective cries like those of a chorus of newborn babies. As the ice-smoke clears, these opportunistic birds hover, dive underwater into the cloud of rust-colored plankton stirred up in the turbulent echo of my loss.

            For millennia past, I was a massive ice mesa, polar desert hiding ridges of basalt rock and fossils millions of years old. Patterned with meltwater channels, I stretched from Arctic Ocean to Barents Sea. In summer, those straits wound south until they tumbled in waterfalls weeping over my stolid face. Joined to me north and south, east and west were valley glaciers hugged by jagged rock—Bråsvellbreen and Etonbreen, Duvebreen and Leighbreen, Worsleybreen, Fonndalsbreen, Schweigaardenbreen. I carved their valleys, poured parts of myself into their clefts. I thought of these glaciers as my arms and legs. They were long ago swept into the sea.

            What holds me here, tenuously, is bedrock. Yet still I slide forward, thrust bit by bit into dark waters . . .

            . . . but slowly, too slowly to catch my lost child.

            All that’s in my power is to watch that broken piece of me, my daughter, drift away as the kittiwakes resettle on her, migrant berg. The last of her is a speck on the horizon, then she’s vanished forever, at the mercy of currents that stream south and west. Shedding as she moves. Spinning as her center of gravity shifts with her inevitable thawing in warmer southern oceans. She will, someday soon, become one with the water into which she was born. How strange to know I’ll outlive her as I’ve outlived all my children!

III

            When I was young, I relished the snaking riverlets coursing across my plain, spilling over my face in ribbons that froze into a tapestry of delicate, inverted spires that chimed in unison whenever the wind played across their spines. I cherished the hidden streams that flowed below me, lifting me up and carrying me forward into the bay. Floating almost weightless, I envisioned being released at last from bedrock’s grip and launched into the boundless waters that lay before me. I thought of myself—monstrous and free—a ship of ice scouring the seas.         

            Yes, I was young, my thoughts naïve, not yet formed by bearing witness to geological epochs. I can almost forgive what’s happened when I think of you humans, in eternity’s time mere fledglings grasping at the worms of infantile convictions regarding your own permanence against Earth’s immortality. As you fade from the planet, fresh life emerges, a new and truer Eden . . . enough!

            Learning to be alone, as I have, requires a certain detachment. Perhaps that’s affected my sympathies toward you.

            Epochs passed. I began to see my error. Summer meltponds absorbed too much sunlight, grew to dark lakes and soaked up more. Moulins opened, sucked the water from my surface in ever-expanding whirlpools. And those once-cherished waterfalls? They lashed my face, catacombed my body, slashed deep abysses. I was dying. Caverns enclosed the nothing I was becoming.

            As I aged, I welcomed the howling gales, storms that tiered snow or sleet over me to momentarily salve my wounds. I welcomed the days of endless winter night, the full moon irradiating my blue-white terrain with avenues of light, stars winking on and off as cirrus clouds scrolled the sky. I welcomed the aurora borealis, that wavery kaleidoscoping, torches held aloft by your dead blazing across the heavens. I welcomed the cold light of star-born objects.

            I welcomed the cold itself that arrested, for a time at least, my diminishment.

I was at peace.

Truth is, now I’m weary. Now I dream of giving birth to myself all at once, a colossal shearing sending me once and for all south to join my children. Instead, I calve and dissolve little by little into the sea. Toward my own ending.

IV

            We had names. A litany of the dead I sing to myself:

            Aagaard, Zykov,

                        Åsgardfonna.

                                    Thwaites, Pine, Haynes,

                                                            Matanuska.

            Jakobshavn,

                        Jostedal.

                                     Kitzsteinhorn,

                                                            Mendenhall.

            Shackleton,

                        Jutulstraumen.

                                    Škorpil, Aialik,

                                                            Veststraumen.

            Tazlina, Grewingk,

                        Königsberg.

                                    Zuniga, Getz.

                                                            Smeerenburg.

            Nordenskiöld,

                        Monaco.

                                    Fridtjov, Yulong,

                                                            Biafo.

            Vatnajökull,

                        Smith…Muldrow…Perito Moreno…

            I could go on. Forgive me. The rhythm is off. My voice is out of tune.

V

            Though pinned to these mountains, this bedrock, I’ve seen extraordinary things.

            I’ve seen marvels at sea. Long ago, a Viking longship with an ornate dragon carved into its prow stalled in the bay as the wind died and the fearsome, blood-red sail slackened. No doubt that dragonship had lost its way for it was the first and last of its kind I observed in my long life. The pilot and his crew readied the oars, first to starboard then to port. The oarsmen lined up, sitting tight one to another. At the pilot’s signal, “Allr róa,” the men drew their oars once in unison. Again the pilot called out, “Æn róa,” and another prodigious heave of the oars followed. Silence ensued as the crew—as if contained in one great body—plied their oars with no more direction from the pilot. Picking up speed, the longship sailed past, moving almost soundlessly but for the susurrus of paddles pulled in unison.

            Much later, a whaling ship suddenly beset by ice was caught and crushed to driftwood but for its mast, which impaled itself in the mud and stones beneath the water. For hundreds of years, that mast, like a hand signaling to no one save me, jutted from the sea. It’s there still, though only the stub of its finger rises above the water. The rest lies buried deep in sludge and scree.

            I’ve seen marvels in the air as well. A hot-air balloon once skimmed the waters to the north of me, distant and dangerously low. Aboard, three men leaned over the basket that carried them, threw down a metal buoy. The ocean swallowed it as fire breathed up inside the balloon’s great bubble. The three men rose, raised their fists in the air, sailed beyond the horizon. What became of them? I once overheard two hunters claim that their bodies were discovered decades later, frozen on Kvitøya, an island to the east, not far from here. 

            It seems but a moment in time after those jubilant, doomed men sailed above me that a stricken airship drifted southwestward across the bay. Its envelope was intact, but there was a gaping hole in the keel where the gondola had torn away. A man clung to one of the metal ribs protruding from the open wound, his legs paddling back and forth as if he were swimming through sky. Then he slipped (or perhaps he let go), plummeted through the air and plunged into the water, the last of him consumed by pancake ice and sea.

            And even on my barren plateau, where dead things outnumber the living, where no human ever settled, I’ve seen marvels. One spring, two men drove a team of huskies over my ragged plain. They were cartographers, here to map each crevice and crevasse, each fjord, bay, island. I heard them speak of an underground lake that lay deep inside me, rimmed by a curtain of icicles glinting in shades of green and blue. They’d marked it, though today it’s merged with the waters that run beneath me.

            I admired those men for their courage, their respect for the land. But more remarkable was how they cared for their huskies, sometimes at their own peril. Here’s what I witnessed one evening after the men had spent the day mapping a cluster of small islands dotting the bay. They’d sledged over to those islands and back, across broken floes and ice hummocks. Both men and dogs were exhausted, hungry. But, as if providence shined down upon them, a seal lay sleeping on a floe near shore. The men stalked, shot, and flayed the seal. Distracted by their labor, they didn’t notice that the floe had broken, and four of the dogs were trapped as it drifted away. One of the men—tethered to a rope held fast by the other—dove into the frigid water. Alas, the rope was too short, and the dogs floated out of sight.

            That night, the men mourned the huskies even as they realized their own survival was threatened by that loss.

            But providence again intervened. In the night, the floe crashed into my cliff-face, and the huskies clambered up the slope. Their howling woke the men. The one who’d braved the water the previous evening climbed up the steep incline to rescue the dogs.

            I try to recall their courage when my thoughts of you—lost like those huskies—run dark. These were explorers who thought nature was greater than man, who lived in a time when it was so.

VI

            Wooly mammoths and polar bears, right whales and narwhals—indulge me in another litany.

            Once upon a time, herds of long-haired mammoths lumbered across my vast white plain, so numerous they eclipsed the landscape. Their feet weighed heavily upon my spine, but I bore them well. Likewise the polar bears. Mothers cavorting with their cubs, tobogganing down my slopes, tossing ice into the air as toys for their children. The bears were patient predators, waiting at a floe’s edge for a seal to appear, bloodying the ice with one swift swipe of their paws. But, unlike you, they killed only to survive.

            I won’t describe the slaughter of right whales whose bones still line the beaches of this archipelago. I choose to remember those leviathans as they breached, arced into sunlight, paused in midair . . . and then their flukes rising high above the water as they dove back into the sea. I prefer to remember the bulls bellowing lustily to their prospective mates, the cows singing back, their calves swimming round them, clicking tongues and clapping flippers in play.       

            More heartbreaking—the narwhal. Some thought narwhals the stuff of fairy tales, ephemeral as unicorns. Today they are, but then . . . 

            There was a time when narwhals littered the sea. I watched men kill them simply for their tusks. They’d saw and wrench those beautiful, helical masterpieces from the narwhals’ snouts, cut away a strip or two of blubber, leave the mutilated bodies to sink in the bay. I understood humans’ covetous longing to possess those tusks. Who’s to say whether I, animated by blood and bone, might have risked my life to possess such an extraordinary prize?

            Voices carried over water, and laughter pierced the foggy gloom of that senseless harvest—the conversations now of ghosts. The bounty, as I discerned over years of listening, was to give these tusks to royalty as a well-rewarded trophy to be displayed behind glass in a “cabinet of curiosities.” No doubt these tusks yet gather dust in those cabinets far away from here, reminders of what’s left of this noble species. All I have is a vivid memory of one mother narwhal who took refuge in the keel of an ice cave at my base, gave birth to a son. Expelled in a rush of blood, the calf found purchase and suckled, the cow’s pink-white milk clouding the water. Then the mother whistled, the baby followed, leapt up on her back, and rode her away as far as I could see. That memory is stored in my own cabinet of curiosities.

VII

            The mountain faces—scabrous with guano, bearded with pale green moss—remind me of the trunks and forepaws of the ancient mammoths. Those shaggy beasts have been extinct for a very long time. I can’t tell you why they vanished. The earth changes, yes, who knows? Sometimes not only through the fault of humans.                

            It was the same with the polar bears. Didn’t you notice their wasting as the ice they depended on dissipated into water? The bears, too, are gone, and the explorers seeking glory and finding only death, and the cartographers mapping this icescape, and the Vikings plundering new worlds, everything that breathed life into this godforsaken place . . . all figments of the figments of your imagination.

VIII

            I told you what was happening.

            Didn’t my warnings make sense? The thunder caused by huge fissures within me? The crash of ice boulders as they smashed onto jumbled hummocks and zigzag crevasses below? The gurgle of liquescing landscape that gave up, one by one, the quiet bodies of your fearless dead, those intrepid souls who charted this once-pristine Eden?

            You watched me from your cruise ships, your three-masted barquentines, your rubber Zodiacs. You were careful. Your guides raised three fingers against my towering cliffs. Three fingers to keep you far enough away so that your puny boats wouldn’t be swamped by the waves my calvings rendered. I’d seen it happen on the stony beaches flanking my edges. The scoundrel wave unleashed. Unwary beachcombers, outrun by a silent swell, swept away and drowned. I can’t say I mourned their loss.

            I was naked ice, and you were the voyeurs.

            All you wanted, waited for, was that one gloriously plump polar bear, that one blue whale breaching. that one immense ice-shatter—caught in photos you could take home to your friends. Your two-dimensional representations that always, always failed to capture what was truly important. You couldn’t contain your excitement at framing each photo to prove that, yes, you’d seen that bear, that whale, that calving. After all, wasn’t that the reason you’d come to the Arctic? To prove you’d been this close to those elusive wonders?        

            So you snapped those pictures, not bothering to take the lens away from your eye for a single moment to contemplate what you were seeing. I’ve noticed that of you humans—the experience of the sublime diminished—no wasted—in a moment of witness once removed.

            Now I’m a slip of the tongue and you don’t come here anymore. Or maybe, just maybe, you too are finally gone.

IX

            Sometimes I would rest, and my voice would fade to long, soft breaths as tiny avalanches bathed my skin. These were trickles, tickling my face and quickly dying away. Did you hear my feathery laughter?

            Yet others, torrents of raging powder, surged over my frozen tongue, raising my voice to thunder.

            Thunder—surely you heard that.

X

            This whole world once whistled. Hummed. Whispered. Murmured. Whimpered.

            This world once sang.

XI

            Summers lengthened as temperatures rose. Miles inland, newly exposed rock baked in the sun, absorbing its rays, sun and heated stone thinning me from above. Ever-warmer gulf currents threaded north, slithered under my belly, pried me away from the bedrock to which I’d clung for thousands of years. More and more frequently, pieces of me shattered and were swallowed by fissures that suddenly opened and closed like mouths of a many-headed sea serpent.

            I would not call these shatterings children. So much smaller than those earlier calvings, and yet, I was diminished by deformity.

            And I noticed then, as I melted and thinned, I receded ever faster. I was pure motion, like those lost children, like those moulins gyring down to hidden underworlds, like those waves that followed me and swamped everything. 

XII

            My name, you ask? My name is Austfonna, the weeping lady.

XIII    

            I say farewell for now. But soon, soon, if eons are a guide, we’ll reawaken to new sounds. Murmuring sea. Whip-crack of water freezing. Sigh of ice as it builds layer upon layer.

            Glaciers re-forming, rising again, one by one.

            And you? You will still be gone.

Mi abuela came to America wearing a tattered potato sack, holding my mother, swaddled in palm leaves, in her good right hand, her only one left. With what little money she had, plus a few good games of poker, she bought a dingy, one-bedroom apartment in the basement floor of a crumbling complex in Hialeah, then declared from then on she’d only know success in life, whatever the cost. That was when the arsenic green wallpaper peeled off and the cockroaches fled through the near clogged drainage pipes and the rats darted out through the broken air vents and the front door. That was when my mother first cried after being silent since birth.

When I was born, Abuela repainted the walls sky blue, because it was a more regal color than brackish plaster. When I was born, my mother had barely entered high school, and my father had barely entered prison for preying on students. When I was born, I was named “Paris” because I reminded Abuela of her home city, the one she refused to remember and yet couldn’t forget. When I was born, I saw the color blue. To me it was the sky and the apartment was the world. The cracks in the wall were lighting, the faded paint the clouds, the leaky pipes the whistling rain that made me giggle while my abuela patched up the chipped paint.

My mother went to school in faux-mink coats. I went to school with knock-off Gucci bags when mink went out of fashion because of the mink abuse involved. Abuela decorated us like Christmas trees in fake diamond earrings and fake ruby necklaces and fake emerald rings, even though we always lost the fake jewelry that still cost her a pretty penny from the electricity bill. Abuela got us finishing school lessons so we’d have the same manners as the pretty rich girls at the good private Catholic schools my mother had always been pressured to get into through academic merit. Abuela somehow got me into one of those private Catholic schools despite raising me atheist.

When I was fourteen, I asked her if this was what success looked like.

“No,” she conceded. “But it’s close enough.”

For now, she added in Spanish under her breath.

“What does true success look like?”

Abuela sighed and flipped on the vintage TV set without color to The Real Housewives of Orange County, pointing out the opulent, tacky furniture and the women in Louis Vuitton heels.

“That. That’s what it looks like.”

My mother said that after she graduated community college she’d show her mother what real success looked like. Then she gained her Associates Degree in Nursing from Miami Dade, and passed the Boards Exam with minimal studying. Her first week on the job, she overworked three nights, and almost died of a heart attack, having to recover at home for three months, her left foot partially paralyzed, still allowing her to walk but with a noticeable limp like she had sandbags sewed to her leg.

“Is this what success looks like, Mama?” I asked her the morning after.

My mother glared for a minute, then weakly laughed. “Yes, mija. This is our pinnacle! Blue walls! Cracked ceilings! All we’re good for!”

My mother wanted to one day buy a pretty white house in Coral Gables, a lakefront property covered in palm trees and grand oaks and nearby good free public schools where cocaine wasn’t hastily hidden in ziplock bags stuffed down the boys’ urinal. My mother didn’t want to wake up another day to a decaying Victorian dresser, or an antique wicker rocking chair that looked chewed through by giant moths. My mother didn’t want fancy fake diamond jewelry. My mother didn’t want to wake up and see the same blue walls so faded, they seemed clinical.

Abuela said my mother was going around gaining success all wrong, that fortune required a sturdy foundation. In her homeland, a four-bedroom house wasn’t bought after growing out of a one-bedroom. Walls were torn down with hammers, recycled, rebuilt into new rooms, into new floors, new ceilings. A family home grows out of a tiny hut like a papaya tree grows from a single seed. A blight passed over the land—one of poverty and ill-lead revolution—which tore down long standing orchards full of sweet fruit. But here a new grove would grow. Here a new grove would thrive.

“Now hand me that roller,” she said after the lecture. “The wall paint is chipping off again.”

If success was blue wall paint, then success meant a new washing machine, a new radio, a new vanity mirror—all things my abuela bought with her own savings, also known as the electricity bill. So, on my first Black Friday in community college, I bought a flat screen TV with what money I’d saved scooping ice cream at a local Baskin Robbins by our apartment. My grandmother couldn’t hold in her joy when she saw it, hugging me in a near death grip and sobbing into my shirt.

“Now we can watch TV in color like our neighbors!” she exclaimed.

“It’s just a TV,” my mother said after getting home from her shift.

“It’s a flat screen!” Abuela argued.

“A flat screen means nothing if we can’t pay our electricity bill again this month.”

That night, Abuela abuela and I watched Desperate Housewives for the first time in color. That night, I saw in gold and silver the true wonder and splendor the reality stars lived in. That night, I saw clearly the cracks in the walls, heard and felt the leak from the pipes hitting the plastic bowls beneath them, saw in detail the fading or chipped blue paint. The next day, we sold the flat screen to pay the electric bill. We went without a TV set after that because we’d thrown out the vintage and couldn’t afford a new one.

And a few months later, she passed. And the day she died, I asked her if she missed Cuba.

“No,” she said. “You can’t miss what you’ve chosen to forget.”

“Why don’t you want to remember?” I asked.

The rocking chair she sat in creaked against the rotting wood floor. A single droplet of water landed on her nose, like a little glass piercing, clear and still as she slowly sat back in her seat until the rocking chair rocked no more. She seemingly looked through me, straight through as though I were a window pane, to the blue walls behind me, chipped and fading again, to be refurbished tomorrow. She sighed.

“We’re building a new life here, mija. To remember would be to love, and I want to love what we made here instead.”

“What did we make here?” I asked.

She passed before she would say.

After the funeral, my mother repainted the walls of the apartment white to make way for a “fresh start,” for true success apart from what came before. She sold the old furniture and fixed the pipes herself. Half the money that went toward paying my tuition at Miami Dade now went toward paying the electricity bill.

“It’ll be tight right now, but it’ll all be for the best in the end,” she said. “Once you graduate and pass your board exams, we’ll finally have the life we always wanted, the success we always dreamed of.”

I didn’t argue, didn’t make a peep in response. Instead I listened to the silence of the pipes, felt the lack of cracks on the not-so-thunderous walls. Instead I stared at the whiteness of our tiny, one-bedroom apartment. The cheap paint was either fading or chipping. I could still see the sky blue underneath.

            Blood is dripping from her mouth as she brushes her teeth. Her eyes have a dull intensity as she works the electric brush left to right, always left to right. The routine is unvarying as she proceeds to the next stage, up and down movement. The blood trickles down her chin and onto her tee shirt.

            He sighs, a weariness hanging over him like a low, dark thunder head.

            “Lydia,’ he says softly. “Done. You’re done.” Her eyes are tiny focused dots in the mirror.

            He reaches to her arm, touching softly with a lovers touch. The flesh stiffens under his fingers as he gently eases the brush away from her face. He sets it on the bowl of the sink as he reaches for the paper towels. Never cloth, too much blood.  He blots her, not rubbing, because the rubbing irritates her, so it feels like dabbing up a spill of precious liquid.

            “Not done,” she mumbles.

            “Remember, Lydia, we talked. When you see the red—the blood, it’s time to stop. Your teeth are clean then.”

            She turns to him, her eyes scanning, momentary loss of recognition. She’s lost the image of his face somewhere in the thick sediment of her damaged neurons. For a moment he can see the searching, the processing and then a whisper of knowing. She nods.

            He leads her to the bedroom his hands on her shoulders, guiding with small pressures. She has adapted to this new way of moving and follows the reins of his fingers.

***

            Thirty five was too young to have a stroke. And  in yoga class. The instructor said she was reaching skyward, her hands in a heavenly supplication when suddenly her body became liquid and splattered to the floor like spilled milk.

            “Her eyes were blank. Staring at the ceiling. We knew something was seriously wrong though she was breathing. Paramedics were here in minutes.” The instructor sounded like she was apologizing for the aberrations of the universe.

            Six months ago. An eternity. Aphasia, degenerative motor skills, trouble talking and OCD. He thought he could at least overcome the other things: the falling, the seizures, the crying. He could help with those but the irrationality of the OCD wore on him. It manifested in compulsive, non-stop teeth brushing and combing her hair until the brush was clogged with strands. She became upset when things were out of line on the kitchen counter, twisting her hands and pacing until she was able to line up containers, salt, pepper, oil and jars. She shuffled them around until tears came.

            Three days each week for physical therapy, neurological tests, memory retention exercise. His routine was wrapped around those days not like wrapped in a warm blanket but more a tarp thrown over a broken tractor.

            He pulled the tee shirt over her head as she sat on the edge of the bed.

            “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you try. I try.” She choked on a sob. “Put me somewhere, a place where you don’t have to worry.” Before the stroke they laughed and giggled like teen lovers even after ten years together.  Their arguments were few and unsubstantial, like snowflakes she would say, not a full blizzard and she would burst his angry bubble with her laughing eyes. During arguments when he felt maligned, he tried to hold on to the anger like a stubborn child.  She shattered his hot bubble when she launched into stories about her family of witches. “My Bubba was a witch,” she joked. “She brought ancient magic from the old country. Croatia. Beware! I am an elemental. She taught me how to focus the evil eye.” She would squint, screw up her face and wink at him and until the anger puffed away.

***

            Her skin sagged on her frame now like a deflated balloon, her once tight muscles atrophied and withered.  She’d lost thirty pounds since the stroke. He had to feed her at first, carefully so she wouldn’t choke. Chewing should be involuntary, he thought as food dripped from her lips. He felt a tightness in his chest, a physical ache seeing her like this. Lydia had taken such good care of herself, yoga, running, sweaty workouts at the gym. Now, she moved from room to room in a slow zombie shuffle. It was all she could manage.

            Friends came in the beginning, bringing food, sitting with Lydia, but she wasn’t the Lydia who had shopped with them, shared coffee and laughed. They tried, he gave them a grade for that, but the toll abraded the kindness like harsh sandpaper. The visits became less frequent, finally dropping to a faint trickle of emails and Facebook posts. Now it all fell on him, a muddy landslide of responsibilities. He was treading water at the bottom of a well with not even a faint glimmer of hope candled against the dark walls as her condition deteriorated. I didn’t sign on for this.

            The results of physical and cognitive therapies had plateaued they told him. She had improved as much as possible given the extent of the damage. Time would not be a friend barring a miracle.

            He prayed. Something he had not done since childhood and it failed to comfort him.

            “You look exhausted,” he shrugged at the doctor’s comment.

            “Yeah, well. . . “

            Lydia was in another room with the physical therapist. He watched though the glass partition. She moves like she’s ninety.

            “Have you thought about placing her somewhere?”

            “Can’t afford it. We’ve maxed out the insurance, for those times when I absolutely have to leave her alone, I have to pay for a home health worker out of pocket. You guys have said, what? Given the pace of her failings, maybe another year. I’m trying to hold out. What choice do I have?”

            “There might be something. We’ve been working on an experimental procedure. I have to point out, it is NOT approved for human trials. There may be legal ramifications.” He paused. “The animal studies have showed promise and the science is solid.”

            “Why isn’t it approved then?”

            “These things take time. It appears our research department is the only one working on this procedure and it is very controversial.”

            “Controversial?”

            “Not everyone believes the stem cells can be made to differentiate into neurons. Some think it may cause even more damage.”

            “How does it work?”

            “We’ll inject a special type of stem cell directly into her brain at damaged sites,” the doctor said. “If all goes well, these cells will differentiate into neurons and repair the areas she’s lost. When they grow back the broken functions will return.”

            “What’s the risk?” he asked.

            “We’re not sure they’ll grow into the proper cells. Uncontrolled growth leads to cancer but the tests on rats have been promising.”

            “If it doesn’t work?”

            The doctor shrugged. “It’s so new. We honestly don’t know. You have to understand that her condition is inevitably deteriorating. She’s not going to get better if we do nothing.”

            “There’s been improvement. You indicated some of the functions were restored.” His voice was pleading.

            The doctor shook his head. “It will reverse and will get bad really fast. I wish there was some other way. Think about it. Talk to Lydia on day when she’s in the moment.”

***

            He explained it to her the best he could, repeating the complicated parts. He didn’t understand all the science of the procedure himself.

            “I want you to get better,” he said. “If there’s any chance.”

            Her head bobbed up and down, almost a nod. “Me too,” she sighed. “Don’t. . .like. . .be. . .ing. . .this way.”

            Together, they agreed to allow the procedure.

            Thursday was one of her better days, one that gave him hope, but she’d had them before only to waken the next morning with meanings lost in a jumble of wrong words and hands not able to hold a cup.

            “If there is any chance for us to be normal again. I want to do it,” she said. “I want to be able to entrance you with my witchy powers again.” They both laughed. Strained to be optimistic. On the good days, things almost seemed like they were before the stroke, other than it was hard for her to walk or putter in the kitchen. Her humor still bubbled to the surface. He longed for those precious days where they made silly jokes and laughed. It was as if the gods cursed them for being too happy.

            They shaved her head again. “You can have a blonde or redhead until my air grows back. I’ll get different wigs to seduce you with once the procedure is done.”

            He hoped it would return to that but he was afraid. He’d lost her once and didn’t know if he could stand a second time.

            When they wheeled her into recovery after the surgery, his knees gave way and he held on to the ledge of the window to keep from falling. She looked like a corpse.

            “It went well,” the doctor said. “It should take about twelve hours for her to be responsive again.”

            “How long before we know if it’s working? I guess we forgot to ask that.”

            “Neurogenesis is an unknown. In theory some of the cells should migrate to the damaged areas and differentiate into the requisite neurons but this is so new. We just don’t know how long it will take.  In some of our experiments it was hours. In others it was weeks and as we discussed, occasionally it didn’t happen at all. We’ll just have to monitor her closely.  Watch and measure the changes.”

            He went home and sat on the couch staring at nothing. Eventually he tumbled into an exhausted sleep.

            When he brought her home four days later, nothing had changed except she couldn’t stand and wasn’t able stay awake for more than a few minutes at time. 

            Maybe he expected too much, he told himself after putting her to bed. He poured a bourbon and sat on the couch staring at the television with the sound muted. In the morning, a nearly empty bottle faced him from the table. It became a pattern. Somehow the alcohol induced oblivion assuaged his pain. It was not his nature to hide in a hole and after five days he stopped. Lydia could talk but could only raise her arm with effort. He managed to load her into the car and take her back to the hospital.  When he lifted her into the car, she was so light, she felt hollow, like a Styrofoam bird.

            “It isn’t working,” they said. “Call hospice.” The change of attitude slapped him.

            “What?”

            The doctor’s head swiveled up and down the hall as he leaned in close enough to taste his aftershave. “We’ve lost funding. The department is being investigated. I’m sorry.”

            “You son-of-a-bitch!” he shouted at the retreating figure.

             He took her back home, put her in bed and fell asleep in the chair in the bedroom.

            Together they had been their own unit, drunk on the feelings for each other. They made efforts not to exclude family or friends from their circle but were overwhelming content with each other’s company. He felt the loss of private intimacy along with its warmth and freshness. Since the stroke he felt a cavernous emptiness. Lydia seemed to sense the loss too but her energies were focused on relearning simple skills.  He kissed her cheeks or forehead, gave her a squeeze but the physical part was laid waste like a dry desert. He missed her delicate hands touching him in prelude and during the coupling but felt submerged in guilt because he still wanted her.

*** 

            His eyes were thick and burning when he wakened. The muscles of his back ached from the contorted position and rebelled as he pushed himself up. He went to her bed. 

            “Lydia, babe…” There was no response. He watched her chest rise and fall. Let her sleep. The rest would help the healing. She didn’t waken that day or the next. He called the clinic.

            “You can bring her in but it is probable that she has slipped into a coma.”

            “That can be good. Like she’s healing, right?” He could hear the deep sigh on the phone.

            “Not likely. I’m sorry, we advised hospice.” He clicked the phone to off. He wanted to throw it against the wall but stoved his anger. He understood if he let go once, he’d be useless to her.

***

            A whisper called to him like a faint rustling of leaves, almost words. Almost a voice. He climbed to the surface from sleep forcing himself awake. Sleep welcomed him in a strangely deep embrace most nights on the chair braced by random pillows.

            “Lydia!” Panic punched him in the chest as he opened his eyes.

            Her eyes were open. He sat up, his muscles resisting with stiffness from sleeping in the strained position.

            “Hey,” he said.

            “Hey,” she answered. “You looked so uncomfortable. Your head was lolling to the side. Your neck must be stiff.” Her words were clear, her voice stronger than it had been in a long while. He stepped across the room, leaned into the bed and kissed her forehead.

            “I feel like I’ve been asleep for a month. And I’m hungry.” His eyes widened.

            “Are you sure?  Maybe some oatmeal?”

            “Yeah, that would be good. And eggs.”

            When he returned with the tray of food she had propped herself up with pillows. Her eyes were bright and her face held a tentative smile.

            “I feel better,” she said. “Not great yet, but better.”

            By the weekend she was walking, slow, tentative shuffling steps but on her own. He called the clinic again.

            “It is better than we anticipated. You have reason to hope,” the team doctor said. “With caution. This is new. Give it two more weeks and we’ll do scans to see how much has changed.”

            “I thought funding dried up?”

            “No more research but we are tracking followups. In the future,” The words dropped off. He felt they had been used like the lab rats.

            On the way home in the car, she said, “It’s going to rain tomorrow. Heavy downpour.”

            “What? You’re watching the weather channel now?” he laughed.

            “No.”

            Before she turned to stare out the window, her eyes were constricted dots.

            The day started bright and sunny with a water blue sky painted with stray dobs of white cotton balls but by noon, sinister dark clouds rolled over the buildings and let loose a deluge of heavy rain. The streets ran with water like rapids for two hours before gradually tapering off.

            “Boy, that was some rain. The weather guys said it blew in off the coast unexpectedly and you said it was going to rain. Where did you hear that?” He asked as she sipped a warm tea and nibbled a piece of toast with marmalade.

             “I don’t know. Just felt it. Maybe my witch powers are coming back.” she smiled.

            “I never saw any witch powers before. You said your grandmother was supposed to be a witch, back in the old country. I remember you talking about that.”

            ***

            Another week and she was still weak but showered without help and fixed her own breakfast.  She beamed across the table. “It’s just Raisin Bran, but I poured it out of the box without spilling any and the milk too. I made you a bowl too but without sugar. That’s how you liked it, right?” She paused. “I know it isn’t much but to me it is a huge deal. I felt trapped inside a body that wouldn’t work.”

            “Do you think you could get by a day on your own. Or a half day. If I can go back to work even for a little while, they’ll reinstate benefits. The company has been good to us but they really need me to come back.”

            He called her five times that first day from the office. He couldn’t concentrate from the worry.  When he came through the door she was at the stove.

            “I’m making mac and cheese,” she said. “From a box.” He wrapped his arms around her and breathed into her hair. It was like after a summer rain, clean and fresh. Before the stroke her hair had the scent of her shampoo. This was different—natural.

            He worked the remaining days of the week. He heard music as came up the walkway. The living room furniture was back against the walls and Lydia twirled round in the center of the room.  She was never a dancer. She had grace and style in her walk and movements but it didn’t translate to dance. She stopped mid spin and came to his arms.

            “I just felt a sudden need to dance. To kind of let loose. Unfettered.” She grinned. “I did keep my clothes on though. You, know, had that kind of feeling like when you just want to run and dance naked.” He shook his head but reveled in the newness of her. Had it only been a week? It was as if a wind had blown through their lives, scooping up the residue of worn and wasted material into a funnel cloud and carrying it away past the horizon. Don’t let this go away again.

            The kitten showed up on the front stoop one rainy evening. A faint pathetic mewing slipped around the door and caught their attention. A tiny shivering gray thing huddled against the mat. She had to bring it in, towel it dry and offer it a saucer of milk. It looked up to her with warm wet eyes.

            He reminded her she was allergic to cats.

            “I was,” she said. “It’s so cute. Admit it, you think so too. If I start to sneeze or get a rash we’ll take it to the shelter but we can’t leave it out on a night like this.” A slim white stripe of fur ran down the front of it’s face.

            He left her alone each day and went to work and called her once each morning and again in the afternoon. A week at work and life was almost normal. Friday she greeted him at the door holding the kitten. She named it Gray and there were no signs of allergy.

            “We should go out. Dinner. A movie. Something,” she scratched the cat’s head. It wiggled against her hands purring. “Gray says we should have some fun.”

            The nearest parking space was three blocks from the theater. She said the walk invigorated her but the movie ran late and it was after eleven when they strolled along the deserted street toward the car.

            “Wow, there were tons of cars here when we came in. Now look, our poor little thing is sitting alone under the light.” Then she stumbled, bumping into him.

            “Whoa, you are right?” he asked, taking her arm.

            “Yes, I think I just lost my balance or my heel caught on something in the sidewalk. But, you can keep your arm around me anyway,” she giggled.

            He thumbed the key fob in his pocket as they got closer. The lights flashed and the latches clicked open and he felt her weight pulling him down. Lydia crumbled like a wilted flower as he desperately tried to hold her up. He heard himself calling her name. Her face was slack, not there, unconscious. He managed to get her into the passenger seat and the belt around her. He started the engine, his thoughts racing. Nearest hospital? Call 911?

            They would ask if she was breathing. Did she have a pulse?

            He head lolled toward him. He reached inside her coat. A pulse throbbed against his fingers. Her chest rose and fell as if she was asleep.

            “Lydia,” he called. “Shit!” He keyed the word ‘hospital’ into the GPS. Saint Mark’s was ten minutes away.

            He screeched under the overhang where the lights said, ‘EMERGENCY’. Inside the florescent lit room, he yelled, “My wife. Somebody help.” A woman in blue scrubs with a stethoscope around her neck came running toward him. He pointed toward the door. Words stuck deep inside him somewhere, refusing to vocalize. The woman called something into a radio on her belt and men were pushing a gurney toward the door.

            They managed to get her out of the car and onto the gurney.

            “Move your car away from the door,” one of the men said. “You can park over there.” He pointed into the darkness. When he gave the man a puzzled look he said, “So if an ambulance or another person can get in. Don’t want to block the entrance.”

            He moved the car and hurried back into the waiting area.

            “My wife,” he said to the woman at the desk.

            “She’s in the ER but you can’t go in. You’ll be in the way. They’re working on her. Doing everything they can. I’m sure someone will be out shortly. I’ll need her name and medical history.

            “Her name is Lydia and she had a stroke a few months ago.”

            “Age?”

            “Thirty-five.” the woman glanced up with raised eyebrows.

            “Family history of stroke? Is she on birth control?”

            “What? No, not now. They did a procedure—at the University Research Center. Something new. It restored functions, helped neurons regrow.”

            “Do you know what it was called? The procedure?”

            “No. It was experimental.” Again, the look.

            “I’ll need as much information as possible. Do you have a contact name over there? Our people will need to get with them.”

            He nodded and dug into his wallet and then his phone for the contacts.

            “Go sit down before you fall,” the woman pointed toward the glassed waiting area. A sitcom acted without sound on the television mounted high up on the wall. A woman held a sleeping baby in another chair. The minutes ticked by like slow moving traffic, all red taillights. Every few minutes he would catch the woman’s eye and she would shake her head. It was well past an hour when a doctor approached him.

            “We’ve stabilized her and moved her to Intensive Care. You can go up now.”

            “Is she conscious? Is she going to be alright?”

            The doctor’s face was solid, stoic. “I’ll take you up. We’ve been in touch with her neurologist.” The doctor guided him toward the elevator. “ICU is on seven.” he said.

            “She’s had another stroke and I need to be honest with you. It doesn’t look good.”

            “But she was recovering. She was almost back to normal. How can that be?”

            His stomach felt hollow and the air he pulled into his lungs was like some useless inert gas.

            “As near as we can tell, all the cells that regenerated failed again,” he paused. “Which resulted in exacerbated deterioration. I don’t think there’s anything we can do for her. I’m sorry.”

            He felt himself slide against the back wall of the elevator but it was like watching outside his body. It was not his own.

            He willed his legs to carry him into go into the room, stumbling like a broken automation. Her still figure lay propped up in the bed, her face slack. If he didn’t go in, things could still be normal. His hands were shaking as he stepped toward the bed, a forced smile on his face.

            “Hey, babe, looks like we’re back at it again,” his throat tightened and he choked. He took her hand and slumped into the bed side chair. “It’s going to be all right,” he lied. “It’s going to be all right,” he said again. “And the weather guys say no rain for tomorrow.”

Camacho knows guys from a town over; he has cousins there. Not a one of them—he or his cousins—grew up anywhere but a rural corner of overlooked American community. You’d never see them anywhere in the media, unless one of them committed a crime too horrendous not to share. And even with that notoriety, they’d be a fuse that fizzled on a dud firecracker. Camacho did well enough—made friends, was well-liked, held the favor of a handful of high school teachers; he didn’t finish in the top ten of his class, but he did land consistently in the top third, which was enough to get him lumped in with the smart kids. And he rode that reputation, for whatever it was worth. It was a currency that seemed to get him somewhere, though it might have been a gold-leafed finish on an antique sewing machine whose owners assumed was worth more than it really was. In that rural Tennessee community, one invested in whatever currency was available. But dammit, the cool cousins lived a town over—same county, but a different world altogether in Camacho’s mind.

He wanted to be like them, though he had no way of conceiving such a transition. Ain’t it funny how the world, whose parameters we know to be vast, and whose celebrities we know to be impossibly positioned for the life they have—ain’t it funny how that world still shrinks to the dimensions of a life? Inside the walls of any given house, you will find millions of people living dramas as poignant as that of any film, and the only explanation for this is that the human condition dictates it.

No, Camacho was not his real name; it was a name born of his friends calling him Macho Camacho for reasons lost to time. By tenth grade, it had shortened organically to just Camacho, and it stuck, no matter how white Charles could be. Yes, his real name was Charles. In fact, his mother, a curly red wig-wearing wannabe line dancer on CMT, called him Chuck most his life, but even she had taken to calling him Camacho by the time he graduated high school. At graduation, a contingent of underclassmen chanted “Camacho, Camacho, Camacho” when Charles crossed the raised platform to shake the superintendent’s hand and receive his diploma. They’d announced he was going to the University of Tennessee at Martin to major in biology. “Camacho! Camacho! Camacho!”

He was living his personal, film-worthy drama in the summer after graduation, just as one may suspect: late nights on backroads; mid-mornings in the kitchen at McDonald’s, toasting buns; evening meals with his mom and little brother, and then back to those aimless backroads with the very same friends who’d designated him Camacho. He dallied in his parents’ church’s youth group, taking on a periodic lay counselor role—a role requiring little other than a willingness to show up. There was Vacation Bible School, youth camp, and a trip to Dollywood. He counselled younger kids, meaning he went along for the ride, soaking up attention from the younger girls which made him feel good and he was still young enough that it didn’t seem creepy. Hell, he was still a kid at eighteen—so what if the girl crushing on him was only fourteen? He was smart enough not to pursue it. He thrived on the possibility something could happen, not that it would happen.

One July night, on one of those rural backroads, with little fear of sheriff’s deputies—who had a reputation for confiscating your beers and sending you on your way, though everyone feared being the kid one of these deputies decided to make an example of—Camacho and his friends ran into two of those aforementioned cool cousins. The eldest’s arms were tatted up—it was hot out, so they all had on short-sleeves, but they weren’t tight shirts, because they weren’t so juvenile as to need to show anything off, muscle-wise. The three of them were standing by a vehicle, each smoking a cigarette; their faces were blurry in the moonlight. A bug-mute field of soybeans dipped to a shallow bowl behind them.

“Phillip? Is that you?” said the oldest cousin—real name Dewayne, nickname Rasta. Phillip was Camacho’s middle name, and for uncertain reasons, the branch of the family comprised of the cool cousins had always called him that. They were the only ones ever to do it.

“Yeah. Hey, what’s up?” said Camacho out the rear lowered window, through which he’d been yelling, “I’m invincible!” only fifteen minutes before, with the Doors’ “Not to Touch the Earth” blasting through the scrub oak. Drunk buzzes were plentiful that night. The country pavement ferried all the young men to transcendence, even those cool ones who effected boredom, like Camacho’s cousins. Charles “Camacho” Phillip Ridenour was now trying to effect a modicum of sobriety—he didn’t want his cousins to know just how drunk he really was. The night was humid in that special memory-making way of rural southern towns. The roads were microcosms—of what, no one was sure. Earlier, they had played some vehicular variant of the game chicken—gambled with their lives—nearly leaving the ground as the Sentra had all but gotten airborne crossing Old Lake Road at high speed—no preview of oncoming traffic, just a hope and a dose of intoxication, and an unchallenged belief in youth’s immunity to tragedy. The world had been as much before them as the cornfield they’d nearly tunneled into.

But now the daredevil ecstasy had faded, and they were parked with half their wheels on the shoulder of Possum Trot Road, smoking cigarettes clumsily and laughing over exaggerated encounters with girls. Camacho wanted so deeply to be cool—for those cool cousins, especially, leaned against their own car—a beater, really, but somehow infused with unsayable coolness (what had they done in a previous life to earn such easy coolness?). The sky stretched wide with blue-blackness, with a luminosity akin to translucence—bony branches of dead hickories prickling staunch into the low light. Camacho, though his drunkenness had passed into the lethargic stage—the bygone, head-tossing unbelievability stage—was craving a piss and a burger, in that order. The piss came easily, the mound of grass beside the car as privy to the mystery of consciousness as the sky with her distant stars. He drained his bladder into the privet and honeysuckle, imagining he communed with the earth, watering her with his waste, which to the earth was more than waste. I suppose she’s as good a god as any, he thought, meaning the earth. The humidity blanketed his beer-numb nose, exchanging sweetness for sweat. And what is that metallic smell, and is ‘metallic’ even the right descriptor?

And what happens over in Lake County? Truth be told, the young woman he was with—a bona fide drinking friend with occasional benefits—would rather have limited his access to the neighboring county, but what could she do? She and he knew that, over there, beyond the penitentiary, they partied—meth-saturated benders where anything could happen, and the price paid in rotten teeth and prison terms held little concern. There were shacks among the corn and bean fields—rickety, flimsy pseudo-shelters where crystal methamphetamine was cooked with impunity. Of course their sheriffs knew about the cook sites—once in a while, they might raid one of these meth houses and round up someone of meager significance, and you could bet the local paper would print a front-page story about how the authorities had leveled a big hit against the illegal drug trade. And labeling it a “trade” had the unfortunate side effect of legitimizing many a loser’s path to lifelong shitty-ness.

They made their way, outward, outward—toward the lake—a geography bereft of accurate notation; loose legends of native people haunting the bluffs whenever anyone bothered to pay attention. The two-lane roads were named for families. Some of the curves were hairpin. Allegedly, creeks flowing into the watershed had their mysterious origins in the bluffs, but though they appeared on a map, they weren’t giving up their sources to the engaged passerby, not even in daylight.

“Can there be a word today as vapid as the word ‘cool’?” asked Jennifer D. She had been Camacho’s off-and-on crush, and she didn’t even know it. Or maybe she suspected it—he sure did hang around a lot. If she wasn’t interested romantically, though, she no less enjoyed the attention. He frequently looked at her breasts, but she tolerated and even forgave him this, because why, she didn’t know; the intricacies of human connection preclude civility. At least he hadn’t tried to touch them, like so many drunk boys.

They were headed to a party—all of them: Jennifer D. and her closest girlfriends and Camacho and his drinking buddies. Two separate cars but one unit, clearly—often in communication, despite the yards between them. Camacho had turned his hat around at some point—not like a private function of the self, the way some men do, finding pieces of their identity in such easy gestures, but turned a full 180 degrees in a brazen, redneck manifestation of coolness—an artist who’s opened his studio for strangers to linger with wine buzzes and drone on about aesthetics, while he sits close pretending not to listen—a backwoods art crawl through the canvas of trees and enough kudzu to wrap a forest, making of its mature plants a sculpture garden worthy of ancient deities. Out there, the spoken word of Jim Morrison made sense. But this wasn’t the usual backroad recklessness—they had a destination. So The Doors was now out; in their place was Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy (in the car Camacho rode in; in the other car, it was straight Meek Mills).

The hills of Possum Trot rolled along in sharp bands—that’s how the road clung to them, like a ribbon of black taffy, faintly tar-scented. A party! They were going to a party, and parties in the sticks—which, though it technically was at a house beside the lake, flanked on each side by a row of similar houses, ranch-style and modest, was far enough from home to be labeled “the sticks,” for the kids who lived in town, of which Camacho and Jennifer D were two; parties in the sticks held a mystique that parties in the quiet neighborhoods of the town, though often quite fun, could not match.  Between the little community of Possum Trot and the lakeside town of Samburg was one of those kudzu-wrapped dioramas of giant trees, bordering a deep ravine that, in the dark, looked twice as cavernous. On this late-spring Friday night, the tall, sculptural trees appeared to be moving as their cars rolled past, drifting heavy like brachiosauruses. And soon the cars were making a deep-graded descent from the bluffs to the lake, from Choctaw-haunted mounds of hardwood forests to flat, cypress-riddled shores of gently lapping waves—waves that one had to be within a few feet to even hear, but once that close, mesmerized the listener into commune with the black water itself, into the cottonmouth prayer and murk, whose far-off splashing of god-knows-what reverberated in parallel worlds of matter and spirit, sending a quickening through the veins of both the abstinent and the drunk.

To be at a party at the house beside the lake was to be aware of that quickening, but it was also the kind of thing a reveler could tune out, and this is what Camacho did. Jennifer D. had vanished into the living room soon after entering, seeking out friends. Camacho, however, got hung up in the kitchen where a couple of his friends were doing shots. The shots came from a gallon-size plastic jug, and the booze was a shade of clear brown that could have been either Scotch or tequila—he would never figure out which—the spirit’s identity was secondary to the effect it would give, anyway, and he was numb enough and swim-brained enough that he couldn’t have told the difference anyhow. It should be noted here that the young man was reviving, a phenomenon different from sobering up, and one that is strongest in youth, but it’s that ability to rally from a nearly asleep drunkenness and be ready for the next round. The party atmosphere was, itself, enough to provoke this, because the thing Camacho enjoyed more than a good buzz was to have a good buzz in a room full of people who also had good buzzes. He perked up quickly.

“Here’s to friends and lovers and fuck all the others!”  It was a toast that rang out often at these things. The young men downed their brown liquor and winced and coughed, but no one threw up.

“Shit, that burns!” said Joe.

“Woo!” shouted Chad.

Camacho said nothing but grinned and wiped his mouth. The ocher linoleum danced at his feet, little vibrations faintly electric, projecting waves of purple and pink from out of the dark yellow. He raised his head to look around at the partygoers—he’d only heard of the guy whose parent’s house this was. It felt like everyone else knew the guy, but this couldn’t have been true. Most of the faces were familiar. Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” was playing somewhere. Camacho began to walk, assuming a low center of gravity to help him walk straight, passing through the living room. He said something flirty to a girl he knew was out of his league, and she graciously responded, because she was kind. He was tempted to think maybe she’d fool with a guy like him, but he knew better. They both knew better, and this had to be okay, and it was okay. No trace of a hard feeling arose in him at the soft refusal; he’d respect her for the rest of his life, but he’d also know he’d flirted with her, and that was worth something.

Back in the kitchen, having made a round through the parts of the house that weren’t locked or otherwise off-limits, he rejoined his tequila-scotch swilling buddies. More people were gathered there now, and the drunkenness was taking on a performative aspect. It wasn’t to see who could get the drunkest, it was more to see who could be most amusing, and in this, if nothing else, Camacho excelled. Yes, he would love to make out with a cute county girl, but just as satisfying, he’d love to make the whole room laugh, and it was the second of these scenarios that was most immediate (with hope held out for the latter, of course), so that’s what he did: on the Formica counter, a red dish towel was gathered loosely around a white paper doily—whatever had sat on the doily previously was gone—and he grabbed a dry erase marker from the family whiteboard near the door and scrawled a set of eyes and an impossibly large grinning mouth on the doily, and then he stepped back, paused for effect, and in as serious a tone as he could, said, “Ronald McDonald.” The room erupted. It was goofy good vibe drunkenness—stupid humor, innocent in its way, the kind that feels like it could veer into wittiness or absurdity, often in the same night. The smile of a pretty girl from the county school rippled through the air, nearly missing him, but he caught it and, emboldened, shot it right back; she turned back to her friends, all of them aglow with the interchange, flirting vicariously and in support, the way packs of young women sometimes do. This is how we know we’re animals: these interchanges are immediate—no need for words. Pure instinct began its work of driving the two into proximity, pheromonally almost, despite the game of disinterest they each felt compelled to play. It seemed as if the only thing that might interfere with a hook-up was the whim of those with whom they’d ridden—a sudden decision by a designated driver to leave, that is—a plausible threat in situations like these.

Everyone was laughing, everyone thought he was funny. He could feel it, too, the way showing out at a drinking party could earn a weird sort of admiration, existent on a parallel plane, not understandable at all, but recognized and carried over into the following week, potentially to follow a person to his grave. The inherently romantic grave, to the young, for whom death is never final; it only becomes final in quaking middle age. True finality—you see it from a vantage point of years lived. But the Camachos of the world aren’t seeing death that way, they’re seeing it through a lens of whiskey buzz and longing. And dark enchantment—poets naked on the Brocken, doting on Dionysus, who will spare their heads. Working-class boys, fully-dressed in their best jeans, racing through Shawtown and Possum Trot—what god of the fields will spare their heads?

No need for head-sparing, though, at the house by the lake. All the partiers feel safe within the glow they share. No one wants to go home yet, not even designated drivers, of which there are very few, because immortal teens need not resort to such measures (though one sophomore girl will find herself the exception, and she’ll live the rest of her long days with a bitter ache). Everyone young gets a pass to feel invincible—the universe grants it, no matter if it’s backed up by reality. We feel lucky on the winding backroads, wrapping round cornfields still in their mown guise of fall, stubbled and faded yellow, pale like bone. The kids from the town go out and mingle with their counterparts in the county—the pretty girls who have been friends since kindergarten, playing basketball and being cheerleaders at the same satellite elementary schools. All the shared memories, and now, too, this night, the party by the lake, to be yet another shared memory. Oh, they’ll joke about not remembering things, because of the alcohol freely flowing, but enough will remain.

Crash! A card table’s legs buckled under the weight of drunken Billy Forsythe, whose daddy was a judge. It was natural that Billy’s nickname was Judge, given his father’s prominence, presiding over both juvenile and adult cases and known by all. Billy “Judge” Forsythe the Younger was affable sober, and downright hilarious drunk. As early as high school, he had the easy manner of one who’s experienced things—it didn’t matter that he really hadn’t.

Enter Camacho to help up his friend Billy.

“C’mon buddy, you alright?” said Camacho, laughingly.

“I’m right as rain,” said rosy-cheeked Billy, nearly laughing at his own comment. “A comment is a comment, even if it’s a cliché. We must remember that.”

“What?!” shouted Camacho, and all within earshot laughed outrageously. “Right as rain,” a phrase so antiquated that no one there got it, and they all thought it was the brown liquor talking, writing it off as a hilarious offshoot of the Judge’s quirkiness. They all loved him, no matter what he said or meant. One or two of them might hear that phrase down the road and remember they’d heard it somewhere, but not a one of them would link it to Billy “Judge” Forsythe.

Eventually, that near-imperceptible point came when a crowd knows to start thinning. People were leaving, but why? The party was so much fun. This felt so unfair to Camacho, who’d thought the party was truly just beginning—had believed it in his heart-of-hearts, whatever that meant. The house was a vessel emptying. A cozy, general mock-up of any house where a family might live its day-to-day, except this one was transfigured by merriment—wood paneling printed with country scenes, somehow charming: a whitetail deer jumping a barbwire fence. And now, though—and now, in the wake of merriment, the ache of its absence.

Fuck ‘em all. That classic counterfeit rage that a young person summons at will was returning. Camacho was coming full circle, as they say. He’d gone from drunk to sleepy to revived drunk and now just drunk-drunk and with a spot of anger, with sleepy soon to reappear. Guns ‘N’ Roses played somewhere in the house—the back half of Appetite for Destruction—“My Michelle,” maybe. Yeah definitely it was that. GNR was decades old, but that music endured, and if fit so right fading into the night. He finished the keg beer, squashed the plastic, tossed it into the trash beneath the kitchen sink, and walked out onto the back porch of the house. And guess who was there.

Those cool cousins stood in a jagged arc around the back porch, as if they’d been waiting for him. The oldest, who was closest in age to Camacho, held a plastic half-empty liter of something—again, a clear brown, but this one distinctively yellow in tint, which made Camacho think it was tequila. That cousin, Dewayne, extended his tattooed right arm to Camacho, passing him the bottle. How does he have so many tattoos at his age? Dewayne’s little brothers, a sophomore and a very worldly freshman, waited patiently for their swigs, not judging, not jostling like kids. They didn’t have tattoos yet because they were still too young, but there’s no doubt that when the time came, they’d embark on sleeves to rival their eldest brother’s. He’d seen them on the road somewhere outside Possum Trot, and now they were here at this party, or at what remained of this party, and suddenly the departing crowd seemed not to matter. It was eleven-ish, and he was supposed to be home by twelve, but this opportunity beset him. What opportunity? To hang with his own blood—his not-as-known-by-him-as-they-should-be cousins, the sons of a cousin of his mother—the branch of the family that called him Phillip.

“There’s a party at the levee,” said Dewayne, often pronounced Dee-wayne.

“Where’s that?” asked Camacho.

“Out past Tiptonville.”

“That’s not here,” slurred a shot-bemused Camacho. Dewayne laughed.

“You wanna go?”

“Yeah, man.”

Camacho was caught up in it, and it was all the sweeter due to their familial relation. It felt instantly extra close. He imagined this bond thick, despite a lack of shared experience. He’d leave behind the friends he’d come with—including Jennifer D.—and ride out to the party at the levee. All the while, with cypresses sliding by overhead, they’d pass a bottle, listening to Tupac. Camacho and Dewayne and Dewayne’s little brothers, whose names Camacho couldn’t keep straight. A car full of cousins—a Jeep Cherokee, to be exact, a dark cherry red, black in the night, windows half rolled-down to let out smoke. It was so dark by the lake—roadside structures hid in deep shadow. They rolled past Blue Bank Resort and the little park where a miniature train used to run; past Boyette’s restaurant and the long boardwalk that put you in communion with the root knobs dotting the shores, where you walked slowly, hoping to spy a beaver or water snake. At night, though, it was all subsumed by blackness, the line between liquid and solid erased, so that one could conceivably pass into the next realm just by wandering out to the furthest points of the boardwalk, lost forever.

Ain’t nothin’ but a gangsta party. Tupac half-singing, a little flat but somehow making it work.

They felt tough, possessed of a street cred none of them had, except for maybe Dewayne, who was known to always win fights. There was a stretch of two-lane blacktop bending in a long, wooded arc, all the way into Tiptonville. Camacho couldn’t come down here without sensing the nearby prison. He only had a vague idea where it was—he’d never been close enough even to see its razor-wire. But still, he had visions of convicts escaping, sprinting from shadow to shadow on the moonlit Tiptonville lawns. It was a time of night when he felt they may encounter an escapee, decked out in stolen jeans and a Levi’s shirt, trying to pass himself off as a hitchhiker, though surely no convict would be so bold as to stand by the road, what with patrols panting after him—half-person, half-bloodhound those cops would be, testing the air with their moist noses and deductive reasoning.

No wary strangers in the margins, though. In fact, not a soul was to be seen out-of-doors in Tiptonville at this hour, Saturday night or otherwise. Nothing at all was going on until they got to the little house at the further edge of town, beyond the city limits but still incorporated, if only loosely. Had it been daytime, the levee would’ve been visible, concealing the flat brown Mississippi. But dark as it was, nothing across the road from the wood-slatted house was visible but a few dozen yards of unsprouted field.

At the house was the opposite of nothing-going-on. Flood lights backlit a pair of silver maples in the front yard, one of them having sustained a lightning strike, half-dead or half-alive. Camacho peered up into its arthritic branches. There were swollen knots at the bends of the limbs—giant hag’s fingers, frozen mid-clutch. There were no leaves, so maybe the tree was fully dead after all. He couldn’t stare upward for long for fear of plowing into a car—automobiles in every space of the yard—not junkers in a makeshift scrapyard of the poverty-stricken, but functional, modern cars, clearly having been driven there that night—people coming to this party. There were voices and music, a faraway pulse of excitement leaking from inside. A few groups of smokers stood in whatever empty spaces they could find, laughing and gushing in the happy exaggeration of intoxication. Hard laughter, interspersed with “Awwwwws” and “No ways”  and, occasionally, an “Are you fucking kidding me?”

They had found the real party—the possible rager till dawn. And when would the cops be there? Then Camacho saw a patrol car in the grass beside the unpaved driveway, where facets of gravel gleamed an infinite gray scale under the moon. The car was quiet and unoccupied. DeWayne saw Camacho processing this, and the other cousins were lighting cigarettes.

“Cops gotta party, too.’

“For real?”

“What else you think they’re doing in there? D’you seeing anyone trying to get away?”

“Huh.”

“C’mon, it’s cool,” said Dewayne, patting his shoulder.

Camacho knew none of the people smoking outside, but Dewayne nodded at a couple of them. They were in a rural area adjacent his own rural area, but none of the faces were familiar.

There was no storm door, just a white wooden one with a diamond-shaped window about eye level. The door opened without having to turn the knob. Dewayne pushed inside, and before Camacho could get a clear look, he heard someone yell, “Dee-wayne!” The music and the crowd noise were nearly even, neither overpowering the other. The hip-hop beat that was only a hint outside was now clear and forevermore would be the soundtrack of the single-camera film in Camacho’s head, that’s how he’d think of it later. He walked in behind Dewayne and the packed living room spread before him like a wide-angle shot. A happiness hung in the air, a communal, extended release—the early part of a good party, before things start to go sloppy. It was almost midnight, and this party was just getting started, and Camacho, swaddled in a haze of his own, having already once gone sloppy himself and then rallied, was finding it easier and easier to ignore his curfew. He was with family, after all, and he counted on this to soften whatever consequence might come his way. And what’s more, a police officer was there. See, Mom? It was safe.

Right away, a girl was giving Camacho the eye. She was ordinarily pretty—wholesome—brown eyes, brown hair, feminine figure not too fully concealed beneath a loose shirt. She’d make a perfect girl-next-door fantasy. Maybe she looked familiar—the first to do so. Then he knew: she was a sophomore, or at least had been the past school year. She was one half of a pair of identical twins, and he saw her every day in the cafeteria and in the band house. She’d flirted with him before, or so he thought: it was so subtle he couldn’t tell whether it was flirtation or friendliness. It was a gentle flirtation—the kind that charms a heart but never breaks it. And he was mildly shocked to find her at this party—a party where he was one of the young ones. Yet she, a full two years younger, was here, too? He envied her freedom, but then maybe she was transgressing like him—abusing a privilege, maybe even using “time with family” as an excuse. Maybe it was easy for her, too, to pretend there wouldn’t be consequences.

Someone handed him a cup, a rim of foam sloshing inside, two-thirds full, rocking in his hand like a micro tempest—the color and stink of cheap beer, probably from a keg concealed in the bowels of the house, heavy and sweating on linoleum. It was a generous offering, and Camacho felt forces in the universe uniting behind his inebriation. This is a thing that happens—you can see its reflection in the bulbous, fluted plastic of cheap beer pitchers raised high in smalltown pool halls; it’ll have you swearing you’ve found your people.

“Thanks!”

“Swallow the night,” was the beer-giver’s response, himself clearly intoxicated, still in the happy phase of it. This beer-giver figure had to be in his late twenties—a grown-ass man in the eyes of an eighteen-year-old.

Camacho stood with his entourage. What was the policeman doing? He was talking and laughing—not visibly drinking, but approving the entire affair, nonetheless, by his mere presence. Only in Lake County, someone said, noticing Camacho was watching the cop. But probably not only in Lake County—it was probably in every backwater of every rural town: the all-out bender sanctioned by law enforcement, because everybody knows somebody who knows someone else, and we’re all friends here, right? Until we’re not.

“But does the night swallow?” shot back someone whom Camacho couldn’t see. The comment struck him, and he laughed hard, and those around began laughing, too. “Does the night swallow?” he shouted. And in it was absurdity and yearning.