The Empire

A Comic Dystopia
a novel

PREFACE: The following story is set in an imaginary dystopic world in which the superrich elite have sequestered themselves behind the walls of a prosperous and technologically advanced Empire, leaving the rest of the world and its inhabitants to suffer and die. It is just a funny story with absolutely no allegorical relevance to our own global community. In this first chapter, we meet our protagonist, Jack Plank, a miserable, whiny, little bitch, and his girlfriend Heidi, a vision of enlightened wisdom.


CHAPTER ONE

Sadness swarmed Jack Plank as the early morning sun shone through the window and lay across the cabin floor in fingers of light. Jack always felt terrible when he first woke up. Even with his girlfriend Heidi Newell sleeping beside him, Jack still felt miserable. Life outside the Empire was tough.

He rolled over and grabbed a package that he kept hidden under his mattress. The package had been delivered a few days ago by post. Despite the utter failure of most basic institutions on the outside, like the economy and the federal government, somehow outsiders had managed to organize the post. The mail was delivered through rain and snow, through sleet and societal collapse. It was the first thing outsiders attended to when they began forming the Fellowship, their half-assed excuse for a Congress, a decentralized, anarchic confederation of unions, syndicates and other local organizations of free association. Through this system of the Fellowship, outsiders organized the post first because people liked getting mail. It made them feel connected — to what was anybody’s guess. Perhaps to each other.

The Fellowship, a profound show of solidarity, was essentially a series of meetings across the ravaged land. Meetings were a powerful thing; the gathering of peoples was awesome. But Fellowship meetings were also quite boring, and most people had a low tolerance for boredom, making the rebuilding of a new and innovative form of society a slow and painstaking process. Moreover, meetings where people argued endlessly about the purpose and legitimacy of “the State” or how to, as the primitivists said, “live off the land,” were less powerful than meetings were people agreed upon a collective vision and then signed historically significant declarations, charters and constitutions. Fellowship meetings were less awesome than meetings where leaders managed to get some electricity, environmentally sound or not, to the people. Or working sewage systems. Or law enforcement. Or laws.

Jack ripped into his package. The return address was: The Empire, The Old White Palace, Department of Citizenship and Immigration, 20529. For three years now, Jack had been secretly applying for Empire citizenship. Only his buddy Lomax knew about it; actually Heidi knew too, but only because she was clairvoyant, not because Jack had told her. The problem with Jack’s dream of citizenship was the Empire’s great prejudice against outsiders. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration was a very reluctant department. While once long ago the Empire had a reputation to live up to — the open land of opportunity thing — a rash of terrorist attacks, actually not that many, had made the Empire resentful and exclusive. Emperians didn’t trust foreigners any more, so they didn’t let them in. Only four percent of applicants were granted admission. It had been decided that the idea of a universal melting pot had proved overrated and highly problematic. History had taught the Empire that you can’t throw a bunch of vastly different people together and expect them all to get along swimmingly. Moreover, there really wasn’t enough money to go around anyway. So walls were built.

Jack spread out the contents of the package before him: the cover letter, Form ETA-9089, Form I-485, Instructions for Form I-485, Abstract of Instructions for Form I-485, Comprehensive List of Common Errors Made When Filling Out Form I-485, Brief Summary of Form I-485 Comprehensive List of Errors. The paperwork was extremely abstruse, and deliberately so.

With his elbows on the floor, and his hands holding his head by its temples, Jack tried to make sense of the cover letter.

“Congratulations Candidate 40,506.88! Step 216.b has been filed in your name by the Committee for Outsider Green Cards (COGC) in the process of reevaluation mode for permanent admittance (RMPA). Stage RMPA signifies that a candidate has fulfilled the necessary checks, both background and foreground. And middleground. You are 37/50ths on your way to Empire citizenship!

“Next complete the enclosed forms and return them to headquarters (HQ) within thirty days. If the ratio of your excellence to the related quality gap of your talent-personality set type in the Empire exceeds the necessary constant of 0.036, then your application will be forwarded to CHOMPA (Center Happenings on Male Prospective Applicants).

“Please do not try to contact CHOMPA directly. Such an attempt will result in immediate disqualification and your application will be shredded at a great speed…”

As Jack reread the letter, the words made less and less sense. He was growing anxious. The completion of step 216.b had seemed to promise more. He thought he was closer than 37/50ths. Thumbing through these new forms and questionnaires, Jack grew distracted and furious. He was going to need to meditate soon. What the hell was this CHOMPA business? He had never heard of it. Moreover, the questions on the lengthy psychological form were bizarre. For example, “1. Do you ever feel you are the only person on the planet?,” or “12. Do you ever sense yourself floating in the ether?” These queries required short answers of no less than 250 words each. This is ridiculous, thought Jack. The survey was haphazard and seemingly endless.

FORM I-485
Psychological Super-Probe C45

20. Give three adjectives, including one color, that best describe the Empire.
21. List these animals in order of your preference: Cow, Chicken, Tiger, Bunny, Cat, Sheep.
22. Do you like fast food? Detail your favorite dollar-menu meal.
23. Describe the influence jazz music has had on your soul. If none, pick another form of Empirean music, except country-western.
24. Describe the influence country-western music has had on your soul.
25. Describe your soul; include one color in said description.
26. Have you enjoyed any movies about characters engaging in any terrorist activities while residing in the Empire?
27. What is more important to you: money or other people’s money?

What a bunch of bullshit, Jack thought. What the hell was fast food? Jack was out of touch with civilization and this bothered him. As for the color of his soul, that was easy enough: blue. Dark, pain blue. And he had heard jazz music once; it had made him feel jittery and spontaneous, so he had that answer. What else? Empire adjectives? Omniscient, omnipotent, and omnivorous. Also, Jack liked cats.

Then Jack lost all motivation for the survey, as was the norm with him and paperwork. After all what did it matter? Jack had plans to infiltrate the Empire. He and Lomax had a connection to the Underground Subway, a group of kind souls dedicated to helping outsiders sneak into the Empire. Jack stood up, grabbed the papers, fetched a pack of matches from the cooking hole, and tiptoed out the front door. Outside in the dirt, he set fire to his dreams of legal Empire admittance. The time for acting above the law had arrived.

Back inside, Jack canoodled Heidi, trying to wake her up. He hated waking up people, seeing as sleep was infinitely preferable to waking life, but he was lonely so he did it anyway. They had to get on the road.



Word had it the Empire was going to drop rations over the weekend. A remarkably benevolent act for a ruthless Empire, but more a mere show of sympathy designed to make Emperians feel good about themselves. So Jack and Heidi camped out in an open field and waited. Waited for free food, or for at least simulacra of food. Fake dry wafers would be a real treat. It had taken Jack and Heidi five days on foot to reach this hillside. Their feet hurt. They had come by way of an OutsiderOutpost where news of the imminent ReliefRations had arrived just ahead of them. Starving people grew very excited at the prospect of fake bread. One emaciated fellow was promising everybody sugary dried cereal, which had been dropped eighteen months earlier to much elation. Another guy grumbled about the possibility of ProteinPacks, which he claimed tasted like rotten bananas. Heidi, with her uncanny knack for prediction, said everybody should expect DigestiPills, a new invention, tiny, yellow pills that supposedly contained enough sustenance for a week.

Jack’s feet hurt, but he wasn’t going to complain about it. He was happy enough to be finished walking. Happy enough to be lying under the sun in an open field with his girl. Happy enough, which was to say not very happy at all: Jack was a melancholic. He was dark foreboding itself, a star of apprehension. After all, he was living in the ruins of civilization, on the outside of the Empire. Fortunately, he had Heidi, who was blessed with a more sanguine constitution.

“Do you want me to rub your feet?” asked Heidi.

“Yes, please,” said Jack.

This was their routine. Heidi carefully unfastened Jack’s homemade sandals. Jack winced, but kept quiet, acted like a man. Heidi ran her fingers gently along the reddened grooves made by the thick straps. Jack had tied them too tight again; there were cuts, dried blood. Slowly Heidi began massaging, until the sensitive skin toughened and she could knead the foot.

In Jack’s drawn-out, painful moans one could hear a hint of ecstasy, a satisfaction of a sexual nature. In fact, Jack enjoyed foot massages more than he enjoyed sex, a bizarre preference conditioned by his increasingly curbed expectations for the world. He held his breath, arched his back against the grass, then exhaled, first in brief gusts, then in a single extended release. The touch of Heidi’s hands enveloped his awareness: her touch was his everything. Jack forgot for a moment that he was tired and hungry, and waiting for Empire airplanes to drop synthetic food.

Heidi went about her task with devoted concentration. She derived her pleasure from pleasing Jack. She understood altruism’s dirty little secret: it felt good to help and please others. She always massaged Jack’s feet until he said enough. It was her clever and determined way of teaching Jack to understand when enough was enough. Because one of Jack’s built-in flaws was that he always craved more. More more more. With Heidi’s help, Jack was learning ever so slowly how to restrict his expectations for the world. Heidi often said, “Only when one desires nothing is one truly aligned with the heavens.” Nevertheless, Jack still had big dreams.

After forty minutes, Jack said, “That’s good. Thanks, Babe.”

Both of his feet pulsed with the gentle, aching afterglow of a good, long massage.

Jack sat up and Heidi nested in next to him. They had arrived early. Of course they had — Heidi had them on a strict schedule. The best place to sit was squarely in the middle of the open field, where no ReliefRations would get caught on tree branches. As the morning drew on, gorgeous light cut through the hazy, polluted sky, and other outsiders began to fill the field.

Jack watched the others set up camp. He observed them closely, their dress, posture and manners, looking for signs of sophistication. That civilization had left these people behind was no reason to behave like savages, Jack figured. But within minutes, he had catalogued much evidence of why these poor outsiders so desperately lacked refinement. One couple allowed their four year-old boy to run naked, which seemed uncouth to Jack’s sensibilities. Another couple strutted around wearing outfits made exclusively from leafs, tree bark and other wild stuff, which was cool and creative, but also quite ridiculous looking. Yet another woman went topless, her voluptuous, tanned breasts hanging freely for all to see, which confused Jack. Like any man he appreciated and was stimulated by the sight of a fine set of healthy female breasts. But dammit, thought Jack, women shouldn’t go topless. Even here, in this post-socioeconomic-collapse world, women shouldn’t go topless. But in reality, many did.

“Stop judging,” said Heidi with her mind, which had curious powers of telepathy. Powers which needless to say tended to bother Jack, who had to work very hard to hide his rich inner life from Heidi’s oppressive clairvoyance.

“Stop reading my mind,” said Jack.

“Can’t help it.”

“Yeah, well, neither can I: I judge.”

They teased each other, and each tease was a serious joke. There should be a word for the way lovers tease each other, a word that means serious joke. A single, perspicuous word for the earnest critique between lovers that goes disguised as comedy.

Empire planes flew overhead dropping pollution on the outsiders, who coughed and waited. Most of the flying objects were private jets and helicars, the most popular forms of transportation in the Empire. One faster, more important plane passed another slower, less important plane. In the southern sky, a hotrod pilot made freewheeling loops and Möbius strips for hours and hours. One plane almost hit another plane the way a car almost hits another car when a driver is changing lanes and fails to see the other car because of the blind spot. That was entertaining for the crowd. Plane watching was a good distraction from starvation. Or at least as good a distraction as one could hope for.

No ReliefRations had yet arrived as evening approached. Even the Empire failed to stick to its schedule. An Empire that had successfully imposed its version of the world on the rest of the globe couldn’t manage to get its own planes to take off on time. But this was a plane on a charity mission. Empire planes launched to kill experienced no such delays.

“Do you want me to rub your feet?” Jack asked Heidi this time.

“Please,” said Heidi.

Jack did a pretty good rub himself. There was ample time on the outside to perfect one’s rub. His method was entirely different from that of Heidi’s. He poured his frustration into his rub. He went at Heidi’s foot as if he were angry with it. As if her foot, like life, had done him wrong. This made for a particularly vigorous and satisfying rub, though sometimes a wave of massive metaphysical fury accidentally seeped from Jack’s fingers into Heidi’s heel, after which Jack would feel embarrassed, apologize, and then continue rubbing violently. Heidi also moaned, like Jack, in a sexual way.

The sun set in pinks and purples and many colors in between, made all the more fantastic by the toxic chemicals saturating the air. People began to doze off, secure in the knowledge that yet another day had closed on a note of bitter disappointment. Proud to remember that they had never expected much from the Empire in the first place. Fuck the Empire, they said to themselves, eating blades of grass, then falling asleep on the hill, hoping for a dry night.

Jack, an insomniac, ran his fingers through Heidi’s hair as she fell asleep in his lap. How beautiful she is, Jack thought to himself. Her hair was the color of the earth, her skin an olive yellow. Her lips were very full; her mouth opened like a flower. She had an adorable strip of peach fuzz that ran down beside her ears, almost a little too far down, spreading onto her cheeks a touch; Jack loved that most.

Heidi’s beauty made Jack think about death. A lovely connection his darkly logical brain made for him. Jack was afraid that death was the loss of beauty. Perhaps death was exactly that, nothing more and nothing less, but the loss of accumulated beauty. How much beauty had Jack bottled up in his twenty-two years? Enough to fear the loss of it. But that was just death; the afterlife was another subject altogether.

And so Jack sat on the hill and practiced philosophy, as he was wont to do. Jack sat and speculated. The question occurred to him: What to make of my earnestness? Because Jack was most certainly earnest. For instance, he had just walked five days for a meal. He loved Heidi doggedly. He read avidly what books he could find on the outside. He was nothing special, but he was an earnest young man. That evening, sitting on the hill, with his love asleep in his lap, Jack came to believe that his earnestness proved the possibility of immortality. What a bolstering thought. What a crazy thought. What an expectant thought!

But how else to explain his earnestness? He didn’t believe in God, not after the shit he’d been through, not after his wretched twenty-two years on the outside. Not after the starvation and the suffering and whatnot. And yet, this tenacious earnestness. So then, Jack thought, the explanation would involve a certain wager. If I live my life right, whatever that could possibly mean, then perhaps I could attain immortality, whatever the hell that might be. Immortality is definitely something I would like to attain if at all possible. If it were not possible, then screw it, at least I would have tried. What was there to lose? The earnestness-immortality formulation was so inspiring that Jack’s head began to hurt. Then he felt crazy; next, painfully foolish. He debated waking Heidi in order to run his new idea by her. Then, to avoid humiliation — because who believed in immortality anymore except for the loons! — he decided against it and instead picked a blade of grass and made a whistle out of it as only an earnest person would do.

The power of ideas to drastically change Jack’s mood was a fascinating phenomenon. The abstract greatly affected the real. But the lift Jack felt from the mere thought of immortality was short-lived, and its afterglow obnoxiously dim. Again, Jack was reminded of the essential suffering and tedium of life. Of the fleetingness of happiness and the spend-the-night nature of gloom. He chewed up his whistle blade of grass and then swallowed it. This upset his stomach. His chemicals were all out of whack. Perhaps it was something in the air. Something like carbon dioxide.

Then a serious pain came on Jack, as it usually did at this time of night. His pain was ineffable, which was the worst thing. Actually it came in many different and terrible forms that Jack patiently and meticulously catalogued. For example, there was the Pain of Starvation, as well as the Pain of Poorly Performed Sexual Intercourse. Then there was the Pain of Utter and Devastating Despair and the Pain of Yet Another Miserable Morning. Generally, Jack’s pain came in the form of heartache, a small, persistent, empty ache. And though he tried diligently to name his pains, in the end, he experienced a thousand nameless natural shocks. So then, his pain was a Shock Pain — a Pain of Being — a Being Pain.

As evening turned to night, the sky taking on a darker shade of black, Jack took up arms and performed his breathing exercises to pass the time. And time passed, which was interesting. Or at least time seemed to pass, which was even more interesting. Why did time seem to pass when all it really did was pile up? And so Jack and a sleeping Heidi waited for the word to come true; they waited on the Empire to make good on its promise.



It was never a good idea to wait for the Empire to make good on its promise because the Empire sucked. While Heidi slept, Jack sat still, waiting, for five hours. Midnight arrived and angry people booed. Stillness was supposed to bring tranquility, but it had failed to do so. Jack was agitated. Jack was hungry. And his being pain was creeping in.

Suddenly the sky filled with tiny boxes attached to red, white and blue parachutes. The ReliefRations arrived and people responded by going crazy. Everyone woke up, even Heidi, who was an unusually deep sleeper. The boxes with Empire logos floated gently downward while the people on the ground acted like savages trying to secure food for their loved ones. They trampled over one another. They threw pointy elbows. One fellow stepped on the back of a fallen woman. The struggle to survive brought out the worst in people.

Some boxes got stuck in the trees. Which was annoying. Inspired by heroism, children scaled the enormous oaks, rescuing rations and throwing them down to their gaunt, open-armed parents. Then, a kid fell and cracked his skull, which was a downer, but he was okay. Just a thin little crack. Nothing a good outsider couldn’t learn to suffer with a quiet pride.

It was like Christmas, only not as fun, and it had nothing to do with Jesus or fourth quarter earnings. Jack and Heidi huddled over their single box. Practicing anti-greed like good outsiders, they had decided that one box would be enough for the two of them, which unfortunately was not true. The contents of the ReliefRation box were befuddling. The first thing they saw was a note written in enormous block letters, “THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS. SINCERELY, THE EMPIRE.” Entirely inappropriate and somewhat offensive. Next, there was a bumper sticker that read, “I BUY EMPIRE,” a declaration of consumer loyalty that obviously applied only to those who still earned and spent Empire dollars, which outsiders did not. Then, there was a leaflet with information about a new television program called “AssimilationNation.” People didn’t watch much television on the outside due to a lack of electricity (not to mention a lack of good programming). But this show looked pretty hot to Jack. The leaflet explained how the show’s producers selected “less civilized” people from around the globe and invited them to participate in the “great, successful human experiment that is the Empire!” So then, non-Empire citizens would spend six weeks in the Empire “learning the rich culture and imbibing the rich, rich spirit.” Everything was videotaped, which was par for the course in the Empire, where people were obsessed with recording and then watching “reality” because they had been tricked into believing that televised reality was somehow better and more real than reality itself. Apparently, the show’s first season, in which outsider tribesmen lived in the city for six weeks before losing their minds and turning murderous, had been a real hit. The leaflet announced that auditions for the second season of “AssimilationNation” would be taking place next month at a local OutsiderOutpost and that the show’s producers were looking for TV-ready outsiders, or in the words of the leaflet, “star-quality lost Empirians.”

Jack was interested, because let’s face it, life on the outside was pretty much crap. What passed for fun was hanging out in abandoned strip malls pushing each other around in rickety shopping carts until someone got hurt. Or else scavenging for hardened bits of French fries in the oil vats of a closed down fast food joint until someone got sick. Or else waiting in open fields for airplanes to drop boxes full of bullshit. In many ways, it was a wastelife in a wasteland.

“Maybe I’ll try out,” Jack said.

Heidi looked at Jack as if he were very dumb.

“Why not?” Jack said.

“Why?” Heidi rebutted.

“Why not?” Jack answered, continuing their mature and probing conversation.

“Because the show is bad. It exploits people for profit,” said Heidi. A solid moral argument, if one was into that sort of thing.

“But it looks like such fun,” said Jack.

“And so because it’s fun, it’s okay?” said Heidi incredulously.

“Yes. Sometimes bad things are okay because they’re fun,” said Jack. Then he thought about what he had just said, which is often the way it works.

“Sometimes you’re okay because you’re fun,” joked Heidi.

Heidi shook her head at what she considered Jack’s confused personal ethics. Jack shook his head at what he considered Heidi’s overdeveloped conscience, which he thought was sort of a female thing. Not that he was going to bring that up.

“I’m just saying it looks interesting. It’s something to do,” said Jack, concealing the true root of his desire, which was to escape life on the outside. Jack harbored big Empire-infiltration dreams. More than anything he wished to find his fortune in the Empire. But he never told Heidi about his plan to infiltrate, for fear that she would take it to mean that he loved her less than perfectly, which was not true in Jack’s most unbiased opinion. Jack was just curious about all things Empire, while Heidi liked life on the outside and despised the Empire like a good outsider.

“Well, I think it’s ridiculous,” said Heidi. ‘Ridiculous’ was the word Heidi used to describe things not to her liking.

Where was the damn food anyway? They dug deeper into the box, through a slew of advertisements, bubble wrap and free key chains. Something rattled at the bottom. A canister of pills. The Empire had dropped DigestiPills after all, proving Heidi’s clairvoyance. A thick line of text across the top of the canister read, “DIGESTIPILLS ARE MAGIC!” To Jack, this seemed like a joke. Some pharmaceutical giant mocking the outsiders’ proclivity towards belief in the supernatural. Then there was an intimidating WARNING/DANGER label which read, “DIGESTIPILLS PROVIDE ENOUGH SUSTENANCE FOR SEVEN DAYS: DO NOT CONSUME MORE THAN ONE PILL IN SEVEN DAY’S TIME!” So much for the joys of eating. Jack longed for frosted oats in milk made sugary by the cereal’s excessive fructose. He longed for a dry cracker. Or the sweet juiciness of a pluot, a fruit he had only heard about that was a hybrid of a plum and an apricot. Amazing. The Empire simply had the most amazing food, and lots of it.

“DigestiPills,” said Jack glumly, and Jack could say things glumly better than anyone.

“I think it’s exciting,” said Heidi. “Digestipills are an amazing invention. These little pills in our hands could end world hunger. Can you imagine!? An end to hunger across the globe!”

Jack was in one of his moods where Heidi’s enthusiasm made him feel like strangling puppies. He rolled his eyes and thumbed through the “AssimilationNation” leaflet. The picture of the face-painted tribeswomen shopping for handbags at an upscale boutique might have made him laugh, had not the juxtaposition been entirely lost on him.

Jack put the leaflet down. “Well, let’s eat.” Following the instructions, Jack placed a single pill on his tongue and did not swallow. The pill dissolved instantly. Breakfast was over. Lunch and dinner too, for a week. So much for three square meals a day.

“That’s it?” asked Heidi.

“That’s the show.”

“Hmm.”

They looked each other in the eye, gauging each other’s reaction, of which there was very little.

“I’m hungry,” said Jack.

“Me too,” said Heidi.

“Maybe it takes a little time.”

“I guess.”

“Stupid pills.”

“My stomach kind of hurts.”

“Mine too.”

They waited to feel full.

“I wonder what would happen if someone took two pills at once.”

“Probably death would happen,” said Jack.

Then, directly behind Heidi, a man’s stomach exploded. Not his whole body, just his stomach. The eruption was so forceful that parts of the man’s stomach tore through his skin leaving a big gaping hole where his belly had been. It was gross to look at. He was crying and terrified and staring down at this hole in his body. But he was okay, still breathing, sort of. Though he probably wouldn’t make it much longer. Jack leaned over and picked bits of the man’s innards out of Heidi’s hair.

Another few stomachs exploded making the entire scene macabre. People weren’t designed to follow instructions; people liked to do things their own way. Considering this truth of human behavior, Jack thought it rather cruel that the Empire would drop such dangerous pills. He envisioned some government clerk deep in the belly of the beast watching this terrifying scene and laughing his ass off.
And indeed there was a clerk deep in the belly of the beast watching this terrifying scene and laughing his ass off.

Meanwhile, Heidi, always sympathetic, thought of all the poor mice whose stomachs must have exploded during the testing stages for the DigestiPill. The scientists in their clean white lab coats must have cleaned up hundreds of rat-gut splattered cages. Was there justice in that? No. All these starving outsiders were ostensibly now fed. Did that balance the scales? Then Heidi’s mind got tired and she dropped the subject.

“Do you feel full yet?” Jack asked Heidi.

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

“Maybe we got placebos by mistake!” joked Heidi.

That was funny, disturbingly so, in the way insanity is funny. They laughed and then laughed some more. A few more bellies exploded because some dyed-in-the-wool idiots thought maybe they could stomach two pills. But the idea of having taken a placebo, and its accompanying threat of continued starvation, was a perfect riot to Jack and Heidi and so they laughed. Hard. Exhaustion and starvation made a person susceptible to hilarious bouts of lunacy. Under the midnight moon, Jack and Heidi laughed and laughed at the insanity of things.

Kiss

Your face looked different, more familiar.
I saw colors in there matching your winter hat.
When you climbed on top of me in the park
I was shivering, not from the cold,
But because I felt so bound up in our kiss.
How much is wound up in a moment?
You're the fortune teller, here's my palm.

An Accident

The Acme supermarket placed its own generic products on the bottom shelves. The unbeatably low prices were sufficient to move the boxes of fake Raisin Bran and copied Cheerios. Ellen Winters was a smart shopper because she had to be. She fingered the federal food stamps in her pocket, pushed her cart down the aisle with one hand. She squatted and selected a box of Acme’s Shredded Wheat, stood up and put it in her cart. She studied her options. A box of Kellogg’s Fruit Loops sat at eye-level. She’d had a bowl just this morning, Sunday, while visiting with her neighbor Jane. Ellen’s kids — there were four of them — were always hollering for a cereal like Fruit Loops. They too ate Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms at their friends’ houses. They saw child actors smiling and lip-smacking and enjoying these cereals on TV. Sometimes they even hummed the jingles, repeated the slogans. Ellen recalled a talking toucan.

“Mmm, Shredded Wheat,” Jason, her oldest, would murmur with his newfound sense of irony as he perused the cereal selection.

Sometimes Ellen did buy Fruit Loops, or more likely, Honey Nut Cheerios. Ellen labeled these kinds of excessively sugary cereals Number Two’s. There was a rule: Whenever there was a Number Two in the house, one had to first eat a bowl of a Number One cereal — Shredded Wheat, Special K, Grape Nuts, and their generics — before enjoying a bowl of a Number Two. This was the best way to create healthy habits.

Ellen picked up the box and studied the ingredients. Sugar reigned supreme. Generally she didn’t like to buy any cereal if sugar was even in the top five. Moreover, this Friday night, she was to prepare dinner for her boyfriend, his two children, and her own kids. They were to celebrate her birthday together, all nine of them. So she wanted to splurge for a few extras today: walnuts for the salad, fancy cookies for dessert, sparkling grape juice for fun. Nevertheless, with the taste of the cereal near in her memory, and a spontaneous generosity in her heart, she placed the box of Fruit Loops in her cart. She smiled to herself.

At the checkout counter, she watched her total tab climb with each item. She wasn’t sure she was going to make it. She’d wanted to stay below one hundred dollars. As the box of Fruit Loops slid up the conveyer belt, Ellen almost set it aside. She thought choosing the cereal had been a mistake, a kind of minor accident. After all, there was no apparent reason behind the purchase. The kids didn’t need Fruit Loops. But she let it go. And the counter beeped as the checkout lady swept the box over the strange infrared machine.

Ellen thought maybe there was a little man inside there who could read barcodes and made this beeping noise all day long. She laughed to herself, just before she saw the total. About five dollars over her intended limit. Not bad. She paid the bill, wheeled the groceries to her Volkswagon van, loaded up and headed home.



Her two boys were playing football in the front yard with some other boys from the cul-de-sac. Ellen called her sons over to help her with the groceries, and after a timeout in the game, they came, begrudgingly. As Mark, the youngest, walked to the front door, he searched the contents of the brown bag in his hands. He saw the Fruit Loops and called out, “Awesome! Fruit Loops! Can I have some now, Mom?”

“No,” she said.

It ended there; Mark wasn’t even hungry.

There was a message on the answering machine. Ellen pushed the playback button, then went about putting away the milk and eggs. It was a woman from the local library, where her youngest daughter Molly, aged twelve, liked to spend Sunday afternoons looking at art books.

“Hello, Mrs. Winters. This is Alice from the William Franks Library. I’m sorry to be calling you, but we have a situation down here involving your daughter Molly. Please call us as soon as possible. It’s very urgent.”

The woman left a number. Very urgent, she had said. So before she even finished putting away the refrigerated goods, Ellen, with a quickly beating heart, dialed the number and asked for Alice.

Bags of groceries still sat on every chair in the kitchen. Ellen moved one to the floor and sat down. The wait on line was short, perhaps fifteen seconds, but it was enough time for Ellen to grow immensely nervous.

“Mrs. Winters?”

“Yes,” said Ellen.

“Thank you for calling,” said Alice. “Would it be possible for you to drive down to the library right now?”

“Of course. Is there a problem?”

“I’m afraid so,” said the librarian with resignation. “We have a situation.”

“Is Molly in some kind of trouble?” asked Ellen, irritated by the vagueness of the librarian’s words.

“I’m sorry, but I’d rather not discuss the issue with you over the phone. Please just come quickly. The police are also on their way.”

“The police!” shouted Ellen, stunned. “Are you serious?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Winters,” said Alice. “Please come.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Ellen was shocked: Molly had always been a good girl, shy and inscrutable, but never misbehaving. As Ellen grabbed her keys off the counter and hustled out the door, her white Ked sneakers stuck to the kitchen floor, making a sticky sound. Outside, she called Jason over to the driveway and told him to finish putting the groceries away.

“And mop the kitchen floor before I get back,” she added. “It’s dirty.”

“Where are you going?” asked Jason.

“To pick up Molly from the library.”

“Why can’t she walk home?” asked Jason, looking back at his stalled football game.

“Just put the groceries away, Jason. I’ll be back soon,” Ellen said, before closing the door, starting the van, and backing out the driveway. Jason called his younger brother Mark over to help with the groceries and told the other boys they’d be back in two minutes. Not enough time to mop the floor.



At the library, Molly was sitting in the back office. Two Whitemarsh County police officers, Alice the head librarian, and a man in a tweed jacket were standing just outside the door to the room where Molly sat. One of the policemen introduced himself as Officer Johnson and told Ellen the story.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Winters, but it appears your daughter Molly has stolen money from this gentleman, Mr. Whitmore.”

Ellen felt the fury rising up in her body, into her feet and through her stomach. She felt it in the red heat of her face. The man in tweed nodded apologetically to Ellen. The officer continued.

“Apparently Mr. Whitmore ran back to get a book he’d forgotten and he accidentally left his wallet at the front desk. That’s when your daughter grabbed the wallet, ran to the ladies room, and removed the cash inside. She then returned the wallet to the desk, thinking no one would be the wiser.”

The policeman paused, rubbed his neatly trimmed goatee. Ellen looked through the glass window at her daughter, who briefly made eye contact with her mother, then dropped her head over the desk.

“I’d like to speak with my daughter,” said Ellen.

“Of course,” said the librarian, opening the door to her office.

When Ellen walked into the room, Molly sat upright, looked courageously at her mother, faced the wrath. Ellen went to Molly, stood above her, and looked directly into her eyes.

Molly, unable any longer to face the severity of her mother’s gaze, dropped her head.

“Molly, look at me,” said Ellen. She hesitated with the question, disbelieving the situation. “Did you take this man’s money?”

At the word money, Molly wailed and threw her head down into her folded arms which rested upon the desk. She cried, threw a fit. No answer was forthcoming. Ellen’s head spun. As she turned to face the policeman, she felt the room breath.

Ellen got to the point, “Did anyone see my daughter do this?”

“Yes, Mrs. Winters,” Alice said solemnly. “I saw your daughter return the wallet to the front desk. Clear as day.”

Ellen’s heart dropped with the truth of the librarian’s witness. Her fingers curled into a fist, a fist she wanted to shake at God. If any doubt remained, it vanished when Molly reared up from the desk, her face wet with shame, and cried out, “I’m sorry, Mommy! I’m sorry!”

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry, young lady! Don’t tell me!” said Ellen, her anger now evident to all. “You apologize to this man.” Molly looked sheepishly toward Mr. Whitmore. “You apologize,” said her mother.

“I’m sorry I took your money,” said Molly, hardly getting the last word out before again breaking up.

“And you apologize to these policemen, here, Molly.”

“I’m sorry!” she wailed. “I’m sorry!”

“And you apologize to Alice,” said Ellen.

“I’m sorry!” cried Molly, utterly defeated. “I’m sorry!”

Ellen felt this last wail at the base of her spine.



The short ride home in the van was silent, steeped in an unspeakable outrage. The gentleman in tweed had kindly decided not to press charges, and considering Molly’s show of remorse, the officer too had let it lie. As Ellen saw it, the two men had merely passed the responsibility of punishment onto Ellen herself.

They drove through the neighborhood, suffered the silence. Husbands were out in force mowing lawns. Kids rode their bicycles alongside the van. A little girl at the corner of Barkley and Eagle had set up a lemonade stand. Sunday stretched lazily toward evening.

Ellen wasn’t only angry, she was touched with fear. This was not how her children, how God’s children, were to behave. Jason was the one who never studied his lessons for church. He was the one with pride and rebellion in his heart, just like his father. Molly on the other hand sang in the choir and could recite at least a dozen verses from the Gospel of Matthew. She certainly knew the Eighth Commandment. It didn’t make sense. That’s what caused the fear. The senselessness and confusion. To soothe her trembling, Ellen prayed to herself. And her prayers mingled with the sunlight cutting through the windshield.

When they pulled into the driveway at home after what seemed an eternity, Ellen turned to her daughter and asked the question.

“Why, Molly? Why did you take the man’s money?”

Molly sniffled. She wanted to get out of the car, to be released, to escape her mother. “I don’t know, Mom.”

“Think about it,” Ellen said sternly. “What happened? What were you thinking when you picked up the wallet? Why did you do it?”

Molly began to cry, “I don’t know, Mom!” She stammered, “It, it was like, it was like I didn’t mean to. It was an accident!”

This was unacceptable. “An accident, Molly? I don’t think so. It was a decision, a bad decision. You chose to take the wallet, then you chose to take the money. Why? What I don’t understand is why you think you needed the money. Why, Molly?”

“I don’t know, Mom!” Molly grew hysterical. “It was an accident! It just happened!”

Disappointed, Ellen shook her head no.

“I guess,” Molly offered at last, sniffling, whimpering. “I guess I wanted the money to buy you something for your birthday.”

Ellen felt her fingers curl and her shoulders tense up. This was an unfair thing to say. She felt the space between her and her daughter harden. Her anger transformed into a more diffused, metaphysical anger.

“Go to your room,” she said flatly. “I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”

Molly hustled out of the van, free at last. She scurried into the house, down the hall and into her bedroom, where she would replay the day’s events over and over again in her mind for hours. Ellen sat in the van a minute, gathering herself. She let the setting sun beat down on her body, and she prayed. She closed her eyes, she breathed, and she prayed.

Back in the kitchen, her sneakers still stuck to the dirty floor.



There was a tradition in the Winters household that Sunday night dinner was breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, eggs and toast. Every Sunday night, it was morning again. This seemed to make the weekend last a little bit longer. Ellen had decided not to allow Molly’s troubles disturb the entire household, and so, a few hours after returning from the library, she and her older daughter Lucy were in the kitchen fixing fruit salad and scrambled eggs for the family.

Earlier, Ellen had visited Jane and told her the story. Jane had said, “The devil got into poor little Molly today. The devil’s damned clever.”

“What do you think I should do?” asked Ellen, debating the proper punishment.

“Search her room for more money,” said Jane.

Standing at the kitchen counter, Ellen cracked an egg against the side of a steel bowl. She watched the egg yoke drop into the bowl along with the others. With the whisker, she beat the eggs, rhythmically whipping the yokes into a smooth, blended whole. Lucy sat at the table, slicing apples and bananas, singing a pop song.

The boys barreled in the front door, rambunctious with physical energy. They were celebrating their victory on the gridiron. Ellen heard Mark talking about another boy from the neighborhood. “Danny sucks at defense,” Mark said, and the boys laughed, loudly and cruelly. They appeared at the kitchen door.

“Don’t use that word,” said Ellen, looking up from the cutting board, on which she was now slicing onions.

“What word?” said Mark.

“You know what word: the word you just said,” said Ellen. Mark rolled his eyes. “Now go wash up and tell your sister it’s time for dinner. She’s in her room.”

“Is Molly in trouble?” asked Jason.

“Tell her it’s time for dinner,” said Ellen.

The boys marched down the hallway of the rancher, screaming, “Mol-ly’s in trou-ble! Mol-ly’s in trou-ble!” They laughed and pushed each other against the walls. Mark bolted ahead and Jason threw the football to him. As Mark caught it, he crashed with self-conscious dramatics into the door of Molly’s bedroom. The door pushed open and Mark fell into the room and onto the floor, rattling the small table at his right shoulder. The things on the table — a collection of porcelain figurines of fairies, princesses and ballerinas — all shook and fell in upon one another. One pink, winged fairy dropped off the side, and Mark caught it with his left hand just before it hit the ground.

“Touchdown!” cried Jason, standing at the door. Then, to Molly, “Time for dinner.”

Molly rolled off her bed and stood up. She pulled her hair behind her head and fixed her scrunchie. She stepped over Mark and walked down the hallway without a word.

Ellen poured the eggs and onions into the Pam-sprayed frying pan. The wooden spoon was halfway across the kitchen, in the drawer beneath the dish drying rack. After fetching the spoon, she passed it through the eggs, scraping the cooked egg off the pan’s bottom. The kids liked the eggs just a touch moist, but not wet.

“Can I have a bowl of Fruit Loops?” cried Mark, as he and Jason stampeded back into the kitchen.

“Can you two please calm down?” said Ellen. “And no, Mark. Eat your eggs first, then, maybe.”

“Fruit Loops!” cried Jason. “Can I have a bowl too please, Mommy?” he said sarcastically, mocking his younger brother.

“I’m just going to pour a bowl, Mom, okay?” said Mark, stooping down to grab the box from the bottom cupboard. “Then I’ll eat it after I eat my eggs. Okay, Mom?”

Jason jostled with his brother. “Me too, okay, Mom?” he said whiningly, making fun of his brother.

Mark had the box already open, and he pulled out the plastic bag. Jason tried to grab the bag from Mark, and the box dropped to the floor. Mark elbowed his brother in the sternum and yelled, “Get off me!” Then Jason jabbed his brother in the gut, and as Ellen put the wooden spoon down and turned to reprimand her boys, Mark yanked at the plastic bag from both sides to open it, and he did so with such force that the bag split clean down the middle, and the cereal, every loop of it, poured out onto the floor.

“God, Jason!” cried Mark. “Now look what you made me do!”

“Shut up, idiot,” said Jason to his brother.

Ellen looked down at the mess, put her hand to her chest. Hopelessness descended, dressed as an angel, and touched her heart. The whole thing appeared to be an accident, but Ellen knew better. Smiling to herself, she went to the corner to get the dustpan and broom. She handed the broom to Mark and the dustpan to Jason. As the boys began to clean up, Ellen returned to the stove, where, for just a moment, the eggs were cooked just right.

Good Novels of 2000-2007

Here are thirteen novels written this decade that I have enjoyed. What do you think? What have I missed? Post a comment!

1. What is the What, Dave Eggers (2006)
2. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami (2005)
3. Old School, Tobias Wolff (2003)
4. Adverbs, Daniel Handler (2006)
5. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
6. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
7. Atonement, Iam McEwan (2001)
8. Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem (2003)
9. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
10. The Romantics, Pankaj Mishra (2000)
11. Homeland, Sam Lipsyte (2004)
12. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
13. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)

Love Poem

for Erin K.

I. Nerves

Your nerves taste like figs and bitters.
Offer them up to me
Before the moment has passed.
It already pants like a winded horse.
Hurry now, fill my mug with gin,
Before I begin to wonder what comes next.

II. Kiss

Your face looked different, more familiar.
I saw colors in there matching your winter hat.
When you climbed on top of me in the park
I was shivering, not from the cold,
But because I felt so bound up in our kiss.
How much is wound up in a moment?

You're the fortune teller, here's my palm.

Mickey the Tiger

.


Mickey the Tiger was an old-timer who lived in a basement apartment in Alphabet City. He was as gay as the day is long. Tompkins Square Park was his second home, and for about a year or two in the eighties, his only home. I got to know Mickey through writing assignments he gave me for his homegrown anarchist weekly called Network. By publishing two of my essays, a Rudolf Rocker appreciation and a piece on decentralized websites, Mickey instilled confidence in me. I looked up to him. Eventually we became good friends.

In the summer of 2003, after thirty years on the scene, Mickey disappeared. Nobody knew where he’d gone. When he turned up eighteen months later, he said he’d decided to spend time with his mother back in Iowa before she passed. He blinked rapidly when he told this story because it was a lie. 




We were smoking cigars in his front room. We had our shoes off. It was snowing outside and the floor of the apartment was cold. Since his return to the city, Mickey had been working without rest on the revival of Network, which had died off in his absence. He’d found the money to go to print, now he was looking to fill the pages. He summoned me to discuss a piece on flash mobs. After we powwowed about the story, Mickey began to rub his belly.

“I’m going to cook some spaghetti,” he said. “Would you like to stick around and eat with me?”

“Sure,” I said.

Mickey lifted himself off the sofa. He was getting older. I had him at about 50, twenty years or so older than me. That many years living the way he did took its toll.

I followed him into the kitchen. He put the water on, then took two beers from the fridge and handed me one. We clanked our bottles together and took the first slugs. It was about four-thirty in the afternoon.

“You still with that girl of yours, the painter?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Stacy and I live together off Lorimer.”

“Good for you,” said Mickey. “How long now?”

“I guess we’ve been there about a year,” I said.

There was a tension in the conversation, a vacuum created by the mystery of the past year and a half of Mickey’s life. According to a tacit rule, Mickey was allowed to ask me about my life, but I wasn’t permitted access to the same information about his.

“That’s nice,” he said. “You’re settling down.”

We drank our beers. I sat down to the table and rubbed my cold feet. I wondered how Mickey was able to piece his life and the lives of others back together after his absence. How one could slip away, then somehow be reconstituted.

The boiling water on the stove made the lid rattle. Mickey stepped to it and poured the thin spaghetti in.

“It’s a good thing to settle down,” he said.

“It feels right,” I said.

“There comes a time,” he said.

He took two plates out of the cabinet and set them on the table. There was a gentleness in his way that struck me as new. The old frenetic madness had been replaced with something tender, wounded. He fetched two more beers from the fridge. With a small sigh, he sat down across from me.

“The time I spent with my mother this past year has changed me,” he began. “There was such peace out there in the country, and I developed a hankering for it. It was nice to go for walks in the woods. To have a drink at four in the afternoon and not worry about summoning the energy to go out later. To go to bed early. To be with someone and not worry about what that person was thinking. This is why I ended up staying away longer than I’d expected to. I came to like my life in Iowa.”

“People were worried,” I said.

“I know. I could have called. But once a few weeks slipped by, then a couple of months, it just seemed so possible. That I could do that. That I could vanish like I did. There was a thrill in it.”

“I thought maybe you’d died,” I said flatly.

Mickey grunted a laugh. He looked squarely at me for a beat. Then he stood and served our late lunch. That was all Mickey had to say about his disappearance. We briefly discussed the piece on flash mobs again, then ate in silence. At 5:15, I went home.




Mickey was a strange bird. I want to emphasize that. Although animated in public, he was ultimately private and secretive. I even suspected him of nefarious business. For example, I knew he ran Cuban cigars to make a living for many years. What I’m saying is that this is not a story about an ordinary guy, about how the extraordinary creeps into even the most normal lives. Rather, this one goes the other way.

After I got home from Mickey’s place, I lay half-awake on my bed until the effect of the few beers I’d had wore off. After about an hour, I got up and turned the radio on. I brushed my teeth and took the trash out. At around seven o’clock, I settled down to work.

As I began to write the essay for Network, something happened. Writing is a peculiar act, and lots of unusual things happen when you sit down to the desk. What happened was this: as I wrote the piece, ostensibly on flash mobs, all I could think about was Mickey himself. The Tiger. The legend. The man in the bathtub writing his unpublishable political manifesto well into his forties. Taking mysterious trips every so often, to D.C., to Central America, on boats. Enjoying regular sex like the natural biological function it is. I tried to concentrate on the flash mob phenomenon — this fad of groups of people suddenly showing up at random locations across the city, then just as suddenly dispersing — but with each sentence, I found I was writing about Mickey the man. "The mob is a demonstration of potential, of the possibility of organization and power coming from the bottom up, or from no particular place at all." No matter how hard I tried to focus on the subject at hand, I couldn’t shake the fact that this piece was going to be about Mickey.

I had been reading about these flash mobs for a few months. With the research done, the piece came easily. I took one break at around ten o’clock to walk to the corner and buy a cup of bath-water coffee.

“This fresh?” I asked my local deli man.

“What’d you think?” he said.

I bought it anyhow and took it home and drank it as I reread my draft. I was pleased with the way the thing was coming together. Like anything, writing is an organic process. You’ve got to soften your grip on the thing and let it come into its own. At midnight, after a round of edits, I printed the essay out and called Mickey. He was still up of course. Told me he was stitching monograms into his towels and watching C-SPAN. I told him I’d be right over with the draft.

I road the L train in from Williamsburg, then walked down First Avenue. I was proud of my piece and eager to show it to Mickey. When I got to his building, I heard him shouting at the television.

“Goddam politicians have zero vision!” he hollered at me as he opened the door. “It’s like the whole goddam world is centered around the next quarterly earning report, and nothing more. The world could end next quarter, and it wouldn’t make a goddam difference to the way these people make their decisions.”

This kind of outburst was not unusual for Mickey, a man of mood swings.

“Don’t just make a good move,” I offered, “Make a move that’s part of a winning combination.” This was an old chess motto I’d read somewhere.

“That’s right,” Mickey said. We sat down on the couches in the living room. “Look at this guy” — Mickey pointed to the television, some representative was giving a speech — “here’s a guy who’s probably nice enough, probably smart enough, to be a leader. But what happens is the guy gets sucked into the system — the two parties, the lobbies, the money, the deception, the corruption, the money, the delusion, the greed, the money! — and after a few years in the game, he finds he can’t do what he set out to do, which was to make a change. To do something good for his country. It’s concepts, ideologies, that get in the way of honest politics.”

“That’s why you’re an anarchist,” I said. He turned his attention back to the guy on the TV. I pulled the hard copy of my essay out of my bag and handed it to him.

He thanked me, took the draft, and began to read it. He paced the room and made comments out loud as he read. Mickey was in fifth gear, all cylinders firing. When he was in this mode, he could tear into a text and fix it in a matter of minutes. With his pen, he axed whole paragraphs, hacked at my sentences and reworked my diction. He marked where to insert a perfectly apt quote from a writer I’d never even heard of. Twenty minutes later, I had a rewrite on my hands. Not easily impressed, I was by Mickey.

“Can you rework it tonight?” he asked. “I’m actually catching a flight tomorrow afternoon, and I’d love to have it before then.”

I gave Mickey a suspicious eye and said, “Where’re you flying?”

He laughed. “To D.C. Just for the weekend. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

“All right,” I said.

“So you’ll get it in by tomorrow, say noon.” It was as if Mickey didn’t realize it was already one o’clock in the morning, but of course, he did.

I nodded.

“Let’s have a few beers first, yeah? You want one?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was happy to stay longer. I felt that if I could hang around long enough, at odds hours, then I’d soon hear more about Iowa.

He called to me from the kitchen. “You want a bite to eat? I’ve got some hummus and crackers. I’ll bring 'em out.”

He placed a platter on the coffee table. Wheat Thins lined the circumference; the center was filled with a roasted pepper hummus. A few olives sat atop the hummus. It was artfully presented, as if this were a dinner party. Mickey handed me a napkin and a bottle of beer. I took a slug.

He turned up the TV and we sat watching re-runs of the speeches given in the House of Representatives earlier that day. They were talking about health care. We sat there for an hour, eating hummus and crackers, drinking beers. A midwestern Republican started in on his spiel.

“I like this guy,” Mickey said. “He’s cute.”

“Nice coif,” I joked.

We laughed. Mickey watched with a curious concentration. For a few minutes, I watched Mickey watch the guy on TV. Then I said, “So, Mickey, what are you doing in D.C.?” He held up his hand as if to say, hold on a minute. I returned my attention to the fellow on TV. I didn’t see what was so interesting about him. He looked like your run-of-the-mill pretty boy Republican. Neatly folded hair, thick eyebrows, a handsome face. When I listened to what he was actually saying, I lost interest again. Same old political double-speak, same old echo chamber.

When the speech was over, Mickey muted the TV and said, “The problem is the system makes these people into hypocrites. It’s our clinging to concepts that keeps people from being fully human, from being who they really are.”

What was I supposed to say to that? I asked my question again, “What are you doing in D.C. this weekend?”

“Attending a conference, a meet the press ball.”

At first, Mickey had taken the normal route to a career in politics. After graduating college, he worked on K Street for a few years, before becoming disillusioned and taking to the underground. But he still had connections in Washington, and every so often he attended these conferences. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what Mickey’s purpose was at these functions. I assumed it was subversive. I wanted to know.

“What do you do at these conferences?” I asked.

Mickey stared at me, and I stared back. He took a deep breath and smiled. “I’ll tell you, John,” he said. “I like you. You’re levelheaded. I trust you.” He leaned in. “What I do at these events is try and seduce members of Congress who are purportedly homosexual. I get an assignment, right. Then, using my charm, I get close. We drink. As much as possible. Then if I’m lucky, which is exceedingly rare, I take the guy home, back to a hotel. You see, with photographs, you can ruin a guy’s career for life. It’s that simple. But don’t go romanticizing this: it’s only worked once. About five years ago, we got this bastard good. You remember Congressman R***, well, I’ll tell you, he was a real son of a bitch. A menace. I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse screwing him over. After we got to him, the son of bitch dropped out of the race the following fall. Usually nothing comes of my efforts. But they keep sending for me. These operatives. They’ll stop at nothing. They’re unbelievable, totally unscrupulous. So that’s what I do. What do you think of that?”

At first, I didn’t know what to say. It sounded outlandish, outrageous. But I wanted to reserve my judgement, to trust Mickey. Though I'd never quite figured him for a blackmailer.

“Ah, forget I told you,” Mickey said, standing now and slapping me on the knee. “You’re young, yet.”

“That’s wild, Mickey,” I said “I would’ve never guessed.”

“That’s the point,” he said. He crossed the room and turned on the stereo. I could see another stretch of activity lay before him.

“Back to work,” he said, and he started doing stretches, as if the day were just beginning. It was 2:30 in the morning. So I left Mickey in his living room doing calisthenics to the throwback sound of The Pixies. “Drive my car into ocean,” Mickey sang out loud as he reached down to his toes. “You’ll think I’m dead, but I’ll sail away...”




At home, Stacy was back from work and sound asleep in the bed. I crawled in next to her, set my alarm for six AM, then passed out. I dreamt of Mickey and cornfields. We were drinking iced teas on lawn chairs in the middle of this fallow field. Mickey picked up a huge, fallen stalk of corn and smoked it like a cigar. He kept chuckling, touching my knee, and saying, “This is the life!” The dream was vaguely homoerotic. When the alarm went off, I rolled over and tried to wake Stacy for sex. But she rolled her back to me and said, “Are you kidding?”

So I stepped out of bed and into my khakis. I rubbed my eyes and put on the coffee. In the apartment’s second room, I sat down to the computer and reworked the essay. I loved working at this early hour. It freed me for the rest of the day.

When I got to Mickey’s around nine, he answered the door in his robe, water dripping at his feet, and said, “I’m in the tub. Follow me. You don’t mind, do you?” So I followed Mickey into the bathroom. He dropped his robe and immersed himself in the bubbly, jasmine-scented water. With a sudsy hand, he picked up his cigar and puffed.

“Read it out loud to me, yeah?” he said.

So I read the essay out loud, as Mickey hollered exclamations. He was excited about the piece; we both were.

“That’s the stuff,” he said. “To think how anonymous text messaging was the sole organizing principle for these mobs. Astounding. People are not thinking hard enough about how deeply technology is changing the political landscape.”

Mickey insisted I light up a cigar in celebration. He offered me a drink, but I reminded him that it was nine in the morning and passed. We talked about the essay for about ten minutes. He soaped his underarms. Then he asked me about Stacy. I told him how she was just so smart and sexy and with it, how the whole thing was so clear and good. He liked hearing about how happy we were.

“Let me tell you a secret, John,” he said. “I haven’t told anybody this, and I don’t know why exactly I'm telling you. I guess you’ve been around the past few days. I expect you to keep all this to yourself. ”

“Of course,” I said. Mickey bit his lower lip.

“The last year and half, in Iowa, I wasn’t with my mother.”

I nodded. This much was obvious.

“My mother died eight years ago from cancer. She lived her entire life on Long Island. But people will believe anything you tell them. And I was in Iowa. I was living on a farm. Every day, I fed chickens. I ate fresh eggs. In the spring and summer, I worked the garden. I sat on the front porch and watched storms come.”

He stood up, briefly exposing his junk, and grabbed a monogrammed towel from the rack. He began to dry himself off.

“And I was living with somebody. The stupid secret is I fell in love, John. I can’t tell you who it was. You see, it’s somebody I met at one of these events. I’m going to see him this weekend. The name doesn’t matter, but he’s an important guy. I seduced him and was looking to screw him, because his views are awful, and that was the idea. But then I got to know him. At home, with me, he was a completely different person. It was uncanny. How sweet and kind he was, how human. So I went out to this farm he owned, he had money, and after we spent a week together, he promised to come back to me, so I ended up staying. When he wasn’t in Washington, he was with me in Iowa. Not for very long stretches of time, of course, the whole thing was secret. And when he was gone, I enjoyed my solitude. But when he was there with me, it was paradise. Like nothing I’ve ever had before. I felt transformed by all of it, by the love, the country. Funny enough, that was as close to normal as my life’s ever been. And I liked it.”

Mickey dried his hair. I sat on the closed toilet, waiting to hear more. But Mickey appeared finished. So I asked, “What happened? Why did you come back?”

“Oh, I can’t go into all that now. I guess you could say we had a fight.”

I nodded. I desperately wanted to hear more. This was only so much as a tease. But Mickey was finished; he had a flight to catch. He thanked me again for the story and saw me to the door. As he shook my hand, we lingered on eye contact. On the train ride back to my bed, I thought about how nice it was to have known Mickey.




Mickey the Tiger never returned from D.C. that weekend. I felt a touch betrayed, lied to, but like anyone, Mickey had a right to his happiness. So after having been back for only a few months, he disappeared again. People weren’t as riled up this time around. His legend was waning. There were new figures on the scene making the usual noise.

Then, rather miraculously, one final edition of Network appeared on the streets. I’m not sure how Mickey managed its distribution, but there it was, with my essay on the cover. It created a minor buzz; people were mesmerized by the idea of flash mobs and what they might mean. Since my story had the cover, people thought I was in with the Tiger, and many strangers came up and asked me where Mickey was these days. I told them I had no idea.

It was close to a year later when I got the letter. Congress was debating Iraq at the time. Mickey had sent me a long, tortured, handwritten letter. It was full of anger and love. He was all torn up about a decision. He was asking me for help. Just reading the letter through caused me a great deal of anxiety. I read the letter a second time, then heaved back in my chair. I folded the letter in thirds and picked up the envelop again, when a photograph slid out. I recognized the faces, despite the makeup and the dresses, I recognized both faces — Mickey and the Congressman from TV. After taking a good look at the picture, and rereading the part of the letter about Iraq and about love, I carefully inserted both the letter and the photograph back into the envelope and tucked it into my bottom drawer. After all, the whole thing was none of my business.

The Professor

The Professor and I became close companions during those years when I, like any young and curious man, was so deeply out to sea, amidst what I now recognize as the darkness of night, the confusion of the half-born, that I was unsure I would ever find myself and thereby be able to return safely from the journey — and in one piece, so to speak. Professor Scott Saft was my doctoral thesis advisor at Columbia, and in this capacity, he was also the single lighthouse available to me as I drifted about in the world of books. He was a remarkable, old-souled, independently-minded man who’d lost his father in World War II. He also had a knack for remembering quotations from literature and a penchant for delivering them with an uncanny sense of timing. Once, a long time ago and just before the events of this story, I walked into his office, pathetically heartbroken, my first love lost, and before I had a chance to tell him what had happened concerning Madeline and me, he cast this nugget across the room, “We never learn a thing from the ones who return our love.” I was momentarily speechless; what’s more, miraculously, instantly, I felt better. The man somehow saw the world move into place just before he himself ever dared to budge. And never did he fail to cite his sources, for as I took my seat that morning and told him my sad story, he recommended I read Lawrence Durrell, before, as he put it, “You lose watch of your heart again.” Since his suggestions translated in my mind to injunctions, I had the Alexandria quartet finished within a few months, but never even mentioned to him that I had undertaken the project. Because for us there were always more serious topics to discuss than romantic love. The Professor, though a committed Platonist, lambasted love as “that mad, grasping religion of the troubadour,” and suggested one never permit the spiritualization of love for another person to happen in one’s soul. But why do I even discuss this here? Love! The Professor himself would howl at me until my humiliation was complete, until my education was achieved.

One night in late autumn, the Professor, his wife Suzanne and I took in an authentic Irish production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Center. We then decided to brave the chilly wind and stroll across the south end of the park towards the Safts’ apartment on the East Side for a nightcap. The Professor was delivering his view of the performance.

“Masterful,” he said. “As close to Beckett’s original vision as I’ve ever seen. So raw, so naked. Much like this wind.”

“The comedy too,” I ventured, “not over done, not awfully hammed up like I’ve seen it done before.”

“Yes, their comedy was thin, transparent. You could see right through the jokes to the inner emptiness.”

Personally, I had found the performance rather painful to watch, an effect I suspect Beckett had intended, and any cheerful instinct I may have oftentimes enjoyed after a show was nowhere to be found on this evening. I felt gloomy. The Professor, on the other hand, was glowing, and as we passed the carriages lined up on Central Park South he spontaneously began talking to one of the horses.

“What are we waiting for, horsie? Tell me, for you must know better than I.” He looked into the horse’s eyes and the thought occurred to me that the Professor was one of these souls in communication with animals, with any source at all that would speak to him.

“Let’s take a ride!” he bellowed. And suddenly, we were in the carriage, trotting through the park. Mrs. Saft, also a professor at Columbia, an esteemed Professor of Religion, mentioned how utterly Buddhist Beckett’s view was. She expanded upon her theory, making connections between Beckett’s nothingness and Buddhism’s emptiness, as well as their common emphasis upon the essential suffering and tedium of life. It was an interesting position and I engaged her in conversation, wondering out loud if Beckett himself had ever encountered such eastern philosophies in his lifetime. Meanwhile, I heard the Professor mumble, as if he’d lost the strain of the conversation and drifted off, “What are we waiting for, horsie?” He appeared to be leaning over the side of the carriage, trying to get a look at the horse again. I glanced at Suzanne who nodded at me solemnly, as if to say, yes, such moments of unusual behavior in Scott have become more frequent as of late.

Then I directed my question to the Professor, asking, “Scott, do you know if Beckett ever read much on Buddhism?”

Then he was back with us in full, explaining in detail exactly where Beckett was with the Buddhists and where his view differed. His lucidity in moments like these always amazed me. “Yes, Beckett read Schopenhauer, who was instrumental in bringing Buddhist thought to the West. The Buddhists say that eventually one comes to see a vivid, shimmering quality in the emptiness — they call it luminosity. It is said to take a long time to get there, and perhaps Beckett never did. On the other hand, I believe Beckett was simply more honest about the human condition. After all, the Buddhists are alchemists, so one must be very careful.”

Mrs. Saft jumped on the alchemist comment and another nightlong conversation ensued, Mrs. Saft defending the view of religion and the Professor defending that of literature. How a confirmed and committed atheist, Scott, ever ended up with Suzanne, a student of, and in her own way, believer in all religious traditions, was beyond me. Moreover, these two were married thirty years and still they could engage in such debates well into the night. It was astounding. It must have been the play; it was a fine and moving performance. We sat in the Safts’ living room and drank scotch and talked and laughed. Eventually Suzanne put a record on and retired to bed. The Professor and I sat alone without words and listened to the simple beauty of Brahms’s songs. As the Professor closed his eyes and opened to the music, I noticed how handsome he was. In a way, he looked old for a forty year old man, gray and tired; but the twist was that the Professor was in fact a young looking sixty-four. My eyes fell shut and I let the end of the day come. I felt the fullness of life inside me as I drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.



A few days later I was in the Professor’s study. Here was a room. Walls lined with bookshelves, and the books themselves organized chronologically according to the author’s date of birth. So the entire oeuvre of an author would be placed between that of his contemporaries, with time advancing left to right along the walls, so that one could see the written word develop historically, in terms of the evolution of consciousness. The great desk was messy with papers and journals and open books. A cup of untouched coffee and a half-eaten croissant lay at the Professor’s elbow. Meanwhile, he was sitting upright in his chair, eyes shut, doing nothing in particular.

A day earlier I had put a short story of mine in the Professor’s mailbox. Of course, I was supposed to be working on my thesis — a theory of monadology in the works of James Joyce, for what it’s worth, which wasn’t much — but my real aspiration was to write fiction. The Professor knew this and had read many of my previous attempts. But he was never encouraging. He urged me to stick to the life of the scholar, mostly because such a vocation was more honest and honorable. While he admitted I may have possessed an inkling of talent, instead of suggesting I cultivate this talent, he instead chose to warn me of the pitfalls of the creative life. This guidance, a form of the Professor’s deep pessimism, rankled my soul, and so I continued to try and persuade him of my storytelling abilities. Each time I sat down to write, I wrote for him, and seemingly, for him only.

“Well,” I said, taking my seat before the desk, “what of my latest efforts?”

The Professor came to and said: “Oh, what? Your story, yes, of course. I’m sorry, but I haven’t had the chance yet to read it.”

Immediately he launched into a strain of thought far away from the contents of my story. He talked again about Beckett and how he was coming to see Beckett’s work more and more as the cornerstone of twentieth century thought. On and on he talked, and even as I tried to concentrate on the pigeons on a wire outside the window, as an expression of my resentment for his not having read my story, I listened. Then suddenly he shouted —

“Contemplation, Jake!”

“What about it?” I asked.

“The whole of western thought can be summed up in this single word — contemplation. Don’t you see? There is nothing else to do. Not even think. Not even write. Not even wait.”

He was pacing the room now and his excited state was contagious. I wanted desperately to bring the conversation back to my story, but that was hopeless now. His attention was not to be caught by the pale projections of my imagination. As he walked hither and thither and spoke about all the writers and thinkers who, he’d concluded, were merely suggesting a man stop and reflect a while before proceeding, I felt inside me a fierce distaste for his manner of ignoring my presence. A mere sounding board was I. Yet, I stayed and I listened, ever intrigued by his ideas.

“Do something with me,” he said, coming around behind me and putting his hands on my shoulder.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Just sit here with me in silence a while, will you?”

It was a strange request. Conversation was the lifeblood of our relationship. What I loved was how the Professor seduced me with his words.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Just sit here with me, say, for fifteen minutes. I’ll sit in my chair, you sit in yours, and we’ll just sit here.”

I agreed, and the Professor eagerly took his seat and gave a modest but ceremonial little bow of his head as if to say, okay, begin now. And so we sat there. I thought about my story, and about Madeline; God knows what the Professor thought about. Then I could have sworn I saw him shed a tear or two. But I wasn’t sure, for at the time, I couldn’t imagine what must’ve been going on inside him for a simple bout of silence to have caused such emotion.

After the time had passed, I rose and excused myself for I had another appointment. Outside, back on the street, I breathed in the cool city air, and I felt a brief but profound sense of liberation: I was back in the real world, the normal world, escaped momentarily from the increasingly strong and bizarre spell the Professor had on me.



A few weeks passed and I didn’t see much of the Professor. I labored away in my apartment on my thesis, arguing that Joyce and his work proved that each man, each soul, was a monad, in the Leibnizian sense: an instance of, and not merely a part of, the universal. The breadth of expression in Joyce’s work, his utter universality, showed that an entire world existed within each man and woman. Blah blah blah. I toiled on with it, fully realizing that I was adding nothing significant to the already unimaginably bloated world of Joycean studies. While I had at one point been very inspired by my thesis, I now saw it for what it was, a commonplace bit of wisdom: a man was a world unto himself. Go tell it on the mountain, genius. I endeavored to make clear how this view was vastly and critically different from the view that a man or woman was merely a part of the universe, but as the pages amassed, I realized how futile my project was. How poorly chosen was my form, the doctoral thesis. Or at least I hoped that was the problem. So after a hour or two of solid work in the morning, hyped up on coffee, I spent the afternoons wallowing in my despair, a state of being that seemed to me even more mundane than my thesis was unoriginal. The park in the wintertime provided modest daytime comforts. But all in all, somehow I was living the most prosaic life I’d ever dreamed of.

Yet, I still had my fiction. On the rare and lucky occasion, something would spark and I would scribble madly for hours into the night. Each time I wrote a story, I thought about the Professor, and whether he would like it or not. I mailed a story to my mother and she called to say she found it “delightful.” At this evaluation, I despaired even more deeply. So I resolved to write a story that my mother would hate, and then proceeded to fail to produce a single sentence for eight days.

Meanwhile, the goddam thesis had to be written, else my life would go nowhere. So I plodded on, each paragraph driving me more insane than the one before it. One afternoon, I tore out each and every page of Ulysses and taped them to my walls. The master’s words were surrounding me and so I figured there was now no way I could not think about my thesis. Of course, I was wrong, and I watched another six or seven days slip by without any work getting accomplished. Instead, I lay in bed hour after hour and just looked at the words on the pages. Just stared at them. Just fucking contemplated them!

Meanwhile, it should go without saying, my debts rose like the sea in a great and violent storm and let us never underestimate the stress of that swelling underneath what was going on day to day.

Finally something happened: a new and excellent recording of all of Beethoven’s string quartets was released on Deutche Gramophone Records. In other words, I had a reason to spend nights in the Professor’s company. I bought the six CD set on credit and presented it to the Professor as a gift. Then we spent a week straight in the dim and familiar light of his living room, listening to the recordings one after another, in order of composition date, and then we did a second, more programmatic run-through. The performances were at turns sublime and devastating. Again I felt the heavens and earth move above and beneath me, nightly now, in the comforting confines of the Professor’s apartment, lying stretched out on his couch, half-drunk on scotch. And the Professor himself, across the room in his armchair, eyes closed, listening intently, the world inside him swelling in concert with the sounds of my latest and most astute purchase.

One evening near the tail end of our immersion in the late quartets, Mrs. Saft invited me over for dinner. I arrived a bit late and yet the Professor was no where to be found. The kitchen smelled of pot roast and apple pie as Suzanne and I chatted.

“How is your batch of students this year?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re all right,” she said. “Another godless bunch it seems, but I am long past complaining about such things. There is one girl who writes beautifully about the difference between faith and confidence. I am learning something from her.”

There was nothing I could do to help prepare for Mrs. Saft was a one-woman maestro in the kitchen. I sipped on my wine and gave Suzanne the false impression that my thesis was coming along just fine. She nodded politely without prodding any further. Finally, I asked where the Professor was. Her answer shocked me: “Probably working on that damned novel of his.”

“His novel?” I asked with an incredulous chuckle.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know about this?” she asked, setting her pot holders down and appearing a touch disconcerted.

“No,” I said honestly. “I had no idea Scott was working on a novel.”

Mrs. Saft quickly grew upset and I could see her mind working on the appropriate solution to the perhaps mistaken revelation of the Professor’s secret project. Suddenly she looked imploringly at me.

“Oh Jake, perhaps you could help. Scott has been working on this thing for twenty years. It’s a thousand pages long. I assumed you knew. Of course, it’s good, of course it is. Of course he needs to write it, I understand this. But I fear, well,” and here she sat down and placed her hands calmly on her knees, “I fear it’s no good for his health.”

I took a seat at the kitchen table across from Suzanne. There was already too much that was odd and unclassifiable in how I felt about the Professor, and this news further complicated my view of him.

“How long did you say he’s been working on this book?” I asked, hungry for more details.

“On and off for twenty years. He considers it his life’s work.”

His life’s work. My God. The words were so heavy. Suddenly, behind us, Scott appeared, as if he’d been there all along. For whatever reason, he was “Scott” now as I looked at him. He seemed perfectly giddy, too. I figured he’d had a good writing day.

“How are my two favorite people in the world?” he said, hugging and kissing, first his wife, then me.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Suzanne. “ Jake’s been here a half an hour already.”

“Oh, you know, the usual,” he said, and then he added with a theatrical flair:

“I have studied, alas, philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through —
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.”

The Faust quote implied to me that the Professor had been deep in study all day. But was he deceiving me? Had he rather been writing his novel as Mrs. Saft had suggested? Such a difference between the two! I was trapped in the mystery. Suzanne rolled her eyes as Scott fetched the scotch. He poured two tumblers nearly full and brought one to me. Then we sat down and enjoyed a hearty, wintertime meal. Later Mrs. Saft again excused herself early, saying she had some reading to do, leaving Scott and me to drink more and listen again to the Beethoven, whose music I could ingest night after night without growing bored in the least.

I must’ve been terribly drunk. Scott had poured large drinks for the two of us all night long. But at some point, after the music had stopped, and after an extended silence during which Scott and I allowed each other the space to either pass out or at least drift off into those private, half-conscious, midnight reveries, I stood and walked over to where the Professor sat in his armchair. His eyes were closed. The silence was unbearable. The room itself as woozy as my mind. I looked at Scott and felt a deep longing; in truth, I felt a desire of a sexual nature. The feeling coursed through me and then must’ve found its way into Scott’s own body, for he opened his eyes, took a look at my face, and said, “Sorry, Jake, maybe in times past, but not you, not tonight.”

I was appalled. I had said nothing to suggest anything of the sort. To assume such a thing! With his wife in bed upstairs! The Professor meant so many things to me, but not that. In fact, the entire scene was inexplicable, alien to any former understanding of the world I possessed. In humiliation, I gathered my coat and scurried out the door without a word. Looking back, as I rounded the corner onto the avenue, I saw Scott looming in the window of his living room, the soft yellow comforting light of the room aglow behind him.



Weeks later I had more or less forgotten, or rather put out of my mind, that strange and singular encounter with the Professor. Then, late one afternoon, I met my mother for tea and a walkabout. She had recently been divorced, for the second time, and as we walked through the park in last days of winter, we briefly connected over the idea that the two of us were the only single ones left in the family. For my other three siblings were all married with children.

“I suppose I’m a little lonely these days,” she said simply.

“Yes, me too, Mom.”

She looked at me a little disapprovingly as I pulled up the collar of my coat. “What ever happened with you and Madeline anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, Mom, that was months ago now. And I told you already. We failed to see the thing through to the end.”

“By thing, I suppose you mean relationship. What is it with the way you put things, Jake? So carefully,” she said, half-teasingly, half-seriously. “What do you mean anyway, ‘through to the end’?”

“I mean through to the end, Mom” I said, making an arc of time with my hand in the space between us, as if to say: from here... to the end.

A light snow began to fall and I knew my mother would soon grow too cold for much more of our little stroll. The branches of the trees looked as bare and as bleak as loneliness itself. But there was something delightful in the fluttering flurries.

“Well, you’re a bright, young, handsome man, Jake. You should go out on more dates. It seems every time I talk to you, you’re hanging out with your thesis advisor.”

“His name is Professor Scott Saft, and he’s a good friend of mine.”

“He’s also older than I am.”

There was nothing to say to that. We stopped on the Gapstow Bridge, arched over the northeast end of the Pond, and my mother asked me, entirely out of the blue:

“You ever talk to your father?”

I answered straightaway: “No, Mom, not in five years now.”

She nodded and I saw a pain in her that she rarely let show. In a way, I wished I could have changed my answer, but there is no changing the truth. It always wins. No matter what words I choose. Nothing dramatic happened between my father and me five years ago. In fact, he had long been at a remove from my life. For I grew up in a single-mother household, and eventually, I came to see how irrelevant my father was to me, and so, little by little, we simply stopped communicating. Though, I admit, the last few conversations I’d had with him had been particularly harrowing. For it seemed to me that my father, an intelligent man, had lost his sense. In fact, it appeared to me, according to a few things he’d expressed — either paranoid ideas about the poison in all foodstuffs, or twisted, solipsistic notions of how taking care of one’s self was really all that mattered, or other simple but appalling gaps in logic — yes, it appeared that my father had lost his mind, and I was afraid, the more that I thought about it, that losing one’s mind was simply what happened to people as they grew older, especially intelligent people. This idea freaked me out, so I just stopped talking to the man.

I moved behind my mother and rubbed her shoulders in order to warm her up.

“Let’s get you home,” I said.

“You’re staying for dinner?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Good. I’ll cook your favorite.” I didn’t know what dish was my favorite, or else couldn’t remember what my mother thought my favorite dish was, but this is what I loved about my Mom: she still knew a few things about me of which I was unaware.



There was one last brutal day of winter left that year, and on that night Scott and I had tickets to see a performance of Beethoven and Brahm’s symphonies at the Lincoln Center. By this point, my thesis was a lost hope, and I was unsure I would ever get my doctorate, and I didn’t care. Scott and I had grown even closer over the last few weeks, for when I shared with him the depths of my despair at my failure to complete my thesis, he shared how he had never completed his first attempt either. Fourteen months, he said he spent working on the damn thing, and all of that time wasted. Again, Scott found a way to comfort me, as well as reveal something about himself that surprised me, for I still couldn’t envision the man failing at anything, not at a novel, and especially not at a scholarly work on literature. After all, he had published many successful books on literature — one on young Irish playwrights, another on New York City poets, even one on Japanese novelists. As for his own novel, it was still a subject we never discussed; the very fact that I knew about its existence was still a secret between Suzanne and me. As for my own fiction, the Professor had finally read that story I had placed in his box months ago, and again, he gave me only a lukewarm reaction.

“It is good,” he allowed, “but there’s still too much in there. You must learn to simplify. And really you should stay away from fiction altogether; but you already know my stubborn opinion on that subject. It’s a wonderful thing to do, to write fiction, but at the very least, Jake, find another way to make your money.”

Yet, despite the endless stream of Scott’s discouragement, I was still obsessed with the man (as well as with the writing). I was drawn to all of his peculiarities and mysteries. And I was always so comfortable in his presence; perhaps I felt that just by being with him, I would imbibe some of his wisdom, some of his basic sanity.

I asked him as we walked along the south end of the park after that night’s less-than-inspiring philharmonic: “Tell me, Scott, what is it that you have against my writing fiction?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Absolutely nothing.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“It’s hard,” he offered. “That’s all.”

“I don’t believe you, that is, I don’t believe that’s the root of it.”

“No, it’s not,” he admitted.

“Then tell me, really, what is it?”

We stopped and rested along the wall, facing north. He gazed across the length of the park and considered his response. The carriage horses neighed behind us.

“There’s no way to say what I want to say, but I will try for your sake, Jake: it’s dangerous.”

Oh how seriously the Professor took everything! I laughed hard at what he said! I couldn’t help myself. It’s dangerous! What a thought! Yes, and walking across the street is dangerous, too, but I do it! — that’s all I thought to say in response but I was laughing too hard to say it. Behind us the sound of a horse going wild grew louder, and suddenly this horse passed us on our right, flying into the park and carrying the carriage and the horseman with him. The horseman was a great big brute of a man and he began viciously whipping the horse. Next thing I knew Scott was chasing after the man and his carriage and screaming at the man to stop flailing his horse.

But the flogging continued. I had no idea of the history of this situation, how the horse had come to go wild, and how the horseman had come to deliver such a brutal lashing upon his own horse. But it happened. And we watched it happen. And eventually the horse succumbed to the cruel beating and fell down on its side. The horseman leapt off the carriage and continued to flog his horse. Other people besides Scott screamed at the man to stop, but such pleading was futile, for the man was possessed. After another unknowable amount of time passed, I watched as Scott threw himself upon the belly of the horse, taking a powerful kick in the head from the horse’s leg at the same time. I stood aghast and immobilized by the scene.

Then I heard it. Those words again. I heard Scott muttering, “What are we waiting for, horsie?” Now his use of the word ‘horsie’ sounded awfully infantile to my ear. What are we waiting for, horsie? He screamed it once, twice. The horseman howled at him to get off his horse, and then the whip came down upon Scott’s leg. I rushed in finally and pulled Scott off the horse, while he went on with his pathetic muttering. What are we waiting for, horsie?

“Are you all right?” I asked breathlessly.

But Scott was gone, no longer with us, splintered into a thousand pieces. He never did answer my question. The police arrived and I said we needed an ambulance. I sat Scott down on the lawn and tried to talk some sense into him. I held his face in my hands, and for the first time, I saw his age in the wrinkles of his skin. When the ambulance came, they put him in a wheelchair and wheeled him into the back. As we drove to the hospital, I held his hand as he continued to mumble incoherently. The Professor was never to speak another lucid word in his life.



This all happened years ago now. I visit Scott at the home whenever I can, but it is very hard for me to see him as he is. In the beginning, I tried to convince myself that he would get well, only to learn how well we deceive ourselves. Ultimately my pessimism was confirmed when the doctors diagnosed syphilis. This caused me to speculate even further about Scott’s surreptitious exploits. A few months after that terrible night, Suzanne invited me over to the apartment for dinner and after the meal she gave me Scott’s manuscript. In my opinion, the novel is masterful, a cornucopia of words celebrating the yes-saying spirit of humanity; but I doubt I’ll ever find a publisher for it. Yet the search continues. My own search too, onward; I still write my stories. But if I write less than I did before, and it seems I do, it is because of what the Professor taught me. So on some nights, instead of scribbling madly, I simply sit and contemplate; in other words, I do nothing in particular. And when I do, I usually come back to the same contemplation, I return again and again to what it means to be fatherless.