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.

Syrup

Elyse Anders was a red-headed twenty-two year old who for the most part was level-headed, although she was an aspiring actress, meaning she was also slightly deranged. But Elyse was very logical. So incessantly logical in fact that she suffered from hypochondria, as well as from her boyfriend’s merciless teasing her about her hypochondria. She lived in Manhattan, a nice enough place to live, center of the world, and the essential place-to-be for a crazy actress; but in the year 2005, Manhattan was also a rotten place to live because everybody was either acting genuinely paranoid or feigning ironic paranoia. Of course Elyse was of the former set, and on this night she was lying in bed, held awake by the undeniable fact that she smelled syrup, and yet she had no idea why.

She ran her nose along her thin, freckled arms. Sniffed. Smelled syrup. But was the syrup smell really coming from her own body? That would be weird. She sat up, leaned over and smelled her legs. Her legs didn’t smell like syrup as much as her arms did, and then, even her arms, well, she couldn’t be sure. The window was slightly open. Maybe the smell was coming from outside. So Elyse went over to the window, pulled up the heavy glass, and sniffed vigorously of the lovely urban air. It smelled like crap, like exhaust and cancer, but not necessarily like syrup. She turned and smelled her walls. She smelled her dresser, her TV, her alarm clock, and then fell to her knees and smell the floor. Syrup! Sweet, golden, maple syrup. Everywhere!

For breakfast, Elyse had had a carrot muffin and a cup of coffee. No pancakes, no waffles. For lunch, one of those ridiculously priced Midtown paninis with roasted vegetables and pesto. Nothing sweet whatsoever. Not even any dark chocolate, which Elyse loved, and which tasted bitter. There would be no sleep with the overwhelming and mysterious aroma of a Sunday country breakfast, of syrup, pervading the room. Elyse panicked; she text-messaged her boyfriend.

“I smell like syrup and I can’t figure out why,” she wrote.

Andy Stone, the boyfriend, was sitting up in bed six blocks north of Elyse, happily reading a Ray Bradbury short story. The one in which a girl named Margot gets thrown into a closet by cruel kids on the only day in seven years that the sun came out on the planet Venus. The story made Andy want to move to Venus. Or Anchorage. Or Hong Kong. Any place but the East Village, where people were too ethnocentric, and also too paranoid.

“I hate when that happens,” Andy texted back.

“Seriously. Do you smell syrup?” Elyse texted back.

Andy laughed, and put down the Bradbury book, which was gigantic because it was a collection, and apparently, for Bradbury, writing was like chatting.

Andy brainstormed a minute, trying to come up with something funny.

“Actually, I smell sausage,” he texted. Andy didn’t realize that Elyse was being serious, until Elyse texted him back, saying,

“I’m being serious. And I’m worried.”

Andy, bewildered, irresponsible, texted back, “Does anthrax smell like syrup?”

Three exchanges was more or less the universal limit on text messaging, so Elyse, frustrated with Andy’s insouciance, called.

“Andy, I’m serious. Do you smell syrup? I’ve been smelling something syrupy all night.”

“No,” said Andy. “I don’t smell anything but the usual alleyway goodness.”

“My arms smell like pancakes,” said Elyse, who now laughed a little, having shared her anxiety with another, which was the patriotic thing to do these days. “Or like caramel. Or like that weird Bit-O-Honey candy. But mostly like syrup.”

“Seriously, who eats Bit-O-Honey’s anymore?” said Andy.

“Damn it, Andy. Why can’t you ever take anything seriously?”

“I take Ray Bradbury seriously,” Andy defended himself. “Sort of. Well, as seriously as one can take stories about Venus.”

“Forget it.”

“Okay.”

Silence, about five seconds of it.

Then, a remorseful Andy said, “Look, babe, if you’re so concerned, why don’t you call 311? If you smell something, say something.”

“I think I will.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Call me back,” said Andy.

The woman on the 311 line patiently took down Elyse’s report: smell of syrup, maybe honey, beginning around eight in the evening, and persisting until now, midnight, officially Friday, October 28th, 2005. Elyse badgered her into disclosing whether other people had called in with the same complaint, but the 311 woman would not say. It was not 311 Hot Line policy to disclose the nature of other calls. Elyse shrieked, “But the smell of syrup is sweeping the city!”

“Yes, Ms. Anders, that may be true. We will look into it. Thank you for your call.”

That may be true. What did she mean?, Elyse thought, after the call, ceiling-staring. Elyse wondered: Was the smell city-wide? Were city officials worried about the smell? Did this pleasant smell have evil as its source? Or was it merely some sort of Halloween hi-jinks? Oh, to live in the age of terror, Elyse melodramatically bemoaned to herself.




Minutes later, somewhere between Manhattan and New Jersey, on the great Hudson River, Tucker Haze, stalwart member of the United States Coast Guard, defended the country from a mysterious odor. With a foot on the bow, Tucker took a call from headquarters.

“Tucker, this is Mav, we’re getting reports of a strange, syrupy smell sweeping the city? Do you smell anything out there?”

“Give me a second,” said Tucker.

He put the phone down and sniffed at the air. Nothing unusual. Dead fish, hint of algae. He sniffed again: no syrup in the nostril.

“No, sir. Nothing of the sort out here.”

“Okay. Get in communication with the tugboats and container ships. See if they smell anything out of the ordinary. Right away, Tuck.”

“Yes, sir.”

The communication ended, and Tucker turned his boat around and headed for the East River to hunt down the smell’s source. Despite the silly nature of the request — find out if anyone smells syrup! — Tucker was imbibed with a mighty sense of purpose, because everything Tucker did, he did purposefully. Because he was a member of the Coast Guard, and the borders were impossible to defend without a deep sense of purpose.

The wind blew through Tucker’s hair, and his nostrils were on high alert, which was red or something.




Elyse half-slept for an hour or two, dreaming of Bit-O-Honey’s. In her dream, it was Halloween and Elyse was seven years old again, and she was trying to trade her Bit-O-Honey’s with her sister for some real candy, like a mini Snickers, or a Mr. Goodbar. Something with peanuts in it.

Then she woke up, suddenly, rudely, and felt an enormous and irrational craving for ice cream. Elyse had not had ice cream for maybe two years, except for a few trips to Cold Spring Creamery, a place she hated, but a place that people always insisted on taking her. She found it demeaning and offensive that the management made their minimum wage employees sing inane pop songs rewritten with stupid Cold Stone Creamery lyrics. And the ice cream tasted like slap-dash crap. These negative Cold Stone experiences caused Elyse to develop an aversion to ice cream. But here she was, craving the stuff. It was that smell. The damn syrup smell was screwing with Elyse in curious ways.

The alarm clock blinked 4:13 in the morning. Elyse slipped into a pair of jeans and fuzzy slippers. Blindly, she made her way down the stairs of the apartment building. Two nighttime revelers, just in from the bars, passed by her on the stairs. She wanted to ask them if they smelled syrup. She wanted to not be alone in her affliction. But these two clearly only smelled vodka and each other’s rank lust.

Outside, nighttime Manhattan, low-grade electricity, potentiality. Creepiness, too. The events of the previous day dissipating, palpably, to make room for the coming happenings. Elyse walked to the corner 24-hour deli. Trucks owned the streets at these hours. The trash truck idled, as one trash man of a pair hustled out of the deli with two cups of black coffee. The New York Times truck, its side wide open, was filled with hundreds of pounds of news. Elyse wondered if the smell was in the papers; then she thought maybe she was going batty.

A half pint of Ben and Jerry’s later and Elyse was back in bed. She tried not to smell, which was harder to do than you might imagine.




Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, was sending out his feelers. Everybody from the Fire Department to state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey was contacted in regards to the mysterious smell. The press had caught on, too. They were demanding answers. What was that smell? Does the public have reason to fear the smell of syrup? Does anthrax smell like syrup? Do terrorists like pancakes?

Commissioner Kelly coolly told reporters, “It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time.” They knew nothing, besides the fact that the smell’s source was in Lower Manhattan, which was a large section of the island, roughly one-third of it.

The reporters were rabid. “People are craving pie all over town.” “And ice cream.” “One woman reportedly put honey and cornflakes in her ice cream. Have you ever heard of such a thing, Commissioner Kelly?”

The Commissioner had no more time to answer questions. Tests of the air were just coming in. He hustled off to peruse the all-important reports. Soon enough the public would know whether there was anything of a hazardous nature in the pleasant smell.

By Saturday morning, the story would hit the presses. Front page of the Metro section.




Meanwhile, Elyse was befuddled, and isolated in her syrup obsession. On Friday morning, she arrived to the office a few minutes late. The Off-On-The-Right-Foot Meeting was already in session. Walking into the board room, Elyse realized that her sense of smell was super sensitive. She smelled Barry’s hazelnut coffee, Susan’s lemon Danish, Alfonze’s chocolate éclair.

When the floor was opened for questions — the topic was supposed to be How to Be Mindful of Work Over the Weekend — against her better judgement, Elyse asked the group of twenty-five graphic design professionals if any of them had smelled anything odd last night, anything like syrup.

They all laughed at her. Elyse had never felt so foolish or awful in all her life. But then, with all the goofing around, all the bad jokes — “No, but I did have a hot dream about Aunt Jamima!” — Elyse found her sense of humor about the thing. She joked along, “I was sniffing my arms all night!” She felt better, a little.

Then, Cindy, from Accounts Receivable, stopped Elyse on their way out of the meeting, and pulled her aside.

“Elyse, I smelled the syrup, too. I did. Maple syrup, yes?” said Cindy.

“It gave me a craving for ice cream,” said Elyse.

“I went out to the diner at three in the morning and had a slice of pumpkin pie,” said Cindy.

They stared at each other, with nothing more to say. There was a strong bond holding them there, a syrup smell solidarity. Then, they broke apart and went about their business. Because, in the face of terror, the best thing to do was to go about your business.




Downtown, Jacques Torres, the Soho chocolatier, was roughed up by a couple of NYPD tough guys. They barged into Torres’ Chocolate Haven, and questioned the former French citizen about his methods of chocolate production, as well as about his political loyalties.

“We spent the afternoon roasting almonds,” said Torres.

But the city’s bloodhounds were unconvinced; after all, they were working off a pretty reliable tip. And the guy was French, or his parents were, or something.

“Besides,” cried Torres, “Chocolate tastes bitter, not sweet!”

After a brief, but harrowing, interrogation, investigators turned the beloved chocolate store upside down, searching for any clues, or perhaps caramel flavored sweets. After nothing was found, the investigators left Torres to his normal Friday afternoon business, quite busy this time of year.




Saturday morning, Andy ran towards his girlfriend’s apartment with The Times in hand. He leaned into her buzzer with giddy energy. Upstairs, Elyse was cooking pancakes. Why not? Andy spread the Metro section out on the kitchen table. None other than the widely respected Anthony DePalma had written a story: Good Smell Vanishes, But It Leaves Air of Mystery.

Elyse read the whole article out loud, emphasizing the more ridiculous and fabulous parts. The smell had sparked “hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line.” Also, and most importantly, officials determined “that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.” Feelings of vindication and hyperawareness flooded Elyse. Andy said, “You ought to be a police watch dog.”

“I’m just glad to see the smell in the papers. I thought I was going crazy,” said Elyse.

Yet, it was more complicated than that. So there had indeed been a city-wide smell scare; Elyse’s concerns were validated. But did that make her feel better? Did it make her feel safer? Wouldn’t things have actually been simpler had there not been a city wide smell, and if only she (and perhaps that crazy Cindy from work) had inexplicably smelled syrup for a few days? Wouldn’t her world be simpler if her smell-fear had not been validated, and had instead withered away like yet another unfounded paranoid illusion? But Elyse did feel better seeing the news in the paper; the news disarmed her. Why? Why was it that she felt better learning that the experience was shared? Why was she so disarmed seeing that the smell was in the freaking New York Times? Was everything okay so long as we well documented our fears and confusion, even without any meaningful disclosure? Elyse got to thinking: Wasn’t it likely that the roots of that damn smell were in fact nefarious? Because the sinister underbelly of the American empire is very real. And a pervasive city-wide syrup smell is just the kind of clue that a plugged-in citizen ought to use to connect the dots and therefore come to believe that something creepy is indeed going on. Something supremely sinister, mostly unseen, and usually unsmelt. But these were difficult thoughts for your ordinary hard-working citizen to accept and then arrange into an organized, logical and workable worldview.

So then the paranoid questions returned to their home just under the surface; the appearance of the newspaper article sufficiently suppressed their urgency. But the questions remained: Who unleashed that damn smell? And why? That’s what we the public deserve to know. But that is precisely what we very likely will never know. Because we only hear the empty echoes of politico-media doublespeak. Meanwhile, the underbelly churns, and we remain gravely and privately paranoid. And, most likely, rightly so.

“There’s no telling how the bad guys are going to get us,” said Andy, as Elyse served up two hefty flapjacks onto his plate.

“Last night, I thought I smelled popcorn, and I did, but that’s only because I was passing by the movie theater.”

Elyse, who with her new sense of communal belonging found the whole thing funny, laughed. Then she said, “It’s weird though, right? That I smelled it? So bizarre, huh?” She shook her head.

“I’ll admit, it’s creepy,” said Andy, heaving a forkful of pancake into his mouth. “But it’s funny too.”

They both agreed that it was comically bizarre — and genuinely creepy — and that syrup is a very tasty addition to any pancake breakfast.




The highest authority in the city, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was quoted in the papers on the syrup incident as saying, “Nature should be allowed to take care of its own.” Which, of course, made little sense and said nothing at all.



The story seemed over, but then for a few days, Elyse snooped around. Without mentioning anything to Andy because she didn't want him to think she was nuts, Elyse did some research. She asked questions around town and googled the hell out of the word syrup. But she came up with next to nothing. People had smelled syrup across the river in New Jersey. (One guy in Des Moines claimed to have smelled syrup on the same day, but Elyse figured he was nuts.) An EMT guy posted a note on the Gothamist website saying that he was trained to be wary of sweet smells because terrorists attached a pleasant smell to toxic substances to make you linger longer and breathe in more. The dirty bomb was a popular hypothesis. Another theory ran that a big container from China carrying methyl cyclopentenolone ruptured while trying to unload at a Jersey chemical factory. Or maybe it was benzoic acid.

In the end, the theories proliferated and degenerated into nonsense. Of course some people suggested aliens and end times. Yet, while these ideas were interesting, what most perplexed Elyse was simply why the truth was unknown, why the truth was out of sight. Because dammit somebody had to know what had happened, so logically, somebody wasn't telling. That's what disturbed Elyse. That's what still didn't make any sense.