Yes

What happened to me on this trip was I decided I wanted to marry Amelia. I was vertiginous with fatigue by the time I finally dropped the car off at the rental place in Harlem. My road giddiness had been replaced by whirling exhaustion. After a zombie subway ride under the East River, I staggered the stairs of my apartment in Bushwick. It was seven in the morning and I had driven straight through the night from a writer’s retreat in New Orleans. I had spent a month in that ecstatic city finishing my first novel. My mind, aligned with my body, was but a soft and detached buzz, the effect of hours and hours of meditative fixation on the road, on life between the yellow and white lines. Bed beckoned my weary traveler’s soul as gently and straightforwardly as I imagine the white light calls us all in the end.

At times like this it was good to live alone. Just me, Mack Wilson, Baton Rouge born, blood writer, jazz lover, amateur mystic. No conversations, no explanations, no expectations awaited me beyond my door. I jingled the key into the dead-bolt lock and pushed through. I heard the sink running. Great, I thought, I’m being robbed. Again. Gentrification had yet to slow down crime in my neighborhood. Last time I was out thirty-five dollars and a brand new toaster oven. Moreover, I felt too tired to put up a fight. But why, I wondered, would a burglar take the time to wash his hands before making his escape? Ever so quietly I shut the front door, leaving it unlocked, just in case. My tiptoe down the hallway made no noise.

Suddenly I felt empty. My mind, not yet thirty years old, took a moment to judge all of life. Facing the threat of a murderer in my midst, I felt so completely exasperated with life, with yes, and with the renunciation of life, with no, and then again with life, and with the after-life or the next-life or the lack thereof, then with the renunciation of the after-life or the next-life or the lack thereof, then again with life, always again with life, with desire, always again with the sufferance of yes. Yes yes yes. Life was a great big yes. There must be some kind of way out of here, I thought to myself, and I was the joker and the thief was in my bathroom. Maybe a good joke would kill him. Maybe that’s what the thief wanted.

The thought occurred to me: this might be the end. And I didn’t care; I was resigned, humbled. Ready to surrender. The end comes, now or the next day, and though what comes next in my book is probably more of the same dream — my matter-energies conserved and transformed — it’s still the end of me. For I understand the end as the end of this, my soul and sojourn, and if this end was hiding, waiting in ambush for me in the bathroom, then so be it. In other words, I was in a rotten mood, courting my own death.

I picked up a black-handled knife in the kitchen and continued my creep toward the end of the hallway. The sink was turned off now and somebody was drying his face on a towel. Oh, the things people do, the things burglars do. Then the guy brushed his teeth. I shit you not. This was the unexpected twist at the end of my trip: a run-in with a hygiene-obsessed burglar. If only more burglars were like this one — patient, confident, clean — then I don’t know what.

I raised the knife over my head, pictured myself a warrior. I would not hesitate to murder this man. In fact, I’d always imagined killing another human would prove rather insightful, if done appropriately.

As I crossed the threshold of the doorway, I thought about God and whether I should settle my bets there.

But waiting around the corner wasn’t God and it wasn’t the end and it wasn’t a burglar. It wasn’t an angel either, though she had seemed to be one for a long time. It was Amelia, my ex-girlfriend, the love of my life. Damn woman still had a set of keys to my place.

“Well, well, well, Amelia,” I said.

I was home and here she was. In the moment, I finally realized my love for Amelia in all its glorious, ordinary fullness. I was ready to prostrate myself, to surrender myself, to go naked before her. For years, I had gone deep. Young souls must go deep. Boldly, alone, into myself, into my writing, into existential truths. But what was all of that now? What’s all of that when a man is in love?

Take a knee, I said to myself. I’d learned to depend upon my inspiration, to trust my inner voice, to have confidence in the secret unfolding of messages throughout my body and in the space around me. I’d learned to see how well the world flows of its own accord and how I merely had to pay attention in order to do the right thing, play the right note. And I’d learned how to take a knee when I had to, how to serve and be served. And so I did. I put my right knee down on the ground in front of Amelia.

The world rushed over my back like a wave. Like the waves that crashed over me in the ocean when I was a kid vacationing with my family on the north Florida beaches. Time, a gigantic wave, folded me into its story, my story, my life. Everything was distilled into poetry, for just a moment, and all the poets themselves cried out a great song of love from their perches in the watchtower. Yes, yes, they sang, an immortal refrain of yes.

Amelia was dressed plainly, in blue jeans and a plaid farmer’s shirt. White, toothpaste foam lined her small, proud mouth. Her ears looked longer than ever, her lobes delicious. Her face was still slightly wet from wash and a droplet of water hung from the bottom of her chin. Her eyes looked tired and beautiful and they said, Shall we go for one more swim, you and I, and see how far out we can go?

Either that, or, What’s with the black eye, Mack?

I opened my mouth, my heart jammed up my throat.

On my knee, I supplicated and I said it:

“Amelia, will you marry me?”

I will always love this woman. While love loves to love love, I love you, Amelia. This was the message my body was sending me and I only hoped she felt the same.

She wept. When I asked Amelia to marry me that morning, she wept. She broke down and cried. This was not what I had expected. At the same time, I saw the truth in her wet eyes: I was in too deep, I needed saving, I needed Amelia. For years, I had lived the life I had always imagined for myself. A penniless artist, like my father before me, who was a jazz saxophonist who’d spent his life on the streets of New Orleans. I had been a bachelor and lover of women. A solitary young man going deep into life’s mystery. As it should be and ever shall be. My soul was a sweet melody that I myself had written. A mournful, cheerful, be-bopping thing. But in this moment clarity struck: I was lonely and I refused to stay this way forever. I was woeful, adrift, steeped deep in the mystery, in the dark melodies. I had just driven home from a writer’s retreat twelve hundred miles away. Throughout the month, I had written brilliantly, like the fucking mad-hatter, and yet, for all my efforts, I had earned nothing. Not a nickel. But all that didn’t matter now.

I kneeled before Amelia, humbled and naked and changed. I had plumbed the depths and now I was returning to the surface. To the real, the factual, the everyday. What was clear was that I loved this woman. The rest, the mystery, would work itself out in time. From now on, I wanted nothing more than to have and to hold Amelia. I wanted to take care of her, I wanted her to take care of me. I wanted her to take this brilliant mess, this mad artificer, this soft, open heart. Take me, Amelia, I asked. Take me, save me. Save me, my love.

But she was crying. Things were not going well. She crumpled down to the floor, sinking into the corner, and cried. I crawled to her and put my hand around the back of her neck. She beat back at me, her half-balled fists flying at my face. She did not want me to touch her. Her feet kicked at my shins.

“You don’t have to answer now,” I said.

“Mack, no!” she said between tears. “Damn you, Mack!” Then she giggled — yes! a giggle! — and asked, “Why do you have a black eye?”

“I got slugged by a pimp,” I said. N’awlins was a tough town.

Amelia shook her head at me. I loved every last bit of this woman, unconditionally, absolutely. I loved how she shook her head at me. How she exercised her freedom. How she so straightforwardly demanded my total respect. How she moved through space.

“I can’t, Mack,” she said. “I can’t.”

“But of course you can, Babe,” I said. “I need you.”

“You need the world,” she said. “You’re married to the sea.”

She had it all wrong: I only needed her. Our love would drain all the seas, shipwreck every boat. The poets were right. Yes is the only word.

“Babe, you’re all I need,” I said. “Our love is all of God’s money.”

“If I come too close, you’ll lose your concentration,” she argued with me. She had listened. “You’ll lose your writing. You’ve said so yourself.”

“Come near to me and prove I’m wrong,” I quoted from a folk song that Amelia and I both knew and loved.

She shook her head no. She scrambled up off the bathroom floor, stormed down the hallway and into the kitchen. Her cheeks flushed, red, furious.

“Stop chasing me, Mack!” she cried. “Please! God!”

I pursued her down the hallway. She stood in front of the refrigerator and stared back at me. Even in the awful florescent light, she looked lovely.

“I can feel your longing in the middle of the night,” she said. “I can feel you lying in bed thinking about me. Don’t you know I can feel these things? You’ve been torturing me!”

So she could feel my spooky action at a distance after all. I stared into the truth of her eyes. She was volatile and I feared the possibilities of the situation, feared failure. I crossed the room, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pinned her against the refrigerator.

“Marry me!” I screamed. She shrieked an incomprehensible noise. It was these two words: marry me. These two words incensed her.

“Dammit Mack, marry you!” she cried. “Now you ask me! Now! Are you mad?”

“No, I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m crazy with clarity. I see what I want now: you. Marry me.”

“I’m not your savior!” she cried.

But she was. Amelia was my savior. There was no salvation outside our love. The poets were right. Yes is the only word. We have our share of paradise in this life, but only a lucky few ever find the secret valley, the sacred world. In a flash, all this became clear to me.

I let go of Amelia and she sank down to the floor, to the base of the refrigerator. I swear I wanted to kick her. If we could just get through this fight, even if I had to kick some sense into her, I knew we would find the secret valley, we would secure a happiness previously undreamed of, we would realize our share of paradise. And I was going to fight for it.

I fell down beside Amelia and pleaded, “Amelia, please. To hell with everything, I want love. I want our love and nothing more. Do you hear me? To hell with everything else, let’s you and me live happily ever after. That’s enough for me. More than enough!”

Again, I propped myself up on one knee.

Ringless, I asked again, “Amelia, love of my life, will you marry me?”

Through a bout of fresh, hot tears, “No, Mack,” she muttered. “No.”

Oh, damn her to hell, I thought. Why not?! Why the hell not! Granted, Amelia and I had been non-committal for five years; we had never fully let go into each other. Ours was the open love affair of two brutally honest artists. Our work was our passion. We had already shared and enjoyed one another for what seemed a lifetime. This was our story. We had even scoffed at the idea of marriage, of family, of settling down, more than once. Moreover, I hadn’t even seen Amelia in a few months. But time is bunk and love is forever.

“Why not?” I cried, taking her face in my hands.

“Because I can’t,” she said.

“Yes, you can,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Yes, you can,” I said.

A beat of silence.

“Why not, Amelia?”

Amelia, shaking free of my hold, looked down.

“I love you, Amelia.”

She looked up and through my eyes to the truth. And then she said it.

“Yes, I love you, too, Mack.”

The words hung there, a perfect reverberation of space, into which my soul dissolved.

And then she wept again.

“But I’ve fallen for another man, Mack,” she stammered. “He’s asked me to marry him, just last night. And I said yes.”

The words left me hollow. As if I’d witnessed my own soul peter out, witnessed it escape my mouth with the breath. I fell over my knees, bent over myself. She was saying no.

I felt emptiness, the gap. The sound of a single gust of wind passing through a tunnel. Amelia covered her face in her hands. She wept; endlessly, she wept. My body hurt all over. My heart freaked out, beating insanely. And yet, despite the pain, it felt good to have Amelia near. I felt my love and my panic, my desire and my loss, as a single tender ache. In the final analysis, all emotion, both pleasure and pain, is suffering.

I was on my knees, bent over the ground in front of the refrigerator. Amelia threw her arms over me, nuzzled her head in the small of my back, and wept.

“I’m sorry, Mack,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too, Baby,” I said.

Amelia was lying to me. A taxi bellowed. The world is mysterious, uncanny, supra-logical. A magnet fell off the refrigerator and hit me on the head, Amelia burrowed into my back, and I said to myself, The girl is in trouble. I don’t know what kind of trouble. Amelia’s own brand, to be sure. And she won’t tell me what’s wrong. And she won’t marry me. Tricky.



I sat with the silence. Then I tried to seduce Amelia.

To bed her: that would fix everything. Bed, the eternal cure. Something in me would not give up. Love, desire, yes-saying. We were crumpled before the refrigerator, me on my knees, bent over forward, as if in prayer, and Amelia too on her knees, slumped over my back, her hands dangling down by my face. I took her palm in my fingers and began to massage her skin. To touch her skin was divine. Each rub slowly moved down the full length of her finger. I was mesmerized by the texture of her skin, its softness, its give. I worked my way up her wrist.

In silence, I explored Amelia’s hands and arms. In her fatigue and shock, she permitted me to do so. Perhaps she was turned on. I don’t know. I didn’t always know what went on in Amelia’s mind; this is why I loved her, for her depth, her mystery. For a moment she responded to my advances with an openness. The thrill of which struck me in the bottom of my spine. The familiarity of this touch. The terrain of her body, a cascade of physical memories. The karmic spark of sexual desire, as if this were meant to be.

I brought Amelia’s hand to my lips. As I kissed her, I felt her entire body lurch and something released and she fell down upon me, more so and deeper now, relieving all of her weight onto my back. We were still in an awkward position, with her hunched over me on the kitchen floor, but such physical details were obliterated by our focus upon the kiss. I turned her hand over and put my lips to the hollow of her inner wrist.

Amelia wanted to make love to me. I believed she still loved me like that. But I was wrong. At that moment, when I kissed her wrist, she pulled back from me, tearing her hand from my grasp. Abruptly, she stood and ran her hand through her hair, as if to dissociate her hand from my caresses. She stood and straightened herself, yet from my vantage point on the floor, the whole effort appeared in vain. We were shaken to the core, and no cosmetics would cover up the raw wound we had just reopened. A spark was still alive.

I stood. She backed up, a step closer to the door. She shook her head at me, her hair falling before her eyes — she looked ravishing in her distress — and she turned to unlock the bolt (it was already unlocked). Then, before either of us could give voice to our desires, to our regrets, she was gone.

In the stillness of my apartment, I took the time to absorb the sudden emptiness, to take stock of the savage scene: a washcloth dripping from the sink, a knife dropped in the hallway, refrigerator magnets knocked to the floor. A pile of envelopes left on the kitchen table: Amelia’s mail. I perused the stack. Each was addressed to her apartment on Powers Street in Williamsburg, where she had lived since had moved out of my place six months ago. The first was a bill from ConEd for a total of $53.72 for the month of July, meaning Amelia had not been using her air conditioner, like a good, green girl. The second was a brochure for a writer’s retreat in California beginning the following week. Amelia, too, was a storywriter. Next, a mass mailing from a 2008 presidential candidate promising Hope is On the Way, A Better America is the Future, a prospect I considered unlikely. There was a postcard from Amelia’s best friend, Ally, writing from the deserts of the west. You’ve got to come to this year’s Burning Man, Amelia. It’s going to be AMAZING. Plus, I miss you. I miss you all over. Next, a blue ValuePak envelope full of fantastic coupons. And lastly, an unsigned letter, with no return address, already opened and read, from someone who had only this to say: Amelia, 2012 is nearer every day. Where are you?

This last letter freaked me out. Was it a joke? A call for help? A lover’s beckon? I had heard enough about the many metaphysical predictions about the year 2012 to know that the year would likely prove whacky, if not exactly apocalyptic. I didn’t believe in the apocalypse. Though, as a committed mystic, while I affirmed a fundamentally esoteric view of the cosmos, I also considered myself a sane man. If one can even says so, if one can validly say anything, about one’s self. But we create our own reality to a degree, so every prophesy, even mad 2012 soothsaying, carries with it at least a speck of self-fulfilling potential. But this was all besides the point. What was important was that, apparently, Amelia was hanging out with a kooky crowd. I wanted to hide her away.

I stood in the kitchen, stared out the window into the alley, and fingered the letters. A mouse ran across the floor, squeaked under the fridge. It’s a tricky world. Dark times. Oh God. Then a melody from a show I’d gone to see my last night in N’awlins bopped through my mind and I began to move about. I stuffed the letters, along with a fresh change of clothes and a cold re-used bottle of water, into my backpack. In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth with my stillwet toothbrush and splashed some water on my face. I turned off the lights, stepped outside and bolted my door. On foot, I made my way towards Amelia’s apartment. Miraculously, I was no longer tired.

Cockroach

You were born on the back of a cockroach, his mother told him. She guffawed from the belly, hard enough to bring tears to her young silver blue eyes. Right here in this room, his mother continued. Her downy soft arms held him gently. Through the cracked window, its drapes dirty and tied-back, the morning sun flung spangles that danced across baby George’s forehead. I was on that there bed, she pointed to the second-hand thing, the worn mattress, the putrid cream colored headboard. You know my aunt Hannah died on that bed and then you were born on it. So there you have it. And when you came out, it was dark in here, just after midnight, and a cockroach done crawled right up underneath you and carried you away. His mother laughed. My midwife went crying and screaming round the room, chasing after you, but you were off. Born into it, son, on the back of a water bug.

The sound of his mother’s laughter, again now, more solid than before, a beautiful, halcyon vibration, hardened into what was to become George’s first memory. A profoundly unsettling sense of otherness overcame him in this instant. The laughter of his mother was not he himself. What there was before was simple and primordial. What there was now was emptiness and spinning. George began to wail as he had not yet wailed. His mother was disturbed, chilled by the shrill sound. She rocked him lovingly in her arms and told him the story again.

Oh, don’t you cry now, Georgie, it’s nothing. Lots of babies are born on the backs of cockroaches in these parts. They say if them buggers could vote, they’d have the Louisiana legislature locked up. Ha! With the flat palm of her hand, she beat softly on George’s little back. Hush now, baby, don’t cry. She sang to him in a voice as sweet and tender as her laughter.

Hush little Baby, don’t say a word

Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird...

Something had happened in George. As he surveyed his surroundings, he began to see things in their separateness. Ignorance took hold of him, and in this moment, a cloud passed over the sun, and the room dimmed. Here was his mother, her breast, her touch, her voice. From whence came this unimaginable distance between himself and his mother? What gulf of terrifying space is this? Worse yet, wordlessly did this terror descend upon him. Its effect was emptiness and spinning.

The sound of his own wails compounded his fear, for these very sounds were more instances of otherness, of something separate. But from what? Separate from what exactly? From he, from him himself: his soul.

And if that mockingbird don’t sing

Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring...

A storm’s coming, you feel that? said Me-me, George’s grandmother, sitting quietly in the corner of the squalid rancher. She was blind and she sat in a wicker rocking chair and she did nothing but keep open her remaining senses to the world. I feel the wind shifting, she said.

Sally, George’s mother, stood and crossed the room, still rocking her baby, humming the remaining few bars of lullaby. She passed George off to his grandmother’s wanting, outstretched arms, from which her skin waggled. Here, Sally said, you hold him a while, Ma. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He always loved that story about the cockroach. But not today. I suppose today’s a new day.

Me-me took the bundle to her chest and kissed the crown of his head. Her eyes opened onto an infinite expanse, reflecting only space, without discrimination, without recognition. She wore a light, summery gown of cheap cotton and a pair of simple, single-strapped sandals. Wisps of wave-white hair flitted about her head as the wind blew from one window clear cross the room to the next.

There’s only the wind, Georgie, she cooed, in a high-pitched voice, seductive on the level of the sublime. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Georgie, there’s only the wind. You feel that, little one? That there’s just the wind, and that there’s all there is.

Summer in the South was brutalizing. Palpable pockets of heat poured in through the windows. The humidity caused Sally to sweat and her white dress clung oppressively to her back. She stood in the doorway, head titled, right elbow on the frame, the back of her wrist resting across her forehead. A portrait of perseverance. A storm’d be welcomed, she beamed. I’m boiling up like an egg in here. The phone rang and Sally turned and walked back a pace toward the kitchen, where she picked up the receiver, put it to her ear, and held it there with her shoulder.

—Hallo? Who is it?

George wrestled with his Me-me. He wanted free. His newfound sense of otherness imprisoned him. What else was knowledge? What else didn’t he know yet? What other mistakes and discoveries of consciousness lay on the horizon? He began to bite toothlessly, viciously at his grandmother. Look at you, little one, she cried. Why don’t we let you go, then? Me-me stood up gingerly, bent down and released George onto the ground. Even the ground felt new to him, different, other. With a sense of exploration, he began to crawl along the floor of the living room. A cheap bald brown carpet, burned in places, stained in others. Free and distracted, he was and his wailing simmered to a whimper.

Ineluctably the world rushed into George now. What fingers are these? Pawing at the gnarled carpet. Picking at the woven fabric there, inserting bits into his mouth. The world through his mouth: that’s the way it would be. Objects swarmed around him: colors, too: grey-blue carpet, red-orange ball, pale-pink leg of Me-me. Namelessly the colors presented themselves, forced themselves upon him as new truths. A bundle of sense perceptions now: that is all. No return to the simplicity of yesterday was possible. He crawled, in a terror, toward the back door, hanging halfway off its hinges.

—Well, we paid that bill only a week ago. I have the processed check here in my hand. Don’t see how we could owe again so soon.

His mother bickered on the phone with the collectors. She leaned again, against the wall-papered kitchen wall, her right wrist crossed over her forehead, in her pose. The phone dangling from her shoulder. Breakfast dishes stacked high beside the sink, teetering. The syrup hardening. Molly sat at the table, coloring in a book, the outline of an animal. The room was dark with the sun still behind the storm clouds. Sally tapped the tip of her white sneaker on the linoleum tile, spat angrily into the phone.

What terror was this? The terror of discovering open space. Suddenly the emptiness in George, this gross gap discovered between he himself and the objects of his world, opened up beneath him like an abyss. The carpet split wide like the mouth of a monster. The spinning became a vector, taking on the direction of a downward spiral. And through this darkness George descended, downward, deepening.

Molly’s ears in the other room perked up at the sound of George’s cries. A brief recollection of her likewise revelations skid across her young mind.

George was falling: this was the fall. For the mind to cleave from infinite space, its origin. Through space he fell, through the living room he crawled. With his soft bald head, he pushed the screen door open. He dropped down the single concrete step with a thud. The sun hid behind the clouds.

Ma, Georgie just crawled outside, called Sally from the kitchen, her hand held over the mouthpiece of the telephone, its chord tangled around her back. Oh, let him be! Me-me called back, rocking at a slow, steadying pace, sniffing the air.

Out back, along the tattered lathe and wire fence separating her neighbor’s existence from her own, George’s mother kept a fruit and vegetable garden: tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, cantaloupes, honeydews. An earthbound woman, Sally was, like a tree trunk. George’s odyssey was to cross the lawn, on all fours, dirt-bound. In nothing but a diaper. Terror-stricken. Each knee forward, an eon. Propelled forth by a hunger: to return, to recapitulate. When he reached the garden, the smell of the brown dirt brought to mind his mother. How is everything also another thing? He dug his little fingers into the warm soil of the garden. The dirt jammed up beneath his fingernails. In his palm now, he stared down at a earthworm, he licked it.

Tilting his head back, he dangled the worm above his lips, then dropped the squirming thing into his mouth. Unknowingly, he ate of God’s living kingdom. The worm guts warm and acidic against his tongue. Namelessly, objects associated with each other in his mind: worm, dirt, mother, poop. Fundamentally still one and the same to George. Their different forms only ever so slowly making themselves manifest. Though at some level he knew this dirt in his hand was not his mother, nevertheless, he ate of it with her in mind. Handfuls of dirt-mother to mouth. With his cheek resting in the garden soil, with two hands, George pulled the dirt toward him and feasted upon the earth. This brought about a solidification, his empty belly filling full. George gorged.

But the spinning continued, heavier now. A larger, more matter-filled object, George fell dizzily through space. It began to rain. The dirt turned to mud and George stuffed his mouth full of dirt and mud. He swallowed a few small pebbles. His face was a single streak of mud, from ear to chin to ear. His nose, blackened at the tip. A voraciousness, a new energy of hunger: mud in the mouth! It tasted so good, so true. And as he swallowed, the spinning did briefly ebb, only then to return quickly, to flow again, so George swallowed again, more and more, obsessively eating mud in the rain.

He fell on his back and watched the raindrops careening toward his face, like so many meteors in a nightmare. The great force of gravity pulled these pellets toward him in its inexorable fashion. Full-bellied, spinning, free in the yard, George lay beneath the downpour. He felt himself to be a falling raindrop, a muddrop, a fat baby dropping through infinite space. With his grubby little hand, he pulled another fistful of mud to his mouth.

—You’ll have to call back when my husband’s home, Sally lied into the phone. Her husband Ralph had nothing to do with paying the bills. Sally was the family’s mind, Ralph, its body. She slammed the receiver down and called out for George.

Georgie! Georgie!

There it was: that sound. Goorrr-geee, ooorr-geee. It came in through George’s ears and excited him like no other thing. Not the mud, not the rain, not the breast. Georgie! Oh, to hear his mother’s voice calling out that sound, that sign of that indivisible thing: his soul. But was his soul merely this sound? Or did the sound point to something else, something that would walk with him always. His beloved soul, form of forms.

Sally pulled her hair back and bound it up with a small, black elastic circle-thing. She wiped sweat from the back of her neck. You just let Georgie crawl out back like that? she said to Me-me as she passed through the living room, but Me-me had already fallen into a short, ignorant nap.

Rain pelted the rooftop. A drip began to fall at the far end of the kitchen. Molly didn’t even look up from her coloring book.

Sally opened the screen door on to the back yard and shrieked. George was on his back, the rain pouring down upon him. His face was covered in mud. Moreover, his face was beet red and his cheeks puffed out. He kicked at the ground with his tiny feet. Sally ran through the rain and swooped up her child. His eyes were closed, as if deep in concentration.

Georgie! Georgie! his mother yelled.

In terror, George was holding his breath, seeking a way out, a way to stop the spinning. When his mother noticed what was happening, a shock of horror consumed her. Her baby wasn’t breathing. Breathe, she cried, breathe, Georgie! With one foot in the garden, she held him in her arms. She shook him. Her baby wasn’t breathing. In the sky, a shock of lightning flashed.

For the love of God, Georgie, breathe!

George had discovered how ceasing to breath stopped the flow of energy through his body. Even the spinning, the inescapable spinning, slowed when deprived of oxygen. Naturally, upon making such a discovery, George set out to experiment. How long could he sustain this calming sensation of non-breath? It only took an act of will to maintain the state, and in summoning this will, George felt again the comforting intimations of his soul. Here was something he himself was doing. So, with scant thought or deliberation, George held his breath. He did not panic as parts of his body began to lack the oxygen necessary for normal functioning. First his extremities twitched. No problem. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to George, for there was no norm.

Sally grew livid, screaming at George to breathe, hustling back into the house. The trees thrashed wildly in the wind. She pushed at George’s stomach and popped his cheeks open. This broke the spell: George took a breath. But he then returned immediately to his experiment. Stubborn, indomitable, George discontinued his breathing. If there was a way out, George would find it now. If there was a way back, George would find it.

They were on the living room floor. A rumble of thunder shook the whole house, causing a lamp to fall off the end table. Me-me awoke to the vital, crisis energy in the room. What’s wrong? she begged from her chair. Georgie’s not breathin’ right, said Sally, wiping Georgie’s face clean with the hem of her white dress. She popped his cheeks again, but this time, to no avail. George had discovered a method of holding his breath in which the mouth did not even have to be closed. A brilliant revelation! In an inspired state, he continued to hold his breath.

Things were stilled, becalmed. Things came back together. The world melded into one thing. Colors merged into a blended whiteness. A cool sensation of sliding pervaded his body. Soon there was only this: the cool sensation, the sliding; then, not even that: nothing, a primordial blank.

Goddam boy won’t breath right, cried Sally, frustrated, angry with her misbehaving baby. She began to shake him violently in the dim light of the storm-darkened room.

Honey, calm down, said Me-me, crawling on her feeble knees toward the center of the room, where George was performing his miraculous disappearing act. Molly stood befuddled in the doorway to the kitchen, a blue crayon in her hand.

For a moment, Sally thought her baby boy might die.

Georgie, she yelled, if you don’t breath right right now, boy, I’m gonna smack you!

Georgie! Geooorgieeee!

From an uncanny space, as if lost deep down an impossible tunnel, George heard again this sound, this familiar call, his name: his soul-sound. It came in through his ears, so many vibrations of space, same as his mother’s laughter had come.

But George was not going to breath. A decision had been made, an act of volition, an exercise of indelible freedom. Frightened beyond reason, his mother shook him and smacked him, terrified by her own violent reaction, possessed by a fear of death, she tried to force her boy to breath. Me-me pulled back on Sally’s flailing arms. George’s face turned a myriad of colors: blue, purple, white. Then he was out. Consciousness: off. Sally was hysterical, helpless. Her body fell down upon George’s body, her tears soaking his dumb, mud-caked face, her mouth blowing furiously into his own. Me-me scrambled to her knees, to her feet, and into the kitchen. She called for an ambulance.

Then Sally felt the faint rise and fall of George chest. Lacking consciousness, George’s body had begun to breath again. There was no escape.

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.