My little brother helped me hit America, but I helped him quit Poland first. That time, there was no way to leave without becoming a Communist, or I didn’t know how. Desperate to leave, I wrote scholars, called philosophers, and wrote letters in any language I could crack, seducing pen pals.

                                                        envelope
                                                        my hand
                                                        her pocket

I had always been a k’nacker, Yiddish for “show-off,” at knocking off a killer missive. Lovers begged me to sing their love. “Make her fall for me,” a lover would whine. “Break her heart as she had mine.” So, I did. “If I get you, I get a future,” I would write, for instance. “If I don’t, I don’t even get a past.” I fooled folks to fall for each other, and then, I watched them walk wounded, weak, lovesick. It felt good. I loved to write like a lover. And like Srulik, the Sholom Aleichem’s hero, I brought lots of lovers together while getting more and more lonely myself.
 
                            shoemakers
                            go shoeless
                            lovers loveless

One day I got a letter from Israel, Mama called. She shipped it in a rogaleh package. Mama baked great rogaleh — crunchy, cheesy, sugar-dusted with poppy-seeds. I was dying to sink my teeth in the baked goods, but even more in the letter. But it wasn’t to be — a thief cut a hole, ate the goodies, and stole the letter. All I got was a box full of smell. The girl’s name was Dorota Jakubowicz, Mama recalled. I traveled to Israel twice, but I never found her.
 
                                                        rushing creek
                                                        log stuck
                                                        spinning

About the same time, a perfumed letter came from a 16-year-old girl, Missy, living in Sacramento. I had dreamed of seducing an American girl, but here, one was seducing me. Pure angel, godsend. I couldn’t believe my luck. But I couldn’t get her, either — she was too green, too babyish. So, instead, I knocked off a killer letter and signed my brother’s name. 

Mario and Missy hit it off right from the go. Soon, Missy, now legal, flew in to visit. Then, she flew in again – this time, to marry Mario and quit together. Payback time had arrived. Once in America, Missy fired off a missive to the Polish cops to set me free.

                                                          my hand
                                                          flowering, an old
                                                          love letter

---

Tad Wojnicki’s work has appeared in Simply Haiku, Contemporary Haibun, bottle rockets, Frogpond, Poetry Midwest, ZYZZYVA, Tattoo Highway, and Rainbow Curve, among others, and anthologies like: AutoBioDiversity: True Stories from ZYZZYVA, ed. by Howard Junker; In the Arms of Words: Poems for Tsunami Relief, ed. by Amy Ouzoonian; and Taboo Haiku, ed. by Richard Krawiec. Tad is the author of a novel, Lie Under the Fig Trees, and a poetry chapbook, Where Angels Catch Hell. Overseas on sabbatical, he currently he teaches Steinbeck and Bukowski in subtropical Taiwan.

Ready, here we go. It’s got to be a she. Sit down. She splatters paint everywhere, yeah everywhere. On glass, like Pollack, like a crazy woman. She bows down to the ground like to a thunderstorm way off in the distance in purple gobs and bubbles way off. The paint splatters and she screams so the glass shakes and her throat gives out while the splotches pour from her mind and her brain and those evil transmitters, but are they evil? They don’t have to be evil–it should be what you were made like, how you came, could she do this if she weren’t like this, if the doctors weren’t there and the people weren’t there shimmying around her with no idea what they were talking about? Could you live that way? Right, of course, her little girl inside does and cries all night and Mommy comes and is just as confused while the night time stars spark out like the specks of cheap paint on her canvas, on her glass, on her floor.

You shouldn’t be worried– she shouldn’t be worried– neither of you can hear.

She’s on her knees and you’re on the chair and she’s scraping her claws on the chalkboard and you’re sitting here typing with those evil things in your ears. Evil? Do they have to be evil? You’re doing it for your art, your expression, like she does. Could you live any other way? It could be just the way you came. Do you want to go to work and live the way everyone else does and dream dreamless nights and see nothing when you wake and think nothing when linguistic sound waves travel through the air and hit you? They hit her too, but you’re trying to block them off when she just lets them hit, when she just lets them hit.

She splatters paint everywhere and all she can see is her mind and those swirling eclipses of moons and slow milky pools of water like when an oar pushes through on a lake.

Everywhere.

She’s got to be beautiful, just like Audrey. She’s got this curly hair and a sexy thoughtless type of action so guys will stop in their tracks, be distracted from their conversations to keep their eyes on her for just one more moment so that maybe when you, they, go to bed at night they can have an image, some coal black hair, some tortured artist going to buy paint that they can have an ugly affair with in the bathroom of the supplies shop. “Do you like this blue?” “Yeah, you know, I feel like I’ve known you for years…” That’s all it takes and you’re, they’re, with her in a small room, not a real room, but like in porn with a small wave back and forth back and forth and back and forth with dim red lights making your, their, skin that crazy yellow hue.

She walks into the store though, and she walks out, she doesn’t say a word because the guy at the register knows her, knows her that well, and she buys her brushes and bottles and tubes and with nods completes the only transaction besides that of the diner she goes to for every meal. The greasy spoon where her early work hangs, where the gallery owners first put their hands to their mouths when getting lunch on the way back to the city. And guy at the diner, like the paint store guy, knows her well enough to give her a Caesar salad and a chocolate milkshake. Yeah, just like that diner at home. She’ll go in, nod just like she’s buying paint and he’ll know, like the way you’ve always wished those waitresses knew what you were going to order before you ordered it. They don’t know you’re a regular but he knows her, she gets the same thing every time and doesn’t have to say anything. Because she can’t.

You can. You do. You fill the air with waves and you think those sounds mean so much, don’t you, so much that a void just sounds like a hummmmm a hummm like it sounds like right now like it sounds right now just a buzz with a tone, a pitch. With just your voice rumbling in your throat. The mind can’t make sense of the silence; it needs to explain it so it hears something that’s not there.

She hears it all. She knows the silence, her mind makes sense of it. She splatters paint everywhere, you can see it on the walls of the diner, yeah, and yeah she painted the restaurant a mural one day and they all watched. Yeah, there’s a story. They all watched her do it because no one ever knew how or why she could produce such screams, such images from nothing. Artie wrote her a note, once, and what did she do? She closed her eyes, opened them right into his, right through his, and nodded yes. The next day she came with her tool box, it’s a red tool box, a little rusty thing with shelves that pop out like that congressman’s make up artist’s box. Red and crazy all over. Yeah, she just comes in and dips a wash towel into a creamy white and throws it against the wall. She hums a muffled song like this one you’re hearing right now, like this you’re hearing right now. She opens her mouth for the first time and all the regulars are just dumbfounded because they know the sounds she’s making: they remember when they held their ears and heard themselves speak or shout like that to try and ignore the pain, to let words and noises go by unheard and unfelt, because it’s better that way, right? They her working and look at their hands like they don’t know how she’s doing it because there’s a fork in their left and knife in their right and she’s throwing dishtowels against a wall.
She dips her hand into a darker brown and swirls in fisted into the pearl and it’s her milkshake waiting for her under the silver box with fifties writing behind the counter. Artie smiles, big smile. There’s a crowd all around and they know who she is, they’ve seen her on the local evening news and read little articles here and there about her shows and seen pictures of fancy looking sophisticates with goatees and New York City smiles with her under their arm. They know. But they can’t believe what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing; what they’re not. The deconstruction, what’s getting in her way? Nothing is getting in her way. It’s the absolute breakdown of a mind and the composition of its reconstruction– upon a wall that used to have phone numbers and FuckYous written on it.

That’s just like this, just like you’re doing right? There’s no one around you though. There’s no wall. It’s ok, probably someday…but why? Why do you need a circle of people around you who know you from articles and smiles and nods? Why?

She would still compose. She did it when she was, when you were, nine, yeah, and when no one was watching her, you, and she would scream like that into the painted echoes, like you hear now, when no one in the world could listen in the woods. In the woods by a lake where she, you, used to camp with your friends from school. There’s a hammock there she, you, would crawl into and sing that choked song. Hmm…

Yeah. Write her a note, write her a note like the guy behind the counter did, she’ll hear you. Scratch it like she would.

Would you still do this if no one were around? Would you still throw your mind and colored words onto paper if no one ever saw it? Would you?

Then, she splatters words onto the paper below the neat script with a charcoal. She pushes it in front of you but before you can read it she takes your head in her hands, they’re your hands, and she stuffs her, your, fingers in your ears and sings into your eyes. You know what that napkin says; you know what that napkin says. You know what she’s, you’re, saying.

“Yes. Yes I would.”

---

David Backer was born in 1984 in Danbury, Connecticut. His first novel, “Peace in Uncertainty“, can be found on Amazon (he hopes you’ll take a look at it). His fiction has appeared in Johnny America, Keyhole Magazine, Boundoff!, Skyline Magazine, and several other small places. He is the Language Correspondent for the TheRagingFace.com and he currently lives in Ecuador where he teaches philosophy at the American School of Quito.

---

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. His painting Composition VII is featured above.

Currently still convalescing from the intensive twelve year MFA program from which I graduated in the early 1990’s, and therefore still too delicate to write fiction of my own, I’ve dedicated my life to helping undergraduates tell their own stories. Well, I suppose I should say ’story’ as there’s really only one: It’s the tale of ‘No Name Depresso who lives Nowhere and has Nothing to Say.’ Occasionally, ‘No Name’ is called ‘Sarah’ or “Magda’ and has either an eating or multiple personality disorder. No Name, Sarah, and Magda are always sad and sometimes angry, but never hungry or happy. And it just so happens that all three girls, as well as all their multiple personalities, want to be writers. The young men have stories too, and it isn’t fair to pretend they don’t. These range from “My character who is not me got drunk and peed in a trash can” to “He watched with parched lips as the figure in blue lowered its musket.” Both genders contribute narratives about cyborgs, vampires, and Jesus, sometimes combining them into a kind of wacky postmodern Mod Squad.

For the most part, though, I enjoy the young writers and the cozy hostility of the ‘workshop’ environment in which we sit in a circle and eviscerate the silent author. My role is that of moderator, like James Lipton on “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” and I like to think that I share something of his startling (terrifying) composure. Even during the minor uprising against the quiet lisping young woman who’d written a fifty-page account of a Mormon missionary named Finnegan O’Malley entitled ‘The Sign of the Albatross,” I maintained my usual intense preternatural calm.

“Yes. It is somewhat improbable that Finnegan’s mission would have taken him to Moline, Illinois, but it’s also not implausible that this particular Moline might exist in some parallel universe, yes?”

I “share” my position as enabler of creativity with a colleague, which means that after years of being paid 98 cents a week to urge affable hung-over fraternity brothers to think of themselves as a ‘community of writers’ we were brought up out of the basement, relieved of Freshman Composition and the Bartlebyish title of ‘adjunct lecturer.’ To keep costs down, we were however reconfigured as “one person,” which meant that Monica, bright, sharp, and professional down to her stylish black boots, had overnight grown a comparatively idiotic Siamese twin. My other half casually took over the college literary magazine, which obediently turned over and won two national awards, writes and publishes screeds of her delightful poetry, and allows students (more than one at a time) to come to her lovely house where she provides them with food and love and support and her charming attorney husband with bail and DWI counsel. I still won’t let students come anywhere near my house because I don’t want them spilling red wine on the carpet.

Aside from sharing a position, I also share an office, this with my husband, who got me the damn job in the first place. He is rumored to be brilliant, despite his remarking to me the other day at breakfast that, when you think about it, human beings were never really meant to walk upright. Since it’s not enough for him to be brilliant on his own, he arranges for other brilliant people to come give literary readings.

The problem is that I never seem to want to attend any such gatherings. Our historic campus has a lovely, formal room in which to honor its visiting poets and writers and thinkers. It’s called The Oak Room and it has a crimson carpet and a glass chandelier, nineteenth century windows, and leather couches upon which the students recline slack-jawed with literary feeling. We the faculty sit trapped on folding chairs in the middle of the room balancing cups of fermented apple juice on our knees and gazing with eager idiocy at the speaker, in one memorable instance a Pulitzer prize winning poet who insinuated (in Latin and from beneath frosted swags of hair) that we were all a bunch of morons. In my darkest moments, while I’m sipping my fizzy apple nectar and nibbling on a silence shattering Japanese rice cracker, watching my students undulate on the couches and my colleagues emit rays of psychic intellectual kinship with the drone at the podium, I have to fight the impulse to confess my own doltish incomprehension, to shout, with feeling, “OOGA-BOOGA! OOGA-BOOGA!”

I am also somewhat limited as a professor of literature insofar as I can only teach one novel. Indeed, no matter what the course, or what is on the syllabus, I inevitably bring the discussion around to Dracula. “Suppose,” I say in hushed tones to a startled group of freshman, “Emily Dickinson was to have entertained Dracula in her bedroom in Amherst. The Count may have flown at her window, a great black New England moth, and thwumped the glass with his wings. ‘It’s Nature, Baby. Let me in!’” Then I’ll try desperately to get back to “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.” It’s the domestic side of Dracula that I personally find so adorable, despite the hairy palms. “And yet, he’s still scary as Hell,” I’ll re-inform my confused students, having digressed mightily from Heart of Darkness. “Why just last night I was afraid to get up and go to the bathroom because I thought Dracula was hiding behind the shower curtain!”

They think I’m joking.

Nonetheless, my reputation as a teacher has taken a wrong turn. The rumor that I’m “crazy” is something I’ve only recently discovered myself on RateMyProfessors.com. But if I were really “crazy” would I sit up there on the desk, swinging my feet, sipping my decaf latte, telling my bright-eyed freshman that “the word on the street is that I’m a lunatic, but you’ve got to be nuts to read The Awakening! Heh, heh, heh!” A few laugh back, nervously. (English is funny!) The rest copy the lunatic speech down in their notebooks verbatim and repeat it robotically at their Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings. Secretly, I’ve stopped reading contemporary fiction, fiction written by adults (in general), poetry of any kind, especially non-rhyming, critical essays, the New York Times, and all the classics (except Pride and Prejudice). That leaves me with Heloise’s Household Hints and Harry Potter, which I find is all I really need in life. I’m afraid I’ll be found out though. Already, my professionalism is, I am certain, being called into question by gimlet-eyed youngsters who come to class in their underwear.

They have cause. I remember one soft, autumn morning, a Tuesday, Tuesdays being reserved for scholarly research, along with Thursdays and Fridays, when I stood barefoot in the vegetable garden drinking coffee and feeling the breeze ripple gently under my nightgown. I had just begun to consider the possibility of planting ornamental cabbages when there sounded, from inside the house, an agitated ringing. With a dawning sense of urgency, precipitated by the memory of the twenty-seven student conferences I’d scheduled for my Introduction to Literature class, I rushed hobblety hoi across the lawn, dodging hickory nuts and angry squirrels, and burst into the kitchen.

“Hello,” I gasped.

“Hello,” I answered myself suavely, “I’m not home right now but if you leave your name, number . . .”

An accusing voice cut across my own: “Professor? This is Courtney K? I’m waiting outside your office? I had a 9:15 conference?”

“Courtney! I’m so sorry! I don’t know what day it is!”

“. . .I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” (Liberty Bell theme from Monty Python blares, ends with simulacra of flatulence). A moment of silence followed. Then, “I’ve got it,” in a low sinister tone.

“Pardon?”

“My essay on the Sun Also Rises?”

“Well done,” I said heartily. “Maybe we could just discuss it over the phone.” It has often occurred to me that this might not be a bad way to conduct literary business. Students could wait outside my office door and I could speak to them from my kitchen over some sort of speakerphone contraption. “Read me your thesis.”

“My what?”

“Your opening paragraph.”

“Modernism is a time of great upheaval and war and the taking down of all kinds of architecture and even changes in literature. Including Ernest Hemingway. When Jake tells Beth he loves her in the dark in Paris he is secretly mourning his lost impotence.”

“Never mind,” I told her, merrily. “Why don’t you just slip your essay under my door and I’ll write it myself as usual.”

“Look, you’d better get over here,” she announced grimly, “Everybody’s waiting for you.”

They were. I had to step over a mass of student bodies lying like wounded soldiers in the little hallway. A weak cry went up as I arrived and they rattled their essays at me, shaking them like empty cups. “Ah! The great unwashed! The teeming hordes of humanity,” I cried to them gaily. Then, head down and heedless to their protests, I hurdled my way into the office (I believe I had changed out of my nightgown but please don’t press me on this point) and locked myself inside. Bozo, a life sized inflated replica of the famous clown (my fifteenth wedding anniversary gift to my husband), stood by my desk, and I was thankful that someone was in charge. And yet, I’m not sure that he can keep covering for me.

Take last week, for example, (it was yesterday really, which is why I’m sitting here in the dark quiet of my basement curled up against the water heater) when a nice red headed young man in my advanced fiction writing class finally managed to catch me off guard. I had asked him to read aloud from his work in progress and he kindly obliged, narrating, in a thin, pleasant voice, the story of American dentist who takes his teenage son to Amsterdam as a graduation present. I was nodding along, lazily contemplating the way late afternoon sunlight illuminated the beer colored highlights in his hair and imagining a story in which a blue figure with a musket fires indiscriminately upon a group of depressed young women while an albatross with a crucifix around its neck wheels lazily overheard, when I suddenly and inexplicably began listening. “Hold it,” I said. “What was that about a nude dancer on a revolving table?”

It would seem that father and son, after smoking some hashish at a little bar on a cobbled street, venture out to see a sex show, whereupon the two of them, dizzy from observing the spinning, gyrating dancers, look at each other, roll their eyes, and throw up.

“They both have weak stomachs,” explained the young man earnestly. “It’s what finally brings them together.”

For many reasons, none of which I care to explain, I felt unable to respond with anything but a hideous giggle. The students, most of them solid, stolid, good girls and boys from the Midwest attempted to cover for me.

“Illness as metaphor?” suggested an ambiguously gendered individual in a ski cap and dark glasses.

“Or perhaps,” announced a rectangular-headed young man, presumably but not definitively a football player, “they’re vomiting up their own evil natures.” He catches my eye. “Like in Dracula.”

“But what I’d like to know,” I said, looking around brightly, “is if the two of them threw up in unison, you know, like synchronized swimmers?”

The students watched me politely for many minutes, these sad mute children of the corn, before, with hysterical gestures I finally managed to wave them away.

---

Barbara Jean Tannert is a writer living in Galesburg, Illinois. Her work has been published in Rose and Thorn, Paradigm and other magazines.

Don’t write a story about a writer. Editors hate that shit.
“Yeah, well, editors are vicious idiots. I’m surprised they aren’t demanding submissions be printed on toilet paper so they can wipe their asses with them before they stuff them into our SASE’s.”
Oh, that’s great. That line’s definitely going to get this story into a top-notch venue.
“Fuck ‘em. I’ve actually corrected the grammar in their rejection letters. I don’t think some of them know how to use ‘spell check’.”
Fine. You can forget selling this one, but—just for kicks and giggles—what’s it about?
“It’s about a writer who’s pretty much lost it. He’s been rejected so many times he’s insulating his walls with ‘sorry’ and ‘alas’ and ‘not suitable for publication at this time.’ And he’s a good writer, too. He writes this really bizarre, Zen and alchemy sort of stuff.”
Maybe that’s his problem. Why doesn’t he write what he knows? Why doesn’t he write from experience?
“Because he refuses to plagiarize life. That’s his thing. He’s convinced that reality is a work of fiction—he refers to God as The Author.”
And I suppose God hates editors, too.
“Oh yeah! Big time! All editors go to hell where they’re roasted on pyres of flaming romance novels. Then they’re eaten by all the ridiculous, slobbering creatures that ever popped like pus sacks out of Steven King’s brain.”
You’re insane.
“That’s the point! He’s completely lost it and he’s writing a story using everything he can think of that editors hate (like parenthetical asides). And, of course, he’s writing about a writer, which is what every writer wants to do (because they’re at their best writing what they know), but won’t because these prima donna gatekeepers have decided they don’t like it. Duh—ever heard of Gatsby? Most editors couldn’t write a grocery list if you gave them the Cliff Notes.”
Does the character say that?
“What?”
The part about the Cliff Notes.
“No, I think that was me. Anyway, he writes this story and it’s brilliant. It’s High Literature and seriously innovative.”
But what’s it about?
“I’m telling you, if you’ll shut the fuck up. So this story is brilliant, but he realizes it’s too damn good. They’re never going to get it. And then he has this epiphany, which is like a big realization.”
I know what an epiphany is!
“Sorry. Of course you do. Sometimes I mistake you for somebody else. Anyway, the epiphany is that all true artists are ahead of their time. That’s what makes them true artists. That’s why the really great ones die in the gutter.”
Like Poe.
“(Don’t get me started on Poe.) So he realizes that, being a true artist and ahead of his time, he’s never going to get this opus published. It’s just too far over their pointy little heads.”
The editors’ heads?
“Of course the editors’ heads, those fucking bastards! So he starts tearing out his walls to get to all those rejection notices he’s been using for insulation, and he goes through them to find out which magazine—which editor—has rejected him the greatest number of times.”
Which one is it?
“What the fuck difference does it make? It could be any of them—they’re all dicks. So he finds out who this asshole is that’s been steadily picking the heart out of his chest with a pair of tweezers, and he sends him this brilliant story that there’s no way in hell he’s going to accept.”
What’s the point? Why bother?
“Because—and this is where it gets good—he’s totally mad, I mean like deranged, and has decided that The Author…”
God?
“Right! And he’s decided that The Author has decreed that all rejection notices sent to him are actually death warrants signed by the condemned.”
So he kills the editor?
“Only if he gets the rejection notice.”
Well, does he or doesn’t he?
“How the hell should I know? I haven’t even sent the thing yet.”

---

J. Michael Shell is a writer’s writer. I was pleased to publish his story, and even more glad that by making this choice I avoided bodily harm.

I read the dedication only after finishing the last word on the last page of the book. I’ve gulped the novel down in one sitting, assisted by the uninterrupted nature of the trans-Atlantic flight and a poor selection of in-flight entertainment. I’ve read it almost too quickly; with half an ocean to go, I am by no means ready to part with the story and its characters. The novel is thought-provoking: after the main character is abandoned by his secret lover and witnesses the collapse of the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, he runs away to a remote Greek island to work as a fisherman and search for meaning.
Lingering with the pages of the book, I’ve read the author’s notes and postscript, in which he explains his naming strategy and claims that all similarities to real people and events are purely coincidental. I flipped back to the beginning and read the editor’s introduction, from which I’ve learned not only that the novel is based on real events, but also that the narrator’s words represent the voice of my own generation. Then, I read the dedication. It’s rather elaborate: the author thanks each individual member of his family; his mentors and editors; some friends in the hope that they would remain so in appreciation; his research assistants; people who gave him the grant to finish the novel; the owners of the B&B who kept feeding him breakfasts while he worked on the final chapters; and me.
“And last but not least, from the very bottom of my heart, I thank Zoe Olsberg, an unforgettable night with whom helped to germinate the idea for this novel.”
The creepiness of finding my own name in the book is thoroughly punctuated by the plane’s encounter with an innocuous air bubble that nonetheless causes several of my neighbors to scream in terror. When the cabin stabilizes, I read the page over from the “eternal gratitude to my mother” to “I thank Zoe…” This sends an odd sensation down from my back to my toes. I adjust my chair into the sitting position and flip the book over to look at the name on the paperback’s cover. The book is a loan from a senior engineer who explained the United Nations’ interest in the highway construction project in Macedonia over lunch before I headed out to the airport; she had just finished reading it and recommended it as good airplane fare.
“And it’s set on a Greek island!” she added, as if Macedonia and Greece were one and the same thing.
No matter how long I stare at it, the name on the cover reminds me only of the author’s popularity. I am 99.9% positive I’ve never met anybody from Greece by the name of Max, much less spent the night. Did my co-worker see the dedication and give me the book knowingly? After all, she has always taken an interest in my love life, and sending me out on construction projects in the countries usually devastated after decades of war, always offers tips on what I should be doing “for fun.” Then again, nobody can accuse her of being shy: had she noticed the name, she would’ve surely brought it up. Who ever reads long dedications, anyway?
My name is still there, printed in the standard serif on thick, grainy paper. I turn the page over. The trouble with gulping down novels is that they tend to evaporate from memory almost as soon as they are consumed. I reread the first page as if I had never seen it before. The words on the page seem familiar, yet, oddly so: not as though I have seen them eight or so hours previously, as the airplane reached cruising altitude above New York; instead they come from a distant memory, a thought that once flashed through my mind and never developed into anything solid.
“Distance,” says the man. “Distance between me and every other human being. It’s increasing. Every new person I meet, I am less and less able to talk to. The words don’t form phrases. And the things they tell me, I never know what to answer back. I always try to be the first one to say ‘Hello’ to people in the morning, because if they say it first, they use my word, I don’t have anything left to say. I used to have friends… I have friends now, but nothing to tell them. I meet them, we talk, I talk, talking has become a compulsion, I have to be always talking, but I never quite get to it. Look at me now, my eyes are watering, I am about to cry, I am in tears, as if I haven’t spoken to anybody in years. But talking is all I do, ask me a question, and I tell you anything you want to hear, much more than you want to hear, ask me a question, and you will be my new best friend. It is awkward to meet people, there’s always this distance that makes me so awkward, not me but my words, my words are always so awkward, it’s because I don’t really have anything to say. I’m not telling stories, I am repeating the stories I’ve told over and over again. There’s nothing original nor unique, there’s nothing authentic about me, it is all just language, words upon words, strung together, and not even pretty or coherent. Look at me, I’m seriously crying, and I’m completely sober, I didn’t have anything to drink, and I’m a mean drunk, imagine what would’ve happened if you poured me a drink. I’ll be thoroughly embarrassed in the morning, no getting around it for sure, it’s like a disease, words pouring out of me, words, and tears, and who knows what else…”
The man keeps talking to me in English, clear tears streaming down his bearded cheeks, and although he says a lot, he never seems to come to the point. He speaks in curt, broken half-sentences that strangely seem to run on and on in never-ending speech. There’s clearly an accent, but Greek, Czech or German, I cannot tell. He’s middle aged and well dressed, he’d fit much better into the business class cabin than here, at the back of the ferry, among backpackers and local families. Admittedly, it was I who started a conversation, taking him for a local and looking for advice about lodging at our port of call. And I did get a few useful tidbits from him (do not stay in Fira, go to Oia; do not agree to more than 25; check the shower) before our conversation was overrun by the stream of his badly put together confessions…

I reread the page several times before a plausible memory of a predawn conversation with a stranger in a Paris airport starts to emerge. In my mind’s eye, I am several years younger and only recently joined the ranks of traveling civil engineers. Unused to all the eventualities of air travel, I fell back on protocol when the unexpected occurred. If my transatlantic flight arrived in Paris in the middle of the night, I felt myself under obligation to wait at the airport for the early morning connection. Trying to save the agency money and time, I deprived myself of sleep. Even though I had not slept in more than 24 hours, I would still be unable to doze because of the close to freezing temperature at the empty terminal. There was one working heat lamp, and I paced around it through the night, swearing to myself that in the future I would not let my managers put me in this situation. Closer to dawn, a youngish man, the collar of his light sports jacket turned up, straggled his way up the corridor and joined me under the lamp, apparently the only heat source in this wing of the sprawling complex. In my reconstructed memory, he had a British accent. I would have said a lot of different things to him that night: talking is a great way to keep warm.
It would have been a very strange conversation between me and that man, especially since my perception was severely altered by the lack of sleep. I was en route to Belgrade or to Kathmandu or to some such place where I would have to interact with people in sign language. This added significant stress to my job, and caused discomfort even when my partners spoke some English. I could never be sure that they understood me, even when it came to the mission-critical tasks. Perhaps because I stayed on edge throughout the conversation, I would have talked wildly, pushing on him my ideas about literature; and he, falling in with my passion, described his dream engineering projects. Both of us would be talking of ways to overcome distance. In my state of heightened awareness, I could have shared with him my idea about how literature was the best way to travel, to traverse the space between places and people. In a novel, one crosses the Atlantic in a space of a sentence. Writers, I complained, are always overcomplicating things: why invent time-travel or space-travel, when essentially every novel ever written does that already? I shared with him my wish to have somebody focus on the distance that exists between people that could not be minimized despite any effort.
“Describe the distance,” I had insisted.
Side by side we would’ve walked in circles around the heat lamp, and only occasionally I would turn my head to see the silhouette of his back, the upturned collar of his jacket, his long black hair in the red light.
There is a face framed by strands of black hair printed on the back of the paperback, and it’s not at all difficult to imagine the straight long nose and high cheekbones belonging to the stranger in the airport. My sensation is that of a quasi déjà-vu recollection: the man talked about bridges. Flipping again through the pages of the novel I find nothing to confirm this almost-memory. The image that my mind draws has my chance companion speaking about bridges with fascination: an entirely new variety of bridges, flexible, floating constructions built on the water surface. They were to be built in sections and could move up or down at the will of the traveler or in an automatic reaction to natural stimuli. Because they would be floating in water, they did not have to be very thick, but could be very long. He imagined enormous Plexiglas bridges over oceans, trains zooming back and forth between the continents in the matter of hours.
“Why can’t you design that? Travel doesn’t have to take days,” he insisted.
The flight attendants serve our last helping of peanut snacks, which means we are going to be landing in Paris within an hour and a half. I turn over the pages of the novel warily, desperately trying to find any reference to the bridges floating on water—but in vain. My memory of this brief encounter at CDG is so fluid, without any beginning or an end; it seems much more like a dream than anything that could have occurred in that place of steel and glass. The next episode of that dream or a chance encounter disintegrates into a nightmare. The sun rises and the airport quickly fills with people. Two airplanes roll up to the terminal almost at the same time: mine, ultimately destined for Belgrade or Kathmandu and his to Athens. We watch them park at the adjacent gates, when suddenly there is a shudder, a sort of an earthquake, and then the steel beams that support the brilliant glass roof of the building folded as if the metal had been a hollow sheen. And in the next moment, my chance companion and I are thrown rudely and painfully into each other’s arms.

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Olga Zilberbourg is a fiction writer residing somewhere between San Francisco, CA and St. Petersburg, Russia. A collection of her stories was published in St. Petersburg in 2006. In English, her stories have been published in Thema, Faraway Journal, The Writer’s Eye, ezra: journal of translation and others. A longer story is included in a recent anthology from the Drollerie Press entitled Things That Go BUMP in the Night. She is also a Story of the Week editor at Narrative Magazine.

“I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future.”
–Marieta in The Garden of Eden

I.
From K-12 (and even today, now and then) my last name would be mistakenly written down or called out as “Hemingway.” — “You have the same last name as a famous writer,” I remember my second grade teacher, a smiling woman with big eyes, informing me.
I replied, “That is not my last name.”
She double-checked. “Oh. I see. Too bad.”
Too bad? She had no idea what she did to my fragile childhood ego. Why was it too bad? Was there something wrong with me now because I was not a Hemingway?
“Your name is close to a great writer,” an English teacher in ninth grade said to me. “Have you ever read…?”
“No.”
He gave me a copy of The Sun Also Rises. I liked the breezy dialogue but I did not fully grasp what was going on in the novel; I would not appreciate the story, and the writing, until a decade later.
I know that when editors and agents first see my manuscripts, they see “Hemingway” and think, “Oh no.” Several have told me this. My own books are shelved next to Papa, though, in libraries and bookstores. When I saw my first novel, in 1994, next to Hemingway in the Aztec Bookstore on San Diego State University, I have to admit my posture straightened with certain pride, and a smile slowly formed on my face. I was next to the master.
These days, I just wish I could sell as many copies as said maestro.
I am often asked if Hemingway and Carver influence me. I say of course. Many writers today are—it’s inevitable. Both are taught in high schools and colleges; teachers inform students that these men have written perfect short stories and they are gods of literature. As students, we believe this; as writers, we want to write just like these early heroes of the sentence.
The high school teacher who gave me The Sun Also Rises went on and on about how wonderful Hemingway was. So did an English professor in my freshman year of college—no writer was a greater writer than Hemingway, according to his mighty opinion; he was one of those community college pedagogues in his late 50s/early 60s with a chip on his shoulder, his voice booming and sardonic as if it were beneath him to teach this class—he should be at Stanford or Brown, goddmmit all. In fact, now that I remember, this professor sported a white beard just like Hemingway’s. Both of these teachers were writers; the former had poems in literary journals and the later had a collection of stories from a small press in the Midwest. Both, I realized, wished they were Hemingway—they wanted his life, his fame, his talent, his attention. It is not a bad thing for a writer to want, toss in a Pulitzer and a Noble and a bunch of wives, and you have made literary canon.
“In his 20s and 30s, Hemingway was virile and full of sperm,” said the college professor. Did he really say that? Yes he did. The dozen eighteen and nineteen year old young ladies in the class looked uncomfortable; some laughed; some scowled. “In Paris, he slept with many women, as many women as he could, because he was a man,” the prof claimed, “and he was looking for material. And it was all about stamina—he was out to prove he was a virile fellow, and he was.”
And I believed him. I had images of orgies and grandiose womanizing when I thought of Hemingway, on the scale of Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski in the novels Factotum and Women, the tough and sure author who could bed any gal of any age and background just because he was a genius of words and the birdies liked that.
Years later, I discovered the prof was exercising his fantasies. Hemingway was married while he was a Lost Generation guy in Europe; he may have strayed from the martial path once or twice but he wasn’t sleeping with half the women in Paris and Madrid as that prof had suggested. Did he have his facts wrong, did he make that up, or was that his deviant desire? Was he recreating a kinky Hemingway he wished himself to be? After all, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway passes on the possibility of sex with a comely model, when the painter Pascin offers her to him. It is one of the more memorable of the vignettes, where the twenty-five-year old Hemingway has a drink with Pascin and “two models who were sisters” that Pascin calls “the good and bad sisters” and that Hemingway describes as

young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with falsely fragile depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring. (102)

The drunk and wealthy old painter treats the destitute Hemingway to whiskey; within minutes the table talk turns to sex.

“Do you want to bang her?” [Pascin] looked toward the dark sister and smiled. “She needs it.”
“You probably banged her enough today.”
She smiled at me with her lips open. “He’s wicked,” she said. “But he’s nice.”
“You can take her over to the studio.”
“Don’t make piggishness,” the blonde sister said. (102)

But does he accept the offer, the macho womanizer of lore, with a wife waiting for him back at their hotel room? No; he goes off to write and Pascin admonishes him not to “fall in love with typewriting paper.” (104)
After that, I heard and read how Hemingway hated women, was a misogynist, was a macho guy who used women for sex and tossed them away. A female friend of mine, a writer, once told me she refused to read Hemingway because of his treatment of the feminine. “He demeans,” she said. She had never read a single word of the man’s work, but she had heard enough negative criticism from feminist and lesbian friends to know that Hemingway was a writer who would deeply offend her sense of the womanly identity. She had heard Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises was interpreted as “a heartless slut” (or so she heard) and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms “was killed off in childbirth for trapping the Hemingway hero into fatherhood, taking away his freedom.” I have heard similar sentiments from both women and men, whether or not they have read the books, from condemning the role of the female as “mere play thing” and “sex object” in For Whom the Bell Tolls (that college professor seemed titillated by “the nights on the hill”) to references of sex as a woman being “destroyed” in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
If The Garden of Eden is as autobiographical as assumed, and seems to be (as we know the majority of his “fiction” is) then Hemingway did explore sex with other women in Europe in those salad days, and feminists—first, second, or third wave—certainly have something to take issue with the “macho” texts of ol’ Papa. When asked what are my favorite Hemingway books, I usually say, “The top three are Sun, Farewell, and Eden.” Hemingway purists will take umbrage, since Eden is viewed by some as a travesty of the editorial hand, although I personally consider it as one of his finest works about human interaction in another time and place, despite it’s awkward transitions and abrupt ending.1 This is why I am focusing on that particular novel, as well as the long story “The Strange Country” and Hemingway’s portrayal of deviant sexual interplay between the men and women found in both. I could discuss such in a number Hemingway works, perhaps—while Brett Ashley’s promiscuity could be considered “deviant,” it is rather understated and not as eyebrow-raising as what is represented in “The Strange Country” and The Garden of Eden.

II.
“The Strange Country” is the last work in The Finca Vigía Edition of collected stories. Almost a novella, it comprises the first four chapters of an abandoned novel and an early version of where Islands in the Stream may have looked like. The two main characters are Roger and Helena; they have a May-December relationship. Helena is twenty-two and fourteen years younger than Roger, who is obviously an alter ego of Hemingway’s, as all his protagonists and narrators are. Helena wants Roger to call him “daughter” in an endearing and romantic way; Roger seems to be reluctant to do this (in that understated Hemingway way we have all come to know and love2), but gives in to her request:

“I like it when you say daughter. Say it again.”
“It comes at the end of a sentence,” he said. “Daughter.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m younger,” she said. (609)

“Poor Helena.”
“Don’t call me Helena. Call me daughter.”
“My poor daughter. My darling.”
“That’s a nice word too. You must’ve mix it with daughter though. It’s no good that way.” (611)

She also asks him, more than a dozen times throughout the text, if he loves her “yet”—this relationship is at its beginning.

“I love you, daughter,” he said. He did not think it was true. But it sounded all right as he said it. “I love you very much and I’m going to try to be very good to you.” (608)

The two are driving from Miami to Los Angeles, using assumed names—why this is Hemingway never reveals, maybe just for the excitement of it. They are not on the run. Roger is a writer (what else would a Hemigway hero be?) and he is apparently selling some of his work to Hollywood, which he finds demeaning to literature but necessary to make money and take care of his sons and ex-wives and maybe his strange new young lover.
The “strange country” is Helena, her body, sex with her, and more directly: her vagina. Apparently the two have not yet consummated their love affair, as insinuated in this passage where, interestingly, she refers to his penis as “he” in the third person:

He felt the silk of her hair over his arm and their bodies hard and taut and he dropped his hand on her breasts to feel them rise, quick-budding under his fingers.
“Oh Roger,” she said. “Please. Oh please.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Is that him? Oh he’s lovely.”
“Don’t talk.”
“He’ll be good to me. Won’t he. And I’ll try to be good to him. But isn’t he awfully big?”
“No.”
“Oh I love you so and I love him so. Don’t you think we should try now so we’ll know? I can’t stand it very much longer. Not knowing. I haven’t been able to stand it all afternoon.”
“We can try.”
“Oh let’s. Let’s try. Let’s try now.” (615)3

Her saying “we should try now so we’ll know” and his replying “we can try” is a pretty good indication that they have not made love yet, perhaps they tried before but were unsuccessful because Roger is, in her words, “awfully big.” This may be something Roger is not used to, thus the “strange” nature of it all.

In the dark he went into the strange country and it was very strange indeed, hard to enter, suddenly perilously difficult, then blindingly, happily, safely, encompassed; free of all doubts, all perils and all dreads, held unholdingly, to hold, to hold increasingly, unholdingly still to hold, taking away all things before, and all to come, bringing the beginning of bright happiness in darkness, closer, closer, closer now closer and ever closer, to go on past all belief, longer, finer, further, finer higher and higher to drive toward happiness suddenly, scaldingly achieved. (615)

This may be the most curious, and poetic, description of penetration, coitus, and ejaculation in the history of American letters, for which he is grateful and thankful and she replies: “I’m dead […] Don’t thank me. I’m dead” (615).4
The deviance is her wanting to be called daughter, and the possibility of her calling him father, or to be kinky, “daddy.” She never says it during sex, but this is Hemingway and we know he leaves things out of the text (wanting us to exercise our imaginations after all) and she could have, as he is too involved with his own feelings and thoughts, and if she did not say it, calling his “father” or daddy” during sex, she was certainly thinking it. She is aroused when he refers to her as his daughter and she thinks of him as her father, either fulfilling a fantasy, kinky desire, or re-enacting something from her past. There are any number of reasons that can explain and psychoanalyze her motives. She mentions that she has known him most of her life, and that his youngest son is too young for him so she must love him; when, at a diner, a waitress asks if she is his daughter, he says yes (627) and this pleases her, she goes along with the lie, although later admits to guilt over the deception, and asks:

“Could you have been my father?”
“If I’d begot you at fourteen.”
“I’m glad you’re not,” she said. “God it would be complicated. It’s complicated enough I suppose until I simplify it.” (630)

Complicated indeed, but not appalling or perverse to either of them.
She is still insecure, however, constantly asking him if he loves her—now, and if he will tomorrow and later. She says, “Wouldn’t it be awful if we were the kind of people who grated on each other’s nerves and had to have fights to love each other?” (625) One reason behind her insecurity is that, we learn through their dialogues, that she was once married to a British man who turned out to be homosexual; he married her for social reasons and everyone, including her family, knew he was gay and thought she did too, but she did not,. So she questions her ability to read men correctly, and when Roger lies that he loves her, she has no idea if his words are true or not.5 Another reason for Helena’s insecurity is their previous inability to have sex. Now that it has finally happened, she is worried she has not satisfied his desires; this is not unusual for a woman who is younger than a man and she knows he has had more lovers than she. She compares herself to all the women he has had; she wonders if he compares her as well.

Then later she said, “Roger.”
“Yes, daughter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, daughter.”
“And you’re not disappointed because of anything?”
“No, daughter.”
“Do you think you’ll get to love me?”
“I love you,” he lied. I love what we did he meant.
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” he said again.
“Say it once more.”
“I love you,” he lied again. (616)

He appears to be satisfied with her; there is no indication that he is not. Yet, when they make love a second time

it was a strange country again but at the end he was not lonely and later, waking, it was still strange and no one spoke at all but it was their country now, not his nor hers, but theirs, truly, and they both knew it. (617)

Even so, Roger knows that this love is a temporary one; it will never truly work, the age difference will be a problem. Like any true Hemingway hero, his one and only love is writing; no woman can ever come before that—he won’t allow it.

III.
A similar “strange” feeling towards sex, the insecurities of a relationship, and a fascination with deviance is the basis for The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s most erotic work. David and Catherine are honeymooning in France, “living at the Grau du Roi […] the hotel was in a canal that ran from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea” (3). David is a writer at the beginning of a promising career; he has published a novel about his experiences as a boy in East Africa6 and many stories; is receiving favorable reviews that his publishers mails to him overseas, and is working on several new stories as he deals with his wife’s gradual uncertainty of her sexual identity and her role in their marriage. She comes from a wealthy family and there is mention of a sizable dowry that is funding their trip.7
Eden is about a threesome. A young European woman, Marieta (or “girl,” as Hemingway refers to her8), enters their lives; they are attracted to her allure and she is attracted to the this handsome American couple with a sensual ex-patriot Lost Generation appeal. Indeed, as Eden was not published until 1986 and the Lost Generation has been romanticized by scholars, Hollywood, and history, David and Catherine appear to be parodies—caricatures—of the clichéd Lost Generation actor. They are smooth, oblique, unaffected, wandering from city to city, addicted to Pernod, talk, and casual liaisons.

“What are you thinking?” the girl asked.
“Nothing.”
“You have to think something.”
“I was just feeling.”
“How?”
“Happy.”
“But I get so hungry,” she said. “Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?”
“When you love somebody.”
“Oh, you know too much about it,” she said. (5)

It is questionable whether David actually does feel anything, because like Roger, he never shows any overt or sincere emotion, he seems to be going with the flow, saying what the women want to hear from him–words of love and happiness–while he is really preoccupied with what to write next, the next drink, the next sex act. But this is typical of all Hemingway heroes, is it not? Even when the other woman shares their bed, it is never clear if he truly enjoys this or if he could care less—this is simply another experience he will one day write about. He is rather cocky about it too, when considering a story he writes in four days and is “afraid that it could not possibly be as good as he believed it to be. The cold hard part knew it was better” (153).
Like Helena, Catherine is worried about pleasing David; she sees him looking at other women at the beach and around town; she believes that adding another woman to their sex life will make him happy. Marieta has a deep tan, she is “a dark present” that Catherine has given to her husband. “She’s your girl and I’m your girl,” Catherine says, and asks, “Don’t you like your present?” to which re replies,

“I like my present very much.”
“How do you like your future?”
“I don’t know about my future.”
“It isn’t a dark future is it?” the girl [Marieta] asked.
“Very good,” Catherine said. “She’s not only beautiful and rich and healthy and affectionate. She can make jokes. Aren’t you please with what I brought you?”
“I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future,” the girl said. (103)

Foreshadow! It is evitable Marieta will become a dark element of the future, What seems casual at first turns into a complication.9 Catherine is confused: she does not know if she is straight, bi, or lesbian. She questions her marriage to a man, his true interest in Marieta, and how it could be possible that she is falling in love with a woman while being in love with her husband. She admits to Marieta, “I don’t go in for girls” (105) yet she finds she enjoying the sex.

“That’s why I came here,” the girl said. “I thought that was what you wanted.”
“I’ve never had a girl,” Catherine said.
“I’m so stupid,” the girl said. “I didn’t know. Is it true? You’re not making fun of me?” (105)
Catherine wonders if she is a man trapped in a woman’s body—she does not say that, but it is implied and it is what she is thinking. She envies David’s penis (oh the Freudian!) and wishes to have one herself, so she can make love to Marieta with it the same way David does. She begins a transformation, wearing his clothes, cutting her hair very short, and trying to look like a “boy.” Of course, we are never clued in to what David truly feels about this—he is fascinated, yes, but does this turn him on or repulse him or is he just as stoic and disaffected as Hemingway’s prose suggests? Just as Helena mused that things would be complicated if Roger was her biological father, David and Catherine soon discover that all the liberal sexual experimenting and deviant behavior gets twisted by typical love and jealousy. “How can you lose with two girls,” Catherine says at the beginning (103), but later changes her tune; when she tells David to kiss Marieta and “make her a fair present” (103) she is not ready for the emotions she feels when actually seeing them together, as David “put his arm around the girl and kissed her and she started to kiss him and turned her head away” (103). It seems to be too much for Marieta as well because she starts to cry during the kiss. Marieta is not as relaxed about the threesome as she wants them to believe. She is having feelings for David; the two start to see each other without Catherine joining in.

…David and Marieta sat at the bar with two martinis. They looked at each other in the mirror, They watched each other very carefully and then David passed his finger under his nose while he looked at her and she blushed.
“I want to have more things like that,” she said. “Things that only we have so I won’t be jealous.”
“I wouldn’t put out too many anchors,” he said. “You might foul the cables.”
“No. I will find things to do that will hold you.” (141)

Deviant? Certainly. Kinky? Perhaps not physically, but internally; Catherine is not only trying to change her outward appearance, but her values and views of socially accepted relationships.

“I told [Marieta] everything about my new leaf,” Catherine said. “The one I just turned over and how I want you to love her too and can marry her too if she’ll have you.”
“We could in Africa is I was registered Mohammedan. You’re allowed three wives.”
“I think it would be much nicer if we were all married,” Catherine said. “Then no one cold criticize us” (144).

The situation, as much as the parties may or may not wish, does not end in bliss, despite Marieta’s observation that Catherine is “very happy and gay” (183).10 Emotions erupt; protectiveness and fear take over. David just wants peace and to finish the next short story, as Roger wants peace and money that Hollywood will provide for his writing. David and Catherine’s marriage is nearly destroyed; people are hurt; the experiment is a failure. Catherine says, “You can spend the rest of your lives together […] I have no further need of any of you” (191).

“All I want to do is kill you,” David said. “And the only reason I don’t do it is because you’re crazy.”
“You can’t talk to me like that, David […] You can’t say such thing. I won’t stand it. I’ll divorce you.”
“That would be very welcome.”
“Then I’ll stay married to you and never give you a divorce.”
“That would be pretty.”
“I’ll do anything I want to you.”
“You have.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“I wouldn’t give a shit,” David said. (223)

Catherine is the one who instigated the situation, who wanted it because she thought David wanted it, to please what she believes is his amorous cravings. Yet David, if I am reading between the lines correctly, knows the threesome will never work, he warns Marieta about “anchors” but never discusses the possible danger and pitfalls with his wife, just as Roger lies to Helena that he loves her and knows, from experience and in his heart, that the relationship with a younger woman is fated for doom.
In the end, David is left with Marieta and Catherine returns to the states; he has traded one woman for the other but knows things will never work for the best. All he really wants to do is write, and the last chapter finds David finding peace and bliss and he revises a short story he has been working on for five days. The biggest pain, the worst deviance, would be to lose his identity as a writer, to forsake his work as he did his wife. Roger has the same fear, and has lived through that pain—at the end of “The Strange Country” he finally tells Helena of an old wound, something she has been trying to pry out of him, how his first wife lost a travel case that contained his early work, originals and carbons all, “eleven stories, a novel, and poems” (648). This is a loss that has haunted him all his life, a deep scar.11 “I was in despair,” Roger says. “I have never been in despair before, true despair, nor have I ever had it since” (648). Likewise, David has never experienced “true despair,” but one might think he will, eventually, when he loses both Catherine and Marieta for good, when they become the scars of memory and when he sits down to write about them and that time in his life he will realize what an unusual gift he had, something many men would envy him for, and what he truly lost, just for a few moments of kinky sex.

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NOTES
1. The “culprit” is Tom Jenks, who was a young and ambitious editor at Scribner’s when the 1,000-page manuscript of Eden arrived at the offices, and he was given the opportunity to prove himself a gifted slasher of words, perhaps on par with his role model, Gordon Lish, the notable editor of Raymond Carver’s minimalist fiction.
2. Or abhor, in other cases.
3. The astute Hemingway reader will find this use of dialogue during amorous action reminiscent of scenes in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
4. This is similar to sexual references of “being destroyed” in bed in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Such suggestions are one of the reasons feminists have issues with Hemingway’s views of women and sex.
5. Some critics believe Helena is based on Martha Gelhorn. Helena has published stories and articles in leading magazines, which Gelhorn had when she met Hemingway. The ages do not match the real people, however, nor the chronology, but that is artistic license for you.
6. A section of the novel, left out of the final edit of the manuscript, was published as “An African Story” while Hemingway was still alive.
7. Some critics contend she is based on Hemigway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.
8. He refers to Helena and Catherine as “girls” in both exposition and dialogue. At one point, Catherine tells him, “Don’t call me girl” (27).
9. My fifth novel, The Dress (Blue Moon Books, 2002), soon to be a feature release from Ballen Films, was, I admit, inspired by Eden and the situations in the novel. The Dress is about a married couple who add spice into their relationship by inviting another women into their bed and lives. It is fun and exciting at first, but as both husband and wife fall in love with their lover, the future becomes dark. The story of threesomes always seems to be the same, Papa knew it as much as any of us who have engaged in such activities eventually learn.
10. An essay queering Eden seems to be called for, leading to interesting literary findings, I’m sure.
11. This is, of course, a true event in Hemingway’s life, the loss of his true first novel and some stories and poems, which he has written about in several works. There has been endless speculation as to whether this was true or hyperbole, if that novel was comparable to The Sun Also Rises, if Hemingway’s career would have been different had it been published, what to what value and import would it be to the literary world if those lost manuscripts were ever found and published. In Joe Haldeman’s The Hemigway Hoax, a time traveler goes back to rescue that suitcase with the manuscripts, only to find there are no manuscripts and Hemingway made it up to create a mythical literary fable, which it has now indeed become.

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Michael Hemmingson is a novelist, short story writer, literary critic, cultural anthropologist, qualitative researcher, musician, playwright, and screenwriter who has been called “Raymond Carver on acid” by literary guru Larry McCaffery and “a disciple of a quick and dirty literature” by the American Book Review. This essay is a chapter in his forthcoming book THE REFLEXIVE GAZE OF CRITIFICTION (Guide Dog Books).

Morgan Gibson(MG)
Ken Knabb (KK)
David Meltzer (DM)
James Brook (JB)

DM: Ken, you knew Rexroth in the sixties?

KK: Yes. Not very well, but I got to talk with him quite a few times. Morgan actually knew him a lot better.

DM: You also met him quite a bit earlier, Morgan?

MG: Yes, I was in touch with him in the fifties. I saw him extensively in the sixties and got to know him even better during his visits to Japan toward the end of his life.

DM: Ken, what made you write The Relevance of Rexroth?

KK: I think the answer is connected with the question Jim posed as a theme for this discussion: Why are the Beats still considered such a big deal while Rexroth has been so strangely neglected? In part, it’s a generation thing. There were the classic modernists, Pound and Williams and so on, and then the Beats — and, in between, there was a wasteland generation, and that was Rexroth’s generation. The sort of anthology that Rexroth would normally appear in doesn’t exist because nobody puts out a book called Poets of the Post-Classic-Modernist Pre-Beat Era. You couldn’t even come up with a good title. Rexroth and his few peers did not really form a movement. In retrospect, you go back and say, “Well, there was also Henry Miller, or Patchen, or this or that other poet.” But at the time these were just a few isolated voices crying in the wilderness, they were drowned out by all the New Critics and Stalinists and so on. It wasn’t until the fifties that you could look back and see that something had been building up. And then you see how much Rexroth had contributed to what was to come later. But until then he’s kind of out of it, there’s no pigeonhole for him.

DM: Many of the authors we interviewed acknowledge him as a forebear.

KK: It’s good that they acknowledge him, but it’s not enough. There’s something big missing there, and what I think is missing is . . . I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Situationists?

DM: I consider your Situationist International Anthology an essential reference.

KK: Well, as it happens, the Situationists were pretty much contemporary with the Beats and hippies (if you can consider the latter as two phases of a single movement). The Situationists looked back at different aesthetic movements from the Romantics on — Impressionists, Symbolists, Naturalists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and so on — and they saw these as successive stages of a kind of self-superseding of art. In each case, you could say it was a movement toward greater closeness to life, or relevance to life, or criticality of the medium, or criticality of the society they found themselves in. And in the fifties the Situationists contended that this development was at an end — that it had gone so far that no further possibility remained for art. To go further you had to go beyond art, you had to supersede art, bring creativity into everyday life — and into subverting everyday life, into revolution. The idea of just writing a different kind of poem had become meaningless.
While they were saying this in Europe, the Beats and hippies in America were pretty much oblivious of these considerations. But they inherited the same situation. In a somewhat confused, half-conscious way they were expressions of this same historical development that was merging art into everyday life. You might still write poems or songs, but there was a sense that this was simply part of your adventure, part of your life.

DM: It wasn’t a specialized calling.

KK: Right. So the Situationists are basically making the diagnosis that this can’t go further without bursting out of the aesthetic boundaries. And if you think about it, there has been nothing since then that we can qualify seriously as an aesthetic movement. There have been movements like punk, but they’ve been more a matter of lifestyle than of art — there’s been no real aesthetic innovation comparable to Surrealism or Symbolism or Romanticism. The Beats are the last artistic movement of any apparent significance. And even in their case, if you look at what gives them their continued notoriety, it’s more a matter of their lives than of their art. People are intrigued by Gary Snyder not because he writes good poems, even though he does, but because this is the guy who was a fire lookout and then went to Japan and learned about Zen. Or Ginsberg is the guy who took his clothes off in the middle of a public reading.
This is what I meant in saying that those poets’ acknowledgment of Rexroth is not enough. I don’t think Rexroth’s primary importance is as a poet, not even as a poet who had a political side. His vision implies going beyond poetry and politics, even if he himself wasn’t totally clear about all the ramifications of this. It’s ridiculous if he’s only thought of as a guy who wrote some very fine poems, and even more ridiculous if he’s only remembered as a guy who paved the way for a few later poets who are actually far less significant than he was. He’s a figure of historic stature, worthy of standing beside the greatest thinkers and visionaries of the past. He straddles East and West, nature and civilization, mysticism and skepticism, radicality and magnanimity. This is why I wrote that book. By going through Rexroth I was able to deal with all sorts of tricky issues — how can this thing be reconciled with that thing? I couldn’t have picked out any other writer, classic or modern, who would have enabled me to address so many of my own concerns simply by quoting him and then making a few criticisms in the rare cases where I thought he didn’t get it quite right. He covered everything. No one else did.

MG: He could have identified himself as a Beat, but he chose not to, out of integrity. I see him disagreeing with the Beats. I’m not saying all of this because I worship Rexroth. I think there are many flaws and contradictions in Rexroth’s work, but I think he’s quite distinct from the Beats in several ways. One is aesthetically, in that he is really a traditional, classical writer in many ways. He advocates anarchist action and revolution, but in his own personality, his attitude, his way of writing he is highly disciplined. His aesthetic is cubist, not surrealist. Conscious construction rather than the “free expression” that Ginsberg and Kerouac advocated. And he had a much better sense of the Western and Asian traditions, bringing that into the present work, the present writing, whatever he was doing. The Beats had a rather spotty sense of the background.
While we were driving over here I was ticking off the answers to that question of why he’s not very popular. First, he is a countercultural figure, but he’s really apart from the counterculture, since he’s such an elitist, an arrogant elitist. And most people saw him that way. I mean, they might admire him or agree with his anarchism but they saw him as an elitist who’s got the final answer. If you didn’t agree with his anarchism, he made sure you were humiliated. And then, how could most young people identify with a guy who seemed so old-fashioned in some ways? They might say, okay, in another age or another part of America, he might support us, but they couldn’t identify with such a traditionalist. Their radicalism was impulsive. It didn’t require theoretical knowledge. You didn’t have to know history to be a sixties radical. Some did, but you could be out on the streets doing your thing and not know anything about Kropotkin or Marx, whereas Rexroth insisted you had to know all of that before you formed your own position, and act accordingly. Another reason he was far apart from the general culture, though he spoke a great deal about revolution, was that when I knew him he was not really an activist. He told me in the mid-sixties that he wasn’t invited to antiwar demonstrations. They felt that he was above it all, and he did tend to pooh-pooh the politics of the times.

DM: Yes, he had that unfortunate attitude, which was off-putting. I remember as a young poet listening to his radio show on KPFA with other poets, and we used to listen to it at times just for laughs — this windbag just going on and on, all these proclamations, this is so, and that’s so. But again, that was our own youth and our own historical turpitude.

MG: I’m glad you said turpitude, because I think there’s an ethical difference. There’s a kind of amoral, hedonistic quality in the counterculture — there is also a heavy moralistic political aspect to the counterculture — but Rexroth’s morality is more complex. It is not the Weatherman or Maoist kind of dogmatism. On the other hand, it’s not pure hedonism. His ethics are philosophical and religious. His longer poetry and plays dramatize philosophical dilemmas. And he seems to swing between Buddhism and Western anarchism — and Catholicism. Do you know Father Huerta, his confessor, a Jesuit? A wonderful man. Sort of a worker-priest in the streets. He and Rexroth were very close the last couple of years. My background was anything but Catholic, I always had trouble identifying with that. But I think it enriched his idea of love. And love permeates all of his thought — the revolutionary ideas as well as the mysticism, the social philosophy, everything is permeated by love, a kind of Christian love. I think it’s the body of Jesus, the body of Christ that we are all supposed to be part of. I think it’s very much part of his mysticism, though he didn’t talk about it much, but it entered some of the poems. In The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart, for example. It’s in the Buddhist poems, too. He found Buddhism compatible with Catholicism. He saw Buddhism as a thing you do, a meditation practice, a contemplative attitude. It’s not a set of beliefs or a dogma.

JB: Rexroth talked a lot about San Francisco and the Bay Area of the time; that is, the late sixties, early seventies. And he would often refer back to the earlier era of Red San Francisco and the longshoremen and labor organizing. Haight-Ashbury was a working-class neighborhood, which is one reason things could happen as they did in the sixties. People did not move into the Richmond or the Sunset. They moved into the Haight. San Francisco is now a very different place, a kind of theme park of itself. Shouldn’t we talk about then and now, and why the scene is so different? The city started changing quickly in Rexroth’s last years, with the culture congealing into Reaganism at the end of his life.

MG: He used to say that San Francisco was on the verge of being the Paris Commune of America. I mean, he really thought that this was the beginning of utopia. He said it was the most radical city in the world. He just idolized it. And then when he moved to Santa Barbara in 1968, he said it’s all going into the sea. He thought the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene was the utter collapse of civilization. I think he identified the whole fate of the world with San Francisco. He admitted defeat. As early as ’65 he said, well, we’ve had it. This is it. We’re not going to make a utopia. Even the early poems sometimes say that, you know, we had this dream. It’s gone. We were the happiest men of our time. But it’s over.

KK: It’s not just San Francisco, it’s the whole society. A generation has grown up with the spectacle, as Debord says. Younger people have grown up in a world that’s almost totally dominated by the spectacle, they have no conception of what was around in the past, not even half a century ago.

DM: Yes, there’s been this continuous pacification and almost stupefaction from the tyranny of abundance that really seems to be short-circuiting any kind of political movement. . . . In the last period of his life Rexroth wrote some very interesting books, like Communalism, the Classics Revisited essays he originally wrote for the Saturday Review, translations from the Japanese, French, Chinese — a wonderful range and acuity and also stylistic availability.

KK: Classics Revisited is not only the best book about the classics, but if I was confronted by someone from Mars and they asked, “What is humanity about?” I would say that if you take that one book, you’ve got everything — all the potentials, all the tragedies, all the beauties, all the absurdities, all the different ways of looking at life, all the different stages where people have made a breakthrough in the sense of self, or community, or relation with nature, or what have you. It’s all there, in those little essays of three or four pages.

JB: That still slips past the question about how Rexroth drops out of the picture. You present an image of a fellow who’s written all these essays and popular articles for newspapers and magazines, who’s written poetry, who’s a very public intellectual . . . it seems like everything’s going for him — and then something doesn’t happen. Why isn’t it now available or interesting to people?

KK: I think he had some blind spots that prevented him from going a step farther and following up the implications of all these insights that he had. It would have pulled the rug out from under his aesthetic orientation. He had this notion that the poem was going to subvert people little by little. That it was more effective to be subtle, and not just use crude propaganda. He clung to the idea that artistic creativity was the thing that would hold things together even if society went insane all around it. I think the Situationists were right in questioning such an idea. This is not necessarily to say, as they did, that art is totally dead, but it’s not on the cutting edge anymore. The cutting edge is more like what the Situationists were doing. Rexroth didn’t make that leap. Had he done so, you would find people interested in him just like people continue to be interested in Guy Debord. Rexroth is in some ways wiser than Debord, but he falls short in this matter of not really seeing beyond art, not having a clear critique of the spectacle.

JB: I think that’s probably pretty true about the limitations of Rexroth, the outer limits of his thought and practice, but then you have people who are much more limited like Gregory Corso or Jack Kerouac and they have maintained their popularity.

KK: People like Corso and Kerouac are easier to assimilate, they’re very consumable. You know where they’re at. But Rexroth — nobody knew where he was coming from. You could not say this guy’s a beatnik, even though he’s very hip. You could not say he’s an academic, even though he’s incredibly learned. He’s sort of classicist, but he’s also a revolutionary . . . People don’t know what to think about somebody like that.

JB: So you’re saying that if Rexroth had been more than he was, he would have gone beyond the available categories and become more interesting to the public at large. Or if he had been less than he was, he would’ve been more easily consumable.

KK: Precisely.

DM: Morgan, what was your motive for writing your book on Rexroth?

MG: In Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom I tried to draw together the diverse directions of his work — anarchism, mysticism, and erotic love. I thought there would be a kind of unity to his worldview or at least a coherent set of ideas or values, and I tried to argue for that in the book. But recently in rereading his work, I think his ideas are much more diverse and cannot be explained in terms of a coherent theory or philosophy. Very well, he contradicted himself. As Ken said, Rexroth probably did not want to be labeled.

DM: I’m thinking of his introduction to the alchemical works of Thomas Vaughan and that A.E. Waite book on the Kabbalah — a whole branch of the Western hermetic tradition he endorsed in a sense by writing those introductions. How does that relate to contemplative Buddhist practice?

MG: That’s a big one. I don’t know as much about Western mysticism as I know about Buddhism, so I hardly know how to make that comparison. He was very much interested in Indian Vedanta as well as Buddhism, that is the non-Buddhist tradition of India. But I don’t know enough about St. John of the Cross or the other Western mystics to say anything very helpful. He had a number of holistic metaphysical experiences, he claimed, going back to childhood, where he sensed the harmony of the entire universe or all reality, universe and supernatural combined. He seemed to think that these intuitions were quite profound and they convinced him of a kind of spirit of love throughout the universe. Then the different mystical writers he read, whether Asian or Western, seemed to confirm that for him, or express it in different terms. But he didn’t need them to convince him. In other words, he didn’t read mysticism in order to have mystical experiences.

KK: I think he’s seeing all these things not so much in contradiction, like whether they’re orthodox or not, but as different perspectives on a fundamental reality. There’s a reality which is just part of being a human. It’s embedded in the brain or the psyche. It’s the foundation of all these visions and powers and conflicts and possible transcendences. He’s experienced it. Other people have. And they have communicated it in different ways. In that communication, somebody like Boehme or other hermeticists might be particularly vivid cartographers of these things. Other more orthodox mystics might be less imaginative cartographers, but then some of the orthodox people might express it well, too. Rexroth would try to point out how you have some Christian mystic doing this and some Japanese Buddhist doing that and then you have some atheist experiencing a similar thing over here — so you get a sense of the whole world or worlds in there or out there, or both at once, and that you can draw on any of it. It was as if you’re visiting Europe. He’d say, “Here’s a map of Paris. Check these things out.”

DM: I think that’s a good way of looking at it. So in a sense, then, it isn’t contradictory in the larger picture.

MG: I wanted to add, I don’t think he ever was seeking enlightened experience, like satori. He was quite unlike Kerouac and Ginsberg in that sense, who were running around trying to find satori, the secret, the wisdom. In his view it had already come. It had come to him. He had a number of these experiences that he thought were genuine and he was perfectly content with them. He didn’t need to induce an experience by drugs or by reading certain texts. In a sense, he felt he already had it, whether rightly or wrongly. And he didn’t need external stimuli. I think that’s a very basic difference with other poets who might be mystical or visionary.

KK: He did go out into nature periodically. I think it was partly to reconnect with that. I don’t think he went out there and came back from the Sierras and said, “I’ve seen a new vision.” It’s more like going back — he’s been through a bunch of turmoil in the city, so it’s time to go back to this place that’s always there. It’s in here, within you, but it’s a little easier to connect with it when you’re in the mountains.

DM: Also, of course, he’s a very underrated poet of that wilderness, that nature.

KK: An awful lot of his poems are about nothing but that. They look like they’re about nature, but really they’re about the transcendent experience — the unspoken thing — like Japanese and Chinese classic poems often are. The poem talks about the moon, the trees, there’s no mention of “me,” but there’s an implicit hint.

MG: There’s considerable interest in Rexroth in Japan because of his presence there. A lot of instructors teach Rexroth, proportionately more than in America. And through personal contacts, a lot of people met him and passed on the word to their friends. I can go to a university in Japan and someone will know his work or at least have heard of him.

KK: There does seem to be a revival of interest developing. Several volumes of his writings have recently been published in French, other people are translating him into Spanish, and the Rexroth material at my website has been generating enthusiastic responses from all over the world.

MG: I think we’re mixing two questions about poetry. One is why certain poets remain fashionable, popular, and commercial, which the Beats are, regardless of literary quality. Why are they published and popular and making money and so forth — as opposed to what keeps a poet’s work alive for centuries? I don’t know what makes fashions. Perhaps the Beats in five years will mean nothing to people. I just reread all of Ginsberg, whom I admired for years and years. Now I can’t imagine wanting to read him again. Whereas I also just reread all of Snyder and I want to reread him next year.
Where is the serious interest in the great literary traditions of the world — Chinese, Western, whatever? That has died, and with that collapse, Rexroth speaks wisely to us. I think people appreciate Rexroth seriously because he connects the plight of our world with the traditions. If you’re not conscious of the traditions and you’re not thinking that they might still be alive, you don’t grasp what Rexroth is talking about. When I read Rexroth’s poetry, for that matter when I read Pound’s or Eliot’s poetry, I started reading the poetry of the world. What readers do that today? How many people are aware of the world before their own lifetime?

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Ken Knabb is an American writer, translator, and radical theorist, best known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. His website is bopsecrets.org.

Some years ago, in some obscure book, you had come across a mention of – if your memory serves you right – a meeting between a woman without a future and a man without a past. (Or was it the other way round?) Anyway, this concept pops up in your mind now while you are sitting at your writing table, sipping your tea.
Suppose you yourself were to write a story revolving around this idea of a woman without a future and a man without a past? It is an interesting challenge and you are not one to refuse challenges.
You put down your tea cup, rest your head on the back of your chair, close your eyes and start thinking.
First, in order to have a story, you must have characters. If you have too many of them, they become difficult to handle. If you have too few of them, then interesting interactions between them cannot be built up. The ideal range for a short story is between three to five major characters. Of course, in a short-short you can make do with just one character too. Your story is going to be a short-short, you decide, and it will have only one character.
What sort of a character? A woman, age around 35, single. Your character must have a name. If you do not want to show your character as belonging to a particular region of the world or to a particular religion, it is better to use as non-descriptive name as you can think of. How about calling your character Jayrus?
Next, you need to come up with some unique character traits for Jayrus. Here is one: she is a misandrist. She hates the male sex with a passion.
You now have your character. How does the story proceed?
It is good technique to let some of the happenings in your story parallel the happenings in the outside world.
Jayrus is a writer and one day, while reading an anthology of fantasy stories, she comes across a mention of a meeting between a woman without a future and a man without a past.
The idea fascinates Jay. Suppose she were to try and write a story around this idea – a story totally different from the one she had read? Why not? She will write such a story.
She starts thinking. No idea for a story comes.
She continues thinking. No story.
She goes on thinking. Blank.
She starts going wild. She must write a story. She must. She is now obsessed with the idea of writing the story.
Here is another detail to be added to the character sketch of Jayrus. She is an obsessive woman.
Very good. You are doing fine. That makes two kinks in your character. (The first kink, if you remember, is the fact that she is a man-hater). The more kinks in the psyche of your character, the better. This sort of thing is “in” these days.
Okay. Back to the story.
Jayrus is obsessed with the writing of a story on the aforementioned theme. It fills her thoughts. Her days are spent in brooding. Her nights are filled with vague nightmares.
Then one day, at the time when day meets night, she makes a fervent wish.
“I cannot stand it any longer,” she says. “I wish something would happen… anything… to give me an idea for my story.” And, thinking these thoughts, she goes to sleep.
And the Powers-that-be hear her wish and grant it. Something does happen that night.
The next morning, Jay’s horrified screams fill the house. Some time during the night, Jay has been turned into a man. Some time during the night, a woman without a future had become a man without a past.
Here then is an idea for the story, Jay’s and yours.

“Tell me about your book,” says Kitty, stroking the cat lying upon her lap.

“The book is a Menippean satire, with countless lowlife characters, a Satyricon for the twenty-first century, the influences are Petronius, Lucian, Rabelais, Sterne, the bible, Gogol, Joyce, Max Miller, Norman Wisdom, Benny Hill, Donald McGill and the Beano,” I say full of ebullience. But I’m lying. I’ve only filled half of a page. Maybe she will read it and help me. Kitty yawns, Carter yawns. “Tocqueville,” I call, pointing teasingly with my forefinger. Tocqueville jumps off Kitty’s lap and lazily walks over to the point, he sniffs, intrigued, but realizes that there is no reward and goes off in a sulk. To change the subject I say, “On the pyramid of the moon thousands were sacrificed to placate the gods but still the rain fell on Peru and with the rain their civilization fell but Vico and Spengler could have told them about how civilizations inevitably fall without all the blood shed and tears.” Kitty watches Tocqueville and grunts. Sometimes Tocqueville disappoints her.

Kitty says, “Silly Carter.”

“Do you want a beer?” I ask. I know I want a beer but I’m not too sure about Kitty.

“No,” says Kitty.

“I’m going to have a cup of tea,” I say.

“Do me an ice tea, no ice,” says Kitty. The peccant cat follows me into the kitchen meowing constantly.

“Feed Carter,” says Kitty.

***

There is nothing on the television, which always depresses me, I think I will watch cable news, twenty four hour news how can you be depressed, we are lucky, it is the best of ages, simply the best, we have anything we want and need. There is a knock on the door, I wait coolly for Kitty to say, “The taxi’s here.” She doesn’t say the taxi’s here, instead she says, “It’s for you.” We are going to a very important celebration of the Arts at the McGlohon Theatre. I am looking forward to the cheese and wine. We are very excited, we hope to meet some very important people. I am wearing my best suit and Kitty is in pearls. We hope to impress. Intrigued, I leave the safety of the bedroom and lugubriously saunter down the stairs to the front door.

“He’s here,” says Kitty and walks away from the door.

It is Kowwowski. He lives underneath us.

Watching Kitty walking away I realize that she is a phantasmagoria. She is not the only one, everybody is that hangs around me, Tim, Macy, Larry, Beth, Carol and Carter, they are nothing more than pencil marks. My neighbors that I never see are also spooks, they make noise but I never see them, the people that hold me up when I buy my coffee are ghouls, the old lady that I stand up for on the bus so that she can sit is nothing more than a sheet undulating giving the impression of life, the driver that cuts me off is only a simulacrum, the lady on the other side of the phone is nothing more than altered wind, those people that email me, robots. I ask myself is it only vicissitude that plays with me, is it the same sheet undulating, only Kowwowski is concrete.

“Be quick,” says Kitty, “the taxi will soon be here.” Kitty turns off the television.

Sometimes we leave the television on, we believe the noise scares off burglars, I think sometimes Kitty leaves on the television for Tocqueville. “It’s only Kowwowski,” I say. “I hope you have a few dollars for the taxi,” says Kitty. I check my wallet, I have two twenties.

Kowwowski looks sick. This is not incongruous, everybody has the façade of sickness. It is the fear. We are living in the red. I could be looking in the mirror. That hue of green and yellow, the furrowed brow, the chapped skin, the dry lips.

“Tybalt, I need to ask you a favor,” says Kowwowski.

***

I am always on 485, always caught in a traffic jam, always going north, always going south, always listening to the radio, always seeing crosses made of flowers indicating death, always cursing, always careening to miss the object in the road, always guessing what the road kill is, always dreaming of stars looking the shattered windscreens, always thinking about the broken down cars, always dreaming of helping, always watching a man stroll with a petrol can in his hand, is a killer, a loser, a bum, an office manager, always wishing that I wasn’t on 485, always wishing I had stopped at McDonalds before getting on 485, always filled with fear that a drunk is behind or in front of me, always scared that the truck’s wheels are about to explode, always on the look out for the cops, always speeding, always cutting in front of other drivers, always eying the other drivers, always wondering where they are going, where they have been, what they are like in the sack, are they junkies, have they got a gambling problem, how much money they have in the bank, why they pick their noses, who they are talking to, wondering why they have not crashed and smashed their heads open and split their brains when they are applying lipstick, I am always wishing the cops would appear and pull over the sportscar, I am always on 485, always blinded by the trucks, always wishing the sun wouldn’t blind me, always hoping the rain would stop, always cussing, always smoking, always desiring a cool beer, always honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk honk, always hoping for something incongruous, always hoping to yaw, always lunting, always, always turning the dial, always pressing my foot down on the gas, always on 485.

***

“I’m depressed,” says Kowwowski.

“We are all sad!” I shout. “That’s life! The Greeks were sad! The Romans were sad! It’s nothing new. The Greeks had a bull. The Brazen Bull it was called. Its inventor was a man by the name of Perillos. It was for criminals that had offended the State. The offender was placed inside the brazen bull. It was life like in size. Under the bronze bull a fire was lit. It was a slow death. Reeds would be placed inside the bull’s nostrils and this amplified the offender’s wild screams. The screams could be heard throughout the city. Terrible. It was a very slow slow death. And we call the Greeks the inventors of reason. Begin inside that bull would make you sad, but I don’t see any bulls on Trade and Tryon.”

***

I am reading Rabelais, lying on the bed.

“Hey Tybalt,” says Kitty.

“What do you want?” I ask, not skipping a word.

“You’ve left me a present,” says Kitty.

“Happy birthday, babe,” I say not skipping a word.

“You best get in here and flush,” says Kitty.

I know that I have to put the book down and climb off the bed and go into the restroom and flush the toilet. It is hard work to climb off and back onto the bed and pick up the book. Wait, something perplexing stops me from reading.

Kitty is still asleep with her bottom sticking up in the air. I put down the book. Kitty is pushing out those Zs. I pick up the book and started to read again. I stop and put the book down, I can’t get my head around it. I’ve had too much caffeine.

Kitty stirs. She turns and smiles and says, “good morning.” Not wanting to alarm her I say good morning.

“I need a cup of coffee,” says Kitty yawning. “Let me finish this page and I’ll make you a cup of coffee,” I say picking the book back up. Kitty yawning slowly climbs out of the bed. I watch her over the book enter the bathroom.

It comes to me this time, clear, simple even. I had entered the not yet. Not yet happened. My mind is being blown to bits. I was in the future. I had been in the not yet and now she is, we are, it is all too much.

“Hey Tybalt!” calls Kitty.

“What do you want?” I ask knowing the answer.

“You’ve left me a present,” says Kitty.

“Happy birthday babe,” I say, not believing my ears.

“You best get in here and flush,” says Kitty.

***

“What’s for tea?” asks Kitty.

I’ve not had time to cook so I answer, “Red Lobster or Applebees.”

“Carter! Carter!” shouts Kitty making her way into the kitchen. “How many pages have you accomplished?” asks Kitty still looking for the cat.

“One,” I answer.

END

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paul kavanagh is happy. his wife is happy. together they are happy.

Q: Chelsea Martin, your story “Dream Date” that appeared in Diet Soap was amusing and ironic. Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian scholar and Lacanian Marxist theorizes that the supposed critical distance, irony, or critique of Stalinism found in Shostakovich’s Symphonies is an example of how ideological art must both contain a commitment to a party line and also a critical distance from the same. Zizek posits that this same ironic distance, this failure to believe, is a central element for successful adherence to today’s primary ideology of liberal multicultural capitalism. Do you feel that your little jokes may make you complicit with the capitalist system of self destruction that dominates us every day?

A: Hmm. Dominates as in ‘dominates’, or dominates as in ‘gently guides’? I think in terms of capitalism and self-destruction, Dream Date is probably a manipulation tool designed by society through me to make people feel more comfortable about the confusion they feel about interactions within sexual relationships and misconceptions about the feelings caused by those interactions. And I guess if one feels comfortable with these types of feelings then it does not feel important to overcome them, which may perpetuate feelings of awkwardness and mental retardation. But I think the ironic distance is just the twelve or fourteen inches of space that two people leave between one another even though physical contact is pleasurable. Also, yeah, ideology. Actually, I don’t know if I understand the question.

Q: What is the “Whatever” in your book’s title?

A: I forget. I think I thought of it while I was walking across the Golden Gate Bridge for leisure and casually contemplating mortality.

Q: Did you create the cool picture on the cover of your book?

A: Yep.

Q: I understand you’ll be in Portland and Seattle on April 6th and April 7th to do readings. Where and when exactly should people show up?

A: Here is the flyer. I haven’t been to either of the two places. I think just show up at the time it says and sit down in stool or whatever and look around and when you finally figure out which one is me, just sit there and look at me. I’ll be there with my thirteen-year-old brother. You can order some alcohol if someone approaches you and asks if you want something, or if you feel like getting up and finding someone who will give it to you. You can pretty much do whatever you want, actually. But remember, it’s the 7th and 8th of April, not the 6th and 7th.

Q: I notice that the girl on the cover of your book is in Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit. Do any of the stories take place in outerspace? Is one of your stories about a girl who sneaks into Neil’s house and steals his memorabilia? Do you think the USA will ever send people to the moon again? Who will we send first do you think?

A: Yeah. Well, no.

Q: Do you believe that the primary cause of today’s economic crisis should be understood to be the deregulation of the financial sector and the decades long transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich, or are you under the impression that our economic undoing is more directly connected to real resource depletion? Do you consider yourself a doomer, a neo-liberal apologist, a militant socialist, a fan of Shostakovich, or something else?

A: I’ve been feeling abused by the upper-management at work because they’re all, “If you lose your job you’ll never find another one, you’re pretty scared, huh? We’re decreasing your hours and hiring some new people, are you scared now? Smile harder at the customers and be scared, we have a pile of qualified and charming applicants in the back office near the hand sink that you need to go scrub immediately, do it hard and make it shiny or else.” I consider myself a Diet Soap author.