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.

---

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

---

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.

Use the transcripts of your online chats to inspire dialogue. Speculate how he may have behaved had this conversation been face to face. Would he reach out to touch you? Would his green eyes flash with lust? He is not yet yours, but you are free to assign him whatever desires you wish. Create a narrative from what was once uninspired chatter. But he can never know, he is not like you. You are free to submerge yourself in his words, in him, but you must do so alone.

Remember the hot stab of jealousy you felt when you saw him trolling for sex on one of those coldly accommodating websites. You gazed at the photograph on his member profile and the low, purring voices of all the men who would pursue him flooded your mind. You wrote to him just to make sure in that moment he was not writing another man. Use that pitiful desperation! Spread it across the page like thick, dark jam. Punish your readers with the sickening realization that if he indeed found another man to fuck, he wasn’t thinking about you.

Recall with numbing shame all those senseless, endless, merciless messages you wrote him while you flip-flopped from one sham reality to the next after gorging on speed. Accept that your memories of his increasingly bewildered replies are forever dim and toneless. His repulsion at you exists in a vacuum. It’s a junkyard walled in glass—there’s no way in or out. You wasted so many words on him, manufactured mere noise. But you will not make that mistake now.

Of all the transcripts you’ve saved, there is one you believe mimics the structure of a story without any desecration from you. Your final “real” chat. You messaged him impulsively that night, before the speed had shattered your personality completely. He demanded you be honest with him. He spoke of the one time the two of you met in person and compelled you to revert to that same boy you were then. You succumbed. You confessed your pain and your loss, feverishly pounding the keys, a junkie for whatever he wrote next. Yes, this combat of wills makes a perfect story: opening hook, rising conflict, unexpected climax. When he confided that your openness aroused him sexually, gratitude bloomed inside you like a cancer.

Coincidence! The scourge of all fiction! Your chance encounter with him, and it is lost to you. How to tell this story without including the mad, mad randomness of it? Impossible! You cannot use this anecdote. You cannot tell your readers how he grabbed you as you sped past him, oblivious. You cannot tell your readers how you gaped dumbly at him, he was so much more handsome than his photo had promised. You cannot tell your readers how he seemed almost shy to finally speak with you. You cannot tell your readers how stupid, stupid, stupid you feel (still feel!) for letting him retreat into the flesh-ridden halls of the bathhouse after you foolishly let a prior commitment whisk you away from him. You cannot tell your readers any of this. Try if you wish. You will fail, your story will fail.

You can only tell one person how this absurdly brief encounter touched you. You could perhaps call him. Maybe write him a message. But he is weary of your words. You wrote in haste, you wrote in panic. And now he wishes you to write no more.

This is not a story but this is the end.

END

---

Thomas Kearnes is a 31 year old writer from East Texas. His fiction has appeared previously in Night Train, Pindeldyboz, Blithe House Quarterly, Parting Gifts, Thieves Jargon, The Pedestal, 3 AM Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and Bound Off, among other journals.

In his bookshop, a small store stuck in the side of a bluff, he catalogued and ordered books as he thought they should be ordered. Loras received his books with solicitation slips titled “Non-Fiction” or “Fiction” or “Biography” or “Children’s Books” or “Pornography” or “History” or “History of Sports” or “Sports” or some other such nonsense; he’d then throw the slip away and read the book himself. He decided that a bookstore’s owner should be the final arbitrator of how a book, in fact, should be listed. If it was solicited as Non-Fiction and wasn’t really Non-Fiction, he would decide what it’s intent really seemed to be and then catalog it correctly. If it attempted to be Non-Fiction, he would put it under “Attempted Non-Fiction.” If it masqueraded as Non-Fiction and was really the bullocks of the beltway, he would put it under “Marginally Correct Works of Argumentation.” This section, in particular, had recently grown pretty full. And, ultimately, things were fine, until one day they weren’t.

Sometime in the last few weeks or so, his books began to be shifted about. He’d started to find things out of order, like bound editions of Playboy had gotten mixed in with the pornography and such. He’d fix it and then fix another one the next day. The shop seemed to be having steady convulsions.

As he put the books back, he couldn’t help but think about his father. His dad was a man of integrity. His dad, at least from what he remembered, was a jerk. While shoving the books into their appropriately awkward places, one memory in particular made him smile. He was visiting his father’s candy shop just off of Main Street, around the corner of the more respectable businesses in Galena, when his father, he recalled, got into an argument with a customer over where the taffy apples were sitting. The annoyed man started the argument because he thought they were sitting in a strange place and couldn’t find them when he’d first walked into the store.

His dad told the customer to fuck off. It was the first time he’d heard his father cuss, and the memory made Loras’s chest tingle. Cursing, no matter the situation, no matter who was doing it, was never allowed at home. After the customer left, Loras’s father came around the register and sat down beside his son.

“Look,” his dad said, as he stared upwards at the plastic-coated register, “I know we’re not supposed to use those words, not at home anyways, but sometimes you have to use ‘em. You can’t let people bully you around. This is my shop, and I’ll do things the way they should be done … fuck ‘em. Candy apples go beside the chocolate bars, in the back, because they both have wax in them. They’re both waxy, so let ‘em sit together.”

“Okay, Dad.” Loras replied, pleased with his father.

“I could probably sell more of ‘em if I set them in the front window, easier to see and everything, but you know what, our store window points southeast. The friggin’ sun would be beating down on them all day and would probably spoil ‘em. I’d have to replace more apples than I’d sell, so where would the store be after that? People don’t think, Loras. Don’t be those people, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

The older man stood up and grabbed a purple-coated apple from the back and gave it to his son. As Loras grabbed for it, he saw the dark creamy coating, shiny as his mother’s crystal glasses at home, start to slide off of its sides. Loras noticed, as he looked behind his dad, that the apples were sitting beside the fudge oven.

***

“Kim, have you noticed any books out of order lately?” Loras asked. “Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been finding books in the strangest places … I know that I haven’t been putting them there so …” The thought dangled with inferred blame.
Kim, a short oafish girl, was hired to work the register about a year ago. He liked her and thought she was sweet, if not bright. Lately, he began to worry that she’d been taking some initiative with the books. Occasionally, customers came in and read a few paragraphs at a time and then sat the books down on a chair or something; he’d told her not to put the books back, but to pick them up and put them near the back end of the store. Every few hours, he’d go and clean up the books and place them into their proper spots. Of all things, Loras was concerned that she was trying to be thoughtful. He didn’t want her to be thoughtful; he wanted her to work the register.

“Really, I hadn’t noticed, certainly a possibility.” She answered with a blank look on her face, a look that Loras thought endemic to her part of the population. “Don’t you think that, maybe, customers have been putting them, well, in the wrong place after they’re done?”

“No, no, I don’t think it’s that … at least I don’t think it is. How hard is it for a person to put the book, the book they pulled out, back into the empty slot they originally found it in?”

“You put a lot of faith into our customers, don’t you?” A small grin crossed her face. “You know, what with all of these books out of order or, at least, in your order and everything. You know? I’m just saying.”

“Actually, I don’t put hardly any faith into them. I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed that every book is logged into the computer … they can search our system like they could at the library. It’s just our books are listed under slightly more accurate headings …”
He paused, hearing the doorbell ring a customer into the shop, “just keep your brain open to what’s going on. I can’t have books out of order; the place would fall apart.”

As he walked away to greet the customer, a few words fell out under her breath in response. It was sad, he felt, that she just couldn’t seem to get it. He just asks people to think a little bit when they come into the shop. It is, after all, a bookstore.
Kim came from Chicago, maybe that’s why she didn’t get it. She’s too in a rush to get everything. In Galena, the pace of the place lent itself toward reflection and tourists-turned-townies didn’t seem to grasp that aspect of it.

He walked to the front, sliding his fingers along the bookshelf that hid the register, thinking about her lack of adjustment. She fell out of his view, though, and was forgotten as soon as he turned the corner.

“How are the slopes today?” He asked the small man wearing a ski jacket.

“What? Oh, this? This is just my jacket. I don’t ski.” The man said as he stared around the front of the shop. “I just like the jacket.”

“You know we have a ski resort just outside of town; it’s on a slope hanging over the Mississippi.” Loras said, while trying to be friendly. “I hear it’s very nice, and they even set up fake snow for the fall.”

“Yeah, I heard it’s nice. But, you know what, snow skiing in Illinois just sorta sits funny with me. I’d rather go someplace west for that … you know?”

“But you don’t ski.”

“No, I don’t … but if it did, I wouldn’t do it in Illinois.”

“But you don’t ski, so what does it matter?” Loras, perhaps stuck in a bit of stunted thought, kept saying. “You’re from Chicago, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, so, everyone outside your storefront’s probably from Chicago. It’s kinda what this place does, doesn’t it?”

“Not this place … maybe the town, but not necessarily, at least, this place.” Loras replied, while moving forward, sliding into the man’s personal space. He could smell cigarette caked over the guy’s ski jacket.

The Chicagoan paused and with an inverted Southside accent said, “…you’re a strange duck, aren’t you?” Loras had learned the mouths of these people a few years ago; the Northsiders were buyers, and the Southsiders were complainers. The man’s mouth fell somewhere in the middle. “How about I buy this place off of you, so you can go be strange off of the main strip? I’d make a nice offer, but only if I get you outta here.”

He grinned. Loras asked him to leave and told him to fuck himself as he left.

“Loras, I’m not sure if you’re supposed to treat and/or talk to customers that way.” Kim yelled through the bookshelf. “Of course, it’s not my store.” He could hear her still grinning on the other side, as if her mouth and jaw muscles were contracting with delight.

“Kim, you have to stop putting books back yourself.” Loras said a few days later. “I know you’re trying to be helpful, and I appreciate that, but it’s not helpful if you can’t get them in the right place.”

“I don’t put them back … I do put them in the back though.” She giggled at using the word back in two different ways; Loras thought she was a strange girl. “… I don’t even do that very often, not many people come in here on a regular basis … you know with that whole not being able to find the book they want thing goin’ on in the store. It kind of keeps people from coming in here very often, you know?” Her shoulders went up for a shrug, but stopped halfway through the movement.

“Thank you for that …” Loras responded, standing beside the counter he’d sat behind when he was a child. Kim was oafish, but he noticed that she managed to be accidentally pretty once and awhile. He grabbed a lollipop out of a jar on the counter and gave it to her. “Maybe you’re right, but maybe it’s the new store in town. Did that cross your mind? It’s a huge bookstore; I’m sure it’s hitting our business. Why wouldn’t it? If you think about it, it makes sense.”

He smiled at his answer. She mumbled something about the two stores being in different markets, but he ignored the mumble and began cleaning the shop. The store, for some reason, collected dust on the bookshelves and countertops like cotton candy on a paper stick. He cleaned and he thought; he thought that the new store in town should be seen by its main competition in town; he thought the two should meet and stop waiting to meet, and he decided that he’d be the one to abridge the wait.

“I’m going to go to their store.” He said, while still dusting a bookshelf near the front. “Start closing up the shop for the night, okay?”

“You probably should do that …” Kim yelled over the bookshelf. He heard her, but ignored the call.

***

It was late autumn when Loras decided to have the meeting. The streets were packed with different sorts of luxury cars, cars that this season seemed give birth to, and people that the seasonal winds seemed to blow into town; it was strange, he thought, the winds were always blowing eastward, but these people always came from the east. It was somewhat of a conflicted stance for autumn to take, but it was, nevertheless, the stance that the season took.

He found his car jammed between some black German thing and another silver Japanese thing. Until about fifteen years ago, he hadn’t been a very good parallel parker. Once the onslaught of tourists started to flood the town, he mastered it pretty quickly. He was adjustable in that way. Once he wedged out, he drove down the main strip and, for once, glanced at all of its foliage, clustered buildings and people as he went. He realized, for a moment anyway, why the Chicagoans visited the town; it was quaint looking; it seemed nice; it looked to be everything that everyone thought the turn of the 19th century should be.

It looked that way, pretty much, until you caught the hook at the end of Main Street. The hook threw you up over the bluff and into the strip malls of the less talked about part of Galena; the place where people actually lived. Kim lived out there too. After she moved here, believing that all things beautiful resided and collected in the downtown of this town, she found out that the storefronts were just stylized hollowed-out old buildings; people worked out of them, but nobody lived out of them. She checked the realty papers for Georgian homes, but found out most weren’t homes anymore. They were little colloquial motels, little B&Bs, little places to sleep for a night, but not for a life. The Chicagoans that moved here, ironically, often found themselves completely lost in Loras’ little town.

The twisting bits of the place pushed her into a track house behind a line of track businesses, which were squished in between a WalMart and the new bookstore. Her dream of Galena, like most tourists turned townies, was smashed once she settled into it. Kim, perhaps, wasn’t representative of every Chicago native, she thought a little less than most, but her story was similar enough.

Loras made it out to the West End an hour or two before the new store closed for the night. It actually had a pleasant look to it, he thought, as he gazed around its cream coated plastic pillars. It had this beautiful blue hue, and the front doors, he swore, looked like real oak. It was almost the perfect imitation of the generic homey style coffee-bookshop, only it was five times the normal size.

He pushed through the doors and immediately walked to one of the eight registers. “Would it be too much to ask,” he paused, as he stared at the young boy, “for me to speak to the owner of the store?”

“The store owner isn’t here … I don’t think he even lives here.” The boy, with pepper behind his eyes, quickly put one finger up to Loras. “Hold on, just one sec’, let me ask the manager.” He ran off.

“Of course he doesn’t live here,” Loras said to another clerk, one register down, “that would be silly.”

“Yes, it would.” She said, while refocusing back on her own customer. He noticed her eyes roll a bit, reminding him of Kim, which made him feel somewhat empathetic to this bookstore and all bookstores’ hiring deficiencies.

Loras waited at the register for the young boy to come back with an answer. He could see him petitioning an older woman for it, but none seemed to be forthcoming; the boy, nonetheless, continued to ask. A line started to form behind Loras, so he walked away from the counter. He didn’t want to be blamed for the hold up, especially since it wasn’t his fault. The boy was the one who’d left; Loras didn’t ask him to leave.

He lingered further into the store, and almost immediately he ran into a rack of comic books stored completely out of place. He didn’t see where they kept the bound editions of these books, so he picked up the circular rack and carried it around looking for the Graphic Novels section. Putting the rack beside the shelf wouldn’t totally fix the problem, but it would get things somewhat closer to how they should be setup. In reality, Marvel comics should be subdivided away from DC comics, and then, after this is done, everything should be further subdivided by genre, character, and, possibly, character’s powers. The sub-genre stories, like all underground comics, should be condensed into one section and be ordered by the year of its publication. These comics, in particular, are very much affected by the growth of the art form through the years and their section should underscore it.

“What are you doing?” Someone asked him.

“Huh?” He peered around the side of the rack to see who it was, but his arms were unable to keep the rack steady. A few comics fell off of it as the rack plummeted to the floor. “Look what you made me do. Do you realized I could have damaged the merchandise? These comic book people, who, of course, and you may not realize this, are very careful about how a book is handled, may not buy a damaged book. You could’ve cost this store quite a bit of money for frightening me like that … I hope you realize.”

“Do you work here or something?”

“No. I’m just fixing this rack; it was up beside the periodicals.” He leaned over and started picking the issues up off the floor. “I’m just trying to put it where it’s supposed to be.”

“Friggin’ comic book guys,” The person said, as he walked away, “… Jesus.”

Loras found the proper area and placed the rack down beside it. It made him feel better about the store, even if it was trying to put him out of business. There was no sense, he felt, in having them do things so poorly. After setting down the rack, he started to notice all sorts of problems with the place. Fiction was mixed up with Literature. Memoirs were mixed up with Biographies. History books were not subdivided by their theories of historical analysis. The store, the shelves, everything was beautiful, but he knew this much… it was all a mess.

“I got your answer.” The young clerk said, as he found Loras. The boy’s checkout line, Loras saw, had spilled over like a six-headed snake into the other lines. Kim and this boy were long lost siblings who only needed to be properly reintroduced in order to restore their fidelity of siblinghood. Loras sighed.

“Good, let’s have it then.”

“Was that comic book rack always there?” The boy asked, “Never mind, probably … anyway, so I got the answer. I found out the owner lives in California and has never been to our store. The manager said that it isn’t likely that the owner will ever visit our store either. In fact,” the boy proudly paused, “my manager didn’t even know the name of the store’s owner. I only found out because I went over to the internet café and found it online.”

“You did this, while you were supposed to be checking people out?”

“Yes.”

Loras sighed again, “Well, that answer doesn’t help me very much does it?”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Has that rack always been there, I thought for sure it was beside the magazine shelf? Anyway, I got to get back to the front of the store. My boss is gonna get annoyed with me if I stay here too long talking to you.”

“Yes, I imagine she will.”

“My father used to own this store. Well, not this store exactly, but he used to run a candy store out of this building.” Loras, lately, had gotten into the habit of talking to Kim during the slow hours of the day. She was behind the register, of course, and he was sitting on a stool beside the front bookshelf. “Were you aware of that?”

“Um, yeah … you told me last week about it.” She answered in a familiar airy tone. “You make the lollipops out of one of the old machines in the back, right?”

“Exactly.” He paused. “You know, Dad wanted me to keep running it as candy shop because of the big influx of tourists … he thought it’d be a good business decision and all that. Fuck Dad though, it’s my store and I like books.” He grinned at the memory, but not at the conversation; they’d become too regular lately, which somewhat frustrated him. The chats were almost always, almost uncontrollably, started by Loras. And In the dead space of the bookstore any sound was welcomed, even a nonsensical one. “I think that I’m going to go back to their store, I have some ideas for it. Were you aware, I’m sure you weren’t, but nonetheless, were you aware that they put the Playboy magazine beside the other pornography? This shouldn’t be done; it’s a literate magazine. It’s not like the store is some gas station; I can forgive a gas station for not knowing any better, but a bookstore demeaning Playboy. At the very least, even if they can’t put it beside The New Yorker, please put it in a spot alienated from the rest of the trash.”

“So you’re going to fix their place?” Kim tiredly responded, as she got up to pick up some books. “I’m going to go set these in the back, but just think about whether that’s a good idea or not. Okay?”

“Why not do something? Someone thinks they have the right to do it here, obviously. Why don’t I have the right to do it somewhere else?” Loras reasoned.

“You know, Dad was strict about how a shop should be run. He demanded things to be correct.” Loras smiled, remembering his father’s dirty mouth. “And I’m betting he’d be fully on board with fixing up someone else’s store who’s messing up your own.”

“Well, I’m not sure …”

He put his hand up. “You’re going to say that you’re not sure about whether they’re the ones destroying our business, putting books out of place and such …” He walked over to her, as she was picking up a book, to touch her on arm. He then whispered, “Who knows, maybe they aren’t doing it, probably not doing it, but let’s pretend that they are and pretend that we didn’t know that they weren’t … have a lollipop.”

He winked and walked out of the store again.

He was fortunate that it was such a cold day. He knew he was going to need to wear his largest winter coat to the store, but he worried that he’d look sort of strange if the weather was nice. The wind was biting and the leaves had finally hit the ground. Fall, for the most part, had left, which meant he would be able to wear a big enough jacket to hide his signs in.

And as he entered the store, pushing those seemingly astute oak doors to the side, he pulled out a list of probable book sections and correctable book sections. He didn’t know how much time he’d have till the manager came and stopped him, so he knew he’d have to prioritize. He put his hand on his chest to make sure the cardboard signs were still inside; he’d already written up a few of the probable section headings.

“What’re you doing here?” An old woman yelled across the room; she immediately pounded over toward him.

“What.” Surprised by the immediacy of her assault, Loras backed up to the doors.

“What’s in your hands?” She grabbed the list. “Give me that, you’re the one who dropped all of those comics on the floor and put the rack out of place.”

“In place, might be more apt.” He trembled out in pseudo-response.

“What? Did you realize, while you were going about fixing things the other night, we had some twenty customers walk out the door without buying something.”

While she was scolding him, she started reading through the list. “You cost us quite a bit of money the other night, you know, and it looks like you’ve decided to cost us some more. What’s wrong with you? Jesus.”

The vast the store, somehow, suddenly, became quite dense to Loras. The front counter seemed to wrap around him from behind, while the bookshelves and woman closed and pushed in on him from the front. The large jacket and signs didn’t help either; he was sweating underneath them. “The boy was the one who took the initiative to leave the counter. I didn’t ask him to leave; I just asked him to speak with the proprietor of the store.”

“Get out of the store. You’re not buying, so leave … just leave.”

“Are you from Chicago?” He could hear the whiff of her old accent coming through her voice.

“Originally, yes.”

“Southside, right?”

“That’s really not the issue here, you know.” Many of them ended their sentences with you know, but it never really seemed like a question. He wondered, while she was pushing him out, whether she came to Galena for a quaint retirement or to run a bookstore.

“I’m going back.”

“Of course you are, why wouldn’t you?” Kim responded, now seemingly enjoying the game. “By the way, someone must’ve recognized you while you were there last time. You got a restraining order in the mail. It’s with the other nonsense in your office.”

“Wonderful, but I’m still going back.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything different, you know …”

“Are you still finding books out of place?” He asked her; he’d given her the job of reviewing things lately. The new store had become a bit of a distraction, and he couldn’t focus right then on the mess in his own shop. “You’re using the ordering printoff I gave you, right?”

“Absolutely …”

“Great, have a lollipop …”

“Wonderful.” She responded, while drawing out a few vowels of the word.

He was able to get to the rear of the new store without being noticed by the manager. The back, like much of the store, was a huge maze of books and shelves; the area, he thought, would be able to give him enough cover to start cleaning the wretched place up. It even sat one level above the front. It was hard enough just to get to the store as it was, he didn’t want to get kicked out as soon as he got there. An ice storm had just hit, and he’d barely made up it up the bluff to make it to this side of town; the beginnings of winter tended to make the hilly life of Galena a bit more eccentric. Even the Chicagoans, the one’s not skiing at least, tended to leave the area.

The store was almost empty. Hardly anyone, except Loras, thought it was a good idea to go out and drive on the newly iced over roads. He glanced around and then sat out the signs he’d made and the new list he’d thrown together; it wasn’t a simple list, no book listing ever is, but his list, in particular, was precise in it’s complexities. He predicated the list on the assumption that the back of the store would be the first to be reordered and corrected. Some sections would be condensed, others would be expanded, and then, in one final go around, the new signage would be put up to make sure everyone knew where to find they’re books.

He began pulling them out, setting each one of the sofas near the shelving. The store was unusually quiet, so he could hear the dustcovers of the books slide away from each other, sounding as if they were unzipping rather than peeling away, as he pulled them out. One by one, he grabbed them and partitioned them off on the sofa.

Time nervously passed. He pressed forward.

“Hey,” Her voice came from blank air, “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m reordering things.” He answered to the voice behind him. He didn’t want to turn around because he knew it was going to be the manager. “I noticed quite a few book groupings needed a better fit, so I decided to put some time in to help the store out.”

He smiled a