Jon Frankel's Blog, page 12

THANATOS

THANATOS

 

I wish I wanted to live

More than I do this drive

To say no to life is sly

Not a drive at all but a stroll

A quiet voice whose droll

Persistence rises to a cry

When the stark difference

Of black and white has faded

Strange how I’m elated

Not to care about the scents

Of manure in the field

When primrose and violet spring

Their blended voices sing

Cardinal and crow one wheeled

Spinning Jenny strung

With day and night young

And old among the strings

That bind my wings.

ADOPTED

My parents, my brother and me.

I’m adopted. When I was a little kid I sensed that this was something I didn’t want other people to know. I’ll never forget my brother telling everyone on the school bus to kindergarten that we were adopted and feeling horrified. There was also this kid in 3rd grade who promised not to tell everyone, and said he would tell me a secret about himself, that he had a metal plate in his head. Now we were even! I was born in 1960, so everything was different then. There was no way for adoptees to know their birth parents. Some people back then wouldn’t tell their kids they were adopted, and as with so much else there was for some a hovering sense of shame. As Blake says, a mystery creates evil and neurosis. There was no mystery for me and no actual shame because my parents were open and honest. They were totally fucked up in other ways but I’m grateful adoption wasn’t one of them. As a child my parents told me two things: 1) I am Jewish and 2) I am adopted.

I have never really given a shit who my birth parents were, and I have never had much curiosity about them. Birth parents are a total abstraction. My real parents were horrifyingly, concretely real! They loved me, bathed me, fed me, slapped me, gave me an education, took me skiing, provided a home and an extended family and attempted (or my mother did) to nurture those things I loved and cared about and gave me a sense that I could do things. I mean, what the fuck else is a parent to do? I won’t recite the litany of fucked up shit that happened because in the end, it was less significant; or, perhaps, significant in the way that fucked up shit made me who I am.

Occasionally over the years I’ve had intense arguments with people (as has my brother), sometimes other adoptees, but usually not, who were absolutely flabbergasted that I had no curiosity. They thought I was repressed or in denial or lying. Since they have no idea what it’s like to be me I would grow increasingly frustrated. And the fact is I wouldn’t actually get angry, it was usually the person I was arguing with who’s face would turn red and who would start screaming, because I didn’t fit their idea of the traumatized adoptee obsessed with finding their birth parents, nursing a deep hole of loss. I have a lot of deep loss holes but that ain’t one of them. And the fact that I have a question mark where most people have an exclamation point has, I think, shaped me in good ways. For one thing, while my identity is Jewish, I’m aware that I would never be admitted to the state of Israel by the Orthodox, because my birth parents, and my adopted mother, aren’t Jewish, even though I paid my dues! I went to Hebrew school for 7 years. I got called Kike and was chased down the hall by jerks throwing pennies saying, Cheap Jew! Hitler would have killed me for my politics and my ethnicity. Well, big deal. To those obsessed with ‘blood’,  I have no identity. In reality, I really see ‘birth’ as an illusion, you are as you are raised. If I found out tomorrow I am Saami I wouldn’t suddenly feel like a reindeer whisperer! I would still get cold in winter. And my Jewishness is a weird amalgam of the Jewish community I was raised in (Ashkenazi immigrants from Central Europe) and my father’s German Jewish family from Louisville (19th century immigrants who came to farm), and my mother’s Minnesota family of Danish and English immigrants from the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. What I really am is a secular, atheist, Jewish New Yorker, a venerable identity and one I’m happy with: cosmopolitan, urban, intellectual, progressive, opposed to ethno-nationalism, religious intolerance and any kind of patriotic nationalistic crap.

But of course there are the biological circumstances of one’s existence. Starting as a teenager I was curious about my biological background, ie DISEASES. I was haunted by the paranoid idea that I might have some weird genetic degenerative disease that my parents never told me about. So I asked my mother about this when I was 18 and she said she knew nothing, but then went on to tell me that I had been privately adopted because, at the time, no Jewish adoption agency would adopt to a mixed family (my mother never converted, despite being a more observant Jew than my father), nor would a Christian agency adopt to a mixed marriage, and the secular agencies would NOT adopt to older parents (mine were in their late thirties, ha ha). The world of 1959.

My father knew Cy Farber, who was a Dean at the San Francisco Medical School. He had a couple of unmarried students who were pregnant. That was me. I learned last year that it was actually my father who flew, alone, out to San Francisco to pick me up and bring me back to the city, six days old. He also said that on the flight home there was a storm so severe he was convinced we were going to die. I am petrified of flying and always have been.

When my mother died I became more curious about my birth parents. And this is weird, I think of my birth mother but not my birth father! Hmmm….Well, I kept meaning to ask my mother and then my father for more information, but the fact is, I could never remember to, and now my mother’s dead. The last time I visited with my father I did ask him, and he gave me the information I wrote above.

In my family we joke about what my ‘real’ ethnicity might be. There are all kinds of theories in the family, and my children seem to care more than I do, but I am curious. Am I Russian, Italian, English? Lately I’ve been having minor health shit typical for someone my age (56). But it always comes up: no family health history. Well, I really want to know now if my birth parents dropped dead of stroke or cancer or succumbed to diabetes or shot themselves on a rainy December night at age 30. I don’t know why but I’d like to know. So I ordered two genetic tests, from 23 and Me and from Ancestry. I will do Tree of Life next. I don’t know if I’ll try to find relatives. I guess I will. My ambivalence is strong. Not hostility, just like, who cares, big deal, what difference would it make. I have a big family I adore. But it’s time to unlock the box while there is still time.

America’s obsession with race, ethnicity, tradition, family background has always mystified me. Why do you care what percent you are? You are 100% you. The admixture is an expressive unity. I understand that if you are a person of color your attitude to this fact accounts for nil. The cop will shoot you. The bank will deny you. The store clerk will follow you. And it’s not like the Nazis were going to carve out an exception to the gas chamber based on my self-report. These are important aspects of identity. Of history. But for me, a white guy, it also doesn’t matter if I should turn out to be 25% Native American and 25% Sub-Saharan African because everyone will see a middle aged, grey haired, pot smoking white guy who used to be a Marxist and lives in an ideological funk. In the end, I’m an Existentialist. Life is absurd. Make the most of it. Love others. Allow others to love you. Then you’re dead.

THE CONFIDENCE MAN

I have been on medical leave for three months. I had three tears in my rotator cuff repaired and biceps reattached. Minor surgery with a major recovery. That’s three months without working. The last time I had three months off was in 1987. The last time I had two months off was in 1996. Since then time off has come in two or three week increments or less. So the question I had was, will I be able to use the time to write? And the answer was yes. I wrote a 400 page novel in three months, or rather, I finished a 900 page novel, of which the first 435 pages were written. Or something like that. It was immensely pleasurable and incredibly stressful to sit in a chair for fours a day, five days a week, playing with my imaginary friends. Sometimes I felt like I was in Trollope territory, in terms of the tonnage. Anyway, Isle of Dogs is now complete, and on the revision block. The poor fellow is getting a major work out. I have so far not been cutting a whole lot, but streamlining it. The loose baggy monster will hopefully be a svelte, feral cat. Or maybe just one of Harry Crews’ body builders with small testicles and a broad chest.

Another consideration was reading. It seemed a paradise of reading was upon me. How fast the hours of the day slip by! But I plunged into the Brontes and Melville. And it was fabulous. The Piazza Tales, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd and Pierre. I am now, today, starting The Confidence Man. It happens that a Melvillean coincidence is at work: today is April First, and The Confidence Man begins on April First and was published on April First. I don’t need to sing Melville’s praises here. God knows he doesn’t need ’em. Pierre is an incredible eccentricitie. I don’t recommend it lightly, as there is much to frustrate the reader. He set out, after Moby Dick, to write things that would NOT be popular, and Pierre reads like his savagely funny farewell to literature. I also read Melville’s poetry, an undiscovered gem of the 19th century. After Whitman and Dickinson he is by far the best American poet of the 19th century, but that’s not saying much. Battle Pieces, his contemporary account of the Civil war in poems, is one of the best books of poems I have ever read. It is not in style particularly innovative but it is anti-heroic, realistic, narrative and deeply existential. The music of Melville’s prose, the rhythm of his thought, is difficult but once you have got it it is beautiful, subtle, cutting and capable of entertaining paradox, ambiguity and the nuances of the contrarian. Melville’s volumes of poetry after Battle Pieces are all worth reading.

As for the Brontes, I am reading a biography of the whole delightful, benighted clan, and read Jane Eyre for the first time and reread Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre is a perfect novel and Charlotte Bronte is a master of story, of setting a scene, of drawing characters and of moving her story through time. From the first sentence one is the hands of an enchantress. Emily Bronte on the other hand is a great artist of unbelievable strength. Wuthering Heights was better the second time through and I think it may be one of the novels I love best in the world. There is nothing else like Heathcliff out there, and the occult suggestions of Jane Eyre are full blown hauntings in Wuthering Heights. It is a frightening book, yes, and delightfully wicked. Both Brontes knew how to pillory a clergyman or religious fanatic. Joseph, the Calvinist servant who snarls in Yorkshire dialect is delicious to the point of sinfulness. Since I am a completist of sorts I had to at least read Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This books is much more conventional in feel and Anne has not her sisters’ perfections, but about 235 pages in her descriptions of debauchery are astonishingly true. The story of this book (I’m not done with it) is of a serious, intelligent, upright woman’s marriage to a dissipated alcoholic who destroys himself. Anne shares with Charlotte a stern morality (utterly absent in Emily) but she is much more christian, much more conventional. Nevertheless her book was condemned by critics as vulgar. They were horrified by the suggestion that a woman might have written it (it was published under the pseudonym of Acton Bell, but many suspected a female author, and many thought there was a single author of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, her first novel). Anyway, Anne, Emily and their brother Branwell were all dead within six months of each other of tuberculosis, leaving Charlotte, who married and died from complications of pregnancy seven years later. There is something so compelling about this it incites fantasies. But the biography reveals that the Brontes were a loving family, a bit poor, but doing better than their neighbors. They ate well, read widely, travelled and were engaged with the world. They are astonishingly fearlessness writers. they don’t defy convention because they never were conventional to begin with.

Well, I’m back to work on April 3rd. But it has been an interesting 3 months. In another 3 I’ll have my shoulder back.

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE

A chapter from Isle of Dogs, the work in progress that consumes all the oxygen around here:

The dorm room had two bunks. Phaedra had the top one, and it was just big enough if she bent her knees and slept curled up like a dog. The hard mattress was lumpy and smelled of disinfectant. Montreal was an enchanted city of glass towers rising from the frigid grey waters of the St. Lawrence, water taxis cruising between the old granite and brick buildings with bay windows and stoops. By day the city bustled with business like any other town, but at night it became its own. The cafes and restaurants were bursting with people. There were poetry readings and performances, circuses and theatre. There were no Rulers, or rather, they didn’t Rule. There were actually many Rulers who lived in voluntary and involuntary exile. They worked. At academies as fencing teachers, or riding instructors, or as performers and athletes. The Montreal Symphony, because of its Ruler players, was a world renowned group and the basketball and hockey teams were champions. Only Vancouver boasted more Rulers and as many trophies.

The language was Quebecois, which Phaedra knew not at all but quickly understood. It had been a delirious journey, by sea from Dubrovnik to Haifa, then overland to Jerusalem, a bizarre, lunar city that lived underground by day and on the surface at night, a city so violent they had to hire a private guard to escort them to the theatre from their hostel, which was located on Circle Eight of the underground city. From there the bus to Istanbul was grueling. She sat sipping hot water on a wooden bench squeezed between a juggler and a clown, gazing eyeless out at the endless blistered earth. Every week they were in a different country, setting up the show, marching through the streets, blaring out the funky tunes.

She could only bring a single bag, with a few shirts, pants, underwear. She didn’t wear socks. She had no winter clothes. Her armpits smelled from travel. In Amsterdam she bought a cherry red beret. They sailed for Harwich from Rotterdam and arrived at Victoria Station at 6 am, the city just emerging from sleep. She spent an afternoon in the British Museum and sat in Karl Marx’s chair. They sailed from Liverpool to Dublin aboard The Beatle, where they performed in the Abbey Theatre and she bought a hardcover copy of Ulysses. What a maddening book! But she could not tear herself from it. She found herself mouthing aloud its strange sentences, and as she sat in a pub nursing a glass of stout, listening to the customers talk about football and horse races, and heard the ringing of a bell, it might as well have been 600 years ago. She read the book as they rode vertiginous waves across the North Atlantic aboard the Timon of Athens to the Port of Reykjavik, grey stilted houses against elephantine mountains. Here they stayed in a windy campsite outside of town and performed in the bandshell in the Gufunes as part of their summer arts festival. The light lingered until midnight, and the people were mad with alcohol and a cheery sort of despair, as if the truth of life buried beneath the flesh were revealed by the hyperboreal sun.

They booked rooms on the Jabme-Akka, a leaking cargo ship, to their next stop, the city of Nuuk, capital of Greenland, a collection of Victorian houses on narrow dirt streets, a town in the throes of a collective hallucination. Mushrooms and LSD were sold like candy and silent groups stood around chain smoking and mulling the twilight. She watched the sun rise at 3am in a cemetery, the headstones pink and coral. She was startled by a man in rags who wouldn’t let her alone. He spoke to her in liquid Kalaallisut. She tried giving him a cigarette which only seemed to enrage him. She was a foot taller than he was but she became nervous as he followed her back to the University where they were staying. She was distressed to learn later of his arrest, and they witnessed his summary execution by firing squad from the deck of a tiny passenger ship, The Hilton. As they sailed out of the harbor the sun was high in the sky and the house fronts were bright and floral against the grey drape of mountains, a land covered in lichens and moss.

Finally, Montreal! She stepped down the gangway and felt like she was home. She walked the streets and found English spoken in the student ghetto around Concordia. It was here, in a cafe, while eating poutine, a grotesque pile of fried potatoes, gravy and cheese, and drinking a country ale, that she wrote her first letter to Sargon since leaving Budapest. It was late August and she knew school was not in session, but Titania had written that she could address a letter to a friend of theirs, Chris Bell, in New York City. She wrote in long hand on pale blue stationary with a violet pen, specks of grease dotting the page.

Dearest Cielo,

The pale surface of the moon is a landscape more haunting and beautiful than any I have seen. The dust is like a silver sea lapping the edge of marble buildings. People here are free to enjoy their lives untroubled by the incessant wars and disputes of Earth and of Mars. I am sitting in a cafe ingesting a plate of the national dish, a blue paste made up of ground insects sweetened with sugar and while it makes me sick to admit it, it is delicious. I have found in the stops we have made in this whirlwind escape from Le Terroir Rouge that this is always the case. The lobster tanks of Vesta yield an incredible, buttery-soft meat for a feelered sea bug, and even in the months of black sailing I would savor the delicacies of each port, tangerines grown in the pod ships of Judah, figs from the Barzakh gas clouds, where Albion dreams. And now this Interzone, this Eden of Glass. To think I thought Uvegvaros the city of Glass! Or those red glass chambers kept by Ocba. I feel for the first time since losing you I have found a place to call home.

It won’t be long now lost brother. Our spotlights will cross in the sky, and two circles become one shining disc.

Her room was with one of the Albanian jugglers, Fiacre, and a Gypsy clown, Dan Dan, named for his mother’s favorite Sichuan noodle dish. They were not good roommates. Fiacre had an unwashed smell and Dan Dan was always masturbating. His ejaculate had a pronounced fish odor that would diffuse through the room making it impossible to sleep.

She preferred the company of women. Her closest friend, not really much of a friend, certainly not a confidante, but a person with whom she nevertheless liked to roll cigarettes and comment on the passing scene, was M’Lorde Lucy, who had joined the troupe in Amsterdam, an English dissident Ruler who had gone into exile when the Tories seized the government and purged its ranks of bastards. She sang perfectly in 3 octaves, was not tall but had the strength of an 8 footer. She was a born gymnast and in the morning could be found after three hours sleep doing acrobatic tricks in the Parc Percy-Walters, a small municipal park with a green and benches and pebbled paths, where dour Quebecois sat drinking espresso and reading copper electraweave papers. Her lithe form leapt, turned cartwheels and flipped summersaults, which the denizens ignored completely. Phaedra watched her with admiration bordering on erotic enchantment and she realized she wanted to be Lucy. But strong and coordinated as she was she could not become airborne, she was made for the water and for running. Sargon she remembered had the power to leap, to fly almost. Lucy reminded her of him.

Phaedra knew she wanted to have sex with her. The idea was exhausting. Sex would ruin everything as it always did. She never connected and even when she came it was like an event happening to someone else. She liked to make others come, pushed to desperation by her tongue and lips. But she had never been taken. Taken. She imagined being taken when she rubbed one out on the toilet, when she thrust her pelvis forward and let the water from the bathtub spigot pulse over her, a slow blues insanity she had to muffle lest her cries be overheard. Lucy. She was always bouncing by, her small breasts bound in a sports bra and tight ass bulging out of the edge of her shorts. She had gone to her room one afternoon, knocked and Lucy beckoned her to enter, dressed only in a chiffon wrap, her lean, muscular legs sculpted and brown. Phaedra resisted. She chose to be no one.

They performed Ruin to packed audiences in English. Being the only native speaker in the company Phaedra had worked on the translation back in Budapest. Diamond Dzosi had written it in Czech and translated it into German but English was the most widely understood language and the source material after all was American. The run came to an end and the company moved to the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, as guests of the Quebec government, where they were to give a series of workshops and perform Ruin, as well as Macbeth and Coriolanus.

She experienced the massive pile of bricks with a mixture of nostalgia and discomfort. It felt like an old dead dream suddenly come to life. The St. Lawrence reminded her of the Hudson and a cruise they took so disturbed her she ran to her room and buried her face in her pillow sobbing, as she remembered, with a clarity that was shocking, hiding in the cave with Sargon. Every word they spoke echoed in her brain and it was as if the past few years were for nothing. She lost her city feet. She smelled horse flanks and stared at dogs not with a wistful nostalgia but crumpling pain in her chest. She sat in sullen wounded silence during the Q&A sessions and answered questions about translating from German to English with monosyllables.

It was an old cobbled city and the canals boats were powered by oar, the water gently lapping the stone walls. The cafes closed early and only a few bars were open until dawn. M’Lord Lucy was her roommate and she found herself drinking until she would curl into a ball like a porcupine and the older woman would stroke her long hair.

Stefan Gorky asked her to coffee at the Musee national des beaux arts du Quebec, whose massive galleries stood empty during the week. Their feet echoed on the white floors and curving stairs. They sat in the cafe and he ordered them a pot of drip coffee. “So,” he said, “What mysteries are brewing in that inscrutable mind of yours? I know when something’s wrong.”

She shrugged.

“You’ve been drinking a lot.”

She shrugged.

“I can sit here all day watching you shrug, Phaedra.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Ah, she talks. Sara, pseudonyms are poor disguises. Do you miss your mother then?”

She laughed. “What mother?”

“Then what is it? I miss my Panic.”

“I feel like I’ve come so far just to arrive at the place I started from.”

“You still wish to go to America?” She looked at him with an expression of duh. “I can’t read your mind, but I take that as a yes. You are remarkably single minded, but I suppose that’s normal. I forget your age sometimes.”

“Oh, because you think single mindedness to be a symptom of immaturity, as if determination and a longing for home were not primal human qualities.”

“There are many primal human qualities. The need to love and be loved being the first.”

She smiled and raised her finger. “Don’t you think, don’t you teach, that human affection flows from the satisfaction of human material needs, food, water, and shelter?”

“And haven’t you argued vigorously the opposite?”

“I like to argue.”

“Indeed you do. Would it make you happy Sara Sitar, Phaedra von Doderer, Panic, if I took you to New York as my guide and interpreter? You do know the city, don’t you?”

She narrowed her eyes and thought. “For real?”

“We have been granted permission to perform in Central Park at the Delacort, under the auspices of the Public Theatre this fall. The New York Rulers, Sargon and Renee, are patrons and have longstanding ties to Hungary. He apparently has a fondness for my country and welcomes our visit, despite some difficulties with the central authorities in Washington. So long as we travel direct by train from Montreal to New York we will be unmolested and under his protection. I must arrange things with the City Council, the theatre board of directors, discuss financing with New York University (which is a co-sponsor), and meet various cultural lions and such. The Ruler Sargon has offered to host us at his New York mansion on Fifth Avenue. Are you interested?” As he spoke her heart sped up and then became irregular and her skin iced over. She turned pale and trembled and grew short of breath. “I thought this would be welcome news!”

“Sire…I mean sir, Stefan, it is most welcome news and I would be happy to accompany you, but I beg not to stay with the Ruler Sargon.”

“I am staying there. It would be very strange if you did not.” She bit her lip and the irids of her eyes churned green and blue, the pupils dilating. He reached towards her and she flinched. “Phaedra, who hurt you? What did they do?”

She looked away and said, “Nobody.”

“He’s taking me to New York,” Phaedra said to M’Lord Lucy, passing her the bottle of Jameson’s they’d bought in Dublin and lighting a cigarette. They were dressed alike, in loose T shirts and underwear, and sat at the small table by the window.

“Brilliant! Lucky you.” Lucy poured a dollop of whiskey in her glass and tossed it down. A hot breeze smelling of the river fluttered the curtain and noises from the bar below floated up through the night, while swarms of insects knocked the screen. “Those bloody hornets are terrifying.”

“Welcome to the New World,” Phaedra said.

“Is it true it’s worse in the States?”

“Some places. Not where I grew up.”

“And where was that, again?”

“Well, in New York Harbor, just off the coast of Jersey, on an island.”

“The Isle of Dogs. You know there’s one in the Thames as well?”

“And on that island, hidden deep beneath the river, a forbidden colony dwells. They dress in scarlet robes, their faces hidden behind huge hoods, with gold cords about the waist. They are mutants from Mars, and there they have built a hive for themselves which they inhabit in secret, for if the Rulers knew they were there they would burn them out like dogs with flame throwers and dissolve their mutant bodies in acid. I was brought there as a child of 8 by my father, a human fleeing the Rulers because he had unlawful relations with a Ruler Woman, my mother, a princesse of the North named Ruth Banffy. He died delivering me into their hands and I was raised in the cold stone halls carved out of bedrock, never seeing daylight or breathing fresh air. I learned their savage tongue and spent my childhood exploring caverns drilled and forgotten, schooled only by the books they could not read, until one day I found an old abandoned tunnel with an escape hatch. For months I stared at the hatch, afraid to open it. One day, I mastered my terror and turned the wheel. It led to a long vertical shaft with an iron stair which I climbed, hand over hand, for days, tying my belt to the rungs to sleep, reaching eventually a landing with a windowed door flooded with blinding sun. Paralyzed by a sight I had only read of, I blinked until the pain in my eyes and brain subsided and then, I walked out onto a platform surrounded by water. Towering overhead was the verdigrised torso of the Statue of Liberty. I took my place in a crowd of tourists, boarded the ferry to Manhattan and lived there with a homeless boy I met on the subway named Cielo.”

Lucy smiled and poured another shot, handing the bottle back to Phaedra, who chugged directly from it. “Someday you’ll tell me the truth.”

“Why would I disappoint you?”

“When do you leave?”

“I’m not sure. We are going to stay with the Rulers of New York, the fallen President and his Consort Renee.”

“How exciting!”

“I thought you hated Rulers.”

“How can I hate what I am? Anyway, you’ll see what it’s like. You’ve never known such luxury. The palaces, the servants, the food and the drink. When my Sire wanted swordfish for dinner he’d send someone by rocket to Gibralter.” She looked wistful.

“Why’d you give it up then?”

Lucy became pensive and the sadness that always weighed on her face grew heavier. “I think, because, it was wrong. I grew to hate my position. When you’re young, you aren’t raised by them, you’re raised by humans, by your Surrogate especially. Mine was Egyptian. Her name was Nefertiti, but I think my Sires named her because they preferred the Egyptian Gods to the mere mortals who inhabit the ancient monuments. Nef had beautiful black hair and an African face with the wisest smile. She made me warm milk when I couldn’t sleep and told fantastic tales of the Arabian Nights and Alexandrian demons. They sent me off to Harrow when I was five. Can you imagine that? I hated every minute of it. A thousand years of sadism distilled in the souls of the inmates. I swore I’d run away and when I was seventeen I did, with a girl I was in love with. We had no idea of where to go but it wasn’t hard to earn enough jewels to board a ferry for Amsterdam. At Harrow you learn how to survive: how to play a rich mark out and the five minute blow job.” She made a face. “Men don’t really care that you find it nasty.”

Phaedra laughed. “Well I’m afraid of staying in a Ruler’s Palace.”

“You don’t look afraid of anything, my dear. Except maybe me.”

“You!”

Lucy was bashful. “Pass the bottle, baby.”

Phaedra passed it, feeling a bit drunk and more than a little sorry for Lucy, whose slurred voice was full of tragic longing. She had never trusted her true story to anyone and was not about to now but the impending trip worried her so much she felt she had to divulge something. Because she would soon be in a house that had banished her. What would happen then? But she couldn’t back out of it now, it obviously pleased Stefan to no end to be able to do this for her, and he needed her, he said, to assist in negotiations. And it was her way to New York. It was the perfect cover. Except it was no cover, unless she could stay somewhere else.

Lucy said, “What are you thinking about?” Phaedra felt the lock click in her brain. Lucy sighed. “If only we could get past this! You shut down every time I ask.”

“I’m sorry Lucy. It’s habit. Look, I grew up in the Hudson Valley, where Sargon and Renee have a Palace. My mother, my real mother, my real, human mother, who lives in Transylvania now, was a cook in the kitchen, and I played there as a child with the little Ruler boy and girl. They were my best friends. One of our favorite places to play was the library. The librarian was a saturnine opium addict and child molester named Baby Sip, and he molested me regularly when I was eleven and twelve. In all innocence I showed my young friends what he had done to me and we were caught by the house Steward, Albion, who reported us to Vice President Sargon. The Rulers were enraged and threatened death, but through the pleading of their Counselor, showed mercy and banished us to Hungary, where my mother’s people came from, never to return. I am afraid if I stay with them I will be recognized.”

“I’m actually tempted to believe this one.”

“I swear it is the truth. You mustn’t tell a soul.”

“No, your secret is safe with me.”

“It would feel safer if you told me something,” Phaedra said.

Lucy became thoughtful again and held her half full glass aloft, inches from her lips, which moved slightly as she thought to herself. She uttered a soft laugh and tossed down the rest. “Drink,” she said. Phaedra drank. “Let’s cut your hair and get you a good suit. After you cross the border and clear customs, disguise yourself as a man. You were a girl when they last saw you. Believe me, Rulers don’t really see the world around them. Sure, we have those heightened senses. The nose and ears of a dog and the eyes of an eagle and all that, but most of them lack the most important senses, curiosity and imagination. They will remember you as a dirty little corrupting girl, if at all. They will not be looking for a nineteen year old man.”

“What do I tell Stefan?”

“We’ll think of something. Now how about a little kiss?” asked Lucy, presenting her cheek.

Phaedra chugged some more and smiled, quite drunk and even more pleased by the plan. “When do we start?”

“Right now.”

“OK. And when we’re done, let’s see if the five minute blow job works on a girl.”

“The girl’s version is more like 20, but I’ll give it a shot if you do too.”

“A race to the top?” Phaedra asked.

“To the bottom. Now go get your head wet while I borrow a scissors and a razor.”

Phaedra sat naked in the hard wooden chair and stared at the bugs hitting the screen, some so hard it left dents in the mesh, while Lucy cut off hunks of her abundant golden hair, crying a little as it hit the ground, lifeless and brown. She felt the cold metal blades against her scalp and Lucy’s hand fluffing out her hair until it was short enough to shave. She showered again and Lucy joined her, soaping up her head and shaving the remainder off, the steam rising between their flanks. When she was done they toweled off and Phaedra surveyed herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked huge. Her denuded scalp was pale compared to her face. It felt strange. Why had she wept for her hair? She felt so light, so free, like no one she had ever been before. She turned around and leapt at Lucy, forcing her to the bed. “The clock starts now.”

LETTERS

FROM MY BOOK IN PROGRESS, ISLE OF DOGS

The first letter came unexpectedly. He had never received one before. They each had a mailbox for communications from the school and home. They were expected to check their mailbox and keep it clean. They received electronic mail all the time but print mail was rare and usually important. Rulers preferred it, but they also seemed to prefer not to have contact with their Scions at all, except during holidays.

It was from her. He held the battered white envelope and examined the handwriting. They had learned to write with both hands (like him she was ambidextrous) and each line of the address was written in the opposite hand so the slant alternated. He opened the letter and she had cross written it. In one direction, written with the right hand, it read:

Dearest Iocle,

I write to you with Vesta on the horizon and enemy ships both fore and aft. So far there has been no action and our little one is safe. She spends the day playing in the engine room and it’s a real job scrubbing the grease and solvent from her face and hands but whatever makes her happy is important as I’m sure you will agree. There is an impossible governess on board. She is constantly harrassing poor Little Sara Istar and the other children to clean their rooms, to be orderly and polite, even once hitting our dear, for which I severely reprimanded her. Apparently she doesn’t like the adventurous scamps when they treat her as one of their own. Remember our own childhood aboard these beastly ships, adrift for 3 or 4 months sometimes, the view monotonous. She’s still too small for a space walk or I would take her out on repairs. I have commanded the missiles to be readied and by the time this missive reaches you we may be dust in the long reaches of time and evolution. Imagine how long it will take, the eons before our dust rains again to sweet Green earth and is taken up by some living creature. Until then we are breathed in and out by the mighty lungs of stars and galaxies. But enough philosophy! How are you my dear? I hope you are enjoying your time alone with Phil and perhaps the pleasure he gives has caused you to forget your Consort and little scion!

Then, at a 90 degree angle, and written with the left hand, it continued:

Soon enough we will dock and go down to Vesta to prepare for the space elevator landing. Ocba’s welcome is in doubt and we go down heavily armed with both weapons and skepticism. Still, I think you will agree that we must exert every effort to contain Vesuvius and counter his influence. Their grip on the Isle of Dogs is such that the dependents dare not rebel but rather suffer appalling abuse. You would think they were convicts, not noble mutants who had made the ultimate sacrifice of the comforts of home to Rule over alien lands. That they are virtual prisoners is a pity. I hope Little Sara will withstand the space elevator. So far she has shown no signs of space distress, perhaps because she was born between the stars. How does Little Iocle? I worry he won’t get enough sleep without his little consort by his side. Is there any gossip at court? We get so little news here. I wonder if the P— is still prosecuting his wars in the west? Surely America’s greatest days lay ahead of it in the Space territories, not that benighted, fractured land of the old Republic. Others dream but we must be realistic. S— and his faction have dangerous ideas though with no hope of realizing them I worry more about the utopia imagined by Everest, speciated Rulers separated as a class, a project Ocba and Vesuvius are apparently doing all in their power to further. Honestly, if we can’t persuade them to curtail their experiments we will need to consider a blockade and even quarantine of Mars. I know S—and B— would support us, but that will have to be in another letter. Oh, Little Sara Istar arrives to read, she has reduced the governess to tears, leading a troop of Ruler children against her! Even if we fail I feel the future is safe in her tiny hands. Much Love and Missing You, Your Ever Loving Consort, Sara.

He had become absorbed in his work and status, which he had never before experienced. Despite the blind attack after the pool game, which Chris Bell attributed to Lug, not Ocktomann, Sargon continued to beat everyone regularly at pool. He had learned his lesson though. He kept his winnings, yes, but he didn’t naively return to his rooms but rather, as his Scion had taught him, he learned to recognize the feeling of an impending attack and slapped before being bitten. That only had to happen once. There were two consequences: the Tutor, Dr. Butt, made him stand naked in the cold hall for an hour for bloodying the nose of the second thief to accost him, and, because he had bloodied the nose and retained his money he was left alone in future. But he learned also to spend it on items he could share with others. He remained aloof. He was the President’s Scion and was expected to act that way. He even came to believe it. But he read the letter and trembled, feeling the breath of Phaedra on the page. He remembered the day they hid in the cave, how they grasped each other in horror knowing what was to come. The ache opened up as if it had never closed and his mind raced thinking of all they used to do, and how meaningless and monotonous his days had become.

He turned the letter over and replied, not in the character of Iocle, but as himself.

My Dearest Sister,

You would not believe this place. They call it a school and it is a school I guess but Papa called it a prison run by children and was he ever right. Ocba’s dungeons are crueler and darker but not as cold. I am always cold. I have to chop my own wood and all day there are classes. The teachers are called tutors and professors. Professors wear long gowns that would be fashionable on Mars but here look like the transvestite wizards of Lower Manhattan (remember them? Please tell me if you do. Also we should maybe write in code, what do you think?). Tutors dress as we do in silly uniforms. I must wash my own clothes and everyone looks the same. They shaved my head! (Here he drew a crude caricature of himself with a bald head, and then of a man in wizard gowns with garish make up and torpedo tits). When you told me about B— J—s I didn’t really understand but the big boys here make the young boys do that. So far no one dares make me and I keep winning at pool. You don’t want to get into debt though. Also sex seems to be all anyone talks about. They curse a lot but not as well as Baby Sip. I was alone for my birthday but Christmas is soon. I think school is horrible. I want to run away and live with you forever in Canada. They say Rulers are free in Canada. Is this true? Please tell me about Castelul Banffy. Is it as cool as I remember? What is the Ruler Banffy like? I remember he dressed like Santa Claus and sat at the end of that long table by himself. What do you do all day? Is it very boring? Do you miss me? Your Loving Brother, Sargon

He was even more surprised when three days later another letter lay in the box, this from his Sire, sealed with red wax, embossed with the Eagle Seal of the President of the United States. He broke the seal and read the typewritten text:

My Dear Sargon,

I hope this brief missive finds you well and adjusting to your new life. Doubtless you are met daily with challenges you never before anticipated. There may be times when you will curse me and your fate but I assure you your trials are but dress rehearsals for the indignities and assaults of life. I realize things change and that the experiences of one generation don’t always serve as accurate maps for those of the succeeding one, but there are verities that derive from human nature, a nature that we share. This last point is one I wish you to bear in mind as you will be exposed to a chorus of self-aggrandizing nonsense that can only serve you ill in future. This we have been over many times but forebear the concerns of your Sire, who writes out of the profound isolation of the White House and a storehouse of experience that has of late surged into immediate consciousness as I contemplate your situation. Gambling I assume remains a passion among the Young Rulers as it is a habit of privilege and boredom. The poor have their lotteries but the wealthy orphan themselves at roulette and immiserate their families with blackjack and games of hillbilly poker, games of chance and no skill. If you must game do so on your own turf, either at pool or one-on-one basketball, at which I used to excel and have good reason to believe you will too as we share of course identical resources of body and mind. It is wise to let others win occasionally and not to be niggardly with the fortune you take off of fools. Always withhold your own emotions and feign rather an affable and bluff exterior; admit no error of consequence but own those that will have little impact; and above all do not be seen as a toady, fag or dependent. The wages of inferiority are low and the expenses high. So long as I maintain my present office your status is assured but understand that life is fleeting and only strong character, a stoic nature and inscrutable mien will see you through times of trouble. Also, I would remind you to always punch first and hard and go for the biggest member of a gang. You will likely lose and receive a terrible beating, but if you don’t all will fear you and if you do all will respect you.

Your Very True and Loving Sire, Sargon III

Mary Tyler Moore

Few artists transform a medium and deliver pure pleasure their audience. I can’t begin to recount the hours and hours of delight I had watching both of her shows, especially Mary, which was in heavy rotation in the late seventies and eighties. I’ll never forget the night when a radio DJ in NYC informed his audience that channel 11 would be rerunning the Chuckles the Clown episode in a few minutes and that they should all go and watch it, his own ratings be damned. This summer I started to watch it again, after what? 30 years? Who knows. That first season is remarkable, hilarious, warm, intelligent. Goodbye Mary Tyler Moore.

GHOST

Ghost

I pretend to live

When you arrive I sigh

We always sigh, hiss and rap

On attic doors and in radiators

You hear me tap

My cold kiss

Is not too shy

Listen for my lips

So close to ear come near

My caress is careless and clear

Light envelops light

Heaviest flesh yet

This overcoat of air

This net

 

A POEM WITH DOGS

Every Day

Someone flies

And someone crawls

Through the parking lot

Of a shopping mall

Or over that spot

And no one dies

Of this though everyone

Writes on the wall and lies

On a cot out in the sun

Exposed to the rot

And plays with their balls

Alone, hot

With doll’s eyes

Dogs in disguise

Dogs on the run

SLEEP

Sleep

Puppets filled the dark

With round ivory faces, black eyes,

Carved wooden noses, at the bars of the crib

Made from Adam’s rib.

Blare of the horn, fire engines

Screamed up the avenue, flew.

Mother voices chased the puppets out

But the sirens’ singing never ceases.

There is no release from the dark

Unless your arms and cheek are near

And our legs, laced as one,

Empty the black of eyes,

And red metal cries.

SleepPuppets filled the darkWith round ivory faces, bla...

Sleep

Puppets filled the dark

With round ivory faces, black eyes,

Carved wooden noses, at the bars of the crib

Made from Adam’s rib.

Blare of the horn, fire engines

Screamed up the avenue, flew.

Mother voices chased the puppets out

But the sirens’ singing never ceases.

There is no release from the dark

Unless your arms and cheek are near

And our legs, laced as one,

Empty the black of eyes,

And red metal cries.