The Paris Review's Blog, page 185

I Can’t Let Kobe Go

Photo: Keith Allison (CC BY-SA)

In 2016, in the final game of his professional career, Kobe Bryant scored sixty points. If that sounds like going out on a high note, it wasn’t. He took fifty shots—the most shots attempted by a single player in the previous thirty-three years of the league. Casual fans will cite the first statistic for years: Kobe scored sixty points in his retirement game. But in the following days and weeks, pundits voiced their disdain for this final selfish display. Proof, they chanted in unison, that it is time to say good riddance to this Narcissus.

They were right; it was time for him to bow out. Nevertheless, there is something odd about treating a great athlete’s defining characteristic as his failing. Kobe missed his first five shots that night and went scoreless for the first six minutes of the game. But when he squared up for shot six, he acted as if he had never missed a shot in his life, let alone all five in the last six minutes. Was it the arrogance of a superstar or the confidence? The jury is still out.

*

In the nineties and the 2000s, there was a dearth of female athletes for a sports-obsessed girl to watch on television. Only tennis reliably offered women who played for a living. I grew up on Steffi Graf and Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport and Justine Henin. I liked watching them but felt nothing more than cool admiration. Then came a young teenager called Serena Williams. She was astonishing, but she was also too loud, too angry, too aggressive, too proud. I saw myself in her and it made me uncomfortable.

It was easier and more fun to watch the men. Sampras and Agassi, Beckham and Zidane, Iverson and Shaq. I took pleasure in them all but I had only one idol: Kobe. I wanted to be him; I felt that I was him. The feeling that overtook me when I played tennis, soccer, basketball, netball, and touch football, I saw it in his eyes every time he stepped onto the court. Later, he gave that feeling a name: Mamba Mentality. Watching him play felt like willing a dream into existence. He didn’t just want to be the best, he always wanted to be better than himself. I wanted his confidence, his swagger, his no-apologies attitude.

*

When I first heard of the rape accusation against Kobe, I was fourteen. I played basketball for my high school. I refused to entertain the possibility that he was guilty. No hero of mine could be capable of this.

My denial continued for years.

*

Kobe taught me that being a great athlete is not primarily about talent; It’s about discipline, focus, and hard work. Talent is luck and it is meaningless. You win by training harder than your opponents, by studying their weaknesses and knowing your strengths. This is, in some ways, an odd lesson to take from Kobe Bryant. He was gloriously gifted, anointed by the heavens. But it was the lesson I needed. I knew early that I could never be the fastest or the strongest but I also knew that I could work the hardest, I could be the best student of the game. And, like Kobe, I always wanted it the most. I still do.

It took me far too long to realize that Serena had the same qualities, but that the world used different words for her. His confidence: her arrogance. His determination: her hostility. His killer instinct: her aggression. It’s no wonder that I wanted to be him, not her.

There was so much I needed to learn about the world before I could learn to love Serena. I needed no such lessons for Kobe. I loved him immediately, with my head and with my heart.

*

My childhood dreams didn’t come true: I am not a professional athlete. Instead, I study literature for a living (although I have represented two countries at four World Cups in a sport called touch football). Even so, in the minutes before a job interview, I swap my notes for headphones as if I were about to walk onto the court at the Staples Center. The only thought in my head is: switch on, game time.

I see Kobe in the unlikeliest of places. In Paradise Lost, when Eve opens her eyes for the first time, she sees her reflection in a lake. She’s so mesmerized that God has to lead her away to meet his first, better creation. But when she sees Adam, Eve can’t help but think him “less fair, less winning soft, less amiably mild than that smooth watery image.” She thinks: I’m better.

*

The details of the sexual assault case in 2003 make clear that Kobe’s self-obsession often came at others’ expense. In this case, a nineteen-year-old girl. The criminal case was dropped, but it seems almost certain he was guilty. He was definitely guilty of the aftermath: he hired lawyers to destroy a young woman’s reputation.

His apology, lauded by some as exemplary, was additional proof that he couldn’t see others fully. He was blinded by himself, just as he blinded so many of us for too long.

*

If Eve’s ultimate sin is poor listening, her original sin is poor seeing. She looks downward not upward. She thinks the still water of the lake is another sky, comparable to the incomparable heaven. She sees herself as a creature of unrivaled beauty. In that still clear water, Eve can only see a distorted self, yet she perceives perfection.

Several lines later, with the touch of his hand, Adam instils in her the wisdom to see clearly. He makes Eve see that it is he, not she, who is truly beautiful. He teaches her to recognize the danger of her vanity. Eve, now educated, sees herself with all her limitations.

I prefer untutored Eve.

*

In March of 2012, the Lakers played the New Orleans Hornets at the Staples Center. Kobe scored only eleven points, and he missed eighteen shots. He didn’t score a single time in the first three quarters of the game. Then he scored eleven points in the last seven minutes of the game, including a clutch three-point shot that won them the game. I’ve watched the highlight reel over and over again searching for doubt, even just a momentary flicker. It is entirely absent from his face and his actions. The crowd gets nervous, the commentators seem almost embarrassed, but Kobe continues to play. He plays as if the last missed shot had never happened. When he makes his first basket, the crowd whoops and cheers, and for the first time you see Kobe get upset. Did you doubt me? How dare you.

If Eve was robbed of that perfect reflection, Kobe never was. No one held his hand and opened his eyes to another, more accurate vision of himself. He never saw himself clearly—not on his first day, not on his last.

Kobe’s impaired vision is fundamental to what made him one of the greatest players in the history of the NBA. He thought he could do the impossible, and that belief made the impossible possible, again and again: playing through a dislocated finger, making both free throws after tearing his Achilles, forcing overtime with a buzzer beating 3 and then winning that game with a fadeaway three-pointer in double overtime, those eight-one points.

*

I can’t let Kobe go. This fills me with shame. I should throw him off the pedestal; he deserves at least this. I know I should, but I don’t know if I can. I can’t explain to friends, especially the ones who don’t love sports, why I haven’t been able to dismiss him. He is too much a part of me, too deeply embedded in my DNA. In the formative years of my life, I didn’t just adore him, I made myself in his image.

Even recently, as I watched him fight for women’s basketball, I felt something close to adoration. He didn’t just boast about his daughter Gianna, he also championed countless young girls, college athletes, and WNBA players. Yet even this, I know, isn’t redemption.

Whatever I do, whatever I think now, I cannot change the fact that no single athlete has taught me more about what it means to compete than Kobe. I conceded recently (unreasonably recently) that LeBron James is a better basketball player. But, like so many of the players dominating the league today, he is derivative of Kobe. And so am I.

My shame about loving, and now grieving, Kobe is laced with anger. I feel anger, and sorrow, that I grew up in a world that made it easy to adore him and easier still to dismiss the nineteen-year-old woman brave enough to speak out against him. I needed to learn about the world before I learned to love Serena, and learning about the world has made me realize I need to love Kobe less. My head knows this, but my heart hasn’t caught up.

 

Tara K. Menon is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and will begin as an assistant professor in the department of English at Harvard University in the fall of 2020. She has represented Singapore and the United States in four Touch Football World Cups.

Kamau Brathwaite: 1930–2020

Photo: repeatingislands.com

The early notices of Kamau Brathwaite’s death yesterday emphasized the indisputable fact that he was a Caribbean and West Indian writer. The emphasis says something crucial about Brathwaite as a person and an artist. He wrote over thirty books of an astonishing variety and sophistication—history, anthropology, tracts and polemics, poetry and fiction (the poetry and fiction unique and radical in the way language and the technologies of language are understood and deployed). He ranged over three continents during his tremendous career. He went to college in England and studied with F. R. Leavis. He did not only live and work in Africa, he had an Africanist period in his thinking and took an African first name. He taught in New York. He never, though, separated himself from either his imaginative allegiance to the speech and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean or his physical allegiance to his birthplace, Barbados. The eulogies now pouring out of that island are rich with the kind of grief and pride that are triggered only by the loss of a beloved native son.

It’s just as indisputable, though, that unless it is understood the right way, saying Brathwaite was a Caribbean and West Indian writer also obscures something crucial about him as a person and an artist. Brathwaite was born in 1930, only five years after Frantz Fanon and only twelve years after Nelson Mandela. He was one of the last surviving members of the first generation of postcolonial writers and intellectuals, the generation that witnessed Partition, Dien Bien Phu, Sharpeville, the Algerian war of independence, the Mau Mau Uprising, the Cuban Revolution, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. No other writer of that remarkable generation was more transparent to the inner process of decolonization; and no other writer among his peers was as committed to making literature align down to its very bones, down to its typefaces and orthographies, with the task of forging a new consciousness. Brathwaite’s experimentalism was never just experimentalism. Brathwaite’s insistence on his local idiom and his theories of “nation language” were as far removed as possible from writing in the vernacular for the sake of the vernacular. These elements in his art and craft were always a response to the largest problem of the postcolonial historical experience: the problem of rehabilitating the colonized mind and restoring it to its equilibrium. His solutions were radical and stunning, in both theory and practice. Those of us who share that history, whether East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean, American, are enormously indebted to him for the clear and steady way he confronted and clarified our understanding of ourselves. So are those of us who believe in the power of literature.

Read Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Coral” in our Winter 2019 issue.

Vijay Seshadri is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

 

Notes of a Chronic Rereader

It has often been my experience that rereading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question. It seems that I’ve misremembered quite a lot about this or that character, or this or that plot turn—they met here in New York, I was so sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist? Yet the world still drops away while I’m reading and I can’t help marveling, If I got this wrong, and this and this wrong, how come the book still has me in its grip?

Like most readers, I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. On vacation with family or friends, I am quite capable of settling myself, book in hand, on the living room couch in a beautiful country house and hardly stirring out into the glorious green for which we have all come. Once, on a train going through the Peruvian Andes, with everyone else ooh-ing and aah-ing out the window, I couldn’t lift my eyes from The Woman in White. On a Caribbean beach I sat in the blazing sun, Diane Johnson’s Lesser Lives (an imagined biography of George Meredith’s first wife) propped on my knees, and was surprised when I looked up to see that I wasn’t surrounded by the fog and cold of 1840s England. The companionate-ness of those books! Of all books. Nothing can match it. It’s the longing for coherence inscribed in the work—that extraordinary attempt at shaping the inchoate through words—it brings peace and excitement, comfort and consolation. But above all, it’s the sheer relief from the chaos in the head that reading delivers. Sometimes I think it alone provides me with courage for life, and has from earliest childhood.

We lived in an immigrant, working-class neighborhood in the Bronx where all needs were met through the patronage of one of the many stores that ran the length of a single shopping street. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the bank, the drugstore, the shoe repair: all storefront operations. One day, when I was quite small, seven or eight, my mother, holding my hand, walked us into a store I’d never before noticed: it was the local branch of the New York Public Library. The room was long, the floorboards bare, and the walls lined, floor to ceiling, with books. In the middle of the room was planted a desk at which sat Eleanor Roosevelt (in those days, all librarians looked like Eleanor Roosevelt): a tall, bosomy woman with a mass of gray hair piled belle epoque–style on the top of her head, rimless glasses perched high on her incredibly straight nose, and a look of calm interest in her eyes. My mother approached the desk, pointed at my head, and said to Eleanor Roosevelt, “She likes to read.” The librarian stood up, said “Come,” and walked me back to the front of the store where the children’s books were sectioned. “Start here,” she said, and I did. Between then and the time I graduated from high school, I read my way around the room. If I’m asked now to remember what I read in that storefront library, I can only recall that I went from Grimm’s fairy tales to Little Women to Of Time and the River. Then I entered college where I discovered that all these years I’d been reading literature. It was at that moment, I think, that I began rereading, because from then on it was to the books that had become my intimates that I would turn and turn again, not only for the transporting pleasure of the story itself but also to understand what I was living through, and what I was to make of it.

*

I’d grown up in a noisy left-wing household where Karl Marx and the international working class were articles of faith: feeling strongly about social injustice was a given. So from the start, the political-ness of life colored almost all tangible experience, which of course included reading. I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L as it manifested itself (thrillingly) through the protagonist’s engagement with those external forces beyond his or her control. In this way I felt, acutely but equally, the work of Dickens, Dreiser, and Hardy, as well as Mike Gold, John Dos Passos, and Agnes Smedley. I had to laugh when, a few years ago, I came across an essay by Delmore Schwartz in which he (Schwartz) takes Edmund Wilson to task for Wilson’s shocking lack of interest in literary form. For Schwartz, form was integral to the meaning of a literary work; for Wilson, what mattered was not how books were written but what they were talking about, and how they affected the culture at large. His habit, always, was to place a book in its social and political context. This perspective allowed him to pursue a line of thought that let him speak of Proust and Dorothy Parker in the same sentence, or compare Max Eastman favorably with André Gide. For Schwartz, this was pure pain. For me, it was inexpressibly rewarding. And what could have been more natural than that the way I read was the way I would begin to write.

*

One night toward the end of the sixties, I attended a speak-out at the Vanguard, a famous jazz club in Greenwich Village. The evening was billed as “Art and Politics,” and on the stage was the playwright LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the saxophonist Archie Shepp, and the painter Larry Rivers. In the audience, every white, middle-class liberal in the city. Very quickly, it became clear that Art didn’t stand a chance up against Politics. Jones dominated the event by announcing early that not only was the civil rights movement tired of what he called white intervention, very soon blood was going to run in the seats of the Theater of Revolution and guess who was sitting in those seats. The place went up in flames, everyone yelling and screaming some version of “Not fair!” all at once—with one voice in particular heard above the rest, crying out, “I’ve paid my dues, LeRoi. You know I’ve paid my dues!” But Jones, unperturbed and unimpressed by the uproar, continued to explain that we “ofays” had fucked it all up, but when black people got there, they would do it differently: smash up the world as we knew it and start all over again. I remember thinking, “He doesn’t want to destroy the world as it is, he wants to take his rightful place in it as it is, only right now his head is so full of blood he doesn’t know it.”

I wanted badly to call that out, as everyone else was calling out whatever hurt most, but he terrified me (one can hardly imagine the strength of Baraka’s public presence in those painfully inspired days), so I kept silent, went home, and, burning with a sense of urgency I couldn’t really account for, sat up half the night describing the entire event from the perspective of my one great insight; and discovering, as I wrote, what was to become my natural style. Using myself as a participating narrator, it was my instinct to set the story up as if writing a fiction (“The other night at the Vanguard … ”) in order to put my readers behind my eyes, have them experience the evening as I had experienced it, feel it viscerally as I had felt it (“I’ve paid my dues, LeRoi. You know I’ve paid my dues!”), then come away moved and instructed by the poignancy not of Art and Politics, but Life and Politics. Although I did not then know it, it was personal journalism that I had begun to practice.

In the morning I put what I had written in an envelope, walked to the corner mailbox, and sent the piece to The Village Voice. A few days later my phone rang. I said “Hello,” and a man’s voice replied, “I’m Dan Wolf, editor of the Voice, who the hell are you?” Before I could think I said, “I don’t know, you tell me.” Wolf laughed and invited me to send him anything else I was working on. A year later I sent him another piece. And I think most of another year passed before I sent in a third.

I had meant it about not knowing who I was. Although at any given moment I could talk a blue streak that often made a listener say “You should write that up,” when it came to it, I’d almost invariably suffer a paralyzing case of self-doubt. It was only occasionally that that burning sense of necessity allowed me to bring a piece of work to a satisfactory conclusion. Now, here I was, after the evening at the Vanguard, with an open invitation to face down this painful disability and begin to realize the lifelong ambition of writing professionally. So what did I do? I got married. I got married and left New York to live in a place deep in rural America where every connection I had to writing was dramatically severed. Soon enough, I did get unmarried and I did return to the city, but it was only to wander about, working odd jobs in and around publishing: still an overaged girl refusing to become an adult.

Then one day I walked into the Voice office—how I had the nerve to do this I’ll never know—and asked Dan Wolf for a job. He said, “You’re a neurotic Jewish girl, you produce only one piece a year, how can I give you a job?” I said no, not any more, I’d do whatever he wanted—and, as it turned out, I meant it. Two assignments later the job was mine.

But what, exactly, was the job?

The Voice was a paper of opinion founded in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, when simply to speak out as a liberal was to be heard as a radical. The key words were “speak out.” The paper had a muckraking bent that made its writers, one and all, sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head. In one sense, the enterprise bore a strong resemblance to the social realism of my childhood, so I fit right in. In another, my predilection for personal journalism soon began to complicate the appealing simplicity of “them” versus “us” that ruled Voice reporting. Using myself as the instrument of illumination when exploring the subject at hand was forcing on me a growing need to look inward as well as outward: to put the “personal” and the “journalism” together proportionally, figure out how the parts really fit together, how the situation actually felt on the ground. For the longest time, it seemed, I worked with only partial success to solve this problem. Then the liberationist movements of the seventies kicked in, politics began to feel existential, and for me the dilemma of how to practice personal journalism was home free.

In late 1970 an editor at the Voice said to me, “There are these women’s libbers gathering out on Bleecker Street. Why don’t you go out and investigate them.” “What’s a women’s libber?” I asked. A week later I was a convert.

Within days I had met Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. It seemed as though they were all talking at once, and yet I heard every word each of them spoke. Or, rather, it was that I must have heard them all saying the same thing, because I came away from that week branded by a single thought. It was this: the idea that men by nature take their brains seriously and women by nature do not is a belief, not an inborn reality: it serves the culture and is central to how all our lives take shape. The inability to see oneself primarily as a working person: this, I now saw, was the central dilemma of a woman’s existence.

The insight felt new and profound and, above all, compelling. Of a sudden, I saw the unlived lives of women not only as a crime of historic proportion but a drama of the psyche that came brilliantly to life no sooner than the word “sexism” was applied—and that was the word that now governed my days. Everywhere I looked I saw sexism: raw and brutal, ordinary and intimate, ancient and ever-present. I saw it on the street and in the movies, at the bank and in the grocery store. I saw it while reading the headlines, riding the subway, having the door held for me. And, most shockingly, I saw it in literature. Taking up many of the books I’d grown up with, I saw for the first time that most of the female characters in them were stick figures devoid of flesh and blood, there only to thwart or advance the fortunes of the protagonist whom I only just then realized was almost always male. It occurred to me that all my reading life I’d been identifying with characters whose progress through life was at a vital remove from any I would ever make.

The exhilaration I experienced once I had the analysis! I woke up with it, danced through the day with it, fell asleep smiling with it. It was as though revelation alone could deliver me into the promised land not only of political equality but of inner freedom as well. After all, what more did I need than the denial of women’s rights to explain me to myself? What a joyous little anarchist I then became! The pleasure I took in the excitement of casting conventional sentiment aside! How blithely I pronounced, “No equality in love? I’ll do without! Children and motherhood? Unnecessary! Social castigation? Nonsense!” Life felt good then. I had insight, and I had company. Everywhere I looked I saw women like myself seeing what I saw, thinking as I thought, speaking as I spoke.

Yet, by no means was it all bread and roses. For example, no one had counted on the level of rage the women’s movement had released in men and in women alike: strong enough, it sometimes seemed, to set a match to the world. Every day, marriages broke up, friendships ended, family members became estranged—and perfectly decent people were saying and doing the most abominable things to one another. One night at a dinner party, a pair of academics—one a tall, slim woman, the other a short, fat man—were listening intently to a distinguished historian whose field the woman knew well. She was adding her voice to that of the speaker with an occasional question or comment when her colleague impatiently demanded that she stop “interrupting.” At any other time within living memory, I was certain, this woman would have fallen silent after receiving such a rebuke. Now, her face hardened and she spat out, “Why, you ugly little man, don’t tell me to stop speaking!” The table went silent, and within minutes the evening was breaking up. I sat there, stunned. On the one hand, I was thrilled by the woman’s outburst; on the other, the loss of civility among us left me with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Who could have imagined that so much hate and fear had been festering for so long inside so many of us.

Within the decade, seventies feminists came to realize that while we stood united in political analysis, ideology alone was not about to deliver us from our own damaged selves. Between the ardor of our rhetoric and the dictates of flesh-and-blood reality, it seemed, lay a no man’s land of untested conviction. We became then, many of us, a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the discrepancy between what we declared we felt and the miserable complexity of what we actually felt more apparent with each passing day.

The contradictions in my own character rose up daily to plague me, and patterns of behavior I had paid no attention to suddenly loomed large. I had always thought of myself as one of those ordinarily decent people who placed a high value on what is generally called “good character.” Now I saw that I did nothing of the sort. In conversation I was cutting and confrontational, at family affairs bored and dismissive, in the office self-regarding to a fault. Although I pined endlessly for intimate connection (I thought) I nonetheless sabotaged one relationship after another by concentrating almost exclusively on what I took to be my needs, not at all on those of my friend or lover. The narrowness of experience to which my own self-divisions had consigned me—how appalling that now felt!

In no time at all an unimagined universe of interiority opened before me, one equipped with its own theory, laws, and language, constituting a worldview that seemed to hold more truth—that is, more inner reality—than any other; and a drama of internal anguish began to unfold. Every day now I struggled with myself, one part of me pitted against another, reason telling me which behaviors to break free of, compulsion demanding that I ignore reason. Again and again I suffered the humiliation of sustained self-defeat. In the goodness of analytic time it became clear—but this took years to absorb—that insight alone was never going to prove sufficient. The effort required to attain some semblance of an integrated self was going to be the task of a lifetime. As the great Anton Chekhov had so memorably put it, while “others [might have] made me a slave” it was I who must “squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.”

Once again, I found myself reading differently. I took out the books—novels in particular—I had read and reread, and read them again. This time around I saw that whatever the story, whatever the style, whatever the period, the central drama in literary work was nearly always dependent on the perniciousness of the human self-divide: the fear and ignorance it generates, the shame it gives rise to, the debilitating mystery in which it enshrouds us. I also saw that invariably what made the work of a good book affecting—and this was something implicit in the writing, trapped somewhere in the nerves of the prose—was some haunted imagining (as though coming from the primeval unconscious) of human existence with the rift healed, the parts brought together, the hunger for connection put in brilliant working order. Great literature, I thought then and think now, is a record not of the achievement of wholeness of being but of the ingrained effort made on its behalf.

*

I still read to feel the power of Life with a capital L. I still see the protagonist in thrall to forces beyond his or her control. And when I write I still hope to put my readers behind my eyes, experience the subject as I have experienced it, feel it viscerally as I have felt it.

 

Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, reissued as an FSG Classic in 2005; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Read her Art of Memoir interview here.

Excerpted from Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader , by Vivian Gornick. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 4, 2020. Copyright © 2020 by Vivian Gornick. All rights reserved.

Redux: Knowing It Would End

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Charles Johnson in his office, with his grandson Emery, 2016.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re preoccupied by questions of impermanence and longing. Read on for Charles Johnson’s Art of Fiction interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Tricks,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast!

 

Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239

Issue no. 224 (Spring 2018)

Take Marcus Aurelius—Meditations got me through Stony Brook University. I’m a Ph.D. candidate, with the pressures of teaching undergraduates, passing my own graduate classes, my qualifying exam, and living in 1975 on my four-thousand-dollar assistantship, with a first child on the way, no job yet, and a second philosophical novel to complete that had to be more expansive than the first one. Meditations got me through because Marcus Aurelius understood suffering, impermanence, and death almost as well as a Zen master. And Plato once said that philosophy is really preparation for death. I extend that wisdom to our very notion of the self as an enduring entity. You let go of the things that are simply unnecessary.

 

 

Tricks

By Joy Williams

Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983)

The children ran outside, calling.

Rosie beamed at Liberty. “You’re a Christian, right? I bet, I mean, I can imagine it.”

“I believe in guilt and longing,” Liberty admitted. “Confession and continual defeat. The circle and the spiral.” The words filled up the room pleasantly, like boulders.

“Jesus could never have saved me from drugs. Jesus is dead.” Rosie reflected sadly on this for a moment.

 

 

Impermanence

By Alex Dimitrov

Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

The first ending. And knowing it would end

I wanted another. Lover, summer,

pen with which to write it all down.

The first disappointment. Which is not

remembered but lives in the body.

And how familiar it became …

 

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The Body Is a Place: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

Two pages into Lidia Yuknavitch’s story “The Pull,” a young girl recalls her childhood as “the kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” This would be a fitting description for most of the stories in Yuknavitch’s new collection, Verge , a bracing and frequently brutal book that explores the darkest margins of human desire in hybrid, fragmentary prose.

As the title suggests, Verge is a book full of precipices. The protagonists include a child trafficking organs through an Eastern European black market, a teenage girl fantasizing about the men at a prison near her house, and a boxer with a threatening heart condition. Despite their differences, Yuknavitch’s characters share a certain precariousness. They are at moments of transition, standing on ledges of various kinds—emotional, societal, ethical and, in one case, literal—grappling with whether or not to jump.

I first encountered Yuknavitch’s writing in college, when a friend thrust her memoir The Chronology of Water into my hands at a party. “You have to read this,” she insisted. “It broke my brain.” The book, which has developed something of a cult following, opens with Yuknavitch standing in the shower after the stillbirth of her daughter. The intimate account of sexual abuse and drug addiction is as formally innovative as it is harrowing. It broke my brain (and my heart), too. In addition to her memoir, Yuknavitch is the author of four novels, including the best sellers The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan. Verge is her first collection of stories.

Yuknavitch writes about the body, particularly the ways bodies function as sites of emotional experience, intelligence, and memory. In an essay in The New Yorker, Garth Greenwell writes: “Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.” Whether depicting sex or trauma or splendor, her writing is visceral. At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin.

For this interview, Yuknavitch spoke with me over the phone from her writing studio in Portland, Oregon, a room she describes as “a big mess full of all sorts of trinkets and talismans—bones, rocks, hair, weird shells, and other witchy things.” She was generous and precise, frequently pausing midsentence to clarify her use of a particular word or phrase. “The way we say things matters a great deal,” she explained. “But I’m longing for the day when we invent beautiful and agitating new words for all of it.”

INTERVIEWER

The title of your new collection, Verge, calls to mind boundaries, edges, thresholds. Many of the stories are oriented around moments of transition or anticipation—all thresholds of a kind. What interests you about these liminal spaces?

YUKNAVITCH

Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m really interested in in-between spaces. In our real lives, we are constantly confronted with choices. But, before we make a choice, we exist for a moment in this sort of generative in-between space where anything is possible and nothing at all is closed off. In different ways, all the characters in Verge are positioned in that in-between space. Sometimes that is literally an alleyway or the edge of the ocean where the water meets the shore, or sometimes it is more interior, a decision or conflict. I’m not sure exactly why I find these wavering, anticipatory moments so exciting as a writer. I think it’s connected to my interest in parallel universes. I just love the idea that every moment contains nearly infinite potential. That there are a thousand possible offshoots and outcomes of any action. I like the idea that a story could live in that space of potentiality, that it wouldn’t have to choose one or the other, but that it could be activated with all those possibilities at once.

INTERVIEWER

You have written several novels, including a work of speculative fiction, and a memoir. This is your first collection of short stories. What, if anything, did you find uniquely challenging or surprising about the form?

YUKNAVITCH

Well, I am a bit of an outlier in that I don’t see as great a distinction between forms and genres as other writers do. I think the membrane, even between fiction and nonfiction, is quite thin. Most of the differences have to do with compositional avenues and strategies. But, in my heart, I am devoted to the literary fragment. I think of that as my primary form, though I can expand or contract it to meet the needs of the story. Sometimes, I string fragments together and they just won’t stop, and those become novels. And other times I am writing fragments from my life and they begin to have a gestalt and those become nonfiction projects. As for the question about surprise, I can only keep writing something if I feel there is surprise in it. So I have to keep scratching at the layers until I find surprise. When I hit the stratum where I don’t know anything, that’s where I want to be.

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested in that language. When you say that you are looking to capture a “vibration,” what does that mean to you? Is it a sense of possibility? A wavering between two points?

YUKNAVITCH

Oh, I love that. Yes, I think of it as a kind of physics within the text, a formal energy. But it also applies to emotional states, a wavering between binaries, a shivering between forms. The space between possibility and demise.

INTERVIEWER

Can you walk me through your process a little bit? When you’re working on a story, do you map the whole thing out in your head? Do you begin with a character or an image and work from there? What happens first?

YUKNAVITCH

For me, the form always comes first and the story follows. In that way, I probably have more in common with poets than I do with prose writers, because the one thing I never consider is plot. There is a French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, who wrote a little book called Tropisms that I read when I was about twenty-seven and it changed my life and writing style forever. She had this theory that you can build a story around a sequence of emotional intensities rather than a traditional beginning, middle, and end. I am a person who has been arrested and hospitalized and even spent some time living in a state of psychosis under an overpass. My life has been a series of intensities and so this idea really resonated with me. The first book where I really did this was Chronology of Water. I just put those experiences in a sequence and let them be what they were. It freed me from the feeling that I needed to clean them up or make them more coherent or palatable by fitting them into a typical satisfying story arc.

INTERVIEWER

You write very explicitly and expressively about the body and desire. In a way, it feels as though the body is almost a kind of setting in which the drama of the stories unfold.

YUKNAVITCH

Well, first I just want to thank you because it makes me giddy that you noticed that. I care about that probably more than anything. For me, the body is a real place. It is a place you go to, a place you inhabit. It is the fundamental setting of every experience you have. And it is sometimes a place you leave in moments of fear or crisis or grief or depression or pain. I am working toward creating art that happens to a reader in their real body. So, in each story I was playing with bringing the body out of its material circumstances, giving it a consciousness. Letting the body have its own point of view. While writing Chronology of Water I literally had that question taped to the wall above my desk. A little note that read, What if the body had its own point of view? And I don’t mean in the ye-olde-philosophical binary of mind/body split sort of way. I mean that we don’t often enough consider the experience of the body as equal to, or inextricable from, the experience of the mind. For instance, if you have a pain in your back for your whole adult life, we don’t ask often enough what story lives there. And what is your spine trying to tell you? I believe that we are all walking around carrying every experience we have ever had written on our bodies. Our physical bodies. And in my work I want these bodies to signify—not as traditional characters—but as if those stories inside the bodies were, momentarily, activated.

INTERVIEWER

Throughout the book, sex and art-making are depicted as ethically fraught endeavors. I’m thinking in particular of the story “Street Walker,” when a woman writer experiences a flush of creative inspiration after hiring a prostitute. In the story, her inspiration is amplified by both sexual arousal and a kind of self-righteous fervor. It’s a really compelling, morally complicated moment, and one that I found myself thinking about for days after. To what extent do you consider the erotic and the creative to be linked? And is that relationship inherently exploitative?

YUKNAVITCH

This is a question that I come back to again and again. What are we doing when we’re writing? It is exactly the question I was holding in my mind in that story. I don’t know that I have an answer, but I like the question. And in some ways I like that I can’t resolve the question. I like that I have to go puzzle on that every year of my life. You know, writers are assholes. And the trick is to occasionally turn that laser eye back in on your own practice. I’m unconvinced that any of us do that enough. For better or worse, I was trying to stage something in that story … a kind of narrative battle. She literally invites this character into her home. She feels so superior and self-righteous, the way artists often do. And you’re right, the writer in that story is literally getting off on her bad self. She is! Which we are all probably guilty of in some ways. But, without giving too much away, the other woman is also writing.

INTERVIEWER

In past interviews you have discussed the influence of queer and feminist theory on your work, particularly writers such as Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. You’ve described these writers as “the underbelly of literature.” I’m curious what you mean by that and how you see your work drawing upon and fitting into that legacy.

YUKNAVITCH

So many of the writers I admire have dared to dive over the edge into what might reasonably be seen as “troubled waters.” When I read the work of Acker and Cooper and many many others, I feel like the art happens to me inside my body. I think that, like Sarraute, they demonstrated that it was possible to break all the rules I had believed existed in literature. They showed me that writing could be violent and physical and polymorphous and messy and still qualify as “literary,” still be transcendent. That there are different narratives available.

I am one of the artists who is trying to use part of her time here to hold open the spaces other people feel uncomfortable looking at. So much of my life and the people I have loved exist inside difficult spaces, like the birth/death space of my daughter, who died the day she was born. Those spaces are no less real, not lesser literature, not lesser beauty to me. For me beauty is complicated and contradictory and a space where binaries are held in suspension. Beauty is troubling.

INTERVIEWER

I love the language that you use to describe that work—that it happens to you in your body.

YUKNAVITCH

Yes. I don’t mean to sound like a broken record but, really, this all connects back to my thoughts about the human body as an epistemological site, a physical place where meanings are endlessly generated and negated. For me, the problem with traditional Western philosophy was that the body was missing. It was only in feminist and nontraditional writing that I found a place where I could engage meaningfully with the experience of living in a body. And all the discomfort that comes with that. Women in particular—and, to be clear, I don’t mean biologically essential women, I mean anyone who inhabits the space of woman—find immediately that the one problem area is having a body. Because the entire culture will try to write that body away from you. We are still in that crisis. We haven’t transcended very far away from that crisis. So we need more writers who are interested in writing into that experience, with all its multiplicity and contradiction.

INTERVIEWER

At several points in the book, we see women hurt themselves. The most obvious example being in the story “A Woman Signifying,” when the narrator, who believes her boyfriend is having an affair, intentionally burns her face on a radiator. I am interested in these moments for the way they represent female rage—how it is internalized, transmuted, and sublimated.

YUKNAVITCH

Absolutely. We are in a bit of a zeitgeist where the story of female rage is having a fire-up opportunity, I’ve noticed. But, I am going to be fifty-seven soon and I can tell you from experience, and a really really expensive Ph.D., that women’s rage is nothing new. It has surfaced and resurfaced in art and literature for thousands of years. And it seems to get reinscribed every time the culture gets concerned about women getting richer and more powerful. I’ve seen it in literature and art. I’ve seen it politically. Of course, it’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to resolve the moments of rage in the book. So often, it’s the myth of resolution that is actually damaging. Rage is natural. Rage is inevitable, particularly in a world that polices bodies with such zeal. Rage can be healthy and productive. But the idea that rage can or should be solved or soothed in any simple way is a means of shutting women and queer people down and it keeps us from exploring the ways in which that anger might be generative.

INTERVIEWER

One of the things I find compelling about your writing is how adamantly it resists traditional resolutions. There is conflict and tension and, in certain cases, that tension is released or transformed, but rarely does the reader get the sense that the story is “over” or solved in any clean, final, way.

YUKNAVITCH

The more I read writing by voices that are outside, meaning people of color, and the more I learn from global literature, the more I can see that new forms are emerging that correspond to different bodies and different experiences. A brief reading list of recent books that I feel challenge the traditional notion of plot and resolution are: Terese Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Tommy Orange’s There, There, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. These are all examples of a narrative forms being intentionally fragmented or extended or expanded or reconstructed in radical ways. All the resolutions are polyphonic, or they insist on an intimate relationship to an actual body in a state of vibration, not a universal body. As though such a thing exists.

You know, I’ve mouthed off before in really slutty ways about how I think the resolution of plot is a political hoax designed to keep some voices and bodies thriving and other voices and bodies silent. Not everyone’s story gets to be tied up neatly with a bow at the end. And I could talk for hours about why I think that is. But in my puny contribution to all the literary streams that lead to the bigger literary ocean, I just want to suspend us for a moment inside the question of what is at stake in each of these stories. That’s more interesting to me than whatever the answer is.

 

Cornelia Channing is a writer from Bridgehampton, New York. 

The Edison of the Slot Machines

Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. 

Original illustration © Ellis Rosen

Tommy saw the solution in a dream. “I’m seeing myself from behind,” he recalled, “and I have [the tool] in my hand.” All through 1990, he’d been searching for a way to cheat the latest slot machines. He needed a new tool, something to replace the clumsy old instrument that had landed him in the penitentiary. Night and day in his Vegas apartment, he toiled on a Fortune One video poker machine. But no matter what he tried, some riddle in the guts of the unit would thwart him.

Then, in the recess of sleep, the solution appeared in all its brilliant simplicity: a flexible piece of metal, wedged at the top, and some piano wire. “I woke up,” he told the History Channel, “actually got out of bed, and went and built it.” Tommy had found his answer: The Monkey Paw.

*

When a friend dropped by Ace TV Sales and Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1980, Tommy Glenn Carmichael was just an unremarkable repairman who moonlighted as a pool hustler. He had minor drug convictions and some juvenile mischief on his criminal record, but nothing about the thirty-year-old suggested that he’d one day stand among the most inventive cheats in gambling history.

Carmichael’s friend had brought along some toys to tinker with: a Bally’s slot machine and a cheating device called the top-bottom joint. Of how his multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise got started that day, Carmichael simply said, “We got to playing around.”

Triggering a payout with a top-bottom joint was a crude operation. A piece of guitar string comprised the “bottom” part of the tool. It went into the left corner of the machine, up against the circuitboard, and sent low-wattage electricity coursing through the unit. The “top” part was a piece of metal curved like the number nine. When inserted into the coin slot, it completed a circuit powerful enough to hot-wire the hopper, where the coins are kept.

Jackpot.

Sensing his destiny, Carmichael closed his repair shop and moved to Las Vegas, eager to put the top-bottom joint to work. After his first attempt, he walked off with about thirty-five bucks in nickels—chump change compared to what would come, but enough to confirm that he was onto something big. “You are thinking you are going to have yachts and cars,” he later told the Associated Press. “You know, the American Dream.”

That dream fell apart on Independence Day, 1985. After a few years of success with the top-bottom joint, Carmichael was playing slots at a Denny’s near the Strip when police slammed him against the wall and discovered the device. He was arrested, convicted, and sent to the penitentiary.

But he wasn’t scared straight. He knew he’d found his calling. Once he was out, Tommy vowed to reinvent himself as the slot machine wizard of Las Vegas.

*

When Carmichael was arrested in 1985, slots had come a long way from their nickel-plated, side-handled origins. German mechanics in San Francisco invented the first slots in the early 1870s, but it wasn’t until the turn of the century that the Liberty Bell machine set the standard, with its three reels of spinning lucky charms: bells, horseshoes, hearts.

Although slots gained popularity during Prohibition, their conquest of casino floors was slow. Compared to the skilled, high-stakes action of table games like poker and blackjack, slots were nothing but a pull of the lever of chance and the payoffs were relatively small. The machines were relegated to the periphery of the casino floor, and pejoratively associated with bored wives killing time while their husbands bet the farm. One Atlantic City casino vice president said the machines suffered from “the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome”: they couldn’t get no respect.

That began to change in 1963, when Bally Manufacturing introduced the Money Honey, widely considered the first modern slot machine. The Money Honey came with front-light electricity and sound effects, giving the play some sizzle. But more crucially, it contained a 2,500-coin hopper. Prior to the Money Honey, if the gambler hit a jackpot, they had to wait for a member of casino staff to verify the win and pay them in cash. As casino operator Warren Butcher said, “This didn’t just slow up play, it kind of suggested closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease play and walk out the door with his winnings.”

With a 2,500-coin hopper, however, odds increased that the gambler would keep playing their winnings back into the machine. Play became continuous, endless. The Money Honey set the industry on an illustrious track that would, some forty years later, lead one Canadian company to market adult diapers specifically to slot-machine addicts who refused to staunch the flow of play. In 1981, slots out-earned table games at Las Vegas casinos, and the same happened in Atlantic City in 1984.

Each phase of the slot machine’s evolution inspired commensurate innovation among cheaters. It began with plugged nickels and coins on strings. At one point, you could pour laundry detergent into the slot in lieu of money (how someone discovered this is anybody’s guess), or jam the gears by giving the arms an awkward tug at just the right moment. Then came a succession of more sophisticated tools like the shim, which could manipulate Mills and Buckley machines, and Jenny’s Shaker, which enabled you to move the reels around.

It was a constant arms race with manufacturers. As soon as a cheating device gained popularity, security was one step ahead. The top-bottom joint, which first inspired Tommy Carmichael, worked for a while, but it was old-fashioned by the time of his bust in Denny’s. “I was playing a dinosaur,” he said. In 1990, after his time in the penitentiary, slot cheats awaited the next breakthrough.

*

Tommy’s Monkey Paw, nicknamed after its wedged, beckoning tip, slid up into the payout chute and triggered a microswitch, emptying out the hopper. The success was overwhelming. This wasn’t the cursed monkey’s paw of W.W. Jacobs’s short story; Carmichael had gotten what he’d wished for, and it was excellent. “You could leave a whole room empty,” he marveled, estimating that he regularly walked away with $1,000 an hour. “You got a credit card that won’t run out.”

But in the slot cheat business, triumph is always short-lived. Less than two years after The Monkey Paw’s invention, fresh innovations in security rendered it obsolete. Indeed, the legacy of The Monkey Paw wasn’t so much in its lasting efficacy, but in the confidence it instilled in Tommy. Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” At the end of the nineties, Tommy Carmichael declared, “Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”

In 1992, Tommy was perusing the showroom of International Game Technology (IGT), a leading slots manufacturer, disguised as a customer. He needed to understand what was going wrong with The Monkey Paw. When he asked an engineer for a glimpse inside one of the machines, to his amazement, the man obeyed. Eureka. “The second he opened it up,” Tommy said, “I knew how to beat it.”

The new machines employed electronic sensors to keep track of how many coins were being dispensed by the hopper. Tommy’s new device, “the light wand,” comprised a camera battery and a miniature light bulb. When shone up into the machine, the light wand blinded the sensor, making it oblivious to how many coins it was dispensing. Say you put a hundred bucks into the machine, then requested it to cash out your input. With a light wand, that hundred would quickly become two, then three—whatever you had the nerve to take.

It was Tommy’s most devastating invention yet. The light wand cost just $2.50 to build, and some slot cheats said they could make $10,000 a day from it. The device proliferated so widely that gambling authority Jason England dubbed the mid-’90s the “light wand era.” “It was probably the device that took more money out of the industry than any other,” England said, estimating the damage in the high hundreds of millions.

Tommy had finally chased down his American Dream. He owned a house in Rancho Bel Air and a Jaguar XJ6; he dated a topless dancer; he paid his taxes on time. Touring around in a mobile home, he’d cheat casinos in Connecticut, Colorado, and Louisiana. In 1995, risking a walk on the plank, Tommy took seven cruises in six months, ripping off slots all through the tropics.

By now, his operation was perfected. He always worked with a team of “shades,” using them to block security, and kept a dutiful eye on the latest technological developments. When IGT installed the Actuator Arm to counter the light wand, Tommy answered the challenge in just over an hour with “the hanger.” He was at the height of his powers, an artist in his prime: “I really felt they couldn’t make one I couldn’t beat.”

*

Although lacking the romance of card sharps, or the freakish genius of card counters, slot cheats are uniquely innocuous, almost laudable characters. If you cheat at table games, you’re siphoning money from your fellow gamblers. But if you cheat at slots, it’s just you versus the casino. There’s a reason that slots are nicknamed “one-armed bandits”: we intuitively sense that their gains are ill-gotten. And so, like Omar Little in The Wire, the slot cheat is only stealing money that‘s already dirty. “I wasn’t hijacking somebody at the family store,” Tommy said. “It was always directed at the casinos.” One notorious cheater named Timothy John Childs once listed “slot cheat” as his occupation on a loan application; that’s how close to legitimacy it sometimes seemed.

But the life of a slot machine outlaw came with high risks. Tommy’s enterprise began to unravel in 1996, when he got busted with a second-generation light wand at Circus Circus. Those charges were dropped, but Tommy kept surfacing on law-enforcement’s radar. In 1998, he was arrested again in Laughlin, Nevada. At the time, he was dreaming up his most ambitious device ever. As he described to the television show Breaking Vegas, written by Peter Fruchtman and directed by Ted Schillinger, “The Tongue” would enable him to steal about two thousand dollars per second by loading up machines with credits and then cashing out. The plan was to snatch millions and retire.

When he was apprehended again, in Atlantic City in 1999, it turned out that federal wiretaps had been recording Tommy and his crew discuss The Tongue. In 2001, he admitted to operating an illegal gambling enterprise, and was given eleven months in prison. It was estimated that his team had stolen over $5 million. Even with all that, Tommy probably would’ve found his way back into the life, hypnotically drawn, like so many gamblers, to the dazzling interface of the machine. But then came the Black Book.

Created in 1960, the Black Book was ostensibly developed to keep organized crime out of the Nevada gaming industry. If your name is placed in the book, it’s a crime for you to enter a casino. The process of who gets included has always been arbitrary, even hypocritical. As Ronald Farrell and Carole Case write in The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada’s Casinos, “Not all who might have presented a serious threat to gaming at the time were placed in the Black Book.” Given so many early Vegas investors’ pasts in bootlegging and illegal gambling, “This would have been impossible.” Instead, the Black Book has always been leveraged to target certain groups and manipulate the balance of power. Only one thing is for certain: once you’re in, it’s virtually impossible to get out.

When word came down that he was going in the book, Tommy didn’t contest it. “It’s a no-win situation,” he said, “a kangaroo court.” He’d already lost his house and his car. Resigned, he moved back to Tulsa. The American Dream was over.

But the Edison of the Strip had one last burst of inspiration. Claiming he’d had a change of heart and wanted to “right a wrong,” Tommy invented “The Protector,” an anti-cheating device for slot machines. At the time, he estimated that he was responsible for ninety percent of cheating devices in circulation, and that The Protector was the one solution he’d always been afraid the manufacturers would discover. When any sort of light shone inside the machine, The Protector would prompt the unit to shut down. In 2002, Tommy sold his patent, which ended up in the possession of iGames Entertainment. The device was approved by Nevada regulators and sold to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for use in its casinos.

Yet Carmichael, who died in 2019, survived by his two dogs, Mojo and Scochie, never stopped haunting the slot machine industry’s unconscious. When the Nevada Gaming Commission discovered that iGames Entertainment’s anti-cheating device had been invented by Carmichael, they launched an investigation into its legitimacy. Said one member of the Gaming Control Board, “There’s little doubt in our minds that Tommy Carmichael has the knowledge and the ability to reprogram it.”

Was The Protector just Tommy’s most elaborate scheme yet, a Trojan Horse for every slot? His patent application contains expertly drawn diagrams, the fruit of a lifetime spent with slots, indicating precisely how The Protector would fit into the machine. And then he concludes, “Further objects, features, and advantages of the present invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art upon examining the accompanying drawings.”

 

Michael LaPointe is a writer in Toronto. His debut novel, The Creep, will be published by Random House Canada in 2021

The Closeting of Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers, 1959. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Carson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.”

Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The [husband] would come in and slap her, [and] the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy. Reeves had cheated on her with one of her friends, Nancy, which he told her their first night together. Their new marriage was already starting to disintegrate. So Carson went home, and Reeves stayed in North Carolina.

She returned to her parents’ house in Columbus, Georgia, to begin a new book, “The Bride of My Brother,” her original title for The Member of the Wedding. Shortly thereafter, in what would become a pattern of reversals for them, separating and reuniting, Carson and Reeves used the advance from her first book to move to New York. Reeves chose to sail first from Charlotte to Nantucket with his old roommate (“roommate”?) Jack Adams. Carson rode the bus by herself. She spent the publication day of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, June 14, 1940, in a boardinghouse room, “cut off and lonely.” When the book appeared the reviews were staggering, especially for a twenty-three-year-old writer. They called her a child, baby-faced, and then in the same breath called her the new John Steinbeck. Richard Wright compared her to Faulkner, commending her “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In an ad for the book in the New York Times, T. S. Stribling called it “the literary find of the year.”

In the days following her book’s publication, her own face in bookshop windows was the only friendly face in the city. That lonely summer, after paying a call to Greta Garbo, her idol, and finding her less than hospitable, and while waiting to hear back from Erika Mann, a lesbian transplant from Europe and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, Carson received a telegram from her editor, Robert Linscott, to meet at the Bedford Hotel. Carson writes that she went right out and bought a new summer suit, wanting badly to look the part of celebrated young writer and unable to do so in the cotton sundresses schlepped from Georgia. At the Bedford, Carson recalls, “a stranger” arrived. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life,” she writes in Illumination and Night Glare, “beautiful, blonde, with straight short hair. She asked me to call her [Annemarie] right away, and we became friends immediately. At her invitation, I saw her the next day.”

Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach was one of the many lesbians Carson encountered in her new life in New York, and she was among the most glamorous. She wore custom suits from Paris, her hair was chicly cropped, and her features were severe and gorgeous. Or, as female writer R. L. York puts it, “Her head was a Donatello David head; her blonde hair was smooth and cut like a boy’s; her blue eyes dark and slow moving; her mouth childish and soft with shyly parted lips. She wore a skirt and boy’s shirt and a blue blazer and she was not afraid of my dog.” When Carson and Annemarie met again the following day, they talked about Annemarie’s morphine addiction (Carson had never heard of the drug) and her travels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and the Far East.

Carson immediately fell hard for Annemarie. Who wouldn’t? She’d been dreaming of escaping Columbus and the South for years, and with her first book she had finally gotten out. The arrival of Annemarie offered her something else that she had been longing for without language to express it. Annemarie told Carson that when she was seventeen, her mother called her “a dope fiend, a communist, and a lesbian,” which was how she wound up in New York. Annemarie tried to remain polite to her mother, though she had little feeling for her. But when she would go home to Switzerland, York says, Annemarie “would don her most feminine blouse, pull her stockings straight, and set out to go visiting.” After she was gone, the neighbors would say, “ ‘Really a lovely girl, if it were not for the awful things one hears about her,’ ” York writes. “That was generally the epitaph.” Little remains of Carson’s interactions with Annemarie, but it’s clear from her letters and from the therapy transcripts that Carson was not shy about her feelings at the time or afterward. She did not disguise them or even question them. She loved Annemarie, and that was that.

*

As I searched through the existing writings about Carson in my downtime as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, I found over and over that her relationship with Annemarie was sidelined or left out of a story about her and Reeves. It doesn’t seem as if these are, for the most part, acts of outright censorship on the part of biographers or the people they interviewed. Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative, the one in which inexplicable crushes on and friendships with women surface briefly within the confines of an otherwise “normal” life. In the published biographies, Annemarie is just a one-sided obsession. (“Carson loved Annemarie far more than Annemarie could ever requite,” according to Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter, and “Annemarie did not return Carson’s enthusiasm,” writes Sherill Tippins in February House.) The more I read, the more it seemed that all of her profound emotional relationships with women were either dismissed or ridiculed. Her therapist (and probable lover), Mary Mercer, becomes in these retellings some kind of nursemaid to a sickly, emotionally flatulent Carson, and the other significant women in Carson’s life—Mary Tucker, Elizabeth Ames, Janet Flanner, Natalia Danesi Murray, Marielle Bancou, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jane Bowles—all become minor characters.

Yet as I read and reread her letters and conversations with Mercer, I found a fuller version of Carson’s life revealed through her relationships. I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others. Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer. There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring to have with wanting to be. It’s the combination of wants that makes these longings confusing, dangerous, and queer. There is a desire to know that is already knowing, a curiosity for what you deep down recognize, a lust for what you are or could be. Writer Richard Lawson describes it as “the muddied confusion over whether you want to be someone’s companion or if you want to step inside their skin, to inhabit the world as they do.”

It is by no means easy to track or trace relationships between women, past or present. Women’s relationships with other women are often disguised: by well-documented marriages to men, by a cultural refusal to see what is in full view or even to believe such relationships exist. In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down. Reasons for this layer one upon the other: A lesbian purposely hides her identity and remains closeted. A lesbian refuses to call herself a lesbian, disidentifying from the term and its associations for reasons personal or political. A woman does not know she is a lesbian—because she does not ever have a relationship with another woman, or because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian. I didn’t call myself one for several years. Or, as in Carson’s case, her own self-understanding and identification are difficult to determine because of the efforts of those who outlived her and pushed her into the closet.

It was her retroactive closeting by peers and biographers that I found most disturbing about my research. I took it personally. I began to feel unreal, deranged. If Carson was not a lesbian, if none of these women were lesbians, according to history, if indeed there hardly is a lesbian history, do I exist?

Rather than name or talk about Carson’s formative loves and friendships with women, the biographies cast them aside in favor of an account of her “tortured” relationship with Reeves McCullers, the man she married and unmarried twice in her life. The straight narrative is given the benefit of the doubt, and writers feel comfortable filling in the blanks to create a great and desperate love story out of what looks, on my reading, like a series of manipulations of a woman struggling to name her own desires. Perhaps it isn’t even as sinister as knowingly replacing one narrative with another. Maybe it’s just that the stories of her relationships with women are partial, hard to compile. To piece them together, you have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it’s like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places.

There are many ways to interpret a life. But what if we choose the most probable scenario, the path of least resistance, instead of trying to talk our way out of what seems evident, instead of trying to explain away the obvious? Lesbian historian Emily Hamer writes:

We know that they were lesbians because this is the best explanation of their lives … The standard of visibility is not a universal prerequisite for knowledge. We cannot see electricity but we know that electricity exists because electricity is the best explanation of why moving a light switch leads to the illumination of a light bulb.

Josyane Savigneau, the author of Carson McCullers: A Life, doubts whether Carson ever experienced sexual desires, period, “romantic obsessions” with certain women aside. She is, unfortunately, not alone in this opinion. She writes, “The labels lesbian and bisexual have been used by those who denigrate any form of marginality to distance themselves from Carson McCullers by categorizing her as an ‘abnormal artist.’ They have also been used by partisans of homosexuality—both male and female—who would appropriate the writer for their cause.” Savigneau’s biography came out in English in 2001. Her description positions me as a “partisan of homosexuality” seeking to “appropriate” Carson’s story for my “cause.” And perhaps I am. I think the cause rather a worthy one.

 

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, Outside, The Lifted Brow, Essay Daily, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the creative writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is her first book.

From My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , by Jenn Shapland, published this week by Tin House Books.

The Artifact

In her new column, Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell. 

I saw a lot of dead bodies in 2018. I was researching a story about medical examiners, and in so doing inadvertently saw autopsies and death scenes and the inside and outside of a lot of corpses. It was an entirely different kind of encounter with the human form for me: so many opened rib cages, sculptural and bloody, and so many surprises. There is a delicate bone shaped like a horseshoe hidden in the cartilage at the throat. The uterus, fierce red, is startlingly pretty when lifted into the light. The dura mater, a membrane that sheaths our brain and spinal cord, clings so stubbornly to the inside of the skull that you need a tool like a chisel to scrape it out. The empty skull echoes. Skin eventually turns colors, swells, splits, peels back like curled paper.

What does a person still living inside her body do with this knowledge? What does a body mean? Nearly all of the corpses, at the moment I saw them, were in a medical examiner’s office, where the bodies are kept naked, toe-tagged, and supine, arranged on metal gurneys with. Any clothing or belongings they arrived with rests in brown bags beside them. There’s a standardization to bodies kept in the morgue—the body becomes an item that has entered a bureaucratic system in order to be organized, studied, catalogued, and released. Corpses in this context are something like people, but they are also like books in a library.

Occasionally I saw a body before it had been processed, and turned into so neutral an artifact. In particular, there was a night when I went to the home of a woman who had died on the floor of her bedroom. I had been on standby that evening—if a death investigator was notified that he needed to go out to a death scene and collect a body, he would call me first and I would go, too. I was hanging around my rented room and keeping an eye on my cell phone, waiting for someone in that particular city to die. This woman was the first one that evening, and so I got into the investigator’s car and we drove together to a quiet residential block lit by swirling blue and red.

The situation at the woman’s house was everything the morgue was not; it was filthy, there was horror, people were having feelings all over the place. The house itself was falling apart and the interior was crammed with garbage. The EMS team hadn’t had enough space to work on her in her bedroom (and they’d been worried about catching fleas or bedbugs) so they’d moved her outside. There were six or ten dogs running around. The policemen on the scene immediately began reciting the story as they’d heard it from the woman’s family: like plenty of other people who lived in the area, which is a food desert, the woman had been malnourish, which led to type 2 diabetes, which led to illness requiring pain medication, which led to addiction, which led to street drugs, which led to heart and liver problems and every other kind of problem, which led to rehab, which led to surgeries to fix the various organ problems and complications, which led more rehab, and on and on. It seemed possible that she’d been killed by an infection in her gaping surgical wound, but the investigator thought that she’d managed to find drugs in the few hours since coming home from the hospital and had overdosed. He referred her for an autopsy to be sure.

The autopsy is a storytelling exercise: in the absence of sure information, it is the job of the medical examiner to excavate the story of your death. “Every body tells a story,” forensic pathologists like to say. “It tells the story you can’t tell yourself.” Without conclusive evidence about what happened, the body will speak. In the case of this woman, the autopsy would confirm whether she died of an overdose, an infection, a heart attack, or something else.

One rule of an autopsy is that you shouldn’t stop when you think you’ve found a cause of death. The autopsy is intended to be the complete record of a body at a particular moment in time—all of its dimensions, markings, defects, and attributes. “Oh! He had rheumatic fever when he was a kid,” the doctor said of one, gesturing for me to come look at a tiny bit of scar tissue in the heart of a woman in her fifties. Another time, a doctor gestured at an X-ray showing that an elderly lady had dozens of healed rib fractures. She likely fell a lot. She likely lived alone long after she shouldn’t have.

This is something I never knew before: that experience is inscribed in the body at the deepest level. I knew about scars and premature graying and sunspots, appearance as a reflection of habit and experience, the residual effects of injury or illness that can permanently reshape the way a body moves and looks. But our veins, too! Even the arches of our feet; even which of our joints swell with arthritis. Once, a forensic anthropologist told me the gender, age, diet, socioeconomic background, basic medical history, and likely country of origin of a skeleton based on his teeth alone. In this sense the body is an artifact but it is also an archive.

Derrida wrote that the archive functions like a prosthesis for memory—it begins at the point where memory fails and, as dancer and scholar Linda Haviland summarizes, “provide[s] a substrate onto which the act of remembering could be consigned and further be retrieved, reproduced, or reiterated in some way.” The archive requires, according to Derrida, “a certain exteriority,” a place other than the self to hold information and memory. Historically, we’ve thought of this as a real structure, a space set apart to safeguard whatever has been chosen to survive time. “No archive without outside.”

But what is “outside,” he asks. There is, even within our own minds, “an internal substrate, surface, or space” onto and into which experience can be imprinted and archived even after it is forgotten. Haviland suggests that the body is a crucial component of this interior-exterior: a “sentient archive.” By this logic, the body carries the self and perhaps is the self but also holds within it someplace, other than the self. Some of what is lost to memory lives there.

*

The encounter with the woman who died on the floor of her bedroom, more than any of the others, sent me into a rictus of anger, or grief, that persisted even after the reporting trip ended. Until that point, I’d been more or less holding it together, but afterward all the bodies I saw lost the relative sterility of the morgue, where everyone is without context. Her death seemed too specific—I’d seen her bras on the carpet and her sons’ faces when they politely asked the death investigator for permission to see her before she was taken away—and too generic, too much a product of impersonal systems, too like a routine news item. Suddenly I was full of rage for the babies in the autopsy suite, the teenage suicides, the overdoses, everyone. All I could see in the mirror or in other people was the body as it eventually becomes—the familiar and beloved made strange, grotesque, helpless, architectural, rotted, lifeless. Everyone I saw, I pictured on the autopsy table. I tried not to be weird about it, but I avoided the butcher counter at the grocery store.

A complication of considering the body as an archive is that traditionally archives are curated by an authority that decides what is worth including and knows what is inside it. But most of what inscribes our bodies is out of our control. No one authority affects our childhood nutrition, national origin, and regional location, our scars, illnesses, basic features, or the habits and circumstances of our communities. We never even see the vast majority of our own apparatus. And yet the sense that we have—or should have—primary agency over our own bodies is so powerful. We protect that sense legally, manipulate it for profit, celebrate those who exemplify it, teach it to our children. Thinking of the body as a sentient archive admits the tension that we are both inscribed upon and the inscriber.

It took a few months for the vivid memories of corpses to fade, but they did. Mercifully, I stopped picturing people on the autopsy table. I thought less often of the little old lady with the broken ribs and the baby who died in a grease fire. Little flashes still came here and there, mostly of particularly gruesome things, but less often. I let myself forget and was grateful.

Most of what is recorded by the body remains a mystery to us. We cannot know which experiences will leave a trace and which will vanish, as the body itself eventually does. This is something I think about when I go to acupuncture. Tension or pain my body has stowed away beyond my conscious awareness are surfaced and eased. I started going a few years ago for TMJ, or painful jaw tension, which has come and gone with periods of stress ever since I was a teenager. A muscle in my jaw was spasming with such force that when I lay flat on my back, my neck started to shake, like a child’s hand refusing to let go. The first acupuncturist’s name was Elizabeth Bishop. (There was also an acupuncturist by the name of Sonntag at this establishment, but I chose Elizabeth Bishop. Acupuncturists as a group seem to have spectacular names.)

I laid on my back on a folding table and was scolded gently for not having taken my socks off. “Breathe,” Elizabeth Bishop commanded, and I tried to comply. When she put a needle in the crown of my head I realized a system of muscles on my scalp had been pulling my jaw tight; it all released at once. After the first session, my jaw pain went away and didn’t return for months.

Recently, I went to see a new acupuncturist, a woman named Molly Beverage. She was warm and calm, and her office was furnished with comfortable chairs and smelled strongly of essential oils. This acupuncture, though, was more intense than anything I was used to—every needle contracted a muscle so powerfully that I had to draw deep breaths to keep from yelping.

There’s a particular pain to acupuncture when it hurts, which isn’t always. The needle doesn’t sting, but it can make the muscle underneath it contract and throb before it releases. It’s not frightening pain, but it is mysterious. I noticed early on that different needles ache depending on where my mind wanders. When I think about work, certain needles light up with pain—the fleshy muscle between the thumb and forefinger. When I am angry, the needle sticking out of my sternum howls and throbs. Then it passes.

About twenty minutes into the session with Molly Beverage, around the time that the aching was beginning to let up, I smelled death. The room filled with the smell of the woman on the floor, of the morgue, of the autopsy suite. It’s a horrible, absolutely singular smell. Where was it coming from? My head was down in the donut-shaped pillow, and from that limited vantage point I started scanning the floor for dead mice. After the session was over and I got up and looked around, disturbed, convinced there must be a dead animal somewhere. Nothing was there. I thanked Molly and left. It wasn’t until we got in the car that I turned to my partner, who’d received acupuncture in the same room. “There was something dead in the room,” I said. “How could you concentrate?”

She looked at me blankly. Her nose is noticeably and reliably better than mine, but she hadn’t smelled anything at all.

 

Jordan Kisner’s writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, GQ, the Guardian, The American Scholar, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Her debut essay collection, Thin Places, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March. 

Staff Picks: Gossip, Ghosts, and Growth

Alma Mahler and her husband, Gustav, 1909. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sometimes you just want to read something juicy, and Cate Haste’s Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler delivers that in spades. Alma is remembered primarily as the wife and muse of three major cultural figures in fin de siècle Vienna: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and the novelist and poet Franz Werfel. But Haste’s biography reveals a woman with artistic ambitions of her own, sidelined in no small part because of the social expectations of the time. To be perfectly honest, though, I read this book for the gossip, of which there is plenty. Haste has a knack for capturing Alma’s world in all its art house fervor. Alma’s first kiss is with Klimt (she refuses his sexual advances by quoting Goethe’s Faust). During the birth of their second child, a panicking Gutav tries to soothe Alma’s pains by reading Kant aloud to her (it doesn’t work, unsurprisingly). Gropius and Alma exchange extremely explicit letters concerning their sexual fantasies (including possibly the most florid description of a blowjob I’ve ever read). We haven’t even reached the second half of the book, which includes Alma’s intense, sadomasochistic affair with the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (culminating in Kokoschka creating a lifelike doll of Alma and dragging it around Vienna before beheading it) as well as her dalliance with and subsequent marriage to Werfel, whom she helps escape Austria by foot in a perilous journey on the eve of World War II. Alma herself comes across as wildly unpleasant—she’s a monarchist and Hapsburg supporter who’s constantly getting into fights with Werfel, a committed communist; she makes frequent anti-Semitic remarks despite two of her husbands and most of her closest friends being Jewish; she constantly criticizes her daughter for marrying for love (five times) instead of marrying geniuses. But Haste portrays Alma Mahler in all her whirring and feverish complexity, and the result is as engrossing as it is jaw-dropping. Read it and you, too, can know entirely too much about the sex lives of almost every major artist, composer, and writer in early-twentieth-century Vienna. —Rhian Sasseen 

I’ve been thinking about the character Claude McKay Love since the summer, when someone handed me an advance copy of Gabriel Bump’s Everywhere You Don’t Belong, and I’m glad he’s finally making his debut next week. But this isn’t a debutante kind of coming out: in Bump’s first novel, young Claude navigates the shittiness of growing up with humor, insight, and a certain big-eyed vulnerability that’ll have you rooting for him through thick and thin—even when it’s Claude who has skated himself out onto the thinnest ice. You live and learn, the adage goes, and over the course of Claude’s trials, he goes from an awkward kid to a young man who knows a thing or three about the human he wants to become. It’s classic bildungsroman, made better by a lot of love for warts-and-all Chicago, and I see dashes of Percival Everett in Bump’s deadpan, how his characters cross the stage with a sashay (and sometimes more). Welcome, Claude! We’re glad you’re here. —Emily Nemens

 

Christian Wiman.

 

Since the release of Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems earlier this month, I’ve been eager for more new poetry from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. So I was delighted to discover Christian Wiman’s collection Survival Is a Style, which, like Sullivan’s, is frank and modest, capturing the first-person experience of contemporary American life in bone-clean melodic verse. Wiman’s greatest asset is his taste for simplicity, best exemplified by “Eating Grapes Downward.” Where one might expect an invocation of the muse, the opening lines are a self-deprecating tribute to writer’s block: “Every morning without thinking I open / my notebook and see if something / might have grown in me during the night. / Usually, no.” Wiman’s short poems, spoken by a singular voice, resemble a collection of Bach-like sarabands and gigues—my favorite, the pairing of “Two Drinking Songs,” is subtitled “1. Up with a Twist” and “2. Neat.” But these simple melodies are not without deep resonance and even occasional dissonance, as themes of spiritual doubt and physical illness recur throughout the book’s four sections. Wiman sets his intentions in a poetic preface, writing: “I need a space for unbelief to breathe. / I need a form for failure, since it is what I have.” So thoroughly charmed was I that I failed to notice I had boarded the wrong train, hopping off just before it tore out of Manhattan—though I would have indeed welcomed a moment more in Wiman’s musical company. —Elinor Hitt

It’s in his novel The Ghost Writer that Philip Roth first introduces us to his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, the book’s neurotic protagonist and the narrator of eight more novels. The Ghost Writer is set around a meeting between Nathan, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring writer, and his idol, the accomplished writer E. I. Lonoff—an ascetic devotee of craft, long married, Bellow-esque. (Of his process, he tells Nathan: “I turn sentences around. That’s my life … Then I have lunch.”) The young Zuckerman is clearly a reflection of Roth at that age—having just published his rather controversial first stories, harboring a quarrel with the Jewish community that he’ll sustain in later novels. But the most bizarre part of the book has to do with Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s dark-haired writing assistant and paramour. As Nathan falls further into Lonoff’s rarefied world, his preoccupation with Bellette grows, and his curiosity about her identity overwhelms him. Throughout the night he spends at Lonoff’s, he wonders, Could Amy Bellette be Anne Frank? The latter half of the novel is Nathan’s imaginings of Frank-turned-Bellette as a detached, secular Jew like himself. He postulates what Frank’s life would have been like and fantasizes about a new one for himself: a life where he’s been adopted by his literary idol and is married to Anne Frank. —Camille Jacobson

I’ve been paying special attention to flower arrangements these past few years—hazard of the trade, in part. But I’m not the only one of my demographic who has gone to seed. All across the city, young women are leaving PR and corporate law to become florists, arranging bracken and berry and blossom in loose, wilder ways, bringing mortality into the living room. The writer Nikki Shaner-Bradford has done just this with “Unfleshing,” a bright and thorny essay on beauty and technology published in Real Life this week. Shaner-Bradford seems to have carefully trimmed all my favorite questions to fit in one graceful container. With each sleek new undergarment and every successive layer of serum, are we growing closer to liberation or to divestment? Her linkages are surprisingly perfect, considering Away luggage, notable for FAA-unfriendly batteries (now removable), and Thinx underwear, notable for creating a menstrual undergarment that has turned out to be almost certainly toxic, and how they both cloak the human element. Her centerpiece is Uncanny Valley, a memoir by the tech veteran Anna Wiener, which I had missed in the fray of suffering the other side effects of living in a post-tech world, such as answering email till today is tomorrow and trying to find funding for print journalism. Shaner-Bradford’s sure hands are part of the work’s wild beauty. We can see her twining around the very subjects she resists as she writes herself into the essay and gains an uncertain safety in foliage. —Julia Berick

 

Nikki Shaner-Bradford.

Going Blind at the Border

© Lenspiration / Adobe Stock.

I don’t know why I went temporarily blind in Tijuana while waiting to cross the border in 1993. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like someone suddenly turned off the lights. First it was the colors that started fading, then it was the shapes, and then shadows altogether. Or maybe not in that order. I could explain the colors leaving, I knew that the world sometimes did that—seemed grayer than usual. I thought it was clouds. I thought the gray came from the walls themselves, and the dried trees and the loose dirt. Maybe that’s just what Tijuana looked like.

But it was shapes I could not explain. Their edges softening into the empty space around them until I couldn’t tell where one thing started and another ended. I could see something was more of itself closer to the center, and less of itself farther out—a gradient. Maybe the soul wasn’t just one thing but an assortment of many little things huddled together, like penguins keeping warm in a blizzard. Or like a flock of birds packed so tightly in a tree that you think they’re all just leaves, until a loud noise startles them and they shudder the bare limbs loose.

The things in front of me slowly became less and less of themselves, but they stretched out nonetheless, beyond the edges of themselves, as if they no longer wanted to be whatever it was that they were put on this earth to be—as if they too wanted to get a little farther north.

Even the sky no longer felt distant but rather like it began right above my head. And didn’t it?

When I tried to look at Amá and Apá, I saw an interchangeable thing. Part was more mother, the other part was more father, but it was one thing nonetheless—malleable, connected.

The trees and the cars and the houses and the children felt like the same thing, too. I could feel the dirt, I could feel the bricks along the wall and their grainy textures—how one square ended at the deep ridge of the grout. I could feel the grout, and I ran my finger along it until it scraped the tip. With time, maybe things would have separated again, maybe they would have gone back to themselves.

But initially, and because it happened so fast, it looked like someone went by and smudged the people’s faces with paint thinner. I could hear Amá talking to me, but I could only see the darkness of her eyes contrasted with her light skin.

After colors, after the shapes, and after the shadows, all that was left was contrast—one thing held up against another. I could tell there was a chair not by what it looked like but by the things around it. By what it was not. It never went completely dark, just almost.

I cried and felt my way along the edges of the wall. There was no here or there, except the sounds of the cars outside and Amá and Apá fighting in another room about what to do with me.

“Mijo, can you see me?” I heard my mother say somewhere in front of me.

“What about now, can you see me now?”

Soon we would be crossing. Soon we would want no one else to see us—to go invisible too, to move through the mountains like a flock of birds shaken by a sudden clanging of a bell.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to slowly disappear? First our shapes, then the edges of ourselves, and finally our shadows, how we looked against the backdrop of the sky. How easy it would be to walk right past the guards so that Amá would not have to run with my baby brother knocking around inside her big belly. We could take our time, stand in the middle of the checkpoint and watch the faces of others as they nervously talked to the guards. We could look at the landscape instead of trying to run away from it, pick up a few rocks and toss them leisurely against the lights and laugh.

I could hear Apá grunt and complain that I was watching the TV too closely and that’s why my eyes “hurt.” He didn’t say blind, he said that was why they “hurt.”

“He’ll be fine, just give him a few days,” said Apá.

Was it something so ordinary, so common? He’ll be fine. What was the point in worrying anyway? We had no money for a doctor, we hardly had enough money for food. All we could do was wait for my vision to return. And if it didn’t, would they go on without me? Would they lead me by the hand and describe what was happening around me? “Here is a mountain. Here is a snake. Feel the coarse leather of this man’s boot.”

When it came back, it didn’t return in the same order it vanished. Things were separate from themselves again—distinctly each their own. Amá was Amá, and Apá was Apá. The birds in the trees were again just birds.

I saw her face at last as she held me—rocking me to sleep. It wasn’t smudged. I would need my rest. Her shirt was green. If we were in a meadow somewhere far away, it would still be the brightest thing in that field.

 

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in the New York Times, The Paris Review, People magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. He lives in Marysville, California, where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University low-residency M.F.A. program.

From Children of the Land , by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Used with the permission of Harper. Copyright © 2020 by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.