A child glanced up at her father and they named that Buttercup. The stripes on the road (not the new ones but the ones the wheels had worn away) they named Ghost Morse Code. They named the difference between a photograph of a red barn and a photorealist painting of the same red barn One-Minute-Past-the-Hour. They left no stone unturned, naming the rock’s light gray belly, the smears of soil that stuck to it, the indentation left behind in the ground. Even the damp smell of centipedes warranted a word. The Naming Books were stored in warehouses across the country at exactly sixty-four degrees. There wasn’t much that wasn’t in them, a nation of Adams flinging names across the land had seen to that. Some people rebelled and there was a name for that too. There was one hotel with no name, no sign and no list of guests. If you managed to find it, you might find a crowd huddled around a group of waiters who were flinging water at vents expelling such icy-cold air that the water would freeze in a random and unclassifiable manner, then melt as quickly as it had frozen. Or a row of long tables with bowls of something that was neither sauce nor soup, and outside the window, a bonfire of pink letter paper.
In the first installment of our Focus series, we turn our attention to Japan. Roland Kelts talks with Haruki Murakami and Motoyuki Shibata—Japan’s preeminent translators of American fiction—and the journalist Riyo Niimoto about the novels that introduced them to America. How do the Japanese see Americans through their literature? Does The Catcher in the Rye read the same in Osaka as it does in Omaha? Plus, we include a survey of new Japanese fiction, with short stories from Yoko Ogawa, Masaya Nakahara and more.
Here’s an excerpt from Roland Kelts’ interview with Haruki Murakami:
Roland Kelts Are the Japanese reading a lot of American fiction these days?
Haruki Murakami Oh, it’s popular now. It’s strange. I think American writers have been very good over the past twenty years or so. When I was in my twenties, we had two camps—Barthelme and other postmodern writers; and the realists, like Updike. But starting in the eighties, we had a third stream—writers like John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien. When I read Carver’s stories, I was stunned.
RK What stunned you about Carver?
HM Nobody wrote stories like those. They went beyond common sense. I learned something from Raymond Carver about writing short stories. He always chose a simple vocabulary. He wrote straightforward stories, with a sense of humor, a crispness, and an unpredictable story line and very bleak endings. His stories are about everyday life. What he was saying by writing short stories is that you have to be intellectual when you write, but the subject matter doesn’t have to be intellectual.
RK What about the other authors you’ve translated. John Irving, for example. What did you learn from him?
HM I learned something from John Irving about writing novels—that kind of powerful storytelling voice. You know, in the old days, people would trace the writing in good books. Japanese people used to trace the pages of The Tale of Genji, for example. You can learn so many things from tracing. It’s just like putting your feet into other people’s shoes. Translation is the same thing.
RK Do you learn from other translators too? Do you read Motoyuki Shibata’s translations?
HM Oh yes. I love his translations. But we have different tastes. Paul Auster, Steve Erickson, Stuart Dybek, and Steven Millhauser—they’re great writers, but I wouldn’t translate their work. Which is good, because we have no conflicts.
I think Shibata likes more balanced fiction. It’s not easy to explain. But whenever I read his translations, I find a very well-balanced literary world—symmetrical. Auster is a good example: It’s like the music of J.S. Bach. It’s kind of mathematical. You could say the same thing about Erickson or Millhauser. Those are wonderful worlds they’re producing, but they are very rational. Sometimes things get crazy and chaotic, but seen from a distance, everything is rational and even stoic. I’m saying that in a complimentary way.
But with Carver and O’Brien, things get irrational sometimes. I guess I feel more comfortable when things are messy. I prefer that kind of world. But you know, I translated The Nuclear Age by Tim O’Brien. And every American I met said that’s his worst book. But I just loved it. I told O’Brien when I met him, and he was so suspicious. He said: “You did? You really did?”
RK As if you were the only one.
HM That’s right. But in Japan, many readers loved it. Sometimes I think American readers are missing something.
When Firs was a short distance from the palace, he heard the noise of madness; the Macedonian officer had known that noise for a long time—he had heard it four years before, when the Tsar had first summoned him.
Beside the palace itself, a platform had been cleared on a stony place and over a hundred people were torturing themselves in the enthusiasm of ecstasy. Firs kept his distance and began looking at these people with sorrow. One man was rolling about on the ground, struggling to rip away the hairy skin on his chest so he could take out the still living heart from in there and show how devoted it was to the Tsar, how brimming over it was with the blood of joy. Another was positioned with his legs up in the air and was continually spinning round on the top of his head, wanting to be blown apart by centrifugal force into insignificant dust. Five people were walking in an unchanging circle, without a stop, their heads bowed in possession of deep thoughtfulness; they were in mental search of the most glorious praise of the Tsar and, on finding it, they would cry out:
“O one and only fruit of gods whose blossoms are spent!”
“O sorrow of the world, assuaged forever!”
“Grandson of all times and father of eternity!”
“Messenger of a blessed creation!”
“Inspired charm!”
“Architect of dawn and cool rivers!”
“Ever brilliant and blinding!”
“In your presence all reason is foolishness!”
Amid this circle traced by those who were meditating and crying out, a number of people were fighting to death as they accused one another of insufficient joy with regard to the life of Tsar Ozny, and two of them were already lying dead. Four people were sitting apart, on a heap of construction rubbish, and gradually tearing out by hand their organs of procreation, in order that no future life should manage to happen, since Ozny had exhausted all eternity, all the meaning of existence and every pleasure; with the birth of Ozny every breath was doomed to vanity in its pursuit of the good.
On the edge of the stony platform, amid those moving about and celebrating, still others were spinning on the ground and smashing their heads against nearby stones in order to smash the last thought out of their consciousness, because every thought is a mystery and may become a rival of the great mind of Ozny; blood had long been flowing from these heads that were being smashed against stones, yet the thoughts being destroyed in these heads were not dying but were being transformed into madness and producing the long cry of frenzy that hung over this gathering which had been going on without interruption for many years. Two of the Tsar’s servants observed the people on the stony platform, and when a death occurred there, or some temporary lifelessness, the servants carried the people away. At night, however, new, unknown people came to the palace from the city of Sobz and from the depth of the country, and they joined those languishing on the stony platform in delight before the supremacy of Tsar Ozny.
With gloom in his heart, the man from Megara entered the palace. A blind Indian searched him and told him to wait until a mood arose in the Tsar to remember about him.
All day long, alone with the blind Indian, Firs sat on a carpet in a small room in the palace and listened to the noise of madness outside. In the evening a tender horn began to sing in the distant emptiness of the palace; the Indian went that way and, on his return, ordered Firs to go to the Tsar.
Beneath the dome of a large unfinished hall, on a throne of stone, sat a serious human being who did not respond in any way to the salutation of the guest from Megara and who expressed neither joy nor sorrow.
Firs prostrated himself on the carpet at the Tsar’s feet, then awaited his will.
Ozny was looking into the emptiness of the air with black and swollen eyes behind whose darkness nothing could be seen but indifference; his torso, tired from power and bliss, stayed upright only as a result of a certain effort, and he was ready every minute to collapse into long sleepy oblivion, leaving his kingdom without care or attention.
The man from Megara gazed at the Tsar with modest curiosity, since the latter was observing one and the same invisible point of space. Outwardly Ozny appeared to be over forty, although his bloated face, exhausted by the struggle with the poisons of victuals and passions, had so aged him that it was possible he was only thirty. The short black hair on the Tsar’s skull, untouched by grayness or baldness, stood up on end from the meaninglessness of life. It was as if life itself were not present in Ozny’s body but merely languishing at its extreme limit, ready for irritation rather than joy. And the Tsar’s head, judging by the temples, was covered by thick veins inside which moved only a fine trickle of blood, since these veins had been filled by a deathly accumulation of sclerotic lime and were squeezing the bloody stream of life; evidently the Tsar was constantly struggling to think with the power of a god, and he had so exhausted his veins of life that death, rather than wisdom, had appeared in his head. And Ozny could sense this thickening mineral power around his mind, because from time to time he squeezed his temples with his hands, trying to grind down the lime coffin in which his appalled consciousness was being slowly buried.
Forget its telegenic cast: the real star of CSI is Luminol. If neo-noir torchlight defined the look of nineties television in shows like The X-Files, the fluorescent glow of Luminol is its twenty-first-century successor. Sprayed in the dark onto a carpet or a car trunk or a bathtub, Luminol turns invisible traces of old blood into light. It makes death itself visible, as if registering the body’s secret neon, by bringing its traces to sudden, glowing life. It’s no coincidence that CSI is set in neon-lit Las Vegas, and that each episode opens with a sequence of aerial shots of the city’s sunsets and shining casinos in hyperreal, glowing color. In CSI even the city seems to have been sprayed with Luminol, to offer itself up, radiant and transparent, to our gaze.
I’m obsessed by CSI. I watch it for the light. I watch it for the exaggerated sheen on the roofs of new tract houses on the desert’s edge as the camera pans across them; for underlit laboratories as sleek as display kitchens; for the gold of a desert sunset igniting a suburban lounge room. I love its saturated colors, the waxy polish of black cars, the squeaky patina of its hallways. I love the light’s excessive, even gleam, the implacable glassiness of its cobalt blues and pinky purples; the sense that objects are always on the verge of flaring into further brightness. I love the way the handsome cast of CSI move through this exquisite brilliance, their faces overcast with color, as if in the grip of some limpid thought made visible: the way the sky, as the camera glides above the city’s casinos and dusky lots, appears to flash and stutter.
My pleasure is only in part aesthetic. There is something more to this weird radiance. It feels allegorical. This is due to the association of death with light instead of darkness. There is also the perfection of the marriage between Las Vegas—with its history as a destination for sin that is approached through a biblical desert—with sleepless brilliance. (This is why CSI’s spinoff series, set in New York and Miami, cannot hold the same compulsive appeal). But it is the sheer, insistent presence of CSI’s manipulated light effects that makes them feel so pregnant with meaning. Shot on 35mm film and then telecined to high-definition (HD), where its colors are exaggerated, CSI’s light is self-consciously artificial and baroque in its deployments. It is so pervasive, so intent on playing out its own technical dramas each week, that it overwhelms the series’ storylines and human cast.
In CSI, light dwells: it inhabits. It imparts a strange aura to every object, including the faces of its cast, so that each appears held in suspension, illuminated from within and without. It is the democratic beauty of this light, with its hint of occult knowledge married to technical expertise, that is so addictive and disturbing. It makes both the animate and the inanimate equally charismatic. It touches every surface with glamour, and imbues each space with potential radiance. Watching its relentless beauty I am reminded of Werner Herzog’s voiceover, in Grizzly Man, in which he reflects, watching outtakes from filmmaker Timothy Treadwell’s archive—a sequence of long takes of the same sunlit Alaskan clearing—on the intrinsic mystery of images when they are captured by a camera: “Sometimes things have their own magic, their own mysterious stardom.”
What does it mean, the slickly brilliant illumination of CSI that turns everything into cinema? The program always takes care to remind us that its world is in the process of a mechanical, yet potent, transformation. Everything is sensitized, portentous, filled with a sense of its own potential stardom—in CSI’s “in-wound” animation sequences, even human flesh appears, as the eye plunges through it, to be lit up from within. Everything is filled, or fillable, with light.
For some time I have been convinced that Luminol’s deployment in CSI, at the very threshold between life and death, has something significant to tell us. Part of the tremendous popularity of this series about Las Vegas’ forensic graveyard shift is the way it plays with the very idea of illumination. It longs for mystery; at the same time it embodies a bright fantasy of scientific exactitude. It celebrates glamour, but you could also call this glamour residue. It banishes mystery, yet appears, uneasily, to be saturated by it. CSI stages for its audience the very limits, in this new century, of blood and light.
*
Luminol makes its first appearance in “Who Are You?”, the sixth episode of the first series of CSI. When a woman’s skeletal remains turn up in the foundations of a tract home, Grissom (William Petersen) and Stokes (George Eads) suspect she has been murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Finding varnished maple floorboards and traces of aquarium sand beneath a carpet, they come to the conclusion that this is the site of a violent altercation. They spray the floor with Luminol—but it fails to react. Grissom explains that it only works on surface traces of blood, and calls for the Alternative Light Source (ALS). As he kneels and points a thin tubular torch attached to a machine at the area, its concentrated beam suffuses the floor with a light as blue as a Madonna’s robe. Beneath this fluorescent light, occult blood traces (as forensic scientists call them) spring to life from beneath the surface, blooming into electric blue spatters, streaks and handprints. Although this first use of Luminol is, technically, a failure, the scene trains us to anticipate the many Luminol scenes to follow, in which places will reveal themselves as gory dance floors of chemiluminscent struggle. It establishes the deep and addictive aesthetic connection—which infuses all of CSI’s light effects—between death, revelation, and eerie luminescence.
The following episode, “Blood Drops,” is one of the most beautiful and baroque in the entire CSI series. Although Luminol is not used, the episode marries blood and glowing light to the “occult” in its other sense—something secret or mysterious in nature. When the entire forensic team is called to a house where a multiple homicide has occurred, they find the bodies of a father, mother, and two sons: two daughters, a teenager and a five-year-old, have survived. The spilled blood is still fresh—the house smells strongly of copper, Grissom remarks to a young police detective, as they climb the stairs—and congeals in pools and odd circular patterns on the walls. Part of the team’s work will be to correlate the sprays and soakings into a pattern that makes sense. As Grissom begins to work with Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) on the mother, who has been slain in bed, they stop talking as they grow aware of a soft patter. The woman’s blood is still dripping onto the floor. That’s not all—her soul is still in the room, Sidle observes. Later, Grissom and Sidle will observe that the killer has also “left something of himself” in the house.
No episode of CSI is more disturbing than “Blood Drops.” It taps into the odd energy of crime scene photography, which the Australian critic Ross Gibson points out can be strangely beautiful, both in the haphazard aesthetic arrangements it creates, and the sense of portent it conveys to objects; for until it is solved a crime scene remains literally “unfinished,” and so acquires extra presence, as if longing for something outside itself to complete it. (CSI’s shots frequently emphasize this decentered, unsettling feeling, by placing the actors at the edges of the frame.) In “Blood Drops,” light carries the potent weight of the invisible: it appears sentient, almost knowing. Slick highlights render domestic objects sinister. The camera dwells on photographs in the stairwell, and the family’s china rabbits, as kitschily shiny as Jeff Koons’ “Rabbit,” which proliferate on the front lawn beneath the mailbox. Light seems almost to plaster itself to the living. As he approaches the house, the strobes of emergency vehicles alight on Grissom’s plump face, and later, as she sits in a police car, they seem attracted in swarms to a fragile Dakota Fanning’s golden hair. Colors are as intense, as chemiluminescent as Luminol—the hyperreal green of the lawn, the aquarium blues of shadows. It is as if color, like blood, is pooling on objects, beneath things. The lurid light is filled with a sense of uncanny threat, the feeling that every surface harbors invisible violence. An early breakthrough occurs in the kitchen when Grissom manages to lift an intruder’s footprint from the lino with an electro-static magnet. This sense of uneasy revelation reaches its high point when Sarah Sidle uses an ultra-violet camera on Dakota Fanning’s chest to reveal a tracery of bruises beneath her pure white skin.
Throughout the series, but especially in these early episodes, the light of CSI is omnipresent, unnaturally alembic, mysterious in provenance. Like Luminol’s chemiluminescence, it often appears to find its magical source within itself—for Luminol’s strange power derives from its biblical ability to bring itself forth, like the first light, out of darkness. Luminol does not throw a light onto the world, but reacts with traces of old blood, to give life to a secret world of death. In this way, it is a kind of closed circuit: both the igniter and product of blood. And the world it creates is uncanny, almost sentient. It is as if, watching, we are returned to the belief held by the early theoreticians of optics, that light was not reflected by objects, but a quality intrinsic to them, that their radiated beams actually penetrated the eye. Light, in CSI, is almost a material presence. It is personal, it seeks us out. The series delights in hyperreal lighting that makes banal locales uncanny. As Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and Grissom search for body parts in a desert turned yellow by post-production manipulation, it is as if they walk through a world of viscous sunlight, as radiantly pregnant with significance as the gold-leaf background of a medieval church mosaic. And it is as if—as we watch a car move along a desert road between intense tangerine sky and paler desert, or Grissom, silhouetted on a pedestrian crossing within a dusk of unnaturally even, tender blue—we are asked to believe in a medieval notion of the air, infused with magic and intent, perhaps even with belief.
Within this glowing reenchantment of the everyday, material objects loom large. They frequently occupy the foreground of scenes— the pink heel of a patent leather stiletto glistens in close-up, a jagged fragment of toenail glows in a pair of tweezers, creamy and translucent. Spotlit, these objects bask in the aura of their own glamour, or flare into brightness. In the opening credits Brown (Gary Dourdan), his own face shadowed, holds a sandshoe to the light, as its unfurled laces fluoresce into whiteness. In a recent episode a supermarket is flooded so intensely and evenly with white light that spilled bags of peas and broken washing powder almost vibrate with uncanny danger. In the universe of CSI it is as if a revolution has taken place and the material things of this world have emerged from their mute service, and now assert dominance over us.
The light of CSI is compelling because it situates itself at the unnerving border between animate and inanimate. In doing so, it may appeal to our instinctive sense that the world is now uncanny in a new way, tapping into an unspoken ambivalence about our relationship to “things.” For some time the balance of the world has been tipping away from nature and toward the manufactured and machine-made. We are surrounded by more and more objects of our own making, more junk and debris. The frightening potential of this proliferation is captured by images in the World Wildlife Fund’s recent “The future is man made” campaign: a jeep-load of tourists photographs a wooden rhino in the African savannah, fake trees grow in an asphalt desert, and plastic turtles forge an empty, moonlit beach. As we become increasingly alienated from the cyclical rhythms of nature, outnumbered by the mass-produced objects of our own making, and our society more secular, the choices we make as consumers have come more and more to define us. We are, in effect, what we buy: and we are haunted by it. The objects that surround us are burdened by our desire.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the slick luster of CSI’s light appears to have migrated into the program from the advertisements that surround it. The same highlights plaster themselves to glossy images of computers and handbags; the same baroque level of color manipulation defines Baz Luhrmann’s advertisements starring Nicole Kidman for Chanel. Even the laboratories and morgues in which the CSIs work could be the setting for an edgy fashion shoot. These are not the overworked, dingy morgues of nineties television, but spaces as smoothly glossy as a Bang and Olufsen catalogue, as exquisitely lit as Howard Carter’s photographs of King Tutankhamen’s tomb (in fact, Carter traveled to Hollywood to learn the craft of cinematographic light). The bodies lying in state on their slabs are not The Silence of the Lambs’ visions of abject, gothic horror or Quincy, MD’s excuse for macho heroics (an unforgettable sight of my childhood: Quincy demonstrating his “Lazy S” in the series opening credits to a row of fainting police cadets). The glamorous cast, like Marg Helgenberger—whose sun-ravaged face and styled strawberry-blonde hair the camera dwells upon—are beautiful enough to be models. They appear, as they work, almost to be absorbed by this sticky light, stalked by color. The landscape of things, in the shape of evidence, makes continual demands upon them. But more than this—it seems to want to transform them, with a kind of ruthless appetite, into gorgeous objects.
CSI suggests that the margin between the human and the inhuman is thinning. The aura objects accumulate is so intense that it is almost mystical: they brood, they hoard light, they may even be imbued with the spirits of the dead. They almost appear to exist on the same plane of consciousness as the series’ human protagonists: to have turned, according to the Buddhist division of states of being, from “things without desire” to “things with desire.” By the same token, people are understood as the sum total of the things that they have touched and accumulated during their lives. Their bodies speak for them: material evidence alone provides the answer to the question “Who are you?” Homes and homely places are particularly uncanny containers of traces, spatterings and brushings. Like Luminol, CSI’s light makes us see a haunted landscape that is at once beautiful and frightening.
*
But there is another aspect to Luminol—its chemiluminescence suggests, gorgeously, the ideal of “enlightenment.” Luminol may bring the invisible, quite literally, to light; but it derives just as much power from its brilliant embodiment of illumination as metaphorical ideal. When Luminol appears in CSI, it fluoresces with knowledge; it delivers spectacular certainty; it is a beautiful manifestation of insight. In “Blood Drops,” a detective blunders into the kitchen and tells Grissom there is nothing to see. Grissom replies testily, “You guys will never get it.” And “getting it,” in CSI, is the point. As Catherine Willows tells a new recruit in the series’ pilot episode, the detectives are able to interpret the world in a way that offers closure to the victims. Doing this, she drawls, is guaranteed to “make you feel as good as King Kong on co-caine.”
There is even a hint, in the series’ many Luminol scenes, of the divine or spiritual sense of “illumination.” The CSIs of the night shift are “sensitives,” unusually talented individuals who love their work, and have a greater sense of driven vocation than the day shift. They bring an attentive reverence to the evidence. The camera dwells upon their faces in the laboratory or the strange silent fishbowl of a crime scene, as they make their private connections with the dead. This, in particular, is a very great part of my own enjoyment, as a writer and ex-academic, of the program—that it makes a fetish of thought. This celebration of thinking is truly revolutionary television. While the police procedural has traditionally revolved around action, CSI’s drama centers around rational resolution. As the investigators bend over ruined bodies, peer at epithelials under a microscope, or pour wet plaster into footprints, their faces are calm. As if lit from within by their own concentration, they have the absorbed grace of renaissance angels.
This unhurried, methodical, almost meditative pursuit of knowledge forms the narrative structure of CSI. The investigators “listen” to the evidence and follow its trail to clear conclusions—“What does the room say?” Grissom asks one of his staff. “Concentrate on what cannot lie. The evidence.” “We resolve,” Willows tells the raw recruit. “We restore peace of mind.” And this is the other charm of CSI: as the detectives painstakingly reconstruct the angles of bullets or establish the place of death through local pollen, they are never wrong. Some snobs complain that CSI’s plots are thin, their resolutions pat, while real CSIs point out that in real cases results are rarely obtained so quickly—but this is precisely the point. CSI’s Luminol scenes are a kind of shorthand for the pleasures the series offers, of repetitive problem-solving and speedy resolution. The light of CSI has a powerful hold over its audience because it not only captures our sense of millennial unease; its strange brilliance compensates us. In the face of the strange, proliferating life of things, it holds out the possibility of truth.
No wonder the CSIs love their jobs. The cutting-edge investigative software at their disposal includes databases of tire treads, weather records, clowns’ copyrighted face designs, and DNA. It is capable of staging remarkable simulations. Investigating a fire in a lounge room, Stokes scrolls through a database of furniture, drags the icon of a particular brand of sofa into an on-screen model of the room and, using another database of ignition temperatures, recreates the fire. (Stokes discovers that the “Curie Point” of the sofa is so high that if the fire had begun here the damage should have been much greater: this ability to divide up and name the world is another of CSI’s pleasures.) In another episode Willows uses red tape to trace the angles of blood spatter, graphs these lines into a computer, and is able to watch the exact sequence of death play out before her eyes. Not only do the scientists have access to this equipment, but the expertise to use it. The seamlessness of CSI’s illumination is striking. Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in its “in-wound” animations, in which the camera travels through flesh at high speed to the very cause of death. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that the series’ luminous cinematography embodies the speed-of-light simultaneity the information superhighway promised, but has so far failed to deliver.
This is just one of the complicated fantasies about enlightenment and science embodied by CSI’s clean, silky light. First, it repolishes the “aura” of science as a pure discipline. While popular culture has, since at the least the fifties, depicted scientists as sinister shut-ins, CSI’s investigators are good-looking, cool, and driven only by the thirst for knowledge: as if The X-Files’ Lone Gunmen had had a makeover, stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, and emerged from their boys-only bunker with an improved attitude toward “the man.” The CSIs are, in a significant reversal, now more pure of heart than the regular police force, who in turn refer to them as the “nerd squad” (an insult that their aura of glamour negates). In CSI, science is an elite form of knowledge: the reserve of experts (regular detectives “wouldn’t know fingerprints from paw prints,” Willows says). The investigators move with extraordinary freedom through a clean, infinitely resourced, and uncluttered workplace. The program breaks with the grainy, drab colors and jerky camera work used in nineties programs like NYPD Blue or St Elsewhere to invoke the decay and under-resourcing of public institutions. Instead, its labs are Utopian preserves, in which the scientists are free to be the best that they can be. Without obstruction, they use their computers to consolidate and match data from a vast number of instrumentalities, both public and private, across America. They always know the right questions to ask to make them yield an answer.
The difference from our own world, in which science has lost its gloss, is marked. It is hard, in an era of multinational drug companies, gene banks, and competing private data services, to believe that science is our friend; or to believe that is capable of supplying answers to overwhelmingly complex problems like global warming. All around us, the glamour of data is wearing off as it is compromised by privatization, lack of coordination between instrumentalities, and uneven development. It is true that those of us with the means may have access to more and more “information,” but as journalist Gideon Haigh points out in a recent article on the problems inherent in Google, we may no longer have the research skills to make sense of it (or even to know what we don’t know). Even governmental democracy can find itself compromised in the swampy gaps between different modes of collecting data, as the Florida election debacle showed us. The CSI investigators’ dogged pursuit of knowledge has a broad audience appeal, because it touches not only those viewers who long for “straight” answers, but also the many of us who mourn the disappearance, in our fragmented service economy, of holistic expertise.
Of the many fantasies that CSI offers us about knowledge, this continuity of care is perhaps the most persuasive. The investigators follow each case through from beginning to end; they assess a body in the field, attend the autopsy, conduct all experiments: no research is contracted or outsourced. Their old-fashioned, holistic approach contributes to an enormous sense of job satisfaction: as Grissom points out to Eckley, the head of the day shift, he does not think of his job as a “career.” It means that the CSIs are able to engage deeply with each client, without distraction, on a case-by-case basis (in fact, they live for their work and appear to have little in the way of social lives). In the laboratories of CSI, as the theme song reminds us every week (from the second series onward), who you are matters. Identifying the victim is the first step in standard forensic practice, but CSI takes this further: the investigators’ obsessive, thoughtful gazes confer on each body a kind of grace. There is a great consolation, in our era of distraction, in the series’ remarkable aestheticisation of the dead. Whether petrified, waterlogged, or burned, they are always beautiful. Their faces are peaceful. The camera also dwells upon them with respectful attention. Gilded by light, they acquire an odd, intimate glamour, which persists until each gives up its secret: Scrabble letters lodged in a throat or a fatal dose of Jimson weed. How many of us could expect to receive this tender, attentive care from a public amenity, regardless of socioeconomic status? CSI offers us an ideal, if disturbing, image of deathly democracy, in which every victim is important and of intense interest. Perhaps a rather sad, and very modern fantasy underlies the allure of this series for so many of us: in death, CSI suggests, every one of us can be a star.
Over and over the word fragile.
“It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” This from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15.
Astronaut Loren Acton spoke of seeing it “contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere.”
To Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the earth looked “touchingly alone.”
And when Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.”
Neil Armstrong said, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
And Ulf Merbold: “For the first time in my life I saw the horizon line as curved, accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”
(Is this what frightened you, is this what you sought to combat and to flee? This fragility, this somehow-knowledge even then before anyone had ever left the earth or seen it from a distance, of how small it is and delicate, as we are too, how finite, how beside-the-point, how fleeting.)
(Might this account partly for my monstrous proportions, as if you were building a shield, a fortress of flesh, as if the vertiginous wings of blood in us could somehow be made to tremble less. But I am a blunt and narrow piece of materiality. Imprinting and imprinted. As were you. Footprints, strands of broken hair dropped here and there.)
On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov exited the main capsule of Voskhod2 by pushing himself head-first out of the opening. A 16-foot lifeline held him to the ship. If it broke he would drift off forever. Although the space-craft traveled at great speed, there was no air rushing past to let him feel it. He spun slowly for ten minutes. But when the co-pilot Belyayev told him to come back he didn’t want to return.
(He didn’t want to return… And yet it seems a lonely thing—that feeling of nothing pushing back.)
Several months later, Edward White walked in space for 20 minutes, though the term’s deceptive as the motion is of free-fall or floating. Seen from 120 miles away, earth was nearly featureless. When he returned to the space ship he had lost 5 kg of body mass and 2 kg of perspiration had collected in his boots.
But he, too, didn’t want to return to the capsule.
When told to come back to the spacecraft he said, “This is the saddest moment of my life.”
His co-pilot pulled him back in.
(And you will work in sorrow the fields… As if your laboratory were that field, a wound always to be worked, a not-quiteness, a rivenness of mind needing to be healed. But when he floated there, in that region without weight or mass or shadow, all fields fell away, all shattering gone soft and pliant, as if there were no need anymore either to build or to destroy—)
(But how my mind builds and destroys you over and over—)
On January 27, 1967, two years after his space walk, Edward White died in a fire at Launch Complex 34 on the Cape Canaveral Air Station. He had entered Apollo 1 for a simulated countdown, along with Command Pilot Grissom and Pilot Roger Chaffee when the fire broke out.
Years later White’s wife took her own life.
(How strange to see the earth from the sky and then come back… to float in space like that, barely tethered, earth a modest uncrowned thing. “So peaceful and so fragile,” one called it; the size of a marble or a pearl “hanging delicately,” said another. And another: “But I did not see the Great Wall.”)
Still, there are many practicalities to be addressed (as you would have known even from your rudimentary laboratory.) “It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract,” the astronaut Alan Shepherd pointed out.
And Neil Armstrong spoke of a feeling that was “complex, unforgiving.”
Lyndon Johnson said, “It’s too bad, but the way the American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it away.”
(But what would it mean to take advantage?)
(And what of how small, and of how fragile… )
(Over and over the word fragile describing this world that has taught me such resistance, the hard of it and brutal, and yet, still—)
Numerous inventions made for space have been adapted by private industry, resulting in such things as studless snow tires, scratch proof eyeglasses (White needed to shield his eyes from the extreme glare of sunlight), the 5-year flashlight, and cordless power hand tools.
The U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation was formed in the 1990s as a “major component of a redevelopment master plan designed for Titusville’s urban waterfront.” There you can “visit the gift shop at the museum and treat yourself, a friend, or a relative to a truly unique space-related gift.”
When Leonov and White floated in space they didn’t want to come back… They couldn’t have known this beforehand. And what is a footstep then, after that, and the feeling of earth (so fragile, so small) beneath a shoe, or the thin tether of breath, or a name, or a day, a boundary, a theory, a bond—
Many Peruvian authors, critics, and readers are of the opinion that there is no common literary project uniting young Peruvian writers. According to this theory, the writers who began publishing in the 1990s were by nature so individualistic that they never formed any kind of group, movement, or tendency, nor could they be said to comprise a generation, in the traditional literary sense of that term. This position surprises me, because among young
authors of the decade, there was indeed a common theme, much clearer and sharper in the Peruvian case, than in any other moment or country that I’m aware of: cocaine.
Cocaine, of course, never comes alone, and less so in literature. Its derivatives are nightlife, prostitution, street violence, repressed or compulsive homosexuality (as opposed to relaxed and natural homosexuality), homelessness, slang, and a series of other elements that, with a little rhetorical embellishment and a lot of punch, tend to be grouped by Peruvian critics beneath the rubric “dirty realism.”
Dirty realism and the adolescence of Lima’s middle or marginal class impregnates, more or less, the style of an entire generation of authors, many of whom were included in the first National Young Writers Awards short story anthology, organized by the Cener of Studies and Action for Peace in the second half of the 1990s. Nor was the cocaine boom in Peru was not limited to literature. Movies like No se lo digas a nadie (Don’t Tell Anyone), Ciudad de M (City of M), La bala perdida (Stray Bullet), and Muertos de amor (Death by Love) demonstrate that this style and theme impacted the world of all the Peruvian storytellers, including filmmakers. Four films may not seem like much, but keeping in mind that Peru rarely produces more than two features a year, these constitute overwhelming evidence of cocaine’s significance for the Peruvian creative class and its consumers. Similar things happened in other countries—for example, the Spanish author José Angel Mañas or the 1999 novel Mala onda (Bad Vibes) by Chilean novelist and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet—but nowhere with the vigor of the Peruvian case.
The explanation most frequently offered for this phenomenon links it to the waning relevance of the leftist ideologies that had sustained social realism. Throughout the 1990s, as these ideologies declined, so too did the principles that Latin American literary and cultural elites had held most dear. As with politics, literature was suddenly untethered, unmoored. Realism, as it had been defined for decades, was no longer real. How to make fiction in a world in which the most concrete ideological realities had themselves become fiction?
In the Hispanic world, the first response to that question was the infamous 1996 anthology McOndo, which reclaimed the quotidian experiences of the urban middle class, in order to capture a new type of reader, that is, middle-class urban youth. Novels and stories ceased to be written exclusively for the academy. For someone like me, who was studying literature at that time, McOndo was liberating. Previously, the entire exercise of writing seemed impossibly weighty—building upon the literary legacy of Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, or Gabriel García Márquez. For many authors who have come since, McOndo allowed us to value and then write about what we already knew intimately, as opposed to having further one-sided conversations with the literary canon.
If the previous statement is true, it’s possible to explain the cocaine-fueled Peruvian literary boom by understanding the world in which these authors came of age. For those born in the 1970s, the democracy they came to know in their youth could be defined as a place without water, without electricity, where the sounds of bombs were routine, where windows were sealed with tape in case of explosion, where life was lived before curfew, where staying out late was, for security reasons, unthinkable. The dictatorship, on the other hand, brought with it peace and prosperity—unsustainable, but still tangible—and succeeded in finishing off the disgraced political parties, along with various political and social institutions on all levels. If the 1980s were an interminable and violent political fight, the 1990s closed off the possibility of discussion and dialogue, creating in its stead an illusory world where everything was okay and everyone should just be happy and quit protesting.
Every dictatorship—and many democracies—derive a subtle degree of legitimacy from the citizenry’s fear of chaos, from those who offer up certain freedoms to a strong leader, releasing themselves of the responsibilities those freedoms bring. Erich Fromm called this phenomenon “the fear of liberty,” including the liberty to think; to see beyond the simple, standard explanations offered. Many societies in moral, political, or economic turmoil—Weimar Germany, Republican Spain, Peru under Alan García’s first administration—have put themselves in the hands of someone who thinks for them. They have left the responsibility to others, have opted not to raise their voices against those others, or to look beyond their limits of their own lives. In some ways, this keeps them from feeling implicated by the government’s actions: it’s not that we approve, it’s that we would rather not know the details of what’s going on while order is imposed in our name. It’s an unconscious process of collective expiation; societies rely on dictatorships so as not to feel guilty for the acts they themselves are demanding.
The young authors of the nineties simply mirrored the mood of the nation—a people gripped by a fear of liberty, and a regime, that of the autocratic Alberto Fujimori, propped up by this fear. Peru was a society that had ceded its capacity to think and look deeper than its own lot—a coked-up, doped-up society. The literature created may or may not have been worthwhile, but it’s significant that these Peruvian authors, unlike their counterparts throughout Latin America, were preoccupied with what they saw, rather than what they read. And, in contrast to their public image as individualists, they dealt primarily with the same reality, sometimes even employing the same stylistic techniques, like a well-organized social collective, transparently united by common concerns.
Awareness of a deed represents complicity with it, and innocence is feigned through silence. These were atrocious times in Peru. Ordinary people were dying by the tens of thousands. The literature of the 1990s then, and in particular the work of young writers, is significant for the issues it neglects—including the issue—rather than those it addresses. Regarding political violence, these writers, comprising the first generation to have grown up with this chaos as an ordinary aspect of reality, preferred silence. As did, certainly, the rest of the nation.
In this respect, Peru differs from other countries of the region. Social and political violence played a significant role in the work of the most important Latin American authors of the 1990s—writers like Roberto Bolaño of Chile, Fernando Vallejo of Colombia, Paulo Lins and Ricardo Piglia of Argentina—and it is also revisited in the recent novels of McOndo authors like Bolivia’s Edmundo Paz Soldán, Chile’s Sergio Gomez or Alberto Fuguet. In this context, it is striking that Peru hid its most brutal open wound, nor is it normal that this silence is nearing its twenty-fifth unbroken year. All this as Chile and Argentina have filled ample libraries—as well as concert halls, movie theaters, and playhouses—with their respective bloody and violent histories.
Did Peruvian literature ignore the issue because it did not have the capacity to confront it? Did the the political successes of the first half of the 1990s shut the eyes of writers euphoric simply to be done with politics? Is Peruvian society so lacking in historical memory? This literary silence has been the object of debate in multiple forums and academic discussions, but there are now indications that, in fact, it simply never existed.
Recently, Professor Marcel Velázquez, from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, told me he was gathering a corpus of literature written and published outside of Lima in the 1990s. According to Velázquez, of these nearly forty books, many touched, directly or indirectly, upon the political violence of the time, but not a single one of them was reviewed in the newspapers of Lima or distributed in the bookstores of Peru’s capital. In his opinion, the “dirty realist” strain of literature, often described as the dominant style of the era, actually only existed in Lima. Naturally, Peruvian literature was also written outside the capital, but Lima did not read it. Lima was doped up. The supposed silence of Peruvian literature was itself fiction—the literature of the violence was being conveniently ignored.
It would be interesting to get to know that body of work now, this anti-canonic writing that existed outside the “official” literature. Be it what it may, whatever it describes, it is part of the country that the writers of Lima, those young and not-so-young, could not see, or ignored with such diligence that we were nearly able to persuade ourselves that it did not exist—perhaps because we were afraid of it, perhaps because its very existence assaulted our innocence. A true sense of what the Peruvian literature was in those years can only come if we know both sides. It is the only way to understand this country, this divided nation, whose two faces have yet to read one another.
“Dorothy Gale,” she said.
“I guess so.” He said it grudgingly. Maybe he wished that he’d thought of it first. Maybe he didn’t think going home again was all that heroic.
They were sitting on the side of a mountain. Above them, visitors to the Land of Oz theme park had once sailed, in molded plastic gondola balloons, over the Yellow Brick Road. Some of the support pylons tilted or tipped back against scrawny little opportunistic pines. There was something majestic about the felled pylons now that their work was done. They looked like fallen giants. Moth-eaten blue ferns grew over the peeling yellow bricks.
The house of Dorothy Gale’s aunt and uncle had been cunningly designed. You came up the path, went into the front parlor and looked around. You were led through the kitchen. There were dishes in the kitchen cabinets. Daisies in a vase. Pictures on the wall. Follow your Dorothy down into the cellar with the other families, watch the tornado swirl around on the dirty dark wall, and when everyone tramped up the other, identical set of steps through the other, identical cellar door, it was the same house, same rooms, but tornado-tipped. The parlor floor now slanted and when you went out through the (back) front door, there was a pair of stockinged plaster legs sticking out from under the house. A pair of ruby slippers. A yellow brick road. You weren’t in North Carolina anymore.
The whole house was a ruin now. None of the pictures hung straight. There were salamanders in the walls, and poison ivy coming up in the kitchen sink. Mushrooms in the cellar, and an old mattress that someone had dragged down the stairs. You had to hope Dorothy Gale had moved on.
It was four in the afternoon and they were both slightly drunk. Her name was Bunnatine Powderfinger. She called him Biscuit.
She said, “Come on, of course she is. The ruby slippers, those are like her special power. It’s all about how she was a superhero the whole time, only she didn’t know it. And she comes to Oz from another world. Like Superman in reverse. And she has lots of sidekicks.” She pictured them skipping down the road, arm in arm. Facing down evil. Dropping houses on it, throwing buckets of water at it. Singing stupid songs and not even caring if anyone was listening.
He grunted. She knew what he thought. Sidekicks were for people who were too lazy to write personal ads. “The Wizard of Oz. He even has a secret identity. And he wants everything to be green, all of his stuff is green, just like Green Lantern.”
The thing about green was true, but so beside the point that she could hardly stand it. The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. She said, “But he’s not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and more powerfuller. She’s got flying monkeys. She’s like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like kryptonite to her.” She’d always thought the actress Margaret Hamilton was damn sexy. The way she rode that bicycle and the wind that picked her up and carried her off like an invisible lover; that funny, mocking, shrill little piece of music coming out of nowhere. That nose.
When she looked over, she saw that he’d put his silly outfit back on inside out. How often did that happen? She decided not to say anything. There was an ant in her underwear. She made the decision to find this erotic, and then realized it might be a tick. No, it was an ant. “Margaret Hamilton, baby,” she said. “I’d do her.”
He was watching her wriggle, of course. Too drunk at the moment to do anything. That was fine with her. And she was too drunk to feel embarrassed about having ants in her pants. Just like that Ella Fitzgerald song. Finis, finis.
The big lunk, her old chum, said, “I’d watch. But what do you think about her turning into a big witchy puddle when she gets a bucketful of water in the face? When it rains does she say, Oops, sorry, can’t fight crime today? Interesting sexual subtext here, by the way. Very girl on girl. Girl meets nemesis, gets her wet, she just melts. Screeches orgasmically while she does it, too.”
How could he be drunk and talk like that? There were more ants. Had she been lying on an antpile while they did it? Poor ants. Poor Bunnatine. She stood up and took her dress and her underwear off—no silly outfits for her—and shook them vigorously. Come out with your little legs up, you ants. She pretended she was shaking some sense into him. Or maybe what she wanted was to shake some sense out of him. Who knew? Not her.
She said, “Margaret Hamilton wouldn’t fight crime, baby. She’d try to conquer the world. She just needs a wetsuit. A sexy wetsuit.” She put her clothes back on again. Maybe that’s what she needed. A wetsuit. A prophylactic to keep her from melting. The booze didn’t work at all. What did they call it? A social lubricant. And it helped her not to care so much. Anesthetic. It helped hold her together afterward, when he left town again. Super Glue.
She’d like to throw a bucket of kryptonite at him. Except that kryptonite was expensive, even the no-brand stuff. And it didn’t really work on him. Just made him sneeze. She could throw the rest of her beer, but he would just look at her and say, Why did you do that, Bunnatine? It would hurt his feelings. The big lump.
He said, “Why are you looking at me like that, Bunnatine?”
“Here. Have another Little-Boy Wide Mouth,” she said, giving up. Yes, she was sitting on an anthill. It was definitely an anthill. Tiny superheroic ants were swarming out to defend their hill, chase off the enormous and evil although infinitely desirable doom of Bunnatine’s ass. “It’ll put radioactive hair on your chest and then make it fall out again.”
• • •
“Enjoy the parade?” Every year, the same thing. Balloons going up and up like they couldn’t wait to leave town and pudding-faced cloggers on pickup trucks and on the curbs teenage girls holding signs. We Love You. I Love You More. I Want To Have Your Super Baby. Teenage girls not wearing bras. Poor little sluts. The big lump never even noticed and too bad for them if he did. She could tell them stories.
He said, “Yeah. It was great. Best parade ever.”
Anyone else would’ve thought he was being one hundred percent sincere. Nobody else knew him like she did. He looked like a sweetheart, but even when he tried to be gentle, he left bruises.
She said, “I liked when they read all the poetry. Big bouncy guy / way up in the lonely sky.”
“Yeah. So whose idea was that?”
She said, “The Daily Catastrophe sponsored it. Mrs. Dooley over at the high school got all her students to write the poems. I saved a copy of the paper. I figured you’d want it for your scrapbook.”
“That’s the best part about saving the world. The poetry. That’s why I do it.” He was throwing rocks at an owl that was hanging out on a tree branch for some reason. It was probably sick. Owls didn’t usually do that. A rock knocked off some leaves. Blam! Took off some bark. Pow! The owl just sat there.
She said, “Don’t be a jerk.”
“Sorry.”
• • •
She said, “You look tired.”
“Yeah.”
“Still not sleeping great?”
“Not great.”
• • •
“Little Red Riding Hood.”
“No way.” His tone was dismissive. As if, Bunnatine, you dumb bunny. “Sure, she’s got a costume, but she gets eaten. She doesn’t have any superpowers. Baked goods don’t count as superpowers.”
“Sleeping Beauty?” She thought of a girl in a moldy old tower, asleep for a hundred years. Ants crawling over her. Mice. Some guy’s lips. That girl must have had the world’s worst morning breath. Amazing to think that someone would kiss her. And kissing people when they’re asleep? She didn’t approve. “Or does she not count, because some guy had to come along and save her?”
He had a faraway look in his eyes. As if he were thinking of someone, some girl he’d watched sleeping. She knew he slept around. Grateful women saved from evildoers or their obnoxious blind dates. Models and movie stars and transit workers and trapeze artists, too, probably. She read about it in the tabloids. Or maybe he was thinking about being able to sleep in for a hundred years. Even when they were kids, he’d always been too jumpy to sleep through the night. Always coming over to her house and throwing rocks at the window. His face at her window. Wake up, Bunnatine. Wake up. Let’s go fight crime. You can be my sidekick, Bunnatine. Let’s go fight crime.
He said, “Her superpower is the ability to sleep through anything. Lazy bitch. Her origin story: she tragically pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. What’s with the fairy tales and kids’ books, Bunnatine? Rapunzel’s got lots of hair that she can turn into a hairy ladder. Not so hot. Who else? The girl in Rumplestiltskin who can spin straw into gold.”
She missed these conversations when he wasn’t around. Nobody else in town talked like this. The mutants were sweet, but they were more into music. They didn’t talk much. It wasn’t like talking with him. He always had a comeback, a wisecrack, a double entendre, some cheesy sleazy pickup line that cracked her up, that she fell for every time. It was probably all that witty banter during the big fights. She’d probably get confused. Banter when she was supposed to POW! POW! when she was meant to banter.
She said, “Wrong. Rumpelstiltskin spins the straw into gold. She just uses the poor freak and then she hires somebody else to go spy on him to find out his name.”
“Cool.”
She said, “No, it’s not cool. She cheats.”
“So what? Was she supposed to give up her kid to some little guy who spins gold?”
“Why not? I mean, she probably wasn’t the world’s best parent or anything. Her kid didn’t grow up to be anyone special. There aren’t any fairy tales about Rapunzel II.”
“Your mom.”
She said, “What?”
“Your mom! C’mon, Bunnatine. She was a superhero.”
“My mom? Ha ha.”
He said, “I’m not joking. I’ve been thinking about this for a few years. Being a waitress? Just her disguise.”
She made a face and then unmade it. It was what she’d always thought: he’d had a crush on her mom. “So what’s her superpower?”
He gnawed on a fingernail with those big square teeth. “I don’t know. I don’t know her secret identity. It’s secret. So you don’t pry. It’s bad form, even if you’re arch-enemies. But I was at the restaurant once when we were in high school and she was carrying eight plates at once. One was a bowl of soup, I think. Three on each arm, one between her teeth, and one on top of her head. Because somebody at the restaurant bet her she couldn’t.”
“Yeah, I remember that. She dropped everything. And she chipped a tooth.”
“Only because that fuckhead Robert Potter tripped her,” he pointed out.
“He didn’t mean to.”
He picked up her hand. Was he going to bite her fingernail now? No, he was studying the palm. Like he was going to read it or something. It wasn’t hard reading a waitress’s palm. You’ll spend the rest of your life getting into hot water. He said gently, “No, he did. I saw the whole thing. He knew what he was doing.”
It embarrassed her to see how small her hand was in his. As if he’d grown up and she just hadn’t bothered. She still remembered when she’d been
taller. “Really?”
“Really. Robert Potter is your mother’s nemesis.”
She took her hand back. Slapped a beer in his. “Stop making fun of my mom. She doesn’t have a nemesis. And why does that word always sound like someone’s got a disease? Robert Potter’s just a fuckhead.”
• • •
“Once Potter said he’d pay me ten dollars if I gave him a pair of Mom’s underwear. It was when Mom and I weren’t getting along. I was like fourteen. We were at the grocery store and she slapped me for some reason. So I guess he thought I’d do it. Everybody saw her slap me. I think it was because I told her Rice Krispies were full of sugar and she should stop trying to poison me. So he came up to me afterward in the parking lot.”
Beer made you talk too much. Add that to the list. It wasn’t her favorite thing about beer. Next thing she knew, she’d be crying about some dumb thing or begging him to stay.
He was grinning. “Did you do it?”
“No. I told him I’d do it for twenty bucks. So he gave me twenty bucks and I just kept it. I mean, it wasn’t like he was going to tell anyone.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah. Then I made him give me twenty more dollars. I said if he didn’t, I’d tell my mom the whole story.”
That wasn’t the whole story either, of course. She didn’t imagine she’d ever tell him the whole story. But the result of the story was that she had enough money for beer and some weed. She paid some guy to buy beer for her. That was the night she’d brought Biscuit up here.
They’d done it on the mattress in the basement of the wrecked farmhouse, and later on they’d done it in the theater, on the pokey little stage where girls in blue dresses and flammable wigs used to sing and tap dance. Leaves everywhere. The smell of smoke, someone further up on the mountain, checking on their still, maybe, chain-smoking. Reading girly magazines. Biscuit saying, Did I hurt you? Is this okay? Do you want another beer? She’d wanted to kick him, make him stop trying to take care of her, and also to go on kissing him. She always felt that way around Biscuit. Or maybe she always felt that way and Biscuit had nothing to do with it.
He said, “So did you ever tell her?”
“No. I was afraid that she’d go after him with a ballpeen hammer and end up in jail.”
When she got home that night. Her mother looking at Bunnatine like she knew everything, but she didn’t, she didn’t. She’d said: “I know what you’ve been up to, Bunnatine. Your body is a temple and you treat it like dirt.”
So Bunnatine said: “I don’t care.” She’d meant it too.
• • •
“I always liked your mom.”
“She always liked you.” Liked Biscuit better than she liked Bunnatine. Well, they both liked him better. Thank God her mother had never slept with Biscuit. She imagined a parallel universe in which her mother fell in love with Biscuit. They went off together to fight crime. Invited Bunnatine up to their secret hideaway/love nest for Thanksgiving. She showed up and wrecked the place. They went on Oprah. While they were in the studio some supervillain—sure, okay, that fuckhead Robert Potter—implemented his dreadful, unstoppable, terrible plan. That parallel universe was his to loot, pillage and discard like a half-eaten grapefruit, and it was all her fault.
The thing was, there were parallel universes. She pictured poor parallel Bunnatine, sent a warning through the mystic veil that separates the universes. Go on Oprah or save the world? Do whatever you have to do, baby.
The Biscuit in this universe said, “Is she at the restaurant tonight?”
“Her night off,” Bunnatine said. “She’s got a poker night with some friends. She’ll come home with more money than she makes in tips and lecture me about the evils of gambling.”
“I’m pretty pooped anyway,” he said. “All that poetry wore me out.”
“So where are you staying?”
He didn’t say anything. She hated when he did this.
She said, “You don’t trust me, baby?”
• • •
“Remember Volan Crowe?”
“What? That kid from high school?”
“Yeah. He used to draw comics about this superhero he came up with. Mann Man. A superhero with all the powers of Thomas Mann.”
“You can’t go home again.”
“That’s the other Thomas. Thomas Wolfe.”
“Thomas Wolfman. A hairy superhero who gets lost driving home.”
“Thomas Thomas Virginia Woolfman Woman.”
“Now with extra extra superpowers.”
“Whatever happened to him?”
“Didn’t he die of tuberculosis?”
“Not him. I mean that kid.”
“Didn’t he turn out to have a superpower?”
“Yeah. He could hang pictures perfectly straight on any wall. He never needed a level.”
“I thought he tried to destroy the world.”
“Yeah, that’s right. He was calling himself something weird. Fast Kid with Secret Money. Something like that. Got kidnapped by a nemesis. The nemesis used these alien brain-washing techniques to convince him he had to destroy the world in order to save the world.”
“That’s really lame. I wouldn’t fall for that.”
She said, “Shut up. I hear you fall for it every time.”
• • •
“What about you?”
She said, “Me?”
“Yeah.”
Keeping an eye on this place. They don’t pay much, but it’s easy money. I had another job, but it didn’t work out. A place down off I-40. They had a stage, put on shows. Nothing too gross. So me and Kath, remember how she could make herself glow, we were making some extra cash two nights a week. They’d turn down the lights and she’d come out on stage with no clothes on and she’d be all lit up from inside. It was real pretty. And when it was my turn, guys could pay extra money to come and lie on the stage. Do you remember that hat, my favorite hat? The oatmeal-colored one with the pompoms and the knitted ears?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they kept it cold in there. I think so that we’d have perky tits when we came out on stage. So we’d move around with a bit more rah-rah. But I wore the hat. I got management to let me wear the hat, because I don’t float real well when I’m real cold.”
“I gave you that hat,” he said.
“Yeah. At Christmas. I loved that hat. So I’d be wearing the hat and this dress—nothing really revealing or cheap-looking—and come out on stage and hover a foot above their faces. So they could see I wasn’t wearing any underwear.”
He was smiling. “Saving the world by taking off your underwear, Bunnatine?”
“Shut up. I’d look down and see them lying there on the stage like I’d frozen them. Zap. They weren’t supposed to touch me. Just look. I always felt a million miles above them. Like I was a bird.” A plane. “All I had to do was scissor my legs, kick a little, just lift up my hem a little. Do twirls. Smile. They’d just lie there and breathe hard like they were doing all the work. And when the music stopped, I’d float offstage again. But then Kath left for Atlantic City, to go sing in a cabaret show. And then some asshole got frisky. Some college kid. He grabbed my ankle and I kicked him in the head. So now I’m back at the restaurant with Mom.”
He said, “How come you never did that for me, Bunnatine? Float like that?”
She shrugged. “It’s different with you,” she said, as if it were. But of course it wasn’t. Why should it be?
“Come on, Bunnatine,” he said. “Show me your stuff.”
She stood up, shimmied her underwear down to her ankles with an expert wriggle. All part of the show. “Close your eyes for a sec.”
“No way.”
“Close your eyes. I’ll tell you when to open them.”
He closed his eyes and she took a breath, let herself float up. She could only get about two feet off the ground before that old invisible hand yanked her down again, held her tethered just above the ground. She used to cry about that. Now she just thought it was funny. She let her underwear dangle off her big toe. Dropped it on his face. “Okay, baby. You can open your eyes.”
His eyes were open. She ignored him, hummed a bit. Why oh why oh why can’t I. Held out her dress at the hem so that she could look down the neckline and see the ground, see him looking back up.
“Shit, Bunnatine,” he said. “Wish I’d brought a camera.”
She thought of all those girls on the sidewalks. “No touching,” she said, and touched herself.
He grabbed her ankle and yanked. Yanked her all the way down. Stuck his head up inside her dress, and his other hand. Grabbed a breast and then her shoulder so that she fell down on top of him, knocked the wind out of her. His mouth propping her up, her knees just above the ground, cheek banged down on the bone of his hip. It was like a game of Twister, there was something Parker Brothers about his new outfit. There was a gusset in his outfit, so he could stop and use the bathroom, she guessed, when he was out fighting crime. Not get caught with his pants down. His busy, busy hand was down there, undoing the Velcro. The other hand was still wrapped around her ankle. His face was scratchy. Bam, pow. Her toes curled. He’s got you now, Bunnatine.
He said up into her dress, “Bunnatine. Bunnatine.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Biscuit,” she said.
• • •
She said, “There was a tabloid reporter around today, wanting to hear stories.”
He said, “If I ever read about you and me, Bunnatine, I’ll come back and make you sorry. I’m saying that for your own good. Do something like that, and they’ll come after you. They’ll use you against me.”
“So how do you know they don’t know already? Whoever they are?”
“I’d know,” he said. “I can smell those creeps from a mile away.”
She got up to pee. She said, “I wouldn’t do anything like that anyway.” She thought about his parents and felt bad. She shouldn’t have said anything about the reporter. Weasely guy. Staring at her tits when she brought him coffee.
She was squatting behind a tree when she saw the pair of yearlings. They were trying so hard to be invisible. Just dappled spots hanging in the air. They were watching her like they’d never seen anything so fucked up. Like the end of the world. They took off when she stood up. “That’s right,” she said. “Get the hell away. Tell anybody about this and I’ll kick your sorry Bambi asses.”
• • •
She said, “Okay. So I’ve been wondering about this whole costume thing. Your new outfit. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s driving me crazy. What’s with all these crazy stripes and the embroidery?”
“You don’t like it?”
“I like the lightning bolt. And the tower. And the frogs. It’s psychedelic, Biscuit. Can you please explain why y’all wear such stupid outfits? I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“They aren’t stupid.”
“Yes they are. Tights are stupid. It’s like you’re showing off. Look how big my dick is.”
“Tights are comfortable. They allow freedom of movement. They’re machine washable.” He began to say something else, then stopped. Grinned. Said, almost reluctantly, “Sometimes you hear stories about some asshole stuffing his tights.”
She started to giggle. Giggling gave her the hiccups. He whacked her on the back.
She said, “Ever forget to run a load of laundry? Have to fight crime when you ought to be doing your laundry instead?”
He said, “Better than a suit and tie, Bunnatine. You can get a sewing machine and go to town, dee eye why, but who has the time? It’s all about advertising. Looking big and bold. But you don’t want to be too designer. Too Nike or Adidas. So last year I needed a new outfit, asked around, and found this women’s cooperative down on a remote beach in Costa Rica. They’ve got an arrangement with a charity here in the states. They’ve got collection points in forty major cities where you drop off bathing suits and leotards and bike shorts, and then everything goes down to Costa Rica. They’ve got this beach house that some big-shot rock star donated to them. It’s this big glass and concrete slab and the tide goes in and out right under the glass floor. I went for a personal fitting. These women are real artists, talented people, super creative, and they’re all unwed mothers, too. They bring their kids to work and the kids are running around everywhere and the kids are all wearing these really great superhero costumes. They do work for anybody. Even pro wrestlers. Villains. Crime lords, politicians. Good guys and bad guys. Sometimes you’ll be fighting somebody, this real asshole, and you’ll both be getting winded, and then you start noticing his outfit and he’s looking too and then you’re both wondering if you got your outfits at this same place. And you feel like you ought to stop and say something nice about what they’re wearing. How you both think it’s so great that these women can support their families like this.”
“I still think tights look stupid.” She thought of those kids wearing their superhero outfits. Probably grew up and became drug dealers and maids and organ donors.
• • •
“What? What’s so funny?”
He said, “I can’t stop thinking about Robert Potter and your mother. Did he want clean underwear? Or did he want dirty underwear?”
She said, “What do you think?”
“I think twenty bucks wasn’t enough money.”
“He’s a creep.”
“So you think he’s been in love with her for a long time?”
She said, “What?”
“Like maybe they had an affair once a long time ago.”
“No way!” It made her want to puke.
“No, seriously, what if he was your father or something?”
“Fuck you!”
“Well, come on. Haven’t you wondered? I mean, he could be your father. It’s always been obvious that he and your mom have unfinished business. And he’s always trying to talk to you.”
“Stop talking! Right now!”
“Or what, you’ll kick my ass? I’d like to see you try.” He sounded amused.
She wrapped her arms around herself. Ignore him, Bunnatine. Wait until he’s had more to drink. Then kick his ass.
He said, “Come on. You used to wait until your mom got home from work and fell asleep. You said you’d sneak into her bedroom and ask her questions while she was sleeping. Just to see if she would tell you who your dad was.”
“I haven’t done that for a while. She finally woke up and caught me. She was really pissed off. I’ve never seen her get mad like that. I never told you about it. I was too embarrassed.”
He didn’t say anything.
“So I kept begging and finally she made up some story about this guy from another planet. Some tourist. Some tourist with wings and stuff. She said that he’s going to come back someday. That’s why she never shacked up or got married. She’s still waiting for him to come back.”
• • •
“Don’t look at me like that. I know it’s bullshit. I mean, if he had wings, why don’t I have wings? That would be so cool. To fly. Really fly. Even when I used to practice every day, I never got more than two feet off the ground. Two fucking feet. What is it good for? Waiting tables. I float sometimes, so I don’t get varicose veins like Mom.”
“You could probably go a little higher if you really tried.”
“You want to see me try? Here, hold this. Okay. One, two, three. Up, up, and a little bit more up. Impressed?”
He frowned, looked off into the trees as if he were thinking about it. Trying not to laugh.
“What? Are you impressed or not?”
“Can I be honest? Yes and no. You could work on your technique. You’re a bit wobbly. And I don’t understand why all your hair went straight up and started waving around. Do you know that it’s doing that?”
“Static electricity?” she said. “Why are you so mean?”
“Hey,” he said. “I’m just trying to be honest. I’m just wondering why you never told me any of that stuff about your dad. I could ask around, see if anybody knows him.”
“It’s not any of your business,” she said. “But thanks.”
“I thought we were better friends than this, Bunnatine.”
He was looking hurt.
“You’re still my best friend in the whole world,” she said. “I promise.”
• • •
“I love this place,” he said.
“Yeah. Me too.” Only if he loved it so much, then why didn’t he ever stay? So busy saving the world, he couldn’t save The Land of Oz. Those poor Munchkins. Poor Bunnatine. They were almost out of beer.
He said, “So what are they up to? The developers? What are they plotting?”
“The usual. Tear everything down. Build condos.”
“And you don’t mind?”
“Of course I mind!” she said.
He said, “I always think it looks a lot more real now. The way it’s falling all to pieces. The way the Yellow Brick Road is disappearing. It makes it feel like Oz was a real place. Being abandoned makes you more real, you know?”
Beer turned him into Biscuit the philosopher-king. Another thing about beer. She had another beer to help with the philosophy. He had one too.
She said, “Sometimes there are coyotes up here. Bears, too. The mutants. Once I saw a Sasquatch and two tiny Sasquatch babies.”
“No way.”
“And lots and lots of deer. Guys come up here in hunting season. When I catch ‘em, they always make jokes about hunting Munchkins. I think they’re idiots to come up here with guns. Mutants don’t like guns.”
“Who does?” he said.
She said, “Remember Tweetsie Railroad? That rickety roller coaster? Looked like a bunch of Weebelows built it out of Tinker Toys? Remember how people dressed like toy-store Indians used to come onto the train? I was always hoping I was gonna see them scalp someone this time.”
He said, “Fudge. Your mom would buy us fudge. Remember how we sat in the front row and there was that one showgirl? The one with the three-inch ruff of pubic hair sticking out the legs of her underwear? During the cancan?”
She said, “I don’t remember that!”
He leaned over her, nibbled on her neck. People were going to think she’d been attacked by squids. Little red sucker marks everywhere. She yawned.
He said, “Oh, come on! You remember! Your mom started laughing and couldn’t stop. There was a guy sitting right next to us and he kept
taking pictures.”
She said, “Why do you remember all this stuff? I kept a diary all through school, and I still don’t remember everything that you remember. Like, what I remember is how you wouldn’t speak to me for a week because I said I thought Atlas Shrugged was boring. How you told me the ending of The Empire Strikes Back before I saw it. ‘Hey, guess what? Darth Vader is Luke’s father!’ When I had the flu and you went without me?”
He said, “You didn’t believe me.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Yeah. I guess not. Sorry about that.”
• • •
“I miss that hat. The one with the pompoms. Some drunk stole it out of my car.”
“I’ll buy you another one.”
“Don’t bother. It’s just I could fly better when I was wearing it.”
He said, “It’s not really flying. It’s more like hovering.”
“What, like leaping around like a pogo stick makes you special? Okay, so apparently it does. But you look like an idiot. Those enormous legs. That outfit. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Why are you such a pain in the ass?”
“Why are you so mean? Why do you have to win every fight?”
“Why do you, Bunnatine? I have to win because I have to. I have to win. That’s my job. Everybody always wants me to be a nice guy. But I’m a good guy.”
“What’s the difference again?”
“A nice guy wouldn’t do this, Bunnatine. Or this.”
• • •
“Say you’re trapped in an apartment building. It’s on fire. You’re on the sixth floor. No, the tenth floor.”
She was still kind of stupid from the first demonstration. She said, “Hey! Put me down! You asshole! Come back! Where are you going? Are you going to leave me up here?”
“Hold on, Bunnatine. I’m coming back. I’m coming to save you. There. You can let go now.”
She held onto the branch like anything. The view was so beautiful she couldn’t stand it. You could almost ignore him, pretend that you’d gotten up here all by yourself.
He kept jumping up. “Bunnatine. Let go.” He grabbed her wrist and yanked her off. She made herself as heavy and still as possible. The ground rushed up at them and she twisted, hard. Fell out of his arms.
“Bunnatine!” he said.
She caught herself a foot before she smacked into the ruins of the Yellow Brick Road.
“I’m fine,” she said, hovering. But she was better than fine! How beautiful it was from down here, too. She felt like Kath on that stage, like she was glowing all over. Holy Yellow Brick Road, Bunnatine!
He looked so anxious. “God, Bunnatine, I’m sorry.” It made her want to laugh to see him so worried. She put her feet down gently. The whole world was made of glass, and the glass was full of champagne, and Bunnatine was a bubble, just flicking up and up and up.
She said, “Stop apologizing, okay? It was great! The look on your face. Being in the air like that. Come on, Biscuit, again! Do it again! I’ll let you do whatever you want this time.”
“You want me to do it again?” he said.
She felt just like a little kid. She said, “Do it again! Do it again!”
• • •
She shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, of course. But he was just old pervy Potter and she had the upper hand. She explained how he was going to give her more money. He just sat there listening. He said they’d have to go to the bank. He drove her right through town, parked the car behind Food Lion.
She wasn’t worried. She had the upper hand. She said, “What’s up, pervert? Gonna do a little dumpster diving?”
He was looking at her. He said, “How old are you?”
She said, “Fourteen.”
He said, “Old enough.”
• • •
“How come you left after high school? How come you always leave?”
He said, “How come you broke up with me in eleventh grade?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question. No one likes it when you do that.”
“Well maybe that’s why I left. Because you’re always yelling at me.”
“You ignored me in high school. Like you were ashamed of me. I’ll see you later, Bunnatine. Quit it, Bunnatine. I’m busy. Didn’t you think I was cute? There were plenty of guys at school who thought I was cute.”
“They were all idiots.”
• • •
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that they were really idiots. Come on, you know you thought so too.”
“Can we change the subject?”
“Okay.”
• • •
“It wasn’t that I was ashamed of you, Bunnatine. You were distracting. I was trying to keep my average up. Trying to learn something. Remember that time we were studying and you tore up all my notes and ate them?”
• • •
“I saw they still haven’t found that guy. That nutcase. The one who killed your parents.”
“No. They won’t.” He threw rocks at where the owl had been. Nailed that sorry, invisible, absent owl.
“Yeah?” she said, “Why not?”
“I took care of it. He wanted me to find him, you know? He just wanted to get my attention. That’s why you gotta be careful, Bunnatine. There are people out there who really don’t like me.”
“Your dad was a sweetheart. Always tipped twenty percent. A whole dollar if he was just getting coffee.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about him, Bunnatine. Still hurts. You know?”
“Yeah. Sorry. So how’s your sister doing?”
“Okay. Still in Chicago. They’ve got a kid now. A little girl.”
“Yeah. I thought I heard that. Cute kid?”
“She looks like me, can you imagine? She seems okay, though. Normal.”
• • •
“Are we sitting in poison ivy?”
“No. Look. There’s a deer over there. Watching us.”
• • •
“When do you have to be at work?”
“Not until 6 a.m. I just need to go home first and take a shower.”
“Cool. Is there any beer left?”
“No. Sorry,” she said. “Should’ve brought more.”
“That’s okay. I’ve got this. Want some?”
• • •
“I need a new job.”
“You’ve already got like a hundred jobs, Bunnatine.”
“Ski instructor, Sugar Mountain. Security guard, Beech Mountain. Lifeguard at the beach on Grandfather Mountain. Just applied for She-Devil of Mountain Mountain. Do you think that pays well? Lifeguarding was okay. I saved this eight-year-old’s life last summer. His sister was trying to drown him. But I always end up back at the restaurant. Waitressing. Waitressing is my destiny.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“Why go wait tables in some other place? I like it here. This is where I grew up. It was a good place to grow up. I like all the trees. I like the people. I even like how the tourists drive real slow between here and Boone. I just need to find a new job or Mom and I are going to end up killing each other.”
“I thought you were getting along.”
“Yeah. As long as I do exactly what she says.”
“I saw your mom at the parade. With some little kid.”
“Yeah. She’s been babysitting for a friend at the restaurant. Mom’s into it. She’s been reading the kid all these fairy tales. She can’t stand the Disney stuff, which is all the kid wants. Now they’re reading The Wizard of Oz. I’m supposed to get your autograph, by the way. For the kid.”
“Sure thing! You got a pen?”
“Oh shit. It doesn’t matter. Maybe next time.”
• • •
It got dark slow and then real fast at the end, the way it always did, even in the summer, like daylight realized it had to be somewhere right away. Somewhere else. On weekends she came up here and read mystery novels in her car. Moths beating at the windows. Got out every once in a while to take a walk and look for kids getting into trouble. She knew all the places they liked to go. Sometimes the mutants were down where the stage used to be, practicing. They’d started a band. They were always asking if she was sure she couldn’t sing. She really, really couldn’t sing. That’s okay, the mutants always said. You can just howl. Scream. We’re into that. They traded her ‘shine for cigarettes. Told her long, meandering mutant jokes with lots of hand gestures and incomprehensible punchlines. Dark was her favorite time. In the dark she could imagine that this really was the Land of Oz, that when the sun couldn’t stay away any longer, when the sun finally came back up, she’d still be there. In Oz. Not here. Click your heels, Bunnatine. There’s no home like a summer place.
She said, “Still having nightmares?”
“Yeah.”
“The ones about the end of the world.”
“Yeah, you nosy bitch. Those ones.”
“Still ends in the big fire?”
“No. A flood.”
• • •
“You keep yawning.”
He smiled at her. Such a nice smile. Drove girls of all ages crazy. He said, “I’m just tired.”
“Parades can really take it out of you.”
“Fuck you.”
She said, “Go on. Take a nap. I’ll stay awake and keep lookout out for mutants and nemesissies and autograph hounds.”
“Maybe just for a minute or two. You’d really like him.”
“Who?”
“The nemesis I’m seeing right now. He’s got a great sense of humor. Sent me a piano crate full of albino kittens last week. Some project he’s working on. They pissed everywhere. Had to find homes for them all. Of course first we checked to make sure that they weren’t little bombs or possessed by demons or programmed to hypnotize small children with their swirly red kitten eyes. Give them bad dreams. That would have been a real PR nightmare.”
“So what’s up with this one? Why does he want to destroy the world?”
“He won’t say. I don’t think his heart’s really in it. He keeps doing all these crazy stunts, like with the kittens. There was a thing with a machine to turn everything into tomato juice. But somebody who used to hang out with him says he doesn’t even like tomato juice. If he ever tries to kidnap you, Bunnatine, whatever you do, don’t say yes if he offers you a game of chess. Try to stay off the subject of chess. He’s one of those guys who think all master criminals ought to be chess players, but he’s terrible. He gets sulky.”
“I’ll try to remember that. Are you comfortable? Put your head here. Are you cold? That outfit doesn’t look very warm. Do you want my jacket?”
“Stop fussing, Bunnatine. Am I too heavy?”
“Go to sleep, Biscuit.”
• • •
His head was so heavy she couldn’t figure out how he carried it around on his neck all day. He wasn’t asleep. She could hear him thinking.
He said, “You know, some day I’m going to fuck up. Some day I’ll fuck up and the world won’t get saved.”
“Yeah. I know. A big flood. That’s okay. You just take care of yourself, okay? And I’ll take care of myself and the world will take care of itself, too.”
Her leg felt wet. Gross. He was drooling on her leg. He said, “I dream about you, Bunnatine. I dream that you’re drowning too. And I can’t do anything about it. I can’t save you.”
She said, “You don’t have to save me, baby. Remember? I float. Let everything turn into water. Just turn into water. Let it turn into beer. Clam chowder. Let the Land of Oz become an exciting new investment opportunity in underwater attractions. Little happy mutant Dorothy mermaids. Let all those mountain houses and ski condos sink down into the water, and the deer and the bricks and the high school girls and the people who never tip. It isn’t all that great a world anyway, you know? Biscuit? Maybe it doesn’t want to be saved. So stop worrying so much. I’ll float like a bar of Ivory soap. Even better. Won’t even get my toes wet until you come and find me.”
“Oh good, Bunnatine,” he said, drooling, “that’s a weight off my mind—” and fell asleep. She sat beneath his heavy head and listened to the air rushing around up there in the invisible leaves. It sounded like water moving fast. Waterfalls and lakes of water rushing up the side of the mountain. Biscuit’s flood. But that was some other parallel universe. Here it was only night and wind and trees and the stars were coming out. Hey, Dad, you fuckhead.
Her legs fell asleep and she needed to pee again, but she didn’t want to wake Biscuit up. She bent over and kissed him on the top of his head. He didn’t wake up. He just mumbled, Quit it, Bunnatine. Love me alone. Or something like that.
• • •
She remembered being a kid. Nine or ten. Sneaking back into the house at four in the morning. Her best friend Biscuit has gone home too, to lie in his bed and not sleep. She had to beg him to let her go home. They have school tomorrow. She’s tired and she’s so hungry. Fighting crime is hard work. Her mother is in the kitchen, making pancakes. There’s something about the way she looks that tells Bunnatine she’s been out all night, too. Maybe she’s been out fighting crime, too. Bunnatine knows her mother is a superhero. She isn’t just a waitress. That’s just her cover story.
She stands in the door of the kitchen and watches her mother. She practices her hovering. She practices all the time.
Her mother says, “Want some pancakes, Bunnatine?”
• • •
She waited as long as she could, and then she heaved his head up and put it down on the ground. She covered his shoulders with her jacket. Like setting a table with a handkerchief. Look at the big guy, lying there so peacefully. Maybe he’ll sleep for a hundred years. But more likely the mutants will wake him, eventually, with their barbaric yawps. They’re into kazoos right now, and heavy-metal hooting. She can hear them warming up. Biscuit hung out with some of the mutants at school, years and years ago. They’ll get a real kick out of his new outfit. There’s a ten-year high-school reunion coming up, and Biscuit will come home for that. He gets all sentimental and soft about things. Mutants, on the other hand, don’t do things like parades or reunions. They were good at keeping secrets, though. They made great babysitters when her mom couldn’t take care of the kid.
• • •
She keeps her headlights off, all the way down the mountain. Turns the engine off too. Just sails down the mountain like a black wing.
• • •
When she gets home, she’s mostly sober and of course the kid is still asleep. Her mom doesn’t say anything, although Bunnatine knows she doesn’t approve. She thinks Bunnatine ought to tell Biscuit about the kid. But it’s a little late for that, and who knows? Maybe she isn’t his kid anyway.
The kid has fudge smeared all over her face and her pillow. Leftover fudge from the parade, probably. Bunnatine’s mom has a real sweet tooth. Kid probably sat up eating it in the dark, after Bunnatine’s mom put her to bed. Bunnatine kisses the kid on the forehead. Goes and gets a washcloth, comes back and wipes off some of the fudge. Kid still doesn’t wake up. She’s going to be real disappointed about the autograph. Maybe Bunnatine will just forge Biscuit’s handwriting. Write something real nice. It’s not like Biscuit will care. Bunnatine would like to crawl into the kid’s bed, just curl up around the kid and get warm again, but she’s already missed two shifts this week. So she takes a hot shower and goes to sit with her mom in the kitchen until she has to leave for to work. Neither of them have much to say to each other, which is normal, but her mom makes Bunnatine some eggs and toast. If Biscuit were here, she’d make him breakfast, too, and Bunnatine imagines that, eating breakfast with Biscuit and her mom, waiting for the sun to come up so that the day can start all over again. Then the kid comes in the kitchen, crying and holding out her arms for Bunnatine. “Mommy,” she says. “Mommy, I had a really bad dream.”
Bunnatine picks her up. Such a heavy little kid. Her nose is running and she still smells like fudge. No wonder she had a bad dream. Bunnatine says, “Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It was just a bad dream. Just a dream. Tell me about the dream.”
In Cartagena, Luis says, the beach is gray at dawn. He points to the barrel of his G3 when he says this, steel gray, he says. He smiles. The sand is white, he says, this color, tapping his teeth. And when the sun comes up on your right, man, it is a slow-motion explosion like in the movies, a big kerosene flash and then the water is sparkling gray and orange and red. Luis is full of shit, of course, but he can talk and it is true that he is the only one of our gallada who has seen the Caribbean. Who has been to Cartagena.
And the girls? Edwardo asks.
Luis tosses back his greasy, black hair. He knows we will wait for his answer. He is the oldest of us (except for Claudia who doesn’t count because she is a girl), and he has recounted this story many times with pleasure.
The girls, he says. He looks at me and it is proper, he is showing respect. Together we smirk at the immaturity of Edwardo.
No, says Claudia. The fishermen. Tell us the part—
The girls, Luis says, speaking over Claudia, they are the best in all of Colombia. They wear skirts up to here, like on MTV, and boots up to here, and it is not like the country, where the autodefensas will shoot them for it. They are taller and whiter and have beautiful teeth and can talk about real things. Nothing like here.
He pauses. Luis has grown a mustache that looks like it has been drawn on with wet charcoal, and now he strokes it with his thumb and finger. I remember a line from a movie.
With that mustache, I say, you look like a shit-eating faggot. Edwardo laughs happily. And it is you who would be shot for your long hair.
Luis ignores me. He says, speaking slowly—In Cartagena, everything is nothing like here.
We are five, including Claudia, and we are going downtown to do some business on behalf of Luis. Apart from me and Luis and Claudia and Edwardo, there is little Pedro, who walks behind the group with his hands in his torn pant pockets in order to fondle his testicles. It is not even funny any more.
I have not seen any of them, except for Claudia, in the last four months. Claudia-the only one who knows where I have been staying-told me yesterday about this business. I did not want to come, but she told me how strongly Luis insisted.
All of them look younger than I remember. Pedro is the only one who has grown—he looks like he has been seized by a fistful of hair and stretched two inches. I wait for him to catch up, and say to him, Ay, you are almost a man now!
Ask him if he has any hair on his pipi, says Edwardo.
Pedro keeps his hands in his pockets and does not react.
See, even now he is molesting it!
Come on, says Luis. He sounds distracted. Claudia is smiling to herself. I look away from her.
To do this business, there would usually be more of us, but our old gallada, the core of it anyway, is three short. Carlos was shot in the throat outside the Parque del Poblado: it was night and he was selling basuco to the crackheads when the rich kids came in their yellow Jeep and cleansed him. Salesio joined his elder brother in the local militia, where he sent back a photo of himself in a balaclava, holding an Uzi sub and a Berreta .45. You could see the shape of his stupid smile through the black cotton.
And then there is Hernando. I do not want to think about Hernando now.
We stop at the border of our barrio, in a dump at the bottom of a ridge. A thin ditch of water runs through the debris. Without a word, Pedro and Claudia take lookout positions. Luis and Edwardo straddle the sludge, one foot on either bank, and clear away the molding cardboard and plastic junk. Soon they uncover the nylon three-seater that we stole, months ago, from a public bus. They tip it forward to reveal the large concrete tunnel into which the water runs. I stand sentinel as they crawl, one by one, into the hole.
On shelves and in drawers, in trunks and boxes, my grandmother hid the artifacts of her old house: decorative ceramics and saints, tea sets she never used, frames and photos, old books of stories (many from the Muscovite Progress publishing house), linens, clothes, and tins that had arrived in Iquitos along the Amazon from Brazil and Colombia, sweets, snacks, tools, newspapers. I wondered about the tea cups, felt their rough texture in my hands, was captivated by the flowers and landscapes, and asked myself who had ever used them, where, and when my grandmother had acquired them; I recreated the house my aunts had so often described to me and imagined them using these tea cups. When I saw the framed pictures, I wondered where in the house they’d hung, I imagined them new, adorning my aunt’s bedrooms, or the den. I imagined the city lights glancing off the sepia-tone photos, the air and breezes of those afternoons, and I did much the same with the jungle decorations that recalled the roanmulas, chullachakis, and tunches with which my aunts frightened me. My grandmother had dedicated herself to sewing in the old days and the antique, shut-in aroma of those fabrics, the designs, and the colors of that era intrigued me, the way the materials had been transformed by my grandmother’s handiwork and by time. When I saw these old garments, I found it hard to believe that my aunts had ever worn clothes my size. It would all morph and disappear one day, and what I had before me, this storage room, was the portal to a universe in which I could navigate freely without moving in space. And so when I discovered the empty jars of Brazilian unguents, the empty bottles of Bully vinegar, Leite de Rosas, and Agua Florida, and noticed that the odors had remained, I felt that objects remained in the world through sheer persistence, and their refusal to disappear colored my wandering. Everything became a beautiful chaos, source of all imagination.
At dusk, after these silent travels, my family would gather around a large high table that I could only reach by kneeling on my chair. My cousin and I were the first to be served, and I recall the aroma that piqued my senses and submerged me in an uneasy calm: the smell of hierbaluisa. The same odor had warmed us on those afternoons we spent at my grandmother’s fields, a plot of earth in the sierras of Lima, where we played with the barn animals, dogs, goats, and horses. When I drank hierbaluisa part of me fell away, and I left that old adobe house in the city and was transported to the rustic shack of palms amid a field of watermelon and sugarcane, to its starlit nights full of the furtive calls of insects, and its cold mornings, silent but for the intermittent song of a bird you could never see. When I drank hierbaluisa, when I took in its odor, I was embraced, completely and at once, by two different worlds, and within me, an awareness surged, a consciousness of beautiful and frightening events, something I could not control. This awareness was a voice, an I, that connected both universes, that called me and was part of my own nature. It was the age of the call…
“We’ll go live with your father,” my old lady told me one day. I had already celebrated my eighth birthday, and the idea of leaving that antique house, confronting a new neighborhood, a different house, disturbed me. I couldn’t tell my mother that I didn’t want to go live with the old man, though I barely knew him. She was glowing since the birth of my little sister, and had already visited the new house my father had bought at the opposite edge of the same district. And anyway, after my father’s accident in the bottle-blue Volkswagen, she wanted to take care of him. So I would finally have a normal family and a house just for us. It was a modern construction, though very small, on a miniscule street, an alley where all the mostly one- or two-story houses sat on similarly sized plots, had nearly identical facades, simple doors and austere windows. Ours was one of the few that had three floors and had been remodeled, which made it a strange place, warm, but somewhat dark. Everything within it was tiny: the living room which my mother furnished with leftovers from my old man’s office; the kitchen, equipped in those days with only a kerosene burner; the blue-tiled bathroom of yellow light. From the first moment I stepped into that house, my natural contemplativeness was manifest. Those dining room chairs of faux-leather and cloudy chrome against the sober geometry of the parquet floors—they welcomed me, and my imagination made space for them. I inspected every corner of the house, every drawer of every end table and dresser, I disappeared into the odors of the objects I found inside, those left behind by the previous owners. How did this golden button, this Christmas card, or this electricity receipt end up in this drawer? Who stuck these stickers on the window of my sister’s room or on the refrigerator?
From the upstairs window I could look out on the humble gray roofs of the other homes, corrugated metal populated with pigeons, bellicose stray cats, and various objects abandoned to the elements by their owners. I wanted to get closer to those things, to hear voices within them, to poke and prod them. Drawers and dresses, cribs and strollers, brooms, toys, artifacts fallen into disrepair—the natural deaths of these objects fascinated me as much as the streets that crisscrossed my neighborhood. I explored these too, first alone and then with the kids I met, with whom I discovered, between games and quarrels, all the profane and forbidden places of the area.
I recall the great noise of afternoons and the fine drizzle of winter. Little by little, along the cement sidewalks, narrow and bordered with weeds—sidewalks whose imperfections I knew by heart—I came to know the history and origins of every resident, and my imagination embellished this mosaic with other voices. Those tiny houses were inhabited by a gamut of people, each with their own customs, and a common destiny. There were those who felt fortunate to live there, and others who had, by some cruel stroke, lost their lucky star, and come to rest in this second-rate neighborhood. Provincials and foreigners, whites, cholos, blacks, Chinese, thieves and honest folk, pious old women, lonely people, whores, and swarms of tough kids playing soccer in a street dotted with potholes, kids who faced off against on-coming traffic like bullfighters with a death-wish. Bars and arcades; billiard halls where we’d pester some drunk to buy us sodas; dark alleys where we told stories of terror and sex, where we plotted to steal candy from a store or from the market, where we hid after kicking the door of an old lady who’d thrown water on us because she didn’t want us playing on the sidewalk in front of her house; the shouting matches between an arguing couple, and an entire neighborhood of heads that peered from open windows for a look. The long, dark path that led to the immense market, the size of an entire city block, a place filled with people from every region of Peru; the high, gray wall of that mysterious fortress, its incessant activity, the exhausted men who emerged each afternoon in their blue uniforms, and the trucks packed with cardboard boxes—the manufacturing zone. The workshops of thermoses and pots, textiles and clothing and the chemist’s laboratory, in whose parking lot we played soccer against the kids from other neighborhoods (whom we ended up fighting) and in whose unkempt gardens we found, each morning, sleeping drunks and drug addicts, and where, on one of those endless afternoons, we smoked cigarettes and drank rum for the first time, and spent the next two days ill, not from the stimulants, but from the beating we each received at home. Those girls I first liked, who never reciprocated perhaps because I was too shy, or too daring. That pink house of the first girl I ever loved, the one whom I never spoke to, the one who left the neighborhood suddenly after her mother hung herself. Between joys and miseries, secrets and fears, my neighborhood was a cauldron of daydreams where I took refuge, as I had in the darkness of my early childhood. And so, as time worked upon me and the memories of my grandmother’s house dimmed, the street became my obsession, my land of stories at every corner, and there I found a new universe to carry with me.
“Your father wants to know why you go out whenever he gets home,” my old lady said. “He doesn’t like you to have this bad habit. When you go to your new school you’ll have to stop.”
To escape, each time further away. To recreate the free spaces I was losing. Each time my wanderings were farther and my confabulations deeper. Little by little, I pushed beyond the invisible barriers of my world, my first playground receding like a wake as I went further into the streets of central Lima, among the pinball machines and the antique alleyways, the record stores, the magazine stands.
The street! What irresistible chaos! Life force and death force against its hostile geometry! I was just a snot-nosed kid thrown into its kingdom when I discovered that the language of objects stayed with me, like a parallel knowledge, a magical understanding that allowed me to make the world a game where everything had relevance and charm. It was the age of the call…
But in this new world, expansive and darker, I would not be alone. As I pushed deeper into the asphalt chaos, I understood that there were others who knew the language of objects, though they expressed it differently. It was there, in the posters I discovered on the streets of downtown, on the walls graffitied with the names of European rock groups—tributes to musicians who surely had no idea that in a distant third world country, in a place supposedly populated by indigenous people in feathers and loincloths, someone might spend their afternoons listening to songs that had been written on a drunken night or on a clear morning, when they themselves had had no sense of what was coursing through their heads. The walls held those stories beneath splotches of paint, hints of those blurred figures who’d sought rage as a way out of the daily tedium. Their existence made me feel less alone, and they became, little by little, part of who I was. Who wrote those phrases in red paint on the wall of the factory? When was the first time someone heard this band? Why had they written the name of the group and nothing else?
I began to look for those mysterious city dwellers, and to feel I was part of them even though I didn’t know who they were. In this way I collected icons, magical objects from these other lands, doorways to hearts like my own: cassette covers, music magazines, and Spanish comics—I loved seeing on the last page Printed on June 23, 1979 in the workshop of STAR, Barcelona, and feeling the atmosphere of that distant print shop, the heat and friction of the presses, the warmth of that dream factory, the elapsed time and the permanence of the object—the concert photos, the bands, the interviews and profiles, the reviews, the amateur recordings that included accidental music, errors, the slang printed on the photocopied paper of the fanzines, the anti-establishment symbols, the tediousness and anguish of being nothing but a member of the herd, the anonymous mass, the expressions on the faces of band members in the pictures. Where did they go after the show? Where were they from? What was on the other side of the door behind the drummer of Eskorbuto in that photo where he was shown laughing, bottle in hand? Why did the guitarist look so tired and sad? The color and the contrast, the wrinkled paper, the realistic lyrics of Polla Records, Eskorbuto, Ratos de Porão, MCD, RIP, Reincidentes—all this filled my afternoons on those long after-school walks toward home.
“People are not stupid because they lack intelligence,” Chusko used to say. “Intelligence is a utilitarian and empty idea. If you think about it, you’ll realize people are stupid because they don’t imagine, because they don’t dream, because they don’t believe in a future. Those who don’t dream are not self-aware and are easy to dominate.”
I remember the first slogans I came across in a fanzine I bought at Big Nose Pepe’s Underground Barricade, over there at the Plaza Francia. Obedience begins with consciousness, and consciousness with disobedience; Anarchism is the way, and history moves toward it; The rich make war so the poor can die; Order is the pleasure of reason; chaos is the joy of the imagination… A hundred loose phrases that arrived in my anxious brain like sharp reprimands. Rejecting them would have meant rejecting myself.
I spent my days steeped in this atmosphere, that gave the ordinary passing of hours a certain air of transcendence. I know what I’m saying sounds dramatic, but this is an effect of literature: within it, there are only key moments. That is how one perceives and understands the events in books, and this is how the world of the Subterraneans came to me, the world of Rock Radikal Vasco, English and Brazilian punk, the New York underground, the Catalán bohemia, the anarchist movement of the Spanish Civil War, the takeover of abandoned factories in Madrid. These were all significant episodes, dramatic events, crucial to the lives of those people I admired from a distance. They were the protagonists of something that deserved to be written down and taken into account. Their essence extended toward me, crossing the hills of a European province, an ocean and a jungle, to arrive in my room and sing to me, from that broken down radio of my adolescence, hymns of resistance, rebellion, and life. Above all the others, La Polla Records, that band from the Basque country that could do no wrong, arrived in my world to tell me that the Catholic Church was the most hypocritical institution on earth, that the bankers of some countries started wars for the sole purpose of selling weapons, that the armies were always ready to defend their interests, that a rich man never entered a prison, while a poor man never left one… I learned so many things from them. The essence of these people carved out a space within me, became part of me, and I wanted to be a part these faraway stories, to become ink and negative, and live far from this world that offered me so little. And these songs brought me memories of lives I’d never lived, a supernatural calling, something outside my experience.
“It’s not that the people don’t have dreams and hopes,” Chusko said. “Of course they do. But what are they? What elements constitute their dreams? The insipid music on commercial radio, the established culture, the weekend soccer games, the parties at the hip spots, voting every five years, studying, getting married, having children, working eight hours, filling the house with appliances, eating, shitting, sleeping… And on top of all that, they tell us this mediocre and empty life is the proper way to live, and whoever isn’t interested is a loser, and whoever wants something more is crazy, or is a terrorist.”
Yes, I was a lunatic, a flamethrower—the people walked around dead and empty through the streets and I wanted to shout that I felt alone. This feeling took me by the hand and separated me from the world until it made of me a stranger, an intruder. I was no longer of this earth. I could spend hours re-reading the Spanish fanzines, their texture, their acrid photocopied smell, and every photo told me I should have lived then, that I should have been there. A parallel life was born, nurtured by the images and histories of others. A dream to chase, where everything that the Age of the Call had planted within me was reflected. Mixing with all human desires. It was a reckless illusion that made the world my toy.
This furious dream had a devastating coherence. It was a universal order in which each object, person, and craving had a role to play. Everything converged toward a reality that lived within me, a world born of music, paintings and writings from the hearts of men who lived far away. I wanted to be one of them. That world demanded, from the moment it was conceived and produced by the imagination, a discerning analysis of reality, and a corresponding action. Its manifestation was implicit. But how to represent that world in a land that was tyrannical, resentful, limited, hypocritical, mechanized, lacking in good will? I would not let that world drown my insides. I had to fight to maintain that fire, make it transcend, push it farther, confront this world of death, this sick dream. This was then, the only way to be where I should have been.
What world, what struggle did the Call seed in me? If someone sang, “A million people live in sadness and will die democratically and I don’t want to shut up,” or, “They’ll have you in their hands for three days, will deposit all their hate within you, you will suffer their interrogations, long hours of vile torture.” If an indigenous Ecuadorian, controlling color and form, rendered the face of a mestizo in an expression that revealed the torment of five centuries of struggle and called his work, “The Age of Pain.” If a Peruvian writer narrated the silent war waged between a North American mining company and a handful of peasants from a community in Sierra de Cerro de Pasco. If this was my daily bread, what kind of world did I dream of? To what cause would I pledge my resistance? How would that struggle be waged?
“When one acts according to what one believes in,” Chusko said, “the emptiness of life disappears. For this, one must act as if one believes, and it is these repeated systematically acts that give weight to one’s faith.”
I had created, almost unconsciously, a faith that I could not let die, and so I had to look for partners, people with which to fight. That struggle against all authority should mine the bases of human misery, ignorance, and this fight, comrade, will never end, because there is no final battle, nor is anything absolute, comrade, the only way to defeat Imperialism is through the teachings of the Central Committee of the Party, revolutionary practice teaches us what is useful and what is not to the Revolution, comrade, it’s necessary to avoid the advance of reactionaries, we must support the ideals of the first warriors of the People’s Global War, comrade, we must make the great leap forward that will guide us to strategic equilibrium and to the seizure of Power, we must stop history, move mountains, assault the heavens, comrade, the struggle demands it…
“You ever killed a man?” RB said.
Rigo scraped flecks of red paint from his arm and didn’t answer.
“Me, I don’t have the heart to kill a man. You got to have heart to kill somebody.”
Using his thumb Rigo made an inconspicuous sign of the cross on his knee and silently said grace and then made the same small cross again before unwrapping the wax paper from his sandwich.
“That must be some good-ass sandwich,” RB said. “I hope it is. I
