Wandering Off the Paper Trail: The potential and threat of congregating personal artifacts on social networking sites

Adapted from a section of my MA thesis; over 100 hundred participants were interviewed about their online behavior

All of my photos since high school are on Facebook.
-23 year old female, PA

“With no paper, there would be no pages / journals all asking the same question repeatedly / WHO. AM I? / The wise would answer this question still unwritten / with simplicity and truth they would say / you are and you are becoming”

-What That There Were a World Without Paper; Britt Hultgren

MyLife: An introduction

About two months after having graduated from college with high hopes and high honors I found myself in the same college town, in the same dingy apartment not doing much. Summer slipped away and with it went my articulations for what I planned to do next, where I planned to go, most of which turned into little more than a dribble of I don’t knows.
I didn’t know.

In a sudden spree of  haphazard decisions that I hoped would miraculously lead me to a place and understanding of acceptable post-college life, I deleted my Facebook account. This, I discovered after a few beers, was a surprisingly easy thing to do. A few clicks and gone. Four years of my developing, online social life kaput. Cyber proof of a (mostly) happy girl bubbling along, evidenced by both my own and my friends’ photos, posts and commentary, all vanished without a trace.

I turn now, half a decade later, to the challenges archivists face in the preservation of online social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook, MySpace, Okurt, et al. This paper will argue for the archival importance, as well as addressing the difficulty, of preserving SNSs.

Step into an archivist’s loafers: The challenge

The age of technology shattered the rationale behind the archivist’s—very deliberate, very detailed—preexisting rules. As is often discussed in archival scholarship, the digital age changed everything (Cox, 2007; O’Sullivan, 2005; Marshall, 2008). And it is safe to say that so far, the discipline’s new rules have yet to be determined.”Life for the archivist is different than it was a mere decade ago and, it seems, working with researchers has irrevocably been transformed” (Cox, 1).

One (of many) headaches is deciding which format to implement to preserve collections both electronically and sustainably. The SAA points many campus cases in the direction of scanning the documents to a PDF file. But how long will PDF files remain popular in our ever sinuous technological world? The rapidly changing nature of technology is not so friendly to a discipline that is accustomed to boxing away documents created on acid free paper that preserved well can survive up to 500 years.

O’Sullivan rightly notes the comparably stunted lifespan of electronic records without the help of “some form of human intervention” (O’Sullivan, 54). Consider the doomsday antidote Susan Lukesh highlights: “Disaster! In 1975, the U.S. Census Bureau discovered that only two computers on earth can still read the 1960 census. The computerized index to a million Vietnam War records was entered on a hybrid motion picture film carrier that cannot be read. The bulk of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s research since 1985 is threatened because of poor storage” (Lukesh, 1).

And what about the future of Finding Aids? As Elizabeth Yakel points out online Finding Aids are practically identical to their hard-copy counterparts making scant use of possible technologies. The Finding Aid, she warns, is not properly evolving alongside today’s changing social cultures and online environments (Yakel, 2007). An issue discussed with fervor at the SAA’s 2008 annual convention, “Archival R/Evolution & Identities.”

These concerns only begin to address archiving traditional hardcopy or pre-digital collections. What about the process of archiving digital-born media like e-mail, blogs and online web videos?

The first issue that arises is sheer mass. “It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times every day” (Smith, 1).
With so many bumps in the road why don’t archivists just throw their arms in the air, turn their backs to computers and return to twiddling away at those Lincoln papers? Because they realize the vast and unprecedented value that blooms from the digital age. One such gem: SNSs.

There has been much written within the last decade about the importance of archiving e-mail correspondence. Susan Lukesh stresses the substance of “informal communication” to aid researchers’ understanding of a subject’s process and path in reaching the point of his or her masterpiece. Lukesh draws her argument from Herbert Menzel who in 1964 proclaimed: “There is no longer any doubt about the great role played by informal, person-to-person communication in the experiences of scientific investigators—often in ways that effect their work quite vitally” (Lukesh, 4). As letters archived from great minds of the past always make for an interesting read, we must seriously consider the e-mails.

In a similar fashion Catherine O’Sullivan makes a tidy argument for the importance of preserving online diary blogs, which she attests holds a like value to that of their hardcopy counterparts, (O’Sullivan, 2005). However, there seems to be a hole in archivists’ and media theorists’ discussions of how and why to preserve SNSs.

Facebook is the new scrapbook

Why are we obsessed with Facebook? No one really knows, but there surely are aspects of today’s American culture (for this study we will stay within the U.S. border, even though SNSs are more popular in other countries, like Russia) that could account for the collective popularity of SNSs. As the web becomes a place where we spend more and more of our time each day, naturally it will become an ever increasingly social environment. Perhaps SNSs are filling the void of our overall sense of loneliness created by today’s mainstream social geographies. In The New York Times, David Brooks notes author Joel Kotkin’s idea of today’s new phenomenon, “the New Localism,” a term he coins to describe the movement of people leaving behind the suburb and moving back into cities in search of human contact. He credits this to a generation that “moved to the suburbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds” (Brooks, 2008). Who knows.

But what I do know is that 75% of American adults between the ages of 18-24  are using SNSs as part of their daily routines (Pew Internet & American Life Project) and it is important to recognize the ways this is changing our social environment as well as SNSs overall importance to today’s collective culture.

danah boyd is a Stanford PhD candidate and MacArthur fellow, who enjoys a mainstream popularity for her work with young people and their relationships to online social networking sites. In many of boyds’ essays she returns to the fact that SNSs are revolutionary because they create a visible web of our social lives. They map what used to be invisible social boundaries and networks. boyd notes that SNSs have changed the organization of online communities, instead of web communities based around shared interests like a television show, a celebrity, pornography, SNSs build networks around people. “Social network sites are structured as personal (or “egocentric”) networks, with the individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where the world is composed of networks, not groups. The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework for online communities, and with it, a vibrant new research context,” (boyd, 2007).

SNSs visualize, and map, an active user’s personal growth and development, both in photographs, blogging, and corresponding. SNSs encourage users to both informally (and formally) communicate with one another while also offering a platform to document one’s feelings and ideas.This helps to promote and later, reflect upon, “the recording of reveries as part of an exploration (or construction) of one’s own identity,” as is described as a common held value of 19th century diaries (O’Sullivan, 60-1). And, not only are users expected to be introspective, tracking and recording feelings, ideas, one’s”about me,” etc. but simultaneously users must be extrospective as all content is “published” or “shared” with an audience.

Most SNSs encourage users to upload digital pictures and include diary-esq. posts, notes and/or blogs on SNS profiles in order to more fully shape an SNS identity. This results in people who might not have been inclined to keep a diary or scrapbook, to create the equivalent of such through an SNS. A 26-year old male from California ponders the possibility of this trend:

[SNSs are] pretty powerful. Seriously. And here’s the kicker, in all seriousness, the coolest thing about these sites, assuming it’s not a trend that doesn’t last, which I don’t think it is, is that these pictures you put up are going to be there for the rest of your life, you can show your kids these pictures, a montage of your life, so now you have this whole community of photos that all these people are taking and that’s your life. A recorded history.

321 Million* recorded histories

(There are presently over 321 million Facebook users)
SNSs are the new home to millions of digital photographs. 52% of survey respondents agreed that sharing photographs was a reason why SNSs has benefited their lives. Many users upload personal photographs directly from digital cameras to the computer, rarely bothering to make a paper copy. Archivist, Catherine Marshall, warns, “The value of digital assets changes over time with changing circumstances: An informal photo may not have been valuable when it was taken, but it may become so if the person in the photo dies (2007: 11).

This returns back to the issue of mass content versus value. Though three hundred slightly different photographs documenting the same sorority party often times isn’t the most valuable thing in the world—baby pictures might be. A 32-year old female survey respondent from Oregon expresses that the most beneficial aspect of SNSs in her life is allowing her the ability to post pictures and notes about her first born baby to her friends and family who live far away.
Yet, this poses a problem. Imagine this new mother posting baby pictures on her SNS profile. Shortly after a host of well wishes come in via Wall posts from friends and family. One friend might hyperlink to an online Best Wishes cards she has created using an online greeting card site. Another might link to a humorous YouTube video about the stresses of new parenthood. As personal artifacts are concerned, this is important to a family. Yet, there is no formal way to preserve these artifacts for the future interest of the child, or to look back on when the parents are older, the child has grown and moved out.

SNSs also track and make visible social trends. After Barack Obama won the presidential election SNS users, cleaning up their online profiles, might delete their memberships to groups like, “I am Voting for Change.” But shouldn’t it be recorded that for a few months tens of millions of Facebook users showed their support to presidential nominee Barack Obama in a Facebook group? Isn’t some of the commentary on the group’s Wall valuable artifacts for future historians to illustrate, decades to come, the political passion that fueled the “digital” air in the fall of 2008? Not to mention Barack Obama’s own Facebook page that houses hundreds of thousands of Wall comments where everyday people write things like this:

Hi Barack, you made us proud! America, you have renewed my trust in humanity! I am South African and I marvel at the fact that my child will grow up in a world where the greatest nation has been led by a black person, and see that as normal! Thank you America, and thank you Obama for living your dream and not suppressing it!” (Posted at 4:06pm, December 12, 2008).

This is the marrow of our society’s collective memory.

How do we save our online lives?

As people are spending more and more time updating and constructing SNS profiles less time is spent organizing personal artifacts like scrapbooks, diaries and photo albums, which might feel like a redundant chore. As Marshall attests, people have often been apt to organize and preserve our personal artifacts casually at best (2007). But at least throwing a few notable newspaper clippings and photographs in a shoebox allows for the possibility of a family member or researcher to discover the items in the future. This is not the case with SNSs.

Unlike traditional archive collections, SNSs—like most digital born media—is fluid in nature, perpetually moving with and through different technologies. In this way, SNSs nicely mirror “real” social lives, a web of networks, growing and shrinking in this direction and that while (hopefully) always evolving. Ironically, unlike real life social exchanges, through SNSs observers can witness social evolution and connections visibly but cannot as easily “catch” them. This presents a great challenge to the SNS user, the archivist, the sociologist, the web designer, the historian, etc. Archivists, sociologists and various other interested researches should not assume that SNSs are a trivial trend and ignore the value of their preservation.

If, sensing the future importance, the mother from Oregon decides to preserve the contents of her Facebook page for her first child’s birth, how would she go about it? Would she print out each photograph? Paste the photo’s comments to a Word document and print that also? Would she try to make hard copies of the data friends’ linked from multiple web/media sites? Such a task is not only going to be exhausting but it will inevitably be incomplete as the web is not easily translated offline. As Marshall notes in web based preservation: “Our first major challenge to overcome is individual’s (justifiable) unwillingness to spend very much energy on curation, while taking advantage of a natural tendency to rely on the existing social fabric to keep digital assets safe. Digital stewardship is difficult and it doesn’t seem to be getting much easier” (2007).

If the value of SNSs is trivialized future researchers stand to lose not only a vast amount of personal artifacts but evidence of how society’s social space rapidly evolved over the last decade. Like letters, diaries and photographs, the SNS user should have the choice if and what to preserve in a safe space that is not attached to a particular web domain. As of now, the average SNS user does not have this choice.

This is a problem. There needs to be a user-friendly way to preserve sections—if not the entirely—of SNS lives. To assume that whatever online social networking site a participant actively employs as well as the mixed media incorporated within a profile will continue functioning for decades, or lifetimes, is taking a big risk. Users must be empowered with the option to easily preserve online personal artifacts; to save the online life.

-Mary Lorraine Snauffer. Jan, 2010.

Works Cited

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Brooks, David, “This Old House,” The New York Times, December 9, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1

Couldry, Nick. “Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understands of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling,” New Media & Society. Vol 10 (3): 363-371. 2008. LA, California: Sage Publications. 2008.

Cox, Richard J., et al., “Marchines in Archives : Technology and the Coming Transformation of Archival Reference,” First Monday 12:11 (November 2007).

Greenstein, Dan and Neil Beagrie. “A Strategic Policy Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections,” UKOLN. Version 4.0 (14 July 2008). http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/bl/framework/framework.html

Haynes, David, David Streatfield, Tanya Jowett, and Monica Blake, “JISC/NPO Studies on the Preservation of Electronic Materials: Responsibility for digital archiving and long term access to digital data,” UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

Lundby, Knut. “Editorial: Mediatized Stories: Meditation Perspectives on Digital Storytelling,” New Media & Society. Vol 10 (3): 363-371. 2008. LA, California: Sage Publications. 2008.

Lukesh, Susan. “E-Mail and Potential Loss to Future Archives and Scholarship or The Dog That Didn’t Bark,” First Monday 4: September 1999. http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issues4_9/lukesh/index.html.

Marshall, Catherine C. “Rethinking Personal Archiving, Part I: Four Challenges from the Field,” D-Lib Magazine, March/April 2008. Vol. 14, No. 3/4.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/marshall/03marshall-pt1.html

Marshall, Catherine C. “Rethinking Personal Archiving, Part II: Implications for Services, Applications, and Institutions,” D-Lib Magazine, March/April 2008. Vol. 14, No. 3/4.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/marshall/03marshall-pt2.html

Pyatt, Tim. “Managing Public Affairs Records in the Digital Age: Case 6,” Society of American Archivists, Campus Case Studies. April 2008.

Pew Research Center: http://www.pewinternet.org/ppf/r/198/report_display.asp

Smith, M. “Eternal Bits: How Can We Preserve Digital Files and Save Our Collective Memory?” IEEE Spectrum, July 2005, 22-27.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/1568

Yakel, Elizabeth. “Creating the Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids,” D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2007. Vol. 13, No. 5/6: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/yakel/05yakel.html

There Was A War Here

It was afternoon in Dubrovnik and Kate had only a few pages left until she finished Tender Is the Night. 

“There you are,” Marjorie said. 

Kate looked up from her book and saw Marjorie leaning in the doorway of the dark wine bar. Marjorie was a silhouette against the afternoon light but even so Kate could recognize the details. She could see that Marjorie’s dress was loose and rippling at the bottom and that her hair was down and she could tell her dress was white.

Marjorie walked through the doorway and sat down on the wooden bench across from Kate. She brought her palm over the table, opened it and let a handful of mismatched rocks scatter. Some were rough and some were smooth. She pushed them in a pile and then she let them be. She pulled her thick, brown hair into a loose bun on top of her head and her silver bracelets clattered down her arms. She secured an elastic around the bun, a few pieces fell loose. She didn’t do anything about them. 

The wine bar was cold and damp like a cave. There were wooden torches set in the walls with thick white candles unlit. Dried avalanches of old wax piled at the base. There was a wooden wine shelf against one wall. A pig’s leg with a black hoof was drying in the corner tied by a thick string looped around a metal hook. 

To reach the wine bar you had to walk up what amounted to several flights of stairs. The stairs were cobblestone and winding. They were outside near the wall that circled the city. Some stairs were higher than others. There were deep grooves between the stones. The wine bar was a hole in the wall, literally. It really did look like a cave, Kate thought when she had found it. 

“I was looking for you,” Marjorie said. Kate earmarked her book, set it down. Marjorie poked through the plate of meat on the table. 

“Is it sausage?”

“I think so, I’m not sure. I didn’t order it the woman just brought it to the table.” 

“Well, that’s nice.” 

“I know, I only ordered the wine.”

Marjorie looked around the room but no one was there. “I’d like a glass,” she said, “if someone comes out.” 

“Where’s the camera?” Kate asked.

“The apartment. It’s heavy. I wanted to walk first. I’ll bring it out tonight. I can’t be bothered,” Marjorie laughed. “I would like a glass of wine though,” she said and scanned the empty room again. 

It was July and Kate and Marjorie had just finished their sophomore year of college. Marjorie had a photography grant, that’s why she was in Croatia. She had worked on her proposal all through the spring semester. Kate proofread everything, repeatedly. Kate promised if Marjorie got the grant she would travel with her, said she was nearly positive her parents would give her money for the trip. 

Marjorie’s proposal was to document evidence of an old war. She would work in a country that signed its peace treaty well over a decade ago. She was interested in Croatia, Dubrovnik in particular. Kate asked why not include Sarajevo or Kosovo. Marjorie said she wasn’t interested in the cities commonly remembered as the centerpieces of the war. She wanted something a bit further from that. She told Kate to imagine throwing a rock in a pond, she wasn’t as concerned where the rock landed but in the outer ripples. That’s what she wanted to document. Marjorie said the time and space element were key.  

When Marjorie started to get heavy like that Kate would always eventually laugh. She would say something like, “Yeah man, just follow the vision.” Marjorie would throw a crumpled ball of paper at her. “It’s going to work,” she’d say. “I’m certain. I can see it.” 

Kate and Marjorie had met their freshmen year at Boston College. They were roommates. Kate was a year older than Marjorie because she had started college a year after she graduated high school. Kate told Marjorie, after Marjorie had probed the subject, that she had spent the year working odd jobs. Kate didn’t elaborate and Marjorie never asked about it again. Marjorie thought if Kate had more to say than she would tell her eventually, when she was ready. Marjorie did get the sense though that there was indeed a story there. But Kate made it pretty clear she had little if any interest in telling it. 

Marjorie made Kate feel safe and from the day she met her Kate knew it would be okay. The two girls were close, had been since the day they met. When they look back on who they were then, nervous freshmen assigned to the same dorm room, and who they are now, the changes are shocking. Marjorie has blossomed into herself over the last two years. The confidence she found in Boston alone has transformed her from the little bookworm she claimed to be all her life in rural Maine to a very assured and beautiful woman she is today. 

Kate has also changed, Marjorie’s observed. Early on Kate was quiet, virtually forlorn, but she has loosened since, though slowly. Kate can still be withdrawn but when she is alone with Marjorie she will allow shades of herself to emerge, if only for a brief time. Marjorie recognizes these moments immediately; when Kate releases herself and is present completely. And she cherishes them. She tries to lengthen them out. 

When the old woman came back into the room Marjorie smiled at her. The woman’s breasts appeared to take up the entire length of her torso and even lapped over her skirt’s belt buckle. Her back was hunched slightly and her hair was white and thin. It was pulled back tightly and Kate noticed the woman’s hair didn’t succeed to cover her whole head. She could see patches of pale, pink skull. The same color as the inside of a conch shell, Kate thought. 

Marjorie pointed to Kate’s wine glass. 

The women held up two fingers. 

Kate nodded. “Yes, two, thank you.” The woman pushed open the swinging kitchen doors and disappeared again. The doors swooshed back and forth several times. 

Marjorie looked around the room, took in a big breath of air and then let it out. “I like it here. Nice place, good find.”

“I know,” Kate said. 

“The wall out there, you know,” Marjorie began, “is dimpled with bullet holes. I was photographing that yesterday, but didn’t notice this place. It’s so weird, I think, how at some point in time someone was shooting an automatic into that wall. Into people standing by the wall, rather.”

The old woman came back with the wine glasses and set them on the table. She pointed at the blue plate and then took it away. She set it on the small table by the pig leg and started hacking off slices with a butcher knife. 

“Well, I guess that’s where the meat comes from,” Kate said. 

The woman rearranged the slices on the plate with her fingers and brought it back to their table. She put her hand on Kate’s head and rested it there for a moment. Her hand was greasy from the pig’s leg. Then she lifted it and went back into the kitchen.

“She did that before. Isn’t that strange? She keeps touching my head. I just smiled last time, I didn’t know what to do.” Kate brought her hand up and touched her hair. She could feel the grease. 

“There’s pig in my hair,” she laughed. 

“She did that before? When you were alone?”

“Yeah, I mean she didn’t touch the pig leg before. But yeah, I’m glad she did it again so you could see.”

“That’s kind of sweet though,” Marjorie said and looked towards the kitchen doors still swinging slowly. 

“Yeah, I mean it was nicer before the pig got involved. Anyway, I’m sorry,” Kate reached for her wine glass, “the bullet holes, you were saying.” 

“Right, well, it’s just something I can never get over, I should’ve by now, but you know, the difference time makes to a space.”

Kate nodded and took a long sip of wine. It was white and cold. She looked at her book. She wanted to finish it. Marjorie caught her glance. 

“Okay, okay,” she laughed. She drained her glass. “I’m going to the apartment, get my camera and wander some, I feel guilty I didn’t even bring it out today. Meet for dinner in the main plaza at six?”

They agreed and Marjorie left. 

A short while later Kate finished her book. She arranged the kuna in a pile by the blue plate and then left the wine bar. She went out into the late afternoon light, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She climbed down the winding stairs, occasionally reaching for the stonewall to steady her balance.

A week earlier Kate and Marjorie had left Dubrovnik for the weekend. They had taken a bus from the city station to the port. At the port they caught a ferry to Hvar, an island they heard about in passing. 

In Dubrovnik, they had rented a small, one bedroom apartment for the month. They only brought one bag each to the island and were able to leave the rest of their things in the apartment. They told the old woman who owned the building that they were leaving for the weekend. The woman spent most of her days in the courtyard garden that was overgrown and untended to. She was wearing a stained, beige smock with a maroon handkerchief tired over her hair. She nodded. She was tossing scraps of meat to the tabby kittens slinking around her ankles. One was trying to nurse on her bare baby toe. Marjorie picked up the runt and it clawed up her chest. Marjorie let it, the kitten sat on her shoulder. Marjorie kept a hand on her so she wouldn’t fall. The mother was nowhere to be found. The old woman thought she had either been hit by a car or a dog had gotten her. She didn’t know.  

It had been overcast all morning and when they reached the bus station it began to rain. The bus was crowded and Marjorie and Kate were the last two seated. Marjorie was put in the very back of the bus while Kate sat next to an old man towards the front. There were a few young soldiers standing in the aisle. 

The coast was a three-hour drive and the bus had to enter Bosnia briefly. When Marjorie realized they were in Bosnia she took a special interest in observing the surroundings, she wanted to see if things looked any different. As far as she could tell they didn’t. She didn’t even realize they were back in Croatia until she overheard someone’s comment. 

When they reached the port the first thing they noticed was the ferry. It was bigger than they had imagined. There was a line of cars waiting to drive onto the ship. Workers were carrying wooden crates up the metal ranks into the side doors. Trucks were unloading cargo. The ferry was the size of a small cruise ship. Kate and Marjorie went into the restaurant on the first floor and then took the stairs to the top deck. They found an empty bench and Marjorie pulled out her book. When the ferry left Kate got up to walk around. She walked to the bow and leaned over the railing. She watched the ferry cut through the blue ocean splitting the water into frothy white foam. She looked up and saw a flock of birds flying away from the coast.  She wondered where they were going. 

“Hard to see someone like you going to waste.” 

It was a man’s voice and it was coming from behind her. Kate spun around. A short, old man was standing with his arms crossed. Kate was surprised. She repeated what she had thought he said, what she was nearly certain he said, in her head. Hard to see someone like you going to waste. 

Kate had absolutely no idea what to say so she didn’t say anything. 

The man was Croatian. That much she could tell. He was old and he was fat. Kate was perturbed. She was not smiling. But she was curious. She couldn’t help that. 

“I was on your bus,” he said in perfect English. “From Dubrovnik. I was sitting next to you. So,” he looked at his feet and then quickly back up at her. “So, what happened there?”

Kate didn’t know what to say. 

“I mean who called you, on the phone, I know it’s none of my business but,” he said and half smiled. “I just,” he paused. Then he let the smile go. Kate kept her back against the railing. 

“It’s just, you may have, you may’ve been crying. I mean you were crying. I know you were crying. I, um, am probably stepping out of my bounds here.” He began to move his feet. He moved one foot out and then brought it back in, he kept doing that. Kate thought it looked like he was warming up before a tap dance. She stayed focused on his feet. She’d been staring at them since he said he had been sitting next to her on the bus. It was easier. His shoes were dull. His slacks were short and his socks were argyle. 

“I didn’t, just then, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, I’m sorry, I,” the man put his hands in his pockets and then took them out again. 

“I mean,” he clasped his hands together and then began to rub them. “What I wanted to say is, I thought it’s a shame how someone could hurt you so badly when they weren’t even there, I mean on the bus with you.” The man crossed his arms over his chest again, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about whatever happened to you. I’m sorry it happened to you.”

Kate finally looked up. The man was against the sun and she had to squint. She pushed her hair behind her ears but it just blew forward again. The man’s appearance had softened to her. He was quiet. He was finished. He nodded his head and turned to walk away. 

“Thank you,” Kate said or at least she thought she said but she wasn’t sure. Maybe she had just said it in her head. Either way the man didn’t seem to hear her, or if he did he didn’t turn around. He walked directly to the exit door, went through it and headed down the stairs to the restaurant. Kate turned back to the railing. She watched the ferry cut through the sea. It reminded her of a big knife dragging through something slowly, splitting it open. She didn’t want to think about anything other than that, the Adriatic Sea and the fact that she was there, right then, slicing through it. 

She never told Marjorie about the man on the ferry. Or the phone call on the bus. She wanted to but she just couldn’t push it out. There was so much she couldn’t push out. It frightened Kate, honestly. The trouble she was having with all that. With talking. Saying what was on her mind, what was truthfully on her mind. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Kate to say things out loud. To say the sorts of important things she knew the people around her would likely want to know. The sorts of things that her friends and family should probably know. 

Kate wondered where all these things were. If she wasn’t telling anyone, if she wasn’t passing them on, then where were they going? That was one thing that frightened her. Kate shook her head, she swallowed up the fear and she went to find Marjorie on the bench.

They took off their bathing suit tops and lied down on the sarongs they had spread out on the warm boulders. The ocean would occasionally splash up and Marjorie would feel the spray on her toes. There was an older man tanning a ways away. A small white dog was asleep on a beach towel next to him. Other than the man there was no one on the rocks. 

There was a small metal ladder bolted into the rocks leading into the ocean. The ocean looked crisp and blue and inviting. Behind the rocks were heaps of white stucco buildings. They were piled there, one on top of the next. They didn’t look straight, looked like a mouthful of crooked teeth. The buildings were mostly apartment or restaurants or jewelry shops selling illegal red coral. They all had orange tiled roofs. Next to the blue ocean the buildings would look beautiful from an aerial perspective, Kate thought. 

Neither Kate nor Marjorie were particularly shy with their bodies and taking off their tops didn’t strike either girl as extravagant. They were more concerned with an even tan. After having lived in the same dorm room for the last two years they were all too familiar with each other’s bodies and, as Kate will point out as a joke, they have accidentally seen each other naked plenty. 

They were both on their backs with their eyes closed. There was a folded three-day old International Herald Tribune between them with a crossword puzzle they planned to start when they flipped onto their stomachs. It was midday and Kate hadn’t bothered to put on sunscreen. She told Marjorie she never burned and Marjorie raised an eyebrow. Kate ignored her. 

“You seem quiet today,” Marjorie commented. The ocean splashed against the rocks and the afternoon’s heat hummed. 

“No, well, have I? I’m fine.”

“How’s Carter doing? Still in love?” 

Kate’s eyes were closed but she could sense Marjorie smiling. Whenever Marjorie brought up Carter she couldn’t help herself from laughing, even if she was asking Kate a serious question. Sometimes she would apologize for it. Kate wondered if Marjorie even realized she did that, snickered every single time. 

“Yeah, I don’t know. This is a dumb time to have a boyfriend, right? I just didn’t know how to end it.”

“You never know how to end it with him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kate said and flipped onto her stomach. 

“Well, if you’re not happy with him it matters plenty,” Marjorie said, she had opened her eyes and turned towards Kate.

“I am happy,” Kate said defensively. “You always think I’m not happy when I’m fine, it’s sort of awkward Marjorie, I mean I’m not going to go dancing down the streets but I’m like, fine. I have a boyfriend, it’s great. I’m happy, I’m happy.” 

“Okay, okay,” Marjorie said, “You’ve convinced me. And by the way, I don’t always say you’re unhappy. You just,” Marjorie paused and sat up, she crossed her legs and faced the ocean. “You just deserve so much, you know, sometimes I don’t know if you realize all you’re entitled to.” 

“I do. I’m fine.”

“Okay.” 

Marjorie had her eyes set on the man. She watched him stand up and roll his towel. The white dog shook off his fur and arched his back. The man walked to the metal ladder and put the towel by it. He caught Marjorie’s eye and they smiled at each other. The man turned with his foot on the ladder and lowered himself into the ocean. The dog stayed on the edge of the rocks, turning his head every which way, he was alert as if scanning the ocean for danger signs, ready to sprint into it if he saw something that would put the man at risk.  

“You know my mom,” Marjorie said and Kate nodded her head. She was still on her stomach resting her cheek on the towel. She didn’t open her eyes.  

“I must’ve been five, maybe four, I don’t know how I remember this.” 

The man let go of the ladder, he pushed himself from the boulder with his feet and began to backstroke away. The dog started barking then. One bark after the next until the man, smiling, free stroked forward and came back to the ladder. He brought his hand up and rubbed the dog’s head and then he started to backstroke again, facing the dog. 

“I was at my uncle’s horse farm in Lanchester, it’s a couple hours away from my house and it’s even more rural than Cording. And my uncle was holding me, I don’t particularly like that uncle, I never trusted him. And my mom climbed up on a horse, we were outside by the stable, and she looked at my uncle, her brother, and said, “Watch me go.” And she laughed.

“She kicked her heels into the horse, it was a pretty, white horse with beige speckles, and she was just off, I mean galloping down the field, she just shot off and her hair was rolling behind her, it was really long then. I mean her hair must have reached her waist. It was too long. 

“Anyway I just started crying then, I mean totally wailing. And what I remember distinctly is this feeling of her pulling away from me, like she was tearing something out of my insides and running off with it. 

“And my uncle was just laughing at me. I mean head bent back laughing. And he said, She’s coming back sweetheart, be a big girl. And he said it between all this laughter. 

“I just remember hating him then. I mean to this day I still don’t like him and for no good reason.”

The man in the ocean swam further away and every time he let his head go underwater the dog began to bark again. It was a piercing bark and it wouldn’t stop until the man brought his head up.

“I just had this sense, since I was really young, that my mom was about to take off. Like at any moment she’d just pick up and go. But she never did. She’s still there now. I don’t know why I always thought that. 

“One day I’d love to be able to ask her, honestly, if she was ever thinking of leaving us or if as a kid I was just completely paranoid,” the dog began to bark again, “that my mother was always inches away from running loose.”

The man was still swimming away and the dog was jumping up and down on his hind legs, then he came down on all fours and began running in frantic circles, yapping endlessly. Kate was still on her stomach with her eyes closed. 

“I don’t know why I got into that, I think that dog reminded me of myself as a kid,” Marjorie laughed. Kate didn’t responded. 

Marjorie tapped her shoulder. Kate didn’t budge. Marjorie realized she was asleep. She laughed at that. She picked up the crossword puzzle and found a stub of a pencil in her bag.

When Kate did wake up she was alone on the rocks. Marjorie’s sarong was still spread out but she was gone. The crossword puzzle was half finished. Kate was hot and dizzy. She had no idea what time it was. The sun was lower in the sky, she noticed that. Kate turned to her back and sat up. Her breasts were soaked in sweat. She brought her hand to her collarbone and ran it down her chest, wiping off the sweat that was running between her breasts in dozens of rolling beads. 

Her hair was plastered to the back of her neck she brought it up into a high ponytail. Pieces of hair were still matted on the sides of her face and she pushed them behind her ears. She straightened her back and reached her arms up, she stretched to one side then to the other and then she noticed Marjorie. 

Marjorie was floating on her back in the sea. Slowly side to side like a swaying hammock. She wasn’t going in any one direction, just back and forth like that. She was still topless with her white bottoms. Her hair was floating out in a halo around her head. Kate stood up and walked across the boulders to the ladder. 

Marjorie’s eyes were shut and her arms were spread out. Kate rested her hands on her sides. She watched Marjorie float from side to side like that. Kate sat down on the edge of the boulder and hung her legs into the ocean. She watched her feet bob up and down in the clear water. A wave came in quickly and pushed her back. Salt water came into her mouth and Kate spit it out onto her bare chest laughing. Then she sat up again.  

In Dubrovnik, after she left the wine bar Kate had to walk across the city to get to the apartment. She wanted to take a bath and change before dinner. Halfway along it began to rain. The sky turned dark quickly and the rain came down hard and fast. Kate didn’t think it would last long. She tucked her book under her arm and walked briskly to a café awning. She leaned against the wall and decided to wait it out. The rain fell in long clear lines like strings of salvia. The rain filled the grooves of the cobblestones and turned the cracks into mirrors. Everything began to glisten. 

Across the square an elderly woman walked out of a restaurant and Kate watched her. She was the only person outside, other than Kate. The woman didn’t seem bothered by the rain. Didn’t seem to notice it at all.  She wasn’t walking straight, that was the other thing Kate noticed. She would stroll in one direction and then casually sweep into another. She seemed to be walking in a long graceful zigzag. Kate thought the woman must be a little mad. She was well kept though, Kate noticed. Her white hair was curled neatly around her face. She had on a light blue blouse and beige pants and bright red sneakers. 

She had a yellow scarf tied around her neck.

An old man pushed open the restaurant door and fumbled with his umbrella. “Emma! Emma,” he yelled continuing to jerk at the umbrella. Finally it bloomed into a black dome and he went running into the square. He headed quickly towards the woman who was still strolling every which way in the center in all of this rain. 

Lightening flashed. Thunder followed and the sound filled up the square for a moment. The woman didn’t seem bothered. Didn’t seem to notice. The man looked up at the sky quickly and then back towards the woman.

“Emma, stop, please, slow down.” The man was scurrying now. He was old himself. Looked as old as she did. He was wearing a grey suit with a yellow tie. 

“Here, I’ve an umbrella,” he caught up with her. He tried to cover her but she was still walking in her way. She was under the umbrella one moment and then the next she would turn a different direction and stroll right back into the rain. 

Kate squinted to make out the woman’s face but she couldn’t see it from the distance. Kate wondered what her expression was like. If she was laughing or if her face was blank. Kate wasn’t sure. She hoped she was laughing. If she wasn’t Kate thought it would be a great shame. She didn’t try to see the man’s face. Didn’t even think to look.  

The man continued to follow the woman’s haphazard route holding out the black umbrella. In his attempt to protect her he was getting rather wet himself. 

“Please,” he called when she turned to the left suddenly. 

“Lets go back, please. Emma, come back now, okay? Could you? It was nice in there, wasn’t it? Warm. Darling. Please.”

Kate continued to stand against the wall and watch the elderly couple spin in circles in that empty square. Through all those clear lines of rain. She watched the woman’s red shoes drum one way and then quickly turn another with that black umbrella floating behind her like a devoted ghost. The man copying her every step, following her every move. 

Kate thought it looked like they were dancing. 

Marjorie wasn’t in the apartment and Kate walked straight to the bathroom to run a bath. The rain had stopped but Kate’s clothes were still damp against her body. She pulled off her skirt, tank top and underwear and carried them in a ball to the drying rack set out on the small balcony overlooking the courtyard. Kate noticed the old woman looking up from the plastic chair in the garden. She set her clothes on the rack and walked back inside. Kate was completely naked. She didn’t care. She didn’t think the woman cared either. 

The bathtub in the apartment was pea green and built into the wall. The sink was the same color and so was the toilet. The walls were papered with a loud orange flower print. It was peeling in the corners, revealing an old yellow wall. Marjorie had joked that the wallpaper made her nauseous every time she went into the bathroom. 

Kate poured shampoo under the running facet. She wanted bubbles. She stepped in, it was steaming, and lowered herself. She rested her head back on the tiles. She unclipped her hair and it fell down her shoulders, the ends floated in the bathwater. 

When Kate took a bath everything felt okay. Everything turned bearable. The calmness was instantaneous. She closed her eyes. She listened to the woman in the courtyard talk in a language she didn’t understand. There was a man’s voice responding. Somewhere a dog began to bark. She listened to the traffic on the main road. She began to turn off. 

Kate had a feeling that the way she felt in bathtubs, and that was to experience a great, sweeping relief, was probably similar to the way sex was supposed to feel. Good sex. Making love. Whatever. 

After Peter died she took a bath every day for six months straight. From the day his father called after Christmas until the day she left her parents house the following fall for college. Sometimes those baths would take up entire afternoons. Sometimes she would get out of the bath, drain the water and then refill it again, right away. She would sit her bare ass on the toilet seat and watch the water rise and then she would lower herself back in. 

Her mother would come into the bathroom and talk to her. Ask her about her day. Ask her what she wanted for dinner. And Kate would just be lying in the lukewarm water, naked and pruned as if it were her office. As if it was completely normal that’s where she was spending the majority of her time. Hours on end, days bleeding into weeks, weeks bleeding into months. It was her life then.  

And even after all that time lying in bathtubs Kate still finds herself enjoying them immensely, each time. Probably enjoying them a little too much. Maybe it’s because she can’t easily take a bath at college so it has become a treat again. Maybe. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t really care. 

Regardless, Kate was happy to be there then. Naked and slippery in the pea green bath in an old apartment in Dubrovnik. She focused on listening to the traffic and to the birds. She thought about what she would wear that evening. Then she didn’t think about anything. And she turned off. And then Kate felt fine. 

When Kate arrived at the plaza at six the clouds had parted. There was a street band setting up in one corner and people were out. The plaza was crowded. The sun was low and bright pink but it only stayed that way a few minutes before it excused itself and went behind a building. Quickly thereafter warm streetlights flickered one after the next until the plaza was illuminated again. There were white Christmas lights wrapped around the awnings of cafes. One white candle burning on every silver table. 

Kate felt an electric sensation to it all and she smiled to herself. All of the waiters looked slim and busy. All were dressed in black and white. They wove around the petite tables holding trays well above their heads. Black hair was greased back, hard and smooth and shining. They all seemed to be the same thing. Moving quickly between tables and people like a current of water flowing around rocks.

Kate set The International Herald Tribune on the table and unfolded it, but she wasn’t looking at it.  

“There’s going to be a festival here tonight,” Marjorie said appearing from the crowd, she sat down.

“Really?” Kate said folding the paper in half again. “For what?”

“I don’t know. But there’ll be music and fireworks.” 

Marjorie hailed a waiter. She ordered a small jug of red wine and asked to see the menu. 

They were quiet for a while. Not in a bad way. Kate was watching a man and a woman. They arrived at an empty table and the man pulled out the chair for the woman, she sat down and the man walked around the table and sat on the other side. The woman was wearing a slim plum colored pantsuit and high heels. She crossed her legs under the table. Pulled a red packet of cigarettes from her purse and offered one to the man. He accepted.

“How was the day?” Kate asked. 

“It was alright, I think it went well,” Marjorie fiddled with her camera and put it on the spare chair. “You know what attracted me to Croatia,” Marjorie began. Kate looked over at her. Kate let her hair out of its ponytail and brushed it out with her hands. She wanted to look pretty. She had gotten in that sort of mood all of a sudden.  

“Is that in all the travel books this place looks so normal, the same as any other chic European place I’d imagine would look, civilized and fine, you know? When I think of twenty-first century wars though I don’t,” she paused. “I think of deserts and jungles. Like Iraq or Vietnam or Africa, something like that. It’s a totally different image. Even Sarajevo, why I didn’t want to involve that, it seemed more,” she paused, “obvious.”

The waiter set the jug of wine and two glasses on their table. He put down two menus. They were thick and leather bound. 

“I mean,” Marjorie continued. “Can you imagine this place having a war? There’s this photograph of a Serb holding a gun to a group of old Croats in front of a post office, the exact same one we pass when we walk to our apartment from here. And this one guy is kicking in the head of a person on the street and the guy being kicked is wearing Tevas. I know that sounds stupid but it’s the Tevas that I found, I mean, shocking. It’s those details that make it. It seems so,” Marjorie turned towards the street band and stared off for a moment. When she looked back at Kate she didn’t continue.  

Marjorie reached for her wine glass. Kate opened her menu. 

“There was a war here,” Marjorie reaffirmed, still holding her glass in the air. “Where do people put that when it’s over? That’s what I’d like to know. I want to find the place people put it and find out what happens to that space.” 

There was a long pause. 

“So, what’d you take pictures of then, today?” Kate asked, she was sincerely curious about Marjorie’s work. She always had been.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Marjorie began. “I feel like I’m so desperately trying to find these details. What’s the whole point of this if not for the beauty of the stupid details, you know? I actually went back to that wine bar. I took a few shots of the old woman who was touching your hair.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She was sweet. She stood by the wine case, near the pig’s leg, and she crossed her arms over those giant boobs of hers, she smiled but never showed teeth. Then we went outside and she stood on the stairs, and I went down a ways and took some shots of her standing there, next to the stonewall. She had her hands on her hips. And she was wearing that red skirt you know, and it was just waving in the wind—this was right before the thunderstorm. And then she started looking up, concerned you know, because the sky had turned black so quickly, and I think those were probably my best shots, this old woman in her big, red skirt billowing considering the storm,” Marjorie paused, glanced at her camera. She looked back at Kate. 

“Well, then it started to rain hard and the woman told me to come back inside and she gave me more of that meat,” Marjorie laughed and so did Kate. “You’ve no idea how much of that pig’s leg I’ve eaten today.” 

Kate was smiling. “I think that’s going to be beautiful, Marjorie. Honestly. I think it’s going to be really good.”

“We’ll see,” Marjorie said and reached for her menu, she opened it and began to page through. Kate was still smiling. She couldn’t wipe it off. The street band started up. A few children jumped up from their chairs and raced towards it. One boy still had a dinner napkin stuffed in his collar. It was waving out behind him. Kate believed in Marjorie so deeply. The pictures would be beautiful, Kate thought. Marjorie would be fine and Kate was grateful for it. 

Marjorie looked up at Kate then, as if she could sense what Kate was thinking and was embarrassed by it. 

“Well, what’re you going to order then?” Marjorie asked. Kate looked down at her menu, said she needed more time. The white candle between them had burnt out. Marjorie’s eyes were fixated on the puddle of wax pooling in the metal candleholder. She pressed the tip of her pinkie finger into it. Brought it out. The skin hardened immediately. Then she pealed it off and looked back up at Kate. 

Later a half moon revealed itself over the plaza and the people started dancing. Marjorie and Kate had finished dinner and were emptying off their second jug of wine. 

When the first firework exploded over the plaza Kate screamed in spite of herself and that put her and Marjorie in hysterics. Kate covered her mouth with one hand, laughing. The band was playing and more and more people were gathering into the plaza. Most were standing with their heads back looking into the sky wide-eyed and opened mouthed. Children were gripping their parent’s hands, clinging onto the bottoms of their shirts. The fireworks were blooming above. Big grey ashes floated from the sky like down feathers. Kate watched a piece of ash land onto a woman’s shoulder. She brushed it off and then continued looking up. 

“They’re too low!” Kate hollered across the table to Marjorie. “Have you ever seen fireworks so low?” 

Marjorie was just laughing. She was gathering her things, getting up. “I’ve to shoot this, okay? I’ll be right back.” Marjorie swung her camera over a shoulder. Kate watched the throngs part for Marjorie, she stepped into the crowd and the wall of people closed around her. She was gone.

In the sky a gold dome bloomed and then fell into ash. 

Kate was wearing a black linen dress with small straps that tied at her shoulders and her hair was down. She was wearing sandals with pearl ribbons that wrapped around her ankles. She stood from the table and walked along the edge of the crowd. She noticed a covered alleyway where a guitarist was playing with a bongo drummer. There was a small crowd circled around the musicians. Kate walked to it. 

Another round of fireworks exploded in the plaza, the sound echoed through the alley. The drummer increased his beat and Kate found herself skipping towards him. 

A firework went off and the ground shook. Kate heard the crowd awe in one great wave. She couldn’t help move with the music and all of a sudden she was dancing. She bent one leg up and quickly untied the ribbon, tossed her sandal to the side of the street. The guitarist looked up and smiled at her. She untied the other. 

Kate’s hands were above her head twisting and turning. She felt her hair sweeping back and forth on the back of her pale, white neck. She closed her eyes. 

Kate felt good and she felt free. Her dress was spinning around her body and the drummer picked up his speed again. He slapped his hands against the skin faster. Kate suddenly felt like her whole life was pouring from this one moment in time. That it was pouring in every direction, into every space. The fireworks boomed and the whole crowd sighed.

Fireworks must sound like bombs. The thought came to Kate abruptly. She opened her eyes and looked towards the plaza, she was still dancing. The crowd was looking up and Kate watched the colors of light reflect on their faces. Kate smiled. Another explosion and their faces were blanketed in warm red light, then blue light and then yellow and with each color there was a roar of sound tearing open the night. The crowd was awing and sighing, holding in their breath and then exhaling all together, as if all those people were just one thing, one body breathing in and out, illuminating light. Kate closed her eyes again. Kate twisted her arms and wrists above her head like a stem of a blooming flower turning to feed from the sunlight.

“Kate, there you are!” Marjorie shouted from the plaza. Kate couldn’t hear her. Kate was dancing. Her arms were high in the air and her hair was sweeping back and forth. She was spinning. Marjorie lifted her camera and started taking pictures of Kate. Dancing alone like that, barefoot in a damp and glistening cobblestone alleyway. In Croatia of all places, Marjorie mused. Kate didn’t notice. 

Fireworks were going off quickly now. One explosion after the next. The drummer continued gaining speed, beating faster and faster. Kate was twisting and turning. Ashes were falling from the sky. Light was pouring over everything.

The Presentation of Self Online: A Study of People’s Relationships to Online Social Network Publics

Recently my Master’s thesis was approved by New York University’s John W. Draper’s Program of Humanities and Social Thought. My thesis was  based on past academic research and the study of over 100 internet-active human subjects from over thirty countries. For those who are interested in reading my thesis, or specific chapters, please let me know: marylorraine.snauffer@gmail.com

Abstract below:

How is the addition of online social network systems (SNSs) transforming the ways we think, perceive and behave? In 1959, noted sociologist, Erving Goffman, coined the term the “dramaturigical perspective,” which argues that human actions and social interactions are dependent upon time, place, and audience (1959). Does this hold true when the players move from a physical environment into a virtual, meditated environment? How are the politics of our social worlds transformed when the “actors” and the “audience” are not simultaneously acting in real-time?

This thesis is not as concerned with the technology of online social network sites like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, etc., but how we allow these new social tools to recreate our sense of self, our creation of self, and our perception of one another.

Examined through four main parts:

1. Trends of past media theory scholarship.

2. The “Architecture” of SNSs, specifically the erosion of fixed social boundaries.

3. The ways users create their online identities and negotiate invisible audiences and the “Authenticity” of SNSs in users’ lives.

4. Lastly, whether SNSs are affecting the ways users archive personal artifacts and the possible benefits and pitfalls of housing personal artifacts in an online, digital environment.

A Quick Note to Loyal Readers or Passerbyers

Some people think I’ve stopped “writing.” I haven’t. It’s part of my essence. I have been working on two stories for approximately eight months. But during those eight months I also wrote a drab 20,000 word MA thesis, made this show that will be a pretty big deal one day, and was full time employed. I know, these sound like excuses. But it is what it is. And I’m just saying. I feel like I have more time now and I’m going to get back to it. I promise. I am going to finish those stories. And they will be wonderful. Really terribly sad. But wonderful.

Thank you for your patience. 

Or, ha, if you are one of those wandering souls who happened to stumble here from the Official Peace Corps blog site– because I have blog stats, I know where my readers are coming from, you might want to scroll down a lot. I was in the Peace Corps over two years ago. 

Anyway. Thank you again. And come again soon…

My Three Year Poem

Exerts from my journal. In chronological order. Between 2006 and 2009

Had a nightmare last night that I woke up

in the U.S.

that I had

gone home. /

I told my parents I had

to go. They could hear

pigs squealing in the background. /

He said it’s such a long time

when you come

back. I will be a man and I said

stop. /

“I’m restless and figity and so are you.

And we’ll always be this way. Sorry to

break it to you. It’s going to a

bitch sometimes.

But

it’s the way it has to be.” I didn’t

write back. /

Do GRES in Bangkok– ideally. /

I found out my dad– dad– my father– not exactly sure

why

I blanked on that. My Dad

had a heart attack. I feel like my chest

the circumference around my breasts

hurt. /

In bed, dark- hate dark

in Phang Nga- alone- I’m like a baby

again. /

A whiskey and water balanced

on his belly. I may see it now. You get

further and further out. More

and more alone. The fan makes

a cranking sound. /

I think of boys

like husbands.

Who could I marry? /

Everyone has been praising me recently

for being here and I

can’t stand it. /

A little drunk off beers– that’s not entirely

honest

and whiskies alone. Not eating a lot. It’s a

control thing. /

Last night I had nightmares. Hundreds of them.

Where I had to force myself. To open my eyes. To wake up.

In between all of that I dreamt I saw Peter Edling– he had very blue eyes-

he was walking towards me and a flock of great

white

birds

giant

were flying over us and then stopped-midflight,

in their flight- against the blue cool sky. Peter said

that’s the most beautiful

thing I have ever seen. /

I submitted my NYU application. /

I feel like I am on a brink of a break

down. Just stomp through it.

Like a solider. /

I’m stuck on a jumbo jet. If I miss

my connection in Japan. What will happen? /

I have to figure out. I have no idea

what I will do after

Oregon.  Can I get my book

published? I have to get

my book published. /

Peter and Katie and Will and I were the last ones up

in the basement. Nothing changes. /

I feel like I found myself

again.

There is a Keith Haring mural between my apartment

and school. /

I made Gavin go the wreck

room. I started crying over my salad

and whiskey. About– I’m not even

sure- not wanting to live in

New York City.

I was in such a natural pattern in Vermont. Writing and

waking up early and

clean air.

Gavin loves me so much.

Awful Secrets

“I do see what I am doing, darling. I promise,” she ironed out the white linen tablecloth with her soft hands.

The woman and the man were at the good restaurant on top of the hill. The building was a restored farmhouse. There was a pile of cold, pregnant pumpkins outside and electric candles in the windows and very heavy white dinner plates. She was a doctor and he owned a business but they were still both young.

“It’s not as though I am having an affair,” she said.

But it was, actually, exactly like that, he thought—tipped the vodka soaked ice from the bottom of the square heavy glass towards his mouth, crunched the ice and thought. When the bottle of wine came she still had her vodka.

“You’re stuck in this spot. You just need to shake out of it.” The woman opened her mouth slightly, released a puff of air and then drew her lips back. She touched her lips with a finger and then rested her chin on the back of her hand. She looked out the window—it was frosted and the thick pains were the color of cream.

“I’ve been everywhere,” she said. “I remember,” she went on, “the first time I felt indifferent. I was sitting on a pile of ruins in Scotland with fine company. And nothing, nothing. It should have been everything. “Thing is, I don’t want to leave my job. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to go off somewhere. But just the same—just the exact same— I don’t want to stay at my job. I don’t want to stay with you. I don’t want to stay here.”

He took a sip of wine. “What a great, big privilege to feel this way!” She laughed. The waiter put down the oysters. The man took one and looked at it first. She leaned in. Her breasts were pushed up against the table. Her eyes were wide.

“It’s like this great, big impolite secret that life is boring.”

He swallowed the oyster.

“Do you think of my feelings? When you talk like this. Do you ever think of how this makes me feel?” He took another sip of wine. Faced the window quickly then turned back to her. “You are saying awful things,” he said. “I think you are saying some very awful things.” He was wiping his hands with the cloth napkin.

“It’s all nothing,” she said and waved a hand in the air as if she were fanning out cigarette smoke. “It’s all a great, big nothing. “Maybe this happens to everyone. Maybe it’s just another big secret. It happens to everyone and that’s why everyone lets themselves die.”

“I don’t know what you need. Maybe you ought to go somewhere for a while. Or to your parents house.”

“If I couldn’t see what I was doing here, darling, I’d be frightened. If I didn’t understand. But my love, my love you have to begin to understand me—there is nothing and I don’t care.

“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care—I promise. So it’s all right. Can’t you see that?

“Don’t, don’t do that, please—”

The man had covered his face with his cracked, bouldery hands. She watched his shoulders tumble forward like a wave breaking. When his chest reached the table he pulled himself back up—like a wave going back, she reaffirmed.

She thought, fine, tonight she’d just cheat it and drink until she was happy again.

Save My Life

A story.

“That night the fever started and later, in my delirium, I said over and over, I am dying. (Maybe you even start to die, and then something saves you. Perhaps it’s like flipping a coin or stepping off a high, unrailed porch when you’re first starting to walk, flinging the leg out into space … Save my life … Isn’t that the core of childhood, that cry as you tip over and what will happen next?)”

-Harold Brodkey, “This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death”

The landlord’s eyes don’t rest that’s the first thing I noticed when he came over to the cabin.
It had just hit midnight but even so the landlord let himself in. I heard his pick-up rattle down the dirt road, saw the headlights cut through the white pines in the front. The shaky light pushed in through the big open window at the front of the cabin and dodged around the room. That window has no curtain.
I had just put wood into the stove that sat in the middle of the main room. I had collected a pile from out back earlier in the day, after I got home from class. Bought an ounce of good pot, it was sitting in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. I planned to put more wood in the stove, smoke two joints then pass out. I wasn’t expecting the landlord.
I had been lying on the fringe carpet, just lying on my back with my hands under my head when he opened the door. I turned my head to the side and saw him. He was old and stocky and short. Hardly had any hair left. The hair that he did have was either plastered to his head or sticking straight out. He pulled off his gloves and stuck them in his coat pocket. Then he bent over with a grunt and unlaced his boots. Stepped out of one. Had to kick off the other. He was wearing thick blue socks.
“Pete, where you at?” He hollered before he even looked up, then he looked up and saw me just lying there in the main room, looking at him.
“Well, there you are, boy,” he said as if he had searched. The landlord walked in the room. Settled down in the one old easy chair that was near the stove. His nose was red and a line of thick, clear snot began to crawl out of his right nostril.
“Get me a beer. You’ve beer? Get me something to put my feet on. Stool. A box. I don’t give a fuck, just something, my feet ’r killing me.”
I didn’t say a word. I got up though. Walked to the kitchen and pulled two beers from the fridge. There was a milk crate in the corner, I grabbed that.
I handed him the beer and tossed the crate on the floor. He straightened it out, put his socked feet on it, crossed them and sighed out. I sat back on the floor, further away from him, leaned my back against the wall. I opened my beer with a lighter and then tossed the lighter back on the floor.
“Listen Pete, you ain’t gonna pay in cash you’re gonna pay some other way and that’s just how it’s gonna be. Gotta pay someway somehow, boy.”
“What’d you have in mind?” I asked. I knew what he had in mind.
He let that lizard smile loose and ran his fat, pink tongue over his thin top lip. He wiped the snot from his face with the back of his hand. My head was hanging low but my eyes were looking right at him. I told him I had to smoke first.

I think it’s the oddest thing all the horrors people allow to harbor in their bodies while going on about their day to day. How those people can look just the same on the outside as they did before the horrors started. I was thinking about this later that night, when I was lying with my back on the fringe carpet stoned out of my mind looking at the wood-burning stove in the center of the room. My feet were right up close to it and they were hot but I kept them there anyway.
The landlord had left. When he got off the old chair and walked to the door, stepped into his boots, bent down to tie them up, I crawled back to the center of the room. Lied down in the same position I was in before. Flat on my back with my hands behind my head. I listened to the landlord open the door, shut it, walk down the way. I heard the pick-up start with a rattle then drive off, the light cutting in and out through the room. I was thinking how if someone had seen me before midnight and then had come back and saw me now, in this same position in these same clothes, here with my back on the fringe carpet, there’d be no reason to think anything had changed. No reason to think I had just sucked that old, rotting man’s dick. Twice.
But shit like that must make a mark inside us somewhere, I thought.

Last week the nurse at the health office told me I didn’t have AIDS.
“That’s good,” I said, “But now there’s blood coming out of my penis.”
She didn’t look surprised. She didn’t look any different. She kept on the same calm face. She said I didn’t have to worry about it but she did make me another appointment with the doctor.
It’s not like it’s bleeding all the time but it’s still bleeding. It’s still weird. I try not to think about it. Try not to imagine it while I’m sitting in class. How there are small beads of ruby red blood dripping out of the tip of my purple spotty dick.
I was standing in my bedroom in the cabin one night. My bedroom is the only room on the second floor. The roof slants from the middle of the room and goes down to one side. That allows me to stand up straight only in half the space. I was in my room taking off my clothes when I pulled off my boxers. I stepped out of them and began to ball them up, was about to throw them in a pile on the floor. I stopped myself and held them out in front of me, spread them wide. The bloodstains were all blotchy. Like some sponge painted red butterflies. I considered this and then I threw them on the floor.
See, I’m having trouble sleeping. That’s another thing but it’s all right. I change in my bedroom and then come back downstairs. Read or smoke or drink beer and just lie there. I’ll just spread out on the fringe carpet and watch the wood stove burn.
I’ll think about things. Things I’ve tried not to think about for years. It’s like recently all these things have been bombarding my mind. They force themselves in. They rape me. That’s the only part about the whole not sleeping thing that really gets to me—how I’m not able to turn anything off. How it just keeps going. My mind just flips everything over and over again and I wish, I mean honestly wish, I could just turn it the fuck off. So yeah, yes, maybe the not sleeping thing does bother me a little.
And I see things. Pictures. They just flash in front of me. I’m looking at the wood stove and then suddenly I’m looking at my mother on the kitchen floor. Or I’m looking at Kate’s old house from my living room window. Kate, my best friend, my childhood neighbor. Kate. Pure. Pure. Pure and good. I drum her name. It’s better to think of her than to think of other things. I know that. I do try.
See, now I’m there. In Connecticut. Now I’m standing in my house watching Kate’s house across the street and I’m sixteen. I’m watching the warm yellow light from her front bay window pour onto the dark front lawn. I’m watching it spread out like a picnic blanket. I see her mom walk by the window. And I know I’m far away. I’m in some ice blue country watching her house all warm and yellow. I know I am very far away.
When the pictures come they are clear. They are very, very clear. It’s like all of a sudden I get it. And I see it. Clear as day, right there in front of me. So what if it happened five years ago? So what if I was wasted at the time? Now I can see everything. What’s that good for? That’s my main question.
I see the Pain. It is a slow and steady creeping red lava. It boils and bubbles and I watch it slither through my old house. I am obsessed with it. I watch it. I try to catch it in old peanut butter jars. I want to trap it and I want to contain it. But it’s impossible to hold Pain in one place. It keeps moving everywhere. It doesn’t stop.
When my mother’s body hits the floor it makes a thud. It sounds like a dead tree and I’m fucking annoyed. I’m reluctant to retrieve it. She is a chore. No more, no less. A chore to slap her in the face. To pull her arm out of it’s socket, accidentally. To call her doctor again. “Yeah, I’m sorry but my mother is having another episode, yes, I’ve stuffed a rag in her mouth…”
We’re at the kitchen table. My mother and I. I am sixteen. The pill container is between us. She shakes out the pills. They tumble into her hand. Bright orange plastic pellets. There is a big glass of water. The glass is blue. Orange in the palm of her hand. A smooth white hand. She laughs. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Big blue glass of water. She clinks the glass in the air. Cheers. “We’ll see.” Hand covers her mouth. Brings her hand down and the orange pills are gone. She smiles. Squeezes her eyes when they go down hard. She smiles. What’s on my face now? I can’t see that.
Then my mother goes upstairs and gets into bed, tucks herself in and I swear to god she doesn’t wake up for the next two years.
“Here’s looking at you, kid.” She laughs.
My neck hurts and I’m on my bedroom floor again. The back window is open and ice cold is wafting in. There’s that first waking moment of the long drunk black out before you know where you are, when you can be anywhere. Endless possibilities. There is a messy note on my stomach from Kate. Kate’s gone but her notes always last. Black permanent marker on my bare stomach. Wake the FUCK up Peter! I rub my belly. Rub the note. I get into bed. Crawl up into the bed like a dog allowed back in the house. It’s morning. That doesn’t matter. My neck does hurt.
I shave off all my hair for no good reason. My mom sees my skinhead in the kitchen and goes running up the stairs sobbing like a baby. Fucking cunt. I take a picture of myself. Hold the camera out and click. Standing there shirtless in the empty kitchen. Shaved head. A three day old letter on my stomach that reads, Peter STOP STOP stop stop STOP! My stomach is hard now. Punch it, it’s hard. I’m a warrior. I don’t smile. There isn’t a flash on the camera. The picture’s no good.
I find the Pain. I am seventeen. Warm black red blood is crawling down my body. The lava. It’s exactly how I imagined it. I’m digging for more. I’m digging to get it all out. Digging with my dead grandmother’s silver sewing scissors. Digging into my left forearm. I’ve found it and I’ll get it now. Kate’s in the doorway. Kate’s standing there silent and dumb looking like a baby idiot. Is she even fifteen yet? Is she fourteen? I don’t know. I come at her with my silver scissors when she tries to get close. I am growling like a creature. She retreats. She slinks down against the wall. If she stays quiet I won’t give a damn. I’ll let her stay if she stays silent. Say one word though and I’ll get you. I dig and I pull out the Pain. Pull it out like some long intense from a dead person’s gut. Scrap it on the floor. I’ve found it and I watch it dry up and hiss and die. The red turns to brown. It looks like shit.
It’s morning and I have clean white gauze wrapped around my arms and thick white tape. The window is open and Kate’s gone.
I’m on my bedroom floor arms and legs spread out like a dead dried up starfish. My mom’s in her bedroom asleep and gone away. Night after night. Year after year. It is a tomb! Years have passed. Moss has grown over everything. There is long grass coming out of the kitchen tile cracks. There are brown maggots crawling out of the telephone cord and the television remote control. And where is my sister? Where is my father? Where did they go? The house is a layer of corpses slaughtered, left behind to rot. The Pain did it. And then the Pain left. The two who stayed behind were demolished. Had no chance.
Now it’s the woodstove. Now I’m back on the fringe carpet. I’m not asleep but it’s not exactly like I’m awake either. I see the woodstove. I am here and I’m alone. I am in my cabin in the middle of nowhere Maine. I just sucked my landlord’s dick and I don’t care. I’m alone and I can’t stop seeing things.
And I know. I know this is not good. I know. I’m not an idiot.

When I first moved here Kate was the one who warned me over the phone not to tell my mom I was living alone.
“Why’s that?” I asked laughing at her.
“It’ll make her nervous,” she said concerned. Kate was pretty much always concerned. I was pretty much always laughing.
“Anyway,” she pressed on, “I told her you lived off campus but with friends. She asked if you lived with Andrew. I don’t know who Andrew is but I said yeah anyway.”
“Who’s Andrew?” I was laughing harder now.
“I don’t know Peter,” she was getting angry, “but just go with it, okay? It’ll be easier.”
“Fine, that’s fine,” I said.
Kate was still living with my mom then, in my old bedroom. I never understood why she was doing that.
After Kate moved out of my mom’s house she went back to West Virginia, to her parents’ house for a few months before she would start college in January. Last month, out of nowhere, she called and told me she wanted to come up to Maine to visit me. I said that would be fine even though the whole prospect made me uncomfortable. How she would see it all, see me. Like I said, I knew I was pretty far out. I knew I wasn’t exactly in a good or stable place. But I couldn’t say no to her.
Kate came at the end November That was the last time I saw her. She stayed for two days. This was last month.
When I left to pick her up from the airport it was cold out. There was snow over everything and ice over that. It all just looks so far here when there are no leaves on the trees and nothing is blocking your view from seeing out. Except for the pines, they’re still covered.
“I nearly died!” She said laughing. Kate was walking towards me between a row of plastic orange chairs bolted to the floor. The carpet was old and brown. Illuminated flight announcements were scrolling on the wall. She had a backpack over her shoulder and a red scarf looped around her neck. Her hair was staticy and longer than I remembered. She was small. Kate’s young. That’s always what I’d notice first when I see her after a time. I think, Who is this child?
We walked out to the car and she kept going on with the story. How she was convinced that small plane she was on had almost gone down. How the fat Muslim sitting next to her had pulled out his Koran and started praying out loud.
“I swear to god!” She cried when I said yeah right.
“Well, what’d you do then?” I asked.
“I just sat there! I was just thinking how good of a story it’d be if, you know, if I survived.”
That first night I made grilled cheeses on the gas stove. Kate sat on a stool. She still had on her red scarf and she was looking at her lap, fingering the tassels.
“So, what do you do here most nights?” She asked finally. It had been quiet. She had commented on that, how heavy it was here. The silence and the space. She said here they felt like actual things, parts she said, not nothing.
I shrugged my shoulders. Kept pushing down the plastic spatula flattening the slices of bread on the griddle. The butter hissed.
“Write. Do work. Go to parties. Have parties. I don’t know, whatever, stuff.”
After a time she still hadn’t responded. I turned back and glanced at her. She was still looking at her lap, nodding, thinking.
“You’re alone though, I mean most of the time. Do you think you’re alone most of the time? Here, I mean.”
I laughed. “Kate, come on,” I said. I flipped over one grilled cheese, then the other. Pushed them down more. I didn’t know what else to say. I knew what she was thinking. I was wondering how much I had fucked her up. Overall. I was wondering if she would ever blame me for that. For fucking her up. Probably, I thought, eventually.
I shoveled the grilled cheeses onto a plate and put the plate on the table. Kate and I sat down. Kate brought her feet up onto the edge of the chair her knees in front of her chest. She picked up her sandwich and started to peel off the crust. She always ate the crusts first. She did that when we were kids, I remember that.
“You’re going to college in a month then?” I asked her, even though I was well aware that was her plan. I wanted to shift the focus.
“Yeah,” she said and bit into her sandwich.
“Nervous?”
“I don’t care.” She looked up at me and smiled. She put her sandwich on the plate. “I’m not just saying that, you know, meanly or whatever.” She paused and picked up her sandwich again. “I honestly just don’t give a damn about it. I don’t really give a damn about much.”
I nodded, I understood. I got up and walked to the fridge. I asked Kate if she wanted a beer.

Kate said she didn’t mind sharing a bed with me, it was the only bed in the cabin, and after she finished dinner she said she was pretty tired. I led her upstairs, she carried her backpack. I warned her to watch her head on the ceiling.
I told her I still had some homework to finish. That I’d do it in the kitchen while she slept. She stood in the center of the room and pulled down her jeans. She stepped out of them and left them like that. A little mound on the floor, still holding her shape in the seat. She left her t-shirt on while she unhooked her bra and pulled it out of her sleeve. Kate was trying to be brave. She was trying to be casual and she was trying to be brave. I watched her. I missed her. That’s what I was thinking then, how much I missed her. Still, right then, even though she was right there. There was so much space between us. I wasn’t even close to her.
She got into my bed, which is just a double mattress on the floor pushed against the window. There are beige flannel sheets and two plaid comforters. I had changed the sheets for Kate. She pulled the covers over her and looked towards me.
“Just stay here for a bit and then go downstairs, okay?”
I sat on the floor in the center of the room. I crossed my legs.
“What homework do you have to do?” she asked.
“Reading.”
“About what?”
“The ancient Greeks.”
“What about them?”
“Stuff. Some philosophy stuff. How they saw time.”
“How’d they see time?” Kate rearranged the pillows. She pulled the blankets over her shoulders and then she closed her eyes.
“Well, they saw it like, differently than how we perceive it. Sort of the other way around. You know, we face forward. That’s how we imagine it at least. We’re walking towards the future while walking away from the past.
“But the Greeks saw the future as something that came up from behind them. So it’s like they’re standing there facing the past and then the future grabs their shoulders and drags them into it backwards.
“Okay, I mean, think about being in a car. Think about being in a station wagon, okay? We’re in the front seat driving. We see our destination as the future, as where we’re going, what we’re headed to, the point, you know? We’re driving towards it and the Past is just receding away behind us, it hardly matters. Whereas if the Greeks were in the same car they’d be sitting in the trunk of the station wagon, they’d be looking out the back window. Watching what they’re moving away from as they’re being driven into the future. It’s interesting. Does that make sense?”
Kate nodded her head but kept her eyes shut.
“Peter,” she said and then she stayed quiet for a while. I just sat there, waiting.
“Do you ever miss us? Miss the people we were as kids? Together like that,” she smiled to herself but kept her eyes closed. So she understood the space then, too, I thought.
“I think I’m like the old Greeks,” she went on, “I think I’m always facing those kids playing.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Alright,” she said. “You can go downstairs now.”
I told her goodnight and then I got up. I went downstairs and rolled a big joint at the kitchen table. Put on my coat and went out to the front stoop. I watched the night and tried not to think about a thing but like I said, for me that’s pretty much next to impossible.

I never actually went upstairs when Kate slept in my bed for those two nights. I ended up sleeping on an old chair in the main room. I would get stoned after she went to bed. I thought I had AIDS then. And if I didn’t have AIDS I figured I must have something else. That was one reason why I never went to bed with her. What if there was something sick inside of me? What if I got into bed and she reached for me? What then? I didn’t want to infect her. In a way I wished she had never visited me in the first place. It was too late. I missed Kate. The whole time she visited me I was missing her.
She was there but she wasn’t and I wished I didn’t have to know that. I wished I could blame our physical distance on the great space between us. But she was upstairs and I still couldn’t touch her. I was gone.
I am dead in large parts. I know that.
I love Kate. I do. And now I just need her to stay far, far away from me.

The next morning we climbed a mountain and I gave Kate a wool hat to wear because she didn’t have one. I packed a backpack with water and sandwiches. I had climbed the mountain plenty in the summer and fall but I had never gone up in the dead of winter like this. I didn’t think it would be that difficult but like I told her I thought it would be worth the view.
Kate didn’t seem too concerned. She asked how long I thought it would take to reach the top. I told her maybe three hours. Truth is I had no idea.
I remember she started up before me and I followed her. I found a good walking stick early on. I could have moved faster but I wanted to stay behind Kate. In case she fell. In case something happened. I wanted to be able to see her.

Kate wrote me this email last summer. It was right after she graduated high school. I was in Guatemala. I was in this dingy internet shop. A little cement hole in the wall with two beige computers set on a weak, blue card table. The computer screen pulsated and it was making me sick. The shop sold bottles of warm coke in the front and there was a fat little boy running in some sugar-induced circle. There was an old man with a freckle in his eye and long stringy hair chain smoking in the corner. It looked like he had been planted in that spot for decades. For generations. I thought he and the boy were the same. There was a circle to life that was easier for me to see there, in that poor, dusty town somewhere east of Guatemala City.
In Kate’s email she told me that she was going to live at my mom’s house because her parents were moving to West Virginia. She said she didn’t want to go down with them. Said there was no point since she was just going to college that fall. She asked me what exactly I was doing in Guatemala. There was no easy answer for that, I thought. She asked if I thought it was weird that she was going to live with my mom, she reminded me again why it was practical. She was trying to be brave. Kate was always trying to be so brave.
Then she wrote the last part. I imagined how she must have written it. Quickly. Like ripping off a band-aid. Quickly. Squeezing her eyes shut right after she pressed send. She wrote, Peter, without you I don’t know who I am.
And that was how she ended the email.
I remember I never responded. I thought about it but what was there to say? A couple weeks later I went to reread it, I was in Mexico searching for the town where Neil Cassidy died. I looked through my email and it was just gone. My email box only holds so many emails and if you don’t save them they eventually expire. Disappear.
Where did it go? I was surprised how badly I felt when I realized it was gone. I imagined emails go to the same place where dreams go. My dreams can be so vivid. Horrifyingly vivid. I will dream I have love, I mean I will really feel that love. Completely. And when I wake up alone I wonder if it counted.
Where did Kate’s email go? The one where she said she needed me in order to be herself. In what space in this world do these things collect? Where did the love my father hold towards my mother go? If nobody deliberately threw it away where did it go? Where was Kate’s email? We lose things every day. What I want to know is where they are right now, as in this second. And are they still alive? And do they still count?
That was the same night I had sex with a male prostitute in an alleyway. I didn’t know he was a prostitute until he asked me for the money afterwards. When I started to walk away he came at me with this small, stupid pocketknife and I laughed at him. I told him to go ahead, stab me. He just stood there looking at me waving his knife back and forth like a fly swatter. Then I gave him the money. Threw a crumple wad of pesos at him. When I told that to Kate she cried. We were at a diner. It was late. I kept eating my pancakes and she just cried, her head hanging low over a cup of coffee.

When Kate and I reached the top of the mountain everything was white and black. It was wide and it was open and it was free. Kate and I hardly had said a word to one another on the way up. She stood there, standing on a boulder covered in a foot of snow, looking out at that great distance before us. She held her arms around herself. I stood behind her and I watched her. The mountain rolled down into hills that spread out and settled into fields. Everything was under the snow. The bare trees looked like fractures running up and down the landscape. Like slits in the universe. I imagined that if you wanted to you could just step into one of those black cracks and find yourself somewhere else.
I imagined running then. Just running straightforward. Running pass Kate and running pass the trees. Running over the boulder and just jumping off the side. Just jumping into the white and black and falling into it completely. I pictured myself as a buffalo. I imagined that someone had herded me to this point. And now they were about to run me off the edge. Even though I knew. Even though this was my land and I knew where I was running to. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care.
Kate stood in the center of it all. Kate, Kate, Kate, pure and good.
Black and white and cold and snow. And Kate.
I stepped back. I kept walking backwards and with each step Kate became smaller and smaller. I turned around and walked a distance away from her. Then I turned back and there she was. Still. Looking off at that great distance. Her body against the white mountain, the white sky and all those black cracks. She was dressed in light blue and her red scarf was swimming. Rippling up and down in the wind. I watched her dash of red waving, continuingly waving at me. I watched it and I started to step back again. Slowly at first and then quickly. I stepped back further and further until I couldn’t see Kate at all.
I spread out my arms wide and I let myself fall back. The snow had started to come down lightly. My back hit the ground and the pain echoed through my body quickly and then that was that. I opened my mouth and the snow came in. It filled up my mouth.
When Kate left the next day, when I drove her to the airport the last thing I said, when she was looking up at me with her long hair, I cupped my hands on her face, my fingers were touching her hair. I said, “Kate,” and she was waiting for it. I said, “Kate, go on.”
She smiled and then she did. She turned and walked on. I just stood there and she kept walking. I watched her backpack, the bottoms of her shoes come up, her scarf. Then she turned the corner. And she was just gone.

It’s not all bad, the things I see. Right now I’m sitting out on the front stoop smoking a cigarette and watching the night and suddenly I see yellow.
I’m not wearing any shoes and I’m fifteen and I’m telling Kate, I’m saying, “This is perfect, I can’t even see you!” And she’s right there in the center of that gutted out yellow bush hollering, “You sure? I’m waving my hands, can you see me wave my hands?”
“No! You can’t see past the flowers. I can’t see a thing.”
I crawl in and we’re both just sitting together in our secret space. That big azalea bush next to the garage, behind the Albertson’s house. And we talk. We talk and we talk and everything is exactly as it should be. I know that.
The bottoms of her feet are black. We’re in Kate’s kitchen and her mom laughs. Says, “Why don’t you kids ever wear your shoes?”
“We’re making our soles tough,” Kate goes, waves her off.
“Making them tough for what?” her mom says back.
See, now I’m starting to think that maybe we did suspect something was about to happen. And maybe what we were doing was actually preparing for it. Why else did we think we needed that secret space so badly? I think it was all in preparation. I think, somehow, we sensed what was looming ahead.
I see Kate sitting cross-legged inside our yellow secret space. I see Kate and her hair is long and wet and clean. I try to touch her. She doesn’t even realize it. She has no idea. How much I love her. I try to reach out my hands. I want to touch her. I try to reach out my hands.
I love her. I love her. Can’t you see that? Can anyone anywhere understand? Does any of this count?
But now she’s gone and its still night and I am alone in nowhere Maine. It’s cold and all that’s in front of me is my breath. I hear the landlord’s pick-up before I see his lights. Then I see the lights cut through the white pines and I know he’s coming back.
I can’t see Kate anymore but I’m thinking about her still. I’m thinking about what we could have known and what we never said. And I know there was one thing, only one thing that I am sure neither of us had anticipated and that was the fence. When the Albertsons tore out all the bushes and the fence was put up well that, that was truly a surprise.
The landlord kills the engine. He is hacking when he opens the door. He spits and turns back, reaches into the passenger seat for something. He is digging through glass bottles. I hear them clinking.
And I see the old fence now, white and peeling, dividing two overgrown lawns. The wind comes through. I see the high grass blowing. A cold tin trash can. Big black round bags piled up. A broken garage window. A fallen oak tree branch mushy with mold. And I see that Kate and I are gone. And I have to wonder, I can’t stop thinking, I cannot stop thinking and I can’t sleep, please. Can you understand this? Can you understand me? Why I need a fucking ounce of sleep? I cannot stop thinking and what I’m wondering now is, what I have to wonder is where, I mean exactly where did Kate and I go?
I need this to stop. I can’t. I need sleep. Please.
The landlord has a big, clear bottle in one hand and he takes a long swig. He slams the car door with his elbow. Ambles up the way. Throws the bottle in the woods, it shatters against a tree. “Boy!” he calls out. He’s wearing a bright orange hunting cap. “Where’s the party tonight, you tell me. Hey, boy! Where’re you at?”
And I know, I know, this is not good.
“There you are,” he says standing above me.
I am trying to be so brave. Can’t you see that? Can anyone anywhere understand? I am trying to be so brave.

Tangerines & Cigarettes

You know. Things happen. When I was nineteen I was in Galicia, the hard coastal northern tip of Spain over Portugal. Rocks claw out of the sea—the sea claws back at the rocks. I remember the senoras with their tight silver buns and blue kerchiefs, baskets in their arms—and the bread. They walked in flocks buzzing from the market. Their breasts lapped over their bellies and the tops of their hands were lined with veins that looked like tree roots, looked like if they finger the soil they will be swallowed down, digested, and then they will come out again and bloom into a row of soft smooth lovely girls.

I don’t exactly feel like telling a story just now. I feel like poking at the beautiful parts. Are they still alive some place? I am taking an Archiving class. I wonder if I print this story out and stick it into a filing cabinet will it stay alive? If the potential to be found remains—does it continue to count? You know. These stories are my marrow.

It was July in Galicia when I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for the first time. I took acid in the main plaza with Karen. Sitting on the ground leaning against the big pillar—I could feel the stones coolness on my bottom through my skirt. I kept itching at my bare knee. We drank tea from a thermos and watched the pilgrims. Streams of them with the seashells around their necks. Dirty, their shoulders raw and burnt. How far had they come? It varied, Karen said—she was examining a pebble, twisting it in her hand. Holding it up to the sun and squinting. As far as Bhutan.

Bhutan. All of the doors felt unlocked when I was nineteen. And Karen was in love with me. And on acid I was in love with her, too.

Years later, in a rural village in Thailand Bootsaba told me how her husband fell onto her when he was dying. It was in the middle of the night and he was going to the bathroom over and over again.
—We both knew he was dying. I knew and I did not know.
She could feel Dying in the bedroom. Could feel Dying packing it’s things into a suitcase.
“I will be ready in five minutes,” it might have said.
—But we would not say it out loud. We believed in words so much! If we did not say the word maybe it would get bored and shoo away.
He would go to the bathroom and then to bed. He was scheduled to check into the hospital early the next morning. Dying in a hospital? Can you imagine anything more awful? Staring at that beige speckled ceiling. Your last earthly sight.
We shuddered. I feathered my left hand. I shuddered again. No, I cannot. Imagine anything as awful.
—We knew. We must have known.
Now Dying pressed the last shirt into the suitcase—a red blouse with a ruffled collar. Smoothed it over and thought, am I forgetting anything? Talcum powder.
—If I had found him on the floor, between the bedroom and the bathroom. I would have never been able to go on. He knew that. My heart would have died.
Bootsaba had fallen asleep, she supposes, is surprised, but must have, and then she woke to his warm body falling onto her, falling into her with a heave or a sigh or a moan or a relief—You are the safest place on earth, he might have thought.
And Bootsaba cried out, “My love, my love, my love!” And she took him into her warm, safe, beating chest.
The suitcase snapped shut. Both locks clicked. Dying straightened its back. Evened it’s shoulder pads.
He fell into Bootsaba and then he fell through her and then cool, cold, colder.
Shaking him now, crying. Screaming. Crying. But before he became cold she was not frantic. She held him and loved him for that moment. For that minute or hour or season. It doesn’t matter. That time, from when he secured himself into her chest to when he died, it wasn’t neat time. Was not measurable rather, was more like the space of daylight filling a room.
—I was brave, Bootsaba says. Smiles. Ticks her head to the side and leaves it there. First her eyes are away but then they come back and refocus on the temple facing the West.

This is the story she tells me in a peeling blue classroom that only has three walls. The sun parades in. There is no wind this month. The temple is on top a hill with 506 stairs leading up to it. We watch it from the classroom. The monks are robed in orange ascending the stairs. Their balled brown heads buoying lightly and in unison. In the blue room Bootsaba and I are sitting by a fan and drinking water and eating wedges of tangerines. There are two stray dogs sleeping in the corner. I look out towards the monks and then back at Bootsaba’s old lovely mapped face—lines running in every direction. Her life’s evidence. Her proof. She breaks my heart, chiseling it away with a very small hammer. There are tangerine peals all over. They smell divine.

Karen and I were going to get matching tattoos so that later in life, when we had left Galicia and had moved on to different places and people and times we would have evidence that one another existed. That we were important to each other. That we were not alone.
—It would be hopeful, she said.
I propped myself on my elbows. We were lying in the grass on the hill that looked over the cathedral. The pilgrims flowed in and out like water. The sun was going down and the light was a warm autumn red. I peered out at it all.
Where was I? Where had I begun?
If we exist in memory does it count?
We never got the tattoos. She burnt my left forearm with a cigarette though. Under a Ferris wheel. There was a traveling carnival. We had befriended a pilgrim, Jordan, from Johannesburg. He stuck around for a while. The three of us would buy wine and bread from the store and drink it on that hilltop in the evenings. Jordan and I kissed once. He pushed me against that cathedral and kissed me suddenly and for a while, I remember. Two years later his car was stolen and he was shot in the face in the afternoon. I saw it on International CNN, the only English station that came into Antonia’s apartment in Barcelona. I was standing up when I saw the clip, holding a pile of textbooks. First they flashed his picture and then they said his name and I knew.

I was asking for it and Karen was exasperated.
—Fine. Fine!
It was nighttime and the glow of the colored Ferris wheel lights fell down on us like dots. Jordan flinched, then laughed.
—I cannot believe, he began. Then instinctively he gritted his teeth, showed his gums. The red cherry went out on my forearm, sizzling. I gasped in a shot of air.
Then I was left with black, a circle of ash haloing around a bubbling blister.
—Happy?
She tossed the cigarette butt on the ground.
—Now we will remember it forever!
I clapped. I was drunk. I looked at Jordan and gave him a prideful smile. I felt like I had won something, that I had just proven correct on a difficult test question.
Now this will always count.

Six years later I am rubbing the dot of scar tissue. Now. Today. In my bedroom in Manhattan’s lower east side. The sound of the street is pelting in through the window like stones. It is my birthday. What do I have to prove it? That I have completed all of these years—that my life has existed? I don’t even own a bed frame or a kitchen appliance. I don’t know. I was once burned under a Ferris wheel in Spain. I am rubbing it. I have proof. I have that.

Ahja Was the Name of the Baby

I wrote this article in the middle of my Peace Corps service. It was never published. But I like it more than any of the other articles I published. So here it is. Two years late.

The Muslim prayer chants are broadcasted from the mosque near my house every evening. The sound bounces off the mountain I live near. I love this sound.

My friend, another volunteer who lives a few hours away, found a nest of baby rats sleeping in his mattress. Rats are a problem here. He drowned them. Then he bought rat poison, which was a ball of tar, and put it in the kitchen. When the rats try to eat the tar their face fur burns off and they scream, which signals for neighboring rats to come and assist, then they go for the tar and the cycle continues until you have all the rats screaming and burning in your kitchen. Then you have to kill them. He didn’t realize this when he bought the poison; he just thought they’d die. He killed the rats in his kitchen with a machete.

I made a joke that his rat problem reminded me of a recent terrorist attack in the south. The five most southern provinces bordering Malaysia are called “the restricted zone,” in Peace Corps jargon and I’m not allowed to go there. The closest province to my house is a couple hours away. There are bombings or shooting almost daily. It’s been going on for the last few years. It has to do with Muslims and Buddhists and the Malaysian border. I’ve never fully understood the root of the conflict.

Anyway, a couple days ago a man shot a noodle shop owner, the police came, and then a bomb went off. It had been hidden in a motorbike. The whole thing was a set up. Lure over as many people as possible and then detonate the bomb.
“Just like your rat poison,” I said.
“I don’t like killing them,” he said.
I was bit by a stray dog a few weeks ago and have had to bicycle to the local hospital every day for cleanings. It’s a deep puncture wound. I sit in that hot, outdoor waiting area for hours sometimes. I watch the poor, old, crumpled women that are pulled out of the backs of pickup trucks with their big, elephant feet twisted in awful directions.

Yesterday I was sitting on a plastic stool outside my house watching a half dead lizard being devoured by ants and wondering what I was doing here. The sun had just set. I was wondering why exactly I had volunteered to be tossed across the world. I wondered whom I was trying to impress—as if I had gone on a giant, two-year rollercoaster to awe a date.

I wasn’t feeling particularly altruistic that evening. The day before I had succeeded in sealing tens of thousands of dollars to be donated to one of my schools by a private donor. –“Whatever you want,” the donor said, he was an American. He had retired and now divides his time between philanthropy and golf. “Whatever you think this school needs, let me know.”

I couldn’t think of anything tangible. The teachers and students need motivation, inspiration, something that will lift the bar around here, lift the standards. Donating the money, I thought then, is the easiest part of charity. I thanked him graciously. Then we posed for pictures.

The old grandmother who lives next store came to my house. In her flowered sarong and oversized button up shirt with the baby at her hip. I love this baby. I took her from the grandmother and walked her to the dumpster down the street where the bony cats loiter. The baby and I like the cats. We watched them paw through the garbage. The Muslim prayers started chanting from the megaphones into the early evening, long scratchy wails and cries. The baby touched my face and I turned to walk her back home.

The Dark Place

Based on a true story, names have been changed.

When I opened my eyes there was light.

Boston. Matthew’s mother was standing over me. I was on the floor, in a sleeping bag, in the main room of the apartment which was everything, was the kitchen, the living room and the office. I considered her. She held her eye on me, kept an eyebrow raised. She drank some coffee and then the fax machine went off and she walked towards it. I had a headache and I felt nauseous.

Boston. Three walls of the apartment were made of glass. The apartment was on the third floor. It was $5,500 a month. The government was picking up the bill. “They’re treating us real good with this,” his mother said later. Said about the apartment, not about the situation. She was angry about Matthew’s benefit party. She was angry the government wouldn’t let Matthew leave the hospital to go upstate for it, even though his doctors said it would be okay. That Matthew would be okay to leave for the weekend. He’d travel by ambulance. But the government wouldn’t have it. Matthew’s mother kept at it. Calling people. Asking for favors. She said three of her boys had given their service to the U.S. Army and she had never asked for anything except for this. She let out a long sigh, said she was a country girl and hit the fax machine with the heel of her hand. “What am I doing here?” she said. I thought it was time to get off the floor. Brian, Matthew’s brother, was gone. I wondered where he went. I wondered if he was planning on coming back.

Outside there was a walking bridge over the freeway. The walking bridge was the same level as the apartment, if I stood at the window I was eye to eye with the pedestrians. “You can see the whites of their eyes,” Brian said last night. I wondered if he said that in Afghanistan when he was in the marines. I thought it was an odd way to put it. Last night everything was funny. When Brian and I were drunk we turned on all the lights. Brian mixed Black Label whiskey, his father’s, with ginger soda and ice. “Watch out, it’s strong,” he said bringing over another glass. He had manners I wasn’t used to. He kept asking if I was comfortable. The Celtics had just won the play-offs. We could see fans spread out of the stadium from the windows. I pressed my palms against the glass like I was surrendering. I examined the streets. Brian pushed at my neck with his fist. He rolled his knuckles from one side to the other. Playfully. It was same game Caitlyn was telling us about. How it tickles your spine. Caitlyn was sitting with Pat’s wife, Abby. They were drinking Coors Lights. Abby was telling Caitlyn about how Pat couldn’t shit. About how his head is three sizes too big and the swelling won’t go down. “But he’s all there,” she said. “I can see him in there. He’s just deep in it. I can see him though. He’s a mess. It’s a mess.” She said. I wondered if Brian and Pat’s wife had ever had sex.

The hospital was on one side of the apartment building. The bridge on the other. The big stadium on the third with the biggest Bud Light banner I have ever seen hanging over everything. The Mass Pike snaked around it all. Under ground and above ground. Burrowing below and then sticking its neck back out, cars darting out everywhere. I hated driving around Boston. Caitlyn and I got lost when we were trying to find the hospital. It was late. At one point we ended up at Logan airport. We had been driving for eight hours. We were laughing but mostly we were frustrated. I was frustrated. I was frustrated I was being pulled along into this whole thing. I just wanted to go to sleep somewhere. Get a motel. But I had already told Caitlyn I would go with her. I couldn’t figure out how to get out of it now. But I wanted to. I kept thinking of different excuses to tell her, but I couldn’t get any of them out of my mouth. So I didn’t say anything but my mind was going wild.

“There’s something I should tell you,” Caitlyn said and paused, “about Brian.” She said this somewhere along Route 95 in Connecticut. I had only met Caitlyn a few days before. I had begun to notice a disturbing pattern of how often she started up her sentences with that phrase; “There’s something I should tell you.”

I was eating baby carrots. I put the bag on the dashboard.
–“He was a heroin addict,” she started, “I mean up until three months ago. He had been using for the last two years. It was pretty serious. He was married, he got married really young, and she got into heroin. Brian never touched it. They had two kids and Brian was doing everything, working, taking care of the kids, taking care of her, everything. And then finally she left him. Just like that. Just disappeared. And that’s when Brian tried it. Like he wanted to know what this thing was, you know, this thing that ruined his life. And he got into it pretty deep. He lost his kids. His parents pretty much dropped him. But then he heard about Matthew and it all stopped. I mean slam-on-the-brakes stopped. He’s clean now. He’s devoted everything to Matthew. Him and his mom. I don’t know, I wanted to tell you that in case it came up there.”
I nodded. I thought, Great. I thought, That’s just great.

“I pray to the good Lord every day,” Matthew’s mother says. We are sitting at the kitchenette table now, she and I. She pours me a cup of coffee. “So many good people are praying to our Lord. And You’ve helped us, God knows. You’ve helped us. You brought Matthew back. Matthew had bled out, you know. When the medics arrived Matthew had bled out. When they got him to Germany he was gone. He was gone for one month. And then You brought him back. This is Matthew’s rebirth. And it’s our rebirth, too, it’s the time for our rebirth, and I thank the Lord for that. Just look at Brian for proof. He’s a new man. A completely new man.” She shook her head, focused on her coffee mug, and then lifted herself from the chair.
She excused herself to the bedroom to get her Bible; there was a passage she wanted to read to me. I was thinking then how there are different levels of religious people; there are the kinds who reference God a lot. But then there are the sorts who talk as if God is right in the room. Drinking his morning coffee or flossing his teeth in the bathroom mirror. I realized pretty quickly Matthew’s mother was of latter category.
I wondered how often she told this story.

“Hey you two,” Abby hollered to Caitlyn and I from down the hall. We were walking through the hospital. The hospital was filled with freaks. There was a boy missing most of his face. It was as if someone had just pulled down a long piece of thick skin to cover his eye, his nose, most of his mouth, like it was plastic wrap and his face was a heaping bowl of leftovers squished down underneath. He was sitting with a boy who was missing his left arm except for a small stump coming off the shoulder. They were on a couch in the hallway near a window. The boy with half an arm kept his eye on me.
–“If Matthew’s bitch of a wife comes in we can sneak you girls in Pat’s room! You know what Pat said? Brian did you hear this? Pat said, put ‘em in my bathroom!”
–“Did he really say that?”
–“Swear. I was telling him how we’re sneaking the girls in and he said throw ‘em in the bathroom!”
–“That’s a good one. We just might.”
Caitlyn was Matthew’s ex-wife. Caitlyn had explained that to me in the car. She told me that Matthew’s new wife was a control freak. That she was a jealous psycho-bitch. “She doesn’t want any single women visiting Matthew.” Caitlyn laughed, “His legs were blown off! Who the hell does she thinks wants to steal him!” She paused and considered her words. “So it’s sort of like, we’re going to sort of sneak in. Brian will help us. But like,” she paused again, “if his wife catches us I’m fucking toast.”
I kept my eyes on the road. I asked Caitlyn if she wanted any baby carrots. My mind was going wild.

Brain fell. He knocked his knee into the coffee table and fell onto the couch where I was sitting with my legs folded underneath. “Shit!” he laughed. “Jesus, Brian!” Abby said coughing out cigarette smoke. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Caitlyn. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Walking it off,” he laughed, took one lap around the coffee table and then sat back on the couch.
Brian took a big sip of his drink. I watched him. I watched him like he was a new and different sort of animal I found, like I was spying on him lurking around my backyard from the kitchen window, debating whether or not to call someone.

I was on my way to Maine, that’s where I was going. I had a job there for the summer. Shortly after I arrived I would realize the whole thing was a mistake. That I was better off staying where I was. Later I would hear a story on NPR, when I was driving alone between Baxter State Park and West Forks. Up there in the middle of nowhere. Long stretches of road and trees and what I consider to be nothingness. An hour would go by and I’d realize, anxiously, that I hadn’t seen one car yet. I was alone so much in Maine. I didn’t think it was good for me, not like I used to. I used to think that sort of thing built character but my mind was starting to change. Self-imposed challenges and exiles didn’t seem noble or educational anymore. They seemed stupid. I wanted to go back to the place where I knew I was happy. There was a physical place, 400 miles south, where I wasn’t lonely and it seemed strange and unnatural that I had voluntarily moved myself from that place. I was changing.

The story on NPR was about a Unitarian minister who told families that kin had died. One story she told was about the death of a 40-year old man in Brewer, Maine. It was a clear night in early December. She said he had decided to go ice-skating on the pond. The stars and the moon and the memory of the stars were bright when they came out of the woods, so much so that when the search and rescue team reached the pond they didn’t need flashlights. The minister said, “I didn’t blame him for wanting to go ice-skating that evening.” She said it was a beautiful night and she understood. She described seeing the tracks from the skates on the ice forming two nearly straight lines starting from the edge of the pond, through the middle, and then, towards the far side, a clean hole lit up by moon. And that was it. That was everything.
There was something I found very peaceful about that story and I found myself thinking about it from time to time when I was alone. In my tent in the woods, or driving from one place to another. Waiting to go home, I waited most of the time in Maine, to go home.

But I didn’t know any of this yet. I was still optimistic about my summer in Boston. Caitlyn was a co-worker who I had just met in New Jersey a day before and we were driving up together. That was my only relation to her. It was shortly after we left Jersey that she began with it all. Asking me if it’d be okay with quickly visit her ex-husband in Boston. How it would break up the drive. The other details started to trickle out later. We’d get back into the car after a rest stop and she’d mention he was in the hospital. That he lost his legs in Iraq three months ago. A few more miles down the road and she would add she hasn’t seen him since he left for his third tour of duty. How she left him after his second tour. And it went on. I kept telling myself it wasn’t that big of a deal. That it was going to be awkward but it was only one night and that by the next day we’d be in Maine so it was fine.

“I can just wait outside,” I said and Brian and Caitlyn just looked at me. “I have a book,” I added. I started to fish through my backpack to wave it in front of them as proof.
–“He’s not going to bite,” Brian said and I felt like an asshole.
We were standing outside Matthew’s hospital room. Caitlyn and Brian were sanitizing their hands. I wondered who Caitlyn told Brian I was. I felt a strong urge to explain my relationship to Caitlyn, which was that we didn’t have one. That we weren’t friends. That we barely knew each other. I strategized ways I could explain this politely.
–“It’ll be fine. He likes visitors,” Brian said. I smiled. I think I might have said Oh, okay, great then. I put my book back in my backpack. I sanitized my hands.

“Matthew’s still totally full from the ice cream social earlier, aren’t you buddy?” Brian said and clapped him on the shoulder. Matthew gave a smile. One leg went as far as his knee and the other was totally gone. There was a white knit blanket that went up to Matthew’s chin. He was handsome. He was twenty-three.
I smiled at Matthew when I walked in and he smiled back politely. Caitlyn followed in after me. I had wondered, thinking about it in the car, what she would do, seeing him for the first time like this. I had imagined she’d start crying. I pictured her falling onto his hospital bed crying. It seemed like the sort of thing you’re supposed to do. I was thinking about the movies—it was all I had to go from.
–“Oh my god, Matty,” she said when she walked in, “we got so lost in Boston! I’m still shaking. I was driving stick! Can you believe that? Stick! I can’t even drive automatic and we were going in all these tunnels. We ended up at the airport!”
–“How in the world did you manage to get to the airport?” Brian asked. Caitlyn laughed. She sat down on the chair near Matthew. I sat in a chair in the back of the room, by the end of the bed, where Matthew’s feet would have been. I didn’t know if I should introduce myself. I am no good at improvising so I just sat there and smiled when everyone else smiled, laughed when everyone else laughed.
–“You got new tattoos.” That was the first thing Matthew said to Caitlyn. Matthew seemed drugged up. It was late. Brain said earlier, when we met in the hospital parking lot, that Matthew had already taken his night meds, but he was trying to stay awake to see Caitlyn.
–“Matty got his first tattoo a couple months ago, right buddy? On his calf.” Brian said, he was standing on the other side of the bed opening up a laptop, “but then two months later he got it blown off! You should see if you can get a refund. Can you imagine, going back to the tattoo parlor? I’d bet they’d give you another one for free.”
Matthew and Brian laughed. Matthew told Brian to show us a picture of it on the computer.
–“It was the Punisher, you know the cartoon? His whole unit got it. Matty was really close with his unit, he’s been getting all these letters from them back in Iraq.”
Brian was still trying to pull up the photo on the laptop. “Matty’s a celebrity. Caitlyn, I don’t know how much of this you know but Matt’s been on I swear, every news channel. He was on Fox News.”
Matthew was nodding along.
–“Tomorrow I’m doing a radio interview for a Boston station,” Brian continued, “When we get back to the apartment I’ll show you the album my mom is making of the newspaper clippings. I mean he’s been in everything.”
Abby was standing in the doorway. “Hey Mary,” she said and I looked up. I was surprised she remembered my name. “Want to meet my Pat? He’s right down the hall. He’s still awake, I think he’s excited about the whole secret mission of sneaking you girls in.” She smiled.
“I only met Brian here,” Abby began when we were in the hallway, “We live on the same floor in the apartment, and we met in the elevator. I mean his face was familiar because we were both doing the same thing. Waking up, coming to the hospital all day, going home, going to bed, over and over, you know? And finally I said something. There are a lot of us at that apartment, the government pushed us all in there,” she laughed. “You know, it’s nice and it’s close to the hospital. But mostly it’s the wives, and a lot of them are just, I don’t know, it’s a lot for a person. Brian’s different though. We can have fun together. You have to have fun or you’re going to break. You’re going to completely melt down. We’ll get some beers after and,” she paused. “You know, he understands. He’s a good friend. Anyway,” she said turning the corner and pushing open a door.
“Honey, this is Mary, Caitlyn’s friend.”
His head was swelling from the left side. It reminded me of a cartoon dinosaur egg. It reached the end of his bed and was wrapped in white gauze. He didn’t have an arm.
“Roadside bomb,” Abby said, “just like Matthew. You just got’ve thank god there was no shrapnel. You’ve no idea what’s that like. How dirty. Just one piece. Those injuries. It’s hard to imagine.”
Abby walked to Pat and rubbed his shoulder.
“We don’t have to hide anyone in the bathroom, I don’t think Ashley will be in tonight. She usually leaves around suppertime. It would’ve been funny—can you imagine? If you girls were holed up in his bathroom? That was a good idea, honey,” she said to Pat, “Brian and I had the whole escape plan routed out. It was like an army mission.”
I stayed with my back against the wall.

“Matthew is our miracle,” his mother says, coming back into the main room slapping the Bible onto the dinning table. “He’s our miracle. They came to my door. Upstate. And I saw them coming in their uniforms and,” her eyes teared up. It was eight in the morning. “They said there was a roadside bomb. Everyone in the Humvee was dead.” She pulled out tissue from her fanny pack and blotted her eyes. “Before that it was a normal day. Before things that mattered, I was upset we were out of coffee beans. That’s what was on my mind before I saw them driving up. The coffee beans. And the lawn needed mowing. But then, a month later, Matthew came back to us. He woke up in Germany.” Matthew’s mother started directing the conversation to the Lord again. I wondered if she was ever lonely, always keeping God in the room.
–“And Brian. Brian had lost his way. He was in the dark place. In the dark place for years and we couldn’t reach him. But he’s back now,” she looked at me and smiled wholly. “You gave Brian back to us. He found his way. His purpose in all this. He’s a caregiver. That’s why he was put on this earth and now we know it. How he treats Matthew. When you don’t know your purpose it can be hard.” She paused. She remembered the passage she wanted to read me. She flipped opened the Bible. Her nails were painted peach. The page was bookmarked.
“It’s about Our Rebirth,” she said and began to read.

“Matthew’s so fucking proud he’s getting $100,000 from the Army and I’m like Jesus fucking Christ you don’t have your legs! You lost your legs!” Brian had been chain smoking ever since his third drink. Caitlyn had gone with Abby to her apartment down the hall. Brian and I were sitting by the window. All the Celtic fans had gone home. Every once in a while a person would cross the walking bridge, I followed them with my eyes. It was two am. It looked so quiet and lonely out there all of a sudden. I took it as my job to watch the night people, when they came, to cross the bridge.
–“And the pride. The language for all this. Hero. Bravery. Pride. Bullshit.
“Sorry, there is no one to rage to here, you know,” Brian laughed. “I’m not going to tell this to mom or anything. Or Abby. I mean she goes along with a lot of this—you have to. It’s all you have. These words. Otherwise, I mean, otherwise it’s all a depressing waste. Meaningless. It’s too depressing. So it makes it better. The ways we spin our stories in order to live, the imagination it takes to bear it.
“I told Matthew I’d be his legs. I told him from now I’d be his legs. He’s my life now, you know. He’s my baby brother.”
Brian kept on talking. And I listened. I thought about how one minute people are strangers and then the next something happens and you are bound to them. You are harnessed together hurtling through the universe. You are holding onto them for your life.

A while later Caitlyn and Abby came back with more beer. “You have to hear this one!” Abby started up. “About Matty’s crazy wife!” She started to put the beer in the fridge as she began to tell the story. It was funny and she kept interrupting herself to laugh. She couldn’t get it out. “You just can’t make this shit up!” She cried, wiping mascara off her undereyes with her thumb. She brought everyone a beer and sat down on the floor. She kept going on with the story, we were all laughing.

As Matthew’s mother read the scripture I wondered where Matthew’s legs were. I wondered what doctors do with the parts. I imagined a department store’s basement piled with mismatched mannequin pieces. The light was pouring into the apartment still, piles of it like stacks of boxes.

Like the Universe beginning it all burst into a trillion stars. And then the Lord sat down in the sun. Hot and dry. Sitting on the Humvee’s fender 100 yards from the engine. He started to pick at an ingrown hair on his arm. After a while the Lord shook a pebble out of his sandal and stood up. He stretched his back from one side to the other and walked to Matthew. The blood was blooming into a larger and larger flower and Matthew’s body was the center of it all. With no great speed, the Lord put his hands under Matthew’s arms and picked him up. Put a hand under his behind and an arm around his back. Matthew rested his chin on the Lord’s shoulder and kept his eyes shut. The Lord rubbed his back. He hushed him.

“Matthew is our miracle,” his mother said again.

The Lord walked away with Matthew. The blood came out and rolled down the dust, rolled back to the broken car and the broken body parts and the bodies, the blood rolled out until Matthew was pure and empty. The Lord walked Matthew out of Iraq. He walked over countries and over the Atlantic and over most of the United States to Brian in some basement in Arizona. He grabbed Brain’s collar with his free hand and dragged him out of his self-imposed nothingness. Brian allowed himself to be pulled away. And then the Lord walked them both home.

I am driving alone now. Turning a corner on Route 201 in central Maine that looks identical to the corner I turned a half an hour before. I am imagining the hole in the ice again. The ice-skating tracks leading up to it. And how the stars and the moon and the memory of the stars must have looked illuminating it all.