Tyler J. Petty

Finding Inspiration on Twitter

2011-11-23T21:21:00.001-08:00

A fun, Thanksgiving-themed hashtag showed up on Twitter tonight: #LiteraryTurducken. The concept is to take the titles of three different literary works and combine them into a single title. ("Turducken" is the turkey-chicken-duck combination that John Madden always talked about on Thanksgiving football games.) This leads to some bizarre, quite clever combinations: Charlie and the Chocolate War and Peace; The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gone with the Wind in the Willows; Tender is the Midsummer Night's Arabian Dream.

I came up with a few of my own that I'm fairly proud of: The Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Restaurant on the Edge of the Invisible Cities; The Book Thief's Guide to the Life of Pi; Harry Potter and the Giver of Mice and Men; etc.

After I had exhausted the novel combinations that I could think of, my mind ran, as it usually does, to Star Trek, which led me to combining three episode titles into this: The Savage Curtain on the Edge of All Our Yesterdays.

That's probably the best #LiteraryTurducken I can come up with, but it might be more than that. I have to say, that sounds like a line from a poem I would like to read, maybe even one I would like to write. Who knows if I'll make time to write it, but the potential is there. And the inspiration for it came from "wasting time" playing around on Twitter.

In Which an Author Gives Me His Chair

2011-10-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't some high-handed metaphor (not yet, at least). Tonight, I went to a reading by Michael Martone, author of a bunch of books, including these:

The reading was in Bracken Library at Ball State University, and I got there kind of late, so the room was already standing-room-only. Actually, that's unusual by itself. Seating generally isn't a problem at events like this. Since all of the seats were filled, I took a spot against the wall, planning to stand and watch the reading from there. I was pretty close to the front and had a good view of the podium--not a bad vantage point at all.

After I had been standing there for a few minutes, this man--

This is Michael Martone, if you didn't know.

--stood up and told me I could have his seat. Now, I had already sat in on a class Martone visited earlier in the day, so I knew what he looked like. Still, it took a second for me to register what was happening: The most important guy in the room--literally the reason everyone was there--was offering me his chair. It's not like he was getting up to read right at that moment, either. He sat down on the floor for around 10 minutes before it was time for him to read.

I half expected him to take off his bow tie (yes, he was wearing a genuine bow tie, which are cool, while we're on the subject) and start washing everyone's feet with it. You have to admit, the guy looks at least a little bit like middle-aged Jesus.

Since I'm a visual learner, I often don't get a lot out of readings, but Martone's personality and repartee made him memorable, even if I don't remember all of his stories (I use that term loosely) all that well. It didn't hurt that he's an Indiana writer and the crowd was primarily made up of Hoosiers, either.

And I got a story out of it myself, too.

Taking Notes and Novel Reading

2011-09-15T06:48:00.000-07:00

"I think someone said something about that somewhere in this book. No, I don't remember who, or when, or what page it's on. But I'm sure it's in there. Trust me, Prof."

Ever since I started college, and now, as I'm halfway through grad school, I have hated conversations like the one above. I have a somewhat obsessive attachment to my memory (from my high school Bible Quizzing days, but that's another story), and besides that, those kinds of conversations just don't make me sound like the budding brilliant intellectual I need my professors to know I am. That's not all grad school is about, of course, but it is part of it.

If you can't back up a statement with evidence, you might as well not even make it.

In order to save face and sound smart, I've developed a system for taking notes while I'm reading a novel that works pretty well for me.

A screenshot of my notes
from Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist.

While I'm reading a book, I have my computer open in front of me, and whenever I come across something I want to note (introduction of characters, important place names, themes, recurring images, etc.), I write a short entry like the ones you see in a screenshot. At the beginning of each line, I write the page number and a brief note about whatever I want to remember. I separate different notes from the same page with semicolons, because I like semicolons.

I don't write as many notes as I did when I started using this system, and I've gotten better at making them as short as possible the more I've done it. I started learning what kinds of triggers I needed to jog my memory, and then writing down only those keywords in my notes. The longer the notes you write, and the more of them you take down, the longer it takes to get through a book, and the higher your chances of not finishing the book on time and of going insane.

I use the Mac Pages program (instead of MS Word) because of its search function (Pages > Edit > Find > Show Search) that allows me to type in a word and see a list of every entry in the document where that word shows up (shown in the screenshot above). Clicking on an individual result takes you to that exact spot in the document. It's quite useful for finding/remembering patterns and motifs. I haven't found an equivalent function in Word. If I'm missing it, someone let me know, please.

Ordinary Horror in Don't Come Back from the Moon

2011-09-10T21:18:00.001-07:00

I have a theory about horror: bizarre things done in abizarre way aren’t horrific because they are too strange to be relatable, andordinary things done in an ordinary way aren’t horrific because they’re, well,ordinary. Real horror comes when you combine the extremes. Bizarre things doneas if they’re ordinary. Ordinary things done in bizarre ways.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course (there are toany rule), but I think it holds up pretty well. I recently encountered anexcellent illustration of my theory in a source where I was not expecting tofind it: Dean Bakopoulos’s novel-in-stories PleaseDon’t Come Back from the Moon.

The premise sounds almost whimsical. In a depressed suburbof Detroit, Maple Rock, fathers tell their families they are going to the moon,and then disappear soon afterward. For these men, though, their trip to themoon is not some grand adventure. In fact, the mystery of their disappearance remainsunsolved throughout much of the book; Bakopoulos’s slow, gradual, almost methodicalexploration of the lives of the families the absent fathers left behind is ashorrific as it is commonplace.

Please Don’t Come Backfrom the Moon focuses on Michael, Nick, and Tom, three young men forcedinto becoming men of the house long before they are mature enough to acceptthat responsibility. Indeed, as Bakopoulos narrates their misadventures, itbecomes hard to envision them ever truly growing up.

For a while, I thought PleaseDon’t Come Back from the Moon was going to be “just another” story aboutboys becoming men despite the failures of their parents and communities. Butthere’s much more to it than that.

(If you’ve stumbled upon this post without reading the bookfirst, I’m posting a SPOILER WARNING here.)

As Bakopoulos’s novel progressed, I realized that it wasgoing to end where it began, with a generation of fathers (the sons of thefathers who vanished in the first story) also disappearing. And all of thepedestrian, unremarkable events in between (teenagers drinking, a priest losinghis vocation, falling in love, working at a suburban mall) are the developmentsthat will lead those boys to consider abandoning their own wives and childrenas they grow older.

In Please Don’t ComeBack from the Moon’s eponymous beginning story, the fathers’ bizarredisappearance seems mysterious and unexplainable. By the time you reach thefinal story, “Please Don’t Come Back fromthe Moon (Reprise),” thephenomenon of absent fathers feels not merely ordinary, but inescapable. Thatgraceful movement from bizarre otherness to ordinary recognition makes this oneof the more disquieting books I have read.

Vignette Novels: Mrs. Bridge and Sold

2011-09-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

This week for #amlinking, we read Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell's 1959 novel about India Bridge, a character he doesn't like or care about all that much, and the developments in her family over a period of several years. Instead of using the traditional chapter/scene format, Connell writes this novel as a series of vignettes (most are 1-2 pages, while the longest is around 5 pages long).

While I didn't care for the condescending stance Connell takes toward Mrs. Bridge--instead of feeling compassion for a woman whose world is crumbling around her, I felt prompted to point and laugh at her passive inability to take control of her life--the structure was fairly interesting. The main advantage an author can gain from using vignettes (or very short scenes) instead of longer scenes is that it forces the author to have a specific purpose for each section (usually just one purpose, though sometimes more), and to figure out how to express that purpose with as little extraneous detail as possible. Obviously, this can save an author from getting lost in a scene that meanders for a long time but doesn't really go anywhere.

A recent novel that uses a similar format is Sold, by Patricia McCormick, which tells the story of a young Nepalese girl, Lakshmi, who is sold into sexual slavery. Sold is told entirely from Lakshmi's first-person narrator point of view, whereas Mrs. Bridge employs an omniscient third-person narrator. McCormick uses this point of view to increase the pathos of the story--as readers, we can figure what is happening to Lakshmi long before she does--as well as to elliptically "look away" from some of the most painful moments in the story. (Since Sold was marketed as a young-adult novel, this strategy proves invaluable to keeping the story from becoming too graphic for its targeted audience.) Additionally, it gives a human, personal voice to what could otherwise become another "tragedy of poverty" story.

Another advantage of the brief scene format is that it allows the author to cover a long time frame in a minimum of pages. Mrs. Bridge covers the entire span of a life in fewer than 250 pages. This format can also give an author greater license to jump around and skip the boring/non essential parts and only focus on the highlights of the story with a minimum of scene-setting and exposition.

One drawback of vignette novels is that, because the story starts and stops so often, it can be difficult to keep readers motivated to continue reading; having to continually jump into one scene after another can be exhausting. This is similar to the problem "novels-in-short-stories" face, except that a single vignette often does not have a complete, self-contained story arc that a short story does.

The Fireworks Factory Plot

2011-09-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

Itchy and Scratchy, the subjects of an embedded cartoon series on The Simpsons, are basically Tom & Jerry’s ultraviolent cousins. In the episode “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show,” Itchy and Scratchy’s ratings have been dwindling, so to resuscitate the show, they add a new character, Poochie, who is kind of like Goofy if Goofy had a surfboard, wore shades, and smoked weed.

In Poochie’s introductory episode, which you can watch here (sketchy YouTube version), Itchy and Scratchy are driving to a fireworks factory, where all kinds of explosive mayhem will surely ensue. Before they reach the factory, however, they meet their new friend Poochy, who introduces himself with a catchy rap song. At this point, the show cuts away from the cartoon to show Millhouse (and this part was cut out of the clip above), who voices the audience’s collective frustration, shouting, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?”

That is, the audience (of characters on The Simpsons) has come to expect a certain level of violence from Itchy and Scratchy, and the sign for the fireworks factory has whetted their appetites. Instead of delivering the payoff the audience expects, though, the cartoon is waylaid (or derailed) by the interpolation of Poochie.

This episode led to the concept of what I (and others) have called the “Fireworks Factory" plot, wherein the story is set up for an audience to expect a certain kind of payoff or resolution, but which is either absent or significantly delayed because the story goes in a different direction.

Is a writer’s job always to give readers exactly what they’re expecting? No. There can be good and valuable reasons for playing with an audience’s expectations. That isn’t quite what I’m talking about here, however. In a Fireworks Factory plot, all the story elements have been pointing toward a necessary and significant catharsis, which is then not delivered. Instead, the story goes off in an unforeseen direction that pushes aside the very scene readers have been eagerly waiting for.

Here are a few examples of Fireworks Factory plots:

Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld

Around 2/3 of the way through this YA science-fiction novel, the protagonist, Tally Youngblood, is on a journey to reunite with her friends, who have been absent for the entire novel. On the way, she is waylaid and ends up hanging out with a bunch of characters who are basically Ewoks. She stays with them for a rather long time.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

There are probably several in this 1200+ page novel, but I’ll highlight two. Early in the book, there is a lengthy description of the Battle of Waterloo. It goes on for close to a hundred pages, the last two pages of which are relevant to the plot of Les Mis. Later, during the climax of the story, when Jean Valjean is carrying the wounded Marius through the sewer, Hugo breaks off to give you an unbelievably detailed history of the Paris sewer system. Seriously, it goes on longer than the Waterloo part does.

The Tree of Life

This film, directed by Terrence Malick, seems to be a simple drama about a family dealing with tragedy. Around half an hour into the movie, Malick breaks away from the family story to depict the creation and history of the universe. I think it’s a brilliant move (it mirrors God’s responses to Job in the Biblical story of Job in order to show the turmoil the mother character experiences), but I have heard that a lot of people left the theater at this point, screaming, “When are they getting back to the family?” They do get back to the family, although it does take a while.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

In this RPG video game for the Nintendo DS, the story kicks off with the heroes accidentally damaging a flying contraption and then setting off on a quest for a part they need to repair it. At the end of the game, they still have not fixed the darned flying machine. I’m not making this up. You go through half the game trying to find the part to fix it, and then once you finally find it, you never get to fix the thing.

The time-travel season of Lost

Self-explanatory.

Again, having a Fireworks Factory sequence in a story isn’t automatically a bad thing. But it will disrupt the rhythm of the plots--might be want you're going for--and can potentially turn off readers--almost certainly not what you're going for--so if you’re going to do it, the payoff that results from the side-trip really needs to be worth it.

Loving the Sunset

2008-01-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

Bryan resembled an old-fashioned telephone switching board. Tubes and wires protruded all over his body, connecting him to the machines that had long been more responsible for keeping his body alive than anything inside him.

Caroline, his wife, sat beside him with her hands in her lap. During his first months in the hospital, she touched him as often and as much as she could. She even persuaded the nurse to let her give him his sponge baths. Rubbing his antiseptic sagging skin was the nearest she could come to intimacy with him without endangering what remained of his life. He told her it felt good for a while, but his frustration at not being able to respond to her and the steady deadening of his senses twisted even that pleasure out of his control.

Most recently, the parts of his brain that allowed him to formulate speech started behaving erratically. In the middle of telling Caroline or one of the nurses a joke, he would either forget his thoughts and be unable to finish it, or he would spasm and spout nonsense. When he recovered, he said he preferred the spasms, because those sometimes still elicited a laugh. That he had made his living as a stand-up comedian and often brought his wife along to the more romantic locations was a cruelty everyone knew but never mentioned.

He still had some good moments, bursts of something short of convalescence but better than simple suffering. Those were the times he followed one of Caroline’s conversational monologues, or smiled voluntarily, or loved the sunset. He had requested a room with a west-facing window. He was too lethargic now for anyone other than himself to notice a difference, but he felt better. Before he died, though, he believed he would still make someone happy.

<><><>

On the day Bryan died, Caroline came into his room wearing a yellow dress. It was a couple of shades darker than her hair, and the two combined equaled the color of the sun in his eyes. He preferred her natural color, but he did not tell her because he knew how much she liked being a blonde. Her green eyes, magnified and sparkling from tears that appeared after she dried her face in the hall, shone as brightly as they did every day. She kissed him quickly and sat down, her head in line with his rib cage. She was too far away to hear him.

Instead of looking at his face, which puckered in a tiny crater wherever she happened to kiss it that day, Caroline had lately taken to staring at his hands. Because he had never used them much when he was healthy, their deterioration was less noticeable. She had difficulty focusing her eyes when she looked at him.

She was alert enough, however, to see his index finger move. He raised it less than an inch, and it was only because they had been married for fifteen years that she knew it meant he wanted her to raise her head.

"Closer," he mouthed.

She leaned in, her arms on the side of the bed, but she was still too far away. Whatever he added
in volume he would lose in endurance, and he knew it would take everything he had to say what he needed to tell her.

"Closer," he repeated.

Caroline perched on the edge of the bed and leaned over his chest. She could hear him wheeze out every breath, and to get away from the sound she moved closer to him, so that her chin almost touched his.

She smiled, which surprised both of them. "Close enough?" she asked.

Bryan held his blink for a second longer than normal, and then he spoke. All he could manage was a whisper that came from the front of his throat and did not even sound like his voice, but it was enough.

"I was doing some shows at a resort in the Caribbean. One night after my set, I couldn’t sleep, so I walked on the beach. I saw a woman in the water, splashing and playing like a little girl. Her bathing suit was black. It looked like her arms and legs were spinning and flying on their own, like they weren’t connected. Her hair was blonde, so bright it looked like the sun rising. I stopped and watched, but I didn’t want to disturb her. She was so beautiful, so pure and innocent in the water."

Caroline knew this story. It was how they first met. He got some of the details wrong–she wore a bikini and her hair was red then–but she was thrilled to hear how much he still remembered.

"The next morning, I saw her in the exercise room. I was too distracted to work out, and I almost followed her into the ladies’ shower room. Right before I went on that night, I found an envelope in my dressing room. A picture of her was inside, and she’d written her room number on the back. That night was the worst set I ever did. I couldn’t remember any of my material."

Caroline could not hold back any longer. Trying to be as gentle as she could, she said, "No, that’s not how it happened, honey. I was laying out by the pool, remember? You could see me there from your room. You called room service and had them bring a drink out to me. You made them write your name and room number on the little umbrella. I’d watched all your sets and I thought you were funny, so I went up. You almost passed out when I showed up at your door in my bikini. Don’t you remember that?"

Bryan blinked. "Of course, Care. But this story is about Jackie. She came first. I went to her room after my set, but she wasn’t there, so I changed and went to the beach. She wasn’t there either. I tried to play in the water like her, but I couldn’t. I felt silly. Just when I was getting out of the water, I saw her coming. She was wearing a beautiful white dress, but she took it off and left it on the sand. She introduced herself in her underwear. We went back out, and she showed me how to play in the water."

"Bryan, why are you telling me about this now? You’ve never said anything about it, about her, before. Why wait until now?"

"Care, I want you to understand. That’s all I want now. She was like a sunrise to me. But my sunset was better."

She dug her chin into his collarbone and pressed his sides with her hands; she could not then have said whether it was from anger or affection. Had he been able to feel pain, to scream, or to cry, he would have. But as Caroline knew from the silence in his chest, he was already beyond agony’s reach.

<><><>

All the legal issues and funeral arrangements had to be taken care of, she knew, but they could wait. She rushed out of the room and past the nurses station without saying anything or even looking at them. She barely breathed as she drove home, and she had not even thought about crying.

It was upstairs in their bedroom, tucked unceremoniously away in one of the bottom dresser drawers; she had forgotten which one and so had to search through three full drawers, throwing aside articles of clothing like a burrowing animal, before she found it.

It was wrinkled and dusty, but in good condition overall, considering how long it had been since she last wore it. Her life had been so consumed with taking care of him for so long. She could not even remember the last time she thought about swimming.

She needed to know if it still fit. Caroline had become conditioned to take care of herself and change her clothes in between Bryan’s medications and emergencies, and she undressed and put on the black bathing suit–one-piece, with a low-cut back–in only a few seconds.

She was already crying softly before she looked at herself in the mirror. She collapsed on the floor when she saw her reflection, sobbing and grateful to Bryan for his final gift to her.

2008-01-06T11:50:00.000-08:00

I watched Terrence Malick's "The New World" last night. This was my second viewing. The first time, I thought it was supposed to be some kind of historical epic action story, and while there were some cool moments, I mostly thought it was slow and kind of boring. But after reading the chapter on it in Jeffrey Overstreet's "Through a Screen Darkly," I decided I must have missed something the first time and needed to give it another chance. This time I watched it as a love story. (Keep that contrast in mind. It's important.)

The movie basically tells the story of the English colonists' first arrival in the new world, and especially of Pocahontas's relationship with the men she meets. I don't know how accurate the movie is historically, and I honestly don't care. So now that that's out of the way...

The first man Pocahontas meets is John Smith (played by Colin Farrell). He has been locked up in the ship's brig for insubordination, but instead of executing him once they reach land, the captain spares his life. He is freed to wander through the pure wilderness and experience all the wild joy he finds there. Chief among the delights he discovers is Pocahontas (the amazing, gorgeous Q'orianka Kilcher, in her first acting role).

Their first meetings are natural and electric. Though they can't talk to one another yet, they communicate on much deeper levels, seemingly without having to try.

To recap: Smith is the uncontrollable good-looking bad boy, whose shirt is never more than halfway buttoned and who is more at home in nature than in society. He is what John Eldredge thinks every man should be, and Pocahontas falls in love with him instantly. She thinks they will be together forever.

But Smith is an explorer. Seeking out and discovering new things is what drives him. And though he is extremely happy with Pocahontas and does love her, when he is offered a chance to leave her and search for a new path to the Indies, he takes it. The call of an adventure is too strong on him: He has to go.

He is not the man Pocahontas thought he was. She is devastated. She has been told the man she loves, the man she left her family to be with, has died at sea. She wanders through the village like a dazed ghost.

Enter John Rolfe (Christian Bale). He too knows the pain of broken relationships: His wife and child have died. He is a quiet, contemplative, kind man. He does not stand out, doesn't do anything wild and dangerous, and his shirt is always buttoned to the top. He is called a tree: steady, dependable, and providing shelter and shade.

He sees something beautiful in Pocahontas, something worth resurrecting and saving, but she is not interested. She does not want to be hurt again, and anyway, Rolfe's demeanor does not enthrall her the way Smith did. But he persists, gently following her and loving her, even though the love is not intially requited.

Eventually they marry, but Rolfe knows there are parts of her heart his wife will never share with him; they are still with Smith, whom Pocahontas has learned is still alive.

John Smith is nothing like me. I'm not bold or exciting or wild, I don't make first impressions, and I keep myself buttoned up. I have much more in common with John Rolfe, Pocahontas's quietly curious, tentative second lover, and the one who waits months and years for her to decide if she really loves him.

Pocahontas and John Smith meet again near the end of the movie. The temptation (and opportunity) is there for her to go off with the daring explorer, her first love, and leave the shelter and nurture of the tree.

But she doesn't.

She returns to Rolfe and tells him, "You are the man I thought you were, and more."

In Malick's movie, the staid tree gets the beautiful princess. And I get to believe.

2008-01-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

I cannot remember a time when I didn't know that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. There must have been some point when I learned that fictional fact, but one of my earliest memories is of watching Star Wars on television (we were taping it, and I pressed the pause button at the wrong time, thus deleting about half of a climactic lightsaber battle); I simply can't remember when the plot of George Lucas's epic was not part of my life.

I was reminded of this today, because in the book I'm currently reading (Through a Screen Darkly), the author, Jeffrey Overstreet, mentions how awestruck he was when he first heard James Earl Jones's voice say, "Luke, I am your father." It was a kind of defining moment for Overstreet, in which he learned that heroes and villains are not always exactly as they first appear, and that even the most terrifying villain can have a final moment of redemption.

Sometimes, I'm sad I've missed out on revelatory experiences like those. I knew what was really going on with Norman Bates long before I actually watched Psycho, it feels like I've always known that the Wizard of Oz is really just a little man in a green suit, that Dorothy and Toto will make it back to Kansas safe and sound, and that Bambi's mother doesn't escape the hunter.

Much more significantly, knowing that Jesus died to save me from my sins feels like something that's been in my head from the time I was conceived.

I'm fascinated by missionary documentaries where the natives are so outraged and shocked that Jesus gets crucified, and then so jubilant when they hear about the resurrection. I really can't imagine what it would feel like to hear that story for the first time.

I think that's part of what drives me to seek out obscure and (especially) foreign movies. I want to see directors I've never seen before fleshing out scripts by writers I've never heard of, so that actors I don't recognize can tell a story I haven't already heard. I want to be surprised and amazed, to have to consider something from a new perspective, to wrestle with ideas I haven't comprehended, to root for a character without knowing her fate beforehand. New and unknown stories let me enter into them and experience them in a way that familiar stories just can't.

So that's why (at least in part) I watch movies about an abused French donkey (Au Hasard Belthazar), an oriental boy with a camera (Yi Yi), two German angels in trenchcoats (Wings of Desire), and a man who guides a scientist and a writer into the Zone (Stalker).

But It Did Happen

2008-01-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking quite a bit about stories--not any story in particular, but more about them as a concept and what they mean and how they work. (This is something writers do.) One aspect that has occupied more of my attention recently is what makes a story worthwhile. When I was younger, I thought that a story was valuable only insofar as it reflected some higher (e.g. Christian) reality or principle. Basically, I looked at everything as an allegory and evaluated its merit based on how it functioned on that level, or I distilled it into a set of consistent, easy-to-understand divine rules.

For example, the band Five Iron Frenzy has a song titled "The Day We Killed", which is about the Indian massacre at the battle of Wounded Knee. I now think it is one of the band's strongest songs, but when I first listened to it, I thought it was missing something. I kept struggling to find the song's allegorical significance--did Crazy Horse represent God? Was it really a metaphor for human disobedience and destruction?--because I didn't think the tragedy of one group of people slaughtered by another could really be that important.

This mindset affected the way I read the Bible, too. While that might not initially seem like a bad approach (the Bible does have lots of parables and allegories, after all), it led me to discount the individual human struggle that drives so many of the Bible's stories; sure it must have been rough for Job while everything he knew and loved was destroyed, but it turns out okay for him in the end, so all his pain and suffering isn't that big a deal, right?

When I encountered someone who was struggling or suffering, I wasn't quite sure what to do with them, because I assumed that everything would work out in the end, and the waiting between now and whenever the solution or repayment came was really pretty insignificant.

What I had not learned then, though, is that most (or all, depending on how you look at it) of life is lived in the waiting time, and that by minimizing the importance the waiting (so I could skip ahead to what I thought of as the good parts), I was ignoring what really makes life what it is.

So now then: How does all of that tie in with the nature of stories?

All the things of life--pain, sadness, isolation, heartbreak, and tragedy, as well as joy, love, and fulfillment--are completely significant, not because you can glean a lesson or principle from them, but simply because they do (or could) happen. Stories give us the opportunity to celebrate and grieve over how vitally important everything is.

And every story works differently: The movement, rules, and internal logic of one story might be irrelevant, or even contradict, how another story unfolds. This does not, however, mean that one is necessarily better or more important than any other, or that the specific truth of one need harmonize with another; stories remind us that the world is somehow big enough to accomodate all of them, all at once.

Quietus

2008-01-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

A short song
out of tune but sincere
sung in parts that won’t harmonize.

Flowers arranged in neat rows
all of them primary colors:
blue, yellow, red.

Black dresses and suits
for contrast
hands folded, resting in laps.

Bowed heads rise
file slowly past
and then leave for home.

The silence
is just what I was expecting.

God's Good Going Away

2008-01-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

I have grown up believing that being close to God, knowing him directly and immediately, was one of the highest, most honorable, and most mature goals I could have. It’s hard for me to remember a time when this idea was not part of my spiritual thinking.

It threw me for a loop, then, when I read Jesus saying things like this: “But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7)

If I’m supposed to grow close to God, then how can his going away possibly be a good thing? Even when there’s no physical contact involved, you still feel closer to someone when you can see them and hear their voice. The second half of the verse tries to offer an explanation, but the logic behind how the visible incarnation of the Son of God being replaced by the Counselor (i.e. the Holy Spirit)–an invisible, inaudible, misty Thing that most people don’t like to even talk about, let alone try to explain–could be a good thing was a proposition that seemed fuzzy to me, at best.

The conclusion seems inescapable: No matter the fringe benefits it brings, Jesus going “there” means that he is not “here” anymore, and how could that possibly be a good thing? It takes a body to hug you, to calm your nerves with its touch, to soothe your fears and lull you to sleep with the sound of its voice, to wipe away your tears and to take on the lurking bullies; can a ghost, even the Holy one, do any of that?

A few chapters earlier–but still part of the same Upper Room speech to the Disciples–John records a statement that feels even more audacious:

“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)

If we have faith in him, not only will we do what he was doing, but we will do even greater things. If anyone other than Jesus himself had said that, I would laugh it off and dismiss it without another thought. It sounds too ridiculous to even consider. But Jesus did say it, and so I find myself forced to wrestle with it.

The explanation for why we will do even greater things, “because I am going to the Father,” seems to link this verse with John 16:7; somehow, God exiting the scene is an immeasurably good development. But how can it be?

According to John, the answer has something to do with the Spirit coming. But like I wrote earlier, I have trouble understanding what’s supposed to happen when the Spirit comes, so I needed to find another way to look at it.

In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes that being in Christ doesn’t just upgrade us from what we used to be, but actually makes us into a whole new creation. A few verses later, he explains what our job is because of our new creation-ness:

“We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20)

An ambassador acts as a stand-in, living in a foreign country and serving as the visible representative of the real ruler. Albeit in a delegated capacity, he has the same power and responsibilities as the ruler; to put it another way, he speaks with the king’s voice. And that is the position God has entrusted to us: To be his face and voice, as though we were making his appeal through us. All because Jesus left and sent the Counselor (the only reason we can function in our new position at all) to us.

The pieces start to fall into place. Jesus leaving and the Spirit coming is good because instead of the presence of God being localized in a single person (or a single place, in the Old Testament), God’s presence is dispersed into billions of breathing, walking, talking people. I get to see God because of them. Even more daunting, they’re supposed to see God because of me.

There are any number of ways to apply this idea, but the first that comes to mind for me has to do with how I talk to people. Why would I want to hide anything from you, when your response could be the words of God to me? And when I ignore you or blow you off, what does that communicate about God to you?

I’m still trying to imagine how prayer might fit into this.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------While I don't want to say unequivocally that God doesn't communicate with people directly anymore, it's never happened to me. My attempts to rationalize that formed the beginnings of this note.

The Mirror Suit

2007-09-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

The chest-piece was an old hallway mirror–egg-shaped with false gold molding for a border–that he inherited after his parents died. It came to him in a packing crate, mailed from whoever had taken care of their affairs. He knew they had died before the crate arrived, but there was a note stapled to the address label reminding him of their demise nonetheless.

The hall mirror lay on the floor of the spare bedroom, which had never been used, for several months, reflecting only the floor on which it sat. All of the other mirrors in the house–long, narrow ones the approximate shape of floorboards; smaller, roundish ones; rectangular ones small enough to hold in his hand–also eventually came to rest in the spare room. The only reason some of them survived in the other rooms of the house longer than others was that they were in corners or at angles where he rarely noticed them.

He found the final two loose mirrors in the house in the far corner of the attic, behind a stack of comic books he had forgot he possessed. The mirrors were set in the top half of a woman’s cosmetic compact that had belonged to his former girlfriend Madalyn. He caught a glimpse of his eyes in the small spherical reflectors. They blinked back at him and stared for a second before he averted his gaze, trying to preoccupy it with the adventures of superheroes whose powers no longer intrigued him. It was the first time he had seen any part of his face in years. He still touched it occasionally, running his fingers over the curve of his lips, along the stony bridge of his nose, through the bristly forest of his brows, but that offered only a secondhand reconstruction. Even if he managed to keep in mind all the various features of his face, their placement and proportion was entirely up to his imagination. In effect, he could draw his imagined face according to whatever theme he wished to follow. He variously saw himself as beautiful, an ogre, an innocent child, a self-conscious adolescent.

But he could not manipulate or negotiate with the blank stare of the mirrors. His eyes were simply there, uncomfortably fixed points reminding him with indifferent finality who he was and what he looked like. He turned over the compact with the edge of a comic book and approached them cautiously, like a primitive confronting the magic of an elevator or a gun. Once he was satisfied that it would not spontaneously flip over, he picked it up and brought it to the spare bedroom. He laid the compact on top of the dresser that had never been used, leaving it to rest beside the other smaller mirrors he had collected. They were carefully arranged, the larger mirrors on the left giving way to steadily smaller ones as they neared the bedroom window, all of them with their reflective face turned down. There was an ever-narrowing path between the mirrors on the floor from the dresser to the door.

The furnishings of his own bedroom, the one in which he slept and lived most of his life, were only slightly more elaborate than those of the spare room. The same ceiling fan hung in both rooms, and while his room featured a dull tan rug with a black-and-white striped trim, the paint and carpeting in the spare room were brighter and livelier. His room also had a computer, which sat on a desk in the corner farthest from the window. On it, he performed the freelance contract work by which he supported himself and his lifestyle, as well as ordering his food and all of his life’s other necessities, prepaying for everything, including the extra service charge to have it all delivered. Paradoxically or not, his own room was less crowded than the spare room.

He normally turned off the ceiling light before the room got dark, because of its tendency to create a reflective glare on the window, but this night he left it on. He scarcely noticed the additional light, however; he could not stop thinking about his eyes.

<><><>

At the very end of his closet, occupying the hanger nearest the wall, was a vestige of his previous life, in which he had gone outside and done numerous things that most people do every day without thinking that anything remarkable has transpired, because for them, nothing has. And while a wetsuit is not an everyday article of clothing, it hung in his closet as a symbol of the days when he had worn such things. Looking at it, he wondered for the first time in years if it still fit.

Thinking back to the last time he had worn it, a jet skiing party with Madalyn’s friends the summer after he graduated from college, he compared his physique then to his body now. Despite the lack of running space in his house, he had amassed an impressive home gym in his basement and used it regularly, and if anything was in better shape now than he had been in college.

He tried on the wetsuit, flexed and felt along his arms and legs for any signs of untoward strain on the suit’s part, and then took it off again, satisfied that there were no obstacles in this phase of his still-forming plan. Next he took it into the spare bedroom and hung it on the door. Picking up his parents’ old mirror, he held it up to the suit. Although somewhat wider than he was at its middle, it would work suitably as a chest-piece. He set it in the hall, so it would not become lost in the jumble of the other mirrors, and looked for a back-piece, finding an ideal candidate underneath the dresser. As he pulled it out, he could see that it was larger than his chest mirror, though not too large for his purposes.

A set of eight strip mirrors he had once received as a present–originally, they were a joint gift to him and Madalyn–proved to be of adequate sizes to cover his arms. They had been manufactured for decorative purposes, and so were not all the same dimensions: half were longer and narrower, perfect for his forearms, while the rest were shorter and slightly rounded, and so would work well on his biceps. He found a similar but larger set to use for his legs. He would wear gloves on his hands.

Next he considered the problem of how to affix the mirrors to the wetsuit. Although the method was not terribly complex–he would use a combination of rubber cement and hanging wire threaded through the skin of the suit, making himself into a kind of human wall–the logistics of how to get himself into the suit with the mirrors attached to it was considerably more difficult. He was going to leave his joints unmirrored in order to maximize his flexibility, but the prospect of putting on a fully-mirrored suit without breaking some of the mirrors, to say nothing of the difficulty of hoisting up so much extra weight on his body at once, forced him to think of a compromise solution. He decided to attach, glue, or otherwise jerry-rig the mirrors on the back of the suit first, while he was not wearing it–because it would be impossible for him to do those with the suit on–and then once those were in place and he was wearing it, to put together the front half of the suit.

With those details taken care off, he turned his attention to his face. Of course he would have to cover it as well, but the question of how to do so was more difficult to answer than his body had been. He had more than enough mirrors of the right sizes and shapes but no obvious way to affix them in place. The wetsuit had a hood that extended around the back of his head and completely covered his hair, but it left his face completely exposed. Because the idea of putting rubber cement all over his face–and possibility sticking hanging wire in his nose–stuck him as patently foolish, he decided to put a ski mask on over the hood and attach the mirrors to it.
He put the mask on and marked the places where the mirrors for his ears, mouth, nose, and eyes should go, took off the mask, and began working. Although his other orifices did not present him with any unforeseen difficulties, when he came to the eyes he realized he had overlooked something. It was so obvious that he laughed when the problem finally occurred to him. With a pair of mirrors over his eyes, he would not be able to see, thus turning the already difficult proposition of moving around in the suit into a seeming impossibility.

While he was trying to think of a solution to this predicament, his mind wandered to the police shows he often watched on television. The interrogation rooms in the various police stations scattered across the televised landscape invariably had an attached observation room, where the other detectives and officers could watch the interrogation unseen behind a one-way mirror. He turned on his computer and searched for one-way mirrors. After skipping past a number of sites offering to sell him a one-way mirror and to install it in his house or place of business, he found a site that explained the physical principle upon which one-way mirrors operated. When a mirror is placed between two rooms, and the light in one of the rooms is significantly brighter than the other, the mirror will be reflective in the bright room, while at the same time allowing anyone in the dark room to see through it. With this principle in mind, it seemed reasonable that the same phenomenon could be recreated with a pair of mirrored glasses, so long as the space between the lenses and eyes was kept dark.

He took the attachment tube off his vacuum cleaner and compared the size of its circumference to the size of the cosmetic compact mirrors. Though too small to fit in the final opening of the tube, the mirrors could fit snugly in the slightly-wider ribs of the tube. He popped the mirrors out of their housing, cut a section of the tube, and placed a mirror in it to make sure that his eyeball measurement was accurate. It fit even better than he had imagined. After securing the mirror in the tube with several dabs of rubber cement, he cut the other side of the tube until it left the mirror the correct distance from his eyes. All that he had to do now was to mold the end of the tube to the curve of his eye sockets.

Once he had finished modifying both lengths of tube, he held them up to his eyes. The effect was similar to looking through a tinted window, or to looking in on a brightly-lit room at night. He cut a piece of the tube in half for a bridge over the nose, and then glued an elastic strap to either side of his invention. The strap was uncomfortably tight around his head, but it held the makeshift glasses to his face and did not allow any extraneous light to reach his eyes.
He laid out the mirrors for the front of the suit on his bed before putting on the half-completed suit. The weight of the mirrors on his back and legs was heavier than he had anticipated, but it was tolerable, especially when he considered the benefits of the suit. He attached the mirrors to the front side of his legs first, then his arms, and finally his chest. Next he put on the ski mask, and finally, the glasses.

For the first time in years, he wanted to see what he looked like. But he no longer had the flexibility necessary to pick up a mirror from the floor, which was where he kept all of his largest mirrors, so he had to settle for the short rectangular one leaning against the wall. Fluffy bears and blue balloons decorated its border. It was one of the last things Madalyn had bought for them, and it was not large enough for him to see his whole self in it all at once, so he first angled it toward his legs and then, in turn, his arms, back, and chest. He saved his face for last.
When he finally picked up the mirror and held it in front of his face, he was greeted with an effect different from when he looked at the rest of his body. When he saw the reflections of his legs and arms, the light bounced from his suit to the mirror and back again at angles that led it off the surface of the mirror. When he looked at his face, however, the angle was such that it reflected him infinitely, in ever smaller iterations, so that he appeared to be shrinking and multiplying even as he stood there. Where his eyes should have been, there was only a bounding spot of brightness as the light of the room attempted to penetrate the reflective surfaces. Trying to follow it made him dizzy.

Walking was not as difficult as he had anticipated. The weight of the mirrors was not as much of an impediment as he thought it would be, although their distribution on the suit–and therefore his body–made him top-heavy, to the extent that he had to stop after each step and reestablish his balance. Fortunately, the front door of his house was not far from the bedroom.

After he opened and closed the door, an operation that required more movements than he had ever before realized, he lumbered down to the sidewalk, wondering what he should do next. He could not go far; walking in the suit was difficult and tiring, and hotter than he had expected. Not having been outside for several years, he had forgotten how warm and humid unconditioned air could be, and wearing what was essentially a black spandex weight suit accentuated the difficulties posed by a summer afternoon.

A woman jogged past him. His glasses severely limited his peripheral vision, so he did not notice her until she was directly in front of him. She was wearing blue athletic shorts and a white tank top, her arms were slender and tanned, and her legs, for as far down as he could see, were toned and muscular. She was wearing sunglasses, but she took them off when she stopped to stare at him. Her hands rested on her hips, one of them holding her sunglasses, and she twisted back and forth slowly, as if admiring the various viewing angles offered by the man in the mirror suit. She reminded him of Madalyn.

The woman put her sunglasses back on and turned to go, but before she had taken a full stride, she looked back at him and waved. He returned it as well as he could, but the suit’s limited range of motion and its weight made it a slow and unnatural-looking wave, something like an astronaut or a deep-sea diver. She smiled. He thought she was trying to meet his gaze, but her sunglasses stopped him from seeing her eyes. It was an unforeseen moment of equality.

Several minutes later, a young boy came up to him, followed a second later by his mother. The boy touched the mirrors on his legs, pressing on them as if trying to set free the image he saw there. The boy was scared when he looked up and saw his reflection in the suit’s eyes.

"What’s wrong with that man, Mom?" he asked. "I don’t think he has any eyes. Can he see anything?"

The mother, an overweight woman who thought he was a statue, said, "There isn’t a person in there. It’s just someone’s idea of a joke. But I don’t think it’s funny. Come on, let’s go home."

"But Mom, it moved! I saw it."

"No, you just thought you did," she insisted, keeping her back to the mirror suit. "You saw everything else moving when you looked at it, and that made it look like it was moving. Mirrors play all kinds of tricks."

She took the boy’s hand in hers and led him away. He tried to twist around for another look, but she would not let him.

After waiting for a moment, he turned and walked toward the center of town; it was the same direction the mother and son had gone, but he was not following them. He waited for the signal to change at the only stoplight in town and crossed the road, stopping in front of the ice cream parlor. There was a bench on the sidewalk. He would have sat in it if he did not have the mirror suit on.

The girl behind the counter looked bored. She cleaned an ice cream scoop in the sink built into the wall, dried it, and surveyed the parlor. Only two other people were inside, and neither of them were interested in ice cream anymore.

One of them was an older man. He had white hair and a white beard, both of which were the same, almost nonexistent length. Sometimes it looked as though he did not have hair at all, and that it was only a trick of the light that made it appear to be there. His hands resembled the roots of a very pale tree. His face was weathered and had a chiseled appearance, but its character changed completely when he smiled. He could lose decades of toil simply by twitching a few muscles in his face.

Sitting across the table from him was the reason he smiled. She was a strange mixture, with a face that looked young and entirely too small for the maturing body to which it was connected. She had slipped off her sandals and was tapping the man’s legs with her feet–small, stub-toed things that were strikingly out of proportion with her hands. She was the sort of girl who looked awkward in every kind of situation. But none of her ungainliness mattered when she smiled and met the eyes of the man sitting across from her.

<><><>

He took off the chest-piece and all of the mirrors on his arms and legs as soon as he was home. Now flexible enough to bend over without falling down, he turned over all the mirrors in the room, leaning some at angles against the walls, leaving others face-up where they were on the floor, hanging some on the walls and even on the ceiling, and resting the largest mirror he had against the side of the never-used crib. He balanced the next-largest mirror on top of the dresser. He took off the ski mask, laid it on the dresser, and looked into the mirror.

The bounding, reflection-multiplying effect was happening again, but he made himself concentrate on the largest reflection; it was the clearest and the one closest to his real face.

A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window and caught one of the mirrors lying against the wall. It rebounded unpredictably but with inexorable brilliance, intensifying on its instantaneous course through the room. It would only stop when it hit him.

He could see himself going blind.

Praying to the Machine

2007-05-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

Thomas had not slept in the same bed as his wife for over a year. It was all the machine’s fault, really. He still loved her, though obviously not quite as much as he loved life itself. He had cried for a long time when he first thought of it that way.

Everyone had thought the machine would be a revolutionary comfort. The exact place and manner of your death, though not the time, all available on a convenient printout sheet. They had tested it for years with the elderly and the mentally ill before they made their announcement. They had to be sure their science was more than a pileup of coincidences.

They tested it on two different groups. One group was told about the machine and its prediction for their deaths. The other group was observed in secret. They did not even know the machine existed. The preponderance of suicides in the first group, they adamantly maintained, was merely a product of statistical variance. There was no known case in which the machine had been wrong.

In many ways, the machine was a blessing. Men can be very courageous when they know they are going to survive. Numerous people celebrated what they called their newfound freedom or lease on life (only some of them sarcastically) by performing outlandish stunts. The phrase "death-defying" quickly became a joke for those who had submitted themselves to the machine’s test.

But not everyone wanted to know, of course. Some people actually wanted to be surprised by death. They thought that not knowing made life more exciting. They said it gave them freedom.

Before he underwent the machine’s test, Thomas had never understood what they meant. He had not believed that ignorance and freedom could be connected. But now that he knew he would die in his sleep, from a brain hemorrhage, with his wife lying beside him, wishing he did not know or that he could somehow forget was all he thought about. He would have prayed if he believed the machine could hear him.

He still spent time with his wife in their room, but whenever he yawned or felt himself getting tired, he took his leave of her and went to the guest room to sleep. They both cried every time he left. She wished he could stay with her to comfort her, to kiss her, to wrap his arms around her, but she could never ask him to stay. She loved him too much to ask him to give up his life for a night with her. She did not pray, either.

He held the beam in his hand and looked at himself in the mirror, wondering what he would look like once he was done. He had tried everything else. This was the only way he could see to be happy again; he needed to forget about the machine. All he really wanted was to lie next to her again, to feel her sleeping breaths on his face.

A red pain clouded his vision the first time he hit himself with the beam. He was bleeding from his ear already, but he had to do it again. He needed to be sure. He raised the beam again, in his stronger left hand this time, and brought it down with all the speed and violence he could summon.

Thomas stumbled out of the guest room, not remembering why he had been in there. All he knew now was that he should be sleeping with his wife. He loved her so much. All the blood was concerning him, too, but he thought she would be able to help him. He had to get to her.

He opened the door slowly and quietly, not because he did not want to wake her but because he simply did not have any more strength than that left. He could barely see her through the curtains of red and white that were flooding his eyes, but he knew she was beautiful. She was lying on her back, her hands resting on her stomach. They rose and fell with her deep, regular breathing. He wanted to call out to her but could not remember how to speak.

She awakened when he fell, the full force of his unconscious body almost throwing her off the bed. There was blood everywhere. It had trailed him to the bed and was now soaking through the sheets and dripping on the floor. The machine had not said anything about blood, or about love. It could not understand them. All it knew was death.

Dwight Manning (excerpt)

2007-05-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

These are the first couple of scenes from a novel I hope to be writing over the next few months/year/however long it takes me. My inspiration, if you want to call it that, was something like "High Fidelity" (by Nick Hornby, also a John Cusack movie) set in a video store.
-------------

Dwight Manning’s date snorted into her drink. The resulting spray flew out of her glass and landed primarily on her face, though some of it reached the back of her chair. She looked at her napkin, then at Dwight, and then cleared her throat. After another moment of silence, she said, "My face is wet."
"I know it is, Gina," Dwight replied. "Why don’t you dry it off?" Normally, Dwight would not have suggested this course of action, reasoning that his date would feel her intelligence was being insulted by such an obvious solution, but he did not hesitate to suggest it to Gina.
She sighed loudly as she dabbed at her face, being careful not to smudge her makeup.
"What was that about?" Dwight asked.
"What was what about?"
"That sigh you just made. It sounded like you were disappointed or something."
Gina put down her napkin. "Well, I guess I am. Of course you know it’s your fault."
"Why? Did I do something to you?"
"No, Dwight, you didn’t do anything to me. That’s just the point. I’m sitting here, alcohol’s dripping off my face, and you’re not doing anything about it."
"I did tell you to dry your face. Were you looking for another alternative?"
"If I have to make it obvious to you, then yes, I was. I thought you would lick it off for me. It’s your fault it’s there in the first place, remember. You made me laugh when I was getting ready to take a drink."
"You thought I would lick your face?"
"Yes. Is that really so weird?"
"But why would you even want me to do that? It wouldn’t fix anything. Your face would still be wet."
"You just don’t get it, Dwight." Having apparently decided their conversation was over, Gina focused her attention on her salad. She was almost finished with it, while Dwight, who had ordered a steak, had only received his meal a moment ago. When it had arrived, he had said to her, "They must’ve had to kill the cow out back." This was the comment that had precipitated Gina’s snorting into her drink.
"I’m done eating," she said. "Can we go now?"
"But I just started eating."
"So if you’re eating, then what am I going to do?"
"You could order another drink, use the restroom, or even stare longingly at me as I eat my food. There’s really quite an extensive array of options open to you."
"Okay. I’ll go get another drink. I think I’ll get a tequila this time."
Dwight watched as his date got up and walked to the bar, leaving him alone with his steak. At least it was quiet for once, and his steak really was quite good, tender and juicy on the inside, charred slightly around the edges, and nowhere tough or dry. "I might have to come here again," he said. "They had this seafood basket thing that looked good too. I almost went with that tonight, but I’ve always been a steak man at heart."
During the pause in which, under better circumstances, his date would have responded to him and kept the conversation going, Dwight turned around to look for Gina. She was at the bar, standing behind a man whose face Dwight could not could see. Her elbow was resting on his shoulder and her other hand had just reached under the back of the man’s shirt. Dwight returned to his steak.
While Dwight was engrossed in contemplating the rationale that had led to the assortment of knickknacks and memorabilia being placed on the wall above their table, Gina returned and slapped him on the shoulder.
"Hey, I think I might’ve hit it off with this guy over at the bar. But I’m not sure if he’s gonna make a move yet, so could you stay around for a few minutes longer? I might still need a ride with you. You still have to pay and everything, right? I’ll just give you a sign if it’s okay for you to go."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"What do you mean? It wasn’t that hard to understand, was it?"
"You’re on a date with me, Gina. Not the guy you just met over at the bar."
"Well, I guess the way I’d look at it, I’d say I was on a date with you. And let’s face it, we both know we weren’t going anywhere. So I moved on. No hard feelings, right? Anyway, Buck–I think that’s his name–is looking kind of restless, so I think I’d better get back over to him."
"Wait a minute. Does he know I’m over here? Is he watching us right now?"
Gina turned around and waved at Buck. "Looks like he is. But don’t worry. I told him you’re my gay brother. He knows there’s nothing dangerous going on over here."
"You told him I’m gay? Why did you do that? And what’s wrong with you, really?"
"Relax. I told him you’re gay so he wouldn’t get any ideas about, you know, us. It’s nothing against you personally. I know you’re probably not really gay."
"But wouldn’t it have been enough to just tell him I’m your brother?"
"Now that you mention it, yeah, it probably would have. But I didn’t think of that when I was talking to him. If you have to know, I think I get kind of ditzy when I’m talking to a guy I like."
"That’s not the only time," Dwight replied. The date had progressed to the phase where he tried to wring out of it whatever semblance of pleasure he could find. That phase rarely lasted long, but Gina was proving to be an exceptional date.
"So you’ll wait for me, then?" she asked.
"I’m going to finish my steak, because I like steak and this one is tasty. If you’re still here when I’m done, we’ll see. But I’m not making any promises."
"I think that woman at the bar–the old one who’s kind of ugly, don’t you think she is? Anyway, I think she’s been eyeing Buck too, not that I blame her, of course. I mean, look at him, who could? I know I’m prettier than her, but she just unbuttoned another button on her blouse. I guess I’ll have to remind him I’m still here."
"Look, Gina, are you really sure you want a guy like that? I mean, one who’s distracted that easily might not–"
She had not heard any of his advice, he was certain. She was already back talking to Buck, one of her legs resting in his lap. She whispered something in his ear, which caused him to lean back and shake his head in disbelief. Gina took a step back and lifted up her shirt to show Buck the "crazy tattoo" she had on her stomach. She had been starting to tell Dwight about it when her salad had arrived.
Gina had not finished her bottle of beer. It was sitting across the table from Dwight, still half full. That he could recall, she had not snorted into or otherwise defiled it. The only physical evidence it had even belonged to her was the smudge of lipstick on the neck of the bottle, imprinted there when had proved to him that she could open a bottle using only her mouth. That had surprised him at the time. It was a good beer, too, imported from some place neither of them had been able to pronounce. He grabbed it and took a drink.
"I’m having sex with this man tonight!"
Unlike everyone else in the restaurant, Dwight did not look to see who had made her night’s plans a matter of public record. He finished the beer and got up, leaving his steak half eaten. He did not want to be there if Gina tried to give him another sign.

"Come on, it wasn’t the worst date you’ve ever had. You just need some time to cool off. In the morning it’ll all be funny."
"I haven’t told you everything," Dwight said. He waited to let the implications of this sink in before he continued. "Right after her second margarita, she went to the bathroom and threw up."
"Did you go in with her?" asked Roger, Dwight’s roommate.
"No. Of course not."
"Then how do you know she did?"
"Because she told me that was what she was going to do right before she got up. And when she came back, she proceeded to start telling me all about it. Fortunately a waiter walked by just then, and I bought her a beer just to shut her up."
"Okay, so it was bad. But it couldn’t be as bad as Kali."
"That wasn’t her real name. I told you that."
"And just how is that a good thing, Dwight? What’s creepier, a girl who gets stuck with a crazy name because of her parents, or one who just goes out and decides it would be cool to be named after the Hindu death goddess?"
"At least she said she liked me."
"Do I need to remind you about the park, Dwight? Remember that? You’re the one who ran all the way back here."
"I thought it was just a name. I didn’t think it was a serious thing for her. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, actually."
"Okay, maybe I’ll give you that. But still...has Taku heard this story yet? I think he needs to. Taku, could you come in here for a minute?"
An exchange student from Japan who had decided to stay on in the States for college, Taku had learned English by watching the movies he rented from Dwight and Roger’s video store. He spent so much time in the store, and he always gave spot-on suggestions to anyone who asked him, that they had eventually given him a job there. Part of his pay went toward the room he rented in their apartment; the rest they gave to him in cash.
"Have you heard about Dwight’s date with Kali?"
"No. Was that the one tonight?"
"No, Kali came a while back, but she’s a classic. You see, all night Kali kept saying how much she liked the park, but Dwight, being the gentleman that he is, kept telling her it was too cold and dark to go to the park, that they should just get a drink somewhere. Well, eventually Diwght gave in, and they went to the park. I think Dwight needs to tell you about the next part. Come on, Dwight, tell our business associate what happened next."
"I thought we were going to sit on a bench and talk or something, but she didn’t want to do that. Instead, she took me all the way to the back of the park, right up against the forest. I’d been hearing thunder coming for a few minutes, so I told her we should probably get back to my car before the rain started. But she said the rain was why they’d come out here, and that she’d caused it."
"This woman, she could make rain?" Taku asked.
"Really not an important detail, Taku," Roger answered. "Just keep listening. The best part’s coming up."
"Well, we just stood there waiting for the rain to start, and then after another five minutes it did. It was really a pretty strong storm, and when the rain started hitting us, she took off her clothes and started dancing in the rain."
"Like Ricky Martin’s song?" Taku asked.
"Yes, Taku. Exactly like the Ricky Martin song," Roger told him. "That’s definitely going in the next time I tell the story. So there’s Dwight watching this naked chick dancing around right in front of him. Now if you have been there, Taku, what would you have done?"
"Was she good looking chick?"
"Yes, Taku. She was beautiful."
"I would have danced with her."
"Exactly! That’s what any normal guy would have done. But not our Dwight. No, as soon as he sees that, he turns around and bolts straight for his car."
"The rain was cold," Dwight said in his own defense. "And it was those really big drops, the can that actually hurt when they hit you."
"What happened to her?" Taku asked.
"What do you mean?"
"This girl, the naked dancing one, what happened to her?"
"He doesn’t know, Taku. Dwight never saw her again. For all he knows, she caught pneumonia and died right in the park that night. Maybe a troll came and took her body away. We really don’t know."
"There aren’t any bridges in the park."
"What’s that, Dwight?"
"Trolls only live under bridges, and since there aren’t any bridges in the park, it’s just ludicrous to suggest that a troll could have been anywhere near the park that night. The closest bridge is twenty miles away."
"I am sorry, but one thing I do not understand," Taku said. "May I ask?"
"Of course, Taku. What is it?"
"My apologies, but earlier, before you called to me, I was overhearing you from my room. You said this woman was the worst date you have had. May I ask why this is?"
"Well, Dwight did spare you the details of the beginning of the date, and there’s some pretty good stuff in there, believe me, but I suppose that what really vaults it into worst date territory is how it ended. Would you like to tell him, or should I?"
"I am possibly confused, but is not naked dancing on a date a good thing?"
"Normally it is, Taku. It definitely is. But since Dwight doesn’t seem to eager to finish up the story, I’ll do it for him. When he was running away, Dwight ran right into this guy, I’m talking a Freaky Friday kind of thing–do you know the scene I’m talking about, Taku?"
"Yes, with the skinny singing girl and the woman from the Halloween. Correct?"
"That’s the one. Well, Dwight’s flat on his back, and the guy he ran into comes over and helps him up. They both ask if the other’s okay, they both say they are, and then Dwight goes to find his car. But when he gets there, he realizes he doesn’t have his keys. He knows he won’t be able to find them in the rain, so he reaches for his cell phone to call me, and guess what? That’s right, the cell phone’s gone too. So eventually he stumbles into this 24-hour gas station, borrows their phone and calls me. And that’s why it was Dwight’s worst date ever. So what if this Gina chick was rude, and snorted into her drink, and hooked up with a guy she met at the bar?"
"This woman, did you say she was a Thuggee?" Taku asked.
"No. Who are they?"
"This is quite fascinating. Last semester I studied the Thuggee. They worship Kali, the goddess. They are very rare in this country. Quite dangerous as thieves and assassins. They travel in groups, the Thuggee, and they rob people when they are not expecting. Very coordinated plans."
"Wait a minute," Roger said. "Are you saying that the whole performance in the park was a setup? That Kali’s associates, or whatever you want to call them, were waiting for him to run away so they could pick his pocket?"
"Possibly, yes. Although as you said earlier, the expected response upon seeing the dancing naked woman is to join with her. However, they likely would have alternative, maybe you would say contingency, plans. The man who ran into Dwight could have been one of those."
"Okay, Dwight. Not only did you go out with the crazy death goddess lady, but you were, the whole time, the target of an operation the complexity and timing of which makes The Sting II look like a botched job."
"Trust me, Kali looked a lot better naked than Jackie Gleason. Or even Paul Newman, for that matter."
"Not one but two mental images I never wanted to have. Thanks a lot for that, Dwight. If I can’t sleep tonight, neither will you."
"I am sorry, but in the first Sting, Paul Newman was not the patsy. That makes your comparison not entirely accurate, Dwight," Taku interjected.
"You’re missing the point, Taku. I was comparing Kali to Newman, not me to Paul. But I see how you could have been confused. I promise my allusions will be more precise in the future."
"It is not anything. I accept your apology."
"While we’re on the allusion accuracy kick, Taku, I think you meant to say, ‘It ain’t no thang.’ But don’t even bother trying to get that to sound good. Even I sound ridiculous when I try it. I think you have to be black for it to sound good."
"Jamal, who rents many horror movies from the store, he is black. Perhaps I will ask him when I see him in the store again. He would make it sound good, correct?"
"Maybe. But I don’t think it would be a great idea to try. You see, it’s one of those phrases that they’re kind of protective of. Jamal might get mad if he heard you trying to use it."
"Similar to, ‘You my nigger’?"
"Yes, Taku," Dwight answered. "Quite similar to that."

Let it Shine

2007-04-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

Would you notice a difference
if I hid my light,
removed its warmth from your skin
or stuck it in a bush,
igniting a localized conflagration--
a few moments of heat-bent, fizzling illumination?
And if I held it out,
would you come close enough
to be branded by my peculiar fantasies,
or only turn your back and look elsewhere
as the incineration creeps toward my hands?
If I extinguished it under a chalice
or whispered it out of existence,
would my outmoded technology
be missed among the encroaching fluorescence?

In The Desert

2007-04-23T07:21:00.001-07:00

I have to cry out shout
to be heard, I write words
with my prostrate body in the sand.
(The length of the letters
six feet long but not as deep.)
The ruts, every waving line of my characters,
are tripping-places where you fall
and land in the sand, and add your lines to the message,
incomplete as you hurry away embarrassed.
You could not see the whole picture and now
you’re afraid you’ve spoiled it,
that I will be angry
because you dared to step on my words,
to come too close for shouting.
And now our rivers will never meet,
yours evaporated by your speed,
mine puddling into the short end
of an exclamation point.

Leftover Miracles

2007-03-07T17:48:00.000-08:00

He liked to think that he helped them, that they needed him. But the flowers had been growing before he had found them and would, he was certain, continue to grow after he was gone. The flowers bloomed in three colors: red, white, and purple. He had never been interested in flowers before, had never learned to differentiate between all the different kinds or how to identify them. He still remembered sunflowers, but all the rest of their names had been forgotten.
All three colors of the flowers grew in the same place on the side of the cliff, in a cleft he had found one day when he was looking at the ocean. They rarely happened anymore, but on clear days, he could see down the hundreds of feet to the water and for miles in every other direction. Even when he could not see the waves, he could hear them crashing against the rocks far below him. That sound would last longer than the flowers, unless sound really did not exist when no one was there to hear it.

He thought the flowers were the most beautiful things in the world. Their colors were so bright. Some flowers had thorns in them, he knew, so he never touched them. That was not the only reason, however. He was also afraid he might hurt the flowers if he touched them. And if he hurt
them, they would not be beautiful to him anymore.

He did not have a wife, but he imagined that if he did, she would wear a dress the same color as the red flowers. She would also have a red shawl to wrap around her shoulders when it got colder in the evening. Her skin would be the color of sand: broken-down rocks that have been touched and darkened by the water. When he imagined her, he could see her taking off her shoes and walking barefoot through the grass, or sitting down and stretching her toes in it when they had a picnic. If he had a wife, there would have to be grass.

Although he had thought about it for a long time, he had never been able to decide what his wife’s name should be. Whenever he remembered a name he really liked, he would practice saying it to her, sometimes out loud, and try to picture her coming to him when he called her. But before he could think of what she would answer him, he would always think of another name, one that he thought might suit her better, and he would practice with that one.
Occasionally, he would try to think of names for the flowers, so that he could call them something other than red, white, and purple. That felt too impersonal. He knew, however, that the flowers had been given names before he had ever met them, and that it would be rude of him to try and rename them, to train them to respond to a name that was not really theirs.
The white flowers made him think of his daughter. He did not have one of those either, but if he did, she would wear a white dress and have white ribbons in her hair. Her hair would be black, like her mother’s. She would have tea parties at a little white table with a little white tea set, and both of her parents would be invited. They would drink tea that was white because it was imaginary, and afterwards, she would change clothes and go to play outside. White dresses are no good for running and diving in the grass, but other clothes are made with the expectations that they get dirty. He could almost hear her laughter flying on the wind. When she was too tired to run around any more, he would give her a bath while her mother made dinner. She would blow so many soap bubbles on him that he would have to take a bath too. She would giggle when she poured water over his head and he shook it out of his hair like a dog, and then he would help her put on her white dress again. She would know what dogs were.

As much as he enjoyed looking at the flowers and thinking about the beauty he saw in them, he could not stay with them all the time. Every few days, or sometimes more often than that, he had to go into the city to forage and scrounge. He had started on the end of the city farthest from the flowers, so that as he became older and weaker, he would not have to go as far to search for food, clothes and blankets, and whatever other small things he found. There was a grocery store at the farthest corner of the city that had supplied him for several months, but he had emptied it a long time ago. He estimated that there was less than a fourth of the city left for him to explore.

He always went as fast as he could when he was in the city. The ash that still sometimes fell from the sky had covered all of the gory and grotesque things on the ground, so that from a distance, the city looked like the cliff, except that no flowers ever grew in the city. Seeing the gray everywhere made him think of the flowers, and of how he needed to get back to them and look at them again.

Sometimes while he was searching, he would get lost and come upon store windows that had been smashed. He could never remember if he had smashed them or not, and so he would go inside to search. Sometimes it was a building he had broken into and emptied, and all of the shelves and store rooms would be barren. Walking through those buildings felt like being in something that had been alive once, but that had died because too many of its parts had been taken away. The other buildings, the ones he had not broken into, were much worse, because the ash did not cover what was in them.

The flowers always seemed brighter and more beautiful when he returned from the city. It seemed incredible that they were there, that they had survived as long as he had. They were leftover miracles from the end of the world. Sometimes he thought about what the world would be like if the flowers were not there.

He still remembered that purple was a royal color. He decided it was his color, too. Kings had authority over their people and their land. They could change the names of cities if they wanted, and, he had decided, of flowers as well. It felt good to know he could do that, even though he did not want to. Some kings added words to their own names, words like Great and Conqueror, so everyone would remember what kind of a king they had been after they died.

He had forgotten his name a long time ago. He could have given himself another one, but he had never been able to think of what it should be. Eventually he would become ash too, not enough to bury the flowers, but that did not matter. The beauty of the flowers would disappear because no one would be there to appreciate it, as would the crashing of the waves and every other nameless thing. But as long as he lived, he would look at the flowers and think about how beautiful they were, and he would tell himself that they needed him to be there.

Thoughts on the "Amazing Grace Movie"

2007-02-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

The title “Amazing Grace” is somewhat misleading, because this is actually a movie about William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd, Mr. Fantastic in “The Fantastic Four”) and his struggle to abolish slavery in England. John Newton, the man who wrote the song “Amazing Grace,” was a kind of spiritual mentor to Wilberforce. Albert Finney (“Big Fish”) plays Newton as a man broken and haunted by slavery but who finds redemption as he joins Wilberforce’s fight. Finney only has two scenes in the entire movie, but they are two of the best scenes in “Amazing Grace.”

The movie goes back and forth between Wilberforce as a 21-year-old, when he is just beginning his campaign against slavery, and him 15 years later, when the battle has nearly consumed his life. The 21-year-old is idealistic and full of energy; the older man bitter and resigned, at least until he meets his eventual wife Barbara (Ramola Garai).

Before deciding to devote himself to the slave cause, Wilberforce had visions of joining a monastery or living in solitude. He is challenged, however, to consider the possibility that living for God and being a political activist could be the same thing. Along with his conversations with Newton, Wilberforce is also convinced of the need to fight slavery by Olauda Equiano, a former slave who takes him on a tour of a slave ship. The deplorable, hellish conditions aboard convince Wilberforce to remain in the political arena.

He is attempting to more or less overturn a foundation of Britain’s economy, and the opposition he meets is hardly surprising. Most of the members of the House of Commons, in which Wilberforce argues his case, have investments in companies that use slave labor. As a side note, if Congress here were run more like Parliament is in England, C-Span would have much better ratings.

Eventually, the French Revolution, along with England’s continued trouble with America, lead to Wilberforce being accused of treason. He retreats and loses his voice, literally and figuratively, and has almost given up the fight for good when he meets Barbara, a woman who shares his convictions and reignites his passion. The scenes where they both try to convince one another that they should not marry provide some much needed lightness to the story. To be honest, though, the movie does drag in some places.

The God-talk in “Amazing Grace” feels less forced than in most movies that incorporate faith. Two reasons for this is that writer Steven Knight realizes that praying and thinking about religion can actually be humorous, and because Wilberforce’s faith is so integrated into his campaign for social justice. Think Bono in a powdered wig.

Overall, “Amazing Grace” reminded me more than anything of the second half of Spielberg’s “Amistad,” except that here the abolitionist hero is white here. And while the story does occasionally feel slow and the identities of the different parliament members can be hard to keep straight sometimes, this is a movie well worth seeking out and watching, both as a story of faith and perseverance, and simply as a well-made movie.

Distorted Reflections

2007-01-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

A rake had been left in the yard. It was just around the corner on the side of the house, hidden in the long grass, so that no one who happened to be walking through the yard could have noticed it before they stepped on it. The rake was at the front corner of the house, and a manual lawnmower—the kind that was powered solely by the person pushing it—was at the back corner. It had been left sideways in the narrow path that connected the front yard to the back.

Inside the house, she was watching television while she waited for her cookies to finish baking. The only programs on were men talking about sports, movies that no one had wanted to watch even when they were new, and people who wanted to sell things. The local news would be coming on soon, but all they talked about these days was the burglar who had been seen in numerous neighborhoods all across the town, and she had heard all she wanted to hear about him. She was currently watching a woman move a whisper-quiet vacuum cleaner across a square of carpet that had apparently been brought into the studio just for this segment. The woman was demonstrating that with this model, you could pick up rows of inch-long nails from the carpet without disturbing your husband’s football game.

Three complete outfits were lying on her couch. The tops and blouses were on the back cushions, and the skirts and slacks were on the bottom cushions. It almost looked like three were people sitting there. She took off the outfit she had been considering and threw it onto the pile in the corner of the room. Standing in the living room wearing only her underwear, she picked up the next option from the couch and tried it on.

She should have been doing this in the bathroom or her bedroom, because there were mirrors in those rooms, but she could not hear the oven timer from there and so she had compromised by bringing her wardrobe into the living room. With the lights in the room turned on and the darkness outside, the windows reflected enough for her to be able to decide whether a particular outfit was the one she should wear. She knew the reflections the windows gave were distorted, but she had decided she would have to live with that.

The oven timer went off before she had a chance to button her shirt, so with the ends of it flapping behind her, she went into the kitchen and took out the cookies. They were oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that she had made from a recipe she found in a magazine. She did not normally eat oatmeal, much less oatmeal cookies, but she had decided to try them tonight. She set them on the counter to cool and went back to look at herself in the window. She had buttoned her shirt and fixed the collar by the time she returned to the living room.

She did not especially like the way she looked in the window—she had never liked looking at herself in mirrors—but the shirt fit her well, and with the top two buttons undone, she thought she looked as good as she could. Only one of the pairs of shoes she had brought down matched the skirt she had on, so she did not even have to make a decision about that. After only a brief consideration, she decided to wear a necklace.

The cookies had cooled by now, so she put them on a plate, grabbed a chair from the kitchen table with her spare hand, and went to the front door. She had to put both items down—first the chair and then the plate on top of it—in order to be able to open the door, and because the screen door closed automatically unless it was propped open, she had to hold it open with her foot while she grabbed the chair and placed it on the porch. Now all she had to do was wait.

As she had on previous nights, she rested her back against the door and hoped she would not have to eat all of the cookies by herself. Even though they were different from what she normally made, they were good cookies—she tasted one to confirm their quality—and under different circumstances she would have eaten them gladly, even factoring in the extra workout time it would take her to burn off their calories. But that was not why she had baked them.

One of the dogs from the corner house started barking at a car, but when she saw that the car was driving past her street, she put her head back against the door. A few minutes later, the married couple who had moved next door in a few months ago jogged past. She had talked to them several times, and they had even invited her over for dinner once, but she had made up an excuse and told them she would not be able to come. She was glad the porch light was turned off and they could not see her.

Just as she was getting ready to go inside for the night, she heard a noise from the back of the house. She froze and strained to make sure that she was hearing was finally what she wanted to hear. After another few seconds it was unmistakable: Someone had moved the lawnmower out of the way and was now coming up the side of the house. She heard him reaching, searching for a window that might have been left unlocked, and she smiled, knowing that he would not find one. He would have to come around to the front of the house.

His steps were slow and cautious—it was obvious he knew what he was doing—but she allowed herself to hope. She could almost see him now, and she could have watched the entire scene if she had stood up, but she did not want to risk anything yet. Finally her patience was rewarded: He stepped on the tine end of the rake, and the handle flew up and hit him. She waited until he had landed on the ground before she moved.

He was dazed but not unconscious. Fortunately, he was able to stand up and walk by himself—she needed only to guide him to the porch. He was a large man, dressed entirely in black and with a black ski mask over his face. Though he had been startled by the rake hitting him, he retained enough of his senses to pull off the mask before they reached the porch.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She turned on the light and sat down.

The plate of cookies was now between them. He looked at them, and then at her, and said, “I think so. I’m just a little startled, is all. I’m sorry to be walking through your yard at night like that, but I was on my way home from work—I’m on second shift at the factory down the road—and I figured I’d just cut through a few yards and save me a few minutes on my trip. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me at all. I was already out on the porch when I heard you. Some nights, I just like to sit out here and listen to the night. And tonight, I was in a baking mood, so I made some cookies to have while I sat out here. Would you like one? They’re oatmeal chocolate chip.”

“How long ago did you say they came out?”

“I didn’t, but it’s only been a few minutes. Go ahead and have one.”

She handed him a cookie in such a way that he had to touch her hand when he took it.

“So you just decided to bake cookies in the middle of the night? I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m prying, but that seems a little strange to me.”

“Well, I’m actually like you. What I mean is that I work second shift too, so I just got off work a little while ago.”

“Really? Where do you work?”

“At this little bakery on the other side of town. You probably wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s late when I’m there, of course, so I don’t actually make the bread or anything. I just organize the orders and get everything ready for the girls who come in for the morning shift.”

“So do you work with dough and flour at all?” He bit off a piece of the cookie. “’Cause you’ve certainly learned your skills from somewhere.”

“Actually, I don’t get to touch much of anything when I’m at work. I guess that’s why I get in these baking moods when I come home sometimes. You’re just lucky you came by on a night when I was in the mood. If you like them, that is.”

“Oh, they’re good cookies, all right. I’ve always liked oatmeal, too. It adds a nice texture. It’s just that I’m a little surprised they make you wear those fancy clothes when you’re at the bakery.”

“What? Oh, no, this isn’t what I wear to work. It’s just that one of my friends is coming in to see me tonight, and we’d talked about going out when she gets here, so I wanted to be ready for her when she comes.”

“Got it. When’s she supposed to come in?”

“What?”

“Your friend. The one you said is coming to visit you. When’s she going to be here?”

“In a while. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that I didn’t want to keep you here or anything. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on going out with your friend because you thought you had to take care of me or something. I’m really not that bad. It’s just that it was a shock, that’s all.”

She handed him another cookie. “Now that I think about it, she might not be coming at all tonight. She mentioned something about that. She’s driving in, and she said that if she was too tired to make it all the way here, she’d probably end up getting a hotel room somewhere. So there’s no hurry. You can stay as long as you need to.”

“This sure is a big house you’ve got here,” he said, looking around at the porch and the windows. “Do you live here all by yourself?”

“Not until two years ago. I wouldn’t have gotten to keep it, but my ex-husband’s lawyer just wasn’t as good as mine.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear you’re divorced.”

“Don’t be. I saw it coming way before he actually said anything, and I’m glad it’s over. I’m really better off alone.”

“But doesn’t it ever get lonely, living in this big place all by yourself? I’m sure you could rent out part of it if you wanted to, make it into an apartment.”

“I’ve thought of that, but actually, with all the stuff I still have here, there isn’t much room. I had a really good lawyer.”

Neither one looked at the other while they tried to think of something more to say. He tensed and ducked down a little when a car drove by, but she did not notice.

“I thought that might have been your friend,” he said. “Did she say how late she might be?”

“No, she didn’t, actually. I’m not sure when she might show up.”

“Do you think you might want to call her? I mean, you don’t want to wait out here all night, do you?”

“It’s a nice night, so I wouldn’t mind staying out here a little longer. Don’t feel like you need to stay here with me or anything. I like having someone to talk to while I wait, of course, but I’ve got plenty of cookies left, and I’m fine with just sitting here. But I forgot what you said. I’m sorry. You were in a hurry to get home.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You said you were going through my yard because it was going to be faster. I figured that meant you were in a hurry.”

“Well, I can see how you’d take it that way, but what I really meant was that I don’t like walking around town at night. It can be dangerous out there, you know.”

“Oh. So know that you’re here, you not in a hurry anymore?”

“Not at all. Could I have another cookie?”

She let him see that she was smiling. “You know what I just realized?”

“No, I don’t, actually.”

“We still don’t know each other’s names. We’ve been sitting here, eating cookies and talking, but we never introduced ourselves.”

“Call me Jacob,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Marianne.”

“That’s a pretty name. But you know what? I can’t stop thinking about that friend of yours. Don’t you think you should maybe go inside and call her?”

“I guess I could, just to make sure she’s okay.”

She did not know if he would follow her inside and so did not look to see if he was. She would have been too disappointed, now, if she looked and did not see what she wanted to see.

His steps were silent behind her as she went to the phone. She turned sideways to pick up the receiver and saw him out of the corner of her eye, just before he swung and hit her. The cordless receiver landed on the floor a second after she did, its batteries spilling from the back of it.

“Now, where’s your most valuable stuff, stuff like that necklace you’ve got on? I’m not interested in the cheap crap. Just tell me what I want to know and I won’t hurt you.”

“Upstairs, the first door on the right. That’s my jewelry room. I’ve been collecting jewelry for years. There are diamonds and pearls, and there’s even some gold, too. That’s where should go.”

He tied her hands and feet together with a rope he had in his back pocket. His hands had felt cold at first, but they warmed against her skin as they worked the knots. He was breathing hard now and he blew air over her neck and into one of her ears. The knots were tight and she could not have gotten away if she had wanted to.

She listened while he banged open the door that had never been locked and began searching the jewelry room. She could hear his hands working quickly: He sorted through her necklaces, rings, and other valuable trinkets, putting the ones that were worth money into his pockets and throwing the others on the floor. Some of the least valuable pieces were the most precious to her, because she could remember why those had been given to her and who had told her she was pretty when she had received them. Now he was throwing those on the floor and breaking them.

He paused in the doorway on his way out. He told her, “My name isn’t Jacob.”

“Are you leaving right away?” she asked.

He was already gone when she started to wonder how long it would be before someone found her and untied her. She had to smile when she thought that someone would do that for her.

Wonders of the World

2007-01-09T13:27:00.000-08:00

His favorite thing about sitting at the top of the monkey bars was that he was up so high; it felt like he could see everything. All of the other kids playing around him, the seagull skimming over the surface of the lake, the reflected gray of its wings swallowed by the encompassing reflection of the clouds, the dog on one side of the park and the two older kids on another. They were too old to still be kids, one a boy and the other a girl, but they were not quite adults yet, either; they were both waiting in the between time. Right now the boy was sitting in the chair swing watching the girl, who was holding her shoes in her hands while she walked on the edge of the water. From his perch atop the monkey bars, Jared could not tell what the boy was thinking about, but he felt sure he was thinking about something. It had been a long time since he had moved.

Jared had watched several other boys, and even a few girls, jump down from the top of the monkey bars. It looked easy when they did it, like falling was the simplest thing in the world. Jared knew it really was, and it was not the falling he was scared of; it was in the seconds of waiting to let go that he always decided to climb down instead. That was how he had gotten up in the first place, which meant he would not have to do anything he had not done before, even though he had to do it backwards.

He walked around the swing set, where kids were jumping off and flying–but only for a few seconds, of course. The dog was at the end of the parking lot, his leash wrapped around a pole while the owner bought a bottle of water from a vending machine. They had just sat down to share the water when Jared walked past them. He liked most dogs, but this one was big and looked like he could be dangerous. Water splashed on the ground as the dog lapped it from the bottle.

There was no sidewalk on the road back to his house, so Jared walked with one foot on the curb and one in the grass. He only stayed on the road until it ran into the railroad tracks, and then he walked beside those. His parents had told him about the shortcut a long time ago, before he was old enough to walk to the park by himself.

While he was walking along the base the small gravel hill beside the tracks, he heard what he thought was the sound of someone crying, or rather, the sounds someone makes when they are almost finished crying. He looked around but did not see anyone on his side of the tracks, so he climbed up the gravel to see if it was coming from over there. A few feet in front of him, an old man was lying on the tracks, his shoulders not quite touching the rails on either side of him. The sound had come from him.

“What are you doing?” Jared asked. “Are you hurt or something? I can try and help you if you are.”

The old man put up his hand. It looked like a flower growing out of the tracks. “I’m not hurt. I’m just lying here, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“I’m waiting.”

Waiting was not a bad thing, but Jared was pretty sure the old man had not picked a very good place to do it. “Isn’t it dangerous to wait here? A train could come by.”

The old man sat up. He was about as old as Jared’s grandfather, and he had been holding a pair of glasses in his hand. He put them on and said, “Yes, you’re right. Waiting here is dangerous, mainly because a train could come by.”

“Why are you waiting here, then? There’s lots of safer places to wait.”

“I’m waiting here because I have to.”

Jared tried, but he could not think of a reason why that could be true. “I don’t understand,” he said to the old man.

“No, I don’t expect you would. You’re too young.”

“But I’m pretty smart. I get all A’s, actually.”

“That’s not the kind of young I was talking about. I meant that you haven’t lived enough to understand.”

“Well, even if I won’t understand, could you tell me what you’re doing anyway? I would like to know.”

The man pulled his legs toward his chest and rested his elbows on his knees. His clothes were dusty from lying between the train tracks. “I was lying here waiting for a train to come. I’m going to let it pass over me.”

“That’s dangerous! Do you even know if you’ll fit? You’d die if there wasn’t enough room.”

“I know that this is dangerous. And no, I don’t know if I’m going to fit or not. I think I will, but I’m not entirely sure.”

“You could check, though. I bet if you went on the internet you could find out just how high off the ground the cars are.”

“You’re probably right about that.”

“So why don’t you check, then?”

“Because if I knew, it wouldn’t be dangerous anymore.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I told you you wouldn’t. You’re too young. When you’ve lived as long as I have and know as much as I do, there aren’t many dangerous things left in the world. There are a lot of stupid and foolish things I could do, but they wouldn’t be dangerous. I’ve either seen them done, or heard a story from someone who’s one of them, or learned about them, and I would know what would happen before I even started. With this, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, but you can’t understand what I’m doing now. Maybe you will when you’re older.”

“Why maybe?”

A train whistled. The man lay down and said, “Because you might be braver than me. Now you need to get out of the way.”

Jared went to the edge of the gravel and sat down. He would be safe there, and he wanted to be there to help the man afterward.

The train did not look like it was moving very fast at first. As it got closer, though, its speed seemed to keep increasing until, by the time it went over the man, it felt like it was flying. The words on the cars flashed by too quickly for Jared to read them. He hoped the man would be all right.

It was louder than he would have believed, even if a really convincing person had tried to tell him about it. It was a constant noise, like sitting at the shore of the ocean if every wave crashed with the force of a thunderbolt. There was a kind of pulse to the noise too, because air was pulled through the gap between the cars and came whooshing out above him. A new gap flashed in front of him every second, but it somehow seemed slower than that.

When all the cars had finally passed, Jared wished the train were longer, because each car meant that he had to wait a little longer to go up and look at the man. He had never seen real blood up close; he had scraped his knees and elbows before, but that was different somehow. He knew what how that would look–could figure it out by how far he had slid or onto what surface he had fallen–without having to actually see it.

There was no blood. The man was shaking, but it was not like shivering in the cold. There was a reason for that kind of shaking and a remedy for it, but if there was a remedy for the old man’s shaking, Jared did not know what it was. His ears and even his lips were quivering just as much as his feet and hands. Whatever had happened to him, it was happening to all of him.

“Are you okay?” Jared whispered in the old man’s ear.

The old man did not answer. He did not appear to have even heard the question, or to have noticed the boy standing above him. His eyes stared. Jared did not know if shaking him would help, and he thought it might even make him worse, so he did not try.

The man’s body continued to shake. A tear from Jared’s eye fell onto the man’s cheek. He wanted his parents here, to explain what was happening and tell him it would be okay. They were good at explaining things to him, even hard things like why seawater has salt in it. But there was a fear in him, and he was crying because the fear was that even his parents could not explain the old shaking man lying between the rails.

His body finally stopped shaking, and his arm went into the air. It took a minute for Jared to figure out, first, that he was not dead, and second, that he wanted help getting up. After he had helped the man to his feet, which took a long time because he was heavy and stiff, Jared asked him again if he was okay. The man pointed to his ears and shook his head. Losing his hearing was his price for lying under the train.

He was smiling, though. It was not a huge smile, like he was seeing his grandchild for the first time or had just heard an extremely funny joke. His smile was smaller and more private, as if he knew a secret and was not going to share it with anyone, no matter how many times they asked. It was also the kind of smile that lasts longer than a normal one. Jared wondered if he could have told his secret, even if he wanted to.

The man patted him on the back and started walking away. Jared watched him to see if he would look back, either at him or at the tracks, but he did not.

Just before he got home, Jared saw the same man and dog from the park. They were walking on the opposite side of the road, so he had to speak loudly to ask if he could pet the dog.

“Sure you can,” the owner said. “His name is Cairo, and he loves children. Come on over.”

While Jared was petting the dog’s head and scratching his throat, Cairo licked his face, which made him laugh. That was his price. He was still smiling when he thanked the owner, and when he went inside, and even after he had washed his face and hands for dinner.

The Snowman

2007-01-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

At first, Miles had thought about building the snowman first and then putting it in something to move it, but he wanted to build a big snowman, one that would be too big for him to pick up and carry. The first snowball would be the hardest, since it was the biggest. If he could figure out how to move that one, the rest of it would be easy.

There was a tray in the garage that they had put their TV set on before they got their entertainment center last year. They did not use it anymore, but it was still in the garage because they had not thrown it away. But when he looked at it, he knew it would not work because even though it had wheels, it was not big enough. Miles wanted to build a big snowman.

Next he went to the shed in the back yard. There were lots of tools in there, but they were all for gardening and painting and working with wood, so they could not help him build a snowman. There was a wheelbarrow, though. Normally wheelbarrows were used to move dirt and stuff like that from one place to another, but there was no reason they could not be used to move snow. It had wheels and a big bucket kind of thing–Miles thought that was the barrow, but he was not sure–and it even had handles. He could use those to move it around in the snow, and he could also tip it down and roll the first part of the snowman in that way, in case it was too big for him to pick up.

He had planned to build the snowman in the front yard, but when he was rolling the wheelbarrow out of the shed, he looked around and figured out that there was more snow in the back yard, so he decided to build it back there. And since he had the wheelbarrow, it did not matter where he built it. The snow was thick and wet, which is the best kind for building snowmen. Miles knew that snow is really just frozen water and so all snow is wet, but some kinds of snow feel wetter than other kinds.

Before he started building the snowman, he walked slowly from the shed, which was at the very back of the yard, toward the house. Next he walked from one side of the yard to the other. He counted his steps as he went, because he knew that the farther he rolled the first snowball, the bigger it would be, and he wanted to make the biggest snowman he could. It took him 26 steps to walk across the yard and only 21 to go from the shed to the house, so it seemed like that would be the best way to go. When Miles thought about it some more, though, he figured out that if he started in the very back corner of the yard, rolled all the way past the side of the house, and kept going into the front, he would have a really big snowball, a lot bigger than if he just stayed in the back yard. He counted 53 steps from the back yard to the front. He hoped he would be strong enough to push the snowball when it got that big.

Finally confident that he was going to make the biggest snowman he could, Miles started rolling. He gathered up the snow in the back corner of the yard and started packing it the way his dad had shown him, and he soon had a snowball that was big enough to start rolling. He did not understand exactly how it worked, but when he rolled his snowball, it picked up the snow from the ground in front of it and got bigger. He thought that maybe the little antler parts of the snowflakes in the ball caught the antler parts of the snow on the ground and took them along for the ride, and then those new flakes caught even more from the ground, but he was not sure that was how it worked. He reminded himself to ask Mrs. Campbell, his teacher, if she knew when he went back to school. Mrs. Campbell was a good teacher and knew answers to lots of questions like that.

The snowball was as tall as his knees by the time he got to the middle of the house. It was heavy, too. He had to push hard with his legs while his arms kept the snowball going straight, because there was not much space between the house and the neighbor’s fence, and he did not want to hit either of them.

When he got to a good stopping place in the front yard, the snowball was up to his waist. He had barely been able to roll it the last few feet, and he was not sure if he could get it onto the wheelbarrow, but he had to try. Once the wheelbarrow was in place and tipped forward, he pushed the snowball for what he hoped was the last time, but it just moved the wheelbarrow along with it. He needed something that would stop the wheelbarrow from sliding, and so that when he pushed the snowball into it, the wheelbarrow would tip right-side-up and the snowball would be sitting on top of it.

In the shed he found a roll of the black plastic they had put under the gravel by the house, which would help, but it was not enough by itself because it would roll too. He looked around for another minute before he remembered that he had left the gardening tools outside. There were two little gardening shovels, which his mother had told him were called spades, sitting on the ground. Those would work perfectly.

Back in the front yard, Miles stuck the black plastic roll in front of the wooden bars on the bottom of the wheelbarrow, and then he dug the spades into the ground behind the plastic. His plan was to have the plastic make it easier to tip the wheelbarrow back up, while the spades would keep the plastic from rolling. He took a deep breath, put his shoulder into the snowball, and pushed as hard as he could.

His plan worked just the way he hoped it would. The plastic made it easy to tip the wheelbarrow, but it almost worked too well; when he was done pushing, the wheelbarrow tipped back and forth like a rocking horse, and Miles was scared that it would fall over the other way. But it stopped after rocking back and forth a few times, and the hardest part of building the snowman was over.

He started another ball of snow and rolled it around in a circle in the front yard. Before long the middle section was as large as he wanted it to be, but he had a problem now, because he would not be able to lift the second snowball on top of the first one. He was not tall enough to do it. Miles now had to decide whether he would make the first snowball smaller so he could put the second one on top of it, or to try to figure out some other way to get the snowball up there. The first one was just the size he had been hoping for, maybe even a little bigger than that, and he really liked the way the second had turned out, too. The way he looked at it, his only real option was to figure out some way to make himself taller.

Nothing in the shed would help, because all of the tools and things in there were for working in the ground, and Miles needed to work in the air. He needed the ladder from the garage. He had used it when they repainted the house last year, and he had gotten comfortable balancing himself on the ladder while holding a paint can in one hand and a brush in the other. He picked up the second snowball to see how heavy it was. It would be hard, but he was pretty sure he would be able to hold it steady long enough to get it on top of the first snowball. He would only have to climb to the second or third step to reach it.

After he made sure the ladder would not slide on the snow, Miles positioned it next to the wheelbarrow, picked up the second snowball, and got on the ladder. He had to go up backwards, but it was not hard to keep his balance and it was not long before the snowman was two-thirds complete. He picked up some short sticks for arms and stuck them into the snowman. All he had left to do was make the third snowball, put a face on it, and take it inside.

Since it was the smallest one, the third snowball did not take long to make. Once it was in place, Miles looked around for things he could use to give the snowman a face. He broke off the end of a branch from the neighbor’s pine tree for the mouth, found two nuts on the ground for eyes, and broke off an icicle from the bumper of their car to use for a nose. After adjusting the eyes a few times to make sure they were even, Miles sat on the ladder and looked at the snowman. It looked just the way he had pictured it in his mind.

The only thing he had left to do was to measure how tall the whole thing was, including the wheelbarrow. He had to make sure it would fit through the door beforehand, because it would be a disaster if the head was knocked off while he was pushing it inside. It would probably fall in his own head, but worse than that, the snowman would be headless, and he had worked too hard to bring a headless snowman inside.

The snowman and the wheelbarrow together were almost four feet tall, which was a few inches taller than he was, but there was still plenty of room to spare. He was not sure why he had been worried. His dad walked through the door every day, and he was a very tall man.

The ramp had been put in that summer. It led straight up to the front door, and it was there so Emmy, Miles’s older sister, could get in and out of the house with her wheelchair. Miles usually did not think about the ramp much, but he was glad it was there now, because he could not have rolled the snowman inside without it. If Emmy had not been using a wheelchair, though, he would not have needed to bring the snowman inside.

Miles’s parents had told him about the disease Emmy had, but he had not understood most of what they had said. The only part he really understood was that his sister was too sick to play with him, especially in winter when it was cold and there was snow everywhere. But Miles remembered how much fun they had when they built snowmen last year, and if she could not come out with him, he was going to bring a snowman to her.

It was warm inside the house, and the snowman was going to melt quickly once he got it inside, so it had to be big if it was going to last until he got it to Emmy’s room, which was all the way at the back of the house. He had not told his parents about his plan because he wanted it to be a surprise. Emmy did not get many surprises anymore, at least not good ones, and Miles knew that she liked being surprised.

The wheelbarrow was heavy, but it was not hard to push once he got it started. He slowed down once he was inside, though, because he wanted to be careful and not bump anything. He could hear his parents talking upstairs.

Emmy’s door was open, and Miles had to peek around the snowman to make sure she was in there. She was sitting on her bed, but her eyes were closed and he could not tell if she was asleep.

"Emmy? Can you hear me? I have something to show you."

Emmy laughed when she saw the snowman. It was not that she thought the snowman was funny; she was just so surprised to see one in her bedroom that it was the only way she could react. It was melting and starting to drip into the wheelbarrow, but was still a good snowman. Miles was proud of it.

"Miles, did you do this by yourself?"

"I built it for you, since you’re sick."

She motioned for him to come over and give her a hug. While she was holding him, she whispered, "It is cold?"

Miles could not figure out if she was asking this as a joke. "It’s a snowman. It has to be cold. It melts if it’s not."

"Could you bring a piece of it to me?"

"But you’re sick. I thought cold was bad for you."

"Too much of it is. But just a little bit is okay."

He scooped a chunk out of the snowman and brought it to her. She held it for a moment, enjoying the feeling of cold wetness in her hand. A drop ran down her arm and onto the sheet, and she threw the slushy ball at him. Miles, who had not been expecting her to do anything like that, gasped and looked around, as if an explanation were hiding somewhere in the room.

"You know what the best part is?" Emmy said. "You can’t get me back until I’m better. And I bet you’ll have forgotten all about it by then."

"No I won’t. I’ll write it down to make sure I won’t." He paused. "When are you going to be better?"

"Well, I’m not really sure about that, but it probably won’t be for a while. I think you’d better take it back outside before it starts melting all over the floor, though. I don’t think we need to tell Mom and Dad about this, either. It can be our secret. But thanks a lot for doing this, Miles. I didn’t think I’d get to feel snow this year. Come back in here once you’ve taken care of your snowman, okay?"

Miles carefully turned around the wheelbarrow and rolled it back outside. He dumped it out in the front yard, put the ladder back in the garage, and took the wheelbarrow and the other tools back to the shed. He stopped and looked at the remains of the snowman before he went inside. The parts that had melted, even though they were broken up and turned upside down, were already starting to freeze again.

Back in Emmy’s room, he climbed on her bed and snuggled against her. He had taken off his snow clothes at the front door. He was tired. Building a big snowman all by himself was a lot of work.

"You know what my favorite part of winter is?" she asked.

"What?"

"Playing in the snow. Especially playing with you."

"But you can’t do that anymore."

"What you are you talking about? I just threw at snowball at you. Sure, it was half melted and I only got to do it once, but that still counts."

"Really?"

"Really. And you know what? I think that because that was the only snowball I’ll get to throw this year, I’ll remember it more than any of the other ones I’ve thrown at you."
"I could bring you another one sometime."

"Thanks, Miles. I’d like that. But not tonight." She yawned. "I’m getting pretty tired. Could you turn off the light when you leave?"

Miles closed the door behind him after he turned off the light. His mother met him on the stairs and told him to get ready for bed. She said she would be up once she checked on his sister.

"She’s already asleep," Miles said.

"Were you in there?"

"Yeah. She said she was getting tired." He wanted to add that she had thrown a snowball at him, just to see what she would say, but he did not because that was going to be his secret with Emmy. It would not be as much fun as playing in the snow, but it would still be good. And it was something they could do together. That was the best part.

Safe

2006-12-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

The walls of Robert’s room were covered with ribbons and banners. Most of them were from sports—tennis, badminton, and hitting—and others were in honor of his academic achievements. His newest banner was for "Outstanding Achievement in Math": His mother had given it to him earlier that morning, telling him he was getting this one because of the creative way he tried to figure out problems.

All of the pictures in Robert’s house were of him and his parents, except for the one with the dog. One was of the first time he had taken a bath, but he could not remember them that one because he was so young in it. His favorite picture was the one with the dog. It had been taken one year ago, when he was playing in the back yard. His parents had gotten him a dog a few weeks earlier, and he had been showing it around the house and the yard, but especially the back yard because that was where his swing set was. In the picture the dog was sitting in Robert’s lap while they went down the slide together. That was the only picture he got to take with the dog, because the next morning when he got up, his mother told him it had run away. She also reminded him he could never get another dog, and when they said this, he started to cry. He was not crying because he could not have another dog; he was crying because other than his parents, the dog had been his best friend. When he looked at the picture of them on the slide, he remembered how happy the dog had made him. His parents reminded him of that every time they looked at pictures together.

Soon after the picture with the dog was taken, Robert had started playing sports. It had been his father’s idea, and at first Robert did not think he would be any good, but his father told him to just try playing to see if he liked it, and then they would worry about being good later. His father told him that if he tried something and liked it, then he could always end up getting good at it, no matter what anyone else said. Robert had wondered why his father said that, but he had started playing sports anyway.

There was no school for the rest of today because his parents had to go outside and Robert did not teach himself school things, so he could do any of the things he liked to do in the house or the back yard. Some of his favorite things to do inside the house were painting, playing with his slinky on the stairs, watching birds when they came to the feeders outside, and watching some TV shows. He did not play video games.

Playing in the back yard was more fun than playing inside the house, though. Outside, he could run for a long time without stopping, dig and build castles in the sandbox, and play with balls. He could not play his favorite ball games when he was by himself, because his favorites were the ones he played with his father, but there were still some good ones he had figured out. One was where he would throw the ball as far as he could and then run and catch up to it as fast as he could; sometimes he dove to catch up to the ball, because he liked diving and was good at it. Sometimes he got dirty when he played, but his mother never got mad at him when he got back yard dirt on himself because back yard dirt would not hurt him. He also liked not having to worry about getting wet sometimes when he was in the back yard, like people did when they went outside—the roof over the back yard kept water from getting in, just like it kept the bad air out. But it did let the sun in, and he liked the sun. When he was younger, his mother had told him every day that if he went outside, the bad air would get him and he would get hurt. She did not have to tell him anymore, though, because he remembered it all by himself now.

When Robert was going past the window, he saw that some boys were playing a game outside. There was a field with grass in it next to his house; the field was like Robert’s back yard except that it was outside. The game the boys were playing looked like hitting, but they were doing other things, too. After one of the boys hit, he started running. And after he had been running for a while, he dove, like Robert did when he played the game where he chased the ball. There were lots of boys playing, more than just the hitter and the thrower—when he played with his father, Robert was always the hitter and his father was the thrower. The thrower’s job was to throw the ball so that the hitter could hit it. Robert’s father was a good thrower, but the boy who was throwing when Robert started watching was not a good thrower, because sometimes the boy who was hitting missed the ball, and the thrower’s job was to throw the ball so the hitter could hit it. When the hitter hit the ball, he started running and the other boys on the field chased after the ball and then threw it to each other. Robert did not know why they did that.
He did not know how long he had been standing at the window when the ball came through it. Usually he kept good track of time, but watching through the window was different. It was like looking at a picture, except that the things in it were moving. It was different than watching TV, too, but he was not sure how. The ball broke the window and Robert started crying, but not because the window was broken. He was crying because the bad air was going to get inside now and he was not fast enough to run away from it. There were little pieces of glass all over the floor. They sparkled when he looked down at them.

The boy who had hit the ball through the window came toward the house. He said that he was sorry for breaking the window and that they would pay to have it fixed, but Robert did not stop crying when the boy said that. The boy had thought he would, so when he did not, the boy asked Robert if something else was wrong.

"Outside’s inside," Robert answered.

The boy did not understand what that meant and asked Robert if he wanted to come out and play with them. He thought that if Robert played with them, he would forget why he was crying and stop. Robert continued crying while the boy looked at his eyes and his face.

"We really would like you to come out and play with us," the boy said. "I bet you’re really good at baseball, aren’t you?"

Robert did not know what baseball was, which meant that it was something from outside and bad, because his mother had told him everything that came from outside would hurt him. But even though he was still crying and felt bad because he was crying, the air had not hurt him yet. The only reason he felt bad was because he was crying, not because the outside had hurt him. When he was a little boy, his mother had told him there was bad air outside and it would hurt him.

"Don’t you know how to play baseball? We can teach you if you don’t. It’s a lot of fun. Wouldn’t you like to try?"

Robert started to climb through the window, because he thought that maybe it was only the air that came through the front door that was bad. His mother had always told him he could not go out the front door, but he could not remember her telling him not to climb out the window. If his mother had not told him not to do it, that must mean it was okay to do. The boy who had hit the ball told him to stop, because there was still glass in the window. He told Robert it would be easier to go out the door.

Once he saw that Robert would not come out through the door, the boy took off his shirt and cleared the glass from the window frame. Robert saw what he was doing and took off his shirt, too, because he wanted to help. They cleared the window together, and then the boy helped Robert climb outside.

He was standing outside and was not wearing a shirt, and nothing was hurting him except for a piece of glass that was stuck in his back. The boy saw it and took it out. Robert’s back was bleeding a little where the glass had been, but he did not notice it because he could not see it and he was outside. There were too many other things to notice now that he was outside.

The sun was warm on him, like when he was in the back yard, but it was different too. When he was in the back yard, the fence was there to keep the bad air out. It was tall, too, so no one could see him except his parents. It was okay for his parents to see him without his shirt on, but it felt different now, because other people could see him. Other than some of the people who came to visit his parents, he could not remember anyone who was not his mother or father seeing him, especially not with his shirt off. But some of the other boys were not wearing shirts either, and that made him feel better. The way the air moved was different, too. It went back and forth and all over, instead of just moving when he ran through it. He liked how the air felt now.

"I bet you’re really good at baseball," one of the other boys said. He was tall and had a black hat on his head. "We’d all like to see how far you can hit the ball. You’ll probably hit it a lot farther than any of us can."

The other boys nodded and agreed with the boy who had just talked, but Robert did not say anything because he did not know how to play baseball. They looked at him and waited, thinking that every boy knew how to play baseball, but Robert did not; he knew hitting, but that was only part of baseball, and he did not even know what to call the other parts. His father would have explained everything to him if he were there.

"Come over and stand here," the tall boy said. Robert came and stood by the boy. "Now, where we’re standing is called home plate, and straight in front of us is the pitcher," he pointed to another boy wearing a hat, "and he’s going try and throw the ball over the plate, but you’re not going to let him. You’re going to have a bat, and you’re going to hit the ball with it. Think you can do that?"

"I can hit," Robert answered.

"But that’s only half the game," another boy continued. He was wearing a green hat. "After you hit it, you have to run to the bases, and while you’re doing that, all of us are going to try and catch the ball and throw it to the base before you get there, and if we do, you’re out. It’s kind of like it’s you against all of us. But if you get to the base before the ball does, you’re safe. So, you’re going to hit the ball, run as fast as you can, and then dive into the base before the ball gets there. Got that?"

"I like diving."

"But you’re not quite ready yet," the boy who was going to throw the ball said. "If you dive without a shirt on, you’ll get yourself all dirty. Here, you can wear mine, because you don’t want to dirty, do you?"

The boy gave Robert his shirt and helped him put it on, and another one gave him a bat. Then they told him to stand next to the plate and wait for the pitch. The boy who threw the ball could throw it very fast, but he did not with Robert hitting. Instead, he tossed the ball underhand and slow, but Robert still missed the ball. He was used to the way his father threw, which was different from the way the boy threw. All but one of the boys clapped and told Robert he would hit a home run next time for sure. Robert did not know what a home run was. The one boy who did not say anything was not wearing a hat. He was the only boy who was not wearing one.

The thrower boy took some steps toward Robert and threw again, and this time Robert hit the ball. He swung as hard as he could, and the ball rolled to a stop just in front of the thrower. After he reminded Robert to start running, the thrower tossed the ball to the boy at the first base, but before he tossed it, he nodded. The ball went over first base and landed on the ground, and a few seconds later, Robert dove into the base, just like the boys had told him to do.

He stood up and stopped, because no one had told him what to do after he dove. Then one of the boys told him to keep running, to try and beat the ball to the next base, so he started running to the next base, and the ball would have beaten him, but the boy at that base dropped the ball and kicked it away, and then they told Robert to keep running again. The boy at the third base caught the ball, but when he did, he ran toward the pitcher, like he was going to hand him the ball, and then they told Robert to keep on running to home plate.

The boy at home plate was wearing a mask and a hat, but the hat was turned around. He jumped to catch the ball and caught it, but he jumped just when Robert was running past him, and by the time he landed and tried to tag Robert, Robert had already landed on the plate.
The boy who had hit the ball through the window shouted, "Safe!" and then all but one of the boys started clapping and cheering. They told Robert what a good hit he had made and how fast he could run, all of them except for the boy who was not wearing a hat.

Just at the moment when Robert dove into home plate, his parents came home. They saw him lying on the ground and dirty, and heard what they thought was laughing. Some of the boys were laughing, but the reason they were laughing and the reason Robert’s mother thought they were laughing were different. Robert’s father touched him on the shoulder when he walked past him, his hand resting there for just a second. He was going to talk to the boys. Robert’s mother made him stand up and walked him back inside. She only held on to him with one hand, because the other one had to keep her hat on her head.

Once they were inside, Robert’s mother said, "What were you doing out there? Don’t you know it’s dangerous out there? Haven’t you listened to me?"

"I was safe, Mama," Robert said. "They told me. I was safe."

"No, Robert. You were not safe. Those boys were lying to you if they said you were."

Robert thought about what his mother had told him. He said, "I don’t like people who lie to me."

Happy Birthday?

2006-12-16T14:29:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow’s my birthday, and today at work I was thinking about what a birthday really means, what it is you’re actually celebrating. Basically, I concluded that my birthday is a celebration of the fact that, for whatever reason, I managed to not die for yet another year. This is such a momentous achievement on my part, apparently, that I deserve to be rewarded with presents in commemoration of it. Celebrating birthdays has to be an American idea. Where else could the mere fact that you didn’t die qualify you for gifts and accolades?
It’s not like staying alive for another year is a completely free ride, though. No, our family and friends realize the deal we’ve got going on, and so every year they conspire to cook up the most unhealthy, most heart-clogging food possible, and then watch us to make sure we eat it. I’m talking, of course, about the birthday cake, which is basically sugar and artificial food coloring piled together in different mixtures, one on top of the other, and then topped off with an additional layer of sugar, the frosting. The time when they make sure we eat the cake, of course, is called the birthday party. You always thought they came over to your house because they wanted to celebrate your life with you, but no, it’s actually so they can make sure that if you actually do survive and make it through another year, you’ve earned those presents they’re giving you. They would still give them to you just because they feel obligated to, but this way, they can know that you not dying for another year really is an achievement.
But for some people, of course, just clogging your arteries with cake isn’t enough of a challenge. What these people do–I’m sure you know the kind I’m talking about–is that they sneak into your house when you’re not there, hide behind the furniture or maybe in the closet, and they wait for you to come back. And when you do come back home, these people jump out of their hiding places and scream at you. You thought they did that because they wanted make your birthday extra special by giving you a surprise party, but that’s not what’s really going on. Actually, they’re giving your heart a final stress test before they have to hand over their presents. The thing is, though, people who do surprise parties aren’t all that smart, because if they really wanted to make you earn your reward for staying alive another year, they would figure out a way to surprise you after the party, because that’s when you’re all full of sugar and cholesterol. And they’d still have time to take back their presents if you don’t make it.

I Speak in Code

2006-12-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

I speak in code
a cleverly constructed combination
of white words and black pauses
hiding among the colors I can’t control.
My focus fractures and my message meanders,
waylaid by specters of previous
mistaken miscommunication;
and my code shrinks and deepens,
becoming less apparent and more permanent,
until I’m sure you won’t understand.
And I keep speaking in code,
writing messages only for myself
because they make me feel special.
I never suspect you’d do the same.
I would speak plainly,
without distortion or degradation or defense,
but I’ve forgotten how, if I ever even knew.
I speak in code
animated by the permanent pressing possibility
that someone might hear,
someone speaking the same coded language.

Where Fairies or Elves or Munchkins live

2006-12-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Reggie had been asleep a minute ago, but he was wide awake now. He had been sleeping in the field behind his house; it was one of those warm summer days, the kind where the sun is just everywhere and it seems like everything is making a sleepy buzzing sound, when really the best thing to do is to find somewhere outside quiet and where no one will bother you, and lie down and take a nap. It was on days like this that Reggie wondered why he used to cry and scream when his parents told him he had to take a nap.
Even though his watch alarm was not supposed to go off for another forty minutes, Reggie was awake now because of the noise. He still had not looked to see what had happened or where it had come from, because when you hear anything that sounds like it might be an explosion, what you are supposed to do is roll onto your stomach, tuck your legs under you, and put your arms on top of your head. You’re supposed to do this because if anything gets blown up into the air by the explosion and then falls on you, you want to make sure it doesn’t hit any of your really important stuff, like your brain or your heart or your knees. Reggie was not sure why his knees were supposed to be so important, but he had them tucked under his chest anyway.
Just a few seconds after the noise, Reggie heard something fall and land in the ground. It sounded like it was only about twenty feet away, but he did not look up to check because he was afraid something else might fall and land even closer than the first thing, whatever it was. After a few minutes of nothing falling, though, Reggie decided it was probably safe now, or at least as safe as it was going to get, and he stood up and looked around.
On top of the hill that was about twenty feet away, where before there had been only grass and dandelion puffs and little buzzing things, there was now a door. The sun was in his eyes when he looked at it, so he could not be sure what kind of a door it was, but he was certain that it really was there. And that it had not been there when he had fallen asleep.
When he got closer to it, he saw that it looked pretty much like an ordinary door, except that there were some black marks and stuff like that around its edges. In all the stories he had read and movies he had seen about kids like him finding things like this, the door or whatever it was led into a magical world filled with fairies or elves or munchkins. If this door was one of those kinds of doors, then maybe the noise he heard earlier was just the noise doors make when they make a bridge from this world to where the fairies or elves or munchkins live, and the black around the corners was just what happens when the door pushes through into this world, like the sawdust a beaver makes when it cuts down a tree. That would explain everything.
Except that Reggie could not see a way to open this door. For one thing, it did not have hinges or a frame or anything, so it really could not swing open like doors are supposed to, and for another, it was stuck about two inches deep into the ground. Maybe the door was not really a door at all, though. Maybe it just looked like a door but was actually a window or a portal or something, and when he walked into it he would actually be transported to the magical world, instead of just walking into a door. That happened sometimes, too.
But apparently this door was not a portal or something like that, because when he walked into it, nothing happened. Actually, it did bend back a little bit, but other than that, nothing happened. Maybe he had done it wrong, though. Sometimes the portals only work when you run straight into them, or when you are believing really, really hard that you will actually be transported into a different world and not that you will just run smack into a piece of wood. So he took five steps back, made himself think that he would soon be in a wondrous land, or at least somewhere other than the meadow behind his house, and kept on thinking those kinds of thoughts while he ran straight at the door as hard as he could.
Here’s what happened when Reggie hit the door: It fell over and landed with a thud on the ground, and so did Reggie. He rolled over and saw everything blurry and weird for a few seconds, like he was wearing soap-bubble glasses, which he thought might have been his eyes adjusting to the light of the new world he was entering, but really it was just because he had smacked his head. After he got up and stopped being dizzy, he flipped the door over and looked at the grass that had been underneath it, because sometimes you have to put the thing or door or whatever in just the right place before the portal will appear. When that happens, the door is not a portal anymore; it is the key that unlocks the portal. But there was just smashed grass and dandelion fuzz under the door. The buzzing things must have escaped just in time. At least, he hoped they had.
Then, because nothing else had worked so far, Reggie thought that maybe the door was not a portal or a key or some other kind of thing that had to do with a magical world full of fairies or elves or munchkins, but that instead it was something that let him see new things in his own world, because that happened sometimes, and that the blurry vision was just his eyes adjusting to all the new and wonderful things he could now see.
So he looked around the meadow behind his house, but he did not see anything new or magical there. There was a squirrel running around the trunk of the tree in his backyard, but he saw squirrels there all the time. Then he looked down at his shadow, not for any particular reason, but just because he happened to do it, and it disappeared for a second. He looked up to see what was going on, and there was a cloud floating in front of the sun, so nothing was going to have a shadow for the next few minutes at least. The cloud looked like a box of cereal with the labels all whited-out, which was kind of interesting because clouds don’t usually look like that, but it was not amazing or magical or anything.
Reggie wandered around the meadow for a while longer but did not see anything that had not always been there. He looked at a dandelion puff and saw how even though it looked like nothing was holding all the little pieces of fuzz together, they were actually connected to the stem by little hair things that kept them from just flying away, at least until the wind blew them away. He had never noticed that before, but that did not mean it had not always been there, just that he had never looked closely enough to notice it until now.
He sat really still for a few minutes and a butterfly landed on his leg. It did not stay there for long, but it was still long enough for him to see lots of things, like how you could kind of see through some parts of the wings but not other parts, and how small the actual body part of a butterfly really is, that had always been there but that he had never noticed before.
Then, because it was still a really nice day and he did not want to go inside yet, and because he still had not seen anything really magical, Reggie walked through the meadow to where it ended because a road went through it, and then he followed the road back toward his house. This way went through the part of his town where all the businesses and restaurants were. He thought that he would have to walk past something marvelous there, because everything there was always new and exciting anyway.
The first thing he saw was that the warehouse next to the furniture store had exploded or something. It looked like a lot of stuff had been burning but was not anymore, and he could see all the way from the front of the building, where there was a big hole, through to the back of it. There was a fire truck parked next to it, and because the firemen were just kind of standing around and not doing anything, Reggie went up to one of them and asked what had happened.
“We don’t know that for sure yet, but we think that there was a gas line in the warehouse that had a leak in it, and someone must have left something burning in there, probably a cigarette, and after a while it ignited the gas, and the building exploded.”
Reggie’s first thought was how cool that would have been to see, but instead of saying that, he asked, “Was anyone hurt?”
“No one was in the building when it went up, but a lot of the stuff inside the building was thrown into the air by the explosion. We’ve been finding chairs and things like that all over town. Some of it went pretty far. As far as we know, no one’s been hurt by any of that, but we’re still checking around to make sure.”
“Were there doors in there?” Reggie asked the fireman.
“Yeah, I think there were. Did you see one?”
“I was taking a nap and it woke me up. I thought it was a magic door or something.”
The fireman did not know what to say to Reggie about that, but he did not have to try and come up with something because just then another fireman came up and said, “We’ve been all over town and haven’t found anyone injured yet, but there is one boy no one’s been able to locate yet. We’re still working on finding him.” He saw Reggie there and said, “This was a dangerous thing that happened today.”
“I was asleep when it happened.”
“Who’s your new friend, Quancy?” Quancy was the name of the first fireman.
“I’m Reggie Welton, sir. He doesn’t know my name because I didn’t tell him yet.”
The fireman who was not Quancy gasped when he heard Reggie’s name. “Did you say you’re Reginald Welton? Are you Benjamin and Angela’s son?”
“Yes, sir. They’re my parents. Why?”
“You need to go home. Get there as fast as you can. Your parents will be there.”
“Okay.”
He did not know why he was supposed to, but the way the fireman had acted made it seem really important that he hurried, so Reggie ran all the way home. It was not really that far, and he liked running anyway. He was hardly even out of breath when he got there.
Reggie’s mother was waiting on the front steps of the house, and he could see that she had been crying. “Reggie, where were you?” she asked. “There was an accident downtown, and we didn’t know where you were. We’ve been worried sick that you were hurt. Your father’s out with the police looking for you right now.”
Even though she sounded mad, Reggie’s mother kept hugging him while she talked, like she was scared of letting go of him. Mothers do things like that sometimes.
“I was just out in the backyard. I told you, didn’t I?” “You said you were going to take a nap.”
“I meant that I was going to do that in the backyard. I thought you knew that. I’m sorry. Why were you so scared?”
Reggie’s mother told him to go to his room. At first he thought that was his punishment, but when he got to his room he knew what his mother had really meant. The house felt strange, different somehow, as soon as he went inside, but he could not figure out why until he went into his room and saw that his bed, along with the whole rest of the wall, had been cut in half. Stuck into the floor was a headboard for a bed, but it was not the headboard for Reggie’s bed. That one was just regular wood with a few curly designs along the top of it, except that now it was mostly splinters. But this headboard, the one in the floor, had all kinds of things painted on it. There was a forest, a bright one, and in some of the trees there were houses with tall people with pointed ears in them. They were small, but you could tell their ears were pointed. On the ground some short people and a few taller ones were walking and looking around, but they could not see the people in the trees yet.
Reggie had not read about those people yet, but his father had told him about them. He said that Reggie could read about them when he was a little older. He thought he was probably old enough now.
Once he had stopped laughing, he went back outside to tell his mother about what had happened. His father was back by now, too. He told both of them about the noise, and the door, and the squirrel, and the firemen, and even about the little hairs that keep the dandelion puffs together in a ball. They all agreed that he had seen some unusual and even amazing things, and that he had had quite an adventure.