STILL-LIFE

by Don DeLillo
APRIL 9, 2007
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September 11th, 2001 (9/11); Survivors; World Trade Center; Marriage; Children; New York City; Airplanes

When he appeared at the door, it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burned matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face. He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no distance in it. He carried a briefcase and stood slowly nodding. She thought he might be in shock but didnt know what this meant in precise terms, medical terms. He walked past her toward the kitchen and she tried calling her doctor, then 911, then the nearest hospital, but all she heard was the drone of overloaded lines. She turned off the TV set, not sure why, protecting him from the news hed just walked out of, thats why, and then went into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table, and she poured him a glass of water and told him that Justin was with his grandmother, released early from school and also being protected from the news, at least as it concerned his father. He said, Everybodys giving me water. She thought he could not have travelled all this distance or even climbed the stairs if hed suffered serious injury, grievous blood loss. Then he said something else. His briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. He said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky. She poured water on a dishcloth and wiped dust and ash from his hands, face, and head, careful not to disturb the glass fragments. There was more blood than shed realized at first, and then she began to realize something elsethat his cuts and abrasions were not severe or numerous enough to account for all this blood. It was not his blood. Most of it came from somebody else. She said to her mother, There he was in the doorway, up from the dead. Its so lucky Justin was here with you. Because it would have been awful for him to see his father like that. Like gray soot head to toe, I dont know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes. We did a puzzle, an animal puzzle, horses in a field.

Her mothers apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves. Today the living room was in a state of happy disarray. Justins toys and games were scattered across the floor, subverting the timeless quality of the room, and this was nice, Lianne thought, because it was otherwise hard not to whisper in such a setting. I didnt know what to do. I mean, with the phones out. Finally, we walked to the hospital. Walked, step by step, like walking a child. Why was he there in the first place, in your apartment? I dont know. Why didnt he go straight to a hospital? Down there, downtown. Why didnt he go to a friends place?
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Friend meant girlfriend, an unavoidable jab. She had to do it, couldnt help herself. I dont know. You havent discussed this. Where is he now? Hes all right. What have you discussed? No major problems, physical. What have you discussed? she said. Her mother, Nina, had taught at universities in California and New York before retiring two years earlier, the So-and-So Professor of Suchand-Such, as Keith once called her. She was pale and thin, her mother, following knee-replacement surgery. She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed: to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it. There were the canes, there were the medications, there were the afternoon naps, the dietary restrictions, the doctors appointments. Theres nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions. Reticent. You know Keith. Ive always admired that about him. He gives the impression theres something deeper to him than hiking and skiing, or playing cards. But what?

Rock climbing. Dont forget. And you went with him. I did forget. Her mother stirred in the chair, feet propped on the matching stool, late morning, still in her robe, dying for a cigarette. I like his reticence, or whatever it is, she said. But be careful. Hes reticent around you, or was, the few times there was actual communication. Be careful. He was in grave danger, I know. He had friends in there. I know that, too, her mother said. But if you let your sympathy and good will affect your judgment. And Justin. Having a father around the house again. The kid is fine. Who knows how the kid is? Hes fine, hes back in school, she said. It reopened. But you worry. I know this. You like to nourish your fear. Whats next? Dont you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come. Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago, they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said whats next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when theres no reason to be afraid. Too late now. Lianne stood by the window. But when the towers fell. I know. When this happened. I know. I thought he was dead. So did I, Nina said. So many watching. Thinking, Hes dead, shes dead. I know. Watching those buildings fall. First one, then the other. I know, her mother said. They were silent for a time. Nina said, Of course the child is a blessing, but otherwise, you know better than I, marrying the man was a huge mistake, and you willed it, you went looking for it. You wanted to live a certain way, never mind the consequences. You wanted a certain thing and you thought Keith. What did I want? You thought Keith would get you there.

What did I want? To feel dangerously alive. This was a quality you associated with your father. But that wasnt the case. Your father was at heart a careful man. And your son is a beautiful and sensitive child, she said. But otherwise. In truth, she loved this room, Lianne did, in its most composed form, without the games and the scattered toys. Her mother had been living here for a few years only, and Lianne tended to see it as a visitor might, a space that was serenely self-possessed, and so what if it was a little intimidating. What she loved most was the two still-lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. They were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery for her, or in the irregular edges of the vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still-life seemed stronger than it had to be, ominous, even, but these were matters she hadnt talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment. You liked asking questions as a child. Insistently digging. But you were curious about the wrong things. They were my things, not yours. Keith wanted a woman whod regret what she did with him. This is his style, to get a woman to do something shell be sorry for. But the thing you did wasnt just a night or a weekend. He was made for weekends. The thing you did. This isnt the time. You actually married the man. And then I threw him out. I had strong objections, building up over time. What you object to is very different. Hes not a scholar, not an artist. Doesnt paint, doesnt write poetry. If he did, youd overlook everything else. Hed be the raging artist. Hed be allowed to behave unspeakably. Tell me something. You have more to lose this time. Self-respect. Think about that. Tell me this. What kind of painter is allowed to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract?
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He signed a document, then another. There were people on gurneys and there were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him. Lianne was there to help. Then she wasnt anymore, and an orderly put him in a wheelchair and pushed him down a corridor and through a series of examining rooms, with urgent cases rolling by. Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took blood-pressure readings. They were interested in potentially fatal reactions to injuryhemorrhage, dehydration. They looked for diminished blood flow to tissues. They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door, he saw I.V. racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X-rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or a cartilage, a tear or a sprain. Someone took the glass out of his face. The man talked throughout, using an instrument he called a pickup to extract the small fragments of glass that were not deeply embedded. He said that most of the worst cases were in hospitals downtown or at the trauma center on a pier. He said that survivors were not appearing in the numbers expected. He was propelled by events and could not stop talking. Doctors and volunteers were standing idle, he said, because the people they were waiting for were mostly back there, in the ruins. He said he would use a clamp for the deeper fragments. Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you dont want to hear this. I dont know. In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bombers body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get fixed in the body of anyone whos in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a caf. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into her skin. They call this organic shrapnel. He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keiths face. This is something I dont think you have, he said.

Justins two best friends were a sister and brother who lived in a high-rise ten blocks away. Lianne had trouble remembering their names at first and called them the Siblings, and soon the name stuck. Justin said that this was their real name anyway, and she thought, What a funny kid when he wants to be. She saw Isabel on the street, the mother of the Siblings, and they stood at the corner talking. Thats what kids do, absolutely, but I have to admit Im beginning to wonder. They sort of conspire. Yes, and sort of talk in code, and they spend a lot of time at the window in Katies room, with the door closed. You know theyre at the window? Because I can hear them talking when I walk by and I know thats where theyre standing. Theyre at the window, talking in this code. Maybe Justin tells you things? I dont think so. Because its getting a little strange, frankly, all the time they spend, first, sort of huddled together, and then, I dont know, like endlessly whispering in this semi-gibberish, which is what kids do, absolutely, but still. Lianne wasnt sure what this was all about. It was about three kids being kids together. Justins getting interested in the weather. I think theyre doing clouds in school, she said, realizing how hollow this sounded. Theyre not whispering about clouds. O.K. My kids totally dont want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something. I dont think so. Justin says nothing about any of this? No. What would he say? Exactly, Isabel said. Keith was tall, with cropped hair, and she thought he looked like Army, like career military, still in shape and beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life, in separation perhaps, in living alone, being a father from a distance.

He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, begin to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here beside her. He didnt seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened, and this was all right. She didnt need to know a mans feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when hed press her to the wall before she finished dressing. Hed get out of bed and look at her, and shed stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall. He lay on a long narrow table within the closed unit. There was a pillow under his knees and a pair of track lights overhead, and he tried to listen to the music. Inside the powerful noise of the scanner, he fixed his attention on the instruments, separating one set from the otherstrings, woodwinds, brass. The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel as if he were deep inside the core of a sciencefiction city about to come undone.
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He wore a device on his wrist to produce a detailed image, and the sense of helpless confinement made him think of something the radiologist had said, a Russian whose accent he found reassuring, because Russians are serious people who place weight on every word, and maybe thats why he chose classical music to listen to when she asked him to make a selection. He heard her now in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last three minutes, and when the music resumed he thought of Nancy Dinnerstein, who ran a sleep clinic in Boston. People paid her to put them to sleep. Or the other Nancy, whats-hername, briefly, between incidental sex acts, in Portland that time, Oregon, without a last name. The city had a last name, the woman did not. The noise was unbearable, alternating between the banging-shattering sound and an electronic pulse of varied pitch. He listened to the music and thought of what the radiologist had said, that once its over, in her Russian accent, you forget instantly the whole experience, so how bad can it be, shed said, and he thought this sounded like a description of dying. But that was another matter, wasnt it, another kind of noise, and the trapped man does not come sliding out of his tube. He listened to the

music. He tried hard to hear the flutes and to distinguish them from the clarinets, if there were clarinets, but he was unable to do this, and the only countervailing force was Nancy Dinnerstein drunk in Boston, and it gave him a dumb and helpless hard-on, thinking of her in his drafty hotel room with a limited view of the river. He heard the voice in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last seven minutes. Now Lianne stood at the foot of the bed and watched him lying there, late one night, after shed finished working, and asked him finally and quietly, Why did you come here? Thats the question, isnt it? For Justin, yes? This was the answer she wanted, because it made the most sense. So he could see you were alive, she said. But it was also only half the answer, and she realized she needed to hear something beyond this, a broader motive for his action or intuition or whatever it was. He thought for a long moment. Its hard to reconstruct. I dont know how my mind was working. A guy came along in a van, a plumber, I think, and he drove me here. His radio had been stolen, and he knew from the sirens that something was going on but he didnt know what. At some point, he had a clear view downtown, but all he could see was one tower. He thought one tower was blocking his view of the other tower, or the smoke was. He saw the smoke. He drove east a ways and looked again, and there was still only one tower. One tower made no sense. Then he turned uptown, because thats where he was going, and finally he saw me and picked me up. By this time, the second tower was gone. Eight radios in three years, he said. All stolen. An electrician, I think. He had a water bottle he kept pushing in my face. Your apartment, you knew you couldnt go there. I knew the building was too close to the towers, and maybe I knew I couldnt go there and maybe I wasnt even thinking about that. Either way, thats not why I came here. It was more than that. She felt better now. He wanted to take me to the hospital, the guy in the van, but I told him to bring me here. He looked at her.

I gave him this address, he said for emphasis, and she felt better still. It was a simple matter, outpatient surgery, a ligament or a cartilage, with Lianne in the reception area waiting to take him back to the apartment. On the table he thought of his buddy Rumsey, briefly, just before or after he lost sensation. The doctor, the anesthetist, injected him with a heavy sedative or other agent, a substance containing a memory suppressant, or maybe there were two shots, but there was Rumsey in his chair by the window, which meant the memory was not suppressed or the substance hadnt taken effect yet, a dream, a waking image, whatever it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things coming down. Its interesting, isnt it? To sleep with your husband, a thirty-eight-yearold woman and a thirty-nine-year-old man, and never a breathy sound of sex. Hes your ex-husband who was never technically ex, the man you married in another lifetime. She dressed and undressed; he watched and did not. It was strange but interesting. A tension did not build. This was extremely strange. She wanted him here, nearby, but felt no edge of selfcontradiction or self-denial. Just waiting, that was all, an extended pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights, not so easily set aside. The matter needed time. It could not happen the way things did in normal course. And its interesting, isnt it, the way you move about the bedroom, routinely near-naked, and the respect you show for the past, the deference to its fervors of the wrong kind, its passions of cut and burn.
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She wanted contact, and so did he. This time the woman showed up in the bakery, the mother of the Siblings. She walked in just after Lianne did and joined her after taking a number from the dispenser on the counter. Im just wondering about the binoculars. Hes not, you know, the most outgoing child. She smiled at Lianne, warmly and falsely, in a fragrance of glazed cakes, a mother-to-mother look, like we both know how these kids have enormous gleaming worlds they dont share with their parents. Because he always has them lately. I just wondered, you know, what he might have told you one way or the other. Lianne didnt know what she was talking about. She looked into the

broad and florid face of the man behind the counter. The answer wasnt there. He shares them with my kids, so thats not the problem, because their father promised them a pair, but we havent gotten aroundyou know, binoculars, not the highest priority, and my Katies being supersecret and her brothers her brother, loyal to a fault. You mean what are they looking at, behind closed doors? I thought maybe Justin. Cant be much, can it? Maybe hawks. You know about the redtails. No, its definitely something else. Im sure of this, absolutely, because the binoculars are part of the whole hush-hush syndrome these kids are engulfed in. I dont think so, Lianne said. This is their secret. And I thought maybe Justin. Because my kids totally blank out when I bring up the subject. She hadnt known that Justin was taking the binoculars on his visits to the Siblings. They werent his binoculars, exactly, although she guessed it was all right for him to use them without permission. But maybe not, she thought, waiting for the man to call her number. Arent they doing birds in school? Last time it was clouds. Turns out I was wrong about the clouds. But theyre definitely studying birds and birdcalls and habitats, she told the woman. They go trekking through Central Park. She realized how much she hated to stand around with a number in her fist. She hated this regimen of assigned numbers, strictly enforced, in a confined space, with nothing at the end of the process but a small white bow-tied box of pastry. There was an old-fashioned pencil sharpener clamped to the edge of the table in Justins room. She stood at the door and watched him insert each pencil into the slot and then crank the handle. He had red-and-blue combination pencils, Cedar Pointe pencils, Dixon Trimlines, vintage Eberhard Fabers. He had pencils from hotels in Zurich and Hong Kong. There were pencils fashioned from tree bark, rough and knotted. There were pencils from the design store of the Museum of Modern Art. He had Mirado Black Warriors. He had pencils from a SoHo shop that were inscribed along the shaft with cryptic sayings from Tibet. It was awful, in a way, all these fragments of status washing up in

some little kids room. But what she loved to watch was the way he blew the microscopic shavings off the pencil point after he finished sharpening. If he were to do it all day, shed watch all day, pencil after pencil. Hed crank and blow, crank and blow, a ritual more thorough and righteous than the formal signing of a document of state by eleven men with medals. When he saw her watching, he said, What? I talked to Katies mother today. Katie and whats-his-name. She told me about the binoculars. He stood and watched her, pencil in hand. Katie and whats-his-name. Robert, he said. Her little brother Robert. And his older sister Katie. Is this something I should know about? And are you supposed to take the binoculars out of the house without permission? He stood and watched. He had pale hair, his fathers, and a certain sombreness of body, a restraint, his own, that gave him an uncanny discipline in games, in physical play. Did your father give you permission? He stood and watched. Whats so interesting about the view from that room? You can tell me that, cant you? She leaned against the door, prepared to remain for three, four, five days, in the context of parental body language, or until he answered. He moved one hand away from his body slightly, the hand without the pencil, palm up, and executed the faintest change in facial expression, causing an arched indentation between the chin and lower lip, like an old mans mute version of the young boys opening remark, which was What? Keith sat next to the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge, curled into a gentle fist. He raised the hand without lifting his forearm and kept it in the air for five seconds. He did this ten times. It was their term, gentle fist, the rehab centers term, used in the instruction sheet.
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He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage hed suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos. It was not the MRI and not the surgery that had brought him closer to well-being. It was this modest home program, the counting of seconds, the counting of repetitions, the times of day he reserved for the exercises, the ice he applied following each set of exercises. There were the dead and the maimed. His injury was slight, but it wasnt the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. He washed his splint in warm soapy water. He did not adjust his splint without consulting the therapist. He read the instruction sheet. He curled the hand into a gentle fist. Her mother had said it clearly, years earlier. Theres a certain man, an archetype. Hes a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and a confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal, and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living, breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man youre going to marry. This is the man she marries. He was a hovering presence now. There drifted through the rooms a sense of someone who has earned respectful attention. He was not quite returned to his body yet. Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice. He spent time with Justin, taking him to school and picking him up, advising on homework. He wore the splint for a while, then stopped. He took the kid to the park to play catch. The kid could toss a baseball all day and be purely and inexhaustibly happy, unmarked by sin, anyones, down the ages. Throw and catch. She watched them in a field not far from the museum, into the sinking sun. When Keith did a kind of ball trick, using the right hand, the undamaged one, to flip the ball onto the back of the hand and then jerk the arm forward, propelling the ball backward along the forearm before knocking it into the air with his elbow and then catching it backhanded, she saw a man shed never known before.

He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here in the apartment, alone for extended periods, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didnt understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasnt so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now, because he was watching. There were the walks to school with Justin and the walks back home alone, or somewhere else, just walking, and then he picked up the kid at school and it was back home again. There was a contained elation in these times, a feeling that was half hidden, something he knew but just barely, a whisper of self-disclosure. The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for long stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian. It helps me go slow when I think, Justin said to his father, measuring each word, noting the syllable count. Keith as well was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the window and sees whats happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand awhile and look. There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something hed rarely done in the year and a half of their separation because it had made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. We go home now, Justin said. She was back from an early-morning run and stood sweating by the kitchen window, drinking water from a one-litre bottle and watching Keith eat breakfast.

Youre one of those madwomen running in the streets. Run around the reservoir. You think we look crazier than men. Only in the streets. I like the streets. This time of morning, theres something about the city, down by the river, streets half empty, cars blasting by on the Drive. Breathe deeply. I like running alongside the cars on the Drive. Take deep breaths, he said. Let the fumes swirl into your lungs.
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I like the fumes. I like the breeze from the river. Run naked, he said. You do it, Ill do it. Ill do it if the kid does it, he said. Justin was in his room, a Saturday, putting the last touches, last pokes of color, onto a portrait hed been doing, in crayon, of his grandmother. Either that or drawing a picture of a bird, for school, which reminded her of something. He takes the binoculars over to the Siblings. Any idea why? Theyre searching the skies. For what? Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl. Katie. Katie claims she saw the plane that hit tower one. She says she was home from school, sick, standing at the window when the plane flew by. The building where the Siblings lived was known to some as the Godzilla Apartments, or simply as the Godzilla. It was forty stories or so in an area of town houses and other structures of modest height and it created its own weather systems, with strong currents of air that sometimes sheared down the face of the building and knocked old people to the pavement. Home sick. Do I believe that? I think theyre on the twenty-seventh floor, he said. Looking west across the park. This much is true. Did the plane fly down over the park? Maybe the park, maybe the river, she said. And maybe she was

home sick and maybe she made it up. Either way. Either way, youre saying, theyre looking for more planes. Waiting for it to happen again. That scares me, she said. This time with a pair of binoculars to help them make the sighting. That scares the hell out of me. God, theres something so awful about that. Damn kids with their goddam twisted powers of imagination. She walked over to the table and picked half a strawberry out of his cereal bowl. Then she sat across from him, thinking and chewing. Finally, she said, The only thing I got out of Justinthe towers did not collapse. I told him they did. So did I, she said. They were hit but did not collapse. Thats what he says. He didnt see it on TV. I didnt want him to see it. But I told him they came down. And he seemed to absorb it. But then, I dont know. He knows they came down, whatever he says about it. He has to know, dont you think? And he knows you were there. We talked about it, Keith said. But only once. What did he say? Not much. And neither did I. Theyre searching the skies. Thats right, he said. This is what we get for putting a protective distance between children and news events. Except we didnt put a distance, not really, he said. She looked at him. Why are you still here? She said this in a tone of gentlest curiosity. Are you planning to stay? Because I think this is something we need to talk about, she said. Ive forgotten how to talk to you. This is the longest talk weve had. You did it better than anybody. Talk to me. Maybe that was the problem. I guess Ive unlearned it. Because I sit here thinking we have so much to say. We dont have so much to say. We used to say everything, all the

time. We examined everything, all the questions, all the issues. All right. It practically killed us. All right. But is it possible? Heres my question, she said. Is it possible you and I are done with conflict? You know what I mean. The everyday friction. The every-word, every-breath schedule we were on before we split. Is it possible thats over? We dont need that anymore. We can live without it. Am I right? Were ready to sink into our little lives, he said. They sat in a taxi going downtown and began to clutch each other, kissing and groping. She said, in urgent murmurs, Its a movie, its a movie. At traffic lights, people crossing the street stopped to watch, two or three, seeming briefly to float above the windows, and sometimes only one. The others just crossed, those who didnt give a damn. In the Indian restaurant the man at the podium said, We do not seat incomplete tables. In the beginning, she washed his clothes in a separate load. She had no idea why she did this. It was like he was dead. She listened to what he said and let him know she was listening, mind and body, because listening is what would save them this time, keep them from falling into distortion and rancor. What was ordinary was not more ordinary than usual, or less. This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, over-intimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in ithands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirteven if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensations, whatever she could breathe in from other peoples pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.
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Its a movie, she kept saying, his hand in her pants, saying it, a moan in the shape of words, and at traffic lights people watched, a few, and the driver watched, lights or not, eyes gliding across the rearview mirror. But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is

the only place it meaningfully exists. She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, would have been an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need that she did not try to interpret. After the first time they made love, he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts, and thighs stamped on the mirror. Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice-blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyones, into some other distance, out beyond the towers. The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of mens intent. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, voices crying to God, and how awful to imagine this, Gods name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower. He watched with her one time only. She knew shed never felt so close to someone, watching the planes cross the sky. Standing by the wall, he reached toward the chair and took her hand. She bit her lip and watched. They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought, There he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand was on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for his dying. He said, It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, Im standing here thinking its an accident. Because it has to be.

It has to be, he said. The way the camera sort of shows surprise. But only the first one. Only the first, she said. The second plane, by the time the second plane appears, he said, were all a little older and wiser.

THE SHELTER OF THE WORLD

by Salman Rushdie
FEBRUARY 25, 2008

At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new victory city of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the days heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real. Even the Emperor succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-youcan. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the privacy of the womens quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace, Jodhas influence and power grew. The great musician Tansen wrote songs for her, and Master Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the Emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page. You have captured her, to the life, he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and stopped feeling as if his

head were too loosely attached to his neck; and, after this visionary work by the master of the Emperors atelier had been exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be real, and the greatest courtiers, the Navratna, or Nine Jewels, all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her wisdom, the grace of her movements, and the softness of her voice. Akbar and Jodhabai! Ah, ah! It was the love story of the age. The city was finished at last, in time for the Emperors fortieth birthday. It had been twelve long, hot years in the making, but for a while he had been given the impression that it rose up effortlessly, year by year, as if by sorcery. The Emperors minister of works had not allowed any construction to go forward during the Emperors sojourns in the new imperial capital. When the Emperor was in residence, the stonemasons tools fell silent, the carpenters drove in no nails, the painters, the inlay workers, the hangers of fabrics, and the carvers of screens all disappeared from view. All then, its said, was cushioned pleasure. Only noises of delight were permitted to be heard. The bells on the ankles of dancers echoed sweetly, and fountains tinkled, and the soft music of the genius Tansen hung upon the breeze. There was whispered poetry in the Emperors ear, and in the pachisi courtyard on Thursdays there was much languid play, with slave girls being used as living pieces on the checkerboard floor. In the curtained afternoons, beneath the sliding punkahs, there was a quiet time for love.
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No city is all palaces. The real city, built of wood and mud and dung and brick as well as stone, huddled beneath the walls of the mighty redstone plinth upon which the royal residences stood. Its neighborhoods were determined by race as well as by trade. Here was the silversmiths street, there the hot-gated, clanging armories, and there, down that third gully, the place of bangles and clothes. To the east was the Hindu colony, and beyond that, curling around the city walls, the Persian quarter, and beyond that the region of the Turanis, and beyond that, in the vicinity of the giant gate of the Friday Mosque, the homes of those Muslims who were Indian born. Dotted around the countryside were the villas of the nobles, the art-studio-and-scriptorium whose fame had already spread throughout the land, and a pavilion of music, and another for the performance of dances. In most of these lower Sikris, there was little time

for indolence, and when the Emperor came home from the wars the command of silence felt, in the mud city, like a suffocation. Chickens had to be gagged at the moment of their slaughter for fear of disturbing the repose of the king of kings. A cart wheel that squeaked could earn the carts driver the lash, and if he cried out under the whip the penalty could be even more severe. Women giving birth withheld their cries, and the dumb show of the marketplace was a kind of madness. When the King is here, we are all made mad, the people said, adding, hastily, for there were spies and traitors everywhere, for joy. The mud city loved its Emperor, it insisted that it did, insisted without words, for words were made of that forbidden fabric, sound. When the Emperor set forth once more on his campaignshis never-ending (though always victorious) battles against the armies of Gujarat and Rajasthan, of Kabul and Kashmirthen the prison of silence was unlocked, and trumpets burst out, and cheers, and people were finally able to tell one another everything they had been obliged to keep unsaid for months on end: I love you. My mother is dead. Your soup tastes good. If you do not pay me the money you owe me, I will break your arms at the elbows. My darling, I love you, too. Everything. Fortunately for the mud city, military matters often took Akbar away. In fact, he had been away most of the time, and in his absences the din of the clustered poor, as well as the racket of the unleashed construction workers, daily vexed the impotent queens. The queens lay together and moaned, and what they did to distract one another, what entertainment they found in one another in their veiled quarters, will not be described here. Only the imaginary queen remained pure, and it was she who told Akbar of the privations the people were suffering because of the desire of overzealous officials to ease his time at home. As soon as the Emperor learned this, he countermanded the order, replaced the minister of works with a less dour individual, and insisted on riding through the streets of his oppressed subjects crying out, Make as much racket as you like, people! Noise is life, and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead. The city burst into joyful clamor. That was the day on which it became clear that a new kind of king was on the throne, and that nothing in the world would remain the same. The country was at peace at last, but the Kings spirit was never calm. The King had just returned from his last campaign; he had slapped down the upstart in Surat, but through the long days of marching and war his mind wrestled with philosophical and linguistic conundrums as much as with military ones. The Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, King of Kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning the great, and

latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glorythe Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personagethis all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first-person pluralhad begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first-person singularthe I. He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as I, not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He waswhat else could he be?we. He was the definition, the incarnation of, the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said we, he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants and trees within his frontiers, and also the birds that flew overhead and the mordant twilight mosquitoes and the nameless monsters in their underworld lairs, gnawing slowly at the roots of things; he meant himself as the sum total of all his victories, himself as containing the characters, the abilities, the histories, perhaps even the souls of his decapitated or merely pacified opponents; and, in addition, he meant himself as the apogee of his peoples past and present, and the engine of their future. This we was what it meant to be a kingbut commoners, he now allowed himself to consider, in the interest of fairness, and for the purposes of debate, no doubt occasionally thought of themselves as plural, too. Were they wrong? Or (O traitorous thought!) was he? Perhaps this idea of self-as-community was what it meant to be a being in the world, any being; such a being being, after all, inevitably a being among other beings, a part of the beingness of all things. Perhaps plurality was not exclusively a kings prerogative, perhaps it was not, after all, his divine right. One might further argue that, since the reflections of a monarch were, in less exalted and refined form, doubtless mirrored in the cogitations of his subjects, it was accordingly inevitable that the men and

women over whom he ruled should also conceive of themselves as wes. They saw themselves, perhaps, as plural entities made up of themselves plus their children, mothers, aunts, employers, co-worshippers, fellowworkers, clans, and friends. They, too, saw their selves as multiple, one self that was the father of their children, another that was their parents child; they knew themselves to be different with their employers than they were at home with their wivesin short, they were all bags of selves, bursting with plurality, just as he was. Was there then no essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? And now his original question reasserted itself in a new and startling form: if his many-selved subjects managed to think of themselves in the singular rather than the plural, could he, too, be an I? Could there be an I that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary Is buried beneath the overcrowded wes of the earth? It was a question that frightened him as he rode his white horse home, fearless, unvanquished, and, it must be conceded, beginning to be fat; and when it popped into his head at night he did not easily sleep. What should he say when he saw his Jodha again? If he were to say simply, Im back, or It is I, might she, in return, feel able to call him by that second-person singular, that tu which was reserved for children, lovers, and gods? And what would that mean? That he was like her child, or godlike, or simply the lover of whom she, too, had dreamed, whom she had dreamed into being as eagerly as he had dreamed her? Might that little word, that tu, turn out to be the most arousing word in the language? I, he practiced under his breath. Here I am. I love you. Come to me. One final military engagement disturbed his contemplation on the homeward road. One more upstart princeling to slap down. A diversion into the Kathiawar Peninsula to quell the obstinate Rana of Cooch Naheen, a young man with a big mouth and a bigger mustache (the Emperor was vain about his own mustache, and took unkindly to competitors), a feudal ruler absurdly fond of talking about freedom. Freedom for whom, and from what, the Emperor harrumphed inwardly. Freedom was a childrens fantasy, a game for women to play. No man was ever free. His army moved through the white trees of the Gir Forest like a silently approaching plague, and the pathetic little fortress of Cooch Naheen, seeing the advent of death in the rustling treetops, broke its own towers, ran up a flag of surrender, and begged abjectly for mercy. Often, instead of executing his vanquished opponents, the Emperor would marry one of their daughters and give his defeated father-in-law a job: better a new family member than a rotting corpse.

This time, however, he had irritably torn the insolent Ranas mustache off his handsome face, and chopped the weakling dreamer into garish pieceshad done so personally, with his own sword, just as his grandfather would have, and had then retreated to his quarters to tremble and mourn. The Emperors eyes were slanted and large and gazed upon infinity as a dreamy young lady might, or a sailor in search of land. His lips were full and pushed forward in a womanly pout. But in spite of these girlish accents he was a mighty specimen of a man, huge and strong. As a boy, he had killed a tigress with his bare hands and then, driven to distraction by his deed, had forever forsworn the eating of meat and become a vegetarian. A Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms. Such was the greatest ruler the land had ever known. In the melancholy after battle, as evening fell upon the empty dead, below the broken fortress melting into blood, within earshot of a little waterfalls nightingale songbul-bul, bul-bul, it sangthe Emperor in his brocade tent sipped watered wine and lamented his gory genealogy. He did not want to be like his bloodthirsty ancestors, even though his ancestors were the greatest men in history. He felt burdened by the names of the marauder past, the names from which his name descended in cascades of human blood: his grandfather Babar, the warlord of Ferghana, who had conquered, but always loathed, this new dominion, this India of too much wealth and too many gods, Babar the battle machine, with an unexpected gift for felicitous words; and before Babar the murderous princes of Transoxiana and Mongolia, and mighty Temjin above allGenghis, Changez, Jenghis, or Chinggis Qan thanks to whom he, Akbar, had to accept the name of Mughal, had to be the Mongol he was not, or did not feel himself to be. He felt . . . Hindustani. His horde was neither Golden, Blue, nor White. The very word horde struck his subtle ears as ugly, swinish, coarse. He did not want hordes. He did not want to pour molten silver into the eyes of his vanquished foes or crush them to death beneath the platform upon which he was eating his dinner. He was tired of war. He remembered the tutor of his childhood, a Persian Mir, telling him that for a man to be at peace with himself he must be at peace with all others. Sulh-i-kul, complete peace. No Khan could understand such an idea. He did not want a Khanate. He wanted a country.

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The Rana of Cooch Naheen, young, slender, and dark, had knelt at Akbars feet, his face hairless and bleeding, waiting for the blow to fall. History repeats itself, he said. Your grandfather killed my grandfather seventy years ago. Our grandfather, replied the Emperor, employing the royal plural according to custom, for this was not the time for his experiment with the singularthis wretch did not merit the privilege of witnessing itwas a barbarian with a poets tongue. We, by contrast, are a poet with a barbarians history and a barbarians prowess in war, which we detest. Thus it is demonstrated that history does not repeat itself but moves forward, and that Man is capable of change. That is a strange remark for an executioner to make, the young Rana said softly. But it is futile to argue with Death. Your time has come, the Emperor assented. So tell us truthfully before you go, what sort of paradise do you expect to discover when you have passed through the veil? The Rana raised his mutilated face and looked the Emperor in the eye. In Paradise, the words worship and argument mean the same thing, he declared. The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the house of God, all voices are free to speak as they choose, and that is the form of their devotion. He was an irritating, holier-thanthou type of youth, that was beyond question, but in spite of his annoyance Akbar was moved. We promise you that we will build that house of adoration here on earth, the Emperor said. Then, with a cry Allahu Akbar, God is great, or, just possibly, Akbar is Godhe chopped off the pompous little twerps cheeky, didactic, and therefore suddenly unnecessary head. In the hours after he killed the Rana, the Emperor was possessed by his familiar demon of loneliness. Whenever a man spoke to him as an equal, it drove him crazy, and this was a fault, he understood that. A kings anger was always a fault; an angry king was like a god who made mistakes. And here was another contradiction in him. He was not only a barbarian philosopher and a crybaby killer but also an egotist addicted to obsequiousness and sycophancy who nevertheless longed for a different world, a world in which he could find exactly that man who was his equal, whom he could meet as his brother, with whom he could speak freely, teaching and learning, giving and receiving pleasure, a world in which he could forsake the gloating satisfactions of conquest for the gentler yet more taxing joys of discourse. Did such a world exist? By what road could it be reached? Was there such a man anywhere in the

world, or had he just executed him? What if the Rana of the mustache had been the only one? Had he just slain the only man on earth whom he might have loved? The Emperors thoughts grew vinous and sentimental, his eyes blurring with drunken tears. How could he become the man he wanted to be? The akbar, the great one? How? There was nobody to talk to. He had ordered his stone-deaf body servant, Bhakti Ram Jain, away, out of his tent, so that he could drink in peace. A body servant who could not hear his masters ramblings was a blessing, but Bhakti Ram Jain had learned to read his lips now, which undid much of his value, making him an eavesdropper like everyone else. The king is mad. They said that: everyone said that. His soldiers his people his wives. Probably Bhakti Ram Jain said so as well. They did not say it to his face, for he was a giant of a man and a puissant warrior, like a hero out of the ancient tales, and he was also the king of kings, and if such a one wished to be a little nutty then who were they to argue? The King, however, was not mad. The King was not content with being. He was striving to become. Very well. He would keep his promise to the dead Kathiawari princeling. In the heart of his victory city he would build a house of adoration, a place of disputation where everything could be said to everyone by anyone on any subject, including the nonexistence of God and the abolition of kings. He would teach himself humility in that house. No, now he was being unfair to himself. Not teach. Rather, he would remind himself of, and recover, the humility that was already lodged deep in his heart. This humble Akbar was perhaps his best self, created by the circumstances of his childhood in exile, clothed now in adult grandeur but still present nonetheless; a self born not in victory but in defeat. Nowadays, it was all victories, but the Emperor knew all about defeat. Defeat was his father. Its name was Humayun. He didnt like thinking about his father. His father had smoked too much opium, lost his empire, got it back only after he pretended to become a Shiite (and gave away the Koh-i-noor diamond) so that the King of Persia would give him an army to fight with, and had then died by falling down a flight of library stairs almost immediately after regaining his throne. Akbar hadnt known his father. He himself had been born in Sind, after Humayun was defeated at Chausa, and then scurried off to Persia, abandoning his son. His fourteen-month-old son. Who was found and raised by his fathers brother and enemy, Uncle Askari of

Kandahar, wild man Uncle Askari, who would have killed Akbar himself if he could ever have got close enough, which he couldnt, because his wife was always in the way. Akbar lived, because his aunt wanted him to. And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as how to look out for himself and watch his tongue and not say the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlessness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility, and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin.
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There were things, however, that nobody thought to teach him, and that he would never learn. We are the Emperor of India, Bhakti Ram Jain, but we cant write our own damn name! he shouted at his body servant at dawn, as the old man helped him with his ablutions. Yes, O most blessed entity, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, said Bhakti Ram Jain, handing him a towel. This time, the hour of the Kings levee, was also the hour of imperial flattery. Bhakti Ram Jain proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, oldschool style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque formulations of excessive encomiums could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing. Bhakti Ram Jains memory was unerring. He could fawn for hours. The Emperor saw his own face scowling back at him from his basin of warm water like an augury of doom. We are the king of kings, Bhakti Ram Jain, but we cant read our own laws. What do you say to that? Yes, O most just of judges, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, ruler of all that is, bringer together of all being, said Bhakti Ram Jain, warming to his task.

We are the Sublime Radiance, the Star of India, and the Sun of Glory, said the Emperor, who knew a thing or two about flattery himself. Yet we were raised in that shithole dump of a town where men fuck women to make babies but fuck boys to make them menraised watching out for the attacker who worked from behind as well as the warrior straight ahead. Yes, O dazzling light, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, ruler of all that is, bringer together of all being, Sublime Radiance, Star of India, and Sun of Glory, said Bhakti Ram Jain, who might have been deaf but who knew how to take a hint. Is that how a king should be raised, Bhakti Ram Jain? the Emperor roared, tipping over the basin in his wrath. Illiterate, ass-guarding, savageis that what a prince should be? Yes, O wiser than the Wise, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, ruler of all that is, bringer together of all being, Sublime Radiance, Star of India, Sun of Glory, master of human souls, forger of thy peoples destiny, said Bhakti Ram Jain. You are pretending you cant read the words on our lips! the Emperor shouted. Yes, O more insightful than the Seers, father of many You are a goat who should have his throat slit so that we can eat his meat for lunch. Yes, O more merciful than the gods, father Your mother fucked a pig to make you. Yes, O most articulate of all who articulate, f Never mind, said the Emperor. We feel better now. Go away. You can live. And here again with bright silks flying like banners from red palace windows was Sikri, shimmering in the heat like an opium vision. Here at last, with its strutting peacocks and dancing girls, was home. If the wartorn world was a harsh truth, then Sikri was a beautiful lie. The Emperor came home like a smoker returning to his pipe. He was the Enchanter. In this place he would conjure a new world, a world beyond religion, region, rank, and tribe. The most beautiful women in the world were here, and they were all his wives. The most brilliant talents in the land were assembled here, among them the Nine Jewels, the nine most brilliant of the most brilliant, and with their help there was nothing he could not

accomplish. And then there was Birbal, the best of the nine, who were the best of the best. His first minister, and first friend. The first minister and greatest wit of the age greeted him at the Hiran Minar, the tower of elephants teeth. The Emperors sense of mischief was aroused. Birbal, Akbar said, dismounting from his horse, will you answer me one question? We have been waiting a long time to ask it. The first minister of legendary wit and wisdom bowed humbly. As you wish, Jahanpanah, Shelter of the World. Well, then, said Akbar, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Birbal replied at once, The chicken. Ak-bar was taken aback. How can you be so sure? he wanted to know. Huzoor, Birbal replied, I promised to answer only one question. The first minister and the Emperor were standing on the ramparts of the city, looking out at the wheeling crows. Birbal, Akbar mused, how many crows do you imagine there are in my kingdom? Jahanpanah, Birbal replied, there are exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. Akbar was puzzled. Suppose we have them counted, he said, and there are more than that, what then? That would mean, Birbal replied, that their friends from the neighboring kingdom have come to visit them. And if there are fewer? Then some of ours will have gone abroad to see the wider world.
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A great linguist was waiting at Akbars court, a visitor from a distant Western land: a Jesuit priest who could converse and dispute fluently in dozens of languages. He challenged the Emperor to discover his native language. While the Emperor was pondering the riddle, his first minister circled the priest and all of a sudden kicked him violently in the backside. The priest let out a series of oathsnot in Portuguese but in Italian. You observe, Jahanpanah, said Birbal, that when its time to unleash a few insults a man will always choose his mother tongue. If you were an atheist, Birbal, the Emperor challenged his first minister, what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world? Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them. How so? the Emperor asked. All true believers have good

reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own, said Birbal. And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none. The first minister and the Emperor were standing at the Khwabgah, the Place of Dreams, looking out over the still surface of the Anup Talao, the monarchs private, formal pool, the Pool Without Peer, the best of all possible pools, of which it was said that when the kingdom was in trouble its waters would send a warning. Birbal, said Akbar, as you know, our favorite queen has the misfortune not to exist. Even though we love her best of all, admire her above all the others, and value her above even the lost Koh-i-noor, she is inconsolable. Your ugliest, most sour-natured shrew of a wife is still made of flesh and blood, she says. In the end, I will not be able to compete with her. The first minister advised the Emperor, Jahanpanah, you must say to her that it is precisely in the end that her victory will be apparent to everyone, for in the end none of the queens will exist any more than she does, while she will have enjoyed a lifetime of your love, and her fame will echo down the ages. Thus, in reality, while it is true that she does not exist, it is also true to say that she is the one who lives. If she did not, then over there, behind that high window, there would be nobody waiting for your return. Jodhas sisters, her fellow-wives, resented her. How could the mighty Emperor prefer the company of a woman who did not exist? When he was gone, at least, she ought to absent herself as well; she had no business to hang around with the actually existing. She should disappear like the apparition she was, slide into a mirror or a shadow and be lost. That she did not, the living queens concluded, was the sort of solecism one had to expect from an imaginary being. How could she have been brought up to know her manners when she had not been brought up at all? She was an untutored figment, and deserved to be ignored. The Emperor had put her together, they fumed, by stealing bits of them all. He said she was the daughter of the Prince of Jodhpur. She was not! That was another queen, and she was not the daughter but the sister. The Emperor also believed his fictitious beloved was the mother of his firstborn son, his long-awaited firstborn son, conceived because of the blessing of a saint, that very saint beside whose hilltop hovel this victory city had been built. But she was not Prince Salims mother, as Prince Salims real mother, Rajkumar Hira Kunwari, known as Mariam-uzZamani, daughter of Raja Bihar Mal of Amer, of the Clan Kachhwaha, grievingly told anybody who would listen. So: the limitless beauty of the

imaginary queen came from one consort, her Hindu religion from another, and her incalculable wealth from yet a third. Her temperament, however, was Akbars own creation. No real woman was ever like that, so perfectly attentive, so undemanding, so endlessly available. She was an impossibility, a fantasy of perfection. They feared her, knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistible, and that was why the King loved her best. They hated her for her theft of their histories. If they could have murdered her they would have done so, but until the Emperor tired of her, or died himself, she was immortal. The idea of the Emperors death was not beyond contemplation, but so far the queens were not contemplating it. So far, they bore their grievances in silence. The Emperor is mad, they grumbled inwardly, but sensibly forbore to utter the words. And when he was galloping around killing people they left the imaginary consort to her own devices. They never spoke her name. Jodha, Jodhabai. She wandered the palace quarters alone. She was a lonely shadow glimpsed through latticed stone screens. She was a cloth blown by the breeze. At night she stood under the little cupola on the top story of the Panch Mahal and scanned the horizon for the return of the King, who made her real. Jodha knew that her illustrious husband must have had witchcraft in his blood. Everyone had heard about Genghis Khans necromancy, his use of animal sacrifice and occult herbs, and how, by the use of the black arts, he managed to sire eight hundred thousand descendants. Everyone had heard the tale of how Timur the Lame after conquering the earth had tried to ascend to the stars and conquer the heavens, too. Everyone knew the story of how the Emperor Babar had saved the dying Humayuns life by circling his sickbed and luring Death away from the boy to the father, sacrificing himself so that his son might live. These dark pacts with Death and the Devil were her husbands heritage, and her own existence the proof of how strong the magic was in him. The creation of a real life from a dream was a superhuman act, usurping the prerogative of the gods. In those days, Sikri was swarming with poets and artists, those preening egotists who claimed for themselves the power of language and image to conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings, and yet neither poet nor painter, musician nor sculptor had come close to what the Emperor, the Perfect Man, had achieved. The court was also full of foreigners, pomaded exotics, weather-beaten merchants, narrow-faced priests from the West, boasting in ugly,

undesirable tongues about the majesty of their lands, their gods, their kings. When the Emperor showed her the pictures of their mountains and valleys theyd brought with them, she thought of the Himalayas and of Kashmir and laughed at the foreigners paltry approximations of natural beauty, their vaals and aalps, half-words to describe half-things. Their kings were savages, and they had nailed their god to a tree. What did she want with people as ridiculous as that? They came in search ofwhat, exactly? Nothing of use. If they had possessed any wisdom, the inutility of their journeying would have been obvious to them. Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd. Yes: this place, Sikri, was a fairyland to them, just as their England and Portugal, their Holland and France, were beyond her ability to comprehend. The world was not all one thing. We are their dream, she had told the Emperor. And they are ours. She loved him because he never dismissed her opinions, never swatted them away with the majesty of his hand. But imagine, Jodha, if we could awake in other mens dreams and change them, and if we had the courage to invite them into ours, he told her while they slapped down ganjifa playing cards one evening. What if the whole world became a single waking dream? She could not call him a fantasist when he spoke of waking dreams, for what else was she? She had never left the palaces in which she had been born a decade earlier, born an adult, to the man who was not only her creator but her lover. It was true: she was both his wife and his child. If she left the palaces, or so she had always suspected, the spell would be broken and she would cease to exist. Perhaps she could do it if he, the Emperor, were there to sustain her with the strength of his belief, but if she were alone she wouldnt have a chance. Fortunately, she had no desire to leave. The labyrinth of walled and curtained corridors that connected the various buildings of the palace complex afforded her all the possibilities for travel she required. This was her little universe. She lacked a conquerors interest in elsewhere. Let the rest of the world be for others. This square of fortified stone was hers. She was a woman without a past, separate from history, or, rather, possessing only such history as he had been pleased to bestow upon her, and which the other queens bitterly contested. The question of her independent existence, of whether she had one, insisted on being asked, over and over, whether she willed it or not. If God turned his face away

from his creation, Man, would Man simply cease to be? That was the large-scale version of the question, but it was the selfish, small-scale versions that bothered her. Was her will free of the man who had willed her into being? Did she exist only because of his suspension of disbelief in the possibility of her existence? If he died, could she go on living? She felt a quickening of her pulse. Something was about to happen. She felt herself strengthen, solidify. Doubts fled from her. He was coming. The Emperor had entered the palace complex, and she could feel the power of his approaching need. Yes. Something was about to happen. She felt his footfall in her blood, could see him in herself, growing larger as he walked toward her. She was his mirror, because he had created her that way, but she was herself as well. Yes. Now that the act of creation was complete, she was free to be the person he had created, free, as everyone was, within the bounds of what it was in their nature to be and to do. How strong she suddenly was, how full of blood and rage. His power over her was far from absolute. All she had to be was coherent. She had never felt more coherent. Her nature rushed into her like a flood. She was not subservient. He did not like subservient women. She would scold him first. How could he stay away so long? In his absence, she had had to combat many plots. All was untrustworthy here. The very walls were filled with whispers. She had fought them all and kept the palace safe against the day of his return, defeating the small, selfserving treacheries of the domestic staff, confounding the spying lizards hanging on the walls, stilling the scurry of conspiratorial mice. All this while she felt herself fading, while the mere struggle for survival required the exercise of almost the full force of her will. The other queens . . . no, she would not mention the other queens. The other queens did not exist. Only she existed. She, too, was a sorceress. She was the sorceress of herself. There was only one man she needed to enchant, and he was here. He was not going to the other queens. He was coming to what pleased him. She was full of him, of his desire for her, of the something that was about to happen. She was the scholar of his need. She knew everything. The door opened. She existed. She was immortal, because she had been created by love. He was wearing a cockaded golden turban and a coat of gold brocade.

He was wearing the dust of his conquered land like a soldiers badge of honor. He was wearing a sheepish grin. I wanted to get home faster, he said. I was delayed. There was something awkward and experimental about his speech. What was the matter with him?
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She decided to ignore his uncharacteristic hesitancy and proceed as she had planned. Oh, you wanted, she said, standing upright, in her ordinary day clothes, pulling a silken head scarf across the lower portion of her face. A man doesnt know what he wants. A man doesnt want what he says he wants. A man wants only what he needs. He was puzzled by her refusal to acknowledge his descent into the first person, which honored her, which was supposed to make her swoon with joy, which was his newest discovery and his declaration of love. Puzzled, and a little put out. How many men have you known, that you are so knowledgeable? he said, frowning, approaching her. Did you dream up men for yourself while I was away, or did you find men to pleasure you, men who were not dreams? Are there men that I must kill? Surely this time she would notice the revolutionary, erotic newness of the pronoun? Surely now she would understand what he was trying to say? She did not. She believed she knew what aroused him, and was thinking only of the words she had to say to make him hers. Women think less about men in general than the generality of men can imagine. Women think about their own men less often than their men like to believe. All women need all men less than all men need them. This is why it is so important to keep a good woman down. If you do not keep her down, she will surely get away. She hadnt dressed up to receive him. If you want dolls, she said, go over to the dolls house, where theyre waiting for you, prettifying and squealing and pulling one anothers hair. This was a mistake. She had mentioned the other queens. His brow furrowed and his eyes clouded over. She had made a false move. The spell had almost broken. She poured all the force of her eyes into his, and he came back to her. The magic held. She raised her voice and continued. She didnt flatter him. You already look like an old man, she said. Your sons will imagine youre their grandfather. She didnt congratulate him on his victories. If history had gone down a different path, she said, then the old gods would still rule, the gods you have defeated, the many-limbed many-

headed gods, full of stories and deeds instead of punishments and laws, the gods of being standing beside the goddesses of doing, dancing gods, laughing gods, gods of thunderbolts and flutes, so many, many gods, and maybe that would have been an improvement. She knew she was beautiful and now, dropping her thin silk veil, she unleashed that beauty, and he was lost. When a boy dreams up a woman, he gives her big breasts and a small brain, she murmured. When a king imagines a wife, he dreams of me. She was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love. Before he left on his long journey, she had marked him with the Three Deep Marks, which were scratches made by the first three fingers of her right hand upon his back and his chest, and on his testicles as well: something to remember her by. Now that he was home, she could make him shudder, could actually make his hair stand on end, by placing her nails on his cheeks and lower lip and chest, without leaving any mark. Or she could mark him, leaving a half-moon shape upon his neck. She could push her nails slowly into his face. She could perform the Hopping of the Hare, marking the areolas around his nipples without touching him anywhere else on his body. And no living woman was as skilled as she at the Peacocks Foot, that delicate maneuver: she placed her thumb on his left nipple and with her four other fingers she walked around his breast, digging in her long nails, her curved, clawlike nails, which she had guarded and sharpened in anticipation of this very moment, pushing them into the Emperors skin until they made marks resembling the trail left by a peacock as it walks through mud. She knew what he would say while she did these things. He would tell her how, in the loneliness of his Army tent, he would close his eyes and imitate her movements, imagine his nails moving on his body to be hers, and be aroused. She waited for him to say it, but he didnt. Something was different. There was an impatience in him now, an irritation almost, an annoyance she did not understand. It was as if the many sophistications of the lovers art had lost their charms and he wished simply to possess her and be done with it. She understood that he had changed. And now everything else would change as well. As for the Emperor, he never again referred to himself in the singular in the presence of another person. He was plural in the eyes of the world, plural even in the judgment of the woman who loved him, and plural he would remain. He had learned his lesson.

MR. BONES
by Paul Theroux
SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

Whenever I get sentimental and tell people how my father used to read to me and encourage me, I realize that Im lying. Is it a gesture of kindness toward himlike You look marvellous! (something he used to say), or Pretty as a picture! (seldom true), or Looks good enough to eat! (of my mothers gristly meat loaf)? Generosity, I suppose, can often verge on the satirical. My father, apparently a simple, cheery soul, was impossible to know. In his lifetime, I found it hard to see him through his niceness, and now, ten years after his death, he seems more enigmatic than ever. There he stands, at a little distance, jingling coins in his pocket, waiting for someone to need him: a satisfied man, with the sort of good humor and obliging manner I associate with an old-fashioned servant. A smile is the hardest expression to fathom. He must have known that. In the period I am thinking of, around 1956, he lost his job. Never mind, he said, and found another one. Did he like it? Im tickled to death! he said. He didnt drink. He didnt smoke. He never went out at night, except to church. Bowling and the movies he abandoned after becoming a father. He had few friends, no close ones, no confidantshe wasnt the confiding type. I was eleven. With two older brothers and a younger sister, I was invisible, in the lower middle of the pack, always a few steps behind, unnoticed. And my father was the insubstantial presence he wished to be, merely a man who lived in the house. Dramatic entrance, and then silence. Dramatic departure, and then silence again. This all sounds harmonious, yet there was disorder and tension and conflict in our household. It bristled like the angular splinters in the woodwork; it pulsed in the air, a disturbance that was deep, subtle, and voiceless, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries, masked by politeness, or sometimes by hostile displays of affection. The quiet household is often more turbulent than the household of the tyrant or the drunkard. One of the unspoken conflicts in our house concerned the house itself. My mothers version of the storythe blaming version, the one she

wouldnt let him live downwas that my father, having decided that we had to move (four kids in a tiny house and a fifth on the way), was appointed house-hunter. My mother was pregnant and busy, but she was also the sort of person who provoked others to make decisions, so that if they made the wrong ones she could say, Well, whose fault is that? She greeted a good choice with silence, a bad one with loud reproach. Deniability was a defense she mastered long before the word was coined. Dad was like hired help: the house-hunter. Unused to spending large sums of money or to making big decisions on his own, he became more affable, more genial than Id ever seen him. He did so out of sheer nervousness, a kind of helpless hilarity, like that of an almost ruined gambler at the blackjack table, risking everything on the turn of a card.
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He saw three or four houses. They were all unsuitable, though he liked them. My mother was vexed. This was our dinner-table talk. (We children were discouraged from speaking at mealtime, so we listened.) Whats good about it? my mother would say. Itll be hard to heat, or Its not on a bus line, or Thats a bad neighborhood. One winter night, she was in tears. Dad had seen a house that he liked. He had been told the price. In his anxiety, he had not bargained; he had not said, My wife will have to see it, or Well think it over. He had said, Well take it!, with a sudden flourish of cash that startled even the seller of the house, a cranky old woman in a soiled apron. At least, that was my mothers version, and, in the oral tradition of our family, the only version that was allowed. In a matter of an hour or so, my father had seen the house and agreed to buy it. Another detail to his discredit was that he had seen it only in the dark. It was January, and he worked until five-thirty; he had driven there after work, tramped through the snow, and looked it over, and by seven the deal was done. The reason for my mothers distress was that, in anticipation of finding the right house, Dad had been carrying five hundred dollars in small bills around with him. The papers hed signed that night had specified a deposit of that very amount, nonrefundable. Our whole lifes savings! my mother cried, thumping the table. How could you? Obviously, hed liked the house; he hadnt wanted to risk losing it; he

wasnt a bargainer; and he had been pressed for time, house-hunting after work. Now the situation was: buy the house and pay the rest of the money with a mortgage or lose the deposit. Our lifes savingswasted! Lifes savings was probably an exaggeration, but not by much; my fathers new job was menial, as a shoe salesman. He was grateful for the work, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees. Dad suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner tableand at other times, too. I heard bedroom recriminations, which were rare in our household. But, in a short time, the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moveda hugely disruptive event in a family that experienced few, almost no, events that involved a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved in the course of my childhood, and what made it most memorable was the fact that my mother was briefly shocked into silence. The house was large but odd-shapedbony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, with the narrow side to the street, the wide side a wall of windows. It seemed somehow unfinished, the kitchen not quite right, the doors either poorly fitting or missing, the varnished cabinets made of thin wood, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. My brothers, Fred and Floyd, shared a room with bunk beds. Theres room for the piano, my father said, in a tone of hollow enthusiasm. That winter, my father never stopped smiling. His smile said, Alls well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hinges, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort it took to open it. She told everyone that she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts. She sighed loudlyall the sounds and gestures of discontent. Dads only response was to say, Ill see to that. He was imperturbablenot so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable: How can I help? The kind of submissiveness youd see in the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer. Spring came. The roof began to leak; the drains erupted; the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by the weather, we could see that the house needed paint. Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in an outraged tone, Youre not going to paint that house yellow! So Dad returned the yellow and bought some cans of gray. Thats better, the neighbor said. My mother pointed out that hed dripped gray paint onto the white

trim. He repainted the trim. Mother said, Now youve gone and dripped white paint on the shingles. Dad smiled and repainted, never quite getting it right. Anticipating insects, he put up screens. The screens were flimsy and rusted; holes had been poked through them. The stove was unreliable, and the fuel oil in the heater gurgled and leaked from the pump, which had to be replaced by a plumber, Dads fellow choir member Tony Martello. Tony worked for nothing, or for very little, groaning in wordless irritation as he toiled. My fathers new job was a problem, too: long hours and low pay, while my mother was pregnant, home with small children. She was heavy and walked with a backward-leaning gait, supporting her belly with one hand, seeming to balance herself as she moved. I lost a child two years ago, she said, as though threatening to lose this one, too. Dad said, Its going to be fine. How would you know? He smiled; he had no reply. As a sort of penance, he washed the dishes, calling out, Whos going to dry for me?, and, because of the tension, each of us said, Ill do it!, and pushed around trying to be helpful.
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I said that my father had no recreations, but he had onethe choir, legitimate because it was church-related. His voice was confident and rather flat, with a gravelly distinction. He prays twice who sings to the Lord was printed on the hymnal. My father believed that. Choir practice was more than a form of devotion, an expression of piety; it was a spiritual duty. Dad always went alone, and he always came back happy. His happiness wasnt audible in anything he said, but his mood was improvedyou could tell by his movements, his breathing, the way he listened, with a different sort of smile, a relaxed posture. April came. The house is full of flies. Ill take care of it. He patched the screens with little glued-on squares of screen.

The faucet drips. Say, Ill pick up some washers on the way home from choir. This is the second time Ive mentioned it. Dad was putting on his hat, snapping the brim, looking jaunty. You never listen. In fact, all he did was listen, but a certain sort of nagging repetition can deafen you. We didnt realize then that wed come to the end of a chapter, that we were starting a new one. After it was over, we knew Dad much better than we had before, and were more bewildered; wed had a glimpse of what was beneath his smile. The wickedest episodes of revelation can have the most innocent beginnings. This one began with a song. Looking back, it all seems even weirder and scarier than it did at the time; I remember it with reluctance, embarrassed and ashamed. My father came home one afternoon carrying a large envelope. Trying to look casual, he got his fingers inside it and, with a selfconscious flourish, took out some pages of sheet music. The illustration on the cover showed a black man in a gleaming top hat, white gloves, mouth open in the act of singing. I could see from his features that he was a white man wearing makeup. SayDad was ruffling the pagescould you play this, Mother? Asking a favor always made him shy. Being asked a favor always made Mother ponderous and powerful. Oh, so now you want something, do you? she seemed to reply, with the upward tilt of her head and her triumphant smile. She looked with a kind of distaste at the sheet music, holding it with unwilling fingers, as though it were uncleanand it was rather grubby, worn at the edges, torn at the crease where it folded. It had a limp, clothlike look, as though it had been propped on many music stands. After a while, Mother took herself and her big belly to the piano. She spun the stool to the right height and, balancing herself on it, reached over her pregnancy as though across a counter. Frowning at the music, she banged out some notes. I could tell from her playing that she was angry. Dad leaned in with his bifocals.
Mandy, theres a minister handy And it sure would be dandy . . .

He gagged a little, cleared his throat, and began again, in the wrong key. He could not read music, but he could carry a tune if he heard it enough. In this first effort, he struggled to find the melody. Youre not listening, Mother said. Just trying to he said, and clawed at the song sheet instead of finishing the sentence. He started to sing again, but too fast, and Mother pounded the keys and tramped on the pedals, as though she were at the wheel of some sort of vehicle, a big wooden bus that she was driving down a steep hill with her feet and hands.
Mandy, theres a minister handy . . .

Hearing the blundering repetitions of someone learning something from scratch was unbearable to me. Probably out of exasperation, I knew the song before they did. I was in a fury for it to be over. I left the room, but even two rooms away I heard:
So dont you linger, Heres the ring for your finger.

Against my will I listened until the song was in my head, not as it was meant to be sung but in Dads halting rendition. Later, over dinner, in reply to a question I didnt hear, Dad said, Fella gave it to meloaned it. Ill have to give it back afterward. Who loaned it? Joe Buffalino. Why? Tony Martello loaned it to him. Whats it for? Minstrel show. Mother made a face. As though to avoid further questions, Dad filled his mouth with food and went on eating, with the faraway, thoughtful look he assumed when he didnt want to be questioned. Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said, Pass the mouse turd, sonny. We stared at him. He was chewing. Tell you a great meal, he said. Lettuce. Turnip. And pea.

He winked. We had no idea what he was talking about. The words minstrel show, he seemed to feel, explained everythingand perhaps they did, though not to me. Words I had never heard before had a significance for him, and a private satisfaction. Mouse turd ? After that, he practiced Mandy every night, singing with more confidence and tunefulness, as Mother played and thumped her pedalling feet. Within a week, he grew hoarse, and from the next room it was as though another man were singingnot Dad but a growly stranger. Around this time, Dad revealed his new name. This was at the dinner table, Mother at one end, Dad at the other, Fred, Floyd, Rose, and me in between.
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Fella says to me, Wasnt that song just beautiful? Didnt it touch you, Mr. Bones? I says, No, but the fella that sang it touched me, and he still owes me five bucks. Whos Mr. Bones? I asked. Yours truly. No, its not, Fred said. Only one thing in the world keeps you from being a barefaced liar, he said to Fred. We were shocked at his suddenness. Your mustache, Dad said, and wagged his head and chuckled. I dont have a mustache, Fred said. Mother got flustered when she heard anyone telling a joke. She said, Dont be stupid. You think Im stupid? Dad said eagerly. You should see my brother. He walks like this. He got up from the table and bent over and hopped forward. He did have a brotherthat was the confusing part. Youre so pretty and youre so intelligent, he said, striking a pose with Mother, using that new snappy voice. I wish I could say the same for you, she said. Dad laughed, a kind of cackle, as though it were just what hed wanted to hear. He said, You could, if you told as big a lie as I just did. He nudged me and added, She was too ugly to have her face lifted. They

lowered her body instead. With that, he skipped out of the room, his hands in the air, and I thought for a moment that Mother was going to cry. He had become a different man, and it had happened quickly, just like that, calling himself Mr. Bones and teasing us, teasing Mother. She was confused and upset. Once he mastered the song, he kept humming it, and his jokes, not really jokes, were more like taunts. Maybe its his new job, Fred said in the bedroom, after lights-out. Its this house, Floyd said. Ma hates it. Its Dads fault. Hes just being silly. Whats a minstrel show? I asked. No one answered. Mother, trying to be friendly, asked Dad about his job a few days later. They said Id be a connoisseur, but Im just a common sewer. There was that gesture with the handswaggling his fingers. Said Id be a pretty good physician, but I said, Im not good at fishin. Or a doctor of some standing. I says, No, Im sittingin the shoe department. Mother said coldly, We need new linoleum in the upstairs bathroom. And you need new clothes, because your clothes are like the two French cities: Toulouse and Toulon. Dont be a jackass. Mr. Jackass to you. I wish Joe Buffalino hadnt given you that music. Lightning said I needed it. Tambo gave it to him. Play it for me again. I need a good physic. Mother began to clear the table. I love work, Dad said. I could watch it all day. Mother went to the sink and turned on the water. She kept her back to us, but I associated the water running into the dishpan with her tears. Mr. Bones was at his friskiest in the evening. He had swagger and assurance, and if we tried to get his attention or asked him a question he began to sing Mandy. He had somehow learned two other songs as well: Ma Blushin Rosie and Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody, Lightnings song and Tambos, so he said. I was used to my father singing, but not these songs; used to his good humor, but there was anger in these jokes. And he, who never went out at

night except to Benediction or choir practice, was now out most nights. He stopped asking Mother to play the piano for him; he would simply break into a song, drawling it out of the side of his mouth.
When you croon, Croon a tune From the heart of Dixie.

He didnt look any differenthe dressed the same, in a gray suit and a white shirt and a blue tie and the topcoat he disparaged as too dressy. One day, one of his sleeves was limp. He flapped it at Mother as though his arm were missing and said, I know what youre thinkingWorld War Two. Then he shot the arm out of the sleeve and said, Nope. Filenes Basement. Bad fit! The variation that nightand for nights to comewas the tambourine he had acquired. When he made a joke or a quip, he shook it and rapped it on his knee and elbow and shook it again. Shika-shikashika. R.S.V.P., he said, holding up a piece of mail. Remember Send Vedding Present, and he jingled the tambourine. One day after school, I went to the store where he worked. Instead of walking in, I kept my head down and crept to the side window to get a glimpse of Dad. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the shoe department, his chin in his hand, looking not like Mr. Bones but sad and silent, like a man trying to remember something. The other clerks had gathered at the back of the store and were laughing, but not Dad. Were they ignoring him? He paid no attention. He was readingunusual, a shoe clerk reading. I didnt know this man, either.
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I began to be glad that he was out most nights. At the house wed moved from, he had spent every evening in his chair in the corner, dressed in flannel pajamas and a fuzzy bathrobe, reading the Globe. Now he sometimes didnt even come home for supper, and if he did it was Pass the mouse turd, or, holding the pepper shaker, This is how I feel, like pulverized pepperfine! The oil burners back on the fritz, Mother said. Any mention of a problem with the house these days made Dad smile

his Mr. Bones smile and roll his eyes. Heard about the King of England? Hes got a royal burner. Well have to get Tony to look at it. Tambo is a busy man, yes, he is. Says to me, What is the quickest way to the emergency ward? I says, Tambo, just you stand in the middle of the road. Mother did not react, except to say, Its giving off a funny smell. Giving off a funny smell! Dad said, and put one finger in the air what I now recognized as a Mr. Bones gesture. He was about to say something and wanted attention. Mr. Interlocutor, what is the difference between an elephant passing wind and a place where you might go for a drink? I dont think you understand, Mother said, in a strained voice. This house hasnt been right since the day we moved in. First it was the roof, then the paint, then the plumbing. Now its the heat. Were not going to have any hot water. Everythings wrong. Dad thought a moment, then looked around the table and said, Mr. Interlocutor, the difference between an elephant passing wind and the place where you might go for a drink is: one is a barroom and the other is a barroom! He said it so loud we jumped. He didnt laugh. He drew his chair next to Mother and sang:
Rosie, you are my posey, You are my hearts bouquet. Come out here in the moonlight, Theres something, sweet love, I wanna say.

Mother looked awkward and sad. He snatched a bowl from the table. Why is my thumb in your soup, Madam? he asked. To keep it warm, Madam. In a way, by clowning, Dad took her mind off the problems of the house. But she could not get his attention. And who was he, anyway? He wouldnt refer to Tony Martello as anything but Tambo, and Joe Buffalino was always Lightning. They had never been close friends before. Morrie Daigle said hed help you fix the roof. Mr. Interlocutor is too hot to do that. He is so hot he will only read fan mail.

That was how we found out who Mr. Interlocutor was. Have you lost your wallet? Dad said to Floyd. No, Floyd said, and clapped his hand to his pocket. Good. Then give me the five dollars you owe me. Floyd made a face, looked helpless, thrashed a little. It was true that Dad had given him five dollars, but he had not brought it up before. Dad said, Hear about the Indian who had a red ant? I didnt understand that one at all. I pictured an Indian with an insect. It made no sense. There was something abrupt and deflecting in his humor. Whenever he made a joke, he seemed to expand, pushing the house and his job aside. Mother appeared to be afraid of him now. Before, she had always made a remark, or nagged, or blamed. These days, she just became very quiet and watched him. Floyd was on the basketball team, Fred played hockey, so they were out most eveningsat practice, they said. I knew it was just an excuse to stay away from home and Mr. Bones. Rose was a little kid of seven, and she actually found him funny, and let him tickle her. But I had nowhere to go. Mr. Bones was a stranger to me, and for the first time, lying in bed at night, I began to think, Who are you? What do you want? The light went on and I had the answer. Most of the lights in our house were bare bulbs with no shades, hanging on frayed black cords from the ceilinganother source of Mothers complaintsand the brightness of the one dangling in my bedroom only made things worse. Emerging from sleep, I was halfblinded. Yet I could see enough to be terrified. A disfigured villain from a horror comic was bending over my bed only after a few minutes did I realize that it was Dadhis whole face a sticky black, a white oval outline around his lips. He wore a wig like a big woolly hat, a red floppy bow tie, a yellow speckled vest, and a black coat, and he was emphatically gesturing with white-gloved hands. He was smiling under the blackness that shone on his face, and he leaned over me and seemed to shriek. Give us a kiss, sonny boy!
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Then he laughed and stood up and waved his gloved hands again and

jerked the light chain, bringing down darkness. His voice had matched his face. He was so black that I assumed he was still in my bedroom, standing there invisible in his floppy tie: Mr. Bones. I had not heard the door close. I said into the menacing gloom, Dadare you there? No answer. I said again, Dad?, and, in a trembly voice, Mr. Bones? In the morning, the room was empty. When I went down for breakfast, he was eating oatmeal as usual. He had a decorous way of holding his spoon. I looked closely at him and saw some streaks of black makeup caked in the creases of his neck. I sprinkled raisins on my oatmeal. Pass me the dead flies, sonny, he said in his Mr. Bones voice. By then, his remarks usually silenced the room. We all felt the effect of his angry humor. Floyd and Fred pretended to find it funny and occasionally they teased back. When Dad made his Toulouse and Toulon joke, Floyd said, Well, youre like a town in Massachusetts Marblehead. Instead of being insulted, Dad smiled and said, I like that. He began to come home every night in blackface. Hearing his jokes again and again, I at last understood the one about the Indian and the red antred aunt was the point of it, though we never pronounced the word that way. We were afraid to ask him about his job these days. If Mother mentioned the housethe drips to be fixed, the oil burner to be mended, the linoleum to be laidI didnt hear it. In response to almost any question, he began singing.
A million baby kisses Ill deliver, If you will only sing that Swanee River.

The rhythm was there, a confident drawl, yet his voice was strained from overuse, gargly and cross, as though he were in pain. The weeks of rehearsals had taken away his real voice and given him this new one. He lifted his knees and did dance steps as he sang, and he raised his white gloves. It seemed so wrong. I was always glancing at the door, embarrassed and scared that someonea neighbor, the Fuller Brush man, Grandpa

might come in and see him swaying and singing, with that black face and that wig. He had another song, too:
When life seems full of clouds and rain And I am full of nothin but pain, Who soothes my thumpin bumpin brain?

He would always pause after that, then bend over and stick out his head and say, Nobody!
When all day long things go amiss, And I go home to find some bliss, Who hands to me a glowin kiss? Nobody!

The next time I sneaked up to the window of the store after school and looked in, I saw him sitting where hed sat before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. The other clerks seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves. Louie Buffalino said, You going to the minstrel show? I dont know, I said. Are you? My old mans in it. Sos yours. I dont even know what its supposed to be. Its a pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show, Louie said. This big event was just a talent show to Louie; and his white-haired father, who worked on the M.T.A. buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had intimidated everyone. He was now someone to fear, saying the things that he normally avoided saying. In his minstrelshow costume, he could be as reckless as he wanted. It was true that Fred told fibs and didnt want to go to college; true that Floyd owed Dad money and hated trumpet lessons. And it was easy to see that Mothers nagging was what caused him to tease her and change the subject. His jokes were more than jokes; they were ways of telling us the truth. The yellow mustard in big quart jars that we stocked was cheap and tasteless; mouse turd was a good name for it. The stale

raisins that Mother bought cheap in the dented-package aisle were like dead flies. But it was so odd, hearing these things from his white-outlined mouth, to the accompaniment of his tambourine. Dad, we said, pleading. Dad done gone. That was prior to his decease, Mr. Bones. I says, He had no niece. Shika-shika-shika, went the tambourine. He was happy, defiantly happy, powerfully happy, talking to us, teasing us in ways Id never heard before. He had once been remote, with a kindly smile that made him hard to approach; now he was up close and laughing at us and he wouldnt go away. It was as though hed been turned inside out, and the true Dad was showing. Swanking in the role of a cartoon slave, hed become a frightening master to us. Something else I discovered one day, because I kept going to the store to spy on him, was that instead of sitting silently alone in the shoe department he now had company: Tony Martello, Joe Buffalino, Morrie Daigle, and two men Id never seen before, all of them with their heads together, sitting in the customers chairs, whispering, as though they were cooking something up. So odd to see this in a store where everyone else was either working or shopping or being loudly busy.
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That was his secretmine, too. These men were like conspirators, with a single plan in their minds, and the sight of them impressed me, because Dad was clearly in charge. I could see it in his posture, as he sat upright, wagging his finger at them like a conductor with a baton, giving directions, issuing energetic commands. Mr. Bones was their leader. That same night, he came home after dinner, in his blackface and floppy tie and wig, and said, Listen to Mr. Bones. Fred was fiddling with the radio. Mother was at the sink with Floyd. I was looking at a comic book. I says, listen to Mr. Bones! He spoke so loud we jumped, and, as we did, he banged and clicked his tambourine. He was like a drunk you couldnt talk back to, yet he hadnt had a drink.
I aint never done nothin to nobody,

I aint never got nothin from nobody, no time, And until I get somethin from somebody sometime, Ill never do nothin for nobody no time!

He searched our faces, shaking his head, and moaned, Nobody, no time! Was it a song? Was it a poem? Was it a speech? It was too furious to be entertainment. Even though it was painful to hear, it was being spoken by a man who had our full attention. We had to listen; we couldnt look away. That proved that he was the opposite of the poor soul he was describinghe was stronger than we were, though I recognized the nobody he spoke of: it wasnt Mr. Bones; it was Dad. After that, he went over to Fred and said, What are you going to do for Mr. Bones? College, Fred said, blinking fiercely. Know the difference between a college professor and a railway conductor? No. No what? No, Mr. Bones. One trains minds and the other minds trains. Which one do you want to be? College professor, Mr. Bones. Mr. Bones turned to Floyd. What are you going to do for Mr. Bones? Trumpet lessons, Mr. Bones. You always were good at blowing your own trumpet. Ha! Then he had me by the chin and was lifting it, as Dad had never done. Who was that lady you saw me with last night? With his white-gloved hand gripping my chin, I couldnt speak. That was no lady. That was my wife! Mother muttered as he shook his tambourine. Youll need some Karo syrup for that throat, she said, and handed him a bottle and a spoon. He took a swig straight from the bottle, then said to Fred, Here, want to keep this bottle up your end? I didnt know it was a joke until he lowered his shoulders and shook his tambourine.

I dreaded the show, which was just a week away, and when the day came I said, I dont want to go. Ive got a wicked bad stomach ache. Everyones going, Mother said, with a kind of nervous insistence that I recognized: if I defied her, she might start screaming. It was a wet Saturday night in May. We went together to the highschool auditorium in our old car, Mother driving. I could tell she was upset from the way she drove, riding the brake, stamping on the clutch the way she stamped on the piano pedals. Dad had gone separately. Tambos stopping by for me, hed said. I hurried into the auditorium, and slid down in my seat so that no one would see me. When the music began and the curtain went up, I covered my face and peered through my fingers. DadMr. Bonesand the other men were sitting onstage, their chairs in a semicircle. Mr. Bones looked confident and happy; he was dressed like a clown, in his shiny vest and big bow tie, but he looked powerful. All of them were in blackface, except Morrie Daigle, in the center, who wore a white suit and a white top hat. Mr. Bones, wasnt that music just beautiful? Didnt it touch you? Morrie said. I pressed my fingers to my ears, and closed my eyes and groaned, so that I wouldnt hear the rest. I wanted to disappear. I was so slumped in my seat that my head wasnt even showing, but although I kept my hands to my ears I heard familiar phrasesdoctor of good standing and that was prior to his decease. The songs I knew by heart penetrated me as I sat there trying to deafen myself. Mr. Bones sang Mandy. Rosie, Rock-a-Bye Your Baby, and Nobody were sung by others. You should see my brother, he walks like this, I heard, and knew it was Mr. Bones. I heard barefaced liar. Even so, I kept my eyes shut, my palms against my ears. There was much more, skits and songs. People laughing, people clapping, the loud music, the shouts. It was silly and embarrassing, yet the same jokes and songs had intimidated us at home, and Mr. Bones had been different at home, too, not this ridiculous man clowning, far away on the stage, but someone else, someone I didnt want to think of as Dad, making fools of us and getting us to agree with him and make decisions. That was who he wasDad as Mr. Bones.
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At the end of the show, while the men were still taking bows onstage, I said, I have to go to the bathroom, and ran out and hid in the car. Back home, afterward, no one said anything about the show. Dad was in his regular clothes, with the faint greasy streaks of black on his neck and behind his ears. He was excited, breathless, but he didnt speak. The strange episode was over. Later, I got anxious whenever he hummed Mandy or Rosie while shaving in the kitchen, but he didnt make any more jokes; he didnt tease or taunt us anymore. Watching him through the side window of the store, I saw him standing near the cash register, smiling at the front door, as though to welcome a customer. The following year, there was talk of another minstrel show, but nothing happened. We had a TV set by then, and the news was of trouble in Little Rock, school integration, black children protected by National Guardsmen, and white crowds shouting abuse at the frightened students who were being liberated. Our bald-headed President made a speech on TV. Dad watched with us, saying nothing, perhaps thinking about how Mr. Bones had been liberated, too, or banished. It was not what Dad had expected. The expression on his face was vacant, stunned with sorrow, but before long he was smiling.

HANWELL SENIOR
by Zadie Smith
MAY 14, 2007

Hanwell Snr was Hanwells father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way. Not in his personhe was a big personality, in that odious phrasebut in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it. A feckless and slapdash manworse, in many ways, than a cruel man. Those who have experience of such people will understand. Cruelty can be righteously opposed, eventually dismissed. A freewheeling carelessness with your cares is something else again. It must teach you a sad self-sufficiency, being fathered like that, and a brutal reticence of the heart. A reluctance to get going at all. Hanwell Snr came to Hanwell like a comet, at long intervals. He was there when Hanwell was born, surely, and six years after that on a beach

in Brighton, holding Hanwell by the armpits and dangling him over a pier. Hanwell Snr spent that evening away from his family, to whom he gave a little money with the generous idea of a round of fish and chips. It didnt stretch as far as that. A boyo, with charm in spades. That sounds antique, but boyo was the word one would have used at the time. First to raise a glass and last to put it downvery much hail fellow, well met although he was never a drunk, and never incompetent. The type to sing along with those far worse gone than himself, with the idea of gaining advantage over them in their weakness. Back at home, he had a machine he put tuppence in and a fag came out, like in a pub. Also, an eye for his wifes nearest neighbor, a widow, Sue BoydSue, Sue, Im very much in love with you, to the tune of a famous ballad of the time, catching her round the waist and waltzing her from the back door to the gate, Mrs. Hanwell smiling helplessly on from the window. A big man physically, far bigger than Hanwell. And then later, maybe that same year, maybe the next, on November 5th, suddenly at the back door in the blackness with the gift of some penny bangers. He didnt stay to light these with Hanwell. Then gone again. Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back: a common enough refrain in England, then and now. Only, Hanwell Snr was one of the periodic returnees. This makes it worse, as previously discussed. Leaving Hanwell standing in the blackness in short trousers holding bangers. This was never forgotten. It persists, a fleck of the late nineteen-twenties. It is recorded here by a descendant of Hanwell Snr of whom he could have had no notion, being as unreal to him as broadband or goblins. No one can explain the process by which these things are retained while much else vanishesa lot of sentimental rubbish is written on the subject. Hanwell himself kept faith with scientific explanations. He knew nothing whatsoever of science. Dimly, he imagined chemical flareups in the brain chemistry, arresting moving images (his analogy came from photographic film, of which he had some experience), and that these flareups are random in their occasion and unobservable at the moment they happen. Of course, the writing of this is also a kind of flareup, albeit of a sadder, secondary and parasitic kind.
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In the mid-thirties, Hanwell Snr went to Canada, an attempt to make

his fortune in logging. Hanwell was given a brief, thrilling tour of the ship before it sailed, although not by his father; a crewman put a candle on a thick brass rail and thus demonstrated to Hanwell how crosswise scratches turn orderly and concentric in thrown light. Three years later Hanwell Snr returned, still with no money. He was now able to roll a cigarette with one hand the way the cowboys did. Hanwell was not especially impressed. Subsequently, Hanwell Snr became a conductor on the buses. Then came the war, from which he never really returned, having fallen for a middle-class lady who drove an ambulance. Turned up once at Hanwells own barracks, with a new nameBilland the affectations of an Irishman. It was eerie to witness. Words held no security with Hanwell Snr, served as no anchor, bore no relation to the things of the world. A darker shade of this same tendency is called psychopathy. He took out a few filthy photos from the Far East and told amusing, believable anecdotes set in Kerry. This, to a stranger, would appear to fit well with the copper-wire hair and the close eyes. Hanwell wished himself more of a stranger. As it stood, he could only wince inwardly at this second, false personality, while making a good show of laughing along as Bill made a friend of all the young soldiers whom Hanwell himself had not yet managed to befriend. Good sort, your old man! Lively, good for a laugh! Said approvingly, and probably true (Hanwell tried hard to be generous in his interpretations), if you happened not to be his son. If you happened not to be his son. Bill walked out two hours later, merry as Christmas. Wasnt seen again by Hanwell for twelve years. It was August of 1956. Hanwell got word that his father was nicely set up with a little business in an obscure village in the county of Kent. Without any real expectationor none he could confess to himselfHanwell got on his bike. This time, he would appear. It was nothing to him, back then, to ride from London to Kent. He was young, relatively speaking, though he wouldnt have thought himself especially so, with a young family already. He did not know then that a second family lay in wait for him, not yet sprung, coiled in his future. A roasting August day. Hanwell had devised a water carrier out of an old plastic kerosene bottle and strapped it to the crossbaran invention a little ahead of its time. He powered along a newly built stretch of the A20, wherever possible nipping off and taking byroads through the villages, feeling that the air was purer there. I hope I can say hedgerow and it will be clear that I dont mean to be poetic, but only historically accurate. Hedgerow, thick and briary, caught his shirt twice and made it

ragged round the elbow. He had it in his mindas I have it in mine, with equal stubbornness, when I am writing at lengthnot to stop before a certain point; he would eat at his destination and not before. One more mile, one more chapter, one more mile, one more chapter. The village was in a little valley; Hanwell swooned round the bends and rolled into town, stopping at the village green, which was all the village there was. Two establishments stood nearby: a redbrick pub with pretty clumps of lavender growing in the window pots and, on the other side of the green, a luridly painted fish-and-chip van. Hanwell knew better than to hope. He got off his bike and pushed it with a sure touch round the perimeter, the faintest pressure of left hand to saddle. It was four oclockthe van was shut up. He leaned the bike against gypsy-red lettering outlined in gold: HANWELLS FINEST FISH AND CHIPS. He went to sit in the grass, beneath a tree, overlooking the cricket pitch and the marshy land near the ponds. He was unable to absorb these various lessons in the color green. Instead, there was smell: sear-leaved, blowsy roses, last of the summer. Collect them, give them to your sister, 1931.
Recipe for Irene Hanwells Ladys Perfume Six roses (stolen, petals removed) Water from the tap Empty milk bottle Squish petals in fist to release the odor. Put in bottle. Fill with water.

His feet stank. He took off his shoes. At home he had a wife who was not well, not well in a manner he could do nothing about nor understand, but as he sat here now in the sun, the tense, resistant nub of flesh inside his back resolved itself for the first time in months. He lay down. His spine pressed into the soil a notch at a time, undid him. Upside down was a land of female legs. He was fond of these new bell-shaped skirts, wide enough to crawl under and be kept safe, and wished he had waited to marry, or married differently. He thought, What if I stayed here? Let the sun swallow me, and the orange dazzle under my eyelids become not just the thing I see but the thing that I am, and let the one daisy with the bent stem, and the rose smell and the girl upside down on the pub bench eating an upside-down ploughmans with her upside-down friend be the whole of the law and the girth of the world. Wasnt it the work of moments, of a little paint, to change HANWELLS FINEST to HANWELL AND HANWELL?
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Note: I have reconstituted Hanwells thoughts for you, as seem likely to me, and as sound nicest. In the novel Middlemarch, we find the old adage of a mans charity growing in direct proportion to its distance from his own door. This is reminiscent of all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else manically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them. It was 1956, as mentioned above. There was nothing but the sun, and Hanwell and the sun. Lying in a patch of long grass, Hanwell dreamed a conversation: HANWELL SNR: (lying beside Hanwell) So you found me, then. HANWELL: Yes, Alf. Wasnt I meant to? HANWELL SNR: Now, look: have a smokedont get ahead of yourself. HANWELL: (taking a Senior Service from its packet) Thank you. HANWELL SNR: So, boy. How are you? Im doing all right for myself, as you can see. HANWELL: Ah, yes, indeed, and even so. Thus is it much liketh the great novel by George Eliot HANWELL SNR: Oh, dont talk guff, boy. You always do thatpretend youre something youre not and never have been. You never did read any of that. Anyoned think youd been up to the university, talking like I dont know what. HANWELL: (sadly) We couldnt afford the uniform for the grammar. I passed the eleven-plus, but we couldnt afford it. HANWELL SNR: (laughing till he cries) Still telling that old chestnut? Dear, oh dear. Bit antique that story, isnt it? Id rather call a spade a spade, let everything come up roses. Well, whatever floats your boat, Hanwell, Im sure. HANWELL: (sung) I put a chestnut in a boat. . . . I rowed it with a spade. . . . A rose I gave my love that day. HANWELL SNR: Youve gone soft. Whose bike is this?

Hanwell sat up and was greetednot with any particular surprise, although with a little sheepishnessand offered the first chips out of the fryer, which he accepted. Ive a little foldup table somewhere here. . . . Hanwell watched Hanwell Snr struggle with the household bric-abrac and shabby furniture piled up in the back of the van. A tall lamp with a tasselled shade and a coat stand lay across each other: a coat of arms for the house of Hanwell. The ambulance driver, Bunty, who might have kept things clean for him, had died the year beforeher money had bought this little concern. Maybe she had cooked him his greens, too, and watched his drink, and it was only now that the ghastly bloat took hold, and the blood vessels broke and dispersed beneath the skin of the nose and cheeks, and the orange whiskers grew wild and laced with gray. It was a shock. Historically, Hanwell Snr was physically superior to Hanwell: Sit on my backgo on, sit on it! You wont break me! Usually said to a lady, and then when she was settled like the Buddha hed do a press-up or two, sometimes five. Now he turned, holding the little table upside down against his vast belly, and this soft thing, more than all the rest, announced him as a man deserted by women. There we arehis great arse pressed on the tabletop; the cast-iron legs sunk deep into the lawnI dont believe in standing and eating. He brought out two little stools, and Hanwell sat on the one handed to him. For a time, Hanwell Snr made his own reluctance to sit appear quite natural, busying himself with the hot oil and dismissing certain chips as not fit to be thrown in the fryer if his only son was to eat them. When the fuss of frying was over, Hanwell realized the obvious: his father couldnt stand to look at him. They remained looking out on the meadow beyond the green, Hanwell Snr leaning against the van, despite his beliefs, with his sweaty cone of newspaper and chewing each chip a long time. He looked across Hanwell if Hanwell spoke, but never at him. Of their conversation, Hanwell could retain practically nothing, finding it quite as unreal as their dream talk earlier. While Hanwell silently pursued a series of unlikely but longed-for confessions (Well, son, the thing is . . . To tell you the truth, I regret terribly . . . ), in the real, thick ripple of the air Hanwell Snr was sweating and rambling about the Suez business and the Araby bastards and other matters of the world that Hanwellthe least political of men, a man for whom the world was, and could consist only of, those people he saw or spoke to every day, fed, washed, or made love tocould not comprehend. At last the topic turned

to the people who concerned HanwellHanwells wife, Hanwells daughters. Hanwell shyly described his current difficulty, making use of the doctors careful and superior phrases (mental disturbance and a tendency toward hysteria). Hanwell Snr took a hankie from his back pocket, worked it round the grime on the back of his neck. He took his time folding it back into quarters. Hanwell saw at once that his father thought it entirely typical of Hanwell to marry a woman who was broken in some way, and now felt much the same satirical disgust hed expressed when the boy Hanwell, instead of laughing at being dangled from a pier, took it in his head to cry.
FROM THE ISSUE CARTOON BANK E-MAIL THIS

Well, Ill say this, he said, finishing his lecture about Hanwells ineptitude at choosing things right and seeing the way of things, and moving on to the more general subject of women, which allowed, at least, the concession that Hanwells trouble might not be Hanwells fault alone: They rewrite historycant let a man be himself. Always telling you what you would be and should be and might be, rather than what you are. And what theyre offering in return for all that isnt half as good as they think it isor Ive never found it so. But maybe youve done betterLord knows, they look a damn sight better these days than in my day. . . . Twenty yards from where they sat, two young women in sundresses were helping each other achieve a handstand. Hanwell Snr nudged Hanwell in his gut, and Hanwell felt strongly the implicit insult to his own mother, who still lived, and still wore her flapper curlswhite nowclose to her forehead, and the same heavy cloche felt caps and Harold Lloyd glasses, perfectly round and thick-rimmed. He said nothing. He ate his chips as the blond, peaky-looking girl firmed her body in preparation for the arrival of the lovely thick ankles of the brunette, well fed as they never were ten years earlier, and when this brunette overreached, and her breasts pressed tight against the cotton of her yellow dress and her legs went backward, and the crinoline frothed over her blond friends narrow shoulders, Hanwell and Hanwell watched them laugh and shake together and fall, finally, in a human heap on the grass. Soon after, Hanwell Snr gathered the two empty paper cones and pressed them into a soggy ball in his hands, and said hed better open the shutters,

as it was teatime and folk would be wanting their food. Hanwell never saw him again. On a date in 1986, one that only the record office would remember now, the phone rang in Hanwells kitchen as he cooked. He was making pizza with homemade dough for the young children of his second family, and his topping was a loose, watery, fresh tomato sauce, laced with anchovies and black olives, so piquant and delicious you could eat it by the spoonful and forgo the crust altogether. It is possible only I liked to do that. I extrapolate my feelings too generally Yes, I seethank you . . . it was good of you to let us know, said Hanwell in a voice a shade more posh than his own. He put down the phone and left the room. After the pizza was finished, he came back in, pale, but composed. He said his father had died, a sentence that required usmy mother, my brother, and meto invent a whole human in one second and kill him off the next. Hanwell had said nothing to prepare us. He had known weeks earlier that his fathers death was imminenthe did not go to him. Twenty years later, Hanwells son would not go to Hanwell when his hour came. It happens that in the course of my professional duties I am often found making the statement I dont believe in patterns. A butterfly on a pin has no idea what a pretty shape it makes. He never settled, said Hanwell, and now hes come to the end of the road, a quaint metaphor, like those that Borges enjoyed, and we, equally, interpreted it literally, thinking of Brighton pier, Brighton being Hanwell country for us, and the place where Hanwells people generally died. When I was a kid, I had a dreamnever forgotten!of the cool, flat Brighton pebbles being placed over my body, as the Jews place stones on top of their dead; piled up and up over my corpse, until I was entirely buried and families came to picnic over me, not knowing, for I was Brighton bedrock now, as Hanwells had been (in my dream logic) since there were Hanwells in England. There have always been Hanwells in England. But I am a female Hanwell and lost my name when I married.

Agreeable
by Jonathan Franzen May 31, 2010 If Patty hadnt been an atheist, she might have thanked the good Lord for school athletic programs, because they basically saved her life and gave her a chance to realize herself as a person. She was especially grateful to Sandra Mosher at North Chappaqua Middle School, Elaine Carver and Jane Nagel at Horace Greeley High School, and Ernie and Rose Salvatore at the Gettysburg Girls Basketball Camp. It was

from these wonderful coaches that Patty learned discipline, patience, focus, teamwork, and the ideals of good sportsmanship that helped make up for her morbid competitiveness and low self-esteem. Patty grew up in Westchester County, New York. She was the oldest of four children, the other three of whom were more like what her parents had been hoping for. She was notably Larger than everybody else in the family, also Less Unusual, also measurably Dumber. Not actually dumb but relatively dumber. She grew up to be five feet nine and a half, which was almost the same height as her brother and numerous inches taller than her sisters, and sometimes she wished she could have gone ahead and been six feet, since she was never going to fit into the family anyway. Being able to see the basket better and to post up in traffic and to rotate more freely on defense might have given her a somewhat less vicious competitive streak, leading to a happier life post-college; probably not, but it was interesting to think about. By the time she got to the collegiate level, she was usually one of the shorter players on the floor, which in a funny way reminded her of her position in her family and helped keep her adrenaline at peak levels. Pattys first memory of doing a team sport with her mother watching was also one of her last. She was attending ordinary-person Sports daycamp at the same complex where her sisters were doing extraordinary-person Arts daycamp, and one day her mother and sisters showed up for the late innings of a softball game. Patty was frustrated to be standing in left field waiting around for somebody to hit a ball deep while less skilled girls made errors in the infield. She started creeping in shallower and shallower, which was how the game ended. Runners on first and second. The batter hit a bouncing ball to the grossly uncordinated shortstop, whom Patty ran in front of so that she could field the ball herself and run and tag out the lead runner and then start chasing the other runner, some sweet girl whod probably reached first on a fielding error. Patty bore down straight at her, and the girl ran squealing into the outfield, leaving the base path for an automatic out, but Patty kept chasing her and applied the tag while the girl crumpled up and screamed at the apparently horrible pain of being lightly touched by a glove. Patty was aware that this was not her finest hour of sportsmanship. Something had come over her because her family was watching. In the family station wagon on the way home, her mother asked her, in an even more quavering voice than usual, if she had to be quite so . . . aggressive. If it was necessary to be, well, to be so aggressive. Would it have hurt Patty to share the ball a little with her teammates? Patty replied that she hadnt been getting any balls in left field. And her mother said, I dont mind if you play sports, but only if its going to teach you coperation and communitymindedness. And Patty said, So send me to a real camp where I wont be the only good player! I cant coperate with people who cant catch the ball! And her mother said, Im not sure its a good idea to be encouraging so much aggression and competition. I guess Im not a sports fan, but I dont see the fun in defeating people just for the sake of defeating them. Wouldnt it be much more fun to all work together? from the issue cartoon bank e-mail this Pattys mother was a professional Democrat. She later became a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce was an open space where poor children could go and do Arts at state expense. She was born Joyce Markowitz in Brooklyn in 1934 but apparently disliked being Jewish from the earliest dawn of consciousness. (Patty sometimes wondered if one reason that Joyces voice always trembled was from struggling so hard all her life to not sound like Brooklyn.) Joyce

got a scholarship to study liberal Arts in the woods of Maine, where she met Pattys exceedingly Gentile dad, whom she married at All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. When young Jack Kennedy got the Democratic nomination, in 1960, it gave Joyce a noble and stirring excuse to get out of a house that she couldnt seem to help filling up with babies. Then came civil rights, and Vietnam, and Bobby Kennedymore good reasons to be out of a house that wasnt nearly big enough for four little kids plus a Barbadian nanny in the basement. Joyce went to her first national convention in 1968 as a delegate committed to dead Bobby. She served as county Party treasurer and later chairwoman and organized for Teddy in 1972 and 1980. Every summer, all day long, herds of volunteers tramped in and out of the houses open doors carrying boxes of campaign gear. Patty could practice dribbling and layups for six hours straight without anybody noticing or caring. Pattys father, Ray, was a lawyer and amateur humorist whose repertory included fart jokes and mean parodies of his childrens teachers, neighbors, and friends. A torment he particularly enjoyed inflicting on Patty was mimicking the Barbadian, Eulalie, when she was just out of earshot, saying, Stop de game now, stop de playin, in a louder and louder voice, until Patty ran from the dinner table in mortification and her siblings shrieked with excitement. Endless fun could also be had ridiculing Pattys coach and mentor Sandy Mosher, whom Ray liked to call Saaaandra. He was constantly asking Patty whether Saaaandra had had any gentlemen callers lately or maybe, tee hee, tee hee, some gentlelady callers? Her siblings chorused, Saaaandra, Saaaandra! Other amusing methods of tormenting Patty were to hide the family dog, Elmo, and pretend that Elmo had been euthanized while Patty was at late basketball practice. Or tease Patty about certain factual errors shed made many years earlier ask her how the kangaroos in Austria were doing, or whether shed seen the latest novel by the famous contemporary writer Louisa May Alcott, or whether she still thought funguses were part of the animal kingdom. I saw one of Pattys funguses chasing a truck the other day, her father would say. Look, look at me, this is how Pattys fungus chases a truck. Most nights her dad went back to work after dinner to meet with the poor people he was defending in court for little or no money. He had an office across the street from the courthouse in White Plains. His pro-bono clients included Puerto Ricans, Haitians, transvestites, and the mentally or physically disabled. Some of them were in such bad trouble that he didnt even make fun of them behind their backs. As much as possible, though, he found their problems amusing. In tenth grade, for a school project, Patty sat in on two trials that her dad was part of. One was a case against an unemployed Yonkers man who had drunk too much on Puerto Rican Day and gone looking for his wifes brother, intending to cut him with a knife, but hadnt found him and had instead cut up a stranger in a bar. Not only Ray but the judge and even the prosecutor seemed amused by the defendants haplessness and stupidity. They kept exchanging little not-quite winks. As if misery and disfigurement and jail time were all just a lower-class sideshow designed to perk up their otherwise boring day. On the train ride home, Patty asked her dad whose side he was on. Ha, good question, he answered. You have to understand, my client is a liar. The victim is a liar. And the bar owner is a liar. Theyre all liars. Of course, my client is entitled to a vigorous defense. But you have to try to serve justice, too. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I are working together as much as the P.A. is working with the victim or Im working with the defendant. Youve heard of our adversarial system of justice? Yes. Well. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I all have the same adversary. We try to sort out the facts and avoid a miscarriage. Although dont, uh. Dont put that in your

paper. I thought sorting out facts was what the grand jury and the jury are for. Thats right. Put that in your paper. Trial by a jury of your peers. Thats important. But most of your clients are innocent, right? Not many of them deserve as bad a punishment as somebodys trying to give them. But a lot of them are completely innocent, right? Mommy says they have trouble with the language, or the police arent careful about who they arrest, and theres prejudice against them, and lack of opportunity. All of that is entirely true, Pattycakes. Nevertheless, uh. Your mother can be somewhat dewy-eyed. Patty minded his ridiculing less when her mother was the butt of it. I mean, you saw those people, he said to her. Jesus Christ. El ron me puso loco. An important fact about Ray was that his family had a lot of money. His parents lived on a big ancestral estate out in the hills of northwest New Jersey, in a pretty stone modernist house that was supposedly designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and was hung with minor works by famous French Impressionists. Every summer, the entire Emerson clan gathered by the lake at the estate for holiday picnics that Patty mostly failed to enjoy. Her granddad, August, liked to grab his oldest granddaughter around the belly and sit her down on his bouncing thigh and get God only knows what kind of little thrill from this; he was certainly not very respectful of Pattys physical boundaries. Starting in seventh grade, she also had to play doubles with Ray and his junior partner and the partners wife, on the grandparental clay tennis court, and be stared at by the junior partner, in her exposing tennis clothes, and feel self-conscious and confused by his ocular pawing. Like Ray, August had bought the right to be privately eccentric by doing good public legal works; hed made a name for himself defending high-profile conscientious objectors and draft evaders in three wars. In his spare time, which he had much of, he grew grapes on his property and fermented them in one of the outbuildings. His winery was called Doe Haunch and was a major family joke. At the holiday picnics, August tottered around in flip-flops and saggy swim trunks, clutching one of his crudely labelled bottles, refilling the glasses that his guests had discreetly emptied into grass or bushes. What do you think? he asked. Is it good wine? Do you like it? He was sort of like an eager boy hobbyist and sort of like a torturer intent on punishing every victim equally. Citing European custom, August believed in giving children wine, and when the young mothers were distracted with corn to shuck or competitive salads to adorn he watered his Doe Haunch Reserve and pressed it on kids as young as three, gently holding their chins, if necessary, and pouring the mixture into their mouths, making sure it went down. You know what that is? he said. Thats wine. If a child then began to act strangely, he said, What youre feeling is called being drunk. You drank too much. Youre drunk. This with a disgust no less sincere for being friendly. Patty, always the oldest of the kids, observed these scenes with silent horror, leaving it to a younger sibling or cousin to sound the alarm: Granddaddys getting the little kids drunk! While the mothers came running to scold August and snatch their kids away, and the fathers tittered dirtily about Augusts obsession with female deer hindquarters, Patty slipped into the lake and floated in its warmest shallows, letting the water stop her ears against her family. Her granddad had once been a true athlete, a college track star and football tight end,

which was probably where her height and reflexes came from. Ray also had played football but in Maine for a school that could barely field a team. His real game was tennis, which was the one sport Patty hated, although she was good at it. She believed that Bjrn Borg was secretly weak. With very few exceptions (e.g., Joe Namath), she wasnt impressed with male athletes in general. Her specialty was crushes on popular boys who were enough older or better-looking to be totally unrealistic choices. Being a very agreeable person, however, she went on dates with practically anybody who asked. She thought shy or unpopular boys had a hard life, and she took pity on them insofar as was humanly possible. For some reason, many of these boys were wrestlers. In her experience, wrestlers were brave, taciturn, geeky, beetle-browed, polite, and not afraid of female jocks. One of them confided to her that in middle school shed been known to him and his friends as the She-Monkey. As far as actual sex goes, Pattys first experience of it was being raped at a party when she was seventeen by a boarding-school senior named Ethan Post. Ethan didnt do any sports except golf, but he had six inches of height and fifty pounds on Patty and provided discouraging perspectives on female muscle strength as compared with mens. What he did to Patty didnt strike her as a gray-area sort of rape. When she started fighting, she fought hard, if not well, and only for so long, because she was drunk for one of the first times ever. Shed been feeling so wonderfully free! Very probably, in the vast swimming pool at Kim McCluskys, on a beautiful warm May night, Patty had given Ethan Post a mistaken impression. She was far too agreeable even when she wasnt drunk. In the pool, she must have been giddy with agreeability. Altogether, there was much to blame herself for. Her notions of romance were like Gilligans Island: as primitive as can be. They fell somewhere between Snow White and Nancy Drew. And Ethan undeniably had the arrogant look that attracted her at that point in time. He resembled the love interest from a girls novel with sailboats on the cover. After he raped Patty, he said he was sorry it had been rougher than hed meant it to be, he was sorry about that. It was only after the pia coladas wore off, early the next morning, in the bedroom that Patty shared with her littler sister so that their middle sister could have her own room to be Creative in: only then did she get indignant. The indignity was that Ethan had considered her such a nothing that he could just rape her and then take her home. And she was not such a nothing. She was, among other things, already, as a junior, the all-time single-season record holder for assists at Horace Greeley High School. A record she would demolish the following year! She was also first-team all-state in a state that included Brooklyn and the Bronx. And yet a golfing boy she hardly even knew had thought it was O.K. to rape her. To avoid waking her little sister, she went and cried in the shower. This was, without exaggeration, the most wretched hour of her life. Things that had never occurred to her beforesuch as the injustice of an oldest daughter having to share a room (instead of being given Eulalies old room in the basement, which was now filled floor to ceiling with outdated campaign paraphernalia), also the injustice of her mother being so enthralled about her middle daughters thespian performances but never going to any of Pattys gamesoccurred to her now. She was so indignant that she almost felt like talking to somebody. But she was afraid to let her coach or teammates know shed been drinking. How the story came out, in spite of her best efforts to keep it buried, was that Coach Nagel got suspicious and spied on her in the locker room after the next days game. Sat Patty down in her office and confronted her regarding her bruises and unhappy demeanor. Patty humiliated herself by immediately and sobbingly confessing to all. To her total shock, Coach then proposed taking her to the hospital and notifying the police. Patty had just gone three-for-four with two runs scored and several outstanding defensive plays. She obviously wasnt greatly harmed. Also, her parents were political friends of Ethans parents, so that was a nonstarter. She dared to hope

that an abject apology for breaking training, combined with Coachs pity and leniency, would put the matter to rest. But, oh, how wrong she was. Coach called Pattys house and got Pattys mother, who, as always, was running out to a meeting and had neither time to talk nor yet the moral wherewithal to admit that she didnt have time to talk. Coach spoke these indelible words into the P.E. departments beige telephone: Your daughter just told me that she was raped last night by a boy named Ethan Post. Coach then listened to the phone for a minute before saying, No, she just now told me. . . . Thats right. . . . Just last night . . . Yes, she is. And handed Patty the telephone. Patty? her mother said. Are youall right? Im fine. Mrs. Nagel says there was an incident last night? The incident was I was raped. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Last night? Yes. I was home this morning. Why didnt you say something? I dont know. Why, why, why? Why didnt you say something to me? Maybe it just didnt seem like such a big deal right then. So but then you did tell Mrs. Nagel. No, Patty said. Shes just more observant than you are. I hardly saw you this morning. Im not blaming you. Im just saying. And you think you might have been . . . It might have been . . . Raped. I cant believe this, her mother said. Im going to come and get you. Coach Nagel wants me to go to the hospital. Are you not all right? I already said. Im fine. Then just stay put, and dont either of you do anything until I get there. Patty hung up the phone and told Coach that her mother was coming. Were going to put that boy in jail for a long, long time, Coach said. Oh no no no no no, Patty said. No, were not.

Patty. Its just not going to happen. It will if you want it to. No, actually, it wont. My parents and the Posts are political friends. Listen to me, Coach said. That has nothing to do with anything. Do you understand? Patty was quite certain that Coach was wrong about this. Dr. Post was a cardiologist, and his wife was from big money. They had one of the houses that people such as Teddy Kennedy and Ed Muskie and Walter Mondale made visits to when they were short of funds. Over the years, Patty had heard much tell of the Posts back yard from her parents. This back yard was apparently about the size of Central Park but nicer. Conceivably one of Pattys straight-A, grade-skipping, Arts-doing sisters could have brought trouble down on the Posts, but it was absurd to imagine the hulking Bstudent family jock making a dent in the Posts armor. Im just never going to drink again, she said, and that will solve the problem. Maybe for you, Coach said, but not for somebody else. Look at your arms. Look what he did. Hell do that to somebody else if you dont stop him. Its just bruises and scratches. Coach here made a motivational speech about standing up for your teammates, which in this case meant all the young women Ethan might ever meet. The upshot was that Patty was supposed to press charges and let Coach inform the New Hampshire prep school where Ethan was a student, so that he could be expelled and denied a diploma, and that if Patty didnt do this she would be letting down her team. Patty began to cry again, because she would almost rather have died than let a team down. Earlier in the winter, shed played most of a half of basketball with the flu, before fainting on the sideline and getting fluids intravenously. The problem now was that she hadnt been with her own team the night before. Shed gone to the party with her field-hockey friend Amanda, whose soul was apparently never going to be at rest until shed induced Patty to sample pia coladas, vast buckets of which had been promised at the McCluskys. El ron me puso loca. None of the other girls at the McCluskys swimming pool were jocks. Almost just by showing up there, Patty had betrayed her true team. And now shed been punished for it. Ethan hadnt raped one of the fast girls, hed raped Patty, because she didnt belong there; she didnt even know how to drink. She promised Coach to give the matter some thought. It was shocking to see her mother in the gym and obviously shocking to her mother to find herself there. She was wearing her everyday pumps and resembled Goldilocks in daunting woods as she peered around uncertainly at the naked metal equipment and the fungal floors and the clustered balls in mesh bags. Patty went to her and submitted to embrace. Her mother being much smaller of frame, Patty felt somewhat like a grandfather clock that Joyce was endeavoring to lift and move. She broke away and led Joyce into Coachs little glass-walled office so that the necessary conference could be had. Hi, Im Jane Nagel, Coach said.

Yes, wevemet, Joyce said. Oh, youre right, we did meet once, Coach said. In addition to her strenuous elocution, Joyce had strenuously proper posture and a masklike Pleasant Smile suitable for nearly all occasions public and private. Because she never raised her voice, not even in anger (her voice just got more strained when she was mad), her Pleasant Smile could be worn even at moments of excruciating conflict. No, it was more than once, she said now. It was several times. Really? Ill be outside, Patty said, closing the door behind her. The parent-coach conference didnt last long. Joyce soon came out on clicking heels and said, Lets go. Coach, standing in the doorway behind Joyce, gave Patty a significant look. The look meant Dont forget what I said about teamwork. Joyces car was the last one left in its quadrant of the visitor lot. She put the key in the ignition but didnt turn it. Patty asked what was going to happen now. Your fathers at his office, Joyce said. Well go straight there. But she didnt turn the key. Im sorry about this, Patty said. What I dont understand, her mother burst out, is how such an outstanding athlete as you areI mean, how could Ethan, or whoever it was Ethan. It was Ethan. How could anybodyor Ethan, she said. You say its pretty definitely Ethan. How couldif its Ethanhow could he have . . . ? Her mother hid her mouth with her fingers. Oh, I wish it had been almost anybody else. Dr. and Mrs. Post are such good friends ofgood friends of so many good things. And I dont know Ethan well, but I hardly know him at all! Well then how could this happen! Lets just go home. No. You have to tell me. Im your mother. Hearing herself say this, Joyce looked embarrassed. She seemed to realize how peculiar it was to have to remind Patty who her mother was. And Patty, for one, was glad to finally have this doubt out in the open. If Joyce was her mother, then how had it happened that she hadnt come to the first round of the state tournament, when Patty had broken the all-time Horace Greeley girls tournament scoring record with thirtytwo points? Somehow everybody elses mother had found time to come to that game. She showed Joyce her wrists.

This is what happened, she said. I mean, part of what happened. Joyce looked once at the bruises, shuddered, and then turned away as if respecting Pattys privacy. This is terrible, she said. Youre right. This is terrible. Coach Nagel says I should go to the emergency room and tell the police and tell Ethans headmaster. Yes, I know what your coach wants. She seems to feel that castration might be an appropriate punishment. What I want to know is what you think. I dont know what I think. If you want to go to the police now, Joyce said, well go to the police. Just tell me if thats what you want. I guess we should tell Dad first. So down the Saw Mill they went. Joyce was always driving Pattys siblings to Painting, Guitar, Ballet, Japanese, Debate, Drama, Piano, Fencing, and Mock Court, but Patty herself seldom rode with Joyce anymore. Most weekdays she came home very late on the jock bus. If she had a game, somebody elses mom or dad dropped her off. If she and her friends were ever stranded, she knew not to bother calling her parents but to go ahead and use the Westchester Cab dispatchers number and one of the twenty-dollar bills that her mother made her always carry. It never occurred to her to use the twenties for anything but cabs, or to go anywhere after a game except straight home, where she peeled aluminum foil off her dinner at ten or eleven oclock and went down to the basement to wash her uniform while she ate and watched reruns. She often fell asleep down there. Heres a hypothetical question, Joyce said, driving. Do you think it might be enough if Ethan formally apologized to you? He already apologized. For For being rough. And what did you say? I didnt say anything. I said I wanted to go home. But he did apologize for being rough. It wasnt a real apology. All right. Ill take your word for it. I just want him to know I still exist. Whatever you wantsweetie. Joyce pronounced this sweetie like the first word of a foreign language she was learning. As a test or a punishment, Patty said, Maybe, I guess, if he apologized in a really sincere way, that might be enough. And she looked carefully at her mother, who was

struggling (it seemed to Patty) to contain her excitement. That sounds to me like a nearly ideal solution, Joyce said. But only if you really think it would be enough for you. It wouldnt, Patty said. Im sorry? I said it wouldnt be enough. I thought you just said it would be. Patty began to cry again very desolately. Im sorry, Joyce said. Did I misunderstand? He raped me like it was nothing. Im probably not even the first. You dont know that, Patty. I want to go to the hospital. Look, here, were almost at Daddys office. Unless youre actually hurt, we might as well But I already know what hell say. I know what hell want me to do. Hell want to do whatevers best for you. Sometimes its hard for him to express it, but he loves you more than anything. Joyce could hardly have made a statement that Patty more fervently longed to believe was true. Wished, with her whole being, were true. Didnt her dad tease her and ridicule her in ways that would have been simply cruel if he didnt secretly love her more than anything? But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things. There was a smell of mothballs in her fathers inner sanctum, which hed taken over from his now deceased senior partner without redoing the carpeting or the curtains. Where exactly the mothball smell came from was one of those mysteries. What a rotten little shit! was Rays response to the tidings his daughter and wife brought of Ethan Posts crime. Not so little, unfortunately, Joyce said with a dry laugh. Hes a rotten little shit punk, Ray said. Hes a bad seed! So do we go to the hospital now? Patty said. Or to the police? Her father told her mother to call Dr. Sipperstein, her old pediatrician, whod been involved in Democratic politics since Roosevelt, and see if he was available for an emergency. While Joyce made this call, Ray asked Patty if she knew what rape was. She stared at him. Just checking, he said. You do know the actual legal definition.

He had sex with me against my will. Did you actually say no? No, dont, stop. Anyway, it was obvious. I was trying to scratch him and push him off me. Then he is a despicable piece of shit. Shed never heard her father talk this way, and she appreciated it, but only abstractly, because it didnt sound like him. Dave Sipperstein says he can meet us at five at his office, Joyce reported. Hes so fond of Patty I think he would have cancelled his dinner plans if hed had to. Right, Patty said. Im sure Im number one among his twelve thousand patients. She then told her dad her story, and her dad explained to her why Coach Nagel was wrong and she couldnt go to the police. Chester Post is not an easy person, Ray said, but he does a lot of good in the county. Given his, uh, given his position, an accusation like this is going to generate extraordinary publicity. Everyone will know who the accuser is. Everyone. Now, whats bad for the Posts is not your concern. But its virtually certain youll end up feeling more violated by the pretrial and the trial and the publicity than you do right now. Even if its pleaded out. Even with a suspended sentence, even with a gag order. Theres still a court record. Joyce said, But this is all for her to decide, not Joyce. Ray stilled her with a raised hand. The Posts can afford any lawyer in the country. And as soon as the accusation is made public the worst of the damage to the defendant is over. He has no incentive to speed things along. In fact, its to his advantage to see that your reputation suffers as much as possible before a plea or a trial. Patty bowed her head and asked what her father thought she should do. Im going to call Chester now, he said. You go see Dr. Sipperstein and make sure youre O.K. And get him as a witness, Patty said. Yes, he could testify if need be. But there isnt going to be a trial, Patty. So he just gets away with it? And does it to somebody else next weekend? Ray raised both hands. Let me, ah. Let me talk to Mr. Post. He might be amenable to a deferred prosecution. Kind of a quiet probation. Sword over Ethans head. But thats nothing. Actually, Pattycakes, its quite a lot. Itd be your guarantee that he wont do this to someone else. Requires an admission of guilt, too. It did seem absurd to imagine Ethan wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting in a jail cell for inflicting a harm that was mostly in her head anyway. Shed done wind sprints that hurt as bad as being raped. She felt more beaten up after a tough basketball game than she did now. Plus, as a jock you got used to having other peoples hands on

youkneading a cramped muscle, playing tight defense, scrambling for a loose ball, taping an ankle, correcting a stance, stretching a hamstring. And yet: the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, and a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste. In Dr. Sippersteins office she submitted to examination like a good jock. After shed put her clothes back on, he asked if shed ever had intercourse before. No. I didnt think so. What about contraception? Did the other person use it? She nodded. Thats when I tried to get away. When I saw what he had. A condom. Yes. All this and more Dr. Sipperstein jotted down on her chart. Then he took off his glasses and said, Youre going to have a good life, Patty. Sex is a great thing, and youll enjoy it all your life. But this was not a good day, was it? At home, one of her siblings was in the back yard doing something like juggling with screwdrivers of different sizes. Another was reading Gibbon unabridged. The one whod been subsisting on Yoplait and radishes was in the bathroom, changing her hair color again. Pattys true home amid all this brilliant eccentricity was a foamcushioned, mildewed, built-in bench in the TV corner of the basement. The fragrance of Eulalies hair oil still lingered on the bench years after Eulalie had been let go. Patty took a carton of butter-pecan ice cream down to the bench and answered no when her mother called down to ask if she was coming up for dinner. Mary Tyler Moore was just starting when her father came down after his Martini and his own dinner and suggested that he and Patty go for a drive. Can I watch this show first? she said. Patty. Feeling cruelly deprived, she turned off the television. Her dad drove them over to the high school and stopped under a bright light in the parking lot. They unrolled their windows, letting in the smell of spring lawns like the one shed been raped on not many hours earlier. So, she said. So Ethan denies it, her dad said. He says it was just roughhousing and consensual. Pattys tears came on like a rain that starts unnoticeably but surprisingly soon soaks everything. She asked if her dad had spoken to Ethan directly. No, just his father, twice, he said. Id be lying if I said the conversation went well. So obviously Mr. Post doesnt believe me.

Well, Patty, Ethans his son. He doesnt know you as well as we do. Do you believe me? Yes, I do. Does Mommy? Of course she does. Then what do I do? Her dad turned to her like an attorney. Like an adult addressing another adult. You drop it, he said. Forget about it. Move on. What? You shake it off. Move on. Learn to be more careful. Like it never even happened? Patty, the people at the party were all friends of his. Theyre going to say they saw you get drunk and be aggressive with him. Theyll say you were behind a shed that wasnt more than thirty feet from the pool, and they didnt hear anything untoward. It was really noisy. There was music and shouting. Theyll also say they saw the two of you leaving later in the evening and getting into his car. And the world will see an Exeter boy whos going to Princeton and was responsible enough to use contraceptives, and gentleman enough to leave the party and drive you home. The deceptive little rain was wetting the collar of Pattys T-shirt. Youre not really on my side, are you, she said. Of course I am. You keep saying Of course, Of course. Listen to me. The P.A. is going to want to know why you didnt scream. I was embarrassed! Those werent my friends! But do you see that this is going to be hard for a judge or a jury to understand? All you had to do was scream, and you would have been safe. Patty couldnt remember why she hadnt screamed. She had to admit that, in hindsight, it seemed bizarrely agreeable of her. I fought, though. Yes, but youre a top-tier student athlete. Shortstops get scratched and bruised all the time, dont they? On the arms? On the thighs? Did you tell Mr. Post Im a virgin? I mean, was? I didnt consider that any of his business.

Maybe you should call him back and tell him that. Look, her dad said. Honey. I know its horrendously unfair. I feel terrible for you. But sometimes the best thing is just to learn your lesson and make sure you never get in the same position again. To say to yourself, I made a mistake, and I had some bad luck, and then let it. Let it, ah. Let it drop. He turned the ignition halfway, so that the panel lights came on. He kept his hand on the key. But he committed a crime, Patty said. Yes, but better to, uh. Lifes not always fair, Pattycakes. Mr. Post said he thought Ethan might be willing to apologize for not being more gentlemanly, but. Well. Would you like that? No. I didnt think so. Coach Nagel says I should go to the police. Coach Nagel should stick to her dribbling, her dad said. Softball, Patty said. Its softball season now. Unless you want to spend your entire senior year being publicly humiliated. Basketball is in the winter. Softball is in the spring, when the weathers warmer? Im asking you: is that really how you want to spend your senior year? Coach Carver is basketball, Patty said. Coach Nagel is softball. Are you getting this? Her dad started the engine. As a senior, instead of being publicly humiliated Patty became a real player, not just a talent. She all but resided in the field house. She got a three-game basketball suspension for putting a shoulder in the back of a New Rochelle forward whod elbowed one of her teammates, and she still broke every school record shed set the previous year, plus nearly broke the scoring record. Augmenting her reliable perimeter shooting was a growing taste for driving to the basket. She was no longer on speaking terms with physical pain. In the spring, when the local state assemblyman stepped down after long service and the Party leadership chose Pattys mother to run as his replacement, the Posts offered to co-host a fund-raiser in the green luxury of their back yard. Joyce sought Pattys permission before she accepted the offer, saying she wouldnt do anything that Patty wasnt comfortable with, but by then Patty was beyond caring what Joyce did, and told her so. When the candidates family stood for the obligatory family photo, no grief was given to Patty for absenting herself. Her look of bitterness would not have helped Joyces cause.

Backbone
by David Foster Wallace March 7, 2011 Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boys goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were childs play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six. There is little to say about the original animus or motive cause of the boys desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. He had been housebound one day with asthma, on a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through some of his fathers promotional materials. Some of these survived the eventual fire. The boys asthma was thought to be congenital. The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion. (The young boy thought, at that point, of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.) The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedrooms carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect ninety-degree angle to his thigh as he could manage. Then he had to lean as far to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foots outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips (the boys idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point of the exaggerated pucker that signifies kissing in childrens cartoons) toward a section of the foots outside that he had marked with a bulls-eye of soluble ink. He struggled to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side, very early one morning, until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedrooms door. The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for more than a month. One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child. The fathers chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate symptoms. More important, it was Dr. Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism in flexion. Dr. Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind. The child lay on a tall padded table and placed his chin in a little cup. She manipulated his head, very gently but in a way that seemed to make things happen all the way down his back. Her hands were strong and soft and when she touched the boys back he felt as if she were asking it questions and answering them all at the same time. She had charts on her wall with exploded views of the human spine and the muscles and fasciae and nerve bundles that surrounded the spine and were connected to it. No lollipops were anywhere in view. The specific stretching exercises that Dr. Kathy gave the boy were for the splenius capitis and longissimus cervicis and the deep sheaths of nerve and muscle surrounding the boys T2 and T3 vertebrae, which were what he had just injured. Dr. Kathy had reading glasses on a cord around her neck and a green button-up sweater that looked as if it were made entirely of pollen. You could tell she talked to everybody the same way. She instructed the boy to perform the stretching exercises every single day and not to let boredom or a reduction in symptomology keep him from doing them in a disciplined way. She said that the long-term goal was not relief of present discomfort but neurological hygiene

and health and a wholeness of body and mind that he would someday appreciate very, very much. For the boys father, Dr. Kathy prescribed an herbal relaxant. from the issue cartoon bank e-mail this Thus was Dr. Kathy the childs formal introduction both to incremental stretching and to the adult idea of quiet daily discipline and progress toward a long-term goal. This proved fortuitous. During the five weeks that he was disabled with a subluxated T3 vertebraoften in such discomfort that not even his inhaler could ease the asthma that struck whenever he experienced pain or distressthe heady enthusiasm of childhood had given way in the boy to a realization that the objective of pressing his lips to every square inch of himself was going to require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time that he could not then (because of his age) imagine. One thing Dr. Kathy had taken time out to show the boy was a freestanding 3-D model of a human spine that had not been taken care of in any real or significant way. It looked dark, stunted, necrotic, and sad. Its tubercles and soft tissues were inflamed, and the annulus fibrosus of its disks was the color of bad teeth. Up against the wall behind this model was a hand-lettered plaque or sign explaining what Dr. Kathy liked to say were the two different payment options for the spine and associated nervosa, which were NOW and LATER. Most professional contortionists are, in fact, simply persons born with congenital atrophic/dystrophic conditions of major recti, or with acute lordotic flexion of the lumbar spine, or both. A majority display Chvosteks sign or other forms of ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their art, therefore. In 1932, a preadolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of Tamil mysticism as being capable of inserting into her mouth and down her esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin, and the other leg to just above the patella, and as thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee at rates in excess of 300 r.p.m. The phenomenon of suiphagia (i.e., self-swallowing) has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica, in most cases caused by deficiencies in cadmium and/or zinc. The insides of the small boys thighs up to the medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for, daily hours spent cross-legged and bowed, slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasciae of his back and neck, the spinalis thoracis and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all the way to the sacrum, and the interior thighs dense and intransigent gracilis, pectineus, and adductor longus, which fuse below Scarpas triangle and transmit sickening pain through the pubis whenever their range of flexibility is exceeded. Had anyone seen the child during these two- and three-hour sessions, bringing his soles together and in to train the pectineus, bobbing slightly and then holding a deep cross-legged lean to work the great tight sheet of thoracolumbar fascia that connected his pelvis to his dorsal costae, he would have appeared to that person either prayerful or catatonic, or both. Once the thighs anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips, the upper portions of his genitals were simple, and were protrusively kissed and passed over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these achievements would come the more difficult and neck-intensive contortions required to access the inner buttocks, perineum, and extreme upper groin. The boy had turned seven. The special place where he pursued his strange but newly mature objective was his room, which had wallpaper with a jungle motif. The second-floor window yielded a

view of the back yards tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the boy as he stood, sat, inclined, or lay on the rooms carpet, stretching and holding positions. His bedrooms carpet was white shag with a furry, polar aspect that the boys father did not think went well with the walls repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion, and palm, but the father kept his feelings to himself. Radical increase of the lips protrusive range requires systematic exercise of the maxillary fasciae, such as the depressor septi, orbicularis oris, depressor anguli oris, depressor labii inferioris, and the buccinator, circumoral, and risorius groups. The zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. Praxis: Affix string to Wetherly button of at least 1.5-inch diameter borrowed from fathers second-best raincoat; place button over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips; hold string fully extended at ninety degrees to faces plane and pull on end with gradually increasing tension, using lips to resist pull; hold for twenty seconds; repeat; repeat. Sometimes the boys father sat on the floor outside his bedroom with his back to the door, listening for movement in the room. Its not clear whether the boy ever heard him, although the wood of the door sometimes made a creaky sound when the father sat down against it or stood back up in the hallway or shifted his position against the door. The boy was in there stretching and holding contorted positions for extraordinary periods of time. The father was a somewhat nervous man, with a rushed, fidgety manner that always lent him an air of imminent departure. He had extensive entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much of the time. His place in most peoples mental albums was provisional, with something like a dotted line around itthe image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he heads for an exit. Often, clients found that the father made them uneasy. He was at his most effective on the phone. By the time the child was eight, his long-term goal was beginning to affect his physical development. His teachers remarked on changes in his posture and gait. The boys smile, which appeared by now constant because of the effect of circumlabial hypertrophy on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual alsorigid and overbroad and seeming, in one custodians evaluative phrase, like nothing in this round world. Facts: the Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds that penetrated both hands and feet medially throughout his lifetime. The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani presented with wounds in both hands and feet, as well as in her side, which wounds were observed to open and close on command. The eighteenth-century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hands wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating the pilgrims own recovery from rationalist despair. According to both St. Bonaventura and Toms de Celano, St. Francis of Assisis manual stigmata included baculiform masses of what presented as hardened black flesh extrudent from both volar planes. If and when pressure was applied to a palms so-called nail, a rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of the hand, exactly as if a real so-called nail were passing through the hand. And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subjects wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 Lacrimi si Sfinti, the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as Gods open wound.

Areas of the boys midsection from navel to xiphoid process, at the cleft of his ribs, alone required nineteen months of stretching and postural exercises, the more extreme of which must have been very painful indeed. At this stage, further advances in flexibility were now subtle to the point of being undetectable without extremely precise daily record-keeping. Certain tensile limits in the flava, capsule, and process ligaments of the neck and upper back were gently but persistently stretched, the boys chin placed to his (solubly arrowed and dotted) chest at mid-sternum and then slid incrementally downone, sometimes 1.5 millimetres a dayand this catatonic and/or meditative posture held for an hour or more. In the summer, during his early-morning routines, the tree outside the boys window became busy with grackles coming and going, and then, as the sun rose, filled with the birds harsh sounds, tearing sounds, which, as the boy sat cross-legged with his chin to his chest, sounded through the pane like rusty screws turning, some complexly stuck thing coming loose with a shriek. Past the southern exposures tree were the foreshortened roofs of neighborhood homes and the fire hydrant and street sign of the cross street and the forty-eight identical roofs of a low-income housing development beyond the cross street, and, past the development, just at the horizon, the edges of the verdant cornfields that began at the city limits. In late summer the fields green became more sallow, and then in the fall there was merely sad stubble, and in the winter the fields bare earth looked like nothing so much as just what it was. At his elementary school, where his behavior was exemplary and his assignments completed and his progress charted at the medial apex of all relevant curves, the boy was, among his classmates, the sort of marginal social figure who was so marginal he was not even teased. As early as Grade 3, the boy had begun to develop along unusual physical lines as a result of his commitment to the objective; even so, something in his aspect or bearing served to place him outside the bounds of schoolyard cruelty. The boy followed classroom regulations and performed satisfactorily in group work. The written evaluations of his socialization described the boy not as withdrawn or aloof but as calm, unusually poised, and self-containing [sic]. The boy gave neither trouble nor delight and was not much noticed. It is not known whether this bothered him. Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an achievement in any conventional sense. Unlike his father, he did not read Ripley and had never heard of the McWhirterscertainly it was no kind of stunt. Nor any sort of self-evection; this is verifiedthe boy had no conscious wish to transcend anything. If someone had asked him, the boy would have said only that hed decided he wanted to press his lips to every last micrometre of his own individual body. He would not have been able to say more than this. Insights into or conceptions of his own physical inaccessibility to himself (as we are all of us self-inaccessible and can, for example, touch parts of one another in ways that we could not even dream of touching our own bodies) or of his complete determination, apparently, to pierce that veil of inaccessibilityto be, in some childish way, self-contained and -sufficientthese were beyond his conscious awareness. He was, after all, just a little boy. His lips touched the upper areolae of his left and right nipples in the autumn of his ninth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and protrusive; part of his daily discipline was tedious button-andstring exercises designed to promote hypertrophy of the orbicularis muscles. The ability to extend his pursed lips as much as 10.4 centimetres had often meant the difference between achieving part of his thorax and not. It had also been the orbicularis muscles, more than any outstanding advance in vertebral flexion, that had permitted him to access the rear areas of his scrotum and substantial portions of the papery skin around his anus before he turned nine. These areas had been touched,

tagged on the four-sided chart inside his personal ledger, then washed clean of ink and forgotten. The boys tendency was to forget each site once he had pressed his lips to it, as if the establishment of its accessibility made the site henceforth unreal for him and the site now in some sense existed only on the four-faced chart. Fully and exquisitely real for the boy in his eleventh year, however, remained those portions of his trunk that he had not yet attempted: areas of his chest above the pectoralis minor and of his lower throat between clavicle and upper platysma, as well as the smooth and endless planes and tracts of his back (excluding lateral portions of the trapezius and rear deltoid, which he had achieved at eight and a half) extending upward from the buttocks. Four separate licensed, bonded physicians apparently testified that the Bavarian mystic Therese Neumanns stigmata comprised corticate dermal structures that passed medially through both her hands. Therese Neumanns capacity for inedia was attested to by four Franciscan nuns, who attended her in rotating shifts in 1927. She lived for almost thirty-five years without food or liquid; her one recorded bowel movement (March 12, 1928) was determined by laboratory analysis to comprise only mucus and empyreumatic bile. A Bengali holy man known to his followers as Prahansatha the Second underwent periods of meditative chanting during which his eyes exited their sockets and ascended to float above his head, connected only by their dura-mater cords, and thereupon performed (i.e., the floating eyes did) rhythmically stylized rotary movements described by Western witnesses as evocative of dancing four-faced Shivas, of charmed snakes, of interwoven genetic helices, of the counterpointed figure-eight orbits of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies around each other at the perimeter of the Local Group, or of all four (supposedly) at once. Studies of human algesia have established that the musculoskeletal structures most sensitive to painful stimulation are the periosteum and joint capsules. Tendons, ligaments, and subchondral bone are classified as significantly pain-sensitive, while muscle and cortical bones sensitivity has been established as moderate, and articular cartilage and fibrocartilages as mild. Pain is a wholly subjective experience and thus inaccessible as a diagnostic object. Considerations of personality type also complicate the evaluation. As a general rule, however, the observed behavior of a patient in pain can provide a measure of (a) the pains intensity and (b) the patients ability to cope with it. Common fallacies about pain include: People who are critically ill or gravely injured always experience intense pain. The greater the pain, the greater the extent and severity of the damage. Severe chronic pain is symptomatic of incurable illness. In fact, patients who are critically ill or gravely injured do not necessarily experience intense pain. Nor is the observed intensity of pain directly proportional to the extent or severity of the damage; the correlation depends also on whether the pain pathways of the anterolateral spinothalamic system are intact and functioning within established norms. In addition, the personality of a neurotic patient may accentuate felt pain, and a stoic or resilient personality may diminish its perceived intensity. No one ever did ask him. His father believed only that he had an eccentric but very limber and flexible child, a child whod taken Kathy Kessingers homilies about spinal hygiene to heart, the way some children will take things to heart, and now spent

a lot of time flexing and limbering his body, which, as the queer heartcraft of children went, was preferable to many other slack or damaging fixations the father could think of. The father, an entrepreneur who sold motivational tapes through the mail, worked out of a home office but was frequently away for seminars and mysterious evening sales calls. The familys home, which faced west, was tall and slender and contemporary; it resembled one half of a duplex town house from which the other half had been suddenly removed. It had olive-colored aluminum siding and was on a culde-sac, at the northern end of which stood a side entrance to the countys third-largest cemetery, whose name was woven in iron above the main gate but not above that side entrance. The word that the father thought of when he thought of the boy was: dutiful, which surprised the man, for it was a rather old-fashioned word and he had no idea where it came from when he thought of the boy in his room, from outside the door. Dr. Kathy, who sometimes saw the boy for continuing prophylactic adjustments to his thoracic vertebrae, facets, and anterior rami, and was not a loon or a huckster in a shopping-center office but simply a D.C. who believed in the interpenetrating dance of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as totalityin the universe as an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at its highest point, an organism that could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universes way of being aware of and thus accessible [to] itselfDr. Kathy believed the patient to be a very quiet, innerdirected boy who had responded to a traumatic T3 subluxation with a commitment to neurospiritual integrity that might well signal a calling to chiropractic as an eventual career. It was she who had given the boy his first, comparatively simple stretching manuals, as well as the copies of B. R. Faucets famous neuromuscular diagrams (1961, Los Angeles College of Chiropractic), out of which the boy had fashioned the freestanding four-sided cardboard chart that stood as if guarding his pillowless bed while he slept. The fathers belief in ATTITUDE as the overarching determinant of ALTITUDE had been unwavering since his own adolescence, during which awkward time he had discovered the works of Dale Carnegie and of the Beecher Foundation, and had utilized these practical philosophies to bolster his own self-confidence and to improve his social standingthis standing, as well as all interpersonal exchanges and incidents that served as evidence thereof, was charted weekly, and the charts and graphs displayed for ease of reference on the inside of his bedrooms closet door. Even as a provisional adult, the father still worked tirelessly to maintain and improve his attitude and so influence his own altitude in personal achievement. To the medicine cabinets mirror in the homes bathroom, for instance, where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to his personal grooming, were taped such inspirational maxims as: NO BIRD SOARS TOO HIGH, IF HE SOARS WITH HIS OWN WINGS BLAKEIF WE ABDICATE OUR INITIATIVE, WE BECOME PASSIVERECEPTIVE VICTIMS OF ONCOMING CIRCUMSTANCESBEECHER FOUNDATIONDARE TO ACHIEVE! NAPOLEON HILLTHE COWARD FLEES EVEN WHEN NO MAN PURSUETHTHE BIBLEWHATEVER YOU CAN DO OR DREAM, YOU CAN BEGIN IT. / BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT. BEGIN IT NOW! GOETHE and so forth, dozens or at times even scores of inspirational quotes and reminders, carefully printed in block capitals on small, fortune-cookie-size slips of paper and taped to the mirror as written reminders of the fathers personal responsibility for whether he soared boldly, sometimes so many slips and pieces of tape that only a few slots of actual mirror were left above the bathrooms sink, and the father had to almost contort himself even to see to shave.

When the boys father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came unbidden first to mind was always tortured. Much of this secret torturewhose causes he perceived as impossibly complex and protean and involving both normal male sexual drives and highly abnormal personal weakness and lack of backbone was actually quite simple to diagnose. Wedded at twenty to a woman about whom hed known just one salient thing, this father-to-be had almost immediately found marriages conjugal routines tedious and stifling; and that sense of monotony and sexual obligation (as opposed to sexual achievement) had caused in him a feeling that he thought was almost like death. Even as a newlywed, he had begun to suffer from night terrors and to wake from nightmares about some terrible confinement feeling unable to move or breathe. These dreams did not exactly require a psychiatric Einstein to interpret, the father knew, and after almost a year of inner struggle and self-analysis he had given in and begun seeing another woman, sexually. This woman, whom the father had met at a motivational seminar, was also married, and had a small child of her own, and they had agreed that this put some sensible limits and restrictions on the affair. Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of tedious and oppressive, as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear, which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman all over again even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short, longed to detach from the woman, but he didnt want the woman to be able to detach. He began to feel numb and even nauseated when he was with the other woman, but when he was away from her he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father (whose son had just turned four) could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair with but to hang in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third woman, in secret and as it were on the side, in order to feelif only for a short timethe relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen. Thus began the fathers true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of despair. The boys mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in Grades 4 and 5. And beyond, of course, like the falls at a long rivers end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the eight centimetres just below the chins point, the galeae of his scalps back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, eyesas well as the paradoxical Ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a nearmythic place in the over-all project: the boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent. This boy was not by nature a worrier (unlike himself, his father thought), but the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his eleventh year, darkening the whole endeavor, a tenebrous shadow that the boy chose

to see as lending the enterprise a sombre dignity, rather than futility or pathos. He did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.