SUBTLETEA (POUR IN SPIRIT)

JUDAS ON THE MOUNT

As the Rabbi said, “Blessed are the meek…”
Judas edged close enough to Magdalene to smell the spice in her hair.
Feeling him brush her arm, she smiled,
Then turned back to the Master.

But for Judas, within this throng,
There was only her bone-white cheek,
Her eyes like dots on dice,
Her hair as black as the space between stars.
He imagined burying his face in it,
As she leaned over him,
Trembling in her pleasure,
Before sinking onto his chest,
Whimpering she had finally found a real man.

He was still in the midst of his reverie
When the Rabbi finished and motioned for Magdalene to join him.
As the crowd dispersed, counting on their fingers
The ways to attain eternal life,
Judas lingered on the scent of her hair.

LESSON

The last thing his father said to him was that he did not fear eternity
As long as he knew that his ashes would be mingled with his wife’s forever.
To that end, his father asked him to mix their ashes together
And to scatter them in Florida where they had been happiest.

So he and his young son are driving across Florida,
Not to see Universal and Disney,
But to stand on Cocoa Beach and cast his father’s ashes into the Atlantic;
Before retracing their route to scatter his step-mom’s in the Gulf of Mexico.

No longer would he have to pretend he was ok with his parents’ divorce.
Not only would this make his ailing mother happy,
It would teach his son a lesson about loyalty and love,
Something he would always remember.

Vivien is a writer, illustrator and painter who lives in Nottingham. Her written works include Promise, Mandala, Secrets, Home From Home, Winter White, Into the Past and Ferne and Chocolate and the Rollercoaster Rainbow and Other Stories. Visit her official site for more information.

I have always worn makeup. Since I was about 15, I’ve been drawn to using colour to enhance my face as I use colour to enhance my paintings and illustrations. Putting on make-up each day is like a meditation: it calms me, concentrates the mind, so thoughts can flow into a stream of reverie.

At the back of my mind, wriggling like an enclosed larva, there is always the idea that I am disguising my real self behind a mask; I have something to hide, and that this ritual is so part of my psyche that I have to do it. I have to colour my face with a slightly darker tinted moisturiser, add deep blood-red to my lips, dab my cheeks with the same tint, slightly pencil in my eyebrows with a dark brown pencil, brush smoky brown shadow over my eyelids and just under my bottom lashes to add even more depth to my dark brown eyes and then add several coats of the thickest, darkest mascara to my eyelashes – top and bottom.  It looks right with my black-brown hair with a deep fringe. And my deep red shade of lipstick alters shades with the colours I wear. You can’t wear a blood-red lipstick when wearing blue or purple. It has to be a berry colour with those blue tints. I have written a “concrete” poem about lipstick, I love it so much.

 
Anyone who knows me will probably have never seen me without my makeup on.  If I had to go to the shops to buy a pint of milk, I would look like this; if a parcel was being delivered and had to be signed for, I would look like this; and if my cleaner, Amy, was coming to do the house for me, I would look like this. I even go to bed with my mascara on. It has to be waterproof mascara, none of that “one drop of rain and it pours down your cheek like soot” variety. And I have been called glamorous and striking though I never think of myself as that. I am me and “me” came out of the womb made-up.

I think there is a link here. I love making things up.  How do you know all that I’ve just written isn’t just made-up? Here I am baring my innermost being, my soul, and you may decide – it’s just make-believe.  I may really look like an old hag, who’s never been near a pot of cream in her life, let alone the right tip of a lipstick. But you’re wrong. Writers are so egocentric, so into themselves that what they concoct is carelessly camouflaged autobiography. And I’m no different, though my publisher might tell you otherwise.

* * *

It was my birthday, the 14^th of April. I was staring at myself in the mirror. Outside the bedroom window the lake in the park sang like another mirror to the spring sky through new green leaves. Another year. Another set of smile lines. Another dressing table full of cosmetics. I think they were working because people just don’t believe I’m the age I am, though some say it’s because I seem so young at heart. I am young at heart, but today my heart feels rather heavy. For the first time I can remember I feel depressed. I don’t know if it’s looking at my naked reflection once too often, or if I’m beginning to feel old, or, if I’m feeling old, why put on the war paint if the battle’s over? “A woman without paint is like food without salt,” wrote Plautus. And I’m feeling very bland at the moment. I need to colour my hair to keep the grey roots at bay. My nickname changes from Cleopatra to Femme Fatale to Fenella (as in Fenella Fielding – when she was younger, of course) with whoever I’m with, but there is always the element of the exotic in their pet names for me and I do like it. I would hate to be bland. And I do feel bland. I even bought a new red lipstick to stave off this feeling, but it wouldn’t leave. And here it was parading up and down my dressing table, shouting “bland, bland, bland” instead of “rebel, rebel, rebel!”

I was getting an awful sensation in the pit of my stomach. I was rebelling against all that artifice, all that money spent of trying to change the way I was, all the hours I sat applying lotions and potions, colours and concoctions until I was a parody of myself. I knew what I was going to do. For a selected time only just to see what it was like, I was going to “go commando”, au naturel, bare myself to the elements and let people know who I was straight away. I would stop colouring my hair, would wear no makeup at all, would not paint my nails. Any colour would be nature’s colour. I felt liberated. My mask was slipping and my gown was falling to the ground.

* * *

I have been reborn in a shadowy cave. I am a totally different person. There is no barrier between me and the world anymore. People have started guessing my age correctly. I have no exotic nicknames. The money I’ve saved from cosmetics has gone to my favourite charities and paying my gas and electricity bills. Men don’t stare at me in the street or wolf whistle from scaffolding. No one wants my point of view on anything and I am always served last in shops and cafes. I’ve become one of the invisible middle-aged and I HATE IT! Yesterday I went shopping and, as you know, this was just an experiment for a selected time only. Well, the selected time is over and I’m back. Bland is not grand, bland is shorthand for unplanned, bland is banned.

I put all my new purchases on my dressing table. I’ve coloured my hair again and my straight shoulder-length style with a deep fringe is like “a rippling sheet of dark silk” – or so I’ve been told by several new admirers. My new lipstick, Darling Violet (which sounds like a friend, and has been) has kissed several new lips, and I’ve been given a payrise by my boss, Mr. Starling, and asked out on a date by two new acquaintances. I’ve started going to a new Yoga class once a week, and one lady, Sue, of the “don’t shave your legs or armpits” brigade told the group that a Yoga class wasn’t a catwalk, when I wore my new deep purple velvet leisure suit. Dirk, whose mat was getting rather close to mine, whispered that he thought I’d get picked up if I went out in it. So I didn’t get changed afterwards and I did get asked out, but I refrained from saying “yes’.” My husband, Ethan, says he’s booked a table for a special anniversary meal at my favourite restaurant, The Peacock, and I intend to be there, all dressed-up and made-up. He likes me just as I am.

published by Lame House Press, 2015
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Introduction
What is honor?  A word…Air. – Falstaff, Henry IV 

Comedian Steven Wright has a bit in which he prefaces a silly song by saying “This next song doesn’t go something like this, it goes exactly like this.” Contrarily, Megan Volpert, author of the new chapbook, Order Sutra, seems to always say “This next song doesn’t go something like this, it doesn’t go anything like this.” Thanks to her appreciation for Deconstructive/Post-Structuralist thinking, she delights in language-bending, shuffling signifiers and signifieds like a card sharp, and contributing to philosophical rupture and decentering. Megan’s benevolent sneers and silly giggles at what many consider to be ultimately non-transcendental language might be summed up in Karl Schlegel’s words from Athenaeum: “Truly, it would frighten you if the entire world seriously became comprehensible, as you demand it.” 

It also complies with the laughter and dance dear Nietzsche prescribed in place of either a sick seriousness in the face of illusory truths or the gloominess of realizing that the once awe-striking mountain disappoints us once we’ve climbed it. That is a primary thing he admired in the Greeks: their being “superficial – out of profundity.” I think this is where Deconstruction and such can flourish responsibly, without spirit-slaying nihilism: daring to dissect language, convention, tradition, abstraction, cultural norms and societal sacred cows while also rejoicing in the inevitability and necessity of language’s signs and even chimeras, maturely understanding the worth of some constructs instead of tearing down every time-tested Bastille with reckless glee or spite. After all, it was Jacques Derrida who said that “the experience of a ‘deconstruction’…begins by paying homage to that which, to those whom, it ‘takes on.’” In spite of my overall contempt for Rousseau, a passage from his Essay on the Origin of Languages is apt here: “[T]he dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say that I too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.” 

“[L]anguage is so limited compared to what we think and feel that we are obliged to lie, words themselves are lies,” says Jorge Borges, who is a key factor in Volpert’s Order Sutra, incidentally. I think it’s telling that in his “Borges and I” this confused conclusion is reached: “I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page…I am doomed – utterly and inevitably – to oblivion.” It’s the same self-doubt that David Hume came to. Literary theorist Paul de Man claimed to defend literature, but many think his doubtful readings threatened it. The “This is not a pipe” of Magritte’s Treachery of Images leads Michel Foucault farther astray than the artist intended, I think, so that in his study of the famous “calligram” Foucault concludes that “the ‘pipe’…has utterly vanished…Nowhere is there a pipe.” It’s not that the center cannot hold; there was no center to begin with. The elephant in the room is the realization that there is no elephant in the room. How did Orson Welles describe stylistic filmmaker Antonioni? “An architect of empty boxes.”

Foucault, who is more radical than Derrida (and Lacan, who saw the signified as having a value in itself, as a representation of the repression of the signified), rejects any primal, truly coherent signs and faults the belief in them as fatal to interpretation, and Ferdinand de Saussure, father of “binary opposition” and such, casts doubt on the existence of an actual supra-structural signified. All things trapped in arbitrary language are signs swirling in an ocean of signs, without locus or transcendence. Only expert (or Volpert) swimmers should dare to dive into these waters lest they drown, for, as Manfred Frank put it, “to question the legitimacy of rationality means nothing less than to place the authority whose name granted legitimacy under suspicion.” My favorite Stoic, Epictetus, said that “propositions that are true and evident are necessarily made use of even by those who contradict them.” Add to this what might be my favorite deconstruction of Deconstruction, a passage from C.S. Lewis’ undervalued The Abolition of Man:

But you cannot go on “explaining away” forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it…It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see. 

“One does not deconstruct simply by progressing, without risks,” warns Derrida. “One must always reaffirm something of the part in order to avoid a relapse into something worse.” He also said that philosophy kills itself with its own weapons. Extreme Deconstruction easily leads to a kind of destruction, and it has the power to annihilate even precious metaphors and similes. (Consider Mallarme: “I cancel the word ‘like’ from the dictionary.”) Obliteration of language is shown by 2001: A Space Odyssey’s H.A.L., who seems more human than his somnolent human cohorts, until Dave “murders” him by shutting down his synthetic brain and his speech degenerates into childish singing and finally pre-lingual infancy. This, of course, is echoed in the demonic gibberish of a dying and insane Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining. Eventually we come to the end of language and the bottomless fall into oblivion. 

Slavoj Zizek talks of a “blind spot” that prevents us from ever seeing reality as a whole, since that blind spot is where we are included in reality, but, as Renato Pugglioli says, “poetry and language conspire to transcend the world of the senses, to attain a superreality which is at once a sublimation and a negation of human and terrestrial reality.” Yeah, so what? Such grandness comes with the game. And, for the most part, the game keeps a lot of us from becoming gibbering – or infinitely typing – monkeys. (I carry a flask of logocentrism in my pocket, just in case.)

___

My first major exposure to Volpert’s exploration of this stuff came from her Desense of Nonfense (BlazeVOX Books, 2009), which, of course, brings to mind G.K. Chesterton’s “Defence [sic] of Nonsense,” an essay in The Defendant that basically praises the nonsensical path as an escape into a freer world (not in Dada’s rather sinister style but rather in that of the fairy tale or Lewis Carroll) and “the huge and undecipherable unreason of [Creation].” In a review I called Volpert’s Desense “both a pie in the face and a skewer,” and I still think that’s a perfect way to describe her philosophically/linguistically charged work and her strong humor. For example, I’m particularly impressed by the structure of Order Sutra’s “included in the present classification,” which features word groupings that amble along in alliterative alphabetical order while maintaining a coherent incoherence: from “Autism and Asperger’s always appreciate better brain command, control” to “Xanaxing yesterday’s younger years, your zoo Zeused.” Turning Xanax and Zeus into verbs alone deserves applause. 

Also, Volpert’s strongest strength may be her focus on or specialization in a chosen subject, coupled with a deft ability to present “heavy” material in palatable prose-poems, to use a weak term. My own essayish prose often masquerades as free-verse and tends to be aphoristic, and I think that’s a big reason why I enjoy how Volpert writes, for her pieces can be classified as bite-size essays rather than over-filling four-course intellectual meals. 

This charming chapbook (I have number 27 out of only 100 printed copies) is primarily inspired by the preface of Foucault’s Order of Things, in which he recalls the personal upheaval caused by Borges’ fictional Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Volpert’s poem titles are exact lines from Borges’ bizarre taxonomical list: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies. Borges as a rupturing elemental in a tenuously ordered world is obvious in Foucault’s dramatic account:

This book arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered all the familiar landmarks of my thought…breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.

When I asked for an electronic copy of the stamped title and “logo” on the chap’s cover, Megan revealed that “because the chap is handmade and stamped, pics of the cover don’t do any justice to the 3D element.” So, even this access problem, this failure of rendering, adds to the whole theme of language’s limitations.

Literary and philosophical theories feed each other overall, and the wonderful richness of discourse is best juggled by performers like the author of Order Sutra, those who seem to smile at what would perplex and even terrify the mass, if the mass decided to finally tune in. Rather than a straight review of this chapbook, I opted to interview its author so that we can take a rocket ride with a wider, wilder view.

In the interview she defends a respect for form over content, repelling a lot of the thrusts of my monologue-ish questions – which results in a near-hostility for the whole nature of interview, undercutting it, as if the interviewer has too much ado about knowing and should, rather, only skate across the icy surface of an artist’s presentation, leaving the water and fish and Lord knows what else underneath alone. But, just like shit, content happens, intentionally or not. That’s part of the overall beauty of criticism and philosophy, the world of swirling symbols that fascinated Swedenborg, Blake and countless others.

Interview

David: The subtitle of Order Sutra is “Confirming everything’s probably under control.” Aside from its Dr. Strangelove/Catch-22 vibe, can this be considered a lampoon of logic? I agree with G.K. Chesterton’s belief that logic is as good for “griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs,” that logic doesn’t necessarily lead to truth. Nietzsche said that logic has an illogical basis, and he advised realists that their “sobriety contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness.” The turbulent human soul certainly confounds logic forever. “On pretty promises quietly rely” is one of the best lines in the book. You could just as well have written “premises” instead of “promises.” What do you think of logic? Explain the book’s title and subtitle.

Megan: I agree with Chesterton because logic is a form, not a content. Nietzsche is a VIP on the list of dead people I’d like to see at my dinner table. No comment on the presupposition of a human soul, though I will vouch for a turbulence.

You’ve got my secret tagline and actual tagline there. The stamp on the title page says “confirming everything’s under control” for a couple of reasons. One, every time I’m trapped in a situation with a bunch of other clueless people, they look to me for answers. This has been happening since I was a kid. It’s a flattering responsibility. The thing to do when it’s handed to you is to confirm that everything’s under control, to assure people you’re going to do your best. Two, the quiet meanness of radical uncertainty must be hilarious. We have no reason to believe everything is under control. If that’s not funny, we’re toast. So I tried to highlight it.

The original draft did say “premises” instead of “promises”! I only changed it to wobble the vowel sounds for a quick second, but I’m glad you heard the other word caught in a strong undertow there. The line you refer to as a subtitle is very attached to my personal brand–the embossing stamp we used to make it doubles as my personal stationery-maker–but “on pretty promises quietly rely” is really the thesis statement and ultimate tonal note for what this book is about. It’s what you’d put on the t-shirt–in a font that speaks to the hissing, venomous quality of the idea.

To borrow from Ani DiFranco, I think “every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.” That’s logic’s essential nature. The title points at the repetitive prayer of the sutra, a faith that at least on its face seems contrary to logic. Order, as a primary symptom of logic, is everywhere in language. So the title hints at a blend of these approaches to communication, the divine dailiness of the thought patterns implicit in our languages.

David: From your “tame”: “The flower did not possess most of the properties of a flower. I made it out of pipe cleaners…This flower was a sturdy thing that had no concern for sun or water…I had no need for the flowers called real.” This reminds me of Jorge Borges’ “The Other Tiger” poem and Magritte’s The Treachery of Images painting, which depicts a pipe and includes the koan-like text “This is not a pipe.” These two works play with art and reality. From “The Other Tiger”:

…the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols…
A string of laboured tropes that have no life…
But by the act of giving it a name…
It becomes a fiction, not a living beast…

…Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
The other tiger, the one not found in verse.

Borges posits a huge chasm between art and real life. “[T]he moment I write about the tiger, the tiger isn’t the tiger, he becomes a set of words in the poem,” he told Richard Burgin in an interview. Burgin: “You’ll always be trying to capture the tiger.” Borges: “Yes, because the tiger will always be…” Burgin: “…outside of art.” Your thoughts? Is it fine, especially in our age of virtuality, to prefer a fake flower to a real one?

Megan: I’ve been pretty near to getting a tattoo of The Treachery of Images a couple of times. “The Other Tiger” beats the same path as John Yau’s “830 Fireplace Road,” which I’ve talked about before. But to keep to your Borges example, I’m super interested in the “always be trying to capture” impulse part, and not particularly keen on art versus life, inside versus outside, fake versus real. I wrote a book about Warhol, you know? Why should we care about the content on either side of the dichotomy? It’s the reaching across the dichotomy, the form of or the act of bridging two things. That I like to investigate.

So that’s the answer your question, but for my money, the main thing about “tame” to focus on is the heavily Victorian diction and syntax. This book showcases a wide variety of kinds of English. I’d be unforgivably remiss not to include a slice of dusty old white sensibility in a museum of Englishes. And to classify it as tame. I think it’s fine in our age of virtuality to prefer fake or real flowers, but it’s marginally smarter just to prefer flowers generally.

David: “having just broken the water pitcher,” which is structured both like a Mad Lib and a document with suggestive, silly redactions, ends with two grade-A clichés, which dovetails with how you ended a piece called “et cetera”: “and and and, but there it is.” Oh, the insipidity! Often, a loss for words boils down to a barren bromide, a weak or desperate attempt to force terms into space that belongs to the ellipsis. “that from a long way off look like flies,” the final – and cleverest – piece in the book, features Morse and binary code. Its closing line, the binary code’s translation, “What hath language wrought?” (cleverly playing on the first thing Sam Morse ever telegraphed back in the 1840s: “What hath God wrought?”), also is the closing line of the entire book. The page that follows is blank, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s meant as the actual final piece, an answer to the question, no word being the last word. Please enlighten us. Or confuse us further. Or both.

Megan: You believe I have everything under control, huh? Right down to inserting a final blank page as a special message for your contemplation? Thanks! I told the publisher, Gina Myers, about precisely this phenomenon, where readers give me 100% credit for every aspect of the book right down to its entire design. She was a little worried that some of the square holes we cut in the front cover had imprecise edges. We sat there and did them by hand together in her kitchen, and I said, “Gina, don’t worry. Because no matter what mistakes I make, my readers credit me with intentionality.” It such a beautiful goddamn blessing. Honestly, I’m lucky my readers are smart, and I’m lucky they work hard to dig into whatever I’m giving them. But I have to crawl humbly back to the hilarity of it when I get interview questions about whether the blank page in the back matter was deliberately put there by me or not.

This isn’t my first back matter controversy, either! My ongoing publisher with Sibling Rivalry Press, Bryan Borland, will vouch for me on this. Somewhere in the edits for the This assignment is so gay anthology, our wires got crossed and I sent him back a copy of the manuscript that still had a giant “blank page – do not cut” watermark across it once all the back matter was already loaded in. Fortunately it shook itself out before the printing, but that’s the level of intent people tend to attach to my work. Truly, it makes me feel like a fucking mastermind. Like Paul Auster or something. I have typos and do occasionally moronic things just like everyone else (including Paul Auster).

“Et cetera” is about the anxiety that is supposed to be alleviated by order. But Hunter Thompson ran for Sheriff in Aspen in 1970, right? “And and and” did anybody feel less anxious because of his ability to impose order? I appreciate so much that the audience for my work credits me with such a profound degree of control over my communications. But I’m basically running a “Thompson for Sheriff” campaign.

David: Art as commentary on art, language as commentary on language. The fun never ends. The fourth wall has been knocked down; everything is discourse. Oorah! As Renato Pugglioli pointed out, poetry has become “idea-thing” more than “sound-sense.” The first piece in Order Sutra, “belonging to the emperor,” opens with these striking lines: “I love ideas. I am furious and love furiously. This makes my ideas furious. I furiously love my furious ideas.” What are your pet ideas? I assume that you dig Foucault, Chomsky and the like, but who are your other pet writers, literary theorists, philosophers? During research or just for fun, are you a dabbler or a deep-sea diver? What do you think of contemporary self-conscious art?

Megan: Poggioli said that at least fifty years ago, likely more, and here we still are. I don’t know if this book should even be referred to as poetry. My native non-fictional tendencies are turning into like a giant whack-a-mole game or something now, just popping up in every creative impulse I have toward a blank page, and I feel like everything I’ve been doing lately is some kind of essay work. This book is flash essay, maybe. And it also pays tremendous attention to “sound-sense,” even just in your sample quote, so if poetry isn’t about that anymore, there’s another reason it’s unwise to classify this book as poetry. I did a good job reverse-engineering that conclusion just now, huh? Logic!

I save dabbling for guitar. My readers expect a deep dive and I do my best on that score. My mind is naturally inclined to it, I think. When I look back at my first two or three books of things I really did think of as poems, I see them now as these enormously unwieldy redactions of essays on language. Like I wrote a doctoral dissertation on linguistics and then selectively highlighted a bunch of buzzwords that boiled down to become the full text. I don’t regret the abstractness of the early stuff, but now I like to fill in the blanks and reach a few more people with many of the same ideas I’ve had for a long time.

But you probably just want me to drop a list on you, huh? OK, here’s a bunch of what my summer included. Dead: Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Aristophanes, George Harrison, Susan Sontag, Alexander Pope (with a hat-tip to JS van Buskirk). Alive: Wayne Koestenbaum, Tom Petty, Peter Sloterdijk, Fran Lebowitz, Anthony Bourdain, Michelle Orange. I can definitely confirm that some of those alive people may or may not be making “contemporary self-conscious art.” And like me, they do not really give a fuck what you call it.

 
David: Here are highlights from “sirens,” my favorite piece in Order Sutra:

The world is made of icebergs. Inside each is a tiny splinter slowly tearing the entire thing apart, and
the racing of this hairline crack makes a noise meant for just one person. That noise is irresistible. It
compels the person meant to hear it into a pilgrimage toward the sound. Therefore, I am going to
Graceland. If the sound fades as I get nearer, perhaps I will turn instead toward Asbury Park.
Sometimes one reaches the sound only to realize it has been misheard, that it was not a fissure singing
in some block of ice. It was a hurricane. You are not meant to crash upon it. It is meant to crash upon
you. Perhaps you are the iceberg, wetly built by a steady onslaught of hurricanes that frost against the
creeping alertness to what is cold.

Your iceberg and its weird Siren call remind me of the white whale’s elusiveness and obscurity, the thrill of the chase and the ironic failure of incomplete discovery in Melville’s Moby-Dick, a book that, like Shakespeare’s stuff, contains everything. Didn’t Ishmael describe the craving of the craving involved in the futile pursuit of jouissance, or the self’s basic inscrutability, when he said the following? “The more I consider [the whale’s] mighty tail, the more I do deplore my inability to express it…Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will…I say he has no face.” Moby-Dick crashed upon enraged Ahab though Ahab sought to crash upon him. Think of Luke Skywalker training with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, when he decapitates the apparition of Darth Vader and sees his own face behind the despised mask. Am I all wet? Please tell us more about “sirens.”

Megan: That piece name-checks the cities associated with Springsteen and Elvis. But then the Elvis bit is actually about Paul Simon, directly copying his “I’m going to Graceland.” Going to Graceland is pretty much the same as chasing the white whale. And there’s a lot of slaying of the father a la Skywalker laced through those metaphors. They’re all a grim pilgrimage, for those crazy few who’re bent on getting healed no matter the cost in the meantime. The more I thought about Simon’s take on it, the more I began to see it as a siren’s song, straight out of Greek mythology. You may be hurtling toward your doom, but hell, you’re doomed if you just stand around here anyway. Might as well fall prey to the sirens.

For me, all of Greek myth is somehow set in a place with warm temperatures. When I try deliberately to think about some of my favorite myths taking place in the freezing cold, that just doesn’t do it for me. But think of all the stories of a grim pilgrimage that do take place in the cold. Liam Neeson made an action movie out of that, you know? Perhaps because of my fascination with logic, I get classified as cold a lot more often than I get classified as hot. So I drew upon my own sense of longing, referencing the music that spoke to me in a way that evoked those feelings, and then threaded it through the image of an iceberg.

Then there’s the big turn right at the end with a little bit of (form alert) who’s-on-first type reversal. I think whenever the stakes in your life are truly high and there’s a lot on the table, it can shake down 50-50 right up until the last second a lot of times. We live in a state of suspense vis-a-vis the future, thanks to our form of time. And we might be doomed or we might be saved. You have to live in the face of that. I think this kind of uncertainty has a theme song, and it’s the song of sirens.

David: In “belonging to the Emperor” you write “I love the idea of contradiction.” Right on, sister. However, to be honest, thanks to my hetero why-curiosity, I thought Is there much contradiction in the physical part of a gay relationship? I assumed that same-sex affection must be an erotic mirroring rather than complements in tension. In James Baldwin’s lovely Another Country bisexual Vivaldo thinks after sleeping with another man: “How strange it felt, this violent muscle…so like his own, but belonging to another! And this chest, this belly, these legs, were like his…It was…like making love in the midst of mirrors…” Joyce McDougall contradicted Judith Butler’s psychoanalytical concern about gay folks lacking an Oedipal conflict in her point that “there is also the homosexual oedipal drama which also implies a double aim, that of having exclusive possession of the same-sex parent and that of being the parent of the opposite sex.”

More Another Country: “[T]his masculinity was defined, and made powerful, by something which was not masculine. But it was not feminine, either, and something in Vivaldo resisted the word androgynous…But, as most women are not gentle, nor most men strong, it was a face which suggested, resonantly, in the depths the truth about our natures.” Of course, there’s Virginia Woolf’s wonderful Orlando, in which male Orlando turns into a female: “Different though the sexes are, they intermix.” Similarly, in an interview we did several years ago you said, “Like all things, I think femininity and masculinity are distinctive up to a certain point, at which point distinction itself as a mode of understanding collapses.” The free jazz of human bodiness fascinates me – which isn’t to downplay peculiar, poignant male-female interplay. Your thoughts on contradiction, gender and sexuality? Do you have a metaphysic of your nature as a lesbian?

Megan: I find your question barely connected to Order Sutra, but that doesn’t mean I won’t answer it. Also, let me point out that I seldom identify as a lesbian. To people that understand what the hell I’m talking about, I identify as queer. “Lesbian” is a label I’ll toss out just to give your grandmother something she might be able to digest. I try to assert my difference using whatever type of English the audience is most likely to comprehend. I don’t have a metaphysic on my nature because having one doesn’t make it any easier to live day to day. So I’m agnostic about being a queer. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like to look in the mirror though. Again, your concern for content is beside the point. Contradiction is a form. Gender is a form. Sexuality is a form. Fill them up with whatever content you want.

Contradiction as a form appears often in Order Sutra. Gender and sexuality, much less so. It seems clear that language can be encoded with masculine or feminine or queer or straight markers. Passive versus active voice in the syntax, particular diction choices about words that men will only use in the company of each other, etc. The “embalmed” piece, which is probably my own favorite in the book, is meant to be inflected robotically. When I read it for an audience, I approximate the smartphone Siri voice. People spend a lot of time on the gendered or sexualizing content of a text, but why not spend the same amount of time on its form? Is contradiction an inherently masculine formation of logic, for example? The voice of that piece does sound extremely masculine, even without knowing the speaker is an emperor. Even without the content of the words. In the end, what I said a few years ago still sounds totally correct: “distinction as a mode of understanding itself collapses.”

David: “frenzied” involves criticism of hostility toward the Other and satirizes the often myopic notion of true civilization, the utopian Bodysnatcher mentality: “The women are frenzied. The homosexuals are frenzied…You are one of us now. Therefore, you are not frenzied.” While the implications are obvious, please tell us more about the piece. Do you think a more honest discourse and genuine harmony (not utopian, for all utopias are dystopias) can be achieved now that sexuality and gender issues are so prevalent, mainstream and mighty today?

Megan: It’s a “waiting for the barbarians” thing, which is about both Cavafy and Nietzsche. This is written in the minor key of irate bosses – a little more honest than it’d like to be, and definitely not interested in harmony. It’s a piece that blue collar folks will laugh about, because they’ll recognize these noises. The voice of this text is holding a clipboard and checking your work, and it’s annoying. But it’s also annoyed. It thinks you’re the dumb one and it has no self-awareness outside of saving its own skin under company policy. It’s faux benevolent and it reeks of marketing.

I’m only a dabbler in guitar, so I know relatively little about harmony. A lot of people find me genuine–too much so. My seeming ability to be genuine may run contrary to any ability to achieve harmony. Though the particulars of gender or sexuality may be proliferating through the courts and televisions, I see no end of otherizing. We rely upon it far too much as a form. I mean, even think about how I’ve structured my response to your questions. I’ve been constantly dismissing your urge to analyze content, privileging instead some idea of functions that purport to be “whatever is outside of content.” To readers of the interview at this point, you’re likely coming across as “frenzied.”

Ah, shit…did I just step into your fantasy that I have everything here under control? You belong to the emperor now, son! Ha ha. Let us please always arrive at a joke together. There’s your fucking harmony. That’s the absolute best humanity can do. Order Sutra is full of jokes, I hope. Some more doomy than others, I hope.

David: Let’s return to “belonging to the emperor” again. I can’t shake the “I am furious and love furiously” line. So perfect. I’ve found that the deepest, bluest melancholy splits open and spills out a furious love, an indiscriminate joy. There must be something to this, right? Despite all the false forms and illusions, there is love, isn’t there? Well, what the hell is it? And where does it come from?

Megan: I don’t know where love comes from, but love is indeed existent. And I know where all existences try to go: language.

The Stone Menagerie

What is inordinate
are the hippopotami of rocks
at Nahant,
thick-skulled,
unblinking, refusing
to mourn themselves;
a half-displaced
surge out of sand as if
they’ve lost their breath
in that terrible
underworld of salt
and constant push.

Their shoulders
beam as smooth as agates
from the iodized wash,
gray pavilions
of armor plate massive
in titillating breezes.

Some are remote,
the unknown at reunions
holding quiet places,
waiting for recognition
in a place in the pool,
a niche in the sun.

Only the sun
enters these huge hearts
and moves them,
only the sun
stirs the core where
memory has upheaval.

But in moonlight,
as the cold year ends down
and sand leaps to lace
as intricate
as six-point stitching,
the broad backsides
become mirrors
and a handful of earthquake
glows at rest.

Bar Harbor Interlude 1

On this graveled morning, wind and wire
are quick partners in Down East melodies,
violent stretch of voices, cloud-high reach
of their alphabet, and rare Elis hurled above
October’s crackling grass.

Raw cries come ambivalent in outward leap
from fence wire stiff as an immovable idea,
and wind, moody as arias or transient as hobos
or gypsies from the arch of Time, touch me
where mornings seep inward, the way

forgiveness moves, slow mounting of steps,
simple knocks at my door. Maine sun-ups need
no introduction to what they toss about, placid
as icebergs, slow and enormous, that fit you
dependable as old gloves you’ve broken in,
or a hunting jacket

hanging beside the back door, a wallet pawed
for years on end, a hammer whose handle knows
your palm with its unspoken arch of intimacy.
Mornings whistle, become covenants with outlandish
trees, quick rivers holding their breath, and all along
the hectic coast blue stones underfoot, trembling,
all day long, trembling.

Louie Crew is an emeritus professor at Rutgers. He lives in New Jersey with his husband, Ernest Clay.

Louie Crew is an emeritus professor at Rutgers. He lives in New Jersey with his husband, Ernest Clay.

Erik Noonan is the author of the poetry collections Stances (Bird & Beckett, 2012) and Haiku d’Etat (Omerta, 2013). He lives in San Francisco with his wife Mireille.

Degas: Dancer Posing for a Photograph

shock tactics composition-as-arrangement
jargon learning-from-nature metaphysics
with ties to all camps he sought an obstacle
exercises in the esoteric Valéry says
his dark eye never saw rosy light
“painting isn’t difficult if you don’t know”
Morisot recalls droll vivid table talk politics
high-minded violent impossible as himself
here a lofty studio’s tall windows show
winter roofs diffuse backlight mingles
sheer artifice of circumstance with her
selfpossessed balance yet what she felt
blurs like the master when extinguished early
he rode the open decks of trams at evening  

Manet: Chez Tortoni

not the Great Writer he might have painted
ten years ago desk hedged about
with colored prints plus beard pretentiously
who lays a ladies’ paradise aside
to pose in profile as premier realist
instead this moment stolen little canvas
looks as if he made it on the spot
stranger collar and hat comme il faut caught
bock untouched café ignored cane chair forgot
mot juste is just what he lacks the single word
servility of portraiture delirium of
impression both recede before an image
city man ink on the make modern creature
playing “the game of speech” therein most human

Vermeer:  Woman With a Lute

no yellow sleeve hung dancelike at wrist and elbow
in muted contrasts with such a Fuck It air
coat appears in the other paintings
building’s not hers instrument even face
only this gesture tuning up belongs
turning away out over whatever else
notes bend she half smiles suspense slips
between moods humors her eyes give voice to
the lute would have been a throwback by those days
hark falsely to simpler times fewer debts
less property take loved ones off leaving
wall map and viol cold company
house a mere reliquary not hers
who was all that enterprise knew of grace 

Born in the UK, Bunny Goodjohn is an English professor at Randolph College, Director of the Writing Program and Tutoring Services, and author of Sticklebacks and Snow Globes and Bone Song. Visit her official site. Read her SubtleTea interview here.

To My Husband on the One-Month Anniversary of Our Separation

In the absence of children, we placed checks against animals:
four cats and hens to remain with me; the dog moved
to your side of the page along with the sectional sofa,
the king-sized missionary bed, the Smith Mountain watercolors.

While you moved out, bought new sheets, acquired
a phone number I need not learn, installed another
electric perimeter fence around four acres of real estate
I will never visit, I pet-sat my own dog;

at night she paced, chewed my baseball caps to damp spirals,
went cold turkey. Day found her insanely panicked, at peace finally
in the back of our old car, her long blonde nose resting
on the Jeep’s rough carpeting, one ear unflopped and cocked.

Last week, while you pet-sat the cats and hens, I visited my parents
to explain our separation, a situation I thought as fragile as the eggs
the Rhode Island Red had been brooding for a fortnight.
And today you drove eight miles to the airport to pick me up,

and I’m with the dog in the back of the car, her tail beating
a soft tattoo, snout burrowed beneath my leg. A strange land,
this back seat—watching your fingers upon the steering wheel,
your tanned arms, the shirt I have laundered for seven years—

and I wonder at the choices we make: at the dog’s, to hunt
down comfort in cars; at mine, to tell my mother you are stupid
but essentially a good man; at yours, to bring your girlfriend,
to open the car door for her, to give her my front seat.

Running 29 North

Two dogs trot slow down 29 North,
proud and skitty. Behind, traffic creepsto nothing. We sound our horns, lean out
our windows. The man at the front
tells them how goddamn late he is,
how they need to goddamn move right now.

We, who are in a hurry to get to where
we need to be, crawl hood to trunk
while these two—one white, one brown— revel in the road’s wet asphalt, its cracks
and ridges, the trash stitched through
the hedgerow, field’s wet scent rising like mist.

I’m tying down my need to rescue them, to tempt them into my car with treats. They’re not skinny, this pair, in no need of intervention. In fact, they’re indifferent
to us, locked in our cars, stalled
on our way from, our way to.

We’re a mere distraction in their moment,
as much as that fence is, this broken gate,
those crows lifting to trees, the road signs
that force us to yield, to stop. And yet,
I still have this need to catch them,
to show them my life is better than this,

this life they’re living now, fur furrowed
by rain, noses scrubbing the road,
and I’m mad at their stubborn refusal
to get out of the way, to let me pass,
to get back to all the things
I have to offer them.

 
previously published in Reed Magazine

Hotel

In a room with flock paper and a dresser
whose drawers had never held anything
precious for more than a few nights,
I used sex—illicit and fumbled—
to wreck a marriage. The dalliance, raised
from five days of fluttering and flattery,
opened to my fingers, unused to suit cloth,
stroking his lapels, to my ear full of breathy
obscenity, to the fact I was naked as a girl
while he was fully clothed. He wore a string vest,
its old man lattice embossing his silk shirt.
When he realized I was game, a fawn
in the headlights of his daring, he ran
to raid his car for condoms. Holding back
the fireproof drapes, the yellowed cotton
nets, I watched, mesmerized: him,
his heavy body, half in, half out of his car,
like a bear rooting in a cave; me,
smearing honey on my palms. I like
hotel rooms with sewing kits and bathrooms
with fake marble and movie star mirrors,
the toilet roll tongues origamied to perfection.
In rooms like these, I am a woman
partial to Perrier, to mints, to having more
than two pillows on her bed. I have shivered sick
under torn sheets in a 10×10 room
off Hong Kong’s Nathan Road, watched my life
with the only man I have ever loved go down
in an ocean of tissue and take-out. I have stowed
bags of hash behind switch plates, have slept
under nets in a stilt-legged cabin on the shore
of the Andaman Sea, have listened
to the gong song of one hundred nights
as the drowned took their leave.
I have watched the drunk monks sing.
I have been bound to a bed with silk ties
and played that relationship upon the room’s
bark-papered walls, projected its jinks and turns
upon plastic frames round jungle flowers
and New York’s broken skyline. I like freebies:
doll bottles of pearly shampoo and conditioner;
a cake of soap, virgin curved to fit my palm; a pack
of pins, needles, and cotton to repair everything
that needs it. In the room up there on the fifth floor,
someone who is no artist painted the pictures,
and the manager has screwed them to the wall
so that no one can take them from him. That is love.
This is New Year’s Eve in Brunswick, Maine
and I have walked back from the bar alone,
my pockets tight with fifths of Grey Goose,
snow showcasing the silence, the occasional car
throwing light my way, like white water.
In the parking lot, a concrete moose twinkles,
his antlers laced with fairy lights, his back so low
you could climb on board, ride him clear to next year.
Or you could reason with me, persuade me to return
to the bar, to Auld Lang Syne. Or we could just go
inside, kiss the concierge who’s hunting under plastic
mistletoe, call the elevator, anticipate the room,
the tight-tucked bed, the 100 channels, the papered glasses
on the bathroom shelf, just begging to be used.

Negative Capability

I do not understand the people who believe
their dog loves them. I meet them in the park,
at PetSmart, in the vet’s waiting room,

and they cannot help but tell me of that first meeting
at the pound, the shelter, the breeders, and of how
the dog (this dog, this beautiful boy) did the choosing.

They tell me to look into his eyes, into his little face.
They are convinced those eyes hold love—the same love
they themselves have for their parents, siblings, children.

Last week, a friend brought a print to the house: a black dog
whose sky gazing Goya had captured on the wall
of his dining room and even this hound was not spared

the ignominy of our humanizing: critics would have us believe
the dog seeks divine intervention, release from the quicksand
of his landscape; fears abandonment, neglect, the absence of regard.

I cannot see it myself.
Today, dawn slowly returning yet again to light the yard,
my own dog lies outside in the dark grass. Inside, his bowl,
a brown sheepskin bed, a tin of crunchy treats, I who love him.

Yet he stays out there with the scrubby grass and all its insects,
the bony pines stalking forward from the weak-veined blue of the sky,
the garden shed moving by slow degrees from black to orange,

with the cows in the valley beginning to call to calves, the jackdaws calling
to other jackdaws, the sun inching up from behind the symmetry
of factory chimneys and roofs, the bulbs dirt-warm in the front border.

And I am sad. Not because I feel he doesn’t love me
enough to come in, to settle on the bed alongside me, to give me
his paw, but more because I am merely human and

have somehow lost my place in all this, my ability to be still,
to set aside my machinations, to be quiet with beauty,
to love all this like a dog.

previously published in the Connecticut Review

Jean Colonomos is a former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company and a former freelance dance journalist who wrote for publications such as Dance Magazine and The Village Voice.  Her award-winning play, Black Dawn, is based on psychogenic blindness many Cambodian women suffered in the wake of Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide.  

In January, 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the American-supported Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and installed a Marxist government. At this time President Eisenhower still maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba.

When my then finance and I planned our Cuban honeymoon, my great aunt Mary, who lived in Havana, told us life was proceeding as usual under Castro. At that point, he was still setting up his new government.

It’s early July, 1959 and we are a ridiculously happy honeymoon couple strolling down the seafront gem, the Malecon. This “we” consists of a nineteen-and-a-half-year-old ex-ballerina who’s a French major going into her junior year at Hofstra, a commuter college on Long Island, and a twenty-two-year-old Colombian who just graduated Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an electrical engineer. We are insanely proud of having withstood a three-and-a-half year courtship when for a time my parents wouldn’t let me see my beloved. They thought we were sleeping together and it took time to convince them we weren’t. Even though we were. And they never wanted me to marry so young. Two reasons that made me want to escape my house. 

We’re honeymooning in Havana, courtesy of my Cuban Aunt Elvira’s mother, Great Aunt Mary, who lives here most of the year except for the brutally humid summers when she visits her daughter in Roslyn, Long Island. The Havana apartment comes with a housekeeper who’s been taking care of the family for years and who my Bogotano husband jabbers with incessantly. He asks Modesta what she thinks about the new Cuba; she answers it’s too soon to tell.

Our first few days, despite the steaming heat, we’re intrepid tourists pounding the streets, hopping on buses, shopping in open markets and eating new foods. The Cubans we meet on the bus want to adopt my Colombian husband: they adore his pristine accent – and me, his gringa sidekick. Sweating non-stop by noon, we return to the humid apartment with a ceiling fan to cool us off. It doesn’t. When we turn on the television, Fidel Castro, who’s been in power five months, rants twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. How does he do it, we wonder? What about sleep?

My husband and I abandon sightseeing. We escape to the air-conditioned Hotel Nacional that’s now empty since dictator Batista fled. They say these big hotels were run by the Mafia, who’ve been kicked out. Though outside it’s burning daylight, inside the Nacional it’s an enveloping, black-velvet night. The days we visit we notice three men gambling. One white-haired gentleman at the blackjack table looks as if rigor mortis has set in.

My darling marido and I flee to Varadero, a pristine, white-sand beach on the Caribbean. We’re finally in honeymoon heaven. Our hotel is simple and clean, we can walk out the door and step into the gentle, bathtub ocean water so clear we can see the veins in our feet. Our meals consist mostly of fresh fish, rice, beans and plantains. The cooked bananas are new for me and I love their sweet bite. At night after we make love, we fall asleep to the men playing dominos below our balcony. The sounds of them tapping the domino twice against the table before playing it soothes us.  

After five blissful days, we return to Havana and what happens next dictates our departure. Re-entering the city, we notice rebel soldiers we haven’t seen before, stopping cars at gunpoint to collect contributions to Castro’s Reforma Agraria. The soldier who points his rifle into our car is barely fifteen, I’d guess by the sparse hairs on his baby-face skin. It’s the first time we feel the oppression of Fidel’s regime up close. We donate and get out of there.

At the apartment my husband tells Modesta we’re going to Mexico City the day after tomorrow. My husband’s parents are there, so our honeymoon is now a family affair. I like his parents but they’re skeptical about me. They’re Holocaust survivors who’d hoped their son would return to Bogota, but he sees his future in America. At least I’m Jewish, which is a plus in their eyes. And I’ll take care of their son, the tall husband next to me with a lilting foreign accent, whom I love.

“Mommy, what’s the matter with Daddy?”

Kevin Pierce looks through the open window of the Civic to see a thin child pulling on the leg of her mother’s dirty jeans as the woman and a man rummage through a pile of garbage that rests against an overflowing dumpster in back of an Italian restaurant.  The three have dirty-blond dreadlocks and are barefoot; lesions run across the parents’ cheeks but the child’s face is pristine. A pizza box moves, the tail of a rat flicks under its lid. The man doesn’t appear to notice and stares at the ground with a distracted expression. Pierce shakes his head and keeps driving toward his destination. 

Fort Zachary Taylor had recently seen more action than it ever did during a war. A few days earlier, Francesca Donovan, a junior at Miami University and the daughter of one of the city’s leading investment bankers, was found floating facedown in the moat around the fort. In the hours after the discovery the scene had been choked with police and reporters, with morbid onlookers raising their phones to snap a post for Facebook or Instagram. One even got there early enough to see the body, and, like a dutiful contemporary American, promptly put it on the Internet, where of course it went viral. Shortly afterward, a letter from the Donovan family attorney arrived, threatening a lawsuit against her sorority – and the school itself – for negligence in keeping participants at an official school function “reasonably safe” from harm. Attorneys passed the letter to their insurer, who in turn assigned Pierce to fly to Key West and investigate.

Before he left his office in Jacksonville, Pierce had looked up the memorial site for Francesca. The pictures traced a kid who had pieces of a nice life. A lush home on the water in the earlier photos. Private school. Basketball and piano. Travel teams and a lot of attention for a 6’1” forward who averaged 27 points a game – and could also place with her Schubert in regional piano competitions. A Mercedes on her sixteenth birthday. A mother whose smiles looked increasingly forced as she aged. A father who was largely absent after the divorce. Francesca had been a striking brunette, a free spirit who sometimes wore sparkling blue contacts over her brown eyes.          

The investigator read her profile on the team’s website. Her status showed a noticeable decline since her sophomore year. A link had shown a YouTube video of an interview with Francesca that now had 129,372 views, a lot for a backup player on a mediocre team. Pierce guessed ninety-nine percent of them came in the last few days. Francesca came across as witty, downplaying a 79-51 loss to Virginia with an endearing laugh. 

Now it’s quiet, with only a handful of people wandering about, taking much less interesting pictures. The dirt path Pierce walks leads to a breakwater composed of hundreds of boulders placed along the Gulf shore.  Occasionally a heron cries in the distance. 

The insurance investigator photographs the site carefully. He walks around it in every direction, closely checking the surface of the dirt road. Not surprisingly, after so many others had gone through the same exercise, Pierce finds nothing. He clambers onto the rock wall and begins examining the spaces between boulders, potential hiding places filled at high tide with sand, shells and assorted driftwood. Stymied, he walks to the fort and looks over every inch of ground as he steps off the perimeter, staring at the water and imagining the beautiful, promising college kid floating there. 

Using the bridge, he enters the fort itself, a brick structure finished in 1866.  Once much taller, it was reduced to a one-story structure in 1889. He walks past a bored-looking park ranger with a scraggly beard and a Union uniform that seems stretched to the limit, and moves onto the spotty grass of the parade ground then to the interior of the fort, making his way through the enlisted men’s quarters and the mess before he gets to the officer’s area.

Light arrives through ancient cannon openings in the thick brick walls. The massive Columbiad is black, silent and impressive. Plaster coating the interior is chipped and completely worn away in places. Rust flakes from old turrets are scattered on the floor by the remains of iron cannon supports. Dusty red bricks lie in the corners of the room.

“You won’t find anything.” Pierce jumps at the sound of the voice. He looks up and sees the homeless man who had been milling about earlier. The man is wearing a brunette wig. His teeth are horrible, gapped and discolored. “I don’t know why people feel the need to pry into sorrow.”  Pale and sickly thin, the man’s voice sounds broken, an oboe with a faulty reed.

“You’re probably right,” Pierce replies, straightening up and looking at him, “but my boss wouldn’t like it if I didn’t check around a bit.” He finds himself trying not to stare at the wig, then finding himself staring at the lesions, so he goes back to staring at the wig, finding it less problematic as an alternate focus. 

“Oh, you’re one of those,” the homeless man says, viewing the investigator with disapproval.

A second passes before Pierce grasps what he means. “Oh, no,” the investigator responds. “I’m not with any tabloid.  I’m with the insurance company.  Do you know anything about this, you know, the girl dying?”

“I know something – I think.  It’s all very confusing.”

Pierce prepares to mentally kick himself in advance for asking a stupid question. “Confusing?”

“Well, I was there. And then I wasn’t.”

The investigator delivers the mental kick. “OK. Well, I have to work now.”

“Whatever,” the man says, abruptly disinterested in tone. “You should let the dead lie in peace.” He moves away but keeps staring at Pierce as he goes.

Pierce shakes his head then resumes his search, spending the next hour fruitlessly going over the grounds again before giving up and walking back to his rented Civic. He turns the car on and, sitting in the cool air, he pulls up a message on his phone from Ron Torborg, once a classmate at North Florida, now a deputy with the St. Augustine Beach Police Department. Torborg recommended Pierce contact John Jimenez with the Key West Police Department as a possible aid. Pierce leaves a message for Jimenez then kills an hour writing an initial report on his laptop before his phone buzzes with the return call. 

After they exchange introductions, Jimenez says “Ronnie told me you may be calling.”

“Yeah, I appreciate you calling me back. This thing is getting lawyered-up pretty quickly, and we need any help we can get.”

“Well, not a lot to give at this point. The autopsy is not back yet. he family attorney is involved on that. Her sorority sisters all swear they hadn’t seen her for at least four hours before her estimated time of death, which was around 3 AM, give or take. No indication of anyone else with her at the scene. Apparently she wandered off by herself. Could be a simple slip and fall. Hit her head and fell in the water. All possibilities are being checked.”

“Say it wasn’t a slip. Any suspects?”

“You know we can’t talk about that kind of thing.”

“I realize that. But there’s an awful lot of money riding on this and we’d like to work with the police in every way possible.”

“Actually, at this point we seem to be OK,” Jimenez says ironically.

“Can you give me anything to go on?” Pierce pleads.

“OK, no B.S., and of course, off the record, we are looking at Ricky Velasquez. He’s a local dealer, small time. She was apparently dating him.”

 “Why is he a suspect?”

 “A potential suspect,” Jimenez corrects. “And I can’t really say, other than circumstances dictate we look at him.”

 “Can I get any info on her sorority sisters?”

 Jimenez gives the names of the girls. “Most of them have stayed here to party, in spite of the death. They’re still at the Sheraton on Roosevelt. I guess they couldn’t have been too close. Kind of messed up.”

 After the call, Pierce looks up the girls online and quickly gets pictures of all three. At 5 PM, he checks into the Sheraton and gets a decent third-floor room with a balcony that looks down at the tiki bar by the pool. He opens the sliding glass door and walks out into the warm evening air, then sits down by the glass table and starts watching the swarm of kids hanging at the bar. A reggae band plays “Buffalo Soldier” and then launches into some pop covers. Around seven-thirty, he sees the girls arrive.

 The investigator walks down to the bar and tries to stand inconspicuously a few feet away from the girls. At thirty years old and wearing khaki shorts and a polo shirt, he doesn’t fit the crowd but no one seems to pay attention to him. He orders a Sam Adams then watches the Panthers-Canadiens game on the bar TV, gradually moving closer and surreptitiously listening carefully to the kids wearing the UM T-shirts. 

Jennifer Winston, a voluptuous brunette with arresting green eyes, sips a Mai Tai from a plastic cup. “I never figured this Spring Break would have gotten so much better, after the way it started.”

“What time are those boys from KU getting here?” Elena Rodiguez asks.

 “Should be around 8,” answers Ashley Canfield, a well-tanned blonde in an orange T-shirt. “But whatever. I’ll always remember this as a horrible Spring Break.”

“You’re not glad you stayed?” Rodriguez asks, looking up from her strawberry daiquiri.

“I still don’t know if it was right thing to do,” Canfield answers.

“Well, we burned a day going back to Miami for the funeral,” says Elena.

”’Burned a day.’ Nice way to put it,” Canfield says sourly.

“Don’t act like you were her best friend. Everyone knows you two had issues with each other.”

“Well, you should have said something about that scumbag boyfriend. You knew what Ricky was like. You dated him.” 

“Two dates, OK? Two dates. And I stopped when I found out how he could be.”

“If I had dated someone who hit me, I’d be sure to tell you.”

“It was one hit. He was drunk when it happened.” She pauses. “He didn’t hurt me.”

“Sure, he’s a great guy. All men hit girls on the second date,” Canfield responds, rolling her eyes. “Did you at least tell her about his side business?”

“You do know she was into it too, right?”

“Yeah, thanks to him.”

“Come on. She was never an angel.”

“No, she wasn’t. But she sure wasn’t like she became. I found needles she hid up high on bookshelves. I’d leave them alone, but it always freaked me out that she was doing it and playing ball at the same time. Crazy.”

“And we probably should all shut the hell up now,” Jennifer says, interrupting her friends as she looks around carefully. They abruptly start talking again about the overdue boys from KU. Pierce finishes his beer then gets the tab from a beleaguered bartender who drops the bill and returns to his blender. The investigator leaves a ten on the bar and returns to his room.

After fifteen minutes on the Internet, Pierce finds “OMG Ricky is amazing” along with a photo of a thin kid with a big smile and dark, menacing eyes. A few more minutes and Pierce has an address. He drives to a rundown street by the Naval Base and parks behind a late model Infiniti. 

Ricky’s supposed residence is a dilapidated two-story wooden house. Occasionally some Spring Breakers pass, laughing raucously, but Pierce sees no one enter or leave so he departs for his hotel at 10 PM.

In the morning, Pierce drives his rental through the quiet streets, passing empty bottles and assorted trash from the prior night’s partying and goes to 7:30 Mass at Mary Star of the Sea. The cadence of the prayers comforts him, bringing back the memory of sitting between his Irish father and Jamaican mother at church when he was a kid. When he gets back in the car, his phone shows Jimenez called and also texted him to come to the station right away.

Pierce drives to the police headquarters and parks the Civic by the main entrance. He walks in and asks the officer on duty for Jimenez. When Jimenez comes out, he seems tired and aggravated. He’s tall, maybe 6’3”, and in his early 30s, with thinning hair and a thickening stomach. He doesn’t look like the voice on the phone. “Kevin Pierce?”

“Yes. Your message said to come down?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He gives a perfunctory handshake. “Come back with me,” he says, and Pierce follows him back to a worn, gray metal desk dominated by a gold-framed photo of a blonde with two little girls.

“Were you parked around the Naval Base last night?”

“Yeah, I was. Why?”

“Parked by Ricky Velazquez’ house?”

“Right. Why do you ask?”

“Let me ask the freaking questions, all right? Ricky Velazquez was a lead we were looking at, and I thought you’d have enough sense not to interfere.”

“I didn’t interfere. I didn’t see anything at all, so I left after about an hour of sitting. I actually never even got out of my car.”

Jimenez pauses and seems to catch himself. “Did you see anything at all?”

“No, just some people passing by, but no one came or went from the house.”

“We had him under light surveillance, which is how we found you were watching him. We definitely would have liked to have talked to him some more.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Because he’s dead.”

“What?”

“His throat was cut. Almost decapitated. We were going to ask him some questions, but when we got there, we saw his body on the sofa through the window.”

“Damn. Any suspects?”

“Well, he was a drug dealer, so no shortage of enemies. But the only one – other than you – who showed up was Francesca Donovan.”

“Who?” Pierce asks, surprised.

“Yeah, exactly. Our camera has footage of someone about her height – which is pretty damn unusual for a girl – and looking a hell of a lot like her walking out of his place shortly after you departed.”

“Well, it obviously wasn’t her. Any idea who it could have been?”

“You can take the ‘obviously’ out of your sentence. She walked right past the surveillance camera. It wasn’t totally clear but it even kind of looked like her close up. I know it sounds crazy, but I actually called the morgue to make sure her body was still there. Which it was.”

“How do I fit in?”

Jimenez sighs. “I guess you don’t. We were just checking if you saw anything.” He looks around his desk for a second. “Right, I left my cards up here,” he says, standing and taking a step toward the high window ledge over his desk. “One good thing about being a little on the tall side,” he says, as he takes a card from a box on the ledge and gives it to Pierce. “Let me know if you find anything.”

“Will do,” Pierce says, suddenly struck by what Jimenez said about his height. He walks out to the Civic and drives to the fort. A scattering of tourists stand along the top of the walls. Pierce jogs through the gate and into the interior.

No one else is in the first room Pierce enters.  He walks around it, carefully looking at the top part of the room, then moves on to the next room, following dim passageways as he makes his way through the fort.

Pierce strides past a gun emplacement – and stops short. In the corner, wearing the same brunette wig, the homeless man sits on a stool. He stares down at the dirt floor as though he hadn’t noticed the investigator’s arrival. His slow, deep breathing fills the room. Gradually, he raises his gaze. Pierce is stunned to see the homeless man is wearing blue sparkled contacts, with blue eye shadow. “Whoa,” Pierce says, “you’re going way too far.”

“Do you think?” the homeless man asks, except the voice is purely feminine now, a pitch-perfect imitation of Francesca.  

“Why are you…” Pierce stammers, trying to get his footing. “A girl died here. This isn’t right.”

The homeless man sighs. “You’re not getting it.” He stands and gives a brief smile with perfect teeth.   

Pierce could swear the man is at least three inches taller than before. There are no lesions anymore. The investigator shudders and unconsciously reaches into his pocket and finds the Kel-Tec .32 he keeps there as a precaution for when investigations go wrong. “Look, I don’t want any problems. I’m just doing my job then I’ll be out of here. Please stay over there and I’ll be gone in a second.”

Near the cannon port is a ledge Pierce can barely reach. He looks around and locates a wooden stool. Keeping an eye on the homeless man, he pulls the stool toward the ledge.

“What are you doing?” the man asks.

“Just doing my job,” Pierce answers warily.

“Don’t look up there,” he says, still in a woman’s voice.

“I’ll be gone in a second,” Pierce says.

“But it’s that second that matters. Please don’t look.”

The homeless man begins to move toward Pierce. The gun comes out and the man stops moving forward. “No need for that. No need for that,” he says.

“What’s on the ledge?” Pierce asks.

“Don’t look. Please just don’t look,” the man says, his voice dripping desperation.

“All right, calm down,” Pierce says. “Just go on your way, OK?”

The homeless man takes a step backward. Keeping an eye on him, Pierce steps onto the stool and glances at the ledge. A syringe rests in the sunlight.

The man makes a small cry. “I let everyone down,” he says in the woman’s voice. “I should have known. He should have known.”

“Who should have known? Have known what?”  Pierce asks.

“There was no point in any of it. No one was any good. Nothing was any good. It was all a letdown, a wasted trip. But I didn’t mean to go that far. I just wanted to touch the edge, but not go over.” He stares at the ground. “But Ricky knows now. That son of a bitch knows.” He stumbles out the door. 

Pierce steps back down and puts his gun away. Even the air seems unnatural after the homeless man leaves. The investigator takes out his cellphone and calls Jimenez. When the police get there he carefully omits any mention of the homeless man. After being questioned, he heads to the airport, drops off the rental car and gets the first flight back to Miami. He stares blankly through the plane window as the sun disappears and the night begins with a purplish introduction to black. Pierce spends the leg to Jacksonville successfully convincing himself he was mistaken about what he saw and winds up never mentioning the incident to his wife when he gets home.

A few days later, when he receives the final police report that rules the death an accidental overdose, Pierce leaves the office early and goes home to his apartment. He pulls up Francesca’s memorial website, pours some Patron, and slips away to random images. The forward in mid-air blocking a shot. The pianist in a black dress sitting pensively before the keys, fingers poised to start. The sorority girl holding a beer and laughing with friends. The sad-faced child standing on the beach. 

But in the end, Pierce’s thoughts return to a homeless family wandering somewhere in Key West, and he wonders what they’re doing at that moment, and how the four of them will turn out.