Short Story: “The House of Boredom”

Markus Grady smiled and laughed and slapped backs and thanked people for a gift that he was not happy to get. His employers in the Ministry of Works, women and men whom he neither respected nor liked, had in view of his years of service seen fit through some advancement rule to favor and congratulate him with a promotion and a raise. He was twenty-two years, now, into his work procuring truesilver for the walls around Queen’s Bower. The usual career was thirty. His raise amounted, per year, to seventy ducats.

            Markus Grady was in his opinion the only true man in truesilver procurement. Everyone else now working in the office was either a woman or a fata, and fatae were almost women.

            Markus’s father, Grady Lask, had served with honor in the proud wars; moreover Grady Lask had grown up in one of those villages where everyone of a certain age had served in the great war against the Adamantine Host, including both of Markus’s paternal grandparents and most of his great-aunts and great-uncles. Men had been more manly then, and women had also, he averred.

            “—fourteen years in the Raj, in service there,” someone was prating. “Herbert was lost then, but—”

            Markus sighed and wandered into the kitchen, where Eswral, in her happy-promotion-Markus sash, was fiddling with one of the debugger cassettes for the coffeemaker. “You didn’t like your party much better, did you?” he asked Eswral.

            She flicked her head back and forth no and her funereal cypress-green wood-fata’s eyes looked enormous and exhausted. Before her own promotion she had mimeographed many of the same kinds of documents for the procurers that Markus produced; now she reviewed supposed errors in those documents, occasionally signed off on truesilver research and development for the Ministry’s Office of Futures, and seemed for the most part a lot happier. It surprised Markus to see her look so sad for him, or because of him.

            “You okay, Eswral?” Markus asked.

            Eswral Riel Síreth yanked at the magnetic tape in the debugger, murmured a few incantations, yanked at the tape again, then started winding it back int to left-hand side of the cassette. Once that was done she fed the cassette into the coffeemaker and turned the machine on. A pleasing burbling sound started up. “Feeling a bit better now,” she said.

            “Was it like this when you were younger?” Markus asked her. Then he said “Never mind.”

            “I wonder,” she said. The coffeemaker kept burbling. Out in the big room the person talking about Herbert’s service in Equatorial Albany was still going on and on.

            “Of course it’s Kingsport, on the Kingsflood, when a man is on the throne. Or a few other kinds of things too besides a man, I suppose. Anyway, Herbert when he was stationed in Queensport—”

            “Have you ever read some of Weatherhead’s adventure novels?” Eswral suddenly asked Markus just as their coffee was beginning to be expressed into the office’s battered old copper coffeepot.

            “My dad wouldn’t let me. He’d talk about all the things they got wrong.”

            “He fought in one of the wars against Smier?”

            “Not exactly against Smier. More some of the bush wars in Equatorial…yes.”

            “My parents are a lot like some of the people you hear about resisting Policy in the Equator,” said Eswral meditatively. “They didn’t want electrification, radiofication, water purification, alterenchantment, population policy, health counseling, resource rationalization, monarchism, communism. With them that has to do with their age, though. Mid-three-digits, and that was when I was born.” The coffeemaker dinged. “Hazelnut, right?” she said to Markus, raising her hands over their pair of cups.

            He nodded. Eswral—he looked at her the way he might have looked at a medlar, or at a demitasse, something small and serving mostly as a conduit of a larger force, a vivifying force like food or drink, into his existence. What force that was, in Eswral’s case, was difficult to define. It wasn’t sex; she was a fata, and probably a homosexual, and Markus was in any case mostly-happily married. It wasn’t death; fatae lived practically forever barring misadventure and Eswral’s work had nothing to do with blood magic or with war. It was a comfort, but some kind of public, civic comfort. Eswral was a bite-sized case of it. He supposed—and she would have agreed with them—that they were all bite-sized cases of many things, more or less, here in this office in the Ministry of Works without the grave problems that the Ministry of Cults, for instance, was having.

            “Tide goes in, tide goes out, things get bought, things get sold,” someone was intoning outside the kitchen.

            “They never have much to say, do they?” Markus asked Eswral. She just gave him a wry, tense smile, and continued murmuring the hazelnut incantation as they commenced to sip at the rims of their coffee cups.

 ❦

Neri Gwaient Gwaifin made them choose between lawn games and watching a movie for the “team” part of Markus’s promotion party, which was also supposed to make up for a lackluster birthday party. Everyone other than Markus and Eswral wanted to do both. Neri popped in a videotape of a historical war movie, not about the wars in which Grady Lask and his progenitor and progenitrix had fought but about something much further back, before Maldry had incorporated the fatae or begun establishing the Equatorial Provinces, before the Ministry of Works or the Ministry of Cults. Back when what you had happening in your life, what you were allowed or not allowed or ordered or not ordered to do, was purely a matter of your lord or lady, his or her vicinity. It had some things in common with the nostaliga that Markus and Eswral had just been talking about, but Eswral, seeing it dramatized and flickering, found that it now turned her stomach. She had no interest in telling Markus this, certainly less than no interest in telling Markus why.

            They moved on to croquet. Eswral and Neri, as usual, both played it ungraciously—sending each other constantly, sending Markus or Ledelly or Saran Gom constantly, sometimes even yelling “Fore!” when they did. Saran Gom got petulant about it. Something about his petulant tone of voice made Markus realize that he was the person who had been prating about tides earlier.

            Saran Gom’s job was to cross-check two or three different kinds of receipt that were kept of some of the truesilver procurement deals. There were almost never discrepancies in the receipts; he spent most of his time on the job singing, and he had a good voice, a lovely tenor that the others generally enjoyed hearing when the door to his office was open. It had not occurred to Markus that he might be a sore loser when it came to croquet, any more than it had occurred to him that he might say banal things about the tide when he did not have to.

            Eswral knew Saran Gom a bit better than did Marcus. His behavior surprised her less. The receipt cross-checking had almost a medicinal effect, as far as she had seen, on some of his more obnoxious habits of thought. It soothed him. He got both fatuous and frenetic otherwise, as today. She would offer, she thought, to go home with him—not for the usual euphemistic reason so many had or claimed to have these days—rather to sit with him and watch a movie together or listen to some music, that same lovely style that he liked to sing. He would calm down eventually, in a relaxed evening with a friend from work. They would put on Hold’s Harpers or The Last Auroras, something big and sweeping and dramatic and set in the distant past, and Saran Gom would eat popcorn and Eswral would eat grapes and cheese, and they would doze and he would relax and she would send him home.

            They had, as fatae, at once compressed and extended feelings of time. When she looked in her photo albums at the cat that she had had as a child, she was looking back more than a hundred years; the photos, were they to be taken out from behind the yellowed cellophane, would have been brittle to the touch. She experienced those hundred years as far shorter than a human being would have, yet she did experience them, and she was still young. The cat, Missy or Peachy they had called her, had been dead for eighty-seven years, and had not had a short life. She had suffered towards the end, and it had taken Eswral decades to be able to look at her kitten pictures without tearing up, yet those decades had been as a year or two, maybe, for an entity like Markus.

            “Imagine Maldry before all this, before the Ministry of Works, before the invasions of the Equatorial Provinces…” Neri was saying. “Well there are still older people around, fatae especially, who were there. It’s nice to think about going back to that. Would we really want to? People are more content when they don’t know how much better it could be. That might have been the case back then.”

            “I think it’s the case in some of the Equatorial Provinces even now, Neri,” Ledelly said. She had gotten her croquet ball, the red one, through one of the return hoops, and now stood ready to send Markus’s or Saran Gom’s, blue or yellow, into the tall grass.

            Markus was thinking again of the great war against Smier and the even greater war against the Manzamo Islands a generation before that. The Equatorial Provinces, Smier, Hatsuba, Qanprur, Noriel, Greycester, all those old tyrannical bastions of the monstrous or the divine. He worked in procurement. He worked for the Ministry of Works, not the Ministry of Cults. He was a man, not a woman or a fata.

            “Fore!” said Ledelly, smirking at Neri and Eswral as she sent Markus’s ball.

Short Story: “Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory”

Caveat lector: There’s a lot of deliberately-unsettling sex stuff in this one.

❦

“Female heterosexuality is in crisis,” you hear tell, “and has been since Genesis 3. You know this. I know this. I don’t think we need to discuss it any longer.”

            When you are seven you meet your best friend, snaggletoothed and free. In your early days seventy times sevenfold you love her. When you are fourteen you realize that in certain lights, in certain kinds of clothing (kinds for which you are still, some say, too young), she looks just like Kate Beckinsale in that Van Helsing movie that your teacher put in the DVD player on the last state-mandated classless day of school. That which you thereby realize and that which you by it mean take another seven years to sink in, and by then you can flee from it, you know how to flee from it, and she is tragically not quite inclined enough to stop you.

            And so that desire that you avoid, or that need—but not as separate from yourself as a need; an unintentionality, perhaps, a telos-eschaton—contorts within you, insisting against resistance, a falling stone, a leap from a height, the needle of a compass tearing its way north through your Pauline flesh. Fucking as many guys as possible is your katechon, your Roman Empire, and it takes a lot of effort not to go on a tirade when someone makes a flippantly dogmatic remark (one way or the other) about abortion in your theology classes. Godhead was, for Mechthild, a flowing light—flow implying direction, implying inexorability. You get other images too for that inexorability, from books and movies and television focusing on “homoerotic girlbestfriend situationships” (a new set phrase, apparently—or were people saying this all along, only you, for obvious reasons, were unprivy to it?). The image of a frozen severed ear, a harassing piece of anonymous mail with two cheap dolls in it, a botched murder with a rock in a stocking.

            It stands to reason that there are occasions of sin in flight-from-reality, in trying to escape a facts-full-in-the-face full-bore brute-force understanding of who and what you are. Yet such fair-weather theologians as yours cannot simply discourage anything. Demand they instead that you should simply replace an end or a chirality that is, by their lights, phenomenon only, something that could just as well be something else, even though the replacements and the substitutions never actually work, are only ever phenomena themselves, and always leave you worse than you began. No parasamgateing yourself into a straightforward ataraxic equanimity of wholly compassed and integrated sex and love for you. You take your degree and become some kind of sacristan, and amidst the arma Christi you find for yourself Peter’s cock.

            Chastity impresses itself upon you before reality does, and you adopt it with another series of excuses, another series of motivated sweepings of your demonless inmostnesses. Will you end up worse than you did before, you wonder? That would not be the first time, if it happened. Your friend, your beautiful and kind and loving friend now married to a carpentrix out Bennington way, calls you often, still at least once a week, long luxuriant calls in which she talks to you with the greatest and sincerest worry. She wonders if you are a real person, which could be asked of a lot of people. She wonders if you are judging her, which you are too busy judging yourself to do, comforting yourself in self-condemnation not over the sereness of the present but over the commissions of the past. You are barking up the wrong damn tree, in the middle of the wrong damn desert, and she knows it, and you do not, and your flippant theologians and sunny moralists have put you no closer to learning it. You do think back, you do, to the unriven living self you once had, childish and muddy and free, and with her even then, always with her, if only you would allow her to be a forerunner for anything except deluded devastation.

            From Pimps to Pious: The Confessions of St. Augustine for Barstool Sports Readers, your poorly-considered and not-that-well-intentioned apologetics book, sits on a library bookshelf at a Newman Center that is physically falling apart. The shelf smells of dust, piss, insects; the center, weed, shit, come. You take the book down. It’s very bad. The title was intended as a joke and comes from a Wordle in which you did very badly. You are seven times five. Thus halfway through the days of our lives you are always being splattered with white paint. Father Youngtrad (not his real name) goes on and on about “Christian freedom,” but you are not convinced he knows the meaning of that term, if it has one. Why for that matter would you want to be free, when you cannot even move through the world with stability or with justice? You would only invite more judgment upon yourself, upon the empty house that you will not fill up with love, upon the sinlessness that you now prop up through the same delusion and flight from cooperation with the truth that once propped up the sins upon sins of your early days.

            Your old friend returns one day, into your life, messaging you, asking for a visit, and you say yes, either because you are stupid or because you are not that stupid. She is divorced. She arrives and she puts the moves on you. It is an unreal, flaccid, Carolinian January, and you do not need to be warm.

            “You really think you have to,” she says, “don’t you?”, with a laugh.

            “I do.”

            “You don’t; you didn’t have to face me. You have to face reality,” she says, “reality. Let me tell you about a story I read. It’s in a book of old Swiss folk tales. It’s about the Virgin Mary as a knight who seduces sad maidens.”

            “I don’t want to hear about this.”

            “Yes you do. Leaves ‘em fucked and deserted, as Brother Marquis said. Or was that one of Fresh Kid Ice’s verses? It’s been ages since I heard that song. Anyway. This is in the nineteenth century. And in our own time, I had this idea, a killer idea, so to speak, for a spec script about a hit man. Or he’s an abortion doctor—and I know you’ve had abortions, so I’m sorry about this—but it’s like one of those Luc Besson or John Woo movies about the noble hit man, you know?” She lowers her voice into Don LaFontaine territory. “In a world…where Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided two days ago…”

            You tell her that you, for one, are still a loyal daughter of the Church, and do not appreciate this flippant way of talking. She asks caustically if you really think she isn’t a loyal daughter, the way she is talking. You don’t have a good answer for that.

            And a bit more from her: “The Witch of Endor was a nice old lady who followed the rules, whatever the rules were at the time. Nicer and older than you are.”

            And a bit more from you: “But I haven’t always followed the rules. That’s been hard-fought.”

            And a bit more from her: “Because you made it hard-fought. You broke the rules to prove some stupid point about being ‘normal’—you were against the rules before you were for them, because that is what you cared about, really—and also you’re not a nice old lady.”

            And a bit more from you: “I’m not autochthonous to the nice old lady way of life, maybe, but is anyone?”

            And a bit more from her: “Really, Name? ‘Autochthonous’? Dua Lipa is still not going to fuck you. And you’re not on the royal road to being a nice old lady either, I can tell you that much.”

            And a bit more from you: “I’ve kept on the straight and narrow though. Inwardly anyway. In my mind. Pun intended.”

            And a bit more from her: “Oh dear. You could have salvaged it until that ‘pun intended’ there, Name.”

            And a bit more from you: “Maybe when I’m an old lady I’ll be nice. I’ll be happy.”

            And a bit more from her: “And you’ll just sit there and wait for that to happen? Are you listening to yourself, Name? Are you hearing what you are saying? We’re talking about facing reality, not aging into harmlessness, as if that were really a thing. I’m sure the Witch of Endor had been a nice young lady too, and Saul gets the worst of it…yet he was among the prophets.”

            And a bit more from you: “He was.”

            And a bit more from her: “So again I ask you, Name: Are you hearing what you are saying to me right now?”

            And a bit more from you: “God have mercy on me; I am.”

            That night you have a dream of Christ, the centurion’s spear-wound in His side wet and willing. What does Christ want from you? It’s obvious, but it’s not what you normally give Him, is it, throwing yourself down on your face in front of an altar, distressed and hiding, your face in your arms, your arms on the floor, hiding not from God or even from yourself but from the flippant certainties of the conservative-secular everyday? Yet hiding in God; you are not prostrate in front of this sopping, lickable gash; you are on your knees, but clear-eyed.

            Trembling you part the folds of salmon flesh, and trembling you lap up the saving tide.

Short Story: “The Abomination of Desolation”

Note: “Standalone” tag notwithstanding, this is part of a broader story cycle, but the other stories in it are not going to be made available for quite some time.

“What’s this we’re listening to, Bella?” Sydney Alter asked his granddaughter on the winding two-lane blacktop between two banks of wooded hills. It was a surly afternoon in early July and the summer sun above the Catskills was never quite there and never quite gone. Bella was twenty years old, taking a break from college because of the pandemic, and living with Sydney and his second wife Gloria as a safer alternative to making her way out to Colorado where her parents and sisters were hunkering down.

            “It’s Taylor Swift,” Bella said. “One of the albums she released last year.”

            “Very relaxing,” Sydney said. “Not the pop trash I’d have expected.”

            “Expected from Taylor Swift of from me, Grandpa?” Bella asked. Sydney was worried for a moment that he had offended her, but then she grinned at him in a way that he recognized as a peace offering and as an invitation to be in on the joke, and he was put at ease. She did not look as if she genuinely expected an answer to the question she had asked, but he decided he would give her an answer anyway—and a true and honest answer, to boot.

            “Not from you, Bella,” he said. “You play clarinet, wasn’t it, or something like that?” Bella nodded and steered the car past a waterfall that plunged down to the right-hand side of the roadway. “So you’ve got taste. I just hear most of the names of these newer artists and it makes me expect some kind of song that won’t agree with me. Your parents are probably getting to an age where they’ll start to understand this. I’m sure you will too, some day after I’m long gone.”

            “Hopefully,” said Bella. “Hopefully I’ll get to that age someday, I mean.”

            “Morbid way to put it, wouldn’t you say?” her grandfather said to her.

            “Lots of morbidity going around these days,” Bella said. She turned the car onto another state highway. The weather was getting finer. The leaves, green on the trees that overhung the road, shined with pearlescent golden light that reminded Sydney intensely of his long-ago honeymoon, which had taken place over a span of similar summer days.

            Sydney and Bella were visiting the site of Glickman’s Mountain Resort, which had limped along until 1988 and whose ruins apparently still stood overlooking the little lake in which he had gone skinny dipping after dark with the girl he had lost his virginity to, the better part of a lifetime ago. He had had his first job at Glickman’s as well and his first beer, furnished by his older cousin Alan when Sydney had been sixteen. Bella was doing her thesis about some of those old resorts in the Judaic studies department at a certain university upstate; since Sydney wasn’t driving any longer on account of his bad eyes, she had offered to ferry him out here so that he could regard his past and she could write her future.

            Bella was not necessarily Sydney’s favorite of his five grandchildren. That was probably Rachel, Bella’s first cousin, the middle child of Sydney’s firstborn Alan. Alan was named after Sydney’s cousin, Rachel and Bella after two of Alan’s sisters. Most of these people lived in the Midwest these days; Bella with her upstate university was the only grandkid who was currently in or around New York. She was therefore also the closest to Sydney’s deceased mother’s family up in New England. Bella’s sister Nessa lived with a gang of roommates in a small city in, Sydney believed, Wisconsin; he heard from that part of his family about two or three times a week most weeks and they seemed not to see calling him as too much of a chore.

            Sydney had flown out to visit that side of the family twice, in 2002 and in 2014. In 2002 they had just moved to the Midwest; Alan II had gotten a job at the Port of Cleveland and the family had been able to find a fairly nice place to park themselves that did not suffer from all the recent problems that people were getting liable to think when they thought Ohio. Bella had been barely a year old at this point and Nessa would not be born for another six months. Sydney’s memory for things like this was not what it once had been, but he seemed to recall that it had been during this stay with them, and not before or after, that Alan’s wife Cynthia had found out she was pregnant for the second time. They had all been overjoyed and, maybe unusually for parents of second daughters (Sydney wouldn’t know), Alan and Cynthia had stayed overjoyed throughout Nessa’s life so far. She would have just turned eighteen now, which made it a little weird in this day and age that she was already living with these roommates; Sydney had never really understood the specifics. It was also not entirely clear to Sydney whether or not Nessa was in college or even expected to be college-bound eventually, and Bella also did not have the world’s clearest answer for him when he would ask her, which by the time of this ride through the Catskills together he had done, by his count, three times. Bella claimed to know her little sister well, but not, she said, that well, given that she had not been able to go home for any of this summer.

            “Do any of these roads look familiar to you, Grandpa?” Bella asked him as the gizmo that was telling her where to drive them chirped and purred.

            “A little but it’s just been so long, you understand,” he said. He felt apologetic, like he was imposing on Bela even though the idea to come out here in the first place on a summer’s day like this had been one that she had suggested to him, not the other way around. She spun the steering wheel cautiously.

            “Glickman’s, Grossinger’s, Concord, Katz…” said Bella. “Fantastic names. Fascinating places.”

            “Fantastic like great,” Sydney asked her, “or fantastic like something out of a story?”

            “Both, for someone as young as me,” Bella said, which was the answer that Sydney had been afraid she would give. “It’s—I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that I can explain, really, or even that I ought to explain. You went hiking a lot when you were younger, didn’t you, Grandpa? Dad has told me that you did.” And Sydney indeed had, and Sydney nodded. He almost saw what Bella meant without Bella having to say it outright. Once back in 1974 or so Sydney and his then-fiançée, Bella’s late grandmother, had climbed Mount Washington together as part of a road trip to somewhere in the far north of Maine to visit a college friend of Rita’s who had married someone there. It had been mid-fall and the mountain was already bitterly cold and speckled with unprepossessing hoar above the blazing maple-red treeline. Yet from that chilly peak a vision had unfolded around Sydney and Rita that might as well have been a vision of hundreds of years ago or of hundreds of years from now. Woods beyond woods, New England burning bright in the still flames of its October. It might be that Bella then expected a similar eternity from the stillness and emptiness of this post-Glickman’s Catskill July, a July that Sydney still wished were full of life and motion once again. Of life maybe at least it was indeed still full; the woods that fell away from the road were after all very green, and Sydney could just make out a family of white-tailed deer grazing companionably together in the fields below some reservoir. Bella seemed impressed, even, already, by this quiet and cicada-sedate summer beauty.

            They drove on and on and reached the place where Glickman’s once had been, a country road stretching between rows of unpleasantly new-looking houses. Sydney could see bits of the resort’s overgrown golf course, which his father, a brash hater of that so-called gentlemanly game, had never let anybody in Sydney’s family use back in those days. The lake could not be seen from the road so Sydney figured they would have to get out and walk. Bella said that she had batching suit packed somewhere in her car and Sydney was happy to get into the lake in his street clothes if that was what it took for old times’ sake.

            “‘Old times’ sake’ seems to mean an awful lot to you, Grandpa,” Bella observed.

            “Well yes, it does; of course it does. Live a while; you’ll see why,” Sydney said, not quite intending for Bella to hear it as a warning. “Living for your memories is something almost everyone ends up having to do and finds themselves doing sooner or later. Actually it took it a lot longer to kick in for me than for most, if you can believe that, Bella.”

            “I can believe it, Grandpa,” Bella reassured him as she drove the car past an increasingly ominous-looking chicken wire fence.

            “Stop the car,” Sydney said urgently.

            “What? Now?”

            “Yes. Now. As soon as there’s a halfway decent pull-off.”

            “Why?”

            “Don’t argue,” said Sydney, surprising himself, worrying himself a little. “I know where we are now and you do not. I know what it ought to look like and you do not. I want you to stop the car now, Bella.” Sydney himself was affrighted by how stressed and aggrieved his sounded.

            Bella brought the Subaru to a stop that was a little bit more abrupt, maybe, than Sydney would have preferred it if he had been thinking clearly at the moment. “Okay,” she said, rattled; he could hear her breath coming in more-than-usually labored puffs. “The car is stopped. Take it easy, Grandpa. Grandpa, what’s going on?”

            “There’s a fence—a fence,” Sydney said.

            “Yes.”

            “With the name of a developer.” Sydney pointed at a sign posted on the fence. “Some casino developer. Bryce Entertainment. See?”

            “Yes. I see.”

            Sydney was more and more agitated, struggling without much success to explain to his granddaughter what made this such an enormity in his eyes. He seemed to remember that Bella considered herself an anti-capitalist, but this was not about capitalism; it was about something else, something more original yet more obscene. “Disgusting,” he said. “Abominable. A desecration. A pig in the Temple. A desecration.”

            “Of what, Grandpa?” Bella asked, eyes wide, looking and sounding downright desperate to understand. “A desecration of what? Please; I want to understand. I want to know if I can help.”

            “A desecration” was all Sydney would say. “A desecration” was all he could say. The summer sun beat down impassively on the casino developer’s construction site.

A Small Play: “All Woes and All Joys”

☛Dusky stage. Dusty and in flames. People come and go. They seem uncomfortable, very intensely so, yet hopeful, or at least waiting for something. The effect is like a station, or an onsen, but the heat is dry and the cleanliness being instantiated is not visible to the eye.

S: That’s what I was afraid of. There was something unnatural in my flesh or, at any rate, in my words and I was afraid of it and afraid of being found out, having people see it there.

F: People like you are always asking if something is “natural” when really our nature comes down into us from on high and has next to no interest in the sex question to begin with.

S: Spoken like someone who never had sex.

F: Yes.

S: Never had children.

F: I had lupus half my life.

S: You gave birth to it four times?

F: More, if you count each time I was up with the chills.

S: I just can’t see my soul burning through my body like that, if there is a soul. It matters more to me what did go in, what did come out of my body.

F: It’s a hell of a way to think about the marriage bed if it’s just a matter of things going in and coming out. Like the most awful guests at a college party. “Please, may I take your coat, Annie Lou?”

S: “I assure you there aren’t too many people smoking reefer in the coat room.”

F: What a time that was. Lord, I don’t miss it.

S: I never really got out of it. I mean, my husband…

F: Yes, hence the four children you gave birth to while I was giving birth to the lupus. I wrote a story about pregnancy. Unwanted, as they say. Called it “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” I don’t know looking back that I’d find it to be that, exactly, but it sure would be better fortune than the lupus, at any rate.

S: I’m sure it would. I read that story.

F: Before you got here, or afterwards?

S: I don’t recall. Do you recall when you read “The Possibility of Evil”?

F: I can’t say I do.

☛Stage lights change color. Elsewhere:

A: I would say my ecological conversion as the Pope puts it, came when I saw a sign on the road driving through freezing rain to get home right before Christmas. This would have been 2021 or 2022. It said “It’s a wonderful life. Drive safe.”

G: By implication, “so you don’t lose your wonderful life,” then?

A: Yes.

G: It was a film, wasn’t it? A rather popular one, as I understand it.

A: Oh, perennially so. A good joke too, for the kinds of jokes MassDOT would make. And it’s the funniest thing: I didn’t even like winter, or cold weather, and I would have been happy to live in a Boston with the same climate as Florida if that was really what the world had in store for us, but I decided that I could not abide a future where that joke wouldn’t make sense.

G: Snow on the roads?

A: As I said, freezing rain. Or sleet. A great deal of it.

G: There was sleet in Tunbridge Wells, also, the evening I went to the New Year’s Eve party at which my conversion began. I remember looking out into that sleety night and humming one of the old parlor songs to myself while trying to scrub claret out of the bodice I had on. I wasn’t used to the neckline, you see; it was more modest than what I had usually gone in for until then; I was growing older, you know, and I felt ill-at-ease. The drops of wine would have fallen on my collar-bone; they fell on my bodice instead, and so I went up to the washroom and stood there singing parlor songs and looking out the window until someone bellowed out, “Happy New Year! Happy 1897!”

A: Is that when you died?

G: No; it was simply when my conversion was complete. I looked in the glass, then—in the mirror, that is, you understand—and I realized that if 1897 was to be any different then I had absolutely better stop feeling so bloody sorry for myself.—Pardon my language.

A: I died right after my conversion. I did not drive safely; I caromed off Interstate 91 and broke my neck on a tree.

G: Oh, what a pity.

A: As a matter of fact I don’t think it was a pity at all. My conversion might not have lasted otherwise.

G: Itself a pity.

A: True enough, I guess.

☛And elsewhere:

C: Portinari? So you are Dante’s Beatrice?

B: I am my own Beatrice.

C: But the one he wrote about?

B: I barely know who Dante is.

C: So you were misidentified? By Boccaccio?

B: I suppose I must have been. I don’t think it’s obvious that that woman was any one particular person, any one real person, at all. Would you want her to be? Forget the Commedia for a moment and think about how La Vita Nuova writes about her.

C: You were saying you barely knew who Dante was.

B: I barely know who Dante the dead man is; I know who Dante the figure of world literature is, because I am being asked about this all the time.

C: I’m sorry.

B: Oh, no need to be. It’s only that it confuses me to this day, that this would be of such overwhelming, almost exclusive, interest to everybody. What kind of name is “Dante,” anyway?

C: It was short for Durante.

B: Fascinating. I do think I may have met a boy with that name, once or twice.

☛The proscenium arch explodes into roses. The roses distend, extend, their petals growing longer and much, much thinner, until they are those of Lycoris radiata, the red spider lily. The flowers fill everyone’s field of vision—everyone’s, onstage and off—and then they are gone, and the people on the stage with them.

Short Story: “‘Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine’ by F.T. Marinetti (with a Critical Gloss by Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky, of the University of Pennsylvania)”

(Note: I think the translation of Marinetti to which I have access is still copyrighted, so this riff on motivated reading of political texts that makes use of that translation can’t and shouldn’t be. Complete Creative Commons free-for-all. See if I care.)

The foregoing will have prepared you for understanding one of our chief Futurist endeavors, namely the abolition in literature of the seemingly unquestionable fusion of the dual concepts of Woman and Beauty. The effect of this has been to reduce romanticism to a kind of heroic assault, launched by a warlike, lyrical male on a tower that is bristling with enemies, gathered about the divine Woman-Beauty.

Marinetti opposes the objectification of women. Some argue that he himself perpetuates the objectification of women throughout this essay in another form, but he makes it clear at the beginning that this is not his intent, and even though impact matters more than intent, the fact that Marinetti supported women having equal political rights to men as well means that we ought to take him at his word here. Our key to interpreting this must then be that he opposes the objectification of women and their treatment as mere sexual objects.

Novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer or Flaubert’s Salammbô can explain my idea. What we’re looking at is a dominant leitmotif that is threadbare and tedious, and of which we wish to rid literature and art as a whole. That’s why we are developing and proclaiming a great new idea that is circulating in contemporary life, namely the idea of mechanical beauty. Thus we are promoting love of the machine—that love we first saw lighting up the faces of engine drivers, scorched and filthy with coal dust though they were. Have you ever watched an engine driver lovingly washing the great powerful body of his engine? He uses the same little acts of tenderness and close familiarity as the lover when caressing his beloved.

Marinetti, rejecting the oppressive structures of “Western canon” writers such as Hugo and Flaubert, instead exalts the liberated eroticism of the machine—cf. Donna Haraway, Shulamith Firestone, pioneers in the field of AI-enhanced adult entertainment, etc. He strikes a blow against sex-work-exclusionary radical feminism. Before these ideas even existed, he already anticipates and refutes the idea that the social construct of romantic love is the only alternative to sexual objectification.

We know for certain that during the great French rail strike, the organizers of that subversion did not manage to persuade even one single engine driver to sabotage his locomotive. And to me that seems absolutely natural. How on earth could one of these men have injured or destroyed his great, faithful, devoted friend, whose heart was ever giving and courageous, his beautiful engine of steel that had so often glistened sensuously beneath the lubricating caress of his hand?

Marinetti rejects class reductionism and labor chauvinism. His leftism and futurism are not the ossified obsession with structure, routine, and so-called “proven” methods that are so typical of “organized labor.” One is confident that Marinetti today would support workforce flexibilization as a means of social advancement and combating all oppressive power structures. Cf. Kazan, On the Waterfront, et al.

Not an image, this, but rather a reality, almost, that we shall easily be able to put to the test in a few years’ time. You will undoubtedly have heard the comments that car owners and car workshop managers habitually make: “Motorcars, they say, are truly mysterious... They have their foibles, they do unexpected things; they seem to have personalities, souls and wills of their own. You have to stroke them, treat them respectfully, never mishandle them nor overtire them. If you follow this advice, this machine made of cast iron and steel, this motor constructed according to precise calculations, will give you not only its due, but double and triple, considerably more and a whole lot better than the calculations of its creator, its father, ever dreamed of!” Well then, I see in these words a great, important revelation, promising the not-too-distant discovery of the laws of a true sensitivity in machines! We have therefore to prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with his motorcar, so as to facilitate and perfect an unending exchange of intuitions, rhythms, instincts, and metallic discipline, absolutely unknown to the majority and only guessed at by the brightest spirits.

Here Marinetti foresees or foreshadows transhumanism and the abolition of the idea that biology is destiny. The human being for Marinetti is a creature of liberated potential, not oppressed actuality. His lack of interest in “givenness” is freeing; cf. “friendly AI” theorists; Solanas, “full automation”; Yoda, “luminous beings are we”; a Boston Globe article about putting Ted Williams on ice that I can’t find to cite right now. [Ed: How hard can this be, Chris?]

There can be no doubt that, in admitting Lamarck’s transformist hypothesis, it has to be acknowledged that we aspire to the creation of a nonhuman species in which moral anguish, goodness, affection, and love, the singular corrosive poisons of vital energy, the only off-switches of our powerful, physiological electricity, will be abolished. We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and we are not joking when we declare that in human flesh wings lie dormant. The day when it will be possible for man to externalize his will so that, like a huge invisible arm, it can extend beyond him, then his Dream and his Desire, which today are merely idle words, will rule supreme over conquered Space and Time. This nonhuman, mechanical species, built for constant speed, will quite naturally be cruel, omniscient, and warlike. It will possess the most unusual organs; organs adapted to the needs of an environment in which there are continuous clashes.

Marinetti does not put stock in the limitations of oppressive middle-class values. His feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Girlboss! [Ed: if you didn’t call him a girlboss when you brought up On the Waterfront, you shouldn’t be calling him a girlboss now.]

Even now we can predict a development of the external protrusion of the sternum, resembling a prow, which will have great significance, given that man, in the future, will become an increasingly better aviator. Indeed, a similar development can be seen in the strongest fliers among birds. You will easily understand these apparently paradoxical hypotheses if you think of the externalized will that is continually in play during spiritualist séances. What’s more, it’s certain, and you can observe it easily enough yourself, that today, ever more frequently, one comes across people from the lower classes who, though utterly devoid of any culture or education whatsoever, are nonetheless gifted with what I call the “great mechanical intuition” or “a nose for things metallic.” And that’s because those workmen have already had the experience of an education in machinery and, in a certain sense, have identified closely with it. In order to prepare for the formation of the nonhuman, mechanical species of extended man, through the externalization of his will, it is very important that the need for affection, which man feels in his veins and which cannot yet be destroyed, be greatly reduced. The man of the future will reduce his own heart to its proper function of blood distribution. The heart, by some means or other, must become a sort of stomach of the brain, which is fed systematically, so that the spirit can embark on action.

Correctly, and foreseeing the important work done by Foucault, Marinetti identifies philonormativity (not Foucault’s word, but it should have been) as a bourgeois value used as a means of restricting human potential to artificial and constricting relationship-forms. See also the concept of the “eroticism of the journey” as in my book on sexuality in the life and times of Jack Kerouac.

Today, one encounters men who go through life more or less without love, in a beautiful, steel-toned frame of mind. We have to find ways of ensuring that these exemplary beings continue to increase in number. These dynamic beings do not have any sweet lover to see at night, but instead lovingly prefer, every morning, the perfect start-up of their workshops. What’s more, we are convinced that art and literature exercise a determining influence over all classes in society, even over the most ignorant, who by some mysterious process of infiltration absorb them. We can thus either promote or retard the movement of humanity toward this form of life that is free of sentimentalism and lust. In spite of our skeptical determinism that we have to kill off each day, we believe in the value of artistic propaganda against panegyrics favoring Don Juans and ludicrous cuckolds. These two words must be purged entirely of their meaning in life, in art, and in the collective imagination. Does not the ridicule poured upon the cuckold perhaps contribute to the exaltation of the Don Juan? And the exaltation of Don Juan contributes to making the cuckold seem ever more ridiculous? Freeing ourselves from these two motifs we shall also free ourselves from the great obsessive phenomenon of jealousy, which is nothing but a by-product of a vanity that springs from Don Juanism. The whole enormous business of romantic love is thus reduced to the single purpose of preservation of the species, and physical arousal is at last freed from all its titillating mystery, from relish for the salacious and from all the vanity of Don Juanism; it becomes merely bodily function, like eating and drinking. The extended man we dream of will never experience the tragedy of old age!

[Ed: You’re missing an easy layup by not bringing up Alexandra Kollontai here.]

But it is for this reason that young men of this present age, at long last sick and tired of erotic books, of the twofold drug of sentimentalism and lust, and being at last made immune to the sickness of Love, will have to learn to systematically purge themselves of all heartaches. This they can do through daily eradication of their emotions and seeking endless sexual amusement in rapid, casual encounters with women. This frank optimism of ours is thus diametrically opposed to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, that bitter philosopher who so often proffered the tantalizing revolver of philosophy to kill off, in ourselves, the deep-seated sickness of Love with a capital L. And it is precisely with this revolver that we shall so gladly target the great Romantic Moonlight.

cf. Erika Moen, “What the Fuck’s a Cuck?”; various other works in the sex-positive feminist tradition; Eric Anderson, The Monogamy Gap; Nancy Meyers, The Parent Trap; Roderick Featherstonehaugh Brill, The Monogamy Trap; Brandon Wheek, The Parent Gap; W. Braxton Naylor, “Towards a Pornography of Epistemological Liberation”; Alex X. Valli, “Polymorphous Perversity and the Decolonial Imaginary”; Jackie Treehorn, Logjammin’; Budd Starr, Gary the Cable Bi 3: Who’s Up for an Orgy?

Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky is the Distinguished Professor of Intersectional Liberation Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Gay Right: The Anti-Assimilationist Witness of Yukio Mishima; Road Head: Jack Kerouac, Hugh Hefner, and the Pornographization of the American Dream; Inevitable: Why the Sex-Positivity Movement Will Win; and, most recently, Hamas’s Fight is Humanity’s Fight: A Guidebook for Queer Palestine Action. She lives with her Dominant, Pitiless Bruce, in Center City Philadelphia.

Short Story: “Collyridian Remains”

Antonelle Vetiver (not her real name) looked from the chopper in which she sat anticipating the first interesting thing to happen to her in years. She was dressed for the job she wanted (a movie archaeologist) rather than the job she had (a real archaeologist), in a Lara Croftish getup of cropped tank top, short shorts, heavy boots, and heavier sunglasses, with a sort of linen jacket over top of everything. The lone sands that stretched far away below her were not level; they were in a mountainous part of the world, and moreover were in it unlawfully, against the express instructions of the government of a certain country. Antonelle did not care about these things, or perhaps it would have been better and more honest to say that actually she liked them; they made her feel more like Indiana Jones and less like some functionary or stoolie. The man piloting the helicopter, Rodney Clark of Needham, Massachusetts, cared, but Antonelle was paying him a whole boatload of money for this, with an astronomical sum still to come depending on how the next part of the trip went.

Probably part of the reason she and Rodney got along so well, Antonelle thought, was that they were both New Englanders, both Massholes in fact, although other than the name of the state itself the town where she had grown up and the town where he had grown up had very little in common. Needham was a suburb of Boston, fairly affluent as far as she knew; she was from Florida, not the Florida of beaches and bikinis and alligators and hurricanes but the Town of Florida, Massachusetts, a tiny hill town, snowbound in the winter and windswept in almost all seasons, full of dirt roads and whitewashed-steepled churches and birches and beeches and elms. There had been little if anything "to do" as a girl growing up in Florida, Massachusetts, other than asking questions of the trees, or exploring abandoned buildings and the yawning no-thing of the defunct Hoosac Tunnel, or going to town meetings, or standing with the firefighters along Route 2 to get small bills from passing cars during the fire department's periodic fundraisers. Mostly at those her job had been to hand out miniature American flags as thank-you gifts. Rodney, she was sure, had had more "to do" at every stage of his early life, up until quite recently; arguably even now he did, piloting helicopters in dangerous parts of the world for a living. Even so she did feel that they had something in common. (Her old English teacher, Miss Corriveau, who, the last Antonelle had heard of her, had recently started her own makeup line on the internet, had always discouraged the future Antonelle Vetiver from saying that she, or characters in the stories that she would write, “felt” things rather than “thought” or “believed” them. In this case, though, Antonelle felt that “feel” really was the most apposite word.)

The helicopter began its descent to the open stone platform that they were using as a helipad. It predated the existence of helicopters by at least a thousand years; Antonelle’s understanding was that the area in which they were landing, now completely unpeopled and without any sign of past habitation other than a few other rock-tables like these scattered here and there in the arid hills, had last had a town of any size in the first century or two after the early Muslim expansion through the Arabian Peninsula. The wind whipping around her bread-colored hair as she prepared to step out onto proscribed soil was hot and dry, but not quite as hot or as dry as she would have expected. There was a strange and unanticipated balminess to it, especially after a decade of the kind of global warming that even her grandfather’s bridge buddy Jack Glump had to admit really was occurring. Normally she would have appreciated it, but there was something eerie about it when she looked at it in combination with what she was here to do, what she was here to study and try to prove.

There was only one source, formally, for the movement in which she was interested, a single passage in the Panarion of Saint Epiphanius of Salamis. A breadbasket against heresies; surely that was about as High Church as it was possible to get without mobbing the altar and killing and eating the priest at the end of the Eucharistic prayer.

“And who but women are the teachers of this? Women are unstable, prone to error, and mean-spirited. As in our earlier chapter on Quintilla, Maximilla and Priscilla, so here the devil has seen fit to disgorge ridiculous teachings from the mouths of women. For certain women decorate a barber’s chair or a square seat, spread a cloth on it, set out bread and offer it in Mary’s name on a certain day of the year, and all partake of the bread; I discussed parts of this rite in my letter to Arabia. Now, however, I shall speak plainly of it and, with prayer to God, give the best refutations of it that I can, so as to grub out the roots of this idolatrous sect and with God’s help, be able to cure certain people of this madness.”

Apparently Muhammad or someone close to him had believed that Trinitarian Christians held the Virgin Mary as a member of that Trinity, or a “person” of that Trinity since all the serious and intellectually-oriented Christians whom Antonelle knew insisted for some reason on making that distinction. That seemed as good a reason as the passage in Epiphanius to believe that these women, the so-called Collyridians from collyris, the cakes (speaking of bread), really had existed. Better, actually, because of how hostile Epiphanius was to them; the overt misogyny in the passage in the Panarion struck Antonelle as so obviously uncalled-for that it invited the question of whether Epiphanius had made up the crassest and most obvious “girls’ heresy” possible as an excuse to fulminate about it. Muhammad, or whoever it was who had induced him to in a few obscure verses of the fifth surah of the Qur’an imply that Christians worshiped Mary, had not held quite that hostility, not quite as obviously at any rate.

The person who had turned Antonelle on to this site had told her that local lore had it there were still Collyridian inscriptions to be seen here, documentary evidence, a smoking gun if there ever was one. Evidently one of Epiphanius’s unstable, error prone, mean-spirited women, sacrificing the collyris on a barber’s-chair altar, had found spare time in her busy schedule of being a heresiarch to become literate in Greek. Antonelle wished her joy of it, prayed for her joy even, since, as she had heard from many of these same erudite Christian friends, it was possible for God, outside of Time, to hear a prayer and apply it on the past.

Her head, unhelpfully but unsurprisingly, was killing her by the time she with her brush and her notebook and her various recording instruments found anything on the stone surface that seemed like it might be a Greek inscription. The writing was, her source had been very clear, on the edges, not the tops, of these things. Walls of foundations, maybe, whatever sense that made. If she had not known better she would have thought it was a scheme to make her land a helicopter in the middle of nowhere. The Greek did look like it might say “Hagia Maria,” but “Hagia Maria” on its own was conventional, orthodox. She would need to find more. A description of the cakes would help; better still would be an ode or prayer or hymn not to “Hagia Maria” but to something less plausibly deniable, “Thea Maria” maybe, or something including the word “prosopon.”

She sang her favorite aunt Gertrude’s old favorite song as she worked. “The day they laid poor Pancho low, Lefty split for Ohio, and where he got the bread to go, there ain’t nobody knows…”

She finished uncovering the inscription. “"Hagia Maira, ten timioteran ton Cheroubeim, kai endoxoteran asinkritos ton Serapheim, ten adiaphthoros Theon Logon tekousan...”

“Totally fucking orthodox. Motherfucker,” Antonelle breathed.

“You okay there?” Rodney called from the chopper. Poor Rodney, Antonelle thought; he had little investment here, but also little vanity; he was not inspired to refute anyone’s prejudices against him, nor was he inspired to make himself known for answering some old arcane mystery. He just enjoyed flying in the hotter and more dangerous parts of the world, and coming from somewhere where the hottest and most dangerous thing for half the year was a spilled cup of Dunkin, he could, she thought, be easily understood. Sympathy was easy, and even love, for someone in Rodney’s position in this world, who was kind.

“Yeah!” said Antonelle, then, realizing that she had snapped at him, “Yeah. Just disappointed.”

“Not finding what you were hoping for?”

“Does not look that way, no.”

She trudged back over the stone table to the chopper and sat back down beside him with a sigh. “Leaving already?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Okay, well, if you want to just relax here for a bit, we have some snacks I swiped from my hotel room before we left Riyadh, and, if you would like, a little nip of contraband.” He picked up what she had assumed was a water bottle and swirled it around in his right hand demonstratively.

“I’d like to just close my eyes for a few minutes, I think,” Antonelle said.

“Okay. Well, I’m going to have some nuts, and let me know if you’d like any,” said Rodney. She nodded, and the last thing she saw before closing her eyes and attempting to drift off was him happily apportioning a handful of brazil nuts for himself.

In Antonelle’s uncomfortable sun-drenched dream, she saw two women standing dolefully in front of her, in the dress of Eastern Roman imperial times. One was older and one was younger; both had big sad brown eyes, and both were holding cakes, holding collyris.

“What do you think it would prove, if we were real?” the older one asked her.

“If we were much as that man said, as Epiphanius claimed,” said the younger one.

“It would prove that he was wrong to speak so cruelly about you,” Antonelle said. “They would see that there were real people there, not just frivolous self-centered straw women for a bishop from Cyprus to vent about.”

“Is it more wrong to speak cruelly about someone just because that person is real?” the older of the two women in antique dress said then.

“Why would it not be?” Antonelle said. “A real person has rights, has a real life, a real inner life. You can be fair or unfair to a real person, not just about one.” She had a hard time explaining this, less because she had never expected to need to and more because it felt, in this sort of dream, as if they, the dream-emissaries, ought to be explaining it to her, not she to them.

“I agree; but do you think others do?” the younger of the two women in antique dress asked her, her eyes growing even wider, even more dolorous. The lighting in the dream-space was dimmed, as in a basilica; natural, but partly warded away. It was by no means the baked bright heat of the helicopter in which she was fitfully dozing in waking, or undreaming, life. “If you say ‘these people really existed; perhaps do not be so cruel to them’ do you really think others will take that to heart? Maybe they will, but I do not think so, especially since Epiphanius is dead.”

“But were you real?” Antonelle asked. “Your stories should be told for its own sake, even if…”

“Told by you?” the older of the two women in antique dress asked her. Antonelle did not have a good answer to this, especially since it made something clear to her that saddened her deeply, which was that her respect for these women and her respect for the past more generally did not necessarily produce a similar respect for her in them. Neither was that, probably, anything worth wondering at; nobody repaid every single quantum or scintillum of respect and love in kind, and Antonelle Vetiver was not one to inspire most people besides herself. She was a vague, self-contemptuous, posturing young living being, and the dreary regions of the dead could surely find more promising chevaliers.

She stirred. Rodney was peering at her with concern. Nary a twist in his mind, neither thought nor motive other than that concern, crossed the sweaty surface of his diligent, far-eyed face. She wondered if he had ever retained for longer than fifteen seconds her explanations of why they were here or what the Collyridians had supposedly been like. She vaguely hoped not, because that unawareness if anything would make him more deserving of the huge payout that he was getting for taking this kind of risk. It was a risk for her agenda, and she was grateful for it; she wanted to be as grateful for it as it was possible to be without caring about him overmuch.

He let her choose the music on the helicopter ride to their contact in Al-Mazyunah. It was a beaten-up old tape deck and she fished out a beaten-up old tape. She listened to Alanis and, as was traditional, thought about her ex-girlfriend. The next time she dozed off she had an uncomfortable dream about receiving oral sex from the younger of the two Collyridian women from the previous dream, apparently during a performance of Iphigenia among the Taurians. She woke up with the helicopter passing, so to speak, through the purpling surfaces of the ultradeep evening sky.

Short Story: “The Jellyfish Void”

Swimming in warm water that lapped at every dorsal inch in pliant acceptance of her misbegotten backstroke, she realized after a while that jellyfish, tiny and transparent, like minuscule balloons some of which had little bits of brackish-inlet sedge or seaweed floating suspended within them, had begun to swim alongside her. Concerned for a moment, she was becalmed again when one touched her upper arm and proved unable or unwilling to sting. Unable, it must have been—the jellyfish, she remembered, a brainless and almost nerveless scrap of animated water, had no more will than it had pain, there in that warm water that soon would cover much more of the world than it did.

Since she had been six she had come, on and off, to this jellyfish space, this cove at the bottom of a long track down from a rambling extended-family home on a bluff. The extended family was no longer hers, really, for a number of reasons, but it was hers enough that she still came here and still visited them and still lost herself in these waters. The jellyfish were new, or perhaps it was she who was new, so new that she had only just noticed them. One brushed up against one of her hips. The sun was hot enough to bake her belly through the dark fabric of her swimsuit, even though she was wallowing in water and easily able to barrel-roll in the water, to log like a whale if it got too much to bear.

Once she had dreamed about being a river dolphin, in South America or in China, maybe. She had come up out of the river, had come into a village, into a festival—and then back into the river, back to an underwater village, an underwater festival. Up out of the river again, and she was a seal on a North Atlantic skerry now, and it was no longer a river but the surging slate-grey sea. She married, grew old, left her husband, and went back into the sea—a lake now, and she was a bright-scaled carp, swimming hither and thither in the sun-splashed, sometimes-shaded shallows. And then the dream had ended, and she had woken in a start, and sat up in a bedroom in a house cocooned in morning rain.

It felt as if the jellies that were swimming with her now had come to her out of this dream of dreams. The darkness of the dream had sent her out into a dismaying light, and that had always worried her, ever since that so-sudden awakening. The light dismayed her less than usual now. She reached out in this warm and brightly lit reality and touched a jellyfish, a harmless jellyfish, maybe not a cnidarian at all but something that merely looked and acted similar the way she herself looked and acted like an ordinary and healthy person. She wondered if she could be or become harmless in her unordinariness and ill health. Probably she was more harmed than harmful already, she thought, as were the jellies, as was the water.

Short Story: “Her Numerous Progeny Prosper and Thrive”

Note: This short story was an “occasional” satire on the relatively-recent death of Queen Elizabeth II, meant to show how ridiculous some of the standards to which various sanctimonious American leftists claimed to hold her would have been in practice.

It is a well-known story, so famed among those interested in this kind of history. On February 6, 1952, a young woman of twenty-five wakes up in a treetop hotel in Kenya, a loft, an eyrie, looking out over verdant wet-season plains. A grim-faced runner comes and tells her to make her way to the nearest telephone, where she is told that her father has died peacefully over the night and she is now the queen and sovereign of vast swathes of the globe.

            What does that “sovereign” mean? What might she do with that queenhood? Not much, some argue; some people say that she is a figurehead, a pasteboard mask, an avatar of power rather than someone by whom or with whom or in whom power can actually be used. These people will tell you that she can only act according to the so-called “advice” of her servants, who in turn must be able to win votes in a democratically elected Parliament, and it is that Parliament that can do absolutely anything it likes.

            Yet some people say that weasel words are great. In theory the young woman’s powers are vast. And a good thing that she can’t use them, too, many say, given what her ancestors got up to when they could use them. Vast quantities of blood and guts, gold and silver, have been brought to bear for her family over the centuries, first to help them rule the world, then to keep them fed and happy, whatever “happy” means, while Parliament ruled the world for them. Now those blood and guts, gold and silver, are hers. Supposing they were not; supposing she attempted to divest herself of them. She is, after all, her mother’s daughter, and her mother is a woman who is reported to have said that she could only look the poor of London in the face after the family’s palace was struck by a German bomb.

            Let us suppose she does just that. “I will remain Elizabeth,” she says; her father Albert reigned as George, her uncle David as Edward, her great-grandfather Albert also as Edward, her great-great-grandmother Alexandrina as Victoria. (Alexandrina, Victoria, Alexandrina-Victoria, is the one in whose name the entity and process called the empire reached its apogee, the one who wore most famously the brilliant jewels that the poor of the earth die digging from the dark earth far away from England.) “This is my first decision—that I’ll keep my own name. My second decision is to set the world free.”

            “The world is by and large free,” her personal secretary says awkwardly. Her husband looks at her with a vague suspended-judgment sneer, as if he is waiting to see just what foolish things this mere girl whose liege man he now is will say. “The tyranny of the Nazis has been defeated, that of the Soviets is not our concern at present, and if you refer to Your Majesty’s own Empire, its tide is ebbing in most parts of the world.”

            “You are literally enacting colonial violence on black and brown bodies by saying that, Martin,” his sovereign princess warns.

            “I’m not—what does that—what the devil are you talking about? Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Martin splutters.

            “That is a whitecisheteropatriarchal thing to say if ever there was one,” says Her Majesty.

            Martin, desperately trying to wrap his head around this change in the demeanor of his new sovereign and concluding, based purely on explanatory power, that she must have come down with an acute psychiatric case of some kind upon losing her father so young, says “Yes, but…what does that mean, exactly?”

            “The remorseless logic of empire must not be allowed to continue. As I now lead the enterprise of empire, I must stop it immediately. Please prepare papers for an Order in Council instructing all British troops and administrators to withdraw from every station outside the British Isles, with immediate effect.”

            “First of all,” says Martin as patiently as he can manage, “the word ‘empire’ takes a definite or indefinite article, you’ll recall; it isn’t some sort of abstract or mass noun like ‘justice’ or ‘love’ or ‘revenge’ and I am pretty sure that is as Your Majesty well knows.”

            “Do get to the point, Martin,” says His Grace the Duke of Edinburg witheringly; he would rather end the part of the conversation involving Martin as soon as possible so that he can attempt to figure out what on earth is wrong with his wife himself.

            “Yes, of course, Your Grace,” Martin says, balancing his hands on his knees and his knees against each other gamely, or rather, in such a way as to deliberately and falsely indicate gameness. It is best, he has always heard, to tiptoe around mad monarchs when one is actually in their presence. “Second of all, Your Majesty will recall that there are very limited situations indeed in which the Crown can act without the advice of its ministers, and absolutely never against the advice of its ministers. The Conservative Party and Mr Churchill are against further retreats from our imperial holdings unless absolutely necessary, and even were an election to be held as soon as possible and the Labour Party get back in, the policy developing on their end is to withhold independence from colonies that have not adopted majority rule. Particularly with the colonies in Africa, immediate independence, especially without leaving any transitional civil servants in place to manage a peaceful break from the Home government, would result in a whole continent of South Africas or worse. Even His Majesty The King—that is, your late father, ma’am—was horrified by the way the Smuts government handled the color issue in South Africa, and of course the new government there is even worse in that regard. Do we really want Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and the rest—even Kenya!—to go the same way? All of this is, moreover, only to establish that what Your Majesty is proposing is unconstitutional and immoral. Further, it is unwise to boot.”

            “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Her Majesty explains. “Let me illustrate. William?” she calls to one of the black employees of the hotel.

            “Yes, Your Majesty?” he replies. He, like everyone, is still getting used to saying “Majesty” to her rather than “Royal Highness.” He resents it perhaps a bit more than do most.

            “Would you want, upon Kenya’s independence, for there to still be British civil servants in the country?” his Queen asks him.

            “Er…not particularly,” he says. “I suppose early on it might not be so bad. Why do you ask?”

            Her Majesty turns back to her secretary. “You see, Martin, William doesn’t particularly want British civil servants, and so there’s really no need for us to force them upon him. To do so would be to reinscribe the violence of empire on his black body. William?” she calls again.

            “Yes, Your Majesty?” he replies again, noticing a reporter at the door whom he will have to go and let into the lobby once this very strange conversation concludes.

            “You may beat up my husband, if you wish,” says the Queen. “We wouldn’t want to reinforce the black brute stereotype.”

            William says “What? Why would I do that?” at the same time that the Duke of Edinburgh says “No he bloody well may not!”

            “Again,” says the Queen apologetically, “I would offer myself, since I’m at the top of the hierarchy here, were it not for the unfortunate coding that would be involved if we did that.”

            “We won’t be doing anything!” William insists, forthrightly and sternly.

            “Lilibet,” says the Duke, bracing himself against the wall and feeling very much as if he could use a good stiff glass of something naval—rum, even grog in a pinch, “I really would very much like to understand what on earth you’re talking about and who the devil you hope to impress by talking about it.”

            “Oh, spare me the toxic masculinity, Philip,” says his wife and sovereign. “None of us are going to reinforce stereotypes here. Not in my family and not in the Palace. I’ll be explaining that further to you, Martin, once I finish explaining the importance of decolonization and my refusal to be a colonizer and an oppressor.”

            “Your commitment to withdrawing from the Empire is admirable, ma’am,” said Martin, falling back into a lickspittle aspect that this job has not normally required of him so far, “but I’ll point out that a stereotype generally speaking is not reinforced by the person or persons being stereotyped.”

            “Representation,” the Queen informs him in the most withering, wintry, and regal—or reginal—tones, “matters.”

            “Er…all right; we’ll say that; we’ll go with that,” says Martin. “Permission to draw up a draft of this—this edict, or this decree, that might pass constitutional and parliamentary muster?”

            “Yes, very well,” says the Queen with a heavy sigh, as if constitutional and parliamentary muster is a consideration that exists only to distract her servants from the moral rightness that is obvious even to them. Indeed, in fairness, much of it is, or should be, obvious to Martin, to the extent that he knows what is meant by what she says.

 ❦

Martin goes into the next room and calls his superiors in the Palace—might they not be his superiors much longer? Who can say—while the Queen speaks tensely with her husband and William begins, gingerly, to let the reporters file into the hotel.

            “Yes, Tommy,” Martin says over the phone, an international line getting far more use this morning than it has in years, than anybody involved in the phone services in East Africa generally ever though that it would. “Drawing up a general statement of approval for the transformation of Empire to Commonwealth strikes me as a good idea as well.”

            “It does my heart good to hear you think so, Martin.”

            “Supposing Her Majesty declines to sign it as not forceful enough.”

            “A grim supposition,” says Tommy, “but in that event it must be said that I have helped shepherd this family through one abdication, which was really a deposition, constitutionally speaking. It would of course be a matter of deep concern for the entire Empire and Commonwealth—even for the entire world—were things to reach that point again after barely fifteen years. It ought to be avoided if at all possible, by whatever means possible and necessary.”

            “Within reason and the law, I take it,” says Martin.

            “Within reason and the law, yes,” confirms Tommy. “A good day’s work to you, Martin.”

            “And to you. You sound exhausted, sir.”

            “Demise of the Crown is an exhausting thing. Much to consider,” says Tommy, and hangs up.

            Martin jots down two pages’ worth of notes, a first draft of a first draft of the proclamation on which the Queen is insisting, and goes back into the room to present it to her, the room where she and her husband are still arguing on either side of an ottoman made from what looks like the stuffed foot of some big game species or another. Somewhere else in the building they can all vaguely hear William speaking in hushed, hurried tones to someone who has already managed to fly in from the Toronto Star, of all papers. Perhaps the person was already in Africa for some other, one assumes some less august and less impressive story? Martin would not be surprised, and he envies such a person.

            “Your Majesty.”

            “Yes, Martin?” She turns to him with her immaculately made-up smile, her immaculate stiffened curls gleaming in the morning sunlight.

            “I have some first notes for your order, ma’am,” he says, and hands her what might be, in the grand sweep of their island story, a poison pill without recent parallel.

            “One moment, Philip,” she says to her husband, who is about to make some caustic remark. She takes up the paper, clears from her throat some of the tears that she has been keeping from her eyes, and begins to read.

Short Story: “The Thing about HIgh School”

“The thing about high school,” her father said, “is that it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”

And she started high school. She did not find it to be jocks versus nerds, exactly. The jocks, by and large, were the nerds. The first boy who made a pass at her was a lacrosse player. He also got straight As, wore custom, and aspired to go to Harvard Business School, even though their high school was the second-best public high school in the school district. Why the fuck, she wondered, did he wear custom if he was going to public school? She ran this by her father and he shrugged and told her to ask him again when he was done with Better Call Saul for the evening.

A few more weeks into her freshman year, she was invited to a party. The party was in fact hosted by unintellectual good-time buddies who drank light beer and had posters of OnlyFans personalities, but these people were not actually any go keg—and ended up having to go to urgent care.

“Some people who act out at parties,” her father told her, “if they don’t know their limits, can go to the emergency room.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m aware. But one thing confuses me.”

“What’s that?”

“These guys didn’t seem like meatheads. They just seemed like burnouts. I don’t think anybody would have been that intimidated by them, unless she’d been beaten down by life already. I felt sorry for them more than anything.”

Her father thought for a moment. “Well, princess,” he said, “the thing about high school is, it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”

Short Story: “The Cinephiles”

Historical note: I first conceived of and wrote this story in the year 2018. Make of that what you will.

It was an unseasonable afternoon in late winter and Blaise Bondarenko tracked damp grit into the building. He was here to meet with his film appreciation group for the first time in over a month. There had been legal troubles and Blaise had had to come up with some pretty airtight excuses to avoid them. The weather had been brutally cold as little as a week ago and one of Blaise’s friends was still home sick after being out in it for a few minutes.

            The meeting place was new, a tearoom done up in something approximating a British Imperial style, with a Raj theme that steered clear enough of overt triumphalism that Blaise’s friend Nasara had felt comfortable recommending the place. Nasara was the first person he knew whom he saw when he got in. She was sitting at one end of an oblong table in an alcove hung with yellow-embroidered dark blue wall hangings, drinking chai masala and waving enthusiastically at Blaise. It looked like she had already switched to her springtime jacket, at least for today. Her long black hair was lank and Blaise guessed that she had forgotten to shower again.

            “So who else is coming?” Blaise asked as he sat down and shrugged off his own coat. “I heard already that Marcus is still home sick.”

            “Ooh, big oof,” Nasara said. “I actually hadn’t heard that. That sucks.” She raised one hand as if she were showing off an engagement ring and counted off her fingers with the other hand. “Okay, so I know Bruce is coming and I think Tatiana said she’ll be able to make it too. Euphrosyne has to come because she’s the one who has the copy of the Mitchell book. And Tony said he’s going to try his best to make it.”

            “So six, counting us? Not bad.” Nasara handed him a menu and he gave it a cursory glance until he found a tea that looked familiar to him; then, remembering that he did not actually like this familiar tea, he decided to order something that he had never heard of. “After what happened with Randy and Kyle I was a little worried that—”

            “I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss Randy and Kyle,” said Nasara abruptly.

            If you asked Nasara what her problem with Randy and Kyle was, she would probably have just made vague comments about their having poor taste and not having gelled well with the rest of the group. The truth, as everybody actually in the group knew full well, was more painful, even though it reflected much less poorly on Randy and Kyle themselves than the way Nasara talked about them usually suggested. The truth had to do with the most frightening possibilities in Blaise’s life. It also had everything to do with the political situation, and with the fact that the group was still watching movies that Randy and Kyle had recommended.

            Randy and Kyle had legal troubles that had begun with a conspiracy case about some of the work that they had been doing as union organizers. Both were veteran organizers even though Randy was a lot older than Kyle; both had done a lot of work unionizing the dining hall workers at the college that Blaise and Nasara went to. They had come under skepticism, then suspicion, and finally repression. Lots of people who cut the figure that they cut went through that these days.

            Blaise ordered his new unfamiliar tea and began to discuss Nasara’s classes with her since she refused to discuss movies until at least four people were present. Nasara was majoring in botany and wanted to go out to the Midwest and work with corn for a living for some unfathomable reason. “Some unfathomable reason” was her way of putting it, not Blaise’s; Blaise didn’t see anything unusual in someone interested in botany wanting to work with corn.

            For some reason there was a portrait hanging over Nasara’s head of someone it took Blaise an embarrassing amount of time to recognize as Lord Mountbatten. He was really beginning to think that she had suggested this place to be ironic, which, if true, would have been the first inkling of irony he had ever gleaned from her.

            He asked her if she liked this place ironically.

            “No,” she said flatly and honestly. “I like it because it has good tea and good food. The Raj theme is a little weird but it’s part of a general India theme. There’s Mughal stuff too. I’m sort of annoyed that your mind jumped immediately to the India thing when I suggested this place, actually.”

            “Sorry. I just thought—”

            “I know what you thought,” said Nasara. “It’s fine.”

            She did not actually think it was fine. Nasara was a member of a family with the last name Rahman and had grown up in Edison, New Jersey; accordingly, now that she lived in the hardwood-and-slush cranny of the Pioneer Valley it bothered her to be thought of as that Indian girl or that Muslim girl. The idea that she should look at her race or even her religion as central, indispensable features of her personal identity bothered her a little coming from people like Blaise and a lot coming from people like the President. It upset her that the only options people wanted to give her were acting like the fairest flower of a country she had never been to or fully assimilating into whatever culture places like this tearoom actually represented.

            Nasara had played the race card, by her own definitions of playing the race card, only once so far in the existence of this group. It had been when they had deciding which Indiana Jones movie to watch, when they had temporarily been available to them from a certain library. Time had been of the essence with this decision, as it was with so many of the movies they had failed to find online, and the discussion that they had had about this had gotten unusually fraught all around. Eventually she had succeeded in vetoing Temple of Doom and they had gone with what Bruce called “the one, the only” Raiders of the Lost Ark. She had enjoyed that movie more than the most recent one they had watched.

            The others arrived. Bruce, gravelly-voiced with wispy grey hair and glasses that he wore perched halfway down his nose so that both Blaise and Nasara had frequent fantasies of pushing them up for him, sat down first. Euphrosyne, a gangly transgender woman (or drag queen; she had never clarified which but they called her “she” and she didn’t correct them) with hair similar to Nasara’s but more carefully kept, came in next with the Mitchell book, which wasn’t strictly relevant to the movie that they had just watched but might be relevant to choosing the next one. Next came Tatiana and Tony, as a matched set; Nasara didn’t know about Blaise, but she was to this day a little mortified that she had once thought they were dating; in fact they were brother and sister, Tony about six years older than Tatiana and working as a social media consultant for a heavily put-upon legal nonprofit while Tatiana finished her degree at Smith.

            “So,” said Bruce once everybody had ordered, “what did we think of The Blues Brothers? I saw this movie in theaters; didn’t appreciate it as much at the time as I do now. Belushi and Aykroyd were big comedy stars at the time but a lotta people weren’t sure what to make of this movie. It cost a whole boatload, but it did pretty well for itself in theaters.”

            “Lots of coke on the set, from what I’ve heard,” said Euphrosyne. “I guess that was what was in at the time, in terms of drugs.”

            “Any more you can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody with their own pot farm,” said Tony, looking at a part of the menu that advertised things made with CBD oil. “I’m surprised los federales haven’t cracked down on this place yet.”

            “Oh, let’s not mention the feds cracking down on things,” said Tatiana. “Now of all times especially I’m worried somebody might be, you know, looking at us with designs.”

            “In this place?” asked Nasara. “Come on, Tat. Look at the little post-its, for God’s sake.”

            Blaise picked up a clear plastic frame with a picture inside it and a post-it note attached to it, which had been facing away from him. The picture was of a Mughal emperor and the post-it said “Thank you for not assuming our employees’ gender & pronouns,” over a pen drawing of a chibi catamount.

            “Anyway,” said Nasara, “as far as I’m concerned, this movie wasn’t it, chief. There were things about it that I thought were pretty sexist and the car chases were so ridiculous that I just tuned out after a while. The music was great, though, and I did like some of the jokes.”

            Blaise spent the next several seconds mentally readjusting his schema for what Nasara was like to accommodate the fact that she called people “chief.” He sipped his bright red tea feeling self-conscious and a little sorry for himself.

            Bruce, a little uncharacteristically, had ordered a pot of tea that had a flower-like item in the middle that bobbed up and down in the hot water as he poured. It suddenly occurred to Blaise, who was still looking at the post-it note, that he had been in this place once before, a couple of years ago, when they had had a whole wall full of post-it notes that had been written or drawn on in various cutesy ways by the customers. For some reason he seemed to have it caught in his head that at the time this place had specialized in bubble tea.

            “Did you think it was sexist, Sini?” Nasara asked Euphrosyne.

            “Way to put me on the spot. Yeah, I did, actually. I wouldn’t say it stopped me from enjoying the movie, but it did annoy me.”

            “I didn’t really notice any more sexism than I’d expect from a movie from 1980,” said Tatiana with a shrug. She nudged Bruce and he poured her a cup of the tea that he had ordered; she had finished her own in what felt like under a minute.

            “I agree with that,” said Bruce. “I noticed it less then. Could just be because I’m a guy; I didn’t notice it now either very much until you brought it up.” He shrugged. “Good to be able to have these conversations, though, I guess.”

            “Especially in this day and age,” said somebody from another table a few yards away. It was a middle-aged woman who looked utterly inoffensive and unassuming, but Blaise still flinched to think that they were attracting attention. This was part of why he didn’t tend to talk very much once everybody got here for these meetings.

            “I liked, well, what they did with the bad guys, obviously,” said Nasara, “and I liked the delivery of some of the famous lines. ‘We’re on a mission from God,’” she said in a passable imitation of Dan Aykroyd. “‘I hate Illinois Nazis.’” The middle-aged woman flinched. “Anyway, there definitely were things I liked about it.”

            “I did appreciate this movie’s bold, forthright stance against Nazis from Illinois, yes,” said Euphrosyne.

            “Spoken like someone who’s never been to Illinois,” said Bruce.

            “I’ll ignore that,” said Euphrosyne. “Anyway, what’s next? Want me to crack open Mitchell?”

            Nasara held a finger up. “Hold on,” she said, lightly. “I’m not sure we’re done talking about The Blues Brothers.”

            “Well—no, we’re not done talking about it; I was hoping that we could get the business side of things out of the way now so we could discuss the movie more open-endedly.”

            “I just don’t think it’s a very good idea to crack open Mitchell when that woman is still looking at us,” Nasara murmured under her breath in Euphrosyne’s general direction. She had also noticed that the middle-aged woman had herself gotten the attention of somebody else, a man about Bruce’s age wearing a badge that looked distressingly militant.

            “Ugh, you’re probably right,” said Euphrosyne.

            “Blaise,” said Nasara, “what do you think we should watch next?”

            The first thought that popped into Blaise’s head was the question, which he had entertained before, of whether Nasara might have a crush on him. There were not too many reasons to think that she did, but she did have a tendency of putting him on the spot with things like this much more often than she did any of the others. It might just have been that they were the same age, two years younger than Tatiana and almost a decade younger than Tony, to say nothing of Bruce and Marcus. The second thought that popped into Blaise’s head was that they might have an easier time getting a hold of The Prince of Egypt or something than they had with Raiders of the Lost Ark, although The Prince of Egypt might not fly entirely under the radar the way The Blues Brothers almost had.

            “How do we feel about The Prince of Egypt?” Blaise asked. “Did anybody else see that movie as a kid?”

            “I saw that movie with my kid,” Bruce said. “Good movie. Not sure how I feel about watching a cartoon on my own as a seventy-one-year-old man, though…”

            “Oh, c’mon, we all have to branch out sometime or other,” said Euphrosyne, as Tatiana gave Bruce a playful swat on the shoulder.

            “I have a better idea,” said Tony, and Blaise tried to shoot him a glare but could not get himself so to do. “Why not The Sound of Music?”

            Blaise looked over his shoulder. The suspicious woman had gotten up to go. The man with the badge was still there but was focusing on something in another corner of the premises.

            “It’s a classic,” said Tony.

            “It’s utterly inoffensive,” said Nasara, and Blaise could not tell whether or not she meant this as a good thing (as a matter of fact, she did).

            “It was seen that way for a very, very long time,” said Bruce.

            “Is this another movie you saw when it came out?” Nasara asked.

            Bruce nodded. “I was maybe seventeen or eighteen. I was living in Springfield and it came out in a movie theater that I think has since closed. I went to see it with a girlfriend of mine who said she had a crush on Christopher Plummer.” Neither Nasara nor Blaise wanted to push Bruce on why he seemed to disbelieve in his teenage girlfriend’s crush on Plummer. “Great film. Seen it a couple times since. Once, again, with my kid when she was maybe ten or so. Yeah, I’d be up for giving The Sound of Music a try.”

            “You okay with that, Blaise?” Nasara asked.

            Blaise threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said, “but I would like to pick the next one.” He was not quite sure why he was being truculent about this. Maybe it was the fact that he was not much enjoying this tea. It had something to do with cherries or cherry blossoms but he was having a hard time figuring out what, if anything, he thought it actually tasted like. He drank the rest of his cup down and poured himself another from the little glass pot. He felt like a tool. That woman and that man had really hampered his ability to enjoy this meeting.

            He was just about to suggest somewhere else to meet next time when Tony pulled out his phone and started, bold as Blaise had ever seen him, looking for possible ways to download The Sound of Music. Tony was someone who had a sticker on his laptop with a picture of a young 1950s businessman shouting “Good luck; I’m behind seven proxies!” Tony had had this sticker, or previous identical stickers on previous laptops, since way back in the days when everybody had more or less accepted that this was an absurd thing to boast about.

            “Getting back to The Blues Brothers,” Tatiana said, “I have to say, I hadn’t known much about blues music before this. I assume this is a style of music other than what people talk about when they talk about, like, ‘St. Louis Blues’ or ‘St. James Infirmary.’”

            Euphrosyne nodded. “Yeah, that’s from a way earlier period,” she said.

            “W.C. Handy is considered the father of the blues,” Bruce said. “He died in New York City in 1958. Belushi and Aykroyd were about eight or ten years old at that point.”

            “Did you know that about Handy already or did you have to look it up, Bruce?” Nasara asked while with one hand she rang the bell to call over a waiter for a second pot of chai masala.

            “I looked it up,” said Bruce. “I did a lot of reading about the blues after watching the movie. Wanted to see if I’d learn anything. Learned quite a lot, as a matter of fact.”

            “Have any of us ever played blues music?” Blaise asked. Blaise could sort of play guitar but was much more accustomed and attuned to soft rock and indie fare than to jazz or the blues or the dinosaur rock that he associated with people like Bruce and to a lesser extent with people like Nasara.

            Nobody, it turned out, had played blues music, although it turned out Tatiana and Tony had grown up listening to it because their dad was a pianist who had for a long time been deeply interested in the old New Orleans standards. Later he had become interested in enka music, a sort of Japanese torch song genre, and finally Italian folk music. Tatiana and Tony were holding their cards close to their chest about their father. Blaise suspected that he might have recently succumbed to a heart attack or something along those lines.

            Something in the environment or in the way they were thinking or feeling here was beginning to make both Blaise and Nasara feel pretty deeply upset. Neither of them were quite sure what it is. Both of them were happy to watch The Sound of Music but something about the nature of that movie was making them worry about the situation in which they were actually finding themselves. Blaise guessed that it was because the movie was about the beginning of something rather than the aftermath of something; Nasara guessed that it was because it felt like a mockery of the world and of politics that it did what it did with such a joyous lead and with singing and dancing. Sini and Tat would probably tell her that it was sexist of her to be having this problem with it if she brought it up to them, and she thought that maybe they would be right to tell her so.

            Nasara, who secretly felt pretty bad about the way she dressed and the way she groomed herself, could not help looking at another middle-aged woman who had come in and sat down at the table from which the first middle-aged woman had gotten up. This woman was wearing a big fluffy down overcoat in a beautiful shade of green and, underneath it, a wrap dress with quilted leggings. It was probably easy enough for this woman and her family to find work and get taken seriously, much as it had been easy for Nasara’s parents until a few years ago. She tallied up her own mounting debts to the world in her head. It was hard not to feel a certain nihilism about them. She decided to open up her heart and mind to letting The Sound of Music help her with that.

            Blaise made the same decision because he was thinking more deeply on his own reactions to The Blues Brothers. He had a cousin called Dave who loved this movie, even though Dave wasn’t a particularly bluesy guy himself. Dave was a few years older than Blaise and lived in New York City, where he tended bar and sang in some sort of rap collective. He was somebody whom Blaise loved very much and yet while watching the movie Blaise had not found himself thinking of Dave almost at all. He thought for a little while on why this might be and realized that it was because he had mentally cordoned off Dave into a vision of the world in which things were a little kindlier, even if no easier. His film appreciation friends were not part of a kindly world. He decided to let The Sound of Music make him think of the world as a little kindlier.

            “That scene with Carrie Fisher building the pipe bomb or whatever was such a mood,” Nasara was saying.

            “Be careful who you say that around,” said Euphrosyne.

            “I thought it was more of a mood in Indiana Jones when they first meet Marion,” said Tony.

            “Well, you did used to drink way too much,” said Tatiana. “Glad you’ve cut back on that, by the way.”

            Tony shrugged. “The ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality just isn’t cutting it as much for me as it used to. I’d call it burnout, but I’m actually having the time of my life now that I’m trying not to push myself quite so hard anymore.”

            “Good to hear that,” said Bruce. “I was never much of one for ‘work hard, play hard.’ Could just be that I’m given to understand I’m kind of a boring guy by a lot of people’s standards.”

            “Oh, we don’t consider you boring, Bruce,” said Nasara with an affectionate swat of Bruce’s arm.

            “Well I know you guys don’t. If anything it’s more so people my own age who for a lot of my life thought of me as sort of the sad sack. It played into the way I saw myself for a really long time, but I’m thinking a little more kindly about myself now.”

            “I was actually just thinking about kindliness and living in a kind world,” said Blaise, who hadn’t said anything for a while. “Obviously that’s not the world we’re living in these days, but I still think it’s worth thinking about.”

            “Things we can do to be good to one another are always worth thinking about, I agree with you,” said Bruce. “Boy howdy, now that’s a cliché way for me to put it.”

            “There’s something to be said for clichés,” Nasara said. “Although I guess ‘there’s something to be said for’ is just another cliché.”

            “Let’s talk about how we’re going to find The Sound of Music,” said Euphrosyne. “It should be relatively easy, I assume, compared to some of the other stuff we’ve had to look for. Although I don’t think it’d fly under the radar the way Flesh Feast did, since it’s so much better-known.”

            “Oh God, don’t remind me about Flesh Feast,” said Bruce.

            “Hey, the rest of us liked Flesh Feast,” said Tatiana, “even if it was only ironically. But yeah, I don’t think we’re going to have to do a deep dive through Euphrosyne’s book to find The Sound of Music or movies like it. Whether that’ll make it easier or harder to find I don’t know.”

            “I’m sure I can find a download of it with a VPN or something,” Nasara said.

            “It might fly under the radar also since it’s a kids’ movie,” said Blaise. “Or at least a family movie. Which the other things we’ve been watching really haven’t been.”

            “Not at all, no,” said Nasara.

            “Not to cut this off,” said Tatiana, “but I’m actually getting kinda hungry. Want to order some couscous or something? I can pay as long as we can split the check on the tea itself.”

            “Splitting the check on the tea itself was exactly what I was planning on having us do,” said Nasara, “although since a lot of us are sharing I think we should split it evenly.”

            “Sounds good to me,” said Bruce, and Blaise concurred, and everybody else concurred also.

            “At least we’re not trying to find Mrs. Miniver or Casablanca,” said Nasara, casually and without regards to anything else that was being said. “I’d like to, eventually, but those are going to be really hard to find, these days.”

Short Story: “The Comet Watchers”

It was a season of unwanted miracles. The world was reeling and kindness seemed expensive. It was the year of the pandemic and the summer of George Floyd. The world lurched closer and closer to some unknown ultimate destination, and Comet NEOWISE appeared in Northern Hemisphere skies.

            A son and father living in those regions were living together a few years into the son’s adult life. The loved each other but now and then struggled to talk about things they had in common. The son was more religious and read more; the father exercised more and knew more about what may be called the “real world.” Both, however, liked science fiction; they had lately, stuck at home, begun watching Star Trek together; both loved the night sky, and both wanted to see the comet where it hung in the northwestern sky in the evening dim.

            Near their home was a fruit farm, with a store where the son had briefly worked upon finishing school, sorting crates of peaches and apples and showing people where to park on weekend afternoons. He had been let go before long but the family was still on good terms with the people at the farm and so they often found themselves going there still. The store was at the top of a large, steep hill with a commanding view of other hills to the east and to the north. Green and gold in the summer, gold and grey in the autumn, grey and white in the winter, white and green in the spring—such was the view in daylight. At night, they thought, it was likelier than not that much of the sea of stars could be seen.

            There were two ways to get to the farm store from their house, one much more straightforward than the other. The straightforward way involved driving down to the state highway, taking it up into the hills for a few minutes, then turning onto a smaller road that went up the steeper hill on which the farm stood. The less straightforward way involved taking several different back roads, one of them unpaved. In this way one could ape a direct back-roads route that had once been the obvious path to take; this route, regrettably, crossed a small bridge that had been out for about two and a half years. Even before the pandemic the towns in that region had not been made of money to spend on bridge repairs in outlying neighborhoods. Now, they had far bigger fish to fry, and likely would have them for quite some time. “I’m taking Route 2,” the father thus said when he and the son got into the car to go and see the comet. “Safer this time of night.”

            “Better lit,” the son agreed, although he was young and dramatic enough that oftentimes he preferred the romance and mystery of the less straightforward way. He expected that preference to be beaten out of him by life sooner or later, even though he had managed to escape being told sententiously that it would be. But for now…

            They set off into the night. The son had a marvelous app or program on his telephone in which one could see a clear map of the celestial sphere, one that, minute by minute, changed as the sky itself revolved or rotated around Polaris and Sigma Octantis high above the Earth. He had checked to see if this app accounted for the comet. It did not, but the website of a certain newspaper described where the comet was in the sky relative to the familiar northern summer constellations.

            “Shoot,” said the father. “Should’ve brought binoculars.”

            “It’ll be visible in the evening for four or five more days,” said the son. “Maybe we can come back in a few days and bring the binoculars with us then.”

            “Have you ever been up here at night before? Do you know how the view is?”

            The son shook his head. “I haven’t,” he said, “but I’m sure it’s fantastic.” This was a place that—during the day—had one of those old-fashioned coin-operated binocular viewfinders that one was liable to find on mountain overlooks and skyscraper observation decks. One could see dozens of miles to where higher hills and mountains receded into an ambiguous bluish horizon, marching steadfastly rank by rank northeastward. The son was confident that its late-evening sky would be remarkable.

 ❦

Twenty years before, when the son had been living alone with his mother in an old farmhouse (the father was, technically, a stepfather), he had gone through a childhood mania for outer space. At first it had been a purely factual and scientific craze, without the note of science fiction that had grown steadily louder in the polyphony of his interests afterwards. He had had a poster on his robin’s-egg-blue bedroom wall showing one of the famous pictures of Saturn from the Voyager flybys, gracing an expanse above a guinea pig cage. Once he had tried to make a mobile of the Solar System that had the planets to scale in both size and distance; it had been a spectacular failure, with Neptune in the bathroom, Pluto too small to keep safely in the back yard where stray cows might get at it, and the real scales still not replicated. He had known the names of all the northern constellations then, and had been able to make out most of them from the train tracks across the road.

            Then Tolkien and Doctor Who had happened, in that order and a few years apart. His future stepfather had been to credit for his introduction to both of them. This period had spanned the 2000s, a fecund and febrile period for the fandoms for both works. The son was banned from a Tolkien fan forum for lying about his age when he was eleven. Latterly he was given to discussing Doctor Who obstreperously on social media, such as it existed twelve or fifteen years before the pandemic—journals; fora. He became, in fact, a creature of books and media, interested in the fictional and the fantastical. Not unrelatedly, by this time he and his mother had moved to a region from which one could not easily see the nighttime sky.

            He had begun to resent the lack of stars and constellations to be watched above his head almost right away after the move. It had been a move undertaken unhappily, for reasons to do with his education. For that reason he felt a certain degree of guilt about “doing this to himself,” and, for that matter, about everything else that he was doing with his life. Increasingly he was interested in girls, in several different ways, and he projected unhealthy fantasies and resentments into that area of his life, fantasies and resentments that had been developed elsewhere. Through some strange alchemy he found himself transmuting interests that he might share with others into excuses to isolate himself. He had certain illnesses too, and between one thing and another, he spent his mid-teens with few real friends.

            The father, previously a male friend of the family, became his stepfather at around this point. At first the son resented this too. His mother’s previous attempts to date had not gone well, and he was afraid that his closeness to this man would be wounded if this relationship went badly too. The situation also forced him to think of his biological father, a deadbeat junkie whom he had never met. It was not a pleasant road for him to go down, and new resentments did end up arising. It was at this time that son and father began to fear that they did not have as much to talk about as they had had in the past. It was a painful realization, and one that the son, at least, mourned intensely.

            Time passed. The son breasted the turbulent currents of religious and sexual identity, to and fro. After a few years of living with his parents in adulthood upon finishing with school, he began to despair of ever really finding again the easy commonalities that had existed in his childhood. When he had loved, back then, he had been able to merely love, without the outside questions of shared interest or presence of a shared goal that modify and limit the loves of adults. He had assumed that that ability to merely love was gone for him now, at least as far as his bond with his father came into it. He assumed this, and felt a mild despair, the kind of sickly-sweet feeling that decadent French poets of a hundred and twenty years before had managed to transmogrify into beauty. Then, shortly before his troubling twenty-seventh birthday, the pandemic hit, and for the first time in his adult life he and his parents had no way of leaving one another’s presence.

 ❦

The car bumped up the steep hill road to the farm store on the dark hilltop. The trees to either side stood grey and silver in the penumbrae of the headlights. The sky between the branches was darkening minute to minute, now the color of willowware, now the color of deep water.

            In somebody’s house to the left of the road a porch light abruptly burned out as they passed it and the shade of the evening shifted. Now suddenly near the zenith he could see what he thought might be Vega. At the hilltop the Great bear would surely be fully or almost fully visible. It was through the Bear’s paw that the comet was passing evening by evening. Now the only question was the cloud cover, light but striated, which would seem to be covering a good bit of the critical northwestern sky. The idea of not being able to see the comet because of light, passing cloud cover was an unpleasant one. One could even say that there was something morally outrageous about it, even if only mildly so. It would be like looking for a Van Gogh in a museum and finding it through the gift shop, or like looking for a livestreamed religious service and finding it with an unskippable ad. Or perhaps not quite as bad as those cases—clouds were not undesirable or inaesthetic themselves, merely objects of a lesser and less compelling order than celestial bodies.

            The son and the father came to the open country around the hilltop. At one point the road curved sharply to the left with very little warning. Going straight would have taken you right into a certain family’s front yard, possibly even into that family’s front kitchen.

            “I wonder if anybody’s ever missed this turn and driven into these people’s yard, or their driveway,” the father remarked. “I hope not. It’d be tough tot get out of that situation, you know?”

            “For the family whose house it is,” said the son, craning his neck at the house as it faded graciously into the gloaming behind then, “or for the driver who made the mistake? I think it’d be a tricky situation either way, but it’d be tricky in different ways. Depending on who in the situation you were.”

            The father laughed, a short, gentle chuckle. “I’m just imagining that I’m in that house sitting down for a late dinner and then suddenly, wham, you and I come barreling right along the road headed straight for the front door,” he said. “I can’t think it’s an easy house to live in, just in terms of keeping your peace of mind.”

            “I never asked,” said the son, who dimly knew some of the people who lived on the hill thanks to his season working at the farm store.

            “Looks like there’s plenty of other people here,” they both thought and one or the other of them said as they neared the hilltop. Spanning the summit and descending for a while along the road in both directions were maybe fifteen cars, along with tripods and collapsible chairs and other accoutrements of summer-evening stargazing.

            The two got out of their car. It was about a quarter past nine, nautical twilight in July in those latitudes, the time for sailors to take their readings with a clearly visible horizon and clearly visible stars. To the west, over a treeline that obscured the westernmost third or so of the hilltop, Arcturus and Spica shone, ochre and opal. One found those stars, or could find them, with the Great Bear’s tail—arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spica. The son had learned that on some website about six months before, when he had first downloaded that phone app and begun a serious scan of the high heavens. So now he doubled back from Spica to Arcturus, continued, and there was the Dipper, suspended in an almost primary-blue section of the sky. It was three or four handsbreadths above the northern end of the western treeline, so that the comet would be about halfway between it and the horizon. That spot was, horribile dictu, behind a band of cloud, but there was an insistent breeze and the clouds were drifting eastward.

            “It’s like Close Encounters,” the father said. “Remember that scene where they pass all the cars on the highway and they’re all lined up along the side of the road to see the UFO?”

            “Vaguely,” said the son. “The last time I saw that movie I was about thirteen years old, I think. I remember that scene, though. I’d be happy to watch it again with you some time.”

            “Have you seen it yet?” the father asked. “Is it on your app?”

The son shook his head. “I think the way this app works focuses on the models of the sky,” he said. “They just discovered the comet a few months ago so whatever model they’re using probably just doesn’t have it. If there was a supernova I don’t think it’d have the supernova either.”

            “There was a news website that had a picture of it in the sky,” the father said. “It should be there once that cloud passes.”

            And the cloud did pass, and there, dimly, was the comet. It was still faint in the uncompleted twilight, a faint, fuzzy patch of sky that one would have thought was a trick of the light were it not for the telltale tail. That tail, or tale, stretched even fainter a degree or a few up and to the right of the main spot of fuzziness, resolving undramatically into the deepening blue almost directly beneath steady-shining Dubhe. One wanted to stare steadfastly into that darkening northwestern sky in the hopes that that fuzziness would clear, in the hopes that something important would become manifest in a more manifest comet, something to be taught as a piece of knowledge to be guarded and cherished.  And so the son and the father held their gaze into that region of the sky, until after a few minutes, just past nine-thirty on that long Saturday evening, it was obvious to both of them that the comet was as clear as it was liable to get. Then the son took out his phone again, opened its camera, selected a night mode that took in all the light it could, and snapped a few pictures of where NEOWISE hung waveringly. They came out well, a couple of them anyway.

            “Can you still see it?” one of a pair of young women, a pair of sisters, or a couple, or friends, asked his father as he walked ahead of him back to the car.

            He turned. “Sort of,” his father was saying to the women. “You might have better luck another night.”

            “You can see it though,” the son said.

            The father nodded. “You can,” he agreed. “You just have to really look for it.”

 ❦

The drive back home was a little different from what they had expected going out. The father, for reasons of trust best known to himself but dearly appreciated by them both, allowed the son to direct him down the other side of the hill and then through the warren of back roads that circumvented the closed bridge and descended into their neighborhood from the north.

            The father was skeptical about this as a means of getting home and worried that the son, for some irresponsible twenty-seven-year-old reason, was directing him towards the closed bridge itself. Even so, he decided to trust where the son was directing him, and soon enough they were on the right back road after all, one that was gravelly and passed a maple syrup plantation and a small dairy farm. The drive home, which took about fifteen minutes, had for the father the great length common to people’s perceptions of unfamiliar roads. They pulled into their driveway at a few minutes past ten o’ clock and straightway went inside. The sky had turned the blue-black color, with a very faint and debatable greenish tinge, of certain fountain pen barrels. The clouds were a little paler and instead had shades of violet and silver. The Dipper had sunken slightly towards the black treeline and was difficult to make out in the glare of a streetlight that stood at the northwestern corner of their property.

            The mother was watching the news, which, as so often in those days, was largely about the pandemic with a few minutes given over to racial tensions and other enormities of the increasingly heavy-handed administration. She looked up as they came in; she was happy to see them, and, being used to having them in the house for the past few months, had indeed missed them while they were out. “How was it?” she asked. “Were you able to see it?”

            “We did but it was pretty faint,” said the father. “I think he got a couple nice pictures of it, though. That new phone of yours,” he said to the son, “takes really good pictures. I think it was worth the money.”

            “I certainly hope it was,” said the son “But yeah, one of these at least came out really well, maybe two or three. You can see the comet’s tail and everything. While we were walking back to the car I also got some good shots of Arcturus and Antares if you guys are interested.”

            “Antares,” said the father. “Don’t they go there at one point in Star Trek?”

            “I’m not sure,” said the son. “I haven’t seen enough of it yet to say. I do know that there’s a novel from the 1920s called A Voyage to Arcturus that I keep meaning to read. We also saw Vega tonight and that’s where the aliens in Contact were from.”

            “You think there actually are any aliens on Arcturus and Vega?” the father asked.

            “Who knows?” the mother said before the son could. “I hope so.” She turned to the son. “I’d love to see the pictures you took,” she said.

            “All right,” said the son. They turned off the news, and he sat down on the couch between his parents to show them his pictures of the sky.

Short Story: “Critical Lenses on the Film ‘Goncharov’”

Note: This story is a contribution to a fictive body of critical and fan discussion being built around a nonexistent Mafia movie called Goncharov. One can learn the basics of how this discussion came about by searching for the alleged movie’s title. In the Goncharovian spirit of collective authorship and modern myth-making, I’m electing to put this story under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license, the most permissive kind. Anybody can do anything with the material in this story as long as some vague gesture is made towards crediting me with some of the ideas. Many of my own ideas, after all, emerged from the broader atmosphere of improv-like storytelling and mythbuilding that swept the internet in general and the microblogging website Tumblr in particular late last month.

With the recent upsurge of interest in the 1973 Mafia film Goncharov, it behooves the critic to give a brief survey of this film’s previous reception. Critical analysis has focused on several main areas and themes within the film: its sexual elements (in particular the homoerotic undertones between Goncharov and Andrey and between Katya and Sofia) and connected feminist concerns, its religious motifs, its atypicality for an early Martin Scorsese film, and its potential political subtexts, to name just a few. This brief essay will attempt to overview, in an unsystematic way, some of those lenses. Appended are synopses (with much unavoidable repetition) of all cuts and releases of the original film from 1973 through 2003; it remains to be seen whether next year’s fiftieth anniversary release will depart significantly from any of these. Since the focus of this essay is the original film in all its versions, we will not be addressing Quentin Tarantino’s abortive late-1990s remake, or the 1981 Turkish ripoff Moskova’dan dev adam (Mighty Men from Moscow) starring Yavuz Selekman and Cüneyt Arkın. The best treatment of Moskova’dan dev adam in English is a chapter in Yuli Lowe’s 2005 book Remix and Pastiche in Turkish Action Cinema: A Moviegoer’s Guide. Tarantino’s ideas for the attempted 1990s remake, some of which made it in highly variant form into 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, are described in almost all detailed surveys of his oeuvre. Of note regarding the Tarantino concept is that it is generally considered to have a tighter plot than does the cryptic, occasionally slapdash original film.

The sexual dimension of Goncharov has been the subject of much recent attention and as such is perhaps the best place to begin. In particular the relationship between Katya and Sofia has seen many different perspectives over the years. In a manner similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s obsessive reworkings of Galadriel’s backstory to smooth down her hard edges, the first few rereleases and re-edits of Goncharov consistently softened Katya and Sofia’s characters and relationship with each other, mostly as a response to persistent lesbian and feminist critiques of the film throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. This process culminated in the 1993 twentieth-anniversary version of the film, in which Scorsese became an unwitting cinematic pioneer by giving Katya and Sofia a relatively happy and all but expressly lesbian ending. However, feminist critics of the original film later reassessed the rerelease and began to argue that the softer ending had the unintended effect of pedestalizing women and relationships between women. The thirtieth-anniversary rerelease in 2003 was substantially similar to the original cinematic release regarding Katya and Sofia, but followed the 1987 director’s cut in expanding on Icepick Joe’s backstory and role in Goncharov’s second act.

Katya and Sofia are, however, secondary characters, although Katya is one of the three leads and both women are important in all versions of the film’s denouement. What of Goncharov and Andrey? Although the two Soviet gangsters out of their time and place get top billing and the film’s climactic showdown, it takes the bulk of Goncharov’s length for the true importance of their relationship to become apparent. Since Andrey, diegetically, knows Goncharov very well, the core premise of Goncharov’s fundamental unknowability to the viewer necessitates that they spend relatively little time interacting, and when they do interact, they discuss mostly philosophical and abstract subjects. Gene Hackman’s character of Valery, a personal aide to both Goncharov and Andrey who has little independent agency and thus does not appear in most plot synopses but has more screentime and higher billing than many of the film’s better-remembered characters, is the viewer’s main source for the preexisting personal relationship between Goncharov and his betrayer. According to Valery’s interactions with Andrey and with Goncharov, the two men considered each other best friends for most of their lives, had a brief falling-out two or three years prior to arriving in Naples and reconciled several months later, and both helped Valery himself survive his hard teenage years in postwar Moscow. De Niro and Keitel’s unusually homoerotic acting choices combine with this background to create a popular perception of Goncharov and Andrey as former lovers (and perhaps even Valery’s co-parents, although Hackman was visibly older than De Niro and Keitel at the time the film was made).

Goncharov was long thought of primarily as a “dry run” for Scorsese’s career and other films. It was Scorcese’s third film, after the relatively obscure Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Boxcar Bertha, and his second turn as a producer (Boxcar Bertha was produced by Roger Corman). Although Scorsese directed the English-speaking actors and was the name most prominently associated with the film in the United States, the driving force behind much of the screenplay and directing style was the Italian polymath Matteo JWHJ0715, a pseudonym for Matteo Negri. Negri deliberately imitated the dreamlike style of The Godfather, and Goncharov thus “feels” very different from Scorsese’s later gangster epics Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, and The Irishman. In 2016, however, the release of Scorsese’s Silence led to a reappraisal of his religious thinking as represented in Goncharov’s religious motifs, many of which, such as Father Gianni’s theme- and tone-setting sermon and the sole-survivor message bottle at the end, seem derived from Moby-Dick.

Attempts to retroactively insert Goncharov into Scorsese’s so-called “trilogy of faith” aside, however, religion is clearly a secondary concern in the film, and critics who look at it primarily through the religious lens still tend to think of it mostly in relationship with other Scorsese films. Goncharov, The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence do not a coherent tetralogy make except by “reading” the films backwards starting from Silence, at least some of whose themes are present in each of the other three (Last Temptation’s moral tension and divine absence, Kundun’s emphasis on persecution and exile, and Goncharov’s depiction of “individual” attempts to cope with the failure of religious community). The other way in which critics have applied the religious lens to Goncharov is as a supplementary or auxiliary lens in analyses primarily focused on other aspects of the film, such as its political and sexual components. One recently popular combination of the religious and sexual lenses involves Katya’s reaction to Father Gianni’s sermon. Scorsese, directing the Anglophone Cybill Shepherd, has Katya obviously fumble with core aspects of Catholic worship such as the sign of the cross and standing for the Gospel reading; since Katya does not perform the Eastern Orthodox equivalents of these actions either, recent critics have interpreted her as staunchly irreligious and/or Jewish, and her discomfort with the sermon as not necessarily limited to its anti-mafia content.

Despite the film’s ambiguities concerning Russian (and broader Soviet) culture, Katya’s attitude towards religion not least of those ambiguities, perceptions of Goncharov as tacitly pro-Russian make it currently unpopular in much of Central and Eastern Europe. Protests in connection with upcoming fiftieth-anniversary screenings have already racked up thousands of planned attendees in cities like Kyiv, Lviv, Warsaw, and Vilnius; in Lviv in particular local politicians have attempted to get the screenings shut down or moved to smaller venues under wartime emergency provisions. Scorsese has condemned attempts to read a right-wing political salience into the film, the political right currently seeming, or being, pro-Russian in much of the developed world; the idea that Goncharov is some sort of advocacy for Russian culture per se is the only critical lens that its makers have actively and loudly repudiated, but in the current world environment surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine it is morally and emotionally difficult to directly defend the movie around Ukrainian, Polish, or Baltic-states critics.

This concludes our all-too-brief overview of a few select critical lenses on Goncharov. Synopses of all readily available versions of the film are appended below, with, as warned, much unavoidable repetition.

Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky

Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies

Art Department, Smith College

❦

ORIGINAL CINEMATIC RELEASE

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. He goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Il Commendatore sends an assassin after Katya, but Sofia, who is visiting Katya to console her about Goncharov’s death, takes the bullet for her. With her last breath, Sofia offers Katya the cruise ship ticket that she bought with the money Mario and Mariella gave her for precipitating Goncharov’s fall. Katya accepts the ticket, feigns willingness to become il Commendatore’s mistress, and poisons him.

Katya spends most of her time on the cruise ship trying and failing to write the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

1987 DIRECTOR’S CUT

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. The scenes of Icepick Joe at home are intercut with flashbacks showing his life in a mental institution before relocating to Italy, having been declared “feebleminded” by eugenicist doctors when he was a child prior to World War II. In 1960 he is released from the mental institution after a botched lobotomy and groomed into a life of crime by a member of his extended family who is never named, moving to Italy in 1966.

When the flashbacks and cat-feeding sequences conclude, Icepick Joe goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Sofia asks Katya to leave Naples with her on a cruise ship, but Katya insists on staying and working to take down Andrey and il Commendatore; she is last seen walking to her death in a standoff with il Commendatore’s goons. Sofia spends most of her time on the cruise trying and failing to finish the first draft of a novel that Katya had started. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

1993 RERELEASE (INFLUENCED BY LESBIAN AND FEMINIST CRITIQUE IN 1980S AND EARLY 1990S)

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. He goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Katya and Sofia leave Naples together on a cruise ship, but are less comfortable with each other than before. Katya spends most of her time on the cruise trying and failing to finish the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

❦

2003 RERELEASE (RESTORES KATYA AND SOFIA’S ORIGINAL ENDINGS; INCLUDES ICEPICK JOE’S BACKSTORY)

ACT ONE

Naples, 1973. A mysterious stranger with a suitcase full of ammunition and counterfeit money arrives from the Soviet Union. He is met at the airport by ANDREY, a man claiming to be his cousin.

Andrey makes introductions for his so-called cousin GONCHAROV with a group of Camorra figures led by MARIO AMBROSINI. Mario invites Goncharov to a gambling den to discuss unspecified “resources” that Goncharov has brought with him from Moscow. Andrey escorts Goncharov to his apartment, where they rendezvous with Goncharov’s wife, KATYA.

That evening, Goncharov and Katya go to the gambling den for the meeting with Mario. While Goncharov and Mario are talking, Katya wanders off and begins flirting with SOFIA, a local woman with a haunted, hardbitten look. Katya and Sofia start drinking, then go out onto a balcony where Katya, drunk, tries to impress Sofia by telling her that she and her husband have been sent to Naples to advance some Soviet political agenda, ambiguously either pro- or anti-regime, pro- or anti-communist. In return, Sofia, who is impressed, tells Katya a secret of her own: she is embezzling money from one of Mario’s front companies, in hopes of leaving Naples and setting up flower shop somewhere else on the Mediterranean.

We cut to MARIO’S DRIVER, who is eavesdropping on them. Noticing his presence, Katya intends to warn her husband. However, Sofia, desperate to stop the information discussed from getting back to either Goncharov or Mario, goads Katya to throw the driver off the balcony to his death instead–the first of many murders in the film. Sofia screams for help; Katya, meanwhile, looks fascinated, drawn in.

Goncharov and Katya leave the casino separately. When Katya arrives back at their apartment, very late and very obviously drunk, Goncharov suspects her of infidelity–but with Andrey, not Sofia. That night, Goncharov dreams of his late great-grandfather.

The next day, Goncharov confides his suspicions about Katya in a near-stranger, the cat-loving Italian-American hit man ICEPICK JOE. Icepick Joe reassures Goncharov and takes him to meet Andrey’s half-sister (through a father who was embedded in an Italian partisan group as a Soviet spy/advisor during the War), CATERINA. Caterina warns Goncharov that he can never entirely trust Mario, who is erratic, paranoid, and xenophobic, and by extension not to trust Icepick Joe, who is on Mario’s payroll.

Katya and Sofia have a chance encounter at a fruit stand in a scene redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. They return to the gambling den, where they behave in a sexually suggestive way with each other in front of Goncharov, precipitating an argument between Goncharov and Andrey that soon escalates into a fistfight. Andrey knocks Goncharov unconscious and Goncharov has another dream of his great-grandfather.

Several days later, Andrey and Goncharov have reconciled without explanation. They debate whether or not they can trust Mario, and implicitly also Caterina (who has advised them not to trust Mario). Katya plays piano in the next room, building to a gradual crescendo that joins with the sound of a ticking grandfather clock to drown out the two men’s voices.

Katya stalks Mario to Mass at the Church of Gesù Nuovo, hoping to talk to him afterwards about his plans for his professional relationship with her husband. At the church she is unsettled by a vituperative anti-mafia sermon by the “angry young man” priest FATHER GIANNI. This is intercut with a scene of Goncharov and Andrey at the same fruit stand where Katya and Sofia encountered each other earlier. They have a long discussion about fruit that takes on metaphorical significance about their feelings of displacement in their new country. They then proceed to commit several assassinations for Mario’s Camorra family in quick succession, which continues to be intercut with Father Gianni’s sermon in much the same manner as the assassination/baptism sequence that ends The Godfather. Mario pays close attention to the sermon and is not as visibly unsettled by it as is Katya.

ACT TWO

Andrey and Caterina visit the recently-closed Fontanelle Cemetery, which they believe is their father’s final resting place. They discuss the sense of homelessness and unbelonging that they attribute to their father (flashbacks will later indicate that this may be projection), and Caterina asks Andrey if he thinks Goncharov feels the same way.

Goncharov, meanwhile, tries to locate Mario to discuss the wave of killings with which the previous act concluded. Mario agrees to meet him at a high-end hotel restaurant, but when Goncharov arrives with Katya accompanying him, they are greeted not by Mario himself but by his mother, MARIELLA. Mariella orders enormous quantities of alcohol and very little food, Goncharov attempts to drink her under the table, and Mariella confides in Goncharov and Katya that she feels that in agreeing to meet with them on her son’s behalf she agreed to walk to her death. Goncharov, disturbed at the implication that Mariella thinks he intended to kill Mario, catches something out of the corner of his eye. He orders one last bottle of liquor “for the table” and, when it arrives, pulls out a handgun and shoots it. As Katya and Mariella take cover from the splashing alcohol and flying glass, Goncharov barges back into the kitchen, where he sees Mario escaping out a back doorway into an alley.

Mario leads Goncharov on a long chase through the cramped streets of Naples, but when Goncharov finally tracks him down, Mario acts chummy and darkly humorous, cracking grim jokes and congratulating Goncharov on “finding him out.” Finally Mario tells Goncharov that he has decided that nobody from the Soviet Union has any place in the Camorra and that they can only be subordinates, never partners. Goncharov leaves without replying to him, but Icepick Joe fires at him with a sniper rifle and wings him, badly damaging Goncharov’s dominant arm.

The movie then follows Icepick Joe as he goes home to his flat, attempts to write a scene in a play fictionalizing (and whitewashing) the historical origins of the Camorra, and feeds the neighborhood street cat Dolce. The scenes of Icepick Joe at home are intercut with flashbacks showing his life in a mental institution before relocating to Italy, having been declared “feebleminded” by eugenicist doctors when he was a child prior to World War II. In 1960 he is released from the mental institution after a botched lobotomy and groomed into a life of crime by a member of his extended family who is never named, moving to Italy in 1966.

When the flashbacks and cat-feeding sequences conclude, Icepick Joe goes to confession at a priest’s home (the confessor has the voice of Father Gianni, but is never shown clearly onscreen), is absolved, and wanders Naples at night and into the early morning before falling asleep on the doorstep of a derelict nightclub.

The wounded Goncharov must attend an inconveniently timed meeting with his mysterious backers, who are visiting from the Soviet Union on their way to Latin America. He sends Katya in his place and, in a moment of comic relief that quickly turns dead-serious, she enlists Sofia’s help as a male impersonator to make it look as if Goncharov is present in the conversation but not participating. Unbeknownst to Katya, Sofia has also taken money from Mario and Mariella to provide, or corroborate, false information regarding the efficacy of Goncharov and Andrey’s work for them, in the hope that this will induce the Soviets to withdraw their operations from Naples. Sofia intends to use this money to buy a cruise ship ticket out of Naples so that she can start a new life, much as Goncharov himself is trying to start a new life by relocating from the Soviet Union to Italy.

The two women share a furtive kiss in a dressing room before proceeding to a louche restaurant in which two old, well-dressed Central Asian men grill Katya about the whereabouts of various people whom her husband was meant to have killed. Many of these men were in fact killed in the Act One climax, but Katya does not know this. Sofia, dressed as Goncharov but not particularly plausibly, implies that many of the people Goncharov killed have in fact survived. The two men, infuriated, storm out.

One of the two men, “BRIGHTON BEACH BORIS,” accosts Goncharov at home and demands to know who the “man” with Katya was. Goncharov rises from the bathtub in which he is convalescing and shoots Brighton Beach Boris in a rage. He storms out half-dressed without waiting to see if he has killed Boris. With day breaking, Goncharov wanders Naples screaming Andrey’s name, until he finds and is found by the still-drowsy Icepick Joe. Goncharov returns home with Icepick Joe and falls asleep in his bed, at which point he dreams of his great-grandfather for the third time.

Icepick Joe leaves his flat to feed Dolce; Andrey goes to Goncharov’s flat to tell Katya and Sofia that Goncharov is alive and where they might find him. We see the other Soviet visitor, “IL COMMENDATORE,” whispering orders into Andrey’s ear inGoncharov’s flat after Katya and Sofia leave, intercut with Joe, Katya, and Sofia walking the streets comparing notes on Goncharov’s whereabouts and wellbeing. When Joe, Katya, and Sofia cut through an abandoned construction site on their way back to Joe’s flat, Andrey reappears and opens fire, revealing that he has been instructed to double-cross Goncharov. Katya almost dies in the resulting firefight, but Sofia pulls her to safety and the two women leave Icepick Joe to his fate.

ACT THREE

Andrey, after killing Icepick Joe, has breakfast with Caterina at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. He tells her that he and Goncharov arrived in Naples without any understanding of Mario Ambrosini’s position in the city’s underworld or of his personality. Caterina apologizes and asks if Andrey is sure that Boris and il Commendatore trust him to “clean up the mess”--revealing that Mario’s decision to freeze out the Soviets has made it back to the latter. Andrey assures her that he has their trust, because Goncharov antagonized them by sending Katya to meet with them in his stead and because Caterina gives Andrey a permanent personal relationship in Naples, whereas Goncharov “has no home in this world.”

The movie then begins to escalate to a final showdown between Goncharov and Andrey. Katya and a still badly hurt Goncharov escape from Icepick Joe’s flat and attempt to flee Naples by stealing a boat. During the attempted crossing to Ischia the boat is fired upon; Katya realizes that the prevailing wind is being used to obscure the direction of the gunshots and begins navigating a safe course back towards the mainland. She grounds the boat down the coast from the city and she and Goncharov begin a hard, dreamlike trek overland, finally arriving in the ruins of Pompeii.

Brighton Beach Boris, still alive, has been tracking Goncharov and Katya. Katya notices him and alerts Goncharov, as she initially meant to do with Mario’s driver in Act One. Boris manages to place a phone call to il Commendatore and Andrey before Goncharov shoots him again, this time fatally.

Katya notices that Goncharov’s arm wound has gone septic, endangering the whole limb. She asks him about seeking out a back-alley amputation, a question that escalates into a violent argument when he tells her that he would rather die than lose the ability to shoot. Katya, either afraid of Goncharov or wishing to give him the death he has asked for, fires on her husband, but misses, leading to the famous exchange “I shot you because I love you.”/”If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have missed.”

Andrey and Caterina lead a series of violent reprisals against Mario’s faction, including killing Mariella with a car bomb and Mario himself with a socket wrench. Andrey then sets off for Pompeii for the showdown with Goncharov.

When Andrey arrives, Goncharov asks him to leave Naples together and attempt to leave the criminal underworld. He appeals to their shared childhood in wartime Moscow and seems on the verge of confessing to Andrey that he loves him when Andrey finally opens fire. After a short, brutal fight (guns, then knives, then fists) that Goncharov loses badly, Andrey embraces Goncharov, then shoots him through the head from ear to ear.

Seeing Katya, Andrey attempts to apologize, but Katya simply leaves without a word, as Goncharov did during his earlier confrontation with Mario. Andrey realizes that in killing Goncharov he has killed a part of his own self, the part that always wavers and reinvents and tries to find somewhere to belong. He embraces Goncharov’s dead body in a shot mimicking Ilya Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.” Then he drives back to Naples in silence to rendezvous with il Commendatore and discuss the problems of succession in the leadership of the Camorra.

Il Commendatore sends an assassin after Katya, but Sofia, who is visiting Katya to console her about Goncharov’s death, takes the bullet for her. With her last breath, Sofia offers Katya the cruise ship ticket that she bought with the money Mario and Mariella gave her for precipitating Goncharov’s fall. Katya accepts the ticket, feigns willingness to become il Commendatore’s mistress, and poisons him.

Katya spends most of her time on the cruise ship trying and failing to write the first draft of a novel. Finally, she stuffs the fragmentary draft into a wine bottle and casts it out onto the waters of Mare Nostrum, where it slowly fades to the iconic final shot of a running sandglass.

THE END

Short Story: “The Watch and the Windrose”

Once upon a time there was a mechanical watch who fell in love with a rose of the winds. She would visit him at all hours of the day, and she would grace him with her winds in accordance with his hours. Her cold dry tramontanes teased him at midnight and kept him cool at noon; her brisk wet levantes made him worry for his movement in the witching hour and in midafternoon; her siroccos and ostros and libeccios through dawn and through dusk warned him of the dangers of day or of night; at breakfast and dinner her easygoing ponentes entertained him at table and her stiff self-confident mistrals sent him to work or to sleep.

So much love had the watch for the windrose that he tried to be like her as much as he could. He would try his hands at measuring not time but speed and distance, and the results would be multicolored charts that people found difficult to read; he would reach into himself and rearrange his workings and turn himself into a weathercock, but he would still only be the receptor of her winds, still would not become her winds himself.

“Why do you want to become me?” she asked him.

“Is not real love a desire to imitate the person one loves?” he asked her.

“Is it? I don’t know love except from you. I am only the winds.”

“How is it,” he asked, “that you are so unbound by form? You blow here and there, and the whole sky and all who inhabit it greet you and pass through you and around you. Try as I might, rearrange myself as I might, I am metal and glass and gems; gems and glass and metal thus limit my beauty.”

“Why do you think that a beauty that is limited should destroy itself in order to become a beauty that is unlimited?”

“Why do you not think so?” the mechanical watch asked, wroth now, but not at her. He had just now realized that certain things, certain motives, certain desires of his did not admit of explanation, and he hated so to realize.

“It endangers the limited to pursue the unlimited.” The windrose was quoting an old, old book in saying this; her gregales and levantes and siroccos had picked up the scent of the book far, far away, and over seas and mountains that scent had come, had been done from Chinese into Sabir and long ages later from Sabir into English, and had sprung up in her mind now as something to share with the watch by way of warning. The anger on his face—his second hand was whirling and reeling—reminded her of her own most tempestuous rages, and she knew full well with how much fear and remorse she looked back on her own simouns and cyclones.

“There is danger in all things,” said the watch, calming down. Speaking to the windrose always had a way of becalming him in the end, even if it was as a typhoon that the conversation began. And he knew in saying this that he was not a mechanical watch any longer, although what he was now he did not know, and he did not think that he was on his way to being a windrose.

Short Story: “Changeful Northern Skies”

Rot was setting in all over Toby Walker’s house. Evil, blue evil, spread like a flow tide over the wooden wainscotting and along the wooden beams. None of her efforts to get it dealt with had panned out, and even her best friend told her that her front door stank of mildew. It was the end of a very wet October, and her yard was filled with rain-speckled muted-colored leaves.

            Toby’s house, whose pipes groaned and sang with steam on chilly nights in seasons other than summer, had been in her family since 1842 and had last been substantially renovated during her early childhood. Tobias Walker IV, Toby's late father, after whom she was yclept Toby though formally monikered Tabitha, had taken seriously the history of their family and their home. He had spent tens of thousands that he had earned snorting coke on Wall Street making it a fit house for a modern family. That family’s now last-living representative strode out to the mailbox that dove-grey autumn morning over a carpet of yellow birch leaves, pale spears the shape of the population pyramid of a medium-HDI country. Black spots freckled them leprously.

            Toby checked her mail. There were three pieces of it. The first was a card asking her to subscribe to a progressive Christian magazine named Relevant. “If you have to say it about yourself,” Toby muttered, “it’s not true.” The second implored her to vote for the man who had been chair of her town’s select board for fifteen out of the past twenty-one years. “If you were going to lose then you would have by now.” The third was a letter from Rachel Dembitz, an accountant in Dunnet Landing. Toby’s accountant. Estimate $11,500 to repaint the house; $6,000-7,000 to redo the front door; another $7,000-$10,000 for the solar panels that you want. Toby said, “But do not harm the oil and the wine.”

            She sighed. The misty air cleared for a few short seconds; it was not a change for the better. Toby thought about the cost of the solar panels. This was after tax incentives; she had discussed that with Rachel before. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach; she took one cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and lit it, a bad habit that she had picked up from her grandmother. In her grandmother’s days and then in her father’s this house had been part of a farm. That farm had now been sold off, most of it; what was left was an acre and a half. What was, or were, left on that acre and a half were a couple of small yellowish cats and one unpromising-looking goat. Toby called the goat Poor Richard. She associated him, because of his name, with the Old Farmer’s Almanacs that she still bought out of habit every fall. Poor Richard and Poor Toby would, because of these solar panels, likely become poorer before much longer.

            Under a changeful sky, Toby trudged inside and called Rachel. Rachel was the only Jew who lived in Dunnet Landing, and likely the only Jew who had lived there since Stan Roth’s early death twelve years before. It was a Saturday morning, but it was unlikely that she had ventured the ten or twenty miles to drive to synagogue; the pandemic had broken down Rachel’s observance just as it had that of so many other once-religious people. Indeed, Rachel picked up her phone.

            “So we’re looking at thirty thousand or so,” Toby said. It was not a question; there was no need to confirm. Rachel’s numbers either were right or they were not.

            “We are,” said Rachel with a heavy sigh, a sigh much older than her own thirty-one years. Older than her thirty-one. Not as old as Toby’s twenty-nine. Life was full of ironies. “Do you want me to come over?” Rachel went on. “We can discuss this in person. I want to show you how I got to these numbers.”

            “I trust your numbers.”

            “I’d still like to come over, as a courtesy,” said Rachel.

            Toby sighed. “Okay. I’ll put on some tea.”

            She took her time making the tea in her chilly kitchen with its blond wooden floors and six-gas-burnered stove. She lit the gas ring under the kettle and it started to sing just as Rachel’s car pulled up the driveway. The car was silvery with a faint pungent chartreuse undertone that Toby had always found a little alarming. It was an old Subaru, as was Toby’s own car. Toby’s was dark blue.

            Rachel came to a stop and stepped out of the car. A pump-clad toe teased one of the cats as he ran up to nuzzle her. Her cumulonimbus of dark hair looking the exact same shade as her dark conservative professionalistic skirt suit, Rachel treaded over the birch-leaf carpet and knocked on the door to Toby’s mudroom.

            “It’s open,” Toby hollered, and poured two cups of cinnamon tea as Rachel came in and kicked off her shoes. Toby smiled. “You always class up the place,” she said.       

            Rachel shrugged. “I am here on business, technically,” she said. She took a bobby pin from her sleek gunmetal-grey purse and pinned back a corkscrew of blackish hair. “So,” she said. “Thirty thousand dollars.”

            “Thirty thousand dollars,” Toby agreed. “Give or take. It’s not pretty.” She paused, then said, “Do you want to record this?”

            “I guess I should,” conceded Rachel. She pulled her phone out of her purse, set it down on Toby’s many-scarred pinewood butcher’s block, and pulled up some recording app while looking worriedly at the signs of damp that clustered like cobwebs in the corners of the kitchen’s lowish ceiling. “Rachel B. Dembitz, CPA, October 30, 2021,” she intoned. “Meeting with Tabitha M. Walker to discuss price estimates for repairs and climate-proofing on her house.”

            Climate-proofing. What a way to think of it. It horrified Toby even though it was she who had decided that it was needed.

            Rachel and Toby had met in college; they had bonded over their complicated middle names. The M stood for Mehitable, the B for Berenice.

            “The figure we’ve been throwing around is thirty thousand,” Rachel said. “This, of course, is an estimate.”

            “Yes,” said Toby. “Not even a mid-range estimate, necessarily.”

            Rachel nodded and took a sip of her cinnamon tea. It had not steeped for long enough, and the water had been a little too hot when Toby had poured it into the cup. The flavor thus was unbalanced, yet Rachel loved it. She loved visiting Toby at home. Loved, indeed, Toby herself, in ways that Toby did not love anybody. Toby’s first love was the house, the house of which she was both begetter and begotten. She inhabited the house as a place of safety, like a womb; she put work and money and feeling into the house, like a germ plasm.

            “Do your reasons for wanting to do all this work come down to wanting to save yourself and the house more money later, or is it morally imperative to you that we get it done now?” Rachel asked. “If it’s just a matter of foresight, it may be prudent to wait until you have, frankly, a stable career situation and some net worth that isn’t all in the form of the house itself.”

            Toby shrugged, thought for a second, then said, “Morally imperative isn’t how I’d put it but I do think it’s important to get it done ASAP.” She pronounced ASAP as a word rather than as four letters, the way her father and grandmother had pronounced it. “The climate itself sure isn’t waiting till my career is going better.” She reached over the butcher’s block to where the 2021 Old Farmer’s Almanac rested. She picked it up for the first time in over a month. “This thing is the least accurate I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “I only bother to read it for its har-har little articles these days.”

            “Like reading Playboy for the articles?” Rachel asked with a smirk, then, unwilling to let her friend get away with one little jab when two would do just as nicely, “When was the Old Farmer’s Almanac ever accurate anyway?”

            “Not the point,” said Toby. She set the almanac down, almost chivalrously, on the butcher’s block between them. Its off-yellow cover was rippled and pilled a little after ten months of sitting in a dank kitchen, with the rot that wound in the times between Toby’s uses of the sterilizing stove. “I think it’s urgent. Yes.” She gestured at the almanac; the hole drilled in its top right corner looked almost as if a worm had chewed through it. She gestured at the ceiling; the rot in the corners was easier to see now that the light was turning from morning to midday. “Does this not look urgent to you, Rachel?” she asked.

            “It’s not my job to tell you that, only to tell you what it will cost. Please don’t get frustrated with me for that.”

            “I’m not. I’m sorry.” Toby shook her head and lit another cigarette. Rachel noticed that she was allowing her own tea to get cold. “Thirty goddam grand,” Toby said.

            “Thirty goddam grand,” Rachel agreed.

            That should, perhaps, have stymied them, or at least given them more pause. Yet Toby’s attention was stuck, bizarrely, on that full-moon-shaped worm’s-hole bored in the corner of the almanac. It reminded her of a keyhole, a keyhole to be opened with a key to thing she longed for most. Rachel’s eyes tracked Toby’s, followed Toby’s to that hole. To it and almost down it. Two sets of eyes gazed with fixity for several seconds at that dark little corner of the world’s many-sided agony. It was a corner that seemed to hold some better possibility inside it. It felt as if there was something at the bottom, something within the lunar phases and sidereometeorological pseudoscientificities of the almanac, something brighter and sharper than the surface of Toby’s kitchen’s butcher’s block. The hole in the almanac was a black hole with promises of something radiating out of the singularity, but radiating slantwise and obscurely.

            Then Toby picked up the almanac, flipped through it almost as a tic, set it down again, and the moment was lost.

            “You hoping the almanac has some financial advice in it?” asked Rachel, but it did not come out of her mouth as though it were a joke.

            “It’s not that I can’t afford the thirty grand,” said Toby.

            “No. I know it’s not that,” Rachel said.

            “You’ve run the numbers? You’ve made sure that I can, technically, afford it right now?”

           Rachel nodded. “I have and you can,” she said, “although you’re going to have to either pinch pennies or get a much better job.”

            Toby sighed. “That would be the case no matter what I did with the thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “All right. Make a note that we discussed this expenditure and I authorized it. I assume I’ll be recouping some of it come tax season, at any rate.”

            “Have you run this by Tucker and Jordan?” Rachel asked. Tucker Littlepage and Jordan Blackett were the executors of Toby’s father’s estate.

            “I did and they said there wasn’t anything legal that would tie this up,” said Toby. “So we can go ahead.” She stood up and adjusted one of the cuffs of her thick blue-black-orange flannel. “This conversation is tiring me out,” she said.

            “You’ve barely touched your tea,” Rachel said.

            Toby shrugged. “Guess that didn’t even occur to me,” she said, although it had, and she had no explanation for it, really. She picked up her cup, now closer to room temperature than hot, and drank it in three or four quick despairing gulps. She looked down at the surface of the butcher’s block again. The cup had left behind it a damp impression or allegory of a washed-out crescent moon.

            “Is there anything else that you need right now?” asked Rachel, tapping her phone for the time. “If there’s not, I’d like to get going; I want to see if the Hannaford in Deephaven has some yahrzeit candles.”

            “Oh, right, it is that time of year, isn’t it?” said Toby with a plaintive feeling. She had met Rachel’s grandfather only twice and only dimly remembered him, but for Rachel he had been a pillar of the earth for a quarter of a century before the demise.

            Sometimes Toby thought that it seemed Rachel envied her, in between the more frequent moments of pity. Here in this house she was ancestor-named and landed, undisplaceably cocooned in a soggy but history-laden husk. All around them was changing, changing, mixing and changing. Being unstable, changing and decaying. Toby guessed that Rachel might find it easy to see her, falsely, as changeless.

 ❦

Toby did not do much with the rest of the day. She had a one-hour online English class with a twelve-year-old boy in mainland China whose parents were paying her handsomely for it. It felt good to Toby to use her certification, and the boy, Weiyu, was charming and a good learner. If Toby could have had more regular hours doing this, and could have done it in person instead of on video calls, she and Rachel would not be concerned about the state of her career. But the hours were scant and the videos were laggy and Toby ended the lesson with Weiyu far more tired than she had hoped. By this time the sun was setting and it was time to take some butternut squash soup out of her refrigerator and warm it up for dinner. The soup had come out a little thinner than she usually made it, and once warmed up was better with a squeeze or two of hot sauce.

            The pipes by this point had started to sing, groaning into their song far earlier in the evening than they ought. It was usually around midnight that the teakettle-like keening started, or later even, as Toby lay wakeful in the room that had been hers since her father’s penultimate heart attack. For the singing to start at not even eight disquieted her somewhat. It seemed a little too early in the year too; the evening was not particularly cold. She hoped there was nothing wrong with the furnace. That would be the last thing she needed. What would happen to the bills alone would set her other expenses back weeks or months. She pulled out her phone and began to draft an email to Rachel about this. Then she read the email and saw that it looked whiny and put her phone aside. She was sitting on her big old couch now facing the empty table across the living room where her television had been before, on a whim, she had put it upstairs. One of the cats jumped up to sit there.

            Toby’s cats were named Simpkin and Tom Tildrum, on her distant cousin Mattie’s recommendation. Jordan Blackett called them Infer and Imply because he couldn’t tell them apart. Toby could tell them apart because Simpkin was a little lighter in color and behaved somewhat more respectably; Tom Tildrum cavorted and gamboled, not so much almost like a dog as almost like a pony. He was doing just that right now on the ratty rug between Simpkin and Toby, and watching him do it was getting on Toby’s nerves.

            Toby refilled the cats’ dry food and slouched up to her bedroom. There on her narrow bed lay a stack of papers that she had found in the attic yesterday. They were old, from probably around the time she had been thirteen. Aced English assignments, journals from family trips to Disneyland and England, fanfiction where Toby was secretly Maximum Ride or a fourth Baudelaire child or an Eva pilot. All mildewy and smelly. Rank, flecked, sloppily bound and interlaced with evil like the interlaced buriedness of last year’s layer of leaves.

            She went downstairs and came back up again holding the yellowish almanac. She flipped through it a bit. September and October will be cooler and rainier than normal, said the forecast for the Northeast, and Oct. 2021: Temp 44° (4° below avg.); precip. 5.5” (2” above avg.). 1-9 Rainy periods, cool. 10-12 Snow showers, cold. 13-19 Rainy periods, chilly. 20-23 Sunny, cool. 24-31 Periods of rain and snow, cold.

            It was not entirely wrong. It had indeed been a drippy autumn so far, though not a cool one. But there had been no snow showers and no cold to speak of around Columbus Day, and in the middle of the month the temperature had now and then scraped seventy-five. There had been a couple of hard overnight freezes within the past week, but only overnight and only a couple.

            Toby lifted the almanac up in front of her and, through the hole bored in it, looked at the stack of childhood papers on her bed. She wondered if this was the image of the keyhole that she thought she had seen earlier. Perhaps it had had to do with looking through that hole at a part of herself and a phase of her life that she had, so to speak, loved and lost. Yet she did not think so; the papers on her bed just looked like papers, not like the kind of inexhaustible treasure hoard that dragons guarded in old-fashioned picture books.

            She wondered if the almanac itself had more to say, perhaps, about some other world than this. Maybe somewhere far beyond whatever walls separated this universe from void, in some nearby universe some other Tabitha Walker was looking at an almanac identical to this one. It was even possible, Toby thought, or hoped, that her other self in that other world had for the past year been looking out her window or going for walks or bike rides or swims in the weather that that almanac described.

 ❦

And indeed she had. As Toby Walker drifted off to unpleasant sleep on one side of the great divide, the barrier of the walls of spacetime billions of parsecs away, another Toby Walker on the other side of that divide stood out in her front yard in the vague light of a distant telephone pole, smoking a cigarette and peering at the stars. The streetlight was further from her house than from that of her counterpart, and the light it cast was warm and pointed solely at the ground; the stars were brighter where they had just come out from behind the flurrying clouds. The ground under that Toby’s feet was the yellow-and-black carpet of leaves that neither Toby had raked in several days. Yet on this side the yellow and black were freckled with thin silver snow.

            She could see the Andromeda Galaxy, very near the zenith, flanked by Alpheratz and Schedar. Towards it her grey-blue cigarette smoke rose palely. The Andromeda Galaxy was, for Toby, a difficult object; she had to tilt her head back and forth to make sure that it was not a smudge on one of the lenses of her glasses. Alpheratz and Schedar looked brighter than usual, likely because the select board had voted recently to further dim down the streetlights on the roads leading away from town. Toby checked her watch. It was a little before eleven. She thought she should probably go the barn and make sure the chickens were settled in for the night before she went to bed.

            The chickens were at this point the main part of the Walker Farm that was even slightly profitable; most of the rest was either protected wetland or preserved in amber as a sort of petting zoo or living museum of Toby’s grandmother’s time, which suited Toby just fine. The Partial Hydrocarbon Ban Treaty had been controversial in her area for all sorts of reasons, and had indeed had serious negative effects on its agricultural productivity in the traditional sense, but the agrotourism had helped offset that and now that Toby’s house was in a few different guidebooks she could usually count on giving three to five tours of it a week.

            The chickens were good and fed. She went into her yellow kitchen with its flickering lamps and its oven hot with the heat of roasting winter squash. Outside the snow was starting to drift down again. She was glad that Rachel had come to visit earlier in the evening and was probably back at the train station by now; it was not the kind of night to get caught outside late in one of the traps that the train station provided these days. Toby still had a car and would have been able to pick Rachel up and get her back to the train station herself, but it would have been a pain for Rachel to get in touch with her to inform her that she needed her to do so. She anticipated a phone call from Rachel when she arrived back home safe in Dunnet Landing, or from somewhere in Deephaven if she still needed to make a late-night run for a yahrzeit candle there.

            Eventually she did call, but by that point it was very early morning. The sky was as dark as it was going to get and about to start getting lighter. Briefly Toby resented Rachel’s call, but then she remembered that at any rate she would have had to get up in ten minutes anyway if the big rooster Fabio had anything to say about it.

             “I’m in Deephaven,” Rachel said, “safe at Peri Oler’s house for the night. Remember her?”

            “I do,” said Toby. “You used to date her, didn’t you?”

            “That’s the one, yes, although right now she has me on an air mattress, which I think is reasonable,” Rachel said. “I got the yahrzeit candle right before the coast bus stopped running. Now I’m just out in her garden looking at the stars.”

            “Not snowing there like it is here?”

            “No, although it was a few minutes ago. I can see this very faint trail of stars in the middle of a sort of…it looks a little like an L or a right triangle. The trail of stars is the hypotenuse. That’s Coma Berenices, isn’t it?”

            “It sounds like it, yes,” said Toby, and smiled. “The Tress of Berenice is what Joyce calls it in Ulysses. The ‘heaventree of stars’ scene; do you remember?” Rachel made a murmuring, affirmative noise; they had met in a modern Irish lit elective. “Berenice,” said Toby, “like you.”

            “We made a pact!” Rachel said. “I was going to learn to like Berenice only as long as you learned to like Mehitable.”

            “I have learned to like Mehitable. I even put flowers on old Mehitable Smead’s grave in the graveyard on my walk the other day,” Toby said. “Dried annual honesty; seasonable.”

            “Fair’s fair, I guess. Just don’t make that crude joke about Peri’s name.”

            “You were the only one who ever found ‘Peri Oler’s areolers’ funny, Rachel; not me,” said Toby, and Rachel laughed.

            They chatted for a while longer and then Toby went out to the barn to try and make Fabio shut up. Then she went back inside and went through her mudroom into her chilly back-house. There she stood looking east over the fields at a long low line of fluffy sheeplike clouds underneath which the sun soon started to rise. They drifted on, pale dusty purple limned with pinkish gold. Japanese irises under warm-colored stage lights, perhaps, or a rose-gold wedding ring on the finger of a frost-giant bride.

            Pinkish gold, too, was the snow that had fallen during the night. There was about half an inch of it, coming partway up the sere leaves of faded green grass. It was rheumy and so thin that it would all but certainly be gone by the time she went to vote on Tuesday even if the temperature did not rise overmuch. Yet something about having snow on the ground on Halloween morning made Toby think that the world had a seemliness to it at the moment.

            She wondered at the fact that Rachel had been able to see Coma Berenices from Deephaven, especially in the pre-dawn hours. It was possible that the sky had been lightening somewhat even then. More light began to enter the sky before one tended to notice a change in color, and Deephaven was more than dozen miles to the east. On top of all that, Coma Berenices was not a particularly bright constellation, and she remembered that when they had been in that Irish lit class together reading the scene in Ulysses Rachel had remarked that she was astonished that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus had been able to see it from a house in the middle of Dublin. That had been in the days of unrestricted streetlight use and almost-constant nighttime driving even around Orono, in the relative wilds north of Bangor. Toby and Rachel had themselves had to traipse out into the woods and crane their necks right at the zenith to see the Milky Way, back then. They had been good nights, but cold ones.

            Toby glanced up at the clock that she had put up in the back-house back when she had given up on trying to slow it down. It read about seven-thirty, which meant that it was probably about quarter past. At this point it was unlikely that she would get back to sleep. So she traipsed into the kitchen and put on a teakettle. The sweet smell of the purplish gas that her stove now ran on flitted into her ear like a singing bird. It reminded her of an automaton, or of Pinocchio or the Tin Woodman maybe. It was a conquest of nature that was also a surrender to nature, or a return to it anyway. She lit the gas ring with a long wooden match, extinguished the match by waving it around absentmindedly for a few seconds in the kitchen’s chilly air, and lowered the kettle gently onto the flame.

            “Need to buy the new one,” she muttered to herself, looking at the 2021 lunar phase calendar that was thumbtacked to the bulletin board that hung next to the kitchen sink. Toby’s interest in stargazing came and went; it was not as much a part of her life now as it was of Rachel’s, which was another good reason why the stars were so easy to see from Deephaven and from Dunnet Landing now. Even so, when she was interested, it was nice to be able to tell at a glance what the moon be bright enough to drown out, and the moon itself seemed lovelier as she got older. It was loveliest on evenings where it rose full above the sere eastern fields. Toby liked to plan to be home on those evenings.

            Moreover having a calendar like this in the kitchen was something that her father and her grandmother had done, another small piece of whatever heritage she had from them. More and more these days she felt that thin warm line connecting her back through time, and yet more and more she felt almost as if she did not need it, as if feeling that connection made her more herself in a way that lessened her reliance on things past. She guessed that this was what people meant when they talked about “living in the past” versus “living in the moment,” and it surprised her sometimes that she was drifting in one direction rather than the other as she got older. She wondered if she would feel the need for the moon calendars more if she was not such an early bird about getting them, if it would feel less like a mildly obnoxious chore and more like a dangerous and high-stakes imperative if she had started thinking about this in the middle of December rather than at the end of October. It wouldn’t surprise her at this point in her life.

            Rachel had said recently that she too had of late felt calmer, more relaxed, and less like she was on the brink of something disastrous that she was running out of ways to forestall. She felt more at-home in the world too, something that she had once, when younger, despaired of, because it was the backcountry and there was antisemitism around. With Rachel, in addition to whatever social or political peace of mind she had come to nowadays, it maybe had to do with the fact that her career was going pretty well. Todd & Dembitz was now Dembitz & Associates, because Rachel’s mother had been able to talk her out of naming it Go Time Accounting instead.

            At about nine o’ clock, with Toby still musing on Go Time Accounting and what a dumb name it would have been, the phone rang. Toby answered. It was the woman herself. “Did you sleep?” she asked Rachel.

            “Yes, a little,” Rachel said. “I’m on the bus back to Dunnet Landing now. I still need to actually do the…” She stammered a little, tongue-tied probably from the lack of sleep. Toby assumed that what she was trying to articulate was something about the yahrzeit for which she had bought the candle. She had given up trying to understand some of the reasons behind Rachel’s comings and goings. It often seemed that the woman had taken slower and more complicated means of travel as a challenge and a call to adventure rather than an inconvenience. Toby envied that; not even she had been able to do her likewise.

            “Please tell me you’re planning on getting more sleep tonight,” said Toby, feeling a little like a prudish mother, a role that, truth be told, she found it fun to play sometimes. Rachel thought for a theatrical moment, laughed, and told her so. Toby was glad to hear it; she was glad to hear it after the stage pause too. That showed a playful attitude that, until recently, Toby had worried that her friend had lost a long time ago.

            “I probably shouldn’t spend a ton more time on the phone right now,” Rachel said. “I’ll call you when I get home safe.”

            She hung up. Toby spared a moment’s thought, maybe prayer but maybe not, for her safety. She did not normally do it, and Rachel did not require it, but right now it felt appropriate somehow. Then she went out to check on her old car and her gasoline allotment and took a drive into town. The general store was open from nine to one on Sundays and they would probably have the 2022 moon calendar and the 2022 almanac still. It would be good to have those on hand before November started.

            Toby pulled her old green Chevy out of her long gravel driveway with its dusting of morning-lit new snow. She set off down the road between trees with frost-rimmed branches and leaves that were rufous and gold.

Note: June 13, 2022: I gave this story a new title two weeks after running it. It was written, and initially published on this site, as “The Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

Short Story: “The Thought of Vinegar”

The child went home each night to a house in the cold hills. There were unseasonable storms and winds in the late evenings, storms and winds on which a witch might fly through an upright window to speak to the little girl in benign but frightening tones. The girl’s uncertainty is an uncertainty that a witch might like to solve, in her necromantic way and for her own fey or devilish purposes. The girl might, then, worry a loose strand of yarn at one of the cuffs of her sweater as she speaks to the witch, telling the witch that in her dreams she has other and better unnatural or supernatural friends.

“My mom says I won’t be seven for much longer,” the girl says. “I just have to wait for a little bit.”

“And how long has it been ‘not much longer’ for, for your mother?” asks the witch. “You’re not tired of being seven until she sees fit otherwise? You don’t wish to start the passage of time yourself, for yourself?”

The questions feel like being poked by pencils, the way the boy who teases her does at school. “It should be any day now,” she insists, “that I’ll turn eight.”

“Who will turn you?” the witch demands. “Who can turn you eight? Who is it who could allow or disallow the passage of time?”

The girl fidgets some more with the dark brown strand of sweater-cuff. “It just happens,” she says, “I think, I guess.” The small piece of off-black chocolate in the witch’s beckoning hand frustrates both of them and looks frustrated itself. For the child it always feels apprehensive to think that her apprehension might vanish. The invitation here is honest and because of this the inviter, the witch, is, for her own part, humiliated and offended, in the power of this child as she might be in the power of that which laughs in the cold marcescent trees.

After an interval the girl says “The lorries will help me get there. To my birthday, I mean.”

Imperiously, the witch declares “How silly! A lorry is a truck, isn’t it?”

“My lorries aren’t. They’re elephants, on dirtbikes. They bike up the stairs and ask me about my day.” The girl smiles at the witch. She is no longer fiddling with her sweater. “They’ll help me with this.”

“Feh,” says the witch—then, realizing to her horror that she really is being sincere with this little girl, “It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?”

Tomorrow the girl will go and take a math test at school, a test for which she will, in fact, have studied. It will be her eighth birthday. She will try to imagine what the witch’s chocolate would have tasted like, but for some reason it will be the taste of vinegar that comes into her mouth instead.