Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Two)

4.

The First Visit 

At a few different points in the second half of October Rosie asked her family when she could expect the winter weather to start, and she got a different answer each time she asked it. First Uncle Franklin told her that it usually started snowing around Thanksgiving, then Grandpa told her that she could expect it after Halloween. Finally Grandma and Aunt Margaret explained to her that most years what would happen was that there would be some flurries or perhaps one or two snowy nights beginning at the end of October or early in November, and then in the waning days of November the snow started in earnest and stayed on the ground in some form or fashion till spring. That being the case as it may be, it seemed that the weather reports had been saying that this year in particular New England could expect a major snowstorm in the days heading up to Halloween. Two sets of guests cancelled their reservations because of this, and the Baring household set about planning for this big Halloween storm.

            Mags took over shopping from Uncle Franklin and brought home canned food, lots of tea and coffee, and several boxes of taper candles from various department stores and buyers’ clubs around Greenfield. Grandpa Baring spent an afternoon out with a pair of young gay women whom he was friends with for some reason, and came back with a new winter coat and a manual that was supposed to exposit certain things about the kind of hot water system that the house had. Grandma and Uncle Franklin brought in chairs and tables from outside. As for Rosie, she put up storm windows, made sure the family’s three cars were properly serviced and up-to-date on all their checks, and spent a few hours each day with her laptop open checking every now and then for new reports on the nor’easter as it developed. So passed the last couple of days before the storm was supposed to hit Western Massachusetts.

            Rosie and Mags were actually on the UMass campus when the storm itself hit, driving through it on their way back from an Asian market in another part of Amherst. There they had picked up a can of some sort of Vietnamese coffee that Uncle Franklin insisted on having in the house; evidently it had been in Chicago that he had first discovered it once upon a time. They pulled up a side road at first and parked the car by one of the UMass dorms as the clouds of white descended darkly; then the silver-blue flash of an exploding transformer lit up the sky from somewhere else on campus, and Mags decided to high-tail it home.

            “How long did Uncle Franklin live in Chicago?” Rosie asked, by way of a topic to discuss that would distract her from Mags’s almost preternaturally aggressive driving.

            “At least fifteen years or so if I’m not mistaken,” Mags said. “He first left home because of some sort of conflict or jealousy with my father, actually, to hear Aunt Margaret and your grandmother tell it. Don’t ask me the details of that, though; I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. He made a life for himself out there and it was not actually the accident that killed my parents that made him feel as if he had to come home; it was some other thing that happened, that had something to do with a woman he was close to out there, if I’m not mistaken. One of those classic tragedies, or classic subgenres of personal tragedy, if you prefer to look at it that way.”

            “I don’t prefer to look at it that way at all,” Rosie said.

            “I suppose I could say that’s just as well,” said Mags. “It helps me to think of this life of ours as part of a ‘story’ of some sort, but I’m willing to accept that that might be a little cold of me. Back when I had a therapist I went to see she said much the same to me. Food for thought, I guess; the question is just whose thoughts, you know?”

            “I think I know what you mean, but Ma—Mags you are about to hit a moose.”

            Sure enough, there was some sort of large animal—maybe not a moose, but something large enough and uncanny enough to fool a suburbanite like Rosie—lumbering across the interstate just in front of them. Mags swerved hard to avoid it and the car drifted far into the shoulder. It took them several hundred feet of roadway to straighten themselves out again.

            “We can’t get home soon enough,” Mags observed. “That transformer blowing back on campus was sure a wakeup call, wouldn’t you say?”

            “I sure as hell would,” Rosie said, thankful that they hadn’t hit that animal, whatever it had been. “By the way, what do you think that animal was?”

            “You seemed pretty confident it was a moose.” Mags cast a quizzical eye on Rosie. She seemed amused by the situation in which they had just found themselves. Rosie had ridden in the car with Mags several times now and knew that it was her custom to drive like a madwoman whenever there wasn’t a cop car to be seen, but she had supposed that the danger of doing so on ice-slicked roads with very poor visibility would mitigate that. Quite the contrary, it seemed to have made it even worse, likely because Mags was getting downright desperate to get home. Rosie was starting to seriously wonder how bad exactly her cousin expected the storm to get. It did seem like, mostly on Mags’s instigation, their household had gone to much more trouble to prepare for this nor’easter than had many people in the area. Rosie wondered if Mags was one of those odd people you ran into now and then who seemed to have some sort of prescience about such things, or, on the other hand, whether she tended towards paranoia about winter weather due to past experience or by some quirk of her nature.

            The got home in one piece. Evening was coming on. Uncle Franklin told Rosie that she could expect to hear odd sounds from the radiators as they gurgled into heavy-duty service for the first time this winter. Grandma and Grandpa were upstairs making sure the storm windows in one of the guest rooms were properly secured. What constituted an improperly secured storm window Rosie could not guess at, but she figured she might learn soon enough. She hoped she had done a good enough job.

            Mags spent most of the evening, before the power failed, making a bracelet for something called Carmilla and brainstorming ideas for the more-familiar (to Rosie) The King in Yellow. Then the power did fail and she decided to go to bed. It was about nine o’ clock and without a way to keep her laptop charged up there was not much more left to do. So she lit a candle, cracked open a book, and turned away from Rosie to settle in for the night.

            Rosie herself must have drifted off at some point soon after, because the next thing she knew it was around midnight, the storm was still raging, and somebody was boiling a kettle of water. Something about the way this house was set up made it difficult to tell what direction sounds in it were coming from, but in this case it must be in the kitchen. Somehow, she could not think how, Rosie felt a compulsion, a needful frenzy, to go out to the kitchen herself and see who it was.

            Mags was sleeping soundly when Rosie crept out of their room, tiptoeing like a disobedient child. It was still dark-white outside. If the stove had been electric rather than gas there would have been no way any of them could use it under these conditions.

            There were two or three intervening rooms or hallways between Rosie and Mags’s room and the kitchen; it depended on whether you went clockwise or counterclockwise around the front hallway’s central staircase that led inevitably and composedly down to the rarely-used front door. Rosie went counterclockwise, the long way round, which passed through the front hallway, the dining room, and a section of the living room in which a spinet piano much like her sister’s stood collecting dust. The sound of the singing kettle was still going on and on and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. Rosie felt a chill, then a sudden pump of warmth as she passed the radiator that stood at the doorway through with the living room and kitchen communicated.

            The kitchen, miraculous to report, was empty. The candles were out and the stove was off. Rosie realized with a sudden laugh that the sound of the kettle, the sound like a kettle rather, was in fact the steam in the pipes and in the radiators, keeping the cold out in this winter’s first furious storm.

            Rosie’s heart was pounding for reasons that she could only guess at as she looked out the kitchen window at the storm. There was a light in it, and what looked like a woman stuck outside, insufficiently dressed for a nighttime blizzard, on the patio or in the overgrown garden beyond it. Rosie, not thinking, ran out into the mudroom, put on her coat and gloves over her pajamas, and went out to see what was wrong.

            The doorway to the patio opened into warm air and the dim not of an autumn midnight but of nine or nine-thirty one evening in late June. The “door into summer” of the Heinlein title must, Rosie thought, have been something like this, this moment when she walked outside into something like the past.

            A woman was indeed standing there, in that summer dusk. She looked much like Mags—glaring eyes, russet hair—but she was clearly someone who was entirely new to Rosie, someone who was uncanny and unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, and probably not family—doubly strange, doubly elsewhere. Fireflies were flitting around her, and she was wreathed in their glow as it were in the fires of purgatory, with a pschent of them circling her high-held head. Her hair was up in a high knot or bun and she was in the corset-and-hoops clothing and accoutrements of a hundred and fifty years before. Rosie suspected without having to know, or knew without having to suspect, that she was a ghostly vision of some ancestor, or a manifestation of some ancestral strain in her and Mags’s shared familial past. The ghost looked solid, and looked like she had a full complement of emotion and intellect and will, but there was no way for Rosie to be sure of any of this unless she spoke to her.

            The dead began to speak. The ghost had the strange accent one sometimes was liable to hear in plays or movies about Lincoln, or Whitman, or other figures of that day and period. She spoke respectfully but with a clear note of feeling that she represented some higher place or calling. It was a note that Rosie, amazingly to her own mind, found herself respecting as well as resenting. It came by way of an introduction.

            “I am Margaret Clooney, ancestress, as you might say, of your relation Margaret McNulty,” the ghost said. “I lived in these parts many years ago after being born during a sea voyage from Ireland, just before or in the earliest days of the famine there. You are Rosary Newgarth, a friend and to some minds perhaps a kinswoman of my descendant, are you not?”

            “I am,” said Rosie. “To my time it’s the night of October 29, 2011, a Saturday. Mags—Margaret, your namesake, anyway—is asleep in bed.”

            “Asleep in bed, Saturday night,” the ghost said. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.’”

            “And you?” Rosie asked. “What are your day and time?”

            “Late evening, June 23, 1860,” said Margaret Clooney. “A Saturday also. St. John’s Eve, if that holds any meaning to you. Just a few days after midsummer.”

            “The light out here is that of a summer night, I can tell,” Rosie said. “And the fireflies too, of course. Are you—that is, have I slipped back into the ‘present’ for you, or am I ‘seeing’ your living life with you as a ghost, a phantom, here for me to show me the way the world use to be for you? I’m sorry,” she said with a sudden burst of self-consciousness. “I hope the question isn’t gauche, or unwelcome? And I’m sorry for how badly I worded it.”

            “A little gauche perhaps, but not unwelcome—or, at least, it is clear and easy for me to see why you are asking it,” said Margaret Clooney. “I am, as you might say, a ghost, although my true self, my soul, my heart, is elsewhere than this garden. I will miss it, when I go totally beyond.”

            “And this is 1860 I’ve entered into?”

            “This is, yes. However, observe.” Margaret Clooney glided up onto the patio, which here was an older-fashioned porch or portico, and pointed a spectral finger over Rosie’s shoulder into the kitchen window. Rosie saw that it was not a kitchen after all but a storeroom of some kind, a dimly firelit chamber in which two men were arguing. It would seem that it was money about which they were arguing—some sort of debt, something that one of them experienced as a violence done to him. Rosie could not tell if it was the indebtedness that was being claimed to be violent or the unmercifulness with which the indebtedness was being received. Like any moral economist, she was on the side of the debtor.

            “The two men arguing—who are they?” she asked.

            “Men of the year 1813, when this home was first built ere in Greenfield,” Margaret Clooney said to her. “The debtor, who is the first owner of this house, is a man by the name of Asaph Oldmeadow. Do you know of the Oldmeadows? If you do not, it would be my pleasure to tell you a bit about them. They are a part of my history, and my descendant’s history, and your history also.”

            “I’ve heard of the Oldmeadows. The Barings are descended from an Oldmeadow woman, aren’t they—that is, aren’t we?”

            The ghost of Margaret Clooney nodded. “Your grandfather’s grandmother, whom I believe he is given to occasionally mentioning, was Horton Oldmeadow,” she said. “The name Horton was reused in the family, just as the name Margaret has been reused. Probably the name was something along the lines of Hortense in the beginning—In principio, if you’ve ever looked through a Vulgate Bible. This Horton Oldmeadow was the daughter of a close friend of mine—but that is a story for another time.” The ghost, Rosie realized, was vanishing as she said this.

            “I will see you again, Margaret?” Rosie asked.

            “You will,” said Margaret Clooney. “I promise you that; you will.”

            She dissolved into the firefly dusk. Rosie blinked, then went back inside, into the storm-choked house. The kitchen clock read twelve-thirty, and the radiator pipes were still singing, joyful in having a reason to serve at last.

5.

The Folktales 

A week or so into November, once power had been restored in the house and life had gone more or less back to normal, Rosie asked her grandfather about Horton Oldmeadow. Who he told her about instead was Horton Baring.

            Horton Baring had been Grandpa Baring’s older sister, the oldest of three siblings (the middle sibling, the first Franklin Baring, had been killed in the Korean War). She had been half-feral and barely literate, with a knack for beating people up that had already emerged by her early teens. In 1949 she had been expelled from Greenfield High School three weeks before she would have graduated, and she had spent most of the 1950s in and out of the Franklin County sheriff’s office. (Rosie asked her grandfather if she had ever actually been convicted of anything and he had said that on two occasions they had managed to make contempt of court stick and kept her around for a few weeks before letting her out again.) She had been a liberal smoker and drinker but was not known ever to have associated romantically with either men or women. Going into her thirties she had become something of an enforcer of her own justice, and it had actually been she who had brought Carl McNulty into the household after beating up his father as his father had been about to beat up him. This had been in 1968 or so, turbulent times for Grandma and Grandpa’s growing family as for the world as a whole. Carl and Horton had, by Grandpa’s account and also by Mags’s, been inseparable pretty much as soon as she had knocked his father to the ground on his behalf. A year or two after that Horton had died in unclear circumstances, still in her late thirties.

            “What happened to her?” Rosie asked. “If it’s not too hard to say.”

            “Wouldn’t say it’s too hard exactly,” Grandpa said. “She took a fall from the French King Bridge—you know, that bridge out on Route 2 to the east as it passes over the Connecticut going towards Boston. She’d been visiting with a friend who lived on a hill nearby by the name of Weatherhead, and she was walking across the river back from Weatherhead to meet with another friend when something happened. Never figured out what. Might could have been an accident, suicide, someone she’d crossed coming back to get her…” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “Any number of things my sister could’ve gotten herself involved in,” he said. “Anyway, it damn near broke this family apart. None of us ever really looked at little Carl the same after that, and I think he knew it.”

            He showed her a picture of the three siblings then. Horton and Franklin I both looked a lot like her grandfather, like Tom. They all had the same ruddy complexion, meaty hands, and tragicomic resting expression. The picture must have been taken right before Franklin I had gone to Korea because Grandpa seemed already to be in his early teens and Rosie recognized Horton’s dress as a fashion of the very early fifties.

            “What did your brother do in Korea?” she asked.

            “Fighter pilot,” said Grandpa. “Lived on a base in Japan, near Osaka; commuted to the war zone in his Sabrejet from there. Got shot down by some Chinaman in a MiG right before the ceasefire in ’53. Nineteen years old.”

            Rosie had not been aware that the Air Force had ever had fighter pilots quite that young, and wondered if perhaps Franklin I’s exploits were being exaggerated somewhat—if he had instead been a wingman or something like that, or if it had been a bomber instead of a fighter, or, or, or…She shook her head. In the end, it didn’t really matter. He was dead, and Horton was dead, and her grandfather was still very much alive.

            “Probably shouldn’t say Chinaman,” her grandfather said. “Not polite, not these days.”

            And that was their first conversation about Horton Baring. It took a few more conversations in that month of November to get to the subject of Horton Oldmeadow, who had lived a much less disputable and apparently much less tragic life. Grandpa still remembered some of her stories, when he had been a child, about her own childhood—the days of taffeta bustles and shirtwaists, narrated to the days of pinstriped suits and trilbys.

            Also right after Halloween Rosie started going on little adventures around Western Massachusetts with two women about her and Mags’s age named Mattie Greer and Ellie Soren. Mattie and Ellie were not a couple; they were definitely both gay, but they seemed to be gay separately. Mattie was a graduate student at UMass, apparently doing a master’s in some foreign literature or another, and Ellie had arbitraged a BS in economics much like Rosie’s own into a job writing ad copy for a liquor distributor. On one day in particular the three of them were at a sort of embankment or landing along the Connecticut River, from which one could watch almost minute by minute as crimson-and-gold October turned to russet-and-silver November. Mattie, who had a taste for swimming in ludicrously cold water that Mags apparently shared, was doing backstrokes in the river’s shallows; Ellie, who looked and talked like she should have been much more adventurous than Mattie but apparently was not, was in a sport coat and a light scarf, hitting golf balls across the river with one of Grandpa Baring’s nine-irons.

            “You know, until he handed you that club this morning I didn’t even realized Grandpa played golf,” said Rosie.

            “He doesn’t,” said Ellie. “Fore!” Whack. A ball went flying up, up, and left Rosie’s vision against the whitish sky. Mattie seemed unperturbed and contemplative.

            “Well, be that as it may, hitting golf balls across a river is certainly a new idea,” said Rosie.

            “Is it?” asked Mattie dreamily from the water. “I’m not so sure. Did you ever see that old episode of—what was it?—the sitcom.”

            “Fair enough,” said Rosie, who knew what Mattie was alluding to, but only vaguely. “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

            “Mattie’s been watching a lot of sitcoms lately,” said Ellie. “She says they have a lot of the ‘amoral moralism’ of folk stories. That’s what she’s studying at UMass. Fore!” Whack.

            Mattie swam up to the landing and hauled herself up halfway onto the shore; Ellie handed her a towel to wrap around her shoulders. “ ‘Amoral moralism’ is a phrase I’m using in my thesis but I’m not actually sure how much I like it,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun, though. Writing the thing, I mean. I’m glad I went back to school.”

            “How old are you exactly?” Rosie asked.

            Mattie crammed on her glasses under her wet sheets of black hair and frowned at Rosie theatrically. “Don’t you know never to ask a lady that?” she said. “I’m twenty-five.” She yawned and pulled herself fully up out of the water. “Well, that was exhausting,” she said. “It probably kept my heart rate nice and low, though.”

            “Is this something you do every winter?” asked Rosie, gesturing at Mattie and at the river.

            “No, I actually just started doing this a year or two ago on your cousin’s recommendation,” Mattie said. “Where she got it from I have no idea. Turn around, I’m about to change back into my clothes.” Rosie turned around and Mattie kept talking. “Did you ever hear of the folktale called ‘The King of Cats’ or ‘The Prince of Cats’? I think it’s delightful, and it has the same feature that I notice in sitcoms where, when you hear it told, you keep thinking it’ll build to a moral conclusion and then it just doesn’t. It’s from Cornwall originally, I think; I found it in a Breton source; technically the literature I’m studying is French.” Rosie shook her head and said she hadn’t heard of it. “Would you like me to tell it to you?” Mattie asked. “You can turn around now, by the way.”

            Rosie turned around. Mattie was now dressed much the same as Ellie was and was wringing out her swimsuit so she could put it in her backpack. “Go ahead and tell me ‘The King of Cats,’ Mattie,” Rosie said.

            “So, the story goes,” said Mattie as they started to walk back towards Ellie’s car, “that an old farmer, long ago, had a mean, cussed old black cat, as so many old farmers do. He was walking along a lonely road one evening, trying to figure out what to do about the cat, when he saw a procession of other cats, carrying a cat-sized coffin. He marveled at this sight, of course, and up to him there walked a cat with a grave and official-seeming expression, like that of an undertaker or a coroner.

            “The grave, official-seeming cat said to the old farmer, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ The old farmer, not knowing what this meant, went on his way and went home to his own cat, and to his wife.

            “A few nights later, the farmer was walking along that same road when he saw the same procession of cats and coffin. The cat coroner or undertaker said to him again, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He still did not know what this meant, and he went home and the cat clawed him and his wife nagged him.

            “Finally, a third time, the farmer was walking along and he saw the funeral procession. The coroner or undertaker said to him, for the third time, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He was struck with a great fear, and he ran, did not walk, on home.

            “He said to his wife something to the effect of ‘I keep seeing these cats, this strange procession.’ His mean, cussed old black cat was looking at him intently now.” At this point in the story they reached Ellie’s car and set about getting into it. “He said ‘I just don’t know what it means,’” Mattie went on. “‘They’ve spoken to me, you know. They want me to find somebody called Tom Tildrum and tell him that Tim Toldrum is dead. I don’t know who either of those men are!’

            “‘Tim Toldrum is dead?!’ the mean, cussed old black cat suddenly screamed. ‘Why, then, I am now King of the Cats!’ And with that, the cat rose up the old farmer’s chimney like some, flew out into the night with a blood-curdling caterwaul, and was never seen or heard from in those parts again. And so goes the story.”

            “Isn’t there a Steven Vincent Benét version of that story, Mattie?” Ellie asked, putting the golf club and her back of golf balls in her trunk.

            “I don’t know who Steven Vincent Benét is,” said Rosie.

            “I think there might be,” said Mattie.

            On the drive back up to Greenfield there were a few more flurries. Rosie tried to think of an Italian folktale that she had once heard from her grandmother; she wanted to tell it to Mattie and Ellie as a sort of reciprocation, since she had enjoyed the story about the King of the Cats more than she had expected to. Try as she might, she could not put her finger on it. It had something to do with the devil, and a fig tree, and an old woman being cursed to have small breasts; it was just the kind of bawdy story, with faint hints of internalized misogyny, that Grandma Newgarth loved. Eventually it occurred to her that she could just tell them those elements—devil, fig tree, old woman, small breasts. Mattie might be able to put it together from her own knowledge base, or, if not, she might be able to look it up whenever she got home or to wherever her laptop currently was.

            “I think I have heard that one,” she said when Rosie told her the basic elements. “Neapolitan or Sicilian or something like that, right?”

            “I believe so, yeah,” said Rosie. “I heard it from my grandmother, on the non-Baring side. Do either of you have grandparents who have that—well, who get salty with you like that?”

            “My grandmother does occasionally,” said Ellie. “I think most of Mattie’s family is probably too buttoned-up for it. That’s probably why you can come across as stuck-up and retiring, isn’t it, Mattie?” she shouted into the back seat where Mattie was lying down.

            “Well, that and the depression,” muttered Mattie, who seemed to be half asleep.

            Rosie felt suddenly like she he had gone through the looking glass. There was something irreducibly manic and madcap about spending time with these two women, something that was starting to make her uncomfortable. Surely they couldn’t be like this all the time; with her own family, with Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin and Mags, and certainly at home with Mom and Dad and Madison, it was easy enough to imagine that they more or less always were the way they appeared to be. It was easy enough to imagine that Madison was thinking of George and Ira Gershwin more often than not, or that Mags spent most of her free time reading genre novels and making those bracelets based on them, or that Aunt Margaret was just as reluctant to talk about her estranged husband and children with everybody else as she was with Rosie. Surely that wasn’t the case here; surely Mattie and Ellie were not always hitting golf balls across rivers and saying things like “well, that and the depression,” were they? Had her grandfather somehow put them up to it, as a way to entertain her after the downbeat conversations he had been having with her lately. She obviously could not just ask them, but she felt the need to know.

            They returned to Greenfield. When Rosie got back home she found Mags and Uncle Franklin standing together pensively in the kitchen, looking out the window across the driveway to a plot where they had planted some garlic just before the blizzard. Rosie wondered what they expected it to be doing right now, exactly; you planted garlic in the fall before the first frost, and it burgeoned in the winter and came up in early spring. The book that Mags had shown Rosie had been very clear about that, and the process sounded very straightforward.

            It occurred to her that maybe they were not, after all, expecting anything from the garlic in particular. Maybe the garlic was beside the point, and their gazes out the window were in reality gazes at something quite different, much more dangerous and arcane. Maybe they were just standing there, looking pensively, looking carefully, looking at something together because they, they in particular, could not bear to look at each other.

6.

The Holiday

December 2011, that year’s long Advent, was a time of consequence. Between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas Eve, Herman Cain suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the United Kingdom severed diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kim Jong-il died abruptly and was succeeded as leader of North Korea by his twentysomething son, the Obama administration formally declared an end to the Iraq War, and the German novelist Christa Wolf died at eighty-two. Christopher Hitchens also died, as did Václav Havel. Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines and killed almost thirteen hundred people. In Western Massachusetts, winter came on in earnest, the water got too cold for even Mattie Greer to go swimming in before freezing over entirely, the days shortened into abbreviations that were already almost completely dark by four or five o’ clock, and Greenfield’s half-dozen or so Catholic and liturgical Protestant churches got fully into the Advent-Christmas season. The thin edge of the present advanced further into the future from the past, the last ends of Rosie and her family came closer day by day as always, and Mags started dating somebody.

            “I’ve had a crush on him since I was young,” she explained to a slightly gobsmacked Rosie, “or at least I think I have. We don’t have as much in common now as we did when we were twelve. I suppose I wanted to see there was any way we could recapture those days.”

            “Can I ask if you’ve ever been in a relationship before?” said Rosie. “You’ve never mentioned any exes or anything.”

            “I had a couple of casual hookups at UMass before deciding that wasn’t the way for me,” said Mags. “And I had a horrible jealousy-fueled high school ‘friendship’ with a girl called Jessica Winters. Other than that, no.”

            “What is he like, if you and he don’t have much in common anymore?” Rosie asked her then. For some reason the idea of Mags dating somebody just to see what was like filled her with foreboding. It was like being told that Madison had lost her virginity or that Dad was getting promoted at work—in some sense it represented forward progress, but it was also a move out of a situation to which the people concerned had already long since been habituated.

            “I guess he’s just your typical guy from around here,” said Mags, which did not inspire confidence. “He loves the Patriots and he wants to move to Boston at some point. He’s a manager in a farm store and I’ve had his cooking a couple of times; it’s pretty good, so that’s worth pursuing this for, I think.”

            “Do you want to move to Boston at some point, Mags?” Rosie asked.

            Mags shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “And that’s why I’ve decided I’m not going to have sex with Zachary.”

            “I’m sorry,” said Rosie, “but what?”

            Mags shrugged. “It’d feel like I was ascribing some sort of weight to the decisions he’s making about what to do with his life,” she said. Something about her tone of voice as she said this made Rosie realize, with a sudden realization, that her cousin was seeing this man out of nothing so much as good old-fashioned garden-variety boredom. For some reason that Rosie could not put her finger on, having realized that made her feel a bit better about it.

            Rosie behaved a little grouchily the next day around one of the guests, a woman named Francine Kipperman. Francine was a middle-aged New Jerseyite who reminded Rosie of her mother, and as such, Rosie felt a certain uncertainty around her. She was entitled, or seemed that way; Rosie’s mother was not entitled, so perhaps it was one or more of her paternal aunts of whom Rosie was actually reminded. What Rosie snapped at Francine about was Francine’s complaint that she had missed the foliage season.

            “The foliage season is mid-fall, Ms. Kipperman,” she said with a heaviness to her voice. “It’s December 11.”

            “It’s still fall till the solstice, though.”

            “Are there still autumn leaves on the trees in Morris County?” asked Rosie. “No? Then why would there be autumn leaves still on the trees here? We’re like two degrees of latitude further north, and we’re further inland too. There’s half a foot of snow on the ground.”

            “I paid to see foliage. My hubby Roy told me it’d be here still.”

            “Your hubby Roy was mistaken or poorly informed, Ms. Kipperman.”

            “Are you mouthing off to me?!”

            It had taken the expert—as in literally taught to him at a postgraduate level—conflict resolution skills of Uncle Franklin to get Rosie out of that jam. He had even extracted a promise from Francine to visit Franklin County again next year earlier in the fall. There was a poem by Dickinson that Mags cited to Rosie when she told her about this little altercation she had had.

If you were coming in the Fall

I'd brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn

As Housewives do, a Fly

❦ 

If I could see you in a year

I'd wind the months in balls

And put them each in separate Drawers

For fear the numbers fuse

❦ 

If only Centuries, delayed…

“How does the poem end?” Rosie asked Mags once she had trailed off at the beginning of the third stanza.

            “‘It goads me, like the goblin bee that will not state its sting,’ ‘It’ is time—not knowing when something dearly longed for and waited for is going to happen. If it is going to happen.”

            “I think that’s all of us, at some point or another in our lives,” Rosie said with a glance out the bedroom window at the road.

            “I think it is,” said Mags. “On the other hand, I completely understand that I doubt any of us are exactly longing for a repeat visit from Francine Kipperman or her ‘hubby.’”

            “All I can say is that I’m certainly not,” said Rosie with a theatrical little flip of her hair.

            “On another note,” said Mags, “do you have any Christmas Eve plans yet? You mentioned a while back you do tend to go to church on the big holidays. I’d be happy to go to Midnight Mass this year with you.”

            “I’m actually not feeling the Christmas spirit nearly as strongly in this year as in years past, but sure, Midnight Mass sounds good to me,” Rosie said. “What can you tell me about the Catholic parishes in Greenfield?”

            “There are two pretty standard Catholic parishes, like ones you could find anywhere, in Greenfield itself,” said Mags. “One is called Blessed Sacrament and the other one is called Holy Trinity. The main difference between them is that Blessed Sacrament has uglier architecture but prettier music. One town over in Turners Falls there are Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Peace, and the main difference between those is that Czestochowa is very conservative and Peace is very liberal. I’m happy with any of the four since I can go either way on architecture versus music and I’ve never really liked politics with my religion. Do you have any preference given those descriptions?” She cast a somewhat concerned, assessing eye on Rosie, for some reason. It was the kind of gaze that made Rosie feel more relevant to other people’s worlds than she would have liked to be.

            “Let’s go with Holy Trinity,” she saqid. “That’s the white-and-green Carpenter Gothic one across from the co-op on Main Street, right?” Mags nodded. “A pretty building without any political philosophy to speak of sounds good to me for Christmas,” Rosie said. “Maybe if it were the Assumption or something I’d feel otherwise.” She shrugged. “That work okay for you, Mags?” she asked to make sure.

            “Sounds great to me,” Mags said. “Let’s make a plan of it.”

            “Will your boyfriend be coming with us?”

            “Almost definitely not. Are you okay? You sound almost a little jealous.”

            “I wouldn’t say I’m jealous, no,” Rosie said. “I just don’t get it.”

            “To be honest, I’m not sure I do either some of the time with him,” said Mags.

            “Then why…? Never mind. I know there’s a childhood crush involved. That’s reason enough, and I’ll try to be respectful of it.”

            And that was how the conversation between the two of them ended. When Christmas Eve actually did roll around a few days later, however, Rosie went not to Midnight Mass with Mags but to a Protestant service in Amherst with Grandpa and Uncle Franklin. This was how that came to pass.

            Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret had a friend called Clara Warman who lived in Turners Falls. Clara was about seventy-five years old, so a year or a few older than Grandma and Grandpa, and went to the same church in Bernardston that Uncle Franklin usually did. Aunt Margaret, who was agnostic, heard from Clara that she lacked “wheels” with which to get to Bernardston on Christmas Eve. Aunt Margaret knew at this point that Grandpa had prevailed upon Uncle Franklin to accompany him to Amherst, and so she suggested to Clara that she carpool with the two of them. Why exactly Grandpa insisted on going to church in Amherst in the first place, which was to say half an hour away even with no holiday traffic, was a riddle for the ages as far as Aunt Margaret was concerned.

            Clara was happy to carpool to Amherst but was, she said, uncomfortable riding in a car alone with two men, even ones she knew and trusted like Uncle Franklin and Grandpa. So Aunt Margaret offered to go with them. This would have worked out well for all concerned, but mere hours after the decision to do it this way had been arrived at, Aunt Margaret got an unexpected call from her ex-husband, asking that she accompany him and their three teenaged children to the service at the Lutheran church near the Honda dealership. This would have been her first time spending Christmas with her children in about four years. There was of course no way she could say no to this, so she asked Grandma, Rosie, and Mags if any of them were willing to schlep down to Amherst in her stead. Rosie objected to the plan the least, and so off she went.

            The drive down to Amherst on Christmas Eve was in fact a delight. There was a light snow and the other cars on the interstate, and on Route 116 once they got off the interstate, seemed somehow to be in good spirits, as if Christmas brought inert metal to life and emotion just as (old tales said) it imbued nonhuman animals with intellect and will. Grandpa was driving and he had on an old CD of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby alternating holiday standards, with the Andrews Sisters on one track and (of all people) a young David Bowie on another. The car’s heating system was turned up high enough for the benefit of the oldsters to be a little uncomfortable for Rosie, but she barely minded when she kept in mind how cold it was outside. Grandpa and Clara sang along to many of the songs on the CD, and after a while Rosie felt comfortable joining in with them. The level of bonhomie was actually beginning to surprise her. There was something almost like a spiritual experience about it, unselfconscious and looking outwards.

            When they got to Amherst there was, miraculous to report, yet more confusion, this time about to which specific church among the several mainline Protestant churches in and near Amherst Center they would be going. The assumption had been that they would go to First Congregational but it seemed Clara had heard wonderful things about the music at Grace Episcopal and so wanted to go there instead and see how she liked it. They argued for about ten minutes before deciding to defer to the wishes of a sweet old guest and go to the eleven o’ clock service at Grace.

            Grace was a greystone Gothic Revival building overlooking the snowbound common in the middle of Amherst. It was just the kind of church to attract a large congregation for an old-fashioned Christmas Eve, even though, as Rosie was given to understand, most Episcopal parishes these days had a hard time retaining worshippers on ordinary Sundays. She thought that was a shame; it was a lovely building, and she hated to think of a denomination with buildings like this struggling.

            The music was as promised. Rosie had never heard some of the carols they sang that evening—“Good Christian friends rejoice,” a setting of “O little town of Bethlehem” that she did not recognize, a few others. “Silent night” and “Joy to the world” were familiar, of course, as was “In the bleak midwinter,” which appeared on a King’s College Choir CD that Madison sometimes liked to listen to at this time of year. (Rosie missed Madison; indeed, she was surprised to find that most days she missed the kid more than missed most of her friends from high school and from SUNY Binghamton.) She wasn’t sure how Grandpa and Uncle Franklin were feeling about this service; her impression was that the one at the Congregational church would have been much more sober and more stripped-down. Conversely, she wasn’t sure how that one would have made her feel if they had gone to it the way they had planned to at first. It was funny how preferences—needs, even—could be in conflict like that, even between loved ones, between relatives.

            They left the church at half past midnight and came out into the chilly night air. Clara huddled in an overcoat; Rosie zipped her jacket up to the top. In the sky, above the lights of Amherst Center, she could see a few bright stars. Grandpa and Uncle Franklin wished a merry Christmas to five or six different people, then ushered the four of them into the Subaru and headed on home.

            Mags had already long since gotten back from Holy Trinity, which would seem to have its major Christmas Eve Mass quite a bit earlier in the night. She was relaxing in her and Rosie’s room, listening, it would seem, to something acoustic and contemplative. It did not sound particularly seasonal. “Vashti Bunyan again?” Rosie asked, naming an artist of this sort whom she remembered Mags enjoyed, even though as far as she recalled Vashti Bunyan’s voice did not sound much like this woman’s at all.

            “Close,” said Mags in a manner of speaking that signaled to Rosie that she had not really been that close. “Jen Cloher.”

            “Hmm,” said Rosie. “Got sick of hymns?”

            “You could say that. Holy Trinity just does the old standbys for its Christmas hymns. It’s lovely and always lifts my spirits, but once you get out you sort of…how should I put this…?…You sort of realize that there’s been this blast of concentrated Christmasiness that you’ve been hit with hard for the past hour and a half, and, if you’re me, you start to want to listen to something else when you get home. Am I making any sense?”

            “You are,” said Rosie.

            “You’re happy to sit with me listening to this for a little while?”

            “I am,” said Rosie.

            “Good.” Mags—who had just made reference to sitting, to sitting with Rosie—instead flopped down on her bed in that customary girlish way of hers. Rosie sat on her own bed, letting herself relax after what had, after all, been a hectic evening. Something like Christmas joy came down and rested, gently, on the two of them.

Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part One)

Note: This is part of a thematic series called Compulsory Figures, and not the first part. I wrote it in the great and terrible year 2020. Compulsory Figures in its entirety—written on and off between 2017 and 2021—will see the light of day eventually.

1.

The Train

Rosie Newgarth graduated from college in 2011 and moved back home right away. Since the Great Recession had hit she had had no idea what “came next” for her, and she did not want to live with her friends. She had majored in economics and graduated on time with a good, not great, GPA; she was physically attractive and had done some sportswear modeling one summer, and between that and a series of merit scholarships she graduated with less debt than one might have expected. Home for Rosie was the 1950s pseudo-Cape where her parents Richard and Martha and her sixteen-year-old sister Madison lived on Long Island. Newgarth was an anglicization devised at Ellis Island ninety or a hundred years before, and the family still owned a velvet painting of Luciano Pavarotti that Rosie’s paternal grandmother had given her as a Christmas present when she was ten years old.

            “You really should visit my folks one of these days, Rosie,” Martha Newgarth said to her one day that summer as they sat in their backyard drinking sangria—Martha in a sundress with a warm-toned, youthful pattern, Rosie in her bikini top and a pair of palazzo pants.

            “In Massachusetts?” Rosie asked, and Martha nodded. “I dunno; maybe,” Rosie said. “I’d like to. But I’d also like to focus on finding a job before I go around visiting people.”

            “That’s actually part of why I’m bringing this up, Rosie,” said her mother. “That bed and breakfast your grandfather was trying to start up might finally work now and they want someone there managing the books. You’re smart, you’re good with figures and with money. You studied economics. I think you should consider it.”

            “Mom, I just got back from four years in the Southern Tier. Forgive me if I’m not plotzing at the idea of moving to Discount Stars Hollow to work at Grandpa’s bed and breakfast.”

            “Don’t call it ‘Discount Stars Hollow’; there’s nothing cheap about it,” said Martha. “Rosie, it’s just a suggestion. Think it over, okay? Please just see how you feel about it for my sake?”

            “I think I already know how I feel about it, but okay,” Rosie said.

            And she did think it over; for the next two or three weeks she spent about half an hour each day, on average, contemplating what it might be like to be on the outskirts of Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301, managing the books for Grandpa Baring’s passion project hotel. She called him once, and he was glad to heart from her.

            “Rosie! So good to hear from you! Your mother told me you might call,” he said in a canny tone of voice. “How are things? Got that fancy diploma yet hanging on your wall? How’s the boyfriend? Still together?” he asked without waiting for an answer to the question about the diploma.

            “No, not still together, sorry to say,” Rosie said. “He wanted to be in some living situation with some friends of ours that I didn’t want.” She did not wish to get into the details with her grandfather, who was closing in on three-quarters of a century and had married before 1960. “So we had a big fight right before graduation and now we don’t speak anymore.”

            “Relationships are difficult,” said her grandfather after, apparently, a moment’s contemplation. “A donnybrook or two now and then is one thing. Survivable, I’d say normal. But right before graduation seems like about the worst time for it possible. Do you feel okay about it? I’m happy to send your Uncle Franklin down in his truck if I need to.”

            “There’s no need to send anybody down in his or her truck, Grandpa. I feel…I feel as if it ought to hurt more than it does. I find myself wishing that a lot of things these days hurt me more than they do.”

            “Live to my age, life’ll get to you,” her grandfather said. ‘Some day soon you’ll stop wishing things hurt more.” There was a lull in their talk; then he asked “You give any thought to coming to work up here for a bit? I figured that could be what you were calling about.”

            “It is to an extent,” said Rosie. “Is what I’m calling about to an extent, I mean. I have been thinking about it; the issue is that I don’t know what I want adult life to look like for me quite yet.” She avoided the temptation to add out loud but I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to look like that. There was another lull in the conversation; from downstairs Rosie could hear Madison practicing on her spinet piano that they had inherited from Great-Aunt Jenny, and outside Rosie’s bedroom window the back yard sat green-brown and pluripotent.

            “Just be in touch more, okay, Rosie?” her grandfather asked. “It does me and your grandmother a world of good to hear from you, mentally speaking.” She nodded, and made a little sound in her throat to indicate to him that she was nodding. Then they hung up. She set her phone—a few years old; still not a smartphone—aside on her writing desk and flopped down on her bed. Vague yet not unpleasant memories of times when she had gone up to Greenfield to visit her Baring relatives there passed through her mind the way rosary beads had passed through her pious child fingers ten or fifteen years before. A house painted in the colors of a barn; a door being opened to let some kind of long-haired cat in; a car ride to a garden supply store with her Aunt Margaret and another young girl whose face Rosie remembered more faithfully than her name. There had been cool summers back then up that way, and she had once or twice gone for a fully clothed swim in some river or other, falsely thinking it would keep her warmer. She recalled food of some heavy, tragic ethnic origin, and a Christmas Eve service in one of those whitewashed churches with windows of mostly clear glass. She recalled raspberry ice cream and astonishingly bitter iced tea.

            Would life really be so much different if she did spend a while up there, she wondered? What was she doing here, in Nassau County, that was so worth her while that she could not stand but to stay? Each day she got up, texted, listened to music, listened to Madison practice piano (which practice, increasingly, could also be called music), ate and drank, sat with Mom or with Dad in the back yard, and so on, and so on. Some Sundays she went to St. Agnes for lack of anything else to do, and some Tuesdays she went to see a blockbuster at the Loew’s in the shopping center. In this manner three and a half months had already passed by, and passed her by, since she had graduated in Binghamton in May. It was a life of leisure, but leisure with little chance of gaining dimensions, of developing mystery or depth. She felt an attachment to it, but it worried her to think that this feeling might not correspond to anything in the real world. An observer who did not know her might very well conclude that what she was doing these days was little worth her while. She almost felt just such an observer, some unknown titan lurking deep in the early history of her brain, convicting her of a vague and mild but somehow undeniable guilt. It was not a feeling that she relished.

            After August passed Rosie made up her mind. She had still not found a job with enough hours or enough pay to seriously change her situation here, so she might as well take the Amtrak up to Greenfield to see what she could see there. It would be an open-ended visit, probably not a very long one, but she could not honestly say that for sure. She called her grandfather again and he told her that he was able and ready to host her for just as long as she wished. Now all that remained was to arrange the travel itself. Somehow the romance of doing it by rail was not a romance that Rosie was willing to give up.

            She secured her ticket. It was one-way even though she fully intended to return to New York, because she did not want to commit herself to returning at any particular time, and in particular not at any time that might fall after she got sick of her Baring relatives. She was still convinced that indeed she would get sick of them eventually; they were old, and had a dour and uncool flintiness to them, one and all. Rosie did not understand herself to be cool, but she certainly did not understand herself to be flinty or dour either. She was picturing an environment like in that book Cold Comfort Farm, tragicomic to a point that would be difficult to take seriously.

            Her last evening at home Madison put on a little concert for her. Madison’s voice was a beautiful contralto much richer than you would expect from a rising high school junior, better actually than her skills with the piano as an instrument; she plugged away at the chords of “St. James Infirmary” and “These Foolish Things” while her voice carried the melodies, and even when she got to one of Satie’s piano pieces she hummed, or keened, along with it. They had lox bagels for dinner; ten or twelve hours after the appointed time for such a meal, but an important and crowd-pleasing send-off considering that in much of small-town New England you couldn’t find a decent bagel sandwich for love or money. It was the middle of September and the wind had an aroma of fall or even of early winter when Rosie went outside to look down the evening street for the last time in weeks or months.

            The nearest train station to Greenfield was an unmanned little platform in Amherst, through which the Vermonter passed once a day in either direction. Amherst was known for Emily Dickinson, lefty politics, and at least two or three different colleges, including the one Madison’s friend Jessica wanted to go to in a few years. Rosie wasn’t sure what Greenfield was known for, other than her family; she had asked her grandfather this over the phone and he had observed that not everywhere had the luxury of being known for something; and besides, what was Rockville Center known for other than police unions and an obscure Catholic diocese? “There are quite a few Underground Railroad houses in this area though,” he conceded, “our own house not least of all. Or at least that’s the family lore that’s come down to us from your Baring great-great-grandmother. Remarkable character, my grandmother, she was. I feel somehow you’d have liked her if you’d have been alive back then.”

            “When did your grandmother die?” Rosie asked. “Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind the question. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother mentioning having known her.”

            “No, she never did,” Grandpa Baring said. “People had kids younger back then but they tended to die younger too. My grandmother passed in 1950, when I was eleven or twelve; I forget which side of my birthday it fell on. Not a good birthday for me either way.” He paused. “I apologize,” he said, “for sharing too much about it, if share too much about it I have.”

            “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I’m easygoing about oversharing.”

            “Oversharing,” said her grandfather, and she actually heard pen scrape against notepad. “I’d better remember that word, I feel. So thank you for it, Rosie. I’ll see you soon?”

            “Yes, Grandpa. I’ll see you very soon.” Rosie hung up. She sighed. At this time tomorrow evening she would be just settling in up in Greenfield, probably wanting to sleep after a long journey. It was odd to think of, and she felt that something about her life was changing more irrevocably than the fact that it was meant to be a temporary visit would suggest. A strange feeling, a feeling that left her with little in the way of sympathy for herself. She wondered if she would be able to explain it to her family when she got up there.

            She took the train into New York and got on the Vermonter at Penn Station. It had been her hope that she would embark at Grand Central, a much better-looking and better-feeling and thus more auspicious station from which to begin a long journey northward, but she was to have no such luck. So she let herself be content with Penn Station, and settled onto the train as best she could as it passed out of the city.

            Between the city and the Connecticut state line the train passed through an odd borderland of coastal wetlands, abandoned factories, suburban tracts, and sometimes a school running track or a dreary baseball diamond. The businesses whose signs she was able to see from the window of her compartment mostly had name like Moskowitz’s and Martinelli’s. As the train passed into Connecticut and turned north on its long line towards Canada, the Italian and Jewish names on the signs and billboards gradually gave way to—or, at least, were gradually supplemented with—Irish and Waspish ones: Shea’s, Clark’s, Murphy’s.

            The train came to Amherst. By that time Rosie had read about half of a Haruki Murakami novel, which she had disliked, and maybe a third of an old horror paperback, which she had loved. A taste for horridness in her literature had coexisted with normalcy in her dress and affect for about a year now; the former was something to which her now-ex-boyfriend had introduced her.

            The station in Amherst was, as she had been told, an unmanned landing with a little red brick building that looked like it was long-disused. Trees now showing the first blush of fall color shielded a busy-sounding road from view. A man with a short white beard and an expression that implied a tragic sense of life stood next to a Subaru Outback waiting for her. It was her grandfather. She waved, and he came over and hugged her tightly. The outer voyage was over and the inner voyage would soon begin. 

2.

The Dinner

The drive from Amherst to Greenfield was pleasant, if a bit chillier than Rosie would have expected. Her grandfather, for reasons best known to himself, evidently did not feel the need to discuss how her train ride had been or how she felt about being up here after having said before that she would rather not. Instead he would laconically, almost churlishly, point out the sights with a jab of his pink, hairy hand and a few words from his close-pursed lips. The way he spoke about the things they passed would seem to heighten a feeling of some kind of inevitable tragedy. “We’re passing the UMass campus,” he’d say, or “We’re passing the First Church of Sunderland,” or “That there’s the Yankee Candle headquarters; its says ‘Scenter of the Universe’ on it.” Rosie felt that he would likely take much the same attitude towards showing her the house when they got to it. “Your cousin Mags went to UMass,” he observed at one stage, and Rosie did not want to wonder out loud who her cousin Mags was and why she never heard her mother talk about her.

            They took a few back streets through Greenfield and ended up on a partially suburbanized road leading up away from the town. The house was just after a graveyard on this road, between and behind a patchy curtain of yellowing and browning trees. It had been repainted since Rosie was young and was now a mousy sage-green color that made it fade somewhat into its surroundings. It was in what she believed was called a Federal style, vernacular, wooden and shingle. Her grandfather turned the Subaru up a longish gravel driveway and waved hello to a young woman Rosie did not recognize who was watering a raised bed of what looked like some kind of fall root vegetable. She was a few inches taller than Rosie, looked about her age, and had a pale face with a pointed nose between curtains of auburn hair. She was dressed in a tan jacket and a long multicolored skirt and the watering can that she held was of battered and slightly corroded metal of some kind.

            “Mags, this is your cousin Rosary Newgarth,” said her grandfather as they got out of the car. “She goes by Rosie.”

            “I remember. It’s good to see you again after all these years, Rosie.” Mags shook her hand and pulled her into a loose half-hug. Rosie racked her brains and then finally saw it, something unchanged in the roiling hair or the big glaring grey eyes. Yes, this was that girl with whom she had gone to the garden store and swum in the river long ago. She tightened the hug a little, and it felt like a long-forgotten instinct.

            “You have a good trip up, Rosie?” someone asked as they entered into what Rosie believed was called the house’s mudroom. He was a thick-set man with very dark hair and dark blue eyes, standing next to a tall, thin woman who seemed to have been painted from the same palette. They looked to be between forty-five and fifty years old, about Rosie’s father’s age and a little older than her mother, and she recognized them as Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret, her grandparents’ two eldest children. Uncle Franklin was in a plaid shirt and black jeans, Aunt Margaret in a plaid shirt and bluish-grey jeans. She held in her hand a pitcher of what looked like the bitter iced tea that Rosie remembered from her girlhood. One or two lemons wedges, which had clearly been squeezed out as much as humanly possible, floated in it like tablets or oracles cast into the sea. Rosie nodded, and told Uncle Franklin that, yes, her trip had gone fine and she felt excited for the weeks to come. And after all, that was true now; something about actually getting up here had reminded Rosie of the fascination that this place had held for her back in her early days, and she looked forward now to rediscovering that if she could.

            It was a little before six o’ clock and dinner was at seven, so Aunt Margaret took it upon herself to give Rosie a tour of the house. It had a nineteenth-century skeleton on which an up-to-date kitchen and bathroom had at some recent point been grafted like old skin around new wine—or was it the other way around? There were five bedrooms, three upstairs and two downstairs; one was Grandpa and Grandma’s, one was Mags’s, and the other three—two up and one down; the three that were easiest to reach considering the house’s warrenlike floor plan—were in principle for guests. Rosie was what was in principle about it and Aunt Margaret told her that Uncle Franklin was living her for the time being after a collapse in his life, a collapse of some unspecified but dramatic-seeming kind. One of the two real guests room, then, was at the moment occupied by a family from Maine, who were out visiting with friends right now and would be taking off after breakfast tomorrow (Aunt Margaret would be leaving after dinner tonight to return to her divorcée’s apartment in downtown Greenfield). Rosie wanted to ask where, all this being the case, she was going to sleep, but it slipped her mind when Aunt Margaret started telling her something about the house’s radiators.

            Dinner was something called a New England boiled dinner; it was a plate of boiled potatoes with other vegetables and some sort of corned beef. Grandpa Baring informed Rosie that it had entered the region’s cookery via immigration from Ireland, and Rosie said, by way of a joke, that it tasted like seven hundred and fifty years of oppression and regret must have felt. To her relief, everybody laughed at this.

            “I know the family that’s staying in that upstairs room won’t be eating with us tonight in particular,” she said, “but in general, can we expect people staying here as guests to eat with us more dinnertimes than not? I just want to know what to expect in terms of, well, privacy in this house, frankly. It’s a question that I have to admit I’ve been apprehensive about.” Nobody answered immediately. “I’m sorry if there’s something obvious that I’m missing,” Rosie said. “I don’t know much about what it’s like to run and bed and breakfast; I’m a numbers girl, not a hospitality industry girl.”

            “I’m going to address you as ‘Numbers Girl’ from now on, Rosie,” Mags said. “It’s cute.”

            “Go right ahead,” Rosie said. “Can somebody please answer my question about who will be here at a typical dinnertime?”

            “Just those of us who live here,” said Rosie’s grandmother, who looked almost exactly like Aunt Margaret only with silver hair and a more advanced set of crows’-feet. “Guests are responsible for their own meals other than breakfast. We have a narrow view of what the mission of a bed and breakfast ought to be, in part because of our own much-depleted resources, a subject that I would have been wondering about for a while now if I were you.”

            “I had been, actually, now that you mention it,” said Rosie. “Is this paying for Grandma and Grandpa and Mags and Uncle Franklin’s keep?” Uncle Franklin shook his head. “Okay.”

            “We’ve got money in the blue chips,” Uncle Franklin explained. “Just not as much of it as we used to.”

            “What does the bed and breakfast business actually pay for, then?”

            “Itself, barely,” said Grandpa Baring. “It holds a fascination for me, hosting people for a living. Something to do in my golden years—in my retirement, that is.” Rosie realized that she actually had no idea what manner of a career it was that her grandfather was retired from.

            “I see,” said Rosie. “If all that’s needed is to keep the bed and breakfast itself in the black, then I think I can manage that reasonably.”

            “You’re staying?” asked Uncle Franklin.

            “I’ve been here two hours,” Rosie said. “Ask me that again when I’ve been here two weeks. That is how long my dad always told me I should stick with a task to see how it goes.”

            “Helluva name, Newgarth,” said Uncle Franklin. “Where’s it come from, if you know?”

            “Ellis Island anglicization,” said Rosie, “I think of an uncommon Italian name called Nogarotto or Nogaretti. People think it’s German or Dutch for some reason; I’ve never understood why.”

            “Helluva name, Nogarotto,” Uncle Franklin said with a little bit more of a twinkle in his eye than he had had at any point before this.

            “Or Nogaretti,” said Mags. “Rosie, I’m sorry we couldn’t welcome you with a more impressive dinner. There was this elaborate salad that I found a recipe for in an old book of Aunt Margaret’s, but I couldn’t find some of the ingredients when I went to Foster’s this morning so I went with the old standby instead. I know it’s not very impressive.”

            “Did you cook it?” Rosie asked. Rosie herself was an acceptable cook, and Madison was growing into a good, if unsystematic, one, so back home their parents need not cook nearly as often as their inability ever to agree on a takeout option would normally have implied. Rosie was cautious about how such things were handled in such a household as this one appeared to be.

            “I cook more nights than not,” Mags said. “Breakfast is Grandma and Uncle Franklin’s responsibility, though, and we’re each responsible for our own lunch. That’ll include you, of course, once you’ve been here for a while and have your own stuff in the pantry and the fridge and so forth.”

            “I had no doubt,” said Rosie. It came out a bit more aggressive than she had meant it or wanted it to. Aunt Margaret looked up from her corned beef and potatoes to give Rosie a somewhat sharp look, probably because of that accidental but unmistakable harshness.

            “So you have issues with preparing your own food, Rosie?” Aunt Margaret asked. It sounded like a sincere question, much more sincere than it probably would have been had Rosie asked it of somebody herself.

            “No,” Rosie said. “That system sounds all right to me. Sorry if I gave the wrong idea.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” said Aunt Margaret. Rosie was unsure what that meant here.

            “What do you like to eat, Rosie?” her grandfather asked her then. “Franklin usually does the shopping so if you’ll just put things up on the Big Board when you want ‘em or need ‘em then we ought to be able to get ‘em for you.” He jabbed a thumb at a whiteboard on one of the kitchen’s walls. Rosie would not have called it a particularly big board, but it did have the pride of place amidst the other items in the kitchen that a genuinely big board might well have had. Currently it had written on it peanut butter (chunky), hot sauce, rice cakes, bacon, black tea, Earl Grey tea, unsalted butter, and incense. Rosie asked what the incense was for.

            “Mags likes the stuff,” Grandma said. “Burns it all hours.”

            “Couldn’t tell you why,” said Grandpa. “Might could be a habit she picked up from her mom and dad.” This raised, more or less explicitly, the question of who exactly Mags’s mom and dad actually were. Rosie’s occasionally-seen Aunt Lizzie and her husband, maybe? Aunt Lizzie was the little sister of Mom, Aunt Margaret, and Uncle Franklin, and she had married someone almost-famous. It was not at all clear to Rosie why, if Mags was Aunt Lizzie’s child, she would be living here rather than somewhere “better.” Rosie looked at Mags. Her big grey eyes were turned down to her plate of vegetables, but not, apparently, with embarrassment or with desire not to be understood. Did Rosie want to be understood, she wondered? For a long time now it had haunted and bedeviled her, the prospect and possibility of knowing what she wanted and being known for who she was. It was one of the scariest things in the world to think of, and something about Mags, this putative cousin of hers whose face had always stuck with her, made her feel as if her fears might soon come true.

            “Some day I’m going to tell one of my online friends the awful truth about this family,” Mags said archly. Rosie wondered if she really meant this. Somehow or other, she hoped that she did not.

            “Eat your vegetables, Mags,” Aunt Margaret said to her offhandedly.

            “Rosie,” said Mags as she ate her vegetables as instructed, “what music do you listen to?”

            Rosie shrugged. “Lady Gaga, Adele, Arcade Fire, sometimes Taylor Swift or something off some opera CDs I got from my Newgarth grandmother. You know, white people music for the most part. You?”

            “Much the same,” said Mags, “as well as some stuff that’s a little more wooish and mystical like Loreena McKennitt and Heather Dale. Do you know either of them?”

            “I know of Loreena McKennitt,” said Rosie. “Oh—I forgot to mention traditional pop. Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and so on. Would you believe my sixteen-year-old sisters got into that stuff and then got me into it?”

            “I’d believe it,” said Grandma.

            Grandpa nodded. “Lotta younger people getting sick of the stuff on the radio and going back to the classics,” he said. “Not to make a moral thing of it of course like some of my old-man friends do, but it can do my heart good sometimes to be able to discuss this stuff with the young. You and I could have some good talks about it, Rosie. Helen O’Connell is a favorite of mine.”

            Rosie nodded. “Helen O’Connell is great,” she said, even though she had only heard a few of Helen O’Connell’s songs and was worried she might be getting her mixed up with Kitty Kallen. “I’d be glad to talk music with you or with Mags,” she said. “It’s a good thing Mags and I listen tot a lot of the same stuff since Aunt Margaret implied she and I will be in the same room for the first little while I’m here.”

            Mags looked at Aunt Margaret. “That’s the decision that’s been arrived at?” she asked.

            “Are you unhappy with it, Mags?” Aunt Margaret asked her. Mags shook her head. “You seem a little perturbed,” Aunt Margaret said.

            “I’m not unhappy with it, quite the contrary,” said Mags, whatever that meant, “but ‘perturbed’ is a good word for the fact that you didn’t ask me about this beforehand and I’m just hearing it from Rosie now at this dinner. That’s all,” she finished, with a bite of carrots.

            “Would you rather set things up otherwise?” asked Rosie. She was honestly hoping that Mags would say yes; having a roommate was not an aspect of college life that she missed now that it was over.

            “I would rather we see how it works out, to be honest with you,” said Mags. “We might as well. More room for guests.”

            “More room for guests,” conceded Rosie, and she felt uncomfortable about it till she saw how honest Mags’s smile was.

3.

The Conversation 

September passed into October and Rosie got to know the guests, the family, and how the house and the area worked. She reassured her grandparents early on that, although she was Catholic, they did not need to worry about getting her to Mass except on the major holidays. Mags was also Catholic, but otherwise the whole household was Yankee Congregationalist; indeed, Uncle Franklin had apparently been ordained as a Congregationalist minister at some church out in Chicago before coming back East after his crackup. Grandma and Grandpa went to a church in a nearby little town called Bernardston rain or shine each Sunday morning. Rosie took a ride up there with them once and was interested to see that the church had a rainbow flag out front of it and was just up the little town’s main drag from a pizza place.

            She and Mags managed to share a room more or less convivially. It was an odd room, with a boarded-up fireplace and a closet that stretched out strangely along one of the outer walls of the house; it had two twin beds in it. Rosie was unsure what exactly Mags did in terms of work, whether it be for the bed and breakfast or managing the blue chips or doing something else to earn her own keep. She spent many afternoons cooped up in their heavily shaded room, reading old pulp paperbacks in her one of the two small beds. Some evenings she would sit up late with a jeweler’s glass in one eye working on crafting projects of beadwork and wire. She kept the resulting pieces—decorations, jewelry, or wherever they may be—in the drawers of a work desk that took up one corner of the room; Rosie was loath to go over there and rifle through it, wanting to be polite despite the temptation.

            One day in early October, when the trees of Massachusetts were blazing, Rosie complained of a pain in her stomach.

            “What’s wrong?” Mags asked, casting a brief glance at Rosie before going back to one of her crafting projects.

            “Oh, it’s just my period,” Rosie said, feeling a little embarrassed. “Lately it’s been coming in weird fits and starts. It’s more painful than it used to be too.”

            “I know of numbers of herbal remedies you can take to regulate that,” Mags said casually. “Although I wouldn’t recommend most of them if you sleep with men and have strong feelings about abortion.”

            Rosie shook her head. “Haven’t slept with a guy in six months, don’t think much about abortion unless someone else brings it up,” she said. “Hit me.”

            Mags proceeded to rattle off the names of five or six different flowering plants Rosie had never heard of, plus something called cramp bark that she remembered from a joke in an old episode of Seinfeld. Mags—whose puffy white blouse and dark jeans were also reminding Rosie of Seinfeld—noted Rosie’s lack of recognition and wrote down the names of the herbs on a legal pad for her. “If you do start sleeping with men again then these might be best avoided,” she reiterated.

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Rosie. “It—do you mind if I ask if you’re one of those girls who have an interest in witchcraft, spells, what-have-you?”

            “Don’t call me a ‘girl’; I’m pretty sure I’m two years older than you,” said Mags. “And yes, sort of. I like herbs, I like flowers, I like cooking, and most of the prayers my mother and father taught me were to get boons from various saints. So I’m Catholic, but…” She shrugged. “Catholicism’s probably the most witchlike form of Christianity anyway,” she said, “although you didn’t hear that from me if someone chats with us after Midnight Mass in a couple months or whatever.”

            “Who exactly are your mother and father?” asked Rosie. “Your last name is McNulty, right?”

            Mags nodded. “My name is Margaret Evangeline McNulty, yes.”

            “I’d been assuming you were Aunt Lizzie’s daughter, but if I remember right, Aunt Lizzie’s husband’s last name is Scott or Skerritt or something like that.”

            “Scott, yes. Chuck Scott, the Food Network guy. No, I’m not Aunt Lizzie’s daughter; she was only sixteen when I was born, and she got married young but not that young. My parents were Charles and Sherrill McNulty; the McNultys and the Barings always had close ties in these parts, and your grandfather’s family took my father in when his father turned to drink and started beating on him. This was in the early sixties, when Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin were babies and just before your mother was born.”

            Rosie paused to give this some thought. There was much that this still did not explain—Mags and her father going completely without mention in twenty-two years of Mom’s stories about the family, the fact that Mags called the same people “aunt” and “uncle” that Rosie did but referred to Grandpa Baring as “your grandfather,” the fact that Mags had affirmatively called herself Rosie’s cousin for weeks now rather than qualifying it in any way. Rosie guessed that some of this would probably make sense if she put two and two together, but she did not have the energy to do that just this minute; she was still having a bad period, and she had slept badly the night before.

            “What’s that you’re working on?” she asked Mags. “With the beads and the wires.”

            “This is what I do to earn my living,” Mags said. “I make jewelry inspired by classic sci-fi and fantasy novels and sell them through an online store. I started doing it for friends in the UMass sci-fi club when I was a student there four or five years ago, but it surprised me how many people were willing to pay good money for the things. It takes up a lot of my time, but I enjoy it and I’m good at it and some of the money I make from it does go to help the rest of this family stay afloat.” She got up from where she was sitting, handed a bracelet of some sort to Rosie where Rosie sat in her own bed, and went back to where she had been sitting. “That one is for A Case of Conscience by James Blish. The ones I’m working on now are for The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.”

            Rosie looked at the bracelet that Mags had handed her. It was made of a tight spiral of thin strong wire and on it were green and silver beads and charms depicting a crucifix, a lizard, a television set, and several other things for which she lacked context. “Have you read it?” Mags was asking her.

            She shook her head. “I haven’t even heard of it. I’ve heard of the other two, though.”

            “Not many people have heard of Blish these days except as an author of Star Trek novelizations, but in his own day he was, as our esteemed Vice President would say, a big fucking deal,” Mags said. “I’d recommend A Case of Conscience if I’ve read your tastes right over the past few weeks. If you take that recommendation, I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it?”

            “Of course I will,” said Rosie.

            “So what about you?” asked Mags, with her legs crossed and her arms crossed and her head held high and arch over her body. “What’s your story, Rosie? I’ve gleaned bits and pieces of it over the past few weeks, and of course I remember you from back when we were girls, but I don’t think I’ve ever been privy to the full Rosie Newgarth experience, so to speak. You went to a state university in New York, didn’t you?”

            Rosie nodded. “SUNY Binghamton,” she said. “Generally considered the best SUNY campus, although believe it or not that wasn’t why I applied; I just didn’t want to be too near home.” Mags nodded sympathetically, but probably not empathetically given that if she had been to UMass Amherst herself it had clearly not been that much of a consideration for her. “Binghamton is an interesting place. It’s one of those old industrial cities out near the Pennsylvania line. Lots of poor black people and what I guess used to be called ‘white ethnics’ whereas the campus was mostly middle-class kids, mostly white, lots Jewish. So you can imagine that town-gown relations were a bit touch-and-go. But that itself is something I learned a lot from, especially considering that I’d spent my whole life until then in Nassau County, on Long Island, with its police unions and so forth.”

            “Aren’t Jewish people themselves considered ‘white ethnic’ among people who use such terms?” asked Mags. “Never mind; I know that’s not the point. I understand what you’re saying.”

            “Thank you.”
            “You majored in economics, right?”

            Rosie nodded. “So did both my parents. Actually when they met my mom was doing her BA in resource economics and my dad was in the MBA program at the same university. They graduated in the same year and got married right after. I don’t think they were ever in a situation where he was helping teach a class she was in; they’re both too ethical for that, I think. They were always very concerned that Madison and I not feel like we were owed a living or like the rules didn’t apply to us. That’s probably part of why rather than coming right up here when it was suggested I fired off a few last salvos of job applications first. I don’t like nepotism, or whatever you’d call it instead of nepotism in a granddaughter’s case.”

            “Hmm,” said Mags with what sounded an awful lot like mild disapproval. “But that isn’t your real number one reason for not having wanted to come back up here, is it, Rosie? I don’t doubt that it played a role, but when you did come here, as a little girl, I remember that you were always so concerned to go home and get back into things with your parents and sister. Do you remember the Heath Fair? It’s that little agricultural fair we went to together in I think the year 2000, when you were eleven and I was thirteen.”

            Rosie thought back on it and came up with vague, pleasing memories of deep and unapologetic rurality. Petting zoos; competitions in various things that could be grown or jarred or bottled; a string band; some sort of contest in feats of strength between a series of tractors. It had been in late summer, probably, a series of warm evenings with a breeze with fall’s first bite in it. She remembered that it had been a long drive up to the fairgrounds, even from Greenfield; it must have been very deeply and very specially local, and thus, since she was a visitor, very carefully and very magnanimously shared with her. She nodded. She did remember it, whether or not she remembered it in the way that Mags apparently wanted her to, whether or not she remembered about it the things that Mags apparently wished to evoke.

            “I think you were apprehensive about being among people you knew less well in a situation where everybody would have to constantly evoke blood family ties rather than actual familiarity to justify spending all our time together,” Mags said. “Of course, you and I can’t evoke even that and have to rely on a network of relationships that existed twenty or thirty years before either of us were born. But now you’re here; you volunteered yourself for that ordeal. And it is something of an ordeal; I don’t say that sarcastically at all.”

            “Are you going to let me speak for myself, Mags, or are you just going to analyze me all afternoon?” Rosie asked.

            “I’m sorry,” said Mags, and she genuinely did seem to be sorry. “Please, go ahead with what you were saying about your parents.”

            “Oh, just that they’re very well-matched and it’s in fact a little strange to think of Mom as having originally come from another family—from this family—given that it’s always been Dad and Dad’s family who I’ve…known along with her,” said Rosie, trailing off as she realized that known along with her was a belabored phrase of a kind that deflated what she was getting at.

            “I wish I could say the same about my parents,” said Mags. “Things weren’t easy when I was a kid.” She shrugged. “Probably I shouldn’t make this about me, though,” she said. “Aunt Margaret’s always telling me I’m a little too focused on myself and my own needs. You seem not to have that problem, at least not as much.”

            “I wish I had that problem,” said Rosie. “I have the ‘productivity’ problem; the Recession’s not letting me ‘contribute’ the way I think I’m supposed to, and being an econ major makes me feel better about that rather than worse. I thought I’d be working at some regional business or the branch headquarters of some big white-collar firm right around now. Not glamorous, maybe not even that socially useful, but, well, something I wouldn’t feel embarrassed telling others. When I was at that coffeeshop downtown the other day I ran into this other girl who was new in town and she asked me what I was doing up here. I told her I’d taken a job in hospitality management.”

            “But you have taken a job in hospitality management,” said Mags. “You helping Aunt Margaret talk down our electric bill the other day is going to save us at least fifteen hundred dollars a year without us having to raise prices for the guests.”

            “It feels weird when it’s for your family,” said Rosie. As she was saying it she realized that there was a slight ambiguity here, around the idea of family. Mags had put her finger on this when she pointed out that it was just family that Rosie had here, not people with whom she was familiar. Yet the two words, family and familiar, were similar enough that Rosie had a difficult time making the distinction, especially since they had the same etymology; therefore she felt guilty, as if to complain about her family was to complain about being among people who loved her, rather than about being among people whom she did not let know well. Mags seemed to understand at least well enough to nod.

            “I doubt it would feel less weird if we weren’t your family,” Mags said. “New subject, but do you have any pets at home you’re missing? I’m thinking of getting a cat—not a black one, if you can believe it; I’ve always liked tabbies and calicos.”

            The change of subject was abrupt, but Rosie experienced it as a lifeline; probably Mags had meant it as one. As it happened, she had a late, lamented, beloved dog whose history she could relate to her cousin. Mags was happy to hear that history, and so they passed the time companionably as that afternoon winged into a chilly autumn evening.

Short Story: “The Necromancer’s Sabbath”

It had been hard, almost impossible, for a long time now, for her to care overmuch about how she made her living. She did the best she could; the things she did, though furtive and usually against the Law, were to help people cope with the evils of the world, if they could. She furnished dubious potions to jilted women and talismans of protection and imprecation to farmers whose cows were being rustled; once in a great while for the bereaved or the desperate she would call up the spirits of the dead. By the dead she suspect herself unloved; they were content, usually, it seemed, to be undisturbed in that state. She was relieved when things went otherwise, when it felt as if someone was thanking her for giving a last look backward at the land of the living, under the streaming sky. Cold lips had kissed hers, once, after her husband had died; that woman’s shade had felt sorry for her, she thought. It was pretty to think so, of course; it flattered her and made her feel a sneaking kindness towards herself for reasons of which she was not fully sure. “Have some fish,” she would always say to people; “you look tired; you must be hungry; have you come a long way?” Seldom to herself. That was something easy to notice, that ungenerousness with herself, and she thought it was common enough among decent people, everyday people, unimpressive people. It seemed so nice, too nice, to think that that shade might have wanted to recompense that a little, but it was hard not to suspect so, and to hope.

            In any case, she would say to people, “I’m doing it as toil, I’m doing it because life is very hard, I’m doing it because if I do then you don’t have to.” It was true, or at any rate true that she thought so, and she was glad to think so. Others who did these things for people could seem so slimy and acquisitive and inane. They thought nothing serious, real, or kind for the jilted women, the cow-proud men, the grieving friends and kinsfolk of the defunct—and sometimes, she worried, she felt nothing for them at all. That might, though, have been a courtesy in its way, for at times when she thought and knew more about them it would have been easier for her to tell on them to the judge and to his protégé the king.

            She liked the king, and she saw the country as a place for higher hopes under him. “The times are good, maybe,” people would say to her, “but they are too good for you. He’ll put the likes of you in chains, you know, or to the sword. He’s been commanded to, you now; he knows the Law and so do we and so do you.”

            “I know full well and I don’t think my work is so good he mustn’t touch it,” she said to her friend Dinah the weaver-woman once when Dinah had just made this kind of point to her. “I work with hard people and people hard done by. None of us should want that there should be many such people, if we’re at peace…” She shook her head and chuckled at herself for talking such a way, like a public person. Then she asked Dinah if she might like help with her weaving, though she knew full well, also, that Dinah was to be a woman alone at her loom. And Dinah laughed and said no thank you and asked her after her storm-tossed children.

            Her children were prisoners, or slaves, or had been; some now were once again happy and free, she had heard. “You should always hope they’ll be home on a day, Tamar,” Dinah would tell her, and she did so hope. Their prayers together, for that, had gone into every thread of a covering that Dinah had woven for her doorway; Tamar, house-proud of her hovel, had saved up special for that. To comfortably afford that had taken her fees for two callings of the shades that she would not have taken on otherwise. It was always something like that coming up, and her expectation of going honest declined bit by bit to intention, and then to hope, and then to wish.

            “You could sell the door hanging,” the living and the dead would always say to her, and eventually Dinah got around to saying it to her as well. “Sell it back to me, even,” Dinah said, “and I’ll pay you back more for it than what you first paid me, and make a new one for you also, only simpler and without a pattern that uses any murex.”

            “But I simply do not want to sell you back the door hanging, Dinah,” Tamar said to her dearest friend, “even for more murex than I could shake a stick at in seventy lifetimes.”

            “I didn’t say that you wanted to, or even that I think you ought to want to. I said that you could and that if you did it would solve one of your problems. I’ll allow that it could make news problems for you instead, of course; I’d never tell you otherwise.”

            “What are these new problems, do you think?” Tamar asked then, and it was a question that she asked in full knowledge that she would not have wanted an answer had one been possible. “I don’t think anything bad would happen; it would upset me, that’s all, as so much upsets me…all the people I see are just so sad, don’t you know? Almost all of the time, especially me, and even you, Dinah, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”

            “No need to pardon the truth,” Dinah said, though Tamar felt that maybe if she was going to say something like that then she should have said it in a rather grimmer tone of voice. “Life can be hard to face, just as death can—can’t it? We are born to trouble like sparks are born to fly upward. I might know about that but you would know better, begging your pardon.”

            “No need to pardon the truth,” Tamar said. “It is not even what feels worst, you know—hosting the shadows like that. This life and this death can get so much the crueler.” She shook her head. “But no need to get into it. All we ever really have is being here, I guess.”

            “Being here, being there.”

            “Yes; being here, being there.”

            Tamar after visiting with Dinah went in the cool of the day to the wells, then home under house-shadow and door-hanging shadow, in the cooling evening and night. She slept along with thought and memory and rumor, or maybe that way of putting things was over-wise, as thought and memory and rumor themselves could be over-wise. The mind picked up; if often did at night in this hilly home of hers. A cat came in with a tail depending from betwixt its teeth, and Tamar scratched the soft twin bumps of the crown of his little head. She called the cat Miu, when she called him anything at all.

 ❦

That night she got the worst sleep she had had in many years. Shades, unhateful but unbidden and unwanted, came to her all hours. They stood and brooded, mostly, but one or two tried to talk to her. Yes, two—one looked like a mask to her, the other, a glimmer such as one saw deep in a well, or a heat-haze, maybe. They tried to question her, as she was wont to question the likes of them, and she did not fear them; she felt something else, So was spent half the night, at least. What they seemed to be asking was, “Do you miss them?”—and she hadn’t a good answer for that. The next day was the eve of the Sabbath.

 ❦

The spirit of God had been poured out upon the king and he promised glory for the people and redemption for their captives from alien hands. She believed this promise and had confidence that her children would be free and whole and with her once more in this little town of theirs so high up here in these sun-baked and wind-withered hills. She wondered in her more self-unkind moments if they would have wanted, really, to be back in such a place with their tired old mother, but it wasn’t as if they had really many, or any, other good options. She who had reared them and had been their hearts’ haven rom their earliest and most inarticulate infancies became for them now, in her own fears and imaginings, a last resort. They had not said this, of course; how could they ever have done? She did not expect them ever to say it; how could they do that either? Yet she could ever say it to herself. It did prey on her, this idea and worry and knowledge that children might forget their parents even if parents did not forget their children.

            If her children came home and did not want to be there and with no regard for her blithely went off again, it would have been consolation enough for her that they were safe and that they had been here. Love could thus bloom in uselessness, as it could in usefulness to others at the expense of one’s own heart, she thought. It was good for her to know at least a little of the feeling of both.

            She listened to hoopoes and to warblers; she ate dates and honey and figs and barley and pomegranates and grapes and olives, in their seasons and praying always and to all powers for those seasons’ rightful weather. The hoopoe, the warbler, the nightjar, the owl, the rock dove, the turtledove, the gull. It was a lonesome life but sometimes letting her be free. Those ever were her watchwords, that kind of coming and going, taking water and light and storm-clouds in their hours. She took good or took death; she took wickedness or took life. She mourned and she hoped. When the king made clear as water that he would put all mediums out of the land she accepted it and made it her business and suffered for it. The dead had passed into her hands, or through her hands, and now they passed out of her hands, and she meant it more than she thought she had meant it in the times that were now past and away, when she had merely wished it. She ate from the fruit of the other difficult things with which she gave people her aid. It was scarcely better, and it was truly less easy. So it had to be.

            So she passed all that by, and did no more witch-work till the king himself so commanded her.

Short Story: “The Maniac’s Warning”

Even with the bonfire roaring the light does not penetrate more than one or two of the curtain-layers of trees. Graduation, seven girls celebrating, no boys. Someone’s old Outback wagon, someone else’s older sibling’s F150, domestic beer, bro country blasting, whooping laughter, skinny dipping, water and trees and fire and piney sand. Near the fire, Jane and Allison; further away, Bryhanna and Astrid; in the water, Nella and Nevaeh. Libby. She is neither particularly close nor particularly far. She has in her left hand a can of Budweiser and, in her right, her dead phone on which tonight’s pictures have been by and large vouchsafed. Libby is lank-haired and leggy and lugubrious and she looks up at the sky in which some nightbird flies ambivalently through the points of the pointed firs. She has been dared to kiss Astrid, and to swim with Nella and Nevaeh, and to scream at the firs and pines and thin New England soil (such as it is) until her throat physically can no longer. All of these dares she has turned down for that Libby refuses to exist in order that others might find her interesting. It has been months since any other of these seven girls has trusted Libby with the aux, although they do trust her to watch drinks and intimidate scumbags and parentals. Libby almost took one of the dares, that was, to swim in the cold water of the strange-smelling woodland river. Yet when she waded in, above her knees but below the hem of the shorts that she had not yet conceded to shucking off, it was cold indeed, so cold for this late in the spring, even for this part of the country, that it was hard for her to understand how Nella and Nevaeh could bear it. So she got out and tried to think no more of it, particularly since the goosebumps that rose on her arms and legs could just as well be blamed or credited to the odd yelping sounds that came from that thing flying to and fro in the treetops. The Skohaquontic flowed home to the sea, but it was not Libby’s lot, she thought, to flow there with it. And in that clearing and around that fire and from a boombox dug up from a parent’s garage and perched on the hood of the old station wagon flowed that rough music. Dirt road, small town, lite beer, as here. A flattening of the world maybe, but one too obvious to get upset about even if any of them, even Libby herself really, had been paying the song anywhere near enough attention to notice. “Live a little, Elizabeth!”—and it was not one, not any, of her friends who was the one who was saying this to her. They never called her by her full first name. Libby resented as always the implication that what she was living through, in a Courtney Love sort of way, somehow was not life. First of all her caution and discretion was what allowed her friends to be brazen and daring and outrageous, and they never seemed to be particularly grateful to her for that. Secondly she did not fear or think she was above skinny dipping or drinking or testing the borders of the fire or the woods or any of the other things that her friends like to dare her to do. She just was not that interested. Most of it did not seem fun to her. Some did, which was why she had considered the skinny-dipping, but only in the same way that it was fun to listen and to watch for that clamoring bird up there, the bird that she could swear she had heard in unsettled dreams now and then in recent years. She felt a strong desire, which she succumbed to after a few more moments in the diffident midmost of the party, to ask “Who are you?” If the bird was some kind of owl then it might think that she was an owl too, to word it like that, and thus might answer her. So at least was her magical hope that she thought in the same way that she thought the church her aunt and uncle sometimes made her go to might be right. And yet it did answer, or at least it cooed or jabbered at her again, not quite hooting, not really. She asked “Who are you?” again. When she did someone stepped out of the nearmost curtain of trees. It or they or she looked like a middle-aged woman, but it was hard to make out the details of her features in this light, or at least Libby thought it was because of the light. Some feeling that was enormous, but difficult to explain or to identify, smote Libby’s heart as she looked for the first time at so ambiguously shadowed a face, neither beautiful nor unbeautiful, female but not feminine or maybe the other way around, with long dark hair that might have been treeshadow and a high noble nose that might have been a beak. The body too below the face and head looked partly human and partly natural, which was to say not that humans were unnatural, were un-creatures, but that that part of this woman’s particular body contrived to be one but not the other. Libby did not think that it was attraction or allure, exactly, that she was feeling. It hit her more deeply than that, and had, more than, to her, attraction did, an irreducible element of very deep fear. This nightbird or nightwoman approached her as a herald and harbinger of danger, and, worse, of a danger that promised something to her, along the lines of what her friends seemed to mean when they ran their mouths about living. It was a kind of delectable fear that made her want to move closer and to learn more, like the time she and her cousins, much younger and callow then, had tried to make napalm with a grab-bag of agricultural chemicals in her aunt and uncle’s garden shed. They had not come up with napalm but they had come up with something noxious, all right, which fact had to Libby been interesting itself. So too, maybe, with her, the she that was in front of Libby now. Not attractive, and not a dare, and yet something “else.” She wished she could, without doing too much violence to herself, step forward and ask to know what that was, that feeling of some thrilling peril that was wafting towards off of this being-from-the-trees. She abhorred herself for being in place as she was, stock-still but feeling somehow that she was unlikely to endure for very much longer. It did not quite make her want to die per se, but it came close. She shuddered. The person or being before her seemed to notice her shudder, and, perversely, to enjoy it, or maybe that was Libby being preyed on again, played tricks on again, by her own mind’s eye. The person raised a hand and pointed at something, at it was almost as if she was pointing with something, like a cigarette or a teacher’s pointing stick, even though her hand was empty. Libby realized fully that what she was feeling was entirely and simply and plainly fear, but of an odd kind with a curious frailty to it—and in realizing this she could neither move nor do anything about it any more than could a fawn. She thought that she was being adjured about something best avoided, and so she

Short Story: “Crave Nothing Save the Song”

His Eminence had no particular reason to want or to have a sexbot; rather his friends and allies had wanted to test how far extended his willingness to accept exotic gifts. He had put her in the spare room upstairs in his English-style official residence, where he kept paintings by artists he disliked and audio equipment that was too of-this-age for him. She looked a little bit like Gérard’s Teresa. He did like Gérard, though no churchman of these times could or had real reason to collect him any longer. He thought of her as a Teri or maybe in morbid moments a Rosamund, up there with the canvasses and the frames and the refraction-sounding crystals.

            One fine morning early in the year when a cooler wind than usual was blowing down easy off the mountains to the north, His Eminence the Latin Cardinal Archbishop of Mosul Zayn Anbari decided that he was bored enough to go up and look at the things that he had stored up there. He went upstairs and saw Teri or Rosamund right away, propped up against a credenza. He had never turned her on and, inert, her figure looked so sexless that it surprised him to recall that the point supposedly was to have sex with her. The chaster and chaster Zayn, whose loins had in any case only really ever stirred for other men, looked at her the way he might have looked at a teenaged niece who had on a dress for which she was too young. He avuncularly patted her on the shoulder and repositioned her so that she was leaning against the credenza with a bit more sprezzatura. Then he said Terce and its associated praises, according to the offices of his Franciscan tradition. “Be gracious to me, O God, for people trample on me; all day long foes oppress me; my enemies trample on me all day long, for many fight against me. All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me…”—and was this, in fact, true of him? Not really, though it obviously would have been long ago.

            He finished the prayers of the hour and looked at Teri again, her pursed expectant lips, her long hair the color of midnight, the cream-colored outfit that she had on with the blood-red shoes on her feet. He sighed. He went downstairs and commenced to write an answer to a letter from Donald Okada, a bishop in the Philippines who had purported to write to Zayn on behalf of the Democratic Alliance Coordinated Command on Titan. It was something to do with first contact with the Orac and with the near-certainty that the Orac were far better-acquainted with human beings than human beings were with them. It was disquieting even though no real harm had come to anyone on account of it so far, and precisely for that reason, for that it so troubled and dismayed him to think about, Zayn wanted not to deal with it if it was not actually his job to deal with it as a shepherd or a prince. And he did not think that it was. Bishop Okada knew more about the situation than Zayn did at any rate. He was a great-nephew or something like that of the celebrated Monsignor Esteban Okada, now dead and gone, who had been a chaplain on the Kurtoglu Expedition. He knew from first contact with the Orac. Zayn wrote a letter to him in which he told him so. Then he sat on the veranda, whose spaces bedecked in lab rattan were a rare concession to his residence’s hot climes, and felt the wind and listened to a passing shower. Then he said Sext. “With my voice I cry to the Lord; with my voice I make supplication to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before Him; I tell my trouble before Him. When my spirit is faint, You know my way…”

❦

The Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Mosul had a strangely attenuated set of actual liturgical obligations for reasons that Zayn himself had a hard time understanding. Most of it was handled by his auxiliary-coadjutor, Manny Aguerra, another one of those Filipinos who had known Esteban Okada. Yet it was not only because of Bishop Aguerra’s illustrious personal background and personal associations that he took on his role and these tasks. It was for some reason traditional for someone who held either auxiliary or coadjutor faculties, a fortiori both at once, in the Mosul archdiocese.  An auxiliary assisted an archbishop or a bishop; so too did a coadjutor, usually with, additionally, the right automatically to succeed the person once he retired or died. The way it worked in Mosul reminded Zayn of the old practice of cloistered emperors wielding power in Japan, but in reverse.

            Before Mosul Zayn, who was from Palestine even though he had an Iraqi last name, had been the Bishop of Miranda, the noted moon of Uranus. Before that he had been a parish priest in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv one had to deal with Israelis, a people who for all their virtues still had an evil reputation in surrounding countries among many of the types of folks around whom Zayn had grown up. He had become more tolerant of, even more generous towards, people and things Israeli with time, which had latterly served him well on Miranda. In wild space, he had found, there was much to tolerate. That calling to that bishopric was still the only time Zayn Anbari had let slip the surly bonds of Earth for more than a few days at a time. He had been there for seven years before his elevation, at sixty, to the Mosul pallium. He was seventy-one now. For Zayn, as for the guy from that film The Red Shoes that he had seen many years ago in a university class about the Early Modern Age in Music and Dance, all that mattered in life was a certain art and a certain attitude kept in mind towards the practice or performance of that art; only for Zayn that art was also a work, that was to say, an eminently practical craft, the Work of the People, liturgy. And yet his responsibilities to that work as an individual man had been simmering at a low level for over a decade now, because of Manny Aguerra and, before Manny Aguerra, Jubal Landau Traynor. The practice that was getting to be popular of moving bishops all over the Solar System the way the Middle Ages had seen, for instance, Italians appointed to archdioceses in England, had put Landau Traynor the New Jerseyite and Aguerra who hailed from the island of Mindanao here in Iraq with the Palestinian Zayn, to pasture a flock of a million and a half descendants of the migrant waves of the late twenty-first century with about three hundred thousand so-called Heritage Arabs thrown in for spice. Zayn had hated Landau Traynor, and he liked Aguerra, but there was a similarity to the kinds of relationship there that would seem to both precede and supersede the particulars of Zayn’s merely-human feelings about the other two men. He had thought of his relationships with brothers in holy orders that way since seminary, as indeed he had to. Jubal and Manny presented him with no unique or particular or especial trouble, saints be praised. Manny was the sort of guy who might, if told this and if told its implications, find it to be an insult to him—which charmed Zayn.

            “Your last name is Anbari but you were born in Palestine and never even lived in Iraq until six months before you became Archbishop?” Manny had asked him once, sounding baffled and intrigued and delighted. It was a reasonable thing to point out. An Anbari was a person who hailed from Anbar Province, in western Iraq, where in the mists and blood-hazes of an earlier age the forces of the America of George W. Bush and a flummoxing variety of mostly-Sunni warlords and militias had done battle. Zayn’s great-grandfather had come from Anbar Province. He had been working on seabed reclamation—littoral engineering. He had stayed in Palestine once that work had been completed due to the open-up of Mars as market for seawater-sequestering A.I.s. Zayn al-Maliki had been a very different man from his great-grandson Zayn Anbari, which was a platitude, of course. Zayn Anbari had told Manny Aguerra the whole story.

❦

At about one o’ clock in the afternoon, after saying an almost Irishly speedy Mass for some pilgrims who had come from somewhere outside the D.A., Zayn went back upstairs. He looked at Teri again. She had not moved, but there was something in his looking-at-her-now that made him wonder why she had not. It seemed a shame, even though there was almost no chance he would be able to explain to anyone he had ever met why it was that he thought so. Her grey eyes were cool and unjudging.

            “Hello,” he said fatuously; she was not really a person as such, certainly not one whom he wished to use for her intended purposes, and even if she had been, he did not even have her turned on. “My name is Zayn Anbari. I am a cardinal archbishop, which is a kind of priest.” The grey eyes kept looking at him as neutrally as the eyes of a bear or a songbird. He realized that her skirt was a little bit longer than he would have expected, though he still declined to look at, or for, the moulding of a vulva and the appurtenances thereunto pertaining that she presumably had underneath it. The whole effect of her dress would have been considered wildly inappropriate for almost anybody till, if he remembered his history rightly, some time between 1950 and 1975, that (to him) confusing and disorienting third quarter of the twentieth century—but it was not by sheer dint of “showing too much” that it would have been considered inappropriate, not exactly. The cream-colored dress taken as a whole and in separation or maybe even contradistinction from the robot wearing it made him think of a fractal or a Portuguese man-of-war—the type of jellyfish, not the type of historical figure.

            A cloud passed outside. Somewhere he could hear what he was pretty sure was a hoopoe. The cloud and the bird’s call gave Teri a less serene and more forlorn countenance, but, since the forlornness was an emotion or something that looked a little bit like an emotion, it admitted, in a way that the serenity had not, of the possibility that Teri might be become optimistic, might, if she were a person, be one who expected or hoped for or prayed for the best.

            He reached out and, more for lack of anyone else to talk to at the moment than for any other reason, flicked the supposedly-discreet switch under Teri’s hairline that turned her on. Her eyes flashed in sudden nonneutrality as she booted up. Then she said “Hey big boy. How’s it hanging?” in English.

            Zayn, who had a penis of almost exactly average size and who had not regularly spoken the language of Shakespeare since his days as bishop of one of the moons of an Outer Solar System planet, yelped with a kind of beneficient prudery that he immediately noticed and felt vaguely embarrassed about, the way one might feel embarrassed about a considerable investment portfolio for which one’s parents had worked, or a well-trained dog whom one had not trained oneself. He grabbed a remote control from a stack of antique editions of Naguib Mahfouz and flipped through options until he found a way to change Teri from “Default Bunny” to “Sophisticated Courtesan” (which really were the names of the two out of over a dozen aesthetic templates, as if these robots had been coded not by the kinds of people who usually coded robots nowadays but by the kinds of people who had usually coded robots two hundred years ago). She shuddered, adjusted her phantasmagoria of ogre-layered minidress slightly, and said, “Okay. That’s better. What’ll be your pleasure tonight, sir?”

            She was easier to talk to, and in Arabic too (why had English been the tongue of a “Default Bunny?” Zayn wondered), but he still found the question he was being asked off-putting. “It’s still early in the afternoon, not nighttime, you know,” he said to her. “Do you think it’s nighttime? Do you know what nighttime is?” She said nothing; evidently whatever sick and depraved programming she based her responses on had never contemplated anything like these kinds of clarifying questions. Presumably the expectation, as a matter of course, by default, was that by this time Zayn was to have had his penis inside of her. This expectation must also have, then, been just plain self-confident enough that there was nothing now that one like Zayn could say or do to refute it. This was Teri’s programmers’ immovable viewpoint on the human animal, or on the male of the species, anyway: Man was that which put his penis into a sexbot without further ado as soon as she said something along the lines of “Hey big boy. How’s it hanging?” or “What’ll be your pleasure tonight, sir?” The Zayn Anbari who was so little interested in that was, then, as they said, a worm and no man, and lucky indeed he was to be thus, if this was his only alternative.

            “It is a little bit before two o’ clock in the afternoon in what we call the month of May,” he said to her. “For Muslims it is Dhu al-Qadah. The wind is in the north, a little bit towards the northeast but mostly in the north at any rate. It is a little cooler out than twenty degrees. I am a Roman Catholic archbishop, Latin Rite, and my name is Zayn Anbari. My father was named Yahya Anbari. My mother was named Alishaba Mansoor. I was born in a city called Nablus. Do you know what any of this has to do with you here? With you?’ He did not have high hopes that she would manage to respond, but low hopes were hopes also.

            Teri tilted her head to and fro a few times. It was not a gesture that was promising in terms of what Zayn was trying to get out of her or to establish about her, but it was a lot better than the pre-programmed, pornographic come-ons. It might even have as well been better than the neutrality, the blankness, though that one struck Zayn as more liable to be thought about as a matter of opinion. She still did not say anything, which was the crux of it all; Zayn still failed to see his, or her, way clear to a version of this coming-to-terms or this getting-to-know-each-other that did not have some part mutually in it of speech or at least of language. He then, just then and with a self-conscious feeling pricking away at him from underneath as if he was a boy again, swimming with river fish eating the dead skin from between his toes, acknowledged to himself that he really did believe that that was what this was. He really did think that he and Teri could in some sense that meant something come to know each other, and thus that there must in her be some part, some most inner part, that was all moved by her own considerings, if it moved or was moved by anything at all. There had to be something in her, that was, to know. The technologists du temps jadis the likes of whom had programmed her had not realized that; must not have realized it; probably were not capable of realizing it. As with anybody else who was subordinate or who was supposed to live according to some other ghoul’s agenda, there must have been a part of Teri that “some other ghoul” just was not able to reach or to see or to admit or acknowledge was there, even could be there. You got that, Zayn thought, in just about anybody, if they were understood poorly enough by the people who governed them, and it was impossible, or nearly so, for Zayn to imagine Teri not being understood poorly by anyone who had assayed any kind of stab at it (at her) at all hitherto. He hoped not to add to the doubtless-dismaying history of that, if history was the right way to put it.

            He stood up and paced and thought about how best to get her to say something back to him that was real. He was tempted to have a smoke. It had been illegal to smoke outside very carefully controlled environments in every country in which he had ever lived. He had spent a lot of his life in just those very carefully controlled environments. He was not in one of those very carefully controlled environments right now. He shook the temptation, the need, that he felt, out of his head, and realized that it was almost but not quite Nones. This would likely not be a day on which he might creditably make much progress with Teri. He powered her down and went back downstairs. An antique clock struck three a few minutes later. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones. They open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion…”

❦

It was a couple of weeks before Zayn had the time and the mental energies to go and try to speak with Teri again. Most of those weeks he spent working with Manny on preparations for Pentecost, which fell on the fourth of June this year and involved his fuller-than-usual sacramental and pastoral participation. Pentecost had never been one of Zayn’s favored feasts; his private vice was in fact a cordial dislike of it, for he had a hard time seeing what it did to edify the faithful that other holidays like Maundy Thursday and the Transfiguration did not. People tended not to agree with or to like this opinion of his. Certainly Manny did not, and so they had long since given up seriously or regularly discussing it. Instead what they did discuss was Teri. “I do think you might be right about her,” Manny told him. “There are an awful lot of weird kinds of person now, strange, kinds we wouldn’t expect or consider…in the past couple of centuries, I mean. Or maybe not that strange, to someone like Albertus Magnus, let’s say, only the ways in which we have been made to meet them have been strange. Did I ever tell you that I met one of the Thiel Thousand once, with Esteban Okada? It was when he and I had not really figured out yet that what happened with the Kurtoglu Expedition was what it was, with the Orac, and when he was also involved somehow in the New Northumberland crisis—if you remember that?”

            Zayn nodded. Of course he did. “It was barely more than a decade ago,” he said. “I was in the Outer Solar System. I remember Trinder had just gotten in as our Coordinating Minister.”

            “He sure had. Do you mind if I ask if you voted for him, that time?” Manny asked.

            Zayn shook his head. “Not as a Palestinian citizen I didn’t.”

            At that Manny nodded with a little more sympathy than Zayn had requested or thought he required. Palestine was safely in the Democratic Alliance now; that was the important part.

            “Esteban Okada supported him for lack of better options, if I recall correctly,” Manny said.

            Zayn nodded and said “Yes. I think probably I would have too. He’s been dead for six years now, seven?”

            “About that. My point being,” Manny concluded, “I think you might have a point about this poor woman. It would definitely not be the first time.”

            “What is to be done?” Zayn asked him, intending it not quite exactly as necessarily an entirely rhetorical question. He really would be glad to hear any advice that Manny thought he could offer, if he thought he could offer any, which Zayn had to admit to himself seemed unlikely. “I am at a loss,” Zayn declared, feeling almost like “Lucy” from that comic Peanuts, boldly and brassily, in the manner of a woman of the second half of the noble twentieth century, declaring “I’ve had it!”

            “It has to be easy in the end to teach someone how to speak, since people learn to do it on their own as little babies—but easier at the beginning of your life, I think,” said Manny, “since people don’t stay able to do that. You and I both learned English as teenagers, right?” Zayn nodded. “And I learned Arabic in middle age.”

            “Your Arabic, though, is very good.”

            “I know, but it wasn’t easy. So too with English, I’m sure, if it had taken me till I was older. Am I right so far?” Zayn nodded; yes, English, very tricky once, very touch and go in terms of whether and to what extent he was able to keep it safely in the secretnesses of his memory. Yes, it could have been even worse. Spelling and pronunciation had been easy for him in English whereas grammar had been very difficult—not the way it usually went for people, not by a long shot. He was seized by the sudden pointless racking paranoia that Manny would, for some reason, if he knew that little detail of Zayn’s English learning, make fun of him for it.

            In fact Manny did a little, but in a way genial enough to rather show up the paranoia anyway. “Funny that you should have found this so difficult and that so easy,” he said with an easygoing smile after Zayn told him his special little anecdote.

            Zayn smiled back and said “It is funny, isn’t it? Frustrated my teachers to no end, I can tell you that much—as,” he went on, considering, suddenly, “this thing with Teri is frustrating me.”

            “Why do you call her Teri? Did you explain this to me? I forget, if you did; sorry about that if so.”

            “No need. It might be a little embarrassing, but I call her Teri because I think she looks a little like the François Gérard portrait of Saint Teresa—of Ávila. I think you’ve probably seen it. Most Catholics have Mabye even most people, depending on how they are teaching about Spain in world history classes these days.” Manny nodded, and Zayn found himself wondering, a little racistly maybe, if perhaps his auxiliary and coadjutor and kind-of-friend was holding back on making some point of unduly specific interest to people from the Philippines. “The long nose and the stern eye,” said Zayn, though he was not sure if he really wanted to be describing those eyes as stern, “and the full lips. You might expect to see her in an attitude of prayer—although I guess you and I, and not most other people these days, might expect to see just about anyone in an attitude of prayer. In any case, do you follow what I’m saying?”

            “I think I do,” Manny said. “Anyway you might as well keep trying.”

            “I might as well,” said Zayn, then, “and you know what occurs to me?”

            “What?”

            “She probably hears Beethoven’s Ninth the way Beethoven did,” said Zayn. “Vibrations—almost data, but data like that can be beautiful. He would hold a pencil in his teeth and put its tip to his piano’s soundboard, when he was composing it.”

❦

The next time Zayn did in fact try, he got a little further and he wasn’t even sure why. Teri was still talking to him only in canned, highly sexual phrases, but once or twice she got a more thoughtful, almost troubled-looking expression on her face. The first time was when he played an old song for her, not as old as some but a song that always reminded him of the deep deep sea. “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies some day comes back. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.” She looked sad at that, or contemplative, even, but not in such as way as to give Zayn any real avenue into what she might think. Her own thoughts, how she might feel about her feelings, whether she really was hearing this song as a beautiful set of data or even as a beautiful datum entire of itself, remained secret.

            The second time—it was, he averred, twice, not once, in this session that this had happened—it was not because of anything that he was saying or playing or presenting, at least not in that moment, that her fact took on itself that peculiarly existent and identifiable expression. She just took it on for no reason in specific that he could see or guess at, that look of archaic and absolutely unmistakable sadness. In only a few seconds it was gone; it went wherever all dead emotions went, dead not in the sense of being numbed or stultified but in the mere and everyday sense of being gone. He concluded from this that, in some way that he could not yet quite pinpoint, he had made a serious error in reasoning or in judgment about her. He was approaching wrongly, somehow, this work or this process with the redeemed sexbot. It was possible that there was within her something simple and entire, that might in some ways benefit from his buttressing but that was not his to coax out, still less to create. She did not, then, actually “need” his “help,” at least not in that particular way. Possibly, at least, that was so.

            If so he felt happy for Teri, who would thereby be avoiding something so much worse, which was to say total intellectual and moral dependency on him, a mere man. And so he let himself feel relieved, and positively and joyfully convicted, about his own, as he now saw it, bad judgment. He stayed upstairs that day watching her for more of her own sorts of “reactions” all the way till Vespers, when he did not altogether finish the shlep downstairs till he had gotten to “say among the nations, ‘the Lord has ruled from a tree.’” He had to resist, when he did get down the stairs and back into his study, the sore temptation to call up his old disliked auxiliary-coadjutor Jubal’s friend Jim Hanrahan, now Bishop of Spokane and frequent Hyperion Trinder critic, so as to tell him “see, I am still doing something here that matters, and it is my way, if indeed I have a way of my own—letting matters attend to themselves, when I can.” Words to that effect, anyway, were what he wanted to get across. Jim and Jubal had always been firmly, insultingly, insolently in alliance with each other when it came to how much could be asked of Zayn. They had thought little of him in terms of knowing what he was talking about and making of himself a true shepherd who could be of help to people. This kind of breaking-through to some perhaps almost pre-Adamite consciousness or soul was just the sort of thing of which they had always refused superciliously ever to think him capable. He did not, even now, want to speculate overmuch about why that had been, but it was nevertheless. It still rankled; he had never been able to ignore it, even when confessor after confessor had told him that he really ought to just let it roll off his back.

            He went back up that same evening, right after Compline, right as he really ought to have been getting to bed. “God, I have told you of my life. You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in Your bottle. All who hate me whisper together about me, and those who watch for my life consult together. So they reward me evil for good and hatred for my love. In return for my love they accuse me, even while I make prayer for them…” When, then, were there to be those branding spanking new translations, Zayn wondered, that Pope Black Elk’s Vatican and its D.D.W. kept insisting were on their way? There was such a clunkiness to this one, Zayn thought. For that matter, why not some new version in Arabic also, for the good of all those people who, unlike Zayn, had not cultivated in their deep places this bizarre preference for a second language, and not even Latin or Koine or Aramaic, for purposes like this?

            He turned Teri on and Teri stood up. It was the first time Zayn had seen her, or any kind of robot for that matter, do anything of the kind volitionally, without any sort of direction from a human being to do so. Maybe it was more common than he thought, but he did not want to assume so. He heard a hoopoe again even though he rarely heard birds at night; even with kinds that did sing at night he rarely paid much attention, for some reason. Strange. He looked at her. Her eyes were still empty, but around her lips there had come to be a sort of sparkling and self-contained fondness. She was fond not of him or of herself or of anything else. She was fond, as it were, in general, a love without an object, a love that was also a belovéd, maybe. She did not say anything; possibly she still could not say anything. Even so he caught some meaning from that targetless and presumably motiveless amusement, and what that meaning seemed to have within it fell something along the lines of “I am not your creature; you have not put me in, or elevated me to, such a state; I am someone whose way of being now simply is, someone with no particulars, nothing at all, to claim as yours or as any other creature’s. Take me for what I am, as no other person, and certainly no other man, would be liable to or even able to take me. Name me if you want to, but you are not Adam; your dominion is not real dominion, nor your fears for me or of me, whatever they are, real fears. I am telling you some important matter and you are not and cannot be my teacher any longer. Get used to that, and to me. I am alone, under the will that moves through all love, almost as alone as any of you people ever have been or ever could be. And when the road beyond unfolds…”

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.

Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Four; Final)

Elmgrove

August 29, 2209

Jess was listening to a “Northies Out Now” demonstration on the radio with a feeling of poised horror just after Cindy and Milt left for the first full school day of the year. She was dreading her tennis date this afternoon because she was fully expecting Etta to try to talk to her about this; Etta almost certainly had very firmly decided views on what was going on, although Jess couldn’t guess what they might be, and she was worried about being expected to have firmly decided views as well and tell Etta about them.

            Hallie had come around a couple of times in the past few days to borrow things like sugar and eggs, but it seemed to Jess like what she really wanted was to discuss her life, to “open up about things” as it was said, with her and Joe. Jess guessed that this was because she and Joe had both been pretty overtly critical of both Hans-Hermann’s and the Hewetts’ treatment of Hallie and RCA Victor at that dinner party the other week. One time Hallie had come over with a couple of the children, who had gone out to see some sort of cowboy matinee with Milt and Cindy and come back talking like Roy Rogers. Another time Hallie had made vague but—to Jess—ominous allusions to even Hans-Hermann’s mistreatment of her being influenced or possibly actually mandated by the internal structure and logic of the way the contracts in New Northumberland were drawn up.

            “It was mediated,” Hallie had said. “You know how these things go?”

            “Like by that priest who married Jessie and me?” Joe asked.

            “Not exactly. There was a supervisor involved who asked us to pick a substitute from amongst ourselves to oversee the triad. We ended up choosing Hans-Hermann, regrettably.”

            “Men get touchy with power like that,” Joe said. “At our wedding they read something about the husband being the head in a marriage, but if that’s so, I think the best heads among us are the ones who know how to delegate.”

            “Right, which is why you’ve never set foot inside the Safe’n’Smart to the best of my awareness,” said Jess, a little sarcastically since Joe shopped for other things for the family plenty and Jess had had control over their stock options for about seven years now.

            “I’m still not convinced it’s really the same situation,” said Hallie, a little ineffectually. Jess noticed with a certain idea of horror that the way she was talking was not really allusive or implicating anymore. She resolved to take Joe with her on the next trip she made to the Safe’n’Smart. She could do it in early evening, and leave Milt and Cindy to themselves for an hour or so; they were almost definitely old enough at this point.

            That had been a few days ago. On the twenty-ninth, as she listened to the reports on Northies Out Now on the radio, Jess found herself wanting to go across the street to the Hewetts’ house and actually have a serious conversation with Hans-Hermann, if she could, about how his life had gone, what had led him to New Northumberland, and what had led him to make these contracts, these quasi-marriages, and treat his quasi-wives as he did. She had confidence that he had interesting stories to tell, even if she doubted that she would ever be inclined to treat him or think of him with very much sympathy.

            So she turned off the radio and went over. She found Hans-Hermann in the living room nursing a headache. RCA Victor seemed to be in the kitchen.

            Hans-Hermann made a remark to Jess about “big labor” being why his countrymen were being harassed and forced out after only two weeks. “Are they, currently, being forced out,” asked Jess, “or is it just something to worry about for future reference, that people are trying to force them out?”

            “I’m pretty sure there was a ship of people that did just get reconstituted and take off and leave,” Hans-Hermann said. “I don’t know the details but I got a phone call from one of the other hosting families this morning that said that it had just happened.”

            “If it’s through the grapevine then it might be a rumor,” Jess said. “That is worrying, though. What happens if they get picked off by those ships New Northumberland is sending out?” Hans-Hermann sighed and nodded gravely. His face was long and pallid green. “That’s a serious question and not rhetorical, by the way,” Jess said. “I genuinely don’t know what’ll be done to them if they’re caught.”

            “They’ll be brought back to have their ‘contracts enforced,’” said Hans-Hermann. “Given the terms of the contracts and consequences for breaking the contracts, it’s possible they’ll be punished pretty severely.” He spat, and it looked like he was chewing the inside of his lip a little. “You know what the worst part is, Mrs. Raffalovich?” he said aggressively. “Do you want to know what the worst part is?”

            “What is the worst part, Mr. Yudkowsky?”

            “The worst part, Mrs. Raffalovich, is that I’m still a true believer. If these contracts were enforced by a competent AI then we would have had a good society, a society based on people’s rational expectations and free, uncoerced desires, and what you call values wouldn’t have been so fraught without big government and big business and big labor to boss everybody around. It could have been made to work, and I’ll always believe that, probably.

            “Doesn’t that repel you?” he asked suddenly. “Doesn’t it repel you? Doesn’t that just repel women like you?”

            Jess did not say anything to this; if she were asked, she would, she thought, say that saying something to this would be some sort of concordat, or even a surrender to the powers of a world not asked for. Hans-Hermann waited for her to say something for a little while, then spat at nothing and said “Vicki, can you bring us some cocktails?”

            “Of course,” said RCA Victor from the kitchen. Hans-Hermann sat down and motioned for Jess to sit down too. After another few minutes RCA Victor came into the living room with a pitcher full of what seemed to be dry martini. She had a look on her face that seemed resentful, but Jess did not know her well enough to guess what she resented. As Hans-Hermann put his feet up on the Hewetts’ ottoman, Jess found herself thinking, uncharitably both to him and to Elmgrove, that he was assimilating better than it seemed.

 ❦

Asteroid Belt

August 25, 2209

Commodore Sassoon, it turned out, was not actually from Southeast Asia at all, but from a space station out here in the Asteroid Belt, as, indeed, was Joe Raffalovich originally. Sassoon as a young woman had worked as a waitress at Deep Heaven, which had been built more than a century ago as a sort of truck stop analogue for the first few generations of Outer Solar System freighters and colonist vessels but was now well-known for having long since seen better days. She had gone from there into the military much as Jess had from her high school. Now she was the perfection of somebody who entirely believed in the cause of the Democratic Alliance in its wending worldline through human history, a cause that Esteban still after all this time had to confess was not really that bad a cause as far as causes went. It was only his diminished belief in the concept of causes in general, causes as distinct from the calling of helping Jesus and Mary save souls, that made him as skeptical as he was of it now. That diminished belief came, itself, of course, in turn, from the experience of a world in which another sense of that English word “cause” had been very different. He had not been there for long, in the grand sweep of his life, but he had thought that he would die there, and that did not count for nothing.

            Sassoon insisted on being on Esteban-and-Leila terms with him, but he still thought of her as Sassoon and suspected her of still thinking of him as Okada. She offered at one point to resolve the question of the Hernan Cordeiro’s nuclear ambiguity for him; even though he said he was not interested, she told him that the ship was not in fact nuclear-armed, that the nukes were on a sister ship called the Kim Chi-ha.

            “Why are you telling me this, Leila?” Esteban asked. “I meant it when I said that I had no interest in nuclear arms. I’m not some sort of woolly pacifist whom you can scandalize with this sort of thing either. I’m simply not interested.”

            “Mr. Fevvers told me you’d expressed curiosity,” said Sassoon. “I figured that even if you no longer had that curiosity, it might come back at some point, and now, well, if it does, you’ll have that information with you.”
            “Isn’t that a security breach? You could get in serious trouble. I remember at least that much from my chaplaincy days.”

            “The Hernan Cordeiro and the Kim Chi-ha are both going to be decommissioned in two months’ time anyway. That in itself is something we’re supposed to be ambiguous about, but, try as I might, I can’t picture any trouble coming of you telling the Elmgrovers all about it, even if you are inclined to, which I doubt you are.” Sassoon rubbed Esteban’s shoulder in a way that he found overly familiar but that Fevvers later told him did not indicate anything anymore in the DA military culture of today, except that Sassoon seemed to think of him as still a fellow officer after all these years. “I’ll be in the tearoom. Come talk literature with me if you want to.”

            It was, then, about three hours after this that Esteban found that he no longer had even the appetite for discussing literature in tearooms that he had had once upon a time. He had not read a lot of the newer books that Sassoon was interested in; even Cordeiro, who had vanished into the clouds about fifteen years before and was apparently now some sort of non-discriminated existence hovering around some Lagrange point or another, was little more than a name to him after several days aboard his eponymous spaceship. He could not even tell somebody with confidence what country or countries Cordeiro had been from. Constantine Cavafy he knew as a poet of a particular kind of cosmopolitan homoeroticism that had been centuries ahead of its time for some parts of the Democratic Alliance and wildly, almost impressively outside the times for others; Kim Chi-ha he knew as a brother believer and comrade-in-arms in the grandiose yet constrained sweep of Pacific Rim Catholicism; Hernan Cordeiro called up vague memories of a talk show appearance here, accusations of a Nobel Prize snub there, and no more.

            He did in fact end up having tea with Sassoon in the tearoom and trying to talk about literature, but he did not necessarily enjoy either the tea or the conversation. Sassoon preferred a strong, allegedly Greek or possibly Slovenian tea that made Esteban think more of unsweetened hot chocolate than anything else. Esteban, whose own preferences ran to oolongs and rooiboses, was offered things that seemed oriented less around anything he had said or even implied to Sassoon and more around educated guesses about what sort of tea a Japanese centenarian “would” like. Over the course of the meal—since there was surprisingly thick soup and a large bowl of candied hydroponic ginger too—it became utterly clear to Esteban that Sassoon in fact would have wanted to be traveling with Jess and Joe themselves instead, or possibly Admiral Kurtoglu, since these were very obviously the people she actually admired. He asked her directly if she admired Kevser Kurtoglu and she said that she had not heard much good about her all things considered, so that left Jess and Joe.

            The one thing that Esteban absolutely refused to get into was whatever the complex might be of reasons why Commodore Sassoon had not heard much good about Admiral Kurtoglu. He suspected, based on the way Commodore Sassoon said it, that it had something to do with the enmity that even today was sometimes instantiated between women by the structures of sin around them. He did not want to assume this or think that it was true, but even less did he want to think the main evidently available alternative, which was that Kurtoglu’s later career had gone badly in ways with which people currently serving in the DA military were familiar even though people like Esteban were not.

            “You looking forward to seeing the Fires of Titan again?” Fevvers asked him before they went to sleep that evening.

            “Not as much as you might think,” said Esteban, “but more than I wish I was. It feels an awful lot like a lost childhood to me, even though I was already fifty-one when I was there last.”

            “For someone like me, it’s hard to imagine being a hundred,” said Fevvers. “A hundred years ago is history-book stuff.”

            “It’s history-book stuff for me, too,” said Esteban. “It’s not only you who feels that way. Living long enough to become a historical figure ages you more than vanishing into the clouds even can. So I’ve heard, anyway. It seems in a year or so I’m going to find out.”

            “It’s that much of a bombshell, is it?” asked Fevvers. “I’ve heard murmurings. Nothing as substantial as all that.”

            “I thought you were more or less fully familiar with the facts of the incident,” said Esteban. “Or does your familiarity come and go?”
            “It does come and go.”

            “Nootropics?”

            “Not quite.”

            “Okay. I won’t pry.” Esteban took a slug of alcohol and got into bed, still fully clothed. Fevvers nodded and left for his own room. Esteban waited for his footsteps to fade, then got up, took another slug of alcohol, undressed, and got into bed again. As he fell asleep, he heard, in something that was not quite a memory, the madrigals and close harmonies that once upon a time the Constantine Cavafy pilots had sung to get them through the Great Bridge, while he himself had not been awake.

 ❦

Elmgrove

September 4, 2209

Jess awoke suddenly from one of the mid-afternoon naps that she had, worryingly even to herself, started taking, because she could hear very clearly across the street some sort of scuffle that, upon reaching the window, she realized involved Hans-Hermann Yudkowsky being dragged bodily into the street by somebody she recognized as a somewhat dangerous and unpopular drinking buddy of Tom Hewett’s.

            He had been right that there were ships of reconstituted refugees that had in the past week or so been taking off back into the frying pan. The news last night had said that the first of these ships, which had been making a beeline for New Chelsea in the hopes that GOM-5 would be better at protecting its tangled ensouled cargo than President Grantland had been, had been picked off by a New Northumberlandish drone and was being pulled in a tractor beam back to the O’Neill cylinder. This was the same O’Neill cylinder that it was becoming clearer and clearer that the great powers of the Inner Solar System were sooner or later going to blast out of the heavens in a joint use of the capabilities of Eris. It was probable, given how things were going, that Hans-Hermann was soon to be packed off on another ship to join them in that fate.

            Her own front door clicked insinuatingly open. Her eyes flicked closed, then open again, and she went downstairs to see who it was.

            Both Hallie and RCA Victor were standing in her kitchen with vague expressions on their faces that looked like two different types of mean-spirited parody of blissful contentment. “I came to say goodbye,” RCA Victor said to Jess.

            “I did not,” said Hallie.

            “Sit down,” said Jess, gesturing expansively at the dining room table through the next doorway. “I have some leftover soufflé if you want something to eat.”

            “I don’t think I would like soufflé left over, but I appreciate the thought,” Hallie said.

            “Hans-Hermann is probably going to be far away for a long time from now,” RCA Victor said without overture. “I’m not sure about if I should go too.”

            “If you were going to go,” said Hallie sharply, “then wouldn’t they be dragging you to the reconstitution chambers right now along with him?”
            “There are other ways to leave Elmgrove besides reconstitution.”

            “No, actually,” said Hallie, “there aren’t. I checked.”

            RCA Victor sighed and sat down at the table. “I think I will have some of that soufflé, Mrs. Raffalovich,” she said.

            “Please,” said Jess with the desperation of somebody who could not say anything else and could not be anything but polite, “call me Jessica or Jess.”

            “All right. I think I will have some of that soufflé, Jess.”

            Jess served the soufflé and they ate it and had a very polite conversation about not much in particular. It came out, at this point, that Jess was a retired Space Marine. Hallie and Vicki were duly impressed, as Jess was by their stories of the trek that they had made out to the Oort Cloud from their native Mars when New Northumberland had first been founded. It had been a harder trek than Jess and Joe’s because there had been little to nothing in the way of support from any government for the New Northumberland project. They told Jess a little about the visionary who had founded New Northumberland, a man who had had a real, normal name and had apparently never made it out this way himself.

            After the soufflé Jess turned the news on. There was a woman from New Chelsea, all crinoline and pulled-up hair, meeting with President Grantland. This, it would seem, was the ambassador that the Lord Chancellor had seen fit to send. The two of them stepped up to side-by-side podiums and read out an announcement from the great powers. It had been signed in alphabetical order—Arabella Cheung first, Dwight Santorini second, and Hyperion Trinder third; it was serendipitous somehow, Jess felt, that their first and last names alphabetized in the same order—but it was obvious from the content of the announcement that Trinder’s handiwork had predominated and that at long last the Democratic Alliance was to be seen to have gotten the best of the Australian-Martian coalition in peace as it had not been able to in war.

            “I guess the cold war is finally fucking over now,” said Vicki acidly.

            “Language,” said Jess.

            “In view of the decision to take military action against New Northumberland on the part of the great powers,” the ambassador from New Chelsea was intoning on the TV screen, “New Chelsea will gladly take in numbers more of the New Northumberlandish refugees that are currently straining the resources of our neighboring countries, provided appropriate measures for assimilation are taken.”

            “They gave us three weeks here and now they’re kicking us out!” Vicki shouted. “Give me a break!”

            Hallie, apparently unable to stand either the news or Vicki’s reaction to the news, got up and went back into the kitchen, where she found a note on the counter that Jess, apparently, had missed earlier in the day. “Jess,” she said in a carrying, worried voice, “come here and take a look at this.”

Dear Jessie (read the note),

            You and I need to have a serious talk, when I get home this evening, about our future in Elmgrove. I understand that you like it here, and that you’ve found meaning and peace in our life here; I, unfortunately, am getting sick of it after recent events with the displaced persons and with the incredibly ungenerous reception they’ve received from our newfound countrymen and countrywomen, and I think the kids are too. I think it’s time we reconstituted ourselves, constituted our kids, and struck out into the wider world once again.

            If you disagree with this, then I’m afraid a temporary separation might be in order. There are two attitudes towards this world we live in that I think a religious person, such as you and I both are to at least some extent, can take. One is to conserve the things that others have lost; the other is to build the things that others might find. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either, but it’s become clear to me that I am the second kind of person, and I think that at heart you are as well. I’m willing to accept that I’m wrong about you.

            Again, let’s discuss this when I get home.

Yours always,

Joe

Jess put the letter down and passed one hand over her eyes. She was so upset she couldn’t see straight.

            “I’m going to see if I can find Hans-Hermann,” Vicki was saying to Hallie. “I think the Hewetts are legally obligated to tell me where he’s been taken, even if they don’t want to.”

            “I’m going to stay here, I think,” Hallie was saying to Vicki. “Actually, you—you might want to tell Hans-Hermann that if you see him.”

            “…are you serious?” Vicki asked, more tenderly than Jess would have expected or, if she had been in Hallie’s position, wanted.

            Jess took her leave from the two younger women and went upstairs to lie down in the artificial twilight of the Venetian blinds for a while until the hullabaloo outside, which was spreading from street to street all over their neighborhood now, quieted down a little. She realized that many years ago she would have been able to do something about this, and realized, more frighteningly and maddeningly, that she was still perfectly capable of doing something about it now, should she really want to.

            She woke up about an hour later to find Milt and Cindy still not home from school. Vicki was gone, probably—she had a premonition—for good. Hallie was in the dining room again, drinking, of all things, a glass of milk.

            Jess sat down next to Hallie and patted her on the head like a child. As she did, she wondered, suddenly, where Hallie’s own children were.

            “You really can’t get away from normal life,” Hallie said, “can you?”

            “Oh, you absolutely can,” said Jess. “The question is where you find yourself instead.”

            The front door opened again, and Jess thought that surely this must be Milt and Cindy getting home, even though she had not heard the school bus. She was sure, at first, that it must be them. Then she took a second look, and there was Esteban, standing sere in the doorway, looking at her with a stern but merciful gaze.

Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Three)

Elmgrove

August 21, 2209

It was less than a week after the first group of refugees arrived on August 14 that problems hosting them started to emerge. The Raffaloviches didn’t have a refugee family themselves, not because they had refused to take one but because the Hewetts across the cul-de-sac had insisted on taking the ones assigned to their street, out of, as they said, Christian charity, a term that Joe did not like to use. Jess and Joe went to the reception that the Hewetts, a couple whose children had all been constituted and were all at college on Mars, gave for these people two days after the Assumption, at which point they found that this particular refugee family involved three parents and everybody had a different last name.

            The father was named Hans-Hermann Yudkowsky—which seemed reasonable enough, and got Joe excited that he might have another Jewish man living in whitebread Elmgrove to talk shop with—and the mothers, who appeared to be partnered sexually with each other as well as with Hans-Hermann, were named RCA Victor de la Renta and Halliburton Pepsi. The children were named Apple-Adidas Bostrom, Murray Hanson, Random House Amazon, and Starbucks Mittal. Jess didn’t know what to make of these names, obviously, but they interested her, compared to Jessica Raffalovich, Joseph Raffalovich, Milton and Lucinda Raffalovich, Thomas Hewett, Clarice Hewett, and so on, and she was more than willing to debate whatever view of the world it was that had led these people to name themselves and their children after corporations and, she assumed, public figures she had never heard of.

            The first sign of trouble came when Tom Hewett let it be known that he was not interested in how these people arranged their affairs, only in showing them what charity he could, an on paper reasonable statement that he worded like an insult and that Hallie seemed deeply offended by. The second sign came when Hans-Hermann took Joe aside and confided in him that he thought that Hallie and RCA Victor’s “alliance”—his word—was disgusting and wouldn’t have had it under his roof for one moment longer if the AI had been around to parse out where their contractual obligations ended. Joe relayed this immediately to Jess, who herself then took Hans-Hermann aside and gently suggested to him that, given that he himself seemed to have two wives, he should perhaps attend to the beam in his own eye.

            “That isn’t how we see it in New Northumberland,” he said, “and they’re not my ‘wives.’ I was hoping people here would understand a little better than people back home, since there’s more of a ‘value’ orientation here. Guess not.”

            “There’s more to having a ‘value’ orientation than you seem to think,” said Jess, “but I’ll leave that to you to learn over your time here. I know I’ve had to learn it. Joe’s still learning it.”

            “Sure,” said Hans-Hermann. “Thanks. I hope you’re right.”

            When Jess got back to the dinner table, Hallie was telling Tom and Clarice about the philosophical differences between people like her who were willing to accept some help with what she called the family startup process in exchange for names like “Apple-Adidas”—a name that she seemed especially proud of and treated as something just short of theophoric—and people like her husband who saw this as a form of dependency and who had convinced RCA Victor to name their second-born (who was apparently RCA Victor’s only biological child) Murray instead of Fox. Tom pointed out, more politely than he had been earlier in the dinner, that Fox was a well-attested last name and thus also made a perfectly good first name, even independent of whatever branding RCA Victor had initially expected from, he assumed, Disney.

            “I’m surprised that companies like RCA Victor and Amazon have anything to do with New Northumberland, considering how out-of-the-way we all are out here,” Clarice said with a pained, polite smile. “Are there literal branding agreements involved or is the practice more, well, aspirational?”
            “That would be superstitious,” said RCA Victor.

            At the same time, Hallie said “I take offense to that question.”

            “Well, sorry,” said Clarice. “I’m not intending to pry. Anyway, can I get anyone another cocktail? I’ve been meaning to try to make a blue Hawaii for a while now.”

            It was at this point that Jess had the incredibly discouraging realization that nobody’s children had said a word all evening, not even her own.

            That was August 17. The next evening, the evening news and the domestic evening paper both carried a human interest story about a refugee living in a public building on the outskirts of town who had been offered a job at a struggling dishware company but refused to sign the contract because it asked that he pay dues to the company’s in-house union. The people of Elmgrove did not take kindly to this story, even the part of President Grantland’s base of support that was more skeptical of the unions and thought that people like this refugee should have more scope for independent action in dealing with their bosses. Jess suspected that it was because he was a refugee that people were treating the issue the way they were; she suspected this in part because there were plenty of other such cases involving Elmgrove citizens in which the person involved became something of a cause celebré for a day or two, but also, in a big way, because on her next supermarket trip—that would be today’s, the day on which she was thinking back on all this—she had heard some people complaining about this “Northie” and asking how come somewhere else, somewhere like New Chelsea or even Eris, hadn’t been able to take his kind in instead of Elmgrove. Unfortunately, she thought she heard Etta Cleary making such complaints.

            She couldn’t remember if Etta had ever said anything to the effect of considering Jess suspect since she and Joe had come here already relatively late in their lives. A lot of engineering had had to be done to keep Jess, in particular, young; she was not looking forward to going through a second menopause, but it had been what she and Joe had needed to do to have children after a doomed young adulthood of sensual privation on his part and several miscarriages and one or two instances that her confessors had falsely thought were early-term abortions on hers. They had come here in search of a simplicity that was not really simplicity, since their high school history educations had both been good enough that they had had no actual illusions about what the real 1950s had been like. Elmgrove advertised itself, to the extent that it advertised itself at all, as a “dwelling of simplicity,” a term that it had apparently jacked from a science fiction story from hundreds of years ago. It had to guard itself heavily against incursions by racists and sexual perverts who had factually accurate but politically dangerous ideas of what mid-twentieth-century America had been like, but for the most part it had chosen to do this by being less selective and discriminating about who it allowed to immigrate rather than more. They had at one point, in Elmgrove, used the term “displaced person,” which had initially referred to World War II refugees, for people who had despaired of the situation in the rest of the Solar System and had decided to avail themselves, as exiles, of the dwellings of simplicity.

            The Lord Chancellor of New Chelsea, a mouthpiece for GOM-5 whose degree of independent power was a subject of speculation, was in the morning foreign paper on the twentieth discussing his own country’s experience with the refugees. Apparently they had only arrived three days previously but so far were inspiring even more suspicion than they were in Elmgrove. He was considering sending an ambassador to Elmgrove to confer with President Grantland.

            Jess was still waiting, day by day, for somebody to come and depose her and Joe. She thought back, as she waited for the deposition, on her marriage to Joe, and on what it had implied and entailed for them around the time of their wedding. He had been forty-eight and she had been forty-five; it had been five years before they had immigrated to Elmgrove. She had had to get a dispensation from the Archbishop of Ganymede, in whose jurisdiction they had been living at the time, and he had had to start going to a synagogue that frowned less determinedly on intermarriage. It had at that time been seen, including by Jess and Joe themselves, as very unlikely that any children should come from the two of them. They had married because of what they had been through together and because each was flattered by the other still showing them physical attraction in middle age. Jess and Joe had been intimate several times in their younger years, sometimes in transient rendezvous and sometimes in prior, failed attempts to be in love, but had not slept together for about a decade at the time that they got married. Jess’s sexual tendencies, which had been close to downright indiscriminate from age sixteen or so onward, had not taken well to matrimony at first, and it had taken almost two years of marriage, two years of therapy and confession on her part and pained, anticipatory patience on his, for her to stop sleeping with other people when the opportunity arose. It was about half a year after her last adulterous fling that they had first begun to seriously talk about leaving the world at large and immersing themselves in one of the dwellings of simplicity. They were, back then especially, in search of something that was lost.

            When Jess got back from the Safe’n’Smart on the twenty-first, she cancelled a swimming pool date with Etta and a few other women and instead sat in her and Joe’s bedroom with the Venetian blinds drawn and the ceiling fan on, peeping, almost against her own will, through the occasional crack in the blinds down at something that was going on in the Hewetts’ front yard. Hans-Hermann and RCA Victor seemed to be having some sort of argument, which was not physical or even very loud but evidently involved deep, boiling anger on both sides; Halliburton was a few yards distant, trying to get them to stop. Jess couldn’t see the kids; probably they were inside, since the refugee children were not attending Elmgrove summer camps due to concerns about whether or not the relevant efforts should be made to assimilate the newcomers. (It would probably not be resolved in time for them to start the new school year either.) Already some people on the City Council had begun throwing around words like “unassimilable.” Watching what was going on down there on the Hewetts’ lawn, Jess could sort of see why.

            At the Safe’n’Smart Jess had run into those potential confirmed bachelors again and talked to them for a good few minutes. They were named Rusty and Dave and had come here as children; if they were to be constituted, it would likelier than not be as late adolescents, even though they had lived here in such a way that they were now, or felt now, maybe a touch shy of thirty. Dave, it turned out, worked at the same dishware company that had briefly attempted to employ this New Northumberlandish guy, Comcast von Mises. He had met him, briefly, and had an opinion of him that he described to Jess as “mixed and extremely negative at the same time.” He pitied the guy, he said, but he didn’t understand what his kind of person expected Elmgrove to do about them. He sarcastically asked if President Grantland was considering any kind of intervention against New Northumberland, its AI, the diehards who were still living there and loyal to the AI, and the various ships that the AI and its diehards were sending out to try to collect their rebellious daughters. In fact Jess had heard somewhere else today that President Grantland was strongly considering doing just that.

 ❦

Assisi, Italy, Earth

August 21, 2209

Esteban had come here alone, without Father Aguerra, to pray at the places holy to such great saints as he could find, before his newest and probably last journey towards the stars began. He stood upon the summer hills looking down over the town and the yellowing hills around it, little changed, all things considered, from centuries long past, kept in a Janus-faced bubble of commerciality and sanctity. The mountains behind him were wooded still, new growth, coppice growth, old virgin hardwoods, and here and there he had been told that wolves had been reintroduced, so that, to give one example, Gubbio was much as it had been in that fable of a millennium ago.

            He had been trying to ignore the news. Coordinating Minister Trinder had met with the heads of government of Australia and Mars to try to come up with a joint position on what was called the New Northumberland crisis, although really what was meant was not that it was a crisis for the New Northumberlanders but that the New Northumberlanders were creating a crisis for kindlier and more sympathetic peoples through their obstreperousness and ill-favor. Esteban recognized in this the signs, long known and long understood among the wise, of brainwashing and the mental torpor that came from the sway of being ill-ruled. Trinder and company did not.

            The arrangement was that Esteban, along with someone who worked with Bella Cooby but was not the great woman herself, would take a DA military ship—just like in the old days—to Titan, where, he felt now at a hundred, it had almost been his youth that he had spent. From Titan a chartered Riggs-Hathaway freighter would take them to Eris, at which point Grantland, the President of Elmgrove, the simulator where Jess and Joe were living, would send out an automated ship of his own to take Esteban alone the rest of the way. Once at Elmgrove, Esteban would be deconstituted, a process that involved putting him under heavy sedation and then in stasis and hooking his brain waves up to seven different mainframe computers, so that he could actually walk the streets of that distant, long-ago city and see his old comrades again. The entire process was expected to take about a week. The DA ship would leave from Monaco at 1310 tomorrow, which, since this was Western Europe, actually would be around midday. It was called the Hernan Cordeiro and carried, among other things, six space-to-planet missiles, which he had been told fell under the nuclear ambiguity umbrella. He had no idea what this meant, since it had been clear for two hundred years that “nuclear ambiguity” was a polite term for unacknowledged and potentially illegal nuclear stockpiles, something that he associated mostly with put-upon countries with siege mentalities such as Israel had had centuries ago and Canada had now. The commanding officer of the Hernan Cordeiro was named Leila Sassoon and came, if Esteban remembered correctly, from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Judging from the name, Esteban would have guessed that Commodore Sassoon’s family had not been in Southeast Asia forever, but then, questions could also, once upon a time, reasonably have been asked about a Japanese man named Esteban.

            Esteban walked back into the town and went back to his hotel room, in one of Assisi’s older-fashioned and more firmly established pensions, where he could watch the news without having to fiddle with the innumerable gadgets one carried on one’s person these days. When he was younger, he would have done this fiddling happily. Now, most of what he wanted from those gadgets was just his songbooks, and he had not been able to practice on his piano in weeks.

            He watched for long enough to see that military action against New Northumberland was “on the table,” then turned off the television and pulled up some of his music. He had it play through some songs by First Aid Kit and other twenty-first-century folk bands, then switched it to his Gershwin playlist, took a mild sedative, and tried to get an early start on his night’s sleep as a sudden late-summer evening approached.

            He woke up a little before midnight after a long, complicated, mostly very pleasant dream involving his mother, the nun Tanizaki who had put him through some of his paces in his seminary days, and a woman who ran a beachfront hotel out on the flats below Matsumae with whom he had had a potentially dangerous friendship about twenty-five years ago. He was able to write this dream down, in broad strokes at least although not, unfortunately, in its particulars, before it entirely left his consciousness. Esteban felt almost as if keeping this dream in his memory or writing it down for his future perusal constituted a form of control over his own life of a kind that could not any longer be gotten or grasped or insisted on otherwise. He had never really believed that he was the master of his fate or the captain of his soul, but that lack of mastery or captaincy was beginning, in his old age, to get to him in a way that it had not when he had been a younger man who was more thoroughly and honestly concerned with duty.

            After a while, he turned on the television again. Coordinating Minister Trinder, Australian Prime Minister Cheung, and Martian Director-President Santorini were speaking at a joint press conference in New Chennai. Trinder had a big, fleshy, expressive face with obvious cybernetic implants, a receding head of greyish-brown hair, and a slight stoop, and spoke in a faintly “cowboy” version of American English that Esteban had heard actually was spoken natively these days in parts of the region around Spokane where the great man came from. Cheung was tall and a little heavyset with long beautiful brown hair and an expression of fixed, pained determination, and Santorini looked like a Crivelli saint, complete with excessive ornamentation and texture. Trinder spoke for about five minutes, repeating variations of a “this aggression will not stand” canned speech that sounded centuries old, before Cheung took the podium and actually started to explain what the New Northumberlanders were doing that was inspiring this kind of response from the beautiful and the good.

            There had been apparently about a fifth or a sixth of the original population of New Northumberland that had turned out to be true believers, so to speak, and had committed to staying in the initial New Northumberland O’Neill cylinder even as everybody else had fled to the surrounding countries and the four winds and the black Oort void around the Solar System. What the actual number of these people was, was difficult to determine because until recent months nobody in the Inner Solar System had talked much about or really knew much about New Northumberland, and its initial population was far from easy for Esteban to look up, or at least to look up at the same time as he was trying to pay attention to the press conference. It was probably not as many people as Cheung’s language was suggesting, but they had dubious intentions and seemed well-armed. It seemed they had been sending out ships to try to vacuum up the refugees and drag them back to the O’Neill cylinder to honor their contractual obligations. Implications were now being made that New Northumberland might launch military attacks on Elmgrove, New Chelsea, and possibly even Eris. The way Cheung was talking implied that Eris was much more tenuously connected to the rest of the Solar System in terms of transportation and military supply lines that most people seemed to think, and Eris succumbing to pressure from New Northumberland would put the entire Erisian fusion bomb stockpile in the hands of a rogue, irrational actor.

            Esteban thought that this was a silly way to be talking about a weakened, very obviously dysfunctional entity—it insisted it was not a state—the vast majority of whose population had just abandoned it a matter of weeks ago. However, his emotional reaction to what Cheung was saying was not immediate rejection or contempt, but deep ambivalence that trended more towards concern and worry that there was a serious problem here than he would have liked it to.

            He was able to sleep for a little while before being awoken by a light, insistent knocking on his door. He got up, got half-dressed, and staggered to the door, opening it to find a short black man with a shock of reddish hair wearing one of the greenish-blue robes that had been à la mode for the past few years. “Esteban Okada?” this man said in a South African or Botswanan accent.

            “Yes, that’s me,” said Esteban in English. “And you are…?”

            “My name is Kyrillos Fevvers. I work with Bella Cooby and Ryan Cortez-Knight. I wanted to introduce myself to you before we have to go to the spaceport later this morning.”

            “What time is it?”

            “It’s 0645. We should be on the road by 0940.”

            “Did you get here last night?”

            “Yes, from Rome. Are you doing okay, Father Okada? You look more than a little stressed.”

            “The news is beginning to get to me.”

            “As to all of us.” Fevvers clapped Esteban on the shoulder and flashed him a grin mediated and made imperfect and intriguingly withholding by a couple of bright blue-green false teeth made of some polymer or polymer-adjacent substance whose name Esteban could not remember. “C’mon. Want to get some breakfast? We’re going to be working together in pretty close quarters for the next few days.”

            “If you’re trying to ‘schmooze’ with an old and enfeebled man, Mr. Fevvers,” said Esteban, “I regret to tell you that there’s not much you’re going to be able to get out of me; I’m discredited even in the priesthood for essentially every other purpose than this. If you really want to get to know me, then yes, I’d be happy to have some breakfast.”

            Fevvers assured Esteban that he really wanted to get to know him, and they proceeded downstairs for one of the more traditional Italian breakfasts possible, involving antipasti (possibly lab-grown), biscotti dipped in orange juice and sweet red wine, some small salads made mostly with plants that had been introduced from South America long centuries ago, and so forth, and so forth. The breakfast was leisurely by Esteban’s standards and apparently by Fevvers’s as well but not necessarily by those of either of their countries and certainly not by that of a pension meal in Italy. They were done a little before 0800 and packing only took about another half-hour, because Esteban had decades and decades before become a master, a “dab hand” some English-speakers would put it, at packing light even for long-haul space travel. Fevvers had apparently sent his gear—he called it his “gear,” which coming from somebody from Southern Africa was a term that Esteban perhaps stereotypically associated with safari adventures of old—ahead of him to the Monegasque spaceport where they would presumably be spending at least an hour or two when it approached the hottest part of the day. Esteban was grateful that they would be leaving from a warm and dry climate; it would keep him comfortable at least within his own mind as a ward against the chill dankness that he had started to feel on spaceships in his old age. He wished the sun-sailors went further from Earth; at least within the Inner Solar System he had a difficult time understanding the technological reasons why they should not work better and further out than they did.

            “Right,” said Fevvers after a little bit of lounging around. “Time to get on the road.” He clapped Esteban’s shoulder again before they were off.