Toward Mercy I Throw the First Stone

He — earth-bound vessel
that he is, god that he
is not — instructed me to write, and so I wrote

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I gave you this voice, and you’ve used it to find me. Fool.

— Geffrey Davis, “Like a River”

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Like peanut ochre

Like penny grass

Like five-day sentience

Like armor brass

Like evening sprout

Like double mouth

Like lips abeyant

You talk to me

Before I knew you I dreamed of you.
In the desert’s glassy dark, your body spread out

on thread grass, I raised a handful of snow
to your lips. You who will teach me silence

in the full light of day, who will take the words
from my mouth with bare hands. Joyful

and at the same time, wretched —
this is what you’ll do to me.

By morning you’ve disappeared,
the sand has settled in my black hair

and I know you well.

Conversation / Incantation

Faceless angel, look at me —
you say you want to run from men
but I am still here.

You are a dream of yourself: a metaphor
for language. Pale in comparison.

For many years, I will live free of guilt
and the lies it makes of our body.

Look, there is something in your hand —
an empty beer bottle
or a dead fish. The earth
is wild with coincidence.

I must confess: once, I held a white dove
by the throat, tore its wings
from its body.

It’s simple, I want to know what violence means.
Compassion

does what it says. And I know this wing which has carried me
can also carry you
if you let it.

And some days I fear that if nobody saw me I would not exist.

If I had a story to tell trust
it would not be mine. Patches of darkness,

sky as cloudy marble
tabletop over which we eat and drink. My dear

epicurean, let me scrawl a red ribbon across your throat
with wine.

Let us lock the windows of memory
with the iron shackles of faith.

Forever the body.
Forever the self.

Whatever you think of me now, know
that I have been much more and much less.

Sometimes I forget — and are you not guilty
of this yourself? —

Raphael’s Madonna, beautiful in her crown
of gold leaves, was in fact painted for nobody.

In the painting, the baby Jesus hands a rose to a child
clothed in wolf skin as Mary looks on, cautiously.

Having brought myself before god I bring myself
before you —

my skin burning like the shed skin of a desert snake.

Fields of Indigo

I am scared of what you’ll do to me.

Once I came to you with a fever. You took off
my glasses, spread sesame oil

along the contours of my face
then handed me a cup of dead wasps

and told me to drink. Perhaps I never really knew
what you promised: paradise nothing more

than learning how to draw the bars of my own cage.
It sounds harmless, like a lamb suddenly emerging

from the bush. And what will they say
of our journey? No matter.

How you crawled through fields of indigo
to tell me your secret

as if crawling back to my arms
from the afterlife.

What do you want to say, Simon? Light the paper
lanterns

and let them go

this measure of darkness, this ridiculous
ransom.

It’s only the second time you’ve found me
shirtless, walking through each room

a plate brimming with water
balanced on both palms.

The light of the fire has so much
to say to the water

and already I’ve forgotten who you are.

We Are Who We Want

This month, Guernica looks at what we want — who we want — and how on earth, or anywhere else, we can possibly survive our own wanting.

We lead our June issue with a diptych on desire and the divine. MM Gindi and Enzo Escober, coming of age as queer young men at different times, in different parts of the world, in homes with different Christianities, forge their queerness with and against the expressions of God that surround them.

Enzo Escober grew up in the Philippines; though his family was not Catholic, he was enamored of the Catholic martyrs and the redemption they offered. “When I was seven, with my book of saints, I wished to be broken like a spotless thing, to be granted God for it,” he writes. But when Escober encounters the story of Matthew Shepard, two decades after the young man’s murder, he uncovers the limits of martyrdom. “[N]obody valued his murder more than liberal groups, whose fixation on his identity was symptomatic of a transformative politics dependent on death . . . a ritual purging of homosexuality’s moral stain,” Escober writes. But where is the room in the myth for a queer man to live, spotless or otherwise?

“I’m scared to write about the devil because writing is a form of incantation, because naming a thing is the first step in manifesting. I’m forty-five years old now and thought that time had diluted the fear, but writing about him exhumes it,” MM Gindi writes. “But I keep returning to this essay, or it returns to me. It haunts me, and I haunt it back.” The devil, in his case, is queer desire. Or rather, the devil exploits that desire, tunneling through otherworlds to reach for Gindi’s soul. Gindi knows what this looks like, how it works, because he watched The Exorcist as a young boy, and because a generation before, his father witnessed exorcisms as a young man. “From a young age, I am taught that the devil is always chasing me and that my job is to keep running,” he writes. “Because I’m gay, I have to run the fastest.”

In Meredith Talusan’s short story, “Sexual Tension,” the protagonist glories in desire, even in spite of themself. Surprised by a desire so strong it trumps career ambitions — desire by another name — they succumb to fantasy, and then flirt with its reality, each threatening an identity constructed, lately, to work as commodity. And in fiction from Spotlights, our series highlighting work from independent literary magazines around the world, a Nigerian woman who desires nothing more than to have a child must reckon, instead, with helping her niece end an unwanted pregnancy. After a lifetime of mothering without the identity or status of mother, she must perform an act that undoes the very thing she most wants in the world — because “this girl I had raised, my child even though she hadn’t come from my body, was despairing.”

In our latest Back Draft interview, Brandon Taylor gives up writing, returning only when he understands that he must want something more for his protagonist. In Wish You’d Been Here, our series documenting the disappearing rituals of a rapidly warming world, one man in the Himalayas finds himself alone in wanting nothing more than a timely spring bloom. In “Administrator,” by Sam Munson, a man who reluctantly becomes the keeper of his neighbors’ keys discovers the pleasure and pain of wanting in isolation.

Omotara James’s poem “Closure” bears witness to the end of desire, while Dmitry Blizniuk crafts poetry around its absence. And Victoria Chang’s ekphrastic poem “Untitled IX, 1982” twists through desires light and dark to understand the expressive limitations of wanting: “What we say, here, now, is only the / part of flesh that is known.”

Thank you for being here.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

Administrator

The first of Horvath’s neighbors moved away in late winter. This neighbor, an older man with an unclean white beard, gave no warning. Horvath discovered his leaving by chance, when he noticed that the old man’s door was hanging open. Entering the apartment after knocking, he found no one. The place was orderly except for the bedroom, where the closet was open and clothes lay strewn on the floor, and the small bathroom, where a cup of coffee, still warm to the touch, was sitting on the rim of the tub. Horvath told the doorman about this. The doorman already knew. The old man had left a note and included the apartment keys in the envelope. The doorman asked if Horvath wanted to keep the keys, since he lived next door. Horvath hesitated for a long time. He did not like to involve himself in the affairs of his neighbors, not least because the building was large, which meant that any problem he might encounter could expand, pullulate, assume truly nightmarish contours, infinite eyes, infinite mouths, infinite arms, like a classical Titan. The doorman frowned at his hesitation. He told Horvath that he himself had a lot to do, and at times like this, everybody had to pitch in and help out. Horvath lacked the strength to argue with the doorman and agreed to take the keys. Because a fight with a doorman also verges on the infinite with respect to time. That afternoon, Horvath checked the apartment to make sure the gas and water were off, and he turned off all the lights and cracked a window to keep the air inside fresh, then locked up. Horvath’s neighbors at the end of the hall asked about the old man, and Horvath told them the truth. He didn’t know anything. Everyone agreed that the old man was an asshole, so no one was too upset he had gone away. Horvath had not liked him much either. He had criticized Horvath (unjustly) for making noise. Then the old man had tried to get Horvath to join his crusade against the people who lived above him, whom he also accused of making too much noise. He tried to get everybody interested by leaving leaflets on doorsteps, and Horvath had heard that enough residents joined up to get the attention of the management board, but it had all come to nothing. The upstairs neighbors were not noisy, just like Horvath. All the same, Horvath felt an obligation. Not to the old man but to the building. What if a gas line started leaking? What if the toilet flooded in the night and ruined someone else’s apartment? To allay these fears, he started checking in on the old man’s apartment once or twice a week, just to make sure. A couple of weeks after he started, he found that the pipe feeding water to the sink was leaking and a biggish puddle had formed in the kitchen. The floor was a little waterlogged, and Horvath, who had worked as a plumber’s assistant in his youth, wanted to check with the old man’s downstairs neighbors to make sure that their kitchen ceiling was not dripping. When he got downstairs, he found that the residents, a husband and wife, were getting ready to leave. The husband was carrying their baby on his shoulder and lugging suitcases out into the hallway with his free hand, while the wife was adjusting the limp straps of a blue car seat, pulling and pulling at them, though they did not give. Before he could say anything, the wife looked up from her pulling and said they were sorry but they had to head out. They did not know when they would be back. She’d heard that Horvath had the old man’s keys — would he mind taking theirs too, just in case? She did not always trust those doormen. Horvath did not want these keys either. He took them anyway. You can’t say no to people in a moment like that unless you are some kind of Greek hero, striding beyond all boundaries. Horvath now had two apartments to watch over. The first one was annoying because the plumber kept rescheduling his visit and Horvath had to deal with the leak by using a bucket that needed changing every few days. The second caused no such problems, but Horvath disliked it because he disliked the inane expressions that the husband and wife wore in the numerous photographs on the walls, and the inane expression that he could see already developing in the eyes of their child. A week after they left, someone came knocking on Horvath’s door at six in the morning. It was another young husband, his wife standing behind him. She had tears in her eyes. The husband muttered something about the doormen and about looking after things, just for a while, and then in a voice lower still, he offered Horvath money. Horvath asked him to speak up. The young husband repeated his offer, and Horvath accepted it. The crying wife stopped crying, and her face hardened. The young husband handed over a grimy stack of bills. Horvath threw the money away as soon as he was inside, then hung the new set of keys up next to the other two sets he was responsible for. (He jury-rigged a pegboard by hammering a few nails into a clear space on his vestibule wall.) Their apartment, H3, was a real shithole. The young husband and wife had seemed well dressed and clean, but they lived in filth. Grayish gruel filled up the metal drain guards in their kitchen sink. Towels, still wet, lay in heaps on the floor. Shut in a closet, crying away, was a tiny, filthy gray kitten. She had no food or drink, and her litter box made Horvath’s eyes water. First, Horvath took the kitten up to his own apartment and cleaned her off. Then he went back down and threw out everything he could pick up in the third apartment — pillows, forks, everything. It looked better when he had finished. He found a few unused bags of litter and food and made the kitten comfortable in his own place, with a makeshift bed near the hissing radiator. He told the doorman about the keys and the kitten, and the doorman said you could never trust these fancy new owners. The doorman must have mentioned Horvath’s name to others in passing, because the stream of visitors increased: people from other floors, people he had never met, people who had nothing to do with the three apartments he was currently “watching over.” At first they arrived with stories and apologies, explained why they were leaving, told Horvath it would only be for a short while. They all wore masklike expressions while telling these stories. Soon, visitors started knocking on Horvath’s door, their faces already rigid, and handing him the keys without a word, just a piece of paper giving the apartment number. None of this bothered Horvath. He earned his living as a translator of technical documents, so his work had not been much affected. He was, now and always, free to accomplish it on his own time. Being woken up at night or early in the morning by residents abandoning the building was not a real inconvenience. No, the only true offense was that fecal, frozen expression on his neighbors’ faces. Horvath had never seen anything like it. Luckily, by the end of the first month, the visits had stopped. Horvath would wake to find, slipped under his door, envelopes containing keys, apartment numbers, and sometimes money. The money he always kept. He felt foolish for having thrown away the money from the cat owners. The new money was not much, but it was enough to pay for cat food and litter. The kitten was growing nicely; she was lean and strong now, with glossy fur and green eyes. One night, during a blizzard, Horvath counted the apartments he had been “given”: thirty-seven, out of one hundred total. His whole floor, except the unit at the opposite end, was now under his supervision, as was an entire other floor: the sixth. The stream of departing residents thinned for a while. Whenever Horvath passed the doorman on the way to the laundry room, the doorman always asked how his new “job” was going, and Horvath always answered that it was going well. Because it was. Horvath had checked each apartment. Nothing major was wrong. The fact that nothing major was wrong allowed him to spend a bit more time exploring. The gray kitten came with him. She liked to jump around as Horvath looked through the kitchen cabinets and closets and examined the furniture and books on the shelves. Sometimes the other residents on whatever floor he happened to be “inspecting” came out and glared at him. In such cases he jingled the keys he’d received until whoever it was went back inside. The other residents got used to him within three weeks, and these glares stopped. A few more residents, including some former glarers, interrupted Horvath on his rounds and gave him their keys; they all said he seemed responsible. Soon he had forty; soon, fifty. The floors below and above him: all empty. He was not worried about the holdouts. If they wanted to stay, let them stay. Since he knew nothing about them, they, in a real sense, failed to exist. Besides, he had material concerns to think about. The floors two below and two above were starting to go his way. He focused his rounds there and came up with the idea of knocking on the doors behind which people still lived, after dinner but well before anyone would be asleep. The residents seemed to know what he had come for. They either said, “No, not yet, we’ll let you know,” or they said, “As it happens, we are leaving,” and gave him the keys. He had so many now that he kept them all on a real pegboard he’d ordered so he wouldn’t have to hammer more nails into his vestibule wall. Each had a label indicating which apartment it belonged to. He kept this pegboard on the wall across from his bed, and every night as he fell asleep, he stared at it. The keys all had expressions, just like their owners. In some cases the same, in some cases different. If you don’t believe that objects wear human expressions, then you know nothing about objects or about human expressions. The key set in the upper rightmost corner — 2C — wore the expression of a syphilitic prince examining his princely chancre. 4H looked like a history professor, with the vacant, thunderous forehead that characterizes the academic class. Others resembled grocers who collaborated with secret policemen, harpists taking long pisses, tax collectors felled by the blow of a peasant’s blue, greasy hatchet. Yes, yes, it all sounds “crazy.” You have never been in the situation Horvath found himself in, however. He liked to watch these faces from his bed, and contemplating their strange variety never failed to help calm him and ease him into sleep. He extended his rounds to the remaining floors with greater confidence. He knocked more boldly and smiled into the faces of the residents when they opened their doors. Some still told him: “Not yet.” Sometimes they smiled back, and sometimes they looked frightened. One couple, oldsters, even whined at Horvath. They begged him to come back and said, “Please, please don’t kick us out — we have nowhere else to go.” Horvath was so shocked that he laughed in their faces, then apologized. He explained that he was not an agent of eviction. But the oldsters went on whining, and the husband actually began to cry, and they said once more that they had nowhere else. Why was he kicking them out, of all people? All along the floor, they said, were younger and healthier people. At this point, Horvath tried to leave, but the old woman detained him. Into his hand she put an envelope, open so that the money inside was visible, and told him that 9B was up to no good, that they had always been unreliable, and that they were planning to leave without paying any rent. Horvath tore his arm away from her cold, shaking grip and headed back to his apartment. He felt dizzy, semi-ill, and the cold stars looked down through the window, and the cold keys looked from the pegboard, for they looked at him just as he looked at them. The envelope stayed on his counter for days before he made up his mind to spend the money, and when the residents of 9B gave him their keys, he found that they were two chubby, almost identical men, smiling and largely silent, incapable of anything close to what the old woman had suggested. But the old woman was gone, her husband too, and nothing could be done to reproach them. The keys came faster and faster after this, it seemed to Horvath. He had almost seventy-five in his possession. More than six floors had fallen under his “administration.” All of this had happened by a simple, subtle, and external process. He dreamed about the apartments under his “administration.” Making his rounds now consumed much of the evening, and he only finished shortly before his customary bedtime. He dreamed about each apartment individually. He was present, walking around, looking at the books, the towels, the dishes, the toys. Sometimes the previous residents were there, sometimes not. Sometimes they spoke to him. Sometimes they ignored him. Sometimes he carried a large key ring with him. Other times it was an old-fashioned hide briefcase. In still other dreams, he wore the keys on silver-plated chains around his neck, and their weight was what dragged him back to wakefulness. These dreams left him well rested, no matter how long they went on and how intricate they were. He was able to attend to his technical translations with more clarity and vigor. More jobs had come in while the residents were leaving: demands to translate medical documents and operating instructions for sanitary technology. Horvath had never paid attention to the content of his translations, and he paid even less attention now. He only wanted to finish as soon as possible so that he could make his rounds with a clear conscience. He regularly met members of the building staff who had come looking for him: the superintendent and his mechanical team, the mail clerk, the security guy for the storage rooms, and the three junior doormen. They wanted to give him their spare keys — to make sure no one else got their hands on them if they, too, had to leave suddenly. The only building staff member who refused to acknowledge Horvath was the head doorman. Before, they had been on friendly terms. Maybe he thought Horvath was using the “outside circumstances” to steal his authority. Maybe he imagined Horvath was collecting tips that, by rights, should have been his. Whatever it was, he refused to speak to Horvath whenever Horvath crossed the lobby, staring instead at the white walls and the building’s doors, which now almost never opened or closed. Horvath tried to explain that everything had happened without his willing it. No luck. The senior doorman would ignore whatever Horvath said. Horvath was not ashamed of haranguing this man. Almost no one came to the lobby except to abandon their apartments. It was the two of them alone. Horvath yelled at the doorman, accused him of insane and conspiratorial thinking, and at last gave up in disgust. If people refused to accept the new circumstances, that was not Horvath’s fault. He had more important issues to deal with — namely, the remaining residents. There were eighteen, mostly confined to the uppermost floors, except for the lone holdout on Horvath’s own floor. The uppermost floors held the penthouses. Rich people lived in them. One was even famous, a banker. Horvath knew that these residents would not rush into his arms. Most of them maintained at least one other residence on a permanent basis, which meant that abandoning an apartment was not a major act but part of the year’s natural course. Also, some of them maintained at least one full-time staff member — a “built-in” caretaker. Though Horvath could not see an immediate way to bring these apartments under his administration, he knew that one would present itself. That’s how the “pure sequence” works, as opposed to the “logical sequence.” Horvath already wandered through these apartments in his dreams. He dreamed of the banker, tall and waxen-eyed, with a mustache and beard that were (more or less) the source of his fame. He dreamed about the maid he had seen walking along the corridor with her arms full of tangled-up yellow bedsheets. One afternoon, just as he was starting his rounds, he heard a story on the radio: domestic workers were no longer permitted to work until things improved. He raced up to the banker’s apartment and found the maid by the door. She saw Horvath coming. She knew about his administration. And she handed over the keys without saying anything. Once the banker and his maid had left, the rest of the rich people soon followed, and they all dispatched their servants to bring the keys to Horvath. These servants brought money as well. Not huge sums but much more than Horvath had collected so far. Except for the maintenance staff, the doormen, and his silent neighbor, Horvath was now alone in the building. At first the thought frightened him. He had never considered this as an outcome, because he had been consumed by the idea of “administration.” And before you leap in to insult him here, let me remind you that you would have behaved the same way. That’s how it goes — when you get what you want, a huge chasm opens, and obliterating mysteries pour through it, exhalations from Styx, Cocytus, whatever. His own apartment filled with a subaqueous weight, all the other apartments pressing down on it. It made his rounds harder, too, because he now felt a rising apprehension whenever he prepared to open a door. It usually managed to drive him back out and send him running down the hall, the way he had as a child after taking the garbage down to the garbage room. The apprehension began to interfere with his “administration.” He discovered that he was delaying his rounds as long as possible. One night, tired of his own cowardice, he forced himself to sit in an apartment while the wild anxiety filled him. He felt like he was choking, like he was drowning. He could not bear it any longer, but he refused to get up; he forced himself to sit on the cold sofa and stare out the window over the ashen roofs. He was sweating. He felt as though he might vomit. And then it ended. It ended in a single instant, like a human life. Horvath stayed where he was. He got more and more tired, inhaling the stale, unfamiliar air. He ended up falling asleep on the sofa. He woke up the next morning unsure of where he was, unafraid. He made himself coffee using the press in the kitchen and drank it while he looked through the window. He opened an odorous can of food for the kitten. After that, the fear no longer afflicted him. One morning, when the hot water to his apartment’s line had been cut off, he showered in a ninth-floor apartment using a different line and shat in the toilet afterward. He discovered a set of barbells in 5J and dragged them out, as well as laid down a yoga mat from 5R. Then, each morning, he exercised for an hour in the hall — grunting, yelling, jumping around. He ran laps back and forth down the corridor, whose length he had previously calculated. Then he showered in 6J. The owners had renovated the bathroom with marble, steel fixtures, a cavernous shower. They had also left behind piled-up towels. Horvath used one and hung it up to dry before making himself tea. He reused the same towel until it began to stink, then took a fresh one. When enough towels got dirty, he carried them over to 7R, where the owners had installed a washer and dryer. 7R was also Horvath’s source for office supplies. Whoever had lived there — and he did not know them, their key had arrived in the night — had also worked from home, and he found a bedroom closet filled with paper, pens, highlighters, and binder clips. 7K, across the hall from 7R, possessed a large library. On the shelves were a number of books in the languages Horvath knew, and he would read stretched out on a leather couch that creaked and whispered under him. After his reading period, he would go and work on whatever technical translation lay before him that day. Then he would eat his lunch in 8S, 4Q, or 5L. In 8S he had discovered a closet filled with canned goods, including smoked oysters, which he had always loved. Filthy, oily flavor, yes, that was what Horvath liked. After lunch, he did more work. The texts seemed to translate themselves. The second half of his workday was a long delight because it brought him closer and closer to the prospect of his evening rounds. He worked out for another hour, showered and changed, then either went up to 8D or down to 2H for dinner. In 8D he discovered a chest freezer full of expensive steaks; in 2D he found an identical model filled with frozen squid, mussels, salmon. Wine he took from either 5L or 2I. In the latter had lived an obese bald man who had given Horvath his keys. This man carried with him a sour, stuffy smell that clung to the money he handed over. His apartment was dim at all hours because he had piled old magazines and newspapers into towers with narrow alleys between them. Following the paths, Horvath had discovered a bedroom that held only bottles of wine stored in bookshelves, on the bed, under it, and in the tub and shower of the attached bathroom. These bottles were quite old and valuable, so Horvath took his time selecting the one he wanted whenever he visited 2I. He did not go often because of the danger that the piles might fall on him. He chose the wines by the labels. He knew nothing about wine. If the label had a horse on it, so much the better, and if it was written in French, then that was good as well. After his meal, he would check in according to the schedule he had developed: one floor every day, with visits paid to all the apartments. He never found anything amiss, but these visits served to better acquaint him with where he might replenish his stores when the supplies in his current “regulars” ran out. They were also good exercise for the gray kitten, whom he brought with him so that she could broaden her horizons and see the variety with which humanity managed to live. The kitten loved the rounds. She would stalk through the empty apartments, and many evenings she killed mice or large roaches that had begun to grow bolder in the stillness. At times, Horvath would encounter the doorman during his evening rounds. The doorman always said that he was not allowed to take the kitten out into the halls, and Horvath’s retort was always that dog owners had been allowed to take their dogs through the halls. The doorman never had an answer for this, but that never stopped him from mentioning the kitten next time. You see what I mean about the power of doormen, and how it is infinitely extensive in time? But the doorman could not call the police, who were dealing with other, more pressing matters. He could not appeal to the condo’s governing board. All its members had left the building. He could not appeal to “Leviathan” (i.e., the aggregate mass of all residents whom all doormen love and hate). Horvath began to enjoy these brief, cold exchanges. He looked forward to seeing the doorman’s wide, neatly shaved face change color with anger, and to seeing the doorman stop walking and raise his thick, hairy index finger as he delivered his bodiless, spiritless reprimand. The doorman started to lose his temper each time Horvath gave that identical response. (He never varied the wording, not once.) The gray kitten went on dancing along the carpet. One evening, the doorman brought one of the junior doormen along. To “catch” Horvath. But to Horvath’s delight, the junior doorman seemed to take his side. When the boss started waving that hairy, trembling finger, and when the deep, raucous voice announced the charges against Horvath, the junior doorman sighed. He chewed his lip. He said that Horvath had a point and that there was really no need for everyone to get so excited. The doorman now began raging at the junior doorman, calling him a backbiter and a traitor. Horvath’s kitten climbed onto the vase-topped table across from the elevator doors; there was an identical table in every hall, an identical vase, an identical mirror above it reflecting another identical hall, into which your doubles might stride at any moment. The junior doorman and his boss were now going at it. The senior doorman grabbed the junior doorman by his green lapels and began to shake him. The junior doorman, his face twisted, shoved the senior doorman away. The senior doorman fell to the ground. He sat there stunned. Then he got up and charged right at Horvath. Horvath tackled him — he was a lot bigger than the doorman, younger as well — and held him on the ground as he struggled. The junior doorman told him to be careful — the old man had been like this for a while. Eventually Horvath let the doorman up. An abyss of time yawned, my god. Like hell. Like the Stygian filths. The senior doorman walked away, and the junior doorman followed him. The next morning, when Horvath went to perform his exercise routine, he found that his equipment was gone. He searched the apartments it had come from: nothing. He ran laps and did calisthenics instead. In the shower in 6J, he thought about what other bullshit the senior doorman had dreamed up. There was more, as Horvath knew there would be. Padlocks had been installed on the chest freezers in 8D and 2D and on the enormous liquor cabinets and wine racks in 5L. But the doorman lacked the courage and equipment to seal the doors, and there were plenty of other apartments that Horvath could find his lunch in. He ate some canned hash from 7I, where a young woman had lived. In searching there, Horvath had found a series of diary volumes, as well as a box of syringes and needles, a length of yellow-brown rubber tubing, and a wooden case holding a few bags of white powder. This powder had the bitter flavor of heroin on the tongue. That evening, instead of doing his rounds, he waited. Then he took the elevator in the basement and headed to the maintenance rooms. The maintenance staff (including the senior doorman) all had complementary apartments on the first floor, and they had long since gone to bed. Horvath opened the maintenance supply room and took what he needed: the only pair of bolt cutters in the closet and two new padlocks. First he locked the supply closet. Then he found the senior doorman’s unlocked supply locker and locked it shut with the second padlock. He carried the bolt cutters back upstairs and cut the padlocks from the chest freezers and liquor cabinets. He was not worried about reprisals. Hardware stores had not been open for weeks, and the doorman had no way of obtaining another pair of bolt cutters. The next day, he went on his rounds as usual. He had no replacements for the dumbbells or yoga mat, so he again did calisthenics and ran laps until he was tired. He showered in 6J and then read in 7K. While he was reading, he heard a modest tap on the door. He looked through the peephole and saw the junior doorman. The junior doorman said that things had gotten a little bit heated and he understood, but would Horvath mind helping them out? Horvath said he would be happy to if the senior doorman apologized in person. The junior doorman went and got the senior doorman. The senior doorman’s voice was shaking as he said that he was sorry. Horvath told him that he couldn’t be understood, that he was speaking too quietly, mumbling like a coward. The senior doorman made as if to lunge at Horvath, but the junior doorman restrained him. Then he repeated the apology in a hard, clear voice. Horvath handed over the bolt cutters and closed the door. That afternoon, once he had finished his work, he drank an entire bottle of brandy in silence in 5L — in the silence and stillness that precede complete intoxication, the sickening clarity of a certain intoxication that reduces each moment to a moment and destroys the “literary quality” of events. In other words, this intoxication — only achievable under certain circumstances — reveals the pure sequence and destroys the logical, temporal sequence. This is the closest human beings can come to understanding god, for whom everything exists as a single, monstrous instant. To look out over the city not “shrouded” in snow, not “covered” in snow, the city not silent and not anything else, either, because attribution cannot exist under these stony conditions, this stony light flowing down into the world and creating each object as you look at it and annihilating it as you look away — yes, my friends, only in this manner can we truly commune with god. Who doesn’t say shit. Horvath didn’t “think” any of this; it brushed past him with its wings. He went on drinking until he emptied the bottle. The gray kitten danced and leapt beside him. Horvath was still drunk when he went back to his apartment, carrying the kitten in the crook of his arm. He had trouble walking. As he reached his floor, he saw the door of the sole remaining resident, his own neighbor, open swiftly and close. He raced over. He wanted to meet this remarkable person, to congratulate them. To offer them their share of his administration. They had earned it! But no one answered his knocks or his doorbell ringing, and he heard nothing moving beyond the door when he pressed his ear to the cold metal. The next day he suffered a terrible hangover. He skipped his exercise routine and took a long shower in 6J. After the shower, he had a look through the living room windows. They looked down onto the street entrance of the building. A white van had pulled up. It was the only moving car he had seen in weeks. Four people in livery came out of the building, followed by three men in gray coveralls. The doormen and the maintenance men. They climbed into the van. The last to go was the senior doorman, who was not wearing his hat. Horvath could see a nude spot on his head amid the still youthful hair the man had kept into late middle age. The van left. Horvath watched for a while to see if the police would come. You couldn’t just drive around without a special permit. But no police came. This meant that Horvath was really alone now except for his neighbor. He went back to the door and knocked again, because he wanted to share the good news and make the resident the same offer: half his administration. Again, no answer. He went downstairs to the maintenance rooms. Just like the other residents, the doormen and maintenance staff had left everything behind. The bolt cutters were back in the supply closet. The propane grills that residents were allowed to use on the roof stood in a row in one large storage space, and piled against the opposite wall were wooden frames holding fresh tanks of propane. Horvath also found spare coveralls (freshly laundered), winter gloves, socks, work boots, and canvas work jackets. The maintenance staff and the doormen had also kept two refrigerators filled with beer. Horvath drank a can right away, even though it was still early in the morning. He drank while he stood in the hot oblong room that held the monitors for the security cameras, and he moved his eyes from one to the other. Empty, empty, empty. There was a camera aimed at the room, he saw, when the view switched to show him standing there swaying with his back to the camera. Nothing new there: heavy, awkward shoulders, scalp reddish and bare, arms dangling like those of a puppet. He tried to peer into the minor infinity extending into the monitor as it appeared on the screen. The view flashed away before he could fish anything from that ghostly, fucked-up depth. Horvath took a cart — one of ten gray canvas carts — filled to the upper edge with tools, winter clothes, and cold beer back to his apartment. He put on the boots, socks, a canvas jacket, a pair of thick gloves. Then he rode the elevator up to the penthouse floor. He had not yet explored there. He chose the banker’s apartment first. In the front room, a vase filled with dried eucalyptus leaves stood on an ebony table under a mirror. In this mirror Horvath and the kitten appeared. She leapt off his shoulder onto the table and then onto the floor. She had trouble negotiating the bare floors and skidded when she tried to stop running. Horvath tucked her into his jacket pocket and then wandered the banker’s apartment for a while. The bedrooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen — they all gleamed with a dental light. This light stuck to the knives, the plates, the toilet handle. Maybe it looks different if you are a rich man; maybe everything stares at you with welcome. Well, what did it matter to Horvath? His administration expanded beyond the bounds of even the richest man. The apartment was freezing. It had a huge terrace along one wall. Cold air was seeping in between the seams of the doors. He stepped out onto the terrace, which was covered with snow. It was the first time he had been outside in weeks. He had a high view of the city. The stores he could see were shuttered. He saw no one in the empty streets except for a small group of police officers. In the building across the way, he saw dark windows. Floor after floor. The residents had left. There was a terrace for that building’s penthouses as well. Standing on the terrace was a figure wrapped up in a long coat, with a hat and scarf. The scarf covered the face. Horvath gestured, waved his arms. The figure on the terrace waved back. The long arms went up and down. The air was fresh and bitter. It smelled like snow. And as he stood there, snow began falling. The kitten leapt out of his pocket and started hopping around on the terrace. Every time she saw a snowflake, she leapt as if in delight or fear. The snow was white and clean. The leftover snow on the sidewalks was white and clean. The snow on the roofs was white and clean. That afternoon, Horvath searched through the apartments under his administration until he found more workout equipment: a set of resistance bands, another yoga mat, and a small treadmill. He brought them all down to the sixth floor and spent two hours exercising. After his shower, he made another extensive search — he was looking for cat supplies. He took all he found and lugged it home, though he dropped some toys off on six so that the kitten could occupy herself while he worked out. He had started taking a notebook with him and marking down anything of interest in any apartment he saw. He made more detailed notes each time he did his rounds. He added maps as well, charting each apartment’s layout and the placement of objects within each room. He added more and more details every day. At first he thought he would soon exhaust the details, but it proved impossible. In fact, it was much harder to fence out the details he did not want to include. These details — objects, colors, qualities, juxtapositions — had as much right to appear in the “administrative rolls” as any other. And he would include them, he would. Not in the first edition but in future volumes. For one volume would never suffice, he saw that now. No, you had to keep going, to keep adding. To classify everything, but to classify it all with a brand-new system, a taxonomy that existed as a circle with infinite circumference and a center located nowhere. Horvath had never considered the possibilities of such diagrams, though he had worked with diagrams all throughout his professional adult life. It had taken the unusual circumstances of his administration to awaken him to their possibilities. Because his administration extended upward, downward, and across the plane; it extended in time as well, back through the pasts of each apartment and into their futures. This annihilated some categories and gave birth to others. He stopped drawing maps and started drawing diagrams. These diagrams linked various apartments, objects, classes, qualities, times, sensations. For instance, one evening he drew:

I won’t bother explaining this diagram beyond noting that it draws the obvious connections between these four objects: that Heidegger stands in a “yielded” relationship with certain sunsets, and the reverse is true for orchids and silver dishes, whereas there is a “degree one” proximity relation between Heidegger and silver dishes and a “degree two” proximity relation between green sunsets and orchids. Horvath did not care if anyone else understood these diagrams. They did not serve an outer purpose; they existed only for him. The trouble was that as long as one apartment remained closed to him, the diagrams, which were by their nature holographic, would always be incomplete and worthless. The knowledge of what the last resident’s apartment contained could throw the knowledge he had already accumulated into disorder. He knew how insane this sounded, and he was glad he did not have to justify himself to anyone. He wrote a short, polite letter explaining to this resident that the two of them were now alone in the building, and while they had never met before — Horvath apologized for this but also said he had wanted to be respectful of a stranger’s privacy — they should meet now because they existed, whether they liked it or not, in a relationship of mathematical precision and importance. He hesitated before finishing the letter. Whoever lived in that apartment had made it clear they were not interested in the outside world. It was likely that they possessed a large enough stockpile to simply wait everything out. Horvath was not a rude person. He hated unnecessary rudeness, and the emptiness of the building would magnify any rudeness into an unthinkable size, a host, mirror facing mirror. (Or something like that. Who knows?) Yet he put it in an envelope all the same, with an inscription from the end of a famous French novel written across the front. I am sure I do not need to tell you what it was. The kitten came with him to deliver the letter. She rode on his shoulder as he squatted down to slide it under the holdout’s door, and he felt her warm breath in his scanty hair. After that he kept to his routine. Morning workouts, afternoon meals, evening explorations. The kitten came with him. He had gotten used to having her as a companion, and he talked to her as he would to another human being — mostly about his findings, his eventual plans for the diagrams, and his thoughts about the last resident. Yet he heard nothing, saw nothing. He found himself reduced to listening at his own door for sounds suggesting that the last resident was walking around. He stared at the lip of light between his door and the sill in the hope that a letter might glide across it. He put tripled efforts into his diagrams. He knew completion was not possible, but he still made every effort, and he found that in making these efforts, he was rewarded with greater subtleties. Consider the following:

Efforts like this can only arrive when the “human mind” functions at a supersubtle, supercosmic level. Horvath reaped some reward for his efforts, as noted, but it was clear that they were ultimately futile unless he could manage to make contact with the last resident and look within their apartment. As for the counterargument that he could simply deduce what the last apartment contained by completing the rest of the diagrams and looking for the most significant lacunae, Horvath had raised and rejected it himself. A compromise, stained with shit and blood. 7K was the one place where Horvath could get a little rest. There, in its library, he could forget the diagrams for a while. He began to extend his daily visits there. He had already exhausted its diagrammatic possibilities, so he could simply lie on the creaking, crying couch and read. True, when he left, the problem would confront him again. True, he was wasting valuable time. This did not matter. He was content to read, to regard it as a form of sleep. One afternoon, he felt disturbed as soon as he entered. The kitten was upset as well, yowling in her high, strangled voice. There was nothing wrong with the place: no major disorder, no break-in. After an initial exploration, he located the source of the disturbance. On the coffee table next to the couch where he usually read was a book. A paperback edition, cheap, of a famous French novel. He had catalogued the apartment’s library exhaustively, and it did not contain this novel. There had been no sign of forced entry, and the apartment was empty except for Horvath and the kitten. Horvath was flipping through the book when he saw the dedication and remembered that these were the words he had scrawled (in English) across the envelope delivered to the last resident: TO THE HAPPY FEW. He raced to the elevator and back to his own floor, holding the book as it flapped with the force of his running. He expected — he did not know. When he reached the closed door, he found that nothing at all had changed. No one answered his knock or the doorbell. He heard nothing when he pressed his ear to the cold metal, and he saw nothing when he lifted up the weather stripping at the door’s bottom and peered through the gap above the sill. Yet it couldn’t be denied. The resident had “spoken” to him. How, exactly, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps they, too, had a key to 7K; perhaps they, too, “did rounds.” He didn’t care about the method the reticent had used. He cared that they had at last responded. From this, Horvath took heart. It seemed to him that he should write another note, but he could not think of what to say. Later that morning, he discovered that the kitchen faucet in 4Q had begun to leak. He called the emergency maintenance number listed in the doormen’s staff room, used when tasks outstripped the ability of the on-site maintenance men. No one answered. Horvath was not surprised, but he let it ring for a while. He went back up to 4Q and shut off the kitchen’s water supply. He could fill pots and pans with water from the bathroom. He also found that one of the windows in 9B had broken — not due to any outside action, the window being too high up for that. No, it looked like a simple case of a fracture caused by excessive cold. The owners of the apartment had manually shut off all heating before they left, and Horvath had not had the presence of mind to turn it back on. He taped over the crack and then taped a blanket over the pane itself before turning the radiator valves back on. At night, when he got back to his desk, he found that he had produced a volume of diagrams exceeding his estimates. He needed a better way to store and organize them. At the moment, they stood in four ragged piles that he had to rebuild at least once a night because drafts or the kitten knocked them over. He remembered a filing cabinet in 7L and brought that up. He discarded the papers within it, which appeared to contain poems or similar trash, after giving a sheaf to the kitten. His diagrams filled the emptied cabinet almost entirely, but at least this got them off the floor and gave him a little space to store new ones. He had trouble sleeping. There were long nights when he half-slept or dozed until dawn, longer nights when his dreams would not leave him alone. When he dreamed about dreaming, for example, or dreamed that he was awake, or dreamed that the ashes of Polish springtime had drifted down and covered everything outside, mingling with the broken, reprehensible snows. And for those wondering why the leaky faucet didn’t “count” as an answer from the last resident, and why the fractured window didn’t express their response to Horvath’s letter, let me say again that you wonder this only because you are unlike Horvath. Horvath was new to administration, but he was no amateur. He knew what an answer looked like, and he was not going to be taken in by amor fati. He avoided 7K because he had no interest in committing the “sin of hope” either, the sin that contaminates and destroys everything. When he heard noises that might be footsteps outside his door, he did not even get out of bed, because he knew they were deceptions. When in the doormen’s staff room he thought he detected movement on the screen aimed down his hallway, he turned his back. Let those shadows flit by, let them dance along the stony walls. They had nothing to do with Horvath. Besides, shortly after this, the kitten got sick. Horvath didn’t know how it had happened. She was tired; she slept almost all the time. She stopped playing with him, and she hardly ate anything. Horvath tried to convince himself that it was nothing. A cold, a passing stomach flu. Young animals got sick all the time. Yet he knew what it was from the first moment he saw the dull gleam in the kitten’s eyes. He tried everything. Feeding her soft food. Keeping her wrapped up in blankets. When she got too weak to go to her water bowl, he gave her water with a spoon and then with an eyedropper. Every morning he brought her clean sheets, taken from 3I and 6N, which had the best bedding, because she could no longer go to the litter box to piss or shit, and he painstakingly cleaned her off with damp, warm towels throughout the day. The kitten did not wail or cry. She was largely silent, looking at Horvath with her dull eyes like coals, like some underearthly hatred. He gave no thought to his own health, though he knew you could get sick from animals. He spent all the time with her that he could, keeping her on his lap while he worked. Soon she became so ill that she could not even eat the porridge he had reduced her dry food to with water. He began giving her beef and chicken broth through the eyedropper. He tried to find some explanation or hope in the diagrams. This illness had to fit in somewhere. Yet he could never make it fit. He could not find the correct directional terms or master the subtle relational effects that diagramming this terrible occurrence would have required. He started searching the apartments for some type of general “cat medicine.” (He knew even as he looked that the idea was moronic, that no such thing existed, yet he kept looking.) He started with 3H, where he had discovered the kitten. He looked everywhere, hurled down everything from the cabinets and cupboards. He looked under the sofa cushions and in a box hidden under the bed, where he found nothing but photographs of empty rooms, or of the same empty room, with a stain on the carpet that moved, or seemed to move, between each picture. The kitten got sicker. Horvath tried to prepare himself for her death. After all, why should it matter? He had tried to do his best, to give her a good life, to save her, and he could hardly pretend that she had been his lifelong best friend; they had known each other for less than four months, and there was no point in mourning someone you had known for only a few months, especially because she was an animal. Horvath, however, knew the truth about animal suffering. That it is unspeakably worse than human suffering. Animals cannot lie to themselves about freedom or redemption. They cannot rely on memory to save them. Suffering exists for animals as a total universe from which there is no escape. He went on trying and trying to save the kitten. He did not dare leave her alone, not even for one moment. He carried her with him in the pocket of the jacket he had taken from the doormen’s staff room. He also carried two bottles, one of water and one of broth, and an eyedropper. The kitten shit and pissed in the pocket, and it leaked down onto Horvath. He didn’t care. There was no one around to smell it. Let the smell fill up these empty hallways and the whole building. In fact, let the piss-and-shit smell reign at the highest peak of administration. The kitten began vomiting too, and this stained the jacket, his clothes, the carpets in the hallways, and the ottomans he sometimes let the kitten sleep on while he performed his rounds. Again, it did not matter to Horvath. Let the vomit rise up and flood the world. No matter what he did, he was unable to escape the dull fire of the kitten’s gaze — in mirrors, in windows, in those rarer and rarer moments when the kitten was awake. He dreamed about her eyes as well, as you would expect. The eyes floated in dimness, or they lit up a room where a stain moved across the carpet like some filthy Bolshevistic paramecium. The kitten weighed almost nothing at this point. Horvath let her sleep on his chest at night so that he would know right away if she stopped moving and died. This turned his sleep into vigil, because he was afraid, as noted, of leaving the animal alone. Every night he would lie down with the kitten on his chest and look into her eyes until they closed, and then his heart and body would contract, and he would start to shiver, and he would wait to see if the kitten was still breathing. At times he dared to put a finger on her prominent rib cage, to feel her thin bones pushing up against her skin through her warm fur. Other times he did not dare. One night, he awoke from a dream of the kitten’s eyes and of the paramecium, and the kitten was dead. Or so he thought at first. Then he realized that she was hardly breathing at all. A shaking panic took hold of his limbs. He flapped his hands back and forth like a child, and tears slid from his eyes into the cavities of his ears. He saw, next to his bed, his pen and pad, and because he did not know what else to do, he picked them up and — without disturbing the kitten — began to write. To describe what was happening, and to beg for her survival and for his own forgiveness. (He did not know what his crime was, but he begged all the same.) When he was done, he signed his missive. Or maybe his hand signed it on its own. The signature read M. Horvath, Administrator. He cradled the kitten, still breathing, in one arm and put the letter in an envelope with the other hand. It was hard, and harder still to seal it. Across the envelope he wrote down the dedication from the French novel (in English, again). He got up and took the kitten and the letter out into the hall. He knelt down and pushed the letter under the last resident’s door. Once it was inside, Horvath failed to resist the temptation to lift the weather stripping. As if the resident might give him a glimpse of themselves so easily. Well, nothing happened. The letter lay there looking huge in his foreshortened vision. He blew through the slit, and the letter moved a little farther into the apartment. This made him panic that he had overdone it. He got up and ran away from the door like a child. Then he ran back and lay down on the floor and put the kitten on his chest. He promised himself he would not fall asleep, but he did fall asleep, and he dreamed of the eyes and the carpet. When he woke up, he was cold, and his back and legs hurt. He had trouble moving his arms and shoulders. A new terror swept through him. The kitten was gone. Then he saw her. She was walking on her own, slowly and clumsily but alive. Walking down the hall toward him. A cry tore itself from his throat, and he offered her broth from the dropper. She ate greedily and with more ease than she had shown since the beginning of her illness. Horvath banged on the door, cried and pleaded for the resident to come out. He shouted his thanks through the cold metal and left warm tears on the cold metal.

Brandon Taylor: “The story can’t be so loyal to one character that it betrays another”

On a snowy morning this March, I picked up Brandon Taylor from his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, in New York City, and we drove up the Hudson Valley to Art Omi, an artist residency and cultural community where Guernica hosted “Back Draft Live,” a writing workshop on revision. Our conversation with the workshop’s fifteen writers focused on Brandon’s new book, The Late Americans, which is set in and around the MFA program in poetry at the University of Iowa. The book — a sectional, multi-character take on a campus novel — contains a spectacular examination of the challenges of making art. Our conversation turned toward when art-making demands saying no — to conventions, to manuscript feedback, to writing itself.

— Adam Dalva, Guernica senior fiction editor

Guernica: Your latest novel, The Late Americans, had an extreme process of revision. I know that it almost blew up your relationship with writing. Will you tell us about that?

Brandon Taylor: I finished the first draft in 2019, and it ruined my life for three years. I stopped writing in 2021 because the book was giving me so much trouble, and I didn’t write another piece of fiction for a year. So this book has taught me many things about revision — within the narrative and also within my soul. This book is about a period in your life that doesn’t feel up for revision — when you have to make those first seemingly permanent decisions about what you’re going to do when school ends, and suddenly you have to make a choice about where to live, how to live, who to live with, in ways that feel permanent.

Guernica: One character in the novel goes through a week of despair trying to write a poem for a workshop. And as we just heard, when you wrote this, you were going through your own kind of despair. I’m wondering if you could share what happened that let you finally gain access to The Late Americans?

Taylor: I was sure I was never going to write again, so I needed a different creative outlet, because I missed being creative. I took up film photography. And that just created a lot of space in my mind. I made peace with the idea that I was letting go of writing forever.

Then I had a conversation with a friend, Lee Pace, where I was talking about this book, and he asked me, what is giving you so much trouble? And I said that I just feel that I don’t understand this character. I’m so afraid that readers won’t care about him because he’s a poet. And my friend said, well, does anybody care about him? Does he care about himself?

I was like: Oh! Does he? Do I? Am I worried about the reader because I don’t care about him? Why don’t I care about him? And I realized it’s because he feels like a fictional character. He doesn’t feel like a person. So what would make him feel like a person? I’m like, I need to give that boy a job — so I was very Protestant, but I love when characters have jobs. That changed the whole tenor of the book. His concerns around art and commerce went from being an abstract thing to being a material reality.

Guernica: Is it common in your work that the texture and wholeness of your characters changes from first draft to later drafts? Or was that unique to The Late Americans?

Taylor: My characters come to me as outfits first — like, literal clothing outfits. An Oxford under a denim jacket, black jeans, scuffed boots. And I ask myself, who’s wearing this? And where are they wearing it? So, in the first drafts, the characters tend to be quite full in terms of their personalities. In the second or third, I start layering. Let’s say a character, in my first draft, goes to a bar and meets somebody and then they go rob a bank together. That’s the first draft. The second draft, he goes to the bar and then he has a conversation. It’s not just a conversation with the guy he’s going to rob a bank with, but with the bartender who tells him this weird story about a donkey he knew when he was a child. Then a third draft would be the story about that donkey, which comes back again at the end in some way. I like to treat my drafts like an improv machine — what if this, also?

I also try to do a thing that Colm Tóibín talks about —if you think you know where the scene is going, choose to go in the opposite direction. This forces you to be more reactive, and it forces the scene to feel more alive. I think sometimes we don’t do that because we’re afraid for the beautiful balance of the story. But that is your job, to disturb it. You are really writing when you’re afraid that you’re going to ruin the thing.

Guernica: One thing Lorrie Moore taught me once —I had written an MFA workshop story where characters get in a car and then they drive somewhere else and they get out of the car and she said, “Adam, you can just skip the whole car ride. You can just say, they drove there.” And I was like, what? It was totally shocking. That is something that still happens a lot in my story drafts —I write two pages, then realize I could have just said: “later.”

Taylor: I call it “trite physicality” — physical details that do nothing for a story at all.

Guernica: Do you have examples?

Taylor: There are some things that, if you find yourself describing them, just take them out. Take them out! Like drinking, the experience of drinking. Unless it’s going to burn their mouth so badly that they’ll never forget it. Sweat. Even sweat dripping down a cold glass of water — any sweat. Sex sweat — we don’t need to know, unless it’s doing something. Like, if the sweat has an odor, that’s cool. Descriptions of light.

Guernica: Any light? Not any light at all?

Taylor: No. Unless you’re recreating a Hopper painting in your work. Light dancing on a lake? No. What else? Place settings. “He lifted the fork…” No. Rummaging in bags, fishing things out of pockets, padding across floors. Never going upstairs, never going downstairs, unless the person is falling to their death from the stairs.

Guernica: Has your work as an acquiring editor at Unnamed Press affected your approach to revising things like stairs and light?

Taylor: I often think my revision process as an editor is to help the writer be brave enough to make the choice that they know they need to make when they don’t yet feel courageous enough to do it. And a lot of my own revision work is just that — “you know what you need to do. It’s staring you, staring at you from the corner. How can we work our way up to being brave enough to face it?”

Guernica: Has there been a time when you had to be courageous about a big scary thing?

Taylor: In one of my stories, the guy who the main character is in love with sexually assaulted someone. And I just kept sort of circling that — maybe he did something. Maybe not. And I realized: I’m trying to protect that character. But the girl he assaults is also a character, and I’m not protecting her. I’m not doing her story any favors. Like, the story can’t be so loyal to one character that it betrays another. The characters can betray each other all they want, but the story itself has to be truthful. Otherwise, I’m just exploiting a gross harm done to a young woman character. I can’t just be out here trafficking in really horrible ideas about violence. So I had to pull up my big boy pants and say, okay, he assaulted that girl. And I have to be honest about that. I have to be as honest and clear about that as I am honest and clear about the other kinds of violence that happened in the story.

So that took a lot of — shadow work, is what my friend calls it. The shadow work of confronting yourself. A lot of the revision for that story was just realizing the ways that I was being dishonest and trying to wring out all the dishonesty I could. You have to say: okay, I’m afraid of that. Why am I afraid of it? The question that always helps me defeat that villain is: am I being truthful? Dishonesty is not kindness. It’s not generosity; it’s not moral. You just confront the thing and let it be the thing. It’s what Trilling calls moral realism and what D.H. Lawrence calls moral fiction: fiction that preserves the true relation between things and doesn’t put its finger on the scale.

Guernica: Where else does fear interfere with good writing?

Taylor: I think about it with dialogue. Dialogue is this rare moment where a character is able to say to another person exactly what they’re thinking, without the trappings of narrative. It’s the one true relation between characters. The one irrefutable act. They said that thing they said, and they can’t take it back. And I think that irrevocability leads us to write bad dialogue, because we’re afraid that the character can’t take it back.

One of my teachers said that good dialogue is like two characters standing on other sides of a field blasting cannons past each other. That’s the way it should feel. Like people shooting cannon balls that are just missing and landing off to the side and blowing up the world behind you. So one thing I like to do is go back and pick out random lines of dialogue and delete them and then see what is changed about the contour. By plucking out these three random lines of dialogue from anywhere in the scene, from any character, have I destabilized the meaning of the scene? And very often what you’ll find in the first draft is that you haven’t, because you haven’t written any actual dialogue. You just put stuff between quotes.

Guernica: I’ve been thinking about how The Late Americans also explores the difficulties of writing while taking writing classes. What advice do you give to writers to try to withstand that intensity?

Taylor: In my most dire moments at Iowa, I would always ask myself: Why am I upset? Nobody gets to tell you what your work is. Nobody gets to tell you what to do. MFA workshops can be really helpful. All workshops can be helpful, but at the end of the day, it’s you and the page. That is the thing that matters the most. I would leave my MFA workshops and throw the feedback into the trash. I wouldn’t even let it into my house. Because it was not helpful to me. You get to decide what’s helpful to you. You’re a grownup. You have agency. I have agency. I can just ignore this. And so I would doodle while I was being workshopped; I would just make these anxiety doodles. Be present. Be respectful. But if there’s something that doesn’t feel useful, it’s okay. This too shall pass.

Spring Without Flowers

In Mukteshwar, a village perched 2,200 meters above sea level in the Indian Himalayas, rhododendrons announce the arrival of spring. When their effusive red blossoms unfurl over the dry winter landscape, and when dozens of species of smaller flowers burst into bloom at the same time, Phul Dei can begin. Children, especially girls, set out in small groups early in the morning to pluck flowers from the forest and scatter them on their neighbors’ doorsteps. The flowers are an offering to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and prosperity. They are believed to bring good luck, as people seek blessings for a full harvest and the well-being of their families. When the girls head back, they offer a few flowers at local springs, with a prayer for a gentle summer.

Or at least that’s what Phul Dei is supposed to be like. When I arrived in Mukteshwar this April, at what should have been the height of flower season, something was clearly wrong. “There are neither children here, nor flowers,” my friend Mohan Karki said when he greeted me. He’d spent the morning hunting for flowers in the forest behind his house and returned with only a single fistful of blossoms to place near the entrance of his cottage.

The flowers that once reliably bloomed in March — which is when Phul Dei falls on the calendar — are now blooming in February. By the time the festival ends in mid-April, the flowers are nearly gone, which is a problem, for the people and their forests: The rhododendron is a keystone species, acting like glue by holding the habitat together. Recent studies have found that the rhododendron is showing a “precocious flowering pattern” because of an increase in average annual temperature in the Himalayas. With future temperature projections climbing ever higher, scientists believe the rhododendron could move toward higher elevations to cope. If that happens, the birds and insects that depend on its blossoms at lower altitudes would lose their essential food source; they would be forced to migrate, or go extinct. This could have devastating repercussions throughout the Himalayan ecosystem.

Mohan’s heart is broken by the diminished blooms, but he tells me that not everyone shares that point of view. People content themselves with a few random flowers to perform the rituals at their homes. Instead of marking the arrival of spring with ritual, the village marks it with the arrival of thousands of tourists, who flee the burning summers in the lowlands — and who spend copiously in the highlands. Villagers may miss the ritual, but the appreciate the income. Mohan, on the other hand, feels the loss.

“They don’t realize what we are losing,” Mohan said. “It’s not just the flowers. It’s the kinship that holds us together that we are losing.”

Blood Ritual

The white, burnished body of St. Sebastian, bound to a tree and riddled with arrows. He was startling to look at: sinewy, tightly coiled, naked save for a loincloth knotted loosely about his waist. His head was thrown back in agony, or his head was thrown back in pleasure; it seemed the ambiguity was the point. In my world he was what passed for a hero in a storybook, a glossy entry in my first book of saints. This was in the early aughts, in Catholic school in the south of Manila. Religion, whether or not one subscribed to it, was the most durable thread in the social fabric. I spent my days professing God’s love but believing in his wrath. I was seven.

Difference, deviation, felt inborn. In the Philippines, where Catholics make up 80 percent of the population, my Protestant family was an anomaly. Protestant — the very word broadcast rebellion. “It’s idolatry to pray to Mary, to pray to the saints,” my father said. “The Bible tells us to pray only to God.” Still, because most schools were Catholic, he permitted a degree of assimilation. I learned about idols and how to worship them, learned canon law and how to pray the rosary. My school was run by the Lasallian Brothers, an order of men who weren’t quite priests but took vows of celibacy and wore habits. We heard Mass every first Friday. Each noon the Angelus would spill out from the campus speakers, and for a minute we all stopped what we were doing, fell silent.

Later in the day, I came home to a tradition most of my classmates had never even heard of. Catholicism was too entrenched in the culture, the scar of three hundred years of Spanish rule. Ours was a newer faith, a legacy of American colonialism introduced to the islands at the end of the nineteenth century. Though my mother was born into a Catholic family, she joined my father’s evangelical church after marrying him. At home, ritual and tangible implements of worship were not so enshrined as the content of scripture. As a corrective to the compromise he made on my education, my father enforced his religion as though it were besieged on all sides. We never missed Sunday service. Every night, my parents, my brother, and I had a Bible study session. Good praxis seemed to entail aesthetic abstinence: my family’s church, where my father was a founding member, had no paintings, no statues, no images. There was only an aluminum cross at the altar, no Christ hanging from it.

And so I craved a rupture in the banality of my world, or as the faithful call it, an apparition from heaven. I wanted to measure the dimensions of the divine, trace its shape, know its color. The book of saints brought me closer. It was a requirement for class — a paperback volume, compact and sturdy, with glossy pages that caught the light when I turned them. Inside was a litany of lives the Catholic Church had deemed holy, a procession of long-dead believers who, through selfless devotion, had distinguished themselves from the rest of the flock. Each saint was accompanied by a full-color image, usually a painting by one of the old masters. They were classed according to how they lived: bishop, virgin, confessor. But it was the martyrs, the saints who were tortured and killed for their Christianity, who captivated me most.

After class the girls played Chinese garter, and the boys played rough, but I was a boy who did not like to play rough. Instead I’d sit alone in a corner of the school gym with my book. Impelled by a macabre curiosity, I’d scan each profile for causes of death: St. Bartholomew, apostle of Christ, flayed. St. Agnes, ancient Roman celibate, beheaded. And taking up a whole page, the Roman soldier St. Sebastian, pure and firm and penetrated.

It was too much, the sight of them, too much for a child to make sense of. In the paintings, most saints were shown in the throes of torture — the hot coals about to melt flesh, the sword about to pierce bone. Yet bloodshed was rendered with restraint, as if in testament to each subject’s impending immortality. A mouth might be screaming in pain, or limbs twisted in recoil, but a martyr would be haloed in light, attended to by angels, flung grandly into the astonishing drama of their own mutilation. There I was, deprived all my life of beauty and then suddenly confronted by its most fearsome iterations. For that was what they were, the martyrs. Beautiful, even at the height of their pain.

I do not mean beauty in the way faces and landscapes are sometimes called beautiful. I am talking about the beauty that overwhelms and devastates, that leaves one haunted. In Greek myth, the mortal Semele bursts into flames upon seeing Zeus in divine form. In the Torah and the Bible, Moses asks to see the face of God but is told that he wouldn’t survive the sight. Looking at the paintings of the martyrs, I felt like I was skirting the edge of some terrible sublime. It was the heady admixture of Thanatos and Eros, the primal urge to steal a glance at the festering wound. To look away would be to abandon my search for the eternal.

St. Sebastian’s ravaged body: still alive, still beautiful. The image in my book was an oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens, completed circa 1618. On the opposite page was a summary of Sebastian’s legend. He was a secret Christian in third-century Rome, when refusal to worship the pagan gods was considered treason. He was a favorite of Emperor Diocletian, who ordered him executed by archers when the truth came out. Rubens imagines him in a convulsion, or in a trance. Whereas other male saints in the book were dressed in religious habits, Sebastian was a nude Greek statue. It was the first time I looked at something and knew I had to look furtively. From then on, looking became something to do on high alert. If you looked at the wrong thing, it could look back, petrify you.

This was before I discovered my desire for men, before the panic and the shame and the intoxicating peril of looking at a body whose beauty rang out like a condemnation. Later I would look at the paintings and see clearly how they constellated my childhood neuroses, gave neat expression to an unarticulated problem. But that came after. Then, there was only a boy with a vague guilt taking root inside him, the dawning conviction of sin, the presentiment of hell.

One had to suffer in the correct way. This was what was left in the end, after one distilled all those school lessons to a caustic reduction. Like a photonegative to the perfect suffering of the martyrs, the book’s inside cover had a sprawling painting of sinners in torment, their faces creased in remorse, their bodies impaled by spikes erupting from the rocky red ground. In this image my formative terrors were born, and I understood what adults meant when they spoke of the fear of the Lord.

“My name is Lorenzo, like Saint Lorenzo Ruiz.” The uniform for boys: a white short-sleeved button-down and trousers the color of gravy. My hair was short and combed flat, cut an inch above the ears. Our full names were stitched to our breast pockets. I shared my name with the first Filipino saint, a missionary who’d traveled to Japan and was executed in 1637 by a shogunate wary of Catholic imperialism. Our teachers liked to tell the story. Saint Lorenzo Ruiz was forced to gulp down water and then had his stomach trampled on by soldiers. He had needles inserted beneath his fingernails. He was hung upside down until his head yielded to the pressure. I imagined this to be a bleak, wet scene. There was no grandiose European painting of Saint Lorenzo Ruiz; the book had only a small colored-pencil sketch of his face. My parents didn’t name me after him, but I thought that making the association clear could mitigate my religious difference.

Except nobody called me Lorenzo. It was my last name spat out like an epithet, or it was bakla, Tagalog for homosexual. I did not think I was, but everyone had decided so. My father called my voice “malambot” — soft, frail, feminine. I drew women in big, diaphanous dresses; it embarrassed him. At school, my classmates made fun of my mannerisms, ganged up on me and jeered, sometimes hit me. Most of my friends were girls. There was one boy I befriended — people said we were the same, but the two of us never talked about it. He wanted to be a priest when he grew up. I was a Protestant and could not share that dream with him.

I didn’t tell my parents about the bullying; my father would only blame my behavior. I endured everything silently, never fought back. Turn the other cheek — that is what Jesus and the martyrs did. Their persecution formed an idiom for otherness I could take refuge in. The alternative was to probe the mystery of my difference, look closer, surrender to the grave thought that my ostracism was biblically warranted.

“Lorenzo.” My pastor’s clean, rubbery face was backlit by white. The microphone in his hand was tilted toward me. “Who is your favorite character in the Bible?” I was a finalist in our church’s Sunday school quiz bee. It was between me and his daughter, and we were being interviewed before the last round. “Job,” I said, “because he had great faith in God.” I saw the congregation nodding all around me, my parents beaming. I’d been fascinated by that narrative ever since I’d first heard it. Satan approaches God with a proposition: he will test the world’s most righteous man and see if his virtue is steadfast. God agrees, and Satan strikes down Job’s children, kills his livestock, and infects him with painful boils. Job laments his misfortune but never curses God, who in the end restores him. It was a book that offered no apologies.

My mother told me about the Rapture. She was reading the Left Behind books, a series of Christian apocalypse novels, and I became convinced I wouldn’t be among the elect. During this time I’d imagine spots of dirt appearing on my hands and arms, marks of the devil out to get me, and in my mind’s eye I’d superimpose on the spots the face of Christ, will the curse away, purge myself. I anticipated the day I would wake up in an empty home. I imagined the kinds of torture I’d endure eternally, once Judgment Day came and passed and death ceased to be the terminus of pain.

This guilt was strange because its root was so obscured. My homosexuality was barely nascent, a present but formless punctuation mark in a life predating language. I did not comprehend it and therefore couldn’t name it as sin. Yet I carried its weight around my neck, was reminded of it in solitude or in conversation. Later in life I would read Simone Weil and understand what she meant when she spoke of malheur. The word is translated as affliction, though this is an imperfect analogue. Malheur is much graver than affliction; it “makes God appear to be absent for a time. . . . A kind of horror submerges the whole soul.” She describes it as “an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain.”

The fear of pain, according to Weil, can be so psychologically rending as to plummet one into this frame of mind. For what truly defines malheur isn’t corporal sensation but a sense of doom. A consciousness keyed to this pitch is corrosive. It makes a wreck of a saint. “Evil dwells in the heart of the criminal without being felt there,” Weil writes. “It is felt in the heart of the man who is afflicted and innocent.” Yet she doesn’t consider the martyrs to have been afflicted. They understood why they were being sent to the executioner; they saw clearly the cause of their pain. Malheur, instead, is what was felt by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane or Job at the nadir of his suffering: a disturbed, confounded helplessness, the soul of an innocent suddenly and inexplicably invested with the world’s malignance.

Weil’s own identity was a contradiction — a Catholic Jew. Her Jewishness, her ancestry, stood at odds with her chosen faith, though she distanced herself from the Catholic establishment and refused to be baptized. She was a thinker well attuned to her particular strangeness. Her sentences pulse with a rebellious devotion. One imagines her in the men’s clothes she often wore, a queered prophet. She felt the pain of others like a tremor: as a child she fasted in solidarity with oppressed workers; later she would starve herself to death in solidarity with citizens of Nazi-occupied France. Suffering was her form of worship, the purest way of attaining knowledge. I recognized her obsession with self-flagellation. She did not need to explain further.

In those days as a boy with my book of saints, the dirty feeling did not seem entirely unconventional. Around me penance was a national obsession. People filled confessionals, inched their way up the beads of rosaries like these were ropes back to heaven. In Pangasinan, a province north of Manila, fanatics flogged and crucified themselves during the Holy Week, a practice the Vatican discouraged. I recall watching on the news one of these rituals, transfixed. “They don’t know they’re already saved,” my father said behind me. We did not believe in confession. We confessed straight to God, named each of our sins in prayer, and got forgiveness in exchange. That was supposed to be the clean beauty of it. My fatal flaw was that I lacked the temperament for moral diplomacy. I wanted the animal laid out on the table for slaughter.

I looked at Saint Agatha in the book of saints, a third-century Sicilian who pledged her virginity to Christ and, when she rejected the hand of a Roman prefect, was sentenced to have her breasts removed with pincers. I was astounded by her power, by the notion of a woman disowning her cultural role. Her refusal to marry, I imagined, belied an irremediable distaste for men. The painting in the book was by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. A handmaiden covers her chest with a bloodied garment. An attendant carries her breasts on a platter. And Saint Agatha looks upward with trembling lips to a halo encircling her head — she is blessed, she is beatified. “The false God changes suffering into violence,” Weil claims. “The true God changes violence into suffering.” In my world, pain was carved up into these two dominions, and you wanted to be a sufferer worthy of grace.

Worthy meaning beautiful. Painted as they were in such an ornate style, the martyrs were wonders of physicality, fluent speakers of the same wordless dialect. All billows of cloth and precious poise, poise I found familiar. Like Saint Sebastian’s mouth, which was always open, delicate, an oyster slick with the sea. His neck turned softly to the side, the limpness in his clavicle like limpness in a wrist. I had never known a man to glory in submission. Dimly I apprehended in him the queerness in my carriage. He drove a wedge into my received worldview; to look at him was to court epistemic collapse.

It surprises many that Sebastian did not, in fact, die by the arrows. According to the legend, he was found, nursed back to health, and then returned to confront Diocletian, who finally had him clubbed to death. The image of his first torture has eclipsed this ending, and Sebastian’s unlikely survival of it made him a popular saint to invoke against the plague in the Middle Ages. In the succeeding centuries, however, his effect has often been more seductive than curative. There is another painting of the martyr, finished in 1525 by the Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Here the arrows tear through Sebastian’s neck, thigh, and side, jagged disruptions to the graceful arc his body makes. A palpable eroticism pervades the painting — his loincloth is translucent, the smooth sheen of his face crowns a toned soldier’s body. It’s an eroticism aware of itself, confident in its brazenness. Bazzi was widely known as Il Sodoma, a nod to his reputation as a sodomite. The biographer Giorgio Vasari writes that he embraced the epithet: “In this name, far from taking umbrage or offense, he used to glory, writing about it songs and verses in terza rima.”

More than three hundred years later, the English poet John Addington Symonds saw this painting on a trip to Florence. “This is a truly demonic picture in the fascination it exercises and the memory it leaves upon the mind,” he wrote of the artwork’s transgressive force, a piece of pornography smuggled onto the altar. Symonds would have known that arousal is involuntary; Victorian constraints did not keep him from having sex with men. Desire is dictatorial, locking the imagination in a stranglehold. The entire eye is consumed by its ghost image. It does not leave.

A corollary: there are encounters that determine the course of a life. Three years after Symonds published this piece of writing, a young Oscar Wilde took a trip to Genoa and was enchanted by a different Sebastian. It was the one finished circa 1615 by Guido Reni, another homosexual, and shows a more muscular version of the saint with his hands tied above his head. Pain here appears merely as a shadow. Reni barely bothers to depict blood: desultory streaks of red, almost invisible, can be seen on the arrows, which look more like playthings. Later, Wilde would describe a cape worn by Dorian Gray as an “ecclesiastical vestment” that is “starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian.” After Wilde served a sentence in England for sodomy, coded then as “gross indecency,” he moved to Paris and became obsessed with reentering the Catholic Church. Often, when signing his name, he would identify himself by the alias Sebastian Melmoth. He died three years later, destitute and depressed.

Time changes, images flatten, a sensibility persists. The same Reni painting Wilde loved becomes a focal point in Yukio Mishima’s 1949 autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask, wherein the male narrator masturbates to an art book reproduction. Tennessee Williams’s 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer features a tragic hero named Sebastian Venable, a homosexual damned to a morbid death. And in the early aughts, in the south of Manila, I see Sebastian in my book of saints and am sealed into a tacit genealogy. A figure created and recreated by queer men, malleable enough to serve a series of assorted functions: allegory, idol, avatar. But always that nebulous fatalism, the desire branded by the memory of punishment. There were times in those days when I wondered if it would always be there, that dark cloud, and if I’d ever be absolved of it.

When I was fourteen, I found that men became difficult to look at, their bodies more real and more forbidden than any saint in heaven. Homosexuality in our church was spoken of as a perversion, a social cancer. One of my classmates joked that anyone who touched me would turn gay. There was a religion teacher I liked; one time in class she went off on a tangent and said she didn’t think gay people were sinners. When she disappeared, there were whispers that the school had fired her for being involved with another woman in the faculty.

By this time, the book of saints was no longer required for class. My mother put it in a box in the attic, and I never saw it again. Still, the images flickered in my mind. I tried to want women, to no avail. My sexuality felt like some arbitrary curse, a bargain struck between God and the devil. Each time I masturbated, I told myself I was letting the sin out — there would be nothing left. Alone in bed, I’d pray for the feeling to pass. My body terrified me. I watched it from the outside like a castaway.

We get the word passion from the Latin pati, to endure. In the late Middle Ages, it became shorthand for Christ’s protracted torture and crucifixion, as in the passion of Christ. During the Renaissance, the word was extended to the martyrs, cementing the notion of a moral ideal predicated on suffering. In today’s vernacular, it’s been largely stripped of its religious connotations, cheapened by offhand use. Yet the truth remains that every transgressive pleasure, illicit and shame-laden, contains an echo of that original pang. The word that changed faces in the night — I felt myself at the nexus of its every resonance.

In 2009, I attended for the first time my church’s youth camp, a summer retreat where all the teenagers went up into the mountains south of Manila. Most of the boys were older than me, headed off to college or already in it, and in our dormitory, they’d discard the formalities of city life and lounge around with their shirts off, unaware of the power in their taut arms, their firm chests. The boy I liked best was tall and sculpted. When he smiled, the skin under his eyes puffed. He treated me like a child, which frustrated me, but he was also amused, I think, by how little I knew of the world. His parents had given him a Hebrew name that meant God has seen.

I did not know what to do with myself, did not know how to stymie the sweet twist in my stomach every time I snuck a glimpse of him. Up in the mountains the air was cooler, the terrain mysterious, our families far away. For breakfast we’d have tocino and tuyo with rice and fried eggs, maybe some Milo in Styrofoam cups. We would sing and pray; we would hike through the tamed wilderness of the camp and balance ourselves on bamboo bridges. One afternoon I was swaying in a hammock, and slowly I realized he was there behind me, rocking it gently. Our conversations were stilted; in my head I salvaged every line. When he injured a foot while running, it was my turn to care for him. He leaned on me until it got better. No boy I liked had ever displayed such warmth. He existed in those few short days as the distortion that gives the lie to the mirage, leads the way out of it. My shepherd boy. I would follow him at a remove if it meant I could see his back.

The mountains in scripture are a liminal space, a tier of creation in which the boundary between God and animal becomes porous. In this rarified air, the clamor of the world is pared to a pin drop. The truth is made simple and plain; one penetrates into the fiber of it. Seven years after the beginning of the fever, I stood in solace with my friend, and beauty did not seem so threatening. He gestured for me to approach, and each survival mechanism went flat; I approached. In that moment the body ceased to be a guarantor of damnation. It did not matter that he meant more to me than I ever would to him. It was enough to be two creatures in congress, the world’s activity frozen as in a still life.

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham’s wayward grandson Jacob is visited by a stranger at his campsite. The man wrestles him until daybreak, and when he touches his hip, his thigh becomes dislocated. As Jacob lies defeated, the man gets up to depart, and Jacob asks for his blessing. The stranger concedes and gives Jacob a new name: Israel. “I have seen God face to face,” Israel says as he limps into the morning, “and my life is preserved.”

I remember how the camp at the end was just as silent as it had been when we’d arrived, how things appeared as though they’d never been disturbed. As the bus descended, our faces became sticky with sweat. The odors of the city were reintroduced to us. And somehow I knew it was here — the end of friendship. To carry on in Manila would have been like repeating a question that had already been asked: its timbre had been altered, so it could not be earnest anymore. In church we would lock eyes from time to time; he would smile, his eyes puffing, and I would nod back, then sweep across the faces in the congregation, halting at the aluminum cross from which a body had absented itself. I did not love him — I loved what he had made of me.

I stopped praying for transformation. I came out to friends, began to leave shame behind. But as a cut asks to be sutured, I felt a yearning for familiar palliatives. The book of saints was gone; I sought a cult of images to replace it. Often, idols are not demolished so much as they are subsumed into new bodies. I looked for figures of beauty that appealed to my taste for the tragic, allowed me to identify with their spectacular plight. Since I lived in a country once purchased for $20 million by the United States, those figures came to me through American media, which was ubiquitous in the islands. Power ballads became my Canticles. My favorite actress could cry just like the Virgin. Nothing touched me like pain apotheosized.

This aesthetic creed colored my coming of age. Alongside it came a curiosity for the history of those like me. Yet when I attempted to delve into the archives of queerness, I found that the internet could tell me far more about Americans than Filipinos. As I exhumed these stories, I saw the martyrs’ frescoed anguish repeated in flesh and blood. People who committed suicide or withered away in institutions. The lethal weight of a secret, one that induced a deep depression. The port-wine stain leprosy of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Punishment, it appeared, was the recurring motif. I was a teenager in front of a computer, scrolling through the profiles of long-dead victims, victims of what were called hate crimes.

Yet there was one name that produced more search results than the rest, provoked wider discussion, arrested the collective fascination more powerfully. It was a name attached to a face, of course, and the face was described as “fragile” and “childlike,” as having “a look of pale purity, the translucent beauty favored in religious art.” Finally and most crucially, the face was said to be the face of a martyr.

Matthew Shepard, twenty-one years old, gay, was tortured by two men in Laramie, Wyoming, one October night in 1998, when I was two years old. Though the particulars seem to change with each retelling, the basic arc retains the force of original myth: Shepard encountered Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson at a bar, got into a car with them, and was then brutally beaten and abandoned in a field. He died in intensive care five days later. In early reports, the cyclist who discovered Matthew’s body tied to a fence said he’d initially mistaken him for a scarecrow, and by the time this image percolated into the national consciousness, it had acquired a more religious valence. “We weep because a life full of hope and promise was so cruelly ended,” eulogized the Episcopalian bishop Frederick Borsch. “His body burned and beaten, and left here, in the United States, in 30-degree weather tied to a fence, his arms extended, all too reminiscent of a crucifixion.”

Memorial websites commenced the canonization. “They killed him the same way they killed Jesus Christ,” read one post. “You are God’s special child Matt. A true martyr lighting the way for a generation lost in the growing darkness,” read another. A church in Florida held a “Mass for a Gay Martyr.” Soon, the secular sphere caught on. Vanity Fair ran a piece called “The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard.” In The Nation, “Matthew’s Passion,” an essay by Tony Kushner, cast his murder as a death tendered for social progress: “We need to see the gay man literally crucified on a fence.”

Shepard’s hands had been bound behind him, and his head rested on the ground — not much of a literal crucifixion. Yet the apocryphal allure of a biblically stylized death was impossible for me to resist. I remember feeling upon discovering him a visceral sense of recognition. I looked at his black-and-white portrait on Wikipedia, the one in which his head tilts ever so slightly to one side, the light from a window dappling his face in a soft chiaroscuro. There was a delicacy in his mien, a faraway glint in his eyes. It was a face that signaled itself, betrayed its wearer’s aberrance in the world of men. I looked at that picture and at the minute distance between his birth and death and decided that this was my patron saint, he who reified the danger of queerness more perfectly than even Sebastian.

Retroactively mourning him was an act of transference: it allowed me to mourn my own place in the world. Yet as I continued to pore over the media coverage, I realized that transcending the canvas meant I had now entered a scene of grotesque realism. Here, allegory came at a cost. For by organizing the lore of Shepard’s death around the locus of his sexuality, the public morphed queerness itself into a broad analogue for torment. JoAnn Wypijewski, writing for Harper’s, offered the most clear-eyed critique at the time: “It’s said that hate-crime laws symbolize a society’s values. If that is true, it means gay people are recognized only in suffering.” That our pain was predestined seemed an instinctive point of consensus. For the members of Westboro Baptist Church, who picketed Shepard’s funeral with signs declaring “God Hates Fags,” that conviction was rooted in fundamentalism. But it soon became clear to me that nobody valued his murder more than liberal groups, whose fixation on his identity was symptomatic of a transformative politics dependent on death, especially the death of a saint.

Of course, the sacrifice had to be without blemish. Gay activists made him into a golden child, angelic and unsexed. Unflattering recollections were skimmed over; his depression and HIV status were skirted around. The idol we were left with lacked the fullness of humanity. It was like a reenactment, performed on a grand scale, of that guilt-ridden gay impulse toward perfection, a ritual purging of homosexuality’s moral stain. “He wasn’t a saint,” said his mother, Judy, in an interview for the article that would nonetheless be titled “The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard.” “He was just a young man in search of himself. You must understand, it’s like putting him on a pedestal that just won’t work. I’m concerned that if people find out that it’s not true, they’ll be disappointed or angry or hate him.” When her son was found, he was unrecognizable. His brain stem was crushed, his skull fractured in four places, his face ravaged.

​​I can remember the sensation of it, leaning away from my screen and yielding to a psychic undoing, the crumbling of a last stronghold. I had departed the province of ideas; in this imperfect life, pain could be meaningless — it could be ugly. No higher power worth worshipping would demand it. When I was seven, with my book of saints, I wished to be broken like a spotless thing, to be granted God for it. But I was not a child of divine revelation; the era of prophets had long ago passed. My mania was attained through osmosis, learned from a world that made a sport of pain, that inflicted or exalted it according to the ambitions of its people. I stared at that black-and-white portrait, its subject damned forever to the tyranny of its viewer’s gaze. Looking had always been my means of veneration. But I had outgrown the passion of the centuries. I no longer wanted a part in its procession. I looked away.

In the temple of my mind, they dwell. Derelict, neglected, warping like wet plaster. Their beauty has proven hollow; it has not survived the years. I come to them as a sojourner surveying the wreckage of the past. I do not stay long. There is nothing here but decay, and I have grown too fond of life to tarry in death’s domain before my set appointment.

In this light, the bodies appear smaller, stranger, poorly animated imitations of being. I find in them no trace of resemblance to myself. I am only reminded of old scourges, weathered in the belief I deserved them. But I have learned that there is no enterprise in suffering if all it asks is to multiply itself, to make itself into a god. After I renounced that death, I found I could look at last into the face of the sublime; its fire consumed me, and my flesh emerged fortified, anointed. Today the bodies that flood my vision are full of praise, exultant in their humanity and in their desire for one another. I fasten my gaze upon them. And when I lose the thread of my renewal, I remember that the psalmist asked, “What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the Pit?” And I remember that Sebastian survived the arrows.

Sexual Tension

Residencies are the best and worst when they cut you off from internet. This makes you more productive, sure, but it also prevents you from using the web for its main purpose, which as we all know is porn. It thus becomes inevitable that you (in this case, me) must find a suitable appendage attached to a warm and preferably fetching body with which to stab yourself for pleasure.

It’s only the first night but I must act fast since there are only eight of us. At dinner, I have my eye on Alfredo, a wing-tipped Argentinian who calls himself an “air artist,” which sounds hot, whatever it means. Over peach cobbler in a Georgia stone house surrounded by cabins and the river where Deliverance was shot, Alfredo claims to have never watched TV. I spot my opening.

“I can’t watch TV either,” I inform the table. “It’s just so much slower than reading.”

Alfredo nods with a scruffed chin. I smile; clueless men make the best prey. To bolster my point, I bring up the adaptation of the Quebecois literary sensation Salée Roonet’s Tête-à-têtes avec Confidantes, which has proven that modern bodice-rippers can be award-winning when peppered with français. “I don’t know how people justify watching ten hours of TV when they can just read the novel in one sitting.”

“Books do get drawn out for no good reason,” adds Savage from Atlanta, a painter whose knitted cardigan and blonde highlights read suburban mom. I imagine a peewee soccer game in her neighborhood where all the middle-aged women have names like Petty, Vicious, and Bossy.

“Good for her that she got her book made into a show,” Tom interjects. He’s a Mississippi food writer who clearly doesn’t worship in the church of Roonet.

“She’s not hurting for cash,” I reply. I’d read a Guardian interview where she talked about her enormous wealth impinging on her socialist values, which made me want to pull out my pubes one by one. My popularity, such as it is, is confined to literary circles eager to embrace a token trans woman, especially since I’m albino Filipino and therefore triply tokenable.

“I do like how self-aware Roonet is about her fame,” says Elma, a poet-xylophonist, in a husky alto with bell-like harmonics. “My wife and I listened to a podcast where she said, ‘When I sit in front of my computer, I wonder whether I can possibly write the next novel by Salée Roonet.’ I felt sorry for her.”

That’s how I find myself focusing on Elma for the first time. I usually ignore whoever my competition is for Most Oppressed Identity at any given residency, and she’s a lesbian from Sri Lanka.

“I also loved it when she said, ‘As long as there’s sexual tension, people will keep reading,’” Elma continues. Her oversized pupils are like Charlize Theron’s, Ronnie for short, my rescue pit bull mama back home. I sneak a crotch grab and catch myself with a lady semi. Alfredo who? I excuse myself and sneak out the main house’s back door. I hold Elma in mind while I use my phone light to rush up the gravel path to my cabin. Her AmStaff eyes, those pouty lips, the waves of dark hair that remind me of the sea at night. Shit. I get lyrical when I’m horny; it’s a blessing. I’ve scrawled my best lines with a hand down my pants.

I enter the cabin and get into bed. I pull down my tights and rub, still frustrated after all these years that my glans is now my clit, my shaft now my vaginal cavity, everything harder to reach, friction more challenging to achieve.

I turn over, kiss Elma’s imagined mouth, lose my hands in her thick hair, sniff the nape of her neck to find lavender essence mixed with Indian Ocean. My hands try to grasp her waist but can’t. How wide is her waist? How big are her tits? She has Ronnie’s eyes though — maybe her swollen udders on Elma’s body, the shallow curve of Ronnie’s waist on Elma’s waist, and yes, yes, but no, but wait, not Ronnie, no wait, don’t, stop; Charlize Theron, though, hottie warrior from Mad Max, firm, Elma-Ronnie-Charlize in desert armor after a long battle, exhausted, long legs waiting for a tongue between them, ah, oh, oh, oh…

I collapse face down, then flop to my back when I can’t breathe. The shadow of a wooden beam; moonlight behind wispy clouds. Am I a not-in-a-good-way perv? Am I a Bad Trans Woman? A discredit to my community, a disgraced ambassador who besmirches my role as literary flag bearer? Will there be a tranny tribunal where my sins will be judged?

Calm down, I tell myself. Imagination can wander into murky territory, be it canine or Sapphic. I’ve never jerked off to a woman I’ve met in person, and I wouldn’t have done it if I weren’t here. It’s the residency’s fault.

I turn on my reading lamp and grab my Paris Hilton journal. The truth is that I desperately need residencies to maintain my literary reputation. A steady supply of sexual romps with clueless men lets me keep writing, but they’re tougher to arrange since I published my first collection and became Googleable. The great thing about residencies is that I can seduce men before they can look me up. Seeing them at dinner after I’ve slept with them allows me to take notes about their behavior — the eye shifting and the awkward gestures — that I use as specific, telling details in my stories.

Elma has introduced a new wrinkle, however. I blame it on the T, which I blame on the fact that I transitioned in the early aughts when keeping your junk wasn’t yet a thing. I ran off to Thailand as one does and returned with a safer if much more unwieldy genital infrastructure. Yet this also meant that my body produces zero natural testosterone, which bit me in the ass twenty years later when my doctor noticed signs of early osteoporosis and put me on a low-dose T regimen.

I was watching a straight bait video three months after starting injections. It’s my favorite porn subgenre, a blindfolded bro making out with a girl, only for another dude to take her place when it’s time for her to give him a blow job. This scenario floats all my boats — making fun of a clueless cishet while feeding my nostalgia for my halcyon days as a trashy twink. Except: when the dirty blonde in the video exited the frame, I found myself imagining my hand in a jar of Vaseline, which I first rubbed on the poor girl’s dry lips before I plunged my slippery fingers inside her manicured muff.

Though shocked!, shocked!, at this sudden shift in persuasion, I decided that pussy fantasies were a worthwhile tradeoff for avoiding brittle bones. The problem is that I can’t seem to fantasize about women without, ugh, thinking about their inner life, and what they want out of the experience of being with me. This is why my thing for women can only happen in fantasyland, because an IRL lesbo affair could ruin my marriage. I am not Elizabeth Gilbert. My story will not be Eat, Pray, Love Pussy.

And yes, everyone’s surprised that I’m married, but who else would take care of Ronnie in my absence if not for Joseph? It’s a miracle that someone was willing to put up with the a lotness of me: a high-maintenance high femme with a coddled man’s ego.

So that’s it then. I will avoid the real Elma. But this shouldn’t keep me from fondling myself while I fondle the Elma in my mind. I put away my pen and journal, turn off the light, then get back on my stomach and rub my clit like I’m starting a fire.

I put on my fake lashes and Gucci combat boots for the bonding hike the next afternoon. I’ve blown off many such activities in the past, but it’s a chance to see Elma again amid the bulbous mountains and half-naked trees of rural Georgia in March. I get to the meeting spot and everyone is there except for Savage, who has once again defied my expectations. Alfredo’s fingers twinkle at the sight of me, but my eyes no longer rest on him. At long last, I have a good look at Elma’s lower half. She’s in a color block sweater and high-waisted jeans, but I spot a swath of brown skin when she stretches her arms. I pull my black-and-white-striped tights to expose my belly button, a substitute for the hole I wish to lay bare before her.

This flirting by midriff soon ceases, however, when the staff member leading the hike walks us to the head of a trail pointing up a steep slope. I have made a grave miscalculation. Elma’s lesbionic legs have trained for such forays into the wilderness, while the most challenging climb I’ve tackled has been level seven on the elliptical. I’m forced to hang back while Elma stomps ahead.

“We can bring up the rear,” says a spiky-haired performance artist named Lor whom I’ve so far avoided. I refuse to be clocked until I’m good and ready; another trans person always risks putting the kibosh on my dramatic reveal. Lor’s squinty eyes squint even more.

“You look familiar,” they say.

Apart from my cult reputation, I am also the face of the trans makeup brand Floooide and a model for Trananarama Jeans. As well, I am often seen in the Instagram accounts of trans and trans-courting-for-social-justice-points celebrities. While I wish to remain unidentified, I’m also aghast that Lor doesn’t recognize me. My most authentic self is Convoluted Paradox.

“It might just be another albino,” I reply, and the implicit accusation elicits the precise look of contrition I wished to extract from Lor, which seems to throw them off my transgender scent.

Speaking of scents, I’m compelled to find out whether Elma’s real smell matches my imaginings. I see her hair bouncing up and down near the head of the pack like a perky rodent. I envision the hike as a literal human drag race, me clawing my way from the back and taking down everyone ahead of me along the way. I leave Lor behind and reach the next resident, then the next, making a bit of small talk with each so my goal wouldn’t be too obvious. My thighs are burning like I’ve been doing it doggie-style. When I finally find myself behind Elma, the trail takes a bend and we begin to head back down.

One might assume this is welcome news, but I was born without depth perception, which makes going downhill a hazardous prospect. Everyone else continues to chatter while we descend through loose dirt and brown leaves, but I can only focus on Elma’s footsteps, unexpected heaven since watching her feet fuses my lust with my desire for survival, especially when we reach a part of the descent that borders a huge drop. My eyes remain fixed on Elma’s shoes rather than what I am certain are graceful calves and an even more graceful rump between whose cheeks I am sure I would want to bury my face.

But no, just Elma’s feet. I wonder if she also spent much of her childhood barefoot, on an island surrounded by ocean, if she too had once been presumed an innocent village child, the likes of whom appear in ads for UNICEF. Those Westerners who sent funds to assuage their guilt were unaware of our gorgeous perversities, which only unfurled themselves once we arrived on their shores.

“Sorry, Matilda, I didn’t see you there,” Elma calls out with her husky bell of a voice. She stops to let me catch up. “Can you believe we’re here?”

For a moment, the part of me that wonders over my life asserts itself, before I swallow it down and reply, “Where else would we be?”

Elma parts her lips and grins sideways. “Is it too cliché to say home?”

“My stories are my home.”

“I can’t wait to hear your work at Saturday Share,” she says, before she starts walking again. After a few steps, she turns and tilts her head, an invitation to join her.

“I’m leaving this weekend,” she says.

I believe it was Georges Bataille who argued that sex is a kind of death, which is why the French word for orgasm is “petite mort.” There is no sexual thrill in poor vision, so what the hell, I start walking next to her on the side nearest the drop. If I were to die, it would be in a spectacular manner that would be worthy of a New York Times obituary.

She asks me about my day and I hear myself making sounds but don’t register their meaning. I can only focus on the smell of her. Lavender, sure, but also the vinegar that repulsed me in women until I smelled it in myself. I do not smell ocean in Elma, however, maybe because she, like me, is decades away from island life. But I bet the scent is still there in the crook of her neck, in those wrinkles that don’t show themselves until one works a day in the fields and the grime collects, the odor of earth and sea that will never go away no matter how much you wash. I turn my head to be closer to her neck, which is when I trip and fall sideways.

I arrive at Elma’s cabin in crutches and boot the next evening for Saturday Share. I only have a bad sprain and friction burns on both hands from grabbing onto a sapling. For a trans woman, I have a surprising instinct for self-preservation.

“Are you okay?” she asks when she opens the barn door. We haven’t seen each other since I went to the emergency room. I wave the other residents off when they stand to help me, while also making sure to wince every time I take a step. I take the divan Alfredo offers, if only to imagine myself as Estelle in No Exit, my crutches clacking to the ground while I spread my body across the fainting couch.

“I’m managing,” I say for sympathy points, but in truth, I have never been so prolific. While I waited for X-rays, I drafted my near-death experience on my phone. This new process will be a great talking point on my next press tour.

Everyone is here except for Savage, whom I idolize more every time she misses a required activity. Lor goes first with a piece called “The Giant Peter,” a rubber penis attached to their waist, so huge it touches the ground. They dance with the member while declaiming in Russian, the only sounds I recognize being “Ukraine,” “Putin,” and “Petersburg.” It’s hilarious to watch them struggle with the extra-large appendage; if only the whole “penis is war is patriarchy” thing weren’t so overdone.

The composer Gudda performs something called “Noratorio,” where he sings “No” over and over in the same pitch for much longer than necessary. Alfredo comes up and gestures like he’s showing us a painting even though there’s nothing there, which is apparently what he means by air art. We take a break before Tom reads a pedantic essay about food in the South and slavery, yadda yadda yadda.

Then Elma stands behind her xylophone with two sticks in each hand and plays a complex melody while reciting poetry in a language I don’t understand. Her tiny hands manage melodies that sound like both rings and booms. There are also invisible muscles performing nimble movements in her throat. I hear snatches of words I’ve left behind on my island like hari, “ruler,” and sana, “hope.” Yes, Elma, ruler of my hopes with your tiny hands, allow me to worship you. Yes, Elma, please use your strong fingers to enter my cavity until you’re inside me up to your wrist, even your elbow. I’ve seen trans women weep over not having a hole that could bring a child into the world, but I have not understood them until now, as tears stream down my face because my canal is too tight for Elma’s fist.

When it’s my turn to share, I do not read the draft of “Sexual Tension” on my phone. Instead, I begin to recall my upbringing in a distant Philippine province.

“They called me sun child, brown inside but white outside, just as I was a girl inside, but outside I was a boy.”

I describe our bamboo hut and dirt floors on which I squatted, helping the women cook and clean until my father ordered me to fish and climb trees with boys. But I burned in the sun when I tried to fish and fell from so high up a coconut tree that I broke a rib — Elma gasps after I say this — and so was allowed to do chores with the women again.

“My abnormalities kept me apart from others,” I continue, “but they made me who I am.” I tell them that once I got to America, I armored myself with glamour and wit to keep the bullies at bay and protect me from my true emotions, which I am only now discovering because our group is so special. I glance toward Elma so that she can read what I really mean, which is that she is special.

By the time I finish, I find that I have touched even me. Everyone says how wonderful I am, and I find myself not only responding that all of them are also wonderful, but meaning it. Then, I tell the others that I’m tired from my injuries and will nap for a moment. I turn toward the wall and close my eyes, intending to fake sleep until everyone else is gone, so I can catch Elma alone.

The next thing I know, the cabin is dark and I feel a subtle weight on my shoulders and back. I twist to find the outline of Elma’s head, her mess of loose curls like ocean waves.

“Sorry to wake you,” she says. Her hands touch my shoulders when she rests the blanket there. “I didn’t want you to get cold.”

I notice moonlight from the windows and my mind clears. Now that my conquest is within sight, I become unsure if I want to win her. I turn my back to face the wall, unable to allow the danger of being too close, but my body shifts forward to make room for Elma, my limbs expressing what my mind cannot.

To my surprise, Elma accepts my invitation, and soon her body is flush against my back, exerting no energy except warmth. Maybe this cuddle is a stalemate of sorts. When I shift around to find myself staring into her canine eyes, I forget who’s supposed to be conquering who.

“I have a wife,” she says.

“May I just smell your neck?”

She touches that place where her pulse is strongest, and the sight of her hand undoes my control. My nose pushes away her fingers and remains there while I keep my mouth closed, too aware of its role as the gateway organ for human love. Sure enough, there is still ocean in the lines of Elma’s neck, and I keep my lips sealed when I venture downward to the crook of her breasts under her thin top. My breathing shallows while my nose probes her crevices — those vinegar pits, that earthen belly button, those lower lips whose most complex odor is the true smell of home.

Date: May 8, 2023; 11:49 pm

From: Matilda ([email protected])
To: Elma ([email protected])
Subject: Residency Story

Hi Elma.

I’ve wanted to email for a while but you know how it is. Can you believe it’s been more than a year since residency? We didn’t really get to talk before you left. I’ll confess that I was just pretending to be asleep, but you already know that.

I’m going to stop pussyfooting (lol) and tell you the more pressing reason for this message, which is that I’m about to publish a story based on our residency and I want to make sure you’re okay with it. It’s called “Sexual Tension.” I’ve never checked with anyone before publishing a story before, but I can’t help thinking about how your wife might read it and put things together. That I was worried about this is the reason why it was really the best idea that things only went as far as they did, which was far enough. If I could keep myself from being with you then maybe I can keep myself from being with a woman ever, because their (your? our?) softer flesh has the frustrating effect of softening my heart (barf).

Attached is a draft. I’ve fictionalized as much as I can while trying to keep the spirit of what happened between us intact. Let me know what you think. Guernica is publishing the story in three weeks (sorry, I’m a procrastinator!) so hope to hear back from you soon.

OxOxO
Matilda

Date: May 8, 2023; 11:50 pm
From: Elma ([email protected])
To: Matilda ([email protected])
Subject: Away: Re: Residency Story

thank you so much for your message. i am at a residency for six weeks and will not be checking email until may 22. in the meantime, my wife Sima is monitoring my account and will inform me of any urgent requests. <3 elma

The Perfect Place for a Homeland

Autumn. The perfect place for a homeland —
dilapidated, thick, stocky.
The wasteland of a deserted construction site
overgrown with magnificent weeds,
decorated with fainted stair flights to the heaven,
unfinished, unaccomplished like teenage poetry.
Lumps of concrete with rusty gristle of reinforcement rods.
Patrols of big-eyes, nostalgic dogs,
which are stuck between their melting love to the man
and progressing faith in the wolf.
There’s neither politics nor culture here,
only solid primordial AWOL.
Here both angels and chimeras
lose their useless wings.
Here the scraggy baby dragons of yellow maples
are barely pinned to the goosebumped space
with black pins of rooks,
and the wind licks the stamps of sorrow —
empty, damp windows.

Maybe Now, Maybe Never

A childless dressmaker must rescue her young niece from an unwanted pregnancy. The family crisis exposes the calcified contours of a sisterhood in which one sister benefits to the other’s detriment. Written by Ukamaka Olisakwe and appearing first in OlongoAfrica, “Maybe Now, Maybe Never” is suffused with quiet suspense as the protagonist navigates the Nigerian city of Aba, its rush and its din, and its idealized notions of womanhood.

Through her rescue mission, the dressmaker finds herself struggling to break free from an old pattern of abuse and patch together an independent identity for herself. The story hovers in the precarious space between hope and despair, leaving the reader to imagine the future of the two sisters’ relationship.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Three years after my divorce, on the very eve of my divorce anniversary, my sister, Oge, texted. At first, it was a call. I was in the kitchen, staring at the fine china my last mother-in-law had given me on my wedding day. It was my ex-husband’s favorite — a set of sixteen plates and bowls and saucers that were free of dents, just white, the soulless white of our brief union. My phone buzzed, followed by a text from my sister. “Uche, Ifeoma is pregnant,” she said. “We can’t keep it. Would you take care of it for me? I will call later.”

I reread the message, sat on the kitchen stool and reread the message, and struggled to understand why Oge could not see cruelty in her message. That she, my only sister, could ask me to “take care of” what I desperately longed for; she, who knew why my two marriages had failed; who saw, firsthand, all I had endured in the past years because of my inability to give my two husbands children. I felt betrayed, the text seeming more like mockery, as though she were cackling all the way from America, reminding me how fertile she was, how fertile her daughter was, both mother and daughter leisurely plucking fruits from the tree that had remained out of reach no matter the ladders I had climbed to reach it, no matter how far I had stretched. For a moment, I considered blocking her number, deleting her from my social media, from my life. Then I put the phone away, showered, and went to my shop to finish the dress I had begun making last night, doing all I could to forget the text message, the content of it, the despair it spurned. By midmorning, the shock, the horror of it all, had dulled to a throbbing ache in my temples. When my phone rang later and I saw it was her calling, I clicked the silence button, then chucked the phone into my bag, shoving her and the ghosts she had ferried in away from sight.

It had been a few weeks since I had spoken with her daughter, Ifeoma, the little girl I had always adored. But look, despite my anger with Oge, I was worried for Ifeoma. Ifeoma, who lived alone at Uli State University, her mother far away in America, chasing dreams; her father prowling the streets of Aba, chasing small girls; her only sibling, Emeka, holed up in a boarding school in Umuahia as if forgotten. My beautiful niece, how feisty she was, how fearlessly she used to speak her mind; this child, when she was only five years old, had ordered me to reprimand the neighbor next door, an older man of about fifty who, in that playful, unsettling tone of entitled Igbo men, had dared to call her “my wife.” She had said to me, “I don’t like that he calls me that,” and I was impressed, not because of what she said but how she said it, her brow and face knitted in rage, her words firm, not in any way puny, like okra trees in harmattan winds. Now it was that face, full of grit and dimples, that haunted me, prickling the hair on the back of my neck, daring me to turn my back on her.

She troubled me all day — those eyes, the way she would pinch her mouth in frustration, how she would curl into my hands in sleep. Feeling the need to lie down and rest my head, I found it impossible to avoid that face, those thoughts, the insensitive way my sister had ruined my already difficult morning with this news. I resisted the urge to sit down and cry and cry. Closing my shop earlier than usual, I gathered the fabrics I had cut, the styles I had sketched, hoping I could, but knowing I could not, corral the helpless feeling in the pit of my stomach with work. When my phone rang again, it was Oge. And my helplessness burst at the seams.

Once, in secondary school, when we had both arrived late for the morning assembly and were supposed to be punished, Oge had knelt, held the hands of the teacher, and cried. Oge cried away her punishment. I stood there, perplexed. Perplexed because while walking to school together, we had laughed at our neighbor Nkiru, whose scruffy sandals were too big for her charcoal-stained feet. Oge’s laughter was crackly and easy and long, and so I wondered: Where did the sudden sobs come from? That was Oge: quick with emotions, her tears the weapon she wielded to get whatever she wanted. And, of course, the teacher flogged only me, twelve strokes in total, the whip — a double-tongued horsetail utalị — swirling in the air and landing with a force that lifted my skirt. I flailed and begged, but my hoarse cries appeared to anger him further, because he brought the whip down even harder. Oge stood and watched until he was done. Then she followed me to the assembly ground, saying nothing.

I sat down and took her call. “Oge, kedu?” I said. “I’m just seeing your message.”

And she began to cry. “Uche nwanne m, the world has gathered to laugh at me. My husband’s people, who are not happy with me because of this America I came to, are going to laugh at me.”

I waited, swallowed spittle, conquered the temptation to put the phone down. I wanted to ask if she had forgotten what today was, what tomorrow meant to me. Last month was my birthday and she hadn’t called, hadn’t sent a message. Did she not remember that? But then her sobs, the way they poured, the stark hopelessness in her voice — they clawed at my walls, hounded me with guilt, and too soon I found myself apologizing to her, consoling her, promising to help with Ifeoma’s matter, yet angered by the cries. And jealous too. Jealous because I lacked this feeble quality that came naturally to her. She looked pretty when she cried, while my face twisted up in unflattering folds whenever I sobbed.

“Thank you, Uche nwanne m,” she said at the end of the call. “I love you.”

I love you. The words were rubbed flat from overuse, bled dry of dense emotions. She should try something better, I thought, like calling often and not only when she needs help. The last time we’d spoken, two months ago, was after she’d asked me to make her a set of ankara dresses and send them through a friend who was visiting Nigeria for the holiday. When she received the package, she was fast with the call, quick with her thank-yous, hurrying like she would rather be elsewhere. Now she wanted something else, and she knew she had me. She had always known she had me. That all she needed was to use her voice, to shed those tears, to mention the name of the one whom I could never desert, and I would come running. This sister of mine, how easily she peeled me down to that upbringing Mama had pounded into me all my childhood. “Echefu kwana nwanne gị,” Mama once told me. “Don’t ever forget your sister. Don’t ever turn your back on your people.” In Mama’s eyes, Oge was a dove, and I was the eagle under whose wings she must find succor. Once, out of frustration, I asked Mama whom she brought to care for me, if I, too, was not worth protecting. “An eagle does not look up when it flies because there is no bird of prey in our village big enough to hound it. That’s what you are,” she said, her tone biting. “You will always stand, but your sister? She’ll wash away easily, like apịtị in a flood.”

When we were children, Mama’s words made little sense, and I had refused to acknowledge the jealousy I felt for my sister, how small it made me feel. Mama laughed more with her. Papa called her his eye. Our neighbors said she was the prettiest. Rich men lined up at our door, offering her marriage, a lavish wedding. And later she had a quick, quick pregnancy and labor that lasted only two hours. Her labor was easy. She gave birth to a daughter who bounced and talked as though the world were made to submit to her. And next, in less than two years, came her son, Emeka, the quieter one. “I’m done having children,” she said after Emeka was born, with the finality of the privileged, at a time when I was struggling to get pregnant, miscarriages pooling in my underwear until I couldn’t differentiate them from my endometriotic periods. Years later, after my first marriage had failed and the second one was quivering on broken legs, America came knocking, welcoming her into its hallowed halls with full tuition and a generous stipend. Her husband did not object. My second marriage crumbled, and America denied my visa application when I tried to get my foot in its door. I had spent years staring at my sister’s glitter, how all the light in the room gathered and beamed on her, while I skulked around in the shadows. She was lucky. Or maybe she was just born in easier times, when our parents could afford all the luxury she demanded. And into adulthood this luck trailed her, a woman for whom life was sifted clean of sharp stones.

And so, when she ended the call saying, “I love you,” I was filled with rage. Rage at the world that raked my feet over thorny bushes. Rage at all the struggles I had known — struggle to find joy, which always eluded me; struggle to fit into my body, whose desperate longings I must now, with my own hands and without question, scrape from the body of my beloved niece.

I stamped hard on my Singer sewing machine, the needle piercing into the ankara fabric at the speed of light, the electric whirring rippling in the air. The fluorescent lamp blinked and brightened, the power surge speeding up the sewing, and the fabric snagged at the end of the backstitch. As I reached for it, tugging the edge of the cloth, my feet still pressed hard on the electric pad, the needle snapped and flew into my face. It missed my left eye by an inch, scratching the skin beneath. “You will not kill me, Oge,” I muttered to myself, pulling away from the machine, overwhelmed with the need to yell at someone, to cry and cry.

Evening came too quickly, and I stared out at the river of traders pouring out from Ariaria Market; their faces, in that orange glow of the evening sun, were oily with fatigue. My blouse was dripping with sweat, and my mascara, I was sure, was smudged by my tears, because I felt the weight of their oily patches sitting under my eyes. I remained in the store, listening to the world outside: the drivers jostling in the traffic, the bus conductors calling out their directions, church speakers blaring out terse sermons and songs, melding with the gaggle of generators, which coalesced into a symphony that was peculiar to this city. The air was heavy with fumes. And the noise was welcoming for once, a fitting distraction from the despair beading my mind. I found in that chaos a comforting music, frenetic like the talking drum, whose intent was to soothe the lonely, to pull them from their misery and thrust them into the boiling belly of this restless city so they would never feel isolated.

The streets had settled, occasional highlife music spitting from the speakers of the open bars nearby, when I dialed Ifeoma’s number. She took a while before picking up the call, during which a young girl walked past my store, tall and lanky, with skin that was draped in the gold of the dying evening sun. She looked at me and smiled, her eyes alight with laughter. She looked like Ifeoma on any day — girls who grew too quickly, their waists flaring too early, drawing leers from badly behaved men who roamed the street, seeking children to swallow. My heart painfully pushed against my chest, panic turning the dial on my headache, before Ifeoma picked up the phone and spoke in a drowsy, tear-rimmed voice. “Auntie,” she said, “Mommy told you?”

“Darling,” I said, “why didn’t you call me?”

“I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me.”

“Disappointed? You’re not a disappointment, Ifeoma. Do you hear me? You can never be a disappointment.”

She sobbed her thanks, said her days had been a nightmare; she had stopped attending lectures and was always checking her underwear for blood spots, much afraid because she had come down with a fever and was suffering a strange stomachache.

Her energy and her laughter were gone, as though something had fallen and sucked her dry, thrusting her into the shadows of this community of ours that was merciless to young girls. An image came to mind: my maternal aunt, Uju, a feisty woman who used to lead our village’s dance troupe, her yellow so brilliant it cut the eyes of men, filled their wives with bile, made her the talk of the village. But then she got pregnant in her final year in secondary school, and our grandfather thrust her into a marriage with an aged widower — our community’s way of punishing girls who bring children into their father’s houses. Her life crumbled like an old cloth, then frayed from years of the bitter marriage before she succumbed to death, a tired, scowl-faced corpse that looked twenty years older than her thirty years.

“Darling,” I said to Ifeoma, panic threading my fingers, “how late are you?”

She began to speak but only tears came. “I am so sorry, Auntie.”

“Stop apologizing. How late are you?”

She sucked her breath, and when she spoke again, her words came in rough breaks, in sharp peaks, in quivering falls, and I urged her on, keeping my voice calm. She had yet to see her period; she was one week late, and although she was sure she hadn’t fully had sex with the boy — her classmate, eighteen years old, like her — the delay, the aches, and even the odd spittle that gathered in her mouth yesterday had begun to bother her. It was why she had called her mother.

“What do you mean you didn’t sleep fully with him?”

“He entered just once. I swear, Auntie, just once, and I told him to stop.”

“He didn’t finish?”

“I didn’t let him finish.”

“When did this happen?”

“First of August.”

“And you’re sure he didn’t finish?”

“Yes, Auntie, I’m sure. But I’m very afraid.”

She began to cry, and the years fell away like a curtain. I was there again, standing by her cot while my sister slept. When she was born, I was the first person in our family to hold her. I washed her myself, fed her formula and glucose water because Oge’s nipples were still inverted and her breasts were lazy with milk; Mama was ill, and Oge’s mother-in-law was long dead, so the onus, the responsibility of ọmụgwo, of being the doula our community obliged new mothers for up to three months after childbirth, fell on me. Now this girl I had raised, my child even though she hadn’t come from my body, was despairing, and I felt a sinking guilt for dwelling on my frustrations when my beloved suffered.

“I will come to you in the morning, okay? Now go and take your bath and eat something.”

“I am not hungry, Auntie.”

“Ifeoma, go bathe and eat. And drink Panadol for that headache. I will get on the first bus tomorrow morning and bring you what you need.”

Before she ended the call, she told me she loved me.

“I love you too,” I said.

On my way home, it occurred to me that I no longer reciprocated that declaration of love when it came from Oge’s mouth, that I would mumble something incoherent or nod absently and end the call, refusing to entertain hope for words that left me adrift, words that made me feel like a thing to be used and discarded.

At St. Michael’s, the traffic was tight as a bottleneck, okada riders jostling on the sidewalks with passersby. Freddy’s Chemist was still open, the lights powered by the small generator that trembled by the entrance, churning up extra smoke into the foggy atmosphere. Freddy, the store owner, always brightened whenever I visited. “Nwanyị ọma,” he would call me, slanting when he spoke, as though he perpetually wanted to collide with me. He talked a lot, his voice greasy with suggestions, but I entertained him because he sold me drugs at a discount, and original drugs too. “That’s fake artesunate,” he said the first time I visited, pointing at the malaria drug pack I had brought for a refill. My head was splitting, despite having completed the dosage a pharmacy had sold me. He held my empty packet against the one he fetched from his shelf, pointing out their differences: the font size, the font type, the glittery insignia, the texture of the packet — differences that were so minute I could never tell one pack from the other. “All these stores, and even those big pharmacies you people go to, sell both the original and the fake at the same price. I am poor o, but I am not that desperate for money. I will tell you the truth, especially you, Nwanyị ọma,” he said with a self-assured grin. My malaria disappeared after I bought the brand he offered, and in the following months, quickly did my typhoid, my stomachache, the common cold — seasonal illnesses that were rampant in our city.

Now he walked toward me, a small, wiry man in tight-fitting jeans, but the smile on his earnest face disappeared when he took a second look at my expression. “Nwanyi ọma.” He sat on the bench, his face mere inches from mine. “Is everything alright?”

I told him I was pregnant and didn’t want it.

He leaned back, a new stiffness entering his voice. Above him, knocked into the wall facing the entrance, was a browned, laminated photo of a blond Jesus. “Why would you want to kill a child?” he asked.

For the first time, I was nervous around him. There was no need to subject myself to this questioning; I could walk into the next store with a pinched face and ask for abortifacients, which were illegal and which they surely sold under the table at an expensive price. But the thought of explaining myself to another stranger was agonizing, and the possibility of being sold fake drugs knotted my belly with tension. “I made a mistake,” I said. “I don’t know anything about the father or where to find him. It was a one-night thing.”

His tone softened, and in his eyes was the confirmation of his great kindness. “I am a Christian man,” he said, “but I will help you. You only made a mistake. I don’t carry that kind of thing anymore, but I will get them from my friend’s store down the street. He sells original medicines.” He stood up. “Wait here for me.”

Sitting there waiting for him, I was warmed with relief, glad that I, too, could receive help, that I, too, could share my burden with someone trustworthy, someone capable. I sat straighter. Then I ached for more of this, a time of bliss, where people lined up just for me, offering perfect solutions — a small slice of this life my sister had led.

The traffic had lessened at the junction, and the nagging of the frustrated drivers had faded. Over, across the street, women stood behind charcoal stoves, roasting corn and ube, which they wrapped in old newspapers. And strapped around their waists were aprons swollen with the money they’d made from their sales. Mere meters from the entrance of Freddy’s store was the breadseller, a young woman who always giggled when she spoke to him, often leaning into him, her eyes wet with wistful yearnings, while his voice bore a distant, fraternal lilt. She looked so much like my sister, Oge — same build, same face. I always wondered if he knew she liked him, and if he entertained her, humored her, so as not to hurt her feelings. If he knew that his detached politeness was why she avoided my eyes, ignored my pleasantries, and hissed each time I walked past her table. She caught my gaze at that moment and quickly looked down, her face a fresco of frustration. She only looked up again when Freddy returned with packets of different drugs wrapped discreetly in black nylon. She said something to him, and he mumbled a terse response, hurrying to meet me. Her face folded. He sat on the bench again, and I shifted closer, our shoulders touching. He smiled, looked away, shy. And she glared at me, her face crinkled with disdain. I held back a laugh.

“My friend has everything we need,” he said. The way he said “we,” as though we had become a team, lifted something inside me. He was unknotting me, and he was not aware of this, not aware that he was offering a soft landing that I must now covet, no matter how it would paint me as too forward in the eyes of the world.

He explained that I must go for a scan to be sure that it was not an ectopic pregnancy, because taking such drugs with an ectopic pregnancy could kill me. He explained how I must take the drugs, the pain relievers, and the antibiotics he had included, just to be safe. He told me the cost of the drugs, said, “I am not getting one naira profit from it, eziokwu. I am doing this for you.”

I held his hand, unsure of how to properly thank him. And it was pleasing that he was the sort of man who, despite his financial difficulties, prioritized honesty over profit. “I would like to buy you drinks one of these days,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, his voice cracking. “Yes, let’s do that.”

At that moment his lightbulb brightened, and I saw that underneath that sweaty, leathered face born of hardship and hard work was a good-looking man who wore his hustle with lighthearted charm. Before I left, I imagined both of us sitting in a restaurant, chatting over platters of nkwobi and bottles of stout or beer, and the image did not make me squirm.

I had just gotten home when Oge called again, tear-voiced and tense. “Nwanne m, how far? Are you still going to Ifeoma’s school tomorrow?” The first thing out of her mouth. No pleasantries. No “How was your day?” Not even a small attempt at mundane talk with which she could use to pretend to care about me.

I should tell her my mind, call out her shortcomings, brand her a user. I should say, “You went to America and forgot your only sibling” and “When are you even going to come back and see these children you left here?” But I didn’t, couldn’t; there was no point in starting a new quarrel, because she knew I would always look past her shortcomings, that my loyalty to family had grown like a tag on the skin, a source of pain, but which I wore the way Mama had said I should. “I will board the first bus tomorrow morning,” I said, and she sighed.

“I love you,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, then ended the call and went to the toilet.

The first time Oge said she loved me, she had wanted me to stay with her children so that she could travel to Lagos for her bank’s customer-service training. The trip would last two weeks. I had just left my first marriage, my body patched with keloids — souvenirs from the fists of a husband who had pummeled my body in return for every lost pregnancy. Oge had yet to find a new maid after the last one fled. Or perhaps she had not bothered, since I was freshly out of marriage, available and needy. “I love you,” she said that evening, after I had agreed to care for her children. The words — so flimsy yet heavy with promises — wrapped me in warm comfort. I sat on her bed and wept while she watched me, a bewildered look in her eyes.

“I love you,” she said again, this time when I agreed to shop for her children’s Christmas clothes because she was busy at work. It was the first Christmas I would spend without a husband. She understood that I needed something in return, but the words and the opportunity of taking her children shopping — what I had wanted all these years for my own desired children — was compensation enough, despite the transactional manner with which she loved.

“I love you” fell out of her mouth again when I agreed to attend the parent-teacher association meeting in her stead.

“Do you know how much I love you?” she said three months before she left Nigeria for her master’s in Vermont. She had just gotten laid off from work, one month after she was accepted into the master’s program that came with full tuition and a stipend.

“What about your children?” I asked her.

“I will bring you and them over when I can, just not yet,” she said. “Could you take care of them for me?”

I stared at her. “You are leaving them with me?”

“Nwanne m, you are the only one I can trust with them,” she said, stuffing clothes inside her new traveling bag, holding up the minidresses and bum shorts she had bought for the trip, clothes she could never wear on the streets of Aba. Her eyes shone with unabashed excitement, and it surprised me that she did not pretend to be heartbroken, that she wore delight so boldly and shamelessly for a woman who was about to leave her husband and two children behind in Nigeria.

“Oge, do you see me as your maid?” I said, feeling a sudden urge to call her a bad mother, to remind her that I took care of her children more than she ever did and so couldn’t understand why she was unreasonably blessed with them, while I was left with empty hands.

She tossed the pink floral gown and sank onto the spot beside me. “Nwanne m, I love you so much. Please do this for me. Once I have settled, I will bring you and my children over to America.”

In the following months, after she moved to Vermont and I took care of her children, she scattered I-love-yous all over her texts, the words tacked to demands, a reward system that had begun to feel more like manipulation — a pat on the back for the one who lacked it, who longed for it. And each time I grasped for their comfort, for the warmth that such weighty words were supposed to usher in, I got nothing but air.

In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection, wondering if there was something in my face that scared children away from me. The first time I lost a pregnancy, I worried myself into an illness. And with the subsequent miscarriages, I roamed from hospital to church, crawling on my knees during night vigils, giving away my savings, donating to orphanages. My first husband called me “man” and said I was a waste of a “fine body.” My second husband spoke more with his fists. I accepted each assault, each belittling comment, another kind of abuse born of self-deprecation because I blamed myself for my inability to carry a pregnancy to term. I prayed for a miracle, just one miracle. And when that didn’t happen, it shook my faith, made me believe that God was just a mean-spirited man somewhere up in the sky who saw our misery as entertainment.

Now, years later, my desperate yearning sat in the body of my beloved, who wanted nothing to do with it. I looked at the ceiling, searching out the face of God in the white plaster, certain that he was laughing at me, smacking his thighs and laughing. And it occurred to me that I still held a small hope, still looked up to him for a miracle, still wanted to have my own child. The fact of this self-truth shook my resolve, and I took my phone, considered turning it off forever and breaking my promise to my niece. But then it buzzed: a short video from Ifeoma. And everything changed when I clicked the play button.

“Auntie, see, I am eating. I am doing as you have said,” she said as she spooned jollof rice into her mouth. She ate like a bird — barely chewing, swallowing in small scoops, a big smile on her face. She fanned her mouth with her palm; the food was hot, and she giggled while trying not to choke on the pepper. I laughed and then sent a quick video of myself. “Don’t choke on the food o! It is not running away. Eat slowly.” She replied with another video of her licking the plate with her tongue. “See?” she said, showing me the now empty plate. “I have finished everything!”

I paused the video. Her eyes, slightly swollen from crying, still shone. Her brightness, her light, reached deep inside me, clawed at my fears, lanced the pus that had choked my mind these years. I sat on the toilet bowl and cried. And afterward, I felt lighter. A heavy weight on my shoulders had let up, and I could finally stand straight.

The bus coughed to a stop at the school junction, and Ifeoma flew into my hands, shivering, holding me so tight. Her excitement dragged tears to my eyes, and I kissed her on the head and swung her around. People stopped to look at us.

“Fine mommy and daughter,” a corn seller by the roadside said as we walked past.

“Thank you,” I said, glad that people could look at us and see me in my niece’s face.

We went to her lodge, a first-floor apartment with one bedroom and a kitchen and toilet, the floor covered with cheap tiles, the kitchen so tiny it would not fit four people at a time. But it was decent and well kept, her books stacked on a small shelf, her bed made, her shoes arranged at the foot of a narrow wardrobe. She was grieving, but her space was organized. An image came to mind: my dirty clothes strewn all over the floor after each marriage ended, my body rank with unwashedness, how Mama cleaned up after me, reminded me to bathe, to eat, to lift myself from the bed.

I retrieved the test strips and a container from my bag and asked her to pee in it. She hurried into the bathroom and returned shortly, her hands trembling. She stood there, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as I dipped the first strip into the pee. “What does it say, Auntie?”

The result stared up at me. “It’s true.”

“I don’t want it,” she said, her voice cracking. “I don’t want it in my body.”

“Of course, darling,” I said, even though there was still a small, dimming part of me that almost asked her to keep it for me. “I brought you some drugs, but first we will have to go for a scan to make sure it’s okay for you to take them.”

She sat down, slung her arms around my waist, rested her head on my chest. I dug out the old wedding ring that I had tucked in the inner pocket of my purse for years. “Wear this,” I said.

She took it, frowned at it. “Why, Auntie?” she asked, fitting it onto her slim finger. Round and thick, its shine was washed by age, the gold now the color of rust. I stared at it, this emblem of pride I had once flaunted, which had granted me access to hallowed halls that now scorned me. “Auntie?”

“I don’t want anyone to ask you stupid questions,” I said. “The ring will ward them off.”

As we left for the clinic, I kept flitting a glance at the ring, remembering how the world had readjusted its perception of me after I removed it. In the past, men offered me the best seats on buses, butchers gave me extra pieces of meat, and older women smiled too widely when they spoke to me. “She is someone’s wife,” they all said. “Please talk to her with respect.” But it had all changed after I removed the ring: men began jostling me on buses; conductors and drivers called me “ashawo” when I disagreed with them.

A bus crawled to a stop before us, and as we got in, the conductor greeted Ifeoma with an overbright voice. The man by the window seat moved farther away, creating more room for her. The older woman by the aisle smiled at the ring and called her “small madam.” Ifeoma leaned toward me, whispered, “She called me madam.” She cupped her mouth, muffled her laughter. I laughed too. Held her hand and looked out the window and laughed, happy in our shared mischief.

At the clinic, she asked me to join her, and we watched the screen as the technician moved the transducer over her belly, the sonogram reporting bleak images that looked like animations done by a toddler in black and white. And she gripped my hand tight when the man said, “Congratulations, madam, that’s your baby over there.”

She only let out a tense breath once we were back on the street.

“Now we know you are in the clear,” I said. “Let’s go home and take care of you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“You don’t have to thank me, darling,” I said. “I am your mom too.” And although this declaration was normal among our people, it meant more to me; it felt true. With her, love came easy, and I often found myself wanting to go above and beyond for her, wanting to laugh with her, to play with her, my worries taking the back seat. On our way home, I realized that this was the closest I would get to being a mother: to love this child, to protect her, to give and give. I pushed my chest out and breathed deeply, the dull throbbing at the back of my head fading, soon gone. For the first time in many years, my skin felt right, the air felt right, and my feet were firm on the ground.

Oge called later, and I was suddenly too fatigued to sit through another call with her, this sister whose friendship I had once coveted. One time, when we were kids playing Power Rangers in the backyard, I had hopped off the fence, missed the old Suzuki motorcycle I was meant to straddle, and crashed against its body. Its rust-worn stand, pointy as a spike, dug into my shin, and Oge broke into a splitting cry that pulled neighbors to my rescue. That was the sister I missed, the one who rushed to my protection, who never hesitated when I needed comfort. But then puberty came. She grew breasts, her face smooth like an egg, and she detached from me — her awkward sister who was all squares and pimples. I mourned for years, spiteful of the puberty that had pulled us apart. We had never fought, never wrestled, never punched each other like the other children in our compound. And over the years, I wished we had, wished there was a rational explanation for the maw that had grown between us, for the violent separation that often left me lurking in the background, needy for attention. When my two marriages ended, she saw in my misfortunes an opportunity for a capable maid. Never a thought, or a question, about how I felt, her disinterest in my feelings stinging like Cameroon pepper in the eyes. She moved to America, and the distance provided the perfect reason for her silence. I would send WhatsApp messages asking about her day, and she would leave them unread, unanswered, her profile announcing when she was online, her status updated with frequent photos. It would take days, and one time weeks, before she replied. “Nwanne m, I am just seeing your message. The semester has been so busy!” I stopped texting, stopped calling, and she was perhaps relieved, because she went mute until she needed something only I could provide.

I tried not to hate her, to give her a long rope of grace, to cultivate the sisterhood Mama had pounded into me. I had been shrunken with concern, often raking through memories, searching for the wrong I did her in the past, a wrong so unforgivable she carried the malice into adulthood. Once, I broke my fast and texted, “Nne, did I do anything to you?” and she replied with emojis and exclamations, her response crowded with excuses about her studies. “I will call later, I miss you,” she wrote back, tossing dollops of attention off her table that I shamelessly lapped up.

Now she was back, her calls on repeat, itching to ask after her daughter, the reason she had called in the first place. The ringtone pierced the air, the lit screen brightening and dimming until the call ended and Ifeoma’s phone buzzed immediately.

“It is Mom,” Ifeoma said, watching me closely as she took it, muttering: “Yes, Mom” and “Yes, Auntie took me for a scan before she gave me something to drink” and “Yes, she will be staying with me for a week” and “Yes, I’m fine.” She held out the phone afterward. “Mom wants to speak with you.”

I shook my head. “Tell her I will call her back,” I said and left for the toilet.

“Maybe Now, Maybe Never,” written by Ukamaka Olisakwe and originally published in OlongoAfrica, which describes itself as a “twittering community of opinion, literature, travelogue, journalism, and topical writing. Not quite like Twitter, where the loudest voices rule, but a corner of the world where soft but melodious music makes an impact, nevertheless, above the din.” Reprinted with permission.

Habibi

As a young boy growing up in Los Angeles, I am entered by The Exorcist late one night after all the adults in the house have fallen asleep. I watch the film kneeling on the thick, red carpet, my face inches from the screen: the screaming girl and dying priest, the spinning head and bloody mouth, the room so cold that everyone’s breath shows. The volume is just loud enough that I can feel the distorted bass of the devil’s voice in the bones of my throat.

As a young boy growing up in Cairo, my father watches exorcisms. His uncle drives him through the deserted countryside to nameless churches lit by chandeliers covered in generations of sand. One by one, the possessed lie on stone floors in front of altars as chanting priests circle and then hold them down.

Years after, my father tells me that some of the possessed were dragged through the desert for miles by their families. I imagine what it’s like to thrash under crucifixes, the nightmare of becoming undone. My father’s devil stories curl around my neck. They are a form of strangulation. I ask him once why his uncle would take him to exorcisms, and he says, “Back then, all we had to do for fun was the radio.”

During the course of such exorcisms, the priest tortures the devil, and the devil eventually leaves because he can’t take it anymore. My father explains that at an exorcism’s end, the devil wants to exit violently through the possessed person’s eyes, blinding them. The priest orders him (the devil, to me, is male) to leave through the possessed person’s toes instead, because the toes are no big deal. When the priest succeeds, red crosses bleed through the feet of the possessed and soak through their socks.

My father and his uncle would stay afterward and help wash the church floor. My grandmother stopped buying my young father white shoes because of all the pairs he brought home bloodied. My father is seventy-five now and only wears gleaming white shoes.

In The Exorcist, Linda Blair — who plays the young, bedeviled Regan MacNeil — lies in bed, wrestling with the demon inside her. She projectile vomits. Her head spins. She curses at her mom. All under a pale-yellow blanket. The blanket imprints on me, and its memory places me at the foot of her bed, breathing in her green breath as she thrashes, her hands tied to the bedpost. Whenever the power goes off and I’m suddenly left in the dark, or whenever I think I see someone hidden behind the drapes, I see that pale-yellow blanket spread across her writhing body, her face blanked out and slashed open.

Pazuzu, the demon in The Exorcist, was voiced by Academy Award winner Mercedes McCambridge, who was then fifty-seven years old and whom Orson Welles had called “the world’s greatest living radio actress.” To add dimension to the demon’s voice, sound mixers recorded all of McCambridge’s dialogue in four different tones. In the final film, Pazuzu’s voice is a braid of those four tones, overlaid with both a Vatican recording of a young girl shrieking in Latin during her exorcism and the sound of screaming pigs being herded for slaughter.

For a sound to produce an echo, there must be at least fifty-five feet between its source and the listener. A normal house is too small to generate an echo. The house I grow up in is indeed normal in the way that many overcarpeted houses are: the faucet that drips, the darkened rooms lit by birthday candles, the father always taking photos. But our house is abnormal in that everything that happens inside it is explained as the work of either God or the devil, either a miracle or a curse. In the house I grow up in, Pazuzu’s voice echoes.

From a young age, I am taught that the devil is always chasing me and that my job is to keep running, to take communion because it offers protection, to confess my sins because it keeps me pure. One fumble and I am his. I dress in my best clothes for church and hold my hands up in the air when I pray, like antennae magnifying the transmission. My mother teaches me that if I ever stray from God, it is a sign that the devil is inside me. Whenever I question my belief in God, this inverted knot of an idea rolls my thoughts the way a storm can roll a ship until it overturns.

Because I’m gay, I have to run the fastest. I pray from my marrow. Did the devil make me gay or did God? The agony of having to run for my life from someone I can’t see is that I never know when I’m ahead, or if I’m ever ahead at all.

I’m scared to write about the devil because writing is a form of incantation, because naming a thing is the first step in manifesting. I’m forty-five years old now and thought that time had diluted the fear, but writing about him exhumes it. It’s taken me four months to get the first page down. I work on it a little bit, then work on something else, then pretend to work on something else. But I keep returning to this essay, or it returns to me. It haunts me, and I haunt it back.

My father was left-handed until his family noticed. The left hand is the devil’s, they said, for reasons that no one could reasonably explain. They made him learn to write with his right hand, and he did so quickly because he feared staying left-handed, as though at any moment the devil could take him over and put him to work. But my father never forgot to write with his left hand. He tells me that if he’s ever in a meeting that isn’t going his way, he’ll start writing with both hands until it does.

There is no Exorcist without McCambridge’s voice. I can hear its guttural rumbling and twisted reverb long after the sound it produces stops. I think impersonating the devil is the most reckless thing a mortal can do, so I start reading about her. I’m trying to figure out whether she was brave or senseless, and I read the following from an article called “A Look Inside William Friedkin’s The Exorcist” by Seth Hansen:

When I’m eleven, the neighbor girls visit with their Ouija board and explain how it works. I think, This is a terrible idea. How could this be sold in toy stores? To children? They make me put my fingers on a corner of the planchette and ask a question. I wonder, Am I opening a portal to hell? But I also don’t want them to laugh at me. After a long stretch of seconds, I press hard on the planchette and ask, “Are we alone right now?” The planchette slowly drags to the word: NO. Even though it’s my house, I stand up and flee. I’m not shocked by the answer. I’ve known it this whole time. Years later, my father will tell me that he saw one of the neighbor girls drunk at the supermarket in the middle of the day. I tell him the Ouija board story. He says, “See. The poor girl had no chance.”

As a child, I believe that the pale-yellow blanket keeps the devil inside Regan MacNeil, that it keeps him pressed close against her body. I stop sleeping under the covers. On the night I watch The Exorcist, I do the math and decide to never sleep under my blanket until I die. It isn’t worth the risk. No matter how cold I get, I sleep on top of the bed, uncovered. Exposed to the light of the Lord.

As a young boy, I ask my father why the devil wants to blind someone when he leaves them. My father says, “He is the devil. He is a very, very bad guy.”

In graduate school, on a random night after I get into a fight with my secret boyfriend, an evil spirit enters my bedroom while I’m trying to sleep. I feel a dark thing staring down at me from next to the bed. I can’t open my eyes, and my ears ring like slot machines dumping quarters. I can feel my heartbeat in my neck. I can’t move, no matter how loud I scream backward into my brain. And then he disappears. This happens for enough nights that I start sleeping on the couch, hoping that he is confined to the bedroom. But he follows. I start sleeping on the floor encircled by my Bible, some icons, and a crucifix, as though they will throw him off my scent. But night after night, he finds me. I invite the priest from my new church over to bless my apartment. I think about what cookies I’ll serve him.

The priest walks around every room in my apartment, praying from a small black leather book with gilded page edges. I shadow him, trying to scan what he’s softly mumbling for the words devil, demon, Satan, et cetera. But all I hear is the word blessing repeatedly, which seems too anemic to lift any curses. I ask him for a prayer of protection, and he says, “As long as you believe in God and take communion, you don’t need it.” I tell him about the dark visitations, and he says, “It’s nothing, just some bad dreams.” Over a plate of Milanos at my small kitchen table, I tell him that I’m gay, and since I’m new to his congregation, I thought he should know. He says, “You’re lost.” I tell him that I’m not and that it’s final, that I’m done trying to change. He again says, “You’re lost.” As he leaves my apartment, he stops at my bedroom door and makes the sign of the cross.

On the Sunday after the apartment blessing, I’m standing in line for communion. When it’s my turn at the altar, I kneel, tip my head back, and open my mouth for the priest to place it on my tongue. Holding the Eucharist, he leans down close to my ear and whispers loudly for me to wait in the back of the church after mass. He doesn’t give me communion, but I keep my mouth open. He shoos me off the altar with a flick of his head. I’m confused but also not, because I know exactly why this is happening. I take my place at the back of the church. My blood warms and my spine empties. The yellow blanket flashes. I close my mouth.

In 1984, about a decade after The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge was cast as Thelma in the national tour of the play ’night, Mother. The play has only two characters: Thelma, an aging mother, and Jessie, her despairing, chronically ill daughter. The first scene opens with a routine domestic conversation about garbage bags and Hershey’s bars, during which Jessie abruptly asks Thelma, “Where’s Daddy’s gun?” Confused and assuming it’s for her daughter’s protection, Thelma helps Jessie find it in the attic. As Jessie comes down the attic ladder, she says, “I’m going to kill myself, Mama.” She explains that she is tired of always feeling pained and that she is done with hoping for different. Over the course of the play, Thelma tries her best to dissuade Jessie from killing herself. At one point she says, “How can I get up every day knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive, and I couldn’t do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?” The play ends with the sound of a gunshot offstage.

After everyone has filed out, the priest and I stand in the back of the church. Looking down at the well-worn red carpet under the half-glow of dimmed chandeliers, he says, “I can’t give you communion because you’re not trying to repent.” I don’t argue or push back. I just nod a lot, tell him that I get it. He says, “I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing or not. But I just can’t give it to you.” Whenever I’d imagined this moment happening, this reckoning, there were always pitchforks and a pyre, crowds of people spitting. I didn’t think it would be this quiet, this soft. He says, “It wouldn’t be right.” The words are hard for him to get out. I try to comfort him by repeating that I understand, by seeming unfazed. I try to make it all go down easy. I think that he’s a good man trying his best to do what he feels is right, and then hate myself for having this thought. This is the last mass I ever attend. I am skinned of my religion. Now I am all flesh.

In November of 1987, John Markle, Mercedes McCambridge’s only child, was fired from his prestigious accounting firm when it was discovered that he’d been committing fraud through his mother’s account. In an attempt to settle the matter and keep it private, Markle and the firm tried to set up a repayment plan with McCambridge, but she refused, saying that she had done nothing wrong and was, in fact, owed money. On November 6, 1987, Markle shot dead his wife, Christine (age forty-five), and his daughters, Amy (age thirteen) and Suzanne (age nine), before turning the gun on himself. I read all of his obituaries. One of them published the long, handwritten letter that he left behind for his mother: “Initially you said, ‘Well, we can work it out,’ but NO, you refused. . . . You called me a liar, a cheat, a criminal, a bum. You said I have ruined your life. . . . You were never around much when I needed you, so now I and my whole family are dead — so you can have the money. . . . ’Night, Mother.”

My father tells me that on the way to the exorcisms, his uncle would stop at a butcher he knew. His uncle would have the butcher slaughter a calf and then cut out its liver. They’d slice it thickly, cover it in lemon juice and salt, and eat it off the cutting board. My father says that the brilliance of its taste wasn’t just about its freshness. He says that it was about tasting the organ at the animal’s body temperature. “Maybe your shoes got bloodied at the butcher’s?” I ask him. He says, “You still don’t believe me.”

Mercedes McCambridge wouldn’t have kept priests by her side if she didn’t believe there was a risk. Did the devil reap what McCambridge sowed in that recording booth by slaughtering her family? This is the kind of question only I would ask, because in the Christianity I know, everyone eventually pays for what they’ve done. What price will I pay for writing about him? What unseen horror is barreling toward me? In her 1981 autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, McCambridge writes: “If I have to climb into heaven on a ladder, I shall have to decline the invitation.” Besides Pazuzu’s dialogue, these are her most memorable lines, interpreted as a chic kind of heresy. If you keep reading further down the page, though, you see that she’s merely describing her difficulty with ladders. She writes: “Going up is sheer agony, and going down is impossible.” McCambridge uses heaven to measure a fault in her body. I use heaven to measure the ladder. My belief in God wavers. It goes in and out like a channel losing reception, but all I know to do is climb.

I am sitting next to my father in my parents’ unnecessarily formal dining room at the end of dinner. Everyone has left the table except for him and me. We’re surrounded by plates of half-eaten shish kebabs and empty bottles of Corona. I tell my father about the dark visitations. About how when the devil comes for me, I can’t move or speak. About the noise I hear and the terror I feel. He’s a doctor and starts going through the differential. It’s not MS or delirium, he says. It’s not seizures or schizophrenia. He tells me that I have sleep paralysis and that it’s common, that it comes from stress. I say, “Are you sure, Dad? It feels like he or something or someone is right there.” He puts his hands on my throat and gently feels for lymph nodes. I say, “It’s like he’s right next to me. Right next to the bed. It’s more than stress, Dad. I know stress.” He wraps his hand around my wrist and checks my pulse. I say, “This is evil. It’s something evil.” He asks if anything is going on with me, if I’m under a lot of stress right now. I tell him about how I wake up with blood in my mouth from grinding my teeth, about infected nail beds that I keep biting. I tell him that I just don’t feel right. My father says, “God is always with you. Don’t ever worry. DON’T. This is nothing, habibi. He is always with you.” I want to trust him, but I don’t. It’s so easy for him to believe in all of it. In the pearly gates and the water into wine. In the kingdom to come. But I only believe the parts about fire and gore. Those are the parts for me. They’re mine.

I type this paragraph with my left hand. And it’s taking a long time to get the sentences out. This is the hand of the devil typing. And it’s taking too long. I type quickly to get this part over with. This is the adult version of sleeping on top of the blanket, a way of minimizing my exposure to risk. My left hand is a planchette dragged against the board. The poor girl had no chance. I’m waiting for something to happen: a door to slam or the lights to flicker, a cold spot to form in the center of the room, any sign that he’s here. I’m kneeling at the altar, my head pulled all the way back, my mouth broken open and left empty. Are we alone right now? The thing about being a Christian faggot is that, like a calf living behind a butcher shop on an unnamed road to a far-off church somewhere in Egypt, I’m always waiting for the knife to come down, for the blood to spill.

Untitled IX, 1982

Closure

My parents were scheduled to divorce on Valentine’s Day.
I was there in the beginning, sat next to my grandmother,

in her teal blue dress and hot combed strands. As a rule,
she refused to appear unrefined. In a warm church in Trinidad,

a wedding evening in hurricane season, we wore our Sunday best,
my mother and I, in matching white lace and wide eyes.

Why shouldn’t this bond be marked by an angel with an arrow,
tasked to put an end to the sorrow of suffering alone

love meant to be shared. The sugar apples of my mother’s cheeks,
rouged more than the red carnation pinned to my father’s smokey

blue suit. I search his handsome jaw and boyish grin for clues. We keep
the happy secrets of these fleeting Trade winds, in the family album,

so old, the memory and the artifact have become one. Pigment sealed
to plastic for eternity, a reality that cannot be undone or loosened,

only destroyed. Marriage is a valentine that misses me
though I have imagined myself able to walk up the aisle,

if not back down it, which is partly why I am disappointed
when the court rescheduled without a reason. Perhaps

the judge on the docket, newly in love, refused to chance the karma
of divorce court. I can say it now, these years later,

I was eager to be asked to witness our legal dissolution.
The annihilation of vows that were broken. Tell me

what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,
or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.

Many Years of Nowhere Behind Us

A friend once described the experience of being a refugee as being in a space shuttle losing one engine after another, catapulted into the infinite darkness of the universe. You and I share that experience: of losing ground and surviving in a vast empty space. It is that common vector which draws me to your books, especially in moments near death — that great darkness, la gran eskuridad, as you call it, “the void into which we were spilled, alive, to die.”

In the summer of 2019, I read your book, My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You, which tells the story of your parents’ flight from the Bosnian war of 1992-1995. I read it beside my husband’s bed in a local Florida hospital. The war had erased thousands of lives and made millions of people into refugees, including your parents, my mother, many of those we love. My husband, an American, was cheered by the stories of your parents’ life in North America, by the humor and the kindness with which you narrated their struggle to transform the space they found themselves in. He recognized my mother in your parents’ excessive thriftiness, their unease when ordering food in restaurants, their preoccupation with personal and global catastrophes. I, by contrast, related to the void that structured their existence.

There is a paragraph in My Parents in which you describe your mom’s exile from Sarajevo as a loss of the “comfortable feeling that everyone around her had access to the same referential field.” I had seen that same loss eat away at my mother after she left Bosnia, too. In Sarajevo, my mother did not have only a career or properties, things that could be replaced. She had her seamstress who made additional pockets on all her pants, her photocopier for endless streams of government documents, her miniature bottles of rose petal scent purchased at the entrance of the Gazi Husref-Bey’s mosque. Like your parents, she came to appreciate her life in America, but the new home was never a substitute for these missing spatial and social coordinates. Like your mom, my mother felt that in exile she lost “everything that had constituted her as a person…Overnight, she became a nobody… a nothing.”

After three decades in the United States, my mother has returned to Sarajevo, determined to die at home: in her neighborhood, in her own language, buried next to her husband. And so it is that I am reading your new novel, The World and All That It Holds, in Sarajevo, by my mother’s bedside, in the shadow of la gran eskuridad. Your book helps me understand both my mother’s zest for life and her death drive.

The main characters in your novel are also refugees. They could be friends we grew up with on the hillsides of Sarajevo, sledding together in Bjelave or playing by the synagogue in Mejtaš. I recognize the dybbuks that haunt Rafael Pinto, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo who “is always on his way home, but never makes it there.” You might have played soccer with boys like Osman Karišik, a street-smart orphan of Sarajevo’s čaršija and a very handsome storyteller, who captures Rafael’s heart on the battlefields of Ukraine in the Great War. Along with Rahela, their daughter, they too were catapulted into the great void by the world’s endless wars, their lives nothing but reiterative encounters with la gran eskuridad. The violence pushed them from Sarajevo to the fields of Galicia, and from the deserts of Tajikistan to the opium dens of Shanghai. Like all refugees, the novel’s narrator tells us, they kept “moving forward because they had nowhere else to go.”

Many years of nowhere behind us, my mother and I are back in our old Sarajevo apartment, a 1970s socialist high-rise with paper-thin walls and neighbors who bring food daily. The apartment was devastated during the war and never renovated. It is emptied of all the things that were once ours but still replete with memories of my father as he lay on his deathbed, just months before the war started in 1992. My mother is bedridden yet feels sovereign in this space. She needs to talk to ease the pain of death. As she recounts stories of unrequited loves among her friends, I realize that her love for Sarajevo exceeds her love for me or for her own life.

I respond by telling her about your novel, about the depth of Osman’s and Rafael’s love for each other: how they both survived the Brusilov Offensive in the Great War as Bosnian conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army, how they longed after Sarajevo but knew that their relationship would have been impossible to either hide or reveal in the city of their youth, how Rafael fought with his demons and succumbed to addictions, how Rahela found a sleazy American womanizer to take her away from her father, how Osman saved their lives by joining the Soviet Cheka but even more so by telling his tales from and about Sarajevo. My mother listens but seems less interested in the plot than in the emotions that the characters carry and evoke. She is enamored with Osman, worried about Pinto, and anguished by uncertainty of their destination and improbability of their return to home.

To soothe my mother, I repeat Osman’s stories, which connect the novel’s protagonists to the city they lost. There is a story about a poor hamal who reports to his wife about the deaths of Sarajevo’s rich and important men — all strangled by the sultan’s executioners with a silken cord; his wife responds, “Thank good Allah you are a nothing and a nobody.” There is a story about Nasrudin Hodža, who was elated to discover he could save money by teaching his donkey to eat a bit less every day, and just as he thought he succeeded, the donkey starved to death. There is a story about a bride who is given diamonds and gold when she departs from Sarajevo to follow her husband, for that much she would lose by leaving the city – and another who is given but a handkerchief when she marries into Sarajevo, for “her gift was a lifetime in the city.” And then there is a story about a local Sarajevo hero, Alija Đerzelez, who earned his incredible strength not through battle but as a reward for his kindness, when he made shade for a fairy’s daughter.

My mother smiles at Osman’s tales, many of which my father used to tell at dinnertime. They are lullabies for children and fables for adults in this corner of the world where — as the common Bosnian saying, repeated by the narrator, goes — even “God had said good night and never came back in the morning.” She wonders aloud if Americans could ever understand literature stitched of Bosnian folktales without happy endings. I hesitate but concur. Osman’s tales do not resemble feats of great masculinity in Manichean battles with la gran eskuridad that propel Hollywood action movies. Instead, they are tales of futility and perseverance in the face of almost certain defeat. Little people, we have always been taught in Bosnia, know their place in history. They harbor fantasies of being spared its whims by being nobodies, by being nothing. They keep moving because they have nowhere else to go. They live because they are afraid to die. Riding in a teplushka, a train full of Russian prisoners of war and dead corpses, and watching over sick Osman, Rafael Pinto recalled the way his mother, Manuči, used to drown mice. The mice would scrape the walls of the bucket but could not escape it, much as “a wise man spent his life searching for a way to live without perishing, and just as he found it, he perished.”

Through Osman’s tales, a portrait of Sarajevo — its neighborhoods, its scents, its street noises, its larger-than-life denizens — emerges like a candle that never stops burning. In Osman’s whispers and kisses, I see armies setting the city on fire and hear melancholy music of Bosnian sevdah and Sefaradim’s Ladino songs. There is no one who, after reading this novel, would not understand Osman and Rafael’s desire to return to Sarajevo; no one who would not wish to rest their head on Osman’s chest as the only possible home in the world. Ultimately, it is Sarajevo, even in absence, that anchors our world and all that it holds.

Perhaps because the angst of survival is so familiar to me, I find as much solace in the perpetual proximity to death in the novel as I do in the rhythm of your writing. Death is always present on the novel’s pages. It is visceral and embodied. It fills the world with its stench. Limbs and brains and guts litter the war-torn landscapes as if to ensure that no one should ever expect death to be easy, to be a solution. I hold onto the frequent refrains in the novel; their repetition offers a lifeline. The choruses somehow console without reassuring, much like Kaddish during Shabbat prayers. Written in Bosnian, Ottoman, Ladino, Yiddish, they echo the linguistic dexterity of refugees and the polyphony of our Sarajevo. “Weep for the mourners, not for the soul that has already gone home,” runs one of these refrains.

My mother and I are saying our goodbyes. She is being cared for by a succession of Bosnian war widows, all single mothers. As they massage my mother’s frail body with kindness and with mehlems, I wonder who will, one day, take care of theirs. The children they raised are looking for work in European capitals. Bosnia is emptying out again. Great powers are squabbling over its carcass. On the fields of Ukraine some new young lives are being crushed. “Weep for the soul that cannot go home and not for the mourners hiding in a wall.” Sabur, mila, the women tell me. Be patient, dear. Endure. Allah, The Almighty, is watching us.

I will take you home, said Rahela to her father, Rafael Pinto, in Shanghai. Andemos al Sarajevo.

Andemos, I hear my mother responding, as she steps into la gran eskuridad.

Gunpowder

The gunpowder went biting its elbows.
— César Vallejo

I have met gunpowder: gunpowder moves past with death: gunpowder is turncoat: gunpowder explodes on the earth: gunpowder carpets the earth with shrapnel and flashes: gunpowder slows to a stop: gunpowder passes on by: gunpowder seeks out: gunpowder takes cover: gunpowder disguises itself as flame: gunpowder is thunder from combat: gunpowder is the smoke coming off death: gunpowder burns blood into ruins and corners: gunpowder breaches: gunpowder passes on by: gunpowder, underhanded: gunpowder and its gusts: gunpowder and its lightning bolts: I have met death.

Epigraph from “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic,” translated by Clayton Eshleman.

Abstraction

         miscarriage 9/24/2021

A cheap print of an aspen grove
In the exam room — it’s not bad,
Cross-lines of bark, long straight lines for the trunks,
Brown and black and gold in the foreground,
Receding to white in the back — the farthest trees, then,
Just a line or two, a white line suggesting
The whole tree.
If I were teaching, say, a child, say
You, I could tell you that it’s called
Abstraction, the line suggests the tree but isn’t,
See the shapes the lines make in your head and it’s a tree
But also isn’t, faint and fainter. But if
You and I were in a forest, if we were in a birch forest in the snow,
Then it’d be a tree and still a tree, a real tree, even if it was so far away we couldn’t see it,
So far so white against the terrible white cold, a tree, a real tree
Just so small and white against the snow it disappeared.

Noon

Listen to the original, in Greek:

a row of cypresses towered over the road
we knelt at the water’s source
drank its cleanness
plane trees shaded the ground, shaded
the brown-on-brown tufts, wool from shearing
residue of hands on the bodies of animals
in Easter the ditchwater purples
while in the square, huddled together, awaiting
sacrifice the chosen offering
bleats
flesh
prey for humans
shared with wine
wine blood, wine bread
dirt.
“A soul dressed in a body,” Empedocles says
earth surrounding the mortal
earth surrounding the death-susceptible
earth surrounding the already gone.

In Search of Radical Care

This month was, I confess, an accident — the kind that our turn this year to digital monthly issues is designed to invite. As we reviewed the pieces in conversation with each other, we found a lot of mothers. More than that, we found so many examples of what culture calls mothering: acts of care, gestures of comfort, so many kinds of commitment to help bodies come into being — or, to borrow poet Phoebe Giannisi’s invocation of Empedocles, to help “a soul dressed in a body” become. Simply that, wherever the verb leads.

It’s perhaps a bit too on the nose (it’s nearly Mother’s Day in the US), but conversations emerge in their own time. Our job at Guernica, we think, is to listen a little more acutely than we might elsewhere in our busy, cacophonous lives and nudge ourselves onward toward the collective vision, that political imagination, that holds so much more for all of us than the world we live in. This month, we heard a search for radical acts of care.

Rafael Frumkin journeys toward trans joys. Sara Petersen critiques motherhood as a gendered and performative act. Sena Moon writes from the intimacy of worlds mothers create for daughters. And, in a sudden turn, Chris Santiago’s poem articulates the existential force, in language as in life, of “mother.” In Apostrophe, our column for book reviews that celebrate the subjective, Aida A. Hozić writes in dialogue with Aleksander Hermon’s work on family — that collective of care (and, often, its opposite) — and in Monika Woods’s “Reading,” a committed mother’s home unspools, even as she helps her son thrive. Yoko Uema longs for safety for the puddle-splashing children of Okinawa, where the consequences of US military presence still put body and soul at risk.

Also this month, we have an extra helping of poetry for you — at Guernica, poetry is very much an offering of spiritual care — from Wayne Koestenbaum, Tuệ Sỹ, and Jesús Cos Causse. And we’re grateful for the translators featured in this issue — Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda, Kristin Dykstra, Martha Collins, Nguyen Ba Chung, and Brian Sneeden — whose commitment to helping new work reach Anglophone readers is equally a creative and political becoming.

Thank you for being here.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

Daydream

Riding an ant, we seek a fairy’s cave
A realm of long life, where butterflies flutter
Where toads and frogs wander, looking for food
Where, in a deep hole, a snake dreams

At the cave’s mouth, a circle of dancing bees
A forest flower paints her sensuous face
Shamed by their lack of beauty, old reeds rise
And become a fairy with fluttering white hair

Weary ants crawl around, searching for food
On our backs: a debt of gratitude and love
The same destiny, lost in a strange land
Same affection, felt in the faint sunlight

We ask the ant: Where is the Pure Land —
Beyond emptiness, there, in the tracks of birds
Away from the call of the black, bitter earth
Where the light of thought takes over from the sun?

We call to the ants, to faltering silver clouds
As we travel along the road, our troubled country
We peel back the past, astonishing deities
And bite infinity, breaking the dream in two

The country has been pensive since that day
When late-night forest fires loved dead leaves
Now we seek a heart that’s been broken
Hungry for time, we gnaw at nothingness

David’s Nipples

on Sunday after church I took a walk
so I could discuss your nipples
with the friendly woodpecker
who visits the birch tree
to turn its bark into torn paper

but now the woodpecker fails to pull its conversational weight
earlier this morning the woodpecker was helpful
describing the swan’s superimpositions
the eschatological underwear

laugh tracks served as euphoria-inducing punctuation
de Chirico waxing Calder
in the metaphorical washroom
near the not yet bloomed orange roses

we advanced the discussion to Dr. Kildare
licking little glassine squares and affixing
collected stamps to their mausoleum book
as if I were the obstetrician and not the undisciplined annotator

Infix

What happens when fantastic
becomes fan-fucking-tastic
was not something I considered
until I tried to learn Tagalog,
the f-bomb in this case an infix,
element that sounds vaguely criminal
but is old as fuck itself.
Motherfucker on the other hand’s
much younger — you low-down mother-
fuckers Sidney Wilson wrote to
the Tennessee Draft Board in 1918
can put a gun in our hands
but who can take it out? Black soldiers
like Pvt. Wilson fought in the Philippines
twenty years earlier & before that saved
Roosevelt’s skin at San Juan Hill.
Before the Spaniards they fought Indians:
Kiowa. Comanche: whose children were forced
to forget numu tekwapu — the Comanche
for Comanche — in English-only schools.
Tagalog agglutinates. Stems
glom tense & tone
like coconut flakes on rice balls.
Kain / eat becomes kumain / will eat
by subsuming um (in English a sound
of uncertainty). Mamatay / perish
fibrillates to mamamatay —
one day you will die.
The infix marks the shift: ma,
as though to go from death
the infinitive to death as future tense
one need only bury their mother.