Duck Beater

[My friend and editor Nate Hoil recently interviewed me about some stories of mine he published in his zine. It's been a while, so I thought I'd go ahead and post the first of these (they're very DuckBeater-ey, I find). I wrote most of this on my phone in winter 2023, after a visit to Nova Scotia—probably why each paragraph after is about one iPhone 13 Pro Max screen long. The finished piece appeared in March 2024 and I reproduce it below with no dignity-mitigating edits.]

He describes a Canadian writer’s short stories as too cute by half. “Like, what’s an example?” He answers, “All the pennies in circulation have been used up in a kind of penny-press craze. Uh,” he tries to remember, “the penny-press is that thing in a museum where you put two quarters in and then a penny, and the penny is smooshed and has a thing stamped on it. In this story, the penny stamp shows you a really small pictogram of your death. Or your first pet. Or the name of your soulmate. It’s short stories like that—they have this carapace of magical realism that is also trivial and plot-motivating. The penny-press must be decommissioned because it’s adversely affecting the economy, the production of pennies can’t meet the demands of the press. Indeed people gather the world over, in a globe-looping line, to enter the museum and climb its however many marble steps until reaching a fourth floor portico where the machine sits prettily and unassuming, save that it’s you know, supernatural.” His interlocutor says, “But you’ve thought about this story a lot.” He concedes: “I think about stories a lot.” “Oh, are you a writer?” He says, “Not really, not anymore.” They drink their beers. “Okay, but what did you write about?” He thinks about it and says, “Just like, love stories, kinda.” 

What were his love stories about? “I worked on this one cycle for a while, about moving to Chicago and trying to make it work with this um, a guy, and I wasn’t that young actually. Thirty-one, then, but it seemed I had no clue how to do anything. I had to start a new job and make new friends and acclimate to my boyfriend’s routines and in a lot of ways, the story I was writing concurrently, to keep up with the devastation and confusion of that relationship, and some of its joys, was a way of describing to myself the difficulty of what was happening in my life. I’m always writing from life,” he says, with exhaustion. “I find my life puzzling, and my friends’ lives interesting, and our problems make good copy, as they say. But people from my imagination don’t really hold my attention in any sustained way. Although, because I’ve never really finished these stories, you could say that my own life also does not hold my attention in any sustained way, either.” The man asks, “Is that why you’re in Halifax?” 

“I’m in Halifax because it and Andrew generate strong feelings and mysteries to me. I’m hoping to apprehend some of those feelings and solve a few of these mysteries.” Does he really believe this? “I’m not saying what I mean,” he says. His questioner says, “Then why not say what you mean?” He laughs a little. “I suppose that I’m very lonely and I wanted to meet my friend. I wanted him out of my phone. It’s normal enough.” The man asks, “Are you going to write about this?”—“Our conversation?”—“Sure. But all of this—” and the man points out at the bay’s midnight blue waters, and the string lights above the beer garden, and the revelers holding half-full steins shout-talking and smiling, and at tall, broad Andrew two tables down, surrounded by his friends. There’s a propane heater behind him whose tall orange flame turns his hair from yellow to gold and he’s laughing at something in such a sustained way, his mirth seems so cumulative, that his green eyes are grin-pinched and sparkling. Why is he looking at Andrew’s hair so closely? What does grin-pinched even mean? 

Evan says, “You know, summarizing my project this way makes me think I spent a decade drafting the most self-involved Am I the Asshole? post that never got on Reddit—I just kept writing down new ways I was being an asshole, or how someone else was being an asshole, or finding strategies to make assholes mean more than their cruelty and their consequences mean more than misery, and that’s possibly a lot of Western literature, actually—Edith Wharton novels are basically like, Am I the asshole for wanting a divorce?” He sips more of his beer. “Am I the asshole for wanting fewer social-climbing friends?” He tries to remember other Wharton plot points. “Am I the asshole for discreetly paying down my gambling debts?”

The man has not read Wharton and fears Evan will keep citing her. “Are you writing now,” he asks, “even a little something?” Christ, thinks Evan, I am getting drunk on this pier and I should have brought a jacket. The September air is unseasonably cool. He is almost crowd-deaf and slightly swaying, gripping the tall table to steady himself. “I’ve been drafting sketches,” he starts, hesitating, “about this sick guy who lives in—or he maybe lived in—Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. It’s unclear now. God. I’m afraid this story will sound like our Canadian friend with her pressed pennies. I’ll tell it like that, if you don’t mind.”—“I don’t mind.” So Evan takes a breath. “There once was a man in high demand to the claim and fame of the stars. He did everything: hair, makeup, tattoos, styling. And he took in everything, all of culture and celebrity—a cosmophage. He played piano, painted and mixed his own perfumes. All his life was luxury; all he owned was exquisite; his tastes were apiece of his access and accolades, his jet-setting ways, his success and self-mythologizing. 

“I know this because I’ve kept detailed records, an archive really, for months now”—Evan repeats this, wincing and abashed—“Jesus Christ, for months now, of the slightly psychotic content he posts to a GoFundMe page. This is where, apart from listing haute couture fashion houses and expensive consumer electronics, he’s journaled about dying from blood cancer or suicide (he hasn’t decided which) and belly-ached about the unfairness of life and begged donors for absurd cash sums, in an effort, I suppose, to recapture the glory that’s abandoned him. For the glory did abandon him, as riches and favor in fairytales sometimes do.”

The man asks if this is another story from his life, and Evan answers: “No, not my life, but I am obsessed with his GoFundMe page and refresh it with eerie persistence. I’ll be holding my dick in the stall and thinking, What’s my sad guy in Port aux Basques blogging about today? and have my phone out before I finish peeing. Once you find someone this idiotic, it’s difficult to look away. You want to keep your idiot safe. You also want to keep your idiot batshit crazy because it’s very entertaining—his heartache is very entertaining. There’s this line by Robert Walser that I love: ‘People will think that suffering has made you stupid.’”

“But your guy’s suffering has made him entertaining?”

Evan shrugs in a practiced, almost sacerdotal, knowing kind of meanness. “Am I the asshole,” he says, “for finding this very public cry for help utterly transfixing? Anyway,” he continues, “it’s difficult to say what drove him back to his small seaside village. Manic depression, insolvency, a breakup? He’s a very unreliable narrator, and there’s glaring narrative inconsistencies, as you’ll often find with someone so unhappy and desperate. It could be that last September, per his reports, Hurricane Fiona destroyed his salon, his livelihood, his apartment, his life. It could be, per his reports, that he’s holed up in a storage room in his mom’s house, drafting these long missives, and sending them out on his meagerly-followed social media accounts, every day asking for someone to restore him, asking for everything back. Asking for Nespresso, KitchenAid and Dyson; for Gucci, Fendi and Prada; for Apple, Google and Amazon; for Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot, Moët & Chandon; for Bugatti, Tesla and Maserati; and for properties in London, Los Angeles and Toronto. Every day, he’s asking that his riches be returned. Every day, he’s asking for a way out that isn’t death. It’s pathetic. Yet a little bit—uh—a little bile noble? Um, and anyway, I’m writing about that.” 

The man asks Evan, if you live in Chicago, how did you find this dying man with his dumbfounding GoFundMe, when he lives in Newfoundland. “Andrew did.” Evan points at Andrew, who remains backlit by a column of propane fire, the two tables away, listening to someone else, eyes lowered and holding his elbows. “He’s a great dredger of internet idiots. Brought me a prize.”

“Why not just fly to Newfoundland?”

“Because I’m not a journalist.”

“But the stuff you take from life—”

“I’m not a reporter. I add a lot of nonsense.”

Peter Handke’s memoir A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is notable for its brevity and also the brevity of its composition. In less than 90 pages he examines his mother’s suicide, sketches something of her backwoods youth in interwar Germany, sympathetically evokes her enervating middle years (child-rearing, poverty, spirit-killing monotony), then analyzes her life’s coda—a time of curiosity, social reinvention and zest. By elevating her consciousness, she apparently collapsed all that’d come before, made it ugly and non-negotiable. To quit the past required a whole bottle of sleeping pills.  

Handke’s analyses is forensic, delicate and rational. You believe he loves his mother not from sentimental asides or fantasies of saving, but by his devotion to the truth, which, given his mother’s unhappiness and pettiness and lack of education, has a nearly universal meaningless. What did her death mean? Who could it possibly affect?

Anyway, he finished the book in two months, and included the odd occasional all-caps abstraction. When I’m walking around at night I sometimes think, “NEAT, CLEAN and JOLLY,” or “WEAK-KNEED,” or “GREAT FALL,” or “MEANWHILE HAD GONE OUT OF EXISTENCE,” and know I’m occupied once more with my little sorrow beyond dreams.

—

“Man,” I texted Mackie, “I’ve been awake since 3AM. It’s 5 now. Jerked off 2x. No sleep.” I hit send before deciding my intentions. I don’t think we know what to say to each other, but we’re always saying things to each other, and it’s never, “Was thinking about you, how great it’d be to be turn over and just talk to you in the dark.” I don’t know if he’d actually ever say that to me—seems wishful. Mackie is not very nice and he lives very far away. 

—

Went to a party on Wednesday. I wore dark blues down to my briefs, and navy small shoes with no arches. I got off the train hobbling and talked myself up in the alleys on the way to the two-story condo where we’d celebrate night 4 of Hanukkah. I’d slept with the host, obviously, and one or two friends in attendance. I’m not really a part of this group, I’ve just—I guess I’ve penetrated it, as they say. 

I had rehearsed convos in my head. I had slammed a blue-bottled beer before getting on the train and felt woozy but competent, just a little in pain. Everyone there seemed leagues more jovial and put together and interesting and adult than me, I felt, immediately on opening the door. I had forced an earring in a closed hole and my left ear was berry red and throbbing—a part of why I felt so juvenile. Grown men don’t just press past the barrier of healed skin. It made a small gratifying popping sound as it cleared the other side and felt hot-hot, and it’s a sensation I’ll repeat (it’s a sensation writing repeats). 

For a while, to get out of the heat and press of my successful and attached gay cohort, I hung out with the only female in attendance, Bernice, a noted fag hag (I believe she condones this use), and stroked a paw of the small dog seeking refuge in a pillow-pile beside me on the over-plush couch. Because I felt lonely, I wanted to ask, “Bernice, why do you exclusively attend these kinds of events? Why do you exclusively attend events where you’re shunted to an oversized couch with a social incompetent? What’s the deal with you and gays?” Instead we talked about our jobs. This inadvertently dimensionalized Bernice for me. 

“I’ve done so much bullshit work for the last decade,” she snorted, “and in 2022 I got hired as a special projects consultant for an absolutely broken renewable energies firm.” She explained the firm’s stultifying snags on ESG semantics, its optical insecurities, how it quavered on progressive politics, waffling on bygone  talking points. “I was loaned out,” said Bernice. “Um, so my firm actually salaried me. I could say whatever I wanted in the vaunted halls of the executive suites and the buffet boxes of free sports tickets and the Connecticut mansion parties. And I called them cowards. I really busted their balls for weeks and weeks—on op-eds, white papers, social media posts, ‘the state security alignment’—I’m sorry, I mean the police—and also, who are those tadpoles in DC—”—“Lobbyists,” I breathed—“Lobbyists,” she breathed back, “I called them out on how based and cucked and knob-choked they all were on the teeny fucking penises of the DC lobbyists. I wanted them to feel so small and stupid and dry and bad, for what they were making, which was millions every day, millions on millions, while I—finally—afforded a Kia. I hate feeling poor. At our age? Don’t you?” “Yes. I hate it.” “Right. So I made them feel poor, a little bit.”

During this peroration I got trembly and blank, excited and critical. I let this leave me. I said, “Did you prevail?” and Bernice said, “The fuck no. But god damn! I made sixteen-kay in November. You ever make that much in a month?” “No, never, and I never,” I said. I told her how had I finally afforded a new car by taking a job at a bank. Bernice has also studied literature. (I don’t think she keeps a blog.) We cheersed saying, “Eat the rich,” [clink], “Eat the rich,” and that felt very correct. The dog licked my palm, perhaps mistaking our intent. “We’re not gonna eat you,” I said, and the dog chittered his teeth at me.

Later that night I made out with a guy name Andrew (such an indelible millennial name), and then never talked to him again though we’ve texted somewhat since.

Mackie asked what I was up to that night and I sent him a couple photo and video updates that were greeted by silence. The next AM he was sending obscure memes again. Out of jealousy, I told myself.

—

It’s odd—I didn’t really solve why Bernice exclusively hangs out with thirty-something gays who ignore her. (My last theory is that she enjoys recreational drugs: her gay friend group is really into those.) Past the obscure memes, I solicited Mackie for some explanation. He unimaginatively offered misogynistic trash, with the line, “Can’t pull but likes to watch.” Typing that up makes me feel very late and very closed-minded to the asexual community, although assuming Bernice is asexual feels as offensive as assuming she hangs out with queers for ketamine. Sometimes our friends, our networks, our densest and most particular milieus spring upon us by accident. And yet—she’s consulted for a living. She made $16K in November. She’s canny. Also clearly she hates straight rich white men. What gives?

I texted the host, thanking him for his hospitality; I texted Andrew, thanking him for his wonderful plump kisses; I texted other men who’d breeched my IG stronghold with accolades and complaints about my attention and comportment. A guy I’d “met” on Grindr and spoken to in the kitchen let me know I’d “rejected him” after he’d shared his album; that’d I stopped talking to him after seeing him naked. But—he was glad we’d met in real life, because he’d had the opportunity to confirm I did read books. He’d written: “When you talk, you use big words.” Embarrassed, I messaged him back saying, “I didn’t reject you. I’m just bad at Grindr. And yeah, I read books.” (Guys: the fact remains, I read books.)

I did reject him. His body repulsed me. He’d been overweight for years and undertaken marathon training, so all the skin on him was oozing and angry and stretched like taffy. Also I wasn’t that into his penis. Judging his fitness—his ripeness—his fuckability—based on something as arbitrary as cock-hardness and a sculpted torso—is the remit of the sexually unenlightened. I know! Not wanting to bang Stu because his body gave me the squick (and his body giving me the squick because of socially inherited standards of gay male beauty) drove me slightly batshit. I’d gone to Hanukkah Night 4 hoping for no part of that—hoping, indeed, for enlightenment. And still, I was confronted in the corner of the kitchen with a man who I had no intention of sleeping with, with him later asking me, “Why?” Also, I think that’s a party foul. If I’d been hideous on Grindr that’d be one thing, but I’d only been silent. 

(I’d gone to Hanukkah Night 4, actually, fully with the intention of some very beautiful, intelligent man courting me, seducing me, sweetly asking if he might take me home. Mackie reminded me: “You went to a gay party hoping to get laid.” When I revisit our texts, I see that on Wednesday night, I did jokingly say, “Wearing blue briefs tonight in case I get laid.”)

—

Prevail in the sense of what. 

I keep telling myself, if you just write in the style (or concern) of Grace Paley, you’ll manage your output better. You’ll actually write, rather than not write, which—bizarre to point out—a lot of egregiously more talented writers simply don’t do. They either don’t read Grace Paley or they don’t take her example seriously. Can’t drop the kids off at the sitter? Disappointing a union rep? Grocery store reverie? Class action lawsuit? Neighborhood defense? Teaching Zoomers dialogue? Furious about parking? Guys being complete pricks? What’s for breakfast? (“Our shrinking family requires more coffee, more eggs, more cheese, less butter, less meat, less orange juice, more grapefruit.”) Seasons shift their responsibilities [planting, watering, raking, shoveling] and finally the apartment, the car, the stoop, and [even] the park demand a graceless apology and accounting for. How do you come by these treasures? 

Paley gives you freedom to remark on the banal frustrations and the relentless petty drama of existing while renting. So too of dating while maybe dating others (a grace for the gays), and of wanting to attend an alderman’s fundraiser but maybe sliding one or more of your dates there, too—a Jane Jacobs by way of Nora Ephron. Maybe I only read her young writing. Perhaps I only read her young concerns. (No: She was 63 when she published the breakfast items above.) But everything feels fresh and hilarious and condoned. “You will sorely fuck this up, surely, but the lesson of living in the city will stick.” (I wrote that last quote, not Grace Paley.)

—

Later, Mackie texted, “Stop being annoying and text me back.”

A previous version of this post included the title supplements “(The Butcher of Loneliness, pt. 2; [Courtship, pt. 5]),” which made the top aggressively ugly and also abstruse. None the less, one should consider this entry as the fifth in a much-dislocated series. —The Editors

—

A stranger messaged me the other day, congratulating me on my Anne Carson tour. It seems I’d avoided her for two decades and then this last month [November] I read most of her work and posted about it, indiscriminately, nearly every night, on my IG story. Obv the accolades piled in, unstoppable. Indeed, I read most of her books in the span of two weeks—whatever I could find at the booksellers or online or through resellers, eager for her matter-of-fact eloquence on Greek historians, Proust’s long “fairy tale,” and then the remarks on Woolf (and why? I’ve barely read thru Swann’s Way). I was walking nearly 12 miles a day like the city varmint they track on TikToks. These were long walks to wear me down and they filled my heels with a bolting pain that pulsed, even in bed, even after taking many ibuprofen. I became lean like varmint, too. Running was an absolute nightmare but I ran anyway and obv you know this. 

What did I imagine Carson wrote versus what does she actually write? | thought she occupied herself with academic exercises—frosty, formal reports from the edge of translation, with some personal assaying inside. Crone’s notes; old lady vibes; sententious from her years collecting the high-finance prizes. (Thus I am both stupid and sexist.) I liked Autobiography of Red in grad school but couldn't follow the plot. [Falling out of the plot is a great fear of mine.] Her compendium of chapbooks, Float, has flashes of Frank O’Hara’s chatty list poems (“Eras of Yves Klein” and “How to Like ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ By Gertrude Stein”), and a very funny aside on style in “Merry Christmas from Hegel”: “You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot about Hegel or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying he was fed up with popular criticism of his terrible prose.” Ancient playwrights made themselves known as ghostships do by creaking thru fog. These encounters were diverting but not fastening, perhaps because they were, let’s be frank, scraps, one-offs, anecdotes, whose audience could be best described as friends and family. What was her deal with the Brontës? The difficulty with pronouns? I wasn’t family yet. I hadn’t read enough. I was a younger man. My circumstances changed. I was presumed to fall out of love, pathetically so. I fell back in love with someone who didn’t love me back—a feeling whose use-value accounts for a world literature rich in sympathetic losers. It was an excellent time to read one Anne Carson.

She writes a lot about not getting what you want. I discovered, with Glass, Irony & God, that she’s never found peace with the lover who abandoned her (“It is stunning... when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore”) and that her oeuvre may well be a perduring dialog with that loss. In Plainwater, published the same year, she opens her “Anthropology of Water” by prefacing, “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands”; and in the ominous poem “New Rule” from Men in the Off Hours, “The night of hooks?// The man blade left open on the stair?/ Not enough spin on it, said my true love/ when he left in our fifth year.” Then in Decreation, re the Bloomsbury set, with its members at last in matrimonial equipoise, Carson shits on the premise of their futurity:

I wonder if they paused to look at each other, these mated and unmated people, on the exposed plane of an ordinary moment of that curious, heavy, historic, wrong day. Sudden feeling of oldness. Black upland wind. Bring a coat, they had been told, and a piece of smoked glass. It will get cold. It will hurt your eyes. Totality is lightless, and should be colourless, yet may intensify certain questions that hang at the back of the mind. What is a spouse after all? Will this one stay, can this one keep me alive?

I mean, it wasn't exactly a great time to be alive. Two world wars, bad cures for cancer, and the ungenial environment for genius women. Still, you get the sense her worry’s sincere; she wants these aristocratic oddballs to find some warmth, some flame of reason. Carson’s apocalyptic scene-setting puts me in mind of Bo Bartlett's Dreamland, a painting full of strange celebrants on their way from a wedding. They are curious, serious, strolling up a hill. A few appear to look back at their viewers. There’s a bride, a pilot, a priest, a baby with a crown; a lady rich in her furs; and leading them all, a fool.

—

In The Paris Review, Carson describes a childhood moving past fixed friendships as her father moved from bank to bank in Canadian backwaters. Uprooted every few years, she regarded her schoolmates as bad bets; better to shy away from relations whose half-life guaranteed painful, present decay. (These are facts. My mom suffered same as a preacher’s daughter, leaving midwest ministries every three years or so for the next Methodist parsonage. I asked her what that was like, and she said, “I was always learning new rules. I never understood them. What music people liked. How I should dress. What was funny. I made good grades and was very pretty but was teased constantly because I was quiet and the minister was my dad and I tried always to be nice. I felt very alone.” Another comp: Anne Carson’s father and my mother’s father both died of premature, catastrophic, late-stage Alzheimer’s.)

When you’re young, you learn how to keep people close: you learn to trust that they last and even if they don’t last, you at least learn that faculty of trust (that people stay), which is a kind of peace. Trust-breakers remain outliers. They do not pertain to a worldview of paralyzing detachment. But “I’ll be leaving,” thought Carson; “this won’t last.” Her work continually makes evident that it has never resolved, never made sense of leaving, and that she has never learned enough from it to move on. Further, her work emphasizes that she has chosen not to move on. That, sometimes, choosing obsessive disappointment is as liberating and galvanizing as choosing what we superficially call “freedom.” “I’ve avoided enlightenment resolutely,” she says. “As it is, I’m just sad.”

In her brother’s epitaph, Carson includes Michael’s note admonishing her, “Don’t go back to the farm don’t go alone,” and, “Put the past away you have to.” The siblings were not only worlds but timescales apart. He wrote from Copenhagen where he was hard-scrabbling, existing on cigarettes and shopkeeping—but wifed-up—still, insect-pinned to a crime he committed in 1978 and never going home. Meanwhile, Anne led university students in Michigan through cases of Attic Greek (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and vocative) and composed odd poems about ruined expectations. On the one hand, several millennia of precedent: Simonides of Keos, Herodotos, Sokrates [her characteristic spelling favors a k where other scholars rely on the less economic ch], Archilochos, Augustine, Basho, Sartre. On the other, she inhabited estranging tactics: Is this a poem or prose translation? Is this a poem or academic gloss? Is this a poem or… opera? And then too the voices of dead starlets, Free French mystics, Romanian-born/German-language suicides, and (famously, for Anne Carson) Sappho. Her brother wrote “don’t go back” and “put the past away” but seemed sorely oblivious to her present case. Up stakes? From where? How can you return to where you’ve never left? How do you come back from where you’ve never gone, etc. (I’m asking for myself.)

Alice, a character in Complicite’s Mnemonic, tells her ex-lover Virgil, “You have to wait now and this time you follow,” crazing him. “Can you hear the inherent contradiction in that?” he reports to a friend, continuing: 

You have to wait and follow. It’s impossible. And I suddenly realized what’s happening to her . . . What’s going on is that she’s feeding back on herself. It’s feedback, turbulence. Her internal state is like weather. Our internal lives are a mystery. We don’t even know what causes us to sleep. My doctor can tell me I’ve got insomnia but he doesn’t know how or why.

I write that Anne Carson has never made sense of leaving, never moved on, and yet her formative years were spent in transit, dislocated, grasping and still removed. In her “Praise of Sleep,” she ends remarks on Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, The Odyssey, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Plato’s Krito with an ode whose last line reads: “Exit wound, as they say.” I consider this a hypothetical—a pretense—of feeling, because she hasn’t exited. Anne Carson is standing stock-still on blue icy hinterlands in dark Ontario. Others left, she stayed, and the wound (this is odd to say—actually, it’s certainly painful to write)—the wound is that we stay. If we exit, maybe we can find a goddam bandage or two. If we exit, maybe we can avoid further harm? In a play, as in life, exits create new scenes. You actually have to leave to move elsewhere, to move on. Acknowledging this is obv v silly but that doesn’t make it wrong. I corrected a friend on the same matter a few days ago: “This is not a metaphor.” 

“An epitaph is a way of thinking about death and gives consolation,” says Carson, in The Economy of the Unlost. “Salvation occurs, through the act of attention that forms stone into memory, leaving residue of greater life. I am speaking subjectively. There is no evidence of salvation except a gold trace in the mind.” 

Here my patience quavers.

Memory isn’t stone; it’s a blood sponge with connective neural byways and low electric activity. And gold is not found in persons whatsoever—not the element [unless thru surgery]—and only meekly by virtue of right action, as a simile, and a tired one.

—

[The sorrow of] unrequited love compels its sufferers to do strange things. Sometimes monstrous things. Of course requited love feeds upon its own vagaries—obsessive texting; fucking in closets at parties; betraying your right conscience to do wrong things (e.g, the one time I went on a big gay camping trip while my grandmother died, not too far away, to shore up my relations with a man. My brothers, who’d flown in to comfort my mother, found my absence unspeakably bizarre). Success in love absorbs these bursts of mania and incorporates them rather too smoothly into the usual narratives of banal romantic triumph. A rehearsal dinner’s tear-stained anecdotes; the party fodder; nostalgia. And despite the severity of love’s work in these broken measures, the idiocy of courtship (and situationship and relationship) have become a civic pastime—a tax some lucky ones pay to perdure in the dreamscape of public life as married, home-owning child-bearers.  

You have to be absolutely nuts. Just out of your mind. You have to be so accommodating, nearly incorporeal, to integrate another’s habits and tastes. Their family—and that family’s customs? You have to know how much regular sex to expect, and money, and if perhaps you care to swing when you travel? Obviously I could not. But then, the happily-in-love don’t write essays on love. They bask cage-jawed behind love’s silencing muzzle. The happily-in-love are editors or novelists or reporters. There are no stings for them, no impalements, and they are galvanized to look elsewhere for the stories of their day. They’re great gossips, for instance, in the miseries of the unloved, because the unloved bring them news. 

As with all my writing, I’ve done readers the pleasure of compositing characters to expedite chronologies and intensify outcomes, while making myself slightly dumber and those around me more kind. I remember reported speech quite loosely—imagine a poor translation flagged by scholars then re-translated in compensation for assumed defects. —The Editors

I Kept Needing Things

Since I have no other, I use as preface a diary entry drafted two summers back, which is anyway what I’m attempting to recall. The keening undertones that struck me as too stupid and too revealing then I see now as the piquant seasoning to a longer work of even higher concentrates of self-pity. What I get for holding too long to a sense of injustice. I had titled the entry “Courtship, pt. 3” in crimped faint pencil before taking up a pen and titling it “Courtship, pt. 3” again, in loopier handwriting. (I know this entry is titled “Courtship, pt. 4.”) After jotting down the fragment I didn’t think about courtship anymore, possibly because I’d felt my way out of it by October, triumphantly, but that’s getting ahead of myself. For verisimilitude I choose to reproduce my cross-outs and egregious syntactical chaos. Here’s what I wrote: 

I kept needing things. Little escalations. This surprised me because I’d promised my self an unembarrassed self-sufficiency for 2020, a way of calling on or deferring to or—relying, I suppose is the word (but it’s not)—my inner-resources. Being in love made me want more… than my want more, quite against my little interdicta that I was prepared to sacrifice the needs for the year. Love is very much something I’m recovering from; “I’m in recovery from love,” I kept telling myself. And then I’d reach in the dark to squeeze Scotty’s hand and dryly mouth—honestly, piteously whisper—“I love you” while he slept. I needed him to say it back. Despite! The amount of! Time! We were insisting on spending together, before his last he persisted in the fantasy of our dating, or resisting labels, and rebuffing, unless drunk, mostly any conversation about what we were and what we were doing. I’m a reflective person. I need others to reflect with me.

When did I get it out of Scotty? The extortion took nearly two months. I joke, using that phrase, but there was some tedious unattractive bullying on my side. I deliver receipts with the rigor of a school marm and the frostiness of an assassin (apparently), all while litigating the math side of love like a prosecutor (YOU HAVE SLEPT OVER EVERY NIGHT FOR SIX WEEKS!) and the solid affection side like an ordinary language philosopher (IN TEXT MESSAGES YOU INCLUDE A LOT OF CRY-FACE EMOJI TO DESCRIBE MISSING ME DURING THE DAY!). This is an example of bad writing but it’s also real anxiety I’m foisting on the page, a weight no page in the history of neurotic white male writers has ever buckled under, thus I soldier on. 

For my part, I’ll say that dating is hard. Establishing strong attachments and certifying them is hard. Despite the two and half months off for quarantine in March through May, I fucked a not insignificant amount of men that winter, spring and summer, and I only wanted to sleep with Scotty (face pressed to his chest, legs wildly contorted, and holding hands). Waking up next to him and kissing after his nipples in lip-smacking anarchy until he swatted me off him: a ritual I’d gladly sacrifice my virginity to attain again.

Boo-Hoo

I asked Scotty two things in July. 

1) I asked him to be my boyfriend. It was probably 8 AM on a Sunday, after a very fun night with his friends. I was near-wailing with hangover and used his body in the lambent morning much as Rose used the door in Titanic, quite clinging, and said, “I was wondering if you would mind—I was wondering if you thought this, too—um, may I call you my boyfriend? Are we boyfriends yet?”

His silence lasted about as long as it takes to drown in a toilet; or, where I’d been transported. I slithered off his ice-cold belly and looked at the faint, far ceiling, croaking, “Well… that’s… definitely an answer.” He said, and I think reasonably, “Evan, I’m leaving in a month. I don’t think we can do it. The long distance. This is good what we have right now. But I am not your boyfriend. You understand that it’s all over soon?” I had my mother on my mind, pathetically, who usually calls on Sundays and who, usually enfeebled by hangover, I give over-honest reports to. “I guess, yeah,” I said. “I’m going to talk to my mom today and she’ll say, ‘How are you and Scotty?’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s all over soon, it’s so good.’” His reply was as lacerating as it was perceptive: “She’ll say you’re too old for me.” 

And indeed, when she called me later in the morning, and I shared my rejection like an idiot, she said, astonishingly, “Evie, Scotty’s going to be a doctor and he’s going to be able to do a lot better than you. Now, are you coming home for your birthday?” “Well, now I’m not.” “Oh boo-hoo,” she continued, “see if Scotty wants to visit the farm.” My mother’s attention span worried all her sons. “I just said he’ll be leaving by the end of August.” “Oh, boo-hoo,” she replied. “Where—where is this behavior coming from? Are you picking it up from the TV?”  

2) I asked him if he loved me. I admit, this was while he was in a bit of a tailspin. His med school had just sent an email confirming that all courses would “perform off-campus,” that is, over Zoom. His entire first semester of med school would take place online and with doctors who were (a likelihood borne out) too proud to adapt to video tutorials. 

“OK! But! You’re no longer moving to the Caribbean!” I interjected during his concession speech. 

My love query was ten days after the boyfriend query (angle of attacks, being what they are) and I’ll have you know its reception was so radically curt I actually told Scotty he was being curt, and weirdly I have a screen grab of the dictionary definition of curt that I forwarded him sometime later in the day. It was shameful of me, besides, to insist on some strong show of emotion, but I’d made my own after he rejected me as his boyfriend: I shaved my face.

My beard had recovered. I’m not being consecutive. He was distraught. “I’m going to have to live at home. With my parents,” he added. I tried pointing out that—silver linings where they shine—he’d be an hour and a half outside the city. He could still see his friends of a weekend. He could still see me. “I don’t want to be here! I want to be there! You’re not getting it!” he said. 

I said I did, I did get it. I’d spent three years attempting to get into grad school, I knew what it was like to navigate defeated expectations, and further, such navigation contributed to future untold resiliencies. Some things happen for a reason. 

“Like what?” he snapped. “Like what are you even talking about? No offense, but going to school to be a writer and going to school to be a doctor are really, they’re really different, and you’re not even a writer. You hate your job. You hate Chicago. You won’t even get a cat!” 

We were in my studio apartment. Fleeing to the kitchen, and then behind the refrigerator door, and pulling out some wine, shielded me a little from accepting or defending this read. I attempted the same tack I’d tried on my mother—“Where—where is this coming from?”—while dragging chardonnay against bottles of barbecue sauce and sparkling water to give me more time to feign untold resilience.

“Evan, I just feel fucked, dude. I just feel fucked,” he said from the bed. “Are you drinking?”

“It’s Friday?” 

“Can I get a glass?”

“Yeah. It’s um fresh wine. Very fresh.” I made a show of opening the new bottle by twisting off the cap with a flourish. I still had my back to Scotty. I doubt he was looking at me. “Thing is,” I started, glugging wine into my not-very-clean stemware, “you’ve definitely made me like the city a lot more, you know? Having you around this summer has been, well, it’s definitely made it feel like the city can be mine, and not just a city I deferred to, or a city I had to come to. It feels like a choice I care to own, finally. You know, being in love with someone—it imbues everything around it with that kind of love.” 

I brought him his glass. His expression was stricken. 

“I don’t want to do the love thing right now,” he said.

“What love thing?”

“I don’t want to say I love you,” he said, taking his glass and putting his nose in it. “That’s not what what this conversation is about.”

“This conversation,” I started, “can be about a lot of things—”

“It’s not.”

In August He Left for California 

“I’ve always wanted to take a trip alone. You know I want to live in California? Maybe do plastic surgery in L.A.” I had insisted on driving Scotty to the airport yet wouldn’t indulge his fantasies of cutting open faces in WeHo, or wherever. He noticed this, saying, “You know, you’re gonna have to get a better stomach for blood when I’m in med school? If I go into surgery, I’m gonna wanna talk about it.”

I merged left nodding yet neither tracking nor agreeing.

“And when I’m in med school, I’m gonna wanna talk to you about bodies and ethics and cut up organs and car wrecks and weird diseases and birth defects and crazy bowel obstructions and brains gone bad and—”

“How often are you going to talk to me when you’re in med school?”

“Every day?”

“Every-fucking-day?”

“Yeah. Whoa. Yeah?” He squeezed my knee as I merged into the left lane.

I felt an element of cruelty, if unintentional, in this conversation, especially as it took shape within minutes of Scotty’s leaving the state for 10 days to a far distant place, one almost completely closed to visitors. (California was still deep in its pandemic measures that August. Most restaurants were carry-out; pools were closed; national parks were iffy.) It was awkward to protest a hypothetical that suggested extraordinary care and devotion on my part—patient attention to reports from medical school, covering topics that disgusted me—from the young man who had rebuffed all my advances toward sureties. Yet in other ways I was entirely devoted and in a demonstrative way. I had, for instance, also promised to pick him up from the airport on his return—insisting. When I think about these gestural affectations toward love and solidity and abiding, now, the strongest feeling they arouse is embarrassment. 

Actually, no, almost two years out, the strongest feeling they arouse is sympathy. I loved his short fingers on my knee. And the strawberry blonde scruff on his cheeks. He’d purchased a tank top at Target that said California in a design intern’s approximation of neon spray paint that confused me no end, and I loved that too, even though it was wretched, just wretched to arrive in a state and wear a pre-fab tourist airbrush celebration of it. And furthermore, this idea that we’d be conversant every evening about the things he was discovering throughout his medical coursework—split ventricles and choked babies and suspicious coughs—I loved this too, because it embodied his knowledge in my own, depended on my willing reception and consolidation. Obviously, my efforts are transparent and piteous and beseeching to a degree that, I find, only concubines (notarized sex workers in an empirical setting) achieve—but these were the efforts I was making, then, to prove not to Scotty but to myself that I was practicing a kind of working love, à la Gillian Rose. 

You know, a year later, after we’d broke up and were still trying to be friends, during a bitter fight about just visiting over the holidays, I’d messaged, “The basis of this arguing is me basically pleading HOLD ONTO ME HOLD ONTO ME HOLD ONTO ME and your counter plea Let me go! Let me go! Let me go! Which is why we just talk circles around each other. It’s exhausting.” And this element of intense clutching/grasping is another aspect I love about this drop-off. I helped him with a bag and kissed his cheek and said, “Have so much fun. Keep me posted. See you soon.”      

The Butcher of Loneliness

Knowing the internet is infinite compels me to write as I please, but especially about the things in romance that mystify me, without fear that I’m somehow adding to the world’s wrongheaded glut of blogposts about love and strife. They cannot all be wrong. Such themes are eternal. They are besides, conveniently, what I return to write about. —The Editors

—

I already discussed this with my friend Peter, so if it has the air of summary that’s because it is. I’m trying to remember what we said about A, my ex’s current boyfriend who I’ve been obsessing over. The usual reasons obtain: he’s hot, he’s a cop, he’s tolerant. They’re open now, apparently, and their parents have met, making things feel luxurious and stable. In painful contrast, my boyfriend has not told his parents I exist at all.

My ex and I remain, somehow, on good or I should say better terms, now that I’m not living with him in a romantic partnership. We exist to each other in our phones, as a text thread unpunctuated by in-person digests. We send mostly innocuous updates about our respective cats. We try to be helpful—for instance, when I lost my job, Dan (I’ll use his name, it’s stupid not to), Dan called immediately to help me with the particulars of filing for unemployment benefits. We discussed, drunk one night, my feeling “erased” (to use the queer therapeutic vernacular) by Scotty during Pride month. “I would like to show up more on his Instagram stories and get photo credits on the hot pics he posts to Facebook,” I whined. “In a year and a half of dating, he’s shown my face twice. In one I was wearing a mask.” The specific things I help Dan with involve encouraging him now in his minor hypochondriasis (“I really think you should get that checked out—after three days? Definitely.”) and coaching him through sexual difficulties (threesomes, hemorrhoids). He seems like a better, more well-adjusted person now that I’m situated at a benevolent remove. He sent me a picture of his hand the other week, for me to admire the skin around his forefinger and thumb. Tan pink, all healed up, no violently chewed down nails or hangnails. His fingers used to be so frightfully eaten apart he joked about wiping blood on clients when he went in for a handshake. “I’m a lot less anxious now,” he noted.

Everything I think could be wrong. But my sense is that Dan became a whole person again. I’m a facet of that wholeness. Yes, it took a lot of brutal struggle and artless negotiation and my own bizarre fragmentation to get us where we’re at, but he came out whole, and now I’m an odd prop or property of that success and from the outside now, I feel the truth of it in my bones. I’m accepting the limits of my place within that wholeness by practicing some form of “unconditional love,” as explained on the Waxahatchee episode of Song Exploder. (Peter, for his part, did tell me that “unconditional love” doesn’t need to describe supporting another person’s every action. “It doesn’t mean you have to live with that person,” he said.) Regardless of its clarity, the unconditional love I’m practicing makes a lot of room for disappointment, it’s medium may entirely comprise disappointment, and my belief is that this disappointment will settle into a kind of suffering grace that will eventually settle into something I inure myself to and notice not at all, like the habitual minor irritation of moving my car for street cleaning or the ongoing weird expensiveness of my phone bill. Hot soup, summer nights, lost love.

I blocked Dan on Instagram a while back, along with most of his friends. (Those friends I did not block, I muted.) I didn’t want to see him in his life on accident. In fact I still don’t and it’s a persistent worry that I’ll run into him downtown (we work in neighboring high-rises) or intersect at the beach or a bar. Imagining seeing him in his life again freezes my blood. I visited his parents late in May, surely an expression of grief and love, and felt the whole while the sadness of driving to Oak Park alone. I did so without music, without a podcast, with no outside aural distraction to save me from thinking about the number of fights we had about music and podcasts on the drive. We fought another time about the irresponsibility of my holding a credit balance of $600. He turned my frugality (if that’s what it was—I had $1,400 in checking at the time, and blowing $600 of that on one payment felt dire) into a point about our futurity. That my shitty financial stewardship reflected poorly on our romantic prospects, because if my money ran out, I’d “give up Chicago” and abandon him. It did not signify, and I still think about money in weird, unhelpful ways, but slowly paying down $600 did not mean I didn’t believe in us, that I was sabotaging our shared life together. We had a screaming match parked outside his parent’s house and in the heat of the moment I told him that to save him from paying a single red cent toward my poor, fucked-up retirement, I’d kill myself at sixty-five with a shotgun. “Oh cool!” he shouted back. “And void your life insurance policy?” Somehow he won the larger argument and I paid, maliciously, the full balance down, there in the car, and he sapped and I charred, we crumbled together into the house for his sister’s birthday. We seemed always to be entering the house in Oak Park panting. I had to on drives beware annihilation, and it’s true that driving through the city even now turns me into a bitch and a werewolf. Anyway. I’d forgotten how passive I was in conversations with his mom and dad—how I needed Dan to shepherd the flow of our talk. I didn’t stay long.

So while Dan sees only what I share with him, his boyfriend, A, looks at my Instagram story with some regularity. Indeed, he has elected that I share with him what I share with everyone else. Not everyday (annoyingly). Not even every week on X day. He trends toward my weekend updates but seems just as likely to search me out on a Monday as a Thursday, and will go up to a month without peeping at all. There have been evenings where he checks in at intervals, tracking updates more or less in real time. (Is it ugly that I know this?) Other nights he gathers what he can in one sweep and leaves whatever’s next until another hour, weeks away, when he visits again.

What is it? Boredom? Insecurity? I know this is genre fare of the accidentally-liking-your-ex’s-new-boyfriend’s-family-vacation-photo variety, still I find his behavior baffling. Also consuming. I find it erotic, too, because he sees me sometimes as I’m performing erotic—my shirtless torso, sweaty after a run. Ostensibly my target, or even uber-target audience, when A catches me on a very good day, say when I’ve been outgoing, intellectual, odd, funny, wild and attractive, I have the sense of meeting him—meeting the man who replaced me—at my best; of inhabiting, if that’s possible, the best version of myself that Dan has told him about, and even meeting A in a capacity that surprises him because it contradicts what he’s been led to believe about me at my worst. Maybe even especially the good things hit different, when he sees me in my life on my terms, cringe content and all.

I told Peter I think it’s exquisite that A, who does not follow me, types my name into his phone to find me, spells out e-v-a-n, but Peter, correctly, said it’s more likely A only needs to tap e to bring me to the top in the search bar. Does A sometimes hover over me, making a choice? Does he ever swipe out, lock his screen, and pocket me for another night? A long time ago, when I was similarly lovesick, I imagined a technology that let you know someone is thinking about you, someone is drafting you an email they won’t send, a text that gets lost, and the frequency of their thoughts. I can’t tell if such an apparatus would make people more heartbroken or less. If you opted into the notifications, whose would you want to receive?

“Odd Frock” is a story about a plague. In a kingdom far away, after a great war, all the sons are dying. Three figures attempt to unravel why: a queen regent, her heron spy, and a wandering priest—or, as they’re known in this kingdom, “frocks.” (I thought I would get to the part about the heron, here, but he didn’t show up.)

3. No Oaths

“I wouldn’t, my regent, consort with herons,” said Long Frock. “They’re shifty and they talk no truth. What’s more, they have sharp eyes and clear ears and fly. Herons are not liked in the kingdom. The people know they are spies. Apple-chucking, flaming apples, apples on arrows, fake arsenic apples, hot caramel apple trebuchets, apple baskets with rotting skeins, razor-sharp apple peels—”

“I’m sorry?” interjected the queen. “What are the people doing to these apples? This is a profound waste of apples. Is this—is this honestly?—is this why there’s no sweetness in this city?” she asked.

“Oh—,” sighed Long Frock. “No. Accepting all the dead, um, sons, no. Weapons,” he said, “are against herons, etc.” He pronounced “et cetera.” “Look: in the popular imagination, herons are spies.”

The queen considered this. “That’s fine,” she said. “The people must know they are my spies. They spy for me. Jesus. My spies: I don’t want them harassed—shot down over orchards and ponds, or whatever. They should get on with their work unmolested. All of this weird talk of apples—saints almighty,” she said. “I look about me for help, and everyone who helped the mad king is dead, and here I am, holding a kingdom of death, for the sake of the dying.” The queen wrenched at her oddly long sleeves, rolling them wrathfully back, suppressing a shriek of outrage.

She mastered herself.

“Tell me, Long Frock,” she continued, “what is your specialty?”

“My specialty?” His Adam’s apple bobbed. He added: “My regent.”

She said: “Eye Frock does intel; Maths Frock crunches numbers or something; Cross Frock leads us through prayer—he literally does something with a ‘cross’; Doc Frock administers draughts and serums and plays at minor surgery; Fleet Frock heads the”—she snapped her fingers at him—“he heads the—”

“I have the run of your stables, my regent, the crown kennels and hutch,” said Fleet, who was sitting among the others, all looking rather cowed.

“Hutch as in rabbits?”

“Rabbits and dogs and horses,” said Fleet.

“I’ve never seen these rabbits.”

“No, and that is a pity, my regent. And in addition to my duties as a horse husband, it is my honor to cultivate your pasturelands in a rotating crop of oats, alfalfa and wheat. The granaries report to my stake and so too the brewers’ taxes and bakers’.” Still feeling dispossessed of significance, he remembered: “Wardens of race days are my reports and also the office of licensing hunts. Revenues are down. Because of all the dead sons. Can’t sell a license to a corpse! But we’d try,” he admitted, “oh, we’d try.”

“You see,” said the queen, flipping her chin at Long Frock. “Such industry in one small frock. And you’ve such a long frock and I feel you do nothing. Nothing.”

“I chair your nine frocks, my regent, and I am the kingdom’s lead diplomat and servant of safe messages. All relations in your kingdom flow through me.”

“Yes,” said the queen, “so just, you know, get on with it. Bring me the birds.” Then she led the men in prayers and then left them to their task.

—

Herons and frocks shared an odd circumstance: no one knew how many survived. Beside the nine council frocks, there were lesser coats (as they were known) dispatched throughout the kingdom and neighboring lands. As wartime consiglieres for the mad king, many held dangerous trade posts and were killed, in botched ventures, as common soldiers. Their bodies were never counted and surely never returned, though disgusting reports of corpse abuse sometimes made their way back to the council.

At the end of the fighting, many of these far-flung frocks gave up their stations and chose silence rather than return and serve an unsure cause. But even before détente, frocks dropped off the map left and right, into doubt and squalor and vice. His regent queen’s words stung, of course, but weren’t untrue: Long Frock had long felt he did nothing. He could not count his coats. How could he count the herons?

There had been, he thought, thousands of frocks. Now there were perhaps eighty. There had been, he reasoned, tens of thousands of talking herons. Now there were perhaps twelve. For the coats, it was an issue of morale, but the bird thing was a whole genocide and kind of a disgrace. Still, silver lining: he had enough glow flies to send them each a message in the night, telling them to meet in the Forest Sands. And if the birds didn’t want to come, they could just eat the flies.

—

The Forest Sands were an odd patch of dense, high fulgurites created in terrible storms along a sandy lakeshore near the castle. Nobody knew the technical term for the glass torrents created by lightning striking sand. But here it is: fulgurites. The queen regent knew, and she knew no one else observed or cared about the noun, and it made her feel deeply oppressed and lonely. “Oh, we’re going to the fulgurites?” she’d say, if there was some incantation or sunset ritual or an intrigue to be had in the gloaming, tree-sized-glass menagerie. And her subjects would look at her like, “What?” and she’d have to say, “The god damn Forest Sands.”

They were tremulously impressive. She understood their mystical appeal. The fulgurites she found as a girl, on the above-sea coral heads of her homeland, were small frail fractals, terminating in six or so arms, yet holdable.

The Forest Sands were a genuine forest of fulgurites. She felt tiny and fragile beneath their crystal sickles. The canopy high, high above glowed an electric blue, so she could see her face and the faces of her frocks; she could see the path, too. The wind kissed the glass and whistled. It drove the hounds insane.

“Send them back!” she shouted to Fleet. The fact was, she wanted to hear the forest scream.

—

Long Frock lost most of his glow flies. Two herons appeared and neither of them spoke. Everyone was disappointed.

“This?” said the queen, looking at these sour birds with listing wings and legs like kabob skewers. Pre-kabobs, is what she thought of these talkless herons. “Why don’t they speak?”

“They report,” said Eyes. “Ears but no speech—common among herons, now.”

Writing about happiness is very difficult and boring. The below are some small attempts I’ve made to write through my happiness. My small, important readership deserves an update, says my brother, whose sensibilities have only rarely steered me catastrophically wrong.

I AM BUYING CHAMPAGNE TO CELEBRATE MY LOVER

Today’s the last day of his job and he’s throwing himself a little party. In September he begins med school and in the next month he’ll put his affairs in order, readying for the big move. I have the sense that tonight begins our diminuendo, despite his staying over last night and spit-fucking me, and I’ll surely stay over tonight, after the many champagne toasts to his prosperous life ahead. 

We’ve started sleeping as two spoons embracing chest to chest, with our faces tucked awkwardly in a neck or an armpit. Of course I wake up gasping, my mouth sucking after a less hot pocket of air, and turn, and enjoy that he pulls me tightly back to him. He’s a heavy sleeper and I’m a light sleeper, and our bedding situation resembles something like a rock in a tumbler with my rolling over and over and over again, arising too early, wildly underslept, shining with sweat, but ecstatic that we’ve touched all night long. I’m attending his celebration in a sleep deficit that I’ve covered with caffeine and a long, soulful run beside the lake. I’ve been thinking about us a lot. 

He wouldn’t call himself my lover, I think, but I’m hoping the expensiveness of the champagne I’m bringing will convince friends in attendance that that’s what we are. I’m hoping my largesse goes noticed and commented on—that it’s interpreted as my being in love with him, and that his peers compel him, by either fretting over my largesse, or pitying me for it, or anyway finding it impressive or amusing or tender or charming—that they tell this young man I’m adoring him and I’m adoring him well. That my adoration seems steadfast and considered. And despite the riskiness of the circumstances (our differences in age, the widening gulf in distance, a sometimes depleting lack of shared cultural references), when we are together I feel comfort and joy. This must be obvious to him without the expensive champagne. I’m always saying it out loud, or anyway variants on the theme of “comfort and joy,” like a seasonal blessing, a profusion of blessings, needing remarked upon. I’m seriously afraid I mother him.

“Let us take in the scene,” I have said before, “let us only observe for the moment my sitting in your lap, your hands on my neck, my constant kisses. What joy!”

He’s done something to my sense of my proportion, and also my prose style. I can’t seem to describe our relationship without slipping into the sardonic, recursive, mildly-institutionalized voice of Robert Walser, a writer I find too cute by half. I’m finding my life too cute by half, I fear. If this is what happiness feels like, I don’t really want much more of it. It’s making me stupid. “People will think that pain has made you stupid,” wrote Walser, a statement that comes back to me when I can’t distinguish between the good times and bad times making me an idiot.

AFTER THE SPIT-FUCKING

We stayed up late talking about what it means to say goodbye to people who don’t know you’ve cared for them. I don’t pretend this conversation had subtext. For the last two years, he’s worked with profoundly disabled people, first as a case worker and then, after the pandemic closed the campus and made that job “nonessential,” as a nursing assistant on the same floor. 

He spent months feeding, changing, bathing and bedding non-ambulatory children and adults. Most cannot speak, a few cannot see, and none can walk, of course. It is a world I’ve rarely thought about—indeed, a world many of us rarely consider, because in its theater of human need are scenes of unremitting hopelessness. It is a languageless suffering and it perdures. I can become very mystified, very shallow-breathed thinking about his care for these souls, however quick he’s been to dissuade me from romanticizing or elevating his ministrations. “One of my verbal residents tells me to fuck myself all the time,” he’s noted. Still, I would point out that birth defects and accidents account for a small percentage of his caseloads’ impairments, and that active neglect and abuse perpetrated intentionally by former guardians (or unwittingly by the American healthcare complex) have hobbled his charges for life. I don’t like hearing stories about choked babies and toddlers left so long in beds their soft bones grow slab-wise, so I’ve asked him, coward that I am, to please skip origins if he’s entering an otherwise benign workaday anecdote.  

His most patient complaint: using his iPhone to FaceTime parents who want to see their son, then listening to one-sided conversations, burbling, giggles, tears, even story-time. His campus closed to all guardians—a devastating precaution. “Don’t send anything xrated today,” he’d text, and I’d know he was hosting a reunion. So I’d keep my clothes on. And he’d answer the phone from an immediately weeping seventy-year-old mother saying, to her forty-year-old son, “Why good evening, Max, good evening. This is your mother. Hi, baby. Hi. I love you. I am your mother. I will always be your mother. I am sorry I cannot touch you, I cannot hold you, I cannot be with you in this time, but you are my Max, and I am your mother. And I love you always. You can hear me and I’m gonna tell you all about my week, okay? And then I’m gonna ask Scotty here how you’ve spent your week, okay?” He said he usually cries on these calls and when I asked why, he said, “Because it seems polite?” And I pressed harder and he said, “Because I get to—I get to connect these people who have missed each other so much, and it’s so sad. They haven’t touched in months. They might not touch this year. My phone sometimes runs out of battery. It’s so weird.”

I’ve asked him whether families are happy to be rid of their incredible dependents and he said that by and large families are miserable to give over members to the institution: that age arbitrates the giving. “A mother and father have a baby at twenty-five. They can care for him well into their fifties—their twenty-five-year-old, their thirty-year-old son. But when these parents enter their sixties? Their seventies? They can’t lift an adult male. They can’t bathe him or change him. Even basic nutrition gets hard. Meal prep is tiring. It’s long. They start to lose track of medications, and they have medications themselves, you know? So the situation gets very difficult and if they want to live, and if they want him to live, they feel like they have to give him up.”

We’re at the point now where intimacy is a given. He doesn’t swallow, but brings me to orgasm, taking me in his mouth and then dribbles it, I guess, my cum, back onto my stomach, apologizing with a flushed red smirk. “I hate that,” he says, “I really hate it.”

“Go ahead, eat it,” I say, joking.

He gives me dark eyes and showily palms the wad into the black pillowcase behind my head.

“Holy Christ!” I yell. “The nerve! The pluck! The audacity!”

There must be a phase in relationships when extracting intimacies—not only of the “terrible things I did in high school”-vein, or the “times I cheated”-vein, or the “unwittingly right wing ideologies I support”-vein—that close couples endeavor. Where you’re always compulsively revelatory, to seem as interesting as you did in early courtship, as erotically forward and emotionally captivating. We’re in that moment and we surprise one another with small tributes as befits that level of affection.

One of the intimacies I proffered is that I’m going through a religious re-awakening, a need for ritual and sacraments. He finds this funny. (I find it embarrassing.) Yet one of his duties has been wheeling charges to his building’s Tuesday Mass, and then helping to administer the Eucharist. I don’t think he in fact touches the host (I don’t think many in his care can safely take of the host; “I’m mostly there in case anyone seizes,” he said), but he did slip a large wafer away for me and now it’s in my apartment, among my candles, possibly growing mold. He asks me when I’m going to eat it and I tell him around Christmas. 

(That was a lie. I’ll eat it when our romance is over, to consecrate the time we had.)

“I eat it,” I say, and he glowers.

I TOLD HIM ABOUT A MYSTERY SURROUNDING MY FAVORITE AUTHOR

Norman Rush. For a decade and better I’ve wondered about the long dedication in Mating, whose last lines read, “...and to the memory of my father, and to my lost child, Liza.” The novel, set in Botswana and borrowing heavily from Rush’s time there as director in the Peace Corps, suggests that perhaps Liza died in Africa or was born still. She goes unmentioned in his Paris Review interview, in subsequent novels, short stories, and reviews. There’s no hint of Liza’s fate. (As I edit this, I recall a phrase in Mortals, the narrator’s idea that “children exposed you to hellmouth, which was the opening of the mouth of hell right in front of you.” Explaining further: “[I]t was the grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter tumbling through the air, blown out of the airplane by a bomb, the three generations falling and seeing one another fall, down, down, onto the Argolid mountains. With children you created more thin places in the world for hellmouth to break through.” And then, in Subtle Bodies, Rush describes a wayward teen boy, whose angry and aggressive behavior corresponds exactly to Rush’s own troubled teen son. In fact, Subtle Bodies is about the decision to have children at all. Nina follows Ned to a funeral, to fuck him. So, Rush has indeed remarked on children and strife, as he has lived it. Anyhow—) Yet by accident I listened to an old Fresh Air interview where Rush is asked to comment on the aspect of family in his novels, and to clarify that inscription. 

“I have a daughter who is now thirty,” he says, “who was born with diffuse brain atrophy and has been institutionalized for many years. Um. But I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory.”

“What was her condition?” presses his interlocutor.

“She is uh profoundly retarded,” pauses, “and will be so.”

“So you feel she is lost to you?”

“Yes. There is no recognition possible between her and us.”

I reproduced this exchange from notes on my phone. Scotty replied, “I don’t think that’s right, actually. Maybe between her and—who—who was it?”

“Norman Rush and his daughter Liza.”

He said, “Maybe between Liza and her dad—yeah, maybe she was so disabled she couldn’t recognize him. I take care of men like that. But I recognize them.”

We were talking about important books at all (I mean that semi-seriously) because his co-worker had gifted him three works, including a volume of Yeats’ complete poetry.

“Why did Paco give you Yeats?” I asked.

“He thinks I need more poetry,” said Scotty.

(Frankly I have felt and still feel sexual jealousy against Paco, who recently got brilliant red and black knee tattoos of spider webs. Like, Spider-Man spiderwebs, covering both kneecaps. Every few weeks he cooks a large meal for Scotty, and they talk about life until 4 A.M. drunk on bourbon, immobilized by edibles, full and warm and caring, and it makes me mad. It makes me mad, because I can’t really see the point of staying up until the uncomfortable small hours between 2 and 5 unless there is sex involved, but Paco is straight, a father, an excellent chef, a dedicated friend, and so my grousing is a kind of unwarranted possession that baffles me into silence on the matter.)

I didn’t have anything intelligent left to say about Norman Rush. I groped along a narrow thought, however, a thin ledge. “You know—a novelist, especially a novelist as concerned with language and comprehension as Norman Rush, would feel particularly devastated by the condition of his daughter. He would see it as ironic and then as punitive and again as senseless—supporting his comforting regime of a militant atheism.”

Although very sober, I recited the first stanza of The Second Coming, tripping over two lines (but the best lines), saying, “The worst lack all conviction, while the best/Are full of passionate intensity.”

“What?” said Scotty.

“I just—that was Yeats.”

“Who?”

“Go ahead and tell your boy Paco that your hot fuck gave you a teach on William. Butler. Yeats.”

We interrupt the fantasy series Odd Frock to bring you the dystopian series Courtship, a reflection on life in the time of coronavirus (truly unprecedented, groundbreaking, up-to-the-minute content). Odd Frock will resume with its third installment, “No Oaths,” sometime next week! —The Editors

—

The Times recently ran an essay-review about the prevalence of “deception” as a theme in newish queer novels. A spate of gay writers have taken up the cause of lies again—lies for love, lies for survival, that sort of thing. I remember reading this description way too close to bedtime, becoming furious, posting a screengrab of the headline to my Instagram story, and then flinging myself to sleep.

Those nights, sleep was less a sheer cliff than a steep embankment, ending in a kind of gray-water ravine. The kind you sometimes find behind subdivisions, full of detergent bottles and half-crushed cans of Michelob Ultra. A lot of my friends—I mean, my coworkers—were describing this sensation: lying in bed awake, confused about the day (unremitting sameness) and confused about the prospect of waking up in a day exactly the same. “I have no reason to sleep,” said my friend Vadim, in his theatrically Russian accent, “and yet I have no better reason to wake up.” This from a man expecting his first child, a baby girl named Marta, in August.

When I tried to go to bed at night and couldn’t sleep, sometimes I punched pillows and blankets into a human-shaped substitute, and pretended to hold this cool lump’s hand. I missed holding a hand while I slept.

I was trying to be honest but not dire with my therapist. Our weekly, forty-five-minute phone sessions had devolved into weak-sauce temperature checks on my declining optimism, and whether my anxiety and boredom were putting me at an increased risk for “acting out.” I think by “acting out,” he meant drinking myself into a rage and dealing in criminal property damage, something I’d done back in October when I had, plausibly, fewer reasons for “acting out.” I’d been arrested and everything. It was a bad time.  

Dave kept offering platitudes taken from his decade working as a chaplain for a clinic in Chicago, during a different plague. I didn’t exactly rebuff his analogizing the wan present with his indelible past, but I didn’t accept these comparisons uncritically, either. “You have to make a lot more choices, more intimate choices, to contract HIV,” I said, after another riff about “needing touches” and “harm reduction” and “risk.” “But the choices I’m making right now are like, Should I Clorox wipe my mail? Should I pet my neighbor’s dog?”

“Evan, what I’m trying to tell you is, you’ll get lonely and start making decisions out of loneliness, desperate loneliness. And whether those decisions include an intimate encounter or a neighborhood walk or maybe a small dinner with friends, you’ll need to entertain the idea of exposure and infection.”

Despite the obviousness of his remarks, I felt pierced by their retrospective application. Pierced and humbled, etc. My life, the one I was leading by myself in my studio apartment, seemed entirely the product of decisions made out of desperate loneliness. The night before our session, I’d watched four hours of Bon Appétit content on YouTube, despite a very on-the-record hatred for cooking, and the night before that, I’d spent six hours spider searching a tiny desk lamp with a cement base. I needed a light feature in my bookshelf—a light feature that could double as a heavy, practical book-stopper. Its discovery engendered a sort of mania. My attention had become a hostage to material comforts. A fantasy I kept coming back to was of a tall blond, maybe from the professional-managerial class, walking into my confinement and being so taken with the objets d’arte and expensive candle glow, he’d shuck his pants off without my needing witty banter or, heaven forfend, making dinner to seduce him.      

What I wasn’t telling Dave wasn’t lying. I wasn’t contorting the truth per se, only under-reporting the meager life events taking place in quarantine, so that most of my hours were spent, it seemed to him, sitting on my couch trying to read. We’d already discussed how reading was impossible. I was too horny. I missed my ex a lot, who also seemed to miss me a lot—he called nearly every day. On one such phone call, I asked for sex by name. I said, “Let me into your bubble, and let’s just fuck it out, please.” I didn’t tell Dave about this. I wanted him to think the two years of hard work we’d put into the breakup was unshakable. That the work was in fact extraordinarily fragile demoralized me endlessly and was, frankly, too embarrassing to report. Besides, my ex didn’t so much decline as leave my request unanswered. Much the kindest thing to do.  

I didn’t tell Dave that I wasn’t eating. Or that I was eating, but like a varmint. A handful of blueberries in the morning, some Cheez-Its for lunch, coffee all day long. Every few days I’d get a hankering for potatoes and put a hurting on pound after pound of frozen microwavables, folding in expensive cheeses. What else. I had developed a compulsive mail habit—checking my mailbox up to five times a day. I ran during the afternoon, and every run, I loathed and cursed dog-walkers, who never broke rank and whose dogs kept them cheerful, glowing, vital, loved. I’ve never hated dogs more. I’ve never hated strangers more. I rarely wore a mask.

Wait. This is what I wanted to explain. It’s facile but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it strongly—that I don’t still feel it strongly. The whole of life, operating along its axis of normal, acceptable behavior, had become a massive con. Maybe what I mean is, the massive con, long evident but carefully ignored, was now fully exposed, or fully loosed, and terrorizing people. It was impossible to pretend that our political system, our economic system, our public health system, our way of organizing culture and society, hadn’t brought us catastrophic failure. And lying about this, deceiving ourselves to go on, was all we had left.

Lying was sanity’s saving grace. Deception, I did not tell my therapist, was become fortitude’s handmaiden. Maybe this entry should be called “What I Wasn’t Telling Dave,” but then it couldn’t have the title I’ve already pinned to the top of the page, “Courtship,” which to me is what this pandemic has really been about. Making overtures to beautiful, intelligent gentlemen, with scant certainty of any attentions panning out, to distract myself from the strange days and lonely nights. (I’m aware that for others this pandemic must be about “joblessness,” “stillness,” “conspiracy” or “annihilation.”) Anyway. I’m writing this in the past tense, I guess to occupy the narrative position of someone who successfully avoided death, the death of loved ones, and ended up, firmly, finally, not sleeping with his ex. It’s so sunny in the city today, it almost looks like the future.

“Odd Frock” is a story about a plague. (I know, I know. Just go with it.) It follows three principals: a queen regent, her heron spy, and a wandering priest—or, as they’re known in this kingdom, “frocks.”

2. Bird Grammar

“I think about the world and it seems tiny,” said the queen, that night, to her maidservant Portia. “I know it is not tiny. My atlas is so large, it has pages of places I’ve never been, countless cities and capitols and—” she inspected her hair tips “—grottoes, I guess? Fairy grottoes.”  

“The gooses or the ducks, my regent?” said Portia, holding a pillow in each hand.

“Whatever is the difference?”

“The goose down has lumps. The duck down smells of soup.”

The queen clapped her hands and started laughing. “Portia,” she said, “where have my old pillows gone?”

“Dove down is thought to bring on the plague. The whole kingdom sleeps on them and the whole kingdom has bad dreams. And then, you know, the bad dreams bring death.”

“I’ve been sleeping all this time on pigeon feathers?” said the queen.

“Yes, my regent, but no more: we’ve burned those pillows, every last one. So what is it? The gooses or the ducks?”

—

When she was a princess and brought by boat from her homeland to the mad king’s court, people called her “bog bitch” and “pond scum” and “duck shit,” and drafted pamphlets about her king father’s unnatural couplings with frogs. It is true she was born in lowlands, often flooded, in a kingdom more air and sea than soil, but her people were cunning and survived atop dykes and tall docks and, as often, pontoons. She resented her new subjects’ lack of basic geographical knowledge, of topological facts. If maps had been more available, and if the people could only read them, they would see her small, frontier-less homeland had no ponds. And another thing: frogs were much too small to fuck. The imputation being, she supposed, that her king father had a very tiny dick, still—

“Portia,” she hissed, scanning for a candle’s low flame. “Portia!”

Her maidservant yawned somewhere in the room.

“I’m having—racing thoughts.”

“My regent?” said Portia, rousing and lighting another flame.

 “I’m thinking about my old home,” said the queen. “I’m thinking about how I miss the sea.”

“Is it the gooses?”

The queen let this pass. “Tell me a story. I need soothing. My spirits, I’m afraid they’re ruffled, and my mind troubled by the disturbing thoughts of the day. That is all,” she added.

“Has my regent heard the one about the widower and his heron?” asked Portia.

“Why are you on about birds all night?” snapped the queen.

“I love a bird,” said Portia, “and my regent, this story is a love story, you’ll hear it.”

“I’ll hear it,” she conceded.

— 

A widower lived alone in the forest, his wife fresh dead. She had been his world, and now he had no world, and no will to live. A heron, observing his decline, thought to steal his home by driving the man to further madness and then suicide. Like all herons of old, he had a grammar, and visited the widower while he slept and spoke to the man in his dreams, brushing wingtips against craggy cheeks, and making comely promises. When the heron’s wings touched the widower’s cheeks, they felt like softest kisses.

The widower awoke day by day to the thought of his lost wife, recovered. He heard her voice in his sleep, and her voice told him to be well. To cook and to clean and to harvest. To make his home a home again; to learn to bake bread; to extract his rotted teeth; to wash his shirts and hands; to look with eyes anew at the hope and wholeness in the world.  

This improvement was much remarked upon, especially by the villagers, who had known what hellpit he’d been swallowed up in and were glad to see him well. The heron, that wicked old thing, was justly proud of his project: he’d aided the widower through dark wilderness, past torments and cold crying, and believed the hour nearly upon them to reveal his dreadful scheme. For where the villagers saw strength, the heron saw fragility, and where the villagers saw resilience, the heron saw vulnerability.

At the height of the widower’s health—indeed, at a zenith of virility comparable to the days when he bedded wife—the night heron at last showed himself. He pecked his prey awake, squawking, “Arise, arise! old man! For I am your bride come back!”

The widower was disappointed but hardly surprised. He certainly wasn’t driven mad to the point of suicide. He never cared for varmints in the house, but especially birds, and used a nearby boot to beat the heron to death. Then he cooked it in a stew.  

—

“Because sometimes our lies do fortify us,” said Portia, by way of finishing her tale, “and when others think to sap us, we grow heartier. And more kind.” Then she licked her fingertips and pressed out the candle flames so that the night seeped all around them.

The queen searched her hands for sense. Palms open, cupping darkness. “You said it was a love story, Portia.”

“My regent, sure,” said the handmaiden, evidently turning her face into her pillow. “The widower remarries. A tavern wench, sure.”

“But that seems like information you just supplied. It’s not in the story.”

Portia did not reply.

“But tell me something,” said the queen, “do herons really talk, in this kingdom?”

Her handmaiden truly growled. Not a sigh but a growl.

“Portia?”

“Some. The ones with a grammar, sure. They are few left, though—us commoners, we dislike talking animals.”

1. Bad Intel

After the mad king died, a plague took hold of the land, killing scores of children. The queen, his second wife, and a regent facing no natural claimants, felt the people move against her. Though senseless wars had felled all half-princes (her four sons) and full-princes (her predecessor’s seven) alike, she was aware of her husband’s mythic philandering, and the tide of unrest must produce some heir—surely some dashing bastard would step out of the shadows to pike her and alight with the crown. But in the second steep death month, none had. Then in the third deeper death month none had. And more boys were dying every day. It was confusing.

The queen was a very devout woman and kept council with frocks every morning and every evening. “They are saying I have brought this curse on,” she said, just after prayer. “They say I am a sorceress and that you are my lieges in darkness, that we have contrived unholy retribution on the families who helped my husband in his wars.” With her frocks, she needn’t explain that by “helped” she meant “families who allowed my king husband to ravage sisters, mothers and wives.”

“I’m not quite sure how I got so mixed up in this,” continued the queen, “only that I am healthy, and that I stood by a man who did evil. I would like to stop evil, of course,” she added, “and it was my sense, that evil must stop when the king died.” She nodded slowly at her frocks, as if accepting an unspoken reply. “Yet indeed,” she said, “here we are. Our kingdom is sick with grief. I am soon become a pariah. Hopelessness has left us heartless, and I am afraid for all our lives.” Then she waited for that day’s brief.

“The deaths, my regent, are now some 3,000 young souls.”

The queen could not hide her revulsion. “I would like to know who these children are,” she said. “And how they are so numerous.” 

How was her husband so traitorous? How did he even find time for the battlefield? How did the people believe her administrative resources could puncture such a web of frogspawn, a spunk glob that apparently coated the whole fucking kingdom.

Eye Frock continued: “There are reports, substantiated reports, my regent, that when the dead are burned they leave behind a golden thread.”

“That’s deeply stupid,” said the queen. “That’s a deeply stupid trick, surely. And a waste of golden thread, if true. I would like a golden thread. Whoever heard? Bless them. This is absurd.”

“It is substantiated,” said Eye Frock, “and by gruesome means.”

“How?”

“A spate—a rash, really—of accidents involving the twine, my regent.”

“How so?”

“Some survivors have found the thread when bundling the next-day’s ashes. They thought it a miracle, a remembrance, and wrapped it on their person. Some on fingers, some on wrists, some on necks. And each time, the thread has burned as it tightened, severing clean through, hot as fire and quick as death. The injuries to fingers are in the dozens. Well, you know how irresistable it is to tangle a string for the cat’s cradle or a lover’s bower or the spider’s keep or—”

The queen flared her nostrils.

Eye Frock continued: “A child of seven lost her arm above the elbow, after using the thread to tie her an armlet. A father’s head was lopped clean off. A grandmother, stooped and broken, wore her grandson’s thread as a girdle, and died sliced in half in her pig yard. There are other strories, my regent.”

“These stories, if true, disgust me,” she said. “Have we a thread to test?”

Long Frock spoke: “In my pocket.”

“Bring it here.”

The long-frocked frock produced an envelope. He slowly emptied its contents, careful, careful, trembling, before—

The queen plucked it, examined it, held it taut and unafraid. The thing was resplendent: as long as her spine, as thick as ten hairs, her hairs, soft, and so lustrous it bounced light upon her face—a band of yellow and blue and white, recalling the heat of the forge from which it came. From which it surely came.

“This is marvelous,” she said, “quite exquisite. But it is just a band. It is not a noose or a machette or a garrote. It is not a device for murder.” She did not add: For it is too pretty. She tied it about her wrist and nothing happened.

When the frocks were done protesting, gasping and heaving, they noticed she was safe. The men searched their minds for an answer. Each had personally seen the devastation wrought. Yet none thought this was a miracle.

“It is because, I believe, my regent, you are a royal, a true royal, and so immune to its destruction,” said Maths Frock.

“We can test that, of course,” said the queen. “One of you,” she said, pointing to the nine at table, “put it on your little finger.”

Eventually a prisoner was found, instead—a tax-dodger and a drunk, toothless and blue-lipped, blinking back at the brilliance of the morning chapel.

“Probably not royal,” admitted the queen.

And because she expected nothing and the frocks expected a bloodbath, neither party was prepared for the low long squeal of their captive, their ring making quick work of the bone yet tearing at the skin. They thought he must pass out, or bite through his tongue gnashing, as the miniscule torus became a lazy line again, and yanked up tendons like roots from the back of his hand. The rending. The sizzle. The spatter.

My friend Neely also recently underwent a breakup, a hardship she finds comparable to something like a botched surgery. “I’m actually physically sore all the time now,” she said, “and I feel ugly.”

She had moved to L.A. for Luis. At first they only fought about money. Her work (she reports, irregularly, for the Times there) made them fight about other things too, like the environment and homelessness and certain irredeemable publicly-funded architectural projects. So they broke up.

“It’s weird, but I found out I have all this aggression that I thought was passion. ‘I’m very passionate about housing rights,’ you know? That’s something I would say to myself in the car. But Luis said I didn’t cultivate passion, I just stoked anger, and the anger was in me. Now he won’t even be friends with me. He doesn’t want to be friends with angry people. He says I wreck his vibe. I can respect that. But I don’t really know anybody else in L.A.”

I commiserarated. I didn’t really know anybody else in Chicago—why I was Facetiming Neely at her job. She was in some desert glen, a canyon perhaps, resplendent in bee whites, her veil open but still sun-shaded, so the contrast made it seem like I had a Stormtrooper on the line. I never quite got the full story on her apiary jaunts, but apprarently she was working (probably volunteering) at some sort of bee farm (bee non-profit?) and that day was painting the tops of Langstrop hives a viciously marigold yellow.

I didn’t know anyone in Chicago, I offered before averring, “I am, though... I’m having more sex than I’ve ever had in my entire life.” Not that I really knew these people, either, I explained. Not even their names. They were often wonderful, attentive, breathy, dashing, fashionable, curious, age-appropriate and obsequiously grateful men—and I knew them as either single letters (J) or emoji (rain drop, hand)—but had declined follow-up encounters just as surely as I’d declined remembering full names and taking down full phone numbers.

“You don’t want them to know you’re an angry person,” she said.

“I don’t want them to know I’m...” But actually that was it. Wow. I was furious. All the time. I was so piping-hot full of fucking anger, so lunatic with rage, I was spending a visible part of my commute crying in the car listening to music now. I hardly ever listen to music. I don’t like how music makes me feel, how it sucks at my feelings, and embellishes them, like tequila. Now I depended on it, at 6:30 a.m., to wreck me into a tantrum. So here I was, doing “Knee 5” by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson off the Einstein on the Beach recording, sobbing as soon as the baritone steps in to sing:

two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching each other holding hands in the moonlight there was silence between them so profound was their love for each other they needed no words to express it

That image alone—of lovers, a park bench, the stupid moonlight—and the lovers’ silence, it brought me to a boil. I argued with the song. SILENT AFFECTION IS SENSELESS AND DOESN’T SUSTAIN ANYONE. LANGUAGE DOESN’T MAKE LOVE. LOVE IS MADE BY ACTIONS. IT IS IMPORTANT TO BE SPECIFIC AND ACTIVE WHEN YOU LOVE SOMEONE. The song didn’t care. Maybe it even agreed. Regardless, I was arriving to my building’s parking garage an hour later, so depleted by disgust and anger and impotence, by the feeling of complete failure, of five years destroyed, of my youth and beauty corroded, of the hackneyed cliché of my entirely normal situation, that I’d sit barking out sobs under the concrete ramps in the dark, until it was safe to stagger inside. What surprised me was that I hated it. I hated him. There was this new person in my life (despite the relative lack of people), and that person lived in my car and made a striking, humorless, dramatic and painful cacophony. I left him there, parked, every day, then inhabited him for the hour and half commute back home.

“People think you’re really into church now,” said Neely, “because of all your Instagram posts in churches.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I’m not. Into church.” I had been going to churches a lot. To sit in them, and to sit through services, and to meekly sing. “I like them though,” I conceded. “I like that they’re the very beautiful and very quiet.”

“You can like church, you know,” she said. Luis and Neely were a part of the Catholic Relief in South Bend, IN, their senior years, and lived among the Brothers and other devout volunteers for a time, until falling in love. They served meals together to the homeless, and volunteered on home-builds and river cleanups, and rock-climbed with the city’s under-served youths. I let them live rent-free for a few months at 1269 Woodward when it became untenable for them to try to keep fucking in what was essentially a gender-segregated Catholic co-op. She said, “For me, I’m not really, specifically into church right now, or prayer, but I’m really into everyday intentions, you know? Energy in the world.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I’m really not into that either. You don’t—we don’t—need to do—please let’s not with ‘thoughts and prayers,’ if that’ okay?”

“But!” shouted Neely, laughing, “You have all my thoughts! Aww!”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“And with all the sex you’re having, maybe going to church is okay?”

“It’s definitely a prophylactic: I’ve not gotten pregnant one time. And the STIs—I can feel em’ just, falling away.”

Neely keeps her hair in two thick brown braids. She has freckles and ears that slightly stick out, and until very recently, confusingly, a top-row of braces that I’ve also never bothered to ask about. Women with braces in their late-20s (besides giving off that extreme Parker Posey-vibe) have always projected an air of fearless unconventionality to me, despite braces being, obviously, an expensive and prescriptive and primarily cosmetic ordeal. When she was thinking, she still touched her teeth as though they were braced.

“What are you doing with your anger now?” I asked.

“I’m giving it to the valley, you know?”

While scrutinizing her face I nonetheless forgot we were doing Facetime so she could see my consternation, which was radical.

“I give it to the valley, Evan! To the bees and the flowers and the arroyo and the brush!” She laughed at me. “I can’t figure out what to do with it. I was listening to myself on the phone with my mom the other night, and had this overwhelming sense that she hated who I’d become. Because I’d become this poor, boring person who just wanted to find shelters for 60,000 Americans, and implement a needle exchange program, and super-charge our food pantries, and develop a network of affordable health care services and career prep classrooms for families on hard times—and the obviousness of this, the obvious good need of this, of caring for my brothers and sisters, and seeing them warm and fed and safe, it was so stupid and boring and strange to her, because it was so impossible, and so we ended up spending like the next forty-five minutes talking about my sister’s big Fucking Expensive STUPID WEDDING!” On this crescendo she added an “AAAAAHHHHH!”—really giving her anger to the valley. “AAAAHHHH! It’s like, the things I know I could do, like write about these things, I can’t pay myself to focus on. I feel very... young,” she said, choosing the word carefully.

“I feel very, very old, Neely,” I said. Then I said something that surprised me: “I feel as though I am too old to have sons, now, that I’ve poisoned my timeline.”

“Your dick! Seems to work! Just fine!” she sing-songed.

“I think I mean that I had thought I had the family I was building. I had spent five years working toward the place where I could have a son. Or a daughter. I’m not sure what brazen sexist impulse keeps me making these patrician claims. I had thought I was coming home every night to this... place... condo, I guess... where the next day or the next year, I knew held greater peace. More success. Manageable strife, if ever strife.”

“You can start that again,” said Neely.

“I can start that again. And develop it over the next five years again, so I’m past forty when I’m a father, and an old man when my son starts his own family, and a burden,” I added, to seem more pitiable than I actually felt. (Or anyway to acknowledge how pitiable I was sometimes feeling.)

“I want to give some of your anger to the valley,” she said, “before I have to hang up. Gimme a little of that sweet sweet anger.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No no, lemme have just a teaspoon. Let me whisper something to the valley.”

I thought for a moment and then said: “I’m mad that I’ve stopped liking kissing.”

“Evan is”—and she whispered this part—“mad that kissing’s no good no mo’. What else?”

“I’m mad that I don’t have a parking tag for my neighborhood.”

“No place to park,” whispered Neely.

“I’m mad that in addition to moving into a tower-garret-studio-apartment, with a broken towel rod and busted dishwasher, I left the cat, I left what feels like a piece of my soul, and I can’t hold that part of my soul anymore, and that part of my soul was the patient part, the part that could read in place for hours and sleep uncomfortably and carry heavy things.”

“Needs a new cat,” said Neely to the valley.

“I’m not getting a new fucking cat.”

“Needs a new soul,” said Neely.

We considered the silence that followed. The valley was quiet. My office was quiet. “Ugh,” I said, and snorted.

Neely’s bonnet fluttered back to reveal her wide forehead and braids. “That wind!” she laughed.

I finally edited this to my satisfaction. It’s another I shared with Peter, who needs to send me more drawings (only when he has drawn something to his satisfaction!). I would say this is a short story more than it’s an essay, which means I’ve fictionalized 12% of it and barely changed the names.

—

A LOT OF THE MEN IN MY LIFE were undergoing strife of one variety or another. Hardly any of it professional. Shawn wanted a job in New York to keep tabs on his boyfriend, Bryan, who lived in Manhattan. They had the usual arrangement with caveats: while apart, they should enjoy sex with whomever they pleased, so long as it was never penetrative. Shawn lived in Chicago (a few neighborhoods from me), so he really had no way of policing their policy, no way of knowing for certain who was letting whom put what where. The normal jealousies creeped up. “People get drunk and caught up in the moment” was his suspicion, which deepened and blossomed. He often texted “am I crazy” before settling into hours of emotional, retrospective analysis. I was putting my counseling hat on a lot for the boys, which is pretty rich, when you think about it. It was like flirting. I assumed the outcome would be the same if I were flirting (sex), but it was much more work (and the outcome ended up being endearment and confusion). I put Kahlúa in my morning coffee and sort of buckled in for the ride.

Is paranoid an emotion? I googled that. For Shawn’s part, he was never having sex with anyone else. For Bryan’s part, he was always having sex. He loved Shawn, and when they spent long weekends together was slavishly devoted to his boyfriend’s every exquisite need. They illustrated this by sending me numerous blowjob Snaps and some clinically erotic Instagram stories. (I’m not sure why they hopped apps.) I was a cut-rate participant/observer, sending weak congratulations on their every orgasm. Weak but “deeply felt,” as the critics say. If I wasn’t in a grocery store getting these images, or at dinner with friends, or at my desk on a Tuesday morning, I might reply back with something saucier by way of encouragement. Playing Switch, numb in Hyrule, vaguely aware of Link’s swimmer’s physique under his cute climbing gear—then a bzzz. And then—twenty or so minutes of elating distraction while a dominating Shawn glazed a whimpering Bryan in mucilaginous ropes of semen. The epilogue to these displays? An eye crimped shut with cum.

Exhibiting couples are always checking in with each other, with their audience, with themselves. “Do you like that?” begets “Do you want this?” begets “Do you need it?” (I really needed it.) Yet rather than heightening sensations, the teleplay of desire squanders them by mangling the ordinary human rhythms of love and sex. The wait on replies alone (as I texted back, as I replayed videos, as I waited for future queries and titillations), was enough to distend all attraction to a gray space of null waiting—the erotic equivalence of a DMV. This was not satisfaction deferred, like edging; this was the bureaucracy of our devices, mandating thrills on a piecemeal hold, to give us time to wipe the lube off our palms before holding our phones again. (My phone was disgusting. Assume all phones are disgusting.) For Shawn and Bryan’s sex shows (I don’t know what else to call them), I settled into a holding pattern, with the fly of my jeans undone, a quickened pulse, and eventually... a hand on the TV remote. (Look: This was during Peak TV. I could be immersed in their most intense, most intimate moments, and also catch up on The Good Place. Besides, I wasn’t sure who else was a part of these broadcasts, who else was among my competitors [could I also follow them on Instagram?], and “the sex wasn’t the main thing anyway.”)

The sex, apparently, wasn’t the main thing, anyway. They wanted to grow old together, explained Bryan. They wanted kids, they wanted property, they wanted grandchildren. As their schedules permitted, they connected on life-affirming business trips—to Atlanta, to Reno, to Austin—while accruing the kinds of expenses that signify serious investment and total commitment. They shared a sensibility (a brand alignment) that showed through even in their most coordinated and winsome posts: a bright “togetherness” captured by strangers competently photographing them in an iPhone X’s portrait mode. Big smiles over barbecue. Shirts off in front of a Route 66 sign. Sometimes the faked focal length is annoyingly apparent, but never for them. The depth of their strife was commensurate with the strength of their devotion. It was enviable, its earnestness. “I love making Shawn laugh—I love hearing his laugh,” confided Bryan, once, back when we still Facetimed. I felt same.

At drinks with Shawn one night, a similar desire arose in me, the desire to fill him with glee—to draw out his rich, low, wagging laugh, with his hand on my thigh. I realized I wanted to be radiant at the exact moment of realizing I was subsisting—had been subsisting for months—on radiance’s shadow. I didn’t want to be the faint part of the moon illuminated by Shawn and Bryan’s earthshine, I didn’t even want to be the stupid, pockmarked, rinky-dink moon. Fuck the earth. Fuck the moon. I wanted to be the sun. I wanted a magnetic field for miles. I wanted to be white-hot charming, and focused, like a laser beam. I wanted to pierce Shawn with longing, ravaging his soul with a kind of diamond-tip precision. It would be like firing a flare gun, igniting our fates. It would be like some other flame- or light-related simile. I didn't mind feeling out of control for once, lusting like a mad man, impervious to restraint or decorum or good sense. He had illustrated, over a year of very triple-X texts, that we had no respect for good sense, at all. And, at last, there were no screens between us. Here I was, commuting three hours every day (my strife was professional), watching other passions on screens for three more hours, wondering if I could just have a small taste of that, a whiff, and here was the object of that manifestation, that torment and temptation. He grazed my knee with his knee. He broke off a piece of grilled cheese sandwich and fed it to me. I casually declined a second feeding.

Who is Shawn? He is two heads taller, plays tennis, keeps a trim beard, has curly short hair and white (but not bleach-white) buckteeth. A copy-writer for a very prominent ad agency. Actually the thing I want to describe isn’t physical, it’s cultural: he reads very straight (gauche to say this), and flirting with him in public, in crowded bars, felt like the gauche victory of seducing a straight man. We want our prizes won fair. I wanted to win a grand prize. I’ve seduced maybe one straight man? God. It felt really, really grand.

Because Shawn does improv comedy, he actually read me jokes that night, pulling up one and then another from a folder in his phone. These were spec headlines he’d written for The Onion (where I know the head writer) and some Vimeo-hosted productions for his agency portfolio. None of them made me laugh but that did not make him stop, because I kept my face warm and alert, and because I was quick to ask questions, questions that intimated close scrutiny—and also because my face is handsome. (I don’t know the preconditions. My face, however, is handsome.) At least I didn’t have to critique this one. He was a gentleman. What helped was that I had consumed a double whiskey before he met me at the bar and had volunteered double shots shortly after his arrival, and then nursed a strong cocktail thereafter. He asked me how my playwriting was going and I was happy to report that I was no longer a playwright, not even a pretend playwright! I was just a normal communications lackey for an emergent fintech company, building PowerPoint presentations that lowered company morale.

Did we have intimacy? I felt near blackout by dinner’s end, but then, I often felt near blackout that season, gripping the present as though it were a cliff’s edge. (The surf below sounded exciting. I could drop down there.) Déjà vu permeated our exchange. Even the grilled cheesed feeding felt prêt-à-porter. Batting his hand away from the second morsel, I remember thinking, “Why does dating suck this much? Why does getting to know anyone feel so hellish?” I recalled that I knew, in fact, Shawn intimately: the crimped thick purple veins of his dick, striations below his ass cheeks, his preference for boxers over briefs; I knew that he liked to humiliate his lover, and often called Bryan, during their love-making, repellently misogynist names. We had the kind of internetty intimacy that checks a lot of porn search engine boxes. It was entirely performative and it was entirely contained within the hidden folder of photos in our phones. We got along swimmingly in part because the absolute worst of ourselves had already been revealed. He was a narcissist. I was an idiot. But all of this information existed on axes of desire—was warped by that desire—and so wasn’t very truthful. (Maybe, I mean, “accurate.”) He wanted a lover close-by. He wanted to live with Bryan, to live with his soulmate. He needed me to confirm that soulmates were real. I needed him to confirm that the entire concept of a “soulmate” was a byproduct of dental insurance, a strong core, the Hallmark Channel, inside jokes, whatever. Sitting next to him at the bar, pummeled near-silent by his stand-up routine, I thought about the difficulty of getting anyone to love us for who we are, let alone loving us for our very worst selves. Shawn was so often his very worst self. Soulmates, in that case, must be real. I marveled at this drunken conclusion before succumbing to intense, silent sadness.

I’ve been sharing quick, minimally constructed stories with my friend Peter, as a way of batting away the rust around my writing. Now that I’ve sat with them for a week or more, and tinkered with them not at all, I’m ready to graduate them to Duck Beater, my horcrux, I mean my blog. 

I HAVE RECENTLY MET SOME VERY POWERFUL GODS

Oh, I stopped going. I gave up the gym because I wasn’t changing. What was my libido then? Tortured, I think, by coltish undergrads in form-fitting sweatpants. Weirdly, I noticed my mood improved if I looked at dogs. If I saw beautiful, loyal dogs in the evenings, open and knowable and kind—I felt my soul swell with every passing. It was a harder kick than studying strangers on the stationary bikes ahead of me. Weirder still, I developed a kind of superstition about these dogs on my nightly jogs. I sought them out, for the contact high. I would say to myself, “I’m gonna see five gods tonight.” Gods not dogs. “I’m gonna see six gods tonight.” I didn’t need to touch them but I did need to pass them and look into their eyes. “I’m gonna see seven gods tonight.” Anyway. That’s why I run outside.

PERFECT GAMES FOR COWORKERS WHO ARE IN LOVE

This one is called “Be Messy, Make Mistakes,” so named for the legend on a coffee mug. The rules are simple:

Wait for it.

Wait a day more for it.

The comparison rankles, but it’s impossibly obvious: Your design lead looks like a young Joseph Stalin (of the 1902 mugshot). Same wavy hair, oiled and swept away from the face, the sides short enough to reveal perfect “number 6” ears. Then the well-groomed beard; the merry dark eyes; the propensity for scarves worn under woolen coats, slightly too large.

Say: “You look like a young Joseph Stalin.” There’s no taking it back. “See.”

Present the results of a quick Google search (two tabs you’ve already opened).

“That’s pretty wild!”

“You’re really a dead ringer.”  

“Well, my family’s Russian.”

“Mm, so—so there could be—”

“A history that ties me to a war criminal, yes.”

You’re sitting side by side now with the perfect excuse to study his face, then the face of young Soso. For this photo, the Okhrana picked up Stalin just after the Batumi Massacre, and his expression, you find, is alight with the flame of revolution. For the sake of comparison, you're allowed to stare deeply, dreamily into your design lead's eyes again.

While he’s here, review some of the updated marketing collateral. Every item earns an affectionate knee touch. (Seriously, he taps your kneecap.)

You say, “New photo.”

He taps.

You say, “Colors print ready.”

He taps.

You say, “Ts and Cs.”

He taps.

Neither of you wins if he leaves his wife and kids.

WHEN THE SHARK BITES

One narrative that preoccupied me during my first serious relationship had to do with the Wright brothers—what the brothers were like as gawky teens. How they celebrated Halloween, where they rode bikes, cemeteries they explored on dares—that sort of thing. I was just out of college and crushing, apparently, on Wilbur, whose photo I’d seen at the Wayne County Historical Museum. I hungered for anachronism. I hungered, too, for love, and so gobbled up a dashing young man in Mississippi. While he fulfilled his tenure in Teach for America, I waited tables in Ohio and, when the spirit moved me, drove out to Dayton to explore the Wright archives.

This was a long time ago, when I was really into Thomas Pynchon and took everything for a sign. Everything conferred a “storm system of group suffering and need,” and there I was, pockets full of cash tips, full up of suffering and need, lamenting the distance from my lover and staunching an uncanny stream of rejection letters from graduate writing programs. Nobody wanted to fund my historiographic metafictions. And who could blame them.

The Wrights were awkward teenagers torqued more fabulously awkward by their mother’s slow death, their father’s increased absences, and the unsuccessful pursuits of their older brothers, who seemed to fail at everything they tried. Wilbur and Orville read widely enough to know their fortunes were unhappy (indeed, they sometimes signed their letters “Smike”). They lived in a small, comfortable city that elevated their ambitions to a high, miserable plateau, and their attempts to paper over poisoned circumstances—to write themselves an antidote—became a project that possibly saved themselves and their younger sister Katherine from fates like those in Dickens’ sentimental tragedies.

The stories I wrote, taken all together, would form The Falconers, a psychological novel that connected slender, depressed fellows to future, strapping heroes. How do lowly men become legends? How do cycling-obsessed boys conquer the skies? (It was that kind of story, with zits.) Thrillingly, my boyfriend moved to Falconer Avenue, just across from the middle school in Holly Springs. Every other month I made the eleven-hour drive, accepting blow jobs and raw dogs and golden showers as reward—monoliths of frantic, first-time sex to confirm our completely successful relationship. And this frosting? Was it frosting! I wrote chapters for The Falconers on Falconer Avenue. The world made perfect sense.

Of course, none of it “came to pass,” as Pynchon’s narrator in Against the Day is fond of saying. The novel fell apart. The boyfriend and I broke up. Still, when I revisit Wright letters and Wright biographies, I’m hounded by a mysterious and entirely inappropriate erection—that is, a kind of Pynchonian kink.

AFTER PICKING A FIGHT IN A BAR

A lifetime ago, I thought it’d be rewarding to teach A. S. Hamrah’s “A Better Moustrap” to first-year students struggling through their second semester of basic comp. I wanted to wow them with Hamrah’s heedless deployment of unsettling theses, argued crisply and irreverently, in an essay that supplies a plausible solution to its concerns (a rarity among most rhetorical appeals, whose authors left my students stimulated but empty-handed). Very in the vein of “A Modest Proposal,” “Mousetrap” confronts a social ill—fetish videos where women crush small animals to death under their Stilettos—yet proposes a non-ironic salve: “crushies,” where “the must-have plush-toys of the Christmas rush will be smashed underfoot.” Most of my course was based on weird internet shit, which I thought (I still think) mostly anyone can appreciate, especially the young. “Mousetrap” is full of that weird-internet-shit jouissance.

“Reading this is like eating your favorite food,” I told the class. “You’re just gonna shovel in ideas. They’re all delicious. Eh, they’re pretty weird, too. But it’ll be fun.” It wasn’t fun. Nobody read the essay. Moving through its arguments, in front of twenty-five nineteen-year-olds and a few grandmothers, was embarrassing. I had to dissect Hamrah’s great takes on crush video culture, his movements through film history, his appraisals of Mickey Rooney, then his wider and, to me, scintillating prognostications on American adulthood—an adulthood most everyone in the classroom (accepting the grannies) was soon to inherit—totally alone. “Do you watch these videos?” one student asked. “Then what’s your fetish?” asked another. “Bryson fucks books!” became the consensus. (“I fuck your dads!” I thankfully did not say but very much wanted to. I was a coward; this partially explains why no one bothered to complete my assignments.)

Flying solo—or falling sans parachute, as the case may be—through Hamrah’s film criticism and cultural reportage of the last decade has probably been a shared experience among his far-flung admirers. Finding his byline in Bookforum or the obscure domain of the International Federation of Film Critics or mirrored pages from the defunct Hermenaut was usually the result of a periodic Google search. If he appears more regularly now, and more regularly in prestige venues, that’s the fault of n+1, where he’s contributed reviews tri-quarterly since roughly 2008.

Indeed, it was Hamrah’s initial, online-only contribution that inspired so much ardor and devotion. “Oscars Previews” provided bright, bursting capsules—the gleeful bitchery of a best friend's phone call. Apparently this quality was transliterated from its material creation, when he reported the piece to his editor, Keith Gessen, over a phone, after complaining he didn’t have time to write the thing. Each entry in this salvo (none are more than a hundred or so words) lands with a zinger. They have the polish of a joke, featuring a setup, some reinforcement and then a payoff. He even plays some of his capsules against each other as callbacks. The entirety of Hamrah’s entry on Michael Clayton reads: “There was a lot of driving in Michael Clayton. I like driving in movies but after a while Michael Clayton started to seem like a car ad—though it showed how a car ad can be liberal. That’s a message for our times.” The wit is authoritative, hypnotic, dismissive. The taste behind these pronouncements felt sui generis, and the criticisms brief enough to be dispatched verbatim without attribution. I was a senior in college when I first read Hamrah. I had a busy season of parties at professor’s houses and dined-out on his opinions for weeks. 

This is not to say Hamrah only works when you’re young and grasping for style. But I do think it’s evident now that his short forms are the seedbed for his long form successes, paper sketches for the larger canvas. When you read enough of Hamrah’s capsule reviews, you get the sense he’s reporting exactly (or only) what fits into his little joke, sometimes you can even hear him reaching for his beats. When you read a whole book of them, you get the sense Hamrah’s less interested in the works under review than in his performance of reviews, his performance of freedom and audacity.

—

The Earth Dies Streaming, apart from film writing, is a log of Hamrah’s fascination with his persona, his brand of humor and arch sensibilities. He’s not exactly a curmudgeon—he wants readers to know he’s tried too many drugs to be a curmudgeon (comparisons to acid trips crop up, as does “bad speed”)—and he’s not exactly an academic (despite his Ivy League bona fides as a corporate semiotician)—and he’s not even a movie reviewer in the jejune, crass, sell-out way so many movie reviewer must be in today’s enfeebled, saturated, and deeply compromised market (he tries “to never include anything in [his] writing that could be extracted and used for publicity”). This is where I trot out a gif of Amy Poehler playing a Cool Mom in Mean Girls. Hamrah’s bobblehead offers virgin daiquiris to teenage cineastes. “I’m not like a regular film critic,” he says, “I’m a cool film critic.” The tits, the wink, the velour sweatsuit.

Other irritations. Hamrah’s insistence on the inferiority of animated films and his churlish dismissal of Miyazaki’s contributions to the medium’s history. He’s always on accident catching some part of a children’s movie—on an airplane, in a public clinic—and using these unsatisfactory experiences to comment on the aesthetics and advancements of animation at large. It’s a hobby horse he flays as often as Adorno assaulted jazz, and (to both their credits), slightly adorable for how insistent and under-thought. If only, as he does in “Jessica Biel’s Hand,” he would immerse himself in the backlog of lauded animation from this century and the last, he might, for once, be able to say something interesting about it.

Hamrah’s stance against feature-length animation is nearly as looming and placeless as his stance against other films critics, whom he evidently reads closely but can never be bothered to cite. His essays are peppered with a dreaded sea of bought-off weekly reviewers whose pedestrian tastes frustrate him. This, despite the regularly insightful, playful, and overall helpful criticism of David Edelstein and Emily Yoshida at New York; Dana Stevens at Slate; Manhola Darghis at the Times; Justin Chang in Los Angeles; and the fairly dour takes of Peter Debruge in the industry’s digest, Variety. Hamrah alludes to David Denby’s work in Streaming’s introduction, then names him outright in a later capsule review of Little Children. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine as to with what critical consensus Hamrah finds his views out of alignment. These are critics and journalists who, obliged by deadlines, report weekly on their film-going habits. That they have new things to say even once a month is a miracle, but that they do so four to ten times a month is frankly incredible. (It must be evident that I’m a fan of movie reviews and film criticism. I work an office job where between menials I find intense delight and distraction in the work of daily reviewers, and I carry around with me an ungainly amount of knowledge regarding box office performances and future releases that in all other ways I have no interaction: I go to the movies maybe three times a month, often by myself, and often I see low-brow flicks. Last weekend I saw the third How to Train Your Dragon movie; the weekend before that, Isn’t It Romantic; a weekend before that, Roma. I saw these movies on the advice of daily reviewers, and Roma only after reading Caleb Crain’s celebration of it.)

I volunteer Richard Brody and Christian Lorentzen as Hamrah’s contemporary intellectual kin, with caveats. Brody’s work is too mystical, too mythical to properly critique his subjects, and his symptomatic readings, which border on the Lacanian in terms of the extraneous and deranged, become hulking apertures that always overtake whatever work is under discussion, squashing them. Also he is never, ever funny in his reviews. Brody is a curmudgeon, and what he criticizes rarely appears in the films themselves but float around the films’ receptions, financing or forebears, and when he ventures into specifics—a film’s lensing, its sound, the actors and their acting styles—his descriptions become ridiculous. Lorentzen, as with his book reviews, writes to a word count. (There is no other reason for the amount of tedious plot summary in a Lorentzen take-down.) If Hamrah sounds like these critics, it may be because all three are careful in their dissents to let the filmmakers know they think they’re complete assholes. When these three do find praise for a work, it’s the entirely appropriate object of adoration, art-house and independent, or, gotcha!, a studio event they appreciate for more correct, more interesting, and more nuanced reasons than everyone else.

What sets these critics apart from the daily reviewers I listed above, may be the daily reviewers’ capacity to surprise and be surprised. Perhaps they saw a movie with a daughter and her friend; they appreciated a family flick in context; they were caught unawares by stray scenes in a larger, unsuccessful work, and appreciated glimpsed wisdom. They have hope yet for a return to better forms. These reviewers are flexible and receptive; they are as likely to be charmed as they are to be chagrined. Even when Brody, Lorentzen and Hamrah are surprised by the quality of a work, they take it as an affront to their sensibilities and bridle, like horses suspicious of an open gate. Why were they not warned? Why should they trust this development? Their reflexive, ingrained annoyance, occasionally flowering into high dudgeon, fills their actual reviews with foregone conclusions. One does not visit their writing for news, or for new takes, for synthesized connections, or revelations of form. One visits for the comforting familiarity of a flagging standard—“a continuity of aesthetics that [has] become an aesthetics of continuity,” if I’m remembering the St Aubyn phrase correctly.

Criticism this entrenched in its own personality ends up toothless. It’s why Renata Adler, for instance, will be remembered for her reporting and not her film criticism. Despite its bite—and it’s quite biting—it rarely leaves a mark. Hamrah never cites Adler—nor do I think he will. His prose and her prose are rather too alike. He must sense the comparison coming, and dislike it, because Adler is not particularly well informed on film and filmmaking. Her amateurish moonlighting grated in 1968, and it grates now, but only for its prosumer-level expertise. Her prose (like Hamrah’s) remains indelible, deadpan, and addictive. When I recall the subhead to Kyle Paoletta’s appreciation of Hamrah, “Always On: A. S. Hamrah’s film criticism is a welcome corrective in an outmoded field,” I consider Adler’s own attempts at the form, as a corrective. And I find them contiguous with other platforms discussing same, places like Slate, Twitter, and The Ringer’s Exit Survey, which preempts the leap from hot take to tweet. (Q: “What is your tweet-length review of Venom?” A: “What if All of Me (1984) but action and also tater tot–loving aliens?”) What I’m saying is this: Hamrah’s form is not novel. His tone is not novel. His writing is, however, very convenient (brief, digestible) and entertaining, and he’s been adding more personal atmosphere of late.

So the named lodestars in Hamrah’s critical firmament: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman and Manny Farber (to whom Hamrah pens an exceptionally sweet and informative essay). Hoberman, the only critic still alive among these titans, shares Hamrah’s acid tongue and penchant for political excavations, while doing his readers a courtesy by assuming not all of them attend film festivals or live in limited-release area codes. The same semester I taught “A Better Mousetrap,” I taught Sontag on sci-fi movies and Hoberman’s seminal “21st Century Cinema: Death and Resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” (later to become his book-length essay, Film After Film). Hoberman can be as tart and irreverent as Hamrah, but he’s not above recounting plot summaries. He’s both a guide and a rebel. I suppose, following my own argument, if in fact I’m making one, this makes Hoberman the better critic—a classification that would not hurt Hamrah’s feelings. (This would hurt very few film critics’ feelings.)   

—

[Editor’s Note: I started this blog a decade ago—occasion enough, I thought, for me to reflect on what it’s meant to contribute (in my extraordinarily untimely and narrow way) to a log that has tried (and more often failed) at recording where I’m at and how I’m doing and what I’m thinking and where I’m going. Having this space has not unreasonably kept me in it—I mean, its persistence has kept me reflecting more or less on the period of its inception. I think a lot about who I was at 23, which is idiotic and costly. I read more books back then. I had no money. My best friend was my brother. I thought I would write a novel.] 

Years ago, my brother’s friend offended him when she asked me why I didn’t prefer one brand of paint over another. I was probably in my apartment's kitchen, working on a canvas, and they were probably behind me, eating my boyfriend's food.

I painted then because I was very poor. One way of thinking through your poverty—if you haven't drugs or sex or a brain injury—is to create pointless tasks for yourself, which is what art-making very often is. It's like Vicodin. It's very lovely, costly, addicting, transporting and makes your stomach hurt if you're not full-up already on something else (say, mashed potatoes). I was painting a truly hideous “family portrait”—globs of white and green paint shaped like cast-off “Sesame Street” creatures—and I was painting, besides, for myself. To hold the brush and to fold the colors and to smell the Turpenoid. A.J. had the money for food (our dying grandfather had cosigned on a student loan) and yet there he was with Victoria, in my apartment, peeling back the silvery foil of a Pop-Tart, making crinkling sounds.

I shouldn't say “my apartment” because it was really Cole’s: I had decamped there when we fell hard in love. This was on the corner of Union and Greenwich, across from an intramural field, and beyond that the law school. It was low-income housing: most has been destroyed; and now that I'm on Google I find the places I walked by, the porch I painted bright blue, the rooms I cherished (orange, annoyingly), they've all disappeared. There's odd grassy lots where there were once old, three-apartment houses, their interiors mangled to accommodate the crying fits of off-campus seniors. In the decade since their vanishment, even the indentations of walkways, of their foundations are invisible, and the lawns are as serene and flat and verdant as well-maintained graves. I recall coming off work one night that October, and finding Cole in the stairwell to the second-floor flat. He was crumpled in a ball, on the phone, arguing with his father: I should visit for Thanksgiving; I should be considered family. He was so angry he was bawling, and he hated me to touch him, and I left him in a daze which is also how I finally left him—in a daze, hating me to touch him. (But on better terms with his father.) Well, that stairwell is gone.

A.J. and Victoria, and in fact many of A.J.’s other law school friends, they regularly came into this apartment. (I have written about them before and realized only in editing this piece that the following brief description is a paraphrase of that missive.) They played Mario Kart on the GameCube, recited Moot Court speeches and ate take-out on the sofas. They gossiped incessantly because a small law school is a high school (it even had lockers), and the attendees are as reckless and dispirited and status-hungry as freshmen in a high school. He was a first year then and I was a fifth year finishing my undergrad, and so I saw all of A.J.'s new friends more than I ever saw my old ones because my old friends had moved on. (They went to Austin, Texas. They stayed at most three years and then relocated to either Los Angeles or the Pacific Northwest.)

I want to try to remember Victoria without resorting to her Instagram account. Back then, she took great pains to distinguish herself as a sophisticated New Englander. I see: high socks, long “piecey” hair, a face white-powdered to pore-less perfection. Perhaps because she was changing her life at twenty-eight and not at twenty-three, as other law students were, her look inclined toward the transformative, toward the gothic and the chic-severe. (Why am I describing her as a later-day Wednesday Addams? She was not a Wednesday Addams. She wore colors. She drank Pimm’s with grape fruit slices and soda water. We took day trips to places like Gary, Indiana, listening to Sam Amidon on the Camry’s stereo.) What I think is, she was alarmed and depressed to be at a “fourth-tier law school in the middle of an ugly corner in uglier Indiana,” and so rebelled against the smallness of her new life by having outsized opinions on luxury goods and fine foods and exotic locales. The worst was that no one knew what she was talking about. She felt this and compensated by hosting foreign film nights. She preferred “the scene,” knew of a scene (there was a music one close by, apparently, in Chicago), and she called herself, sometimes guffawing, a “scenester,” but also wanted us to know she was down with whatever. Just, whatever. She nettled everyone but mostly everyone pitied her, so on balance, her gloom and her snobbery were tolerated.

Victoria made mysterious, indelible gestures. Their performances were somehow less memorable than their obscure resonances, and those resonances affected us obscurely, too. An example. She once loaned A.J. a copy of A Wild Sheep Chase, wanting to hook him on Murakami. When he gave it back unread at the end of term, she insisted it was a replacement copy, that he had lost her original. “If I lost your book,” he told her flatly (and not at all to his credit), “I would not have bothered replacing it.” She said, “No, no—you would. And this is proof.” She told exasperated classmates that A.J. had lost her beloved Murakami paperback and tried to replace it with an exact copy, a conviction seemingly borrowed from the phantasmagorical worlds of Murakami. She used this as a wedge issue about trust, about fidelity. “You’re a coward who couldn’t tell me the truth,” she said, slipping comfortably into a Whit Stillman role. “You’re a deceiver.” To this day, A.J. accepts loaned books graciously while maintaining (not, I think, aloud), “If I lose this, I won’t replace it.” He has never replaced a book I loaned and then he re-loaned again, and there have been more than a dozen. Victoria gave him that.

Another example. When A.J. proposed to his wife, Victoria emailed soon after, advising against the marriage. Incredibly, she sent an email to A.J.’s fiancée too, her reasons for either party diametrically proposed. She was not certain A.J. harbored a strong enough attachment to commit to what she thought would be a lifelong and life-destroying folly. And to Tayler, she said that the two did not know each other enough; that, although they met and dated in high school, and all through college, had not found themselves as adults and might try living longer, in other relationships, before settling down. The emails were cruel, stupid, and strange. Their audience did the generous thing: blamed them on the performer's romantic illusions and then dismissed them as curiosities. Yet sometimes A.J. wishes he had kept his “receipts”—that he’d printed out Victoria’s appeals to him and Tayler, to have at hand such shining examples of sincerity. I’ve heard him rueful about it. “I’m not trying to be an asshole,” he’s said, “but I wish I had these things to point to and say, ‘Here is someone who believes she is doing the right thing.’” But all those emails are gone. The law school closed last year—rather spectacularly, given the coverage in the Times. He doesn’t even have an alumni vanity mailing address.

Victoria adopted this business about oil paints from someone else, her “friend who shows in Chelsea,” a factor that compounded  A.J.'s ire. “He uses exclusively, I think, Windsor and Newton,” she said. “Mixing from other labels creates inconsistencies, sometimes chemical clashes?” She opened the fridge and A.J., after scrubbing it with a towel, sat atop the counter. Bluish light came in through bay windows. The law students appeared not only chronically under-slept (they were) but also ethereal, and perhaps very ill. Victoria helped herself to milk. The cords in A.J.'s neck strained as he gazed at the ceiling, lips pursed, white-knuckling the countertop. Some of this was histrionics and some of this was my brother holding onto his sanity.

I said I didn’t I have a preference—or rather, I just didn’t think about it. I had inherited some desiccated oils from my grandma, raided other buttery leftovers from the art building, had bought cheap, thin student sets in the last full years of school—and I got by on what I had. I got by beautifully, actually, elbow-deep in half-tubes and tubes splayed open at the ends, and tubes coaxed open with needle-nose pliers. The mineral reek and vegetal reek from these paints necessitated full days of airing out the apartment. The solvents and extenders smelled of clove cigarettes smoked indoors. I left canvases to dry outside, where they collected tree fluff and tiny, delicate dead bugs. My images were neither hurt nor helped by these environmental additions. I said I was paying down student loan debt, and would practice brand loyalty when I was solvent again. Victoria said, “Oh, but you really should.” I thought to myself, perhaps for the first time, Why did my brother befriend this orphan?

“I really should,” I say to myself, most days on my drive. Wasn't there a performance art piece—a woman, saying 1,000 things she should do, into a tape-recorder? “I really should recycle. I really should call my mother. I really should pay my parking tickets.” I really should honor ritual and superstition, and my gut instincts. I really should read what I buy or at least attend more assiduously to reviews, so as to refrain from buying disappointments. I really should do my part to cut back on carbon emissions, clean the seas, and vote. Everything is in reach. The way Victoria said it—breezy, condescending, hopeful—is the way I hear most advice, particularly the advice I give myself: spoken in the tones of unconvincing conviction. I drank much less then (somehow), still I had a bottle of Bombay Sapphire at hand (somehow), and peered at Victoria and A.J. through its blue glass, tripling their blue-hued bodies.