The World

They won’t come to you if you do what you’re supposed to do, if you wait on your butt on the ground with your food-stick in the food. Eager, but they won’t eat without at least some chance

to get stepped on, of fluttering out from the shadow of your foot as you traverse with perfect technique from branch to whatever branch they’re jerking down now like swingers doing half the twist. New Yorkers, iced-tea hyperactive. Looking neither towards nor away from each other,

provoking you with wings and screams, an audiovisual tickle. Provoking the sort of pain like light under wood that you won’t feel again until you lie in a bed feeling guilty about something, the bed’s tendrils collecting your personal information as you toss and turn.

Provoking you with smells, the chord-dirt between their eyes, their mouths like medical diagrams with pencil holes punched down the middle, like some equipment only a scientist would say was safe, strapped together with muscles, with a tiny serrated hole above the tongue risking causing an ‘I-told-you-so’ cave-in,

a crack in every mask: grumpy robin, cross-eyed flirty woodpecker, panicked grackle, kiddie bluejay, starling confident as a prince from a Russian fairytale.

What is it they want from you? Do they want you to break them? Starlings using the stick-tip painfully with the backs of their throats to scrub away pain, robins converting matter to energy before it even goes over their tongues.

Not the blue jays, who whenever you reach for the screen door fly for their freedom on rusty shear wings

too far apart at the handle. Once escaped they perch on the nearest fan and sit on their freedom like roses.

Not the few fully grown birds left behind in the fledglings’ cage, who can see the walls, the escape, and despair at both: a few flickers, and a few robins

looking up at them, like mathematicians trying to imagine large numbers.

WATCH THIS.

http://youtu.be/k9YJM2GCvk8

OKAY. NOW. READ THIS.

I was a little bit drunk on beer, festiveness, and general fun vibes, and I only scribbled stuff down whenever other people came up to him to gush, so sadly I don't have many of Stetson's actual words-- which is a pity because his words often quite poetic. Nor are these exactly my questions. I didn't really mean this to be an interview so much as a chat, and I've tried to make the logic clear. So I hope this roughly holds together.

Colin Stetson is one of my favourite artists in any medium. Every aspect of his practice, from how he conceptualizes art, to the physical struggle involved in each performance, to the discipline his work demands, to the haunting music itself, has made Stetson's work basically essential to how I think about art and writing. 

But perhaps one of the things I love most about Colin Stetson is that he is a consummate storyteller. I was over the moon when I found this article because it talks about (among many things) Stetson's connection to storytelling. For me at least, a number like "Judges" wonderfully weaves together layers of abstraction and emotion through the saxophone to return to a realm of the ultra-tangible, a tangibility which I'd always enjoyed but only realized with full devastating clarity when Stetson perform  at Sappyfest 8 and his saxophone shook my goddamn sternum. 

Perhaps it was the combination of sleep deprivation and the Sappyfest atmosphere, but after a fucking breathtaking set that left me feeling totally fucking shelled, I approached Stetson with an offer of beer and some questions I had about narrative and storytelling, because for a long time I've wanted to do with words what he does with music. Lucky for me, Colin Stetson is a really friendly and generous dude who was straight-up happy (like actually happy) to be able to pass on what he learned.

Stetson: "Have you seen any films by Terrence Malick?"

"No."

"I'd recommend all of his films. The Thin Red Line. First and last, The Thin Red Line." 

I'd asked a question along the lines of "The way I understand narrative is that it's roughly founded on a kind of logic of cause and effect, but you tell stories with states. I'm curious how you [i.e. you personally] go about telling a narrative using states." 

Stetson said to look at how Malick tells stories, constructs scenes, without dialogue or words, and talked about how what he tries to accomplish with his music is create a space that is intimate, but vast within that intimacy. You can "play sunshine," and create emotional scenes and spaces, all without words.

We agreed that constant practice was vital, and that waiting around for inspiration was "horse shit" (that might have been my phrasing). "I'm a boring teacher," he said, because he believes in practice, spending huge amounts of time and energy on a mechanical foundation that forms the basis of... making art. He gestured up at the night sky and explained that a lot of people look up when they go looking for something wonderful, powerful, etc., then he waved his hand at the crowd around us and the fences and the asphalt, "But's it's not up there. It's down here. It's mechanical. It's bone."

In the same article I linked to above, Stetson talks about what he learned from working with Tom Waits. 

“When I first worked with Waits, I came from a background of playing the saxophone in the typical ways and genres in which the instrument was used. In most of those settings, your personal sound—pressing your ego (ego as in self) into the music—is pretty paramount. You’re playing standards and you’re playing them the way that you play them. Same with how you treat a piece of classical music—injecting the self into all things was how the game was played for me up until that point. I think you’re limited in a sense when your self is on the line in that kind of way. You don’t usually take things down to a level of vulnerability, or that do things that don’t sound proficient.”

“When I worked with Waits I realized very quickly that what he wanted wasn’t about serving yourself. He wanted you to serve the song, to come there, use your life experience and be an actor in a scene—to play a character. So I would do that with him and in an instant he had me playing in ways I’d never explored before. What I got from that was the importance of ridding music of the taint of self and ego.”

My next question was about how, practically, to rid yourself of that ego.

Stetson explained that you must "voraciously" feed your creative self. This is, again, a question of practice: what you practice is dissolving your self. When you lose yourself in movies, fiction, music, you're exercising a muscle. The muscle is your whole self, and it becomes better at disintegrating the more you work it. Stetson also said to "Be discerning," about what you feed yourself-- understandable, if it's the foundation of the work.

Stetson explained that, for a lot of people, making an art is about "What I can do." The alternative, what happens when you let that go, is that the work becomes about "What does this character need? What does this scene need?" The "I" becomes more of a director/facilitator, watching the scene and moving elements to make it into exactly the scene that it needs to be. The major problem becomes forcing that dissolution onto your audience, "Whether you do that through identifying with a protagonist, seeing a landscape, a scene, or even just motion." Again, it's mechanical. Practicing dissolution, offering it to others.

Stetson's next bit of advice was also super-useful.

"Don't explain yourself. Just tell your story."

It was one of the most important lessons he'd learned from reading. Stetson talked about how he really liked Haruki Murakami, because Murakami never feels the need to explain himself, to explain his story and how they relate to the real world, this world. "It's something simple that nobody tells you." He makes a little scissor gesture in the air and explains that when you cut the work off from that need, from this world, "It's freeing."

It was also a little thing that nobody had told me, that made so many things make sense. By so many things I mean all the art I gush about all the time.

I asked Stetson if he'd read Blood Meridian and he said he hadn't, but he liked the road, and he sounded interested in it.

I also asked, "What's essential to a story?"

"Very little."

He recommended looking at the old myths, "The stories are often really simple, but they really resonated with people back in their time." 

He asked some questions about what I was studying, and said he was working on a novel (which I'll snap up the moment it hits the shelves). We watched The Luyas for a bit and then he went to go track down a friend. He shook my hand. "It was nice meeting you, Sean."

Yes, it was the year Camille died, but it is the cats that I remember. White, almost shapeless, as shadows, descending upon our apartments like ghosts in a fog, slender, still, and pale, we did not know why they arrived, where they came from, why they chose our apartment (of all places) to settle. They had no master, and behaved in the fashion of masterless cats, fearful and aggressive, or else unaccountably tame and demure, running when we came too near, sniffing our fingertips, eager, content. It was not a few days after the long passing of winter when the first of them began to arrive, a matron and her kittens. They looked at us, well, at Amy, steady and indifferent, though, when she approached, the cats hissed and bared their slender teeth, and she knew to withdraw.

That spring was calm. Winter had been thick and steady and the last of the snows had vanished. There was to be little rain, though the ground was rich and well-watered from winter. Amy was new at the apartments. Our gardener had left and she had moved in and assumed the gardener’s duties. She had a ground floor apartment, with a door onto the courtyard, next to Camille’s. She wore her hair in a knot and her clothes were crisp as bed sheets, and as soon as the snow had thawed and the air had warmed a little she began planting peonies and tulips in the garden. The first time she spoke to Camille was the day he asked if he could draw her, and she sat still and quiet on a bench beneath the quaking tree while he sketched her in charcoal in his black-bound book. For a while, they didn’t speak, save to say, “Hello,” in the mornings, as they stood and the cats rubbed against their legs.

The cats became Mr. Dragonfly’s obsession. When they first arrived in a trickle, he gazed at them with scientific vigor and when they arrived in waves and masses he could be seen in his apartment window with a notebook feverishly tallying the cats he did not recognize. He was a dealer and collector of coins and stamps. His currency was hypothesis. Some mornings we awoke and went outside and found him on his balcony with his hands wrapped around a cold cup of coffee, his notebook by his side, fingers bent and cold tabulating facts. He had been up all night. He stood by the railing, watching, thinking.

As the spring wore on the buds on the boughs unfurled and each day seemed to bring with it new calm and vigor. Camille brought out a book to Amy one morning as she tilled the soil and they spent the day together on the bench examining the sketches he had made of her from his apartment. She saw herself in pastel, ink and charcoal, standing, kneeling, her gloved hands buried in the earth or parting branches for trimming. Each hair had been delicately rendered, her face’s freckles brought forth as pebbles seen under water. Camille smiled, weak, and frail.

“They must expand from the apartments, in wave,” Mr. Dragonfly deduced, “Like a flood, through the streets. We don’t feed them. We don’t have mice. There are no birds. What do they eat? What do they drink? They must go out, then.” He spent nights outside, maintained a careful count, his eyes on the cats as they wandered on the eaves and balconies, up the trees and under the bushes in the dim glow of porch-lights, eyes ablaze with analysis, intent, and the lights of his house on well into the morning, when, standing on his balcony, he (blurry-eyed but vigilant) proclaimed, “It can't be! The cats—not a single one of them has left the courtyard in the last ten days!”

The afternoons warmed like wet stone in sunshine and the grass sprouted in the cracks of the courtyard stones, the clouds as cold and beautiful as dew-soaked leaves on a misty morn. Amy began to pet the cats, those that would approach her, and even a few that didn’t, though they scratched and bit and she collected many cuts across her arms and hands. Camille held them, her hands, looking, examining, and in the weeks that followed he brought out sketches of her hands and her arms covered in cuts, and then sketches of her, in her entirety, each fresh cut in its proper place on her arm. She laughed at his fixation, wiping away a few stray hairs from her blouse in a single, delicate motion.

Dragonfly's determination mounted. And, aware of the stealth of cats and their ability to slip away without being seen or heard, reappearing with equal silence, he began interrogating shop owners ten blocks in all directions to see if they had been leaving out food for the animals. They listened, they listened to him closely, as he described the cats, the tide of cats, and they paused and thought and then said that, now that they came to think of it, they had not seen, or heard, any cats in a very long time, and, they added, none of the cats they had ever known matched the description of the unanimous white animals that populated the courtyard. There were dogs, though, that ate everything left in the alleyways. The dogs had always lived in the alleyways, and, (many of the shop owners thought) would be there for a very long time in the future.

The garden sprouted. The green shoots broke through the ground and began to grow thick and full, though flowerless. Amy filled the garden with her diligent presence, and it never grew so lush as it did that year. Camille now left his apartment to do his sketches, sitting on the garden bench beneath the cat-laden willow, glancing up, catching a faint and fleeting smile from Amy as she went about tending the soil, her face half-hidden by foliage, laying down crushed eggshells to deter the snails, filling the birdfeeder in case any birds did dare to approach the apartment garden that year. She spoke to Camille in his sadness, as he illustrated a portrait of Amy kneeling in the soil.

One day Dragonfly left to sell his current stamp collection. He had finished with this one, and was moving on to the next one. “A collection of South American stamps,” he decided, and it seemed the cats were no longer a presence in his thoughts, though, on occasion, we watched him as he tried to approach one and found he could not, or would not. The ubiquitous kittens grew and they huddled and played in the nooks and corners, never more accountable than they had been before. The landlord bought a small water fountain and its trickling filled the courtyard, and Amy began to put bowls of food, fresh water and milk out for the cats who gathered by her door each morning and evening to eat while she and Camille picnicked in the garden, his book, now almost filled with sketches, clutched to his side. The garden came to fill the courtyard with its presence, it was impossible not to smell the greenery on the air, hear the high leaves stir when the wind was up, or when the cats were silent in the night.

In April a van from the arrived from the pound, white as only paint can be. From our apartments we watched the men from the pound dash through the courtyard collecting the mewling, hissing, clawing cats as they spat and ran and attacked, ferocious, unforgiving, as they were dragged away and forced into cages in the back of the van. The men took all afternoon to do their work, stopping now and then to rest and remark upon the absence of people. We were there, for the most part, watching distantly from well behind our windows. And even though Dragonfly was home that day, his blinds were shut, and his television staid off, and not a sound issued from his apartment. The nights, for a while, were silent, free of midnight howls.

One day, Camille smiled at Amy as he left the apartments and walked out to the street with his portfolio, stopping to tie his shoelaces for the last time. That morning was cool, and bright. The winds were high, and it was wet and clear, as if it had rained the night before. He wore a thin jacket. The first bird arrived that afternoon. A nightingale, that, while we breathed into our pillows, pierced the calm of the night.

That spring when the peonies bloomed they were white, like hospital beds. 

His thoughts behave like billiard balls,

The kind they teach in class:

Perfect and hard and rolling round

Like an ideal gas.

  They crash against themselves, he says

Sometimes they burn and melt,

I’m teaching mine to stop and drop

And press against the felt.

  But if you cup one in your hand

And raise it to your ear,

He’ll shake his head and smile and yawn

And pour another beer.

i. 

Ena made her way down the winding dirt pathway that curved through the belly of the whistling thorn. She didn’t need to take the map from the vendor a town back, but it felt precautionary at the time; that was the reason she gave herself. Now, it seemed to burn a hole in her side where she kept it, secure and untouched beneath the leather strap of her belt. It was as though the Hinterlind she was returning to, and the dying thorn surrounding it, and the fading dirt path that had not been walked on for years, had sent her a collective message of dismay. In her youth, the thorn trees had filled the Djaewling Forest. They had twined their barbarous, wooden limbs around one another in thick clusters, spread throughout the land in unsuspecting places. Wary a foreign traveler was who, unfamiliar with the Eastern Fowl’s land, came upon the whistling thorn, oft loosing a faithful mutt to it. The country of Hinderlind, and the vast hemisphere of the Eastern Fowl it resided in, contained many medicinal and many poisonous thorns within it. To tell the difference between friend and the foe was near impossible, till flesh should meet thorn. But the hunters would know that the good game, the Snid Elk and Vaarwn Nod, liked the tender shoots of sweet grass that grew around it’s base. And the Salvetics, with their healing ways, knew how to tell from the way the light reflected off the thorn’s sap, or from the pitch of it’s shrill skirl, if it was to aid in life or in death. 

Ena stuck to the main roads as she made her way towards the Hinderlind, but she didn’t need to. Not because most of the thorn had died from the Bittle Bug’s infestation - the thorns that once scared her as a child were now puckered like the faces of old men. And not because she had the map. Of course, she hadn’t forgotten. “Home” was a fixed thought, an idea taught to her as a child, ingrained in the lexicon of her mind. It was waking up to Lee-ma’s glazed gwor-tarts, filled with freshly churned custard and chunks of tender gwor-fruits. They were picked young for their bright, yellow color and their sweetness. When harvest time came each year, they were a prized delicacy in Ena’s District. And “home” was quieter memories, too. It was Yoh-ma’s stiff back as he hulled another sack of mortar over his shoulder, aiding the others who had chosen to join in the rebellion. She always tried to remember her father through better memories, but that one always came first. No matter where she went, or what she tried to forget, home was a word that would always be associated with a particular place, or a particular person. For Ena, it would always be the Hinderlind. 

It was strange, though. She approached the draw-bridge at the end of the path, half-raised in midair, with one of it’s chains detached from the windlass where the Servicemen had destroyed it during battle. She hadn’t even passed through the gate, and despite the wreckage that still surely remained inside, she knew it had remained nearly the same. Only the patches of thorn where the Bittle Bugs had done their damage, and the dark stains that covered the stone walls in certain spots near the entry-way, and the lack of noise and life, were different. The dead thorn, like sooty fire-patches that had long since lost their spark, sat hidden amongst the tall grass. They were tiny memento’s of an unfair war. It was unfair, knowing how much had been lost, that the tall stone walls made of mud and mortar still stood tall, and the etchings children had once carved on them still remained. Yet none of them had. 

No matter how much the Hinterlind hadn’t changed, Ena felt completely different from the last time she stood in front of it, listening to the whistling thorn as the wind blew through the small, cylindrical holes the ants had made in them. They used to sound like old men whispering almost-forgotten truths to her. Now, they sounded like nothing but a dull whine, a full breath pushed through a narrow pathway by force. She wasn’t the same child who’d sat stagnant as her people fought a loosing battle. 

In her travels, people would never believe her when she said where she came from. Few known survivors had remained after the war. So, she would tell them what she saw. How after the Bittle Bugs came and wiped out the crops, people panicked, but they thought it would get better. How the Salvetics prayed to the Gods, and the Servicemen searched for aid from neighboring townships. “No one could have known that the infestation would grow,” she would say, “but when all the thorn had been destroyed, and all the medicine it supplied used up as well, the Bugs came after the people. Little nicks in the skin, like small clusters of precision paper-cuts colored black and blue, was all it seemed to be. The wounds would heal, and it would be forgotten. And then one day, like a kiss from a ghost, a person would suddenly crumble like ash to the floor. And for days they would lie in a bed, their skin turning a shade of mold. Everyone was sad at first, until they became afraid. Old friends and new suddenly stopped visiting one another when one was infected; and what started as simple, mandatory check-ins from the Servicemen medics, turned into people quietly slipping away in their sleep after the doctor’s visit. When the people discovered why their loved ones were dying, the rebellion was born. My Yoh-ma fought with them. But the Servicemen had outside resources, and they cut off our ration-supply. We didn’t stand a chance.” When she would finish, she could tell that most people didn’t believe her. She was still young. She would have had to have been a child at the time of her tale. How could a child survive such a genocide as this? 

They were right. She was too young to carry arms, and had it not been for Lee-ma, she would surely have died in the final purge like the others. But she still remembers being scooped up into Lee-ma’s soft, sturdy arms, as she whispered, “Be still, Ena. Be still, my little Jyun-ma.” Her face had been pressed against Lee-ma’s sweating cheek. Through the fray of flaxen hair that flew out from her mother’s loose braid, she had watched as the people tore into each other from the distant fields outside her window, painting the dull golden color of the wheat with tinges of red. Yoh-ma had hid her beneath the floorboards, in a space small enough for only a child, and to this day she wonders how she didn’t make a noise for so long, when they finally came for Lee-ma and Yoh-ma. 

Afterwords, as Ena held her as she was dying, she whispered the words that Yoh-ma had often told her when she was frightened by the sounds of the rebellion, and couldn’t sleep at night.

You are not alone, and you are not afraid. You’re with me. 

She was wrong, though. They all were. 

Where am I right now? That’s probably the first thing you want to know. A setting will help you picture me. Then you can decide your opinion on me. If I told you I was in an alley way surrounded by some stoners you’d probably fix your reading glasses lower on your nose and turn on your judgement eyes: “poor messed up kid, what is she doing with her life?”. But if I told you I was in a nice big house with wooden floor boards doing homework at my desk you’d probably assume I was average, and worthy of your approval. Maybe you’d compare me to your own daughter, or some Mary Anne you go to school with (my name is Sam if you care to know, not Mary Anne). But honestly, I could invade a first-class mansion or kick back on the grungy streets and still be the same person in every one of my burning garbage bones.

Where I am isn’t either of those places, by the way. I am not in the world. I’m not in a house or outside of one. I’m not in a real place. Maybe you’ve been where I am once or twice or a million times in your life and are trying really hard not to go back to it. Too bad for you I’m going to remind you of something you didn’t like. And if you’ve never been here before: welcome to the very secure space between the rock and the hard place. It gets pretty comfortable here after a while. I am six feet under, buried deep. I am underground. I’m lying in a coffin made of metal. That way the earth doesn’t cave in around me. It’s a small dark room. I’m reclining on a slightly uncomfortable loveseat, blowing smoke out of my mouth with the straightest face you’ve ever seen. I tilt my head back and am content. Very little air gets into my little gray box, even though I’ve made some sort of chimney to stop this being “buried alive”. But I’ve gotten used to that. The itching, panicked babbling in my lungs and the tightness in my chest is just like background noise.  But don’t think I’m getting emotional on you. Just remember that everything I might tell you about myself is excess flowery shit; totally separate from the straight-standing body that is me. Above: scampering feet and scratching claws in the dirt. Whistling hot breath muffled by the thick metal. Chuckling, muttering, laughing. Sometimes crying or screaming.

“You can never really be sure what’s in these things,” Carles Silva said, taking a small nibble of the Boston Bibb lettuce that hung limply from the corner of his double cheeseburger. 

 “It’s not even a matter of trusting the owner, because so often they don’t know either. I mean, they get the forms in the mail, these management jerk-offs and three-ring binder franchise clowns, and it’s at that moment they realize they know shit-all about what goes on in their own kitchens. At the molecular level at least. I asked a guy once, what was in his hamburger – it tasted like shit – and he just looked at me and said beef.” Carles laughed at his own joke. “Five to one this place has radium poisoning. I’m thinking the buns. They absorb that nonsense like a sponge.” 

The cheeseburger shielding his face was square like how they used to be made, its sourdough bun taping to a spiral peak that swarmed with poppy seeds like a whipped ant hill.

“But there are things in these foods that are undetectable by anyone, really. I mean you’d be amazed. L&L used to have a swarm of trained specialists they’d send out for inspection audits, guys with their tongues trained at École Certeau or the M.E.C. by these limp French assholes, and I mean our guys would swagger in with maybe a magnifying glass and a slide-rule between them and let their suits do half the talking just to milk the free meals. And we compare these career guys’ results–—recognized, certified experts though they were–—with the printout from a five-year-old spectrometer set that you could get at a yard sale – ” Carles paused to take another small bite of his burger and, still chewing, reached to something at his feet. “I mean you’d be amazed.”

Martin Pengrass sat across from Carles in the turquoise booth behind the jukebox and watched the latter’s head dip under the tabletop’s horizon line. Martin was drinking a vanilla milkshake with a raw egg blended in for texture. Carles fumbled around for a while down there, constricted by the stay-press’d slacks which bulged around the slow expansion of his  thighs, like hocks of ham. Martin felt underdressed and looked down at the arms of his nylon windbreaker pretzel-tied into a cape atop his hawaiian shirt. The one-piece plastic seats reminded him of popsicles, for some reason, as they dipped toward the wall in a way that left his feet dangling a few inches off the checkered floor. Carles was still bent-double, fighting for air. He smelled oil – 4-hydroxy-3-nonenoic acid. Crispy fries – 6-Acetyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydropyridine. The walls around them were covered in reproduction black and white photos, and a blown-up glossy Rita Hayworth pouted next to a hissing ventilation duct. A lean metal coat rack stood next to each stall. Martin played with his left foot, slipping the threadbare talon of sock in and out of a scuffed loafer, on and off and again, before Carles returned to eye level, kidney-bean red but laughing it off, as he placed a small suitcase onto the table. It was 11:53 am, and they’d just beaten the lunch rush at Winky’s Weiner House.

Martin had woken up two hours ago with cigarette flu and his favourite good pants were too scuffed to to leave the house. He was supposed to meet Carlos at Winky’s, his phone’s blinking icon said, and bring some baking soda if he had any. He did, and he ran down into his basement lab to grab some while slipping his windbreaker over his shoulders. Martin walked to the bus stop outside his apartment and took the 12:10 over. There had been a man yelling at the bus driver about which of two coins is really a quarter.

After curiously poking at a few stray drops of orange grease on the tabletop, Carles spun a combination into the suitcase’s tumblers and opened it to reveal its innards: the dull surface of a dial-riddled tan instrument whose faint hum could be felt in the rippling condensation of Martin’s glass. “Just got this puppy last week – a modified Agilent 5975 Series MSD Dentector. Cutest lil’ Mass Spec on the market, but the precision’s unmatched. Just got it for surviving ten years with Ellen!” He wolf-whistled like a cartoon character “It’s what you get, staying faithful”. His smile was genuinely smug, like the sibling with the biggest Christmas gift. 

 Carles worked as a nutrient auditor for Lundgren & Lundgren, where he tested food products as a very indiscreet kind of “secret shopper” – it’s hard to be truly secret with a portable lab taking up half your booth. Hole-in-the-wall burger joints like Winky’s were his specialty, and he’d carved out his name in the profession after finding elevated Einsteinium levels tainting the entire McDonald’s supply chain two years ago – the real start of his career, he joked. He wore a tiny gothic-script L&L on the lapel of his blue blazer. Lundgren and Lundgren falls off the tongue like a flat of bricks, Carles would say, and so he had taken to referring to his employer as ‘Ellen’,as in just a minute, Ellen’s calling or Ellen’s an angry bitch this week so I won’t be able to make it to dinner, a habit which confused casual acquaintances. 

“We’d been running on Soft Laser Desorbtion for the last five years. Accurate ionization, don’t get me wrong, but you’d have to sit in a dump like this—“ Carles gestured broadly, nearly smacking a seamy-faced waitress, “—for hours while the results were spat out on punch cards that you couldn’t even read until you’d gotten back to the lab.” Martin took a sip of his milkshake and snorted inwardly. He patiently waited for days for his results to be analyzed, always working with outdated data. He didn’t own a suit.

Martin and Carles knew one another from Amherst College, where they had roomed together as sophomores in the Charles Drew Black Cultural House. Theirs was the only double left with a washing machine. And the price was okay. Martin spent most of his college career playing checkers at the library café, while Carles was treasurer for Psi Upsilon. They both studied chemistry, but Martin had favoured phytoanalysis of scents. Perfumes were his passion, the brownian tendrils of coffee smell or menstruation tickling his nose hairs used to give him a sense of workmanlike satisfaction, but this passion had been dulled on the grinding block of a poor job market. He worked in the cluttered basement lab of his house for a neglected Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, helming a shampoo project that was set to be shelved in the next quarter.

Martin handed Carles the box of Arm and Hammer, its corners dinted from the time it spent in his coat pocket. Carles pushed aside his blazer’s lapel and produced a glass scoopula. He carefully transferred three tiny bumps of the white powder into the Spec’s vaporizing chamber, and with a lambskin handkerchief proceeded to coat it. Martin watched with disdain. The open section of the spectrometer reminded him of a thimble, or a flour-sieve maybe.

Once this was done, Carles lowered his gold-rim glasses onto the bridge of his nose, and after giving a few preliminary pokes with the blunt end of a scalpel, cut the burger cleanly in half, and placed its bleeding cross-section face down on the porous metal surface of the chamber, closing the tiny porthole door behind it. 

“So – you have a woman in your life Martin? Know anyone special?”

Martin stared at the half moon of burger remaining on Carles’ plate. The ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauce mingled together like an oil spill. He wondered if any isotopes would be found, if there was any radon in the back of this dying diner. He thought of Marlene – married now, to the guy who fixed Martin’s pipes and overcharged him. Freda – he’d found her in the dump eating cardboard after their second date, and she was at Saint Vic’s now, playing checkers all day, reliving a safer and more sterile version of Martin’s college prime. Tammy – maybe she still worked here. This was only the second time he’d been to Winky’s. The first was for a date with Tammy. She got 75% percent off. 100% off if she made the meal herself. Martin walked off during the second course, feeling sorry for himself, and synthesized some eugenol vapour to cheer himself up. It reminded him of his childhood cottage.

“Nothing special, no. still waiting.” Martin picked his finger nail skin as he heard himself laugh dismissively. “How about you? That fancy briefcase must cause quite a stir at the clubs.” Martin held only the dimmest notion of what transpired at clubs.

Carles looked down as he turned a large dial and examined the open suitcase’s LED screen as he took a bite of the remaining test-subject. He sighed, and a speck of ground beef anchored itself to his lower lip. “Tell you the truth, I’m married to Ellen these days. Working too much, and the nature of the profession has done its damage. At least Epifano got the upscale beat, and he’s lost 20 pounds eating nothing but single-leaf salads and Oysters Rockefeller. But tell you the truth, it’s bleak, man. I still imagine sometimes, I sometimes still wish Stella and I hadn’t called it quits.” The machine beeped several times and emitted a loud whistle as its hum changed frequencies. Martin caught a glimpse of an embossed crest on the ugly tan suitcase’s lid. Carles payed it no attention.

“I’ll be in the mall sometimes, or just walking around on the job, and I get  hint of the smell. And it drives me up the wall. There’s a certain way their hair smells when you know that they take care of themselves. It used to be all over my bed, in the shower, on each and every chair in my house, everything that just smells like fries and overcooked beef now. Shampoos with the stupid floral smells – it never just smells like fruit though, more like heat. It makes a bubble around their heads, a kind of halo that smells like burnt toast with nutmeg.

“Before she left, I noticed my wife’s hair never smelled like that anymore. She had started using this goat stuff without any chemicals, and she told me about it, about the switch, and I really think it’s the overpriced boutique stuff that did it.” Carles toyed with a company ring. “I want her to scald her hair again and flatten it in the press, to smell primping in the morning and roll over in bed so I can just get a good whiff of it.” Carlos sniffed. Despite his girth, he looked small in his suit, somehow farther away.

Martin’s attentions shifted, and his mouth sprang to action. “That’s nerolidol and myrcene”. Carlos’ brow furrowed. “Nerolidol. It’s a sesquiterpene found in aromatic oils. Tea-tree, mostly. The shampoo industry latched onto it as soon as modern wand-style hair-straighteners were first catching on. It reacts with heat to make the hair-straightener smell, the toast one. I ran some tests on it a few years ago. And the cinnamon, that’s myrcene. It’s an olofinic tyrpene dimer of isoprene. Smells kinda like cinnamon or nutmeg, vaguely sweet when it gets hot. Very proximity-sensitive.”

The corners of Carles’ mouth drooped and he pushed his glasses up until they were flush with his eyelids. His mouth was smeared with a nondescript sauce. 

“Sorry.” Martin couldn’t help smiling a little. “I can make you some. Some of that smell, I mean. An oil vaporizer or even a heated pot placed near a drafty window or a fan, and your whole house would smell like it again, it would––. 

“My whole house smells like fucking burgers.” Carles squeezed the bridge of his nose as he waved over a waitress with her back to the booth. Martin recognized Tammy as she turned, in her Winky’s apron with the smiling moustached hot-dog, and tried to turn away, but their eyes met, and Tammy scribbled something on Martin’s bill before brusquely sliding it to him across the tabletop, where it sopped up some condensation on the milkshake glass. She paused and turned around, squinting at the spectrometer. “What in the hell is that, and who told you you could bring it in here?” The two sad, rumpled men looked up and Tammy turned on her heel. “Smell that?” Carles mouthed.

“Myrcene.” Martin whispered reverently.

“Get out, fucking creeps,” Tammy scoffed, as the sprinkling of other customers turned around and gave them the look as the spectrometer ceased its cheerful whistling and spat out a short length of ticker tape.

As she walked away, Tammy’s cowboy boots clip-clopped into the kitchen as she forced a derisive sound between her lips, at once feminine and whale-like.

Martin turned over the bill as Carles watched. YOU STINK! it read, in hasty block capitals, the second word triple-underlined.

The two sat and stared at one another for a minute or two as the ticker-tape danced out of the suitcase’s side slot. It issued a final beep before its red light faded to burgundy. Carles wiped his face on the printout sheet and tossed it under the table with some derision. “Next stop, south-side Winkies.” He got up to put on his coat. Martin looked at the squashed sliver of hamburger that remained on their table.

The sea could go on forever if not for the tell tale lights of landmass. Of course, it could just be St. Elmo's Fire, could just be the Flying Dutchman. 

On this table, my writing table for the next five days, there lies a letter I cannot read.

A cargo ship passes in the bay, huge and patchwork. A big top haunted circus tent. A movable heaven. For such a monster to have the audacity to move and bellow. 

Not every word in the world is meant for you to read. I learned that spelunking my family history - snooping like a private investigator to better understand the dying when they had lived enough to write of it.

I get a missive from Portugal - a Jewish boy telling nothing but a declaration of his place in the universe. Portugal. From there to here, I'm sure, much cargo has been carried, but none of it so quick or essential. What could be more important? I am in Portugal. 

And immediately my mind wanders to what that glory could be. Across the Atlantic, before my eyes, across to Old Europe, where every Canadian must admit is the leader of the conspiracy of their country.

I want Europe, but for now the sanctity of port transfixes me. When I went for coffee, saltwater hung in the air like something suddenly remembered.

He came from a land of dying languages.

Can I love him for that?

  His name like a sigh of last words of innocence: calice.

Take this, all of you, and drink it.  

This is my blood and butter.  This is your wine and sin.

  “Do you know nothing of women?” I ask him.

Stay still —

No more jumping on the bed, it is made.  

We have dug this grave and laid in it,

jumped into fever, played in it

and you had to use your head.

Mama called the doctor and the doctor said,

No more

legs spread like butter on bread

sandwiched between bedsheets.

Statistically speaking, this time cannot count.

Oh please, don’t count this time,

these calories inside of me—

I already have the energy to take the necessary steps

back to where it’s safe to be sick, throwing up

my hands in the morning.

Red Rover. Give warning.

For we are too full of Great Big Bad Ideas that swell like lips,

glowing and bruised and pregnant

with all the possibilities of their stories.

We cannot hold them in.

Our hands are too small and delicate; our hands are dry 

like my eyes. Hold mine, so I do not have to look at yours.

No more.

  “Do you know nothing of women?”

Just that, between you and me

there is no No-Man’s Land;

I can see no Big Bad Other, only

Lower my eyes from your feelings, your touch.

Promise me you’ll stay smiling, small brother.

In the most tasteful rape scene I’ve ever seen written:

“He came. And then he left.”

And I fell in love again with stories retold

so many times they become points of interest

in plotlines, not semi-severed life lines

scarring our hands: they cannot hold your lips closed

against the flow of Great Big Bad ideas that swell like hips

glowing and bruised and pregnant

with all the possibility of their stories.

Do you know nothing of women?

We take the necessary steps

back to where it’s safe to be sick,

days breaking in half as they fall into step

right down - we’ll come falling

into arms so nice in precisely the ways

we’re taught to mistrust as children.

  “Must you use these stories?” They’re all we have to hold.

Our hands are too small and delicate and scarred

to carry these stories.

Too far, too far.

The robins returned like woodsmoke on the high lazy wind, like wedge-shaped shadows over the snow.  The robins returned and wondered what sort of spring had spread like a flat white fungus over the fields.  They hid and starved.  In the nervous system of the hedges they snapped and flared. They snuck past dog yells and wind chimes and the hustle of anxious pilgrims. They were secrets, the universe wondering why I took its jokes so seriously like when it put a dead coyote in front of the car and I thought it was a tire a twisted bumper or some black cargo. The robins would be gone as soon as the moon was full and the skies regrown. I had been too busy counting the sadnesses on a scale of streetlights in garnet keys between the hopes and wanting to tear the air’s glowing skin up and focusing on the air.  The slush could have grown a million deformed hands and I wouldn’t have noticed – I would have stomped them down to their wrists.

The sun returned and imposed a disciplined entropy on the backdrop I looked to for company, not presence, in the meantime until love could come beating its drum and summoning its rain. The tacky disco-themed wedding afterparty it had spread like a tablecloth over the snow-soaked apartments became a florid moonscape.  The line of condensation glow along the lower edge of my window stopped glowing, became a display case.  Ultimately, things changed for the better, but I was paying too much attention to the folds of morning and evening and the hyenas cackling invisible over the balconies, the first stink waking up in the slush and a child crying out oblivious from the top of a snowbank, a child’s cry rippling along the wires, to notice the birds of indeterminate species spinning their pinwheel throats. The moon returned.  The moon preferred agonized prayers and desperate apologies but my tastes had changed.  The moon in its passive-aggressive rage tore up and repaved the street again and again like a chittering truck. I sat in my chair and watched the powerless darkness settle around me. I wanted a paper-thin revelation. I sat in my chair and plotted love. The robins made their love in the bushes and left it hanging high from the hedges and chiming like streetlights.  And looking for something bigger falling past the horizon the pilgrims passed it by. I sat in my transitory chair. I slept on the sun’s track, the black metal transitway.

When we realized that we were not done fighting, that we weren't near being done fighting and that we would probably never be done fighting, Alice and I went our ways which, though separate, were nonetheless connected, like two telephones, by a long, winding, invisible thread. Alice went north and established a bakery that earned its name building castles for the fabulously rich out of gourmet breadstuffs. One of her mansions of herbed foccacia caused a year-long rosemary shortage in all the nation's districts and bales of rosemary had to be flown in from Greece. Everyone learned to grow herbs in the gardens, that year. I applauded Alice, Accomplished Alice, Alice-Who-Once-Was-Mine. I was still at a jealous stage, stealing loaves of sourdough fresh from her ovens, devouring the crusts with rich cream-of-tomato soup my latest girlfriend, Claire, made with tomatoes so plump and ripe it was as if I could taste the warmth of the sun in the soup. Claire was sad and desperate but in a sexy way. Alice caught me with my filthy mechanic's hands in her cupboards, eventually, but it didn't matter, because I had caught her pilfering photos of me and Claire and from the our dresser, one night when I returned home early from work. 

After the separation, I opened a vehicle-repair shop specializing in helicopters, which took a while to get off the ground, but did, eventually, and I became applauded in mechanics' circles for the elegance of my repairs, and took Claire flying out to distant counties on hot summer evenings, and we picnicked with wine and made love on the soft tall grasses beaten to the ground by the wind of helicopter blades. Alice was in the distance, she and her boyfriend, a tanned, intelligent, Apollonian statue of a man, glancing at me and Claire, who was wearing a dress the belonged to Alice which I had removed from her wardrobe and doused in her perfume. There was a period of time when whispered rumors implied that I was slated to receive the Order of Canada, but more or less accurate parallel gossiping was circling about my turbulent private life stifled any chance I had at receiving recognition for my contributions to the field of aeuronotics repair. (Claire and I had by now arrived at the yelling-and-throwing-teacups stage, the burning-the-stash-of-erotic-letters-penned-by-Alice-and-subsequently-found-in-my-desk-then-threatening-to-leave-me stage.) Alice and I met for coffee on a beach in Honolulu. Her boyfriend was getting his stomach waxed, and suspected nothing, for not even the bell-boys saw us dive into a janitorial closet for a brief interlude in the dark.

If you’re lost, then welcome. 

This is THE WORLD. 

Who are we? Roughly speaking, we’re a literary collective. 

More directly speaking, we’re a team of people who write. 

We make music and art. We probably sing, dance, and take pictures too. But mostly we write.

We want to speak and be heard, and we’re hear to help each other do that. We're here to spread the word, on our word, on how we see the world. 

It's kind of catchy, isn't it? The word on the world.

We assume nothing - our word is not law. You don’t have to believe us when we say we’re here simply for the pleasure of it, but it is that simple. That's our manifesto.

You’re here for show. And, frankly, so are we.

If you’re feeling curious, click on the PAGES to find out who we are. Follow us if you want to see more of what we do. We promise you nothing, only the stuff of our dreams, served up to you on a not-so-silver, standard legal-sized platter.