Past Writings

Pardon the lame format and all, still making up for the fact that I didn’t do all this when I first set up shop. The following are collected short stories I’ve written during my time at Olin. Some of them wanted to be longer (nat’l novel writing month project perhaps?) but never found the time, and/or it wasn’t within the constraints of the class I was writing for. The first one is from last semester at Olin; the rest are from a class at Wellesley last fall.

As with everything else on the site, a Creative Commons license applies.

Somebody Up There Likes You

I.

Matilda looks up at me. Her eyes have been glued to the paper for several silent minutes, leaving me to stew in my own anxious juices and make poor guesses at what she thought of the words on the page. The mood of the reading, I think, was ravenous. She caught hold of the subtler message and chased it to its conclusion without pausing once—hardly even blinking. But, what will she say? For all I know, I am still taking a risk.

—You make an interesting argument for yourself, Mr. Juarez, but I’m afraid I can’t validate your claim. It’s nothing to do with you personally; it is a matter of strict company policy. I don’t agree with the rule any more than you do, but, my hands are tied.

I am confused. Is she playing some double-game here, whose meaning is lost on me? I was sure I caught the flicker of recognition in her eyes. She has got to realize there’s no “claim” at stake here—just my unbridled Mexican schoolboy heart and the sweet, supple, untouched skin of a thirty-something claims adjuster named Matilda Mathison. My heart begins to sink—was I wrong? Could she possibly be too naïve to grasp my intentions?

—Call me V-Victor please. I ask that you re-re-reread the claim, please.

—Sure. Victor. Listen, Victor, I can assure you I don’t need to read your claim twice, I understand precisely what the matter is. I see hundreds of claims like this a year.

—You do? Surely she can’t mean that.

—Yes, many hundreds. And you know, things like this wouldn’t happen if people would only read the their contracts more carefully…

—Ah, you confuse me. I m-must insist… Matilda, that this is not one of, one of those cases. Read b-between the lines, and… I may see you again. I turn and am out the door of her office before Matilda can make further arguments regarding my frivolous insurance claim. Of course I know the damages aren’t covered by my policy. But I’m not here to whine and complain and add to her stress, like those other simpletons lined up outside the door. I am here for Matilda. I’m twenty, I’m virile, and I have an offer she won’t refuse.

I don’t see, or hear, or feel, but rather, I know her response. I know it at the exact instant she puts two and two together and—well, damned if they don’t equal four. At that moment I am in the elevator headed for the first floor.

How do I know this? Because I have heard Matilda’s thoughts. Not in my ears. I couldn’t begin to describe what sense I am using to hear her. But I am on Matilda’s wavelength now, and my reception is clear. Just a handful of times in my life this sort of thing has happened; but I learned, quickly, to pay attention to the things I hear. They’d always point to somewhere new and exciting and filled with shared happiness. And then, the first time I entered this insurance agency, I heard a poignant distress signal I could not ignore. Somewhere upstairs, amid the fat claims adjustors, a good woman silently harbored a desperate need, a need only I, Victor Juarez, could wrest free and deal with.

I get as far as the parking lot before my phone rings. It’s Matilda, and I’m pleased to find my perceptions and judgments borne out once again. She chastises me for my inappropriateness, warns me that she carries mace in her purse, and asks me to return at five, so that we can go to dinner together.

II.

Have a free sample, fucker. One potent little cube of Stuart, wrapped in seaweed and padded with briny white rice. Gag it down, and don’t bother saying you didn’t care for it, because I’ll already be busy hocking it to the next potential customer. I won’t call y’all and y’all won’t call me. Fucking publishers.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to be angry and surprised to have the manuscript come back again. Well, maybe it’s just not a promise I should be making. I’ve done this a dozen times and it has yet to become noticeably less painful. But I stay true to form. I shed an awkward tear or two, looking over the manuscript and finding no one even bothered to mark it up, and then without the luxury of grieving overlong I shove it into the next manila envelope, already stamped and addressed and containing my SASE, and bid goodbye once again to Observations About People, chapters 1-5. Emily takes it off my hands and will take it to the post office.

Emily thinks my writing is the best thing since sliced bread, and she ought to know. She’s been published in three different periodicals—a jack of all trades, my Emily. She admits there’s nothing spectacular about her stories, and she says that’s the only way she’d have it. Ordinary people don’t need extraordinary events to read about, Stuart, she’d say—all that’s required is that the author speak in a voice people enjoy listening to. She’d also say I should save myself some trouble and not make my first stab at publication be a full-length novel.

I can’t argue the fact that her short fiction is remarkably coherent and sturdy from not being spread out over as many pages. But neither am I inclined to deny the intentions of my muse—I have a lot of complicated things to say with this book, and I need all the eggs in one basket; and that basket can only be so small before eggs start tumbling out and breaking on the floor.

Days drag out into weeks when I can’t seem to think much about anything except my manuscript, lying helpless on the desk of some fat critic/bureaucrat who thinks he knows good material when he sees it. I know he can only be so appreciative of the art—he didn’t become an artist himself. Either it was a lack of talent, or a lack of balls, that damned him to the eternal position of kingmaker with no chance at his own crown. Doesn’t matter which—this is not the type of man I want reading my stuff. Why not someone like Emily, a part-time author? But no, I wouldn’t ask her to leave my side to go work in the great publishing houses of the City fifty miles south of us. I need her in this little farmhouse off the Thruway, perhaps more so than is healthy for either of us.

I get up early one day—by my standard at least, since I’ve spread myself thin and have been sleeping into the mid-afternoon—with the premonition of receiving mail. Of course I don’t have ESP, but as an artist, I see the world through superstition-colored lenses. My nerves are clearly frayed as I join Emily at the breakfast table, and she tries to send me back to bed. But I won’t rest until she agrees to take me to the post office. I’m determined now to hurry up and let the cat out of Schrödinger’s bag. Later in the day, Emily’s going down to the City to refresh our stash of hydro—it may be right on time to either fuel a hedonistic celebration or dull my disappointment at another rejection.

We drive to the post office in her rusty old Chevy truck. The town’s miniscule, existing only to support a service area on the interstate. Farming in the area’s in decline, as is the condition of the pavement. The wrinkled but energetic clerk greets us at the front desk.

—Well, if it ain’t our very own man of letters! she says. Normally I don’t have the heart to accompany Emily to the post office, so this woman doesn’t get to see the other half of the mail transaction, where I do all that swearing and fussing and repackaging. Naturally, she assumes I actually get published and paid for my submissions. I don’t disturb her fantasies. I simply ask if she has mail for me.

—As a matter of fact honey, I do. She hands me the envelope and immediately my pulse quickens. This is not my SASE. It’s made of fancy, creamy vellum paper with a Mark Twain stamp on it. Publishing house executives no doubt attach significance to such details. I salivate as I see my own name penned in expensive ink—by someone whose time is similarly expensive, if the sloppy writing is any indication. The envelope feels fat, stuffed, but I don’t even know what items it would be stuffed with. I’ve never gotten a positive response.

—Open it, sweetie, Emily says. I do. I feel ill when I see my manuscript, heavily folded, the sole item responsible for the marked obesity of this rather small envelope. It is covered in red ink. Intellectually, I know this to be a good sign, but I can’t help the sense of dread that climbs my throat and chokes all the joy out of me. I wonder just how many things have been marked WRONG on those 35 pages of text. What were they? How did I miss them all? Emily’s already thumbing through the pages—I’m sure she’ll try to comfort me later on by telling me that the critic didn’t know his shit from his oatmeal.

She stops at the last page with a satisfied grin. My memory gets a little blurry at this point, though I’ll never forget the expression as she reads me the post-it note stuck to the back of the manuscript. The name referenced is that of an agent, a name well known to writers, to whom I am to forward my manuscript with all due speed lest I hold up my date with destiny.

III.

She’s taking this all miraculously well, I think to myself as I order us a round of Dos Equis, to break the tension and perhaps to cool our mouths when the stuffed fried chipotles get here. I have brought shy Matilda to that intersection of the underworld and the elite, known locally as just Lark. If I were to take her someplace more upscale, less tarnished, the thought of what’s to come might be made all the worse by comparison. Here, less so. To the unadventurous, this place passes for sketchy. But I know it to be safe and friendly. And quiet Matilda has put her faith in me: she looks unafraid.

Angel, she calls me, one of the few times we really get to talking. Against my first impulse, I take the name as the compliment she intends, though I also casually deny any resemblance. I can understand her reasoning—my inexplicable gift of empathy, combined with a strong desire to fulfill her wish, might seem to leave few other explanations (though, were she gifted in a similar fashion, she might realize she is surrounded most of the day by men who would fulfill her wish for the asking). I’m amazed that she is not at all skeptical, or suspicious that I have somehow obtained the information in an unsavory manner. When I mention this, her eyes grow more serious.

—At times, Victor, the question of privacy is outweighed by the need to have our secrets known to the right person. Some intrusions can be justified. Some are holy and mysterious—like the presence of God within us. I have faith that what happened was for the right reason, quite independent of my belief in how it happened.

This rationale impresses me, as a student of existentialism and pragmatism. What best defines an angel: a mythological being from the Judeo-Christian canon, or a mortal human given a more active role than usual in God’s earthly plans? I then give myself a mental slap on the wrist for letting my ego balloon at Matilda’s suggestion.

—Matilda, you’re a w-wonderful person—almost too w-wonderful for me to intro… introduce you to what m-most call Sin—I really want to help you. But… it d-didn’t start as a mission of m-mercy. It was… an opportunity. A romantic encounter. I knew you’d… be pretty. Pretty and… and lonely, and thirty-something. You understand?

—And what are we to do, complain that things worked out? There are motives at work beyond your own, Victor. By my wish and your… temperament, God has brought you to me, she says with a knowing smile—and without that, I should never be able to conceive.

Several rounds later—beers for me, water and juice for my companion—I am feeling a little drunk and more than a little stupid. Something about Matilda’s warmth and blind trust got me feeling profoundly uneasy, as if I were guilty of trespassing, despite her assurances that I’m doing nothing wrong. I drank to take the edge off, only it seems I forgot to stop there, and now my head’s clean off. I can’t drive like this, and the one beer has made Matilda tired. She seems less worried about the situation—I wish I knew what she was thinking now, that I might share her calm. If only I could think straight…

She catches me fretting and puts a hand on my shoulder: it’s alright, Victor, we’ll catch a cab. Where to? Her apartment, she says. I stammer drunkenly—that is, about twice as bad as when sober—that this might not be the best time for her to take me home. But she insists: We have more to discuss, anyway, she says, and coffee will do us some good.

I check my watch just before we leave, and find that as usual the alcohol has distorted my sense of time. The night is still young.

IV.

Close to two weeks pass before we think to check the post office for a response. That’s how long Emily and I remain stoned, never allowing ourselves to fully come off it. The daily cycle goes something like this: we wake. We bake. We breakfast. We go for a long walk in the wooded hills. We share a blunt and the view from the top. We go home and brainstorm for an hour, typing aimlessly on our laptops. We grill steaks. We booze. We watch a shitty movie or two. We hit the bong until it’s all we can do to reach the bed, where we meditate to Shankar. Then, in an epic display of Rastafarian fortitude, we make love until sunrise. We collapse, gazing into each other’s eyes. We sleep a bit.

In this glorious custom we while away our days, until the morning comes when I don’t find any pot left in the stash. Emily being the voice of reason and self-control has not revealed to me where she’s keeping the bulk of our enormous hoard, and thus I am left with no choice but to inform her that our time of celebration has ended. I’m greatly saddened by this, but I know intellectually that it’s only the withdrawal of my prized habit that makes it difficult to look forward to getting back to work on my book.

As I’m making the coffee and getting out breakfast supplies, Emily comes downstairs. She looks more disheveled than most mornings, probably owing to the fact that I’m feeling more sober. You didn’t bring me my breakfast hookah, she says, are we out? Afraid so. Got a cigarette, Stuart? Christ no, what for. Look at me, Stu—don’t you think I could use a cigarette?

I consider telling her she couldn’t ever use one, but I save the preaching and give my lover a second look. She does seem a bit pale, a bit ill. Our celebration has taken its toll, I suppose, and a return to the status quo is in order. How do you feel, I ask?

—Stu, I’m late for my period.

V.

For a week’s time now I’ve been cleverly dodging the deed—all too happy to while away the hours at Matilda’s side engaged in theological and philosophical discussion. We sit together at the kitchen table or on Matilda’s couch, sipping coffee or tea, playing chess or doing puzzles, testing and analyzing each other. I’m impressed at what a good (if unlikely) pair we make—destiny has brought together in us the components for an intellectually formidable offspring. Already I’ve begun to imagine his achievements—sure to dwarf those of mother and father. We’re still working out the details of raising the child, but there’s no question I’ll want to see him in some capacity.

Matilda still blushes a bit at the mention of the necessary physical component to this process. But if she wants to get pregnant without a surgical procedure, there’s damn little choice. And of course, there’s the issue of premarital sex to consider. Matilda admits she feels somewhat cornered—torn between an obligation to reproduce and the admonition to remain pure. But she holds no delusions regarding our relationship, and won’t ask me to consider marriage. This was a great relief to me, as I was not looking forward to explaining my opposition to marriage as a relationship and family model.

Tonight, I can sense change in the wind. Following my nose, I buy a couple of roses at the supermarket before driving to the apartment complex. Matilda answers the door with a faint smile on her lips. She accepts the flowers with gusto, and offers me a glass of sangria. As I drink the wine, she tells me she’s prepared to act. Timing is now on our side, she says; lest we belabor the process we should make an attempt tonight, and the next few nights. There’s a hint of painful determination in her voice that tells me Matilda came very close to letting the matter slide. It now falls to me to see it through.

I take her hand and lead her to bed. The lights go out. We stand unfettered and humble before God. Matilda prays for strength and wisdom. When she is done, I kiss her cheek softly and whisper in her ear. I tell her to relax, let it happen, and try to enjoy it.

—Victor, how can I relax when my heart is racing like this?

—Just wait. Soon it will be… like nothing else.

VI.

One by one I am pulling the hairs from my head. Emily projects I will be bald by the time our son (or daughter) is born. And a child will be born.

It’s not like I’m unwilling or unready to father a child; but Emily is so young to endure this, and although we operate smoothly as a couple and care quite a bit for each other, we never intended to put down roots at this age. By way of an open and honest partnership we have, for several years, supported each other in continuing artistic and personal growth. I’m terrified of anything constricting us, of having to split our attentions between work and a child. Emily, on the other hand, grows more certain daily that she wants this baby. She says the miracle of life can only inspire us to greater artistry. She makes as if to backhand me when I tell her I think it’s the hormones making her say such things, then shoves me onto the couch and kisses me instead.

—That’s what my hormones have to say, you asshole.

And as for me, my hormones raved with boyish pride at the news that I was finally going to be published. I got my response from the agent in New York as soon as Emily and I had sobered up enough from our celebratory binge to drive to the post office. Evidently, the publishing house had faxed a page of my stuff to this guy on a hunch, and he’d loved it. He promised to go to bat for me, and to hook me up with an editor to help get the manuscript ready to market. He also wants to know if I’m considering a sequel, which I am. At this moment, however, I can’t seem to get anything out, preoccupied as I am by the thought of what’s happening inside Emily.

Somewhere within the vault of the uterus, a faction of tiny invaders is growing. The descendants of the steadfast ovum and one enterprising sperm have arranged themselves along the perimeter of a balloon. Folding in on itself, the embryo next assumes the shape of a hollow sausage, racing along its developmental track even as it reaches out to Emily for nourishment. There are a thousand separate ways for the process to go awry, killing mother and/or child.

Emily has little in the way of sympathy for me when I tell her how nervous I am about the whole goddamn thing. Am I supposed to be the pillar of reason and surety in this picture? Because that’s never really been my style. It has been said that Emily is the man in our relationship; in maternity she seems even more so. Rarely have I seen such strength in a person—she treats the morning sickness and the cravings and the mood swings as if they were everyday occurrences. All I have to do is bring her the flavor of the day in thirty minutes or less, and in return Emily swears she won’t throttle me.

Tonight, she’s in a good mood, which is to say her only act of violence was pinning me to the bed and her only craving was for yours truly. Now we’re quiet and relaxed, and I’m feeling ready to drift off to sleep when Emily tells me her mom’s been at her again for us to get married:

—She said she wants our baby to grow up in a normal home.

—And what did you tell her?

—What I always tell her, that there’s no such thing and I’m not about to change my mind.

—Atta girl.

—What do your parents think? she asks. I relate the strained conversation I recently had with my Dad on the matter—strained, of course, being the only kind of conversation he and I have. I was really hoping I’d catch hold of Mom first, or that he’d let it wait until she was around. Talking to Dad is like… talking to a weakened version of myself. At times I could swear I heard his disappointment that I haven’t turned out to be much manlier than he did. I wanted to scream into the phone that a man is more than just the size of his dick or the thickness of his skull, except that we weren’t actually having that discussion, we were having a discussion about alternative family structures.

Mom and Dad don’t care, at least not vocally, that Emily and I have stated our intention not to marry. They simply want to be sure we know what we’re doing and that the child will get the love and attention it needs. I told Dad I don’t think Emily will ever stop attending to the kid—even in her sculptures she’ll be constantly loving the thing. Then he asked how I felt about it, and I fell silent for a moment. I told him I wasn’t sure.

—And why not? Emily wants to know.

—I’m a writer, Emily. Writers are egomaniacs. I’m honestly not sure I’m ready to end that phase of my life where there was just me—and you—to look after. I don’t know how to pledge my love to a thing I can’t know the value of by conversing with it.

—You’ve got it all backwards, Stu. You don’t love a child in proportion to its worth. You love it because that’s the only way it can grow into a great human being. Also, because it’s yours. You made this, Stuart—it’s an extension of you and me. If we love ourselves and each other we’d have to be hypocrites not to give up everything for him.

—Of… course, you’re right.

—Of course I’m right. I’m fucking pregnant.

VII.

He handles me with a loving tenderness I could not have anticipated. I always saw Latin dancing as a violent, impassioned thing, sufferable only to creatures of the underbelly—as if the desperation and lust embodied by a tango could sunder a more sheltered person like me. But my angel has a way of proving the impossible possible.

Victor takes great gusto in his role as leader, in the twirling and dipping and such. He wore an exquisite suit just for the occasion. I’m wearing my one good black dress—quiet, sufficient, multipurpose, collecting dust until now—and I can imagine, seen from above, the pretty rosettes it must trace on the hardwood floor each time he spins me. After fighting for a time to keep my balance in high heels, I’m allowed to instead go barefoot. At his insistence, I’ve let my hair down to trace its own wild arcs. Victor says it’s important that we remember each other’s bodies in this interim—my period—lest we get bashful next time we are intimate. I thought it improper for us to sleep side-by-side, and so this was his compromise solution. I can’t say I mind learning a bit of dance.

The pastor at Trinity Lutheran was sure to let me know just how he felt about my endeavor to become pregnant; thus I had, for a time, delayed consulting with him on the matter. But a few quick words diffused his hellfire tongue, and he was made to understand that my decision is final. I quickly laid out the situation—the meeting with Victor, the quiet evenings together, the brief acts of copulation, the initial failure.

I knew he’d be interested in the story, once explained. We had a lengthy discussion about the interpretation of God’s will, and in the end I was left feeling more confident in my decision. My anxiety, which has grown steadily as I’ve had to repeat my relations with Victor, is now somewhat less. All that remains is my impatience to become a mother.

We complete another dance, and Victor “steals” a kiss from me. He says it’s a natural byproduct of said relations that he should come to feel emotionally attached. He goes on to flatter me without a hint of shame. I feign displeasure at this, and Victor can only defend himself by stammering that it’s the truth. Ah, Victor, you’ll spoil me. Feeling beautiful was not even on my list of priorities when you came along.

VIII.

For God’s sake, Stuart, grow a pair. I certainly have, in my own way, though mine are rather too large and perfectly situated to ruin my posture. At times like these I occasionally (but only briefly) wish I’d taken some big burly idiot as my lover. With Stu, things are infinitely more interesting but also infinitely more complicated. I can’t always get easy support, or win those arguments a girlfriend is supposed to win with ease—though I do now possess a hell of a trump card if needed. It’s mostly late at nights, when we’re both exhausted and he is staring at me dumbstruck with passion, that I remember why I chose this life, why I willingly gave up the chance to always be right.

But that’s not right now. Right now I’m forgetting why I love Stuart so goddamn much. We are having an argument for the third or fourth time. Its form and content are something of a blur, but it ends when he slams a hardcover book down on the kitchen table and walks out, saying I should call him on his mobile phone once we’ve both cooled down a couple degrees. Moments later I hear his decrepit muscle car cough and sputter to life and roar down the driveway.

For a few minutes I sit and cry in the kitchen, confused and exasperated. This is not what I need right now. This is the last thing I need. Slowly, nervously, I reach for the book on the table and lift it up to eye level. It takes me a few moments to comprehend the big bold words on the cover. I groan. It’s The Holy Fucking Bible. I scream my lungs out:

—GOD DAMN YOU, STUART! YOU FUCKING IMP!

I’m not sure what I mean by that, but it feels appropriate to the situation. I expertly toss the book across the room, where it hits the doggie door and clatters down the front steps. The next moment I’m running back through the house, out the screen door, toward the shed where I built my studio. No sooner am I inside than I start sketching madly.

It’s not my usual habit. Rather, I’ve made a point of avoiding any attempt to sculpt when I’m emotionally off-kilter. But this is one of those times when lesser means of expression just won’t do. I’ll make a harsh, angular masterpiece of Stuart and his bible—towering like some Catholic schoolmarm with the skewed approximation of a book in hand. I fight with the pliable clay for a good two hours, until my arms are sore and my determination starting to erode. Then I sit down on the plywood floor, panting and sweating in the cool air of the studio. I give up. I grab the cordless phone and make the call.

—Hey, Love, he says calmly.

—Hey, Stu. What were we fighting about?

—I haven’t entirely forgotten, if you really want to know.

—Just come home, Stuart. This isn’t doing me any good. I need my man here with me.

—I can’t exactly drive home.

—You out at the abandoned gravel mine?

—Yeah.

—Fucking stoner. I knew you couldn’t quit.

—I made a tape, honey. Everything I was feeling at the time. I got all that out on tape.

—And? (Instinctively I worry when Stuart says something like this. Things can slip out that neither of us really wanted to know.)

—I lit it on fire, babe. You know I love you. I just had to get that shit out of my system.

—Good boy, Stu. Listen, I’m coming to pick you up, okay? I’ll just be a few minutes. There’s something I have to do first.

He says goodbye and I hang up the phone. In the far corner of the room I open the tool chest and take out my mallet o’ shame. Goodbye, Catholic schoolmarm.

IX.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have conceived a child. Victor warns me not to set myself up for disappointment, but I feel it with the same unwavering faith that has yet to let me down, ever since the day he walked into the agency with his little note full of highbrow double-entendres. What a dunce I thought Victor was then—but always handsome. I must admit to feeling a ripple of excitement when I realized just what he was up to.

We’re two weeks into my cycle now. Last night was our third try of the new moon; but for some reason it felt nothing like the times before. Up to now, our “attempts” as I call them have been enjoyable only for Victor; the sensations from my nether regions, while potent, were not very pleasant, and the whole experience was quite trying; I have been careful not to discuss this with him, as it’s clear he places much value in his skill as a lover and, anyway, I did not think there was anything that could done about it: God had not seen fit to make me enjoy intercourse overmuch, and I accepted this.

But then last night, by a slight change of parameters, Victor made everything different. He has since made a complete physiological explanation for the effect, but it means little to me next to the human experience. It was like a great river of spiritual energy coursing through me and out of my loins. I’ve taken it as a sign that the moment was right, and that God has blessed our coupling. Victor doesn’t deny that it was a very special night, or that he hopes I am correct in my interpretation. But he is quick to remind me that, if I am wrong, it would be wasteful of us not to follow-up over the next few days. I ask, pointedly, if he’s not simply looking forward to being with me again.

—Matilda, I see no reason to interfere with the intersection of my wants and your needs.

What a cad! Apparently my anger shows, because in the next instant he embraces me and gently rubs my back with his fingertips. How does he know so easily how to diffuse me? Has he been reading my thoughts again? He says that he hasn’t, that it’s all a matter of knowing how human bodies work in general. Nevertheless, my experience in moments such as this one can border on surreal, and I haven’t let go of the creeping suspicion that Victor is an agent of the supernatural.

He reminds me that we’re in this together. He says he wants to visit his son every weekend he’s able. The words warm my heart, and I find myself doing something I haven’t done in all this time with Victor, something that alarms my own sensibilities:

I lift my face from his shoulder and I, Matilda, kiss Victor slowly on the lips.

X.

The point of no return has come much sooner than I expected. I can’t say I’m thrilled by the questions we are now forced to consider, but it’s speak now or hold my peace, and as I have no alternatives to suggest, I keep my mouth shut.

Emily bought her first set of maternity clothes today. As if that weren’t bad enough a shock to poor Dad, upon coming home, she wanted to have a discussion about… the house. The wonderful, cheap, decrepit house, full of memories and the kind of rusted-through miasma that fuels my very best work. It’s never given Emily much cause for complaint, either, until today. Today she’s going on and on about the lead paint, the possibility of harmful asbestos, the likelihood of radon gas in our area, the lack of space for an infant. Bullshit, I say, there’s plenty of room for an infant. When it becomes a toddler, then we can talk. By then I’ll at least have completed the current project and so I suppose I’ll be ready to move on to some place that isn’t so dilapidated. At length, I consent to getting some radon and asbestos testing done.

The ongoing revision of my book makes the conversations with Emily seem a lot more civilized by comparison. I’m nearly prohibitively sick of looking at this manuscript—with its heavy-handed characterization, mundane dialogue and a fair number of plot holes. No wonder so many publishers passed it up—and here I’m supposed to just make it work. My agent, Hyde, tells me to have patience. I should be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon, he says. Soon, I think, is a very relative thing in his world.

Emily’s taking a break from her usual work—free-form sculpture—to do, of all things, pottery. The symbolism of that shape really inspires her at the moment. I can anticipate a large expansion to our hanging garden this summer, but otherwise I hardly see much value in the work. Just wait, she says, you’ll see it soon enough.

She’s becoming increasingly enigmatic in my eyes. A perfectly normal transformation for a pregnant woman, I’m sure, but still it frightens me. I ask her, Will I ever get the old Emily back? No, she says, you’ll get something much finer. Such words are hardly a comfort, and I continue to chafe at the thought that wherever she’s gone, she’ll stay and I will soon have to follow.

Perhaps, first, I’ll pen a short eulogy for the heady heyday of these two avant-garde young artists, and their never-ending quest to find meaning in sex and psychedelics. And then I’ll read it once, softly, in the otherwise dead quiet of the attic before I set the paper aflame and move on.

XI.

It seems that Matilda’s faith was not misplaced. Sometime in week three of her second cycle, we conceived a child. Right now, he or she is a hair too small to show up on ultrasound, but all signs indicate the baby is healthy, strong and deliciously ordinary. Given Matilda’s age, doctors will be watching carefully for Down syndrome and the like. Not that anything in this world will change her mind about having the baby.

Today I am meeting Matilda’s congregation. They have this gorgeous (and very liberal) little church just outside of Arbor Hill. The people come from all backgrounds, all faiths and all races. Most do not seem the wiser—I’m introduced only as a friend of Matilda’s—but then, I’m not sure they would react any differently if they knew.

The pastor, a small golden-haired Irishman by the name of Hennigan, is clearly the wiser. He gives a lengthy sermon about alternative relationships and family life. Typically, he begins, we look to both testaments for advice when facing a spiritual conundrum. But when we attempt to reason about alternative families, we run into a problem. Jesus Christ was born in surrogacy, and had little to say on the matter. The ancestral wisdom commonly cited is hardly more helpful—most of it taken directly from the most outdated section of the Bible, the ancient legal code of Leviticus. Were we still tending our flocks in the shadow of Sinai, in the presence of the Lord’s Tabernacle, I might say to you, clearly a man must not lay with a man, just as I might proscribe under pain of death many crimes that are now misdemeanors.

My friends: the Tabernacle has been destroyed. A new covenant now exists between us and God, one in which faith and love and compassion are primary imperatives. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk—who among us feels compelled by this ancient law to avoid eating a Big Mac for lunch? Not I. These are new and uncertain times, my friends; over and over have I seen the old and dogmatic voices of Christendom in this country outstripped by pious, charismatic young men and women who were previously branded as corrupt—bastard children, homosexuals and even ecumenicists like me. We can no longer rely on the edicts of the old guard—we must each of us pray to Him for guidance when we are confused…

—That was a beautiful sermon you preached, I tell him at the reception.

—Ah, well, you can thank Matilda here for driving the point home with me, he says with a big smile. It’s clear he thinks a lot of her.

—Pastor, she says, this is Victor.

—I thought as much—though truth be told, I’d never imagined the lad quite so young. Put ‘er there, Victor, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I understand we are in your debt.

—Not so, not at all so, s-sir. I have… just recently repaid my d-debt to Matilda for, for tolerating my… childish advances.

—Modest, I see. He’ll make an excellent father. Pastor Hennigan smiles broadly after reaching this summation, though Matilda flashes him a confused look.

—In such capacity as we decide on, yes, I certainly hope so, she adds. We haven’t quite finished discussing the matter, you see. Pastor Hennigan nods; I am struck dumb.

—Excellent. Now, won’t you both have a little quiche? My wife’s a fantastic cook.

XII.

Stuart has been alarmingly quiet recently. I know better than to dream his previously stated anxiety would pass in a puff of smoke, and, as he damn well knows, I’d rather be aware of what he’s feeling than watch him sit and sulk.

Being a man, with the typical one-track mind, Stuart finds a peculiar Zen quality in silence. It allows him to hear himself think more clearly. No doubt he believes he is doing us both a favor by refusing to pollute the airwaves. But silence oppresses me. A woman spends her whole life at war with silence, with entropy. Now, more than ever, I need someone to talk to who will answer me back with anything but silence.

Once a week or so, he goes out with his lawn chair and smokes himself into such a stupor that I have to drag him inside before he can catch his death of hypothermia. I’ve found it hard to deny him this release, since he seemed (until recently) productive the rest of the time; anyway, there’s no way to make him understand the cost, to me, of his habit without begging another fight. And that I cannot afford—I don’t have the strength for it.

Mother would accuse me of this-and-that; I am a prostitute, a weakling, an enabler; accomplice to a worthless vagabond college drop-out whose heavily political fiction is little more than veiled slander against the Republican party. But mother never means any harm to me by these missives; like me, she is fighting primarily against silence between us. It is a source of great amusement the lengths to which she will go to adopt a conciliatory stance. Like when I told her that Stuart and I were living together, and with no intention to wed, and she began to explain how she “knows what it’s like” because when they were seventeen and going steady she let Dad finger her in her parents’ basement. Then I reminded her how she caught my first boyfriend doing the same thing, and wouldn’t let him see me for almost two weeks.

—You know I had to keep up appearances, she said. If I let you get away with it having caught you, it would have gone to your heads and you would have gotten worse ideas.

Now she calls me almost daily and tells me I need to pack up and “get out of that hell-hole,” so I can have my baby in a supportive environment. Unfortunately, she has a tendency to underestimate my loyalty to Stuart.

Unfortunately, so do I, I now realize.

XIII.

Surrogate father, Victor Juarez muses to himself as he barrels down the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, destined for no place that he knows. There’s a hint of anger in the words as he hears them inside his head, but it is not the predominant emotion. Victor’s teeth are gritted with determination. He is experiencing another spiritual imperative.

Surrogate father is how Matilda described him to the doctor manning the ultrasound. It’s not entirely inaccurate, but Victor feels that it doesn’t go far enough. Victor has not simply donated sperm. He has, and will continue to offer support and love to the baby and its mother. He is not a deadbeat. He takes pride in his offspring. Can’t she see that?

Case in point—would a deadbeat leave the house at four AM on a Sunday morning, amid freezing rain, on the mere premonition that somewhere to the south, a mother and daughter are in distress? Victor allows himself a sly grin. The fact that he’s up to good makes it easier to endure sleep deprivation and stay focused on the road.

He bleary eyes almost fail to spot the wreck. In the shadow of an underpass, a white Chevrolet truck has done an odd thing. It has wrapped itself around one of the bridge supports, at an odd angle of 135 degrees or so from where it should be facing. It must have lost traction on black ice. There is no sign of an emergency response—not entirely surprising, given the hour and the weather. The highway is empty.

His mind races to process the information. He is rapidly approaching a turnaround / state police nest; beyond that, the southbound is separated from the northbound by a forested ravine. The driver of the pickup may be trapped, or too badly hurt to move. This must be the source of his calling. Accordingly, and blithely ignoring the sign OFFICIAL USE ONLY / NO U-TURN, Victor makes overzealous demands of his steering wheel and the car’s anti-lock brake system.

Several long minutes later, freed of the upside-down compact car but still reeling from the outcome of his monumental fuck-up—Did I oversteer or did I overcompensate? Both, maybe?—Victor finds his way back uphill to the road’s edge. Fuck—still the wrong side of the highway. He stumbles back down the hill and up the other side, staggering across three lanes as he calls 911. A few frustrating moments are wasted in explaining the predicament: Two cars crashed. No, not together. Nearby. Yes, I’m on my way to the scene now. No—I mean on foot. My car’s in a ditch right now. Me? I think I’m alright. Sore as hell, and a bit lightheaded, now that you mention it…

The Chevy is totaled. Window glass is everywhere. Emily clutches her neck. She is badly cut. Victor does not know her, yet his heart sinks when he sees that she is pregnant. He passes within a hair’s breadth of despair—now that he is here, he can’t imagine what good he will be able to do. He clings to the dispassionate voice of the operator, to whom he emotionally unburdens himself along the way.

—All completely normal, sir. You may yourself have had a concussion. But I need you to stay with me. As do this woman and her baby. Is she responsive? Is she breathing?

Slowly, Victor regains his focus. Careful not to disturb her spine, he is able to rouse Emily and coax a series of barely-coherent statements from her.

Emily’s field of vision has shrunk to almost nothing, but at the center of it she sees his worried eyes. A multitude of voices seem to echo in the surrounding space: Yes. Sh-she is… responsive. Ask her her name, her address. Ask if she can feel her limbs. Keep her talking. Y-yes. Do not move her. Yes, yes, I know n-not to. Can you… hear me, ma’am? What is your, your name.

—Angel?

—Say again, p-please?

—Are you an angel, sir?

—I… well… I’m here to help.

XIV.

Exsanguination. Bleedout. I’m rolling the word around in my mouth, trying to make sense of what could easily have killed Emily and the baby. The driver’s side window, what was left of it, came pretty close to her left carotid.

Emily lost a good quart of blood, as is. It’s not clear what trauma the apparatus of the womb has sustained, or whether the baby was affected when she went into shock. Though now’s hardly the time for chagrin, I can’t help looking back on my behavior over the past several months with a sense of failure. I have been an abysmal partner to the woman I adore. I cannot relinquish some responsibility for Emily’s state of mind and her desperate need to be somewhere else today. She was going to be with her parents, of all people, rather than stay at the house.

The door to the emergency ward opens. An otherwise lithe woman with a bulbous midsection, with creamy white skin and obvious crowfeet, briskly walks up to me.

—You would be Stuart, right?

—That would be me. It’s nice to meet you…

—Matilda. I’m here for Victor. He is… my partner. Father of my child (she adds, with a hint of pride).

—That’s some coincidence. I am told it’s him I have to thank for the life of my girlfriend, and our baby.

—Victor is a genuine saint. Wherever he’s needed he just seems to arrive, on cue.

—I just hope I get the chance to thank him personally. How’s he doing?

Not well, I learn. Though they haven’t found much in the way of specific trauma, it is clear that Victor suffered one hell of a concussion when he rolled his Toyota. He came into the ER alert but confused, then for a while did nothing but recite Il Paradiso in response to questions. Eventually, after a few bouts of lucidness, he sank into unconsciousness. His behavior while he was awake seemed to hint at partial paralysis.

I tell Matilda about my Emily, my beautiful genius. I tell her that I’m to blame for what’s happened here. I had some trouble dealing with the changes in Emily’s personality, brought about by hormones gone berserk—I wasn’t man enough to stand by her; but that ends today, for good. Right now, she and the fetus are stable. I’m told that the danger is mostly gone, but I’ll know for sure when the doctors are finished stitching and I get to see Emily myself. Though, I don’t know how I will even begin to apologize to her enough.

—You don’t have to beat yourself up so badly, Matilda says—whatever happens, happens for a reason, don’t you think? Ignoring for a second my Jungian influences, I tell her that, in my view of it, things don’t happen unless I get my ass in gear and make them happen. Let me tell you then, she replies, about my Victor, and the things that have happened because of him, and then ask yourself if it was merely causality.

XV.

I had the sneaking suspicion that I did not have many breaths remaining to me. Then, rather abruptly, my chest muscles gave up the effort altogether—but the oxygen kept coming in. I sensed that my body had been invaded by machinery. So be it. I could stand to spend a while longer tethered to this plane of existence while coming to terms with my early departure.

I realized that I’ve been a moron. I never got myself an organ donor card. One-hundred sixty pounds of perfectly healthy flesh and marrow will have to go to waste. Still, I was able to see that pregnant woman safely inside the ambulance before I began to lose my grip on the world. She was the imperative, the only thing that mattered.

I cannot tell a lie (not anymore, at least): I’m a bit sore about the lost chance to be there for the birth of my son, to watch him grow up and, if Matilda was willing, to try for another. But I have absolute confidence Matilda will do me proud as a mother.

By degrees, I am finding myself out of body and out of mind. There are certain parts of Victor Juarez that fade into nothingness, and there are parts of him that remain. Only, they seem less and less like the deeds of one Victor Juarez. I don’t always see my face—that is, the face I am looking down upon as I hover several feet off the bed—connected to the body that is taking part in these myriad selfless scenes I am remembering. I have been through so many places and times and done such countless works that the net good is dizzying. No, not I. How many of these deeds were mine? How many belong to someone who came before me?

The metaphysical tension is palpable and growing. Victor Juarez is being pulled apart at the edges as the warm light of compassion and hope rises from deep within. It is at once terrifying and ecstatic. Who will I be when it is over? Will there be anyone left?

Bright light washes over all aspects of my awareness, and when it recedes, I can see what has happened. There is no I; we are two now.

Victor Juarez was no angel. Victor Juarez had an angel. Now it is somebody else’s turn.

Thoughts on Emergency Debugging

They say it is more than feeling sad. Easy enough information to accept; not so easy to recall when it matters.

That valuable little iota of wisdom returned to me one recent afternoon in the decisive silence after I admitted to myself that I was broken, and had been so for God only knows how long. The realization wended its way through a hedge-maze of axons and synapses, pointing out as it did so that the evidence had been in plain view for just eons now and that any sensible administrator would long since have noticed the glaring errors in his system logs and shut it down for immediate repair. Granted, on silicon hardware the task is much simpler:

admin@dachshund# >>> tail /var/run/syslog

…On this line, we see a bewildered look in the mirror from a man who’s been hung over longer than ought to be physically possible; down here, an alarm clock reading 4:00 PM and seen through groggy eyes; here, the trademark behaviors of a hermit; and here, complete inability to form the simple sentences of an e-mail, which corroborates all the dumb and irrational things I’ve been thinking aloud. And everywhere: distractions, distractions and more happy distractions.

She was right. My mother—still the unofficial practitioner of the family, whose tenure in health care exceeds my tenure on this planet—and I didn’t believe it.

“We hardly see you downstairs. You’re not feeling depressed, are you?”

“No, mom.”

“You’re sure. Because… you really seem a little…”

“I’m not. I mean, I’ll keep it in mind, but…”

Her questioning should have been enough to start the alarms ringing. But at the time, I drew a blank. I had forgotten what it feels like to be depressed. Not that winter-blues, don’t-want-to-be-out-of-bed type feeling everybody knows. The real deal. Nothing but static on my radio. Whole days taken out of life. Probably she knows the signs better than I do. The very sense of whiteout I am slowly coming to associate with depression makes it one of those things that slip through my fingers and into cracks in the road—makes depression like a fine coat that I slip into with thoughtless ease, but cannot remove without raising my arms to the ceiling.

She can objectively see all this, and in light of the family tree, too—full of inspiration and intellect, tainted by the sort of anomalies that so often go with these things. I am not the first in the family to orchestrate a chemical puppet dance—not the first for whom success or failure has been decided from a lofty catwalk, where I the maestro, hidden, pulled levers and strings and frantically adjusted counterweights. A little less norepinephrine; a steady increase of the dopamine stimulus; trying not to think of how far down it is to the floorboards. Objective evaluations like my mother’s are invaluable, as it’s hard at this altitude to distinguish cheers from catcalls.

Unfortunately, there are days when even she can’t get through to me. There are days when the stresses of performance are so great that my body uncoils itself at the least invitation, and on such days I play to an empty house, alone and drunk in my aerie, jacking off to a tape recording of the previous night’s applause. Such days, while superficially happy, are the very days when it all begins to go awry. On such days, critics are under no circumstances allowed in. My mother was attempting to play the critic.

She wanted progress. She’d given me names, names to whom I should be peddling my art. And for a few minutes, I’d been able to set aside the games and distractions while my fingers waltzed over the keyboard—ultimately in vain.

To whom it may
Dear Elizabeth
Dear Ms Johansen, it is my great I wanted to let you know I am writing you to inform you of to express my interest in summer employment opportunities at Acme Novelty Corporation. I am an Engin I am in my Junior yera at Olumdjkdsfg dlfjkfjk AAAAAAAARRRRGGGHHSONOFABITCH!!!!!!!!1

They were missing beats and tripping on their own feet and everything else that well-practiced digits do not usually do. Occasionally I’d stop to look something up on the web, then immediately forget what I was looking for, and I’d stare hard at the screen a good half a minute before I could proceed or else give up and return to typing. Every phrase that came to mind was picked apart and condemned by the time the letters reached the keyboard. So I capitulated in short order and went back to my distractions, ignoring or perhaps unconsciously fleeing the impasse. Either way, I managed not to realize what a demoralizing defeat my will had suffered.

At dinnertime, it was all my parents could do just to get me downstairs. The left side of the dining room table was piled with clutter, as usual—no need to remove it entirely now that the family only takes up one end—and I lumbered in wearing my too-tight corduroys and a wifebeater that bulged somewhat less at the abdomen than when last I’d worn it. A bowl of reheated seafood chowder sat at my place on the table, and I was thinking that a burger would be much more appetizing just then. Dad nodded silently to me as he poured his Corona into a plastic mug; Mom motioned for me to take a seat.

“You know, you’ve lost weight,” she said.

“Can I have a beer?”

“Help yourself,” she said. “How’s your appetite? I notice you’ve quit snacking at nights.”

“Is this somehow a bad thing?”

“Not at all, as long as you’re eating something. Any progress on those cover letters?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well… when are you going to do something about it?”

“I did. I tried. The words won’t come.”

Depression: a pathological cessation of the feelings and behaviors of contentment and fulfillment. More than feeling sad, it is a downward spiral of productivity and creativity.

The trouble with depression is that, like contentment, it wears many guises. Worse, it conceals itself behind other illnesses, transient pleasures, and willful laziness—things that can also get in the way of function and fulfillment. Because my work ethic never was the strongest, I can’t say when in the past semester I might have started slipping. It wasn’t until I got back from spring break that I emerged from the fog long enough to see its shape: the persistent, nagging sensation that something wasn’t right and the clumsy, automatic nature of everything I’d been doing… and the glib casualness with which my will surrendered itself to HEY LOOK SHINY THING!

I asked, What’s happening to me? Why is this happening to me? And in these questions lurked the kernel of recognizable human experience that would trigger my understanding.

Whereas, with behavioral disorders, you can’t make progress until you’re willing to embrace what you are, depression is an invasive phenomenon. It happens to you. It enters your house unbidden, with its clumsy, messy ways and its mange and its stink and its bad attitude, and sets up camp and refuses to go away, no matter how much you implore it to go fuck itself or at least shut up and let you sleep. And it runs around masquerading as you, fouling the nest, and generally making an ass of you, until you just can’t ignore it any longer. The threshold is crossed in a single heartbeat.

admin@dachshund# >>> tail /var/run/syslog
HolyShitError in kernel module WorkEthic
HolyShitError in kernel module Hygeine
HolyShitError in kernel module LanguageSynth
admin@dachshund# >>> runsh sysalert.sh –f /var/run/syslog
maintenance staff have been notified.
admin@dachshund# >>> reboot

Finally, I had a clue what I was dealing with. I could begin operating on past debugging experience. The hardware that runs my system is esoteric, and the software adds its own layer of complexity; but, allowing for the occasional crash (which most of us suffer), it has been a pretty reliable workhorse. The left partition and the right partition somehow manage to work together, with neither one taking over, and their work gets done more-or-less efficiently. I take pride in the capacity for introspection and repair; evidently, my pride was too great, my confidence too absolute.

Because, two weeks later, I’m still unable to comprehend how a thing as big as a depression could stay hidden for so long while doing so much damage.

I feel locked in a cocoon, holding my breath, as I wait—restless, anxious and confused—for any little sign of improvement. It’s hard to tell. There are moments of serenity—not euphoria, but a distinctly balanced, relaxed feeling—and there are moments of profound agitation in which I feel as if my brain has grown too large for my skull. In class, my laughter is louder, my smile brighter; is this happiness? Is this what I’ve waited for? Au contraire, even in troubled times I could laugh. One thing I do feel sure of is that I’m losing more time than can afford to dispense with.

Day one. The new prescription is a hack—a temporary solution to a permanent issue with my hardware—but there is some elegance in its simplicity and, frankly, I expected no less. If it works, it will have been worth it. I’ve reviewed all the data, and what was once a vague suspicion is now a clear sign of breakdown. Depression’s close cousin, burnout, visits me at least once a semester; but the current situation is different, unlike anything I’ve endured since high school. Productivity has ground to a halt. My output is all but meaningless. It might still be weeks before I resemble my old self again.

Day four. This evening, I feel tense, achy and spaced out, and when I try to sleep it off, I find I cannot. I hear people talking through the walls; I try to tune them out, but it only gives me a headache. Had I researched the side effects, I would have bought earplugs. Have my suitemates always been this loud? Has the television?

“Hey. You don’t look so hot.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Anything we can do?”

No way to put this nicely. It’s your voice. It’s all their voices. They’re so damn loud.

“Um, these walls… are really thin.”

“Want me to kick everyone out in the hall?”

“You’d do that for me?”

“For you, anything.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. And hey, cheer up.”

“I’m working on it…”

I feel guilty for doing that. I feel guilty about everything. The emotion digs in with its claws when I return to bed, and won’t let go. I’m scared, angry and a little distraught. Chemicals, that’s all it is—chemicals and too much stress. I’ve been expecting too much of myself and it is killing my functions. A good night’s sleep would be a good thing.

Experience tells me that when the trouble is over, I will feel as if I’ve returned to Olin and planet Earth after a lengthy absence; and I will wonder just how many months I spent in that shadowy place, which looked and sounded a lot like Olin but did not taste or smell or feel right; and I will look at the sun and sky as new things, and I will owe it to myself to embrace life in its infinite visceral beauty, etc, etc, etc. Maybe.

Day six—last night I prayed sincerely to the God I don’t believe in. I am scared enough of losing another friend to engineer’s burnout that I will enlist whatever help I can get. And I thought up a moral for this story. Within the bastion of intelligence that is Olin, a working mind is a thing frequently taken for granted. We abuse our minds and bodies as if they were invincible, only to feel terrified and alone when—surprise—they give out under the strain. We bang our heads into walls, looking for contentment in workahol; but it isn’t there. Self-awareness and true well-being don’t fit into our Outlook calendars.

Furthermore, learning and behavioral disorders and even plain laziness, things which may cripple a person of average intelligence, have a way of going unnoticed in people of brilliance. Now, we are here together, confronted with the knowledge that we are not unique, and the little things for which we have always managed to compensate are suddenly a great weight pulling us down. A small misstep can become the seed for a veritable cancer of fatalism: burnout.

How do you tell an engineer, one of the most fiercely independent species on the planet, that she needs help she isn’t getting? How do you convince her to release the burden of expectation she carries around on her shoulders? We all come to Olin with a unique set of skills and talents and a unique learning style. We all set impossible goals for ourselves, and we all fall on hard times. If we engineers are to succeed, the same support that exists for students with well-defined problems must be seen to exist for all of us.

Day thirty—despite the slow and steady improvement I have experienced over the past month, I am growing more and more convinced that this time, I will have to change my definition of normalcy before I can achieve it. Something is different, and I am using what little I have at my disposal to compensate for it. It’s just the sort of trouble that always seems to happen when things are going a little too well—I meet an immovable obstacle in the way of continued personal growth, so that I have to retrace my steps, remind myself what I was doing and why.

What, exactly, is wrong? A difficult question, that. Depression? The obvious but incomplete answer I’ve been able to give so far. In part, I suspect it is a result of my never-ending rebellion against structure.

I am, incidentally, a proper child of deconstruction and existential thought. While it is part of my human nature to develop intricate structures as a means of understanding what I know of my world, thereby simplifying that world, it is equally part of my specific and personal nature to loathe imposed structure, to tear it down and to look disdainfully upon its members, longing for the universe simply to be. Inevitably, I resist organizational strategies and never want as much help as I could probably (okay, definitely) use. Invariably I return to the state of greatest disorder. To change that habit for life—as I must do before I can stand on my own—won’t be easy.

It requires a grounding faith in something, anything that I can stick to and believe in. And, historically, my beliefs have been as inconstant as the moon. Theorems I’ve got. Principles and ethics I’ve got. But beliefs?

admin@dachshund# >>> env-enum belief
-I believe the world is round.

-I believe Democrats have more fun.

-I believe I should trust my intuitions.

-I believe in living and loving and learning and happiness.

-I believe my thoughts and experiences are worth sharing.

-I believe human intelligence is the most invaluable substance in the known universe.
admin@dachshund# >>> env-append belief
…I believe greatness is worth living uphill.

And there in my room, the dim glow of the terminal my only source of illumination, it occurs to me that I may just be onto something.

The Great Race

November, 1999

The straggler arrived at the bus stop. He was flushed, sweating despite the pre-dawn cold. The morning had caught him unprepared, just like the last one. And the one before that. Another blind struggle against drowsiness—stumbling to the table, crunching furiously on little rings of sugar-coated fortified cardboard while, somewhere off to his left, the female parental unit smiled and made his bag lunch for him. Tiredness was the new routine—if anyone felt the need to ask him why, he’d mumble something vague about homework and deadlines, glossing over the truth. Nothing to see here—just a self-polluting eighth-grader, par for the course. Move along.

Mercedes looked at him with the same wholesome grin as ever. He wondered if she ever had unclean thoughts, or if development in that direction was utterly checked by religion. So much the better: once you ate from the tree of knowledge, you couldn’t go back. And the aftertaste was lousy.

“You don’t have to stare at the ground, do you?”

In the midst of his philosophical musings he was struck by the uncomfortable awareness of her eyes bearing down intently on him. Why was she breaking the routine—twisting their normal two minutes of silence before the bus arrived into an unexpected shape that would resist his well-honed ability to compress awkward moments into something tolerably short?

Resisting the urge to bolt, he planted his feet and lifted his gaze to meet hers. Wild yellow eyes cut a swift vertical arc from the fractal pattern of cracks in the road that had so often drawn them, up and over the slight body of a pre-teen girl dressed for modified league soccer. Her scrawny neck and thin, smooth face were light-brown—mulatto, he could remember her saying once. A beautiful word—mulatto. He settled on her mild and rather nonplussed stare—eyes that were chestnut-brown by day. Impossible to tell in this light. They grew wide and earnest when she spoke:

“What do you think about that takes such concentration?” Good question. What is the topic of the day, sex or set theory? Or Great Expectations? Or how about sex? Am I trying not to imagine what a heartbreaker you’ll be when your sheltered mind begins to notice boys? Am I wondering if you’d notice me (if only I were a bit more normal)? Could I, for one brief moment, have forgotten you and the rest of humankind to simply admire what nature has inscribed on the face of our “finished” works?

He shrugged. The words croaked their way out of him: “It is no one thing. My mind wanders when I do not get enough sleep.” His sunken eyes with their drifting gaze sold the statement, calling her attention away from a rising anxiety that made his hairs stand on end and flesh crawl with tiny points of sweat.

“Well, what keeps you awake?”

He didn’t answer, trying his best to ignore her, and hoped for the conversation to die. The junior high bus would be here any minute now.

She persisted. “Hey. We never got like this as kids. Remember?—I used to chase you down the street naked, threatening you with girl-cooties. You used to trust me. What’s your problem—that I went and changed on you?”

“Yes,” he said loudly. “In the freezing cold all I wish for is less clothing.”

“Well, you changed on me too, Cody. I’m disappointed.”

November, 2001

“Wake up, Cody.” Two long years of that persistent voice seemed merely the continuation of that fateful morning’s conversation. He heard it on the bus, on the phone—a persistent presence ever since Mercedes moved back in with her mother. A slender hand reached over the back of the seat and came to rest on his left shoulder. His shoulder jerked, and the hand retreated. After a deep marshalling breath, he spoke to her, in a voice that cracked and rumbled much as it had two years ago, on the day she began untangling the web he’d spent so many years weaving about himself.

“I’m okay, Mer, honest. It was just…”

“Just what? What can justify your looking half-dead all the time? You know as much as I do those nights locked in your room do you no good.” Her attack was soft-spoken, just for his ears. She was leaning over the seat back.

“No questions, Mercedes, I don’t want to discuss it.”

“When have I ever failed to ask questions?”

“Never. But, there are things you should not have to think about.”

“You’re right,” she said, and she reached out and grabbed his long, shaggy bangs and pulled hard. He found himself pressed against the seat with his head tilted back, looking up her nostrils, noticing how she’d retained that cute little knob of a nose as she turned into someone boys coveted. And he thought of her new boyfriend. Eddie seemed harmless enough, but his Jesus help him if he ever so much as smiled too broadly to the guys after a date with Mercedes—Cody would be less forgiving.

Cody sat motionless, his spidery lashes occasionally fluttering, and waited to be told what he’d done wrong now. “After all,” Mercedes said, “I’m just a girl—right?”

“It’s not that, Mer. I simply cannot discuss it without bringing up details I know you don’t want to hear about. Isn’t that reason enough for you?”

“Go on,” she said tersely after a moment.

As long as we were apart, you were invulnerable to my baser thoughts. Now I have to fight to keep you out of them—and you resist me every fucking step of the way.

But what he said was, “I finish, and I don’t feel satisfied. I feel… worse. Empty. And the only solution is more.” It came out in a sorry whisper.

“But have you tried reading a book? Do you call me on the phone? Or come chat with me, since you’re so close to the damn keyboard anyway…” mortified, she crossed herself. “Point is, I’m there for you.”

“Suppose you’re even still awake. What am I going to say? ‘So Mer, I just washed away ten million of my progeny and yet I still feel sad and lonely.’”

“Cody,” she cooed as she stroked the dandruff-ridden hair of which he was so self-conscious—“you are the biggest drama queen I ever met. We’ve made so much progress, but with that attitude…”

“Leave it alone!” he growled, when his anger at the intimacy of the gesture cut through its soothing effect. “Just let me sleep.”

The door snapped shut on the last stop of the morning route. Trees and houses began to crawl away, then slowly picked up speed until they were dashing by in a great blur. The bus merged onto the interstate. As the baritone hum of the engine rose, Cody sank back into himself. Life was all climax and dull interlude. Sooner or later, Mercedes would recognize the pattern as he did. And in the ensuing revelations, there he would be, unicellular and naked under the microscope, begging her to turn off the harsh lights.

November, 2002

“Last one, boys. Go!” The entire junior squad leapt forward as one at the coach’s command, synchronized not from habit or eagerness to comply but because they were all excited that practice was nearly over. The chill air of the season bit at Cody’s arms and thighs, but just below the skin his muscles were hot with activity. He’d only gone a short distance when his thoughts started to drift away from technique. The coach yelled out, “Fix that posture, Sleepy! You can’t stay in JV forever. You plan on warming the varsity bench next year?” But falling asleep at the wheel was inevitable. Cody’s mind kept returning to the rumors of trouble between Mercedes and Eddie, and to the letter he’d just received from what seemed more like a hoax than a real college.

“What is this,” he said happily as he climbed the bleachers to meet Mercedes halfway. She had been perched there for at least a half-hour, waiting, he assumed, for the chance to bug him about a paper for world history or chemistry or something. It must be maddening to sit and watch them run this routine in particular—endless repetitions of one lap at a hard run, one at a steady jog, then walking in place waiting for the pulse to come down before starting over again. It would look as if they were winding down for the day, and then—off again at a hard run. It certainly wore him out doing it.

“You and I are walking home,” she said. That was bad news. Not that it wasn’t nice, once in a while, to take the long, leaf-strewn trail that led down by the river instead of riding the bus down the interstate; but by the tone of her voice, he knew there was something big on her mind, and that she needed the privacy of the nature walk in which to interrogate him. He steeled himself for the verbal assault while he gathered his things.

Three years I’ve stood here, taking everything. Trying not to mentally undress you, even as you struggle to undress my mind. You always were more comfortable in your skin than I—though you showed it differently when you were young.

It began about ten minutes into their trek, as light glinting off the crests of little wavelets began to show through the trees. “I hear there was another big party up on the Hill this weekend,” she said evenly. Immediately he understood.

“I was there. Being sociable, like you wanted. It was no small effort covering my ass on a Saturday night, either.”

“And you met my Kathy, my best friend from junior high?”

He nodded. “We’d said a few words in passing at the high school, but it was the first time we really got the chance to talk. You were absolutely right, though, I can see the resemblance, except…”

“Except that she took you down the creek to their favorite smoking spot and… hmm?” The fire in her eyes was inescapable.

“And… yeah, things happened”—standing still, waiting for the outburst.

“Things? Cody, I was shocked to learn what happened.”

“To be fair, none of it was my idea. Not my fucking idea just because I’m the male. She’s the one with the experience.”

“She was also high as a kite!” And she stormed off toward the river, with Cody running after.

“And you think I was what, sober?” he demanded. “I was in outer space! I was just going with it. She led and I followed.”

“Think, Cody. What have I always said?”

“I know you think you have to protect her, but I am not the devil.”

“She’s like a twin sister to me!”

Cody stopped dead a second time. Something hard and heavy began to weigh on his stomach.

“Of all the intoxicated girls, why my Kathy?”

“This is weird. Really weird.”

“Weird or not, we’re not leaving these woods until I get an explanation.”

This time, Cody went with his instincts. He bolted. Perhaps some day he would explain it to her in a letter—a long, well-thought-out letter once he’d put some psychic distance between himself and the situation at hand.

It was two long, awkward weeks before she spoke to him again. It was another week before he remembered he was taking the wrong person to the winter formal.

December 2002

“You, I thought I told you to take care of details like these before I come over. Just look at this hair!” Mercedes pointed accusingly at his reflection in the mirror, using the hand that wasn’t preoccupied with trying to untangle and flatten out a wild cusp of hair on the top of Cody’s head.

“I did. Honestly, I took a shower at four-thirty and I fixed it.”

“So what happened between four-thirty, and the time that I showed up at your door to see you looking like this?”

“I… guess I got nervous and I un-fixed it in my nervousness.”

“On tonight of all nights!” She pulled so hard he shouted, and the gnarl of hair unwound itself.

“Don’t get so upset, Mer. It wouldn’t be your last Ice Prom that I was spoiling.”

“It wouldn’t be yours either, Cody… it would?” He watched in the mirror as understanding began to grow and spread across her face.

“You should see my high school record. It begins three years before I enter high school. Special bussing, distance learning, exemptions—and that summer class at Worcester Poly. I have absolutely no need to be here next fall…”

“Getting out while the getting’s good, eh?” Her smile was transparent.

“…Except, of course, that I’ll miss you and Kat and those few others who’ve made this place interesting. You, especially.”

“But where would you go? Where can you expect to find what you’ve been missing here?”

He closed his eyes and leaned toward the toilet, nearly tipping the rickety stool onto the bathroom floor in the process. From a basket perched there he pulled several laminated pamphlets and extracted the second from the top. He gave it to Mercedes and said, “This will at least partly answer your question.”

He watched as, rapt with attention, she thumbed through page after page of what he remembered so well: mounds of statistics, sample student and faculty vignettes, answers to student questionnaires and cleverly worded propaganda. “Yeah,” she said as she slowly set down the pamphlet, “it’s a pretty special place alright. But—it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“In the middle of the California desert, to be more exact.” When he saw that this wasn’t helping her unease, he added, “I’m not accepted there yet. But I’m on their watch-list, so to speak. I have other offers, but that’s my top pick.”

“You mentioned Kathy,” she said. “So nice of her to step aside and let me be your date to your first and last Ice Prom.”

“She turned me down, Mer.”

“She told me otherwise!”

“She changed her mind.” Under his breath he added, “We were both unhappy with the arrangement. You finished?”

She shook her head. “Let me get my makeup kit.”

“Why do I need that?” He started to get up, but she put a firm hand on his shoulder.

“The same reason I do, stupid. To cover up blemishes and the bags under your eyes. Just count yourself lucky that you’re so generously endowed with eyelashes, they show up just fine.” She snapped the case shut.

“And if I wasn’t?”

“Hold still.” With an artist’s touch she began conservatively applying the lightest-colored foundation she had in her kit.

“Listen,” Cody said softly, careful not to move any more than was necessary, “I never intended to bring anyone other than you to this dance. But I felt like I couldn’t, as long as you wore Eddie’s class ring. The guy’s a head taller than me, and I didn’t feel like pissing him off.”

Mercedes restrained a laugh. “Okay, first of all, Eddie is not that kind of guy—he’s a gentle giant—and secondly, what harm was there in taking me to the Ice Prom as a friend? It’s upperclassmen and their dates; it’s not like he can go.”

“I once said a few things to Eddie that weren’t very fair. It was about you and, in retrospect, considering that he’s vice president of the Christian club, it was pretty outrageous. But you’d seemed better off without him.”

“I am better off without him. Don’t be fooled by that high-and-mighty title of his; Eddie’s mind is filled with politics. When Eddie looks at me, he thinks the same exact thoughts that you do. He applies all the same labels.” She took a step back, musing to herself while she examined her work.

“I highly doubt that’s true,” Cody said.

“And, he was prepared to act on those thoughts of his,” she said, as she resumed filling in and blending in the foundation.

Cody took a deep breath. “As I would be,” he said.

She stopped her work. “What did you say?”

“Nothing, just finish my face. We’ll talk in the cab.”

“This,” he said—and he gestured around the spacious U-shaped passenger compartment of the “cab” his family had graciously rented—“is not what I had in mind, but then knowing me I could find a reason to reject any choice of setting. But I realized that if I do nothing, the feelings in my chest will affect my every decision until they burst free like an alien chest-burster.”

“How poetic.” She smiled warmly. “Is this how you work your magic on women? Oh, but I’m interrupting. Do go on…”

“I’ll accept your criticism later. You need to understand some things; first of all, I have been messing around with Kathy, for some time. It’s been a comfort to me, and I saw nothing wrong with it until the day you cornered me. Then I realized how Freudian the whole thing was, and I felt sick.”

“Cody.” She leaned over and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay to think of me that way. You won’t go blind from it, and to be honest, I’m flattered. Even though you and I can’t just casually act on our feelings, I would rather you tell me how you feel than keep it bottled up inside.”

“Nothing that’s going on here is casual, Mer. I love you.”

Mercedes was very still for a moment; after that, she was a blur of motion, straightening his tie, brushing herself off, and speaking quickly. “And there it is, I guess. You—always one to be direct, even when it troubled people. Have you thought this over? Because I honestly had no idea. I’m speechless. Most people would say, anybody would say that this was kind of sudden…”

“Not sudden!” She was taken aback by the strength of his voice. He removed her jittery hands from around his waist and resumed talking. “We’ve… been doing this runabout for what, three years? All that time you’ve been wearing down my defenses with grooming and mothering and goodness. You’ve won my heart; now stop being so naïve.” Mercedes buried her face in her hands.

“I did what I did out of love for a friend.”

He smiled. “And I don’t resent it. It was a good race, but I’m tired of running. Please—before we lose this chance.” His class ring glinted on the finger of his outstretched hand. She brushed his arm aside.

“It won’t work. You’re asking me to jump off the deep end with you.”

“I’m not. Just tell me where to begin. Deep end, shallow end, I don’t care. A beginning, that’s all I ask. That… and a smile from you would be nice.”

She looked up slowly. A single tear had smeared the mascara down the left side of her face. “How do I look?”

He beamed. “Fantastic.”

“And this?”

“Nothing my mom’s emergency kit won’t fix. She’ll be waiting out front to take pictures.”

Twenty minutes later, they were nearing the front of the line to be announced before the promenade. His palms, which had dried a bit while comforting Mercedes in the minutes prior to their arrival, were once again wet. His ears again were hot with blood. None of his garments felt like it was on quite right. When he mentioned this to Mercedes, she laughed.

“I keep wanting to fix my bra,” she said. “In comparison, that suit doesn’t look like it’d be so bad. At least your mom helped me fix my makeup. She’s sweet, you know. Do you know what she said, when I told her what you said in the limo?”

“You told her!” he said, noticing they were on deck.

“She said, ‘I know, dear. I can hear it in the way he talks about you.’ She also said that if I had a heart I would marry you. Sweet woman.”

“I… remember the day you left Eddie, you told me you only play for keeps. And that you’d only consider a man who could do the same.”

She nodded. “What about it?”

But the announcer cut them off. “Cody Alexander Hutton of the class of 2003, escorted by Mercedes Alvarez.” On cue, they walked arm in arm, Cody focusing as much effort as possible on the paradoxically effortless-looking stride Mercedes had tried to teach him. His shoulders sagged when he noticed the way some kids gaped at him and his escort. An incredible heat surged over his temples and forehead—what could it be? Were his zits showing through horribly? Were they amazed by the caliber of the woman beside him? Or was it simply that he’d asked to be announced as class of ’03 without first telling his classmates?

The awe of the crowd seemed to deepen when they reached center stage; he had just enough time to register this before he realized that his lips were suddenly locked to those of his escort. The prolonged kiss that followed drew cheers from the student body and flashes from cameras throughout the crowd. He was already doubting the accuracy of his memory in the split-second between the parting of their lips and the removal of her fingertips from his shoulders. All I know for sure is that I’m grinning like a retard in front of all these people. And she is smiling as if she knows what a fool she just made of me.

Quietly she said, “Tag. You’re it,” and towed the beet-red fool offstage left.

Unaccredited

There is an element of agelessness in Thomas McPherson. The highest-ranking interaction designer of the New Olin Corporation is hairy and heavyset, but with the energy and mannerisms of a preteen. Physically, his pre-diabetic state—brought on by too many late nights in front of his desktop computer, hacking away at thorny issues in his latest program or obsessing over the layout of a webpage, fueled only by a large bottle of the Brazilian guaraná he buys religiously at Stop ‘n’ Shop—has slowed him down over the years, and his naturally wide frame now hints at the figure of a loaf of bread. But the earnest eyes, and the demeanor of constant calculation, haven’t changed.

Gregarious, agile, passionate, a free- and fast-thinking engineer who can communicate ideas effectively—that is the prototype they were seeking, he reminds himself. Of course, acceptance was only the first step. You had to survive freshman year, and then, once you crawled from the wreckage of your pride, the true edification began.

That was way back, when the Corporation was not yet even a twinkle in the eyes of Olin students, and OC stood for “Olin Center” or “Olin College,” never “Olin Corporation,” unless, of course, you were a historian of the original Franklin W. Olin. A Cornell graduate, Frankie’s entrepreneurial and technical smarts created the namesake company that brought him fortune—fortune leading to the foundation—the foundation doling out hundreds of millions in small awards to individual colleges over the years before finally becoming the school that bore his name, and would bear his successors. All told, it has taken the better part of a century for the chickens to come home to roost.

On the morning of a day that would come to be seen as Olin’s most important reunion, however, no such grandiose thoughts entered Tom’s mind.

The debate in which Thomas had found himself caught was petty and distasteful. His opponent was quick, persuasive, and a great connoisseur of the new. Fresh out of MIT—a wonderful TA for the students of Tom’s graduate-level course, Human Factors Quantitatively (HF++ to the romantics), but too much the bullying office geek. No appreciation for what it meant to be on Olin turf, to be stepping on a professor’s toes.

“Implementation aside, guys…” Trying to steer everyone back to their senses.

“I know, Tom, I know exactly what you’ll say, Hick’s Law is our maxim, Fitts’s Law is our maxim. And I’m not trying to say otherwise. All I’m saying is, see the forest for the trees. You can get all these options to run on the Windows platform but it’s slow, and it’s clunky, and it crashes the machine. Does that suck about Windows? Yes. But the fact remains that the implementation’s not ready.”

“You’re thinking too specific. For our purposes, all that matters is that the underlying principle can be borne out by a timed test on a suitably fast computer. We do have a few such computers.”

“Yes, but…”

“Or, if you’re that curious about implementation, you can wait until next year when X12 development goes cross-platform, and build the better mousetrap yourself. Then it won’t matter which way explorer natively draws the menu, will it? However, I’m digressing. And, I’m running late.”

Thomas felt a tinge of guilt as he fled the third-floor office, leaving his underlings to pick up the pieces and try to guess at his mood. But much more upsetting was the precious time he’d allowed to slip by in futile and often combative discussion of the pros and cons of the school’s intranet site. His subordinate was more of a teacher than he’d ever be; the graduates thought of Thomas as mainly a research man and guiding hand in the creation of the budding Corporation.

And for better or worse, that is my role for the remainder of the day, he said to himself as he made his coffee—guiding hand. Spewer of statistics on such matters as the planned acquisition of E-Ink, on the power consumption of their product in comparison with commercial LCD and plasma screens. On the goings on at X.org and the secrets we’re keeping to ourselves for the moment. On the average packet size to encode OpenGL commands as X calls for a remote user. And of course, on who will be kicking whose ass this afternoon in the first annual virtual reality games.

Headed for the elevator, he tried to put a bit more confidence in his step. Jason, he reminded himself, has everything under control. What happened next has been burned into memory with special clarity.

Charles Jones, too, remembers what happened next. He remembers how a single phone call chased from his thoughts the malaise that had plagued him all morning. Reaching back further, he often remembers the eve of the incident. One moment he was awake, trying his best to work despite the codeine, and the next moment…

“Charlie.”

“Wha—what is it?” Charles felt unduly groggy as he peeled his face from the stiff cushion of a couch in what he eventually recognized as the faculty lounge of the engineering school. No, not unduly groggy. The medicine had put him out for the better part of the night. “What time is it,” he muttered, revising the previous question.

“It’s four AM baby, morning of the big conference. Oh—you look awful.”

Look who’s talking, was the thought he stifled when his senses, which were finally beginning to cooperate again, picked out the strange features of the face that was looking down at him. A strong chin, a nose ring, her colors fading and smudged, ruffled brown hair and those big, undeniable eyes. Hostility faded as memory of those eyes sank in.

“Eve, you can’t spook me like that.”

“Baby, I’ve been looking all over for you! You never showed, and I got worried.”

“I fell asleep going over the slides for Thursday’s lecture. Didn’t I say I was going to be here all night? No? Well, I’m sorry. But, Eve, you can’t just comb the campus for me. Nobody knows we’re together.”

“And whose idea was that.”

“You have to understand…” Charles found himself losing his train of thought at the sight of this 1.9-meter monster of a woman, fashionable if somewhat disheveled, in close-fitted black slacks and a fine blue blouse that did much to distract attention from her fake breasts. “I’ve never been with anyone like you. I need time to adjust before I can start sharing the news.”

She took a step closer, so that his eyes couldn’t help picking out the familiar pattern of creases around her zipper that spoke of Eve’s anatomical identity. “Charlie, we’re safer here than we are anyplace else. But you can’t wait for the rest of the world to catch up. Remember what Gandhi said?”

“Let my people go?”

She shook her head. “He said, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’”

Charlie smiled as he reached for his lover’s hand, and found it—startled, as always, to find it so large and dexterous. The electricity of the touch forced him to inhale deeply. “I’ll be the revolution next week,” he said. “The rest of this week is hell.”

“I’m not sure I can wait that long for my revolution to come.”

“Well Eve, what would you have me do?” And why the debauched grin?

“Oh, I’d see to it that the revolution comes now, baby.” Eve shuffled a bit closer. He saw that she was becoming aroused.

“You mean, right here and now?” Jesus, girl, you’re putting me to shame.

“A little something, just for you. It’d be a thrill—especially after the last two hours of hunting you down.” As she spoke, her eyes scorched him. He could feel their black magic in her words, oceans of desire crashing into his senses. In better health he might have submitted, forgetting his stated need for discretion. He shook his head.

“I’m exhausted, hun. Just take me somewhere I can sleep, and not wake up with my spine all fucked up. Tomorrow I have inspections to run and controls to babysit.”

She helped him up and, as they made for the door, a silent prayer was on his lips: The world is mad but you, my baby—my sweet dual—you may yet drive me sane.

Thomas remembers the nervous confusion of their voices in the dark.

—We’re trapped.

—You have got to be kidding me!

—Don’t panic. Remember, fear is the mind-killer.

—Now is not the time for sci-fi aphorisms.

—Will somebody hit the call button already?

—How? I can’t see shit.

—Just get Mallory over there. She can read the Braille, can’t she?

—I can do better than that, Tom.

At that moment, a bright spot of light hit the elevator ceiling and bounced off, casting ghoulish gray light over the occupants.

—Who in God’s name carries a Mag-Lite around the office?

—Mallory the Righteous, it would seem. I don’t hear any Hallelujahs from the congregation…

—Hallelujah! (all the voices said in rapid succession.)

—Meh. They asked me to give our new double-E profs a tour of the Intel cluster. It’s kind of hard to see into the guts of the beast without a flashlight.

—A righteous purpose in my book.

—Righteous? A power-sucking monstrosity that can’t even run a proper Unix.

—Define proper?

—Clearly, Thomas has never seen MATLAB do its thing on a network of several dozen Itanium processors and programmable asynchronous logic tiles…

—Or played the big-screen virtual reality games down in the IOsphere…

—Whatever.

—Fuck!

—What is it now?

—The call button’s not working! Everything is dead.

—Campus-wide blackout, Eric?

—No way. The elevators are hooked to the backup power. It’d take an EMP to knock us down, even temporarily.

—That, or another bug in the elevator company’s code.

—Worst purchase ever. We were better off writing our own controls from scratch; but you-know-who settled the matter for us.

—You have to admit, the “smart building” idea looked good on paper.

—And the back-end code hasn’t been a problem. It’s the user interface stuff we had to get rid of completely. And the broken interface to our corporate software.

—Tell that to the firmware that just caused our express elevator to lose power and comm. Computerization is a liability, not a feature.

—Cell-phone reception, anybody?

—Not a chance. We’re owned.

—You’d think the cell tower on the roof could get through even these walls.

—Wait… I’ve got a wireless link to the rogue peer-to-peer network.

—Eric, that’s impossible. Wi-Fi in the elevator?

—At that signal strength, shouldn’t we be wearing lead crotch-guards?

—Read it and weep. Three bars.

—Hot damn.

—Pretty ironic if it saves our asses after all the trouble it’s caused.

—Hurry up and message Jason while you can!

—Just a minute. Hey Mallory, will you give me some light? These new-age pocket PC’s aren’t so handy in the dark.

Certainly Jason Lee remembers that fine spring day when Olin’s prodigious children began their return. While Thomas was stuck between floors, at the opposite end of the sprawling campus that was once Babson College, Jason was feeling uneasy at the helm of the top-floor board room in the recently-completed Center for Executive Education 2.0. Most of his top men and women were already on scene for today’s do-or-die conference, but the Office of Innovation and Research staff was conspicuously late, as was the ever-punctual Dean of External Relations. With thirty minutes left before the trustees and other guests were to be brought upstairs, he turned to Mark Jordan, head of Administration and Finance, and said, “Mister Jordan, make the calls.”

Mark raised an eyebrow silently at the use of his surname, but his eyes were fixated on the table, as he finished what he had already been typing out on the sleek table-top keyboard in front of him. A small sheet of electronic paper displayed the tiny machine’s output as a group of simple, black & white X12 windows. When he was satisfied that the system had understood his request, he pressed the enter key and his attention returned to the anxious president of the college and CEO of the nascent Corporation. “It’s done. If they’re on campus, we’ll have them in thirty seconds.”

The Panic Button, as Jason had dubbed it, was IT chief Pointy’s proudest achievement. It had its root in pranks of their student days, now the stuff of folklore—using clandestine scanners to rape the staff prox cards for their owners’ access permissions. The culprits had strung little green army men between the rooftops of the engineering campus. Jason found it ironic that the same students who had gone before the honor board for this harmless act had gone on to develop their hack, at the request of IT, into a fully functional and integrated people-tracking system that was essentially unhackable and could be used against such pranksters. Add to that a sophisticated network of wireless signal trackers; the physical Ethernet port directory; and notification mechanisms across e-mail, AIM, Jabber and the rest of the mainstream messaging solutions; and higher-ups had the means to locate anybody who wished to be found, as well as some who did not.

The latter case was rare on such a decidedly open campus. Still, the information that the system provided was kept classified, and for simplicity’s sake inquiries were returned not by the system but by one of Pointy’s techs.

The call came up on his headset over the secure channel; it was from Charles, the head of server maintenance. Mark nodded to Jason as he took the call: “Hi there, Charlie. They have you watching over the boards today?”

“Everybody else is either covering the bases for today’s events, or crashed out in the faculty lounge after working through the night to prepare. As for me, I’m on codeine for my cough and I slept like a baby.”

“I hope you have good news for me, Charlie.”

“Sir, would you care to remove yourself to a private location? I notice you’re in the board room, and most of the attendees don’t have your clearance…”

“They can see who’s missing just as easily as I can. Get on with it.”

“Sorry sir.”

“And don’t sir me, pal. We were in classes together not too many years ago.”

“Okay, so, I have your squad of geeks on the chart at various locations in the OC building until 0815 when they… all got into the elevator on the top floor going down.”

“Then what?”

“They disappear. It’s as if they turned off all their electronics, and disabled their proximity cards somewhere between there and the first floor vestibule.”

“And you’re sure that they did exit there?”

“No, but the link to that part of the elevator controls is currently down. I simply inferred it because that’s where they should have been going…oh. Shit.”

“Remembering your physics, Charlie? E & M? Faraday cages?”

“I grok the problem.”

“And I grok a solution. Get facilities there, ASAP.” Mark lowered his voice a notch, then, “The president wants his technologists here five minutes ago.”

“I’m getting a call, Mark… Facilities is already on the way. Complaints about the elevator not responding.”

“Thank you, Charlie. G’bye.” Mark closed the phone and looked up. He mouthed the words, “We have a problem.”

There is a soft rustling and jostling, and Thomas finds himself fighting back an inexplicable grin. He doesn’t want or need to lift the lids of his drowsy eyes; he already knows Shelley has climbed back into bed and is peering down at him. She braces herself with a hand against his chest. He takes a slow, deep breath, amused by the resistance of the extra weight, and as he exhales, he finally opens his eyes to her.

“What were you grinning about, you fiend?” she asks.

“Nothing.” He grins some more, cranes his neck to read the alarm clock: 1 AM.

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” she tells him as she plows her fingers through his messy pile of black hair. “I’d say you were pondering something. Yes?”

“Work stuff,” is all he wishes to say about it. “And you, why haven’t you fallen asleep? It’s been half an hour.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“My Shelley, not sleepy? Who was never up this late a day in her life, until our wedding night? Something’s wrong with this picture. Did I not give you enough of a workout?”

“No, I think your night-owl habits are just contagious.”

He smiles. “I’ve noticed. I hear you slinking away after sex to check your mail.”

“After which,” she adds, “I come back and you’re asleep, peaceful as a baby. Dreaming your dreams of code.” She pauses. “Could I have a backrub?”

“Of course, sweetie.”

Some time later, she breaks the intent silence to ask what it is about work that was so funny.

“I was remembering that time I got stuck in the elevator,” he replies, “on my way to the big reunion. You know, back then I really undervalued teaching—couldn’t stand the stress. Now all of a sudden I’m longing for the old days.”

“Is it from something that happened at the conference today?”

“No, in fact everything was perfect. We were on schedule; the elevators behaved themselves. And, our execs slaughtered their execs in the battlefield sim.”

“And you got the contracts. Hey—you missed a spot.”

He nods (as if she could see the gesture), retraces his path, and, after a moment of searching, finds the adhesion. “Uh-huh. A purchase agreement from Mr. Cavalcanti of Mechtronic Fun and Games, and the partnership with Allied Sys on their DOD project. Both worth ridiculous amounts of money.”

“Department of defense? I thought the company by-laws forbid working on military contracts.”

“They only forbid developing offensive weapons. Plenty of information systems on the battlefield are purely defensive—for instance, anti-ballistic AI’s like the Patriot. Our task is even more kosher in the board’s opinion—helping armies calculate the path of least resistance and least bloodshed. It’s ironic—the first Olin Corporation amassed a fortune by selling munitions, and we’re selling ways to use less of them.”

“Seems like a dangerous tool to put in the hands of a bunch of radicals like yourselves. Especially with the constant wisecracking about plots for world domination.”

Thomas shakes his head “That’s all it is, wisecracks. And the DoD project is black, no one but the development team will ever see its code. Of far greater importance to any would-be millennial factions is the exponential growth we’re going to experience as a result of these contracts.”

“And there are such groups?”

“None of it’s serious,” he says. He muses over this as he finishes working the small of her back, then returns to the shoulders. “But there are those of us who like to romanticize Olin as the nerf-gun-toting jihad of the corporate universe. The campus mythos gets to everyone, even the ‘offworlder’ employees from Caltech and MIT. Work enough hours surrounded by that, and the simile of a crusade becomes obvious. It can’t be helped. They’ve even made a zealot out of yours truly. Feel better?”

Shelley nods. “So that’s the trouble. You’re disillusioned.” She lifts her chest slowly off the mattress, straining to arch her back. He listens thoughtfully to the popping of joints, waiting for her to relax and face him.

“I know myself well enough to know when I’m being stubborn and impatient. I’m a broken record of idealism these days. I’d never be able to rest easy—if it weren’t for you.” That said, he leans forward as if to kiss her cheek, fakes right and buries his kiss in her neck, just above the shoulder.

“You brute!”

He smiles. “Tag, you’re it.”

“Ooh, I’ll get you for that, Thomas. I’ll get you good.”

“Excellent, maybe this time you’ll tire yourself out and we can sleep.”

A Kind of Valor

Some day, love, you will return to me.

I’ve done my research, and I know the statistics on divorce. You needn’t feel sorry, love. And I am learning from my mistakes. Not like you-know-who.

I know the man you call husband better than you may have realized. As a squad leader (brilliantly charismatic but a chauvinist to the bone), a friend (patronizing and disloyal), and a lover (they don’t call him Drill Sergeant for nothing, yes?). I don’t know whether you’re living in Sodom with him, but I have an educated guess. Where I have always been willing to rein in my first impulse in deference to a woman’s comfort, the Sergeant is no such gentleman, an expert at getting what he wants out of anybody.

An impeccable posture and so many bronze stars are apt to hide the real demeanor of such brutish, uncultured, cold-blooded mercenaries as my father and the Sergeant. I do not fault you for being taken in as I once was. One of his many talents is to generate such trust, without which he could not have had our blindly turned, meaty backs in which to bury his mountain climber’s axe in order to move up in society.

It’s important that you understand what it means for me to speak of the Sergeant this way, and that I don’t do so lightly, or out of anything as petty as jealousy.

I was twenty-three, still a greenhorn, when the Sergeant first had sex with me. I didn’t respond to his advances—I had yet to embrace bisexuality—so he chloroformed me. That got it over with painlessly, at least (but don’t be jealous). The next thing I remember is lying naked in his arms, crying, although, in fact, this was likely days or weeks later. He slapped me and asked what the Hell was wrong with me. I asked if he’d never submit to me as I had done for him, and what he said was this:

“When you’re the soldier I expect you to be.” At the time, we ranked as equals.

I did what I thought I needed to do to be in his heart. In the heat of battle, I all but took bullets for the man, who had attained a sort of worship by now from most of the men in our unit. I helped him think, and sometimes outright thought for him, and rapidly the Sergeant became known for his tactical brilliance. And still our relationship was a one-way street—with me giving him everything he asked until tears ran down my face.

I began to live in a fantasy world. The Drill Sergeant would always be by my side—he’d sooner die than leave me, and vice versa. I spent hours imagining our steady climb to the top of the ranks together: an unbeatable duo, which no one in their right mind would split. We’d win this war all by ourselves, if they asked us to. All the while nobody would guess what really lay between us.

And then one day I woke up from this dream to find the Sergeant gone, spirited away to more important duties at some far-flung command post. I broke in two, and was sent home on medical leave for my “nerves.” It was around then that I found out about Sarge’s dirty little secret, his “parting gift” to me I suppose he’d call it.

They pressed me hard for answers, even slapped me around a little, but I refused to tell them who had given me the disease. Still mired in a bizarre kind of loyalty toward the man, I vowed that his secret would never escape. When I came to my senses, it was too late to have an effect—Sarge had grown too powerful. I suppose that’s how it is with all his lovers. Was it so with you? I wouldn’t know. But I do know one thing.

Mother might have been susceptible to the virus, but my father’s genes give me resistance; I can expect to live twice as long as the Sergeant. I will have you to myself again, and next time, I promise not to waste a moment.

“11/16/2005”

“It’s been awhile. Good to hear from you.”

“Yeah. Listen, did you hear about Rob?”

“Uh. No.”

“Oh.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m afraid I am the bearer of bad news.”

“What happened?”

“There was an accident yesterday morning.”

“So he’s…”

“He’s gone.”

Our mutual acquaintance e-mails me with an article, titled “Sailor dies in SUV-truck crash.” I read it twice, and I watch the video of the newscast one, two, three times.

I don’t feel anything, except a little confused. Why should it be him? Rob had his moments, his brief but astonishing victories, but, as far back as I can remember, he mostly had the shit end of the stick. And the only light waiting at the end of his tunnel turned out to be the headlights of the oncoming trailer.

I find myself longing for the voice of my rival, relating one of those victories to the guys in all its gory detail while I burned with silent envy. We were at our best and ugliest when one or both of us were dating. We contended over women, though it’s hard now to imagine how any one girl could have been compatible with or attracted to both of us. When this did occur, people teased him over the fact that he was getting “sloppy seconds.” Later, he paid me back for it by reaching second with a girl who, I’d convinced myself after much heartache, was unattainable. Let him keep his bragging rights. If I could hear it again, I’d feel more confident that he really lived when he was alive. It’s been nearly four years now and my mind tends to distort such old trivia.

I wax spiritual. There must be some higher purpose to Rob’s being perpetually pissed-on. After such a life, he deserves the 72 virgins and all that.

My friends and I rise to the occasion. In a sudden fit of selflessness, we reopen long-dead channels of communication between long-divorced social circles. We want him to be remembered. We want his fate known to those who were once close to him, even to those who weren’t. We are curious to know who we’ll see at the wake.

People smother me in condolences, which I redirect toward the deceased and his loved ones. I’m just a messenger; I’m not even as upset over the matter as I should be.

And then, Sunday, I am waiting for my good black pants and shirt to come out of the laundry so I can finish preparations for the trip, when the travel forecast comes on. It’s going to rain at Rob’s funeral, and probably at his wake. Rain like the dickens. There is something wrong with this. Rob never let life get him down, though it seemed like he’d been born under a fuckload of bad karma. Those virgins had better treat you well, buddy.

As we finally hit the road on Monday, I can sense the dread of my companions.

Our trip is tiring but smooth, the silences more reverent than awkward. It’s the conversations in between that feel strained and full of our apprehensions. My confederates explain that wakes are not “feel-good” situations, not even in the cathartic sense. They are suffocating and chafing and miserable.

And the few available distractions—Rob’s attractive and amiable relatives—are unconscionably taboo to look at with anything but the most sincere pity and sorrow.

We are constantly catching ourselves in poetic indulgence. “Those twenty-one blanks are the most painful shots you’ll ever hear,” one of us says. I feel a twinge of guilt, remembering that I won’t be there when his shipmates bury him. I have to continue on with my family the next morning and drive twelve hours further south.

“But when they fire, at least nobody new is dead,” I insist.

“That doesn’t stop them from wounding your soul,” he replies. He’s been talking like this all day. I can’t bring myself to tell him how ridiculously Emo he sounds.

After a stop at the hotel to catch our collective breath, my friends and I make it to the funeral home. “This is it,” they announce. They have been here before—for Rob’s father. From their looks, I already know it is going to be much harder for them.

After we part ways an hour or so later, I have the next few days to reflect in relative quiet on what I have seen. The disorderly mix of naval uniforms and black suits, young faces and old, all painted with varying degrees of anguish, and forming a long human funnel leading to the center aisle, Rob’s mother, and the casket (closed—head trauma), is like nothing else I can imagine.

I make a silent prayer, one I have been thinking of since Monday, at the dinner table on Thanksgiving Day, as someone else, someone who met the qualification of being religious, says grace. I meant to verbalize my concerns but now I find I can’t bring myself to rain on their parade. The prayer goes something like this:

“Never mind the bollocks. I thank God for two things: that I have my loved ones and that I have myself. The rest is an unnecessary bonus.” If I doubt this, I need only to look back to Rob’s example. He lived happily when he had nothing else to rely on.

The Pathology of Self-Control

Murphy gets up at seven, as always. She closes her door, and tiptoes down the stairs and across the living room in her navy blue sweats—so unlike Trisha’s obnoxious pink ones—careful not to step on the tinfoil wrappers, or the empty beer can I knocked off the table. I only know she’s there because I’m not asleep this time.

Rather, I am curled around the back of Trisha, a parasite greedy for her warmth, on the foldout couch with a lousy fleece blanket that’s a good foot too short to cover us. I am trying to will myself back to sleep, but failing.

I have this deal with Murphy and with my bunkmate, Sam, who’s a terrible sleeper and very particular about sleep conditions: they keep to their rooms between 1 and 4 AM on nights when Trisha comes over, and I, in return, will keep her theatrics from reaching their ears. It was difficult at first, but never prohibitively so. The trouble is, I’m sensitive to my sleeping habits too, and one thing I can’t stand is knowing, five minutes after the deed, that my partner is already out cold and I’m alone in my half-drunken and amorous stupor. The minutes drag into hours.

Tip-toe, tip-toe, tip-toe, tip-toe, tip-toe. The door opens and closes.

I pull my girl a little closer to my waist, crushing the blood out of a bothersome half-erection as you might stub out a cigarette. In the long run, of course, this only makes it worse. “Trish,” I say in her ear, “I want you.” She tells me to fuck off, so I roll over, give it a squeeze, switch tactics and grope for the Cuervo, desperate to be unconscious.

Outside, Murphy will do a warm-up jog, some calisthenics, and her morning 5K run through downtown Troy. She’s told me she is training for a marathon by the end of college. I told her, I think that she’s in it for the wrong reason—more the fear of a thing she cannot do than the desire to make something of herself. She has a list taped to the ceiling over her bed. Whenever I see it, I get the eerie feeling I’ve read her thoughts:

• get ready for Boston or NYC marathon
• make more time for Aikido training
• should be able to converse intelligently with engineers, researchers, educators and politicians (public speaking course?)
• learn to program in at least one web-application language, one system language and some dialect of assembler
• balance community service with design with startup business with daily Tai Chi

What I haven’t told Murphy is I know the reason she throws herself at work. Each time she meets with classmates within the confines of some vaguely academic project, she is meeting her socialization quota without the risk of bringing up anything too personal. I imagine she’d agree with this assessment.

Murphy concedes there’s a lot to human interaction she hasn’t experienced. Sam and I try to explain that it is a dangerous flaw, that no one survives as an island, but this is not the same intuitive fact for her that it is for us. Relationships, as far as she can tell, are distraction sandwiched between two slices of pitiful longing.

When I finally drift off, I sleep until almost noon. I awaken to find Trisha kicking my leg, impatient for me to get up and take a shower with her. I tell her I’m still tired but she won’t hear of it. She makes lewd offers, and now it’s my turn to say “fuck off.” If there’s one thing I’m in less of a mood for than morning breath, it’s being snowballed, which I know she would do just to bug me. Eventually, I quit my bitching and somehow manage to stand up. It’s time for Ritalin and Irish coffee.

I’m sitting with Trisha, eating a runny-eggs-&-cheese on rye, the coffee on its way, when Murphy enters carrying a long black dress in a plastic bag slung over her shoulder. Without hesitation Trisha runs to her and emits all kinds of high-pitched noises, some of which sound like excited English. Apparently Murphy has been asked to the upcoming formal. More astonishingly, she has accepted.

Trisha wants to know, has she finally found the nice Catholic boy to settle down with, as her parents hoped? Well, actually he’s a Jew. A liberal Jew from Worcester. Good for her, she should date who she chooses to anyway. Date? Actually, he just didn’t want to go stag, and she needed the excuse to learn West Coast Swing. Actually, she’s not sure he’s even straight. I shake my head—so much for things changing, actually.

Trisha demands that Murphy model the dress for us, and through miraculous powers of persuasion, she gets her way. I have to admire how perfectly it fits. A wicked little thought surfaces in my mind, but I blink it away. Murphy grudgingly accepts our compliments, then scampers away to take off the “ridiculous” garment, and I turn to Trisha, who—much to my dismay—looks unabashedly frisky. She nods and says, “You thought just what I thought, didn’t you.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“Didn’t you say I’d get to pick the girl?”

“If you say one goddamn word to her, I will end it right now.”

“Baby, relax! What is your problem?”

As I pour the coffee, I begin to relate to Trisha the incident that happened freshman year, when Murphy and I were floormates in one of Rensselaer’s shitty old dorm buildings. I was hung over, weak with depression and delirious with pent-up libido, when I made the mistake of coming onto her. Her immediate response was neither affirmation nor outright rejection, it was puzzlement.

First, she said she wasn’t sure she’d read me right. She had paused to consider the words. Then she asked me, with all seriousness, why I would be asking her.

Tongue-tied, I didn’t explain. How could I bring forth the well-deserved adjective nobody had ever wasted their breath to give to Murphy—attractive? She told me that, flattered though she was by the offer, she wasn’t really into things of the kind that I was proposing. I went off to cry in a corner and play sad, whiny songs on the guitar.

Our friendship had suffered a major, but not permanent, setback. What I had said could be no less than a shock to her system, but it would die down; it would not have a lasting, humanizing effect. Since then I’ve kept the other geeks in line and off Murphy’s back, convinced that nothing will change her. She is trapped inside her world—beautiful but flat—by deep-rooted fears of immersion, union and self-yielding.

Trisha is still smiling. “You know, Davey, I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. I think you’ve misjudged your friend. I know why she rejected you.”

My neck hairs stand straight up. I shake my head. “No, you don’t.”

“She may not love the cock,” Trish says slowly, “but she and I could still hit it off nicely, if you’ll give us the time alone…” Her eyes are wild, distant.

I don’t try to explain how I know she’s wrong—she wouldn’t listen anyway—and I don’t think twice about slapping her across the face. The die is cast. Lovers like Trisha may not be a dime a dozen on campus, but neither is Murphy. Nor am I a sellout. Forced to choose, I know what my first loyalty is.

“What the hell was that?” She puts a hand to her cheek.

“I’m sick of playing games. I want you gone.”

“Games? What games! Do you realize what you’ve just thrown away?”

“Yeah. Now get the fuck out.”

“Fine. Just so you know, Dave—you hit like a little girl.”

Plates shatter on the floor. “Fucking mouth-breathers”—and with that Trisha puffs out her chest and leaves. And as I sit there, meditating on the life of easy debauchery I have indeed thrown away, Murphy comes up behind, still wearing the dress, and puts her dainty hands on my shoulders. I’m startled by the physicality of the gesture.

“She’s not coming back,” Murphy observes. I turn to face her.

“We just… couldn’t see eye-to-eye on things.”

“Would it have killed you if I’d said ‘yes’ to her?”

I lower my head. “I was hoping you didn’t hear that part.”

“I read her words. She was talking straight at me. And I recognized the look in her eye—as something that I once saw in yours.”

“Murph, you’re my roommate, my best friend. I know how Trisha’s mind works! I don’t care if you are a lesbian, I wasn’t going to let her use you to push my buttons.”

“But haven’t you already?” she says, and walks away again.

Now, as before, I don’t say anything. I listen, and in the silence I can hear my own words defeating themselves. Then I empty my mug into the sink—today there’ll be no coffee in my Irish.