University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Everyone wants to be ambassador to France

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Everyone wants to be ambassador to France

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Content HURT 1 EVERYONE WANTS TO BE AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE Bryan Hurt University of Southern California HURT 2 CONTENTS The Fourth Man 3 Vodka Party Drum Solo 18 All of The Arctic Explorers 22 The Beast of Marriage 34 The Bilingual School 38 My Other Car Drives Itself 49 The Sadness of Tycho Brahe’s Moose 67 Rose 91 Dogs 95 Some Zombies 103 Vicissitudes, CA 106 Heavens 148 The Kingdom of Norway 153 Sex: An Intercourse 164 Cervantine 171 HURT 3 THE FOURTH MAN It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care. --Pablo Picasso, on news of the first moon landing, quoted in the New York Times, July 21, 1969 #1 When the first man came back from the moon everyone in America threw him a parade. There were forty-two parades in total. All of the women wanted to have his babies. All of the men wanted to shake his hand. #2 The second man sat in the backs of red convertibles with the first man. They wore gold medals around their necks and went from parade to parade smiling and wiping confetti from their hair. #3 Four months later, when the third man stepped out of his shuttle he was lifted onto the shoulders of his colleagues. NASA rocket scientists who had never carried anything heavier than decimal points lifted him above their heads and carried him into decontamination. When he got out, Tom Wolfe wrote a book about him. He never paid for a beer again. HURT 4 #4 When the fourth man emerged from the spaceship he was greeted by no one. He stood at the top of the metal staircase and watched the NASA rocket scientists carry the third man away. He unclasped his helmet and stepped aside for the NASA janitors who were already pushing their buckets into the rocket, eager to clean up the mess that he and the third man had made while in space. PATTERNS But it was always like this for the fourth man. Even when he was a child, he finished second to the mess. The fourth man’s father worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and every year moved his family around the country so that he could build dams and prevent flooding. Every year the fourth man lived near a river that • had flooded • was flooding • was about to flood FLOODS In 1936, the fourth man’s father moved the family to Fort Worth, Texas. That year the fourth man was four and the Brazos River crested at fifty-six feet. While his father smoked cigarettes and cursed his dam, and his mother filled sandbags, the fourth man raced toy boats in the floodwater that submerged his back yard. The first boat tipped over in an eddy, but the second sailed out of the yard and into the cow pastures. Even now the HURT 5 fourth man could remember how smoothly its white sails ducked underneath the split-rail fence and receded towards the horizon and disappeared. NEW WORLD The picture on the fourth man’s Apollo Mission flight patch was of a boat sailing across the face of the moon. The boat had full white sails, dragged a trail of fire, and was modeled after Columbus’s Pinta. Though the Pinta was not the first boat to reach the New World it was widely thought to be Columbus’s favorite. OLD WORLD After his lunar module had touched down on the moon’s surface, the fourth man prepared to read his statement. He was especially proud that he’d managed to work in the words that Columbus himself had inscribed on the bows of all his ships: “Following the light of the sun we left the Old World behind.” But once the contact light flashed blue and the module settled into the dirt, the third man flipped the switch on the radio and casually uttered the words that all of the TV stations would choose to replay. “Man,” said the third man, “that might have been a small one for Neil, but it was a long one for me.” SELFLESSNESS When The U.S. entered World War II, the fourth man’s father enlisted to join the Army Air Corps. The newspapers were full of pictures of fighter pilots flying, fighting, and smiling overseas. But when the fourth man’s father went to the recruiting station he learned that at thirty-five he was already too old to become a fighter pilot. He had to join HURT 6 the infantry instead. The fourth man’s father spent the next five years in Europe, boots in the dirt, fighting the war. HINDSIGHT Was this the reason why the fourth man had become a pilot? Because his father could not? People sometimes asked him this. When they did the fourth man would laugh and tell them that there was nothing competitive about his relationship with his father. He’d say that he’d always loved airplanes and anything to do with flying. Even as a child he’d loved Buck Rogers, Twelve O’Clock High, bald eagles, and kites. He hadn’t become a pilot, he’d say. He’d been a pilot all his life. SACRIFICE On the day the fourth man’s father drove away to basic training, the fourth man stood at the top of the driveway and waved after his father’s Chevy Cruiser. A steady wind pushed the smell of grass across the plains and the fourth man continued waving long after the black car’s taillights were out of sight. SACRIFICE For five years there was no Little League, no marching band, no touch football, no family vacations to Holiday Beach. But it wasn’t just like this for the fourth man; everyone else’s father was also fighting the war. HURT 7 WHAT WE LEARNED During the war the fourth man’s mother opened a grocery store. Within a year she’d expanded from one store to two. By the end of the war she owned four grocery stores and an ice cream shop. When the fourth man’s father came home he could have quit his job and worked for her. HARD WORK Is a quality that’s not emphasized enough in public schools. For example, in elementary and high school the fourth man’s favorite subject had always been math. He liked math because it was relatively straightforward; if you knew the equations you could solve the problems. Still his grades were never any better than B’s and C’s. It wasn’t until he went to college and joined the NROTC that he learned that if he worked harder he could do better. It was then that he had four a.m. wake up calls, seven mile runs, push ups, sit ups, and the drill sergeant’s hot breath in his face. He could still recall the warm swell of pride he felt when he earned his first A in calculus, when he ran his first six minute mile, when the drill sergeant told him that he’d graduated from maggot to scum. #5 They say that the fifth man was the unlucky one because he never got to actually set foot on the moon. But he was the one who said, “Houston we’ve had a problem.” After that, Tom Hanks played him in the movie of his life. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two. HURT 8 THE RUSSIANS Before Gagarin, the Russians launched fifty-seven dogs into space. The first and most famous dog to achieve full orbit was Laika who died seven hours into the mission from stress and overheating. Next, though less well-known, were Belka and Strelka, who went up together, spent a full day in orbit, and returned to Earth alive. What’s not often mentioned is that Belka and Strelka didn’t go up alone. They were accompanied by one gray rabbit, two white rats, and forty-two mice all of whom also returned to Earth alive. RECOGNITION Imagine throwing a dart and hitting a perfect bull’s-eye. Now imagine that the dart weighs five tons and the bull’s-eye is sixty miles away. Essentially that’s what the fourth man had been asked to do. His job was to pilot the lunar module off the surface of the moon and reconnect it with the mothership that was orbiting above, traveling at an average land speed of 3,500 MPH. It was a once-in-a-lifetime shot and is made no less impressive by the fact that the fourth man had spent six years practicing for it. Imagine what it takes to spend six years preparing for just one perfect moment. #6 Was played by Kevin Bacon in the fifth man’s movie. After his NASA career, the sixth man was elected to Congress by a landslide. When he died they named a middle school after him in Colorado. He has a big statue in Washington D.C. HURT 9 DAMS One common misconception about the fourth man’s father is that he only built dams. But if you go out to Possum Kingdom or Somerville or any of the other dozen new lakes and recreation areas that have sprung up along the Brazos River since the 1940s you can see for yourself that dams are only half the father’s story. He built reservoirs. THINGS THAT LAST After the war, the fourth man’s father traveled to places like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee to build new dams. He’d be gone for months at a time, and, for a long time, the fourth man thought that his father was ignoring him. But later, as an adult, he realized that he could drive to almost any reservoir in the four state area, sit in the shadow of its dam, look up at the two hundred vertical feet of concrete, and know that his father had had a hand in building it. In another one or two hundred years his father’s dams would still be there. How many other sons could claim a legacy like that? WHAT WE LEARNED In terms of pure scientific discovery, some people say that we didn’t learn enough to justify the tremendous costs of multiple return trips to the moon. But these are the kinds of people who don’t understand what Sir Edmund Hillary meant when he said, “Because it’s there.” What we learned is that we were able to put twelve Americans on the moon and send more than double that number into lunar orbit. There’s no other nation in history that has done anything close. Columbus only sailed to the New World four times. Magellan only circumnavigated the globe once. HURT 10 RECOGNITION “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation” is what the president said after the first and second man came back from the moon. When the fifth and sixth man returned he hosted a dinner for them, and spoke of their “special qualities” and “extraordinary concert of skills.” What would the president have said about the fourth man if the two had ever met? This is something that the fourth man would also like to know. PRIDE Besides walking on the moon, the fourth man’s next proudest moment was earning his first pair of Naval aviator wings. In 1955, he’d spent a year in Beeville practicing takeoffs and landings, takeoffs and landings, until the time came for the graduation ceremony in June. By then his father was in Tennessee, on the Tennessee River, building what would become the Boone Dam. The fourth man could still remember how hot he’d been in his Navy whites, the shadeless bleachers with the one empty seat that he’d reserved for his father, the way his mother’s hands shook when she pinned the bronze wings to his chest. REGRETS The fourth man believed in living a life without them. There’s no point dwelling on the past when what really matters is always what’s happening next. Still if he could go back HURT 11 and change one thing, he’d have liked it if his father had been alive to see him walk on the moon. POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE When Vincent Van Gogh painted “Starry Night,” no one said that it was one of the best painting ever painted. It took people years to recognize and appreciate the genius of what he’d done. The same is true for many of history’s famous people. The New York Times misspelled Herman Melville’s name in his obituary. It took two hundred years for Copernicus’s theory to be confirmed. So was the fourth man worried that he wasn’t immediately as well known as some of the other men who’d walked on the moon? He’d prefer to let history be the judge of who is remembered and who is not. #7 The seventh man to fly to the moon was also the second man to have flown in space after Gagarin. Even before he planted the American flag in lunar soil, everyone already knew who he was. #8 The eighth man is the astronaut who NASA wishes everyone would forget. He was the first man to throw a javelin on the moon and the only astronaut to state publically and often his belief in extraterrestrials. After NASA, the eighth man founded the Institute of Noetic Studies, which, according to its literature, “conducts and supports research into HURT 12 areas that more mainstream scientists do not entertain.” Think aliens; think remote healing; think ESP. PRESENCE Some astronauts say that they felt God’s presence on the moon, but it wasn’t quite like that for the fourth man. When he floated down to the surface and bounded from crater to desolate crater, he too felt as if someone else was there bounding along with him, though it wasn’t God. How to explain it except to say that there’s a special bond that connects father and son? REMEMBER To say that the fourth man’s father spent much of his time away from his family building dams is not to suggest that he was totally absent. Some of the fourth man’s best memories are the ones of his father coming home. HOMECOMING In 1961, the fourth man was working on ejection seats in Jacksonville, Florida. There was an electrical malfunction that year which caused some of the seats to misfire. The seats wouldn’t eject or, when they did, their parachutes wouldn’t deploy. Good pilots died. This was also the year that the fourth man’s father suffered a massive heart attack while on a walk around the reservoir at Possum Kingdom. Plunging is how the fourth man would later describe the sensation of suddenly returning home. He didn’t fly home, and HURT 13 he didn’t hurry home. From the moment after he hung up the phone with his mother, he plunged. HOMECOMING On their return trip from the moon, as their capsule plunged through the miles of upper atmosphere, the third man looked out the window, at the sky lighting up yellow and orange with flames around them, and tried to describe the feeling of endless descent. He said he’d never felt anything like it. Not so for the fourth man. He said that he’d felt it once before. FLOODS A flood is usually taken to mean a great flowing or overflowing of water, but it can also be used to express an outpouring of emotion, as in: a flood of tears. MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION What surprised the fourth man most about the moon was its complete barrenness. Sure he’d known from the experience of other astronauts that the surface of the moon was a wasteland. “Magnificent desolation,” is how the second man described it. Others talked about the moon’s essential grayness, its sand like ash. Still how to comprehend such an empty landscape? As the fourth man walked across the moon’s battered surface, the Earth glowed blue like an aquarium in the distance. HURT 14 NEVER THE SAME They say once you travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere you’ve been essentially changed. Gamma rays begin to bombard you at 328,000 feet. Bones and muscles lose density in the vacuum. Weightlessness often causes space-sickness with nausea and vomiting. When Gagarin returned from his first space flight, he complained of black dots dancing around the edge of his vision. He was stricken with headaches. Though he’d been a lifelong atheist, he had his daughter baptized almost as soon as he stepped off the plane. #9 The ninth man smuggled more than three hundred commemorative stamps with him to the surface of the moon. When he returned he sold them to a German stamp dealer for a lot of money, which he used to establish a trust fund for the families of Apollo astronauts. Though NASA let him keep the money, they made sure that he never flew a space mission again. #10 Had a minor heart attack on the moon. When he came back, he founded the High Flight Ministries and dedicated the rest of his life to finding Noah’s Ark. After several unsuccessful expeditions to Mount Ararat, he retired to Colorado Springs where he suffered his third major heart attack. He was the first man who walked on the moon to die. HURT 15 #11 The eleventh man brought a framed picture of his family with him to the moon and left it on the surface under the American flag. They say that with a strong enough telescope you can still find the picture. You can still see the footprints of all the men who walked on the moon. THINGS THAT LAST When the fourth man came back from the moon he enrolled himself in painting classes. At first he couldn’t say why he was taking them except that he’d always liked beautiful things. His favorite airplanes to fly were always the sleekest and most beautiful. His favorite dam that his father built was the one with buttresses. He liked that while painting he could lay one color on top of another and increase the beauty of both. It was like mathematics, the way you can add two numbers to create a greater sum. The first painting he made that he ever thought successful was called “Hopes And Dreams” and showed a spaceship blasting off. At first the picture didn’t capture the grandeur of the actual event, so he painted a rainbow in the sky behind it. What the fourth man liked best about painting is that you could solve problems with colors. You could record and enlarge. #12 The twelfth man was the final man to walk on the moon. By then the national mood had changed. Even the fourth man didn’t watch it on television. He’d been up to the space station to do experiments with spiders, he’d trained with the Russians in Space City, he’d HURT 16 been made NASA’s chief astronaut, and he was thinking of retiring so that he could paint full time. That night more people watched reruns of Hawaii Five-O. CELEBRATION The fourth man’s next successful painting was of two astronauts leaping off the surface of the moon, their hands meeting in high fives. The Earth is high in the sky above them and in the background there’s a big billowing American flag. This never happened, of course; the moon missions were dangerous and the mood much too serious. But it’s what should have happened, again and again. INSPIRATION One astronaut floating in space above another who’s lying in repose on the surface of the moon. Both astronauts have their fingers extended towards each other in a imitation of Michelangelo’s famous scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one where God gives Adam life. TRUTH It’s true that the fourth man took his father’s remains with him to the moon. The final thing he did before he returning to the lunar module was scatter his father’s ashes. He tossed the ashes and watched them mix with moon dust. In this sense, you could say that his father really was with him on the moon. You could also say that his father is still up there, that he’s permanently 286,000 miles away. HURT 17 REMEMBRANCE A more somber painting than most of the others: a ghostly astronaut standing on the moon’s surface. The astronaut’s legs are transparent and fade until they become indistinguishable from the surface of the moon itself. SEE YOU AGAIN By the time the fourth man arrived at the Emergency Room his father had passed away. The fourth man was told that his father held on longer than anyone had expected, that he insisted on seeing his son before saying his final goodbye. But this was just like the fourth man’s father. He always insisted on saying a proper goodbye to everyone, because, he said, a proper goodbye always implied its corollary. Whenever the fourth man stood at the top of the driveway and waved goodbye to his father, his father would lean out the window of his Cruiser, honk the horn, and yell, “I’ll see you again.” SELF-PORTRAIT There are two astronauts on the moon tossing a football. One of the astronauts is the father and the other, obviously, is the son. In the picture, the son is holding the football and wants to toss it to the father who’s running away from him, sprinting towards a crater. If you look closely, through the son’s visor, you’ll see that his mouth’s open and that he’s shouting something. If you could hear him, you’d hear that he’s shouting: “Turn around. Look at me. I’m here. I’m here.” HURT 18 VODKA PARTY DRUM SOLO When Mr. Holiday broke into our room to break up the party, the other Brian jumped out the window. Five stories down late-model Skodas, Peugeots, and Citröens pulled into and out of the parking lot. Brian’s fingers clung to the sill. I could see them from where I sat on my bed. The twins, Adam and Aaron, dove into the closet. All of the girls hid in the bathroom. They poured vodka down the toilet and flushed. This was Prague, 1998, and my high school orchestra’s tour of Eastern Europe was ending the same way it’d begun: in Prague, in a Soviet-era tenement building turned hostel, where American teenagers in every room were drinking gallons of vodka. We were the Medina “Battling Bees”—bees on account of our town’s most famous citizen, the revolutionary beekeeper Amos Root—and for two weeks we’d been touring the European countryside, playing concerts in elementary schools and concert halls in Budapest, Bratislava, and Brno. In Brno we’d recorded a CD that would be sold for years afterwards at the local Borders in Fairlawn, OH, where, if you wanted, you could go to one of the listening stations and hear me botching the same drum solo again and again. For most of those two weeks I’d been staring out of windows—bus windows, boat windows, car windows, hostel windows—feeling bad for myself, an activity for which being fifteen and in the post-Soviet Czech/Hungarian/Slovakian landscape was particularly well-suited. Outside of every window were gray skies, gray buildings, gray cows grazing in wet fields, telephone poles connecting no one. Every window was spit upon by rain. I was feeling sorry for myself because the girl I loved, a violin player, HURT 19 didn’t love me back. She was in love with one of the twins, who was in love with someone else. Adding to my Young Werther-like sorrow was also the fact that the orchestra’s good drummer, Pete, had skipped out. He was back home, in Medina, and I was forced into being the orchestra’s lead drummer, a role for which I was not suited and did not want. It wasn’t that I was a bad drummer. I had plenty of talent but none of the will. Pete had both. He wanted to be a great drummer. Not only did he play in every orchestra, honor band, and jazz combo that the high school offered, but he practiced for hours each day after school. Each day when I got home from school I ate Chips Ahoy! and watched Total Request Live. During the weeks leading up to the tour, Mr. Holiday seemed to become more resigned to his fate than determined to do anything to change it. The orchestra was going to tour Eastern Europe without its first-rate drummer. There was nothing he could do. We barely practiced the piece that I was supposed to solo, some old- timey, diluted, Americana-style jazz song that’d been adapted from Porgy & Bess. When we did practice the song, Mr. Holiday rushed everyone through it. He’d beat his wand against the podium. He’d glare at me while I fumbled behind the drums. Even when we weren’t practicing, I’d catch him sometimes staring at me. He’d sigh a depressive’s sigh. The week before we left on tour he stopped trimming his beard. One of the main reasons why I was never the world’s best drummer is that I followed when I should have led. I preferred playing the more atmospheric percussion instruments—the timpani, the bass drum, and once, memorably, the anvil—instruments whose musical presence was felt more than heard. A good drummer is supposed to be super-confident. You set the beat and charge ahead. Me, I always felt exposed behind the HURT 20 kit, as if the violin player and everyone else in the orchestra was looking at me, which, in fact, they were. What I recall most, when it came time for me to perform my solo in the Brno concert hall for the orchestra’s CD, is the fist I felt in my chest. I spazzed out, hit a few cymbals, hit a few drums. Mr. Holiday stopped me and told me to do it again. I did it again but worse. When the CD eventually went on sale, my parents bought a copy, though I don’t think they ever listened to it. They are, mercifully, not the kind of people who are often moved by the urge to listen to a high school orchestra’s rendition of a John Phillips Sousa march. I, on the other hand, listened to the CD all the time, though I never had the courage to listen to it at home. I’d slip away to Borders, put on the big headphones, skip past all of my good bass drum and timpani work, and listen to my drum solo. That same damn drum solo, over and over, again and again. A few years ago I was back in Ohio, visiting for the holidays, and my parents and I drove past the strip mall where that Borders had been. Before the whole company had imploded, when it was still hoping that it could downsize to survive, our Borders had been one of the first to go. The windows were dark but inside you could see all of the empty bookshelves, the empty bins. I was sad, of course, because like a lot of people who’d grown up in a certain time, in a certain suburban place, who were not immediately talented at music or sport, I’d spent a lot of time there. Identity, I guess, is what you call it when you build up a relationship between the idea of yourself and a place. So the idea of a place that no longer sold Bradbury or Vonnegut or Dungeons & Dragons manuals? A place that no longer sold my drum solo? Sometimes I think back to Prague in 1998, to that moment when Mr. Holiday walked into our room, while the girls were flushing vodka, while the twins were in the HURT 21 closet, while Brian was hanging out the window, while I was sitting on my bunk, drunk and stunned, and wonder what the scene looked like to him. After all he’d been a teenager once. You could see the evidence of it, the acne scars on his cheeks. He never told the school, our parents, or anyone else about the party. He never spoke to any of us. When he saw Brian jump out the window, he straightened his shoulders, walked across the room, reached out, and pulled him back in. Then he left. For awhile after that it didn’t matter about my drum solo, or about the girl who didn’t love me, because there we all were drunk and young in a hotel room in Prague, and there was still vodka, unflushed somehow, left to drink. That night we drank and drank and continued acting stupidly. It was one of the last nights we’d have like that, a night before the world around us really would go out the window, the world before the fall. HURT 22 ALL OF THE ARCTIC EXPLORERS PYTHEAS First of all Pytheas, Pytheas of Greece. He was everything that you’d expect from an ancient Greek person. Toga laurel wreath, all of that. Everywhere he went he discovered things. He discovered the Baltic. He discovered amber. He discovered the British Isles and everyone living there. People who painted their faces blue and who traded in tin and who had not yet discovered themselves. When his boat made landfall, Pytheas, the British people said, discovered them. And then, when he left the British Isles, sailing north, he continued discovering things. The midnight sun, for example. Pancake ice. The relationship between the moon and the tides. He discovered Thule. Thule, he said, was the paradise at the top of the world. The people there lived on millet. The land had the consistency of jellyfish. “Neither land, properly speaking, nor air nor sea,” he said, “but a mixture of these things like a marine lung.” Marine lungs being what they called jellyfish back then. HURT 23 Today, of course, we know there is no Thule. Thule might have been Iceland, Greenland, or the Faroe Islands. Who knows, really, what it might have been. THE IRISH Next up were the Irish. Irish monks. Significant because the inhabitants of the British Isles are the most prodigious of all the arctic explorers. The next most being North Americans. The next most after them being the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians. The Irish went to Iceland. Got on a boat and followed a flock of geese. FLOKI OF THE RAVENS Also went to Iceland because of birds. His sobriquet—of the ravens—because of his having sailed with. Three ravens that he released when his boat went out past the Outer Hebrides. The first of which circled the boat and, not finding land, landed again on the mast. Also, the second. The third raven flew northwest and Floki followed. They arrived, eventually, at Iceland. Which he called Snowland because of the snow. HURT 24 He spent one bad winter there. Bad because he ate the ravens, his pets. Also bad because of the monks. Monks and Norsemen being mortal enemies. There was lots of killing between them. Mostly killing by Floki but also, too, killing by the monks who were not entirely pacifists. Which is why, today, we don’t know much about either having lived on Iceland. There’s nothing left of Floki and little of the monks except for some Irish place names. Toponyms for places like the island of Papey, after what the monks called themselves, the Papar. The island where puffins go to mate. INGOLF THE ICELANDER For a long time that’s how it went. People went to Iceland. People died. For example, in addition to the monks, Floki’s daughter, who one day while riding a horse, fell off and into a creek, and drowned. And so another reason why Floki’s winter was a bad one. But then there was Ingolf. Ingolf the Norseman who, because of having raped and pillaged in Norway, was fleeing the Norwegian king. The king chasing Ingolf. Ingolf chasing a door. HURT 25 Because that’s what Norsemen did back then. When they got into trouble they’d toss a door into the ocean and follow it. The Norse gods would guide the door to safety. Their having a favorable disposition towards doors. The gods took Ingolf’s door to Iceland and so with it Ingolf. But because of Iceland’s being Iceland it wasn’t such a safe place. Because of, among other things, the ice. And everything that the ice signifies. Such as starvation. Such as loneliness. Such as eternal punishment of the soul. The ice, according to Dante, signifying the ninth and deepest layer of hell, its being furthest away from God’s warmth. But where else could Ingolf, not a Christian anyway, go to? Behind him was the king of Norway. And plus all of the angry Norwegians. So on Iceland, on the southwest shore, on the ice, Ingolf took his boat apart and with boat parts (minus one door) built a hut. And over time more huts. Because of the princess who Ingolf stole from the king of Norway, the king’s daughter, Ingolf’s wife, who bore his children. The children needing huts. And then huts for the children’s children. And so on. And so the founding of Reykjavik. The Cove of Smoke. HURT 26 OTHER ARCTICS (LITERAL) The arctic where the devil lives, for example, according to Isaiah, in a house of fire on top of a mountain of ice. The arctic with the dragon from which all evil comes. Whose smoke it was that Ezekiel saw in his vision of God. The smoke, Ezekiel said, that was coming from the north from out of the dragon’s nose and mouth. The arctic where the Wisu live. That tribe of people who came, sometimes, down to Bulgaria and killed the Bulgarians’ crops. Their very presence, it’s said, having been enough to turn water to ice. And so the arctic about which I’m primarily speaking. The inhospitable arctic. The encroaching arctic. OTHER ARCTICS (FIGURATIVE) The enticing arctic. The arctic, for example, towards which the Bulgarians would spend three months traveling in order to trade with the Wisu, the very same people who’d have, some months earlier, come down and wreaked havoc on their crops. When the Bulgarians arrived they’d leave their dogcarts in the arctic, on the border, overnight, and then return in the morning to find that, sometimes, the Wisu had left them goods to exchange. Dragons’ teeth, for example. Seal skins. HURT 27 Whale fat packed in straw. Other times, though, they’d find that the Wisu had killed their dogs and left them nothing. They took it as a sign of displeasure, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The Bulgarians, obviously, not being the best at figuring out signs. But it was a sign, they agreed, certainly, of something. Dogs’ blood being so visible for so many miles out on the ice. MORE EXPLORERS Everyone you’d expect, but also others you might not. Arabs, for example. Such as the writer Shams ad-did Abû Abdallâh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi. And the geographer, Zakariya al-Qazwini, who was Persian, not Arab. But still. What struck both of them about the arctic, most of all, was the cold. And the emptiness. The writer, ad-Dimashqi, said that it was emptiness like— AND COLD Like a thousand bee stings. Like a lion’s roar. Cold, ad-Dimashqi said, just as others have said both before and after him, that was inversely proportionate to the heat put out by the fires of hell. HURT 28 But in the arctic, for the people who live there, hell and fires are not such easy ideas to understand. The natives thinking that a hot eternity doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. Because what’s so bad about a fire that never goes out? MISSIONARIES Not that this has ever stopped anyone, missionaries in particular, from going north and trying to teach them differently. For example, and especially, Isaac O. Stringer, the Canadian Bishop who wanted to teach the arctic Inuits about hot hell and Jesus Christ. He who became better known as the Bishop who ate his boots because of one day, after trying and failing to convert the Inuits to Anglicanism, his walking home and being caught in a surprise snowstorm. Snow coming down like surprise! Not that it was a surprise, not really, not to the Inuits who actually lived there, because in the arctic, in reality, snowing being what it does. Then, of course, there was the Bishop’s getting lost. The food situation. His having run out. From the Bishop’s journal, October twenty-first: Breakfast of sealskin boots, soles and tops broiled and toasted. Soles better than tops. HURT 29 BOOT-EATERS In the historical sense, boots are a popular source of food for people who have nothing else. For men, in particular. For sad men most of all. The saddest boot-eater probably being John Franklin. Not that it’s a contest. Not that anyone’s keeping count. Franklin who was better known as Sir John Franklin of the Queen’s Royal Navy, his having been knighted for surviving a bad winter up in the arctic. Sir Boot-Eater to those who knew (everyone) what he’d done. On arctic expeditions food is always the first thing to run out. The second is common decency. The third is the rule of law. So Franklin, in the arctic, lost on the ice, cooked his boots. He wrote a letter to his wife, indecent because of the things he said they’d do together when he returned to London, the types of food they’d eat in bed. Then he killed a guy, a member of his own expedition, whom he suspected of hoarding food. The sound of the killing attracted polar bears, which Franklin also shot with his rifle. The polar bear meat, in addition to boot leather, being what kept him alive for so many months. Not that it mattered in the end: his boot-eating, being rescued, or anything else. Because by the time Franklin returned home, his wife, Sweet Jane, had already left him. She’d run away to Tasmania with a scientist, Franklin’s friend. The scientist, she said, was the only man who could make her swoon. HURT 30 Then Franklin went on another arctic expedition, this time looking for the Northwest Passage. The expedition that everyone calls ill-fated. The way all of its people mysteriously disappeared. RESCUE MISSIONS Usually a bad idea but sometimes not. For a long time in Europe and North America, when an expedition disappeared, it was de rigeuer to send out a second. And then, when the second disappeared, to send out a third. For a while, in fact, the arctic was crowded with expeditions getting lost looking for lost expeditions, rescuers rescuing rescuers. And sometimes one rescuer, who was cooking his boots, writing a letter to his love, would hear a gunshot or smell smoke and find another rescuer, also cooking his boots, also writing a letter, just a mile or two away, through the fog and across the ice. What happened to Fridtjof Nansen, for example. Nansen the Norwegian who was trying to reach the North Pole first by boat and then by dogsled, his boat having been crushed by the ice. Nansen who got caught out on the ice by the winter. Who shot his dogs for food. Who built a kayak and tried to paddle back home. But then the walrus attack. The walrus attacking Nansen’s kayak. HURT 31 Nansen who shot the walrus and ate it and, while repairing his kayak, heard dog barks and voices in the distance. And then the appearance of Frederick Jackson. Jackson who’d been sent to look for Nansen. Who’d also gotten lost and had been wandering around the arctic all winter on the ice. JACKSON: I’m glad to see you. NANSEN: Thank you, I also. JACKSON: Have you seen a ship here? NANSEN: No, my ship is not here. JACKSON: Aren’t you Nansen? NANSEN: Yes, I am. JACKSON: By Jove, I’m glad to see you. REASONS FOR GOING Financial reasons, mostly. The Northwest Passage. The North Pole. But also, of course, fame and posterity. The desire to be known. FAILURES After Nansen’s attempt, there was Andrée’s. HURT 32 Andrée the Swede with the hydrogen balloon. The balloon that was ninety-seven feet tall, weighed a ton and a half, and was assembled in Paris. That was made of gray and brown varnished silk. The idea was to fly the balloon to the pole, land and take pictures. To go above the ice, not over or across it. The ice’s shifting, its impermanence, its very iciness being the thing that kills. But when they found him, many years later, frozen and buried in the ice on White Island, his head separated from the body and his bones picked over, it was a clear reminder that ice isn’t the only thing. Polar bears kill. Exposure kills. So does reckless optimism. Among Andrée’s things were a black three-piece suit and a top hat. And in his journal was his plan, upon reaching the pole, to continue flying the balloon to San Francisco, which he estimated to be the closest major city. When he landed he’d put on the suit and walk into the heart of it. The people would greet him with a parade. PARADES And so I think the main reason for going. Not for literal parades, per se, though also, kind of for literal parades (because, you know, who doesn’t want a parade), but for the recognition of having gone HURT 33 somewhere. Parades being thrown to celebrate the end of an absence. Their being a way of saying welcome back. And so the reason why I’m leaving Los Angeles. Why I’m going to Spitsbergen and then to the arctic. So when I return you can say I’ve missed you. By Jove, you can say, it’s good to see you. Until next time we’re angry at each other and the arctic starts pulling. When we’re feeling taken-for-granted and overfamiliar and sexually deprived. That wild white loneliness. Our going north into it being a reminder of what we have here together. That necessary arctic. The arctic that precipitates tickertape and the thawing of our hearts. HURT 34 THE BEAST OF MARRIAGE Thomas Day was rich but very ugly. He couldn’t dance. “Who will marry me?” said Thomas Day. He thrust his hands into his pocket and asked his friend Richard. Richard took out his snuff box, lit a pipe. “My sister will marry you,” said Richard. But Richard’s sister wouldn’t marry him. Not even for all of his money, she said. Or all of the money in England, she said. He was that ugly. He was that bad at dance. “What about Anna Seward?” said Thomas Day. But Anna Seward heard about this and married someone else. Thomas Day went to the orphanage and adopted two girls. The girls had names but he didn’t like them. “From now on you will be Lucretia,” he said. “Sabrina,” he said. The girls were eleven and twelve years old. Thomas Day promised to make at least one of them into his perfect wife. He hired a boat and they all sailed to France. But in France nobody had a good time. Thomas Day, it turned out, didn’t like French people. He didn’t like French roads. In a letter to Richard: “The women prefer their lapdogs to their children; the roads are full of holes.” The girls got smallpox. They got fevers. They got mucous and pustules. Their crying kept him up all night. When they recovered they went on another boat ride, this time just for pleasure. The boat flipped over in the Rhône. Eight months it went on like this. Thomas Day dueled a French person. Thomas Day dueled a French person. Thomas Day dueled a French person. Thomas Day hated dueling as much as he hated French people. But in France what could he do? Whenever HURT 35 he went to the coffeehouse or the market there was always another French person insulting him in French. The girls went to all the duels: duels by the river, duels in the field, duels at dusk. They’d sit on the ground and pull up grass. And what about the girls? Turned out that Lucretia wasn’t perfect wife material. “Perfectly stupid,” Thomas Day wrote to Richard. When Thomas Day came back to England he apprenticed her to a milliner in Ludgate Hill. Later she married a linen draper. Everyone agrees that she lived a very happy life. Thomas Day and Sabrina moved to Lichfield. Thomas Day rented a big house in the country. He invited Richard over; invited lots of other people as well. There were hors d’oeuvres and a string quartet. But when the people wanted to dance Thomas Day wouldn’t let them. He took the bow from the violinist. No one was allowed to dance. Everyone met Sabrina. They all agreed that she had long eyelashes for a thirteen year old and fine auburn hair that hung in ringlets on her neck. “I will teach her to become the perfect wife,” said Thomas Day. “Bravo,” said Richard. Then there was the toast. But Sabrina wasn’t the perfect wife. She failed all of the tests. The pistol test, for example, where Thomas Day fired pistols at the girl and told her not to move. The hot wax test, which was just like the pistol test but, instead of shooting pistols, dripping hot wax. Richard asked Thomas Day why he was shooting guns at the girl. “Stoicism,” said Thomas Day. “My wife should be as fearless as the Roman heroines; she should be as intrepid as Spartan wives.” “Are you firing real bullets?” asked Richard. They looked at the girl, trembling and crying on the ground. HURT 36 Then Thomas Day fell in love with another girl. She wasn’t a girl, technically, because she was the same age as Thomas Day. Her name was Honora Sneyd and she combined everything Thomas Day wanted in a woman. Fortitude of spirit, literary and scientific tastes, a disinterested desire to please. Thomas Day offered her his noble hand. She told Thomas Day that she’d think about it. Really, she’d think about it. Even though he was ugly. Even though he couldn’t dance. Meanwhile, Thomas Day sent Sabrina to boarding school in Warwickshire. She was very happy there. Very happy. She was the happiest girl to have ever been sent away to boarding school. Her letters to Thomas Day went like this: “I’m so happy. Happy. Happy. Happy. Happy.” Honora Sneyd broke Thomas Day’s heart. All women eventually broke Thomas Day’s heart. Even his mother. She broke his heart by dying. He was one year old. Honora Sneyd broke Thomas Day’s heart because she could not love him. She tried, she said. Her heart, she said, could not be schooled into softer sentiments in his favor. Thomas Day made a list of things that could not be schooled. The list went: 1. Hearts. 2. Girls. Honora Sneyd broke Thomas Day’s heart two more times. The second time when she married Richard. The third when she died. There were other girls who broke his heart. Elizabeth Sneyd, for example, who was Honora’s sister. She broke his heart by playing with it. Told Thomas Day that she could love him for his money, but only if he learned how to dance. But when he returned from Bath she changed her mind. She liked him better the other way. Before he could waltz, she said. Before he could dance minuets. HURT 37 Later Thomas Day moved to London. He lived alone and wrote a poem about slavery and a book for children. Both were met by great success. He wrote letters to Sabrina at boarding school and, eventually, he wrote letters to Richard. Sabrina forgave him. He forgave Richard. In the letters everyone felt sorry about everything that had happened. At least they said they did. And there were other things besides the girls. Like Thomas Day’s love for horses. He liked to talk about the gratitude, generosity, and sensibility of horses. Whenever he met a disobedient or unruly horse he blamed its behavior on the mistreatment it must have suffered at the hands of its owner. He died trying to break a new horse. He was never a very good horseman, and the horse threw him off its saddle and stepped on his head. At the funeral everyone agreed that it was just like him to try to break a horse without a whip or a horsebreaker. “A victim of his own uncommon systems,” said Anna Seward. Foolish, said everyone else, that he would shoot his guns at girls but that he tried breaking a horse with kindness instead. HURT 38 THE BILINGUAL SCHOOL So we sent our kids to the bilingual school. It was Mrs. Eagle’s idea. She’d found it on her morning walk. Turned down Milwood Avenue instead of cutting across Crescent Court, looked up from her steaming cup of Starbuck’s, and there it was, a school inside a tall blue fence. On the fence were bright and childish paintings of charming things: airplanes, flowers, tigers. L’école bilingue, said the sign above the doorway, English and French. All of this was written in a fancy white script. Inside the fence she heard the happy sounds of children. She pressed her face to a knothole and saw children playing hopscotch. Children swinging the tetherball. Children clutching leather-strapped books and nodding smartly to each other. All of them in perfect black berets. Across the street was the public school, the middle school where we would have to send our children when they got to be that age. Outside, there were children lazing on the steps. Children smoking cigarettes. Children practically fornicating with other children. At home Mrs. Eagle called the rest of us. A meeting for concerned parents, she said. Mothers who are concerned about the education of their children. We ate madeline cookies at the meeting. Dipped them in tea and talked about how exciting it would be for our children to learn French. French is the language of love, said Mrs. Davis. HURT 39 But not amorous love, I hope, said Mrs. Cavendish, who happened to be our host. She moved around the living room, pouring more tea. No, said Mrs. Eagle. Italian is the language of amorous love. Spanish is the language of forbidden love. German is the language of modern love. English is the language of self love. French is the language of brotherly love. We all agreed that brotherly love was the best. Then Mrs. Spatz took out a picture book and we looked at pictures of French couples carrying umbrellas. French couples eating croissants. French couples riding tandem bicycles along the green banks of the Seine. Mrs. Spatz began humming Aux Champs Elyées. At first our kids didn’t want to go to the bilingual school. They wanted to know what was wrong with their current school. What was wrong with primary-language-only education? We explained that their current school was failing them. Primary-language-only education was making them vulgar and limited in expression. Mrs. Cavendish had shown us a drawing her daughter had made in art class. It looked like an ill-formed dog hopping over a fence. A nice dog, said Mrs. Eagle. It’s supposed to be a horse, said Mrs. Cavendish. We told our children that at the bilingual school they would learn to draw horses that looked like horses. But then they complained about the dress code. We don’t like berets, they said. They’re too hot in the summer, they said, and don’t cover your ears in the winter. HURT 40 We told them they should consider themselves lucky to wear berets. We showed them pictures of artists, intellectuals, and Che Guevara. Che Guevara is un-American, they said. French is un-American, they said. We admit they almost had us for a moment. How had that picture of Che Guevara gotten in there? We asked Mrs. Spatz, who was in charge of assembling the pictures. I think he’s cute, she said. We agreed that Che Guevara was cute. We liked his eyes and his cheekbones. The rakish way he pursed his lips. Che Guevara is cute, we told our children. There’s nothing more American than being cute. The children weren’t the only ones to object. Our husbands complained as well. They didn’t understand why we should send our children to a bilingual school. Didn’t regular schools still teach French? We explained that bilingual schools didn’t just teach the language. They taught culture, music, food, art. Public schools can’t teach you to listen to Debussy, we said. Public schools can’t teach you to appreciate soft cheese. Over breakfast our husbands grumbled and looked at the brochures. There were turtle-necked children smiling happily on the covers. The Eiffel Tower towering in the background. The costs, our husbands said. The social stigma, they said. HURT 41 They pointed out that the bilingual school didn’t even have a football team. How would our children learn to interact with their peers? We cleared their breakfast plates and rinsed them in our sinks. We watched oily swells of bacon fat pool and cloud like our dreams. What to do? we asked ourselves. We gazed at pictures of Che Guevara. What would Che Guevara do? Withhold sex, said Mrs. Eagle. We were sipping Frappuccinos. We sat beneath an umbrella and shielded our eyes from the sun. Mrs. Eagle explained that we would withhold sex until our husbands came to see our point of view. Mrs. Davis fanned herself with a napkin. How long? she asked. Until our request can no longer be denied, said Mrs. Eagle. How long will that be? asked Mrs. Davis. About a week, said Mrs. Eagle. Mrs. Cavendish plunged her green straw into a plastic cup. What if we’re already withholding sex? she said. Mrs. Spatz removed her sunglasses: You have to have sex in order to withhold sex. HURT 42 About a week later we sent our children to the bilingual school. We walked them to the blue fence and said goodbye underneath a picture of a smiling tiger. Goodbye, said our children. And they were quickly assimilated into the playground by the crowd, their black berets indistinguishable from all the others. At the end of the day we met our children outside the blue fence. Hello, we said. Bonjour, they said. Mrs. Eagle squealed with delight. It went on this way for several weeks. We said goodbye outside the fence and they said au revoir. We said hello and they said bonjour. They added other expressions to their vocabulary, such as s’il vous plaît, exusez- moi, and merci beaucoup. When we went to In-N-Out they ordered their cheeseburgers with pommes frites. Even our husbands seemed impressed. How do you say American football? they asked. Football, said our children. How do you say soccer? said our husbands. Football, said our children. Our husbands smiled and shook their heads. They marveled at the ambiguity. How do you say cows? said our husbands. HURT 43 We were picnicking in the mountains. Picnic baskets on picnic blankets on the ground. Around us, cows chewing grass. Les vaches, said our children. Our husbands continued asking. How do you say chewing? How do you say grass? While they asked, we ate sandwiches. We removed them from our picnic baskets, unwrapped them, spread them with cheese. Mrs. Spatz said that cheese is a product of aging. Controlled spoilage, she said. Her twins taught her that. At the bilingual school they learned that cheese is created by souring milk, letting bacteria colonies settle and grow. The smell of cheese is the smell of decay, she said. We sniffed our sandwiches. They seemed to smell fine. Mrs. Davis told us that her cheese smelled like soil. Mrs. Eagle said that her cheese smelled like shoes. But good shoes, she said. Expensive shoes. She took a bite. Mrs. Cavendish said that ability to ignore signs of death is a mark of civilization. By learning about cheese, she said, our children are learning to be civilized. Cowbells clanked around us. Our husbands and children, playing soccer, cheered. Mrs. Davis was the first to notice that something was wrong. After school her children continued speaking French. They’d sit at the dinner table and talk to each other in sentences that chimed like bells. HURT 44 When she told them to brush their teeth they’d look at her, say something tinkling, and laugh. When she asked them to take out the garbage they’d stare at her blankly, at the two Hefty bags in her hands. Je nais sais pas, said the boy. His sister: Je nais comprends pas. My husband is worthless, said Mrs. Davis. He just laughs. He thinks it’s funny that they talk to us that way. We were at Mrs. Cavendish’s. Pictures of horses that looked like horses hung on her fridge. What are they saying? asked Mrs. Spatz. She blew on her tea. Exactly, said Mrs. Davis. It’s impossible to know. Mrs. Eagle said that it was very difficult to learn a foreign language without immersing yourself in it. They’re immersing, she said. But at home Mrs. Eagle found her son sunning himself by the pool. His black beret seemed blacker. The felted wool soaking up all the light. Bonjour, he said. His words chimed across the water. Comment faites-vous? Later that week we sat by the same pool. Suntan lotion wafted in the air. How old is he? asked Mrs. Davis. Mrs. Eagle rolled onto her stomach. Ten, she said. For tanning, said Mrs. Davis, ten seems kind of young. HURT 45 Mrs. Spatz told us that her twins had suddenly become interested in mime. They actually do a great routine, she said. One blows up a balloon and hands it to the other. The other floats away. But they get paint everywhere, she said. Not to mention bedtime, she said. Whenever it’s bedtime they became trapped in some kind of box. We asked Mrs. Cavendish about her daughter. Mrs. Cavendish leaned forward in her chaise. She’s been teaching my husband, said Mrs. Cavendish. Teaching him what? we said. She’s teaching him French. For example, when they drove to Whole Foods. Mrs. Cavendish’s husband would roll down the windows. Quel temps fait-il? he’d say. Her daughter stuck her hand outside. Il fait bon. Or at the movies: Qu’est-ce que j’ai manqué? her husband would say. Un tremblement de terre. What’d you say? said Mrs. Cavendish. The audience hissed at her, someone kicked her seat. Language is a fortress, she told us. We knew exactly what she meant. Language is a fortress on St. Helena, we said. Because when we said goodbye outside the bilingual school, we noticed that the children’s au revoirs sounded less like goodbyes in French and more like actual goodbyes. HURT 46 When we picked them up after school, we noticed how they lingered on the playground with their classmates. What were they saying to each other? Each consonant, each nasally vowel was building a wall between us. Brick by brique par brique. We asked our husbands if they noticed anything going on. But they were husbands. They gazed into their smart phones, playing Flight Control and Angry Birds, said no. Then there was the strike, and the strike was impossible to ignore. We don’t know why it started exactly. Mrs. Davis told us her children weren’t doing their homework. Homework? we said. We hadn’t seen our children doing homework either. We asked them about it. They flipped TV channels: top models, top chefs, got talent. How do you say? they said. En grève, they said. We knew what en grève meant. We’re not the type of mothers who don’t watch the evening news. We’d seen the marches in Lyon and Paris. The marchers with en grève banners. Hand-painted. Red paint. And what are you striking about? we asked. But the children wouldn’t say anything more about it. En grève, they said. They continued flipping channels, berets perched defiantly on top of their heads. HURT 47 We met with the headmaster. We waited outside his office and pulled our skirts closer to our ankles. We coughed. The inside of the bilingual school was just like the outside. Bright colored walls with bright pictures of cheerful things. Mrs. Cavendish sat underneath an apple. Mrs. Davis sat underneath an ostrich. Mrs. Eagle sat underneath an Arc de Triomphe. The wall above Mrs. Spatz was blank. The headmaster served us macaroons. He took off his beret and scratched his mustache. Told us he understood our concerns. Mademoiselles, he said, everything is okay. How do you say? he said. Vos enfants grandissent. Your children are just growing up. And maybe he was right. When we were children hadn’t we done the same sort of things? Not strikes, exactly, but other things. Revolutions. Black nail polish. Che Guevara t-shirts. Punk. I don’t like it, said Mrs. Cavendish. The headmaster shrugged: What’s for you to like or not to like? Your children are condemned to be free. That night the bilingual school held an open house. The students presented on the difference between French and American education. The Davis twins made existentialist dioramas. There was a baking contest and Mrs. Cavendish’s daughter won for her éclairs. The open house ended with a mime skit led by the Spatz twins. At the end of their routine HURT 48 they called all of the children on stage and blew up balloons for them. They all floated away. In the summer we sent the children to France as part of a foreign exchange. They mailed us postcards of ducks on the Seine, shoppers on the Champs Elyées. Having a great time, they wrote. And as an afterthought: Wish you were here. And a year after that they graduated from the bilingual school. There was a bilingual middle school, but we sent them to the public school. By then they didn’t care about French or bilingual education. They cared about lazing around and smoking cigarettes and fornication. They didn’t care about us. It was hard at first, but eventually we were okay with that. It’s not like we didn’t care about them, but maybe we didn’t, at least a little bit. We didn’t care in the same ways we used to. After all, they didn’t want us to walk them to school. They didn’t want us to hold their hands. They didn’t say anything when we wished them goodbye. Sometimes when we saw them walking towards us, out of the middle school or into our houses, with acne covering their faces, with their skinny jeans, with their skateboards, reeking of perfume or cologne, they didn’t even look like our children anymore. They seemed more like bad translations of our children. Our children partially dubbed. HURT 49 MY OTHER CAR DRIVES ITSELF In the 19 th century, when Karl Benz pitched his car idea to investors, he tried to temper their expectations by telling them that demand would be limited because of lack of chauffeurs. During the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors predicted that cars would be driving themselves in twenty years. My point is that for almost as long as we’ve been imagining cars, we’ve been imagining that someone else would be driving them. We are Google’s chase team. What we’re chasing is the red Prius that’s approximately thirty feet in front of us. The Prius planes and curves on the California One as adroitly as any NASCAR. Around even the most rollercoaster-like turns its speed is a steady thirty- five. Our van hurtles and weaves behind it, hugging the cliffs of Big Sur. More than four hundred feet below waves break and churn against some very sharp rocks. It’s Monday, midday, and the sky is set with tiny white clouds. Somewhere near Bixby Bridge, Levandowski points out the window, excitedly, at what he says is a whale. He tells us that its dorsal fin just breached the surface of the water and disappeared. He presses the binoculars to his chubby face and continues scanning. Clarke and I refuse to look. Clarke’s behind the steering wheel. His knuckles are whiter than the clouds above and you can see the muscles in his jaw tense with concentration. HURT 50 Levandowski points out the window again. “There it is,” he says. This time we look. Clarke looks and I look. Down in the bay there’s a big spray of water, a black dorsal fin, and then the van’s wheels are crunching over gravel. Clarke slams the brakes, but still we’re slung into the guardrail. Clarke starts yelling at Levandowski. I lift my laptop to make sure my pants aren’t damp. A few minutes later we’re back on the road. Levandowski’s sulking because Clarke threw his binoculars out the window. The Prius is gone. I log onto Google Maps and see that the blue dot that signifies Prius has stopped moving. When we catch up we see that the car has driven itself into a cliff. The front end’s crumpled. There’s smoke pouring out the engine. The LIDAR mast, with it’s forty- two lasers and tens of thousands of dollars worth of navigation equipment, has snapped off the roof and is scattered across the road. Levandowski puts on his gloves and starts collecting the technology. Clarke looks like he’s going to cry. I open the laptop and begin typing the incident report. The gist of which is We are fucked. Next morning we’re called into Page’s office. That’s Larry Page, as in Google’s multibillionaire cofounder and CEO. He’s read my report and basically agrees with its assessment Totally fucked. HURT 51 He digs into his pocket and pulls out his cellphone, which he tosses onto the desk and asks what we think it is. What I think is that it’s exactly like that part in Star Wars where, during the Battle of Endor, Admiral Ackbar yells, “It’s a trap!” Because obviously. Page clears his throat. Clarke finds a stain on his tie and begins rubbing the hell out of it. Levandowski focuses on a spot on the wall, just above Page’s head, and stares really hard. I slump in my chair. “It’s a cellphone,” I say. “What?” says Page. “Cellphone,” I say louder. “Wrong.” Page picks up the cellphone and hurls it at us. It whizzes over our heads and explodes against the wall. What that was, says Page, was a smartphone. And in terms of functionality, he says, it makes his Ferrari look like a retarded piece of shit. Why, he wants to know, can’t we make a car that’s at least as smart as his smartphone? Clarke looks at Levandowski. Levandowski looks at me. Levandowski sighs. “There was a whale,” he says and stops. “It won’t happen again,” he says. HURT 52 Page doesn’t say anything. He picks up a stapler and begins squeezing. As we hurry out of his office, the stapler flies into the hallway and dents the wall. Levandowski and Clarke want to go down to the lab to do another postmortem on the LIDAR. I tell them that I’m going to lunch. It’s not even ten o’clock. “Whatever,” says Clarke. “Don’t be evil,” he says. Google’s motto used to be something we took seriously, but now it’s something we say instead of saying something else. “Don’t be evil,” I say back. But instead of the commissary, I go to the parking lot and call Julia. Julia’s a graduate student at Stanford. She’s not my wife. Julia and I met when we were demoing an early version of the Google Car. Both of us were in the Prius’s backseat, letting it drive us around Stanford’s campus. I was looking out the window. There were old brick buildings, green trees, the California sky. It took me a while to realize that Julia was looking at me. She was smiling. “Things are in the saddle,” she said, “and drive mankind.” She told me that that was Emerson. “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing,” she said. When we got back to her apartment she told me that she was getting her doctorate in literature. She was writing a dissertation about representations of machines in poetry. Consilience is what she wants to call her book. She says that it doesn’t matter that the title’s already taken. Julia doesn’t answer. I hang up before the phone goes to voicemail. HURT 53 Instead, I press the icon on my phone that dials Tracy’s number. Tracy who is my wife. Even before the phone starts ringing, I know that she’s going to pick up. Ten months ago she went on maternity leave and she hasn’t gone off. Whenever we talk about her going back to work because, you know, hard times, we end up getting in a big fight. “Hello,” she says, and I hang up. I’m in the car and halfway to Stanford before I realize that she’s calling me back. When I on knock on her office door, Julia looks up from her desk, first surprised and then disappointed. “Oh,” she says. “It’s you,” she says. There’s a catastrophe of papers spread out in front of her. She’s wearing these reading glasses that magnify her eyes. I ask whom was she expecting. She scans the hallway and closes the door. “These are my office hours,” she says. She asks what I want. What I want, I tell her, is to take her to lunch. She looks at the clock. “Breakfast?” I say. We go to her apartment. It’s a one bedroom in Pacific Heights. Out the window you can almost see the Golden Gate Bridge. “You’re sad,” says Julia. She’s holding my penis but she’s essentially right. What I feel most of the time is something like sadness. HURT 54 My wife has noticed it too. “Do I make you unhappy?” is what Tracy says when we’re in bed together. “You realize that you frown all the time?” I tell Julia that we lost a car. “Another one?” She sounds truly disappointed. But then she really believes in the project. When we first met I gave her the investor’s pitch, the one that made them go nuts and give us all their money. In America there are forty thousand automobile deaths per year. Ninety-three percent of those are caused by human error. Every ten years that’s the population of Oakland gone, in twisted metal and burning rubber, just like that. At Google it’s our conclusion that, when it comes to being drivers, people basically suck. The Google Car is our hands-on-our-hearts attempt to do something good. The truth is that we’re developing the Google Car because the technology’s ripe. In ten years autonomous driving is going to be the industry standard. Every car company, and most of the tech ones, has something in R&D. Drive around Silicon Valley for long enough and it’ll begin to seem like every third car is being chased by a black van. Back at the lab Levandowski and Clarke are yelling at each other. It turns out that in a very technical sense there was no accident. The Prius crashed because it was supposed to crash. HURT 55 Telemetrics show that something small, perhaps a small animal, ran into the road in front of it. Once the LIDAR picked it up, the car swerved, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do. The question that Levandowski and Clarke are now debating is whether or not swerving is a good design feature. Like is it better if the car swerves and crashes? Or if it continues plowing forward regardless of what’s in its way? Levandowski has a big heart so, of course, votes for swerving. He want to know what happens next time when it’s a kid or someone’s dog. “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Clarke. Clarke says that Levandowski’s argument is stupid. He says we can adjust the LIDAR so that it picks up bigger things like dogs and children. The real question, he says, is if we’re going to let an eighty thousand dollar car crash itself every time a squirrel or whatever runs into the road. “What would a real person do?” he says. He says that’s how the car needs to react. Levandowski heaves himself off his stool and beings pacing around the lab. He’s muttering to himself. “I thought people were the bug,” is what I pick up. Both of them want to know what I think. What I think is that we’re the guys who drive behind the car that drives itself. You want to ask a moral question go talk to our CEO. I pick up a dissected piece of LIDAR and twirl it between my fingers. It’s a mirror attached to a long metal stem. HURT 56 I say that I guess I’d choose swerve. Clarke walks out of the room. “What?” I call after him. “I’ve got a kid,” I say. Of the three of us, Clarke’s the youngest. Google hired him right out of MIT. But in terms of the technology he probably knows more than Levandowski and me combined. In college he won some kind of big government award for designing a helmet that could mind-read mice. You put the little helmet on the mouse and then put the mouse in a maze. The helmet would tell you a fraction of a second before the mouse turned a corner if it was going to turn left or right. Levandowski settles down next to me. We begin picking through the guts of the LIDAR. There are wires and sensors and motors and motor parts. He asks me about lunch. “A three hour lunch,” he says. Levandowski knows all about Julia and his stance is that he disapproves. This is because Tracy and I once invited him over for dinner and now he thinks that Tracy’s great. The whole time they joked about me like I wasn’t there. Tracy passed him the green bean salad. “You should see him with the diapers,” she said. She pinched her nose and held the other hand about three feet in front of her face. “At the office,” said Levandowski, “you ask him a question and he practically dives underneath his desk.” HURT 57 On average Americans spend one hundred hours a year commuting back and forth to work. Stretch that out over a lifetime and that becomes eight thousand hours. Which is one full year of life. Start adding in all of the other car trips you take and the number skyrockets. The conservative estimate is that by the time you die you’ll have spent eight years behind the wheel. The only things you’ll have spent more time doing are working, watching TV, and sleeping. “If you hate your commute so much,” says Tracy, “get another job.” She’s put the baby to sleep and we’re finally getting around to dinner. The microwave beeps and she puts chicken on the table. “But who will provide us with our bounty?” I say. I gesture at the gray chicken that looks an awful lot like last night’s chicken. “You’re resourceful,” she says. This is pretty much how it goes every night. I complain about something and Tracy deflects it back at me. “You wouldn’t let us starve,” she says. I’d complain about the chicken, but I already know how that one goes. Tracy will ask me what did I expect, exactly. She’ll say that it’s hard work raising a kid. Then she’ll remind me that it wasn’t a decision that she made on her own. She’ll talk about the long and frequent conversations we had, before we even started trying to make a baby, about pulling the goalie from the net. HURT 58 I liked the idea. The metaphor I guess you’d call it. By pulling the goalie we were choosing to let fate decide. “Who talks like that?” Tracy said when I told her this. “We’re deciding,” she said. Later that night, as we undress for bed, Tracy asks me about the phone call from earlier. She wants to know why I called and hung up. “Phone call?” I say. The baby’s sleeping in her crib at the foot of the bed. We’re whispering so that we don’t wake her. “You called,” says Tracy. She shows me the Caller ID. “Huh,” I say. I tell her that the phone must have dialed itself. She wants to know, on a scale of one to ten, how would I rate that answer. “One being complete bullshit,” she says, “and ten being regular bullshit.” I tell her that I’d rate it zero. “Zero’s not an option,” she says. “Then how would you rate it?” I say. She turns off the light. So far Google Cars have logged more than two hundred thousand miles and still they keep crashing. For awhile their biggest problem was stop signs. The cars couldn’t figure out that people were essentially aggressive drivers and that they rolled through intersections instead of stopping completely. In four-way situations the accident rate was something like seven in ten. I was the one who came up with the workaround. HURT 59 By making the AI a little more aggressive we could ensure that Google Cars would roll through stop signs before other cars. Human drivers would be forced to yield to them. Focus groups basically hate them, and why shouldn’t they? They’re more like something from The Terminator than The Jetsons. But accidents are down by more than fifty percent. Next morning I’m standing over the griddle making pancakes when Tracy comes into the kitchen. Pancakes are Tracy’s favorite and are something I have a true talent for. Whenever I make pancakes they always come out perfectly round and perfectly thick. Tracy puts the baby in the high chair and asks me what’s the occasion. “Can’t a guy make pancakes?” I say. “I’m not complaining,” she says. She stands next to me and tugs on the collar of her bathrobe. She’s not wearing anything underneath. We watch the butter deliquesce and the batter congeal. The smell of pancakes rises into the air. I put a short stack on Tracy’s plate and tell her that sometimes phones really do dial themselves. “There’s an article on Google News,” I say. “Are we still arguing about that?” says Tracy. “Then what are we arguing about?” I say. Tracy shushes me. She kisses me on the cheek and then on my lips. And before I know it my hands are sliding inside her bathrobe. “You know,” she says, my ear in her HURT 60 mouth, “you’re not a bad guy when you give it half a shot.” “Neither are you,” I say. My hands are moving south and my palms are becoming sweaty. There’s heaviness of breath. Pancake batter spitting. “Well,” I say. “Not a guy,” I say. I tell her that she knows what I mean. She does, she says. “I’m an adult woman and you’re an adult man,” she says. “With adult responsibilities,” she says. Then she lifts the baby from the high chair, wipes food off her face, and puts her in the crib. She asks if I’m going to join her in the bedroom. But by then my pancakes are burning. I’m already late for work. We’re standing in the parking lot outside of Google HQ. It’s overcast and there’s a flock of seagulls in the trashcans. You have to shout to be heard. Clarke’s holding a baseball and is waiting for the Prius to come around again. We’ve rigged this one with a modified LIDAR. When it’s close enough Clarke tosses the ball. It bounces off the Prius’s hood and the Prius keeps going. Then Levandowski tosses a soccer ball. Tires screech as the Prius jerks deftly out of the way. We do the test several more times. Each time the Prius hits the baseball but swerves for the soccer ball. When we present the results to Page that afternoon we tell him that the Google Car can now calculate between catastrophic and non-catastrophic HURT 61 collisions. In the latter case, we say, the car can now decide that the less damaging decision is to collide. AR Detection is how Clarke pitches the new feature. AR meaning Acceptable Risk. Page squeezes his stapler a few more times. It’s only when he puts it back on his desk that I realize that I’ve been holding my breath. He tells us that he wants us to start doing road tests. “This weekend,” he says. Out in the hall I notice that the dent in the wall has been patched but not repainted. The plaster’s a different shade of white. Levandowski’s upset about something. You can tell because he keeps making these herm sounds and playing with the knot in his tie. Clarke asks him what’s wrong. “Acceptable Risk?” says Levandowski. Clarke asks him what he’d call it. Levandowski says herm. Then he says that baseballs and soccer balls are one thing but that he wants to know what happens to the kid who’s chasing the ball. “Is that an Acceptable Risk?” he says. Clarke says that nothing happens. He says that that’s the whole point. By then we’ve walked across the campus and are at the garage and there’s the question of who’s going to sign the car out for the weekend. Clarke says that he will. But Levandowski says that he doesn’t trust him with it. HURT 62 “Not with Mr. Acceptable Risk,” he says. While they argue, I sign the waiver and pocket the keys. Driving the Prius home, I detour through the suburbs. It’s evening and in each neighborhood there are kids chasing kids, kids chasing soccer balls, dogs, kids on bikes. It’s a lot of information to process. I wonder what if Levandowski’s right. For humans there’s a tenth of a second lag between receiving and processing information. Computers are three hundred thousand times faster. That means that by the time I’ve seen a kid running into the street, have sent the electrical signal to my foot telling it to the hit brake, and have received the signal back from my foot saying that the brake has been pressed, a computer would have done all of it three hundred thousand times. And yet, even for computers, there are gaps in the information. Blind spots. Thousandths of a second when the information is still traveling, when it’s neither been processed nor received. As I continue driving I find that I’ve detoured my way into San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge, once hulking in the distance, is now the dominant part of my skyline. Its two towers, like pyramids on either side of the bay, are shining brightly, orangely, in the sun’s remaining light. Soon I find myself outside Julia’s apartment. I idle on the curb and watch the sun set. The streetlights blink on. HURT 63 I kill the engine. I press the intercom and ask Julia to let me inside. At Google, in the lab, we literally have a checklist of things we want to make sure the technology can handle before it’s ready for the public. The list goes Left turns: check Stop signs: check The list is pretty mundane but at its bottom is the meta-category city driving. Because not only are city streets the most difficult type to navigate, but also because people in the city are the most unpredictable. Google hired an urban psychologist. You can look it up. The litmus test of our litmus test is San Francisco. I mean look at a street map. It’s like someone traced over a Pollack painting. When Julia opens the door she’s wearing a dress. It’s a short, shiny, tube-like thing that’s designed to show off, among other things, her breasts. I ask what’s the occasion. She says she’s going to dinner. I ask if she wants a ride. Then we’re in the backseat of the Prius. There’s the glow of the LIDAR’s GUI and we’re watching the screen’s little hourglass, waiting for the AI to boot up. HURT 64 I ask Julia where we’re going. My fingers are poised over the touchscreen, ready to punch in the address. “I’m going on a date,” she says. Which, of course, is obvious. Besides the dress, she’s wearing a honey-and- something scent that I’ve never smelled before. I’m not surprised, but still I feel something. Gutted, I guess. She asks me what I ever expected. “I mean,” she says, “have you even thought about this? Our situation,” she says and gestures between the two of us as if what we have between us is a situation. “About how unfair this is to me?” she says. Out the window the Golden Gate’s towers are lit up. There’s black water in between them. Cars driving across the expanse. “I’m not breaking up,” says Julia. “If you could even call it that. We can still keep doing what we’re doing.” I make a noise of assent. She names a restaurant on Embarcadero. The car starts driving. We go past other parked cars, under streetlights, up a hill. After I drop Julia off, I let the car drive me home. I sit in the backseat and watch the moonlight on the water. Even in the dark you can see the waves breaking towards the shore. HURT 65 There are other cars on the road though not that many. As we pass each other, my car and the other cars, I wonder what this looks like to them, the other drivers in the other cars. This driverless Prius, with its steering wheel jerking itself, and its man in the backseat gazing out the window, his forehead pressed against the glass? What will it look like in ten years when all the cars are like this? All those autonomous cars with their LIDAR masts, AR augmentation, collision detection units, lasers, radars, HUDS, GUIs, infrared cameras, inertial measurements, and 6-D stereo-vision systems? Cars that never get lost and can drive themselves, down to the millimeter, exactly in the middle of the lane? What will it be like for us when we we’re no longer driving ourselves? I think about Tracy and the baby and myself riding safely in the backseat of a driverless car just like this one. I think about how tomorrow we can all be taken for a ride. For a while I’m buoyed by the thought. One of the first things that Julia taught me is that science is the expression of what we’ve learned to keep from fooling ourselves. “Poetry,” she said, “is also the expression of what we’ve learned to keep from fooling ourselves.” We were naked in her bed and I’d asked why she was studying what she was studying. I asked if she ever read just for fun. I told her that when I was a kid I used to read for fun all the time. HURT 66 “When I was a kid,” I said, and she put her finger on my lips, shushed me. “You’re not a child,” she said. She began reading to me. She read me that Emerson poem. She said, “Things are in the saddle and drive mankind.” She said, “Go, blind worm, go.” And I did, eventually. I went home to Tracy and the baby. I go. HURT 67 THE SADNESS OF TYCHO BRAHE’S MOOSE 1. TRUE STORY So first of all not a moose exactly. An elk. But what an elk. Moose-like in its magnificence. Nine tines to the antler. Sixteen hands tall at the withers. Bugling voice bright as a trumpet. The finest elk in all of Denmark. Loyal as a dog, it followed the astronomer almost everywhere he went. 2. AB OVO Morning in Denmark. Pale blue sky, clouds like raw wool, bees hovering in the breeze. There amongst the acres of farmland, above a tiny village, sits a brick castle on top of a hill. Inside the castle, Otte Brahe wakes up next to his wife, Beate Bille. He smells the air around him. Rosemary, flowering wheat. Otte Brahe looks at his wife. He admires her long flaxen hair. The way she’s wrapped seductively in the sheets. He leans over and kisses the mole on her neck. Beate Bille sighs. HURT 68 Otte Brahe sighs. They sigh. Far above, Mars moves in trine with Jupiter. Five planets in the eastern hemisphere signify a boy. 3. KIDNAPPED Two years pass. Tycho Brahe sits in the grass with a tabor drum between his legs. He beats the drum with a single drumstick and harasses an old cow. The cow stands in a strip of shadow beneath the castle’s walls. Cow looks at Tycho. Chews grass. While Tycho beats his drum, Uncle Jørgen storms out of the castle. Uncle Jørgen is Otte Brahe’s older brother. He’s visiting from southern Denmark, where he’s ruler of Vordingborg Castle and sheriff to the king. Uncle Jørgen slams the door. He mutters something about a promise. Otte’s promise. Marches past Tycho and towards the stable and his horse. Then he stops. Turns around and looks at his nephew. Says: “Ach!” Uncle Jørgen picks up Tycho and throws him on his saddle. HURT 69 They gallop away. 4. LATER Later, Otte Brahe and Beate Bille find the drum and the drumstick. There’s the same old cow standing in the castle’s shadows, still chewing grass. It’s not hard to piece together what must have happened. Otte Brahe tells his wife that they’ll let Uncle Jørgen keep Tycho. After all, Uncle Jørgen and his wife are childless; Otte Brahe and Beate Bille, on the other hand, have plenty of children. With the recent arrival of Steen, they have four in all. And Otte Brahe did promise Tycho to Uncle Jørgen eventually, once another son was born. So all things considered, says Otte Brahe, it’s not like Uncle Jørgen stole the boy. Not exactly. “Still,” says Otte Brahe. He rubs his beard and looks at the sky. There are honey buzzards circling the castle, cirrus clouds. He tells Beate Bille that he feels foolish. He says that he really shouldn’t have gotten drunk and promised Uncle Jørgen their firstborn son. 5. TYCHO’S MOOSE Ten years later. Tycho Brahe is home from the University of Copenhagen. Winter break. HURT 70 Since the kidnapping—the transfer is what Otte Brahe and Uncle Jørgen now call it—home is with Uncle Jørgen and Aunt Inger on the island of Zealand. Tycho sits on the back of a horse. Cold wind blows off the water. Waves ice the sea. Tycho lifts his face and feels the stinging pellets of snow blast through the pine trees. In the distance, he sees Goose Tower. Its golden goose weathervane glints under the dull gray sky. “Papa,” says Tycho. He points to a cow elk grazing in a nearby copse. Uncle Jørgen exhales a cloud of breath. He raises his musket. Cocks the flintlock. Shoots. The cow elk staggers and falls into a shrub. While Uncle Jørgen dresses the elk, Tycho wanders further into the grove. He hears bleating from nearby bog-rosemary bushes. He pulls back the branches and finds a small shivering calf. Big watery calf-eyes. Ribs showing through its coat. Tycho removes his jacket and wraps it around the small animal. He returns with it to his uncle. “Moose,” he says. HURT 71 Uncle Jørgen looks from the baby elk to his nephew and back again. Doting and permissive, he doesn’t correct. 6. THE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE Everywhere he goes, Tycho talks about his moose. At school he talks to anyone who’ll listen. He tells his teachers and classmates that the moose is kept in the stables with the horses but that during the winter it’s allowed to sleep inside next to the fire. He tells them that even Aunt Inger is fond of the animal. She decorates it with bows. He’s telling this to his law professor. He has the professor pinned against a column in the courtyard. Long columnar shadows are splayed across the ground. Tycho tells his professor that the moose prefers apples to gooseberries; it likes redcurrants best of all. The professor interrupts. He cranes his neck to look at the sundial in the center of the plaza. He tells Tycho that he must go. But before the professor can hurry away, the courtyard is cast into sudden darkness. Like a curtain at a playhouse, the moon slides in front of the sun. The professor stops. Tycho stops. Everyone stops. Where there was once sun, now there is no sun. A big blacked-out O. Some fall to their knees. Others run for shelter. HURT 72 The professor swoons. A solar corona blooms behind the moon’s shadow. Stars appear, thick and white as pennycress. Tycho gazes at the sky above him. Most wonderful thing he’s seen. 7. FREDERICK II OF DENMARK SAVED FROM DROWNING Five more years pass, not without significance. The solar eclipse indicates new beginnings, the sun’s steadiness overruled by lunar passions. Tycho buys an ephemeris based on Copernicus’s theories. He buys books by Johannes de Sacrobosco, Petrius Apianus, and Regiomantus. He learns that his eclipse had been predicted by Ptolemy, that it was part of the same eclipse cycle that blacked out the sun when Christ was on the cross. But he keeps all this information a secret. He doesn’t tell anyone that he’s been studying astronomy, not even his tutor. He only whispers it to the moose. Because science is a fine course of study for alchemists and apothecaries, for middle-class barbers’ sons. But Otte Brahe is a member of the Rigsraad. Uncle Jørgen is Vice Admiral of the Danish fleet. During summer, Tycho smuggles a small celestial globe back home to Vordingborg. He stays up until dawn memorizing the shapes of the constellations. Orion’s belt, the bend of Sagittarius’s bow. HURT 73 When Uncle Jørgen asks him why he’s so tired looking, Tycho lies and tells him that he was up late studying the Edict of Amboise. When Otte Brahe writes and asks how he likes studying court politics, Tycho writes back: I like them fine. But for Tycho, meals with Uncle Jørgen and Aunt Inger are the hardest things to endure. Uncle Jørgen only talks about the latest naval skirmishes with Sweden. Aunt Inger still wants to know more about the latest fashions in Copenhagen. Tycho forks squab into her mouth and tells her: All of the ladies are wearing sable pelts. Rich ladies dip the paws in silver. Jewels replace the eyes. What Tycho really wants to talk about are the problems with the universe. Lately he’s noticed that none of his ephemerides match any of the others. Copernicus’s date for the conjunction of Jupiter is a whole month off from that in the Alfonsine Tables. Apianus and Regiomantus have completely different ideas about the location of Mars. More than anything else, Tycho wants to return to the university and spend long hours in the library poring over star charts, correcting the universe and resetting the stars. The only thing that makes summer at Vordingborg tolerable is the moose. Much has changed since Tycho found the moose in the bog-rosemary bushes. Now the moose is a large moose, a bull. It has thick velvet on its antlers; its head is the size of a firkin; it follows Tycho everywhere like a schoolgirl in love. While Uncle Jørgen and King Frederick plot and strategize against the Swedes, Tycho and his moose go for long walks in the woods surrounding the castle. Sometimes they walk as far as the ocean. Even on the beach the air still smells of pine trees. There are white flowers on the dogwoods. A warm breeze blows from the east. HURT 74 As they walk along the beach, Tycho talks loudly over the waves. He tells the moose about his plans for the universe. He wants to make his own ephemeris, but he needs a larger allowance. He needs better instruments, a radius that’s large enough to measure the angles between the stars. Normally attentive, the moose gazes distractedly down the beach, its ears turned towards some faraway sound. Tycho hears it too. Down the beach there’s someone, many people, calling for help. Tycho and his moose hurry towards the noise. They round the bend and see a party of bathers. The livery is King Frederick’s: carmine on white. Everyone is on the shore except for the king. Tycho sees him in the water, caught in a riptide, drifting out to see. He sees Uncle Jørgen sprinting into the ocean. Tycho follows. Moose gallops in as well. But Tycho is a poor swimmer. He’s unable to swim past the wave line. The surf pushes him back to the beach. Uncle Jørgen reaches King Frederick but also gets caught in the riptide. Both men cling to each other, recede towards the horizon, drift away. Steady as a boat, the moose paddles through the waves and reaches Uncle Jørgen and King Frederick. The men drape themselves over the moose’s body and are transported back to shore. HURT 75 8. DEARTH That night the king orders a feast at the castle. There are torches, buglers, attendants in white gloves. Oxen, calves, and muffed cocks are slaughtered for the guests. When dinner is served, the moose sits at the head of the table next to King Frederick. The moose doesn’t sit, of course; it stands. Eats a plate of spinach and summer greens. After the feast, King Frederick lifts his goblet and toasts Uncle Jørgen and the hero moose. He gives them both medals and makes a speech. He talks about the majestic though unpredictable and deadly nature of the sea. “Like a Dane,” he says. “Like my mother,” he says. Everyone but the old queen laughs. At the end of the ceremony, Uncle Jørgen, pale-looking, gold medal bright around his neck, excuses himself. He complains about a chill. He pats the moose on its head. Says goodnight to King Frederick. Goodnight to Aunt Inger. Goodnight to Tycho. A week later, Uncle Jørgen dies. 9. THE END End of the longest summer. HURT 76 Tycho packs away his belongings. He fills his trunks with books, clothing, the new ephemerides that he bought with Uncle Jørgen’s inheritance. He loads it all onto a coach and says goodbye to Aunt Inger. Aunt Inger, who is still wearing black. Tycho says goodbye to King Frederick. Goodbye to all the servants. Goodbye. But from Vordingborg, he doesn’t return to school in Copenhagen. He doesn’t see the point. Why should he pretend to study the law if Uncle Jørgen isn’t alive to care? Why spend all of his time bent over books, reading about the universe, when all he really needs to do is look up? Instead, Tycho and his moose travel to northern Denmark, to Knudstrup Castle, one of his real parents’ homes. Knudstrup is isolated from everything. Its village has only two dozen cottages, five grain mills, and farmland that’s flat and expansive as the sky above. The castle is so far north that during the summer the sun barely sets. During the winter, white stars fill the daytime sky. Tycho and his moose spend that autumn wandering through endless yellow fields of wheat and rapeseed. Tycho tells the moose that he misses Uncle Jørgen. He misses things that he didn’t expect to miss about him. The sound of his uncle’s laughter, the particular roughness of his beard. Throughout the fall, Aunt Inger sends Tycho letters. She tells him how empty Vordingborg is without him. She misses the moose. HURT 77 But instead of moose, Aunt Inger keeps calling the animal an elk. A common elk, as if there’s anything common about it. Tycho tosses her letters in the fire. At night there’s no sound in the castle except for wood and paper burning, no sound at all except for Tycho and the moose’s footsteps echoing off limestone as they pace outside on the castle’s parapets, gazing at the sky. There’s the nebular spray of stars above them. Warm lamplight from the village below. Tycho presses the radius to his cheekbone. He lines up Jupiter in the first sight and finds Saturn with the second. He measures the angle, checks it against Ptolemy’s measurement, and scowls. According to Ptolemy’s Almagest, the planets should be moving towards a conjunction, signaling expansion, social interaction, and material well-being. But if Tycho’s measurements are correct, the planets are actually moving away from each, approaching their square. Bad energy, problems, frustration. “All wrong,” says Tycho. “Everything is wrong,” he says. The moose blinks open its eyes. A cold breeze rattles through the ephemeris. The moose yawns. Tycho shoves his radius back into its case. He walks down to the village. The tavern. Beer. HURT 78 10. ASTRAL LOVE Winter comes to Knudstrup. Heavy clouds settle in and blank out the sky. Tycho and the moose spend much of their time alone in the castle. Sometimes Tycho reads books in front of the fire. He reads astronomy books, astrology books, chivalric romances: Robert the Devil, Amadis of Gaul, Havelok the Dane. But most of the time he doesn’t read. He drinks. To pass the time. Tycho sits in front of the fire, empty wine glass between his knees, and a journal open on his lap. On each page of the journal are sky measurements that he’s made during the previous summer and fall. There are coordinates for the traveling planets, lists of all the fixed objects in the ethereal sphere. One at a time, Tycho rips out the pages and throws them into the fire. He rips out a sketch of Virgo and crushes it. But before he can toss it in the fire, he’s interrupted by a knock at the door. Tycho looks at the moose. The moose looks back at Tycho. If a moose can shrug then that’s what it does. Shrugs. There’s another knock, and Tycho stumbles out of his chair. He knocks over an empty wine bottle on his way to open the door. Behind the door is a gust of wind and a girl. The girl’s eyes are deep and blue as the firmament; her hair is wheat. HURT 79 She tells Tycho that she’s there to deliver the firewood. She apologizes that the delivery is late. “My father,” she says. “Sick,” she says. Tycho squints beyond her out the door. There are snowflakes in the moonlight, a horse attached to a cart. Tycho tells the girl to wait inside while he unloads the firewood. After he’s finished, he offers her redcurrant wine. The girl tells Tycho that her name is Kirsten Jørgensdatter; she’s fourteen years old and lives in the village with her father. But Tycho already knows all this. He’s seen her in church. He likes the way she wears her laced collars and cuffs, the way she braids her fingers when she prays. Her pale moon-shaped face. He asks about her father, Jørgen Hansen, and she tells Tycho that he has a fever. Tycho raises his glass and watches the fire through it, the smoke and logs rinsed red by the wine. He tells her that he once had an uncle named Jørgen. Then he tips back his glass and drains it, drinking to her Jørgen’s health. By the time they’ve finished the bottle, the fire has burned down to its embers. The moose leans against the wall, snoring. Kirsten yawns and says that she should be going. She says that she shouldn’t have left her father at home for so long. Outside the castle, clouds swirl above them. The world is silent, a held breath. Kirsten pulls up her hood and touches Tycho’s hand. She thanks him and tells him that she had a nice night. After she’s gone, Tycho remains in the courtyard. There’s the warm tingle on his hand where her hand touched his. The wall of clouds has split and for the first time all winter the stars are showing. HURT 80 Venus in ascension. Naked sky. 11. IN RUT Tycho and Kirsten continue to make love all winter. But it’s love without kissing, love without hugging or handholding, love between a nobleman and a peasant girl. Chaste, forbidden, sixteenth-century love. Even after her father has recovered, Kirsten delivers wood to Tycho’s castle. They drink mulberry wine and Kirsten listens to Tycho talk about the universe. He tells her that the planets and the stars are forever isolated from one another, that they’re locked in separate crystalline spheres. He tells her that that’s what their love is. He is a planet, and she is a star. Who could understand it? No one, says Tycho. Not Otte Brahe, not Beate Bille, not Aunt Inger, not Jørgen Hansen, not Aristotle or Ptolemy. Tycho tells Kirsten that the universe has an order to it. He tells her that their love breaks every law. Then in March comes news that seems to affirm this. Tycho receives a letter from Germany, from the University of Rostock, three hundred kilometers south of Kirsten. He’s been accepted to study with the great astronomer Heinrich Brucaeus. Brucaeus’s Du motu prima libri tres is one of Tycho’s favorites. There was no one he wanted to study with more. HURT 81 12. THE HEAVENS PROVIDE Tycho consults all of his books. He rereads The Almagest, The Tetrabiblos, The Handy Tables, The Metaphysics. Should he choose love or the university? Kirsten or the stars? In a rare concurrence, the books all say the same thing. They agree that when Jupiter is in Sagittarius, the heavens signify optimism about the future and foreign travel. But in late-spring, when the king of planets is travelling between Sagittarius and Aries, the stars also signal innovation, new ventures, and expansion. Tycho’s decision is not to make a decision. The books seem to tell him that he doesn’t need to choose between one love and the other. Because Jupiter is traveling, he can go to Germany and expand his family. He’s allowed to innovate; the old laws need not apply. Tycho marries Kirsten a month before school starts. He hires a chaplain from Gothenburg, who performs the ceremony in the castle’s chapel. It’s not a proper marriage, not exactly; rather, it’s a morganatic marriage. Marriage without dowry, without verbum, without Jørgen Hansen’s consent. It’s the only kind of marriage that the state will allow between a nobleman and a peasant. When Tycho dies, Kirsten won’t be able to inherit his property. Her children won’t be recognized as his heirs. Still it’s a love marriage. After Tycho says “I do” and Kirsten says “I do,” he carries his bride up to their bedroom. Kirsten’s gown trails on the steps behind them. Tycho smells the bundles of rosemary she’s tied to her sleeves. In the bedroom, Tycho unties her corset. He lifts her dress. HURT 82 There’s starry whiteness. A fourteen-year-old’s chest. 13. MY MOON, MY MAN Tycho leaves for Rostock the next day. He kisses his bride without waking her, pushes her hair behind her ears, and leaves an envelope next to her head. Next, Tycho says goodbye to his moose. He strokes the moose’s antlers and feeds it redcurrants. He tells the moose to mind Kirsten while he’s gone. Moose bugles sadly. Then Tycho rides a horse to Gothenburg. He boards a boat and sails to Copenhagen. He boards another boat and sails away. Back at Knudstrup, Kirsten wakes up and hears the moose bugling in the courtyard. She finds the envelope, opens it, and reads the poem that Tycho’s written for her. She rereads the part about how when they look at the stars at night they’ll be looking at the same stars and so will always be together. We live so far apart, and yet the beams of radiant Olympus join our eyes at last. She stands at the window and searches the sky for some object to fix her eyes upon. She finds the white crescent of the moon hanging above the horizon and stares at it. She wonders what good it is being married to Tycho if he could just as happily be married to moonbeams instead. HURT 83 15. THE FAMOUS STORY OF TYCHO’S NOSE At last the boat arrives at Rostock. Tycho watches the city’s skyline appear on the horizon. As it draws closer, the roofs, like sharp teeth, chew into the sky. Above the skyline is the vestige of last night’s moon. He traces its crescent with his eyes and imagines Kirsten doing the same. When the boat finally docks, Tycho hires a coach to drive him to Brucaeus’s castle, where Brucaeus is throwing a feast for his newest student. At the feast there’s eel, olla podrida, and half a kid. Tycho is introduced to another Danish student who’s come to the university to learn from the great astronomer. His name is Manderup Parsbjerg; he has hair like a storm cloud and eyes that match. Tycho and Parsbjerg sit across from each other at the feast table. They talk about the universe. “What about Copernicus?” asks Parsbjerg. “Please,” says Tycho. He leans across the table and pours Parsbjerg more wine. Tycho says that Copernicus may have had some good ideas, but that he really couldn’t believe the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. Tycho tops off his wine. He watches it dribble over the top of his cup. “And what about the crystalline spheres?” he says. He asks what about the birds. What about the clouds? He asks Parsbjerg to explain to him how humans and other animals could stand on an Earth that’s spinning through the universe like a top. He pours himself more wine. “I’ll tell you what I think,” says Tycho. HURT 84 Tycho tells Parsbjerg that he thinks that the sun rotates around the Earth and that everything else rotates around the sun. He places his cup in the center of the table and tells Parsbjerg that the cup is the Earth. Then he sets the wine bottle next to it. The wine bottle is the sun. Tycho pushes the wine bottle around the cup. Then he takes Parsbjerg’s cup and places it next to the wine bottle. The cup, he says, is everything else. Tycho pushes the wine bottle around his cup and Parsbjerg’s cup around the wine bottle. He tells Parsbjerg that his model of the universe is the only one that makes complete mathematical sense. Soon, he says, it will explain all of the cosmic mysteries. Parallax, retrograde motion, planetary drift. “The mechanics of the universe explained,” he says. He pounds the table to emphasize his point. His cup, Parsbjerg’s cup, and the wine bottle all tumble over. A tide of red wine crashes into Parsbjerg’s lap. When Parsbjerg returns to the table, he removes his gloves, leans forwards, and slaps Tycho’s cheek. “A duel,” he says. He slaps the other cheek. “The harbor,” he says. 16. THE FAMOUS STORY, CONTINUED Dark rain hisses down on the cobblestones. There are seagulls asleep in the water, the swaying outlines of ships. Parsbjerg drinks wine straight from the bottle. “Ready?” he says. Tycho nods. HURT 85 The two men touch swords. Then Parsbjerg cut the nose off Tycho’s face. He swings his sword and smashes it through skin and cartilage. The sword slices a chunk off the bridge and cleaves through the entire tip. Tycho’s nose falls to the ground. His sword clatters down next to it. Tycho’s not far behind. 17. UNCLE JØRGEN —stupidest thing. Tycho groans. He opens his eyes and sees that he’s still on the boat, that he’s still sailing back home to Knudstrup. The ghost of Uncle Jørgen is still hovering above his bed. Tycho groans again. Beyond stupid, says the ghost. What were you thinking? he says. You’ve always been a horrible duelist. Could never tell pommel from tip. The ghost tugs on his beard. Booby, he says. Blockhead. Tycho squeezes his eyes closed. He feels the boat plunge underneath him and smells the dung-smelling poultice covering his face. Clodpole, says the ghost. Tycho’s physician enters the cabin, and the ghost blinks out of existence. The physician checks Tycho’s wound and replaces his poultice with a new one. He feeds Tycho a spoonful of camphor and ground elk hoof. HURT 86 After the physician leaves, the ghost comes back. Dunderhead, says the ghost. Idiot. Beef for brains. 18. KNUDSTRUP REVISITED Moron. Wretch. The ghost floats at the foot of Tycho’s bed. Outside the sun is rising above the wheat fields. Orange light creeps into the room. Tycho covers his ears. “You’re not here,” he says. No, says the ghost. Your nose is the only thing that’s not here. There’s a knock on the door, and the ghost drifts towards it. He tells Tycho to open the door. He tells Tycho to let Kirsten in. So she can finally see what you’ve done to your face, he says. Since Tycho’s returned to Knudstrup, he hasn’t seen Kirsten. Except for his physician, he hasn’t seen anyone at all. He won’t even look at himself in a mirror. He just probes the wound with his fingers, feeling the strange new flatness of his face. Kirsten knocks again. The ghost begins phasing through the door, passing in and out. Coward, says the ghost. Chicken liver. “Go away,” says Tycho. “Leave me alone,” he says. HURT 87 Outside, Kirsten sets the tray of food on the floor and collects the old one. It’s still full of Tycho’s favorite things: smoked ox tongue, dogfish, Corbeil peaches. Tycho’s barely taken a bite. After she delivers the tray to the kitchen, she tells Tycho’s visitors that his condition hasn’t changed. Aunt Inger, Otte Brahe, Beate Bille, even King Frederick. They’ve all come to the castle to see Tycho. But Tycho won’t see any of them. He’s told Kirsten to turn them all away. “I’m a monster,” he yelled through the door, when Kirsten told him that the king had arrived. “I’ll never see a living person again,” he said. The ghost agreed. Worse than a monster, said the ghost, because even a monster has a nose. 19. THE MOOSE Kirsten tells the king that Tycho won’t see him. “A shame,” says the king. He tells Kirsten that he’s already contacted his best surgeon. Tycho’s not the first person to have lost his nose in a duel. He tells her to tell Tycho that there are things the surgeon can do. On his way out, the king stops by the stables to visit the moose. It’s been more than two years since he’s seen the animal that saved his life. He has to squint into the shadows to find it. The moose is standing deep in the barn, beneath the hayloft. It’s mangy, gaunt, and surrounded by flies. The king extends an apple, and the moose steps forward. Moose grunts and bares its teeth. HURT 88 The king drops the apple. He recalls the once majestic animal, how it pushed through the waves like a zephyr. It was the finest moose in all of Denmark. Now it’s this. 20. MORE OF THE SAME Time passes. How much? For Tycho it doesn’t matter. It could be a week; it could be a month. Tycho doesn’t leave his bedroom. He drinks until unconscious, wakes up, and pours himself another cup. Outside his window, he watches Kirsten and her father working in the garden. They’ve planted tulips, hyacinths, and tomato plants. The sky is big and orange above them. There are towering cumulous clouds. Tycho checks his wine bottle. Is it chardonnay? Chablis? Since the accident, everything tastes different. All of the flavors are muted, more diffuse. The ghost hovers next to him. Accident, says the ghost. Give me a break, the ghost says. He asks Tycho if his decision to duel Parsbjerg was an accident. Was it an accident when he decided to draw his sword? Tycho tips the rest of the wine into his cup. He sees Kirsten looking up at his window. She smiles and waves. In his hurry to close the curtains, Tycho knocks over his cup. Wine spreads across his table. It soaks through is ephemerides, his astronomy books and notebooks, everything that Tycho has been checking and double-checking to see which of the HURT 89 universe’s signs he must have misread. Does it matter that Kirsten is a Virgo? What do The Handy Tables say about marrying in May? Wine drips into Tycho’s lap. Look at you, says the ghost. How could you hope to correct the universe? The ghost asks Tycho how he could even hope to correct his life. For Tycho the ghost has a point. A father who’s not a father. A wife who’s not a wife. A nose that’s not a nose. A moose that’s not a moose. How do you correct something like that? 21. THE TYCHONIC SYSTEM A day or so passes and the king’s surgeon arrives to fix Tycho’s nose. He offers to make Tycho a prosthetic. In exchange, the king wants Tycho’s moose. The king writes in a letter that he wants to honor the noble animal. He has a spot for it in his stables. He feels that he owes much to the moose and that he hasn’t given it enough. In the letter, the king says that he wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to give Tycho counsel, but he confides that even a king knows what it’s like to experience loss. He urges Tycho to take care of Kirsten. He reminds Tycho that, in many ways, she’s all that he has. And even Tycho is able to understand the king’s implication: That Kirsten is all that he has left. That even she won’t continue forever to suffer his neglect. But instead of leaving his room and joining her in the garden to plant tulips, Tycho remains in his chair. After the surgeon measures him for his prosthetic nose, he pours himself another glass of wine, ignores the ghost, and massages his past. HURT 90 For Tycho the past is his moose: the heroic moose, the compassionate moose, the moose that slept by the fire and let itself be decorated with bows. On the day the moose rescued King Frederick, Tycho was regaling the moose once again with stories of the eclipse. While they walked beneath the evergreens, Tycho was telling the moose about the blackness of the moon’s umbra, about how the moon had overpowered the sun. He told the moose that during the eclipse the stars shined with full intensity and that even the birds refused to take flight. He told the moose about how he gazed up at the sky as the moon sliced across the face of the sun and turned day into night, proving to everyone who saw it that everything was reversible and that nothing was fixed. Then he recalled how the moon continued on its trajectory, sliding past the sun. The stars disappeared, the sunlight returned, and the birds took flight again, the reversal reversed. Their wings clapped as they lifted off and drifted away. HURT 91 ROSE Here’s a secret: It wasn’t until after she married the Prince that Briar Rose found out that he had a thing for dead chicks. Now, before you imagine her disappointment, imagine his. His friends didn’t tell him that the girl behind all those brambles would still be alive. I bet they laughed pretty hard while he set out to cut and cut away for his dead beauty, only to revive her with a kiss. Still, they gave it a shot, the Prince and Briar Rose. It really was some kiss. I don’t know how it is for you, and maybe it’s different for everyone, but for me, when I fall in love, it’s a lot like waking up. That’s how it was for Briar Rose, too. She’d been asleep for a long time and when the Prince came around and woke her up, she found herself head-over-heels. It wasn’t long after she asked the Prince to marry. So at first everything was pretty cool. The Prince was upfront about his preferences for the deceased and Briar Rose didn’t mind role-playing a bit. There were even some things she liked: erotic asphyxiation, for example. But soon all the Prince wanted to do was do it with her inside of her old glass coffin. “It’ll be hot,” he coaxed. “Think about it. Your skin, cool glass.” But really, after a hundred years squished inside that coffin, there was nothing hot about getting back inside. One thing to know about the Prince is that he’s smaller than he looks on TV. He has small, delicate hands. His feet don’t reach the end of the coffin. He stands on a milk HURT 92 crate behind his podium when he gives speeches. He has a tiny penis. “Don’t make a sound,” he told Briar Rose. “Don’t move a muscle.” He wanted her to pretend like she was dead, but really, she didn’t have to pretend too hard. When he put himself inside her, he came in about a second. Then he fell asleep right there, right on top. Briar Rose’s legs cramped. The Prince’s penis shriveled. The coffin was made of black reflective glass, like the kind they hide security cameras behind at the airport and at the mall. For all the years she slept inside, Briar Rose never spent much time considering her trembling reflection, which cast all around. But, under the Prince, there was nothing else for her to do. All she could see, all there was, was herself and a cold black expanse. It was depressing. And then his whole castle began to feel like a little black box. The garden, the kitchen, her bedroom, the game room with its pinball machines and billiard tables. Everywhere Briar Rose went she felt equally trapped. The Prince wasn’t a bad guy but he was dull, his desires repetitive. She started taking other men to bed while he was away fulfilling his princely duties. The gardener, the pool guy, the baker. To bed! To be spread out wide across quilted sheets and not kept crammed in some old sleep-smelling box. Soon Briar Rose developed something serious with the Prince’s steward, a dark- haired guy about a hundred years her junior. It was love, like waking up, and it was an easy secret to keep. The Steward kept the Prince’s schedule and knew where he was supposed to be every hour of the day. When the Prince was meeting with foreign dignitaries, they would do it up in his bedroom. And when the Prince was out hunting foxes, they’d bang each other in the stables. Once they even did it on the throne while the Prince was having tea with his mother. And the other castle employees—even if they saw HURT 93 them kissing down in the dungeon—they didn’t dare say anything. Briar Rose was queen and could have them fired as easily as hung. So it was a terrible shock when it all ended badly, in the Steward’s death. The police drained the moat, found the murder weapon—the Prince’s gun. They came to arrest him, and the Prince went easily. He walked across the drawbridge, and into the mob of reporters. “No comment,” he said, again and again, and ducked inside the back of a cruiser. I remember seeing it all on television even though I was just a kid. If you looked carefully, you could see Briar Rose there in the background. She was standing in the window up in her tower. You couldn’t see her face, but I bet if you could, you’d see that she was crying. The Prince didn’t look sorry, not once, not even when they called him up on the stand to testify. He stood there impassively and confessed to the murder. “I did it,” he said. He said he would have done it a thousand times more. That’s how much he loved Briar Rose. When I met her it was in Boise at the Annual Conference for Museum Curators. By then she was working for the Getty, and had long since dropped Briar from her name. I was sitting on a restoration panel and afterwards she introduced herself. We went for drinks and talked about that kouros, the one that made all that news a few years back for being a fake. I asked her about the Prince, and what he was like in real-life. Rose was forthcoming. “Small,” she said. “A tiny man.” Even when they showed him on TV that last time, he in his orange prison jumpsuit, his hands shackled behind his back. Even framed inside the little television box, he looked bigger than he actually was. HURT 94 She said he still sent her letters. He promised that when he got out of the slammer he’d find her again. “Sometimes he says he loves me,” she said. “Sometimes he wants to kill me.” She takes pills to fall asleep, that’s how nervous the Prince has made her, even after all these years. “How terrible,” I said. She agreed, and I ordered us another round of drinks. Still, when I had her in my bed, Briar Rose’s hair spread out like sunrays atop the sheets, I could see where the Prince was coming from. I stroked her arms and watched her sleep. I thought: How pretty she must have looked kept inside a glass box. HURT 95 DOGS Here’s another one you might not have heard before. There are two guys sitting at a bar, drinking what might be their second or third round. The bar is not so nice and frankly, one of our guys could afford to drink in a bar much nicer. He’s a business guy, has started up an Internet something-or-other, and makes truckloads of money. The other guy’s a writer. He is—let’s face it—me. As far as the bar goes, the writer says he’s been in worse. But who can know for certain? He’s the type of guy who says things just to have said them. What’s certain is that the bar is long, small and dark, and even though it’s just the three of them, our two guys and the bartender, it feels crowded. There are windows, but they’re round like boat windows, small and thick. The afternoon sun can barely muscle through. The beer on tap is warm and the surface of everything is sticky. So when one guy (the business guy) gets up to go to the bathroom, or when the bartender walks from one end of the bar to the other, this floor noise follows them, squick squick squick. When the writer tries to slide his buddy a fresh beer he finds that he can’t. The glass sticks to the grime, beer, dirt, and skin covering the counter. It makes a sucking noise when the business guy picks it up. The reason why the writer and the business guy are in this crappy bar in the middle of the afternoon is because the business guy’s sad about his dog. The dog’s running away. What happened was this: HURT 96 Yesterday some neighborhood children were standing outside the business guy’s fence. The dog was teasing them, because that’s the kind of dog it was. “The farm means you’re dead,” said the dog. “You can’t chase rabbits when you’re dead.” “What about Oscar?” said the little neighborhood girl. “Oscar’s dead,” said the dog. “Your parents lied to you.” The little neighborhood girl began crying. The neighborhood boy, her brother, dropped his baseball and put his arm around his sister. The children staggered away and the dog stared at the baseball through a gap in the fence, a fat string of drool dripping from its tongue. When the business guy came from work he found a note wedged into the flag of his mailbox. Train your dog, the note said. “What’s this about?” the business guy said. The dog looked up from the slipper that it was chewing. “Beats me,” the dog said. “Is that my slipper?” said the business guy. “This slipper?” said the dog. “Bad dog,” said the business guy. He chased the dog outside and locked the door. The next morning when he went out to get the paper, he saw that the front gate was open and that the dog was gone. The writer’s also at the bar because of sadness. But he’s not sad about the business guy’s dog. He’s never liked dogs and he likes the business guy’s least of all. The writer’s sad because his girlfriend left him, again. “She’ll come back,” says the business guy. “She always does.” HURT 97 But this time the writer’s not so sure. She read a screenplay that he’d been writing and left him because she claimed he was writing about them. She said that the screenplay was about their actual life. In it a young man and a young woman have an adventure together, fall in love, and get married. Years pass and they learn that without the adventure—the sexiness of explosions, the romance of car chases—they’re completely wrong for each other. The man is completely boring. Every night he comes home from work and wants the woman to cook him a chicken breast. He never wants to go out to dinner, but when he does he always wants to go to the same place for a cheeseburger. But the food there is always too greasy. When they come home the man spends the rest of the night on the toilet, saying he’ll never eat out again. And the woman’s like, “Oh great. Now I’ll have to cook you a stupid chicken breast for the rest of your stupid life.” When the man finally decides it’s time to eat out again, where does he want to go? You guessed it. But it’s not like the woman’s so perfect either. Over the years she’s put on weight. When the man looks at the woman’s ass, he feels resentful. It’s not the ass of the woman he’d had an adventure with. “You don’t love me,” the man says when the woman asks why he’s muttering to himself on the couch. For both of them change is scarier than divorce and so they stay together for all those years. Eventually they begin trying to kill each other. When the man uses his power tools he leaves them plugged in into the socket in the hall. The woman almost trips and breaks her neck. When it’s fish night the woman forgets to debone the man’s fish. Every time he gets to a bone, he goes on and on about how he almost died because of her carelessness. Finally one of them becomes old and senile and is committed to the nursing home. In order to pay for the one in the nursing home, the other one sells the house and HURT 98 moves into a no-bedroom apartment with thin walls. That one visits the one in the nursing home frequently and then less frequently, because the one in the nursing home has forgotten the other one’s name. One of them dies. A third guy walks into the bar. This guy’s wearing a suit. He’s sweating and panting and is red in the face. He walks up to the bar and orders a beer. “You’ll never believe it,” he says. “I can’t believe what just happened to me.” The writer and business guy sip their drinks and wait for the third guy to continue, all ears. The third guy says he was just outside at the bus stop, minding his own business, waiting for the bus, when a dog came up to him and started begging. “For money,” the third guy says. “Two dollars,” said the dog. “Two dollars is all I need.” “Get lost,” said the third guy. He looked at his watch. He needed to pick up his daughter from ballet practice. If he were late again he’d never hear the end of it from his ex-wife. “Come on,” said the dog. “I’m starving. You’re telling me a guy like you, in a suit like that can’t spare a couple of bucks?” The third guy’s bus pulled up to the stop, and the dog maneuvered in front of him, blocking his path. The dog looked up at him and gave its tail a sad little shake. The bus doors opened, and the third guy tried to nudge the dog away with his foot. “What are you doing?” said the dog. “Are you kicking me?” HURT 99 The third guy’s bus pulled away. “Hey,” said the third guy. His voice was lost in the brakes. “I can’t believe you kicked me,” said the dog. The dog was snarling, gnashing and baring its teeth. The bartender wipes down the bar with his bar towel. “Hey,” says the bartender. “Where’d your friend go?” The writer and third guy look at where the business guy was sitting, but there’s no business guy. An empty stool. The business guy’s gone. Outside the bar, the writer and third guy are calling for the business guy, and the business guy is somewhere else calling for his dog. Not only is the bar shitty and shabby but the street it’s on is also kind of the same. There’s litter on the sidewalk, cigarette butts, condom wrappers, and beer cans. When buses speed by the litter gets caught in their wind tunnels and knocks against the writer and third guy’s feet. Eventually they find themselves in a shitty park with a weak fountain in its middle; the fountain’s water shoots weakly into the air. Around the fountain are mothers with strollers. Tied to the handles of the strollers are leashes, and at the end of the leashes are dogs. “That’s the dog,” says the third guy. HURT 100 He points to a dog standing up at a trashcan, its head in the trash. Even from the distance, squinting into the sun, the sun that’s refracting and being magnified by the fountain’s thin line of water, the writer can see that it’s not the business guy’s dog. “Nope,” he says. “Not the dog.” The business guy’s dog is black and white. This one’s brown all over. “You sure?” says the third guy. After all the majority of dogs are friendly and eager to please; it’s not like the world is full of talking dogs. But what can the writer say? There must be at least two talking dogs in the world—the business guy’s dog and this brown dog. “I’m sure,” says the writer. The writer asks the third guy about his daughter, the one he was supposed to pick up from the ballet lessons. “Oh no,” says the third guy. He looks at his watch and hurries to a bus stop. The next bus picks him up. And then, except for the brown dog and the mothers, the writer is alone in the park. There are hot mothers and plain mothers. Mothers with babies swaddled in pink and mothers with babies in blue. The writer sits on a bench and watches the mothers. Even the hot mothers are tired-looking. There are big circles under their eyes. The writer’s own mother was always tired-looking. When he was a kid it seemed that all she ever wanted to do was nap. When he came home from school, eager to show her the big red A that his teacher had written on the top of his report about dinosaurs or werewolves or Sir Francis Drake, she’d always be there, in bed, in the bedroom, a wet towel covering her face. And later, in college, when he told her he was going to become a writer, she’d pour herself a HURT 101 glass of chardonnay and lay down on the couch, moaning. “So you can write about your mother?” she said. All that writers do, she said, is write about their mothers and beg for money. She asked what she ever did to make his life so bad. “It’s not like it’s been easy,” she said, “raising you all alone. You being a kid like you were.” But really what had she done? Besides her constant napping, her inattention, the crappy and crappier boyfriends who either pretended to be his father or pretended that he didn’t exist at all, there was, for example, the incident with the dog. When the writer was twelve all he wanted in the world was a dog. One day, to his surprise, his mother brought one home. It was a warm puppy, a Labrador mix that licked his face and crawled all over him. Whenever it saw the writer get off the school bus and walk up the driveway, it got so happy it peed. One day the puppy peed in the mother’s shoes and that was the last the writer saw of it. The next day when he came home from school there was a goldfish in a bowl. Soon the sun begins to set and the streetlamps switch on. The park’s filled with their humming, and the mothers push their strollers towards the exit. The dogs tied to the strollers tug on their leashes, leading the mothers home. The brown dog, that asshole, lifts its head from the trashcan and sees the writer sitting by the fountain. “Hey guy,” says the dog, “can you spare a couple bucks?” The writer opens his wallet and puts a few dollars in the dog’s mouth. They sit there, the dog and the writer, by the fountain, and watch the mothers leave the park. The sun puts colors to the clouds in the sky. “That’s some sunset,” says the dog. And it is some sunset, even though it’s because of the smog that the sky is filled with such bright oranges and pinks. HURT 102 “It’s a good one,” says the writer. And they sit there, the dog and the writer, long after the sun’s set and the sky’s gone dark, and back home in their apartments the mothers put their children to bed and say that the world is a good one and that it’s meant for them and that their mothers will always love them and that they’ll never be alone or afraid. HURT 103 SOME ZOMBIES After Super Wal-Mart, Charles and Kara came home and found zombies in their front yard. There were like one hundred zombies trampling their lawn. Zombies on the neighbors’ lawns and on all the lawns. Most of the neighbors were zombies. Some of them moaned. “Zombies are cool,” said Charles. Zombies stood in the driveway and in front of the garage. One was eating a cat. Kara honked the horn. Zombies stood. It was October and yellow and orange-red leaves fell off the trees and onto zombies. Charles and Kara had been dating a year and a half. They were having relationship problems. Charles was five years older than Kara and had asked her to marry him. In a panic, she said yes. She was in her mid-twenties and unprepared for life’s vicissitudes. She had imagined that she would be able to sleep around until she was in her thirties. At least. Somehow, she felt, someone had tricked her. “Honk the horn,” said Charles. “I honked the horn.” She honked again. Zombies found a living person. It was Mr. Lau. They pulled him off his bike and tore him to pieces. The blood sprayed ten feet in the air. Another thing that she disliked about Charles was his pushiness. “I have to pee,” said Charles. Zombies were on a killing rampage. “We can’t get married,” said Kara. “I can’t.” One of the zombies was the piano teacher, Mrs. Young. Her jaw hung from her face in a permanent gape. Off and on Kara had taken lessons for eight years but was never very good. “You have to practice your scales,” Mrs. Young used to say. “Play your scales. Play C minor, Play C minor now.” HURT 104 Now Mrs. Young threw a dismembered limb at Kara’s car. The limb landed on the car, left a blood-streak, and rolled to the ground. “What about our plans?” said Charles. “Our plans for a long and happy life. A life sanctified by the blessings of God.” Charles crossed his legs. When he bought his coke, Kara told him not to super-size. He super-sized it anyway. The empty yellow wax-paper cup rolled beneath the seat. “Pee in this,” said Kara. She reached under the seat and shoved the cup at Charles. “You never listen to me,” she said. “I want a secular service.” She felt sleepy and wanted take a hot bath. Zombies broke into Kara and Charles’ house. They smashed down the door and carried out the television, the VCR, the stereo system. They flung clothing across the yard. A zombie ripped apart Kara’s favorite bra. Another wore Charles’ corduroy pants. “My pants,” said Charles. He frowned and looked at his pants. There were dirt stains near the ankles. “Listen, maybe if you honk the horn longer. Press on it for a long time.” He reached across the seat and held down the horn. Kara’s father didn’t like Charles. He called him effeminate. Charles was a computer programmer. He programmed pop-up advertisements for the Internet. He had programmed more than one thousand. Whenever Kara was on the Internet and an advertisement popped up, Charles told her which ones were his. “I made that one,” he said. “I made that one and that one and that one and that one.” “Not Charles,” Kara’s father said when she told him about the marriage. He was in low-security prison for tax evasion. Kara told him during her weekly visit. “Don’t marry him just because you’re upset with me,” he said HURT 105 “I hate you,” said Kara. Charles turned away from her and a zombie pressed its rotten genitals against the car window. “O.K.” said Charles. “Fine.” Another zombie leaned against the car and exposed itself, and then came another and another. Rampaging zombies crowded around the car. They pushed their bodies against it and climbed on top of it until it was completely covered: a green-red, pukish, rotting, fleshy lump. “Hate me,” said Charles. “Fine. Fine. Fine.” A few weeks later Charles and Kara went back to Super Wal-Mart. They bought bed skirts, decorative pillows, down comforters and duvets, electric blankets, throw rugs, slip covers, panel curtains, floor lamps, wall lamps, touch lamps, ceiling fans, sectional sofas, microfiber ottomans and faux-leather chaise lounge chairs, bar stools, wine chillers, rice cookers, slow cookers, jug blenders, citrus juicers, electric can openers, sonic toothbrushes, oral irrigators, extra-wide hair straighteners, self-cleaning shavers, deep cleaners, wet/dry upright vacuums, yard rakes, garden claws, oscillating sprinklers, bamboo fence, spade shovels, pick mattocks, corded and cordless screwdrivers, lithium- ion inflators, handheld GPS navigators, cellular telephones, digital music recorders, DVD players, sling boxes, flat-panel televisions, home entertainment systems. They bought ninety-day replacement plans. Three-year warranties, life-time warranties, etc. HURT 106 VICISSITUDES, CA 1 Brandon and Kara went hiking but were unprepared for the physical challenge. “Hiking is hard work,” said Kara. She cupped her hands and drank from a limpid mountain stream. “But it’s awesome,” she said. “Nature rocks,” said Brandon. They were in the San Gabriel Mountains and from their elevation could see Los Angeles and the smog in the distance. In Los Angeles city people lived in tiny apartments. The tiny apartments had tiny windows and the tiny windows had tiny curtains which blocked the prying eyes of neighbors. The curtains, sometimes, needed to be ironed. Brandon didn’t own an iron. He thought about this. Nature, he thought, is good because it’s simple and expansive. Brandon came to the mountains to find enlightenment. Enlightenment, he learned from his yoga teacher, could be found in nature. Kara thought Brandon needed stimulation. She liked him, she said, but was tired of his moodiness and constant napping. Kara took off her overshirt and sat on a rock in the sun. Underneath she wore a tank top that Brandon admired on account of her breasts. Kara has nice breasts, he thought, even if we are just friends. A cloud moved away from the sun and a yellow sunbeam shined on a nearby tree. HURT 107 “Look at that tree,” said Kara. She pointed to the tall luminous pine. “There’s so much meaning in that tree.” 2 The next day Kara was sick with dysentery. Brandon visited her at the hospital. He gave her a bouquet of flowers and asked how it was going. “I have dysentery,” said Kara, “because micro-organisms have invaded my intestines via my stomach.” “Montezuma’s Revenge,” said Charles. “The lesson,” said Charles, “is never to drink from a limpid mountain stream.” Great, thought Brandon, Charles is here. 3 A few weeks later Brandon met Kara and Charles for dinner at a macrobiotic restaurant on La Brea. They sat at a small round table and looked at their menus. “I love macrobiotic food,” said Kara. Charles said: “Macrobiotic food is my favorite.” Brandon didn’t know about macrobiotic food. He looked at his menu. HURT 108 What’s seitan? he thought. “I’m thinking of ordering the tempeh with miso-cured tofu cheese,” said Kara. “On ciabatta?” said Charles. “Ciabatta is a carb,” he said. Charles was a personal trainer. Not so long ago he moved to Los Angeles from Orange County to expand his client base. This is how he met Kara. First she was his client. Then his girlfriend. Soon they’d be moving in together. “But I’ve lost five pounds,” said Kara. “Because of the dysentery,” she said. “In fluids,” said Charles. Charles said: “Fluids don’t count.” Kara pulled her hair away from her neck. Her neck was slender and featured an array of beauty marks. “Then I’ll get the seitan wrap,” she said. Charles ordered the chopped salad. When it was Brandon’s turn he couldn’t decide. In a panic he ordered the tuna roll. But I hate sushi, he thought when the meals came out. Charles said something about politics. “I dislike the president,” he said. HURT 109 “Garfield was my favorite president,” said Brandon. “James A. Garfield?” said Kara. “President from March to July of 1881?” “From Ohio?” she said. “That’s the one,” said Brandon. He said: “I think he would have proven to be an effective leader if he’d been given the chance.” Charles put his hand on Kara’s knee. “That’s funny,” said Charles. “Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, is my favorite presidential assassin, and it’s not just because we share a name.” He said: “Did you know that Guiteau killed the president because he was sexually frustrated?” “How awful,” said Kara. Brandon poked his tuna roll. “Don’t you agree, Brandon?” said Charles. “Agree?” “That sexual frustration is awful.” “I thought Guiteau killed Garfield because he wanted to be ambassador to France,” said Brandon. “Please,” said Charles. He said: “Everyone wants to be ambassador to France.” 4 The next day Brandon woke up to the bright morning sun shining through his bedroom window. HURT 110 He walked to his couch and napped until lunch. After lunch Brandon looked for jobs on the Internet. He read: Financial Analyst, Portfolio Associate, Dental Receptionist, Detention Services Officer, Helicopter Repair. Just like the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that, etc., there were no listings for Ethnomusicologist. Ethnomusicology is all I am passionate about, thought Brandon. Brandon had recently finished his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology. Often he wondered why it seemed like no one besides himself realized how important it was to study music in conjunction with certain ethnographic and social phenomena. He thought about all his Ethnomusicologist heroes. Why would the world not want more Ethnomusicologists? Soon he found himself looking at pornography. To cheer himself up he went to the movies. There were explosions. Romance. When he walked out of the theater he felt even more depressed. Film could have been a viable artistic medium, he thought, but had shed all its loftier aspirations for pure financial gain. I was entertained, he thought, but I wasn’t moved. HURT 111 5 Brandon went to Kara and Charles’s housewarming. Local business entrepreneurs and minor celebrities loitered in the living room and on the patio. Since when, thought Brandon, did Kara befriend so many minor celebrities? “Charles just opened his own athletic club,” said Kara. “We’re considering a franchise,” she said. They had just moved into a penthouse apartment in Silver Lake. To celebrate they bought a Pekinese and named it Chu Chu. Miranda July lived a floor above. The apartment was decorated with modern furniture. Brandon wandered over to a sleek-looking bookshelf and looked at the bright and varicolored books. Above the bookshelf was a painting. Yellow, orange, a slash of red. “Rothko,” said Kara. “It’s just a print,” she said. Miranda July stood alone at the drinks table. She looked disinterestedly into cup. “That’s Miranda July,” said Kara. “I liked her movies,” said Brandon, “and her book.” “Thank you,” said Miranda July. “They all occurred to me naturally,” she said, “as when a plant springs from the soil or when an animal gives birth to a litter of baby animals.” HURT 112 Charles walked through the living room with a platter of cocktail shrimp. Chu Chu trailed behind. “Oh no!” said Kara. She said that Charles wasn’t supposed to serve the shrimp until after the crudités. She chased Charles and Chu Chu back into the kitchen. Miranda July asked Brandon what he did for a living. “Ethnomusicologist,” he said. “Unemployed,” he said. “Of course,” said Miranda July. She told Brandon that all worthwhile professions were practically unemployable. Then she told him about an uncle who was an analytic philosopher. He lived in squalor until he died. “Pneumonia,” she said. “It was probably very treatable,” she said. A hired pianist began playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Brandon told Miranda July that the piece had been a favorite of his favorite Ethnomusicologist, the great Carl Stumpf. Miranda July nodded. “Music is the world-language of feeling,” she said. 6 Later that week the phone rang. It was Miranda July. HURT 113 “Of course,” said Brandon. “I love lunch,” he said. He stood in front of his closet and looked at his clothing. He thought about calling Kara then remembered that she and Charles had gone to Puerto Vallarta for the long weekend. What does one wear? he thought. Eventually he chose a dark shirt and thought about Miranda July. Sexually. 7 “Hello, Miranda July,” said Brandon. “Hello, Brandon, ” said Miranda July. Miranda July had chosen an outdoor table at the café and looked especially pale and elegant beneath the bright and cloudless sky. Brandon said something about the weather. “Seventy degrees and sunny,” said Miranda July. “It was overcast this morning,” said Brandon. “The marine layer,” said Miranda July. Miranda July wore a black scarf which she took off and folded in her lap. Brandon twisted his napkin. Miranda July checked her phone. She sent a text message. A white van pulled to the curb and several paparazzo jumped out. HURT 114 “Look!” said one. “Miranda July is eating lunch!” They began assaulting Miranda July with bewildering flashes. “With whom is Miranda July eating lunch?” said another. The cameras flashed on Brandon. “Look at the shabbiness of his clothing,” said a paparazzi. “The collar of his shirt is fraying. His jeans are ill-fitting. His shoes are nearly worn to the sole.” “He must be a blossoming actor,” said another. “A struggling artist.” “An independent musician.” When their lunch came out Miranda July squeezed ketchup onto her French fries. “These French fries are horrible,” she said. “Taste them,” she said. “They’re limp and tasteless.” Brandon thought the fries tasted okay but told Miranda July that she should send them back if she disliked them. “One must not settle,” he said. “I disagree,” said Miranda July. She squirted more ketchup on the fries and continued eating. She said: “An inability to settle can be the source of great unhappiness.” 8 “Puerto Vallarta is amazing,” said Kara. As she walked her hair clacked in tight beaded braids. “There are breath-taking sunsets and jungle-covered mountains,” she said. HURT 115 Kara and Brandon were walking Chu Chu to the dog park near her new apartment. Her new engagement ring burst in the sun. Brandon told her that he’d had lunch with Miranda July. “How’d it go?” asked Kara. “She paid,” he said. “Too bad.” Kara scooped Chu Chu’s poop into a plastic bag. Back at his apartment Brandon watched a news report about gray whales. The gray whales were dead and kept washing up on a nearby beach. Their smell menaced the surrounding beach communities. The TV showed pictures of volunteers rolling the whales back to sea. On the news reported explained that each time the volunteers rolled the whales out to sea they were washed up again somewhere else along the coast. She interviewed a volunteer. “This time,” said the volunteer, “we’re going to roll the whales out to sea and attach them to boats via meat hooks. The boats will drag the whales even further out into the ocean. With luck they’ll be eaten by sharks and other sea animals.” They stood on a beach where the whale corpses moldered in the background The reporter blinked into the camera. Her nose and mouth were hidden behind a carbon mask but her eyes were brown. Kara has brown eyes, Brandon observed. He remembered the last time he and Kara had gone to the beach. HURT 116 Brandon had rubbed suntan lotion onto Kara’s shoulders. Kara had rubbed suntan lotion onto his. But now, he though; now Charles will be the only one to rub suntan lotion onto Kara’s shoulders. 9 Brandon, Kara, Charles, and Miranda July all went to the horseracing racetrack in Hollywood. They all sat in the box seats. Chu Chu sat in Kara’s lap. “Horseracing is the sport of kings,” said Charles. He flagged down a waiter and ordered more ice for their juleps. “But it’s dangerous,” he said. “Per one hundred thousand participants,” said Kara, “it has the highest number of deaths.” “A blood sport,” said Charles. Miranda July sat next to Brandon. Her hands were folded in her lap. There are Miranda July’s hands, thought Brandon. I would offer to hold them but I don’t know her intentions. He pondered the artist’s inscrutable self. Charles talked about his athletic club. “I’ve just hired an assistant,” he said. “His name is Javier and he has long golden hair and the most perfect biceps I’ve ever seen.” HURT 117 The gates opened and the horses charged out. “Which one did you bet on?” asked Kara. “Blaze of Enchantment,” said Miranda July. “He’s currently running neck-and- neck with Apache Sunrise.” “Apache Sunrise is a shoo-in,” said Charles. He said: “He was sired by Sierra’s Sweet Rain.” The horses rounded the far corner and thundered towards the grandstand. As they came nearer Chu Chu leaped from Kara’s lap. He bounded onto the track and was trampled by the thoroughbreds. “Chu Chu!” said Kara. “Blaze of Enchantment!” “Apache Sunrise!” The lead horses collapsed in a pile on top of the Pekinese. Enraged, the other spectators began pelting Brandon, Kara, Charles, and Miranda July with their losing betting slips. On the racetrack a team of stablehands began untangling the scrum of jockeys and horses. “Chu Chu,” said Kara. Charles wrapped her in his commiserative embrace. 10 “Poor Chu Chu,” said Charles. “My only consolation is that Blaze of Enchantment and Apache Sunrise will never race again.” HURT 118 “Nor will Moonshadow,” said Miranda July. “Nor Lady Boots,” said Brandon. “Nor Peach Blossom,” said Charles. “Nor Afternoon Delight,” said Miranda July. After the ceremony Kara stood alone by the punch and crackers table and stroked her jar of ashes. 11 The principal looked at Brandon’s resume. “It says here,” said the principal, “that you’re an Ethnomusicologist.” “I am,” said Brandon. “Do you care to explain?” “Ethnomusicology?” “Yes,” said the principal. On the wall behind the principal were portraits of the school’s previous principals. They gazed sternly at Brandon. Brandon explained. “And you propose to teach Ethnomusicology to elementary school children?” “Yes,” said Brandon. “Maybe,” he said. The principal wrote something in his notebook. “And what about the recorder?” said the principal. He said: “Can you teach the recorder?” HURT 119 “I can play the recorder,” said Brandon, “or the sweet flute as it was called in the eighteenth century.” The principal reached into his desk and pulled out a recorder. Brandon took the beige bakelite instrument and blew into the fipple. Out came a cascade of sweetly sour notes. 12 “Miranda July?” said Brandon. “Yes, Brandon,” said Miranda July. “Is it true what they say about us in the tabloids?” “No.” “Are you sure?” “Of course I am.” “It’s not even a little bit true?” “How could something be a little bit true?” “Well—” said Brandon. “Well what?” He said: “We do spend a lot of time together.” After Miranda July left his apartment, Brandon continued lying on his couch and continued thinking about it. But we really do spend a lot of time together, is what he thought. HURT 120 13 Brandon phoned his mother in Cleveland. “I don’t feel special,” he said. His mother told him that he was special. But she was his mother. Another week passed and he heard nothing from the job search, nor did he hear anything from Miranda July. 14 Kara told Brandon that she didn’t know what to tell him about Miranda July. “But when it comes to the job search,” she said, “maybe you should expand your horizons.” They were at Charles’s athletic club. Kara wore a black unitard and was on the step machine. Her face was red from stepping. “Ethnomusicology is diverse,” said Brandon. “It’s multidisciplinary,” he said. On the other side of the gym Miranda July was doing dumbbell squats in front of the long mirror. Brandon thought she was watching him. “But maybe you should apply for other types of jobs?” said Kara. “Charles could help you,” she said. Brandon told her that he refused to work for The Man. “The Man?” said Kara. “The establishment culture,” said Brandon. HURT 121 Kara told Brandon that she knew what The Man was. “What year do you live in?” she said. She told Brandon that history had long proven the institution to be ubiquitous. Meanwhile, Charles’s new assistant, Javier, approached Miranda July. He placed the hand of his well-muscled arm above her buttocks and demonstrated a more efficient squat. “Bend at the hips,” he said. “The hips?” said Miranda July. “Your fine curvaceous hips.” Well, thought Brandon. Back at his apartment he continued searching for jobs on the Internet. Soon he was looking at pictures of naked girls. The naked girls touched themselves. The naked girls touched each other. Sometimes the naked girls touched each other with ice cubes. 15 The owners of the lamed horses were suing Charles and Kara. “It’s outrageous,” said Charles. “They want eleven million,” he said. Charles chopped vegetables in his kitchen. He was making a salad to go with his steak. He chopped tomatoes and onions, zucchinis and bell peppers. He chopped with zeal. “But we’re going to file a counterclaim,” said Kara. HURT 122 Her knife wavered over an avocado. She said: “The racetrack was not properly barricaded.” “The lawyers agree,” said Charles. “A post-and-rail fence is not an adequate barrier.” “Lawyers?” said Brandon. Said Charles: “My team of expensive lawyers.” Brandon’s father had been a lawyer. He’d practiced corporate law until he was disbarred for tax evasion. Currently he was serving time in the penitentiary in Chillicothe, OH, which had once been the prison to Charles Manson. Brandon liked to point out that Charles Manson was a very important figure in North American Ethnomusicology. “Charles Manson had close ties to the Beach Boys,” said Brandon. He said: “He contributed lyrics to the song Never Learn Not To Love.” “Everyone knows that,” said Charles. “His contribution was uncredited. The song was originally entitled Cease To Exist.” Kara changed the subject. “Let’s change the subject,” she said. She asked in anyone had heard about the gray whales. “Back again,” said Brandon. “Those poor people,” said Kara. “But I suppose everyone must suffer. After all suffering is the counterpoint to happiness.” Everyone agreed and Kara served dinner. After dinner she announced that she was joining the job search. HURT 123 “Lawyers are expensive,” she said. “As are weddings,” said Charles. He said: “Lawyers and weddings.” He proposed a toast. 16 Brandon went to the grocery store. He pushed his cart down the frozen food aisle and selected frozen pizza, frozen pot pie, frozen lasagna, frozen buffalo wings, frozen mixed vegetables, frozen Hot Pockets. Then he steered his cart into the condiments aisle and reached for a bottle of ketchup. On the other end of the aisle Miranda July was reaching for a bottle of mustard. “Miranda July,” said Brandon. “Brandon,” said Miranda July. They pushed their carts towards each other and met in the center of the aisle in front of the salsa and mayonnaise. Miranda July’s cart was filled with cans of tuna fish. She wore a white t-shirt and her breasts were two small cones that pointed at Brandon’s chest. He tried to imagine them naked. Miranda July’s breasts, he thought. Veil of cotton, he thought. HURT 124 “Brandon?” said Miranda July. “Um,” said Brandon. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He asked Miranda July about the tuna fish. She explained that it was for a performance piece. She said: “I’m going to cover myself in tuna fish and molder on an expensive beach.” “Like the whales,” she said. “What beach?” asked Brandon. “Point Dume.” “Why?” Miranda July: “Art doesn’t ask why.” 17 Brandon paid for his groceries and went back to his apartment. His landlord was waiting for him on the front steps. “Your rent is due,” said the landlord. She sat with her walking cane across her knees and a cigarette burning between two fingers. “It was due last week,” she said. Brandon shifted his groceries from one arm to the other. He shifted them back. “I don’t have enough money,” he said. HURT 125 The landlord grinned. Her teeth glinted under the blank gray sky. “How much did those cost you?” “My groceries?” said Brandon. “Your groceries,” she said. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess about one hundred dollars,” he said. The smoke rose off her cigarette. “I want them,” said the landlord. “My groceries?” “Yes,” she said. “Give me your groceries,” she said. 18 “Be an empty rice bowl,” said the yoga instructor. Brandon bent himself into the position. He pressed his hands and feet to the mat and pushed upwards. What he liked most about yoga was the mat. When he stood on it he felt as if he were on his own private rubberized island. I am an empty bowl of rice, he thought. His hips and buttocks strained towards the ceiling. Next to him Kara did the same. The yoga instructor strolled by and stopped to comment on Kara’s form. HURT 126 “Good,” said the yoga instructor. “Feel the fireflies in your stomach,” he said. The yoga instructor’s bare foot was planted on Brandon’s mat. His big toe was leveled directly below Brandon’s nose. Empty bowl of rice, thought Brandon. Empty bowl of rice, he thought. Private island, he thought. “Brandon?” said the yoga instructor, “what’s wrong?” After the class Brandon arranged his face into a smile. He pulled his lips towards his cheeks, his cheeks towards his forehead, and his forehead towards his occipital bone. “What are you doing?” said Kara. “Smiling,” he said. “It looks painful.” Kara tied her shoes and continued telling Brandon about her new job. “Which is why yoga is good,” she said, “because work puts so much strain on the body. After work my neck is strained. My upper back is strained. My lower back is strained.” “But you must be happy to have found a job so quickly.” “Not happy,” said Kara. She crossed her legs and began tying the other shoe. “What I feel is more like relief,” she said. HURT 127 She said: “Charles and I are relieved to have the extra money. Our legal costs are mounting and so are our wedding costs. The wedding decorator wants to know what we want for centerpieces. Charles wants floating tea candles. I want fresh flowers. Obviously we can’t have both.” “Obviously,” said Brandon. But the distinction bothered him long after he returned home. Why couldn’t one have both floating tea candles and fresh flowers? He stood in front of his empty refrigerator and gazed into its darkest depths. What a cruel world this is, he thought, where one must constantly be forced to choose between two equally attractive but competing desires. I can continue being an Ethnomusicologist, he thought. Or I can eat. 19 Vast greenness. Brandon stood at the tee box and gazed out onto the fairway. The hole was a long dogleg. Sand traps pooled in the distance. “What do you think?” said Charles. He pondered his shot and consulted with Javier. “Which club should I use?” Javier crossed his muscular arms, cupped his chin, and brooded. “Three wood,” he said. “My thoughts exactly,” said Charles. HURT 128 He said: “The three wood has a long flexible shaft, a nicely shaped head, and a thick sturdy hosel.” Charles swung the club and the ball disappeared. It was Brandon’s turn. He swung his club at the ball and missed. He swung and missed again. “Two strokes,” said Charles. “The trick,” said Charles, “is to keep your head down and follow through with your swing.” Brandon swung again and this time the club connected. The ball bounced a few yards before settling in the grass. “Good,” said Charles. “Well not good,” he said, “but you know what I mean.” Charles and Javier mounted the cart and drove ahead to look for their shots. Meanwhile, Brandon continued hitting his ball up the dogleg. When he finally came around to the other side of the trees he saw the cart parked in a secluded grove behind the green. Charles and Javier were in the cart and from a distance they seemed to be embracing. Charles seemed to be embracing Javier. Javier seemed to be embracing Charles. And it seemed as if they were doing something with their mouths, as if their mouths were also embracing. HURT 129 Shocking, thought Brandon. He thought: I am absolutely shocked. But when he thought about it later he was somehow not surprised. I was shocked, he thought, but I’m not surprised. 20 Brandon met Kara for lunch the next day. They sat on a bench in front of Kara’s office building and watched the reflections of clouds drift across the big mirrored windows. “How’d it go?” said Kara. She’d packed sandwiches for both of them, peanut butter and jelly for herself and just peanut butter for Brandon because he didn’t like jelly. “Fine,” said Brandon. “Charles is going to help you with the job search?” Brandon nodded. “Excellent,” said Kara. “Charles is so generous,” she said. She bit into her sandwich and a large gob of jelly flew out. Brandon picked up his napkin and pressed it to her blouse. “Kara,” he said. He said: “There’s something I need to tell you about Charles.” As the purple stain spread across her breast Brandon told her everything he’d seen out on the golf course. HURT 130 21 “Do you solemnly swear to the tell the truth? The whole truth? And nothing but the truth? So help you God.” After Miranda July testified about Chu Chu and the racehorses it was Brandon’s turn. He sat on the hard wooden bench and felt the judge’s eyes upon him. He felt the jury’s eyes, the lawyers’ eyes, the bailiff’s eyes, the court reporter’s eyes, the horse owners’ eyes, Miranda July’s eyes, Javier’s eyes, Charles’s eyes, and Kara’s eyes. He felt Kara’s eyes most of all. Kara held Charles’s hand and glared at Brandon. The interrogation began. 22 Brandon described the scene the best he could. There was the noise, the stink, the heat, and the thick cloud of dust settling over the grandstand settling over the grandstand after Chu Chu had been trampled. There were horses splayed on the beaten dirt track. Jockeys piled on told of them. And from underneath it all, there was the handle end of Chu Chu’s leash. The lawyer for the horse owners paced in front of the jury box. Twelve representative heads swung back and forth. HURT 131 “And your father?” she said. “Would you please tell us about your father?” she said. “My father?” said Brandon. “He wasn’t at the racetrack.” “Why not?” said the lawyer? “Because he lives in Ohio.” “You mean in prison,” said the lawyer. She said: “He lives in prison in Ohio.” She stopped pacing and cracked open the red slash of lipstick on her face, revealing two rows of very white teeth. “Let the record show,” she said, “that Brandon’s father is criminal.” She said: “Let the record further show that his mother’s been calling him but that he hasn’t returned her calls.” Charles’s lawyer tried to object but his objection was overruled. “Your soul is narrow,” the horse owners’ lawyer told Brandon. She said: “Your character is flawed.” Across the courtroom Kara continued to glare. 23 Brandon pulled his couch onto the sidewalk. He wrote $100 on a piece of cardboard and leaned it against the couch’s cushions. Then he went back into his apartment and brought out his mattress, his bedframe, his table, his chairs, his television stand, and his bookshelf. He priced everything to sell and sat on the steps waiting for buyers to come. HURT 132 Soon two teenaged boys appeared. Each was pushing a bike that appeared to be stolen. The bikes were girls’ bikes with pink and flower decals and silver streamers streaming from the handlebars. The teenagers dropped the bikes in the grass and flopped down on Brandon’s couch. “How much?” said one. Brandon told him. “How about fifty?” said the other. “Fine,” said Brandon. Then the teenagers assaulted Brandon. One punched him in the stomach and brought him to the ground. The other kicked him in the face. While Brandon writhed on the ground the teenagers picked up his couch and walked away with it. They left their bikes in the grass. Soon Brandon picked himself up off the sidewalk. He picked up the bikes and priced them $10 each. 24 “Your couch?” said Miranda July. “Yes,” said Brandon. “The teenagers,” he said. HURT 133 They were sitting on the floor of Brandon’s apartment. Brandon pressed a beer bottle to his swollen nose. On the TV on the floor across from them a news reporter was standing in front of the courthouse. A picture of Chu Chu flashed on the screen. “How’s your nose?” said Miranda July. “I think it’s broken,” said Brandon. Miranda July stared at his bruise. Her irises were two black disks that scanned back and forth across Brandon’s face. She asked Brandon if she could touch it. She said: “I’ve never touched a broken nose.” She cupped her hands over his nose. “It’s warm,” said Miranda July. “Warmer than a normal nose,” she said, “and firmer than I expected for something that’s broken.” A tear ran down Brandon’s cheek. 25 Charles and Kara stepped out of the courthouse and were greeted by a gift of reporters. The reporters pushed towards them and asked them how they felt about the verdict. “Victorious,” said Charles. HURT 134 He said: “This is a victory for dog owners everywhere. It proves that post-and-rail fences are not adequate barriers for horseracing tracks. We hope that horseracing track owners everywhere see the message that has been sent today and replace their post-and- rail fences with more substantial fencing.” Kara reached into her purse and removed a framed picture of Chu Chu. “Imagine,” she said, “if it had not been our little dog that had wandered onto the racetrack but that it had been somebody’s child who had been crushed to death under the hooves of so many horses.” Kara gazed intently into the cameras and continued fondling the picture of Chu Chu. 26 “Kara looks fat,” said Miranda July. “It’s the TV,” said Brandon. “I agree,” said Miranda July. She said: “TV makes everyone fat.” 27 That night Brandon had a nightmare. It began, as so many dreams do, as a dream of naked girls. The naked girls were washing cars. Some washed the cars with hoses. Others washed the cars with sponges. Eventually a school bus appeared for the naked girls to wash. HURT 135 They lathered and sprayed the school bus and when it emerged from the cloud of soap one of the naked girls told Brandon to get in. “In the bus?” said Brandon. “Get in,” she said. Brandon got in the bus and said hello to Miranda July who was driving it. “Where are we going?” “Home,” said Miranda July. But as the bus began travelling it became clear that Miranda July wasn’t taking Brandon back to Ohio. There was rainforest out the bus’s windows. Ocean on the other side. “Where are we?” said Brandon. “Puerto Vallarta,” said Miranda July. “It’s beautiful,” said Brandon. “Indeed,” said Miranda July. “But it’s also dangerous,” she said. As soon as she said this three people stepped out onto the road in front of the bus. Each wore a red balaclava and carried an AK-47. “See,” said Miranda July. She brought the bus to a stop. The guerillas boarded the bus and pointed their guns at Brandon’s face. “Give us your nose,” said one. This one was well-muscled and had a familiar voice. HURT 136 “Charles?” said Brandon. Charles took off his balaclava. “Give us your nose,” he said. Kara took off her balaclava. “Your lying nose,” she said. Then the third person stepped forward and swiped the nose off Brandon’s face. “Brandon,” said his landlord. “I’ve got your nose,” she said. 28 When Brandon woke up his nose was throbbing. He found a note taped to his door. The teenagers wanted their bikes back. If the bicycles weren’t returned, the teenagers said, they were going to mess Brandon up. They made a short list of the things that they’d do to him. We’ll slice off your ears. We’ll feed your ears to the birds. We’ll invert your knees. Below the list was a picture of an earless stickman with inverted knees. There were stickbirds on the ground eating the stickman’s ears. Though the drawing was crude, the teenagers had been able to render the stickman’s obvious pain. Brandon decided not to be home when the teenagers came back. HURT 137 He rolled up his yoga mat and went to the yoga studio. But when he arrived there the woman at the counter told him that he couldn’t take the class. “Your nose,” she said. “It’s bleeding,” she said. Brandon touched his nose and saw that it was indeed bleeding. He also realized that he couldn’t feel it. His nose was numb. “May I have a tissue?” he said. The woman gave him the box. Brandon sat on the bench outside the yoga studio and rolled tissues into his nose. He thought about going home. But then he thought about the frowning stickman. 29 Later Kara came out of the yoga studio and found Brandon sitting on the bench. Her skin shone with a lucent halo of sweat. “Brandon?” she said. She asked what he was doing there. Then she asked what had happened to his face. “Teenagers,” said Brandon. “How horrible,” said Kara. “But,” she said, “I suppose you deserve it. After all it’s like they say: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, etc.” “They?” said Brandon. HURT 138 “Yes,” said Kara. She said: “That’s what they say.” “And Charles?” said Brandon. “Charles and they,” said Kara. Then she told Brandon that the teenagers must have been the agents of karmic justice, doling out punishment for the lies that Brandon had been spreading about Charles. She also told Brandon that he was mostly forgiven. “After all,” she said, “forgiveness is the better part of valor.” “Not discretion?” said Brandon. He took out a tissue to see if his nose was still bleeding. It was. “Forgiveness,” said Kara. She told Brandon that she forgave him because his jealousy of Charles was understandable. Charles was successful. He was a small business owner. Brandon, on the other hand, was something else entirely. He was like an artist, she said, but without the skills and ambition. To show how forgiven he was, she invited him to the launching of their of their new boat. “We bought it with a small part of the settlement,” she said. “The Chu Chu Too,” she said. HURT 139 30 When Brandon arrived back at his apartment he saw that the door was ajar. He stood at the threshold and peered down the hallway. At the end of the hallway he saw the kitchen. Inside the kitchen he saw his refrigerator. The refrigerator was sideways; it was tipped on its side. 31 Brandon went to Miranda July’s. He went to Kara’s. He called his mother. No one was home. Brandon called the prison in Ohio. He was transferred from the switchboard operator to a prison guard and was then put on hold. Eventually his father came on the phone. “Brandon?” said Brandon’s father. “Yes,” said Brandon. He asked his father about prison life. “Fine,” said his father. He said the food was fine. His bed was fine. His roommate was fine. He liked the rigid schedule. He had lots of time to read. “The library is very impressive,” he said. He said: “I’ve read Bentham, Kierkegaard, and Foucault.” HURT 140 Brandon told his father that was happy to hear that he was enjoying his imprisonment. He said: “After all the system is designed to do more than punish.” “Indeed,” said Brandon’s father. “The system is meant to lead to a reconciliation with reality. Crime is the refusal to accept the basic facts of existence. In most rational societies that which is abhorrent to nature is also against the law.” He asked Brandon if he’d heard about the gray whales. “Take those gray whales for example,” his father said. “Their refusal to decay in the ocean is criminal. It goes against their very function in nature. The function of gray whales is to live and decay in the ocean. If they refuse to do the latter who will feed the bottom feeders?” “Anarchy,” said Brandon. “Exactly,” his father said. 32 Numb nose. Cold nose. No nose? 33 “You look terrible,” said Kara. “The teenagers,” said Brandon. “Again?” HURT 141 “I’m afraid to go home.” Brandon explained about his refrigerator. Kara closed the door and stepped outside her apartment. She asked where he’d been staying. “The Saharan Motel,” said Brandon. He told her that his room looked out onto the pool. It had a bed, an air-conditioner, and a minibar, which technically was more than he had in his own apartment. He told her that whenever he tried to fall asleep he’d hear the minibar and be reminded of his own refrigerator. He hadn’t slept in a week. “Can’t you unplug it?” said Kara. “I tried that,” said Brandon. He told Kara that the maid had found the cord and told the management about it. The management had threatened to kick him out. “But I have worse problems,” said Brandon. He told Kara that his nose had turned from numb to cold. “Can you lose a nose?” said Kara. Brandon didn’t know for sure but he thought that you could. “Oh yes,” he said. “You can definitely lose a nose.” 34 After they went to the doctor’s Kara drove Brandon back to his motel. “Now we know,” said Kara. HURT 142 They sat on Brandon’s bed and listened to the sound of his minibar’s engine. There was a vacuum cleaner in the distance. On the wall a picture of a slow camel moving towards an oasis. “Yes,” said Brandon. “I’m relieved,” said Kara. She said: “I’m happy that your nose is fine.” “It’s not fine,” said Brandon. “It’s broken,” he said. “But you’re not going to lose it,” said Kara. “That’s true,” said Brandon. She said: “The only type of nose you can lose is a syphilitic nose.” Outside the sun quivered in the swimming pool. A child sat in the sandbox and built a shapeless lump. “I don’t have syphilis,” said Brandon. He said: “Because I haven’t been having sex.” “Promiscuous sex,” said Kara. She said: “You can only get syphilis from having promiscuous sex.” Brandon thought about Charles. Promiscuous sex is what he thought. HURT 143 35 Everyone gathered at the marina for the launch of the Chu Chu Too. Brandon was gathered with a fresh bandage across his nose. Kara was gathered. Charles was gathered. Javier was gathered. Miranda July was gathered. Charles wielded a bottle of champagne. He held it by its neck, ready to smash it against his brand new yacht. But before he smashed his champagne he made a speech. Said Charles: “Back in the Viking times the Vikings marked the launch of a new boat with a human sacrifice. They sacrificed a human and spilled his blood into the sea to satisfy the Sea Gods.” He went on: “Like Vikings we are gathered here today to launch a new boat. But unlike Vikings we are not allowed to sacrifice human beings. Instead we are going to sacrifice a very expensive bottle of champagne. May this bottle of champagne satisfy the Sea Gods so that they protect us on this voyage and on many voyages to come.” He broke the bottle and everyone applauded. Kara handed out yachting caps. Everyone boarded the boat. 36 “How do you like it?” said Miranda July. “Fun,” said Brandon. “My first time on a boat,” he said. HURT 144 Brandon and Miranda July stood alone at the rear of the boat. Everyone else was at the front of the boat eating shrimp on toothpicks and laughing. The laughter flew back like spray from the waves. Brandon’s nose was bleeding. He was cold and nauseous. Every time the boat bumped over a wave he grabbed the rails and choked down a tide of vomit. The boat hit a wave and Brandon grabbed the rail. “I hate boat rides,” said Miranda July. She said: “Boat rides always go on too long. The sun is always too hot. The boats are always too confining. But every time I’m invited I accept. I think maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time it will be a fun boat ride. But at the same time I know exactly what’s going to happen.” “What’s going to happen?” said Brandon. “Reality,” said Miranda July. 37 After they had sailed past Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach and had begun the long curve up the coast towards Malibu, Charles called everyone to the front of the boat. He and Javier had brought along golf clubs and wanted everyone to hit golf balls into the sea. He offered Kara the chance to go first. “What about the fish?” said Kara. HURT 145 “What fish?” said Charles. Kara said: “I don’t want to hit a fish.” “You won’t hit a fish,” said Charles. He handed a club to Javier and Javier swung it. The ball landed far away in the water. There was a tiny white splash. “See,” said Charles. “The ocean is vast but mostly fishless,” he said. He gave a club to Miranda July and she dutifully knocked a ball into the water. Then he gave one to Brandon. “Let’s see if you remember how it goes,” said Charles. Brandon looked out at the ocean. Then he looked at Kara. Her nose. Her brown eyes. But not her breasts, thought Brandon. Not her breasts, he thought. “I can’t,” said Brandon. “The fish,” he said. Charles hit two more balls into the water. “No fish,” he said. “Oh it does look like fun,” said Kara. She stood at the front of the boat and raised the club above her head. HURT 146 She swung. But before the club connected with the ball the boat bumped over a wave and everyone lunged forward. When Brandon stood up again he looked to the spot where Kara had been standing. Kara was gone. 38 Everyone stood at the rail and called into the water. But there was no Kara. There was just blue-black sea. Charles climbed over the rail and dived into the ocean. Javier peeled off his shirt and jumped in as well. Miranda July clutched a lifesaver. “Look,” she said. She pointed at a floating whale corpse that had surfaced alongside the ship. There was a whole rotten pod of them. “It’s the whales,” said Miranda July. “That’s what we hit.” Brandon could smell them. “The stench,” he said. “Truly horrible,” said Miranda July. Then Brandon saw Kara. She was clinging to a whale corpse and drifting further away from the boat. HURT 147 “There she is,” said Brandon. He climbed up the rail and pointed. “Kara,” he said. “I’m coming,” he said. But Charles and Javier had also seen her. They began swimming towards her, their muscular arms pulling them through the water with ease. By the time Brandon had removed his shirt they had already reached her. The three were hugging together and paddling back towards the boat. The rescue was already over. It’s too late, he thought. But then Brandon jumped in anyway. He mounted the rail and plunged into the water. He was a poor swimmer and was dunked by the waves. But when he got his head above the water he could see Kara and Charles moving together in the distance. The whales rose and sank around him. “I’m coming,” he said. There was music in the water, the sound of waves slapping on whales’ bodies. “Wait for me,” he said. Now he was moving farther away from the Chu Chu Too but didn’t seem to be getting any closer to Kara and Charles. “I’m coming,” he said. HURT 148 HEAVENS 1. You have pain in your back and can’t sleep. For three months it goes on like this: back pain, waking up, going to the couch, reading a magazine, not sleeping. Everyone you know asks why you look so tired, why your bad mood. Your wife doesn’t ask. 2. You go to the doctor and the doctor puts you in a machine. While the machine takes pictures of your back it plays classical music. You don’t know anything about classical music except that it’s depressing. Violins don’t cover up the machine’s noise, and when they do it’s not like it’s enough. No music in the world can hide the fact about where you are at that moment, in the basement of a hospital, inside a tube. Also depressing is the fact that your doctor can’t find it. “Your pain,” he says, “it’s in your head.” 3. You go to a psychologist. “Of course it’s in your head,” the psychologist says. He asks where else you expected your pain to be. He says that the best thing to do is to surrender to it. Try marijuana. “Seriously,” he says. “We live in California.” He rubs his beard and asks about your mother. 4. You tell your wife that the psychologist says to surrender. “That’s not the same as giving up,” she says. “Suicide is not surrender.” HURT 149 5. But it’s not just back pain that you’ve been moaning about. It’s the shittiness of the world in general. Of course, it’s not the world in general that you find so shitty. It’s the world as you perceive it vis-à-vis it’s shittiness towards you. Your wife says that if you don’t stop feeling sorry for yourself, she’s going to leave you. She loves you, she says, but it’s clear that you’re not thinking about her. You tell her that she doesn’t mean it. Actually, she says, she does. That night neither of you sleep. You, on the couch, in the meanest part of yourself, in the bile producing ducts in your gallbladder, and in the empty spaces in between, feel this as a victory. 6. But in the morning she comes out of the bedroom with her suitcase. She’s going to stay with her parents. Not forever, she says. But definitely for a couple of nights. 7. You call your mother. You ask how she could have done this to you. “Done what?” she says. Bring you into a world, you say, where everything is turned against you. “You mean a world,” she says, “where most of the people you know love you. A world,” she says, “where you’re considered a contributor to the total sum of good.” She asks how she could not. 8. But you go ahead and do it anyway, that thing that you’ve been threatening to do. You do it in the bathtub with pills. You regret it too almost immediately after you’ve swallowed them. But by then it’s too late. It’s true what they say: What’s done is done. How sad is that? HURT 150 9. When you open your eyes you’re in a room with your grandmother. She’s your grandmother but she’s also an angel. You’re an angel too. You have the halo and the wings. The room you’re in is white and there’s harp music playing. It’s not, truth be told, all that different from being in an MRI. “That was stupid,” your grandmother says. You ask if you’re in Heaven. Your grandmother rolls her eyes. 10. You sleep all the time in Heaven. It’s practically the only thing to do. When you’re not sleeping you play in an orchestra. Because that music in MRI machines? It’s not being piped in at all. There are literally orchestras of angels that go to hospitals and play for sick people. In life you never had the patience to be a musician, but in Heaven, after you put some effort into it, you find that you have some talent for the violin. 11. When your mother and wife show up in Heaven, they’re happy to see you but also kind of surprised. You know, you say. You were surprised too. But Hell’s a lie, something that they made up down on Earth. Your wife doesn’t believe it. “Not after what you put us through,” she says. “It’s just different,” she says, “different than what we thought.” She says that she was sad for a long time. She even thought about suicide herself. But then she met someone new. They got married, had kids. Her new husband is already up there in Heaven. It turns out that you know him. He plays saxophone in your orchestra. You like him. He’s a nice guy. 12. And that’s the thing about Heaven: eventually everyone you know shows up. For a while it’s like Facebook, or a really great party, but then the conversation dies out. HURT 151 Because there are no politics in Heaven; there’s no weather. Even the music gets old. You’ve heard all the harp music a thousand times. You’ve played all of the violin solos. Why on Earth doesn’t anyone write any great violin solos anymore? 13. One day you go to ask your grandmother what is it that she does to pass the time. But you can’t find your grandmother. You check all of the rooms in Heaven and realize that it’s not just your grandmother who’s missing. Your mother and your wife are gone too. All of the faces are changing. You don’t recognize anyone anymore. 14. Back in your room you sit on your bed and think about all of the people you used to know in Heaven. Your grandmother, your wife. The priest who officiated over your funeral. Your sister. Your sister’s twin daughters. The daughters’ sons and the sons’ daughters. Presidents of the United States, those you voted for and those you did not. Even your wife’s new husband, the saxophone player, even he is no longer in Heaven. You close your eyes and try to sleep, but for the first time since you’ve come to Heaven, you can’t. 16. Soon the phone next to your bed begins ringing. It’s an old-fashioned phone, black and with a cord. You pick it up and on the other end is your grandmother. “Listen,” she says, “you’ve enjoyed yourself, right? You’ve had a good time?” Of you’ve had a good time. You’ve been in Heaven. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “You can’t stay in Heaven forever.” Why not? “It’s kind of like Disneyland,” she says. “They have to keep the lines moving.” HURT 152 17. You wrap the cord around your fingers. You feel like crying. You wonder if they lied to you about this being Heaven, if they lied to you about Hell being a lie. You ask your grandmother where you’ll go next. Your grandmother sighs. She says that you’ll go to another Heaven, of course, a Heaven where everyone is already waiting for you. A Heaven with rock music, she says, and picnics, with great big outdoor spaces and lots of dogs. It’ll be different from the Heaven you’ve known, but it’s a Heaven all the same. And after that, when the picnic’s over and the dogs have gone to sleep under the picnic tables and the ants are carrying away the chicken bones, you’ll go to another Heaven. And another Heaven. Because there’s always another Heaven. And another Heaven after that. HURT 153 THE KINGDOM OF NORWAY There's this bar we go to sometimes. It's called The Kingdom of Norway and it's very exclusive. In fact, it's so exclusive we've never been there. No one we know has ever been there and no one you know has ever been there either. If they say that they have, they're lying. But tonight—trust me—we're going. And after that we imagine it will be the type of bar we can say we sometimes go to. There are three of us in the car, which is Matty's and is an old VW Rabbit. Matty is my roommate and he has been since college. Back then we called him Matty and he liked it. "Hey, Matty," we'd say. "What's up, Matty?" "How's it going, Matty?" "Matty, give us a high five.” And back then he would. He'd say, "What's up," and he'd tell us how it was going, and he'd return all the high fives. We'd all slap hands and go to the bar for the three p.m. Happy Hour. And at five p.m. we'd go across the street to the other bar for the other Happy Hour. In college, we were all drunk all the time and Matty was our mascot. He could drink more than anyone and his hair was long and curly and everything was more fun when he was around. But now Matty won't drink more than three drinks and he wears his hair short and no one calls him "Matty" except for me and his mother and his grandmother. And when we do—when, for example, I say, "Hey Matty, what's going on?"—he doesn't like it. Matty wants people to call him Matt or Matthew. He tells me that names mean something, that every name comes with an implied meaning, and that the name Matty HURT 154 means that no one is going to take your shit seriously. Then he reminds me that in his business shit needs to be taken very seriously. His business is accounting. He's just a beginning accountant and right now counts decimals for Dickhead, Dickhead, & Associates. But someday he wants to become a chief financial officer. In preparation, he's stopped smoking pot and has learned to tie a tie. He knows the Windsor Knot and the Half-Windsor and is working on the Four In Hand. I myself don't have a regular job. Until a month ago I taught kindergarten at a private school for rich kids. I taught them how to tie their shoes and finger paint and about the Alphabet People. But one day I failed a surprise drug test. "Nathan," the vice- principal said. She caught me at the end of the day, outside the entrance, as I was walking to my bus stop. "Would you mind peeing into this little cup?" She held the cup between two fingers and told me that it wasn't a big deal. She said that everyone had to take a drug test as part of their six-month review and that, in fact, it wasn't a surprise but was written in our contracts. So I took the cup. I walked back to the building and into the bathroom, unzipped, and squeezed out some urine. The next day I went to my classroom early, before school started, and cleaned out my desk. Now I have a level sixty-two Viking on World of Warcraft and all day long I kick virtual ass. Tonight Matty is driving because he's the only one of us with a car. His car is more like a piece of shit than an actual car because nothing in it works except for the air conditioning, which doesn't turn off. It works hard all the time blowing loud cold air in HURT 155 our faces. In fact, the air in the car is so cold we have to roll the windows down to warm up. Matty could fix the car if he wanted. He's got the money and could fix the air conditioning, the brakes, the water pump, the transmission, the windshield wipers, the burned-out headlight. If he wanted, he could buy a brand new car. But instead, he's saving his money so that he can move into a place of his own. He tells me that he still likes me and we'll still be friends and, as far as roommates go, he thinks I'm the best. "But Nathan," he says, "don't you think it's time we got out on our own?" While he drives, he lights matches and flicks the lit matches out his open window. He steers without hands, his knees locked against the wheel, and the white-and-rust Rabbit tilts along the empty road, a crooked trail of black matches marking its path. These are my matches he's tossing and you can see he takes joy in spending them. I'm trying to quit smoking and Matty says he wants to help. So in this way, by lighting a match and tossing it out the window—match by match—the cigarettes in my shirt pocket become a little bit more useless. By the time we get to The Kingdom of Norway, they won't be much more than sticks of paper and tar. In the back seat, Helen sings. She sang softly at first, to herself, but now her voice fills the entire car. She sings a song we don't know with words that go, "Je n'existe pas, I'm just a wish. Je n'existe pas, I don't exist. Je n'existe pas. Don't you wish." She sings because the radio is broken and conversation is impossible over the blast of air. But Matty tries to talk to her anyway. "What are you singing?" he shouts. "A song." "What song?" HURT 156 "A fake song," Helen says. "I'm making it up." Helen is French-Canadian and very beautiful. She's been sleeping on our couch for the past week and Matty and I are both in love. Her hair blows wildly, caught in the lift and fall of the wind, and a black bit of it sticks between her lips. She spits it out and continues her song. She sings: "Je n'existe pas. Je n'existe pas. Je n'existe pas." When we first met her, she told us that she had been traveling alone for months. She told us that she had just graduated college and was on a tour of the American continents and that her trip would end when she reached the southernmost tip of South America. Matty asked where that was and Helen shrugged. "I'll know it when I get there," she said. "There will be no where to go but up." I know all about the southernmost tip of South America. It's a clutch of islands, an archipelago called Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire, and it's half in Chile and half in Argentina. When I was in junior high, I won my school's geography bee and went to the district semi-finals, and I won those, too. But I lost at the all-state competition to a home- schooled kid who thanked Jesus every time he answered a question correctly. That was the correct answer to the final question: Tierra del Fuego. The Land of Fire. It was neither in Chile nor in Argentina, but was a scattering of islands off the coast of both. The home-schooled kid took home a big gold trophy and a spinning Rand- McNally globe. All I got was a cheap blue ribbon with "Runner-Up" printed in flaking silver letters. My parents hung it on the refrigerator and told me I'd do better next year. But next year the state ran out of money and had to cancel all the bees. HURT 157 It turns out The Kingdom of Norway is farther than we'd thought. We've been driving now for hours and all of civilization is long behind. The road has become steep and narrow. It winds up into the mountains, which long ago met and overtook the setting sun. This whole trip was Helen's idea. She had been given directions by the friend of a friend, some guy she met while lighting bottle rockets for the Fourth of July in St. Paul, Minnesota. Supposedly he used to tend bar at there. He told Helen that The Kingdom of Norway was a former speakeasy and that back in the day the bar was a favorite hangout for celebrities like Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill. Now it's so exclusive no one knows about it unless they've been told. You have to drive for hours into the wilderness just to get a drink. People have died there, the guy told Helen and Helen told us. Famous people. Outside Matty's car, the sky is black and the thousand pines that rise above the road are blacker. Beside and below us the mountain descends into a dark green valley populated by a forest of towering trees. Matty lights the last match and with it sets the matchbook on fire. He waits until the matchbook is completely engulfed in flames and then tosses it out the window. The fiery bundle hits the pavement, bounces, and spins like a pinwheel through the air and careens down into the brush. Around the next corner is a two-pump gas station. A square and glowing sign stands up in the trees, a beacon, but all the numbers have fallen off the sign except for a five, which dangles and sways in the evening breeze. Matty steers the car off the road and into the gravel lot. He pulls up to a pump and takes a twenty out of his pocket and hands the bill to me. "When you pay," he says, "remember to ask for directions." Then he gets HURT 158 out of the car, inserts the hose into the tank, and leans through the back window to talk to Helen. When we talk to Helen, we usually talk to her about North America. We want to know where she's been and what it's been like but we're especially interested in Canada. Matty went to Vancouver once to visit his great uncle, but I've never been. When he came back he told me that Vancouver was just like every other place. His uncle lived in a gated housing development named Coopers Quay. There was a 7-Eleven across the street and a mile from that there was a strip mall with a twelve-screen movie theater. Mostly it was cold, Matty said. The wind blew hard and the sun set earlier than he was used to. But I've seen the maps and I know, just by its geography, that Canada is different. For one, it's bigger. More open. There are no crowds of people. No one lives in small apartments with shared walls and shared floors and shared ceilings. I want Helen to tell us about the exotic places like Quebec, where they speak French, and about Newfoundland, where the Vikings first landed. I want to hear about Eskimos and dog sled races and winter roads that are laid across frozen lakes. But Helen doesn't talk about Eskimos or dog sled races or winter roads. She didn't even know that the Eskimos have forty-two words for snow. "That's amazing," she said. "Imagine the possibilities." Helen tells us that she grew up in Alberta but has spent a lot of time in Quebec. She spent one summer outside the city working on an organic farm where the owners, a husband and wife, spoke only in French. They were assholes, she tells us. They knew English but refused to speak it and they forced her to work fourteen- hour days. Once, when they caught her eating a tomato off the vine, they deducted it from HURT 159 her paycheck. "A tomato," she said. "Do you know what that's worth? Less than fifty Canadian cents." About her current trip, she tells us that she's been working her way west and, now that she's hit the Pacific coast, is heading south. She started in Toronto and before she met us had been in San Francisco. She was in Seattle before that. There she saw two killer whales in the Puget Sound. One, she says, lifted its tail like a penitent's hands from the steel-gray water. The other was dead, washed-up on a rocky beach. The truth, however, is that Matty and I aren't all that interested in Helen's killer whales. We don't really care about how strong the wind felt as it blew across the Golden Gate bridge or the week that Helen survived on nothing but white wine and Hostess cupcakes. What we really want to know is where she slept at the end of every day. Did she sleep on couches? we wonder. Were they regular couches or pull-outs and how did these compare with our own? We want to know if she slept alone like she does in our apartment, as I've seen her when I've tiptoed into the room after Matty's asleep, with her black hair curtaining her pale soft face. Inside the gas station is an old man with a graying ZZ Top beard sitting on a wooden stool. He grunts as the door chimes open and then goes back to watching the thin red hot dogs turn on the rack inside their little oven. There are boxes of cigarettes behind the counter and near the door is an old Ms. Pac-Man machine and a spinner-rack with dusty comic books. The floor smells as if it has just been washed and my shoes squeak as I walk across it. Outside, through the window, I see Matty leaning into the Rabbit's back HURT 160 seat, talking to Helen. Laughing. He reaches through the window and pushes a rush of hair off her face. I put a quarter in Ms. Pac-Man and play three lives. Each time I get eaten by the pink ghost. The guy at the gas station tells me there is no Kingdom of Norway. He flips open a phonebook and shows me the bar listings. There's a long list of names but the one I'm looking for isn't on it. He asks for the address and then unfolds a map. The road I have named is represented as a thin black line that staggers into the map's green wilderness. He shakes his head and his beard swishes across the map. "Kid," he says. "There's no bar on that street. There's no Kingdom of Norway. Out there, there's an electrical substation and an abandoned horse farm. That's about it." Outside, dark northern clouds wall up in the sky and blank out the stars. Matty and Helen sit on the hood of the Rabbit. They lean against each other and a high cold wind blows pine needles from the trees. The needles patter down to the ground and lie like exclamation points on the parking lot gravel. When they see me exit the store, they smile. Matty asks for his change and he wants to know if we're getting any closer. I tell him that I spent all of his money, and no. We're not getting closer. I apologize to Helen and tell her that there is no Kingdom of Norway. I tell them that I looked it up in both a phonebook and on a map but it wasn't in either. Maybe there used to be a Kingdom of Norway, I say, but now it's gone. "It's late," I say. "Let's go home." HURT 161 We don't go home and I get demoted to the back seat. We continue on our way and the sky fills with rain clouds. The pines loom above and rock in the strengthening wind. In the back seat, I play with my new lighter. I flick it on and off—on and off—and the effect is that of a slow strobe. A small fire flickering in this dark metal shell. "Nathan," Matty says. "Will you cut that out? I'm trying to concentrate." The rain begins and the large drops break against the Rabbit's windshield. The windshield wipers are broken and the world before us blurs, becoming watery and washed-out. But I don't stop. The Rabbit presses through the rain and Matty hunches over the steering wheel, peering through the bleary windshield. He drives slowly now, the car engine whines, and with our windows closed, we are cold. We are very cold. Just when I think I can't take it anymore—the air conditioner, the car's dizzying spiral, the incessant rain—when I think I am ready to tear Matty from the wheel and turn the car around, the road crests the top of the mountain and the forest of bone-straight pines ends. There, spread before us is a field, dark and broad, with tall grass. The grass whips and lashes in the downpour and in the distance, at the field's edge, we see the form of a building. It's indistinct, the form, but it is definitely a building. "Look," says Matty. The building is bulky; it appears rectangular and long with a tall, pitched roof. The roof slants into the sky and is concealed, here and there, by clouds of fog. "The Kingdom of Norway," he says. "I told you," says Helen. She reaches across the seat and takes hold of Matty's hand. She squeezes it. "Exactly where I said it would be." HURT 162 But it's not The Kingdom of Norway. Even from the back seat I can tell that the roof is pitched at an awkward angle and the building is dark, too dark for it to be anything but empty. "Turn around," I say. "This is stupid. Look at it; it's nothing. It's the abandoned horse farm. This is not The Kingdom of Norway." But if they hear, Matty and Helen ignore me. They stare hopefully, straight ahead, through the blurring rain. Helen squeezes Matty's hand again and they look from the ruined building to each other's faces. I know what they're thinking: finally we've arrived. The year the state canceled the geography bee, I wrote a letter to my principal. In it, I told him that the cancellation of the bee wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to me and it wasn't fair to students like me who had been studying all summer. "I'm a promising student," I wrote. "I'll bring fame to our school. There's not a place on the map I can't identify." The principal liked my letter—"It's a good letter," he told me but then told me that the problem was above him—and he suggested I send it to the district superintendent. So I sent the letter to the district superintendent and waited for his reply. When he responded, the superintendent told me the same thing as the principal. "It's bigger than us," he wrote. "The state's out of money. Budget shortfall. Financial crisis. Cuts need to be made." But he said I was right to complain and that if I really wanted to be heard I should call the local assemblyman. He gave me the telephone number and I called. I called more than a dozen times before the secretary put me through. "I'm a busy man," the assemblyman said. "What do you want?" HURT 163 I explained to him about the geography bee and about the year before and Tierra del Fuego. I told him that I'd been studying all summer, the whole map, and that he could quiz me on anything. "Anything," I said. "Come on. Ask me anything." The assemblyman asked what it was I thought that he could do. He told me that he was only an assemblyman and that the state's budget was already set and there wasn't anything he could do to change it. "Even if I could," he said, "why should I? Why should I change it for you?" "Because I'm a winner," I said. "I'm a sure winner, and this year I know it's my time." HURT 164 SEX: AN INTERCOURSE -- Hello. -- Hello. -- Today we will make love. -- Yes, we will make superior love. -- We will make the most sublime love that has ever been made, here on your marriage bed. -- Afterwards we will smoke cigarettes. We will smoke cigarettes and drink brandy because there is nothing finer than smoking a cigarette and drinking a fermented drink after vigorous love-making. -- I couldn’t agree more. And now I am quite eager to squeeze your young, supple flesh and exult in the magnificence of your breasts. -- My breasts are magnificent. -- Truly! -- Well, then. Let’s begin. -- Should you start or I? -- You start. You’re so much better at starting. -- Thank you. -- Don’t mention it. Just the other day I was telling my husband— -- You told you husband! HURT 165 -- Not about us. Just the other day, as we were walking up the hill back home from the market, our arms full with groceries, I told my husband what a terrible starter I was. He set his bag of bread and apples on the ground and wrapped me in his arms. ‘Honey,’ he said. ‘You’re a horrible starter. You’re the worst starter I’ve ever been with. Sometimes, when you start, it’s all I can do to hide my revulsion.’ -- You’re not that bad. -- Don’t lie. -- You’re not. What does he object to? -- My seductive move. -- Your what? -- My seductive move. You know... when I lay you down prostrate upon the bed and straddle you with my thighs and I begin to— -- Oh, that. Yes, yes that. I don’t know if I’d call it so much a move as a— -- A what? -- Well, it’s a bit elaborate for a move. -- Then what is it? -- More of a production. -- I thought you liked it. -- Yes, once or twice I liked it fine. I found it quite novel. There are still parts that I like very much. For example, some of the choreography, I think, is very original. And don’t think I missed the allusion to Proust. Proust, I’ve always believed, is one of the most sensuous writers. That bit about the macaroon I always find to be particularly evocative. HURT 166 -- It’s a madeleine. I studied Proust at Exeter. ‘Your soul is a dark forest...blah blah blah.’ We had to study all the classics. Proust, Flaubert, Shaw— Anyway. I’m happy that all the work I put into my seductive move was not for nothing. -- Not at all. But, you know, at the end of the day one wants to get down to business. -- That’s what my husband said. ‘Let’s get down to business.’ All that men care about is business. -- ‘We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.’ -- Who said that? -- Captain Picard. -- Captain Picard? -- Yes. Of the Starship Enterprise. -- Yes, well. When we got home, my husband and I, and after the groceries went in the cupboards, I asked him if he wanted to have a go. You know, a poke. But he said that all the talk of starting had turned him off to the idea. He said that it would take him a week to warm up to it again. -- A week? -- So as you can see, I’m quite desperate. -- Then let us start. -- Yes, yes. Let’s start already. -- -- -- -- HURT 167 -- How’s that? -- Pleasant. But perhaps if you moved your shoulder a little higher. Like that. Now reach your arm over here and press your lips flat against mine. -- Flat? -- Press them. -- Flat? -- Yes, flat. I was just reading a romance novel and the hot young protagonist pressed his lips flat against those of the heroine. His hair was long and yellow and it fell from its ponytail and lay upon her bare shoulders. It lay like pools of gold. -- Time out. -- Time out? -- Yes, time out. I’ve developed a cramp. Ouch. Right there in the inside of my right leg. I’m cramping and I don’t think I’ll be able to go on. -- You must go on. -- I can’t go on. -- Oh! Stay here. I’ll get you some ice. -- And some Gatorade. -- Gatorade? -- I’m thirsty. -- I’ll get ice and Gatorade. Is there anything else? -- No no. I will sit here, close my eyes and massage my cramp while I wait. There is nothing like a little solitude to rouse the libido. Some days, in anticipation of sex, I confine myself to my bedroom for ten to fourteen hours. I lie on my bed, in the dark, and HURT 168 think about nothing but my libido, which I imagine to be a badger. A Burmese ferret badger with dark, dark eyes. Mentally, I stroke and prod my badger until it’s agitated. When it is finally agitated—that caged libidinous badger—I know it is time to emerge from my bedroom and hunt for a new chatelaine. If I’ve agitated my badger sufficiently, if it’s rabid, I’ll club a woman over the head with the top of my silver-plated cane and drag her back to my apartment. I’m a sophisticated gentleman—I wear cufflinks on my sleeves and am descended from aristocracy—but I’ve a closet full of women, all of whom I’ve clubbed. I think, in fact, you’ll look quite nice between my Canali and Bottega Veneta. -- -- Hello? -- Who are you talking to? -- You left? -- I’m back. -- I didn’t notice. -- Here’s the ice. -- No Gatorade? -- We’re out. But I found Powerade. -- I can’t drink that. -- Why not? -- It’s blue. -- Blue? -- Yes, because it’s blue. HURT 169 -- You don’t drink blue beverages? -- No, I don’t. -- Okay. -- Good. -- But may I ask— -- Oh, fine. Ask is you must ask. -- Why don’t you drink blue beverages? -- They are unnatural. There are no blue beverages that occur in nature. I know what you’re about to say and don’t say it. Don’t say that water’s blue. It’s not. Water is clear. It’s clear like glass and the strength of my reason. It’s clear like the ceiling that rises above your womanish head. -- What ceiling? -- The glass ceiling. -- Don’t start about that. HURT 170 CERVANTINE You want to know what childhood was like for the man they’d call the Prince of Geniuses. Let me tell you: It wasn’t great. My father was Rodrigo de Cervantes, Rodrigo the Deaf they called him on account of the hearing defect he claimed to have suffered since childhood. Together with my mother he produced six children of which I was their third and oldest son. I was born in Alcalá de Henares on St. Michael’s Day, September 29, 1548, the same year that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, laid waste to the Lutherans at Mühlberg and that Ivan the Terrible made himself Russia’s first tsar. That year the Inquisition had already claimed the lives of some two thousand heretics, and it’s entirely likely that when I was screaming my first breath there was some poor Jew or Protestant screaming his last. Rodrigo, my father, was a surgeon, though he wasn’t a particularly good one. He’d never been formally educated, so everything he knew about his chosen profession he’d learned from books. Lobera’s Libro de las Cuatro Enfermedades Cortesanas was the most popular medical book of the day and, because it was easy to read and had many illustrations, was responsible for producing a great overabundance of surgeons. It seemed as if everyone who wasn’t otherwise employed was hanging the red-and-white pole outside their doors. In the marketplace in Alcalá you couldn’t spit without hitting someone who was trying to sell you a vial of Lobera’s remedy for gout. HURT 171 What set my father apart from all the other surgeons, in terms of his incompetence, was his complete inability to treat children. Whenever he tried to leech or let blood from a child, that child would likely die. It was so bad that whenever my mother saw him leading a child into his office, she’d begin throwing marrowbones into her soup pot. After all, she’d say, dead patients can’t pay you for your services and neither will their parents. Still she was married to a man named Rodrigo the Deaf, so her complaints got her about as far as you’d expect. My most recurrent childhood memory is of sitting around the dinner table with my sisters, each of us sipping a small and unsatisfying bowl of marrowbone soup. Eventually my father killed the son of a high ranking magistrate. Who knows why the magistrate decided to bring his son to my father for treatment. Surely he knew of my father’s reputation. Even I knew and I was only five. Perhaps the magistrate knew that the Cervantes family name had once meant more than it did then, that as a family our rank and fortune had been greatly diminished, so took pity upon us. Perhaps he knew that my father’s father had himself once been a city magistrate. And perhaps, at some point, my grandfather had done a favor for this magistrate, which the magistrate had then wanted to repay. Or maybe the magistrate simply knew that, as far as surgeons went, my father wasn’t so great and wanted to save himself a few maravedís. Regardless, I remember the day well because it was the last that I’d spend in Alcalá. It was an October evening. There were orange clouds in the sky. I could smell wood fires burning. I’d been playing Fox and Geese in the living room with my older sister Luisa and, as was customary, she was the fox and I was the geese. The game had been interrupted by the arrival of the magistrate and his son. Of course my father didn’t HURT 172 hear them knocking, so I was the one who had to answer the door. I can still remember my distinct disappointment. My geese had had my sister’s fox surrounded; for once it seemed that I was going to win. The magistrate’s son was my age. He was taller than I was, less skinny, though with the pasty, inside-all-day, complexion of either the very rich or the sick. He complained about a fever and a cough, both of which were common for the season and should have been easy enough to treat. But after my father announced that he wanted to let several ounces of blood to clear the infection, my mother began tossing marrowbones into the soup pot. The magistrate asked my father about all of the noise coming from the kitchen. “What noise?” my father said. Whenever my mother was concerned, his hearing was especially bad. My father took the magistrate and his son back into his office where he began laying out razors. Because he wanted to teach me the family business, my job was to sit in the corner and observe. “Miguel,” he said as he always said, “watch and learn.” According to Lobera, blood runs through the body in rivers and streams. The surgeon’s job was to simply find one of the body’s lesser tributaries and redirect its flow. That’s what my father intended to do when he sliced into the magistrate’s son. I’m sure you can guess what happened next. When I emerged from the office it was as if from the Palace of the Inquisition. There was blood in my hair, blood on my face, blood rimming my fingernails. When we ran out of bandages, my father sent me into the kitchen for linens. When we ran out of HURT 173 linens, I raided my parents’ dresser for clothing. Then I raided my sisters’. After it was all over, it escaped no one’s attention that mine was the only wardrobe intact. The magistrate threatened my father with every kind of violence. But when he saw that his threats fell, literally, on deaf ears, he stormed into the kitchen and threatened my mother. He kicked over her soup pot and broke some plates. He promised that it was with my bones that he’d be making soup. That night we fled Alcalá. Among the magistrate’s more salient threats was that he’d have us investigated by the Inquisition. Even though we Cervantes had always been a good Catholic family, we knew that the inquisitors had a reputation for lacking what you might call historical accuracy. We packed our belongings onto a small cart and walked two weeks to Valladolid, the capital. The entire time the mule ate better than we did. While my father talked ebulliently about his new beginning, my mother dug around the campsite for root vegetables, carrots and potatoes. My sisters got dysentery. My blisters bled through my shoes. Things were even worse when we arrived in Valladolid. There was a university there that trained surgeons. My father was so outclassed he didn’t even try. The first thing he did was borrow money, which he promised to repay with the family’s silverware. But he failed to mention that we didn’t have any silverware; we’d already sold it. Within a year he was in debtor’s prison. By then my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister, Magdalena. She had to sell our furniture just to keep us fed. When Magdalena was born, it was with a clubbed foot, a condition my mother blamed on the nine months she’d spent sleeping on the floor. HURT 174 For me the worst part of Valladolid wasn’t the lack of beds or the cold floors, but waking up each morning. Valladolid was Spain’s most orthodox city and the center of the Inquisition. Everyday the first thing you smelled was the fires they built for heretics. When you closed your eyes, on top of the bird songs, you could almost hear the screams. Our misfortune continued for ten more years. When he got out of prison, my father moved us to Córdoba, which was where Juan de Cervantes, my grandfather, lived. If there’s one thing to know about my father it’s that he blamed his father for everything that had gone wrong. In Alcalá, my grandfather had been the city’s highest ranking magistrate. He’d groomed my father and his older brother, Andrés, for lives of privilege and wealth. Instead of rhetoric, my father was tutored in horse-riding; instead of college, he attended jousting tournaments and costume balls. So when my grandfather abandoned his family—when his political rivals exposed his longstanding affair with his seventeen- year-old housekeeper and practically forced him (his words) to flee the city, taking only his mistress and eldest son with him—my father, at the age of thirty-three, was left alone and with almost no knowledge of how to take care of himself. What do you do? How do you make money? Who do you blame? These are questions I’ve often asked myself. Sometimes, when I ask them out loud, my wife sticks a finger down her throat. Pretending to gag, she says: “I can’t hear you,” she says. “I’m puking,” she says. There was light snow on the day we arrived in Córdoba. It blew through the market stalls and spun around the delicate tops of minarets. The first thing my father did was borrow more money. Even though he was there to beg for my grandfather’s charity, his pride HURT 175 wouldn’t allow him to present himself as completely poor. He bought new clothing for all of us and booked a room in the Posada del Potro, the city’s most expensive inn. But my grandfather wasn’t fooled. He’d heard about the magistrate’s son. He knew that my father had just been released from prison. He poked a finger at me and asked how old I was. My father looked at his shoes. He blushed. The new leather shined. He told him that I was almost eight. “Him?” said my grandfather. “He’s a runt,” he said. He said that I was too small and sickly-looking to make a decent heir. His wife, my grandmother, served lunch: there was pottage of coriander, thick eggplant, mutton, almonds, and sweet oranges. She was a dozen years younger than my father and looked more like my oldest sister, Andrea, than anyone’s grandmother. They both had the same thick, dark plaits of hair. My own hair had been sheared and scrubbed for the meeting. While my grandfather continued talking about my insufficiency, it itched behind my ears. In Córdoba our living conditions improved somewhat. We moved in with my grandfather, whose house was large and warm and there was plenty of food. My grandfather found my father a job in hospital administration, and I was enrolled in Jesuit school, where I garnered a reputation for being bookish and strange. I preferred to keep my own company. My teachers regarded me as something of a nonentity, a name to be read during roll. When my classmates paid me any attention it was often only to make fun. Miguel the Quiet is what they called me because they thought it to be a clever play on my father’s nickname. By the second year I became known as Miguel the Mouse. HURT 176 That was because Sancho de Azpeitia had begun leaving dead mice on my desk. Sancho was the son of a wealthy landlord; no one doubted that he would grow up to murder someone. Everyone knew that he’d already been practicing on the neighborhood dogs and cats. Every morning he’d leave a new mouse on my desk, its neck broken and tongue lolling from its mouth. When I found it, Sancho would be grinning at me from across the classroom. He’d say something like: “Look Miguel, I found you a friend.” Or: “Why are you crying, Miguel?” Or simply: “You’ll be next.” On the day my grandfather died, Sancho had done a particularly gruesome job to the mouse. In addition to its neck, its forelegs had been snapped and were jutting at odd angles. It was missing an eye. The mouse was waiting for me on my desk, just as I had expected it to be, but somehow the sight of the mangled animal affected me. Unhinged me you might say. While Sancho laughed, I remember picking up the mouse’s body and hurling it across the room. I remember launching myself also, at Sancho, moving indiscriminately through space. There was furniture falling away from me; chairs toppling. Then pain and darkness. When I woke up I was lying on the floor. From my nose there was a crusty trail of blood. At home my grandfather was still on his deathbed. Everyone was still gathered in his room around his bed. There was the priest leaning over him, my grandmother crying, and Uncle Andrés. My father was still pacing with his black surgeon’s bag, the one with all his knives. HURT 177 When I walked into the room, my grandfather opened his eyes. He settled them on my father’s black bag and barked at my father. He told him that he didn’t need a surgeon. He coughed up blood and said that he was perfectly capable of dying on his own. My father stormed past me. We knocked shoulders and he snapped at me for standing in his way. My nose was bleeding again. My grandfather scolded me for breathing through my mouth. After my grandfather died, we all gathered around the hearth to listen to the lawyer read his will. Someone had lit a fire even though the weather had been unseasonably warm. My grandmother inherited the majority of his money. Andrés got his antiques, his artwork, and his rental properties: “To be sold,” the lawyer intoned, “in public auction or privately.” My grandfather also donated generously to both the church and the orphanage. He set aside a large sum of money for a bronze statue to be sculpted in his likeness and erected in the Calle Mayor. While we waited for the lawyer to read my father’s reward, my mother suckled my newest brother. He’d been born just a few months earlier and, out of deference to my grandfather, had been named Juan. The inheritance turned out to be so small that it might as well have been nothing. When the lawyer read it, my father leaned forward and cupped his ears. “What?” he said. Even my mother was struck by a sudden and hysterical deafness. She almost dropped the baby. She also said: “What?” What was a couple thousand maravedís and some clay jars that my grandfather claimed had once been given to him by the Archbishop of Seville. We broke the first jar that very night. My mother smashed it against a wall. After my father lost his job, when HURT 178 we left Córdoba, we took the other two with us. Juan broke the second one a few years later while playing fetch with a dog. I still have the third one. It sits above my fireplace, completely unremarkable, gathering dust. We spent the next seven years in Cabra. Compared to Córdoba or Alcalá, Cabra was a backwater. It was a small fortress town in Andalusia; there were four churches, a palace, and a garden with fountains. The town was surrounded by a moat, which El Cid had once used to rebuff the king of Granada. But by 1557, the moat had mostly dried out. What water was left was oozing and brackish. Uncle Andrés was mayor and owned several rental properties. He hired my father on as landlord, a profession for which his deafness turned out to be a particular gift. What I remember most about Cabra is its ravine. The ravine was dark and deep and filled with oak and poplar trees. There was a stream at the bottom that terminated in a cave. I liked the stream, in particular, because it reminded me of the arteries that I’d read about in Lobera’s book. I remembered the illustrations, the channels and canals of blood. I imagined the stream in the ravine running through the cave and connecting with other hidden waterways and all of them flowing together, web-like, in a network just beneath the surface of the Earth. The idea made me feel less isolated, less trapped, more connected. The image also brought back memories of the magistrate’s son. Most of the time, when not in school, Juan and I would play knights errant at the bottom of the ravine. We’d pretend to sail down the stream and emerge somewhere fantastic, the Island of California, for example, where we’d been sent by an enterprising duke and duchess to search for fame and lost treasure. Usually, I was the knight and Juan the bumbling squire. If you’ve read the Quixote you won’t need to strain. HURT 179 There were other things you could do in a ravine. When I was fourteen I began taking a girl down there into the cave. The girl was Ana de Ureña. Her father, Juan de Ureña, was one of my father’s tenants. He hadn’t paid his rent in more than three months. Ana was two years older than me. In addition to being a reprobate, her father was a leather maker and she assisted him. Her skin was red from tannin. She smelled like bark. Ana followed me to the cave because I told her that I wanted to show her something. “Come to the cave,” I said and she did. Down there we began touching each other, automatically. It was damp and dark, and as we writhed, I expected the red on her skin to come off on mine. Every noise we made was consumed by the sound of water. When we were finished I was surprised, though not displeased, to find that there was blood. I washed myself in the stream and watched the reddish cloud drift away and dissipate. The water would carry the blood to other bodies of water, perhaps to other bodies, human. I grew excited at the thought. We did this many times without incident. But one time Juan followed us into the cave. I was behind Ana and she was leaning over a rock. I could smell the tannin coming off her and also the sulfur that she used for scudding leather. There was sweat running down the back of her neck. When I looked up I saw Juan crouching near the cave’s entrance. His eyes were wide and dark, and before I could think I was charging him. I chased him into the ravine and he tripped over something, tree roots or branches. Naked, I squatted over him and punched him, repeatedly, in the face. That night we ate goat stew for dinner. Andrea, who was training to be a nun, led us in prayer. My father complained about Ana’s father, Juan de Ureña. He still hadn’t HURT 180 paid his rent. My brother Juan sat in his chair and sniffled. I didn’t have an appetite. I poked at the gray cubes of meat and watched the steam rise off my stew. My mother cleared our bowls and we continued sitting and listening to my father who was still complaining. “Juan de Ureña,” he said. Where had my brother gotten his black eyes? Why were my knuckles bloody? During dinner or afterwards these are questions that nobody asked. In the summer, Uncle Andrés fired my father for incompetence. It wasn’t just Juan de Ureña who wasn’t paying his rent; there were many tenants from whom my father was failing to collect. They got in a fight about it. I’d been in my bedroom writing poetry. They weren’t love poems, exactly, though I did have Ana’s body on my mind. No sooner had I dipped my pen into its inkwell than I heard the argument downstairs. When I went down to investigate I found my father in the kitchen throwing coins at my uncle. “You want money?” he said. “Here’s money,” he said. My uncle shielded his face while my father pelted him. A coin ricocheted off and hit the soup pot. It rang like a gong. When he ran out of coins to throw, my father began weeping. He sat at the table and put his face in his hands. He began begging Uncle Andrés not to fire him. He apologized. He asked for another chance. It was pathetic. My uncle straightened his collar. He cleared his throat and straightened his frame. He told my father that he had one month to pack his belongings and to find a new job. He also said that their father had been right about him. He was a disgrace to the purity of the family’s blood. HURT 181 That last month in Cabra was a tense one. My brother still wasn’t speaking to me. My mother wasn’t speaking to my father. Ana cried when I told her that I was leaving. We were in the cave putting on our clothes. She walked to the stream and began sobbing. I put my hand on her shoulder. It was still cold from having been pressed against the rocks. What did she expect? I asked her. She was the daughter of a leather maker, I said. I was descended from a great family. I said: Even if I were to stay in Cabra it was never going to last. There were other sources of tension too, political ones. Charles V had died and his son, Philip II, had taken the throne. He’d moved the capital to Madrid. Andalusia was threatening to join with Granada and secede. Because he didn’t want to get caught in a civil war, my father decided to move the family to the new capital. We rented a house on the edge of the city along the banks of the Manzanares. My window looked out onto the green tops of the trees of the Casa de Campo, the hunting grounds of the new king. In Madrid my father found work as a tax collector. On weekends I would accompany him as he walked around the city. If you’ve seen the map by the famous Dutchman, Frederick de Wit, you’ll know that the layout of Madrid in 1566 was very chaotic. There were no central thoroughfares. Most streets dead ended. They curved like cats’ tails and became other streets. If my father had a plan that determined his collection routes, I couldn’t discern it. On Saturdays and Sundays we knocked on the same doors twice. What I could discern is that my father kept about half of what he collected. This was on top of his wages. If we were given two maravedís, he’d pocket one for the city and hand the other to me. How he got away with it, I can’t imagine. Much later when I HURT 182 myself became a tax collector, I’d try a similar approach that would land me in jail. Sometimes when people ask me what advice I have for young writers, I say get yourself arrested. You’ll have plenty of time to write. Like Cabra, life in Madrid began good and quickly got worse. I continued my education at the parish of San Andrés under the tutelage of Juan López de Hoyos. He was also the royal chronicler and said that he saw promise in my verse. When the queen died during childbirth, he published a book that included four of my poems. I was only nineteen years old and a published author. While the rest of the city mourned, I celebrated. My brother Juan and I went to an inn. We toasted the dead queen, Elizabeth of Valois. We both got very drunk. The Inquisition was active in Madrid, though executions had been halted because of the queen’s funeral. When we stumbled out of the inn and into the afternoon daylight, I pissed on a woodpile. It wasn’t a political statement even though that’s how it was perceived. The perceiver, in this case, was Antonio de Sigura. To call him a rival would be to give him too much credit. Like me, Antonio was a pupil of Juan López de Hoyos. He was jealous of my accomplishments, both in poetry and with women. But in truth he had nothing to be jealous of. Though he lacked my natural poetic talent and good looks, he came from a family of builders who was working on the king’s new palace. His father curried favor with the king. My own father was a failed surgeon, a failed hospital administrator, a failed landlord, and a corrupt tax collector. Between the two of us it didn’t take a prophet to see who was going to have a better life. HURT 183 When Antonio saw me pissing on the Inquisition’s woodpile, he called out and ordered me to stop. As I said, I was quite drunk and so perhaps behaved impertinently. “Verily,” I said and continued urinating. I told him that I expected that I should be done urinating very soon. By this time Juan was also peeing on the woodpile. He was only ten years old and drunk, I think, for the very first time. We were standing in a plaza with a fountain whose trickling matched the sound of our own. The sun was setting. Long shadows splayed across the ground. Antonio strode across the courtyard and placed his hand on my shoulder. His other hand was on the hilt of his sword. Invoking both the name of the king and the Inquisition, he once again told me to stop peeing on the woodpile. Then he said something insulting about my father. To show him that I meant him no personal disrespect, I also said something insulting about my father. Antonio fumed. Juan and I laughed. What followed next only comes back to me in bits and pieces, vivid fragments. Antonio cast aspersions at me. He insulted my family’s honor. He said something about my mother. He repeated the same about Magdalena, my youngest sister. Somewhere from the woodpile a log appeared my hand. I thumped Antonio over the head with it. He collapsed to the ground. Juan had a log and was also thumping Antonio. As we continued, blood flowed between the cobblestones. Each stone was caught in and connected by an expanding grid of red. Let me tell you that it’s almost always a bad idea to thump somebody. It’s still a worse idea to thump somebody inside the shadows cast from the walls of the Imperial HURT 184 Palace. The punishment for the latter, it turns out, is ten years in prison and your right hand. The summons for my arrest arrived the next morning. The policemen’s pounding corresponded with that of my hangover. I lay in bed and suffered both. Eventually my father answered the door. “What?” he said. “Who?” he said. His deafness was in fine form that day. I heard scuffling sounds as the police forced themselves into the house. “Miguel who?” my father said. By then I was hiding in the closet. When the policemen came into my bedroom, he told them that I’d not come home last night. I tried to calm myself. I stuffed a shirtsleeve in my mouth. I closed my eyes and I pictured the grid of Antonio’s blood flowing outward, growing and connecting. I thought of Ana’s blood, my own blood knocking in my heart. After the policemen left, my father opened the closet. He looked at me impassively. He shifted his eyes towards my erection. He told me to put clothes on. I needed to go. A common saying among the peasants in Madrid is that to thrive you need to go to sea, join the church, or serve the king. What choice did I have? With the arrest warrant on my head, the only option I had was the last one. I would join the army and hide in plain sight. In addition to the civil war in Andalusia, Spain was at war with the Ottomans. The Turks had broken a thirty-four year truce when they, with a fleet of three hundred ships and fifty thousand soldiers, had captured Cyprus. They sacked Nicosia a month later. Our silk and spice routes to the East had been cut off completely. On Nicosia, almost all of the island’s twenty thousand inhabitants had been put to the sword. HURT 185 My father booked me passage on a ship to Italy. I was to join with Diego de Urbina’s company in Naples. He was an old friend of my grandfather’s and would likely keep me safe. The ship was leaving that very night. While my mother packed my belongings, I wept. I shoved Juan López de Hoyos’ book in the faces of all my family members. My poems were such fine poems. Everybody said so. I was meant to be a poet, the voice. Your verse, López de Hoyos had told me, will make the angels swoon. I begged my father to let me stay, to hide me. Juan begged him as well. But what are words to a deaf man? Even if he could hear them, what did they mean to a man for whom family was synonymous with disgrace? When I arrived in Florence, Diego de Urbina gave me a musket and a saber. He ordered me to Sicily and from there onto a galley. There were two hundred such galleys in the Sicily and sixty thousand men. I was assigned to an oar and for two months rowed east towards Greece. Men grew sick around me. Some of them died. The seagulls pecked at their corpses. We’d push them overboard and behind us would be a line of bodies pointing back home. I lived on stale bread and porridge. Oftentimes my hands were too blistered to even hold a spoon. When asked by the oarsman next to me how I endured, I thanked my father. After all, what’s two months of this compared to twenty years of life? We caught up with the Turkish fleet in October. Their mass of boats spread across the entire horizon. From the distance they were indistinguishable from low-lying clouds. We rowed for an entire day before their shapes became distinct. A corpse was hung from the largest of the Turkish galleys. The whispers pronounced that it was Marco Antonio Bragadin, one of our generals. His body was striped red and white like a barber’s pole, suggesting that he’d been flayed alive. HURT 186 It was only then that my neighbor to the right decided to ask me why I’d joined this expedition. His mouth had more holes than teeth. He was scarcely any older than my brother Juan. “Money?” he said. “Fame?” “Shame,” I said. But he misheard me. He clapped me on the back. “Fame on Earth,” he said. “Wealth in heaven.” Our boats pulled closer and could hear the groans of the Turkish galley slaves. Their chains rattled across the water. We could smell their stank. Our commander raised his musket above his head and shouted, There’s no paradise for cowards. We raised our own muskets and repeated him three times. What would followed would be called a land battle at sea. There would be thirty thousand dead, most killed in hand-to-hand fighting, one hundred and fifty boats sank to the bottom of the sea. They said that as far away as Mykonos the waves washed the beaches red. I’m amazed that I survived. Like everyone else, I rose when ordered to rush to forward and board a Turkish boat. But as soon as I stood a bullet hit me in my left arm. My neighbor, the boy oarsman, fell down next to me. He’d taken two in the head. I often worry about how people will remember Miguel de Cervantes. What’s the story they will tell? Author of Don Quixote, cheating tax collector, ungrateful lover, distant brother, emotional cripple, his father’s son? From the floor of the galley I watched my blood spill out of my arm and mix with the blood of others. It ran into the ocean and from there, presumably, to everywhere else. I thought about the magistrate’s son, the cave in Cabra, the cobblestone grid of blood. I heard sound of cannons firing, boats HURT 187 splintering, the screams of the dying. I thought how wonderful. Finally, here we all are. All of us together. Making so much noise. HURT 188 HAS NATURE CRAMPED THE IMAGINATION? HURT 189 CONTENTS HAS NATURE CRAMPED THE IMAGINATION? 190 REPEATABLE PAMELA 211 LAURENCE STERNE AND THE SCIENCE OF TRUE FEELING 223 THE MOUSETRAP 234 HURT 190 HAS NATURE CRAMPED THE IMAGINATION? In a 1765 letter to his friend George Montagu, Horace Walpole, the 4 th Earl of Orford and world’s first gothic novelist, complained that Samuel Richardson was “England’s most boring export.” 1 At the time, Richardson was England’s most popular and influential novelist. His epistolary novels Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753) had sold through multiple printings and had inspired scores of imitators, most famously Henry Fielding’s satirical Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Richardson himself was considered to be at the forefront of a new type of novelistic writing, one that focused on domestic and emotional verisimilitude over the more overtly mythological, supernatural, and heroic narratives that had come before. Yet Walpole found Richardson’s embrace of what we now call “literary realism” (that term, however, is here somewhat of an anachronism; the word “realism,” literary or otherwise, wasn’t coined until well into the nineteenth century) to be “deplorably tedious.” 2 As he wrote in a private letter and repeated in the introduction to his own novel The Castle of Otranto (1764): “In Pamela nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting. But the great resources of fancy 1 Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Charles Duke Yonge (New York: Putnam, 1890) 27. 2 Walpole 3. HURT 191 have been dammed up by the strict adherence to common life. Nature has cramped the imagination.” 3 And so the question that this essay poses: Has nature cramped the imagination? Walpole’s critique of Richardson is more than just a jealous author taking a swipe at one of his successful rivals. By accusing Richardson of merely “copying” from nature, Walpole was inserting himself into a broader and more philosophical discussion. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, the literary and ontological lines separating fact from fiction had not yet been drawn, and the boundaries were often debated. Skeptical philosophers like George Berkeley and David Hume argued that all of human knowledge and belief was a products of the imagination: “Belief,” said Hume, “is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.” 4 And Berkeley went even further, claiming that nothing existed outside of human thought: “All things that exist, exist only in the mind.” 5 Yet on the other side of the debate were empiricist philosophers who, like John Locke, maintained that the mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which sensory experience is recorded, and that is where all knowledge of the world comes from: “Where there is perception,” said Locke, “there is knowledge, and where it is not…we always comes short of knowledge.” 6 3 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (New York: Longman, 2007) 7. 4 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993) 32. 5 George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. Kenneth Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982) 35. 6 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge: Hackett, 1996) 224. HURT 192 Indeed, Samuel Richardson’s brand of fiction was strongly influenced by this newfound enthusiasm for and faith in empiricism and its belief that true knowledge was derived from the evidence of the senses. Hence Richardson’s claim that Pamela was “founded in Truth and Nature,” that it wasn’t a novel at all but a collection of letters that he’d found and edited into manuscript form. 7 And even after he admitted authorship in order to stem the tide of imitators who were bleeding him of his profits, he maintained Pamela was based on a true story he’d overheard in a tavern about a poor girl made rich through marriage and that he’d written Pamela with precisely this story in mind. Today it’s clear that Richardson was on the right side of history. Pamela is considered one of the first true “modern” novels—not just because of its focus on the domestic and emotional inner life of its singular heroine, but also because of its referential truth claims—and the empiricists handily beat out the skeptics. We need look no further than the authority of science to see the pervasive influence of empiricism and inductive reasoning. In fact, our faith in empiricism is so deeply ingrained in current thought that metaphors for sensory perception, in particular for vision and seeing have proliferated since the eighteenth century (the “Book of Nature” metaphor, for example, which suggests that knowledge of the world can be “read” visually, the same way we read words from books) and now dominate how we talk about our knowledge of the world. “Even a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors,” says U.C. Berkeley history professor Martin Jay. “If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for those deeply embedded as well as those of the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight into the 7 Samuel Richardson, Pamela (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971) 4. HURT 193 complex mirroring of perception and language.” 8 In fact, there are ten such metaphors in the previous two sentences. Yet, despite this, I believe that Walpole’s objection to Richardson’s fiction remains a valid one and that it’s still worth exploring. Has nature cramped the imagination? To put it another way: what, if anything, has our faith in empirical thought cost us, both in terms of artistic expression but also in a broader sense? Has it hampered our imaginations? Does a reliance on the evidence of our senses limit the way we think and talk about the world around us? I want to begin thinking about the effects of “scientific perception” on art, literature, and otherwise by investigating the science of perception. In particular, I’ll begin by thinking about the science of our primary perceptual organs. Let’s begin by looking at the eyes. One third of all our brains’ impressive resources is devoted to the task of seeing. 9 On the surface, this might not seem all that surprising given how much of our day-to-day relies on sight. For example, when I wake up in morning the first thing I do is put on my glasses. I look across the room at the alarm clock or up into the expectant eyes of my dog, who’s staring down at me. What is surprising about this statistic, however, is that for all the brain-power devoted to it, 10 we’re not very good at seeing. After I put on my glasses, 8 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: U. of California P., 1994) 1. 9 David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain (New York: Vintage, 2011) 22. 10 Which is a lot of brain-power. One way to think about is that there are more brain cells networked and working together in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy (Eagleman 2). HURT 194 I stumble around my apartment Mr. Magoo-like. I leave the house wearing two completely different socks. According to neuroscientists, I’m not alone. Humans are notoriously bad at seeing what’s around them. Here’s a fun experiment: Can you tell the difference between these two pictures? 11 Roughly two-thirds of all people who look at them can’t. (The difference is the height of the walls.) These pictures are commonly used to demonstrate a phenomenon that psychologists call “change blindness,” in which we often miss large changes in our visual world from one moment to the next. Another fun example can be seen in a short YouTube video of an experiment conducted by Harvard psychologist Daniel Simons. 12 In it, the subject (a young woman) 11 These images appear both in Ronald Rensink, “The Need for Attention to See Change” (2011) http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/index.html and in Eagleman 25. 12 Simons is kind of the go-to expert on “change blindness” and other visual cognition and awareness issues. He’s made another famous video (also on YouTube), “The Invisible Gorilla,” in which subjects kind of amazingly fail to notice a guy in a gorilla suit who’s milling around in their midst. HURT 195 approaches one of the experimenters at his desk and hands him her consent form. The experimenter takes the consent form and ducks behind the desk to “file” it. While he’s behind the desk, the first experimenter is replaced, surreptitiously, by a second one, who stands up and directs the woman down the hall to where her experiment will, ostensibly, take place. When the woman arrives, she’s asked if she noticed that man who directed her to the room was different from the one who took her consent form. Like seventy-five percent of the experiment’s other participants, she did not. 13 One of the big takeaways from this experiment, and others like it, is how little of the world we actually see, even when we think that we’re seeing it. “You are not seeing the world in the rich detail that you implicitly believed you were,” says David Eagleman, Baylor University neuroscientist and author of the really great book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. “In fact,” he says, “you are not seeing most of what hits your eyes.” 14 One reason for this (to put it in decidedly unscientific terms) is because our eyes kind of suck. If you were to assemble even a relatively crappy team of scientists and engineers to design a better eye, they’d be able to do it in no time. In vertebrate species, especially, eyes have evolved in ways that are pretty counterintuitive to how we process vision. 15 Light must travel backwards through each eye before its routed along to the brain. And when it arrives there (which takes anywhere between 100 and 500 13 “Change Blindness Experiment” (2009) http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/14/change-blindness-exp.html. 14 Eagleman 26. 15 See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: Norton, 1996). HURT 196 milliseconds, approximately), 16 the image has been flipped upside-down. Worse, you’re not even receiving the full picture. Optical nerves, along which light travels from the back of the eyes to the brain, can only send data. They can’t process or receive. As a result, there’s an optical nerve-shaped blind spot, as large as seventeen full moons, in each eye. 17 (To “see” the blind spot, close your left eye and keep the right one focused on the + sign. Now slowly move the paper forward and backward in front of your face.) All of which is to say that the brain compensates for the eyes’ crappiness by making a lot of things up. It needs to in order to fill in that seventeen-full-moon blind spot. The brain does this by finding patterns in the visual field surrounding the blind spots and using these patterns to fill them in. That’s one of the reasons why the pictures above look the same to so many of us. In most cases, the brain “sees” before the eyes do. That is, it makes assumptions about the visual world well in advance of its receiving confirmation from the eyes. 18 So when we alternate our attention from one similar picture to another, the brain’s already anticipating what it’s going to see. That’s why the 16 Barry Dainton, “Delays: How Long Does It Take Stimulus to Reach (or Produce) Consciousness?”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/empirical-findings.html#2 17 Eagleman 32. 18 And remember, in addition to the blind spot, information from the eyes reaches the brain only after a half-second delay. So the brain’s compensating on two fronts: it’s filling in gaps in the information and trying to bridge the gap in time. HURT 197 change in the height of the walls is often so difficult to register; the brain anticipates that because both are similar, both pictures will be the same. That’s also why it sometimes takes people who have been struck blind by strokes days or weeks to realize and accept their blindness (if they do at all). The brain, unaware that its connection to the eyes has been severed, continues making stuff up. 19 There are two important takeaways from all of this. The first is that the brain sees independently of the eyes. Eyes facilitate a kind of seeing that’s based on external and physical stimuli, but this kind of seeing if far less prevalent than we might expect. In fact, we favor “eyesight” over “brainsight” only when we encounter something in our physical environments that our brains didn’t already anticipate or expect. Eyesight’s useful when you need to solve a visual puzzle (finding the difference in wall heights, for example, or spotting the typographical error in the triangle below), or if you’re hunter-gather and need to be on the lookout for a tiger hiding in a bush. But the vast majority of the time we rely almost entirely on “brainsight.” Generally speaking, information gathered by the eyes serves only as a “sketch” that the brain fills in. 19 Eagleman 50-51. The illusion of of “seeing” HURT 198 Which brings me to my second important point. The brain draws no distinction between information that’s generated internally or externally. As the neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it, “eyesight” is merely vision that’s “anchored” by sensory input. However, we all have visions all the time that aren’t anchored by our senses, most notably when we’re asleep. “Asleep vision (dreaming),” says Eagleman, “is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with little more commitment to what’s in front of you.” 20 One thing that all of this shows is that the brain doesn’t recognize literary categories like “fiction” or “nonfiction.” To the brain they’re all the same. In the 1990s a team of Italian neuroscientist demonstrated this when they accidently discovered something called “mirror neurons” while implanting electrodes in a monkey’s brain. They noticed that certain regions of the monkey’s brain “lit up” not only when the monkey grabbed for a banana, but also when it saw another monkey doing the same. Scientists soon discovered that humans have mirror neurons as well. “We have neural networks,” says evolution and literature scholar Jonathan Gottschall, “that activate not only when we perform an action or experience an emotion, but also when we observe someone else performing an action or experiencing an emotion.” 21 This is why babies as young as forty minutes old can imitate facial expressions. It’s also thought to provide a biological explanation for empathy. When we see someone smile, the mirror neurons for smiling fire off in our brains. 20 Eagleman 45. 21 Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012) 60. HURT 199 What’s most interesting from a literary perspective is that these neurons provide proof that the brain doesn’t distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. They fire regardless of whether we’re watching an actual person smiling, or if we’re watching someone smiling in a movie, or if we’re reading about someone smiling in a book. In one “brains on fiction” experiment conducted at the Dartmouth brain lab, scientists asked subjects to watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly while their brains were being scanned by an fMRI. The machines showed that the subjects’ brains mirrored the emotions that were being displayed by Clint Eastwood on the screen. When Eastwood looked angry, the subjects’ brains looked angry as well. 22 In this context, literature’s most famous (and most delusional) knight errant, Don Quixote, who gets so caught up in the books he reads that he can’t distinguish between reality and fiction, might not seem so crazy at all. Though the brain doesn’t pay attention to the literary or ontological distinctions between fact and fiction, it does pay a lot of attention to the patterns and commonalities between the two. This sort of pattern recognition and completion behavior (think about how it uses patterns to fill in blind spots in our eyes) is super-useful because it helps us anticipate and extrapolate meaning on the fly. Crappy though the eyes may be, they still take in a lot. Instead of waiting to receive and sifting through all of that visual information, the brain makes a series of calculated guesses about what it expects to see in any given situation, scans quickly for evidence that confirms these guesses, and then sort of runs with things from there. “The brain,” says David Eagleman, “internally simulates what will happen if you were to perform some action under specific conditions. Internal models not only play a role in 22 Gottschall 62. HURT 200 motor acts (such as catching or dodging) but also underlie conscious perception. As early as the 1940s, thinkers began to toy with the idea that perception works not by building up bits of captured data, but instead by matching expectations to incoming sensory data.” 23 Don Quixote expects to see giants on his journey across the Spanish countryside, and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what he sees. It’s only when our internal models fail to match up with external reality that we rely on the evidence of our senses, when the giants we expect to see turn out to be windmills. All of this seems makes good evolutionary and biological sense as to why we place such a high aesthetic value on patterns. Biologically and cognitively, patterns represent safety, comfort, and stability. Patterns are deemed aesthetically beautiful and good because they show us that our internal and external realities are in synch. Singularities, on the other hand, are deemed ugly and monstrous. The difference is between gazing out onto a benign and peaceful prairie and gazing out onto a prairie with lions lurking in the grass. As the essayist and fiction writer Charles Baxter says of rhyme and repetition in storytelling: “It’s not the unexpected that is beautiful, but the inevitability of literary choices that surprise us with their sudden correctness.” 24 We see this distinction all of the time in our art and in the stories that we tell. How many of our heroes are archetypical everymen, people just like you and me who have been plucked from their day-to-day lives and imperiled somehow, blank canvases (the literary equivalent of the eyes’ blind spots) for us to project our internal models onto, 23 Eagleman 48. 24 Charles Baxter, “Rhyming Action,” in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2008) 116. HURT 201 patterns that reinforce our sense of moral and ethical propriety and that reassuringly externalize our sense of self? How many of our villains are aberrations, monstrous because they represent breaks in the pattern and thus threaten our stability, who introduce discord between our internal models and external reality, who menace by suggesting that the belief systems upon which we’ve built our perceptions are wrong? There’s David and Goliath, Perseus and Medusa, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Macbeth and Macduff. There’s the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales: “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “Bluebeard.” And more recently, there’s Peter Parker and the Green Goblin, The Doctor and the Daleks, the ninety-nine and the one percent. 25 Not only are these patterns pervasive in art and stories, but also they’re self- affirming. We create art and tell stories that reflect our internal models of the world, but in reflecting they also reaffirm them. The external world looks like the internal and the internal looks like the external. To the brain that means that everything is simpatico; everything’s safe, comfortable, and stable. And remember, the brain doesn’t care if what it “sees” is internally generated or externally generated, if it’s fact or fiction. What it cares about is consistency. What it wants most is for the internal and the external worlds to match up. With that in mind, I contend that one of the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment, and of its leading empiricist thinkers like John Locke, was to turn the brain’s aesthetic preference for patterns into the basis for determining what are scientific 25 And in The Doctor we have a character who’s almost the perfect tabula rasa, but not in the Lockean sense: he’s a blank screen for us to project our own internal models onto. Not only is he essentially nameless, but he’s also formless, played by a new actor every couple of years. HURT 202 matters of fact. “Knowledge,” said Locke, “seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas.” 26 This is exactly the ethos that informs the creation of scientific knowledge. The entire program of scientific experiment (from which all scientific knowledge is derived) hinges on the idea of pattern-making, on multiplication, and on repeatability. The more something can be observed to happen in nature, the truer it’s deemed to be. “The true Philosophy,” said Robert Hooke, the chief curator of experiments for the Royal Society of London from 1660-1664, “is to begin with the Hands and Eyes, and to proceed on through the Memory, to be continued by the Reason; nor is it to stop there, but to come about to the Hand and Eyes again, and so, by a continual passage round from one Faculty to another, it is to be maintained in life and strength, as much as the body of man is.” 27 The great irony of the Enlightenment is that artists soon turned to turned to this new science and its experimental method looking for an aesthetic. Hence, Samuel Richardson’s claim that his book was “founded in Truth and Nature.” The idea was that true art, like true knowledge, was derived from observing the physical world. For “literary realists” like Richardson, art is a reflection of the natural world and not the other way around. In fact, the “Book of Nature” metaphor became popular around this time, the suggestion being that knowledge can be “read” by observing nature, the same way that we read words from books. Also around this time the art of “casting from life,” began to come into prominence. “[Casting from life],” says Columbia University history professor 26 Locke 224. 27 Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1985) 37-38. HURT 203 Pamela H. Smith, “involved capturing a small animal alive, killing it by immersing it in vinegar and urine so that it was not deformed by blows, and then posing it in a life-like manner by attaching it with threads to a clay base. A thin plaster-and-sand solution was painted over the animal, and the whole thing was then fired in a kiln, which hardened the plaster and burned out the organic matter. This formed a mold that was first cleaned out with a warm oil and then poured with metal.” 28 The Enlightenment-era shift that I’m describing in both science and art is that people went from thinking of themselves as being the creators of art and knowledge to thinking of themselves as being passive recipients of both. Art became seen as a reflection of the world around us; knowledge was “derived.” Today, however, there’s increasing evidence from both neuroscientists and philosophers that suggests such passive perception is biologically impossible. “What we perceive,” says U.C. Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, “is determined by what we do (or what we know how to do); it is determined by what we are ready to do… We enact our perceptual experience; we act it out.” 29 In other words, perception and knowledge are actively created. What we do—and this includes thinking and imagining—becomes what we perceive. This isn’t quite Hume and Berkeley level skepticism, but it’s not so far off. So has nature cramped the imagination? Yes, and no. But yes only if we acknowledge that our misperception of the primacy of the senses, and the over- determined authority we’ve granted empiricism for shaping our own subjective experiences, has somewhat limited the breadth of creative expression, that this 28 Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2004) 74-75. 29 Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 1. HURT 204 misperception has told us what art or knowledge should look like. And there are already plenty of examples of successful artists who have taken the opposite tack. It would be hard, for example, to argue that a Pollock painting aims to replicate any particular thing found in nature or that writers like Donald Barthelme and George Saunders intend to represent the world, strictly speaking, as it is. Even during the eighteenth century, while this empirical shift was taking place, there were artists actively experimenting and seeking alternative modes of expression. For example, even though he claimed à la Richardson his was a “found” manuscript, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is decidedly anti-empirical, filled with absurd events and otherworldly things: there’s a gigantic helmet that “falls from the moon” and dashes the young prince Conrad to death on his birthday (The child was dashed to pieces, and already buried underneath an enormous helmet, a hundred times more large than any casque made for human being [sic], and shaded with a proportionate quantity of black feathers”). 30 There are ghosts, pictures that leave their frames to talk and sigh, gigantic disembodied limbs, and “a hundred gentlemen bearing an enormous sword, and seeming to faint under the weight of it.” 31 And all of this is presented as a brilliant satire of the system of empirical knowledge creation that Walpole criticized in his private letters. His novel’s operative framing a device, a prophecy (“That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it”) operates exactly like a scientific hypothesis—it begins with an inductive inference and then through empirical evidence that inference is proven to be true. 32 30 Walpole 14. 31 Walpole 74. 32 Walpole 14. HURT 205 It’s my hope that as we continue to realize how little we actually see with our senses, and that the empirical model is one model amongst many of the brain’s powerful fictions (and I mean fiction in both the nonreferential sense and in the Latin sense, fingere, “to fashion or form”) the vistas of creative expression will open up. Already the power of the human mind and the human imagination to shape the world around us is being explored by experimental physicists like Oxford University’s David Deutsch. “Scientific theories,” says Deutsch, “are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses—bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. 33 He goes on: “The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature.” 34 In the essays that follow, I shift my attention away from the question of “has nature cramped the imagination?” in order to look at novels that have “cramped” nature. Each of the novels I examine—Richardson’s Pamela, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1761-67), and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749)—explore the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and stories, and each, I argue, utilizes scientific and empirical techniques in order to effect real world results. I present the novels out of chronological order because I don’t believe that ideas develop according to a set chronology; that’s another empiricist myth. The connection I try to trace amongst all of them goes roughly like this: Since the Enlightenment novelists 33 David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (New York: Viking, 2012) 4. 34 Deutsch 56. HURT 206 have coopting scientific and empirical strategies and they’ve been using these strategies to create so-called “realistic” fictions that have transformed the ways that readers have perceived and interacted with the world around them, sometimes to disastrous effects. In the first essay, “Repeatable Pamela,” I examine the ways that Richardson uses repetition within his own novel to encourage its readers to further reproduce the book. Under the empirical system, repetition is the key to inductive reasoning. The more something happens, the more likely it will continues to happen, and the more the predictions we can make about it happening will be true: “If one repeatedly has similar experiences under similar circumstances,” David Deutsch tells us, “then one is supposed to ‘extrapolate’ or ‘generalize’ that pattern and predict that it will continue… On each occasion when that prediction comes true, and provided that it never fails, the probability that it will always come true is supposed to increase.” 35 Pamela is nothing if not repetitive. Samuel Johnson, for example, the corpulent, curmudgeonly, and outspoken eighteenth-century literary critic, who praised Richardson as “an author who enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of the virtue,” also went on to that Richardson was often a very boring writer. “Why, Sir,” he famously remarked to Thomas Erskine, who, like Walpole, had once complained that Richardson’s writing was “very tedious,” “if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.” 36 35 Deutsch 5. 36 Quoted in James Boswell’s The Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2008) 144-5. 480. HURT 207 Samuel Johnson is not amused. Indeed, the first one hundred pages of Pamela is a relatively gripping (given the subject matter) story about attempted rape and abduction, but over the course of the remaining four hundred pages, this same story is retold again and again. I argue that the repetitive nature of the book inspires further repetition of it in the real world. Hence the hundreds of unofficial sequels, parodies, and panegyrics that flooded the marketplace after the original’s publication, the wax Pamela figures that were sold on Fleet Street, and the Pamela racehorse naming trend: “The first racehorse to be named after Richardson’s heroine,” Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor report, ran at Reading in July 1741 and by 1742 several Pamelas are regularly found in the starting line-ups, alongside the usual displays of political allegiance (“Poor Robin,” “Bold Vernon”) and crude innuendo (“Frisky Fanny,” “Bushy Molly,” “Stiff Dick”). Two Pamelas were entered in for the same race at Epsom in May (both by baronets, one of them a Tory MP), but neither succeeded in beating “Merry Pintle”; a third ran disastrously at Earlshilton in June (“Foxhunter ran against a post…upon which Stadler fell over him, and Pamela fell over Stadler”); a fourth was running in Ireland in July. These horses had begun to age by mid- HURT 208 decade, when “Mister Muster’s Ches[tnut] M[are] Pamela, six Years old,” was the strongest survivor, but Richardson’s novel retained sufficient currency for a new generation to take their place. The equestrian vogue was alive and well in 1748, when “Capt. Shafto’s Grey Filly, Pamela,” was among the successes of the Yorkshire season, her virtues rewarded by the Mayday hundred guineas at Blackhambleton and several other prizes. 37 I argue that the ultimate reproduction of Pamela took the form of an unfortunate and real-world scientific experiment, in which a wealthy though dilettantish science enthusiast adopted two girls from a local orphanage and absconded with them to a secluded country estate where he tried, like Pamela’s antagonist Mr. B, to raise one of them to become his perfect wife. If Pamela culminated in a science experiment, then my next essay, “Laurence Sterne and the Science of True Feeling,” shows that Tristram Shandy resulted from one. When Laurence Sterne attended Cambridge in 1733 one of his classmates was David Hartley, an ambitious polymath who was attempting to reconcile the mind-body debate that divided the philosophical skeptics and empiricists. What resulted was Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), Hartley’s six hundred page masterwork that was sixteen years in the making. The centerpiece of Hartley’s treatise is his “Doctrine of Vibrations,” a theory that speculates that knowledge is generated both by mental associations and by physical sensation and experience, and that two types of knowledge “vibrate” together to create something that’s entirely new. 37 Keymer and Sabor 3. HURT 209 I show that Sterne turned this theory into a rhetorical technique to encourage a kind of reader he called a “true feeler,” someone, according to Sterne, whose “own ideas are called forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within him entirely correspond with those excited. ’Tis like reading himself and not the book.” Like Richardson, Sterne’s appropriation of a scientific technique ensured that his novel had a lasting and real-world effect, one that resulted in a conflation between reader and book and, more importantly, between reader and author. However, unlike Richardson this effect actually seemed to hurt Sterne’s commercial success. By the time the final volumes of Tristram Shandy were published in 1767, Sterne’s “true feelers” were more interested in buying copies of the sermons penned by Sterne’s character, Parson Yorick, than they were in buying copies of the book from which the fictional parson sprung. In my final essay, “The Mousetrap,” I turn my attention to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, in particular to an episode late in the novel where Tom Jones and his servant Partridge attend a performance of Hamlet. During the performance, Partridge mistakes David Garrick’s realistic performance for reality itself and leaves the theater both as the subject of mockery and believing in ghosts. I use this episode as a paradigm through which to explore other realistic performances in Tom Jones, especially the narrator’s realistic performance of authorship. Critics and readers, from the eighteenth century onward, have long believed that Henry Fielding and the intrusive narrator of Tom Jones are one in the same and that when the narrator speaks about the art and craft of fiction, he’s stating Fielding’s own opinions and intent. I argue, however, that the “Mousetrap” episode suggests a more cautionary reading. We should not necessarily read the narrator’s introductory chapters to each book HURT 210 in Tom Jones as eighteenth-century craft essays, or that if we do, we should not read them as being representative of Henry Fielding’s own beliefs. In fact, there’s significant difference between what the narrator says makes good fiction and what the novel actually does. If we mistake the narrator’s realistic performance for the author’s real sentiment, we might leave the book, like Partridge leaving the theater, as the butt of everyone’s joke. HURT 211 REPEATABLE PAMELA In 1770, Thomas Day adopted an eleven- and twelve-year-old girl from local orphanages and took them to France where he began an ill-fated attempt to train one or both to become his perfect wife. Inspired in equal parts by Rousseau’s Emile and the scientific experiments of his newly acquired friends, Erasmus Darwin and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Day began a social experiment that was as bold and odd as any performed in England at the time. Richard Edgeworth described it as “a design more romantic than any we find in novels.” 38 According to Day, the ideal wife should “have a taste for literature and science, for moral and patriotic philosophy… [S]he should be as simple as a mountain girl, in her dress, her diet and her manners; fearless and intrepid as the Spartan wives and Roman heroines.” 39 To this end, Day settled with the girls in Avignon where he began their education. France was the ideal location for this experiment because it brought Day closer to his muse, Rousseau, and because the girls couldn’t speak the language and so would “receive no ideas except those which himself might choose to impart” (Seward 37). 38 Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Begun by Himself and Concluded by His Daughter, Maria Edgeworth, vol. 1 (1820) 209. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 39 Anna Seward, Memoirs of Dr. Darwin: Chiefly During His Residence in Litchfield, with Anecdotes of His Friends, and Criticisms on His Writings (1804) 35. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. HURT 212 Thomas Day was reportedly very ugly, and he couldn't dance. However, it didn’t take long for things to begin to go predictably wrong. The girls got sick with smallpox, and because Day refused to bring along any English-speaking servants, he found himself solely responsible for their care. The girls “chained him to their bedside by crying and screaming if they were left a moment with any person who could not speak to them in English. He was obliged to sit up with them many nights; to perform for them the lowest offices of assistance” (Seward 37-8). When the girls recovered, the expedition continued to suffer a multitude of disasters. They went boating and their boat overturned in the Rhône; an impertinent French officer challenged Day to a duel in Lyons. 40 After eight months, Day abandoned the venture and returned to England. Because two girls proved too difficult for him to raise on his own, he apprenticed the younger one, Lucretia, to a milliner in Ludgate Hill. He settled with the other, Sabrina, in a relatively secluded estate in Lichfield, and sought to continue his experiment in earnest. 40 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: FSG, 2002) 187. HURT 213 Once again, it didn’t take long for things to unravel. Day believed that the ideal wife should be a Stoic, so subjected his then thirteen-year-old ward to a series of trials that were designed to teach her to withstand both physical pain and fear of immediate danger. Unfortunately for Day, these experiments didn’t turn out as planned: “When he dropped melted sealing wax upon her arms she did not endure it heroically, nor when he fired pistols at her petticoats, which she believed to be charged with balls, could she help starting aside, or suppress her screams” (Seward 39). When Day tested her ability to keep secrets, he found that she repeated the secrets almost immediately to friends and servants alike. She detested books and the study of science. Day soon concluded that his pupil would be unfit to mother his future children, because she “gave little promise of ability, that should, one day, be responsible for the education of youths, who were supposed to emulate the Gracchi” (40). Still, he continued his experiments for a full year before finally deciding that he could never mold Sabrina into the perfect wife. Rousseau’s influence on these experiments cannot be understated. While Day and the girls were suffering through the worst of their French pilgrimage, Day was writing ebulliently cheerful letters back to Richard Edgeworth, praising Rousseau’s Emile and its remarkable author, “Excellent Rousseau! first of humankind!,” for their vast stores of wisdom. “Were all the books in the world to be destroyed,” wrote Day, “the second book I should wish to save, after the Bible, would be Rousseau’s Emilius… Every page is big with important truth” (Edgeworth 238). Indeed, Day borrowed many of his unorthodox parenting techniques from Rousseau’s manual on child-rearing, especially from Book Five, which dedicates itself to the particular problem of raising girls. However, Rousseau’s program falls far short from calling for the types of daily tortures that Day HURT 214 inflicted upon his girls. In fact, Rousseau calls for a certain kind of temperance when raising female children. “To make a young person docile,” writes Rousseau, “one must not make her unhappy; to make her modest, one must not brutalize her.” 41 That’s why when I read about Day’s misadventures and failed experiments, I’m struck by the resemblance they bear to those in another, even more famous and influential, eighteenth- century conduct book, one that predates Emile by nearly twenty years and explicitly promotes the kind of treatment that Day inflicted upon his two young wards. Samuel Richardson’s 1740 Pamela is the story of a fifteen-year-old servant girl whose master subjects her to a series of increasingly sinister trials designed to test her virtue and, ultimately, determine whether or not she will make a worthy wife. Just as Thomas Day fled to France in order to raise his girls outside the influence of English society, Pamela’s master, the incorrigible Mr. B, kidnaps Pamela and spirits her away to his secluded country estate, where he attempts to do to her whatever he will. Though Pamela spends much of the first half of the novel continuously rebuffing Mr. B’s attempts to seduce and ravish her, she eventually succumbs to his advances and agrees to marry him. Before this, however, Pamela and Mr. B both suffer a string of setbacks reminiscent of the kind that plagued Thomas Day in France. Pamela tries to secure her release by writing letters to her parents; Mr. B intercepts them. Mr. B tries to trick Pamela into sleeping with him; Pamela attempts to run away and, for a little while at least, manages to convince everyone that she has drowned herself in a pond. The second half of the novel details Pamela’s attempts accommodate herself to upper-class society and build a successful relationship with her new husband. Here again, 41 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Penguin, 1979) 370. HURT 215 the broad parallels between Richardson’s novel and Thomas Day’s experiment are remarkable and worth noting. Though Mr. B does not shoot pistols at or drip hot wax upon his young wife in order to test her forbearance, he does make Pamela adhere to a list of rules as stringent as those Day imposed on Sabrina, his latter day “Spartan wife.” Mr. B presents Pamela with a list of forty-eight rules that she must follow in order to ensure their continued marital happiness, a good deal of which pertain to how she is supposed to raise and educate (or not educate) their future children. For example: 8) That the Education of young people of Condition is generally wrong. 9) That I accustom them to bear Disappoints and Control. 10) That I suffer them not to be too much indulged in their Infancy. 11) Nor at School. 12) Nor spoil them when they come home.” 42 And just as Thomas Day moved back to Lichfield so that he could introduce Sabrina to his friends and colleagues, Mr. B invites his neighbors over to his estate so that they can admire Pamela and praise her simple and virtuous upbringing. Striking as these resemblances might be, however, any evidence directly linking Thomas Day’s experiment to Richardson’s novel is at this point merely circumstantial. Though Day was an avid and eloquent letter writer, he left little to suggest that he had read or was particularly familiar with Richardson’s novel. However by 1770, Pamela had achieved a degree of cultural ubiquity that would have made it nearly impossible for him to claim complete ignorance to its basic premise or plot. Pamela’s initial publication launched a so-called “media event” whose breadth and scope remained unparalleled 42 Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T.C. Duncan and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971) 370. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. HURT 216 throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. Within a year of its going to market, nearly two dozen Pamela adaptations, knock-offs, panegyrics, parodies, and unauthorized sequels had flooded the British marketplace. By the time Thomas Day was visiting orphanages to interview prospective subjects for his experiment, Pamela had not only inspired a minor racehorse-naming trend, but also it had been turned into innumerable plays, ballad operas, paintings, engraved illustrations, decorative fans, and wax figures. The book was even responsible for “a statistical spike in the production of new fiction” that was not matched until the circulating library boom of the late 1770s. 43 In other words, if Thomas Day wasn’t aware that his plan bore at least a passing resemblance to the plot of Richardson’s novel, it is also unlikely that he cracked open a contemporary novel, went to a play, or walked down Grub Street at least once during his twenty-two years of life. But even if Pamela doesn’t share some credit for influencing Thomas Day’s experiment, its ability to inspire imitation is remarkable all the same. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Pamela knockoffs numbered well into the hundreds and even Samuel Richardson, himself, found himself caught up in the reproduction game, first with his near-universally panned sequel to Pamela, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, and later with Clarissa, which not only shares Pamela’s epistolary form but also revisits many of the themes touched upon in the earlier novel. The question for me, then, is why does this particular novel lend itself so well to reproduction? Why were figures from such philosophically and socio-economically diverse backgrounds as Samuel Richardson and 43 See Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Living Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005). HURT 217 Thomas Day equally compelled to repeat the events of Pamela, both in literature and in real life? One answer, I think, lies in the culture of experimental science that was continuing to gain prominence throughout the eighteenth century. Experiment-based scientific inquiry, as we now know it, was largely an invention of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The term “scientist” wasn’t coined until 1833. 44 However, experimental science has roots that trace back into to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into the epoch that we commonly refer to as the scientific revolution. More than anything else, the scientific revolution signaled a radical shift in the perception of how new knowledge is formed. Experimentalists rejected the centuries-old Aristotelian notion that knowledge of the natural world was derived from generalizations. In the new paradigm, knowledge was thought to be grounded on the structured observation and interpretation of natural events. As Robert Hooke, the chief curator of experiments for the Royal Society, wrote in his Micrographia, “The Science of Nature has already been too long made only a work of the Brain and Fancy. It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material things.” 45 Under this new, empirically-based system, knowledge was deemed true only when it could be observed universally. Therefore, experimental philosophers engaged in a program of systematic experimentation, in which the repetition of results became one of the chief testaments to the truth of knowledge professed. In other words, matters of fact were the outcome of a process that involved a number of individuals having a shared empirical experience. The 44 Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Vintage, 2010) xx. 45 Robert Hooke, Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions Of Minute Bodies Made By Magnifying Glasses With Observations And Inquiries Thereupon (1664). HURT 218 greater the number of people who witnessed or experienced something, the more likely it was thought to be true. But it wasn’t just the natural sciences and experimental philosophy that were actively engaged in adopting this new system of empirically-based observation. The new novel of the eighteenth century also placed special emphasis on the importance of empirical evidence and the structured observation of the natural world. Samuel Richardson boldly announces as much on Pamela’s title page, claiming that his novel is “A Narrative which has its Foundation in Truth and Nature” (2). He goes on to claim in the preface that Pamela is not a work of imaginative fiction, but a compilation of real world letters and journal entries that he found and edited into manuscript form. The novel is presented as a kind of natural object, which its author had almost nothing to do with. This sense of reality is then bolstered by the way that information is generated within it. I am not the first reader who has found the novel to be excessively repetitive, oftentimes to the point of tediousness. Samuel Johnson, who was otherwise a big supporter of the novel, thought pretty much the same thing himself: “Why, Sir,” he told Boswell, “if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.” 46 Indeed, almost every significant event in the novel is repeated one or more times. For example, Pamela’s lengthy second volume seems to exist for the sole purpose of reifying the events of the first. Part Two begins with Pamela recounting the events of the first part of the novel to her captor-turned-husband Mr. B. As the volume proceeds, Pamela repeats her story again and again to the increasingly skeptical procession of 46 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2008) 480. HURT 219 guests and family members that Mr. B invites over to his house to meet Pamela for themselves. The volume’s central conflict revolves around whether or not Mr. B’s sister, Lady Davers, will believe Pamela’s version of events, or if she will remain convinced that Pamela has somehow tricked her brother into a sham marriage. The crisis is only resolved when Pamela presents Lady Davers with the material evidence that proves her case, the letters and journal entries that she wrote while Mr. B’s captive. Just as with experimental science, the more Pamela’s story is repeated, the more people who bear witness to it, and the more it is deemed likely to be true. This reality effect is further compounded by Pamela’s epistolary form. Pamela’s letters and journal entries put readers in the so-called “laboratory” right alongside her, experiencing and observing the events of the novel at the same time she does. Denis Diderot describes this effect in his 1762 Eloge de Richardson: “Oh, Richardson!,” he writes, “in spite of ourselves we play a role in your works, we take part in the conversations… How often have I surprised myself, like a child taken to the theater for the first time, crying out: ‘Do not believe him, he is deceiving you… If you go in there you are lost.’” 47 Diderot’s experience with Richardson’s novel recalls what Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe in their 1985 Leviathan and the Air-Pump as “virtual witnessing,” which they define as “the production in a reader’s mind of an image or experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication.” 48 According to Shapin and Schaffer, early experimentalists used written descriptions of their experiments to create a class of witnesses that could participate in experiments at a 47 Quoted in T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 102. 48 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1985) 60. HURT 220 distance. Detailed verbal descriptions of scientific experiments shifted the site of experiment from the physical laboratory to the laboratory of the mind’s eye. Through virtual witnessing the multiplication of witnesses was potentially unlimited. Readers didn’t have to be present to witness an experiment in order to verify whether or not the knowledge professed was true. They placed their trust in the accounts of others who claimed to have been at the scene of the experiment and used these accounts to determine their assent. In the case of Pamela, readers are presented with exactly this. Pamela’s realistic-seeming letters and journal entries serve as a testament that she really experienced Mr. B’s attempts to seduce and mold her into his ideal wife. The epistolary form allows readers like Diderot to become virtual witnesses, experiencing and observing Pamela’s trials as if they were really there. However, in the eighteenth century as today, literal witnessing was still preferable to virtual witnessing. Because artificial or contrived accounts raised the issues of fictionality and trust, physical replication trumped verbal description. In fact, verbal description was often used as the jumping off point for the real world replication of scientific experiments. Joseph Priestley’s 1767 The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, for example, was equal parts history of the emerging science of electricity and how-to book for armchair electricians. Sections of the book offer guidance to aspiring scientists, providing “Practical maxims for the use of young electricians” and “A description of the most entertaining experiments performed by electricity.” 49 49 Quoted in Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (New York: Riverhead, 2008) 35. HURT 221 One of Priestley’s instructive diagrams for armchair electricians. I believe that much the same can be said about Pamela. Not only does the book claim to contain information about the natural world, but also the way this information is presented encourages its real world replication. We see this in the way that repetition is used within the book in order to verify its heroine’s version of events, and in the way that virtual witnessing is used to make readers into Pamela’s accomplices and collaborators. Those who witness the experiment are more capable of repeating it for themselves. Certainly, this all falls within the realm of Samuel Richardson's stated intentions. Pamela, after all, was meant to be a conduct book; its influence extending well beyond its pages. By employing many of the epistemological techniques used by experimental philosophers, Samuel Richardson achieved just this. He also created a book that lent itself particularly well to reproduction. The result was that his Pamela experiment was repeated hundreds of times in other books, plays, and curios. And I believe it even inspired Thomas Day’s ill-conceived scheme to adopt two girls from local orphanages and raise HURT 222 them into the perfect wives. The Pamela experiment, in other words, repeated into real life. HURT 223 LAURENCE STERNE AND THE SCIENCE OF TRUE FEELING In January, 1768, shortly after the ninth and final volume of Tristram Shandy was published, the American physician, Dr. John Eustace, shipped Laurence Sterne what he esteemed to be a piece of “true Shandean statuary,” a gnarled walking stick with multiple handles pointing in different directions. The stick, Eustace wrote in the accompanying letter, had previously belonged to North Carolina’s Governor Dobbs and had been given to Eustace by Dobbs’s widow: “Its singularity,” wrote Eustace, “made many desirous of procuring it, but I had resolved at first not to part with it, till, upon reflection, I thought it would be a very proper, and probably not unacceptable, compliment to my favorite author.” 1 Eustace must have been surprised, then, and disappointed to one month later receive a decidedly grumpy letter back from Sterne regarding his “probably not unacceptable” gift. “Your walking stick,” Sterne wrote is in no sense more Shandaic than that of its having more handles than one; the parallel breaks only in this, that, in using the stick every one will take the handle that suits his convenience. In Tristram Shandy, the handle is taken which suits the passions, their ignorance, or their sensibility. There is so little true feeling in the herd of the world, that I wish I could have got an act of parliament, when the books first appeared, that none but wise men should look into them… It is not in the power of everyone to taste humor, however he may wish it; it is the gift of God; and, besides, a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with 1 John Eustace, “Letter to Laurence Sterne,” in Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) 411. Hereafter cited as Letters. HURT 224 him; his own ideas are called forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within him entirely correspond with those excited. ’Tis like reading himself and not the book. 2 More than the walking stick, it’s this letter and Sterne’s subsequent description of his ideal reader, his “true feeler,” that earned Eustace his place as a footnote in his favorite author’s life. For the first time Sterne stated explicitly what his fiction had always only strongly suggested: readers shared co-responsibility with writers. Good readers were expected to work alongside writers to construct the imaginary worlds of books. In Tristram Shandy this process is likened to polite conversation. “Writing,” says Tristram, “when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation… No author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.” 3 What’s interesting is how much Sterne’s description of this process in his letter to Eustace differs from what he wrote in Tristram Shandy, not the least because, after nine years of bad press and near-constant accusations of obscenity, libel, and plagiarism, his opinion of the reading public had grown so much less amicable than when he’d first begun serializing his novel. Gone is the idea that the writer owes his readers “the truest respect,” and in its place is the complaint that most readers belong to the “herd of the world,” whose own ignorance does nothing but undermine the author’s work. Gone too is the polite metaphor that reading is like conversation. Instead, Sterne describes it as a 2 Letters 411. 3 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), ed. Howard Anderson (New York: Norton, 1980) 77. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. HURT 225 decidedly strange process where the ideal reader “vibrates” in association with the author’s words, the ultimate result being like some kind of metamorphosis or transmutation that involves both reader and book: “’Tis like reading himself and not the book.” One way to explain Sterne’s negative change in attitude is to note that around the same time he wrote his letter to Eustace, his personal, domestic and financial situations were in states of rapid decline. He was living alone in London and was pursuing a reckless and unrequited love affair with a woman named Elizabeth Draper, who, at twenty-three, was more than half Sterne’s age and already married to a prominent businessman. Sterne’s own wife had long since separated from him and was living in the south of France where she, in Sterne’s words, was “waging war with [him]” by pressing him for money and turning their daughter Lydia into “an elegant accomplish’d little slut.” 4 On top of all this, Sterne was on the losing end of his thirty-year-long battle with pulmonary tuberculosis and was also likely suffering from the advanced stages of syphilis, gonorrhea, or some combination of the two, the results of his many past indiscretions. It’s no surprise, then, that the letters from his declining years show a man who suffered from violent mood swings and depression and who often coped by turning to fantasy and delusion. His wish that he “could have got an act of parliament” to ban unsympathetic readers from reading his books is one of his more mild ones. What’s more difficult to dismiss as a result of his declining mental state is the idea that “true feeling” readers “vibrate” in association with the books they read, which to 4 Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2001) 402. HURT 226 me is a decidedly stranger claim. Yet Sterne’s belief that both people and objects emanated and communicated via sympathetic vibrations tracks across many of his letters and traces back several years. Take for example the 1765 letter to David Garrick where Sterne urges the retired actor to return to the stage. “Return,” he writes, “return to the few who love you and the thousands who admire you.—The moment you set your foot upon the stage—mark! I tell it to you—by some magic irresistible power, every fiber about your heart will vibrate afresh, and as strong and feelingly as ever. Nature, with glory at her back, will light up the torch within you—and there is enough of it left to heat and enlighten the world for many, many, many years.” 5 Just as in his letter to Eustace, Sterne suggests that Garrick is capable of both radiating and absorbing some kind of vibrations that have the power to transform both himself and the world around him. “Nature,” says Sterne, “will light up the torch within you—and there is enough of it left to heat and enlighten the world for many, many, many years.” What I argue is that the “vibratory” process that Sterne describes in both his letters Eustace and Garrick is not the result of some “magic irresistible power,” as he somewhat disingenuously claims, but that it has its roots in popular eighteenth-century science, in particular a scientific theory with which Sterne was likely quite familiar. When the twenty-year-old Sterne arrived at Jesus College in Cambridge in 1733 one of his fellow classmates was David Hartley. A remarkably thin young man, and a vegetarian who refrained from eating meat because he suffered kidney stones, Hartley was five years older than Sterne and was about to leave Cambridge to begin his tragic and short-lived marriage to Alice Crowley, who would die one year later while giving birth to 5 Letters 64-65. HURT 227 their son. 6 Like Sterne, Hartley was born the son of an Anglican clergyman and seemed destined to join the church. However when it came time for him to take his orders, Hartley abstained for what he claimed were “conscientious” reasons, not the least of which was his objection to the church’s doctrine of annihilation, the eternal punishment of the soul. 7 Instead, Hartley proved to be more of a polymath, devoting himself equally to the study of philosophy, politics, medicine, and religion. Above all, Hartley applied himself to understanding the “functions of the human mind” and aimed to find a theory that could bridge the Cartesian divide between mind and body, bringing together the diverse fields of physiology, metaphysics, and religion in such a way that would “afford beauty and splendor to each.” 8 The thing that focused his investigation, which was no doubt spawned by the death of his wife and his solo attempt to raise their infant son, was the general question of how does a child learn anything and, in particular, the specific question: “How does a child learn to love?” 9 The answer that Hartley came up with was presented to the public in a massive, two volume, six hundred page book that was sixteen years in the making. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations was published 1749 by Samuel Richardson, who was familiar with Hartley through their mutual acquaintance with the quack physician Dr. Cheyne. Though Richardson himself never read the book, 6 Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) 30. 7 Ross 47. 8 Allen 6 9 Ibid. 17. HURT 228 complaining in private that it was too technical and laborious, he did go on to praise its virtues in public. 10 Indeed, Richardson’s voice was only one small part of the great outpouring of public support that met Hartley’s book, especially from members of the religious dissent and scientific community. Joseph Priestley, who was at the time England’s foremost scientist, and who is now most famous for having discovered oxygen, called Observations “the true science of human nature” and said that he could “think [him]self more indebted to this one treatise, than to all the other books [he] ever read beside.” 11 Similar praise continued well into the nineteenth century, and the book remained equally influential. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was so personally moved by Hartley’s book that he named his first son David Hartley Coleridge. John Stuart Mill and Alexander Bain credited Hartley’s writing with helping them found the school of thought known as “association psychology.” The last thinker who seems to seriously consider Hartley’s work was William James, who addressed briefly and a bit obliquely it in his 1890 Principles of Psychology. The centerpiece of Hartley’s Observations was what he called the “Doctrine of Vibrations.” This doctrine drew upon the still revolutionary Newtonian model by arguing that the body’s “component particles” were subject to the same rules and laws that governed all other material objects. According to Hartley, new ideas were formed when sensations from the material world met with and vibrated in association with those already stored inside the brain. Hartley argued that all ideas began first as physical sensations that were impressed upon the body from without. These physical sensations 10 William Merritt Sale, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1978) 11 Alan 13. HURT 229 were registered in the body by the vibratory motion of its “component particles.” These vibrations then traveled up the nervous system and into the brain where they were stored as miniature vibrations, or what Hartley called “vibratiuncles.” Any physical stimulus could cause this. You could, for example, feel a gust of wind, read words on a page, or hear a phrase of music. Any one of these would cause the “component particles” to vibrate and these vibrations would be sent to the brain where they would then be stored. It’s Hartley’s invention of “vibratiuncles,” these stored miniature vibrations in the brain, that caused his theory to be taken first as revolutionary and later, as understanding of the human nervous system and neurological processes grew, for it to be discounted as grievously flawed. Hartley argued that whenever the body’s “component particles” begin vibrating, the vibratiuncles stored in the brain became excited and reverberated in response. These vibrations and reverberations then came to together to form “joint impressions,” or ideas composed neither entirely of external sensation nor entirely of subjective experience, but of some unique combination of both. Up until this point eighteenth-century theories of knowledge creation broke into two roughly diametrically opposed camps. There were the empiricists who subscribed to the “Book of Nature” metaphor, which argued that knowledge of the world was “read” through making observation, just as we read words from books. Opposing them were the philosophical skeptics, philosophers like Hume and Berkeley, who argued that all knowledge was subjective and that we could know nothing of the external world beyond the “veil of ideas” that clouded our minds. 12 12 George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982) HURT 230 Hartley’s “Doctrine of Vibration” was attractive and significant because it offered a third option that bridged the Cartesian divide between mind and body. Hartley argued that ideas of the world arose from neither mind nor matter, but a combination of both. The philosophical implications of this were significant and, it turns out, ahead of their time. Hartley’s model theorized that not only were ideas shaped by the world, but that ideas also shaped the world. Vibrations from the external world traveled into the body and imprinted themselves on the brain. But once imprinted, these vibrations became ideas that were themselves capable of reverberating and changing how future sensations were perceived. Though the “Doctrine of Vibrations” was eventually discounted as bad science— after all “vibratiuncles”—many of its ideas have proven to be quite resilient and have been reaffirmed by modern day science. Experimental physicists, like Oxford’s David Deutsch, for example, have recently argued that the ability to create explanatory knowledge gives people the power to transform nature. In the 1990s, neuroscientists discovered “mirror neurons” in the premotor cortex of the brains of chimpanzees and humans. These are neurons that fire not when we perform an action but when we see an action being performed. In some monkeys, for example, these neurons can fire when one monkey hears another monkey breaking a peanut. In the monkey who hears the peanut being broken, certain mirror neurons will fire in parts of the motor cortex that would be activated to make the movements needed to break an actual peanut—vibrations without HURT 231 and reverberations within. As one neuroscientist who studies mirror neurons has put it: “When we look at others, we find both them and ourselves.” 13 Which brings me back to John Eustace’s “Shandean” walking stick and Laurence Sterne’s idea of the “true feeler,” the ideal type of reader whose “vibrations within him entirely correspond with those excited. ’Tis like reading himself and not the book.” Before Eustace went out and found Sterne his multi-handled walking stick, he read about it in Tristram Shandy. After Tristram journeys across the plains of Languedoc, he sits down to write about his “Plain Stories” with his pen “o’ vibrating.” “In short,” says Tristram, “by seizing every handle, of what size or shape soever, which chance held out to me in this journey—I turned my plain into a city—I was always in company, and with great variety too” (377). The walking stick that Tristram uses to navigate the plains is as multi-handled as the one that Eustace found in real life, and it’s just as transformative. Not only does it turn Tristram’s “plain into a city,” but when its handles extend across the page and are picked up by Eustace and mailed across the Atlantic to Sterne, it turns Sterne’s novel into something else. The point I want to end on is to suggest that not only was Sterne aware of Hartley’s “Doctrine of Vibrations,” but that he actively employed it as a rhetorical technique in Tristram Shandy. By extending the “handle” of participation across the page and asking his readers to assist Tristram in the production of the text, Sterne was engaged in a Hartlian experiment in knowledge production. The most obvious example of this is probably Tristram Shandy’s famous blank page, whereupon Tristram insists that each reader draw a picture of his own idealized version of the Widow Wadman. “Sit down, 13 Quoted in Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard U.P, 2009) 142. HURT 232 Sir,” says Tristram, paint her to your mind—as like your mistress as you can—as unlike your wife as your conscious will let you—‘tis all one to me—please your own fancy in it” (330). On the blank page that follows readers are asked to combine their own memories and experiences with the information offered up by the book, and their resulting “knowledge” of the Widow Wadman turns out to be hybridized version of both. Here the reader really is “reading himself and not the book.” According to Ohio State University professor David A. Brewer, there exist no eighteenth-century copies of Tristram Shandy upon which readers have actually drawn upon the blank page. By setting Hartley’s theory in motion, Sterne blurs the lines between experience and memory, reader and book. After readers have supposedly drawn their versions of Wadman on the page, Tristram exclaims: “Was ever anything in Nature so sweet!—so exquisite! (332). What’s provocative and promising about both Hartley’s theory and Sterne’s appropriation of it is that it challenges traditional conceptions of how we think knowledge of nature is gained, especially eighteenth-century conceptions that relied heavily on scientific empiricism and inductive reasoning. What both Hartley’s “Doctrine of Vibrations” and Sterne “true feeler” models suggest is that nature is defined by the HURT 233 constant interplay between mind and body, the imaginary world within and the referential world without. THE MOUSETRAP Late in Tom Jones, Tom and Partridge attend a performance of Hamlet in London’s Covent Garden. Playing the title role in this production is said to be David Garrick, the most famous actor of the eighteenth-century stage. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father takes the stage, Garrick’s feigned fear is so convincing that Partridge does not consider it to be a performance at all. Much to the amusement of Tom Jones and the theatergoers around him, Partridge concludes that because Garrick’s reaction to the ghost appears to be real, the ghost must be real as well. He then falls into “so violent a Trembling, that his Knees knocked against each other” and spends the rest of the play alternately shouting warnings at the stage and staring at it through his fingers in fear. 63 After the final curtains close, Tom asks Partridge which actor he likes best. To which Partridge replies that he likes the actor who plays King Claudius best: “he speaks all his Words distinctly, half as loud again the other. — Any Body may see he is an Actor” (557). This episode is striking, in part, because Partridge’s reaction to and dismissal of Garrick’s performance anticipates charges leveled against Tom Jones by its eighteenth- century critics. Samuel Richardson, for example, claimed that Fielding’s novel copied too directly from life and was therefore not artistic. He sneeringly dismissed Tom Jones because it seemed to him to draw too much of its source material from Fielding’s own 63 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones: The Authoritative Text, Contemporary Reactions, Criticism, ed. Sheridan Baker, Norton Critical Edition, 2 nd edition (New York: Norton, 1995) 555. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. HURT 235 experiences, what “he has seen and known” in the referential world, and not from some realm of pure artistic imagination. For instance, he accused Fielding of modeling the novel’s heroine, Sophia Western, after his first wife Charlotte Cradock, of modeling Lady Bellaston after “an infamous woman of his former acquaintance,” and of making the character Tom Jones too obvious an analogue of Fielding himself. 64 Similarly, Samuel Johnson complained that Fielding’s book contained “Portraits of which every one knows the Original, and [the reader] can therefore detect any Deviation from Exactness of Resemblance.” 65 Whether or not these accusations are correct, both men attacked the artistic merit of Tom Jones on the basis that it bore too close a resemblance to real life. For Richardson, this close resemblance signaled a lack of artistic talent. Fielding was not creating art, he was merely copying what he already knew. And Johnson argued that art that simply copied could easily be exposed as a bad or inaccurate imitation of the original upon which it was based. In other words, they charged that Fielding was not an artist but an imitator. And when his imitations deviated from their originals, he showed himself to be a bad one at that. What I find particularly interesting about these charges is how closely they resemble Partridge’s critique, in Tom Jones, of Garrick’s Hamlet. When Tom and Partridge’s companion, Mrs. Miller, suggests that Hamlet is played by the best actor ever 64 Richardson is quoted in Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions: “In his Tom Jones, his hero is made a natural child, because his own first wife was such. Tom Jones is Fielding, himself, hardened in some places, softened in others. His Lady Bellaston is an infamous woman of his former acquaintance. His Sophia is again his first wife. Booth, in his last piece, again himself. Amelia, even her noselessness, is again his first wife. His brawls, his jarrs, his gaols, his spunging-houses, are all drawn from what he has seen and known” 65 Samuel Johnson, “From The Rambler,” in Tom Jones: The Authoritative Text, Contemporary Reactions, Criticism, ed. Sheridan Baker, Norton Critical Edition, 2 nd edition (New York: Norton, 1995) 664. HURT 236 to take the English stage, Partridge reacts with indignation: “’He the best Player!’ cries Partridge, with a contemptuous Sneer, ‘Why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a Ghost, I should have looked in the very same Manner, and done just as he did’” (556-7). Just as Richardson attacked Fielding’s novel as too verisimilar and therefore not artistic, Partridge claims that Garrick’s performance is too realistic and therefore not a performance at all. In both cases, the implication is consistent with the eighteenth-century belief that good art or performance should be somehow distinct from the ordinary and referential world. 66 Both Richardson and Partridge assume that almost anyone is capable of copying, and that an artist or performer who copies too directly from lived or real experience invalidates himself as such. The irony in Partridge’s case, of course, is that not only does his opinion of Garrick fail to reflect that held by the vast majority of eighteenth-century theatergoers, but also by disavowing Garrick’s performance as performance, he comes to the unfortunate conclusion that the actor playing the ghost on stage is, in fact, an actual ghost. Not only does this misconception cause him to break the fourth wall between audience and stage—yelling warnings at the actors—but it haunts him long after he leaves the theater. When he and Tom return to Mrs. Miller’s, Partridge is unable to fall asleep for fear of the ghost. Long after his companions go to bed, he trembles in his sheets, seeing the ghost everywhere he looks and crying out, “Lord have Mercy upon us! 66 Jonathan Raban in conversation with David Shields uses the example of landscape painting, but I think the analogy can just as easily apply to verisimilitudinous fiction: “As recently as the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings were commonly thought of as a species of journalism. Real art meant pictures of allegorical or biblical subjects. A landscape was a mere record or report. As such, it couldn’t be judged for its imaginative vision, its capacity to create and embody a world of complex meanings; instead, it was measured on the rack of its ‘accuracy,’ its dumb fidelity to the geography on which it was based” (David Shields, Reality Hunger [New York: Knopf, 2010] 14). HURT 237 there it is!” (557). Richardson’s reaction to Tom Jones is much the same. Just as Partridge cannot discern Garrick the performer from Garrick’s performance, Richardson does not distinguish Fielding from his fiction. As a result, he sees Fielding haunting the pages of Tom Jones—Fielding everywhere he looks. And like Partridge, he spends much time and hysterical energy pointing this out, shouting, “Look there he is!” But of course, Samuel Richardson is not the only person ever to have done this. Far from it. Since Tom Jones’s initial publication and up to the present, the great majority of the novel’s readers have found the real Henry Fielding haunting its pages. Though few today might argue as Richardson does, that Tom Jones is a clear fictional stand-in for Fielding himself, there are a great number who maintain that Fielding is indistinguishable from the book, most of whom insist that he and the novel’s narrator are one and the same. One canonical example of this common species of reader is Wayne C. Booth, who in his Rhetoric of Fiction asserts that there is no significant difference between Fielding the person and the implied author of Tom Jones. Describing the reader’s relationship with the narrator as a strong and intimate friendship, Booth writes: “The gift he leaves—his book—is himself, precisely himself. The author has created this self as he has written the book. The book and the friend are one.” 67 The pronoun “he” in this case is ambiguous, perhaps purposefully so, as Booth uses it to refer to both the author and the narrator, and he uses both of these terms pretty much interchangeably, as he insists that narrator was created by Fielding to speak in Fielding’s name. Booth even goes so far as to wonder whether or not Fielding was himself feeling infirm at the same moment when the narrator describes himself as an “infirm author.” And though he concludes that what Fielding 67 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2 nd edition (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1983) 218. HURT 238 might have really felt “matters not in the least,” it is only because he has already made up his mind about who the narrator is: Henry Fielding without a doubt. And this is one of the more benign examples of the ways that Fielding has been conflated with his fictional persona. In Factual Fictions, for example, Lennard Davis details a rather heated academic debate about the real or fictional status of the full moon mentioned about halfway through the book (336). The debate centers on whether or not the full moon described as lighting Mrs. Waters’s flight from Captain Waters is meant to be the same moon that actually hung in the sky the night that the real-world Duke of Cumberland began his march against Bonnie Prince Billy and the rebel invaders during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. If it is the same moon, the argument goes, then readers can consider Tom Jones to be less a work of fiction and more of a documentary or journalistic report, because this detail allows the plot details of the novel to be tied to specific dates and real world events. According to Davis, if the full moon in Tom Jones is the same one that appeared in the night sky of November 23, 1745 then Fielding has “permitted reportage to take over from fiction-making,” because he is no longer giving an account of just his characters, but is also giving readers enough historical reference to trace the actual day-to-day activities of the Rebellion itself. Like Booth, Davis even speculates that some kind of one-to-one relationship exists between what Fielding saw and experienced at the time of writing and what he’d chosen to include in the book: “Fielding may have well been writing this chapter just as the full moon had risen. By looking out his window he might confirm that there was a full moon that night…and he might have included that fact in his work.” 68 What is fascinating 68 Davis 205. HURT 239 here is the shift from the question of whether or not the moon in the text is authentic, to whether or not Fielding actually saw it, thus making his real-life experiences indistinguishable from those related in the text. Again, the implicit claim seems to be that if readers can connect Fielding to the moon, we can assume that he has copied so much from nature that it is no longer necessary to consider Tom Jones a work of fiction, or to distinguish it as something distinct from the author himself. Like Richardson more than two hundred years before him, Davis seems to suggest that it is possible the book contains so much of the real Fielding that it almost works better as an extended series of personal essays—“Fielding on his Wife,” “Fielding on the Rebellion,” “Fielding on Art,” and so on—than a fully imagined and unified work of art. Indeed, some critics find it so difficult to distinguish Fielding from his narrator that they consider Tom Jones a hybrid form. 69 But to contextualize this within the larger framework of the novel itself, let’s think back for a moment to Partridge’s reaction to Garrick’s Hamlet: Just because Partridge is unable to tell the difference between Garrick’s staged fear and actual fear, is it permissible for him conflate the two and thus believe that Garrick is no longer acting, that he is reacting to an actual ghost? In Partridge’s case, the answer is obviously no. Of course he isn’t behaving in a correct or justified manner when he so thoroughly conflates Garrick the actor with Garrick’s performance, no matter how realistic the performance might seem. In fact, the Hamlet episode goes out of its way to show that Partridge is foolishly mistaken and so makes him the butt of the joke, not just in the eyes of the readers but to the other characters who are attending the play as well. The narrator clearly states that Partridge’s 69 For example this is a problem for Booth, who wonders how we can consider Tom Jones a “unified work of art” and not “half-novel, half-essay” (see Booth 216). HURT 240 inappropriate behavior draws the attention and ridicule of the other audience members, that it “caused much Laughter” and “afforded much Mirth, not only to Jones and Mrs. Miller, but to all who sat within Hearing” (555, 557). Indeed, Partridge’s conduct begins to outshine the performance itself, as the other audience members soon begin to pay more attention to what he is saying and doing in response to the play than to what passes on the actual stage. But this is exactly what Tom Jones has intended to happen all along. Before he even departs for the theater, his plans are to “admit Mr. Partridge as one of the Company. For as Jones had really that Taste for Humour which many affect, he expected to enjoy much the Criticism of Partridge; from whom he expected the simple Dictates of Nature, unimproved indeed, but likewise unadulterated by Art” (554). In other words, Tom anticipates that Partridge will not know what to make of Garrick’s realistic performance and so brings him along so he can watch him watching it. Here the plot of both Fielding’s novel and its interpolated play begin to converge, as the Hamlet episode in Tom Jones begins to resemble the Mousetrap sequence in Hamlet itself. Just as Hamlet stages The Murder of Gonzago in order to observe Claudius’s reaction to it, Tom Jones arranges this trip to the theater so he can watch Partridge instead of the play. In both cases, the outcome of the trap is the same: the “guilty” party reveals himself when he shows that he cannot discern the performance before him as performance as such. What makes Fielding’s Mousetrap even more interesting is his decision to reference David Garrick, a historical person, and so make him a part of it. On one hand, this reference makes Fielding’s trap even more resonant with Hamlet’s; the “natural” style of acting that Garrick made famous on the real eighteenth-century stage is HURT 241 consistent the instructions Prince Hamlet gives his own actors in the play: “Suit every action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you not o’erstep the modesty of nature.” 70 The irony, of course, is that Garrick’s particular performance of Hamlet might be remembered as one of his most famous roles, though not necessarily as his most modest or realistic, and so not the one that most closely corresponds to Hamlet’s dictates. As Joseph Roach has pointed out, Garrick commissioned a special mechanical wig for the part, so that his hair could be made to literally stand on end when the ghost appeared on the stage. Moreover, once the ghost was on stage, Garrick would strike a silent and terrified-looking pose that he held for so long audience members would often begin wondering if he had forgotten his lines and needed prompting. 71 70 William Shakespeare, The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2001) 70. 71 Joseph R. Roach, “Garrick, the Ghost and the Machine,” Theatre Journal 34.4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1982) 431-40. HURT 242 Line please! David Garrick striking his famous pose. For eighteenth-century readers who were aware of the realities of Garrick’s performance, Partridge’s overreaction to it was no doubt all the more inappropriate and comedic. Not only does he fail to distinguish between performer and performance, but also he ignores some pretty obvious signs that point to the contrary, i.e. that Garrick’s performance is not quite as natural as he would like to perceive. In this way Garrick’s inclusion in the episode serves to heighten the readers’ awareness of their role as meta- spectators: they are watching somebody watching somebody watch a performance that perhaps they’ve already seen for themselves. And not only do they get to laugh at Partridge for confusing Garrick with his character and thus believing in fictional ghosts, but they also get to congratulate themselves for not having made the same mistake. In other words, Garrick serves as a kind of pop-cultural reference, a powerful and well- recognized metaphor that (1) illustrates for readers how easily and foolishly Partridge conflates what he perceives, at least, to be a realistic performance with reality itself, and HURT 243 (2) shows readers that Partridge is spectator just like them. The result is that the spectator becomes the ultimate object of observance. Readers focus on Partridge, who focuses on Garrick, who as Hamlet, focuses on the ghost. Here is where Fielding’s Mousetrap extends beyond its fictional stage and implicates his readers as well. For if the trap is meant to catch Partridge as spectator qua spectator, then it is also meant to catch all audience members who put too much stock in the authenticity of realistic performances, a category of which most of Fielding’s readers are certainly a part. In this way Fielding’s trap reveals to us our own Partridge-like tendency to conflate actors with the characters or the roles they create. It asks us to consider our own gullibility, the extent to which we ourselves can maintain several levels of focus and so discern between performer and performance, and to reconsider what has come before. To this end, it is no coincidence that the subheading of the chapter that follows the Hamlet episode in Tom Jones reads: “In which the History is obliged to look back” (557). Up to now the criticism of Tom Jones has focused on the extent to which Fielding himself may have been his novel as vehicle to “look back” and comment on his real life experiences, that Fielding writes about and remembers, for example, the same moon that he actually saw. But if we “look back” at Tom Jones through the paradigm of Fielding’s Mousetrap, if we reconsider it with new emphasis placed on the spectator—taking into account the ways that Fielding shows us how all spectators on many different levels misinterpret, embellish, and efface what they actually see—what will we find? I think we will find that Fielding invites the same kind of conflation of which Partridge is found guilty and of which many of Fielding’s readers still engage. We will find that Fielding HURT 244 purposely blurs the lines between his actual person and his narrative persona—between his history, history and fiction—in order to impart upon the text a deep sense of epistemological play. And I think there is much to yet uncover about what Fielding’s play tells us about the craft of fiction as it was developing in the eighteenth century and what influence it has born on the shape of fiction today. HURT 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Richard C. David Hartley on Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2008. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Ed. Kenneth Winkler. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983. Boswell, James. The Life of Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Brewer, David A. The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Dainton, Barry. “Temporal Consciousness,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2010. 1 September 2012. <plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/empirical- findings.html> Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: Norton, 1996. Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking, 2012. Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2011. Eaves, T.C. Duncan and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Begun by Himself and Concluded by His Daughter, Maria Edgeworth. Volume 1. London: 1820. Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones: The Authoritative Text, Contemporary Reactions, Criticism. Ed. Sheridan Baker. New York: Norton, 1995. Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. HURT 246 Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. New York: Vintage, 2010. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: 1664. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Eric Steinberg. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead, 2008. Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor. Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Roach, Joseph P. “Garrick, the Ghost and the Machine,” Theatre Journal. 34.4. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Ross, Ian Campbell. Laurence Sterne: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile; or, On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Penguin, 1979. Sale, William Merritt. Samuel Richardson: Master Printer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Schaffer, Simon and Steven Shapin. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Seward, Anna. Memoirs of Dr. Darwin: Chiefly During His Residence in Litchfield with Anecdotes of his Friends, and Criticisms on His Writings. London: 1804. Shakespeare, William. The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. A. R. Braunmuller. New York: Penguin, 2001. HURT 247 Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. Howard Anderson. New York: Norton, 1980. Sterne, Laurence. Letters of Laurence Sterne. Ed. Lewis Perry Curtis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New York: FSG, 2002. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York: Longman, 2007. Walpole, Horace. The Letters of Horace Walpole. Ed. Charles Duke Yonge. New York: Putnam, 1870.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Has Nature Cramped The Imagination? explores and challenges the conventions of the longstanding tradition of literary realism, a tradition that stood largely on the shoulders of eighteenth-century science and its culture of vigorous experiment. The novel’s turn towards the empirical, referential, and verifiable coincides with similar shifts in eighteenth-century philosophy and science. Just as the goal of experimental science was to expand the boundaries of human knowledge and perception, “experimental” novels of the eighteenth century posited and sought out the thus far unknown. I show how authors like Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne borrowed and employed the rhetorical strategies of experimental science not just to create “realistic” fictions, but to create fictions that would later become “real.” The sermons of Sterne’s fictional Pastor Yorick, for example, which eventually outsold the novel they sprung from. Or Thomas Day’s real life child abduction and re-education scheme that owed as much to Richardson’s Pamela as it did to Rousseau. ❧ Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France is a short story collection.

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Creator Hurt, Bryan (author)

Core Title Everyone wants to be ambassador to France

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 06/27/2015

Defense Date 03/15/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag eighteenth-century novels,OAI-PMH Harvest,short stories

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

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Advisor Anderson, Emily Hodgson (committee chair), Bender, Aimee (committee chair), McCann, Edwin (committee member)

Creator Email bhurt@usc.edu,bryan.hurt@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-280990

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Legacy Identifier etd-HurtBryan-1713.pdf

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