University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The monstrous city: urban sprawl, Los Angeles, and the literature of the fantastic

(USC Thesis Other)

The monstrous city: urban sprawl, Los Angeles, and the literature of the fantastic

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content 1

The Monstrous City: Urban Sprawl, Los Angeles, and The Literature of the Fantastic
Anthony Abboreno
English Literature/Fiction Writing
PhD
University of Southern California
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
December, 2017

2
Table of Contents
The Monstrous City:
Introduction: pp 3
Chapter I: pp 22
Chapter II: pp 31
Chapter III: pp 46
Chapter IV: pp 80
Conclusions: pp 97
Bibliography: 105
Fiction:
We Say We Are Beyond This: pp 108
Go With The Flow: pp 124
Something That Listens: pp 152
It Kills Your Heart: pp 172
Light is a Rare Thing: pp 187
Far Away But Not Too Far: pp 220

3

Introduction

Fry's Electronics is a national, big-box chain—just one example of a retail
category, like Wal-Mart or Best Buy—that has built its fortune on exploiting cheap
real-estate on the periphery of metropolitan areas, as well inexpensive goods,
manufactured overseas by exploited labor and imported via the bulk shipping
container, or "big-box." The chain has outlets throughout the country, but the
particular one that concerns us lies far from downtown Los Angeles, in northern
Burbank, near the working-class city of Sun Valley. It is not close to Warner Brothers
studios—arguably, the most notable location in Burbank—or even downtown
Burbank itself. If you stand in the parking lot and look north, you can see the San
Gabriel Mountains, and, looming much more nearby, Yahoo's corporate
headquarters.
Fry's in Burbank is one of the chain's earlier outlets. In the nineties, the
company decided that they would decorate each of its stores with an elaborate
theme—a practice that has since been discontinued, because of expense. The store
in Burbank, built in 1995, has been decorated to seem as though it is being invaded
by aliens evocative of fifties science-fiction and horror movies. The results are
garish enough to evoke a theme park: if the store was in a rural area, on a stretch of
highway, instead of lodged awkwardly in the sprawl surrounding Los Angeles, it
would be a tourist trap. You'd see billboards for it. Instead, it is just a place where
you can buy a toaster. Or a telescope. Or a handle to mount on the side of your
4
shower, if you happen to be disabled. Or pepper spray, or a sandwich, or a cash-
register, or pornographic magazines, or a washing machine, or, of course, any of the
wide selection of computers and computer parts for which the store is named.
The store's front entrance has been modeled so that it appears as if a flying
saucer—complete with glowing lights—has crashed into the building. Once inside,
the customer is faced with a life-sized alien invasion, including a jeep that appears to
have been sliced in half by a death ray, statues of American soldiers caught in the
midst of death spasms, and three-foot-tall aliens, complete with bubble helmets and
antennae. The rest of the store is dotted with similar scenes. At one end, giant ants
hang from the ceiling. Near the computers, a giant octopus appears to have burst
through the wall and floor—its tentacles support product displays. A small food
court has been modeled to look like a drive-in theater, with science-fiction films
perpetually playing on a screen and benches designed to look like the rear sections
of fifties automobiles. By the audio video equipment, another flying saucer has
landed, and if customers step inside, not only will they see racks of empty alien-
space-suits—apparently kept in storage by the invaders—but also a miniature
movie theater, in the corner of which stands a Darth Vader outfit. This is not the
only part of the store that evokes a specific film—in the center of the store is a full-
sized statue of Gort, the robot sentry from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
As you would expect, the store's core business lies in selling electronics and
audio-visual equipment. But it also sells nearly everything that could be of interest
to a homeowner, business-owner or nerd hobbyist. The assortment of goods is so
expansive, that it is almost an attraction in and of itself. Yet, the basic layout of the
5
store, and its core design, are conspicuously boring. Apart from the decorations, the
store looks very much like a warehouse, with exposed support beams and ducts, a
raised ceiling, and tall, metal shelving.
I have chosen to begin with this store because, in its blending of the
exceptional and the typical, it presents a compacted example of all that defines
representation of the fantastic in urban sprawl. Lars Lerup has described the
aesthetic experience of sprawl as one of “Stim and Dross”: the manner in which
sprawl tends to create huge networks of wasteful Dross—parking lots, warehouses,
highways—that connect and support attractive Stims, such as malls or big-box
stores. Fry’s in Burbank is both Stim and Dross, warehouse and fabulist landscape,
and in fact, it seems to entertain by calling attention to this contrast, rather than by
masking it. Fry’s does not attempt to create a seamless fifties science-fiction
landscape—it does not pretend to be an alien world—instead, it presents itself as a
contemporary, dross, big-box warehouse into which a phantasmagoria has made a
violent incursion.
In doing so, it also calls attention to one of the most common themes found in
the art and literature of sprawl. The celebration or invocation of rational and
technological progress—the warehouse, the computer store, even the proximity of
the Yahoo corporate headquarters—along with the anxiety that at a certain point, all
of this reason and technology could double back, and reverse upon itself. Rationality
and progress can bring us computers that drive new jobs and new industries, as well
as conjure the naïve egalitarianism of big-box stores, highways, cheap-housing and
cheap snack-food. It can also bring the threat of mutation, invasion and exhaustion
6
of resources: giant ants and octopodes; bug-eyed monsters that seem like
nightmares from the past intruding upon nightmares of the future.
And, indeed, in a subdued sense, these nightmares have come to pass. The
optimistic tech boom that must have made a gaudily decorated, not-exactly-urban
store seem plausible in the nineties seems laughable in 2017. Even Yahoo, whose
building is visible from the parking lot, peaked in the same era. While there is still
plenty of money in technology, the economy has vastly changed, and so have
moneyed notions of desirable housing. The bulk of texts in the following work were
written somewhere between the mid-50s and the mid 90. Sprawl still exists as a
cultural phenomenon, but it is now more widely accepted that those who can afford
to live and work in urban centers will do so. Middle and upper-class people are
moving back to the cities, and gentrification—perhaps more than fuel-consumption
or white flight—has become the most prominent moral crisis of urban areas in the
present day.
Sprawl, as defined by this essay, is the expression in landscape and
community of dueling impulses. On the one hand, the idealization of rationality,
technology, and progress—progress in the post-enlightenment sense, where the
progress of rationality, technology, and social-equality are often seen as working in
tandem—on the other, irrationality, exhaustion of resources, and the entrenchment
of an elite class. Cities expanded outward under the pretense of the former, but
produced culture and spaces that were always infused with the latter. While the
present study does not have enough space to trace a true historical arc, it will
7
nevertheless attempt to describe how these issues were portrayed as culture and
communities shifted over a span of about thirty years.

As it will be defined within this essay, sprawl is not identical to suburbia,
although it includes suburbia and has its origins in the same cultural forces that
created the suburban boom of the forties and fifties. As a broad framework, sprawl
might be thought of as Suburbia 2.0—urban expansion driven even further beyond
the suburbs, by technological change and the desire for inexpensive land. Other
terminologies have been developed by other authors to describe sprawl, but in the
interest of simplicity without, hopefully, over-simplication, the present study will
integrate these disparate, but parallel, studies under the umbrella term of "sprawl."
One of the more useful, critical explanations of sprawl is provided by
sociologist Robert Fishman, in his book Bourgeois Utopias. While Bourgeois Utopias
is concerned primarily with the development of suburbs leading up to World War II,
Fishman also spends considerable time addressing what he sees as the dissolution
of suburban ideals beginning in the postwar era. The period that is often seen as the
postwar suburban boom, Fishman defines as "the end of suburbanization in its
traditional sense, and the creation of a new kind of decentralized city" (Fishman 17).
For Fishman, classic suburbia is defined by its reliance upon an urban core, and by
its industrial and economic segregation. True suburbs lie at the border between city
and country, are the domain of the bourgeois elite, and lack major centers of
employment. Beginning in 1945, however, suburbs become increasingly un-
suburban in this classic sense, gradually mutating into a phenomenon that Fishman
8
describes as the "technoburb." Fishman's inspiration for this neologism derives
from his notion that these new, post-suburban communities are enabled by
technological progress, and typically built around technological industries. Fishman
states that "these new cities contain along their superhighways all the specialized
functions of a great metropolis—industry, shopping malls, hospitals, universities,
cultural centers and parks" and that they are marked by "urban diversity without
urban concentration" (Fishman 17). Collectively, technoburbs exist in multicentered
conglomerations that Fishman refers to as techno-cities. Increasingly, "urban
functions disperse across a decentralized landscape that is neither urban nor rural
nor suburban in the traditional sense" (Fishman 17). Fishman's notion of the
technocity and techno-burb, the dissolution of the suburb and the development of
newer, decentered urban areas, are very much what the present study means by
"sprawl."
Other texts attempting to circumscribe the phenomenon have used different
terminology. Journalist Joel Garreau, in his book Edge City, published one year after
Bourgeois Utopias in 1988, defines sprawl in terms of self-sufficient communities
existing in proximity to major urban centers. Much the same as Fishman, Garreau
declares the primary distinction between the Edge City and the suburb to be that an
Edge City contains workplaces—as an economic entity, it is not dependent on an
urban center the way that a classic suburb would have been. Garraeau also defines
Edge Cities, strikingly, by their "newness." One of the core criteria he lists for Edge
Cities, in the first chapter of his book, is that they were "nothing like 'city' as recently
as thirty years ago," and instead were "just bedrooms, if not cow pastures. This
9
incarnation is brand new" (Garreau 7). In doing so, he explicitly ties the Edge City
into notions of cultural advancement.
While Fishman's study maintains a critical awareness of ways in which
technoburbs may be problematic in terms of their relationship to class structure,
economics, and material resources, Garreau's vision of the Edge City is generally
utopic. Indeed, while his text is a key study on the subject of sprawl, his prose is
often flowery, and loaded with slippage that suggests a web of underlying tensions
very similar to those found in our earlier analysis of Fry's. In one passage, he
envisions the Edge City as a sort of egalitarian, inclusive, consumer paradise.
Garreau argues that Edge Cities are:
"Astoundingly efficient (…) by any urban standard that can be
quantified. As places to make one's fame and fortune, their corporate
offices generate unprecedently low unemployment (…) As real estate
markets, they have made an entire generation of homeowners and
speculators rich. As bazaars, they are anchored by some of the most
luxurious shopping in the world. Edge City acculturates immigrants,
provides child care, and offers safety. It is, on average, an improvement
in per capita fuel efficiency over the old suburbia-downtown
arrangement, since it moves everything closer to the homes of the
middle-class" (Garreau 8).
It is important to notice how Garreau's language evokes an American mythos of
social mobility, and bootstraps capitalism. Edge cities are places to make one's fame
and fortune, they make Americans rich, as the same time that they help immigrants
10
assimilate, and, presumably, also one day become rich. Consumer goods and luxury
items, of course, are the fuel driving this machine. It is also important to notice a
conspicuous blind-spot: Garreau does not even pretend to frame the conversation in
terms of anyone other than the middle-class. The workplaces he discusses are
explicitly middle-class ones. Forms of manual, or "unskilled," labor are not even
addressed.
Elsewhere, he ties his vision of the Edge City to a romantic past, using
language that evokes Turneresque notions of the Western Frontier. Garreau
explains the difficulty of quantifying Edge Cities by describing them as "such
mavericks that everyone who wrestles them to the ground tries to brand them"
(Garreau 5). For Garreau, the Edge City also represents a "pushing into new
frontiers" (Garreau 4); he invokes Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp" (Garreau 8), in
describing the impulse that drives Americans (he is very particular in continually re-
affirming the Edge City as a patriotic, "American" phenomenon), and even—without
any apparent consciousness regarding the genocidal implications of doing so—uses
language that recalls colonialism and Manifest Destiny: "Once Americans have
chosen a future" Garreau states "it is open to being molded and shaped, but anyone
merely standing in its way is inviting a trampling" (Garreau xx).
The form of progress that Garreau envisions, then, folds into itself a
romanticized past, into which is folded the threat of violence. Even as Garreau
argues that the Edge City is a reasonable progression of the free market, supply and
demand, he exhalts violent imagery and unreason. In one passage, Garreau explains
that he refers to an Edge City as such, because the "rules that govern its creation
11
involve a search for edge—for advantage" (Garreau xxii). In doing so, Garreau uses
the language of marketing and capitalism, arguing that progress is the result of a
rule-bound system where everybody works to his or her own advantage. In another
passage, Garreau argues that the Edge City is a product of an American mentality
that is "wildly individualistic" and " may not know how to resolve dilemmas, but
that does attack obstacles—compulsively and reflexively" (Garreau xx). Violence
and neurotic compulsion are the modus operandi in this case, not calculated self-
interest.
Garreau's vision of the Edge City, then, is full of a monstrous tension between
reason and unreason, inclusiveness and genocide, egalitarianism and elitism.
Perhaps more than he realizes, it is appropriate that he explains that one of several
reasons he has chosen the term Edge City is because an Edge City "puts people on
edge. It can give them the creeps" (Garreau xxii). Garreau perceives that this
creepiness is a product of the newness of Edge Cities—the fact that they seem
neither fully urban nor rural, that they lack conventional downtowns, and exist in
proximity to but independently of major cities. While these may, indeed, be amongst
the reasons why Edge Cities and urban sprawl give people the creeps, there are also
ideological tensions and incongruities at play, which Garreau does not explicitly
address or resolve.

Between Fry's and Garreau, we have two texts—one purportedly
documentarian, the other overtly commercial—in which uncertainty and ideological
tension become elements of urban sprawl. In the case of Garreau, this results in a
12
subtextual monstrosity. In the case of Fry's, it becomes represented as a physical
incursion by monstrous creatures.
In the case of Fry's, where tension is represented as a magical or monstrous
intrusion, what results could be defined as an aesthetics of the fantastic. In terms of
literature, art, and film, the fantastic is often described as a nebulous non-genre—
not exactly realist, not exactly science-fiction or fantasy—much like urban sprawl
itself. Perhaps the single most important text on the fantastic is The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre , by Russian critic Tzvetan Todorov.
Todorov's most influential idea is that the fantastic is a genre defined by
uncertainty. For Todorov, as a formalist, this is primarily a generic uncertainty, and
his ultimate definition of the true fantastic story is very narrow. Todorov argues that
the fantastic is that which lies which between the opposing poles of the uncanny and
the marvelous. Uncanny stories, for Todorov, are stories in which a non-realist
element is introduced but ultimately pinned down to a realistic explanation,
whereas marvelous stories are stories with verifiably irrealist elements. Stories in
which irrealist elements are introduced, but kept in uncertainty—where realistic
explanations seem possible but unlikely—are what Todorov designates as “the
fantastic.”
Todorov argues that purely fantastic stories are rare. Most stories that begin
in a fantastic mode eventually resolve into either the uncanny or the marvelous, and
so it is possible for a story to belong to more than one of these genres. Todorov also
suggests that the fantastic genre, in its truest form, only appears during the
13
nineteenth century, and that, while something like the fantastic appears in the
twentieth century, it is by nature fundamentally different.
The thematic concerns of the fantastic, as Todorov sees them, have to do with
either a distinction between the self and the external world, or between desire and
social approval of those desires: Todorov describes these as themes of the self and
the other. Fantastic elements explore the distance between the thoughts or desires
of the self, and the external world. The move that Todorov makes next is to suggest
that in the twentieth century—for reasons he does not explore in depth—there has
been a distinct shift in modes of thought, so that the binaries fantastic literature
requires are no longer tenable. Whereas fantastic literature was always based on a
hesitation between what a character perceives, and what is real, contemporary
literature no longer makes the distinction between perception and reality at all.
Instead, literature becomes concerned with the realm of pure language.
Even at a glance, it is easy speculate as to why a mode of writing that
destabilizes binaries, that conjures a world that does not feel determinedly real or
unreal, would be popularly deployed in describing spaces that also disrupt binaries,
being neither city nor country; not urban, nor suburban, nor rural. However,
Todorov's definition is both largely de-historicized—he does not speculate much on
what created the shift between nineteenth and twentieth-century thinking—and so
narrow as to make any kind of external application challenging. Most critics have
had to modify elements of his work in order to fit their project. The two succeeding
critics of greatest interest to the present study are Rosemary Jackson, with her book
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, and José B. Monleón and his book A Specter is
14
Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic. Both alter Todorov's
definition of the fantastic in ways that enable it to both address twentieth century
literature, and more effectively accommodate projects based upon materialism and
cultural history.
The earlier of the two books, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion lays
groundwork for both Monleón and the present study by redefining the fantastic as a
mode, rather than as a genre, and by creating a definition of the fantastic in which
the origin of uncertainty comes not from within the reader, but from an uncertainty
within the reality that is depicted by the work. Jackson's stated goal in doing so is to
make the fantastic, as a concept, a useful tool for readings grounded by cultural
analysis: by rendering the fantastic as a mode which brings political and social
realities into question, Jackson sets up the fantastic as something that is both deeply
connected to the material culture in which it was produced, and imbued with
enormous subversive potential.
Jackson's significance to the present study is manifold. She provides a
usefully compact way of recognizing fantastic uncertainty that does not limit itself to
the nineteenth century—authors such as Kafka, Pynchon, and Italo Calvino can be
addressed and viewed in continuity with earlier writers. Second, her definition of
the fantastic as a mode, rather than a genre, creates the possibility that the fantastic
can be embedded within works of disparate genre. In this way, Jackson is able to
argue that there is a close relationship between fantastic writing and literary
realism, especially in the case of nineteenth century authors who deploy fantastic
and gothic elements within putatively realist works. Jackson's definition also helps
15
distinguish the fantastic from science-fiction or fantasy works that seek to create a
secondary world. Authors that strive to transcend reality by creating a wholly other
world, such as Tolkien, are less directly linked to the fantastic mode than authors
such as Charles Dickens.
José B. Monleón points to Jackson as a key critic in opening possibilities for
historicized readings of the fantastic, but argues that Jackson drastically
overestimates the fantastic's subversive potential. While Monleón's reading of
Jackson perhaps gives her too little credit—she does discuss socially conservative
uses of the fantastic—it effectively sets up Monleón's argument that the fantastic, at
least in the nineteenth century, was primarily a conservative mode. Monleón's
discussion of the fantastic is useful to the present study in the way in which it
creates a possibility for a deeply materialist reading of the fantastic, linking the use
of the fantastic to cultural and material changes, particularly those relating to the
organization of communities.
Monleón frames the societal changes that define his period of study as
being—much like urban sprawl—primarily about class and space. In Monleón's
argument, the fantastic develops in response to Enlightenment ideals of reason and
social progress. Monleón views Enlightenments ideals of reason and social equality
as inherently linked—reason, in an Enlightenment mode, demands the ultimate
dissolution of class privilege. Initially, Monleón sees a developing bourgeois class as
exalting reason because it serves the class's own interest of establishing itself in
opposition to the aristocracy of the past. Early Gothic/fantastic narratives, then,
tend to place reason in a place of high-priority, at the geographic and cultural center
16
of cities, and frame unreason as a threat that exists on the fringes. In these earlier
fantastic narratives, unreason is paradoxically linked to the old aristocracy
(decaying castles) as well as the poor (sick-houses and asylums that had been
relegated to the outside of the city). Fear is produced by the tension of this paradox
and its historical implications: the bourgeoisie is haunted both by the aristocracy it
has displaced, as well as the notion that, if the progression of reason continues,
someday the bourgeoisie, too, will collapse into ruin.
As the bourgeois become even more entrenched, however, the status of
reason shifts. Unreason moves to the center of the city, and eventually, the center of
society. Monleón sees this generic recentering on unreason happening in stories
such as Guy de Maupassant's "Le Horla," Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and
Mister Hyde, and ultimately in 20
th
century texts, such as "The Metamorphosis" as
well. The shift in the fantastic from dealing with the unreason of the external
society, to the unreason of the self, for Monleón, is not merely a symbolic question as
it was for Todorov, but part of a gradual, reactionary shift in thinking and politics
where power is consolidated by making unreason the center of art and society,
rather than a threat to it.
I am not interested in tracing as clear an ideological arc to the fantastic as
Monleón is. As Monleón himself acknowledges, such arcs are, of necessity,
oversimplified. They neglect historical exceptions, they strip away possibilities (the
possibility of a politically progressive fantastic, for example) at the same time that
they open new modes of thinking. Regardless, Monleón's work lays a potent
groundwork for materialist readings of fantastic fiction, especially in the case of the
17
present study, where elements of shifting classes and shifting spaces are so integral
a part of the texts.

The goal of the present study, then, is to use a framework based on Monleón
and Jackson to explore the thematic tensions that appear in explicitly fantastic texts,
such as the Fry's electronic store, as well as putatively realistic or documentary
texts that carry themes shared by the fantastic. In doing so, it will provide an
introductory study of the literature and culture produced by urban sprawl. Just as
sprawl blurs the distinctions between cities, suburbs, and rural areas, I will not be
making distinctions between high or low cultural texts: however, the focus will be
primarily upon written literature.
No study such as the present one currently exists. Even suburbia—an older
and more easily defined and recognizable phenomenon—has been surprisingly
neglected as a focus for literary study, with few book-length works in existence.
Those works that do explore the literature of suburbia tends to focus on suburbia's
ostensibly realist fiction, with little if any attention being paid to representations of
the fantastic and what they represent.
The closest book-length work to approach the present study, in general
theme, is The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, by Bernice M. Murphy.
While Murphy provides an excellent survey of its subject, and covers some of the
same ground as the present work, her work differs from this study in a number of
important respects. The first is that Murphy's work on the Gothic differs from the
present study's understanding of the Fantastic in that, while Murphy sees the Gothic
18
as responding to cultural forces, she sees it as responding to those forces by either
directly inverting popular myths, or directly embodying cultural fears. Her
definition of the gothic is also somewhat different from the idea of the fantastic
being used here: for her, the gothic emphasizes the notion of fearfulness, and only
includes works with explicitly magical elements. While her approach is extremely
useful, especially in the context of a book-length survey, I think that a more nuanced
understanding of how the fantastic or the gothic functions better suits the present
work.
The second distinction is that Murphy's reading of the Suburban Gothic is
dominated, primarily, by a lens directly informed by texts on suburbia and suburban
anxiety written in the post World War II period, when the United States was
undergoing its major suburban boom. While such material does relate to the present
study, in that it provides one example of cultural forces that are still exhibited in the
more expansive phenomenon of urban sprawl, it does not provide as clear a picture
of developments in contemporary literature as I would like.
In the following work, I would like to explore different methods by which the
fantastic has been used to explore the tension between reason and unreason in
urban sprawl, specifically through the literature of Los Angeles, which has often
been regarded as the foremost example of sprawl. While I do not plan to create a
fully explanatory model in the fashion of Monleón, I do think it is still productive to
organize my texts chronologically, to make better sense of their evolving historical
context. Beginning in the fifties, I would like to organize depictions of sprawl and the
fantastic into three primary modes, which I will describe as: the conservative, or
19
utopian; the dystopian, or nihilistic; and the progressive, or optimistic. This final
optimistic mode is sufficiently nuanced that I will include two entries on it. In one, I
will describe a tentatively optimistic text, in which—much as Todorov imagines the
fantastic tentatively evoking but never resolving the question of magical
interference—the potential for a serious interruption of sprawl is suggested, but
never fully resolved. Texts such as this walk a border between optimism and
nihilism. The other category is the fully optimistic text, in which the potential for
change is not only evoked, but realized within the text. Note that this final mode
does not necessitate a happy ending: what is important is less whether movements
for change are successful, within the novel, than whether their failure is attributed
to something mutable, such as an institution, or immutable, such as "human nature."
If the failure is do to a mutable cause, then there is usually an implication that the
movement for change can be repeated, perhaps even with greater success against
now-weakened institutions. If the failure is due to an immutable cause: no such luck.
This study will begin with the conservative, or utopian mode, in which an
author either fails to see the tensions inherent in sprawl, or suggests that sprawl
itself can somehow resolve these tensions by continually expanding. Joel Garreau's
Edge Cities can be considered a journalistic example of this mode. For a fictional
example of this mode, which deploys the fantastic in the form of vampiric imagery, I
will use Frank Lloyd Wright's The Living City, in which he imagines free-market
capitalism creating a utopia in which the egalitarian potential of the American
frontier is indefinitely expanded. Much in the same fashion as Joel Garreau, Frank
Lloyd Wright acknowledges social inequality and some of the problems of
20
capitalism, but proposes to cure these problems with capitalism itself, via the mode
of sprawl. In the process of doing so, he does not so much solve tensions as paper
over them, hiding sprawl's violence against the subaltern beneath a thin façade. I am
describing the utopian mode, broadly, as a conservative one, because while it is able
to recognize problems within liberal capitalism and sprawl, it proposes to solve
them by offering more of the same, and thereby forestalls further conversation.
Capitalism has problems, and capitalist sprawl is the answer. The system remains
hermetically sealed.
I will then move on to describing a dystopian or nihilistic vision of sprawl,
written not long after The Living City: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. While I Am
Legend begins by offering up many of the same components as The Living City, even
turning Wright's imagistic vampires into bodily ones, it does not attempt to placate
the reader in the way that The Living City does. Instead, it draws the tensions within
sprawl to extremes, tearing the system of capitalist sprawl wide open. The nihilistic
mode is tricky to position, however, because while it never allows sprawl's wounds
to close again, it does not create room to imagine a viable possibility outside of
sprawl either. Sprawl is terrible, inadequate, and corrupt, but it also seems
inevitable.
In the process of discussing I Am Legend, we will refer to some of the social
conditions that created the Watts Rebellion of 1965. This will help set up our next
text, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon—which was published the same year
as the rebellion—as well as Pynchon's essay "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,"
which was published shortly after. Again, we will see a similar deployment of
21
fantastic incursions into an urban sprawl that, initially, appears seamless. However,
Pynchon goes so far as to imagine a revolutionary counter-force to sprawl, the
Trystero postal-conspiracy, by which the subaltern of sprawl can communicate and
perhaps successfully enact an "anarchist miracle." While there is some controversy
in the scholarship about whether Trystero can be read as a revolutionary
counterforce to sprawl, or how seriously it should be taken as a potential
counterforce, I will argue that it should be taken very seriously indeed, and in fact,
that the narrative tension of the novel requires us to take it seriously in order for
the novel's notoriously irresolute ending to have the necessary impact. Is Trystero a
viable threat to sprawl, or is it just an invented conspiracy? Oedipa, and perhaps
Pynchon himself, cannot decide, and we are left wavering horrifically between
optimism and nihilism.
The final text we will address is Karen Tei Yamashita's The Tropic of Orange,
which I will categorize as an optimistic text, in spite of its brutally sad ending. Of the
texts we address, it is the only text that assumes not only a non-hegemonic, non-
bourgeois perspective, but several such perspectives. I will raise the possibility that
this is part of what enables it to portray the fissures in sprawl and imagine an
alternative to them in such an effective way. While Tropic of Orange does not
necessarily imagine a successful insurrection, it does imagine change in ways not
addressed by our other texts. At the end of Tropic of Orange, we see not only that
sprawl is unsustainable, but that viable alternative definitively can exist, at least
until increasingly unstable institutions put them down.
22
I
Towards the end of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and career, the architect began
to direct his attention towards the then-nascent phenomenon of urban sprawl. An
array of advancing technologies—cheaper and better telephones and electricity,
cheaper cars and transportation—inspired Wright to base his art around a utopian
vision for the United States, retitled Usonia, and a new form of city, referred to as
Broadacre City. While Wright does not reference historian Frederick Jackson Turner
directly, Wright’s vision for Usonia seems to be a direct adaptation of the then-
popular Turner Thesis—in which American democracy and culture are conceived as
being formed from the presence of the Western frontier. In Turner’s vision,
American culture is defined by the ongoing ability of the working poor to settle onto
cheap land, find opportunities for financial advancement, and replenish themselves
culturally by leaving the city and returning to a state of independence and
agriculture. The Turner thesis ends, however, or at least is complicated, by the
completion of the transcontinental railroad—and the resultant closing of the
frontier—in 1890. Wright’s Usonia can be understood as an indefinite reopening of
the frontier. In Usonia, advancing technology allows urban populations to take
advantage of previously underused land, and it becomes possible for everyone who
chooses to live in an individual home to do so. In this land of infinite plenty,
everybody can be a farmer, and yards are big enough—and means of distribution
sufficiently refined—that everybody can not only garden produce, but turn a profit
for their efforts. Even the working poor—formerly confined to tenements where the
need to pay rent kept them in a continual state of poverty—can aspire to ownership
23
of large estates, which they can build up gradually via mass-produced, modular
housing. When evoking a romantic American past, Wright makes sure to evoke the
ideal of the Western frontier, stating that: "our vast territory, riches untouched, was
inherited by all breeds of the earth who were courageous enough to come and take
doman on the hard terms of 'pioneer,;" (Wright 39). Wright envisions a romantic
frontier, much like Turner, that ennables a populist meritocracy, in which the most
qualified people from all over the world can draw wealth from a vast and untouched
store. Wright qualifies this vision, however, by stating that this past frontier is "Not
the frontier we are facing now" (Wright 39). The egalitarianism of the frontier has,
for the time being, closed: Wright's project, then, is to reopen the frontier by other
means.
Usonia is also intended to be a perfect, capitalist democracy. Indeed, while it
would be easy to misread Wright's critiques of rent and profit-seeking as anti-
capitalist, Wright is quite clear that what he is seeking is decentralization, not an
end to capitalism. In fact, Wright sees the capitalist alternative of communism as a
form of centralization analogous to, if more grievous then, what he sees in the
United States's current system. For example, on page 31 of The Living City, Wright
states that centralization has "become the uneconomic force that (…) degenerated to
a force we call communism" (Wright 31). Here, Wright not only dismisses
communism, but even assumes a position of market fatalism, in which any economic
system distinct from laissez faire capitalism is dismissed a priori as null and void.
Communism and over-centralized capitalism are not merely less than ideal—they
are uneconomic. Later, Wright goes on to advocate "true capitalism" (Wright 46), a
24
system which emphasizes decentralization, and evokes the type of deregulated,
neoliberal economics that come to the fore in the seventies, and ultimately enable
sprawl as we know it to take hold.
In the second edition of his book The Living City, published in 1958, Wright
addresses Usonia and Broadacre City at length. The old cities are envisioned as a
kind of capitalist vampire in which individuality is crushed by increasing disparity
of wealth. Wright refers to this process as “pig-piling” and sees it as counter to true
democracy. Wright also abhors Communism and Socialism however, so envisions a
better future not through a government distribution of wealth, but through a land of
infinite frontiers and infinite plenty. Although Usonia is meticulously planned,
Wright imagines it arising spontaneously, through the exercise of a capitalist free
market, in much the same fashion as the glorified Edge City.
It is worth noting that Wright intended Broadacre City as an artistic
statement, more than a viable plan for the future. To critique Broadacre City as
unrealistic overlooks that it was always intended as a fiction. It is still worthwhile to
note, however, some of the wrinkles in this fiction, amongst them the way that it
inconsistently doubles back on the past.
Even though Broadacre City is intended as a vision for the future, Frank
Lloyd Wright repeatedly states that its core goal is to create a more “natural” or
“organic” way of living. Early in the work, he frames the discussion of Usonia by
referring to an imagined prehistory in which humanity is divided into wanderers
and cave-dwellers, stating that:
25
Of all the underlying forces working toward emancipation of the city
dweller, most important is the gradual reawakening of the primitive
instincts of the agrarian. Agronomy, source of the ancient wandering
tribe. (…) Call the survival of the ancient feudal city due to survival of
the ancient cave-dweller instinct. The adventurer protests and denies
this surviving shadow-of-the-wall—this old new city (Wright 62).
The shadow-of-the-wall, in Wright’s larger formulation, is the continuing legacy of
the original desire to build cities for protection. In Wright’s vision, although walls
are no longer needed, their shadows remain, and this is part of the legacy holding
people within cities. Although Wright is nominally forecasting the future, present
and future are both framed in terms of archaic holdovers. The present shadow-of-
the-wall, an ancient memory, is broken by the reawakening of even more ancient
holdovers—those of agronomy, and the wandering tribe.
Although Wright seems to regard the contemporary city as a perversion of an
even older, city-building impulse, he nonetheless sees the city as an unwelcome
holdover from the past. In one section, for example, Wright states that: “Unholy
survivals of feudal thinking have made our survivals of the medieval city a
monstrous conspiracy against the freedom of life” (Wright 89). In other words, even
though a reawakening of the past is what will lead people to the future, clinging to
the past is also what is keeping people in the monstrous present. It also seems
notable that, when seeking to characterize that monstrosity, Wright consistently
describes it as a vampire, as in a passage on page 68, where he writes that “not one
of our big cites can subsist long on its own birth rate as birthright; therefore, a
26
vampire, it must renew itself on our farms and village” (Wright 68). Similarly, in
another section, Wright states that “our big cities, vampires, must die” (Wright 84).
The specific monstrosity of the vampire, of course, evokes not just blood-drinking,
but also unholy survival. The past will lead people to the future, but it also haunts
and plays upon the present.
The vampire has a history of being used as a metaphor for reconciling
disparate visions of capitalism, and we will see it used this way again later, in our
analysis of I Am Legend. Of particular usefulness here is the analysis of Dracula and
Victorian English capitalism by Marxist critic Franco Moretti, in his book Dialectic of
Fear. In his work, Moretti envisions Victorian capitalism as seeking to reconcile,
among other things, a fear that monopolies—which were not common in England at
the time—could provoke a return to an old aristocratic order, with a belief in the
supreme goodness of market-driven individualism. The likelihood that market-
driven individualism, unchecked, could lead to the creation of monopolies creates a
dissonance in this worldview, and according to Moretti, leads to:"the great
ideological lie of Victorian capitalism, a capitalism which is ashamed of itself, and
which hides factories and stations beneath cumbrous Gothic superstructures"
(Moretti 150).
When he refers to Gothic superstructures, Moretti seems to be referring to
the culture at large, as well as the specific literature of the Gothic. According to
Moretti, the fear that individualism could in fact lead to monopolies is mitigated in
Victorian culture generally by centralizing the myth of the benign, Christian
capitalist—an individual who frequently invests in the community—and in Dracula,
27
specifically, by emphasizing the foreignness of the money and blood hoarding
vampire in contrast to the economic individualists who oppose him. The metaphor
of the vampire, in other words, allows some of the nightmares of capitalism to be
projected onto a foreign Other, which can include noxious visions of both past and
future, with the goal of denying the existence of these fears in material reality. It
seems that Wright is using the metaphor of the vampire in a comparable fashion,
albeit unwittingly. The vampire in Dracula is an archaic holdover that threatens the
present, but is foreign enough to be expunged by Victorian capitalists without the
fear of self-critique. Similarly, Wright presents what he sees as a negative form of
capitalism as sufficiently archaic and monstrous to be dispelled by his reasonable,
ideal capitalism, without undue concern about how these two ideologies might
overlap.
And just as Moretti describes the Victorian English as hiding the more
unsavory aspects of capitalism beneath Gothic superstructures, it seems Wright is
prepared to hide the more unsavory aspects of Capitalism beneath idealized sprawl
However, there are good reasons to suspect that Wright has not banished vampires
from Usonia as well as he imagines. While workers, in Usonia, for example, are no
longer beholden to landlords for rent, they still must work, and they still live in
distinctly different neighborhoods from the rich. Wright promises that the factories
workers must labor in will be clean and beautiful—but in a map of Broadacre city,
placed in The Living City as an insert, he still places factories close to the worker’s
homes, and far from the larger homes of the wealthy. Wright promises that there
will be no slums in Broadacre City, but he does nothing to eliminate economic
28
segregation. While the bloodsucking in the Usonian future is less explicit than in the
present, workers still toil, and their lives are still confined to less desirable areas of
the city.
Concurrent with Frank Lloyd Wright's development of the Usonian ideal city,
land speculators and architects in Los Angeles were engaged with a similar
project—albeit with Usonia's darker undertones much more clumsily masked. In
Bourgeois Utopias, Robert Fishman points to the invention of the California Ranch
House in the the thirties as being aesthetically and functionally similar to Frank
Lloyd Wright's development of "Usonian Houses" in the same era, suggesting that
they constituted part of an identical zeitgeist. Indeed, much like Usonia, Los
Angeles's city planners envisioned the city as a city of sprawl—entirely composed of
individualized homes, with no centralized downtown, and none of the downtown
congestion or lower-class slums of a more conventional city. Fishman cites the Los
Angeles architect Richard Neutra's account of a presentation on LA city planning to
European students, at the International Conference for Modern Architects at
Brussels, 1931. While the presentation on Los Angeles planning was intended as
part of a comparison study of international cities, students were baffled by how
different LA looked from any understandable form. In particular, Fishman quotes
Neutra as citing the city's size, with Neutra describing the map as overwhelmingly
large, a "monster map," but also as lacking qualities considered typical of zoning,
including "multi-story slums" (Fishman 156). Fishman uses Neutra's account as a
way of demonstrating the newness of Los Angeles as a new form of de-centered
city—the logical evolution of suburbia into a form in which urbanism is dispensed
29
with altogether. It seems noteworthy, also, that when the city is described in this
way, it shares with Usonia not only a common conceit, but also a similar result,
albeit enacted in real space. Slums and congestion are apparently eliminated, when
in fact they are just being reshaped into new forms that fail to conform to old
visions. Monstrosity continues to haunt the city.
For Fishman, this monstrosity is initially visible in a new geographical
distribution of poverty. A local economy driven by real-estate and real-estate
speculation favored sprawl; the decentering of downtown, the destruction of public
transportation, and the proliferation of roads meant that distance from downtown
did not necessarily confer exclusivity. Nor, according to Fishman, did Los Angeles
ever develop a singular industrial or shopping district, around which class lines
could be cleanly drawn. However, as in the case of Usonia, the ubiquity of suburban-
style living meant nothing like true equality.
Fishman points out that one way Los Angeles sustained the notion of
exclusivity which originally drove suburban development involved placing exclusive
neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills along the edges of the Santa Monica and San
Gabriel Mountains, where geographical elevation could be conflated with social
transcendance, as well as cleaner air (Fishman 167). Less explicitly addressed by
Fishman, racial segregation also formed a key component of class-stratification in
Los Angeles. While sprawl may have helped LA avoid Wright's "pig piling," or the
multi-story slums of conventional cities, racial housing covenants still ensured that
poverty remained concentrated amongst ethnic minorities living in segregated
neighborhoods—albeit, neighborhoods composed largely of single family dwellings
30
built along suburban ideals similar to that of many of the city's white
neighborhoods. As Edward W. Soja states, in Chapter 14 of The City: Los Angeles and
Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, at the time of the Watts Riots in
1965, "few areas of Los Angeles contained the conventional densities of urban life,
even among the poor and working class communities of every color, for the city's
ghettos and barrios were more suburban than anywhere else in America" (Soja,
428). The result is a city in which, for many decades, an urban underclass was
overwritten by a predominantly white image of L.A. not merely because of racial and
financial hegemony, but because the city's ghettos and slums did not look like slums
as the (predominantly white) intelligentsia understood them.

31
II
Richard Matheson's 1954 horror novel, I Am Legend, can be read as a
nihilistic subversion of the idealistic sprawl envisioned by Frank Lloyd Wright and
embodied by Los Angeles. Whereas in Usonia, the advance of technology and
networks of sprawl initially seem to enable greater equality, I Am Legend opens with
a vision of sprawl that is overtly threatening and elitist, in which the sole human
occupant of a city is barely able to maintain life using the technology available to
him. Whereas in Usonia, the vampires of capitalist exploitation are hidden, in I Am
Legend, vampires exist openly, initially as representations of an insurgent subaltern
which threatens the protagonist's grasp on hegemony, and later as a pure
embodiment of the threat of hegemony itself.
I Am Legend focuses on a central character, Robert Neville, who struggles to
maintain a suburban lifestyle in the novel's near-future southern Los Angeles of
1976, following a plague that has turned every person on earth into a vampire. In
The Suburban Gothic in Popular Culture, Bernice M. Murphy does an exemplary job
of describing the ways in which Neville's survivalism mimics the cold-war notion of
the suburban household as a fortresslike, military-industrial unit. Every day, Neville
boards up the outside of his house, manufactures wooden stakes, and tends
carefully to his supplies. He drinks too much, but tries to eat healthy, and to
maintain aspects of suburban life as best he can. He even drives a station wagon,
which Murphy describes as a "quintessential family car" (Murphy, 30).
Above and beyond idyllic suburbia, however, the novel is also fixated on the
geography of sprawl itself. Cars, roads, and the expansiveness of the greater LA area
32
are crucial elements of the novel, as are allusions to the technology and industry
that ennabled the spread of Southeastern L.A. Given that sprawl is driven by
technological advancement, and often envisioned by its proponents as a
technological achievement, the function of technological and scientific progress
within the novel is of particular interest.
One of the technologies emphasized in the novel is the network of roads that
comprise Los Angeles sprawl. Within the first chapter, the reader is presented with
the names of the streets Neville lives and drives on (Cimarron Boulevard and
Compton Boulevard, respectively), and special attention is paid both to Neville's car
and the abandoned cars that litter his neighborhood. As Neville drives down
Cimarron Boulevard, en route to filling his own car at a gas-station, the narration
observes that "on both sides of him the houses stood silent, and against the curbs
cars were parked, empty and dead" (Matheson 24). Neville also pays extensive
attention to his own car. While he is at the gas-station, the narrative states: "He
checked the oil, water, battery water, and tires. Everything was in good condition. It
usually was, because he took special care of the car. If it ever broke down so he
couldn't get back to the house by sunset…" (Matheson 25). Neville's car, in I am
Legend, is not merely a tool, but a life-support system. The implication is that if
Neville should find himself in L.A.'s sprawl without a car, he will not only be unable
to navigate the roads, but he will die.
The sprawl of Los Angeles also drives the tension of a key sequence, in which
Neville loses track of time and has to rush to get back to his house by Sunset. The
sequence begins with Neville, depressed, leaving his house without any clear goals,
33
but ultimately arriving at his wife's grave. Neville leaves his home while speeding
down empty streets: "he went around the corner doing forty, and jumped that to
sixty-five before he'd gone another block (…) at eighty-nine miles an hour, he shot
down the lifeless empty boulevard, one roaring sound in the great stillness"
(Matheson 35). Neville's ultimate destination turns out to be his wife's tomb, which
is not geographically located by the narrative, but which the reader is later informed
that it took him at least "an hour to reach" (Matheson 41) presumably at speeds
comparable to those with which he began his journey. Los Angeles is vast. This
vastness is especially crucial, given that over the course of the afternoon Neville
loses track of time, and must rush home before sunset. Once again, the reader is
informed that "silent streets flew past" (Matheson 41), but even as Neville floors the
accelerator, he is unable to make it home before sunset. Amongst other travails, his
car is destroyed, and the next chapter begins with him hotwiring a car in his
neighborhood, so that he can drive to Santa Monica, which is the only location
where he knows he can find a new car of the exact make and model that he is
accustomed to.
The emphasis on cars and roads is not the only way in which I Am Legend
fetishizes technology. Neville is a veteran—once stationed in Panama—who prior to
the apocalypse, worked at an industrial plant. Presumably, the plant was one of the
military-industrial plants that fueled growth in Southeast Los Angeles during World
War II and the Cold War, and this work experience seems to give him the expertise
he needs to begin a scientific studies of the vampires which he lives amongst and
kills. The novel frames this pursuit of science and reason not merely as an exercise
34
to fill Neville's days, or even as a search for a cure, but as an attempt at mental
salvation. What seems to bother Neville most about the vampires, at the beginning
of the novel, is that their existence seems unreasonable, and therefore at odds with
the technological underpinnings of the city and society as he knows them.
Chapter three opens with Neville reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, and
reflecting upon the relationship between vampire and superstition. Vampires,
according to Neville, first appeared as a thing "out of the Middle Ages (…) with no
framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the
pages of imaginative literature" (Matheson 28). Here, the vampire is presented as
being manifestly segregated from reason and the mechanisms of reason. Vampires
effectively did not exist, prior to the apocalypse, because reason and progress did
not have a framework which could accommodate them. In the aftermath of the
apocalypse, however, the situation has apparently been inverted. Neville imagines
that "the legend had swallowed science and everything" (Matheson 29). Later in the
novel, in a moment of frustration, he conflates the usurping of reason and progress
with the usurping of capitalist and commercial culture. A narrative dip into his
stream of consciousness shows him imagining:
"No germs, no science. World's fallen to the supernatural (…) Harper's
Bizarre and Saturday Evening Ghost and Ghoul Housekeeping. "Young
Dr. Jekyll" and "Dracula's Other Wife" and "Death Can Be Beautiful.
"Don't be half-staked" and Smith Brothers' Coffin Drops" (Matheson
93).
35
Not only does Neville believe he is the last man on earth, but he believes that he is
the world's last bastion of reason. And he explicitly conflates reason with capitalist
accoutrements—magazines, advertising slogans, and consumer products. Vampires
are not merely an enemy of human progress in the sense that they kill people, then,
they are an enemy to human progress because they eclipse the rational and
capitalist systems which drive urban sprawl, and whereby progress is putatively
achieved.
As with Wright's Broadacre City, Franco Moretti's reading of Dracula is once
again useful for describing how the vampires in I Am Legend function as metaphors.
Much as Dracula is both foreign aristocrat and supreme capitalist, the vampires in I
Am Legend are both a recrudescence of an anti-rational, feudalist past, at the same
time that they can embody individualist consumer capitalism pressed to its most
harmful extremes. Neville's paranoid fantasy, after all, is not that consumer
capitalism has ended—it is that, perhaps, the vampires will turn out to be more
enduring consumer capitalists than the people which preceded them. Similarly, the
network of roads Neville traverses is both a byproduct of consumer capitalism—the
constant outward expansion of the city in search of more desirable living space—
and primary means by which the vampires threaten his life. As the novel has
established, Neville would have much smaller chances of being caught by vampires
after sunset if he did not have to travel such great distances. Los Angeles's system of
roads aids and abets the vampires.
In one sequence, I Am Legend even begins to conflate the vampires with the
roads themselves. Neville tries to find salvation by recuperating vampires into a
36
rational framework, and he is mostly successful in doing so. Through methodical
experiments, he discovers that vampirism is caused by a bacilli, that vampires can
be killed by stakes because the bacilli is anaerobic, and substantial puncture-
wounds expose it to air, and that vampires are poisoned by sunlight and garlic. All of
his researches culminate in a scene where he explains vampire physiology, in detail,
to a woman he believes is another human survivor. What is noteworthy about the
scene is not only the extent of the terminology Neville has mastered and used to
map every detail of vampirism, but the way in which his descriptions of vampire
physiology bring to mind the L.A. road network he has been traversing since the
novel's opening.
Neville reveals, for example, that vampires produce a powerful "body glue"
(Matheson, 141), and that this is why bullets cannot hurt them. Neville explains that
shooting bullets into a vampire is "like throwing pebbles into tar" (Matheson 141). A
bullet-riddle vampire, then, is essentially made of pebbles and tar—key ingredients
of asphalt. With this detail in mind, Neville's repeated invocation of the vampiric
"system" might recall the U.S. highway system, which was then being built, as well as
proliferation of regional freeway systems, including L.A.'s. Neville states that a
vampire " system could sustain almost an indefinite amount of bullets" (Matheson
141); that vampires are propagate when bacilli spores germinate and "one more
system is infected" (Matheson 143); and that once the bacilli is "inside the system, it
(…) sets up a symbiosis with the system" (Matheson 145). Vampires have gone from
an all-consuming superstition, without reason or frame, to a clearly systematized
and ever reproducing network of pebbles and tar.
37
Freudian projection is one of the means by which Moretti accounts for
Dracula: Victorian English capitalism occludes its fears by projecting onto a foreign
Other. I Am Legend performs a similar maneuver, linking vampires not only to urban
sprawl and urban progress, but to a racial and social underclass. Bernice Murphy is
perhaps the first critic to point to a racial subtext within the novel: in particular, she
cites the novel's description of Neville as being of English-German descent, blond
and blue-eyed, and to one particular passage in which Neville, in a drunken
delirium, imagines vampires as though they were an oppressed minority group.
"Friends," Neville says, dictating to an imaginary audience, "I come before you to
discuss the vampire, a minority element if ever there was one, and there was one"
(Matheson 31). "There was one," Neville's drunken double-negative, is the wordplay
that belies the grimness of his situation. Vampires are no longer the minority, but
the norm: Neville is the last Aryan in his neighborhood, Los Angeles, and possibly
the world.
While a white fear of racial integration was a crucial element of 50s suburban
culture, generally—Murphy correctly cites the racist policies of the Federal Housing
Administration and the Home Owners Loan Corporation as facilitating white flight—
when the novel's specific setting in Los Angeles is considered, her argument
becomes even stronger than she recognizes. Murphy models her idea of the racial
tension in the novel along terms set by white flight generally: black people and
minorities were forced to remain in the inner city, while whites were allowed to flee
to more exclusive suburban areas.
38
This model does not perfectly describe Los Angeles. Los Angeles already had
black, working class suburbs in the fifties, Watts being a crucial one of them. These
suburbs were underserviced, but they did follow the general model—low-density
neighborhoods composed primarily of single-family dwellings—and were part of
the general, extended matrix of LA sprawl. The downtown area of Los Angeles, also,
was already less of a critical center in the 1950s. Watts, and the working class white
suburbs surrounding it, were not built for people who commuted to white-collar
jobs in the city center, but for blue-collar workers employed in the city's Southeast
industrial belt. In these ways, Los Angeles slightly bends the rules by which white
flight is conventionally understood.
Maintaining segregation was still a priority for whites living in the suburbs,
however. Anxiety about racial integration was particularly potent, predictably, in
areas bordering Watts: Compton and Inglewood were both neighborhoods where
white hegemony was carefully defended in the forties and fifties. In her 2014 book
Death of a Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton, California, Emily Straus
describes how, during the time in which I am Legend was written, two social forces
put increasing pressure on minorities to move out of neighborhoods like Watts and
into surrounding white communities. One of these forces was increasing population
density within these segregated neighborhoods, due to increasing numbers of
people emigrating to Los Angeles for industrial jobs. The other was increasing
poverty within these neighborhoods, due to discrimination within the workplace.
When some factory jobs were cut, following the initial post-war boom, blacks were
the first to go. Poverty began to increase in areas like Watts, and families who could
39
afford to leave, tried to. Compton was one of the primary places where black
families tried to go. As Straus states: "Given Compton's geographical location and its
relatively affordable suburban living, it was not surprising that blacks pushed
against the towns racial restrictions. It was equally predictable that Compton's
white residents would hold their ground" (Straus 45). At the period in which I Am
Legend was written, racial integration was not only a salient concern throughout the
United States, but a major issue in Compton, specifically.
I Am Legend is very particular about its setting, not just with regards to being
set in LA, but with regards to where it is set in LA. As Neville travels throughout the
city, killing vampires and gathering supplies, the novel names the roads he uses, and
the neighborhoods and intersections he passes through. Neville lives just south of
Compton, on Cimarron Boulevard. On the day in which the novel opens, he drives
East on Compton Boulevard "through Compton, through all the silent streets"
(Matheson 25) to an unspecified location where there is a "field excavated into a
gigantic pit" (Matheson 25) where bodies were dumped and burned during the
height of the vampire plague. While the location of the pit is not specified, its
location just east of Compton on Compton Boulevard means that it is likely in
Gardena, a city with a substantial portion of Japanese families who were moved to
internment camps during the 40s. In Neville's 1976, the fires in the pit are, in fact,
still burning—the smoke is so thick that Neville must put on a gas mask, or be
overwhelmed—and this is where Neville disposes of the bodies of vampires he has
recently killed.
40
Afterward, Neville goes directly to Inglewood. The narration states that: "On
the way to Inglewood he stopped at a market to get some bottled water" (Matheson
26). In fact, other than his trips to the pit, Neville spends most of the novel either at
home, or on foraging trips through Compton and Inglewood. So much so that later in
the novel, when he meets a woman he thinks is a human survivor, and she tells him
that she has been hiding in Inglewood, he is initially incredulous. He states that:
"I've been in Inglewood many times (…) why didn't you hear my car?" (Matheson
131). I am Legend is set not in and around just any American suburb, or even just
any Los Angeles suburb, but in and around some of the city's most prominent points
of racial tension. It features an Aryan protagonist who patrols the then-white, but
fiercely embattled neighborhoods of Inglewood and Compton, looking for vampires
who are conflated by the text with racial minorities, and dumping them in a pit
which may be located in a city where, at the time the novel was written, the
deportation of Japanese residents was still a fresh memory.
I Am Legend, then, is not merely a novel that alludes to race, or the civil rights
movement, but a novel deeply connected with the conditions of race and class
specific to Los Angeles sprawl. In the process of exploring these subjects, it touches
upon many of the motifs described in Monleón's work. In I am Legend, technology
and reason are the means by which Neville advances himself as a member of the
middle-class. The presence or absence of reason is also the means by which he
identifies himself as separate from threats to his statue—in this case, the subaltern
groups represented by LA's vampire populus. In a manner distinct from the model
described by Monleón, but similar to that found in Joel Garreau's Edge City, or Frank
41
Lloyd Wright's Usonia, Neville seems to believe that by pursuing reason for his own
ends he can integrate subaltern groups into his vision of society. However, as is
typically true of sprawl, his attempts at integration are only a kind of erasure—in
this case, an erasure that actively kills the subaltern. In Usonia, the vampiric old city
is hidden, but still present. In I Am Legend's Los Angeles, the vampiric old city is
present, hidden, and hunted.
Given the themes we have established, it is exceptionally important to
address the end of the novel, in which the center of reason shifts. For most of the
novel, Neville views himself as post-apocalyptic LA's hegemon—his understanding
of reason and what it does and does not include shapes the city and how others are
able to exist within it. At the end of the novel, however, he encounters a woman
named Ruth whom he first assumes to be another survivor of the plague, like
himself. Instead, he finds that she is a person who has been infected with the
vampire bacillus and survived in an intermediary state—one of many like her—who
has been sent to spy on him.
Neville discovers Ruth's identity by running a blood test on her, and
afterwards, she knocks him unconscious, and leaves a note, as well as one of the pills
she and the people like her take in order to keep their vampire bacilli under control.
The pill itself is of particular focus, both in her note and in Neville's own reaction,
seemingly because it represents that the locus of reason has moved away from
Neville and towards the vampires. In her letter, Ruth says that it "was the discovery
of this pill that saved us from dying, that is helping to set up society slowly again"
(Matheson 155). In other words, while Neville has been navigating his world of
42
technology and reason, some of the vampires have been engaging in a similar
project, and apparently achieving greater success with it. Perhaps for this reason,
Neville regards the pill with an intense horror. The narrative states that "He picked
up the small amber pill and held it in his palm, smelled it, tasted it. He felt as if all the
security of reason were ebbing away from him. The framework of his life was
collapsing and it frightened him." The framework of Neville's life—his experiments,
his roads—falls apart because reason is no longer his sole purview.
In Monleón's formulation, the status of reason in the 19
th
century fantastic
begins to shift gradually over time. Initially, unreason is centered in places that are
seen as obstacles to reasoned, bourgeois progress—old aristocratic estates, or
asylums for the most poor and subaltern. As the bourgeoisie become an entrenched
class, and the pursuit of reason and equality becomes a threat to them, rather than a
boon, unreason is repositioned as the center of society, and reason becomes
positioned as a futile exercise.
In I am Legend, however, reason maintains its central status—only the center
of hegemony shifts. Some time after Ruth escapes from Neville, the other members
of Ruth's society return to Neville's house with the intention of arresting, and
ultimately, executing Neville. Neville watches from the window of his home while
the members of this new society slaughter the other, apparently less developed
vampires that routinely surround his home. Neville, in fact, seems to think of these
new vampires as being of an order closer to him, describing them as "dark suited
men" (Matheson 158), rather than monsters. Neville is horrified by the pleasure
these dark-suited men take in killing the lesser vampires, observing that "they were
43
more like gangsters than men forced into a situation," (Matheson 158). Although
later, after his arrest, Ruth will conjecture that he might have taken a similar
pleasure in killing, and only have been unable to recognize it, at the moment of his
arrest Neville feels " a sense of inward shock" when he recognizes that he feels
"more deeply towards the vampires than he did toward their executioners"
(Matheson 158). As Neville recognizes that he is no longer the sole arbiter of reason
and violence, his perspective shifts, and he finds himself identifying with the
subaltern.
In fact, this realization leads to the final lines of the novel, as well as its title.
At the novel's conclusion, Neville looks from the window of a jail cell at a crowd of
people gathered to witness his execution. The narrative states that:
Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He
knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he
was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the
concept came (…)
Full circle, he though (…) Full circle. A new terror born in
death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.
I am legend. (Matheson 170)
To put it plainly: the novel's hero has discovered he is no hero, and has in fact been
Dracula all along. This realization has shattered him.
One way to read this ending is as manifesting the ultimate fear of the
established bourgeoisie as defined by Monleón: that eventually, the bourgeoisie's
commitment to reason and its attendant values of egalitarianism will lead to the
44
class's obsolescence. While the ending of I Am Legend does not imply that reason is
useless or false, it does question the utility of reason as a force for social equality:
bourgeois progress, it seems to imply, was doomed before it even started. It is also
possible to read the ending of the novel in terms specific to the period in which the
novel was written, as a materialization of the worst fears of white suburbanites
fighting to exclude people of color—white hegemony has been dissolved and
replaced by an ascendant subaltern.
These readings are compatible with a third, which places the novel in direct
conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonia and the idea of the Edge City. The
ending of I am Legend not only embodies the fears of a white bourgeoisie, but casts
doubt upon the entire neoliberal project of sprawl driven by freemarket capitalism.
If, in Usonia, the shadow of the walls built around the old cities can be dispelled—or
at least masked—by reason and capitalism, in I am Legend, that shadow can only be
reified in the unassailable fortress of forever.
While the ending of I Am Legend is too broadly nihilistic to position the novel
as a revolutionary text— nothing in the climax suggests any possibility of an
alternative to or escape from the system as it is—there is still something
noteworthy in the way that it refuses the cozy affirmations of Usonia, or even
perhaps a novel like Dracula, in which the monster is definitively killed and
banished. Critic Robin Wood, in his essay "An Introduction to the American Horror
Film," has suggested that horror often works by picking apart the seams of a social
order and then leaving the wound open or only superficially resolved, and that this
offers a kind of progressive potential. Here, we can once again usefully compare I
45
Am Legend to The Living City. If The Living City points to a gangrenous wound in the
class structure and then places a bandage over it, hoping that the wound will heal
instead of continuing to fester, I Am Legend holds the wound open and picks at any
scabs. Treatment is not forthcoming, but neither is the reader allowed to imagine
that the system is stable, healthy, or fair.

46

III
By 1965, the systemic problems hinted at in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend
had erupted in the Watts Rebellion, often referred to as the Watts Riot. In her book
Race, Space and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, Janet L. Abu-Lughod
explores the different perspectives on how the riot actually started. Predictably,
police testimony—in the form of the McCone Report—and public testimony diverge
from one another. What seems certain, nonetheless, is that an instance of police
overreach during a drunk driving arrest in Watts escalated into police brutality, and
eventually full scale rebellion and property destruction that spilled across Southeast
Los Angeles. The precedent for these events, according to Abu-Lughod, included not
only a history of over-policing in Watts and Southeast Los Angeles, but also the
continuation and expansion of many of the economic and institutional factors we
have already described.
Almost simultaneously, Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 was first
published, and while the book does not directly reference the rebellion, it is hard to
imagine that Thomas Pynchon was not at least conscious of the seeds leading to it.
Indeed, shortly after the rebellion, Pynchon published a rare (for him) journalistic
piece, entitled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts." The two works parallel each other
both in language and imagery, to such a degree that critic Casey Shoop, in the superb
essay "Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the New Right in
California" asserts that "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" should even be
considered a "companion text" (Shoop 76) to The Crying of Lot 49.
47
While Shoop does not spend much time picking apart the parallels between
the two works, Shoop's 2008 essay—in which The Crying of Lot 49 is read as a direct
commentary on Ronald Reagan's rise to governership—is a valuable example of a
surprisingly recent trend of criticism situating The Crying of 49 in a firmly
materialist, historical context. While historical context for The Crying of Lot 49 has
often been acknowledged, the bulk of criticism on it has nonetheless tended to focus
on the novel as a commentary regarding language and rhetoric; the building and
deconstruction of texts. This approach is understandable and valid: the novel's plot
is about a woman whose name bears connotations of both Freudianism (Oedipa)
and textual analysis (German textual critic Paul Maas), and depicts her pursuing
shifting leads in an unresolved mystery centered partly around an obscure
(fictional) renaissance Italian play. And these readings are not wasted, in my view:
speech and writing are both invaluable components of political action, both within
The Crying of Lot 49 and the world we as readers inhabit, so any analysis of the
novel's exploration of text can be considered valid or useful. Nevertheless, studies
on The Crying of Lot 49 that place extreme emphasis on "textuality"—signifier to the
main exclusion of signified—have sometimes fallen into a kind of nihilistic trap, in
which the work of a politically engaged writer becomes effectively depoliticized. In
particular, these readings have sometimes tended to nullify any optimistic potential
in the novel's Trystero network, reading it only as another example of the ways in
which language can be opaque, obfuscatory, or malign.
This is why, for the present work, "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" is
important not only because it gives us a way of grounding the work in historical
48
context, but because some of the parallels between the two texts make a case for a
strong, materialist reading of The Crying of Lot 49—not to the exclusion of textual
readings, but as a supplement to them. What is especially important to me is the
way that Pynchon's closing description of the Watts rebellion—which he refers to,
in common parlance, as a riot—parallels The Crying of Lot 49's Trystero-affiliated
notion of the anarchist miracle. "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" concludes with
an affirmation of direct political action in which Pynchon describes the rebellion as
an artistic act—albeit musical, rather than textual—as well as a material act. The
fact that this closing image is a mirror of imagery in The Crying of Lot 49, to my
mind, creates a suitable precedent for a reading of The Crying of Lot 49 that will be
less concerned with textual ambiguity, and more concerned with how Pynchon
renders cities as a material space, in which art, language, and communication can
oppress, but also offer opportunities for change.
In fact, it seems to me that emphasizing the way Pynchon describes the
rebellion/riot itself can completely change a reading of the novel. For example, in
one of the few articles that places "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" in direct
conversation with The Crying of Lot 49, critic Granville Ganter chooses to ignore
Pynchon's description of the rebellion/riot, instead focusing on earlier parts of the
essay, in which Pynchon emphasizes the artificiality of the "scene" of "white L.A."
surrounding Watts. Ganter uses this as part of an argument that "Pynchon's
complaint is that mainstream culture was able to ignore the poverty in Watts by
turning it into a textual problem, one abstractly defined by mimeographs,
computers, and newspapers" (Ganter 68).
49
There is power and truth in this notion: that allegiance to text over human
need—in the form of allegiance to draconian law for example—can lead down
terrible paths. And Ganter raises a number of useful political questions, and even
addresses the notion of how text-centric thought has come to shape cities (Ganter
76). But in my view, Granter commits an error in dismissing the revolutionary
potential of Trystero—if, indeed, it is real—when he says that "the WASTE/Trystero
conspiracy is Pynchon's metaphor for a 'muted' and broad ranging continuity
among the principles of western society, one which centers on mistaking 'textual'
reality for 'world' reality" (Ganter 68-69). I think that Ganter's dismissal hinges on
misreading some crucial points, and furthermore, that by removing any possibility
for progression from The Crying of Lot 49, Ganter forces the novel—and perhaps
Pynchon's entire corpus—into a reactionary position.
One place I see Ganter misstepping is in his quick dismissal of The Crying of
Lot 49's notion of the "anarchist miracle" as an example of empty satire: "anarchists
who ironically 'unite' to fight in the name of their philosophy" (Ganter 72). Here,
Granville both neglects the parallels Pynchon creates between anarchist miracles
and the Watts rebellion, and—in a rush to emphasize linguistic instability and
disorder—ignores the history of organized anarchist action to which Pynchon
repeatedly alludes, with references to the anarchist painter Remedios Varo, who
fled Franco Spain, as well as anarchist poet Fernando Arrabal, and the anarchist
writer Mikhail Bakunin. Furthermore, I find Ganter's conclusions regarding the
novel's—and Pynchon's whole corpus—diagnosis of what constitutes effective
political action to be well-intended, but horrific. Banter states that:
50
For Pynchon, the relationship of words to each other is important, but
words are only part of the human experience. The real heroes of
Pynchon's writing are those who value what exists beyond the written
word—Benny Profane's shared bottles of wine, his dismay at the sight
of technical jargon, the silent empathy of a look in the eyes when
Elena and Fausto 'shar(e) pain" (Ganter 76)
While I agree with the notion that, for Pynchon, something must exist beyond the
written word, Ganter's own emphasis on textual instability and corresponding
dismissal of Trystero paradoxically reifies the emphasis on text that Ganter
elsewhere criticizes so deftly. The notion that two white bourgeois sharing a bottle
of wine constitutes "heroism," is one that, to my mind, can only arise from a position
in which so much is flattened into text, and text so fully separated from reality, that
effective political communication and corresponding action are effectively
impossible. While the anarchist miracle could have been read—in situ with Ganter—
as an appraisal of spontaneous political action as superior to political acts that never
reach beyond the architecture of language, that is not the move that Ganter makes.
Instead, Ganter interprets the linguistic work of Trystero as just an alternate and
equally destructive system of linguistic power, dismisses everything associated with
it, and winds up with nothing.
Of course, I think Ganter is mistaken on this point. Nonetheless, the stakes
are high for a reading that maintains the integrity of Trystero as at least
representative of revolutionary potential, and one could even argue that this is part
of the novel's power: as we shall see, even though the ending withholds definitive
51
information regarding whether Trystero is real, or an invention of Oedipa/Pierce
Inverarity, the ending also makes clear that the stakes riding on this question are
very high. Regardless of whether Trystero is real, however, I think that we can easily
read the suggested Trystero as being politically productive, partly by calling
attention to the parallel between the very tangible political action expressed in "A
Journey Into the Mind of Watts" and the anarchist miracles in The Crying of Lot 49.
I think Ganter also errs in taking some of the some of the novel's depictions
of Trystero as shadowy or malign at face value, and I will address this at length in
my own reading of a passage on the historical relation between Trystero and a
puritan sect known as the Scurvhamites. For now, suffice to say that I think it is
crucial to distinguish the locus of perspective in the texts being offered. While
Oedipa—or historical Puritans—may sometimes view Trystero as threatening, they
are doing so via a bourgeois, hegemonic lens: I see no more reason to take these
assessments at face value, than to take Robert Neville's initial assessment of I Am
Legend's vampires at face value.
Pynchon's June 1966 essay, "A Journey Into The Mind of Watts" was
published in the New York Times only weeks after the publication of The Crying of
Lot 49, and not long after the riot itself. In the essay, Pynchon discusses his
perception of Watts after the rebellion as being filled with a pervasive atmosphere
of anxiety and exhaustion. In response to a recent police shooting, Pynchon writes,
residents respond with feelings ranging from "a reflexive, driving need to hit back
somehow, to an anxious worry that the situation is just one more bad grievance, one
more bill that will fall due some warm evening this summer." Pynchon's phrasing
52
implies not so much a satisfaction of the impulses that drove the rebellion, or even,
exactly, the sense that the tensions which ignited the rebellion are still present, but a
kind of real hopelessness at the possibility of change. Central to this sense of
impossibility is the enforced distance between Watts and the segregationalist white
culture of hope and escapism that surrounds it. When describing an image of jet
planes flying over Watts to LAX, Pynchon writes that:
From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts—
and in a curious way, besieges it—looks like those jets: a little unreal,
a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city,
belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the
L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-
color magazine photos (...) It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is
everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or
retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody
mills long the strip on weekends looking for (…)
Watts lies impact in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by
contrast, a pocket of bitter reality."
In this essay, Pynchon seems to perceive a Los Angeles that consists of layers of
optimistic unreality and weary realism. Pynchon's description of Los Angeles and
Watts evokes the tensions we have found unacknowledged in Garreau's Edge City,
and in Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonia. For Pynchon, Los Angeles is a city that is
primarily a fantasy of white, bourgeois vision of progress driven and mediated by
technology. This fantasy does not acknowledge, or even seem aware of its failings,
53
and so Watts—a neighborhood afflicted by racism and economic exclusions—lies
impacted within it, as a mostly ignored reminder of the illusion's failings.
This much is clearly elucidated by Ganter. It also parallels some of the
motions we have seen in other texts. For example, in Edge City, Garreau imagines
that sprawl and technological advancement can create greater equality, but he
casually invokes the language of manifest destiny and genocide. In Usonia, Wright
makes a claim similar to Garreau's, suggesting that sprawl might lead to greater
happiness and prosperity for all, yet does nothing to address class-stratification, and
even envisions a city explicitly segregated along class lines. In "Into the Mind of
Watts," Pynchon directly addresses sprawl's technique of wallpapering over
inequality in ways that both Garreau and Wright ignore.
In fact, Pynchon's vision of sprawl is not entirely dissimilar from that
advanced by Matheson in I Am Legend. However, Pynchon manages to avoid evoking
I Am Legend's xenophobic possibilities. Part of this avoidance stems from how the
texts are engaging with perspective in distinct ways. In "A Journey Into the Mind of
Watts," Pynchon tries to engage with Watts as a sympathetic observer, whereas I Am
Legend is written from the limited third-person perspective of a white hegemon
who only realizes the subjectivity of the Other when it is too late. In fact, the
perspective here is important enough that other critics have taken notice of it, albeit
against the context of Pynchon's own work, rather than against Matheson's. For
example, David Witzling, in his 2008 book Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon,
Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism, recognizes this essay as a watershed in
Pynchon's ongoing attempts to grapple with how his own privileged status as a
54
white man affects his postmodern sensibility and ability to grapple with the issue of
race in America (Witzling does not, however, address The Crying of Lot 49 at any
length, except to briefly suggest that it fits into Pynchon's exploratory arc: this
seems like a missed opportunity, as the shift in perspective from Oedipa, the
sympathetic but alienated hegemon, to "A Journey into The Mind of Watts"s assay
into direct understanding and sympathy feels noteworthy).
For our purposes, however, it is most important to note that "A Journey" and
I Am Legend, both render a sprawl preoccupied with accoutrements of progress—
advertising and industry, for example—which are quickly revealed as illusory or
thin when viewed under the proper conditions.
Another quality that distinguishes Pynchon's view from Matheson's,
however, is a measured optimism, and it is here where my reading most crucially
diverges from Ganter's. Whereas I Am Legend's conclusion is broadly nihilistic,
implying that the neoliberal conditions that created sprawl are somehow embedded
in the core of human nature, and that the center of hegemony can shift but never be
dispelled, Pynchon is prepared to open—albeit tentatively—other possibilities. In
our discussion of The Crying of Lot 49, we will discuss the book's recurring notion of
the "anarchist miracle," which seems to designate, among other things an occasion
when a group of people works in perfect sympathy with each other, seemingly
without even trying. Such a notion, while presented as implausible, does seem to
offer an alternative to the unchecked capitalism and competition represented by
sprawl in a way that nothing in I Am Legend—or any other text we have discussed,
does. This idea of the miracle is echoed, in two different ways, in "A Journey Into the
55
Mind of Watts," and so although the essay was written after The Crying of Lot 49, it is
productive for us to discuss how the essay uses this image, so that this can serve as
backdrop for our forthcoming discussion of the novel.
In one sense, the idea of the miraculous is presented in "A Journey" as being
ridiculous or even harmful—a byproduct of the dissonance created by the gap
between white and black Los Angeles. Pynchon describes representatives of a
"poverty board" erected in Watts to forestall future riots as being crucially out of
touch, in the way they chastise residents for lacking the optimism, or emotional
maturity necessary for finding employment. Pynchon refers to these representatives
as "poverty warriors," and suggests that their approach is marred by an inherent
failure of white Los Angeles to connect with Watts. He writes that, when speaking to
them:
You are likely to hear widom on the order of: "Life has a way of
surprising us, simply as a function of time. Even if all you do is stand
on the corner and wait." Watts is full of street corners where people
stand, as they have been, some of them, for 20 or 30 years, without
Surprise One ever having come along. Yet the poverty warriors must
believe in this form of semimiracle, because their world and their
scene cannot accept that there may be, after all, no surprise. But it is
something Watts has always known.
Among the unsurprising realities that residents of Watts experience are being
harassed by the police, perhaps while on the way to a job interview, "wondering
when some cop is going to stop you because of some old piece of car you are
56
driving," or of being told during an interview that one does not meet the job
requirements, but also that the interviewer is not "obliged to tell (…) what the
requirements are." Amongst staid realities such as this, the plea for optimism
presents itself as a "semimiracle," an intrusion from a separate, false, world and
scene that can only imagine things in terms of satisfying and hopeful surprises.
It is noteworthy that Pynchon uses the phrase "semimiracle," perhaps
suggesting that a surprise is not wholly impossible, but also suggesting that the
miracles poverty warriors hope for are not proper miracles, but of an inferior order.
If miracles are usually thought of as bringing salvation, a semimiracle might be
something which—even if it were to happen—would bring a result much less
satisfying: not salvation, but merely a "hopeful surprise."
A proper miracle, Pynchon implies, is transformative. While Pynchon does
not use the term miracle again in "A Journey", he concludes the essay by evoking
something very close to the anarchist miracles which we will discuss in Crying of Lot
49. At the conclusion of "A Journey," Pynchon explains that one way white Los
Angeles hopes to mollify Watts is by absorbing it—at least partially—into the white
version of LA:
"It is, after all, in white L.A.'s interest to cool Watts any way it can—to put
the area under a siege of persuasion: to coax the Negro poor into taking
certain white values. Give them a little property, and they will be less tolerant
of arson; get them to go in hock for a car or color TV, and they'll be more
likely to hold down a steady job. Some see this for what it is—this come on,
57
this false welcome, this attempt to transmogrify the reality of Watts into the
unreality of Los Angeles. Some don't.
The gestures of mollification are in bad faith. The invocation of a television set, as a
means of getting the citizens of Watts "in hock," is especially key, because Pynchon
has already established that television is the primary means by which the unreal
ethos of Los Angeles—one in thrall to ideas of economic liberalism and
technological progress—is multiplied.
Pynchon then goes on to suggest that a more organic means of resistance for
Watts is art. Pynchon's definition of art, however, is somewhat expansive.
As this summer warms up, last August's riot is being
remembered less as chaos and more as art Some talk of a balletic
quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from
the center of the action, a scattering of The Man's power, either with
real incidents or false alarms.
Others remember it in terms of music; through much of the
rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it
is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights; everybody knowing what
to do and when to do it without needing a word or a signal.
Pynchon suggests that the riot is perhaps not a destructive act after all, but a
creative one, in which Watts worked together as a community to create a reality
distinct from both the everyday order of Watts, as well as that of white Los Angeles.
This seems to be one alternative to the "semimiracle" of hoping for the opportunity
to go in hock buying a television set; maybe a true miracle, in its own right.
58
While Pynchon evokes themes similar to those found in I am Legend, then, he
also refuses to foreclose on the possibility of a way out. In place of I am Legend's
cynicism, in which the hegemonic culture is revealed as corrupt, but where attempts
to overturn also may be futile, resulting only in recursion to the "unassailable
fortress of forever," Pynchon offers the possibility of riot/rebellion as art; of
destruction as a creative act from which, presumably, new possibilities might arise,
even if—in this particular instance—they seemingly haven't.
While Crying of Lot 49 itself was published the same year as the Watts
rebellion, and makes no reference to the rebellion itself, having Pynchon's essay on
Watts helps give additional perspective as to how we might view the broadly
satirical novel—replete with the punny names and cartoonish slapstick for which he
is famous—as interacting with the tangible world of LA politics. As we explore
Crying of Lot 49, we will find that, much like I Am Legend and "A Journey Into the
Mind of Watts," it portrays urban sprawl as a kind of vast and permeable layer
which papers over a subaltern with pervasive images of technology, media, and
rational progress. Then, unlike I Am Legend, but much like "A Journey Into the Mind
of Watts," it offers us a glimpse at an escape in the form of an "anarchist miracle."
The protagonist of Crying of Lot 49 is Oedipa Maas, a housewife who
unexpectedly becomes chief-executor of the estate of a her former lover, a real-
estate agent whose holdings are vast, but primarily focused in the Los Angeles
suburb of San Narcisco. In the course of investigating Inverarity's holdings, Oedipa
stumbles upon what seems to be a centuries-old conspiracy involving the postal
service, and in particular between two different courier organizations—Thurn and
59
Taxis, and Trystero. Pynchon is fond of puns and oversignifcation, and so even in the
names of its characters Crying of Lot 49 suggests some of the themes we have been
discussing. As has been frequently noted, for example, Oedipa Maas's first name is
an allusion to both Freudian theory and blind Oedipus, and Pierce Inverarity's name
sounds like the phrase "pierce inveracity," which could suggest an agent which
breaks through untruthfulness. The nature of that untruth that Oedipa is blind to
and which the exploration of Inverarity's estate helps her to pierce seems to have
something to do with the nature of cities themselves—particularly San Narcisco,
although later in the novel this sense of unreality expands to include San Francisco
and the Bay Area. However, Oedipa's first inkling of the nature of her project occurs
in the first chapter, before she travels to San Narcisco, while she is remembering a
visit she and Inverarity paid to an art gallery in Mexico City.
Oedipa recalls that, while she was there, she saw a painting by Remedios
Varo entitled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre", and began to cry. She cries because,
while viewing the painting, she imagines her own place in an imaginary and
inescapable world, the description of which mirrors Pynchon's description of white
Los Angeles in "A Journey Into The Mind of Watts":
She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a
painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a
couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident
known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing,
there'd been no escape. Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time
to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are
60
like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is
magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for
no reason at all.
While Oedipa's epiphany is mediated by painting and architecture, rather than by a
television, she nonetheless identifies a world of the imaginary that has been woven
together by forces outside of her control—much as Los Angeles has been woven for
the residents of Watts—and in which Pierce is in some way complicit. This
imaginary world is depicted as a kind of magic, largely impersonal.
Much attention has been paid in criticism both to the textual description of
Varo's painting, as well as how discrepancies between the actual painting and its
novelistic description reflect upon how its signification can be understood. David
Cowart, for example, in his essay "Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and the Paintings
of Remedios Varo" points out that Pynchon's description of the painting omits
certain details—for example, a shadowy figure who resides in the central tower, and
resembles the agents of Trystero as Pynchon describes them. Casey Shoop has
pointed to this presence of the unstated as a strong argument for not divesting the
novel of its real-world context, or allowing its depiction of language to simply
dissolve into non-meaning. For Shoop, the crucial omitted detail: "suffuses
Pynchon's text with something just beyond itself (…) the tacit acknowledgment
enacts at the level of form the apprehension of a purposive outside" and asks the
question "does this unbidden presence, waiting without acknowledgment from
Pynchon's prose, cast into doubt the regular correspondence that critics maintain
between the novel's refusal to mean and theories about language's refusal to arrive
61
at the signified" (Shoop 54). In other words, for Shoop, the conspicuous absence of
the figure can be read as a statement against textual reductionism. By omitting such
an important symbol from the painting, Pynchon is calling our attention to the
notion that, yes, even in novels, things of importance do exist outside of and in
relation to the text.
For our own purposes, this important omission adds weight to the notion
that some kind of meaning will be lost if the connection between Trystero
(represented outside the novel in the painting) and the world (both inside and
outside of the novel) are fully severed. It is also my assertion that while the
potentially reactionary power of text is significant, political opportunities are
always closed—and never opened—when we suggest that art and reality can ever
be totally removed from one another, and Pynchon knows this. And so, I would like
to call attention to the fact that while Oedipa's entrapment in the tower is largely of
symbolic construction, that does not mean that this symbolism ends at the level of
language, and that also does not mean that changes in language or symbolism are
unable to move power from the opposite direction. The place where Oedipa is
standing may only by accident be known as Mexico, but that symbolic national
border has very real consequences for the people who exist on either side of it.
Conversely, a symbolic change in that border (say—purely for the sake of
illustration—a government decree moving its location, or better yet, a mass public
refusal to regard the border as an authoritative descriptor of nationhood or human
identity) will likewise have real-world consequences. If we are going to carry that
analogy in one direction—language and art shape reality for the purpose of
62
control—it seems counter-productive to me to then nullify that potential for change
in the opposite direction. We have to allow for the possibility that art/language can
direct actions which resist control, or we, as authors and critics, become trapped in
an aporia of meaning in which we can do nothing but drink wine.
Shortly, we will explore a similar enactment of the symbolic in the novel's
depiction of the urban sprawl of San Narcisco and Los Angeles. Of particular interest
to us regarding this painting, however, is both how directly this image can be
contrasted with the closing of I Am Legend, as well as the identity of the painter
herself. If I am Legend opens with a fractured city, circling back upon the
unassailable fortress of forever, Crying of Lot 49 begins with an imaginary fortress
that only holds its prisoners by a kind of ephemeral, cultural magic. Although Oedipa
feels despair in this moment, the possibility of escape from the tower is already
hinted at: while many of the contemporary and historical details found in The Crying
of Lot 49 are fabricated, Remedios Varo was an actual painter known for her
anarchist politics, who fled Spain during Franco's rise to power. The theme of
anarchy, anarchism—as well as people acting in concert without governance—will
recur throughout The Crying of Lot 49, apparently, much like the Watts rebellion,
offering one means of escape from the imaginary tower or the unassailable fortress
of forever.
For the time being, however, Oedipa is still trapped. Shortly after receiving
notice that she has been named executor of Inverarity's estate, she drives to San
Narcisco from her own Northern California suburb of Kinnaret-By-The-Pines. The
description of the city that the narrative offers us translates the architecture and
63
magic of Remedios Varo's painting into the language of technology and roads. The
narrative states:
She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a
vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-
tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time
she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a batter and seen her first
printed circuit. (…) Though she knew even less about radios than
about Southern California, there were to both outward patterns a
hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning. (Pynchon 14)
Observing the landscape of San Narcisco, Oedipa is able to perceive it as an imagined
text which can be read. In this way, the passage evokes Varo's tower. If Varo's tower
causes Oedipa to imagine the manner in which places and borders are magically
woven, staring at the landscape of San Narcisco causes her to imagine a landscape
overwritten by technology. However, while Varo's painting caused Oedipa to be
overwhelmed by a sense of the arbitrariness of the constructed world, this
landscape of reason and technology—at least initially-seems to promise a concealed
meaning, of which she, the executor of Inverarity's estate, is presumably at the
center.
Oedipa is already beginning to gain a sense of the hollowness of this promise,
however. On the next page, Oedipa grows exhausted by the landscape of "more
beige, prefab, cinderblock office machine distributes, sealant makers (…) and
whatever" (Pynchon 15). As the landscape repeats itself, Oedipa's sense of its
64
meaningfulness begins to break down. Oedipa resolves that she will stop at the next
hotel:
(…) however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point
become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your
hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn't (…)
What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic
needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein
nourishing the mainliner LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected
from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. (Pynchon 15).
Sprawl, pushed forward by technology and reason, at first promises an exhilarating
form of communication, but eventually turns into tedium and repetition. Ultimately,
the road it reveals itself as a syringe, mainlining capital into a city. After reaching a
certain point of apparent, reasoned progress, sprawl turns in on itself and is
reduced to the status of a drug, ameliorating whatever passes with a city for pain. Of
particular note is that qualifier "whatever passes, with a city, for pain" implies
that—while cities are often linguistically conflated with their residents—here the
city is being regarded as an entity distinct from its residents. The conceptualization
of human pain is comprehensible and material: the phrase "whatever passes"
implies something abstract and figurative. The narrative here is struggling to
imagine the city and its capital as living organisms, and projecting feelings onto
them, at the same time that it is recognizing that what first seemed like an attempt
at communication is, in fact, just a hypodermic needle moving capital.
65
Oedipa will shortly discover that, much like the city in I Am Legend, San
Narcisco and environs do more to hide subaltern residents than serve them.
Sometimes, this is rendered overtly. Oedipa meets the lawyer Metzger, who informs
her that one of Inverarity's properties, the housing development Fangoso Lagoons,
includes canals with "real human skeletons from Italy (…) for the entertainment of
scuba enthusiasts" (Pynchon 20). The word Fangoso means muddy or cloudy in
Spanish—divers at Fangoso Lagoons are being invited to dive beneath the surface of
the housing development and examine the city's hidden dead. Or at least, they are
invited to imagine that they are doing so—the skeletons are, after all, imported. The
thought of these divers is nevertheless enough to cause Oedipa to reflect again upon
the city's semiotic presence: "some immediacy was there again, some promise of
hierophany: printed circuit, gently curving streets, private access to the water, Book
of the Dead" (Pynchon 20). The reference to Book of the Dead centralizes the hidden
dead in Oedipa's intuition of meaning, and throughout the novel, the hidden dead—
and sometimes, the undead—will be used to invoke the city's paved over subaltern.
In this way, The Crying of Lot 49 fits into the metaphorical continuity of The Living
City and I Am Legend: images of death and the undead are used to depict a city that
consumes and conceals.
When Oedipa actually visits Fangoso Lagoons, for example, she and Metzger
have a conversation with a friend of Metzger's, another lawyer named Tony Jaguar,
who explains the origins at the bottom of the lagoon. Initially, Metzger postulates
that the bones come from cemeteries that have been torn out to make way for new
highways: "Old cemeteries have to be ripped up," Metzger explained, "Like in the
66
path of the East San Narcisco Freeway, it had no right to be there, so we just
barreled on through, no sweat" (Pynchon 46). While Metzger's assumption is
erroneous—the bones are in fact the remains of a company of soldiers that died in
Italy—the notion that San Narcisco's freeways have consumed the bodies of the
dead remains.
This notion will be invoked again, later, when Oedipa visits the stamp
collector Genghis Cohen as part of her investigation of the Trystero postal
conspiracy. Over the course of the novel, Oedipa finds evidence of Trystero in a
series of unlikely places: in the form of a muted postal horn graffitied in a bathroom
stall, in the text of a renaissance Italian play entitled The Courier's Tragedy, and in
the iconography of counterfeit stamps. While she visits Genghis Cohen to discuss the
nature of these counterfeit stamps, Cohen serves her dandelion wine, made from
flowers picked from a no longer extant cemetery. Cohen states that: "I picked the
dandelions in a cemetery, two years ago. Now the cemetery is gone. They took it out
for the East San Narcisco Freeway" (Pynchon 76). The dandelions, then, are
associated with the process of the dead being consumed by freeways. What is even
more striking about the wine, however, is that it apparently becomes cloudy during
the time of year when the dandelions would have bloomed, if the were still alive.
Cohen says that the wine is: "clearer now (…) a few months ago it got quite cloudy.
You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through
a fermentation. As if they remembered" (Pynchon 79). Cohen here imagines the
blooming as a process of unearthing dead memory, but Oedipa, who has been
pursuing evidence of the Trystero conspiracy, mentally corrects him:
67
No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some
way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not
need the San Narcisco Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace,
nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the
dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine. (Pynchon 79)
While some portions of the novel depict Trystero as ominous or even malign, here
Trystero is associated with the hopeful survival of the paved-over subaltern.
Oedipa's thoughts seem to suggest that Trystero offers a possibility, however slight,
of evading the inexorable process of sprawl.
Close reading of The Crying of Lot 49 gives further suggestions of the nature
of Trystero's hope. Later in the novel, Oedipa learns about a sect of Puritans refered
to as "Scurvhamites" who created a pornographic edition of The Courier's Tragedy,
which included the spectre of death hovering in many of the background images. It
is implied that for the Scurvhamites, this spectre of death served as a representation
of Trystero. Emory Bortz, a college professor and expert on The Courier's Tragedy
explains the Scurvhamites understanding of the universe to Oedipa:
(…) one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime
mover. The rest ran off the opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a
brute automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts
into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow
those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking into the gaudy
clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this
was to prove fatal (…)
68
(…) the brute Other, that kept the nonScurvhamite universe running
like clockwork, that was something else again. Evidently they felt Trystero
would symbolize the Other quite well.
The Scurvhamites imagine Trystero as the alternate of their prime mover—a brute
Other which leads to eternal death. This is the passage on which Ganter hangs the
most important part of his argument that Trystero are merely another linguistic
trap, alternate to but no better than Los Angeles itself. Ganter's reading relies upon
Ganter taking the Scurvhamit assessment of Trystero at face value. As Ganter says in
"Rioting, Textuality and The Crying of Lot 49," the point of this passage is that: "The
comic demise of the Scurvhamite anti-mechanical creed is that they created a
system in their very effort to isolate themselves from a system" (Ganter 71). In other
words, attempts to fight systems of language with more language just creates
further entrapment.
There are good reasons within the novel, however, for not accepting the
Scurvhamite perspective as reliable, and for therefore refusing this reading. One is
that, perhaps unwittingly, Ganter's reading flattens the distinction between
"systems" of language and meaning in a way that opens space for the type of false-
equivalencies expressed by the novel's character Mike Fallopian. Fallopian is a Nazi
sympathizer and member of the reactionary Peter Pinguid society, and in an early
scene, explains the society's namesake's convoluted stance on industrialism: "Good
guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against
industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath,
both are part of the same creeping horror" (Pynchon 37). Later in the novel, Oedipa
69
encounters the owner of a military surplus store named Winthrop Tremain—whom
we later find out is an associate of Fallopian's— selling swastika armbands that are
not actual surplus but freshly made in "this little factory down outside of San Diego
(…) got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can sure turn them old armbands out"
(Pynchon 123). However one interprets The Crying of Lot 49's refusal to mean, it
seems dangerous to take it in the direction that Ganter does, in which systems of
language and power are so indistinguishable from each other that we risk political
nihilism, where all articulated positions are the same, there is no good and bad, and
the perils of worker exploitation under industrialism can be carelessly waved away
via extreme racism. Unless Pynchon agrees with Fallopian—and this seems very
unlikely—the novel is more likely making a case that different systems of language
and power are not all part of the same creeping horror.
1

Fortunately, we don't have to take the Scurvhamites notions of Trystero at
face value. It is important to note that Emory Bortz describes the Trystero as a
Scurvhamite example of the "brute Other," Other being explicitly capitalized,
evoking Freudian and post-Freudian concepts of the Other as a site of projection.
Oedipa's name, of course, explicitly prepares us for the presence of Freudianisms in
the text, and Bortz's status as a literary critic cements the notion that he is using this

1
Also noteworthy is that while the Peter Pinguid society does use a secret
mailing system, their system is explicitly separate from Trystero, and makes use of
the military-industrial corporation YoYodyne's "inter-office delivery" (Pynchon 38).
As Fallopian himself explains: "It's not as rebellious as it looks" (Pynchon 38).

70
common critical term very purposefully. As critics such as Moretti would remind us,
the process of Othering involves projecting one's own fears and underirable
qualities onto an outsider, more than it does accurate assessment—the Scurvhamite
association of Trystero with eternal death is easily read as slander, and in fact,
reading it as such is better supported by the novel's other invocations of Trystero—
such as that of the dandelion wine—as a survival of life after death. In other words,
the Scurvhamite belief in Trystero as the representation of eternal death is a
projection and inversion: the prime mover of the Scurvhamites brings death, while
Trystero brings life.
This helps makes sense of the second portion of Bortz's explanation of the
Scurvhamites, which suggests that the brute Other is what keeps the
nonScurvhamite universe running like clockwork. This would suggest that the
Scurvhamite god is not the prime mover after all: Trystero provides the Universe
with a sense of purpose and order, while the brute Scurvhamite god paves over
Trystero with death.
Oedipa's exploration of Trystero, then, is an exploration of the inverse of
sprawl—the things that keep sprawl living and give it a sense of purpose, even as
sprawl attempts to obscure them. While searching for the meaning of Trystero and
the muted postal horn, Oedipa drives north to Berkeley, then spends an evening
wandering San Francisco noticing signs of Trystero everywhere amongst the city's
subaltern. Oedipa, the former young Republican, is even astounded to find the post-
horn in a Laundromat in a black neighborhood: "It was a Negro neighborhood. Was
the Horn so dedicated?" (Pynchon 99). While references to race are not abundant in
71
The Crying of Lot 49, this is one moment—similar to the encounter with Winthrop
Tremain—that connects the broad subaltern of the novel to the depictions of race in
I Am Legend and "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts."
Of particular interest is the part of Oedipa's journey where she finds the true
inverse of San Narcisco's street circuitry, in form of a dying sailor's stained mattress.
The sailor has a tattoo of the post horn on the back of his left, and Oedipa meets him
at a rooming house in San Francisco. When the sailor mistakes Oedipa as someone
who understands the Trystero conspiracy, he asks her to drop off a a letter to his
wife at a secret mailbox under the freeway. Inside the sailor's home, Oedipa falls
into a revery considering the sailor's history, as well as the notion that not only is
the sailor's body a repository for that history, but somehow his mattress is as well:
What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among
the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over
him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday
smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those
years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges
of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously,
tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a
computer of the lost? (Pynchon 102)
Of particular interest to me is the notion of the mattress as the memory bank to a
computer of the lost, and the manner in which this sets the mattress as a contrast to
the radio circuitry of San Narcisco's street map. San Narcisco's street map is
designed to give a false sense of speed, whereas the sailor's mattress seems to
72
truthfully record a history of abject—but not ignoble—bodily function. San Narcisco
is designed to serve abstracted notions of reason and progress, but ultimately fails
to serve "the lost," whereas the sailor's mattress not only serves its basic function as
a place to sleep, but also preserves a record of history.
This history, however, is doomed to destruction. As Oedipa contemplates the
mattress further, she thinks about an earlier episode in the novel, in which she
encountered a scientist named John Nefastis, and his machine built around the
metaphorical notion of Maxwell's Demon:
She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and
massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up
around the sailor, in his Viking's funeral: the stored, coded years (…) ,
would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned.
(…) The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie,
depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost (Pynchon
105).
In order to understand the process that Oedipa is describing, we have to backtrack
to the description of Nefastis's machine—an ostensible perpetual motion device
based around the idea of a demon—apparently both literal and metaphorical—
which sorts molecules into hot and cold. It is worth noting that Nefastis's name
seems to be a portmanteau of Bubastis—an ancient Egyptian city—and either
Nefertiti (an ancient Egyptian queen) or the word "nefarious." Nefastis's machine,
then, can be said to be associated with the nefarious city.
73
Nefastis's machine functions when a special type of person, whom he
describes as a sensitive, stares at a piston. According to Nefastis, if a sensitive does
this, Maxwell's demon will send the person information gathered from sorting hot
and cold molecules, which the sensitive will then feed back into the machine, driving
the piston which functions by destroying that information. As Nefastis states: "One
little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over
and over with each power stroke" (Pynchon 85). Nefastis then summarizes this by
saying that "entropy is a figure of speech, then (…) a metaphor. It connects the world
of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The
Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful but also objectively true
(Pynchon 85). Earlier, the Nefastis introduced the concept of entropy by stating that
it was applicable to both information and energy, but only incidentally or
metaphorically. In the process of completing the metaphor, the machine also
generates energy from entropy—entropy of heat, and entropy of information. This
process is compelling—if indeed it is compelling—because it means that the
machine is violating a law of thermodynamics. It is, essentially, a perpetual motion
machine.
Much criticism—beginning with Edward Mendelson's seminal, 1978 essay,
"The Sacred, The Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49," has centralized Nefastis's
machine in part of a longer discussion of the function of linguistic entropy in the
novel, as well as, perhaps, Pynchon's work as a whole. What is important to the
present study, however, is not necessarily whether a surplus of linguistic "meaning"
is generated in toto by the Nefastis machine, but that if the machine were to work,
74
its apparent perpetual motion would nonetheless require labor, and in fact destroy
surplus (or consume it, like flame) with each drop of the piston. In other words,
even in its ideal state, the perpetual motion of the Nefastis machine is an entirely
empty promise.
But in fact, the machine doesn't work. When Oedipa stares at the piston, it
refuses to move, and in the sailor's apartment, she recognizes that, while some may
seek to gain by the consumption of surplus information, members of subaltern
groups often stand only to lose. The notion that metaphor is a thrust at truth and a
lie, then, is a gesture at different perspectives of the city. If the metaphor is a gesture
at truth, it is such because it points to the notion of sprawl as an apparently
functional version of the Nefastis machine—labor goes into the capital of sprawl, the
sprawl—shaped like a radio circuit—converts that into information technology,
which drives the piston that allows sprawl to continually expand. From the
perspective of someone who is engulfed in this magical version of sprawl, such as a
person in white LA, this seems like a perfect system. When you look at the underside
of sprawl, however, dodging the magic of surfaces, you find the stained mattress
that is destined to go up in flames, and recognize that this process is both
destructive and unsustainable.
At its base level, this construction of sprawl and the mechanisms by which it
functions already opens up greater progressive possibilities than I Am Legend. In I
Am Legend, sprawl is revealed as corrupt, but also natural—there is nothing outside
of the system that creates sprawl. Conversely, by emphasizing sprawl's artificiality,
75
Crying of Lot 49 leaves the reader open to considering new possibilities. The novel is
inherently less nihilistic than I Am Legend.
The Crying of Lot 49 also offers some hope. The dandelions, and possibly by
extension Trystero, are one example. If the dandelion wine can retain memory after
the cemetery's destruction by the freeway, then perhaps there is some hope that the
memories absorbed by the sailor's mattress can be sustained after immolation. Or
that, perhaps, the mattress itself might not be immolated. Equally relevant, however,
is the notion of the anarchist miracle, which brings us back to "A Journey Into the
Mind of Watts" and Oedipa's contemplation of Varo's anarchist painting at the
beginning of the novel.
While wandering San Francisco, and before meeting the sailor, Oedipa
encounters an anarchist named Jesus Arrabal, whom she coincidentally met before,
on the same trip to Mexico in which she had her revelation in front of Varo's
painting. Of note is that Arrabal's name signifies in two ways. On one level, it can be
read as an allusion to the Spanish anarchist playwright Fernando Arrabal. However,
arrabal is also a Spanish word for a suburban slum. And so, in more ways than one,
Arrabal can be considered a direct contrast to Nefastis. If Nefastis is the nefarious
city, Jesus Arrabal is the savior of the suburban slums.
While conversing with Oedipa, Arrabal advances the idea of the anarchist
miracle—a direct contrast to Nefastis's magical machine. Arrabal states that:
You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But
another world's intrusion into this one (…) Like the church we hate,
anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out
76
spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows
the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body
itself (Pynchon 97).
Here, in passage that alludes to anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin, but which seems
closer to the notion of mutual-aid expressed by Bakunin's contemporary, the
anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, we have a system in which the soul's innate
talent for consensus allows movement without entropy. Neither information nor
heat is being destroyed—instead, the masses are working together effortlessly, as a
single body.
Oedipa returns to the idea of the anarchist miracle as the evening progresses.
While considering the wide array of people who communicate using Trystero's
system, for example, she imagines that she is witnessing such a miracle. The
narrative states that:
If miracles were, such as Jesus Arrabal had postulated (…),
intrusions into this world from another (…) then so must be each of
the night's post-horns. For here were God knew how many citizens
deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. (…) it was a
calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its
machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate,
indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance,
this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. (Pynchon 101)
The fact that numerous people—united only by their subaltern identity—are able to
communicate using an unadvertised system causes Oedipa to imagine Arrabal's
77
miracle and the soul's talent for consensus. The process she is witnessing is a
calculated—but apparently effortless—withdrawal from Nefastis's machine. Each
person is operating individually, but all of the are working together, in a world that
exists apart from the apparently inexorable city. This brings us back to Pynchon's
explanation of the Watts Rebellion, which he would write a year later. Pynchon
imagines the rebellion—popularly called a riot—as not a riot, but a kind of
coordinated dance, of people communicating without a "word or signal." In other
words, a calculated and artistic withdrawal from the Nefastis machine that White LA
seeks to impose on Watts.
So far, we have mostly discussed Trystero as an entity that definitively exists.
However, the novel always withholds the possibility that Trystero does not exist:
that the coincidences Oedipa encounters are too coincidental, that everything
Oedipa is experiencing could be part of a convoluted plot on the part of Inverarity,
or a product of her own paranoia. In this refusal to resolve between the reality of
"miracles" or mundane conspiracy, the novel actually approximates a pure version
of Todorov's notion of the 19
th
century fantastic.
However, while the novel refuses to unveil the reality of Trystero, it never
allows us to assume this is an unweighted question, as it would be if Trystero truly
offered nothing like an alternative to the horror and power of sprawl. The weight of
this question is exceptionally clear at the novel's closing, in which Oedipa is left
stranded at an auction of Inverarity's estate.
At the final auction, Oedipa is made aware of an anonymous bidder whom, it
is suggested, might be Pierce Inverarity, who has been orchestrating all of her
78
experiences from behind the scenes. Oedipa develops the notion that the question of
whether Trystero might be real could be revealed by the identity of this bidder, and
worries about how her life would be impacted by this revelation. Oedipa recognizes
either that she was "in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For
there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or
there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way
she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien,
unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia" (Pynchon 151). Trystero must
represent a world of viable alternatives outside the text of sprawl, or else all life
becomes subsumed into a kind of orbiting paranoia.
The identity of the bidder is never revealed, however, and Trystero remains a
mystery. To answer the question of why Pynchon withholds the reality of Trystero, I
refer back to the notion of perspective. Oedipa is not subaltern, and her access to
subaltern forms of communication is necessarily limited by her privileged
perspective. This reading fits Crying of Lot 49 even more clearly into the arc created
by Witzling, in which Pynchon's early career can be read as a gradual effort at
coming to terms with his own privilege. The Crying of Lot 49 is a privileged writer
engaging with the perspective limits of writing about the subaltern via an
exceptionally privileged character. Having hit those limits, he seeks to address those
limits using different tools in his subsequent work.
The reading is also compatible with some of Oedipa's own closing thoughts.
As Oedipa recognizes that her understanding of whether or not Trystero is real
hinges upon the identity of a mysterious bidder, and that the auction is going to
79
close with nothing revealed, she has "only some vague idea about causing a scene
violent enough to bring the cops into it and find out that way who the man really
was" (Pynchon 151). Oedipa's inability to put her privilege at risk by violating
behavioral norms and breaking the law at this crucial moment keeps her
perspective limited. She will never know whether a political alternative is viable,
because she would never dare to do what she must, in order to find out.

80
IV
If The Crying of Lot 49 offers us a very tentatively optimistic portrayal of
sprawl, in which the perspective seems to waver, particularly at the end, between
the nihilism of I Am Legend and a grasp at something better, Karen Tei Yamashita's
novel, Tropic of Orange, takes us to a position of full optimism. I say this even though
the ending of the novel is cataclysmic for virtually all of its major characters:
optimistic, in the terms I am formulating, does not necessarily equate to happy. But
the important thing that Tropic of Orange does is fully and definitively imagine
alternatives to sprawl as existing—at least temporarily—within the context of the
novel. I am thinking in particular of its depiction of the FreeZone, a kind of anarcho-
communist encampment of homeless citizens that develops on a stretch of freeway.
Part of what enables Tropic of Orange to create such clear depictions of
progress is its willingness to assume a variety of perspectives, many of which are
definitively subaltern. Tropic of Orange's chapters are split between the
perspectives of a large cast of characters, including Buzzworm, an African-American
man who works as a kind of pro-bono social worker for the homeless; Manzanar, a
homeless Japanese-American who conducts an imagined orchestra from a pillar on a
freeway overpass; and Bobby Ngu, a Chinese-American "from Singapore with a
Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown," who runs a cleaning
business. The wide range of perspectives allows Yamashita to explore ostensibly
stable notions such as city and country from several angles, enabling us to better see
all of the ways in which these structures are, in fact, unstable, and to imagine ways
in which they could be changed. All three of the texts we have looked at so far have
81
been locked into one form of hegemonic perspective or another, under which real
change can often obliquely impossible or threatening. Regardless of the sympathies
of the writer, it is difficult to fully problematize sprawl and thereby imagine change
when assuming a purely hegemonic perspective. Yamashita avoids these problems
with her expansive cast of characters.
In the process of doing so, she also introduces new elements into sprawl that
are crucial, but which go unaddressed in most of the texts we have discussed so far:
immigrant experience and globalization. Recall, briefly, our big-box store, and the
origins of its shipping containers. Scholars such as Edward Soja have given these
subjects prominent place in their current theories of sprawl: Soja, for example, has
referred to Los Angeles as a kind of Aleph—referring to a Borges story where a man
finds a spot in his basement from which he can glimpse all time and history. Soja's
argument is that international boundaries break down in Los Angeles not only
because it serves as a center of global and human commerce, but because the city
reproduces itself globally through media. The "localness" of Los Angeles thereby
comes to feel unstable.
In Tropic of Orange, particularly strong attention is drawn to the function of
globalized capitalism in this process. In fact, the novel concludes with a magical
battle between two luchadore wrestlers: SUPERNAFTA and El Gran Mojado.
SUPERNAFTA, of course, is intended to represent Bill Clinton's NAFTA treaty, which
enabled more free trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, but in the
process gave US and Mexican corporations greater freedom in exploiting underpaid
foreign labor. This last point is especially crucial to recognize, since it is part of the
82
key to understanding the distinction between leftist critiques of globalization and
recently prominent, far-right critiques of globalization. While leftist critiques of
globalization largely focus on the way treaties such as NAFTA enable greater
exploitation of workers and the environment by making it easier for companies to
outsource labor to countries with fewer regulations, right-wing critiques focus
primarily on the dissolution of "nationhood" or "national culture." Although there is
a minute overlap between these critiques, it is important—in these days of Trump,
Bannon, and the rise of the nationalist far-right—to recognize that the former is a
critique of capitalist expansion and concurrent colonialism, imperialism and the
exploitation of labor, while the latter is mostly a nationalist and frankly racist dodge
used to scapegoat immigrants and foreigners in the hopes that domestic laborers
will decline to organize and even vote in favor of local deregulation, thereby
allowing an increasingly elitist and exploitative system to continue more or less
unhindered.
Tropic of Orange connects treaties such as NAFTA with the type of
deregulation and valorization of technological and reasoned progress that enables
sprawl. In the final battle between SUPERNAFTA and El Gran Mojado, for example,
SUPERNAFTA articulates the putative rationale of globalization in a pre-match
speech, stating that: "It's the future. And what's the future? (…) It's a piece of the
action! And that's what progress is all about. A piece of the action" (Yamashita 257).
SUPERNAFTA claims that unrestrained capitalism and technological progress will
create greater opportunities both at home and abroad—his notion that this will
offer a "piece of the action" is parallel to the utopian notions of sprawl Joel Garreau
83
suggests in Edge Cities, in which Garreau imagines that urban sprawl creates greater
opportunities for workers, including immigrant workers, without bothering to parse
out questions of the type of work that is being created and who will realistically
have access to it. It is also noteworthy here that SUPERNAFTA's very appearance
encapsulates some of the tensions between apparently rational progress and the
breakdown of reason and progress that we have been discussing here, and it does so
in ways that are explicitly linked to depictions of Los Angeles. The reader is told that
SUPERNAFTA's appearance is machinelike: "like the Terminator (…) National
heroes like SUPERNAFTA were usually replicants of some sort" (Yamashita 257).
These are allusions to both the killer robot in The Terminator and the replicants
found in Blade-Runner, films which both address conflicts between technological
progress and emotive humanity against a backdrop of Los Angeles sprawl.
In contrast to SUPERNAFTA, El Gran Mojado (whose name translates to "The
Grand (or big) Wetback," ironically marking him as the champion of stigmatized
immigrant labor), delivers his speech in the form of an emotive poem. Instead of
championing reasoned progress, he champions a sense of humanity, and gestures
towards the ways in which the ostensible "progress" offered by SUPERNAFTA is
actually a dehumanizing and elitist lie. Instead of the blunt salesmanship offered by
SUPERNAFTA, El Gran Mojado delivers his speech in the form of a poem. In one
portion of it, he states:
The myth of the first world is that
development is wealth and technology progress
It is all rubbish.
84
It means that you are no longer human beings
but only labor.
It means that the land you live on is not earth
but only property
It means that what you produce with your own hands
is not yours to eat or wear or shelter you
if you cannot buy it (Yamashita 259)
El Gran Mojado directly calls out SUPERNAFTA's lie of technological and economic
progress. In El Gran Mojado's formulation, technology is not necessarily progress,
because development and technology do not necessarily help anybody, in a human
way, if all they do is help exploit labor and transform land into a commodity. El Gran
Mojado directly addresses the problem of uneven development that Joel Garreau, in
Edge Cities, ignores, when Garreau praises the ability of sprawl to create new
opportunities for workers and immigrants.
It is also worth noting—especially for the purpose of further elaborating
upon the distinction between left-wing and far-right critiques of globalization—that
both SUPERNAFTA and El Gran Mojado evoke and critique ideas of diversity in their
speeches, but that the critique of diversity is not that different people are unable to
live together, but rather that diversity as a concept is all too easily commodified for
the benefit of predominantly white, capitalist hegemony. In SUPERNAFTA's speech,
he claims that he is fighting not only against "that Big Wetback" (Yamashita 257) but
for "that multicultural rainbow of kids out there" (Yamashita 257). SUPERNAFTA's
willingness to invoke the racial slur of wetback in its translated form—even placing
85
disgusted emphasis upon it—immediately reveals the hollowness of his praise of
"rainbow" diversity. El Gran Mojado directly responds to SUPERNAFTA's claim in
his own speech, stating that: "This is not a benefit for UNESCO./We are not the
world./This is not a rock concert (…)/This is not about (…)/dividing into tiny pieces
what is always/less and less" (Yamashita 259). El Gran Mojado's objection to
globalized capitalism is not that it creates diversity, but that it commodifies
diversity without sincerely addressing the systems that perpetuate inequality.
Earlier in the novel, the Japanese-American newscaster Emi makes a similar
argument, in a Sushi restaurant, while trying to provoke her boyfriend, the Mexican-
American newspaper journalist Gabriel. Emi states that "Cultural diversity is bullshit
(…) it's a white guy wearing a Nirvana t-shirt and dreds" (Yamashita 128). When
Emi is confronted by the white diner sitting next to her, Emi turns to the sushi chef,
whose name is Hiro, and says: "See what I mean, Hiro? You're invisible. I'm invisible.
We're all invisible. It's just tea, ginger, raw fish, and a credit card" (Yamashita 128).
Emi's objection to cultural diversity seems to be that the notion, in its most
frequently touted form, is duplicitous—less about recognizing the humanity of other
people than in breaking people down into cultural signifiers such as dreds, tea,
sushi, or the word "Nirvana"—which can easily be removed from context and
transformed into commodities. The fact that this primarily benefits already
privileged "white guys," rather than people of color such as the sushi chef—who
remains invisible to the privileged consumer—is encapsulated within her critique as
well.
86
Tropic of Orange weaves the notion of globalization into the fabric of Los
Angeles not only through the lives of characters who inhabit the city, but through
the notion of global trade. One of the book's many subplots involves a series of
mysterious deaths throughout Los Angeles, which are eventually traced to the
consumption of poisoned oranges. Because the vagaries of trade make it impossible
to determine where these oranges originated, however, all oranges in the city must
be destroyed. The panicked news media immediately spins this as an "illegal"
orange scare—connecting oranges to the fear of immigration—while ignoring the
lives of immigrants and less privileged people that have been taken by the oranges.
Buzzworm, an African-American man who works pro-bono with the city's
homeless and listens to the radio at all times, hears the crisis unfold. When
Buzzworm thinks of the people he has known who have been killed by the oranges,
a street vendor Margarita, and a young man who was involved in gang violence, he
reflects that "Maybe Margarita and the little homey had made it home the same way.
But they weren't the names on the news. 'Course they'd probably never be"
(Yamashita 138). Again, the globalized city might be diverse, but it still treats those
outside its hegemony as invisible. Meanwhile, when word gets out that the poison in
the oranges might be concentrated, smuggled cocaine, some people begin hoarding
them. As the narration states: "You mighta thought it was only the gangs or the
druggies or the mafia going after them, but it was everybody, like it was a lottery.
Housewives and yuppies, environmentalists and meat-eaters, hapkido masters and
white guys in dreds with Nirvana t-shirts" (Yamashita 140). Dangerous as they may
be, ostensibly rational capitalist trade renders the illegal oranges into a coveted
87
consumer product as handily as it does any immigrant experience, "illegal,"
undocumented, or otherwise—even the hypothetical white guy with dreds,
previously invoked in Emi's conversation at the sushi restaurant, wants them.
At the same time that the orange crisis in Los Angeles is reaching its peak,
Buzzworm notices that space and time within the city is beginning to change. The
narrative tells us that "The world teeter tottered (…) Time stood still eternally (…)
Second hands on watches never moved (…) radio stations on every dial were just
holding their notes" (Yamashita 137). The things that Buzzworm perceives are not
illusions—reality within the city is beginning to warp.
Within the narrative, this is because a single, non-poisonous orange that has
become magically linked to the Tropic of Cancer is being carried north, and the
orange is bending time and space as it travels. This orange was grown on a Mexican
estate owned by Emi's boyfriend, Gabriel. Gabriel bought the estate knowing that his
family originally came from the area, as a broad attempt to reconnect with his
heritage. However, this notion is predictably complicated by the movement of global
capital. Gabriel has discovered that nobody in the town where this house is built
remembers his family, and that everybody "wondered at this young Chicano who
had a college education and whose grandfather had fought with Pancho Villa and
ended up in Los Angeles" (Yamashita 5). Not only have Gabriel's origins in the town
been obscured by history, but his status has been altered as well—while Gabriel
may be Mexican-American by ethnicity, in his old home town he is more capitalist
than laborer, hiring local workers to help build his estate and even paying a
Mexican-American college student, named Rafaela, to take care of the estate for him
88
(amusingly, we will later find that the papers Rafaela has written for her courses
include titles such as "globalization of capital. Capitalization of poverty.
Internationalization of the labor force." and "Exploitation and political expediency"
(Yamashita 161)). Periodically, Gabriel will send supplies to Rafael so that she can
use them for maintenance: on one occasion, Rafaela walks to pick up one of Gabriel's
packages, only to find that it contains faucets labeled "Hecho en Mexico" (Yamashita
68). The orange from Gabriel's estate, then, comes to embody Tropic of Orange's
recurrent theme of how global capitalism creates an indeterminacy of origin for
products and people in sometimes unpredictable and arbitrary ways.
In fact, while Gabriel's orange is the only one that seems capable of literally
bending space and time, throughout the text, orange are a recurring signifier of the
strange ways that capitalist trade can seem to bend geography. In another sequence,
for example, Buzzworm talks to the street vendor Margarita—who will eventually
die from a poisoned orange—about the fruit she is selling. Margarita tells Buzzworm
"I got nice oranges. This not the season see. So is imported from Florida" (Yamashita
85). Buzzworm is surprised, and corrects her, saying that, "If it's Florida, it's not
imported. Same country, see. If it's Mexico it's imported" (Yamashita 85). Of course,
as Margarita then points out to him, Mexico is much closer to Los Angeles than
Florida is. The trade in oranges thereby exposes the arbitrariness of ideas of
national origin and national borders as produced by capitalist interests.
I'd like to preface our discussion of how it does this by laying out some
precepts regarding how capitalism—and particularly global capitalism—changes
the nature of space, by referencing the contemporary Marxian geographer, David
89
Harvey. A theme that David Harvey has repeatedly emphasized in his frequent
writings on neoliberal capital and the development of technology and urban spaces
is Marx's concept of how capitalism seeks to "annihilate space through time"
(Harvey, 99) in order to increase the speed at which resources can be transformed
into productive capital. In his work, Seventeen Contraditions and the End of
Capitalism, Harvey lays out several ways that he sees this imperative guiding the
development of new technology. Harvey states:
Shortening the turnover time of capital in production and in the
market and shortening the lifetime of consumer products
(culminating in a shift from the production of things that last to the
production of spectacles that are ephemeral) have been imperatives
in capital's history, largely enforced by competition). (…) The
increasing speed of transport and communications reduces the
friction and barrier of geographical distance (…) Capital literally
creates its own space and time as well as its own distinctive nature
(Harvey 99).
Capitalism's imperative to annihilate space through time is one of the driving
features of sprawl: without information technology, and technology such as cars,
roads, and highways, the outward spread of cities in search for cheaper land is not
possible. We have seen how this fixation on the technology of communication and
transportation has been reproduced in I Am Legend's roads, and "A Journey Into the
Mind of Watts" and Crying of Lot 49's televisions and radio circuits. Urban sprawl is
a very direct example of how, using technology, capital "creates its own space and
90
time." In Tropic of Orange, we will see this theme rendered even more explicitly, as
Los Angeles's urban space begins to collapse upon itself.
As Gabriel's orange travels North, not only does time periodically seem to
slow down or stop, but spatial relationships within Los Angeles, and between Los
Angeles and Mexico, become distorted. In the latter half of the novel, for example,
Buzzworm encounters a gang-member who tells him that the Crips and Bloods are
trying to make a truce, and divide their territories within the city according to a
legally binding contract. However, they are unable to reach any kind of agreement
not because of issues with "trust" (Yamashita 187) as Buzzworm initially suggests,
but because space in Los Angeles is changing in unpredictable ways. As the gang
member tells Buzzworm:
It's about how come the map's wrong? It's about shrinkin' and
expandin' jurisdictions. How come Adams is this wide and Martin
Luther King's got more miles on it than you can walk comfortably
anymore. How come a little crew with a bit-time two-block piece of
the action now's got a three-mile fiefdom? Contract like this gonna
mean some heads get bashed. (Yamashita 187-188)
While criminal enterprises exist outside the legal network that sustains capitalism,
they often replicate the and even aid legal capitalism's function, along with its
precepts of labor and profit. Here the Crips and Bloods attempt to more fully
assimilate themselves into the capitalist order of Los Angeles by producing a legal
contract. They are seeking to become a fully endorsed part of the system of capital—
to assimilate completely into the reasoned system of sprawl—but sprawl itself has
91
become unreasonable, and distortions in space are preventing them from reaching
any agreement. By mutating space within the city, capital has begun to impede its
own spread.
This notion that capitalist sprawl is beginning to turn on itself is seen even
more clearly a few pages later, when we learn that a homeless encampment set up
on a stretch of the Harbor freeway—a sort of anarchist commune that has existed in
uneasy relationship with the law since its inception, earlier in the novel—is
beginning to grow geographically, so that it threatens to overtake the city. In a
conversation with Emi, Buzzworm points out how the freeway encampment
changing size:
It's growing. Stretched this way and that. In fact, this whole business
from Pico-Union on one side to East L.A. this side and South Central
over here, it's pushing out. Damn if it's not growing into everything! If
it don't stop, it could be the whole enchilada. (Yamashita 189-190).
The notion of the homeless encampment growing to overtake the city is not
something that authorities are prepared to take lightly. As Buzzworm says earlier:
"Look around. LAPD's not exactly surrounding us to protect and serve. They're not
going to let us live in a major thoroughfare forever" (Yamashita 189). The growth of
the homeless encampment represents a direct threat to the city. Not only does it
block a major thoroughfare—in the process impeding trade, preventing people from
getting to work, and otherwise interrupting the ostensibly free trade needed to
maintain sprawl—it's growth threatens to entirely replace sprawl, replacing the
system of neoliberal capitalism with something very different.
92
The reader is given snatches of what that different thing might be throughout
the novel. The homeless encampment was started when two semi-trailers
jackknifed on a stretch of harbor freeway, sandwiching between them a long stretch
of cars that quickly became abandoned. The crash also started a brush fire on the
sides of the freeway, driving nearby homeless encampments to take shelter in the
mass of now empty parked cars. What happens next is very much a direct refutation
of a mythos like that advanced by I Am Legend. Whereas I Am Legend imagines a
vacant city being re-occupied by a hegemony as avaricious and cruel as that which
preceded it—reifying the "unassailable fortress of forever"—Tropic of Orange
envisions a very different kind of post-capitalist apocalypse. The narrative tells us
that what happens:
(…) was the greatest used car dealership.
The vans and camper tailers went first; then the gas guzzlers—
oversized Cadillacs with their spacious pink and red vinyl interiors,
and blue Buicks. (…) A spacious interior with storage space was
favored, while the exterior condition of the car was deemed of
secondary importance. (...)
Convertibles remained as before: toys. Children clambered
over them; adults sat in them and laughed.
The first thing the homeless encampment does is redefine space. Vehicles are no
longer prized for their exterior appearance, novelty, or their speed—their ability to
annihilate space through time. Instead, vehicles are now prized in terms of how they
offer comfort, and living space.
93
The narrative goes on to show us that:
In a matter of minutes, life filled a vacuum, reorganizing itself
in predictable and unpredictable ways. Occasional disputes over
claims to territory arose, but for the moment, there were more than
sufficient vehicles to accommodate this game of musical chairs.
Indeed it was a game, a fortunate lottery (…)
A moving van was emptied of its contents: washing machines,
refrigerators, ovens, chairs, tables, sofas, beds, carpets, barbecue pits,
lawn mowers, etc. Watermelons, bananas and cantelope were hauled
off one truck, as were Wonder Bread, Cacique tortillas, and Trader
Joe's fresh pasta. Someone passed out bottles of Tejava and Snapple.
Cases of cold Perrier were taken to the fiery front.
(…) It was one of those happy riots. (Yamashita 122).
What happens here is not at all the unassailable fortress of forever, but something
much more akin to Pynchon's anarchist miracle. Here, however, the process of such
a miracle is imagined in much richer detail than Pynchon ever offers, in either The
Crying of Lot 49 or "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts." Branded goods—the sort of
things that I Am Legend's protagonist Robert Neville invidiously fears vampires
usurping—are appropriated and freely distributed. There are some territorial
disputes, but they seem to be easily resolved. The overall spirit is one of mutual aid
and happiness.
The anarchist miracle does not merely last for a moment, either. For
Pynchon, anarchist miracles are brief—a kissing of cosmic pool balls, a riot like a
94
dance that is quickly exhausted. Karen Tei Yamashita envisions the miracle
prolonging itself. For example, we find that the community, which starts being
referred to as the "FreeZone" (Yamashita 191), begins organizing its s own
newscasts, requisitions a "construction heap" for a cemetery (Yamashita, 190), and
begins gardening produce for feeding its citizens. As part of one of the FreeZone
newscasts, a man occupying a Cadillac is interviewed about the planter he has built
under the car's hood.
(…) we got a garden goin'. Something we always wanted. Got lettuce in
the corner, some baby carrots over here, tomatoes here. A patch like
this'll do some good feedin'. Folks in the Fast Lane a little distant from
the right shoulders where the plantin's easy. (Yamashita 191).
What is happening here is far from the violence of I Am Legend, and also far too
sustained and prosaic to seem like a miracle. In the FreeZone, people are organizing
and resources are being negotiated, seemingly without avarice or violence. Gardens
are being grown on the right hand shoulder, where it is easy to grow produce, and
other space is being re-engineered to produce food: space is being used to sustain
life, not generate profit. In another part of the FreeZone broadcast, we learn that a
woman has given birth, and that "contributions of diapers, baby clothing, and food
for the mother" will be "gratefully accepted" (Yamashita 191). Money is not being
exchanged, here. Good are being traded according to need.
Even though this FreeZone seems very fair, however, it still signifies a
breakdown of the putatively reasonable progress of sprawl. In fact, the very
accidents that made the FreeZone possible were caused when drivers died from
95
eating slices of poisoned orange. In the aftermath of one of the accidents, we learn
that the surviving passenger of the car that caused the pile-up: "Says his friend
chewed up a piece of orange and passed out. He swears it was the oranges"
(Yamashita, 90). Given that oranges, throughout the text, are connected with the
progress of trade that results in both globalization and sprawl, this breakdown of
the freeway via orange-inflicted accident gives us a serependipitous moment of
capitalist progress turning on itself, and in the process opening up a space not for
unreason in the sense that bourgeois Gothic authors might have feared it, but
instead, for a new kind of egalitarian progress.
It is noteworthy, also, that while Tropic of Orange does not use images of
undeath or the risen dead with the same persistence as our other texts, it
nonetheless does connect LA's homeless with ghosts, on two occasions. In the
chapter introducing the non-profit, unofficial social-worker Buzzworm, we learn of
an anecdote he tells about one of the many watches he wears on his arms. It is a kind
of ghost story, about a man going to a pawnshop to reclaim a watch that he inherited
from his father, only to find that his father's ghost has returned and claimed the
watch in the meantime. According to Buzzworm: "Point is: dead come back"
(Yamashita 29). Later, when Buzzworm is talking to Gabriel about the importance of
interviewing the homeless, Buzzworm explains: "Homeless are like the dead. You
the medium. We gonna talk through you. Day of the Dead like" (Yamashita 157).
Outside the encampment, the homeless are ghosts haunting the landscape of Los
Angeles, occupying a symbolic space comparable to the vampires of I Am Legend or
Pynchon's postal conspiracy.
96
This opening of real progress, of course, cannot be allowed to overtake the
city. In the climax of the book, the LAPD descend on the FreeZone and massacres its
residents—bourgeois order must be preserved at all costs. It is strongly implied that
this attempt to reassert order will not be wholly successful, however. During the
conflagration, Emi the reporter is accidentally shot, when the police fire at the
satellite dish on her news van. Buzzworm tries to carry her to safety, but is unable to
do so before she dies. Through the narration, we are told that: "her death would be
unforgivable. Emi's enraged media would see to that. A thousand homeless could
die, but no one would forget her ultimate sacrifice" (Yamashita 251). While there is
some cynicism here, the import of Emi's death is not being contested: although there
something morally repugnant to the notion that one newscaster's death might
signify more strongly to the bourgeois city than the deaths of a thousand homeless
people, her death will nonetheless mark a decisive shift in the way the city is
allowed to think of itself.
97
Conclusions

Tropic of Orange does not end with the destruction of FreeTown. Instead, the
narrative takes us back to the arena where SUPERNAFTA and El Gran Mojado have
been fighting, and shows us the arrival of Bobby Ngu—Chinese-American immigrant
with the Vietnamese name—now reunited with wife Rafaela, and his son, Sol, whose
absence he has been mourning for the length of the novel. The magical orange with
its connection to the Tropic of Cancer has been brought to the arena, and time and
space have begun to collapse upon this exact point.
Bobby has arrived just in time to witness the conclusion of the battle
between SUFPERNAFTA and El Gran Mojado. El Gran Mojado grows wings and fans
SUPERNAFTA's flaming head until SUPERNAFTA explodes, but at the last moment,
SUPERNAFTA fires a missile into El Gran Mojado's heart. Bobby believes that both of
the luchadores are doomed: as the narrative states: "The rudo with the head of fire
is a goner. People cheering like crazy, but Bobby knows: winged warrior's a goner
too" (Yamashita 267). The moment is apocalyptic. The tensions of sprawl, between
abstracted reason and humane feeling, have been brought to an absolute breaking
point. Where do we go from here?
If this were Frank Lloyd Wright's The Living City, we might re-emphasize our
commitment to our original notions of progress. We might conclude that the failures
of liberal capitalism—social inequity, monopolization, vampirism—came from poor
execution rather than built-in contradictions. We might imagine a new form of city
as a perfect apotheosis of capitalism and the free-market, and try to overlook the
98
fragility of our supposedly egalitarian façade. A façade not just in a colloquial and
figurative sense, but in a very literal one. We would mask problems in our social
architecture with more architecture.
If this were Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, we might barricade ourselves in
our houses and prepare for war. We might come to believe that, whether we like it
or not, the conditions that created sprawl are largely unchanging. Sprawl might
collapse, but a better society will not be formed in its aftermath. We might, at best,
feel a kind of nihilistic satisfaction at seeing so much loathsomeness go to waste.
Or we might be like Oedipa Maas, who at the end of The Crying of Lot 49, is
given an opportunity to discover whether any alternative to sprawl can exist, but
refuses it. Oedipa chooses not to risk making a scene, or get the police involved. She
stays well behaved, and as a result, she never learns whether a new kind of city is
possible or not.
Bobby makes a different set of choices. After SUPERNAFTA explodes, and El
Gran Mojado is declared a goner, Rafaela gives Bobby the Tropic of Cancer's magical
orange and tells him to cut it into pieces. When Bobby does so, the Tropic of
Cancer—which has appeared along the orange for all this time, as a kind of
ephemeral fishing line, comes undone. Seeing this, but not knowing what the line
represents, Bobby grabs the split ends and holds them, while Rafaela takes the
orange pieces to El Gran Mojado and begins feeding them to him: "Like it's gonna
help. Like she's a soccer mom at half-time. Like it's the last rites" (Yamashita 267).
Before Bobby can find out what becomes of El Gran Mojado, the crowd swoops in
and take El Gran Mojado away, to carry him home.
99
Bobby is still holding the Tropic of Cancer, but he is uncertain of how long he
can. He looks at his family, Rafaela and Sol, and asks himself:
What's he gonna do? Tied fast to these lines. Family out there. Still
stuck on the other side. (…) What are these goddamn lines anway?
What do they connect? What do they divide? What's he holding on to?
What's he holding on to?
(…) That's when he lets go. Lets the lines slither around his
wrists, past his palms, through his fingers. Lets go. Go figure. Embrace.
That's it. (Yamashita 268).
Bobby not know what the consequences of rejecting the Tropic of Cancer will be,
and neither does the reader. We do not know what will become of El Gran Mojado,
but we know that SUPERNAFTA—the agent of sprawl—is truly dead, and also that,
whatever other cataclysm might result, Bobby's release of the lines will allow him to
return to his family. But we also sense that there will be no more cataclysm. After all,
as Bobby's says, "What are these goddamn lines anyway?" They amount to very
little, in the end. Oedipa Maas saw the imaginary boundaries of sprawl, but was
ultimately unable to test them. Bobby tries to hold them together, recognizes their
ephemerality, and then lets them go.
In our discussion of The Crying of Lot 49, I mentioned that, in his explanation
of the anarchist miracle, Jesus Arrabal alluded to the anarchist Mikael Bakunin.
Arrabal claims that an anarchist miracle is "not what Bakunin said" (Pynchon 97).
Bakunin's most well-known work is God and the State, which he originally intended
as a chapter of a much longer book, but which was posthumously discovered and
100
republished as a pamphlet. In it, Bakunin actually disavows the concept of miracles
entirely. Bakunin sees miracles as a derivation of religious divinity, and explicitly
opposes any social order predicated on religion because, he argues, the concept of
divinity precipitates social inequality. In Bakunin's formulation, a heightened
emphasis on divine inspiration leads, inevitably, to a lowered estimate of the human
capacity for understanding. As a byproduct, a political hierarchy based upon religion
quickly becomes imposed: the majority of people—who see themselves as removed
from inspiration—seek out and assign greater importance to a minority, who claim
a heightened understanding of divinity.
I am not interested in whether or not Bakunin's argument regarding religion
is accurate, or in a deep analysis of the origins of social hierarchy. I am interested,
here, in how it reflects on Jesus Arrabal's idea of the anarchist miracle, and our
larger project of imagining cities. When Bakunin invokes miracles, he does so with
irony. In an extended passage, Bakunin imagines a creation myth in which divinity
falls, is shattered, and must then belatedly pull itself back to life. This act, Bakunin
writes, "is the greatest of miracles" (Bakunin 50). Bakunin is being cynical: the
concept of the miracle, which he presents as being absurd in itself, is only necessary
because of the a priori assumption of the fall. Bakunin wants a society that leans on
neither divinity nor miracles.
The miracle that Jesus Arrabal describes, then, both is and isn't what Bakunin
said. It is, in that the result is something that Bakunin might have approved of: a
world without a hierarchical state. It isn't, because for Bakunin, the very notion of
miracles makes such a world impossible.
101
Jesus Arrabal's speech in The Crying of Lot 49 calls attention to the way that a
novel can hold a living contradiction in a way that a philosophically reasoned model
struggles with. While urban sprawl often leads to conclusions that fall outside the
ideals of enlightenment reason—drastic social inequality, for example—it is, in
theory, built on a model very much informed by enlightenment reason, and a
valorization of (neo)liberal capitalism and the free-market. However, while sprawl
grows from notions of scientific rigor, it will always hold tensions that this rigor
cannot account for, in the forms of social stratification, racial discrimination, and the
inherent and painful inequalities generated by any capitalist market.
Fantastic literature has proven an excellent mode for entering the spaces
where these tensions exist, and sometimes for forcing them apart, like a plant
growing in a crack in the sidewalk, slowly crumbling the cement around it. As we
have seen, some modes crumble the sidewalk more than others. None of the modes
we have explored, however, posit a stable world after the sidewalk. We have not
looked at a single work that fully envisions an urban world that is post-sprawl,
although some have given clues as to what such a world might look like.
In part, this is because such a project lies outside the realm of the fantastic,
and falls more properly into the domain of second-world fantasy or science-fiction.
The fantastic, as defined here, dwells on uncertainty: it is designed to add unreal
elements to the world that we know, and to explore unstable elements of the world,
but not to generate a coherent substitute for the world. Even Frank Lloyd Wright,
who tried to envision a new kind of city, struggled with the vampires inside of it.
102
While I am not prepared to argue that indeterminacy is superior to order, or
that indeterminacy is everything, I do think that such a sense of indeterminacy is a
fine byproduct of a novel. As much as I have emphasized the importance of keeping
text and city in touch with one another, and to remember the potential of text to
shape our cities and our communities, to me the most feasible project for a novel is
to pinpoint, problematize, and explore situations, not to create new workable
systems.
In part, I think this is because doing so allows the novel to play to its
strengths, one of which is a kind of indeterminacy. Although we have written away
Bakunin's cynical ideas of the miraculous here, it is worth pointing out that this idea
of the novel is very much in line with his idea of art. While Bakunin condemns the
idea of a society based upon Divinity, he is equally harsh towards the notion of a
society that builds itself upon an ostensibly rigorous, but static, scientific model.
Bakunin imagines that such a model would invariably lead to a destructive
hierarchy in much the same way that divinity would. While Bakunin is pro-science,
he is pro-science in the sense that he believes everyone should have communal
access to a concrete set of facts and principles, around which society can be
renegotiated over time, rather than externally prescribed. His notion was that this
ability for society to change and adapt was something that a scientific social model
could not adequately account for, given that such models were—in his view—of
necessity more static than lived experience.
While Bakunin intended this denigration of the scientific social model
specifically as a shot at Marx's model of a communist revolution, this particular anti-
103
Marxism should not be read as pro-capitalist. In fact, Bakunin was firmly against
industrial capitalism, and in the period when Bakunin was writing, would have been
considered a communist of a different strain than Marx, and not an entirely separate
beast. Using Bakunin's words as an implicit critique of the aggressive rationality of
neoliberal capitalism, therefore, does not seem to be an undue elaboration upon
their spirit, even if it does not fit their specific goal.
Because Bakunin views science's role in society as somewhat compromised,
he assigns a very high place to art, which he frames as a necessary adjunct to
science, and in some ways the superior of science. According to Bakunin, unlike
science, art "in a certain sense individualizes the types and situations which it
conceives (…) it recalls to our minds the living, real individualities which appear and
disappear before our eyes" (Bakunin 57). In Bakunin's thinking, a scientific model
operates by making observations and then creating a static, generalized, and
somewhat dead, model. Art, in Bakunin's view, is not beholden to this creation of
models. It can explore the complexity and diversity of lived experience with greater
ease. In Bakunin's somewhat elliptical formulation: "Art (…) is as it were, the return
of abstraction to life; science, on the contrary, is the perpetual immolation of life,
fugitive, temporary, but real, on the altar of eternal abstractions" (Bakunin 57).
Bakunin is not suggesting that science is useless, but that the models it creates
should not be sanctified, because they will always be substituting certain vital
abstractions with dead ones.
Fantastic sprawl, as we have been discussing it, is very much an interrogation
along these lines. If sprawl is a model of certainty, reason, and scientific abstraction;
104
the fantastic interpolates uncertainty, the breakdown of reason, and vital
abstraction. At its best, it can take an apparently inevitable system to pieces. Bobby
looks at the lines of the Tropic of Cancer, questions why he is holding onto them, and
decides to let go.

105
Bibilography

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Bakunin, Michael. God and the State. New York: Dover Publications, 1970. Mother
Earth Publishing, 1916.

Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic
Books, Inc, 1987.

Ganter, Granville. "Rioting, Textuality and The Crying of Lot 49." Found Object. vol. 2.
no 9, 1993, pp 66-81.

Garreau, Joel. Edge City. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1981.

Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. iBook ed. New York: Vanguard Press, 1926.

106
Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. iBook ed. New York: McClure,
Phillips & Co, 1902.

Lerup, Lars. “Stim and Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis.” Assemblage. 25 (Dec 1994)
pp. 82-101. JSTOR. Web. 29 Aug. 2013.
Mendelson, Edward. "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49." Pynchon: A
Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Edward Mendelson, Prentice Hall, 1978.

Monleón, José B. A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the
Fantastic. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Moretti, Franco. "Dialectic of Fear (Extract)." The Horror Reader, edited by Ken
Gelder, Routledge Press, 2000, pp 148-160.

Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic In American Popular Culture. New York:
Palgrave, Macmillan, 2009.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. Perennial Classics, 1999.

Pynchon, Thomas. "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts." 12 June, 1966. New York
Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-
watts.html. Accessed March 3, 2017.

107
Scott, Allen J. , and Soja, Edward W., eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at
the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkely: University of California Press, 1996.
Shoop, Casey. "Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the New Right in
California." Contemporary Literature. vol 53, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 51-86.
Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory. New York: Verso, 1989.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. New
York: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Witzling, Davd. Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of
Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Vol.
II: An Anthology. Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1985.
195-220. Print.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Living City. New York: Horizon Press, 1958.

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997.

108

Fiction Dissertation:
We Say We Are Beyond This

We Say That We Are Beyond This,
By Anthony M. Abboreno

Before I knew that anything had happened, what my beautiful son who I loved
had done, that he was going to be tried as an adult, and that he was going to be taken
away from me and everything he cared about, I was watching a crappy movie on Netflix
and thinking about how at least I knew he was safe, at his friend Andrew’s house, and I
was trying to decide whether I should have another beer.
I had been drinking too much since his mother had left us: since she had really
finally cracked, and abandoned us completely without a word, and even though the house
was quieter and calmer with her gone, nothing broken and no screaming, we both felt the
absence. Brian, my son, had been dealing with his problems his own, secretive, twelve-
year old way. He got moody, spent whole evenings in his room, talking with friends over
the phone or on the internet, using the computer a cousin of ours had given him. I had
109
been filling the void with beer: first the good stuff, which I preferred, and then, when that
got too expensive, Schlitz. I wasn’t a puking-in-the-sink, parking-the-car-crooked,
crying-and-stumbling kind of drunk, you understand. But I was more caught up in
myself than I should have been, not really paying attention to what my son Brian needed,
and the alcohol made that much easier. I would wake up in the morning and realize that
there were spots from the previous night I couldn’t remember, nothing serious, just what
show I’d finally decided on before going to bed, for example. Not full black-outs, but
more like brown-outs. I was just at the edge of keeping it together, just existing, but I was
finally deciding to pull myself back and figure out how I could devote myself to
parenting again.
I’m not trying to make excuses. When the newspapers grabbed onto this, I got
some flack, but nobody really pointed to my drinking the way they pointed to his
mother’s absence. That’s how it is when kids go wrong: moms get all the bad press.
People don’t expect much of fathers. I don’t think that’s right. I think they should have
pointed to me too, for not paying enough attention to Brian. Maybe even for keeping him
around his mother as long as I did.
Reporters tried to track her down, get interviews, but she couldn’t be found.
Everyone looked up her old website--the rolling hit counter, at the bottom of the page,
ran up hundreds of thousands of visitors--where she talked about the end of the world:
how alien sightings were really demon sightings, and vice versa. How these things came
from a world that was completely strange to us, but parallel to our own, and so even
though we could never understand them, they knew intuitively that our cores were full of
murder and cannibalism--completely full--and they wanted to turn us towards those other
110
selves. Her psychiatrist finally convinced her to give all that stuff up, but she never took
the website down. I tried to find a way to do it myself, but too many things were
password locked, files were invisible and protected. I’m not a tech guy: I might as well
have been staring into the parallel world itself. So eventually I just gave up, and let the
website hover there in space, like a ghost. She promised she wouldn’t update it anymore,
and as far as I am aware, she didn’t.
And anyway, website or no, we still had to deal with the mood swings, and the
outrageous paranoia. The time she tore apart Brian’s room looking for drugs that were
never there, or the time she put a pillow over my face in the middle of the night and tried
to suffocate me, for reasons I still don't understand. The edges of these problems had
been apparent when we got married, but I had kept thinking they would get better, we
would work through them together. But they didn't, and we didn't. She got a new job in a
new town, where Brian and I didn’t know anyone, and we moved there. This meant that I
had no one to talk to when her behavior got worse. You know how it goes.
When she left us, she didn’t leave a goodbye. Instead, she had torn open a paper
grocery bag and laid it flat on the kitchen table. It was covered in symbols that didn’t fit
any language or iconography--messy shapes, pierced with lines and angles, like you’d
find in a geometry proof. Symbols that looked almost like a foreign language--like
Chinese or Korean characters--but that I knew came from inside her head. I recognized
all of it, more or less. It was an amped-up version of what she used to do in her website
days.
111
The only words in English were written at the corner of the bag, in small,
cramped letters: the same handwriting she’d use on a to-do list. It said: “I'll see you when
it's time.”

I was still thinking about whether I should have another beer, had completely lost
focus on the television program I was watching, when the doorbell rang a dozen times
quickly, like the person pushing it could reel me in faster, the faster and more frequently
it was pressed. Then the ringing stopped, and whoever was there started pounding with
his or her fists.
For a moment, I was afraid that it was Brian’s mother, reappeared. I loved her and
I missed her, but I hate to admit that I also lived in fear. It was good that she was gone,
and I worried that she would come back and threaten us all over again. I never knew what
she meant by her parting message, and so it hung over me, always. If I saw a car that
looked like hers, parked outside the grocery store or outside Brian’s school, my mouth
would go dry, I’d start to feel the familiar panic, and I would have to check the license
plate and look through the window at what was inside before I became convinced that it
was all in my head, and it wasn’t really her come back to get us.
When I opened the door, though, it was just Brian. Brian with his t-shirt stretched
out and loose at the collar, like somebody had been pulling at it. The shirt had a
tyrannosaurus on it. I had bought it for him two years ago at the La Brea tar pits, because
he loved dinosaurs. He hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, so it still fit him.
I got out of the way so he could come in. He was crying: big, chest-crushing sobs,
the kind that come when you feel that you have lost control and there is nothing left but
112
just to protest like this. I saw now that his shirt and his face had dirt on them. There was
blood on his hands: I thought that it was his. I thought that he and his friend Andrew had
been in a fight.
I made him sit down, and then I got a damp paper towel, and came back and
started wiping his face. It was all I knew how to do, do you understand? He was only
twelve. Sometimes he would seem so grown up: you would look at him, and see the man
that he would grow up to be. But more often than not you still saw a baby--his round
baby cheeks, his childish delight in small things. Ice cream. Dogs. A drive into Los
Angeles, to go to the Natural History Museum that he loved. He loved dinosaurs.
“What’s wrong,” I said. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong.”
I made shushing noises. I had so much experience in trying to calm people down,
and this was still the best that I could do.
“We stabbed him,” Brian said. “We killed him.”
My first assumption was that I had misunderstood: that he had said something
different. Then I started to think maybe he was the one who had a bad grasp of the
situation--that in his panic, he had decided that one thing had happened, when there had
really been another.
“You didn’t stab anybody,” I said. I used the calmest voice I could. I felt sure of
myself. “Nobody is dead.”
I reached up to wipe Brian’s face again, and he grabbed my hand and pushed it
away, smearing blood on my wrist.
“He is,” he said. “Jonah is dead. We killed him”
113
I had no idea who Jonah was, but at that moment, I hated him. Please don’t judge
me: at that point, he was just a name. He wasn’t a kid like mine.
Off the cuff, I made another decision. I got another beer, and popped it open, and
I got a second one for the road. If you spend years covering for a violent and unstable
person, you make all kinds of contingency plans. So this was autopilot for me.
“Get up,” I said. “The police might come, and we have to get out of here.”

I didn’t think we had time to pack anything, or even a clear idea of where we
would go, but I made Brian change his shirt, and wash the blood off of himself. I had
some notion that we needed to put time between ourselves and whatever had happened,
and I also had the idea that it would be awhile before the police had decided Brian had
fled: they would go to his home first, probably, to see if he had gone there, but if there
was nobody home, they would not necessarily expect anything foul. I wasn’t even
worried, in terms of personal liability, about what would happen if the police decided to
pull us over. A guy’s kid comes home panicked, incoherent, so he takes him out for a
drive, thinking some fresh air would calm them both down and get the words flowing. In
fact, if you had asked me then what I was doing, that is what I would have told you, and I
would have mostly believed it. I didn’t think of us as men on the lam. Not exactly.
We got on I-10 going East. I had no clear plan for where we were headed; I was
being impulsive. We were still seeing familiar landmarks at that point. We drove past
Joshua Tree State Park, where we had once spent a good weekend camping, during a
period when Brian’s mother was relatively well. We would head down this road when we
were going to visit relatives, an Aunt and Uncle of Brian’s who lived in Arizona. I had an
114
idea that maybe that would be a place to go, but then cancelled it. If the police were after
Brian--and I still wasn’t completely convinced that they were--that might be a place that
they’d check. How long did police searches take to really get started? I had no idea if we
were dealing with hours or days.
After two hours on the road, I started to get hungry. I noticed a sign for a twenty-
four hour Sonic, so I decided to pull over and go there.
“I need food,” I said, “so I can think. Do you want to eat?”
Brian shook his head no.
I don’t know if you have Sonic in your area. If you have never been to one, they
are a little different from other fast food restaurants. They only have a small, outdoor
sitting area, but it’s really designed for you to eat in your car. There’s an order window at
every parking space, and you push a button, and then they bring the food out to you. I
thought this would be a good setup because it would mean we’d have to interact with
people, face to face, as little as possible.
I ordered myself a double cheeseburger, with jalapeno poppers on it, and an extra
large drink. I wanted something that would keep me full for a long time. Even though
Brian said he wasn’t hungry, I got him a cheeseburger and fries.
While we were waiting, I looked over at him. He wasn’t making eye-contact with
me, but he had calmed down enough to tell me part of what had happened.
He and Andrew had invited over a third kid, Jonah, who I didn’t know. Jonah was
a little bit stupid, Brian explained. He was into babyish things that a twelve-year-old
should have outgrown. At the same time, Jonah would attempt to pretend he knew about
things that he knew nothing about, like sex, and how it was done. For whatever reason, he
115
had latched onto Brian and Andrew. He found them one afternoon with a diagram they
had made, and asked them what kind of game they were playing. They had explained that
it was no game: that they were involved in something deeply serious and occult.
“It was from Mom’s website,” Brian said. “We wanted to conjure her.”
It turned out that he and Andrew had become obsessed with the website his
mother had written. Andrew especially, had been pulled into it. Or at least that is what
Brian had told me. Andrew had looked at my ex-wife’s paranoid writing about angels and
alternate dimensions and something about it had perfectly locked into the grooves of his
mind, and from then on my son Brian had gone along. At least, this is a mix of what
Brian told me, and what I know of him. Because, whatever his feelings about Jonah,
Brian was also a soft touch. It was the way he learned how to get around his mother’s
mood swings: he never made it clear what he wanted to do, or didn’t want to do. You
always had to ask him very carefully, or you ran the risk of bulldozing him. I probably
could have made him go along with anything, if he thought it would make me happy.
There was a knock on my door, and I realized that I hadn’t been paying attention.
When I looked over, the guy who had brought the food had a look on his face like he was
trying to figure out what was going on. He was only doing his civic duty--a man comes
in, in the middle of the night, with a crying kid in his car, you want to make sure that it
isn’t something serious, and you don’t have to call the police. But I was mad at him
anyway. He was a pencilneck, with weird, thin, red and curly hair, like a mangy afro.
“He went to his friend’s for a sleepover,” I said, “and they were mean to him. So I
thought we’d come out for a snack.”
116
This seemed to explain things for him. He handed us the food and I paid him in
cash--I did that on purpose; I was thinking that way--and then I rolled the window back
up. When he was out of sight, I opened the door, discreetly, and poured out about half of
my Mountain Dew. Then I cracked my roadie beer, and dumped it into the cup, and
stirred it around with my straw. I wanted the caffeine and I wanted the booze, and I
wanted to make sure that if the police pulled us over I wouldn’t have an open can in the
car. I left the can on the ground and drove out of there, and put us back on the road.
“Could you unwrap that burger for me?” I said.
Brian nodded. The burger was huge and messy, and pieces of it kept falling in my
lap. I should have gotten something neater, but what can I say. Nobody can think of
everything.
We drove for eight hours straight, just barreling down I-10, trying to go fast but
not too fast, because once you get out of the city the traffic cops on that road are brutal.
But you get an idea of where they hide out--at the bottom of hills, just after overpasses--
so if you’re smart you can still fuck with the speed limit a little bit and get away with it.
While we were driving, Brian filled me in more about what had happened. About
how one afternoon, after school, Andrew had announced to Brian that they would
sacrifice Jonah. He had found something or other--something vague--on my wife’s
website that had led him to the idea Brian's mother had crossed over into the parallel
world, and that he had found a way to lead her home: something about trails of blood.
This, at least, was how he pitched the idea to Brian.
“We made fun of Jonah for thinking it was all a game,” Brian said. “But
sometimes it was a game. And sometimes it was serious. That was what made it fun--that
117
even though we knew we were making it up, we got to the point where we wondered
whether or not we weren’t.”
Because Brian is not a murderer, not in the way you think of murderers: he liked
thinking about power, because he spent a lot of his life feeling like he didn’t have any.
And he loved his mother, in spite of what she had put him through. What little boy is not
like this? He was only two degrees removed from Jonah, who pretended to know about
sex.
Andrew’s house sat at the edge of a local nature preserve--not forest exactly, and
not exactly desert, but more like scrub. The kind of setting that stands in for the frontier
in every Western movie, or an alien planet in every episode of “Star Trek.” Towers of
weird stone, which looked deposited there by a monstrous intelligence. They would
imagine what the geography might look like if they crossed over, into the otherworld that
perfectly overlapped our own, but went unseen and untouched. They found a circle of
rocks that seemed, they decided, like the perfect place for a gateway--a sort of crude,
natural Stonehenge, where an empty circle of land was overlooked by four huge boulders.
This, Andrew had declared, was where they would sacrifice Jonah.

By the time the sun was coming up, I was too tired to drive anymore, so I
announced that we were going to stop at the first hotel we saw. I was going to have to pay
with a credit card, which I didn’t like, but I didn’t have enough cash on me to do anything
else. We had already gone past Phoenix, so I hoped we had maybe put enough ground
between us and any kind of police search, anyway.
118
I picked a Holiday Inn Express, because I was hungry, and I knew they had a
pretty good free breakfast. It was starting to occur to me that, really, I was only delaying
the inevitable by going on the road with my son. That he was going to get caught, and I
couldn’t stop that from happening, and then he was going to be locked away for who
knows how many years. At this point I still thought he was going to be tried as a juvenile-
-he was only twelve--and I had even started thinking on the positive side. Maybe he
really did need help. Maybe I did too, and if both of us got it we could build some kind of
good life out of this, after this was all over. I mean, even then, I knew that wasn’t what
the criminal justice system was about. We talk about reform, but it is really just about
punishing people and devouring them. I knew that, but not in a first-hand way, so I had
hope.
If I was going to be using a credit card anyway, I didn’t see any point in my son
spending, probably, one of his last days of freedom in a rat-trap, so I picked a Holiday
Inn Express.

By the time we checked in, it was more morning than night. The clerk told us that
we could go straight to the breakfast, if we wanted to, so we did. Brian had never eaten
his cheeseburger, and he seemed as though all his hunger had hit him at once.
Holiday Inn Expresses have a great hot breakfast. It isn’t just bagels and cereal--
you can get almost anything you could get at a normal breakfast; almost anything you
could desire. They have tiny, single-egg omlettes, with a slice of cheese in each. They are
all exactly the same size, and probably made in a factory, then reheated from frozen, but
they still taste the way you want an omelette to taste. They have biscuits and gravy, and a
119
waffle iron, and a machine that makes perfect pancakes--you press a button and a glob of
batter comes out of a spout and onto a hot grill, and you flip it yourself, and bingo:
pancakes. The wonders of technology.
Brian loved--loves--pancakes. I do not know if they serve pancakes in jail, and I
do not know if he will ever eat a pancake again, and already, at that point, I had some
uncertainty about this, so I offered to make him pancakes. I did three, and we sat down
and he ate them, quickly, so I got back up and made him another three. He was smiling
now. Maybe he didn’t deserve to smile, but I didn’t care. Yesterday he was a little boy
who loved dinosaurs! Today he was a murderer who some people would say did not
deserve to smile and eat pancakes.
He liked a lot of syrup, and this syrup came in little plastic packets, like ketchup
packets. I kept tearing them open and passing them to him, and he kept dumping them on
his pancakes and eating them.
We were alone in the dining area when we first started doing this, but halfway
into his third stack of pancakes, another father and his son came down and sat at a table
nearby us. The father was wearing khaki shorts with a polo shirt tucked into them--a real
L.L. Bean kind of guy--and he had sunglasses dangling from a cord around his neck. The
son was a little bit fat, wearing a shirt from the Grand Canyon. After the son sat down, he
took a Gameboy out of his pocket and started playing with it. The father spoke to me
when he passed our table, on his way to get the two of them food.
“Road-tripping?” he said.
I nodded.
“Where you headed?” he said.
120
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
He laughed. “Man,” he said. “That must be nice.” He looked back over at his son.
“Well,” he said. “We’re headed to Phoenix. My wife is there visitng her sisters,
and we’re road-tripping to meet her. It’s going to be a pain, you know, when she and
them get together.” He smiled, expecting that we could connect on this.
“Yak yak yak,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.
He looked away, as though my saying this embarrassed him. He must have
realized that there was some part of my situation that he didn’t understand, and that we
were nothing like each other after all.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t so bad, really.”

That was all I ever really wanted. A normal trip, stopping and seeing the sights. I
wanted to be able to look at Brian and know that I had put some kind of good in the
world, that here was a strong person who was something like me, and was better for
being raised by me, because he would not make the same kinds of mistakes that I had
made: he would be a person who could stand up for himself, he would be a person who
would know his way in the world and be able to follow it, not letting himself get thrown
off by bullies, not making excuses for himself. And at that moment, looking at that father
and son, I still had hope--my son would go to juvie, he would see a psychiatrist, they
would give him some discipline that I had failed to give him, and then maybe one day he
would be released and we could form a bond again, we could hold each other and try and
push forward to some kind of future that looked like that future I wanted.
121
And maybe you say I had no right to hope. That Jonah’s parents had had their
child taken from them, so why should I be able to keep mine. Jonah’s parents had no
hope, so I should not have any either. And you are right, probably. Some things you can
never take back, you can never move on from them. But to tell somebody that to his face,
and so viciously. I have read newspaper editorials over this controversy, over whether or
not my son should be tried as an adult, whether the crime was gruesome and premeditated
enough to justify what they have done to him, which is to take him away forever--sixty
years! He will be an old man by the time he enters the world again; I will probably be
dead--and to say that he and I have no right to hope, seems as cruel as murder to me.
Their son was made a blood sacrifice, and so my son must be also. I cannot think of
anything as leviathan and ancient as eye for an eye. We say that we are beyond this but
we are not.
The subtleties of how Brian and Andrew lured Jonah to his death disturb me, but I
should mention them, as I eventually learned them that afternoon, in the hotel room, as
we were trying to fall asleep but before the local sheriff came and knocked on the door,
because of course the police had been monitoring my credit cards.
If you were a child, this is how you would commit a murder. They pretended to be
Jonah’s friends. They invited him over and told him that they would let him join in their
game. They showed him the different locations that they had found in the desert, and
finally, on the way to the gateway, they had let him walk ahead and then Andrew had
pulled up his shirt to show Brian the knife he had been carrying the whole time--a paring
knife, small but sharp, wrapped in a scabbard made out of cardboard and tape.
122
When they got there and Andrew took out the knife, Jonah was confused. And so
was Brian, he told me. He had not thought this was really going to happen. Andrew
passed him the knife and told him “You draw first blood, stab him.” And Jonah’s eyes
had been wide and confused and Brian couldn’t imagine how he would hurt or stab or kill
somebody but he didn’t know how to back down, either, so he passed the knife back to
Andrew, saying “You do it.” And Andrew had looked angry then, passing the knife back
to him, saying “This is an honor.” And this was when Jonah had started to cry, but he
didn’t run. For some reason he didn’t try to run until Brian had passed the knife back to
Andrew one last time and Andrew had charged at Jonah, getting him with the knife and
knocking him down, and the two of them were tangled there on the ground, Andrew
trying to stab, Jonah bleeding and trying to escape and crying for his mother, and what
could Brian have been thinking in this moment, realizing that all he wanted was the same
thing, but he was the one who was going to survive this and Jonah was not? And neither
of them was going to get what he wanted.
“Help,” Jonah had said. “Help me, Mom.” And “Help,” Andrew had also said.
“Help me, you dumb-ass. Do it for your mother.”
Brian and Andrew took turns stabbing Jonah. After the first stab, Brian said, it
was not so much easier but automatic, panicked. He lost track of how many times they
stabbed him, he bled so much, but he was still alive when they left him there crying and
in his own blood, saying that he did not want to be left alone, he did want to die.
I am not trying to excuse my son’s crime but I am trying to say: this is not how
adults murder. Or at least, this is not how I have been made to think that adults murder.
This is a strange and terrible crime, but this is a crime of boys who are young and stupid,
123
who don’t know how and when to back down, who panic at the wrong moment and do as
they are told, who are afraid of being called a mean name, and afraid of being alone.
124

Go With The Flow
Anthony M. Abboreno

Deborah’s therapist advised her that it was time to try and renew contact with her
sister, Melanie. He told Deborah about an article he’d read on the internet, that included
the top ten regrets of dying people. It had been compiled by an editor, but all the items on
it had been, at some point, related first hand. Deborah thought it was weird that she paid
somebody so much to talk to her about things she could have found herself, for free, but
she supposed that part of the service was having someone to hold her accountable. If she
had read the article herself, she would not have done anything about it. It would only
have made her more depressed.
Number one on the list was losing contact with people. You don’t regret money
on your deathbed, maybe, but you regret the things that really matter, those close
connections with others. Friends you grew away from, relatives you argued with and
125
never forgave. Deborah wasn’t dying, but she would, someday, and so now was as as
good a time as ever to rekindle lost relationships. And besides, what could it hurt?
Deborah’s therapist assured her that connections with people don’t just evaporate. For all
the talk about how people change, usually all it takes is a little work, and two separated
people can rediscover what connected them in the first place.
It took Deborah a little while to determine how Mel should be contacted. Mel had
a Facebook profile, but after a brief period where she had seemed to post almost
compulsively--sharing memes about how mass-killings were not caused by media or by
guns, but by drugs, sound-weaponry, and government mind control; stories about mutants
washing up on the shores of New Jersey and their connections to frankenfood and Big
Pharma--updates had abruptly stopped. That had happened almost a year ago. The only
picture on Mel’s profile was a faded scan of her High-School graduation photo. The info
she had listed included no physical address, not even a town or city. Deborah had her
sister’s old cell number, and an old e-mail address she wasn’t sure if Mel still used, and
she tried the cell number first.
After five rings, the voicemail picked up. It immediately went to one of those
frustrating, unpersonalized recordings, where a machine just reads you the number you
already dialed. Deborah left a message, saying that she wasn’t sure if this was still
Melanie Ford’s number, but if it was, that it was her sister Deborah. She wanted to meet
up, try and start things again, maybe have lunch if Melanie still lived in town. Then
Deborah had said goodbye, and hung up.
An invisible weight collapsed on her. She was taking pills for that, but at times
like this it still oozed through, she thought about death, and that was why she saw the
126
therapist. She spent the rest of the evening sipping boxed wine and watching Pinocchio, a
movie that she and Mel had loved as children. At one o’ clock, soused, she fired off an e-
mail to Deborah’s old address explaining how much she loved her.
She barely woke up in time for work the next morning, chased some Advil with
coffee, had to rush to get dressed and skip breakfast, then navigated LA's surface roads
feeling like her head’s inner gyroscope had gotten busted, like tilting too quickly in any
direction would make her feel nauseated. The school was in Boyle Heights, and it would
have been faster if she had used the interstate, but she never used the interstate when she
was hung-over: she didn't trust herself to react to other drivers, or trust her hands to
remain steady. When Deborah arrived, she found that the homeroom teacher had not left
lesson plans, but merely a pile of Xeroxed worksheets and a cryptic warning to “look out
for Brian.”
Brian was quiet for most of the afternoon until just before lunch, when Deborah
looked up from helping another student, and saw that his eyes had turned a pinkish red,
the color of mucus membranes. Then, slowly, they returned to normal. It took Deborah a
moment to realize that he had turned his eyelids inside out: she remembered knowing a
kid who could do this in grade-school, but hadn’t thought about it in years.
“Brian,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m mad,” he said. “My eyes turn red when I get mad.”
Shortly afterward, Brian threatened to stab another child with safety scissors, so
she sent him to the office.
After lunch, when the students were doing a math worksheet, class was disrupted
by the buzzing of the intercom. Deborah called out, and the disembodied voice of the
127
front secretary said that she had a call on the line. The secretary couldn’t tell whether it
was an emergency or not, but it sounded like it might be.
Deborah looked out at the students. With Brian in the vice-principal's office,
things seemed calm. She notified the full-time teacher next door--a woman who was
actually younger than her--that she needed to step out for a minute, and then she went to
the school's front desk.
This was a school Deborah had worked at before, and so she knew the secretary,
Christine. Christine’s angle was weird cheerfulness--sometimes she wore a cardigan
covered with novelty buttons, smiley faces, cartoon pictures of the school’s whale
mascot. Right then, Christine looked like she had seen a car accident, and was deciding
what to do.
Without saying anything, Christine stood up from her desk chair so that Deborah
could sit down to use the phone. Deborah took the receiver.
“Hello?” she said.
There was no response on the other end, at first, but just a wall of static. And then,
gradually, like a weak radio station, she heard a voice on the other end. It was quiet and
garbled at first. It sounded like a foreign language, or the nonsense words a baby makes
when it is still learning to speak. Then, gradually, like someone fighting their way to the
surface of the ocean, it grew louder and more clear, and Deborah recognized it as the
voice of her sister.
Deborah felt light-headed. Sick to her stomach. Unreasonably, she thought of it
as something in the static. Something in the pitch of it, its ebb and flow, was making her
seasick.
128
Mel’s voice burbled. “Had to wait until he left the house,” she said. She made it
sound like something that was a little unfortunate, but just a matter of fact. The way you
might tell somebody you had waited to return their phone call because you were out
running errands.
Her voice subsided again, turning back into that faint and mushy baby language.
Deborah called out her sister’s name, but couldn’t tell whether Melanie could hear her or
not.
Eventually, Melanie’s voice returned. It told her a time--tomorrow, at one--and
then started rattling off numbers. Deborah realized that this was an address, and then she
grabbed a pen, frantically, off of the secretary’s desk and began writing it down on the
secretary's notepad. Because of the static, she doubted that she would be able to ask Mel
to repeat it, if she didn’t right it down correctly the first time.
When Melanie was done, there was a quiet click on the other end, and then the
static was gone. Immediately, Deborah’s stomach stopped hurting. She wiped her
forehead with the back of her hand, and realized that she had broken out into a cold
sweat.
The next day, Deborah had to pass on a new substitute teaching assignment, so
that she could make it to the appointment with her sister. She ran the address through
Google Maps and found out that it was in South-Central; a branch of a fast-food chain
Deborah had never heard of. Apparently, these things were all over the place in South
America, but there was only one location in the United States. All the Yelp reviews
complained that it did not live up to the experiences they’d had at similar restaurants in
129
their home countries, or abroad, and that it was not worth driving to this “ghetto”
neighborhood just to get sub-par chicken and rice. Deborah didn’t care for their tone.
But the neighborhood around the restaurant was run-down, she had to admit. The
main-street was mostly fronted with gas-stations and strip malls, half of the stores in
which had cracked windows, and looked dimly lit. She couldn’t tell whether they were
open or closed. What homes she could see from the street had bars on the windows and
wire fences separating them from the sidewalk. She had taught in rough neighborhoods
before, had once heard a popping sound outside of a classroom window--her first thought
had been “firecrackers,” although later she found out that it wasn’t--and seen a seven year
old scream and duck under a desk, already afflicted with some kind of PTSD. So she felt
that she had some kind of realistic grasp on what a bad neighborhood could be, and what
she felt as she drove into the parking lot of the restaurant was not exactly nervousness,
but just a sense of being displaced.
The inside counter was fronted with bullet-proof glass, and she had to receive her
food through a rotating slot. But this was expected. Deborah ordered chicken and rice and
sat at a table that looked clean, near the window. Carved into the table’s formica surface
was a symbol she didn’t recognize. It had the quick and dirty technicality of some of the
gang graffiti she had learned to look out for in or around schools, but it didn’t belong to
any gang that she could recognize. It was an octagon with lines inside of it, connecting all
of its points, in the middle of which was a crude human figure, the kind you might draw
if you were playing a game of hangman. Except instead of having a circle for a head, this
one had an upside-down triangle. It gave her the impression of a person trapped in an
130
enormous web. Then the bell above the front door rang, and she looked up to see her
sister, Melanie, who smiled at her.
Melanie walked up to the counter and ordered an Orange Bang from the cashier,
who seemed to know her, then came back to the table and sat down across from Deborah.
She smiled.
The smile, Deborah thought, looked less like a smile of happiness and more like
the sphincter-mouth of a deep-sea creature.
“I can’t talk long,” Melanie said. She sounded vaguely apologetic, but not
bothered. “I have to get back to the house before David does.” She looked at her
wristwatch. “Free-time isn’t exactly copious these days, you know?”
Deborah had spent some time talking with her therapist about what she wanted to
say at this moment. About how she was sorry that she hadn’t been there for what must
have been difficult years for Melanie, especially when they were teenagers, and the
depression had hit Melanie hardest.
Melanie had first tried to kill herself when she was twelve, had spent large
stretches of high-school skipping classes, because the anxiety of being around other
students was so overwhelming that she would rather do anything than confront it. She
had made her second suicide attempt at fifteen--tried to strangle herself in her closet with
a belt--but her mother had intruded just in time, and caught her before she had stopped
the blood-flow to her brain. Deborah remembered standing in a hospital room, staring at
her sister in bed and the hideous purple black bruise encircling her sister’s neck, listening
to a nurse explain how lucky they were, and how little time it takes for strangulation to
cause permanent brain damage. After this, Melanie had been institutionalized for several
131
months in a place where they didn’t allow people to have shoelaces, or belts, or even
backpacks or any other kind of bag with a strap.
Throughout all of this, Deborah had never really been there for Melanie. That was
putting it nicely. Deborah had disowned Melanie socially, made a point to avoid her at
school. One night, after Melanie had been in an argument with their parents, Deborah had
pursued Melanie back to her bedroom and told her that she thought Melanie was being a
brat. Brat was the word she had used, as though she was an adult scolding a child, even
though Melanie was a year older than her. Deborah had told Melanie that she couldn’t
understand why Melanie had to keep creating these conflicts, why she couldn’t just get
herself together and go to school: it was bratty, it was babyish. When Deborah had said
this, Melanie had cried.
In her talks with her therapist, Deborah had discussed how she would apologize.
How she wanted to explain that--even though she knew this was not an excuse--she had
been dealing with her own problems with anxiety, with depression, which were not as
bad as Melanie’s it was true, and which was not an excuse. But she had been denying
them, and now, as an adult, when she had a better understanding of things, she also
realized how cruel she had been and she was sorry.
Confronted with Melanie right then, however, all of that practice disappeared.
One problem was that she had not imagined this moment taking place like this. She had
imagined Melanie as being tearful, as being also eager for reconciliation. She had
imagined them meeting in a comfortable coffee-shop, somewhere near Deborah’s
apartment in Hollywood. The kind of place where students and the vaguely counter-
132
cultural came to munch pastries and play boardgames, or type screenplays for movies that
would never be made.
She had not imagined Melanie as seeming rushed, almost indifferent to her
presence. The meeting was not supposed to take place in some weird fast-food restaurant
in a broken down neighborhood on short notice. Visually, Melanie seemed fine without
her--yes, maybe her eyes were a little sunken, like she hadn’t been sleeping, her hair a
little grimy and unwashed. But no, Melanie was dressed the way she always dressed.
Thin, vaguely hippyish, in a dress covered with some sort of faux AmerIndian pattern,
with scores of loose bracelets around her arms, helping to obscure the scars left there
from her teenage years. Wrapped around Melanie’s neck was a shawl in a pattern that
clashed with the dress. It was an eyesore, sure, but for Melanie, eyesores were par for the
course.
What threw Deborah off more than anything, though, was the smell. At first, she
had thought that it was something in the restaurant that she hadn’t noticed before: it
reminded her of spoiled food. But as Melanie shifted her weight in the booth, the smell
grew stronger, as though it were sunken deep into her pores and being released by
friction. It wasn’t the normal, onion stink of body odor, or even the cat-piss of stale
sweat. It was a death-stench.
Rather than apologizing, not really knowing what to say, Deborah began talking
about the first idea that came to her.
“I watched Pinocchio again recently,” she said. “It was the same night I called
you, and sent you that e-mail. I was thinking about how we used to watch it as little kids,
really little, and how even though it scared you, you still enjoyed it. You remember your
133
favorite part? That whale, with its enormous eye, the way it fills the whole screen. You
would cover your face, and I would hold you. I could never tell how much you were
really scared, or how much you just liked being held.”
Melanie seemed to think about this for a moment. She sipped on her Orange
Bang.
“I was actually scared,” she said. “I didn’t like being held.”
The hard edges of Deborah’s depression dug into her, then. She felt like crying.
“Who likes being held?” Melanie said. She shook her head. “Being restrained is
always terrible, don’t you think?”
Deborah didn’t feel this way. It seemed absurd to her, that Melanie might feel this
way. Of course everyone liked being held, hugged, embraced. Deborah often longed for
this. Sometimes, when she worked with younger children--kindergartners or first graders-
-they would run up and hug her legs, and the experience filled her with such warmth that
it felt like the only fuel she could use to get through the day.
“But,” Melanie said, “being restrained is also a huge part of life. It’s not
something you can escape, so now that I think about it, I do understand where you're
coming from. Yes, I can see how you could have misinterpreted what was happening.”
Deborah took deep breaths. She tried to think of the world outside of herself, to
think about what the situation around her was demanding, instead of her own misery.
“Mel,” Deborah said. “You’re acting weird. I don’t understand what’s wrong with
you. I can help you if you need it.”
Melanie laughed. She drank some more of her orange bang. “I’m doing fine,
honey,” she said. “You’re the one with the faulty memory.”
134
She looked at her watch. “Shoot,” she said. “I wish we had more time. But you
talking about Pinocchio makes me think of something. You remember that song, ‘I’ve
Got no Strings?’”
Deborah nodded.
“You always loved that song,” Melanie said, “but I hated it. Which is interesting,
because lately I have been thinking about how the things we experience as children, and
the things we feel drawn to, don’t so much shape us as describe our own internal plan. I
mean that you can go back and look at your feelings in the past, and they perfectly map
out what you become. But it’s not that those events changed you, it’s the opposite. Those
events describe what you already were.”
Melanie pointed to the picture carved in the table. “Like this thing,” she said.
“When you look at it, what do you see?”
Deborah stared at the image. Suddenly, it not only confused, but also revolted her.
“It makes me think of a person caught in a spider-web,” Deborah said. This was
true.
“I think you loved that song,” Melanie said, “because you thought it was good not
to have strings. A lot of people think that way. It’s not fun to think of losing control of
yourself. But listen: what I think I recognized then, and what I really know now, is that
you never have control. All of us are on strings, do you get it? And the sooner you
embrace that, the sooner you look at the strings and accept what they are, the better you’ll
feel.”
135
Now Deborah did start to cry. Melanie reached out and put one hand, gently, on
her shoulder. The hand stank. The whole arm stank. Deborah felt like she was going to
throw up, and she cried harder.
“I know how you’re feeling, baby,” Melanie said. She used her fingers to knead at
Deborah’s flesh. “Are you seeing a therapist? Therapists will tell you ways that you can
fight it, but that’s stupid. The right thing is to just accept what you’re thinking and
feeling. To know that this world you experience is true. To know that we all have strings
to hold us down, or pull us around, and the trick isn’t to get rid of those strings. It’s to
accept them. To allow them to allow us to fulfill our purpose.”
Melanie looked at her watch. “I’m sorry I can’t explain better,” she said, and
tapped her forehead. “Trust me, it makes sense up here. I’m also sorry that David is going
to be home soon, and I have to go.”
When Melanie stood up to leave, Deborah reached out to grab her, like a child
grasping frantically for its mother. Accidentally, her hand caught the edge of Melanie’s
shawl and pulled it down, lower on her collar, and that was when Deborah saw the bruise
on Melanie’s neck, ugly and purple black, as though she had recently been strangled. It
made Deborah feel as though she was looking at a ghost.
“Melanie,” Deborah said or shouted, she was not sure, but her ears rang.
“It’s nothing, Deborah,” Melanie said. She pushed the shawl back up to cover the
bruise. Before Deborah could say anything else, Melanie was halfway out the door.
“Don’t call me,” Melanie said. “I’ll call you.”

136
The private investigator Deborah hired was an older, black man, who agreed to
meet her at a coffee shop near her apartment, the very coffee shop that she imagined
having her ideal meeting with Melanie, in fact. His name was Colby, he said. Yeah,
Colby like the cheese, he said, and smiled. It was clear that this was a practiced move,
something he had developed to put customers at ease, but Deborah was grateful for it
anyway. Even the smallest kindness felt like a salve, these days.
Colby bought himself an herbal tea and a chocolate chip cookie, and then sat
down with her at a wobbly table, underneath a blurry photograph of a naked person
petting a cat.
“The first thing I want to tell you,” Colby said, “is that this is completely routine
work. I’m just telling you that because, a lot of people I work with, they feel like coming
to a private investigator means they have failed. They’ve fallen into some dark
underworld. But lots of people lose track of some relative, or a spouse, and need some
more peace of mind about what’s going on. More peace of mind than the police have
time to give them. And that’s no comment on the police, trust me. I used to be one, before
I retired. They work hard for their money, but they can’t be everywhere.”
He looked down at the cookie he had purchased. It was on a ceramic plate with a
picture of a bee on it.
“This is way too big for me,” he said. “Do you want half?”
She shrugged, and he broke off half the cookie and handed it to her.
“I’m trying to watch my diet,” he said. “The doctor says that I don’t have diabetes
yet, but because my Dad had it, and my uncle had it, it’s bound to catch up with me
sooner or later, and it's better that I start watching my diet now.”
137
He took a sip of tea, then cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he said. “That is neither
here, nor there. Why don’t you tell me about your problem?”
Deborah took a bite of the cookie, even though her mouth was dry, and she felt as
though she would never be able to chew it. Where did she start? With the nightmares she
had been having? She had begun having a recurring dream where she stood with her
sister on a boat that their parents had rented one summer, looking out on a sea covered in
floating, baby jellyfish, each with a fin like a tiny sailboat, colored like turquoise jewels,
while her father explained how poisonous they were. How even though they looked so
beautiful, if either Melanie or Deborah were to jump overboard, they would probably die,
and if they were to try and grab even one of them, they would be badly hurt. And how
then there was a jump-cut, the way there sometimes are in dreams, and Deborah was in a
vast, dark space watching a man standing over a clouded fish-tank. How the man rolled
up one shirtsleeve and reached in the tank to pull up a beautiful blue jellyfish, allowed the
pale and stringy tentacles to drip down his arm, but how he didn’t even flinch. The
jellyfish pulsed like a stolen heart, and Deborah thought of snake handlers and cyanide
drinkers. She always woke up feeling that someone was in the room, watching her.
That would be too weird, she decided. And Colby would think it was beside the
point, anyway. He seemed friendly, but she didn’t want to waste his time. So she
explained to him the situation about her sister, where Melanie lived, this man named
David--whom she had never heard of before. Colby guided her through a description of
her meeting with Melanie, and off-handedly, she mentioned the design on the table. At
that, Colby brightened.
“You think it’s a cult thing?” Colby said. “You ever hear of war?”
138
Deborah was confused by this question.
“It’s an acronym,” Colby said. “WAR. Weapon Arm of the Redeemer. Back in
the day, hippies loved their acronyms. It was kind of an environmentalist thing. They
thought Los Angeles was less like a city but more like a tumor. Thought that the way we
were living, the landscape was against us, the city was against us, even our own bodies
and brains were against us. That someday it would all turn inside out. And right here,”
Colby said, and poked at the table, “right here in Los Angeles was some kind of ground
zero.”
He shook his head. “Man, people are always saying crap like that about L.A. But I
like living here.
“Anyway, they thought we were all just arms on some bigger organism. Or
fingers. They’d twist up their metaphors, but the basic idea was that the sooner we came
to embracing who we are, the sooner we’d feel a kind of peacefulness. Not a bad
message, usually. You see that kind of thing in self-help manuals: go with the flow, stay
copacetic, live in the moment. But for them it got weird. They made all these pamphlets
about murder and death. Crap like that.”
He rubbed at the side of his nose. “I’m not trying to panic you,” he said. “I’m just
letting you know: there’s stuff like this out there.”
“I don’t know how she got my phone number at work,” Deborah said. “I don’t
know why she called me there instead of calling my cell phone.”
Colby didn’t seem perturbed by this at all. “If somebody knows how to use the
internet right,” he said, “there’s a lot they can find out about you. She probably called
139
you at work because she thought it would be harder for this David guy to know who she
was calling. Not to alarm you, but it was definitely a cry for help.”
Deborah wasn’t so sure about any of this, least of all the explanation of how
Melanie would get her work number. Because Deborah was just a substitute teacher, she
didn’t think there was any online record of where she was working. Maybe Colby was
right, though. It seemed reasonable.
“Those marks around her neck," Colby said. “Do you think they were self-
inflicted, or did he do them?”
“I don’t know,” Deborah said. She worried that she might start crying again.
Colby shook his head. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t want to freak you out. I don’t
think WAR is a thing anymore. They’re just a footnote, for crime nerds. But I should tell
you. The way they went? A kind of mini mass-suicide, a rented warehouse out in the
Valley. All eight members. It was death by hanging. Should have been bigger news, but it
happened around the same time as the Manson thing.”
Colby shrugged.
“This is just retirement work for me, you understand? I do it because it keeps me
going. And I like having a little extra money, to help family out when they need it. That
doesn’t mean you’re low priority, though, it means you’re top priority. I’ve got nothing
else going on right now. I’ll put a move on it. Maybe I can even dig up something so you
can get the proper police involved. I still know some people on the force, I even know a
guy who works in that neighborhood. You understand?”
Here, Deborah did cry. This was embarrassing, how much she cried. This was a
problem she had talked to her therapist about.
140
“You’ve come to the right place,” Colby said. “I’d give you a hug or something,
but a lot of people don’t like that. It’s unprofessional, I guess. I don’t want you to
misinterpret anything.”
He dusted his hands on his pants, and stood up. He hadn’t touched the cookie at
all, had barely sipped on his tea.
“I’m going out to the car to get that contract,” he said. “We’ll talk about pricing.
You just hang on, and I’ll be right back.”

Deborah paid Colby with her third credit card, the only one that she actually had
some money left on. Rent was going up in her apartment building and her neighborhood.
Prettier, wealthier people were moving in, and substitute teaching didn't quite cut it
anymore.
That night she decided to have a glass of wine, and then a second, and then this
quickly moved on to the idea of drinking herself to sleep again. She had might as well.
She didn’t have cable, because it was too expensive. She subscribed to Netflix,
but couldn’t settle on anything to help her relax. Her usual comfort food of cartoons or
children’s movies was no good: it kept reminding her of when Melanie and her were kids.
Everything else, it seemed, contained some image that invoked, in some way, what she
was afraid of. Simple things you couldn’t account for. She’d be watching an old sitcom,
and an obnoxious boy would build a string puppet that he could start annoying people
with. Or a man would take his belt off and hang it in the closet.
Finally, she turned the television off and started pacing the apartment. She must
have blacked out, because her next memory was of waking up on the couch with the
141
television blaring, on a documentary about totalitarian governments and their infatuation
with the occult. It was talking about PapaDoc Duvalier using necromancy to interrogate
the severed heads of his enemies, then somehow drawing connections between that and
Himmler’s investment in astrology, and arcane religious beliefs espoused by Muammar
Gadaffi, and Pinochet. The idea being that people who wanted to take control of others
were drawn to systems that promised that control. But it seemed to be implying not that
this was mere pathology, but that there was something undergirding all of this nonsense.
That dictators were not just drawn to the occult, but that in some sense totalitarianism
was itself an occult practice, maybe the apotheosis of one.
Deborah had fallen asleep in a sitting position. Her neck and her shoulders hurt,
and when she turned to her left she saw that Melanie was sitting there beside her, smiling
with those deep-sea teeth.
Deborah heard a crackling sound like soap bubbles bursting in a sink; so quiet that
Deborah at first thought might be part of the soundtrack of the show on the television.
Melanie wasn't wearing her shawl, and Deborah could see the mark on Melanie's neck,
deep and wide enough that you could put your thumb in it, bruised in a range of purple
and black and green.
"Yes," Melanie said, "I'm really here."
She turned her head to one side, as if she was thinking. "You're going to think this
was a dream," she said. "How can I prove this to you."
Melanie reached up to her neck and pulled a long string from the depths of her
wound. It was translucent and slick with some type of fluid. Melanie placed it on the edge
of Deborah's wine glass, where it adhered to the surface in an S shape.
142
"Don't touch that," Melanie said. "It's poisonous."
Deborah wasn’t convinced that she wasn't dreaming, but she also didn't care. She
needed to be understood, and if the phantoms in her head were the only thing that could
understand her, she would settle for that.
"I've been trying to get help," she said. She told Melanie about meeting with
Colby and how nice he seemed. How that was just a small step forward, but that's what
life was, her psychiatrist had told her, small steps, one, two, three, trying not to look too
far ahead on the path lest you be horrified by the future you see congealing in front of
you. She was rambling a little, she knew: she did that when she got nervous. Almost
without meaning to, and not really wanting to hear the answer, she asked Melanie about
WAR.
"David is so smart," Melanie said. Deborah was not sure if this was meant to be
an answer, or if Melanie was just on a different train of thought. Deborah remembered
that this would happen sometimes, especially when Mel was feeling depressed: Deborah
would think they were having a conversation, and then halfway through, discover that
there had been no conversing at all. That each of them had been trapped in her own head,
just talking.
Deborah could still hear the crackling noise from before, louder now. She had the
impression that Melanie's neck was getting longer, but she could put this down as an
optical illusion, generated by the flickering light from the television.
"We are all of same mind," Melanie said. She sighed. "David is so good at
explaining this. Listen, the jellyfish is a metaphor, but it's a biological one, whereas we
should be talking in terms of quantums."
143
Melanie's breath smelled rotten: it was the same smell from the restaurant. It
oozed from Melanie's clothes when she moved or gestured.
Melanie pointed at the television. "Light waves and particles. Sound waves. We
aren't just immersed in these things: we're liquefied. The turquoise blue man o' war: it's
not one organism, it's hundreds, working together. Some run the brain, some run the gas
bladder, some run the arms, like strings, that grab prey and drag it into the whole."
Growing up, Deborah and Melanie had always been almost the same height.
Sitting on the couch, they should have been equal to each other, but now Deborah could
see that Melanie was looking down at her, as if Melanie had somehow grown taller.
Deborah considered throwing up.
"Our family was not a dysfunctional organism," Melanie said. "It was just a
dysfunctional organ. Does that make you feel better?"
When Deborah woke up in the morning--bleary eyed--the television was on
again, showing an episode of SpongeBob Squarepants where he tried to catch jellyfish in
a net. There was a long strand of something crusted over and stuck to her wine glass, like
a dried up rice-noodle.
“Screw this,” she said. She picked the wine glass up carefully, by the stem, and
threw it in the garbage. Then she unplugged the television and carried it downstairs to her
car. It was a struggle for her, because she was a small lady, and it was a good-sized
television, purchased in better days. Halfway down the stairs, she stumbled and almost
dropped it. When she got it to her car, she shoved it in the backseat and took it to a
pawnshop she had often driven past, in a strip-mall at Santa Monica and Highland. The
guy there offered her fifty bucks for it. She blanched at this. She had expected more.
144
“Ma’am,” the guy said. He was an older man with hair growing out of his ears, so
much hair that Deborah was surprised he could even hear. “Have you ever even been to a
place like this before?”
She looked at her surroundings: dusty piles of old CDs, DVDs, an electric guitar
with somebody’s name engraved on it. Under the counter was a selection of knives: some
of them huge, some of them with ornate handles that were bejeweled, or looked carved
out of bone. She didn’t know how to answer him. Should she lie?
“Trust me,” he said. “I’m giving you a real nice deal.”

Deborah wasn’t on top of things. She missed an appointment with her therapist,
and got a note in the mail saying that she was being charged anyway. Hundreds of dollars
blown, for no reason. She didn’t even have a TV anymore, and she was still in the hole.
Deborah cried right there, in front of her apartment mailbox. A woman on her
way out of the building, wearing jogging shorts, noticed Deborah there, gave her a look
that might have been one of sympathy but that Deborah assumed was embarrassment or
disgust.
“Oh, fuck you,” Deborah yelled.
The woman kept walking without even looking back.
When Deborah returned to work on Monday, she was back in the classroom with
Brian. It was looking like the teacher in that room might be developing some kind of
chronic illness. People in the teacher’s lounge were whispering that this might be
something that would keep her down for good.
145
The teacher’s lounge was more of a cubby. It had one window that looked out on
the asphalt lot that the school used for a playground. There was a small table, and a
fridge, and a microwave. An older woman said the doctors couldn’t even figure out what
June--the woman Deborah was replacing--had contracted.
“I went to her apartment to see if she needed anything,” she said, “and June’s legs
were all swollen. She could barely get off the couch. She couldn’t wear shoes. She was
wearing socks, but she had cut the sides open so that they would fit around her ankles.”
Deborah felt as if she was the one who was swollen. That afternoon, she passed
out another sheaf of handouts that June had left her, even though the students had stopped
doing them at this point. It seemed that June had been absent often enough, had been
negligent enough, that all the students had just stopped caring. When Deborah demanded
that they be quiet, they all laughed at her, even the ones who had been nice to her before.
She decided that she didn’t give a shit, and sat at the teacher’s desk, started going through
the drawers looking for something to read.
In the bottom drawer on the right, she found a spiral bound notebook with a faux
leather cover. It looked official, so she started flipping through it, thinking that maybe
there would be some semblance of a lesson plan in there, but it was just a class log. Basic
descriptions of what the class had done on certain days, what certain students’ behaviors
had been like, probably kept for personal reference.
Drawn on the last page, taking up a whole sheet of paper, was a version of that
same design she had see carved into the table at the fast-food restaurant. It was in a
different color pen than the rest of the notebook--most of the notebook was in blue, but
146
this was in black. Deborah dropped the notebook like she had just discovered an
enormous spider.
“Miss Ford,” a girl called out.
“Miss Ford,” the girl said. “Brian is going nuts.”
Deborah stood up and saw that Brian was lying on the floor between rows of
desks, completely still, with his eyes closed. Was he having a seizure? Deborah wasn’t
sure how to check for the signs.
She stood over him. “Brian,” she said, “can you understand me?”
“Mah,” Brian said. The noise was strained, but Deborah thought it sounded like
he was calling for his mother.
“Mah,” Brian said. “Lah, mah.”
Deborah watched in horror as a dark stain spread across the front of Brian’s pants:
he was pissing himself. She buzzed the front office on the intercom, told them to contact
security and the nurses office.

Colby finally called her back at the end of the week, told her over the phone that
he had a lot to tell her. She met him again at the coffee shop. It was raining that day.
Since the beginning of the drought, it almost never rained in LA, but when it did, it came
down long and hard, and she was unable to find her umbrella. She turned a couple
garbage bags into a makeshift poncho and rainhat, and on the way to the shop she was
almost run over by someone in a corvette, who hydroplaned through a stop sign.
When she entered the coffee-shop, Colby was already inside, waiting in line
behind a man who was taking forever, asking about the ingredients in all of the pastries.
147
Colby saw her come in, and raised his eyebrows. “Kripes,” he said. “You’re
turning into a bag lady now? Maybe I should lower my rates?”
At first, Deborah was confused about what he meant, and then she remembered
how she was dressed. She ripped the garbage bag off her head in embarrassment.
Colby acted like he was embarrassed, too. “I was only kidding,” he said. “I didn’t
know you’d take it so hard.”
The man in front of them finally decided not to buy any pastries, and left the
counter. Colby waved Deborah forward. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a coffee. I
have a lot to tell you.”
They went to the same table that they sat at before, under the same blurry
photograph of the naked person and the cat. The table was covered in grease and crumbs
from the previous customers, but Colby sat down anyway, without wiping it first. He
seemed tired and distracted, Deborah thought. He wasn’t as well-dressed as the last time
they met, either. He was wearing khaki pants and a wrinkled blazer, that looked like it
had been slept in.
Colby sighed and put his hands on the greasy table. There was a scab on the side
of one of his hands, near the thumb, and he started picking at it.
“I’ll start with the basic stuff,” he said, “the stuff I was able to get just via internet
searches, LexusNexus, stuff like that.
“From what you’ve told me,” Colby said, “it seems like her life the last few years
pretty much corresponds to what you got from checking her Facebook. A few years spent
kicking around at low-income jobs. She lived in a tiny apartment over by MacArthur
park,” he said. “Lot of new immigrants live there.” He shrugged. “Lots of activists."
148
“She was involved in politics.” He said. “Did a lot of protest stuff, but sensible.
You probably know about the more reasonable things--the stuff against police shootings,
the occupy protests.” He shook his head. “I think that stuff is childish, by the way, but it's
sensible.”
Deborah wasn’t sure she was supposed to answer this.
“But then,” Colby said. He stopped picking at his scab, and held one finger up for
dramatic emphasis, leaving flakes of reddish-brown crust on the table. “Then she got into
something weirder.”
He reached for the inside pocket of his blazer, and pulled out a folded up piece of
paper, then smoothed it open on the table. It was a Xerox copy of an old police mugshot:
a white guy who was handsome but mostly non-descript, except that his nose looked
almost completely flat. Just a little smashed nub, with two nostrils at the bottom of it, like
somebody had taken their thumb and pressed it against his face. Almost like some kind of
birth defect.
“Remember how I told you that everyone in WAR killed themselves?” Colby
said. “Well, it wasn’t everyone. This is David Arkwright, last surviving member of
WAR. Maybe your sister’s David? Seems like a big coincidence, the weird graffiti, the
name, all that talk about strings. Don’t you think?”
Colby tapped the photograph with his fingernail.
“David’s parents were higher-ups in WAR. He was maybe one and a half, two
years old when they died. Police found him in the warehouse, after he had been trapped
there with those stinking corpses for days. He didn’t have a proper birth certificate, so
nobody knows his exact age. Nobody knows why they didn’t kill him too.”
149
Melanie thought about Brian and her sister and the kid who jumped under the
desk because he knew the difference between firecrackers and gunshots.
“Sorry,” Colby said. “I can see you’re upset, so I’m sorry. Anyway, the coup de
grace.”
He took another piece of paper out of his pocket, and spread it out flat on the
table, right over the picture of David. This was of a two-story house, pushed back from
the sidewalk by an enormous, overgrown lawn. Caught behind the shadow of an
apartment building on either side, it looked as though it was intentionally hiding.
“That,” Colby said, “is where I think your sister is living. I wrote the address on
the back here.” He flipped the paper over to show her.
“Thank you,” Deborah said. She looked at him, dumbfounded. “What do we do
now?”
“Well,” Colby said, “I don’t want to be mean, but partly that depends on how
much money you have. I mean, I have doctor’s bills. My son, he isn’t as competent as I
would have liked, and he bashed up his car last weekend. I had to help with a down
payment on a new one, just so he could get to work. I’m not trying to be mean, but you
have to understand, I’m in business here.”
Deborah put her hands to her face and realized that she was crying again. She
couldn’t believe it; couldn’t even feel it. It seemed as though she would never stop
crying.
“I thought you said you knew a police officer,” she said. “I thought you said you
knew somebody on the force.”
150
“Listen,” Colby said. “I’ll cut you a deal. I’ll give you a cheaper rate. I can tell
that you’re struggling.”

That night, Deborah dreamed that she was looking at Los Angeles, but that Los
Angeles was sitting at the bottom of the ocean. She was swimming and swimming, and
kept thinking that she was going to drown, but she didn’t. The water was warm and
comfortable, and even though she was frightened, she kept having the feeling that she
shouldn’t be. She opened her eyes, and in the periphery of her vision she thought she saw
her sister, head hanging loose, long wet hair hanging over Melanie's eyes like a shroud.
Something was holding Melanie to the ceiling: a series of translucent cords that gleamed
in the light from the streetlamps outside.
Deborah got up when it was still night-time, and she knew what she wanted to do.
Without even bothering to check the time, she went outside to her car and started driving.
Her phone still had the directions to the chicken restaurant in South Central programmed
into it. She followed them, got there and started searching by car, checking the streets
carefully, looking for the address that Colby had given her.
On the side-streets, the neighborhoods were dark. Her headlights made
overlapping cones in the darkness, like the search-lamps on a submarine. When she found
the address she was looking for, she couldn’t even see the house from the street. She had
to park, and walk up to the fence, trusting that the building would be there. In the
overgrown yard, unseen things rustled in the grass. Something croaked, less like a frog
than a cricket, but really like neither. The house, when she got to it, was damp. The paint
151
on the door, and on the whole exterior wall, was swollen and blistered, like the paint on a
leaky ceiling.
The door was unlocked. She went inside, into a hallway where the floorboards
were covered with a throw-rug that was covered in mold. The ceiling sagged, and seemed
to pulse. She though of the jellyfish from her dream: the stolen heart. She thought of the
enormous eye of a whale; of Geppetto sadly calling after Pinocchio, Pinocchio; of baby
jellyfish wandering on the waves.
Upstairs, there was a smell, and she followed it. Melanie would be there, she
knew.

END

152

Something That Listens

Anthony M. Abboreno

Because I used to work for the chemical company's PR division, I know that the
color of our sunset is almost exactly pantone 448 C: the aura of green on a half-healed
bruise. The company uses it to label deadly chemicals so that children will not eat them.
Coloring our town's sunsets with it was unintentional: we've caught flak, for that.
Before the mutants, that was our biggest problem, PR-wise. Otherwise, people
loved us for our products, and for the jobs we brought to town. And under me, before the
mutants, the PR division had things handled. But now I have been laid off, and I am just
trying my best not to obsess over my wounds: coasting through the end of a backyard
barbecue where the only people who showed up are my wife, Helen, and my next-door
neighbor, Manny.
Instead of feeling good, I have the dull headache of an afternoon spent drinking in
the heat. I look at a plate of uneaten burger patties, and find myself empathizing with the
fat congealing around the burgers' edges.
And then we hear a sound like thunder, although there are no clouds. We realize
that it has come from a dumpster, in back of the apartment building next door. When we
153
go to check what has happened, we see that the lid is up. The edge of the dumpster comes
up to our necks, and we can see that one of the mutants has managed to climb in, and he
can’t climb out.
The mutants are a problem, everywhere in the neighborhood. First all of the
raccoons disappeared, then some cats, and now we have these things instead: crawling
out of sewers, getting into peoples’ attics and making all of the dogs angry. The mutants
are not especially dangerous, but they are a nuisance, and they make you feel bad.
I assume that this one was looking for garbage to eat, but yesterday was garbage
pickup, and so the only thing in there is a vacuum cleaner bag he has already torn open.
The mutant's skin and the bottom of the dumpster are covered in grey crud. It’s really a
lose-lose situation for it.
The mutant is as tall as my waist, with short legs, and arms that almost drag on
the ground, closed out by fingers that are long and thin like pencils. Because he has no
neck, he has to lean backward in order to look up at us. I turn to Helen and Manny.
“It reminds me of your Dad,” Helen says.
I think she means it as an off-color, loving joke, but it hurts, because my Dad
passed away just over a year ago. Still, I try let it go, because I haven't been such a great
spouse lately either, and also she has a point.
I remember visiting my father once, not long before he was put on an oxygen
tank, and hearing a cascade of breaking glass coming from the kitchen. He had dropped a
plate by accident, then, angry with himself, gone into the cupboards and intentionally
dropped several more. The way he had looked when I found him--supporting himself
154
against the counter, less angry at that point than frightened by the way his body and
temper had betrayed him--was not unlike how the mutant looks now.
Without saying anything, Manny takes a swig of beer and chucks his bottle at the
mutant, which is only standing there, swaying back and forth, staring at us. The bottle
bounces off its head and for a second the mutant stops, totally still, its bone colored skin
shining in the light from the street lamps. Then it rolls its dark, ping-pong sized eyes up
and back, like it’s trying to look at its brain.
I turn around and grab Manny by his shirt, and we wait like that for a second,
before Helen reaches out and puts her hand on my arm, then slowly pushes Manny and I
apart.
Manny turns back to the mutant and gives it a look of pure hatred. The mutant is
sitting down now, the unbroken beer bottle lying on the metal behind it, looking back and
forth between us in confusion.
“These pests,” Manny says. “You know, I caught one of them ripping off my car
muffler the other day?"
I haven't had a bad encounter with the mutants, myself. They look creepy, they
can bite, but they're not aggressive. One of our company's damage-control initiatives--
which failed--was helping the city send mutant traps to every house. These were actually
repurposed raccoon traps. They look like wire dog cages, but with a spring-loaded door,
just about big enough for a raccoon to lie down in without feeling too comfortable.
The traps worked. We never had any complaints about people getting hurt, or
about mutants escaping. But nobody wanted to use them. Nobody bothered to send them
back, either: ours is still in the garage, and right now, I go to get it.
155
I think the problem people had was that if you caught a mutant, it meant you had
to look at it. That's something most people don't like to do, and it's pretty easy to avoid if
you're careful. Even though you'll see the occasional mutant scurrying around in daylight,
the mutants are mostly a night-time thing. During the day, you can ignore the occasional
mutant darting across the street, dragging a piece of road-kill into the sewer. At night,
when they tend to linger, you can stay indoors and pretend they aren't there.
But trapping a mutant meant you would really have to confront it in the full light
of morning, contemplate its clammy skin, and hear the moaning noise they sometimes
make, which sounds like someone waking up from a painful dream. And to make things
worse, the city is often overwhelmed with mutant related calls--you might have to live
with your mutant for weeks, before they could send a guy out. Better to just let the
mutants pass in the night, mostly unseen, and try to forget about them in the morning.
When I get to the garage, I have to dig through a mess of junk I have stored in
there--flower pots, buckets of half-dried paint--until I find the mutant trap and haul it
back out of the garage, and into the evening lamplight.
I drop it triumphantly by the dumpster. Somehow, even after just a few months in
storage, the wire cage has collected a layer of sticky grease. I wipe my hands on my
pants.
Helen looks at me as though I am crazy. Manny shakes his head.
"I don't know anybody who's used one of those," Manny says. "What happens
when the city collects them?" He looks at the mutant with hatred. "Are they released back
into the wild? Or do they just get killed in a parking lot?"
"It doesn't matter," I say, "because I'm not calling the city about it."
156

Helen and I keep the mutant in the garage. I have to clear out a lot of floor space,
so that we'll still have room for Helen to park the car, but most of what I have in storage
is only junk intended for nameless, future projects on the house. Looking at the size of
our mortgage payments, though, and comparing them to how long my severance pay is
going to hold out, casting into the future that way seems pointless. So it's cathartic to get
rid of all that. I feel good about it.
I have been worried, lately, that Helen and I are in the endgame of our
relationship. We still love each other, I think, but we are always aggravated--it's the sort
of thing we'd go to counseling for, if money was less of a problem. For me, drinking has
been a big part of my coping mechanism. But for Helen, at least from my perspective,
there are no coping mechanisms. Sometimes she will find a beer can I have left out, and
stomp into whatever room I am sitting in so that she can draw my attention to it, before
throwing it away. Or then there are passive aggressive digs, like that line about my father.
Serious conversations are rare between us. We're getting avoidant. But we do talk
about the mutant. I try to be reasonable about it. I talk about how I did a search on the
internet, and read about how joblessness can lead to depression, but that having a pet can
help. Helen points out that whoever wrote that article was probably imagining a cat, or a
turtle.
"One of my students presented a news article," she said, "about how we don't
even know what the mutants are mutants of. Are they a fungus? Are they rats? His own
theory was that if you dug up the cemeteries, most of the graves would be empty--he saw
one that looked like his grandmother, and now he thinks they are people we knew,
157
reincarnated. Another kid yelled out that they were aliens who had gotten lost. It took me
a while to calm all of them down."
Helen is a grade-school science teacher. I agree that her students are very
thoughtful, but I hold firm, and eventually she agrees to let me keep the mutant for sort of
a trial period.
Because I am unemployed, I can feed the mutant three times a day. There is no
science to it: I just make a little bit extra of whatever I'm having for myself, and I put it
on a plate for him.
Usually, I'm the only one who watches the mutant eat. But one night after dinner,
I convince Helen to come out with me. Eventually, even she admits that the mutant is an
amazing creature. For example, he does not need to shit. I develop the idea that he
perfectly metabolizes everything he eats, and Helen agrees that this makes as much sense
as anything.
After you feed him, he sits down and gets very still, with his mouth drooping
open so you can see his rows of teeth like shards of broken glass. If you get close, you
can feel him giving off a comfortable but intense warmth, like a space heater. The
expression on his face could be anything: beatitude, gratefulness, food coma. After about
half an hour, he belches a small cloud of ash, and his body cools down again.
"Last night," Helen says, “I dreamed that I woke up, and that thing was standing
at the foot of the bed, as big as you. It had broken out of its cage, and it had come into the
house for us."
I try to be conciliatory.
158
"He can't break out," I say, nudging the bars of the cage with my shoe. I'm
bullshitting a little: I have no idea, but the cage seems secure. "And he isn't mean. And
his name is Bud."
Bud was the name of a dog I had when I was a kid, Helen knows, and this seems
to move her.
Another thing Helen has observed: since getting the mutant, I'm not drinking as
much. Being unemployed after losing the job of your dreams is not an easy thing--
especially when your marriage is going poorly--and I had arrived at the point where I
measured my consumption not in drinks, but in bags of recycling. I am down to a bag a
week. Really good.

I get happier, Helen notices. I wake up earlier in the morning and have more
energy. Every night, I make Helen a lunch that she can take to work the next morning. I
get ambitious. I get real bougie about it. Sometimes, I make a nice quinoa salad, with
avocado and chickpeas. Sometimes it’s a lentil soup, with sweet potatoes.
If I mention Bud, Helen gets tense. She doesn't like to talk about him, but she tries
to focus on the positive. She says it seems like cooking gives me a greater sense of
purpose, congratulates me on laying off the beer, tells me that even my skin looks better.
I see her off every morning with a fresh cup of coffee in my hand, and give her a kiss on
the cheek.
Afternoons when I would have been alone, I sit out in the garage with Bud,
listening to music on a portable radio and just talking. I have to admit: Bud’s mental and
biological mysteries probably make it easier for me to relate to him in the way I do. It is
159
nice to love something that always seems content to listen, and never shits. But just
because a feeling comes naturally, it doesn’t make it any less real.

Helen and I have an argument over Bud. It's in the morning, while she is eating
oatmeal, and I am helping get her lunch together, because she slept late. She tells me that
she is still having nightmares.
"I had a dream where I thought I was alone in the house, but then I heard someone
talking in a low voice. I thought it was the television at first, but when I walked into the
living room, the television was turned off, and everything was dark. And then one of
Bud's hands crept out from under the couch, those long fingers clicking against the wood,
and then his head slowly came out. I thought of a bug, molting."
I tell her that I used to have nightmares about the mutants too. Lots of people do.
To live in a town where the night-time thumping on your roof might not be a possum, but
a sharp-toothed thing with flesh like lard: this is not conducive to good sleep.
"He was repeating your name," Helen says.
She tries to change the topic a little. She says she thinks part of the problem has
been that, since I was laid off, I spend too much time at home. She thinks I'd be happier if
I had a project, and tells me about how she ran into Manny in the driveway the other day,
and he said he wanted my help on something he and a friend were working on. He said
my marketing expertise would be appreciated. She says that they're supposed to be over
there working on it this afternoon, and she says I should join them.
“Talking to Bud is not the same as having a conversation,” she says. “It’s not a
human interaction. Bud can’t give you feedback. Bud can’t give you advice.”
160
I think about Bud out there, in the garage, and how even though he can’t talk, I
think he can understand me. I don’t mean this the way a person means it when he says his
dog can understand him. It's more like talking to someone who is asleep and dying, in the
hospital. You sense that beneath the fluttering eyelids, more is registering. It’s a heart and
soul thing.
Still, I feel badly about Helen's dream. I'm not trying to be obstinate, and I'm not
trying to be mean. I tell her that I'll go.

That afternoon I walk over to Manny’s. On the way, I notice that his grass is
overgrown. The flowers in the flowerbeds in front of his windows are wilting, like he
hasn’t been watering them, and some brownish weeds have started to grow between
them. Manny is an IT guy, and he works from home, which means he usually kills a lot
of time by working on his garden. Whatever he and his friend have been working on must
be consuming him.
Manny answers the door with a hammer in one hand, his elbow bent, like he’s just
about to pick it up for a swing. I take a step back, surprised.
“You’re the person we wanted to see,” he says. He doesn’t look like he’s shaved
in a couple of days.
He beckons me inside with the hammer. I have mixed feelings about following
him, but I do. We head down into the basement, where I have only been once before,
when Manny wanted to show me a new Bow Flex machine, which now sits pushed off to
one corner of the basement’s big, central room. The air smells musty, and the floor is
161
covered in gray carpet, which is so worn down in places you can see the nylon mesh
beneath it.
Manny's friend is standing on a blue, plastic tarp that has been spread over the
middle of the floor. He's a massive guy, over six feet tall, and heavy, with a chin that
recedes in layers. He's tightening a bolt at the top of what looks like a huge birdcage, big
enough to make an eight-year old child stand inside of, and for a moment I have the
impression of an ogre in its lair. Scattered around the birdcage, like bones, are tools,
springs and rods, and three curved pieces of metal, like giant ice-cream scoops. And then,
a few things that disrupt the image with their dullness, and bring me back to ground. A
plastic bag full of nuts and screws, and a booklet of paper instructions, like the kind that
comes with cheap furniture.
“That’s Axe,” Manny says, coming down the stairs behind me.
Axe walks across the tarp, being careful not to step on anything, and shakes my
hand. I expect a crusher of a shake, like bankers and business executives are fond of, but
his palms are sweaty, and his grip is flaccid. Afterwards, I wipe my hand on my pants and
hope that he doesn’t notice.
“Manny tells me you’re keeping one of those things in your garage,” Axe says.
His voice is on the higher side of normal, and that seems weird coming out of such a
large body. It’s like watching a movie that’s been dubbed.
Manny laughs. “Come on, Axe,” he says. “The guy likes mutants. He can’t help
it.”
Axe smirks at me, as though he’s already summed me up.
162
Manny and Axe converge back on the birdcage, and Manny waves me over. He
grunts when he bends to pick up the paper instruction booklet and hand it to me. The
booklet is surprisingly professional. Flipping through it, I can see that it really is like the
kind you get with cheap furniture. Step A, Step B, that kind of thing. On some pages,
there’s a cartoon of a happy person doing something you should do (build it on carpet)
juxtaposed with a frowning person doing something you shouldn’t (hit a certain part with
a hammer).
“These are really complicated,” I say.
They are. They call for a lot more tools than any furniture I have ever bought.
You even need your own vise-grip.
Axe shakes his head. “That’s your input,” he says. “Good job. Tell us something
we don’t know.”
I stare back at him. He doesn’t pay any attention, just squats down to adjust
another bolt on the bottom of the cage.
“We’re working on the instructions,” Manny says. “This is just a prototype. We
had it custom made.” He gestures towards Axe with the hammer. “Axe is good with
tools,” he says. “He’s actually a car mechanic. That’s how I met him. This is Axe’s
baby.”
I flip to the last page in the booklet, which shows a cartoon image of the
completed device. When the machine is done, the cage sits in the middle of the three
metal scoops, which are connected to a spring plate in the middle, like a bear trap. Each
of the completed scoops has three spikes attached to it, facing inward. It reminds me of a
huge and deadly flower, petals open to face the day.
163
Underneath that is a picture of the thing baited, with what looks like a ham hock,
and a smiling mutant standing outside of it. And beneath that is a picture of the trap
sprung: the flower petals have closed and the mutant is entirely hidden inside of them,
except for a little trickle of cartoon blood, down the edge, into a gutter cleverly place in
the bottom.
I look at Manny. Something about my expression bothers him.
"It's humane," he says. "Like a mouse trap. Anything that steps into it, we're
talking an instant kill. We've got a spike for the brain, and a spike for the internal organs.
We've even got redundant spikes, just in case something goes wrong. And it's better than
the old trap, because no matter what, you don't have to see anything. You call the city,
they can empty it out, and you can hose it down. It's reusable."
Even though I'm not saying anything, he gets angry.
"Do you see how weird you're being?" he says. He waves in the direction of my
house with his hammer. "While you were over there wasting money feeding one of those
things, mooning over your future, we found an opportunity."
I take a deep breath. It would be a bad idea to escalate this.
"I'm just going to leave," I say.
Manny shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just that I care about you guys. I
think you’re doing Helen and you a disservice. You know? You could get in on this thing
while it’s small. We need a marketing guy.”
Axe looks up from the cage. I know he’s just been pretending to focus on his
work this whole time, while he was actually eavesdropping on our conversation. The
bastard.
164
“Forget it, Manny,” Axe says. “I told you he's a sucker. We’ll have my brother do
the marketing, like we talked about.”
I don’t say anything. Manny offers to show me to the door, and I say that’s okay,
but he does it anyway.
I go back home to find a big fat envelope from the mortgage company, and three
smaller ones from different credit card companies. A bad afternoon, and I can’t think of
anything to do but go check on the mutant. Bud.
The garage has a little window, and I can see dust motes floating in the afternoon
sunlight. I sit in my chair across from Bud's cage. If I look at his face one way, it seems
so smart, but it isn't challenging. If I look another way, he's dumb as a cow, but not
obnoxious. From another yet another angle, each is somehow contained in the other. It's
like being in a room with mirrors on either side, reflections going on indefinitely. You
could fall through it forever, and never think you were losing yourself.
Can he be petted like a dog? Cautiously, I reach my fingers between the bars of
his cage and touch the top of his head. Even though his skin looks translucent, almost
gelatinous, it is firm and warm to the touch. He sticks out his tongue, which is huge and
dark, like a beef liver, and licks the tip of my fingers. The tongue is dry and soft as a baby
blanket.
I stick my fingers in deeper, and feel a little prick, like you get touching a
doorknob in winter, and when I pull my hand back I see that, suddenly, the pinky finger
is gone. There’s no pain; there’s no scar. The finger is just missing. I get a buzz thinking
about it, almost like an orgasm, or a shot of strong booze. It seems revelatory. I start to
feel better.
165
When I look at Bud, he appears satisfied too. He belches, and moans at me.

Helen comes home and goes right to the fridge, cracks open one of my beers, then
takes a long drink. This is a new habit. Then she sees my hand, and beer comes out her
nose. She drops the can, and beer foams out over the tiles.
“Jesus Christ,” she says.
She sits down at the kitchen table, but keeps her eyes on my hand. I stare at my
hand, too, contemplating the wound that isn't a wound. It looks especially weird, I
recognize, because I don’t even have a bandage on it. Why bother? It doesn't bleed.
"I already called the city about Bud," she says. "They told me that they'll send
someone, but it could be a couple weeks."
For a moment, I feel panicked. I imagine ways that I could get Bud out of here,
and help him escape. Then, I think that maybe I can get Helen to call the city off. I sit
down across from her, take a deep breath and try to seem calm.
"Manny has a killing machine next door," I say. I explain everything. How the
prongs and spikes are designed to punch through the mutant's skull. The look of
happiness in Manny’s own face, while he was showing it to me.
The whole time I'm talking, Helen stares at my hand, and I can't tell if she's listen
to me. Then she starts to cry, silently She did it when my father died, even though she
didn’t know him very well. I've never met anyone who could be so sad with so little
noise.
“Everyone is going crazy," I say. "Please, help me out."
166
I reach out and try to take one of her hands in both of mine, but she flinches away
from my missing finger.
She shakes her head. "I can't live with a person who keeps monsters in the
backyard," she says. "Even misunderstood ones."

Those debts are still looming. I haven’t really been looking for a job. I try to keep
to the basics; the things I do know how to do. I still make Helen her lunches every
morning, even though she accepts these now with a kind of weariness, as though she is
benefiting from a process she disagrees with.
During the days, I go out to Bud like I have been, and feed him. After a day or so,
the optimism I got from giving a pinkie finger to him wears off, so I start to think. I don’t
want to upset Helen with any more missing fingers. And besides, I like my fingers. So I
take off the shoe and sock on my right foot, and just stick my toes between the bars of his
cage.
It feels so comforting letting him lick my toes. I haven’t felt this at peace since I
was a little boy, worried to the point of horror about small things, maybe—whether or not
I could get the dinner I want, whether or not I could have a toy I want—I had an easy
childhood, so it was all wants, but none of the big existential concerns. No death. No
taxes. And then, zap. There’s that climax. And when I pull my foot back, sure enough,
the two smallest toes are missing.
I start wearing socks to bed. Big, thick, wool ones. It’s something I already have a
habit of doing, although usually in colder weather, which makes it easier for Helen not to
question me. During the day, I develop a bad limp in one leg—it is surprisingly hard, to
167
walk without toes on one foot. Helen asks me if I’m okay, and I say I’m better than okay,
that I just fell and hurt my ankle, but otherwise I haven’t felt so good in years.
She stares at me, as though she has another question, maybe a lot of them, but she
is afraid to ask. At night, she curls up far over on her side of the bed. At dinner, she
doesn’t eat as much. It kills me, scraping her half-finished plate into the trash. I hate the
waste. But it doesn’t seem to be appropriate taking the food out to Bud, because I know
that’s the center of what she is worrying about.
When you read magazines about relationships--the kind of things Helen keeps in
the bathroom, to flip through while she’s on the toilet--there is a lot of writing about
communication. Well, this is something I think we have never been very good at. I am
not trying to be cruel. I am just trying to weather this.

One morning, after Helen has gone to work, I go out onto the porch and discover
that Manny has finished his trap. It sits on his front lawn with its petals spread out and
waiting. Also, along the edge of the grass, he has some tiny spears propped into the
ground and facing outward, like pike-men defending against charging horses. But these
spears only look about knee-high: they are small enough to be lawn ornaments, and the
metal seems cheap and mass produced.
The big trap is baited with a huge piece of ham, just like the instructions said. In
the warmth of the early afternoon, I can smell the ham on the breeze, sweet and smoky.
It’s true that I have always dealt with moral issues by simply trying to let them be.
Some people would call this avoidance, maybe. But if somebody voices an opinion I find
despicable, or tells a racist joke, my usual response is to nod and leave the room. Maybe
168
I’ll vent about it later, and maybe I won’t. But this attitude might explain why I am able
to stand on my porch for so long, transfixed, knowing what is about to happen but not
doing anything about it until I realize that one of the smaller mutants, toddler-sized, has
made its way across the lawn, and is sniffing at the bars of Manny’s trap.
“Don’t go in there,” I say. I yell it, loud, but I’m not sure if the mutant can
understand me. “Stop!”
The mutant looks at me and moans, and then it turns back to the trap, reaching its
hand forward, one awkward footstep before the other, and I start trying to run to save it.
But I’ve abandoned almost all my toes at this point, and it’s a bitch running without them.
My gait is clomping and flat-footed, almost as clumsy as that of the mutants themselves,
and I am not even at the edge of Manny’s lawn when I see and hear a noise like a steel
door being slammed closed, and I feel the faintest spattering of droplets on my face. The
droplets are mutant blood, which, it turns out, is very dark: at the edge of black, but still
perceptibly red, like cooked beets. The trap is closed: the metal scoops have perfectly fit
together, so that I can't see the mutant inside, and I think about all those redundant spikes.
But still, I think, maybe there's a chance, so I snatch one of the tiny spears off Manny's
lawn and try prying the trap back open.
I put all my strength behind it, using it like a crowbar, until it snaps in two and I
stumble backwards.
One of the broken pieces has cut my hand, across the palm, so now there’s my
own blood coming out, mixing with the mutant blood. I don’t see Manny until he puts his
hand on my shoulder and I lash out at him with the busted spear, tearing a hole in his
shirt. He grabs me by the collar and tries to punch me, but all he does is swing me around
169
and cuff my ear. As I spin I catch a glimpse of Axe, standing back, in Manny’s front
doorway.
“Asshole,” Manny says. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
It’s hard for me to keep my balance with my feet the way they are, and Manny
pushes me to the ground easily. I fall just a couple feet from one of the upright lawn
spears. A close call.
“I’ve always liked you,” Manny says, looking down at me. From this perspective,
he seems like a giant.
“Did you know Helen came over to my house crying yesterday?” he says. “She
doesn’t know how to talk to you.” He takes a deep breath, and looks at the lawn trap,
which is oozing blood. I barely did any kind of work on it with the lawn spear. The metal
is scratched a little bit, maybe. That’s all.
Manny picks up the pieces of the broken spear, which I have dropped, and shakes
them in my face.
“These cost thirty bucks each!” he says.
I think that sounds like a rip-off, and that he needs a better manufacturer, but it’s
not my place to speak. I crawl away from him, then pick myself up slowly and start
walking over to my house.
“If you touch my property again,” Manny says. “I’m calling the cops.”

I stop off at the kitchen to grab a beer, leave a bloody handprint when I brace
myself against the refrigerator door, smear blood all over the handle when I stagger back
170
to open it. Mutant blood. Me-blood. I’m too exhausted to care. I chug a can, open
another, then head out to the garage.
Bud has grown. I don’t know if it’s been happening gradually, and I am only just
now realizing it, or if it somehow happened overnight. But when I initially herded Bud
into the raccoon-trap, he had plenty of space inside. He could almost stand up in it. Now,
he can’t even sit up straight. He’s hunched over in there, with his shoulders pressed
against the wiring so tightly that his skin bubbles out around the metal. It sounds as
though he’s having trouble breathing. I can hear him wheeze.
I do the only thing that makes sense, and open his cage. He stares at me, like a
dog looking at a suspicious stranger, and intuitively I do what you would do with a dog. I
reach my hand out—the one with the bloody palm—and let him sniff it. Then I rub the
top of his head: his skin feels so soft and good against my wound, almost as though I
could push right through it, and he doesn't seem to mind that I get blood on him. And
then his mouth hangs open, like a dog happy with getting pats, and he sticks out his
tongue and licks my palm, very slowly and lovingly. And zap. When I pull my arm back,
my hand is gone, all the way up to the wrist. Just a blank space there. I feel an incredible
stillness. It’s good.
Bud emerges slowly, and then unfolds himself and stretches his arms, like he just
got off a long airplane flight. I am shocked to realize that he is almost as tall as me. For
whatever reason, he stands up straighter than any mutant I have seen before.
We go back into the house. He stops in the kitchen, takes a deep breath, and sighs.
I wait at the opposite end of the room and watch him while he looks at the cabinets, the
countertop that I had been meaning to get replaced, and all of the appliances I have lined
171
up on it—the good Kitchen-Aid mixer, the Jimmy Buffet margarita maker. He is passing
judgment on the superficiality of all this, I think. I have not felt this awkward since I went
away to college, and my Dad came to visit, and I forgot to throw away all of my beer
bottles first.
I think it makes sense to offer him a seat. Awkwardly, with one of my stumps, I
pull out a chair for him. “Would you like to sit down?” I say.
With almost total confidence, Bud crosses the room, and sits. He folds his arms
on the table, leans forward, and closes his eyes. He's got a bright red smear of me across
his forehead, but still, he looks restful, like a person who has examined his place in the
world--all the hooks and prongs of it--and decided that this is acceptable. I sit down to
join him.
END
172

It Kills Your Heart
Anthony M. Abboreno

When Ken pulled off the interstate and drove into the Walmart parking lot, the
first thing he noticed was an enormous mound of trash sitting in the middle of it, at least
twenty feet high. It was full of Styrofoam egg cartons and drywall and electric wires;
cardboard boxes, broken plumbing, and crushed wooden pallets. At first he thought this
was a sign that the store was being remodeled, and that it was probably closed, but he
was tired and he decided to check anyway. He parked his RV well away from the trash,
and when he got to the store, he found that it was indeed open, clean, and fully stocked.
He liked stopping at Walmarts, when he was on the road. The prices were good,
and they allowed--even encouraged--travelers to stay in their parking lots overnight. The
store provided free security, and the travelers provided business. Ken picked out two
organic oranges, and a decent looking apple, while he tried to decide whether to stay in
the store's lot for the night. He was eager to get moving: his visit with his son in LA had
gone poorly, and he wanted to put as much distance between himself and that city as
possible. But he was also tired, and unsure whether it would be safe to continue driving.
It was his conversation with the cashier, finally, that persuaded him to stay. She
was the only person working in checkout.
When he first approached her, she looked bored. She was perched on a stool,
reading a National Enquirer with a cover that promised details on a celebrity's recent
173
brutal suicide. Ken guessed that she was somewhere in her sixties, maybe a little younger
than him. He thought that she was beautiful.
Her name-tag told him that she was Beth. She looked embarrassed at being caught
reading her magazine and closed it up quickly, then tapped it on the counter.
"Can you believe the kind of people who read this?" she said. "Bunch of ghouls."
Ken paused before putting his produce on the belt.
"Personally," he said. "I only read it for the dieting tips."
Beth laughed. "That's why you buy the expensive oranges," she said. "No, I read
it to stay current on what's going on with the world. It's the most reliable news source
there is." She flipped and plopped the magazine down in front of him, to an article about
prominent Scientologists who were running the world. According to the article, they had
a secret torture palace in Hollywood. Or rather, the palace itself wasn't a secret--it even
had a restaurant that you could go eat at, if you wanted to. It was only the fact that they
tortured people there that was a secret.
When Ken smiled, she shook her head. "Pretty foolish," she said. "I know. A
couple weeks ago, they were saying these people were in the Illuminati. Imagine how
much easier the world would be, if there was just a villain looming over us." She
shrugged. "You could shoot him, and get it over with."
Ken felt guilty. He was a liberal voter. "It's all about money," he said. "Who has it
and who doesn't. I used to boycott Walmart, actually. I thought they moved to small cities
and towns and just sucked them dry."
174
Beth smiled at him. "You're not as dumb as you look," she said. "But it's not your
fault. I shop here, too. No. Money gathers at the peak, and most of us just hope for more."
She nodded. "We're all like moths flying towards a lantern."
Ken nodded at this, unsure of how he should respond. He looked over his
shoulder. Several lanes down, in the self-checkout, was the store's only other customer,
who was wearing a beat-up leather jacket with fringe, and had hair that looked like it
hadn't been washed in days. Earlier, Ken had seen that the man was trying to buy several
rolls of duct tape, and a gallon of Spectracide bug spray, but seemed to be having some
trouble with the checkout machine. The man was still struggling with the machine,
swiping his card repeatedly and thumping the reader with the bottom of his fist, but
nobody seemed to be going to help him.
"That's just Louie," Beth said. She touched Ken's shoulder to turn him back
around, and then she leaned forward and pointed at her head. "He's crazy, but you don’t
have to worry about him. Management puts up with him because he actually buys things,
when he has money."
The touch on his shoulder warmed Ken like a shot of booze, spreading down into
his heart and his stomach. He guessed that Beth was probably just a touchy person, and
that she wasn't actually flirting. But the tap on the shoulder was still enough for him to
look at her more closely. Near the edge of her collarbone, Ken could see the very edge of
a tattoo, but not enough to make out what it actually depicted.
Beth finished checking out his produce. "When I said that you weren't as dumb as
you look," she said, "I meant it as a compliment. I meant that I thought you were too
good looking to be smart."
175
Ken could still hear the sound of Louie banging his fist against the card-reader,
across the store.
"Are you staying out in the lot?" Beth said.
It was a fair assumption. She had probably encountered travelers like him before.
She turned away from him, and pointed at three o' clock from where they were
standing. "There's a bar that way," she said. "You could even walk there maybe, if you
don't feel like spending the night alone. I get off work in an hour."
Ken took his groceries. "I'll think about it," he said. "Maybe I'll see you soon."

He was parked far away from the door, and at a glance could see nothing but
intestate or desert or darkness in any direction. Ken knew that he had more than a
hundred miles to go before Phoenix, but otherwise he hadn't been paying much attention
to the road signs, and wasn't sure what the nearest town was. He wondered if there was a
population nearby that the store served, or if it received enough business from people just
passing through.
The heat of the day rose up from the asphalt, but the wind that blew across the
desert was cool. Up above was the cold glow of the parking lot lights. Their posts cast
elongated shadows like insect limbs, and around each of the bulbs hovered a smoke of
flies, of moths, of mosquitoes, and flitting amongst them what looked at first like birds
but what Ken knew to be bats. Some of the bugs were undoubtedly attracted not just by
the lights, but by the mound of trash, which loomed dark and mountainous in the center
of the lot, but to Ken's surprise, did not smell.
176
His RV was actually a modified Sprinter van, the kind UPS uses. The inside felt
bigger than you'd think, with windows on the sides, and space for a bathroom, a small
table, a bed and some cabinets. Once he got inside, he tried to focus on his nightly
routine--filled out a postcard, did some leg-lifts on the bed. Years ago he had decided
that, instead of retiring to a home, he would retire onto the road. He had a permanent
address in Florida, but mostly traveled. It wasn't the safest way for an aging person to
live. It meant he needed to be extra-attentive to routine; to keeping in touch.
Finally, he called his son--whose home he had just left that morning--and
explained that he had reached his destination for the night.
He felt badly about dreading the call as much as he did. His son's wife had a chest
stint, so that when she went in for chemo they could just shoot the chemicals right in. The
doctor's prognosis was good, people were optimistic, but she was tired all the time. On
his recent visit, Ken had learned that his son was unable to keep up with things at home.
The family had four kids. Two cats. There were full bags of trash stacked up next to the
garbage can, and paper plates, crusted with food, piled on almost every surface.
Ken's daughter-in-law was a member of a Baptist congregation. Shortly after
marrying her, Ken's son had found religion too, and the congregants had been helpful
with things up to a point, bringing food when Ken's son and daughter-in-law didn't have
the energy to cook. More food than they could actually eat. By the time Ken visited, the
fridge was stuffed with moldy casserole dishes, and rotting lasagnas had begun to stink
on the kitchen counter. Ken had done what he could to straighten up, but he was not
confident in his son's ability to maintain things. He had not ended the visit on bad terms:
just anxious and sad ones.
177
Now, back in his trailer, talking with his son on the phone, Ken had an idea.
"Maybe," Ken said, "I'll even stay here for a few days."
The idea was spontaneous, but it satisfied him. Driving cross country, Ken had
often passed small towns on the road and wondered what it would be like to pare
everything back and start over--or, at least, to pantomime starting over. Set up life in a
place where the world could feel small.
His son told him that the idea was fine, everything was fine, and they said
goodnight.
Ken decided that, if there was ever a decent night to break from routine, it was
that one. He would go to the bar Beth had suggested, which meant it was important to
take his medication early, so that he didn't forget later.
His medicine cabinet was cluttered with full and empty bottles. His biggest
problem was blood-pressure, but also high-cholesterol, and a case of stable angina that
meant he needed to take nitro-glycerin periodically, for chest pains.
When he reached inside, something feathery brushed up against his hand, and he
snatched it back. Inside the cabinet was an insect, feeling dumbly amidst the forest of
bottles. It was the size of a big cockroach, but shaped wrong, with a body that was flat
like a leaf and a nose that came down into a cruel, hooked beak. It looked like it could
bite. In a panic, he searched for something to smash it with--settling on an old
Newsweek--but when he turned back to kill it, the bug was gone.
He rummaged through the bottles, but couldn't find the bug. The thought of trying
to sleep in the same trailer as that thing sickened him.
178
Then, as though on cue, there was a knock on the door. Ken opened it, and saw
Beth standing there, wearing a tank top and jeans. He could see more of the tattoo--a
shape like a two fingered claw that stretched out from under one of the straps on her shirt.
She was holding a pint of whiskey in a plastic bottle.
"You look upset," she said.
"Just a bug," he said. His throat was dry. As soon as the words were out, he felt
like a coward. He'd been a schoolteacher in the inner city for thirty years. Men like him
weren't supposed to be scared of bugs.
Beth nodded, as though his anxiety was expected. She stepped up into the trailer,
cracked the seal on the whiskey bottle, and handed it to him. He took a slug and passed it
back to her. She drank, too, and started looking around the place.
"This isn't bad," she said. "You know, I always fantasized about something like
this. Being able to fly anywhere I wanted, instead of being stuck here."
She handed the whiskey back to him, and he drank more. "What's stopping you?"
he said.
"Buddy," she said. She stepped forward so that they were almost touching. "Are
you dumb and handsome after all? You met me in Walmart."
Standing close to her made Ken feel good and young, in a way that he hadn't in a
long time. He thought more about her tattoo: how big it was, how far down it went,
whether it looked soft like the skin on her face, or had gotten stretched out by pregnancy
or weight at some point in her life. Ken had come to love these intricacies of aging
bodies. Ken didn't get laid often, but retirees have better sex lives than you might think.
179
He was already drunk when she announced that they should head to the bar. She
had to take him by the hand and guide him across the lot, help him to climb the median to
cross the interstate and scramble up a hill, overgrown with weeds, to where the bar
suddenly loomed. It was a cinder block building, with a blue neon sign that read
"Quenched."
Inside, it was so brightly lit that his eyes hurt. A touch-screen jukebox was
playing nineties country. The space behind the bar was cluttered with junk: plastic
Hawaiian leis, a rubber lobster, a huge inflatable parrot. It was probably supposed to
make the place look lively.
There were only two other patrons. One of them was a man with a face that
looked barely old enough to be out of high school. The other was a woman who looked
old enough to be the man's Mom, but she had her hand on the man's knee, which made
Ken think they might be lovers. That was fine, of course. Ken was nobody to judge--not
that night.
"Two beers," Beth said. She held up her fingers in a peace sign. The bartender
was wearing a Hawaiian shirt--it went with the theme, Ken supposed--and had a cheesy
smile to match.
Ken stepped forward. "I'll pay," he said.
Beth smiled and squeezed him around the shoulder, then kissed him on the cheek.
"Thank you, sweetie," she said.
The bartender handed Ken two beers and winked at him. It gave Ken pause. Was
Beth notorious? At that moment, he didn't care. At his age, he could deal with a case of
the clap, and he'd be dead by the time AIDS had a chance to kill him.
180
Beth introduced him to the other patrons. "This is Robert," she said, waving at the
baby-faced man. "And this is Linda."
They were talking about the drought in Los Angeles, fantasizing that when the
water ran out, the people would stampede East, clawing and biting at each other. The way
Linda described this made Ken envision Durer's woodcut of the four horsemen, trampling
humanity underfoot, and he said so.
Linda shook her head. "Not the four horsemen, exactly" she said. "I don't believe
in the Bible."
Ken downed his beer, rested his arm on the bar and ordered another. The place
was weird, but the beers made him feel good about it anyway. He was trying to drink
himself back to his fantasy about living there, camping out in the Walmart lot and just
walking to the bar every night, getting hammered, walking back. If the parking lot got too
hot, he could go into the store, where there was free air-conditioning. Maybe he'd get to
know Beth better. Maybe, if he got lucky, they'd screw every night, their bodies salty
with desert sweat.
The bartender passed Ken his beer.
"Look out," the bartender said.
He pointed at a spot on the bar, just by where Ken was resting his arm, and Ken
recoiled. Crawling along the bar was a huge, black insect, just like the one he had seen in
his trailer, but this one seemed even bigger.
"Kissing bug," the bartender said.
181
For some reason, none of them made a move to kill it. When it got close to
Linda's beer, she lifted the bottle away from the bar so that the bug could keep walking.
Robert did the same.
"Those things can carry chagas disease," Robert said. He thumped his chest.
"Kills your heart."
Linda nodded. "You should see one of them eat," she said. She pointed at the
insect, which had almost reached the end of the bar. "See how they're flat like that? The
whole back end of their body is like a balloon. They'll just walk right up to you and start
sucking, and that body swells up, turns round." She sounded excited by this.
She leaned towards him. "They like to go for your while you sleep," she said.
"They like your face. That's why they call them kissing bugs."
Robert laughed: it was a squealing, baby laugh, Ken thought, to go with his baby
face.
"Oh," Robert said. "Leave him alone."
As if to reassure Ken, Beth put her arm around his shoulder and kissed him long
and hard. She guided his free hand to the center of her back. As he clutched at her tank
top, one of the straps moved, giving him a better look at the tattoo near her collarbone. It
depicted the forelimb of a massive insect. If it had a body to go with it, he realized, the
tattoo must stretch all the way down her chest, down to her legs.
"Don't let them bother you," Beth said. Nobody seemed surprised by her sudden
display of affection. The bartender just shook his head.
Ken's mouth was dry again. He sipped his beer. Beth took his free hand and
guided it around her waist, and he slowly reaffirmed his decision to stick around.
182
He was startled when the door behind him swung open. It was Louie, the crazy
person from the self-checkout.
"Speak of the devil," the bartender said. "Louie, these people were just talking
about your favorite bugs."
Louie didn't laugh, didn't comment, just sat down in the far corner and stared at
Ken. Without asking what Louie wanted, the bartender poured a tumbler full of whiskey,
then took it back to him. After setting the whiskey down in front of Louie, the bartender
bent over and started whispering something to him. Even though Ken couldn't overhear
the bartender's words, the discussion seemed heated.
Robert turned to Ken. "Crazy people like Louie shouldn't drink," he said. "That's
what I read online. If you're feeling crazy, drinking might make you feel better for a little
while, but over time it just makes everything worse and worse." He pointed his finger
down and spun it, as though he were making a cyclone in a pool of water. "You end up
flushing yourself like a toilet bowl."
Ken noticed that the bug had vanished from the end of the bar. "I saw one of them
in my trailer," he said.
"Be careful you don't get an infestation," Robert said. "Usually, you only get a lot
of them if there's an animal nest nearby. Something living under the floorboards or under
the foundation, maybe, like a pack rat. You're supposed to go through and make sure all
the cracks and crevices are sealed, but it's a pain in the ass." His eyes widened. "They can
get in through a crack the width of a penny!"
The bartender got back from his conversation with Louie. Apparently, he had
overheard what Robert was saying.
183
"I don't know why we get so many around here," he said. He said this almost
sarcastically, the way you might talk about a problem everyone knew how to fix, but
nobody wanted to solve.
Linda made a choking sound, as though she was trying to hold back a laugh. She
smiled tightly, and shook her head.
"No ideas," she said. "No ideas at all." She scratched at her upper arm, and for a
moment, Ken thought he saw a bug perched there, on Linda's bare flesh. But he quickly
realized that this was an illusion--what he actually saw was a tattoo, similar to Beth's but
much smaller, a life-sized image of one of the bugs.
Through the haze, he tried piecing things together. There was something going on
that he was missing, something important enough that everyone seemed to know it but
him. For the first time, it occurred to him that Beth might be looking to fuck him for cash.
"This is a whorehouse," Ken said. He was angry about it at first, but when he saw
everybody staring at him, he felt embarrassed, and apologized.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That's fine. I just didn't know."
Everybody laughed at him, even Beth.
"Baby," she said. "This isn't a whorehouse. I don't want your money."
The alcohol buzz Ken had been trying to cultivate had finally turned into
depression. Ken thought of his son and his daughter-in-law and the comfortable life he'd
only too briefly had--thirty years, but still too brief--in a nice home when his wife was
alive and he could wake up next to her and read the paper and drink his coffee and feel
comforted and loved, and he wanted to cry.
"The hell with this," he said.
184
He moved towards the door. As he reached for the handle, he noticed another one
of the bugs, crawling across the door at eye level. The bright overhead light cast a
shadow from it, making it look huge, its movements spastic. Carefully, he reached out
and took the door handle with his index finger, and stepped out into the cool night air.
"Baby," Beth said, but not too loud. "Wait."

It took time for Ken's eyes to adjust from the brightness of the bar to the darkness
outside, and so for a few moments all he could see was the Walmart's parking lot,
surprisingly far away and at the base of the hill. A constellation of white lights, and
amongst them an enormous fire, blazing in red and orange and even gouts of green and
blue, as different materials caught flame. Thick black smoke billowed out and up,
endlessly, all the way to the sky in a column.
Beth touched his shoulder and he shrugged her off, and kept walking. She
followed him. Dimly, he registered the sounds of her footsteps crunching down the slope
to the interstate, tracking across the road. He noticed that his RV was missing.
"What did you do?" he said. But without waiting for an answer, he kept walking
towards the flames. He stopped when the heat on his face became too much to bear, when
his eyes began to sting from the fumes. The stench of burning plastic and oil was
incredible. In a broad circle around the fire, the tar of the parking lot was melting and
bubbling.
A bug landed on his cheek and he slapped at it. His fingers came away red: it
must have been a blood-sucker. He saw more bugs coming--all kinds--moths, flies,
cockroaches, things he could not name and even one or two of the kissing bugs, flying
185
towards the light. Many of them hovered at a safe distance, forming a bubble of chitin.
Others darted towards the flames, suddenly ignited like match-heads, and then went out.
"Where is my home?" Ken said. He was talking specifically about his RV, but he
also meant it more generally than that. Still, his words lacked urgency. He wondered if he
was in shock.
For months after his wife had died, he had tried to keep everything as it was, to
staunch the wound with belongings. Until finally the clutter had become so unbearable
that he had decided it would be better to just bleed out, to get rid of everything and sell it,
give most of the money to his son who needed it, buy the RV with the rest and start over.
He was an enormous fan of starting over.
Beth put her hand on his shoulder.
"You can see how pretty this is," she said, "You know that good luck has to come
from somewhere. We've seen hard times, but now we're content. Some day, we'll
flourish."
She gestured at the cloud of insects. "The lower creatures go back millions of
years. When we talk about ancestors, we only mean the ones we can understand most
easily: the rats burrowing through leaves in old forests. But our feelings go all the way
back to the sludge. Those feelings still fit with how we live now. In fact, they fit better
than ever. We're going back to basics. We're digging up old gods for new times, and
we've found that they answer our prayers."
There was joy in her face. Ken could not tell whether she was speaking
extemporaneously, or quoting from a book.
186
"What you would call trash," she said, "the lower creatures adore. We burn this as
an offering. There is a glorious future in these flames of industry."
When Ken had confronted his son about the mess that his grandchildren and
daughter-in-law were living in, his son had cried, talked about how his own depression
meds weren't working and the doctors were trying to switch him to new ones, how he was
doing the best he could and he knew the mess wasn't good for his wife, who had the stint,
and was vulnerable to infections. Ken remembered his own wife's--his son's mother's--
illness, and the crush of trying to be a nurse, day in and day out. His knees had hurt, his
knuckles had hurt, even when he was able to take enough Xanax or drink enough booze
to quell the anxiety, the pain in his joints had kept him awake at night. But he didn't have
the mental problems his son had: not to that degree. Ken's wife had been crushed by
them, would spend whole days not leaving bed, would periodically collapse from the
weight of things and lie on the floor, sobbing. She would hallucinate: she had once
confessed to Ken that she often heard a voice whispering to her across her pillow, telling
her that she should die. The voice's breath had been hot and humid, and sometimes it had
sounded like a man and sometimes like a woman, but it had always sounded generic and
detached, like a radio broadcaster trying to be understood by as many people as possible.
Something tickled Ken's hand, and he looked down to see that one of the insects,
a kissing bug, had landed on him, and was biting him near the wrist. Beth saw it too.
"It's beautiful," she said. "Do you agree?"
As if in response to her voice, the insect fluttered its wings, their fibers iridescent
in the blazing light, and Ken watched as its abdomen grew and grew: swelling with
blood, with life, and with happiness.
187
Light Is A Rare Thing

Jo had been seeing ghosts lately, with increasing frequency, and this frightened
her. They appeared as quick blurps from her previous life--now superimposed onto LA's
Skid Row--which came out only after the sun went down. The ghosts were rarely of
people who had died, but usually of people who were so absent from her life, as to be a
kind of death. She would think she saw somebody she knew. Usually, it was an old
friend, or just an acquaintance. The person would duck around a corner, and she would
run after them, but find that they had vanished, leaving her crushed by the loss.
It reminded her of the way she had been, years ago, when things she read in the
news or saw in her life seemed to stitch together into an ominous and viral presence. She
had written about it on the internet, even self-published a book about it called "A History
of the Secret War." And other people had responded: yes, this makes sense to us; we see
it too. And she wasn't sure whether they were noticing the same thing as her because they
really were witnesses to the same awful shape, or whether she was just a vector of
disease.
She'd been married, then, to a man named Khalil, and had a son named Brian, and
had finally left because she was a threat to them herself, or maybe because her presence
was drawing attention to them from the awful things she wrote about. But now she was
was here, relatively stable. It was true that she lived on the street, and that she was
unemployed. But she was working on those things. She had been to therapy. There was
even a clinic that she could visit downtown, and no, the pills they prescribed were hardly
cutting edge, they made her feel groggy and half-awake, most of the time, but they took
188
the edge off. And if she took care of herself--at least as best as she could--this kind of
thing wasn't supposed to happen. Not as much.
Some of the ghosts were extremely elaborate, like watching a play. Jo once
thought she saw two people fishing off a 110 overpass, their lines drifting and
disappearing into the street below, and had been sure that the people she saw were in fact
herself, and a man named Darius, who she still knew, but no longer loved in the way she
had for a short time, after her husband Khalil had left her. Late at night, she and Darius
would go to the Santa Monica pier together and fish using chopped-up squid. They had
friends there--a guy named Tomas who shared soda with them; Emanuel, who always
brought his pitbull--but most people who fished seemed to like the stillness, and so they
didn't talk too much. Jo remembered the vast darkness of the ocean; how imagining the
depths of it had filled her with a kind ecstasy, like standing on a tall balcony and guessing
what it would be like to throw herself off.
Was Skid Row beginning to engulf her, the way that the ocean had threatened to?
Many of the other residents she had spoken to were crushed by mental illness; paranoia;
mania or depression. A man had recently told her that government agents were trying to
drive him crazy with grief, by spraying the odor of his mother's perfume around him
while he slept. A woman had recently explained that she was being fed upon every night
by Dracula himself, who had shipped his coffin downtown in a truck filled with designer
beer and French bulldogs. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and gentrification appealed
to Dracula, and so now he was doing his part in driving out the people who lived there
and make way for upscale apartments and chi-chi boutiques.

189
The dangerous thing about hearing stories like this was the way they took hold of
her. From one angle, she knew they were delusions, but from another they rang with
absolute truth, like hearing an idea that has been a part of you for years, but which you
have never been able to articulate. The ocean was like this, too. Sometimes Jo had seen
things taken from it and felt as though they were embodiments of her own afflictions,
pulled from her own skull. Once, she saw a man cut into a swollen fish only to have
hundreds of eggs spill out over his hands, like a slimy foam, and Darius had made a joke
about the price of caviar. Another time, she had caught a fish that seemed to have two
tails. Darius had pulled one of the tails loose and showed her that it was actually a
parasite: a lamprey with a mouth like a bloody wound, that had latched onto the side of
the fish and fed upon it.
Josephine imagined Skid Row as an abyss swimming with portents. Sometimes
the residents would call one up, whether they wanted to or not.

What finally took the legs out from under her was seeing the ghost of her son,
Brian, outside the train-station at Seventh and Metro. It was getting late, and she was
standing near the crowds of people emerging from the escalator into the cold glow of the
streetlamps, when she had seen him. He looked the way he had as a little boy, running
between peoples' legs. Then, he had turned and stared her in the face, and Jo had seen that
yes, it was indeed Brian, but his look was all wrong. His skin was mottled and crushed,
like a bruise, and his eyes were so dark as to be invisible. It was almost as if that part of
Brian's face had been cut out--like the eye-holes on a paper mask--and Jo imagined that
there had been a coldness and a smell wafting off of Brian, like freezer-burned meat.
190
She fled as quickly as she could without running, and made it two blocks before
she had started crying, right there on the crowded sidewalk, while she bulled past
sidewalk cafes and herds of polished up people coming out of bars. She didn't like
drawing attention to herself: when people stared, it made her feel like her old craziness
was returning. So crying in front of those night-time crowds, shuffling around in their
evening dress to buy expensive macaroons and fifteen dollar cocktails and eat outside at
the sidewalk cafes that were sprouting up like fungus in parts of the city that only until
recently had been abandoned to Skid Row, marked as exclusive property of the indigent
as long as the city didn't feel like fucking with them, was serious business.
Finally, she found a doorway for a shop that was closed for the night, in a quieter
part of the street, and it didn't smell like piss. So she sat down there and gave in to it,
really let herself confront--in a way she usually didn't--how things had ended. Khalil had
surprised her in the kitchen and she had turned on him with a knife, slashed his hand open
before she had realized it was just him and sat down, dumbstruck and apologizing. She
had helped him bandage his hand and clean the blood off the floor--the smell of pinesol
in the bucket making the moment feel more domestic and stable than it deserved. And
then she had gone into the living room and seen Brian sitting on the couch watching
television, not oblivious to what was happening--he must have heard his father scream,
he must have heard the way Jo had cried and apologized--but seemingly indifferent. She
didn't want to have that effect on her kid, and not long after, she had decided to leave.
She stayed like that she didn't know how long, until she felt a damp, warming
licking on her cheek, taking away her tears, and she looked up to see Rhadagast and
Charlie, her friend Lauren's two labradors, and a little behind them Lauren herself,
191
seeming worried. Lauren had two therapy dogs from her life before: a pair of labradors,
one chocolate, the other gold, who both wore Christmas-themed collars that were red and
decorated with green pine trees. Jo liked the dogs; always stopped to pet them and let
them sniff her hands. They were trained anxiety support animals, and so each possessed a
deep stillness. They wagged their tails when Josephine appeared, and nudged their
muzzles into her palms looking for pats, but neither of them twitched or fidgeted for
attention the ways dogs usually do.
Jo reached up and touched the chocolate lab Rhadagast's nose. She rubbed him
behind his ears, and he wagged his tail. Staring into his eyes was like looking at the
surface of a calm lake. Just seeing him made you feel better. He was a good dog.
"Can I get you anything?" Lauren said. "A candy-bar or something."
Lauren was not a person who could make offers frivolously. Everything she
owned, she carried in a bulging duffel-bag over her shoulder, and that included bowls and
food for her dogs.
"It's fine," Jo said. She stood up, then poked her head out of the doorway and
looked warily up the street. "Did you see anybody following me?"
"Nobody," Lauren said. She reached down and started petting Rhadagast. It was
what she did whenever she got nervous, and she was nervous a lot. "It sounds like you're
getting paranoid, too."
"Too," Jo said. "Too. What is this, too?"
"I'm going to Rite-Aid to buy dog food," Lauren said. "Walk with me."
They cut down streets where the bottom floors were closed down, but higher up,
you could see lights on and reams of cloth in old offices where workers sewed clothing
192
for cheap wages. They walked down one of the reworked, gentrified streets, where
French bulldogs strained at their owners' leashes to snarl at Charlie and Fritz, and the
sidewalks were so crowded that Lauren had to hold her duffel-bag close to her body with
one arm, so that it would not bump up against anyone. They saw a cop car, cruising like a
shark, with a shotgun hanging out the open, passenger-side window, and they walked
down a block where everything seemed decrepit except for some kind of art-gallery,
where mannequins the size of children enacted the stages of life: birth, work, watching
television, and death.
Periodically, throughout all of this, spray-painted like a kid's tag, Jo saw the
image of a ghost. Small, on the side of a fire-hydrant, large, on a closed store's metal
shutter. It had a triangular tail and a gaping mouth and two hands like hooks, and it made
her wonder how many other people downtown had been seeing ghosts. Jo thought about
this, while she listened to Lauren's dream.
"I was little again," Lauren said, " and my parents told me they were leaving
because I never took out the garbage. Before my parents left, they were throwing out
everything in the house, dumping all our things into huge bags and dragging them around
behind them, like dinosaur tails. It was too scary to watch, so I hid in the corner, listening
to the sounds of them scraping and bumping.
"And then I heard a sound like somebody knocking on a door, and when I looked
up, I saw that they had finished moving out, but there was somebody knocking to be let
in. Either they had changed their minds, and were coming back, or there was somebody
else coming to take their place. I shouted out, 'who is it?' But it wasn't a person waiting
out there at all. It was something howling. And I woke up to see that it was Charlie that
193
was howling, it was just a dream, but I could still smell that smell. The good smell, and
the garbage smell, one after the other."
They stopped, finally outside the Rite-Aid, light coming from the doors like
beacons on an otherwise desolate street. Lauren was going to have Jo watch the dogs
while she went inside.
Jo scratched Charlie behind the ears. The chocolate lab, Rhadagast, stared at her
and waited patiently for his turn.
"Sniff Charlie's breath," Lauren said.
Jo got a noseful. It was fresh for dog's breath, like clean water from a garden hose.
Lauren prodded Charlie in the side with her fingers. "At first, I thought maybe the
smell was real. That he was sick or something, and it was coming out of him. But he
doesn't look sick. If you touch him, he doesn't yell, like he's in pain."
Lauren swung her duffel bag around her shoulder so that it was in front of her,
unzipped it, and took out a book to show Josephine.
"Then I saw this," she said.
The book was folio sized, with a gold-embossed cover, and glossy pages. It
reminded her of a high-school yearbook, or some of the Time Life books that her parents
used to get in the mail. The title on the front cover read "Zelig's Book of Omens."
Lauren took it from her, and flipped it open. "Look inside," she said. "No ISBN. I
found it in the public library, in the local history section, but it wasn’t in the database."
She looked at Jo seriously. "I wasn't there to get history books. I go there for fantasy
novels, you know, but I was just wandering around after. Browsing. So this was
coincidence. Too much coincidence maybe."
194
The book had pictures. Lauren showed Jo one of the full page illustrations, drawn
in charcoal. The image was pure kitsch: some kind of brick-walled cellar, and lurking in
the shadows, a thing. But the amateurishness was so extreme as to be nauseating. The
perspective of the bricks was all off, the contrasts were too sharp, the thing in the corner
could have been a smashed body or a mound of rags or an enormous slab of butchered
meat.
Lauren took the book away from Jo again and read out loud.
"Of all the creatures of this world and others," she said, "few are as dismal as the
kopfgeist, and yet, there are people who have willfully taken on its mantle. A kopfgeist is
created from a life of extreme avarice, and dedicates itself to living off the substance of
others--love, dreams, hopes, are all fodder for the kopfgeist. Fortunately, most kopfgeists
spend their existence trapped in graves, underground, withering eternally."
Lauren slapped the book shut, then twitched her head to the left, quickly, as
though she had just caught somebody reading over her shoulder. Jo followed her gaze to
the building across the street. Originally, probably almost a hundred years ago, the
building must have been a luxury hotel. It had an enormous lobby dominated by a desk
that might once have been intended for guests checking in, but was now manned by a
security guard, and above the double-doors the name "Arkwright" had been cast in
concrete. Three stories up was a stone cornice with stars carved into it, like decorative
tiles. Jo knew that for at least a decade, while downtown lay fallow, the building had
been a kind of halfway house, until about a year ago, when the owners had managed to
evict everyone and convert it into luxury apartments. In the process, they had sandblasted
the façade, refinished it, and had all the windows replaced with fancy new ones that had
195
bright white, plastic frames. Even though it was old architecture, the building looked new
and tacky, like a Disneyland facscimile of grandeur.
Posted on the inside of one of the entrance's glass double-doors was a sign that
read "Returning To a Bright Future: Walter Arkwright Realtors." The acronym for this
would be WAR, Jo recognized. At the back of her skull, something enormous and
mildewed loomed. The title of her old book, and her old website. Prophecies of doom. It
was that kind of obsession with coincidence that had gotten her into trouble in the first
place, and she tried to push it away.
Lauren was quiet, hunched over, petting Rhadagast and Charlie alternately,
rubbing them under their Christmas collars. Jo had helped Lauren ride out panic attacks
in the past; knew that it was important for Lauren to have company so that Lauren
wouldn't start drinking.
"I keep seeing things," Lauren said. She stood up and lifted her shirt, exposing her
stomach. "Look here."
On her stomach was a circular bruise, about the size of a hand. Along the edges
were tiny sores, around which the skin had raised into feverish bumps, like spider bites.
Unreasonably, it made Jo think of the lamprey, from years ago, suctioned onto the side of
a living fish.
"Last week," Lauren said, "a woman showed me a mark just like this. I'd never
met her before. She told me she'd just come to Skid Row, and that she had gotten this
mark just after. She thought I might know something about it, whether there was
somebody doing this to people, or there was something going around. I haven't seen her
since."
196
Josephine shook her head. "I got bug bites once," she said, "from sleeping on an
old mattress."
She decided not to mention her own hallucinations. It was too easy for sick people
to feed into each others' thoughts, validating and building upon them until their
symptoms formed an unstoppable momentum. As a favor, she agreed to watch the dogs
while Lauren went inside.
It was a simple kindness, and she was pleased to do it. The night was warm, but
because it was a weeknight, pedestrian traffic was relatively subdued. She nodded at the
one person who walked past--a man in a business suit, although what errand he would be
on at this hour, Jo couldn't imagine. At the far end of the block, a group of twenty-
somethings in fashionable clothes were clustered, probably trying to decide what bar they
were going to head to next. Their laughter echoed up the block.
Out of the corner of her eye, where a person's night vision is best, Jo thought she
glimpsed something moving in the dark, near the corner of the Arkwright building. It was
so pale that it almost seemed to glow, a glistening shape the size of a person, but when
she turned to face it, it was already gone. The wind picked up, surprisingly cool and
damp in the dry warmth of the Los Angeles night, and for a moment Jo thought she
smelled--of all things--Pine-Sol.
The rest happened quickly. One of the leashes pulled tight, and she gripped it as
firmly as she could, and then there was a flash of light-colored fur as Charlie the sweet
golden lab snarled and bit into her hand, his bare teeth flashing and sinking into her flesh,
a surprising gout of red. She screamed and let the leash go, and Charlie took off running,
and Jo called after him, knowing that Charlie usually responded to his name. But this
197
time he ignored her and kept running. Rhadagast, on the other hand, wouldn't budge. That
was his training, Jo realized: he wasn't supposed to move until Lauren came back.
Lauren must have heard the sound, because she came out of the store, clutching a
sack of dog food under one arm, and holding a paper bag with two chew bones sticking
out of it in the other.
"Where's Charlie?" she said.
Jo handed her Rhadagast's leash and ran down the street, but Charlie was already
gone. Around the corner was a gastro-pub, where people at sidewalk tables were drinking
nice beers and eating expensive food. The smell of it reminded Jo of how long it had been
since she had eaten; how that wasn't the problem she needed to address right then. She
went up to diners and shouted out: had anyone seen a dog go that way. Some people
leaned back, as though her very aura repulsed them. Others ignored her. Finally, a woman
in a black dress politely told her that, no, she hadn't seen a dog anywhere.
Jo couldn't go back. She kept looking, even though things seemed hopeless,
turning from face to face, trying to make eye contact with someone who could help. She
squeezed her wounded hand with the other: her blood was dripping out onto the sidewalk,
and people were cutting her a wide berth.
In the muddle, she caught a glimpse of something pale, like the belly of a fish. For
a moment, she thought it was the face of her ex-husband Khalil, with his skin looking
drained and sick, and that he was smiling, with all his teeth. Khalil was a handsome man
but he had stupid gap-teeth, Alfred E. Newman teeth, that he wasn't at all sensitive about
showing. But why the fuck would he be downtown, looking for her? The man turned his
back on her, and she touched him on the shoulder to confront him.
198
The man who turned around was not her husband, of course. She had been
mistaken about his complexion, too, which was fashionably unhealthy, but not so pale,
his lips and cheeks an ordinary color instead of scarlet red. He was about the same age as
her husband, though. The same build.
He recoiled from her in disgust. "Sorry," he said. "I don't have any money."
"That's not what I wanted to ask," Jo said. For a moment, embarrassment and
anger overwhelmed her. She thought about digging her nails into the soft part at the
bottom of his throat.
Finally, Jo had to admit defeat. She walked back to the Rite-Aid, where Lauren
was sitting on the sidewalk, crying, the dog food and two dog bones at her feet, one arm
around Rhadagast.
"He's gone," Lauren said. "Oh my god, Charlie was my baby, and now he's gone."

Josephine didn't think they would be able to find anything, unless they got help.
So, first she used her last few dollars to buy bandages and iodine at the Rite-Aid, fixed up
her hand as best as she could, and then she brought Lauren with her to the block where
she lived. It was night-time, so people had already set up their tents. The block was
covered in them--bubbles of nylon in red and blue and yellow that stood out against the
grey concrete. Other people had created makeshift shelters as best they could, by draping
blankets over shoppings carts, suitcases and backpack frames--whatever they could use to
make some semblance of walls or a ceiling, and to create a barricade, however
superficial, between themselves and the city.
199
Months ago, the block had been noisier. Even late at night, people would sit out in
front of their campsites, sharing drinks and food. But over the last few weeks, a hush had
fallen over things, and her neighbors had gradually withdrawn or moved on. Jo knew who
owned what, could tell an individual by his piles of belongings, and at least half the
accoutrements on the block were new to her. It had been a healthy community at one
point, or she had thought of it as one, and then piece by piece it had gone sour. It had
been a gradual enough change that she hadn't noticed or thought about it, until now. A
dark depression crept over her. Her injured hand throbbed.
At the far end of the block, three people had set up aluminum folding chairs in
front of a metal camp-stove. They were cooking hotdogs and Ranch brand beans in a
dented frying pan, and the smell reminded Jo of how little she had eaten that day.
Tonight, this tiny clutch seemed like the last vestige of the way the block used to
be, glowing warm and blue from the light of the propane fire.
One of the three guys was Jo's friend Darius, who had been living in Skid Row
since before even her. The other two were just a couple of passers through--one looked
like he hadn't even been homeless for too long: his skin hadn't been burned to the dark
color of amber that most white people got living on the streets of Los Angeles, and he
still looked young. Real poverty aged people fast. The other was hard to place: you could
tell he'd been poor for a long time, because he was missing a couple teeth--Medicare paid
for pulling; not drilling and filling--but that didn't tell her much about where he was from,
or where he'd been.
Darius knew Lauren too, and when he saw her and Rhadagast he stood up and
gave her a hug. When he was done with that, he turned to Jo, and they looked at each
200
other for a long moment, trying to decide what would be appropriate. There was a lot of
good in Darius. He was generous, he was confident, he owned a tent for privacy, and he
was a handsome man who would be even handsomer if he just combed his damn hair. It
was sadness that had made Jo decide to break up with him, she supposed. Plus, he drank,
and Jo didn't like to be around that kind of thing anymore.
"God," he said. "You look sad." He looked at Rhadagast, and then noticed
Josephine's hand. "Something happened to Charlie," he said.
He went to the shopping cart where he kept most of his belongings, and got out an
old plastic milk crate, for Josephine to sit on, and then offered Lauren his chair. There
were a couple seconds of awkward exchange, and then finally the young guy said he
didn't care, he had a blanket that he liked sitting on, and Darius and Lauren could both
have chairs.
These were good things, Jo thought, these exchanges. She was warming to the
young guy already. He introduced himself to her as Zack. The other guy offered his hand
for her to shake, but said his name quietly so that she had to ask him to repeat it. He was
Cesar.
"We've got a lot of food here," Darius said. "Plenty to share, courtesy of Zack."
Zack shrugged. "I found a sale on Bar-S hot dogs and Ranch beans at a dollar
store up in Hollywood," he said. "I used to eat Ranch beans as a kid, so I really like them.
They're okay."
"He even bought paper plates," Darius said.
Even though she had to be as hungry as they were, Lauren wouldn't eat. Josephine
wanted to help her, but she had to clean her plate first. She hadn't eaten all day, and the
201
stress of the dog bite and losing Charlie had pushed her over the edge: the beans were
delicious. Even though she ate them quickly, she tasted every bite--the sweet fattiness of
the hot-dogs cut through with the sharp, tinny taste of the beans. It was better than being
stoned, Jo thought. She was high on life.
Then Lauren started crying again, and it was time, Jo thought, to get back to
business. She helped Lauren explain the story of what happened. It wasn't easy, because
Jo felt guilty about letting Charlie go, but Darius understood that Jo was a reliable person,
and he helped explain this to the others: how strange it was that Charlie had acted the
way he had; how none of this was Jo's fault, but something else.
Cesar said something quietly, and Jo had to ask him to speak up.
"Sorry," he said. "You were in front of the Arkwright building." He looked at
Darius. "I used to live there, about fifteen years ago."
Darius nodded. "Cesar's been off the row for a long time, but now he's back," he
said. He drew a circle in the air with his finger. "The eternal recurrence."
Cesar shook his head. "If you think that place is weird from the outside," he said,
"you should see it from the inside. The floors are numbered funny. Some floors are
marked as floors, and some are marked as half-floors. The building is seven stories, but
technically, there's only four floors, with an elevator on one side, and a circular staircase
in the middle. At the top of those circular stairs is a skylight." He shrugged. "The front
door of each apartment opens out onto the staircase, so in theory, each of us should have
been stepping out every morning into beautiful light. But at the time, the skylight's glass
was covered in soot; yellow crud accumulated from decades of pollution. So everything
just looked like spoiled food.
202
"Somebody told me that the weird design was meant to seem futuristic," he said,
"at least, back at the turn of the century, it was. The guy who commissioned it, William
Arkwright, wanted it to look like some kind of a ship. Not a boat, obviously, although
that's where the idea for the half-floors came from. But some kind of time-ship, or a
space-ship." Cesar pointed up at the sky, where the only thing visible was the looming
contours of the rooftops, because most stars were blotted out. "Will there be ships that
travel through outer-space someday? Or back and forth through time? I guess they're as
likely to look like that building as anything.
"One thing I can tell you for sure is that something about the way that building
was designed was faulty, or else it was just badly maintained. Because it always felt
damp in there, and the hallways always stank--kind of like mildew, kind of like
something else funny, you couldn't place."
He took another forkful of beans, and talked around it. "You could complain," he
said, "but you know landlords. And the smell wasn't the worst of it: it was just what you
could put your finger on. People were sad there. They went a little crazy. Some people
thought it was just a bad building, they thought the central staircase was funneling down
bad vibes, or something like that, so they moved out. They said they would rather live on
the street.
"I saw it change people. I had a neighbor, Gary, who moved in not long after I
did. He was off, but he was friendly. He always had a big smile, so you wanted good
things for him, and he liked to sing a lot. Stuff about god, mostly: songs I figured he must
have learned in church. The walls were thin, so I always knew when he was around. But
it didn't bother me. I'd be lying in bed at night and there'd be the quiet sound of him, not
203
the words but just the tune, seeping between the apartments, helping me sleep. It made
me feel like I wasn't alone."
Cesar was finished with his beans, but it looked like he wasn't done eating. He
kept scraping at the paper plate, getting little bits of sauce onto his fork and then licking
them off. Jo couldn't blame him.
"First, he stopped singing as much as he used to. Sometimes, I'd hear him yelling,
like he was arguing with somebody. And then one day he stopped me in the hall and told
me that he was sorry he had been so noisy lately, but he had been arguing with his
mother. He thought she was getting old and having a hard time taking care of herself, so
he convinced her to move into an apartment in the basement. But he was still worried
about her. She looked sick, he said. He didn't think she was taking care of herself in her
old age. I nodded and told him I understood.
"And I thought I did, but not in the way he imagined I did. Because the Arkwright
building has no basement apartments: it's just utility closets and a laundry room down
there, so far as I know. And Gary's Mom had been dead since he was a kid. He'd told me
that himself, not long after we met--he'd spent a lot of his childhood in foster-care.
"Then he started doing this weird thing, where I'd hear him knocking on my door-
-at least, I think it was him--and go outside and find out that he had gone back into his
apartment. Other nights, I'd hear him bumping around his apartment: sliding and scraping
sounds like somebody trying to move heavy furniture by himself. The last time I saw him
was a week before I moved out, and he looked like hell. No smile. His skin looked like
wax. And he smelled bad, like the building smelled. Like it had gotten into him
somehow. It crushed me, watching somebody dissolve like that."
204

After they finished dinner, Josephine and Darius sat on the ground next to each
other, while Jo unwrapped the bandage on her hand and showed Darius the wound.
Darius shook his head. "I was thinking about you while Cesar was telling that
story," he said. "About Gary growing up in foster care."
When Jo had been little, her mother had been declared unfit and she'd been taken
away. But whatever: she'd fared better in foster care than most, and found a good family
eventually.
Goddamn, her hand hurt. She tried to make a fist, but she couldn't. Closing her
hand made the pain sharp and intense, and even after she relaxed the muscles, the
throbbing was worse than it had been.
While Jo was rewrapping the bandage, Darius stood up to help Ryan and Cesar
finish cleaning. Lauren was sitting by herself, petting Rhadagast, when Rhadagast stood
and started peering into the night. Half a block from their campsite was an alley where
the pale glow of the streetlamps did not reach. Lauren stood up and started looking into
the same place as Rhadagast, squinting and with half a smile on her face, as though she
was trying not to let herself get too happy, while she tried to figure out what she thought
she was seeing.
Ryan was the first to notice what Lauren was doing. He nudged Darius with his
elbow, and Darius turned to look, and it noticing them, out of the corner of her her eye,
that caught Jo's attention. Cesar had taken apart the propane stove, and was crouching
down to put it back into its case, and he turned to look, too.
205
Lauren's expression turned from one of hesitation, to one of pure happiness. She
looked beatific.
"Charlie," she said.
Before anybody could stop them, she and Rhadagast ran to the end of the block
and turned, down the alley and out of sight. Moving together, they looked so relaxed and
cheerful, it almost seemed like an image out of a corny movie montage. As if they should
have been running on a beach, and not down a decrepit city block and into a garbage-
strewn alley.
Cesar stood up and dusted his hands off on his pants. Ryan looked at him.
"Man," Ryan said. "I was always a cat person, you know?"
Darius was the first to make it to the mouth of the alley, to look for them. It would
have been Josephine, but she had needed to stand up first, which was harder to do with
her wounded hand.
"Where the hell did they get to so fast?" Darius said.
In fact, the alley seemed empty, except for a dumpster and a fire escape, and the
piles of detritus that seemed to accumulate everywhere downtown, like scattered leaves
in fall. The group of them entered the mouth of the alley slowly, cautiously. Josephine
thought of a memory from childhood--her kindergarten teacher, who was always nice to
her--would lead the class in a call and response game called bear hunt.
"We’re on a bear hunt," she would chant, and they would all pat on their legs.
"And what do we come to?" The response was always meant to be an obstacle: a
river, a tree, and last of all a cave, at which point the teacher would drop her voice, the
children would start to whisper. It was just a silly game, but that part had always given
206
Josephine chills. She had never been in the woods, but she knew you had to be careful
around bears.
Ryan walked up to the dumpster and opened the lid, then peeked inside of it. He
waved the stink away from his face with his free hand.
"Nothing in here," he said. He sounded relieved.
He dropped the lid and turned his back, and then while he was walking away,
slipped and fell, screaming. Jospehine's startle response was up--she screamed too--even
though all that happened was Ryan falling on his ass.
Ryan stood back up, carefully, with his hands outstretched.
"There's some kind of gunk here," he said. He sniffed at his hands. "Smells like
what we just ate," he said. "Ranch beans and hot dogs."
But as Josephine got closer, she caught a whiff not of dinner, of but Pine-Sol, as
if that section of the alley was freshly mopped. She bent down to examine the ground
near Ryan's feet. The alley pavement was covered with a slick of milky ooze that was
thick like mucus. Somewhere to the side of the Pine-Sol was another smell: frostbite;
spoiled food. It was not so much as if cleaning products had been used to cover this other,
fouler odor; it was more like an optical illusion for your nose, like how a hologram can
change from one thing to another depending on what angle you see it from. If Josephine
tilter her head one way, the smell was Pine-Sol; the other way, it was something dead.
Darius got closer. "Smells like Rice Krispies treats to me," he said. "My
grandmother used to make those when I came over." He paused and wrinkled his nose.
"And, phew. What's that?"
207
"That other smell," Cesar said, "I swear, that's the weird smell my apartment
building used to have." He shrugged. "For me, the first smell is menudo."
"Yuck," Darius said. "Too bad for you."
Cesar didn't look offended. He was staring at the slime by Zack's feet, deep in
thought. "It's like it gets into your brain," he said. "Evokes something that makes you
nostalgic." He looked up, smiling. "You know how an angler fish catches its prey? It has
a little light growing out of its head, that it dangles in front of its mouth. Other fish swim
towards it, because at the bottom of the ocean, light is a rare thing. It's hopeful, right?
They think they're swimming towards comfort, but really they're going right into the
predator's jaws."
Josephine imagined those jaws. She knew what an angler fish looked like, its
horrible mouth full of needle-teeth. But hers had Khalil's stupid gap-teeth and,
apparently, smelled like fucking Pine-Sol. Of all the goddamn things to draw her down to
doom, it was the smell of cleaning products.
Zack sighed. "So, somehow, I'm at the bottom of the ocean. And I guess I like hot
dogs more than I ever knew." He looked at the others. "And where did this come from?"
He stared at the goop, apparently thinking of Cesar's story. "Some kind of ghost? Is that
it?"
Nobody bothered to answer. Instead, they kept following the trail of milky white
slime down to the end of the alley, where it tapered off, and stopped. On the ground,
there, were Rhadagast and Charlie's collars, covered in goop, the Christmas colored
fabric saturated and dark.
208
Even though the trail was gone, they kept searching. In the middle of the night,
downtown Los Angeles was a very different place. Entire blocks were emptied of foot
traffic, shop windows closed off with metal shutters, occupied only by the tent-cities of
the homeless. Most people were already asleep--if you lived on the street, you had to get
up bright and early to move your gear, before police started hassling you--and those who
were awake claimed not to have seen either Lauren or the dogs, although one man did
show them a series of marks on his stomach, just like Lauren's but worse, leaking a clear
fluid and, he claimed, hot to the touch.
"I keep getting woken up by noises," he said. "A sound like somebody dragging a
a dead body along the sidewalk, and another, like a person hitting bones together." He
shook his head. "I'm a little nuts, I admit, but I usually know from real."
Then there was the graffiti, which once they noticed it, seemed to be almost
everywhere. In different parts of downtown, somebody had spray-painted images of what
looked like a cartoon ghost: holes for eyes, a gaping mouth, hands positioned above its
head like hooks and a long tail instead of legs. Here it was sprayed in neon along a stretch
of curb, so that it looked like some obscure message from the utility company. There it
was, painted three feet tall, high up on the side of a building. Here it was again, scratched
into the window of a booted car with deflated front tires.
Zack stopped at that last one, and ran his fingers along the etchings in the glass. "I
think it's the government," he said. He looked at his companions. "I read this book once,
by a guy who claimed he was a former government operative. He talked about how AIDS
was an experiment by the Nixon administration, a weapon to kill black people and
queers.
209
"I think this is something like that, but better, more precise. Some kind of super-
weapon that's been festering in a secret lab in that basement all these years. Whoever
made it is probably working with the city, trying to clear all of us out so they can
maximize profits around here, rent these buildings out to good, rich people."
Cesar shook his head. "I don't know if it's that simple," he said, "I did some
research on its history. That was how I found out about the way the building was
designed. I also found out some things about the guy who commissioned it, William
Arkwright. That's where I found out about how the building was designed. I also read
about how he consulted a fortune-teller--or something like that--for advice on the plans.
"It was around the turn of the century, and that kind of woo-woo stuff was even
more popular than it is now. Especially in Los Angeles, which has always been a haven
for weirdos, cults, things like that, ever since the United States took it from Mexico. But
something about Arkwright weirded people out. You know, realtors are kind of the kings
of Los Angeles, this city was built to sell, and most of them knew each other. You could
trace almost anyone's career back to old money via handshakes. But nobody had any idea
where this Arkwright guy came from. It was like, all of the sudden, he just appeared--
bought a bunch of downtown property--and then, poof. He was gone again."
"Baloney or not," Cesar said. He pointed at the car's scratched window. "What if
there's a secret society or something? Do we really know what the hell those letters stand
for?"
Jo wanted to know how she could best protect her friends, and how she could best
protect her family. It was possible that Khalil wanted her back. Maybe he didn't know it,
but maybe, if she went to his home, he would take her back into his arms, and back into
210
his life. And maybe she'd be better. She was clean now, she thought she had learned how
to take care of herself. But of course, maybe not: it as Or maybe she had found the nexus
of ugliness right here in downtown, and could end it all tonight. Lop the head right off
this thing and make the world right.
"We don't," Jo said. "And anyway, I don't think it matters what they stand for.
We've figured out by now that there's something in that building, but we're just killing
time. We don't want to face up to it, because facing up to it means that if we want to help
our friends, we have to be seen creeping around on somebody else's property." She spat.
"I know Cesar has been on parole. My criminal record isn't squeaky, either. Breaking and
entering looks bad for us.
"But," she said, pointing towards the Arkwright building. "We know something is
probably festering in there. It's probably been there for a while, growing maggots, just
like Cesar's friend did. And it's been awhile, but it's finally starting to stink. We're finally
seeing the flies. And we have to find out what that thing is, and we have to find out if we
can do something."

It could be dangerous living on the streets, so you always needed something to
protect yourself. Between them, they had a small arsenal of weapons. Zack had an old
leather blackjack, which once belonged to his grandfather, and Jo had a pocket knife with
a locking blade that she carried with her wherever she went. Darius had a rusty hatchet he
kept stashed with his camping supplies. Cesar opened the duffel bag where he carried all
his clothes, and rummaged through dirty laundry until he unveiled a snub-nose revolver
he kept wrapped in socks. He had no permit for it.
211
"The key is to make sure you have at least some clothes that look really nasty," he
said, "so that even if the police stop and search you, they won't spend much time
looking."
If they had been other people--people with day jobs, with authority, without
criminal records--they might have waited until morning, gone into the building fearlessly
as if they belonged there and nosed around to see what they could find. This seemed as
though it would be the safest thing to do--discover the vampire while it was sleeping and
dormant--but it also wasn't an option for them. They were exactly the kind of people that
the building's desk security was intended to keep out. So they had to go while it was dark
out, while they had a chance of creeping in safely, hiding in the same shadows that
whatever was preying on them used.
Besides, they wanted to act fast, while they still had some chance of helping
Lauren. They hid their weapons on their person as best they could and walked onto the
street where the Arkwright building was built. The Rite-Aid where Lauren had bought
food for her dogs was closed for the night, the bars nearby were closed too, and there was
no sound except the gentle sweeping of a car driving down an adjacent street. Yellow
light shone from the front entrance of the Arkwright building, and inside they could see
the security guard sitting at the front desk. But the guard wasn't watching the street: he
was playing with his smart phone. So much the better for them.
"We'll go around the back," Josephine said. "See if we can find a better way in."
They ducked into the alley along the right side of the building, the same one
where Jo had caught a glimpse of pale something earlier, when Charlie had panicked and
bit her. There were fire-escapes running down into the alley from the side of the
212
Arkwright building, and further back, a steel railing barricading off a flight of stairs that
had been cut down along the building's side, leading to the basement level. Jo guessed
that it was some kind of service entrance, leading to the laundry rooms, and storage
closets for janitors.
The bottom of the steps stank of Pine-Sol, and that other smell, so Jo knew they
were on the right track. And when she looked at the others, noticed the faraway look in
their eyes, they had noticed the smell too. Each was engrossed in their own version of it:
they were lonely in this way. She remembered hearing once that smell was more closely
linked to memory than any other sense. It occurred to her that this could be a strategy on
the part of the monster, Dracula, WAR, whatever it was. How much resistance could it
expect from a group of people who were each trapped in a private reverie?
"Darius," she said. "Hold my hand."
At first she reached out with her injured hand, because it was closest to him, but
when he balked she realized her mistake and turned so that he could hold her other. His
skin was rough and warm, and made her feel grounded again.
At the bottom of the stairs was a steel door that was dented and scratched. She
doubted that it had been remodeled with the rest of the building: why waste money
prettying up the service entrance? The door was locked, of course, but she saw that on the
ground, to the left, a half-circle was missing from the brick wall. The bricks above it were
arranged to form an arch, so it must have been part of the original building design.
Garbage and dirt had collected around it, as though water had washed debris into it the
last time it rained. Anybody glancing at it would assume that it was some kind of drain or
storm sewer, but it was too big for that--just large enough for a thin person to crawl into--
213
and when she went to examine it, sure enough, she found that the smell was stronger
there, and collected on bricks and the garbage were traces of that milky ooze, some of
which had begun to dry and flake apart, like the skin on a healing burn. She thought of a
pet door: letting the cat come and go to piss outside, to hunt mice, without anybody
needing to let it out.
"I can squeeze through that," Zack said.
"Guys," Cesar said, looking between at all of them. "It's a sewer."
Jo didn't think he looked skeptical, though. She thought he looked terrified, like
somebody revisiting a past trauma.
Zack shrugged, then got down on his hands and knees. "It's the only sewer I've
ever seen that smells like pork and beans," he said, then thought about this. "At least,
before they're eaten."
He balked when he saw the ooze, and recognized that climbing through the
opening would mean getting it on his clothes, and his belly. But because he was short and
skinny, physically crawling into the opening wasn't a problem.
Josephine went after him. She was skinny too, but it was harder for her. The sides
of the stone opening scraped against her shoulders, and she couldn't bend her knees
completely in order to crawl properly, so she had to hunch along like a snake, and every
so often she would knock her swollen and bandaged hand against the stone and have to
grit her teeth. Once she was completely inside the tunnel, she thought she heard a
scraping sound echoing up it, and thought of the noise that everyone she had spoken to
claimed to have heard--that dragging sound: moving bags; moving boxes. She realized
that there was whatever it was was coming from inside the tunnel, and that there was no
214
way back, and she started to panic. Then she moved again, and knew that the sound was
coming from her, and from Zack up ahead. Sound in the tunnel was distorted; you
couldn't tell what you were hearing. She breathed deeply once, twice, and kept going.
Darius groaned, and went after her. Up ahead, she could hear Zack huffing and
grunting. Behind her, Cesar yelled out.
"Hey," he said. "I can't fit."
She could hear him rustling in the garbage at the tunnel's opening, as if to
demonstrate how hard he was trying. She knew he was afraid, but she also knew that he
was certainly telling the truth. Cesar wasn't fat, but he was the widest of the three of
them, and Josephine herself was barely squeezed into the tunnel.
"Wait outside," Darius shouted. "Keep watch."
Cesar must not have heard him. The funny acoustics, again. "I'll stand out here
and make sure nobody comes," he said.
Josephine had no real idea how long the tunnel was. She had some sense that she
was going down, but she wasn't sure how far, and although seemed as if it was endless,
she did not know how much of that was from the darkness or the claustrophobia. She
could smell that homey smell of pine-sol, and sometimes that other smell, could hear the
scraping sounds of her friends crawling along with her, and occasionally a moan of
frustration from Zack up ahead. Halfway through, she yelled out, when she touched
something wet and slick. Paper garbage and ooze had washed up and collected in a bend
in the tunnel, and in order to pass through it she had to bend herself at the waist,
painfully, letting the jagged brick from which the tunnel had been hewn scrape against
her legs and sides.
215
Darius must have heard her struggling. "it's okay," he said. "It's going to be
alright."
And then, she caught a big whiff of that smell, that smell of home, and pushed
through, and for the last leg the smell became even stronger, a kaleidoscope of memory,
not just pine-sol but the smell of rosewater perfume that her Aunt used to like and the
smell of the deoderant that Khalil used to buy, and Johnson's baby shampoo in her
daughter's hair. And as she neared the edge of the tunnel, she saw a dull blue-green
phosphorence and thought of stories people had of nearing death, or supposedly,
remembering being born: the slow creep into a welcoming light.
When she came out of the tunnel she found herself in a wood-paneled room that
reminded her of an insurance office--the kind of place that was designed to look
authoritative, and comfortable to people with authority. Bookshelves lined the walls, and
there was a desk in one corner, but the entire floor was covered in a sludge that when she
was touched it felt warm and slick. It was a foot deep, and suspended in it were
translucent globules the size of tennis balls that glowed from within with that blue-green
light. These were, in fact, the only light in the room, the only reason she could see
anything
To enter the room, she had to push her hands through this muck, feel the dull
resistance of the globes as the pressure of her limbs pushed them aside, and get the slimy
matrix that ensconced them onto her arms and legs. Every time she disrupted the stuff, an
eruption of gas was forced out, and her thoughts would light up with memory, and that
other stink. She imagined that she was crawling onto the surface of her own brain,
216
punching holes in its soft exterior with her hands and feet, communing with and
destroying herself, simultaneously.
When she was finally standing, for a moment, she imagined that she was in the
living room of the old apartment that she had Khalil had shared. Everything was brightly
lit and the sun came in through the windows and shone off the brightly painted walls, and
somewhere was the smell of Khalil's cologne, of pinesol, of Johnson's baby shampoo, and
her daughter was walking towards her holding out a picture book that Jo used to read to
her--Babar the elephant--and then the next minute Josephine turned her head and she was
in that dank basement, up to her knees in gleaming sludge, which she could see now had
soaked into the wood paneling on the walls, sending dark and swollen tendrils of
moisture up towards the ceiling; that the bookshelves across from her were slumped and
splintering; that what she had at first thought was her daughter was actually Rick,
stumbling towards her, with a waterlogged volume as thick and heavy as a phonebook.
He handed it to her, and helped her turn the pages carefully, but the ink had not run.
"A lot of the stuff back there is just financial records," he said. "But I think this is
Arkwright's diary. Look at this."
He turned to a page where somebody had drawn a creature like the one she had
seen in Lauren's book, although the skill was greater, the details were finer. She could see
now: yes, that was a mouth, this was a tail that dragged, here were two arms ending in
bony hooks. She could recognize it now as a more detailed version of character she had
been seeing in the graffiti. Not a ghost after all: not exactly.
She looked down at her feet. In some of the globes, she could see tiny things
struggling, winding in and around themselves like worms. She thought of the fish Darius
217
had once cut open on the pier; the eggs that had spilled out. She started laughing. Here
she was, homeless and poor, and up to her knees in glowing caviar.
There was a scraping noise, and at first she jumped, but it was just Darius, finally
crawling into the room.
"What the hell is this stuff?" he said. He slowly stood up, and looked at his hands
and arms with disgust. "What the hell are you laughing at?"
When he first looked at her, he was scared and frustrated, but then he smiled, as
though he were just recognizing her again for the first time. For a moment, Jo expected
him to flicker back and forth the way Zack had--maybe he would turn into Khalil; maybe
he would turn into somebody else from her life. But he didn't.
A popping sound came through the tunnel, once, then twice more quickly. Most
people would have been surprised by how quiet it seemed--more like fireworks, than
what you'd catch in a movie--but Jo knew the sound of gunfire echoing through the
distance. It was Cesar. Gradually, the room filled or seemed to fill with a clean wind, like
ocean air. Like Pine-Sol. Jo looked to her left and there was Zack again, as Brian with her
book, and there was Darius, and around her was the Santa Monica pier. They had caught
a fish and opened it and the eggs had spilled out and out until the warm slickness of them
covered the deck, they were piled all the way up to her knees, and there was a scraping
noise that she imagined was something heaving itself up the wooden legs of the pier, up
out of the water to the platform where she and Darius waited. But no, it was something
coming down the tunnel. A slow scraping and a knock, knock, sound, like a knife on a
wooden block chopping up bait, like a claw bumping against stone. Tock and drag.
218
Darius looked out at the ocean, horrified, as if he had just realized how deep it
was, how vast, how anything could be down there and he had no way of knowing what.
And then he was chopping bait, knock knock, against the wooden block, and then he was
holding a fishing pole and reeling something in, something heavy, and Jo couldn’t tell if
that dragging sound was something crawling up the legs of the pier after all or just the
sound of Darius's catch scraping against the legs of the peer and then bumping against the
side of the platform, bump bump, knock knock, and then a glimpse of the sea as a tunnel-
-somewhere she knew, but couldn't have told you how. How big, how deep, and when
Darius finally reeled in his catch, she saw that it was enormous: a piece of seaweed
clotted driftwood, no, a monstrous clump of hair. No: it was Charlie, hooked by the
mouth, his beautiful fur matted and dirty. And when Darius finally got Charlie up at eye
level he looked at her and seemed afraid, but she couldn't understand why.
Khalil was standing behind her. Where had he come from?
"It's a big one," he said, and he smiled with goofy, Alfred E. Newman teeth.
There was an enormous lamprey stuck to Charlie's side, pulsing and feeding there.
It was as big as Khalil's arm, but he was able to reach out and grasp it with one hand
while he supported the fishing line holding Charlie with the other, and he pulled it loose
with a wet, ripping sound, so that it took a hunk of Charlie's flesh and fur with it, and
there was so much space inside Charlie, just an enormous gaping black hole, and out of
that hole smaller lampreys came gushing, crawling and writihing. It made Jo think of a
time when she was Brian's age and had gotten a box of her favorite cereal, Captain
Crunch, from her mother's cabinet to pour herself a bowl and out of it had come running
hundreds of tiny cockroaches, spilling over her hands and onto her feet, and now that's
219
what these lamprey's did. Crawled up the line and spilled onto the deck and crept up her
legs, biting into her with painless teeth. And some of them reared up and she could see
those smiles, those teeth, but they were her ex-husband's teeth. At least it didn't hurt. Her
hand didn't hurt anymore, either.
"Get out," Darius said. He was slapping at the lampreys, knocking them off her.
"Where's Brian?" she said. And she turned and saw that her daughter was buried
under a pile of swarming fish and fish-eggs, and while she tried to get them off, to unbury
her daughter and see that face again, there was Khalil at her shoulder. Biting her and
smiling.
She remembered that she had a knife, so she stabbed him. Once, twice in the
stomach. What came out of him was not blood but something that looked vomit, that
spattered onto the deck, splashed in the fish eggs, and then she dove into the ocean away
from him, into a cavern where she had to crawl, where she struggled away from the sea
and the Pinesol and her husband and daugter and even Darius, and felt wonderful as
though she was being unmade.

220

Far Away, But Not Too Far
By Anthony Abboreno

When my wife, Judy, and I moved out to Wisconsin, one of the things that we had
hoped for was that our son, Sam, would do well with more outdoor space to play in. This
was why we chose to move into the Pine Oaks community, but this was not why we left
our old home—we had moved out because Judy had been hired at a community college
nearby, teaching writing composition, and because the chain of big box stores I have been
working at had been pushing me to transfer to a failing branch near Milwaukee. As far as
work goes, I am good at looking at a group of people, at a situation, and fixing what is
wrong with it. But as far as my son, I don’t know. It’s a warm winter, and our next-door
neighbors are friendly but only that, and sometimes I wake up feeling like I have moved
to the Bermuda Triangle.
Sam is five. A lot of people in my neighborhood send their kids to private school,
but we can’t afford that, so we take him to school in town. It costs us a little extra,
because our neighborhood is not incorporated, but still not as much as a private school
would. And it is, we think, just as good. At his new kindergarten, the teacher says that he
221
will not go outside for recess, even when she reminds him of how much the other
children would like to see him. Even when his best friend, Tyrell, stands by the jungle
gym and asks him nicely to come play.
When the teacher says all of the other children love Sam, she is not blowing
smoke. Sam is always happy. He almost never loses his temper with anyone, and for a
five year old, this is astounding. He is afraid of nothing, and sometimes this is a
liability—long ago, we learned to put plugs in the electric outlets, pad the corners of
tables, keep sharp objects away from countertops where he could grab them. But now he
sleeps in our bed every night, and refuses to go outside unless you hold his hand the
entire time.
It’s his bedroom window that’s the problem. He has a beautiful second floor
window that looks out on a tree in the backyard, and now that it’s winter the tree is bare
and some of the other chimneys in our community have smoke coming out of them. A
ways away, you can see some more trees, and a little creek, and there would be snow if it
wasn’t such a warm winter. But during the day, Sam refuses to look out it, and during the
night, he sometimes won’t even walk past it, if the bedroom door is open.
It’s gotten to the point where we’re so worried about him that we drive him the
whole three hours back home to a pediatrician he is used to, Dr. Foster, who is originally
from Texas and recently grew a handlebar mustache like something you would see in a
cowboy movie. Normally, a long car ride like that with a five year old is an impossible
thing, but when we tell Sam where we are going he decides to put on a game face about
it. When we get out of the car at the Doctor’s office, he is smiling, and doesn’t want to
222
hold my hand, and does a lurching dance-step across the parking lot. I try to remind him
that we are going back to Wisconsin, at the end of the day, but he just nods.
Dr. Foster checks Sam’s blood pressure and pulse, tells him to stick out his tongue
and feels his lymph nodes by pressing gloved hands against the side of his neck. Part of
the reason we came down here is because Judy and I like Dr. Foster, a lot. We trust him
and so does Sam. But watching anybody prod your kid, for me at least, can get sticky. It’s
a strong enough feeling that I conferred with Judy about it once, years ago. I wanted to
know whether it was a natural, protective thing, or whether it was because I have always
disliked doctors. They make so much money and always look sickly, and then they tell
you that your problem is drinking too much coffee, or not sleeping enough, or eating a lot
of frozen food.
Judy had thought that my problem was probably a little bit of both. It was late,
and we were in bed, and she had diagnosed me without rolling over. She told me, sadly,
that we had to stop talking soon so she could go to work tomorrow.
After the lymph nodes, Dr. Foster asks Sam some questions.
“You know,” he says. “When I was your age and my family moved into a bigger
place, I was so happy to have my own bedroom. Finally, I had my own space. I could get
away from my sisters.“
Sam looks away from him, embarrassed. “Maybe,” he says.
“In confidence,” Judy says, “he told me he thought there was a monster, but that
he knows he’s too old to think about monsters.”
“Mom!” Sam says.
223
Dr. Foster pats him on the head and gives him a whole pack of holiday stickers
with turkeys and pilgrims on them, which Sam looks at and turns over and over in his
hands. We have to remind him to say thank you.

Sam is normal, apparently. Dr. Foster tells us that he’ll call around and find us a
recommendation for a child psychiatrist in our area, but that he doesn’t think we’ll need
it. We just need to be nice, and positive and encouraging, and things will settle
themselves out on their own.
Our original idea was to spend the afternoon in town, and it could be like a break
for Sam: a taste of the familiar. But after we have hamburgers and ice cream at his
favorite restaurant, he stares grimly out the window at people walking past on the
sidewalk and announces that he is too sad to continue. He’d rather just go home.

* * *
There is a starkness to the Midwestern plains, where you can see all the way to
the horizon, and it can make the world seem bottomless in the same way that staring at
the ocean does. It gives me plenty of room for contemplation on the way back, and then,
once we finally have been buzzed into our community at the gate and are pulling into our
driveway, I see a bundle of fur up on our roof, right near Sam’s window, like a prophecy
of my own idiocy.
After Sam is inside, watching television, I have Judy come out with me and we
both look up at it.
224
She puts one hand over her eyes, to cut out the glare. “Well,” she says, “if he’s
scared of his bedroom now, seeing a dead raccoon up there isn’t going to help.”
She suggests calling an exterminator, but I tell her no, it’s fine, I’ll get it down. I
have a new ladder in the garage that can go up to the second story, and the raccoon is
dead already, so this shouldn’t be a big deal. She gives me a look that I think means
“don’t be macho,” but it isn’t machismo at all. Ever since we bought this house, I’ve been
dreading the day when I’d have to climb up to the second story on a ladder. I’m scared,
and tense, and eager to have at least one triumph today.
Even though I bought the best ladder in the store, to me, it still feels shaky and
dangerous. Up on the second story, within groping distance of the raccoon, the wind is
harder and keeps blasting across my eyes. Every time I wipe the tears out of them in
order to see, I feel my weight shift. The raccoon carcass is the size of a dog, and slumped
across the tar roofing like a sleeping drunk, and for a second, I worry that maybe it will
even wake up. I brace myself before giving it a good jab with the pole end of a rake that I
brought with me.
It’s too much of a jab, and even though the raccoon doesn’t budge, I end up
pushing myself backwards. But I don’t fall, and while I’m catching my breath, I turn
around and look behind me, and realize that I’m as high as the tallest branches of the tree
outside Sam’s window. It’s almost within jumping distance, but not quite, and that
realization, and realizing that from up here I can see almost the entire complex—curving
sidewalks and identical, l-shaped rooftops with attached garages and nearby creek and
muddy clearings where trees have been cut down but new houses haven’t been built—
suddenly makes me feel as though I am soaring, and my heart beats faster. If something
225
were to take me from this ladder and let me go, I think, it would be a long way to the
ground.
I decide to try the claw end, and pull the raccoon towards me. I’ll drag him off
the ledge and then clean him up after he splatters on the walkway. It takes a few tries, but
I’m eventually able to roll him halfway over so that he’s splayed out on his back, and
then roll him some more, so that he flops down facing towards me.
The weather hasn’t been cold enough to keep him from rotting, and now is when I
finally catch the meaty, vinegar smell of him: a smell which I always thought—like body
odor—in a different degree or context could signal food or sex, but in this context kicks
up my adrenaline and makes me gag not from disgust but from reflex. The raccoon’s
mouth is open and his teeth are exposed. He looks as though he is recoiling in shame,
maybe because his stomach is open so that his red insides gape. Past the edges of the
wound, I can’t see much, and it amazes me how much black, empty space he has in him.
* * *
The doctor suggested that the best way to get Sam to start sleeping in his bed
again is to just make him do it. Put him in bed, let him yell, sweat through a few nights of
hearing him yell himself to sleep and we’ll all come out the other end okay. He explained
that we’ll feel cruel, but reminded us that parenting often felt cruel. The only real cruelty
would be if we let Sam mess himself up by clinging to us for too long, or if we started to
resent him. This was the fastest way.
It sounded shitty to me, though, so on the way home I came up with a different
plan, where instead of having Sam sleep with us, I could sleep in his bedroom, with him,
and then wean him off of it slowly. I could get out our old air-mattress, and sleep on the
226
floor—I could rest better, at least having a whole mattress to myself; Sam would get to
feel secure; I would get to feel good about parenting; all three of us would win.
Sam doesn’t know about the dead raccoon, so I see no reason to let it derail any of
this. We have a low key dinner—frozen fish-sticks, and peas—and even though Sam
usually likes this fine, tonight he just pokes at his food. We eventually get him to eat one
of the fish-sticks, and a handful of peas.
Before I excuse him from the table, I give him my idea. But instead of answering
me, he just keeps staring at his food. I can’t tell if he is ignoring me, or only thinking.
“Is it okay if I sleep on the mattress,” he says. “And you sleep on my bed? I don’t
want to look out the window.”
I agree to this, even though his bed is kid-sized, and my feet will hang off the
edge.
After Sam leaves, Judy and I start to clean up.
“You didn’t talk to me about this,” she says. She gets out a Ziploc bag and
empties Sam’s unfinished food into it. “Is it healthy?”
“Maybe I’ll feel closer to Sam,” I say. I shrug. “Maybe it will be fun, like a sleep-
over. It seems like good Dad stuff.”
Judy points at me with Sam’s dirty, plastic kid’s fork. “He’s going to wind up
liking you better than me,” she says. It’s meant to be a joke, but she just sounds annoyed.
“We’ll take turns,” I say. “You could sleep in there tomorrow night.”
Later on, I help Sam brush his teeth and get dressed in his pajamas—which have
happy dinosaurs printed on them, and which he is almost too big for—and then I let him
227
stand outside his bedroom door, with the door closed, while I get ready for bed. He
refuses to go inside until I’m in there with him, setting up the mattress.
While the mattress is inflating, he talks over the roar of the pump. “If you see the
monster,” he says. “We should both leave, and not sleep here.”
I shake my head. “You can go,” I say, “but I’ll stay. So I can beat the monster
up.”
“That’s violent,” Sam says.
He sounds truly unsettled, and I regret making the joke.
The mattress is full, so I turn the pump off and snap the valve closed. I push on it
with my hand. “Test that and see if it’s firm enough,” I say.
I get a sheet on it, and put his blankets and his pillow down there, and we settle in
for the night. I ask him if he wants to leave the light on, and he says no, but he does want
the hallway door open, which seems fair.
Both of us lie there in the dark, being quiet, for I don’t know how long. On the
ceiling are some glow in the dark stickers, shaped like stars, that I put up when we first
moved in. At first I was trying to arrange them into accurate constellations, but after a
few hours, I got tired of that. So there is the big dipper, the little dipper, and then there
are some random clusters that can be whatever you want.
I start thinking about how, just a few feet beyond the stars, and off to my right, is
that dead, rotting raccoon, and I look over to where the tree looms outside the window.
At our old house, it would be backlit by a streetlight, but here it’s just a black shadow,
and hard to separate from anything around it.
“You okay Sam?” I say.
228
When I roll over to check on him, he’s already asleep.

Later, I wake up to the sound of the wind howling, and then a scratching noise,
like a branch against the roof.
My first impulse is to check the window, and when I do, I can see the tree more
clearly than I could before. The moon is higher, and my eyes have adjusted to the bad
light, and I realize that the tree is probably too far from the house for it to be scraping
against anything, and that besides, it is not blowing in the wind at all. All of its branches
are dead still.
It makes no sense to me, so I sit up for a better look, and that’s when I hear a long
scrape against the roof, like somebody dragging a rake across it, and then a clatter, when
one of the tiles breaks off and slides down to the gutter. For a second, I imagine that the
tree outside disappears and that everything outside the window is black—that something
has moved in front of the window and is blocking any light from coming inside—but
when I sit up to get a better look, that feeling goes away, and I can see the tree again.
I look to check if Sam is awake, but he’s gone—wandered off to his mother’s,
during the night, and she has allowed him to stay—and then I get up, walk slowly to the
window, and look out at the moon, the stars. When I look over to the trees by the creek,
for a minute, I think I see something else there—a chunk of shadow that’s not a tree, not
cast by the moon, just a piece cut from the horizon—but then I blink again and the
impression is gone.

229
The next day, I wake up tired and aching, from sleeping badly in a shitty, under-
sized bed, and when I get downstairs, Judy and Sam are already awake, and Sam is eating
a frozen waffle and some microwaved turkey bacon.
Judy looks up at me, from the cup of coffee she is drinking. “His appetite from
last night must have finally caught up with him,” she says. “He wanted two pieces of
bacon.”
She checks her watch. “Sorry,” she says. “I accidentally let you sleep in an extra
twenty minutes.”
I put my hand on her shoulder and give her a kiss, and then I start getting my
things together to go. It isn’t bad that Judy let me sleep in, but those extra twenty minutes
mean that I have to rush. Because my commute is longer—a lot longer—than it used to
be Judy bought me a huge travel mug, as a house-warming present, and this makes me
less anxious about making such a long drive, sleep deprived as I am.
When the cup is full, it takes almost half a pot of coffee, but it will still fit in the
cup-holders in my car. While I’m pouring it, I think about mentioning what I saw last
night to Judy, but now that it’s morning the whole thing seems strange, and unlikely, and
unimportant, like almost all anxieties that happen during the night. I ask her how her
night was with Sam.
“He spent all night kicking me,” she says. “You got off easy. Tonight I get his
bed.”
I don’t remember—I realize as I’m heading out the door—to pack myself lunch.
But that’s fine, I think. There is a McDonald’s across the street from my store that half
my employees eat at anyway, and I can go there for lunch just this one day, out of many.
230
And then, just as I am reaching out to unlock the car, I see something that I feel
like I should have seen sooner, which is that there is a dead squirrel draped across the
bottom of my windshield, like a parking ticket. The squirrel’s head is missing, but there’s
almost no blood.
I had an Aunt whose cat began bringing her dead mice—as many cats are prone to
do—but then her cat started bringing her mice that were only mangled, so that—dropped
on the bed spread as she was waking up—they would crawl towards her feet, like
disgruntled ghosts. Her theory was that the cat was trying to teach her how to catch mice,
and she lived in fear of the day when he decided to take the training wheels off
completely, and dropped a healthy one on her face while she was sleeping.
I look over my shoulder, but of course there’s nothing there. I try to think of who
has a cat in the neighborhood, and briefly, I think about the night before, and I wonder if
there is any substance to Sam’s apprehension about going outside, but it doesn’t compute,
and I get in the car without wiping the squirrel off the windshield first. My hope is that
when I get up to speed on the interstate it will just fall off by itself, and then I won’t have
to touch it. But of course this doesn’t work. The wind just squashes it on tighter, mashes
whatever blood it has left outwards in a stream, and when I get to work I have to wrap it
up in newspaper and throw it out, and then wash the glass completely.

Big box stores are called big box stores because of the shipping containers they
use to move goods from overseas—you have seen them, they look like freight cars, and
they are good for maximizing space on a boat. This is part of the reason why big box
stores can be cheap in such a Darwinian way. Another store—the main one you think of,
231
now—is the king of this, and the store that I work for is not. But it almost was, at one
point, and people used to boycott us too. Now, morally, we look good by comparison. In
terms of finances, we are just okay. In these respects, we are about the same as you,
probably.
When I first got transferred to this branch, our main problem was just getting our
new stock unloaded. We had empty shelves, and brand new stock sitting in storage.
Insane things, that weren’t exactly what we needed. A truck full of basketballs, for
example. We still had swimsuits out in the clothing section, but the winter coats were
packed away. No wonder, I thought, nobody wanted to shop here.
But I have been told that there are crates in there that aren’t even inventoried.
Even at the chain’s heyday, the management here has been terrible. So I take two of the
employees I trust most—Rick and Jamal—and I have them come with me on an
expedition to the back of the warehouse, which is worse than any store warehouse I have
ever seen. The lighting is bad, for one thing, so that standing at the doorway and looking
towards the back, or looking right or looking left, you cannot see where the metal racks
of stacked up cartons and pallets end. The air smells musty, like animals have been living
in here, and it makes my eyes itch. Stepping inside the warehouse makes me feel like I
have been swallowed.
It’s a bad feeling, but we go in there anyway. Jamal brings a handheld inventory
scanner and Rick brings a step ladder, and the three of us start checking the labels on
boxes. Everything is stored in cardboard boxes or cartons, stacked up on wooden pallets
and wrapped tight with plastic. These are stacked two rows high on industrial metal
racks. We need the step ladder to check the boxes on the second level.
232
The whole time, Rick talks, but Jamal is mostly quiet. Rick is technically
retired—he used to be an electrician—but he works here part time for extra money, and
he’s been doing it for years. He has been a mall Santa, and he looks the part, in that every
Santa I have ever seen looks just a little too thin, or a little too weary to pass, but has
done a good job anyway. He plays blue-grass music. Sometimes, he visits elementary
schools to tell folk tales to the kids. He told me, our first day together, that he’s even been
to Sam’s.
“A few years ago,” Rick says, “we got a poisonous spider in a box of bananas.”
Jamal is a polite kid—not far out of high-school—but way more serious than
Rick, and I can’t tell if Rick’s chatter annoys him. Jamal’s going to community college—
not Judy’s—and after that, he’s going to transfer to a state school and get a degree in
business and leave all this big-box stuff behind. He’s tall, wears glasses, knows more
about the store than anybody else here. He shakes his head. “I’ve heard about that,” he
says.
“I remember the kid who was stocking shelves at the time,” Rick says, “a high-
school student, came running towards the front of the store yelling, and when we first got
back there we didn’t believe him. This thing, when we found it, was hiding between two
of the refrigerated bins, right near the prewashed carrots and bagged salads.” He holds his
hand up. “It was as big as this,” he says. “I swear, this thing could eat mammals.”
We’re what I would have assumed is halfway deep in the warehouse at this point,
and I still can’t see the back. The barcodes that Jamal is scanning are registering
inventory that is incredibly old—from before handheld scanners, but thankfully not from
233
before barcodes. Some of the dates go back to 1987, which is already two years earlier
than the earliest thing in our records.
If I look up, the racks tower over us. Dust motes float in the yellow glare of the
electric lamps.
“It had six eyes,” Rick says. “Two in front and four on the top of its head, and
those two big ones in front were just so round, so dark, like something you’d see on a
stuffed animal. It was just lost, you know? It wanted to be safe and happy like anything,
and here it was jammed around metal and plastic and those cold-water jets that spray
down on a timer. Our refrigerator units make a thunderstorm sound, before the water
sprays, so patrons know to take a step back. Do you think the spider knew that sound?”
“I don’t feel bad for spiders,” Jamal says. “I hate them.”
“We squashed it with a broom,” Rick says, “and then later on, we found out that it
was lethally toxic. Not only that, but because it was non native, if it had bit any one of us,
we would have died. No hospital within a thousand miles stocks that anti-venom.”
Stacked on one of the bottom racks is a huge, wooden crate that looks like
something you could stuff a bull inside of.
“All I’m saying,” Rick says. “Is there could be a lot of weird stuff back here.”
Jamal searches the whole outside of the crate looking for a shipping label, but he
can’t find one.
He looks at me. “I’ll go get a crowbar,” he says. “So we can open it.”
While he’s doing that, Rick walks up and gives the crate a gentle kick. He points
at the bottom.
234
“It’s not on a pallet,” he says. “No space at all there. How would you even get a
forklift under this thing, if you wanted to move it?”
Jamal comes back with the crowbar, and I give him a cue to open the crate. He
jams the crowbar into one side and pries it open. The wood cracks, and there’s a sweet
smell like saw-dust and autumn leaves, and then the whole end of the crate falls open
with a crash. Straw spills out of the inside of the crate, and further in, packed in straw, we
can see the bumper of a car. When we go inside and start taking handfuls of the straw out,
we see that it is a 1980s Volkswagon Rabbit. Beige.
“Now, who the fuck would pack a car in straw?” Rick says.
Jamal walks up and runs his hands along the bumper. “When I was little,” he says,
“my parents had this exact car. It was old and in bad shape, but my Dad liked to work on
it.
“I don’t think our stores ever sold cars,” Jamal says. His voice shakes, but he
stands up quickly, like he’s been caught in an embarrassing moment. “Could be
something illicit maybe? We should call management.”
Of course we’ll call management, I say. It takes us a surprisingly long time to
return to the front of the warehouse—almost ten minutes—and back in the store I
discover that things aren’t going well. The basketballs still aren’t stocked. A woman in a
Green Bay Packers sweatshirt is yelling at the girl working our customer service desk and
trying to return a twenty-dollar Winnie the Pooh alarm clock that she doesn’t have the
receipt for.
“I bought this for my daughter as a present!” she says.
235
I go over there and straighten things out, and let the woman make her return. Who
am I to judge? Twenty dollars is a lot of money to a lot of people, and it’s terrible to buy
a present for somebody and have it break.
By the time I get around to calling management, it’s already six ‘o clock. The
first guy I speak to—John, technically only one step above me—has no idea why there
would be a car in the warehouse, so he gives me the phone number for a guy higher up.
That guy refers me to another guy, who tells me I’m lying.
“I understand,” I say. “I’d think it was ridiculous too. I’ll send you a picture.”
It’s nine o’ clock by the time I leave, which means I won’t get home until ten, and
for the last twenty miles, I’m really worried about nodding asleep and crashing.
Eventually I stop at a gas-station and buy a cup of coffee, even though I know it will keep
me awake later, when I need to sleep.
Judy is sitting in the kitchen going over a stack of student papers. From the living
room, I can hear the television going, turned to a show Sam likes called LazyTown. Judy
tells me that Sam is asleep in there, on the couch.
“I told him that he could sleep there until you got home,” she says. “And then
we’d take another shot at his room. He didn’t like that. He told me he was afraid of
Bloody Guts.”
“A stomach problem,” I say.
She shakes her head. “He said it was the name of a monster. I called his friend
Tyrell’s Mom, and she said it was from a scary story that somebody told some of the
students. Not the kindergartners. I’m not saying the school is totally irresponsible. But it
trickled down to the kindergartners, I guess.”
236
“Well,” I say. “That’s normal.”
I go to get myself a glass of water, and realize that the only clean cups we have
are reusable ones from the kids drinks at Pizza Hut, or the Zoo. All of them smell like
sour milk at this point, no matter how much we wash them, and I don’t know why we
keep them except pure cheapness. I use one anyway.
“Totally normal,” Judy says.
I tell Judy about Rick, and his part-time job as a story-teller.
“If he’s the one who did it,” she says, “Ask that dumb-ass where he gets off.” She
slaps her hand on the stack of papers in front of her. “But also thank him, because our
mystery is solved. I came home between classes this afternoon so the exterminator could
pick up the raccoon. I asked him if maybe the raccoon had been living up there for a
while, and that was what has been scaring Sam.”
She moves the stack of papers she’s been grading, and underneath there’s a tar
roofing tile with a slash down the middle of it, like somebody gouged it with a big
linoleum cutter. She hands it to me so that I can take a closer look.
“He went into the attic,” she says, “said there was no sign of raccoons nesting, but
maybe raccoons had been there anyway. ‘Who knows?’ he said. Then he found a bunch
of messed up tiles like that on the roof. I asked him if the raccoon had done it, but he
didn’t think so.”
Some of Judy’s hair has fallen in front of her face, and she brushes it away. “So
there’s really no mystery solved,” she says. “I think I hate this house.”
The thing about the house is that we got a deal when we bought it. Things had
fallen out from underneath the last owners, and they had moved out in a hurry. On top of
237
that, there were some problems with the electrical wiring that we needed fix. And some
mold in the basement. The combination of those things meant that we were able to buy
something much bigger and nicer than we would normally be able to afford, made us
both happy, but maybe me more than her. Which I feel guilty about.
I try figuring out how we could move again, at this point. We still owe money to
the contractors we hired to take care of the wiring and the mold. We don’t have enough in
our savings for a down payment on another house. We don’t even have enough to rent a
moving truck without putting it on a credit card, to be honest.
Instead of asking Judy if she wants to move again, I start telling her about my
night in Sam’s room. I go through the whole thing, tentatively, framing the weirder parts
as a nightmare that felt very real. Telling the story that way doesn’t exactly feel like a lie,
even in the face of this clawed up ceiling tile. It feels more like downplaying a serious
pain because you are worried about going to the doctor.
“A few years ago,” Judy says, “I read about a family who successfully sued their
realtor for not disclosing that a house was haunted. But how do you make sure you have
ghosts? It’s not like testing your basement for radon.”
She says it like a joke, but neither of us laugh about it, and we don’t talk while I
get my dinner together. There’s leftover spaghetti and meatballs in the fridge, from
Saturday, and the drone and beep of the microwave are loud enough to drown out the
sound of Lazy Town coming from the other room.
Some people hate reheated leftovers, but I’ve always found a lot of comfort in
them. It’s good to move through your day knowing that you have something real at home
that can be ready to eat in just a few minutes. When the microwave is done I stir
238
everything up and sit down. The meatballs are still a little cold in the middle, but I like
them this way. Uneven heating is part of the leftover experience for me.
Judy makes some notes on the paper she’s been grading, and moves on to the next
one. It takes her a long time to get through a few pages.
“We’ve only moved over one state,” she says. “But these personal essays are
already a lot more gruesome. This one is about why the student wants to be a paramedic.”
“That’s a gruesome job,” I say.
“It’s a gruesome story,” she says. She sits back down, grabs the paper and holds it
up, for emphasis. “This kid says that she and her friend were out driving when they came
upon an accident. Some guy was speeding, and jumped a curb and rolled his SUV into
the parking lot of a gas-station. The SUV was on its hood by the pump, the driver was
dead, his cousin—who was in the passenger seat—had flown through the skylight and
died, and the only survivor was his sister, who was running around the SUV with her eye
hanging out.”
“God!” I say.
“My student got the girl to sit down,” she says. “My student was not afraid at all.
She went into the gas-station and got some napkins from a napkin dispenser, by where
they sell the hot dogs. She helped the girl wipe her face, and kept the girl from reaching
up to feel the dangling eyeball, and refused—wisely—to give the girl a mirror no matter
how much she asked. And after keeping calm and helping this person with napkins, she
decided she wanted to become a paramedic.”
“Wisconsin,” I say.
239
“I think this student is an amazing person,” Judy says. “I couldn’t do what she
did. The writing is well organized and it’s sad at the end, and I’m going to give it an A
minus.” She puts the paper down.
I tell her about finding the car at work, about how unreal it seems, about how
nobody can figure out why it’s even there. She looks over my shoulder while I talk, like
she’s paying attention, but she isn’t.
“Are we good parents?” she says. “I don’t know if indulging Sam is going to help
him turn into the kind of person this student is, or if it’s just going to tell him how to be
dependent on other people all the time, and also make us crazy.”
“Is it bad to be dependent on other people?” I say.
“It is when it makes them crazy,” Judy says. “And if we are talking about ghosts
and monsters in any kind of serious way, it is something to worry about.”

The two of us go into the living room to wake up Sam. I give him a gentle nudge
on his shoulder, but instead of opening his eyes he just rolls over onto his side, so that
he’s facing the back of the couch.
“I want to stay here,” he says.
Judy looks at me until I step aside, and then she puts her hand on his side. “Come
on,” she says. “You have to sleep in your own bed.”
Without saying anything else, Sam starts to cry, first quietly and then louder, and
he still won’t look at us. I don’t want to mess with Judy’s authority, but I break easily.
“I’ll stay down here,” I say. “It’s okay.”
240
Under other circumstances, there might be an argument here, but right now there
isn’t. I don’t think either of us has enough of an idea of what’s going on that there’s a
clear course of action, and so Judy decides to go back upstairs to sleep in our bed, and I
go to get the air mattress, and move it down here.
When everybody is settled in, me on the air mattress, Sam on the couch, Judy
upstairs, I try talking.
“Sam,” I say. I think about telling him that there’s nothing to be scared of, but I’m
not sure about that. “I know something is making it hard for you to do what you want to,
or what you have to, but at a certain point you have to make a decision not to let these
things control your life. What are you really afraid of?”
“I’m scared of dying,” he says.
I can’t argue this point, so I try to redirect him. “You can’t help that,” I say. “You
just have to focus on something else. So think about what you like. Think about how
much you look forward to watching Lazy Town.”
Sam rolls over and looks down at me, but says nothing.

Later that night I dream that I am lost in the woods, but not worried about it. I am
sleeping between some rocks, warm, and listening to the wind howl overhead. Then I
wake up, but I can still hear the wind. I look at the couch, and Sam is still exactly where
he started, sound asleep, then I pace around the living room quietly for a while, looking
out the windows and making sure they are locked. I go out into the hallway and check the
front door, then all the other windows on the first floor, and then I decide to go upstairs to
see if Judy is asleep or if the wind is bothering her too.
241
When I get to my own bedroom, the bed is empty. Judy isn’t in it. I know she’s
not anywhere on the first floor, because I have been everywhere down there.
Immediately, I go to the window, not sure what I expect to find, but halfway across the
room I bang my toe on something and tumble forwards. On the way down, I hit my
elbow on a bedpost, and then I lie there, stunned, on the hardwood floor. Sitting at the
foot of the bed is a footlocker that wasn’t there before. It’s the one that Judy keeps our
winter blankets in, but we haven’t had to use them this year because of the weather.
Impulsively, I give the footlocker a kick, and then I hope that the noise I made didn’t
wake up Sam.
Down the hall, I hear the toilet flush in the upstairs bathroom. A few second later,
Judy walks in the door and turns on the light.
“Sorry,” she says. “If I knew you were coming up here, I wouldn’t have left that
out.”
She bends down and helps me up, asks me if my toe feels like it’s broken. I try
flexing it.
“I don’t know what a broken toe feels like,” I say. I stand up slowly. The toe is
stiff, but it doesn’t hurt much unless I press my foot against the floor, and force it to
bend.
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
The bed has a comforter on it, and a couple extra pillows. Judy looks at it and
shrugs. “What can I say,” she says. “I like to sleep warm.”
The two of us wait for a few seconds, listening for any noise downstairs.
“Sam is still asleep,” I say.
242
I feel the need to account for why I’m roaming the house, and so eventually I
mention the wind.
“I don’t hear any wind,” Judy says. She gets back in bed. “You really hear wind?”
I turn my head to the side without really being sure of what I hope this would
accomplish. Maybe the sound would rush out of my ears sideways, like water.
“Yes,” I say.
Judy sits up. “That is scarier than anything,” she says. “Is there a lot of noise at
work?” she says. “Maybe it’s tinnitus.”
“I don’t know what’s going on at work,” I say. “Not much noise, though.”
Judy isn’t going to suggest going to the doctor, because she knows I’ll be an
asshole about it, but I can tell that she wants to. What else is there to do. I ask her what
she thinks gouged up those roofing tiles.
“Probably nothing did,” she says. “Probably they were just put in badly in the first
place, like everything else in this house, and we are all just having a hard time because
we are unhappy.”

At work the next day, Jamal brings a thermos full of coffee and some paper cups,
and when it’s still morning, the three of us share it while we work. It’s good, hot and
bitter. Jamal makes great coffee, and I tell him so.
“Thank you,” he says. “I started drinking it last year. School, plus full-time work
means coffee, and if I’m going to do something I want to do it well.”
Our plan for the morning was originally to see how far the warehouse went before
we finished taking inventory, just as a kind of reconnaissance, but we’re long past the
243
unearthed car, and we still haven’t managed it. From where we are, you can barely see
the open door off at the other end, and the only light coming down is the yellow stuff
from the overhead lamps. We all know it’s nuts, but there’s a thrill too it also. I remember
a video game I used to play in college, where if you wanted to you could abandon
everything, and fly out to sea. There was nothing out there—just ocean, forever.
Eventually, a gargantuan submarine would appear and sink you, with a missile. It was a
way of making sure you didn’t get off track. But for a while, there was that rush of seeing
how far you could go, and how much emptiness there really was, and then the
submarine’s sonar would start to ping—a warning that you had gone too far, and the only
thing that lived out there had found you.
So far, we still haven’t found the submarine, but we have, so to speak, gone off
the edge of the map. More and more of the pallets are replaced by wooden boxes with no
shipping labels, of various sizes, stacked up double on the racks or big enough to fill an
entire rack by themselves. And then in some places—for twenty, thirty feet at a time—the
racks stop and it’s just boxes, stacked up in towers, or in pyramids, like blocks.
Jamal points at one of the towers—a stack of boxes that goes all the way up to the
ceiling.
“That’s just sick,” he says. He sounds repulsed, but also interested, like you might
sound if somebody offered to show you a recent surgical scar. “I don’t know how you’d
stack them that high. It doesn’t look safe. I’m afraid to get too close, you know?”
The weirdness of it defeats speculation, so instead of talking about the crates, we
mostly talk about normal things. The longer we can keep our minds off what is happening
around us, the further we can go, and it seems like all three of us want to go a lot further.
244
I take a sip of my coffee and turn towards Rick, and ask him whether he ever told
the grade-school kids a story about Bloody Guts.
He nods. “The sixth graders,” he says. “Halloween, two years ago.”
Rick explains that he’s sorry it had to trickle-down to my kid, but he’s glad the
story at least took on a life of its own, because that’s what stories are supposed to do.
He says Bloody Guts is a story that started in France, but then migrated from there
to Ireland, and England, and Acadia. He is something like an ogre and something like a
ghost. He’s tall, and he lives in a cave, or he lives in the forest. Far away from people but
not too far.
“You can even turn into him, or something like him, if you aren’t careful,” Rick
says. “It’s all about the wilderness, what people do to each other out there, when the food
runs out, when things get too bad.” He puts his finger on my chest, and then on Jamal’s.
“It’s everything bad in you,” he says. “And you.”
He tells us how Bloody Guts is defined by hunger, by fixation. He gets a craving
for a particular person, and he talks through the blasting wind. You hear your name being
called again and again, until you go outside into the cold and then he takes you, and if
you return it might be with missing hands or feet. Or you might be a different person,
with the same face but a different voice and a different perspective. Why this happens is
anybody’s guess. Is it something they are able to glimpse from where Bloody Guts takes
them, deep inside of his cave, or high above the earth? Is it something in his visage: his
gory fur; his skin mummified by the cold; his bared, crooked teeth?
“Let me tell you this one story,” he says. Just like I tell it to the kids.”

245
“It was a long and brutal winter and the village was starving. Now, you know how
when you get hungry, you feel like you could eat just about anything. You might say “I
could eat a whole pig!” You might be willing to eat the cafeteria food, and even think that
it’s good! But imagine that this hunger went on and on, with no end to it, like an endless
path you had to keep walking, even though you had no idea where you were going, or
what you would do when you got there, and thought you might be lost. The people in this
village kept testing what they would eat, hoping that this might be the thing that would
carry them through to the next day. They boiled their old, leather clothes, and ate them.
They ate dirt. They chewed tree bark, and dried leaves, and couldn’t stop.
“One boy in the village—or maybe it was a girl—but this child, just about your
age, heard some of the older people talking about what they knew had happened, but
couldn’t face. The problem was that Bloody Guts had stolen the spring, and in doing so
had stolen the rest of the food. He had done this because he was always hungry.
Whatever path they were on, Bloody Guts was even further down it, past eating clothes,
past death, knew things no human being could ever know about how to want things and
this knowing and wanting had made him evil, full of hatred and contempt and greed. And
so he had stolen spring, stolen the source of all food, and was keeping it deep in his cave,
eating pieces from it but never growing fatter.
“This child knew that the only way to fix things was to confront Bloody Guts and
get back spring, but that all of the adults were too afraid to do it. So one morning, the
child took the warmest clothes she could find and gathered them together and went off to
the monster’s cave—everyone knew where it was, finding it was not a problem—far
beyond the outskirts of the village.
246
“This cave had a mouth that was like the mouth of a beast, and wafting out of it
was a smell worse than you have ever smelled—worse than stinky diapers, worse than
old cheese, worse than a dead rat sitting in your house’s wall. Even when the child held
her nose, she could smell it, but went deeper and deeper into the earth.
“When she found Bloody Guts, he was sleeping in a chamber deep within the
cave, resting with his back against spring, his swollen belly already beginning to shrink
down until his skin pressed tightly against his ribs. The floor of the chamber was piled
with greasy bone that the child had to climb over in order to get inside. She knew that as
soon as Bloody Guts was hungry again, he would wake up, and so she needed to act
quickly. He had teeth as long as a man’s fingers. His claws were as long as a person’s
arms. She would never be able to fight him fairly, and so she took a leg bone off of the
ground, and with one end that was broken and sharp, she stabbed him as hard as she
could, through his flesh and deep into his stomach.
“Bloody Guts woke up howling. The bone jabbed through his stomach was so
painful that he was unable to stand, but he was able to reach out with one hand and grab
the child’s ankle, and his grip was so strong that she was unable to break free.
“‘I cannot live,’ he said. He pointed to the bone in his stomach, with his empty
hand. ‘And now I cannot eat. The only way I will let you escape, is if you agree to be like
me. To take my place, and become a monster too.’
“The child said yes, assuming that she could lie—there was no reason to be
honest when dealing with Bloody Guts.
“So, for a while, there was a good ending. The child brought spring home, and her
family could eat, and things got better in her village. There were parties. Everyone told
247
her that she was a hero, and gave her extra soup, but they were confused because she still
seemed so unhappy. She didn’t want to eat her soup. She didn’t want to eat anything.
‘I can hear him,’ she said. ‘At night, he’s calling me.’
“And then one morning her family woke up and found that she was gone, and
they cried, because they knew that this is what being hungry—something that nobody
could ever avoid—had come to.”

“You asshole,” I say. “You told that to kids?”
He looks at the ground and hunches his shoulders—my reaction crushes him, I
can tell.
“I change the ending, when I tell it to kids,” he says. “I give them a happy
ending.”
Jamal shakes his head.
“Maybe we should just get back to work,” he says. He downs the last of his
coffee, which is probably cold by now. “Let’s forget about it.”
But it’s hard for me to forget about it. It isn’t so much that I am angry at Rick,
who looks upset by my reaction to his story, and who I feel badly for. As we pack our
things up and stand up to go deeper into the warehouse, I feel dizzy, and part of it is
tiredness, but I also feel like things in my life are going to spin out of reach—the house,
my family, my job—and now, on top of everything else, a kid’s story has me scared that
my son and I are being stalked by Bloody Guts.
248
Eventually, we get deep enough into the warehouse that we can no longer see the
outer door. Even the last of the racks have petered out—it’s just the wooden crates now—
and Jamal stops us, and asks if we hear something.
And he’s right: even though none of us can feel a breeze, it sounds as though the air is
rushing over our heads in gusts. If we stop to rest, an odor settles over us like a rotten
blanket. It’s subtle enough that initially, we have to ask each other about it, to make sure
that it isn’t just our imagination.
Jamal wonders if the smell isn’t carried in the dust, which seems to coagulate on
everything in a powdery, oily slick. He stops us in front of a pyramid of three wooden
crates, covered in a quarter inch of grime. The one on the bottom is largest, as big as a
train car, and they get progressively smaller as they go upwards, until the top one is just
the size of foot-locker. He writes the first two letters of his name on the bottom crate with
his finger, and then points upwards.
“What do you think wanted to get in there?” he says.
On the front of the top crate are what look like claw marks, like a dog was trying
to get into it, if the dog were larger than a bear. I look back and forth between Jamal and
Rick while they are still squinting upwards. Dust is caught in their hair, like snowflakes.
The overhead light makes them look jaundiced.
Rick walks to the lowest crate and looks back at us.
“Would you give me a boost?” he says.
Jamal bends down and braces his hands together so that Rick has something to
push off of. Still, it takes a couple tries for Rick to get the top edge of the box and start
pulling himself up. His fingers slip a few times in the dust, and he starts coughing, but he
249
eventually makes it to the top. He wipes his hands on his pants, leaving huge, gray
streaks that look like cold fat.
While he’s still within arm’s reach, Jamal passes him a crowbar, and he tosses it
on to the next box up before climbing his way up to again, until he is standing in front of
the top box, which he leverages open with the crowbar. The smell of the straw is so
strong, I can get it from where I’m standing, on the ground.
Without looking, Rick reaches into the straw with both hands. He digs around.
“Shit,” he says. He pulls out what looks like a small rifle. “I had a B.B. gun just
like this when I was a little kid.”

When we get back to the store, I talk to my supervisor on the phone again, and
this time he says that we’re not supposed to go into the warehouse at all, any more, until
he checks with somebody higher up.
“It’s a legal thing,” he says. “What you’re finding back there, I have no record of.
If one of you gets hurt, I don’t know how that will affect our liability, and I don’t want to
get sued.”
What he’s saying makes sense, and so for the next few days, we don’t go into the
warehouse. We go home at our regular times. I get more sleep. Still, Jamal and Rick and I
feel closer. We eat lunch together in the break room, and on Friday, Jamal finally breaks
and says what all three of us have been thinking.
“I keep wondering what else there is back there,” he says. “I had this dream last
night, where the three of us went inside, and decided we were going to keep going, until
the warehouse ended. But it never did. It just kept going and going, until all of the sudden
250
I thought we were in a cave. And then there was this smell. Like an open sewer, or an old
garbage dumpster. A mix between the two.”
“You were probably smelling your own farts,” Rick says, “and you imagined that
it was a cave in your dream.”
“No,” Jamal says. “I kept thinking of that story you told us. Bloody Guts.”
Rick looks at me, like he’s anxious about how I’m going to respond to this, but I
don’t say anything.
“That story really got to you guys,” he says. “Didn’t it?”
At home, Sam and I are still sleeping downstairs. He still hates his bedroom, and
every morning I deflate the air mattress and roll it up, then put it in the corner, so nobody
will trip on it during the day. I have to go upstairs to get my socks, and clothes and
underwear every morning, and then one day I get home and find out that Judy has
arranged all of them in the living room, in separate Rubber-Maid containers.
“I figured this would help you out,” she says. She goes up to the first one and
opens it, so that I can look inside. “This is socks,” she says. She points down the line.
”That’s underwear. There’s pants, and that last one is casual clothes.”
“This is a passive aggressive thing,” I say.
“No,” she says.
But even if it is, I don’t know what to do about it. I look up at the ceiling and
think about telling Sam that we’re going to have to move back upstairs, but I can’t do it.
Other than that, things feel like they are more or less getting back to normal, and I
find that reassuring.

251
One night we have dinner together, tired, so we have frozen lasagna. At the end,
when it comes time to throw away the plastic wrap and tray that it came in, I open the
garbage can only to realize that the bag is completely jammed full—instead of changing
it, it seems that we have just been pressing down on it, compacting it, trying to delay
action for as long as possible, but now it is finally time. When I take the bag out I feel
something wet against my knee and realize that it is leaking, which also means that the
bag has a hole in it. The bag is actually beginning to rip, and I have to rush to the back
door in a delicate, shuffling run, with filth oozing to the carpet and the bag’s weight
shifting as the hole slowly stretches wider. But I can make it, I think. It’s time the odds
were in my favor tonight.
Halfway across the driveway, the plastic rips completely and spills all over the
asphalt. I can’t believe how much it stinks, or what was in there—chicken bones, plastic
wrap, plastic trays from frozen dinners, and a lot of what I initially think is rice but then
realize is maggots. It’s a stronger smell, even, than the raccoon on the roof, than the dust
in the warehouse, and it takes a few seconds before I realize that not all of it is coming
from the garbage but that some of it seems to be carried on the wind, and when I look up
in the direction of the wind I see that a huge section of the stars, the horizon, a section of
my garage is blotted out, like somebody has wiped at them with an ink-brush, and I am so
overwhelmed that I just sit down on the ground, right in the maggoty plastic garbage, like
somebody has asked me to.
I close my eyes, and for a second, I am engulfed. The stink is like someone
jamming fur into my nose and mouth, and I think of the dead raccoon, and then when I
open my eyes again my pants are soaked through with rotting trash, spotted with crushed
252
maggots. I go back inside and mound up all my clothes on the bathroom floor, and stare
at them for more than ten minutes before I realize that I would rather throw them away
than even touch them again. I have to scrub myself until my skin turns red, and wash my
hair three times, before I am satisfied that I am finally clean.
After I am out of the shower, and dressed in my pajamas, I go into the bedroom to
check on Judy. She’s sitting on the bed with a new batch of papers, four or five pillows
and an extra blanket piled up on the side of the bed where I would usually sleep. She’s
decorated the bedroom more, too. Above the bed there’s a painting that she inherited
years ago, that she thought we could never find a place for anywhere else in the house.
It’s of a sailboat: her grandfather did it, as a paint-by-numbers, when he was still alive.
On the bedside table is a Mickey Mouse alarm clock that her parents gave to her when
she was little, that she keeps even though the alarm doesn’t work any more, and the
mechanism ticks in a way that drives her nuts.
“You’ve settled in here,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. She looks up at me. “Are you okay?” she says. “You look
flushed.
“I’m not really okay,” I say. I don’t have a good grasp on how I feel, and I’m
ashamed of that. So I stick with what seems most clear.
“There were maggots in the garbage,” I say.
“Gross,” she says.
When I go downstairs, Sam is lying on the floor with his eyes closed.
“What’s this?” I say. “I thought we were doing better today.”
253
“I am,” he says. “I am getting better, but right now, I just need to stay here, and
not look out any windows for a little while.”

Thinking about Jamal’s nightmare, and Rick’s story, and my own life, I am
increasingly convinced that the only way to resolve anything is to go into the warehouse.
What I expect to find there, I have no idea. If I encounter Bloody Guts himself, I don’t
know what I will do. Part of me expects the warehouse to just keep going on and on, until
we run off the edge of the earth.
I drive to work, obsessing over this, and when I get there I find out that Jamal and
Rick feel the same way. Jamal especially, says that he has been unable to sleep well for
days. Rick says that he has been having nightmares, but that he feels like he can take
things in stride.
“At a certain age,” he says. “I just started accepting things.”
We decide that we’ll have better luck if we take transportation. The center aisle of
the warehouse is just wide enough to drive down, and so I volunteer my car. Jamal rides
shotgun and Rick sits in the back.
After ten minutes of good speed, the entrance is completely invisible to us. The
boxes on either side of us start to get bigger. We roll past one that is big enough, we
think, for an elephant. Another that stretches all the way to the ceiling of the warehouse,
and further back than we can see. I have no idea how long the road will even stay clear,
and so I start to slow down. Back here, the dust is thicker, collecting on the ground like
snow drifts. Our tires leave tracks that I can see in the rearview mirror, and then we start
to notice cobwebs—huge ones, that cover the boxes and stretch across our path, so that
254
every fifteen minutes or so I have to stop the car and get them off the windshield with my
plastic ice-scraper. They’re sticky, and it’s hard work. By the third or forth stop, my arms
ache, and I have to get Rick and Jamal to take turns, helping.
Some of the boxes are still small enough that they look like we can open them. On
the fifth stop, Jamal sees a group of them, made out of wood and the size of refrigerator
boxes laid on their backs. On impulse he pries one open. The familiar autumn smell wafts
out, and when he starts digging through the straw, he uncovers a stone face; a stone body.
“It’s a sarcophagus,” he says.
He goes to the next box and pries it open, but just barely. He looks as though he is
so tired he can barely move his arms.
“Skulls!” he says.
And of course he’s right. The whole box is packed full of skulls, no straw at all
and barely any space between them, like something you’d see in a catacombs.
Without saying anything else, Jamal starts bashing the skulls with his crowbar,
like you might bash against a machine you can’t get to work when you are past the point
of being scared to break it. Chunks of bone fly out of the box and clatter to the floor. He
reaches down and picks up one of the whole skulls and throws it, and we can hear it land
in the darkness, not very far away.
Eventually he slows down and starts coughing from the dust, then he goes back
into the car and tells us that it’s time to keep going.
We drive some more. Nothing changes. We still have to stop for cobwebs. The
ceiling seems to disappear until the only thing we can see overhead is the electric lights,
which seem to hover in space. Some of the boxes get to be so big that I can’t believe
255
there are trees large enough to form them. I crane my head to look out the window and
they just stretch up and up, apparently forever.
Jamal and I aren’t paying attention to the gas gauge, but Rick is. Finally, he leans
forward from the back seat and taps on the dashboard.
“We’ve gone through half our fuel,” he says. “Time to drive back, if we don’t
want to get lost in here.”
It’s another ten minutes before I start to accept that he’s right. We get out one last
time, and we all step outside the car to look around.
In every direction it’s nothing but boxes, as big as buildings, like a windowless,
doorless city. The smell of the dust is tremendous, and I feel overwhelmed.
It’s Rick’s turn to use the ice-scraper.
“There shouldn’t be any cobwebs on the way back,” he says, “because we already
drove through them all.” He pumps the scraper against the glass. “At least I hope. I can’t
take much more of this.”
Jamal sneezes.
“We have to keep going,” I say. It sounds false to me, but I repeat it a couple
times anyway, testing it out.
“It’s true,” Jamal says. He shakes his head. “I don’t even want to go back at all.
There’s no point.” He waves his arm. “I can’t come to work, knowing that this is in the
parking lot. I don’t know how I’ll even get to sleep, knowing that this exists.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Rick says. He looks away from the windshield, but
keeps scraping. “But you have to live.” He stops scraping and leans against the glass,
then looks at me.
256
“You’re older,” he says. He sounds like he is trying not to cry. “Am I wrong?”
Slowly, I start to shake my head. I’ve just opened my mouth to say that I think he
might be right, that I have to give him his point, when he screams, and the noise is so
perfectly synchronized with my own movement that for a second I think the scream is
coming out of me.
“Shit,” Rick says. He sits down heavily next to the car, and grabs his hand. “Oh
wow, that hurt.”
There’s a scuttling underneath the car, and then I see a spider, as big as a hand,
come running out and across the concrete, towards the boxes. It must have gotten under
the car from one of the webs, I think, and hidden near the windshield—maybe in the
close space between the outside air-vent and the hood. I think that this must be just like
the one that hitchhiked in on the produce, but when I ask Rick, he doesn’t answer. I turn
and see that he’s passed out, slumped against one of the front tires. Even though I
remember the end of his story—that there are no paramedics, anywhere near here, with
an antidote that can save him—I realize that there is nothing left to do but try and Jamal
agrees. We load him into the back seat of the car and Jamal sits there with him, pressing
his fingers against his neck, trying to read his pulse while I speed as fast as I can back
towards the front of the warehouse. Rick is right that there are no more cobwebs, and we
make good time and for a while it even seems like Rick will be able to die in daylight.
And what about the other consequences? For Jamal, for the store, for me. I feel badly
even thinking about them, in the face of this.

257
Officially, Rick’s death is ruled an accident, which doesn’t mean that the lawsuits
won’t come. The store should take the brunt of things, but I shouldn’t assume, my boss
says, that nobody will come after me.
“I’d look into a lawyer,” he says. “My brother-in-law—he’s pretty good. He got
his law degree a few years ago, and you’d think he’d be rich, but he’s always looking for
work. There are too many lawyers, he says. Even good ones.”
But I don’t want to hear about a lawyer’s problems. Rick’s family doesn’t give
me any consolation—the only surviving relative that I am aware of is a sister who lives in
California, and she does not want to talk to me. Rick has a wake, and some of the
employees go, but I don’t. I am afraid to cause a scene. Jamal reports back to me about
all of it: he says Rick wanted to be cremated, and so there was just an urn there, and some
sections of poster-board on artist easels, with photographs of Rick taped to them.
Anybody who wanted to could come with a picture and tape it to a clear section of
poster-board. It was Rick’s sister’s idea.
There wasn’t a lot of family, but there were a lot of other people. The poster-
board was overflowing. People were taping pictures to pictures. A picture of Rick dressed
as Santa Claus at a neighbor’s Christmas party, which was a big deal for all the kids. A
picture of Rick standing on a step stool, helping somebody paint their garage. And then
some earlier stuff, brought by his sister. A black and white baby picture, professionally
taken, where Rick as a baby was smiling in a way that looked like Rick as we knew him
as a man. A picture of Rick and his sister as grade-schoolers on Halloween, dressed as
bums. Rick was wearing a clown nose.
258
“Rick was apparently just an OK brother,” Jamal says. “But I don’t think he and
his sister hated each other.”
Even though it’s a bad impulse, I ask if I was mentioned. I’m trying to figure out
if not going was a good idea, after all. Jamal shakes his head.
“It seemed like nobody wanted to think about that,” he says.
For closure, I get phone calls from journalists. I think most of them are very
young, because they seem a little embarrassed to ask me anything, even my job title.
Then I get a guy who comes on like nothing bothers him. He asks his questions fast, and
they get specific. He asks me where I grew up. He asks me what school my son goes to.
“Hey,” I say. “You’ve got some balls.”
He sounds embarrassed. “I’m new at this,” he says. “I’m still in school. This is
part of my semester project.”
I run my hand through my hair, massage my scalp. We talk for a little while. I
find out that he has a sister who lives in Chicago. That he wanted to go to school in New
York, but his parents were almost sure they couldn’t afford it, and so discouraged him
from applying.
“I don’t know it you’ve talked to any other reporters,” I say, “or anybody else
from the company. And this sounds like a bad thing to ask. But do you have any sense of
where I fit in all this? I mean, am I going to get sued? Am I going to get to keep my job?
Is there anyone from Rick’s life, unofficially, who’s getting left out? A girlfriend? A
boyfriend?”
259
“I’ve talked to a few other people at your store,” he says. “The endless
warehouse, nobody knows what to do about. I talked to a friend of mine in law school,
and he laughed at me.”
“I’ve heard law school is a bad bet these days,” I say.

Judy, Sam and I are sitting in the living room together, and Sam is watching his
Lazy Town. I look out the living room window, which looks out on our backyard and
then, a little bit beyond that, the remains of the creek bed and the space where the trees
were cleared, years ago, when the housing bubble was still in full swing and the
developers thought they would be able to make more buildings. But the houses that was
supposed to go there never did, and for now, maybe forever, we can see all the way to the
forest, and the highway.
The sky is heavy and everything is covered with a modest layer of snow—a
couple inches, like doughnut glaze. The last few flakes are gliding down, and I know that
by tomorrow, maybe by this afternoon, nothing will be left but brown sludge. It’s still a
warm winter. It seems like every winter is a warm winter now—climate change, I am
told—and it bothers me that Sam might never see the snow storms that I used to see,
growing up in Illinois, even though those storms could be inconvenient and even scary,
once the novelty wore off.
I look at Sam, sitting cross legged on the floor in front of the television, and then I
look at Judy sitting on the couch next to me, with a blanket tucked around her legs and a
liter bottle of diet coke capped, on the floor, while she grades papers. This is her paper
grading ritual: she wraps herself in a blanket on a Saturday morning, opens a bottle of
260
coke, and drinks the coke while she grades everything straight through. She drinks the
whole liter. She doesn’t even get up to use the bathroom.
“It’s perfect weather for building a snow man,” I say.
Sam turns around, and Judy glances up from her papers. In the episode of Lazy
Town Sam has been watching, Sporticus, the hero, has just foiled Robby Rotten’s plan to
become Mayor of Lazy Town. Robby should not become Mayor because he encourages
people to not play outside, to sit around eating junk food and playing video games and
sleeping too much. Sporticus does the opposite—he encourages eating vegetables, and
creative play, and exercise. As far as leadership goes, both Sporticus and Robby seem
pretty benign.
Sam sticks his jaw out and to the side, to show that he is thinking. This is also
something my father does, but I don’t.
Judy decides to pitch in. “Look out the window,” she says. “Look at how low the
clouds are. Do you think Sporticus is out there?” This is a reference to the fact that
Sporticus lives in a space ship hidden inside of a cloud.
Sam is young enough to want to play along, even if he is tempted not to. He
stands up and looks through the window, without walking towards it.
“Don’t you think,” Judy says, “that Sporticus would want to build a snowman?”
Sam doesn’t cry, but his expression is absolutely sad. It isn’t that he doesn’t want
to go outside, he has explained to me, it is just that he can’t.
“For a little bit,” he says.
Judy and I are excited by this, and she puts her papers down and we both get
dressed, quickly. We make Sam put on his winter coat, but when he doesn’t want to wear
261
his hat, we don’t push it. We get him outside and ask him what’s the first part of making
a snow man, and he tells us—the body. It’s good packing snow, and when we roll up a
snowball to be the snowman’s body, it crunches along pulling up an entire path of
snowfall with it—along with twigs, and dirt—revealing brown grass underneath.
We can tell that Sam is fading, so when it comes time to make the torso, we fudge
it, and Judy and I just glom snow on top until the snowman is pear shaped. Then Judy
suggests that we go inside to find some things we could use for eyes, and a mouth.
“Yeah,” Sam says, and charges inside.
We go through the kitchen and find some old radishes, and a carrot that we should
have peeled and eaten. Judy has the idea that we could cut an orange into wedges, and
then one wedge could be his mouth, and we could share the rest.
All of this is good, Sam agrees, but when it comes time to go back out, he won’t.
He has had enough, and stands at the doorway while I go out to build the snowman’s
face, so he can see it without leaving the house. The nose goes there, he says, and the
eyes go there. When I am done I jam a couple branches into his sides—one smaller than I
would like, and the other long and spidery, and go back to the house to see how it looks
from where Sam is standing.
Actually, I have never seen a snowman that didn’t make me sad. You can always
smell the disparity in them, between hope and the final product, and the love holding
those two things together, and right now this snowman with its red eyes and dirty,
translucent skin and outstretched arms cuts me to the core. I think that it is the most
mournful, ghoulish thing I have ever seen, but Sam says he likes it.
262
“It’s good,” he says, and hugs me around my legs, and then hugs Judy around her
legs. The three of us have hot chocolate together, and then we go back to our day.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Earth, sky, and morning light: naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories

PDF

The connoisseur of pain: a novel; and, A new and sharper vision: sensuous aesthetics as theological immersion in Terrence Malick's The tree of life, Thomas Kinkade's landscapes, and Ron Hansen's ...

PDF

Take me with you: critical encounters with sex work literature

PDF

In defense of “prose”; and, Concrete flag

PDF

Mercy and metaphor: the empathy era and its discontents

PDF

Savagely spiritual: illness and the imagination in the fiction of Jean Stafford

PDF

Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

PDF

Americans abroad and not Constantinople

PDF

The paradox of Jewish identity in the age of assimilation: Irène Némirovsky, her life and works

PDF

The Futurists: speculative fiction for the network society

PDF

The new old motion: contemporary poetry, nostalgia, and the American West

PDF

The usual things in unusual places: plotting simultaneity in narratives by women

PDF

A bag of shocking pink: occult imagery in contemporary American fiction by women

PDF

Translation: three contemporary metaphors (a critical musing on the profession); and, Guises: stories (a short story collection)

PDF

Prosodic recursion and syntactic cyclicity inside the word

PDF

Nineteenth-century artificial intelligences: thinking machines, mechanized minds, and the Victorian detective

PDF

Plotting the geographic imaginary: nostalgic impulse in the California novel and So L.A.

PDF

So funny I forgot to laugh: the female comedic voice in contemporary American short fiction

PDF

The moral basement: investigations into ethics and irony in contemporary fiction

PDF

The Pocho as palimpsest: reframing ‘deviant’ masculinity as resistance; and, Owl medicine: a novel

Asset Metadata

Creator Abboreno, Anthony McGuff (author)

Core Title The monstrous city: urban sprawl, Los Angeles, and the literature of the fantastic

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 09/24/2019

Defense Date 05/02/2017

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

Tag fantastic,fantasy,grotesque,Los Angeles,monstrous,OAI-PMH Harvest,science-fiction

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Handley, William (committee chair), Deverell, William (committee member), Everett, Percival (committee member)

Creator Email amabboreno@gmail.com,workabboreno@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-434229

Unique identifier UC11263228

Identifier etd-AbborenoAn-5764.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-434229 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-AbborenoAn-5764.pdf

Dmrecord 434229

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Abboreno, Anthony McGuff

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA