This is no city on a hill;
it's Wednesday and I've called off work
to contemplate an almost empty house,
to scrutinize a sleeping pill,
to speculate about a hotel clerk.

Sitting on a broken, sinking sofa,
becoming involved with a vine and floral pattern,
losing my breath and clenching my eyelids,
I know that this is how I yearn,
this is how the anxious heart must yearn;
and if I had the peace of Christ, or Tao,
or anything to keep myself away
from that matter of the final when and where and how,
I think I would not burn.

I wish he thought I had been praying.

And it was something very commonplace unfolding,
as he made sure that he wouldn't be a nuisance, asking,
"So tomorrow is ok then? You're sure you don't mind?"
I only mind the yellow sky.
I recognize he made an effort to be kind,
accommodating. But there's the crux; I had to be accommodated,
and that's the sort of thing I've always hated.

I could live rightly, be prosperous and have my health,
but I wait, and that's like the rustic waiting for the river
to run out before he crosses, as Horace said.
I go upstairs and sit down on my bed.
I don't move. Today, even the sky has a sick liver.

• CLOSE

The past stretches back like a receding wave
in my stomach there is a stone
all those years spent in the quiet library
and now I am joking on the beach with my sickness

The cup of life seems bottomless
but the old men know
this is the truth, this is the gospel
there is nothing more sad than an empty swimming pool

at that hour, at that minute
these broken red cars
that we have for hearts
will run once more

tomorrow or the day after tomorrow
or the day after the day after tomorrow
love will swim through the salty water
love will swim through the empty spaces
love, like a hungry shark, will devour you at last

• CLOSE

The vanishing was leisurely, her absence heavy at times, minimal at others, its form filling in one deficient minute at a time. It began sometime before Ine’s grandfather, her father, passed away. As he became a magnet, pulling all the scattered bits of himself together, his history, the people he knew, she continued slipping farther and farther from them. Aunts and cousins, people Ine had never met, came to visit them, paying their last respects to her grandfather’s dying legacy. As she watched him exchange his stories, the summation of everything that made him the person he was, his life in history became clearer, more vivid, as he slowly faded into a collection of ghosts.

When asked, Ine did not remember seeing her mother at her grandfather’s service, though she very well could have been one of the mourning women, watching from behind her black gauze veil, amidst the funeral arrangements of modest flora, chrysanthemums and spears of fern. But watching the front of her house, from high above on the cemetery hill, I thought I saw a dark figure moving among the trembling hedges. In fact, of the handful of women there, I am fairly sure none of them were her. There was a particular way she walked, as though she was forever carrying a tray or a basket.

Ine lived alone in her mother’s house for almost a decade. Every morning she awoke with no one beside her, she made her own breakfast, ate alone, locked the front door, saying good-bye to no one as she left for work. She proceeded in this way, alone, for all but a few moments in the course of a week, when she bumped into the mailman on the way out to the car, or apologized to the cashier for taking too long putting away her change. Until one day, while sitting on the floor of the family room of her house, she realized she was not alone.

sitting there, one Saturday morning in fact, she felt a queer cold pressure on her shoulder, as if someone had passed the hose of a vacuum right over the fabric of her shirt. The force was so strong, she was compelled to turn around. And there she saw a hazy nothingness. She felt it brush her forehead. She could hear it speaking soothingly to her, somewhere from within, in such a way that she could no longer feel the borders of her own skin. She knew it was benevolent, yet it was not supposed to be there. It pulled all the warmth and peace from the room, just to maintain itself in a place that it did not belong. From that point forth the house had a strange air as if, after years of settling into its foundation, it had become unsettled again.

When Ine was only fifteen, she had met a boy by the name of Alex. Alex had no quality that would leave an impression on you, with the given exception of his dullness. He was quiet—but would speak in turn. Intelligent, but not clever. Her grandfather did not approve of Alex. She took him home once and did not see him again, until he came to work in the same office as Ine, to set up their computer network, shortly after the unsettling of her home.

The first week he was there, the office had a scheduled vacation—only seeing patients on an emergency basis. Ine never took vacation, and so she had Alex almost to herself. She unlocked the office door for him in the morning and stayed late when he worked late to lock the door again, sometimes walking him to his car, or really walking towards his car, as he did, before pivoting en route, towards her own. The second week the office staff were being trained on the new system. Alex was explaining, instructing, fixing glitches and errors, and seeing much less of Ine. He was leaving soon. On the last day of the week, their conversation, hardly worth mentioning, went something like this:

And with that, he put his hand on her shoulder, patting it lightly, a gesture that was neither a hand shake nor an embrace, but almost a neutralization of both.

Every turn in the development of their relationship had been propelled by an outside force, and the final push would be no different. After they had been eating together for several weeks, Alex explained that he would be leaving the medical complex within only a few days, and might be leaving the town altogether.

Like most of their conversations, this small interchange was followed by a long period of silence where Alex quietly ate his sandwich as Ine awkwardly picked at her food, nervous and thoughtful. The prospect of Alex leaving had disturbed her. She was climbing out of her isolation, one step at a time, and she knew his leaving would push her back to the start. Which may have been the reason why this time she took that slight, outside push, and adding her own will, hastily advanced their friendship three steps beyond.

The ground below felt too close, white and flat like a kitchen floor, the limbs and twigs of the trees were dotted with little clumps of snow, as if they were bits of cotton, added by an unseen hand. They continued to watch the moon as they arrived at her car, and then after saying good-night, watched as they drove to their homes, rounding corners, catching glimpses as they passed under the snowy trees. The white crescent was slowly fading from the face of the moon. At home, Ine sat under her window. By eight o’clock, the moon was gone, leaving a strange, brown circle in its place, sitting behind the slender poplar branches.

Within a week Alex was living with her, staying in her grandfather’s room, sleeping in his bed. The following winter, after Ine slipped on an icy sidewalk, he stayed with her in her bed. They never talked about it, but even after her sprained ankle had healed, he continued to stay with her at night.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

Before I was born my mother received a card from my grandmother in East Germany. My mother had just returned from her last trip to visit my grandparents, and with the growing border controls, she had little hope of returning in the near future. The envelope showed signs that it had been opened and resealed. One line, towards the middle of the page, had been blacked out. Probably something small, a minor complaint, about how the price of butter was too high, or how my grandfather’s job was becoming tedious. This didn’t matter to my mother. What mattered was what was yet intact. Tucked within the card were pictures from her vacation. A family hike in the mountains, a few dim pictures of my grandparents sitting with a flock of sheep.

In this way, Florenz has become only a legal name to me, cold and unfamiliar. Since my grandfather has died, no one I know has addressed me by it. Mail addressed to Florenz could only be official, a bank statement or a notice. If a caller asked for Florenz, I knew it was no one with whom I would care to talk. I would say that I was not in, or I was in the bath, or had moved to another address. I would say there was no Florenz here. No, this was not Florenz.

As much as I wanted to visit my grandfather’s home, to salvage what I could from the past he had left behind, the fear instilled by the language and cultural barrier deterred me from making the journey--to again be isolated and alone. To be away from Alex. After over a month of deliberation I decided to simply ignore the letter, discarding it as I discarded much of my official documents, my mother’s documents, in a dark corner of the lower, catchall drawers of her desk. And so the letter was left to slip into the cracks of oblivion, to lose itself inside the internal expanses of the desk frame, until one day, years from now, I would discover it amongst the dust and forsaken paperclips while searching for something else, long after I had ceased to care.

He ignored me. He had his own secret now. “I’ve closed my bank account. One month. I have enough money, you can quit your job. I think we should go for just one month.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

She bought new sheets. Certain things she could take, but the sheets were all old. Old, embroidered and monogrammed, with a history that belonged at her mother's house. She wanted to leave as much there as she could, as if she could just slip back into the empty house, at any time, completely unnoticed, as if nothing had changed. The beds made, refrigerator full.

After Ine's great grandmother had died, her grandfather had decided to move to the states to live with her mother. He also left his entire house--the only things he took were his clothing, a few toiletries, a bible. And the green album. As he pulled it from the layers of clothing in the case, he looked at Ine for the first time. He could feel as she was watching him, and he looked almost ashamed, as if he was embarrassed to have brought anything with him at all. “Für deine Mutter,” he said. For her mother. He put it down on the bed before her, patting it with his hand. She wanted to open it, to look inside, but she could not interrupt his unpacking. It had taken on a magical feel, like a sacred ritual of sorts. Years later, when he was dying, he had her mother retrieve the album from her room. He turned to the back of the book, pointing to a set of pictures, of him, her mother, her grandmother, sitting on a grassy hillside. They were surrounded by sheep.

And so, as he lifted the transparent paper from the photographs, he spoke to her.

He turned to Ine, shifting in his seat. His eyes become unfocused, glancing about the room, before resting on a certain spot on the wallpaper, where the edges had begun to curl inward. As he talked, her mother talked over him occasionally, translating a word or phrase, so that in the end, she heard him tell the story in two streams, from two perspectives that came together, overlapping and passing through each other.

He tapped his forefinger on a picture of himself, leaning over one of the sheep, as if to inspect him, or talk to him, as he often talked to the neighborhood dogs, Yes. You’re a nice dog. Yes. Guter Hunt.

Ine knew that it was not long after the trip that her grandmother passed away.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

“Alex?” I called. “I thought I heard you in here.” I saw one of my plates, or one of my mother’s plates rather, sitting in the corner, broken in half. I looked around for a moment, before looking up, and there I saw Alex, hanging from the ceiling. But not really hanging, per se, but crouched, like a bat, on the wooden underside of the upper floor. He sat there, knees hugged to his chest, shaking slightly, his shoulders moving up and down, or rather, down and up. I had never seen him so upset.

He looked around the corners of the ceiling, and then, barely astonished, looked down at me and replied, “Me? What are you doing up there?”

I was not sure that I still regretted my decision to come here. I was hopeful about the new surroundings, our adventurous move to the wilderness of the Pacific coast borderland, when I heard a crash in the hallway. I walked into the end room. That was what I was doing there, but I still didn’t understand what Alex was doing up there.

For the past few years, or maybe since I met Alex, or at least since I received the letters, I had not been myself. I was all right sometimes, but I remembered a time where I had felt happy, I didn’t remember a change, but I knew this wasn’t that time. It had gotten to the point where sometimes I thought I was actually being nice, and he thought I had some underlying intent, and I wasn’t sure then if I did, and if I did, if it was the same that he thought I had. I had intended to get away alone, but I hadn’t made a change by myself, so I made us make a big change together. And now I realized, that if it wasn’t for me, he would be cowering on the floor in his own apartment, and, more likely I thought, maybe not even cowering at all. He would be sitting on his own sofa, reading his own books, staring out his own window, regardless, it would be his own doing. I had dragged him all the way up here, and as ridiculous as it seemed, I had to get him down.

I plummeted head first towards the floor, and if Alex hadn’t been there to grab my legs as I dove past him, I might have been knocked out for more than a few moments. When I woke up I was sitting on the guest bed, Alex on the chair beside me.

I fell asleep and immediately was transported into the family room of my mother's house. I stood, beside the couch and the heater, watching myself as I sat on the floor. I reached out to touch the hair of this detached entity of myself, but I could not reach far enough. My arms were somehow constricted. But fortunately, in dreams, you can will what happens. You have a thought, and it manifests itself as a dreamed reality. As soon as I thought it, the other of myself stood up, turning around. I looked terrified, and my consciousness flitted between selves, morphing from one to the next as characters often do in dreams. I told myself to be still, that I was harmless, and that I would do nothing, but I could not articulate any words. I reached across again, just to feel if I was real. As soon as I pressed my own forehead, the dream dissipated, and I found myself tangled amongst my blankets, my face resting on the back of my hand.

• CLOSE

Love was complacent in the midst of God,
through never ending backyards we never saw of neighborhoods we didn't know at all,
in states that don't exist.
The color blue and death ascended as we treaded to the edge of town.
Though basements’ faceless occupants talk in blurs like of opera halls, floral prints, and white bedroom walls.
Outside the window where we found the knife after being chased by unknown intentions.
Biological clocks stop,
my skin was vernal and blank.

The grass was tall and intrigued by our shadows, fell still.
We were just a piece of a shadow that was everything surrounding.
We fell back into puddles away from the blank figures that waited under porch-lights,
scattered infrequently and always watching cause they were, too.
We hid away from static waves among bushes and you held onto me like we held onto the nostalgia of nonexistence.
Between white fences and the sky we fell into puddles, we split a bag and our clothes were subtle.

• CLOSE

Still, with all those women, he never met one whom he found suitable for marriage. By and by, he fell out with the idea of ever feeling love, and in his forty-seventh year, abandoned the notion, as one would call off an arduous search for a climber in the Alps after a lengthy blizzard. Sitting at the table where he ate his breakfast, he poured vodka into a glass emblazoned with a star. He made himself drunk, guzzling a funeral’s worth of the liquor. On the far wall he had hung pictures of the people who had been his family. There was his younger sister Elena, who had been killed while serving in the army, with her arm around his older brother Georg, who had been massacred at Nikolaev. Their mother had frozen the second winter Stalingrad was besieged.

“Vadym Mikhailovich Tatarinov! That’s your name. You are forty-seven years old, Vadym Mikkhailovich. Don’t think I don’t know it because I certainly do.”

“And I’ll tell you something else. You neither love nor are beloved. How is that so? You are not misshapen, you earn double pay! Why don’t you have someone to bake you fresh bread? Hm? I’ll tell you, Mister Doctor!”

Now he put his hands on the sink and leaned in, his eyes meeting his eyes. And that was how it happened. He gave up bedding women and redoubled his work, where he was discovering many interesting facts about the tolerances of the human body and psyche that had not been known before. Single-mindedly, he worked to devise equipment and experiments, but, as was always the case with scientific research, he never seemed to have enough funding to achieve his goals. He applied to his superiors for greater resources, invoking the security of the people’s revolution. Love, he wrote, bred unpredictability, restlessness, trouble. But if love could be dissected, understood, and controlled, then surely such knowledge would be an asset to the Politburo. They granted his request, and he had as much money to work with as would have fed forty-seven thousand mouths for a year.

By August of 1950, the doctor had made some remarkable progress. Utilizing ingenious techniques he had developed himself, he was able to predict to the minute how long a pair of lovers would remain attached to each other. His subjects came to him believing that they were participating in a study on the nature of lovemaking. After spending one night in a room appropriate for such observations, the couple would be separated and the experiments would begin.

“Yulia, I have some questions to ask you. You have a piece of scratch paper and a pencil that you may use if you would like. When you have an answer, say it aloud. I will record your answers to these questions with this machine,” he gestured toward a green metal box on the table. “Do you understand?”

“Firstly, what is the sum of the first five prime numbers?” She worked out an answer and said it.

He continued to ask her questions, her answers to which were invariably wrong. He manipulated the recording to make it sound as if Yulia had had even greater difficulty, for instance, by doubling the durations of her pauses, looping minor stutters, and so on. He then invited her fiancé Anton into the room with the green metal box.

Asking Anton the same questions, the doctor took notes while the young man responded correctly every time.

His prisoners always had food sufficient in quality and quantity – better than most of them ate outside the facility. They had hot water every other day. But Vadym Mikhailovich kept a bag of burrs always at the ready. When confronted with the apparently profound stupidity of his lover, a man became much more likely to acknowledge that perhaps this was not the person best suited for his love. Or else it was the man whose ignorant and unintelligent responses slowly repulsed his girlfriend or wife. This was the mildest method – Level 1, as the doctor referred to it. From there, it became personal, intimate, and cruel. “Yulia, think of all the men with whom you have engaged in sexual activities. The best, think of as a ten, the worst, a one. With complete honesty and a regard for the import of the scientific research we are conducting, please evaluate Anton on your scale.” Her answer was then replayed to Anton, immediately after he had evaluated Yulia on his scale. From mildly pointing out ignorance to exposing sexual inadequacy and revelations of infidelity, the doctor discovered ways to play the piercing, high notes that stung his subjects instantly, along with the low, persistent, reverberating tones that resonated in the walls and bowels. Most experiments took a week and a half to carry out.

Sitting at the table where he ate his breakfast, the doctor poured vodka into a tall glass. He drank slowly, letting the warmth in his belly thaw him. For an hour he sat, drinking and reflecting on his work. As the experiments continued, Vadym had become increasingly convinced that the reason he could not find love earlier in his life was that he had intuitively understood what his experiments provided evidence of.

He walked to the bathroom and, after using the toilet, looked at himself in the mirror. Bald and fattish now, his mouth permanently turned down at the corners, he could see that it would be doubtful he could have any woman but a whore.

Finishing his vodka, he got under his sheets and slept a dreamless sleep.

The next day, a technician introduced case 51.857-A/B to the doctor: Maksim Lebedevich and Vera Nikolaevna. The doctor hurried through his standard, mendacious explanation of the experiment, making sure to emphasize how imperative it was that the two fully participate for the benefit of science and the future. They were not prisoners, certainly, but they could not be let go from the facility until the conclusion of the experiment. That next morning, the sessions began.

“I have some questions to ask you. You have a piece of scratch paper and a pencil that you may use if you would like. When you have an answer, say it aloud. I will record your answers to these questions with this machine,” he gestured toward a green metal box on the table, “Do you understand?”

“Firstly, what is the sum of the first five prime numbers?” She said the prime numbers aloud, keeping place with her fingers, adding as she went along. She gave her answer.

“You are a bright woman, so I will tell you more of our purpose. We must find the precise thing that causes love so that we can implement our findings in such a way as to improve the lives of the people. Traditional methods of finding love are inefficient and do not suit the pace of progress that must be made over the next five years.” Very little of what he said was true, naturally, but misdirection had proven to be a very effective way of handling his more intelligent subjects. Vadym Mikhailovich called Maksim Lebedevich in and asked him the same series of questions, then replayed Vera’s responses.

“You misunderstand the point of this exercise. Do you not find it curious that Vera could not give the acceleration due to gravity?”

The days passed but the experiment drew no nearer to completion. Neither had admitted to infidelity or even having ever had sexual relations with another person. And the little foibles that were like ice picks against other couples were as feathers tickling the amusement of Vera and Maksim. Finally, the doctor decided he had to resort to more radical procedures. Technicians, posing as guards, raped Vera Nikholaevna. That afternoon Maksim was called in to see Vadym Mikhailovich.

“Maksim Lebedevich, you must understand that you are a subject in a vital experiment, and, moreover, you are my patient. Believe me when I say I have your best interests at heart. We ask a little of you, so that the future may benefit greatly.”

“We have never found anyone unsuitable for our experiment. Sometimes it takes as long as two months to learn what we need to know,” Vadym told him. In fact, the longest case on record was twenty-two days, most of which was due to the dullness of the subject couple. Generally, cases requiring two weeks were considered nuisances. Vadym dismissed Maksim.

Vadym Mikhailovich determined that it would be necessary to gain a better understanding of the neurological responses of Vera and Maksim. Setting his technicians to work, he had an apparatus built that involved two television screens, a set of buttons, and a timing mechanism. He placed Vera and Maksim in a room together, separated by a soundproof glass partition. In front of Maksim, the doctor placed a screen with these words showing: DO YOU LOVE VERA? PRESS YES OR NO WHEN INSTRUCTED.” Vera’s screen read the same but asked if she loved Maksim. They looked through the glass at each other. The screen changed with a flash. “PRESS YES OR NO NOW.” What happened next baffled Vadym Mikhailovich. The technician on Vera’s side spoke through a microphone:

“Comrade Technician Yuri has misinterpreted the data. The results on the male’s machine conclusively indicate that the female responded first.”

“The results indicate that the female subject responded first,” technician Lev said into the microphone.

Which was patently impossible, knew Vadym Mikhailovich.

The screens flashed and changed to “PRESS YES OR NO.”

“The results on the male side confirm Comrade Technician Yuri’s conclusion,” said technician Lev, at which point the arteries carrying blood to Doctor Vadym Mikhailovich Tatarinov’s brain nearly burst. His consternation became so extreme that he could no longer stand the sight of the two and went home to his apartment, leaving instructions that they not be fed or given hot water for four days.

Vadym’s apartment felt enormous to him. He looked around at the furniture that had not changed since the day he moved in. A record player sat on a table, unused for a decade now. Not bothering with a glass, he took three gulps of vodka and sat down at the table where he ate his breakfast. He saw his reflection in a porcelain plate on the table. “Vadym Mikhailovich Tatarinov! That’s who you are! And who do these pieces of shit think they are, trying to give you a stroke?”

“It’s love, isn’t it? Well, it must be. It is an abnormal case, but it is love. Beyond all explanation. Love!”

He finished the bottle and went to bed sick.

At the end of the four days, he had Vera hauled before him. He lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

“I am aware of that. It is a prescribed part of your treatment.”

“Vera, you will lower your voice and understand your place. You are a subject, one of many, in a very important experiment that I am conducting, and furthermore, you are my patient. Do you understand the relationship between us? You are not to question my methods or my expertise. You are not to raise your voice at me. What you are being treated for is a persistent delusional condition. Our experiments have proven irrefutably that “love,” as the neurosis is popularly termed, is a correctable condition. You and your husband have been among our more trying cases, but I have arrived at a definitive cure and have had it implemented.”

Maksim Lebedevich was given cyanide in his food that afternoon and did not feel much pain when he died. Vadym Mikhailovich released Vera two days later, giving her twenty rubles and a packet of decent cigarettes as well as her husband’s personal effects. Vadym Mikhailovich wrote a report for Stalin in which he described the case in detail, though he opted not to mention the results of his final experiment when he submitted the report along with his letter of resignation.

• CLOSE

There's a lot of ways to get where we're goin’ and we picked every way that people on drugs would take.
We came to a fence in an alleyway--we crawled on the ground and stacked plastic crates--
you made crass remarks on how much the cold makes you shake.
Your hair is darker than the night cause I can't see the strands against your hands while you feel your way through.

We held dimorphic prayers in our hands and with that corroded the streets
and rocks and the sands.
We saw people undress in different lighting they perceived to make them look best,
so the lighting was varied or the TV’s were on,
pulsing blue on varied breasts and embracing arms.
Old men smoked cigars on high rise balconies in a patrician manner, their wives in the bathrooms applying self tanner.
Morbific by nature but constrained to the ground—we were higher than they could ever dream and all colors of the sky we attained.
We saw the edge of trashcans lining places of development. We saw piers
peering out from under the cities gown.
We felt our chests move high and our stomachs left on the ground.

• CLOSE

[in soothing voice] Imagine yourself on an island with white sandy beaches, imagine the sun toasting the tops of your arms as clear friendly water teases your toes.

She stares, wondering if he can see the wickedness. Hoping. They never see it, the nice ones. How have they come this far without pain?

Breathe in, breathe out. The instructor turns on soft music, while she twists the words. Imagine your heart, unbreakable as stone, calm as the summer waters. Je ne le ferai pas, parce que j’ai peur de la loi, mais je veux fusiller tous les oiseaux.

• CLOSE

You recognized our enemies
where they lurked behind the curtain.
You forged a road, the only road
when all paths were uncertain.

We didn't know, until you taught us,
just what was our high, elusive goal--
not laboring for fame or profit,
but to engineer the human soul.

Old Bolshevik, we lay you down.
You answered the National Question;
in honor of your memory,
we canceled the election.

• CLOSE

But you practiced every chord and sixteenth note,
grew from your love like some damn Bono quote,
in a narrow room where silent posters cheered.

• CLOSE

Forty thousand years, a blue flame, and the number nine,
and it's always been war,
skulls, swords, and guns, every stop on the time line

and my brother died on his feet, but I held his hand--
you, changer of small things,
Dark God of Hope, if it's my worship you demand

like a weapon, and those it kills it does not miss or see;
I'll be amenable.
But there's one thing you have to promise me:

• CLOSE

He thinks about his mother and father and the girlfriend who broke up with him. and how that had driven him to enlist, to forget, to escape, to leave her behind. He wants her to change places with him; no, he wants to kill her himself. The hate that wells up is not directed toward his captors but her, her, that goddam bitch. Jesus, please, he says through a throat so drily tight it feels like the flesh is cracking, flaking off the inside every time he speaks.

Ghaazi sits on a folding chair at a vinyl-covered card table, head propped on his right hand, spinning a cell phone with his left. They are waiting for instructions.

"What name," he says again, more softly.

"You kill we. We kill you. You kill we," Ghaazi says as he lifts his sweaty, hairy head from his hand and makes a circular gesture with his fore and middle fingers.

"Thank you," says Eric. Qasim nods and twists the cap back onto the bottle. He is weary.

Then the phone rings. Ghaazi takes the phone in his right hand. With a tremendous effort, he struggles to recall the English his father had taught him.

"Please, please don't kill me," says the soldier. The phone continues ringing.

"Ghaazi," Ghaazi answers the phone.

• CLOSE

I know my prowess is distanced like black suns
I like your dirty clothes
Da da da doo da

• CLOSE

She’d wash the dishes in the sink and then set the water at the right
temperature, which was a tricky thing, and get the towel. It was
always the same towel, an unremarkable frayed brown from her
grandparents' lake house. It started, as these things often do, out of
convenience, and soon became habitual, integral. She’d reach under
nicer towels to get it, become sadly puzzled when it wasn't there.

He usually stuck his head under the faucet without checking the
temperature. Trustingly, but maybe carelessly, and very rarely
bravely. She’d wet his hair with what he thought was just the right
amount of fingertip and nail. She’d wash it once, and then again,
taking care to get the base of his neck and his scrappy sideburns.

They had kissed, once, in Illinois. She was trying to sleep on an
unfamiliar couch with a ragged cough and a headache that felt like two
black eyes. They were exchanging half sleep thoughts when his head
popped up from the sleeping bag on the floor and, for a second, his
cigarette mouth touched her cough syrup lips. It was a long drive
home, and they never discussed it. If they had, she’d say it didn’t
mean a thing, and he’d swear he was still free.

• CLOSE

"Oh," Karl responded.

Their voices had woken the bunnies, and the rabbits sat nervously in their part of the kitchen, noses twitching, spooked. It was before breakfast. She took them, along with the silverware and the sheets, and packed everything carefully in the backseat of her Volvo. It had been a very domestic scene--drawers opening and closing, the clatter of forks and butter knives, even the smell of fresh laundry wafting up from the basement where it'd been sitting half folded since the previous night. Karl stood near the bay window, watching her pack methodically. She’d wedged the bunny cage between two large amps and a wooden box filled with distortion pedals and was now making sure everything was secure. Her guitar case was already buckled in the passenger seat, riding shotgun. She closed the rear passenger door, got in the car, and pulled out of the driveway. A faded sticker of The Clash clung to the back bumper, but probably wouldn't survive the winter. Karl watched the Volvo drive down Delaware, make a left on Buena Vista and disappear.

"What's up, Karl?"

"What? When?"

"Christ."

"But don't worry, I've figured something out. We don't need them, listen to this." Karl put the phone down on the top part of the keyboard. He could just make out Robert's faint voice saying "Karl..."

And Karl played a song.

If you wanted to summarize it, you could. A half-decent paraphrase might be: there was a kingdom, and the kingdom is no more. That's literally what the song is about, but you miss the remarkable thing by doing that, by shaving off the edges. People don't know how to write about popular music. They use buzzwords and talk around the core of it, or worse, they get caught up in the drama of musicians. Musicians exist to deliver their songs-- that's their importance to us. You don't care about the delivery truck, you care about the medical supplies. Karl knew that. Karl knew he was the method of delivery. And when you heard the song, you knew it, too. It was a motherfucker of a song.

Here's how a woman in her thirties responded when asked what she was doing when she first heard it. This is from a twenty-year retrospective article Boot did, just first names.

This is anecdotal. But ask anyone who has heard the song, and you'll get a similar story. Chances are you remember when you first heard it, too. But what is the song about? I don't think Karl knew. He never spoke about its genesis, or why it's called "A Gift from the Bunnies" or about the incredible success it achieved. Certainly the lyrics offer some clues, but it seems the essential piece of the puzzle is missing. I refer to the controversy surrounding the final line of the song, where Karl sing/speaks "this is what I said to make you leave", which is of course an alteration of the first line, "this is what I sing to make you stay". The first pressing had a colon printed in the lyric booklet after both lines, but this was removed from all subsequent pressings without any explanation from the label. Fans clamor to know what--what did Karl say? And there's more than one forum frequented by those who claim to know. In fact, there’s even an Internet meme that resurfaces whenever a new version of the song comes out that shows a picture of a bunny with some speculative answer to that question, often ridiculous or obscene.

Scientists find the fact that the phenomenon cannot be repeated less troubling than that it occurs at all. For what else behaves this way? There was a small movement to ban the song, but it was never pursued seriously, since there’s nothing in the content of the song that is controversial. Quite the opposite, in fact. But because it raises questions that science has been unable to answer, there are still some who have deliberately avoided listening to it. Their abstinence is often a source of envy for the rest of us, as many would love to return to a point before hearing it, to listen with fresh ears and experience the feeling that to most these days is locked away forever in an unusually precise memory.

"This is what I said to make you leave," Karl sang quietly as the last chord resonated in the immaculate front room. The light of late morning had crawled its way from the window to cover half the hardwood floor. There was no sound from the phone, but when Karl picked it up he heard Robert weeping.

“Thank you.”

"I don't know what's happening in my life anymore, Robert. Things are ending and beginning. I think I'm through. She took the bunnies."

"I'm saying I think I'm through."

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“Huh? Oh yes. Yes, that’s it, I believe. For today,” replied Karl.

“Yes, ‘til then,” replied Karl gathering his leather satchel and his cell phone off the table.

This ambivalence she felt towards Karl’s project sunk into her thoughts as she was heading towards the Blue Line to catch the metro to meet her friend Anna for drinks. Wry, cleverly hyphenated phrases, fractured images loosely hewn together—worse than Ezra Pound and less earnest, that was her dim perception of it. It also struck her in some sense vulgar… there was no plumbing or forging. It wasn’t a craft, but a party game.

The subway steps smelled like piss, and she could hear a couple yelling at each other on the steps above as the evening eased full on.

Lucie felt like she had almost been hit by a car rounding the corner, caught in the horror of approaching headlights. “Huh?”

Karl briefly noticed Lucie’s slip showing. He pushed it quickly from his mind, not because it titillated him, but because it mildly surprised him. Surprised him in such a way that he was not quite sure why it surprised him at all. It was the same feeling he had had when he noticed a pack of Newports sandwiched between pens and highlighters in Lucie’s bookbag while she was fishing for change to buy coffee with.

A question. Karl muttered a reply- he was not quite past the slip. A slip? Really? He was sure slips were the domain of itchy little girls in their hooped Easter dresses and secretaries with silently graying hair. A twenty-something year old woman wearing a slip seemed wrong. It bothered him on his walk all the way home.

But a slip? It was almost a ludicrous as a gentleman he had seen when he was exiting Fisher. The man stood like a strip of celluloid smoking slowly under a street light. If that wasn’t enough the man wore his hat low over a blue-grey long abomination of a coat.

He rounded the cobble stoned street; the heels of his shoes were every day a bit more worn. The door gave a creak; painted toenails peeked over the sofa.

What everyone except Karl Chakravarthy seemed to understand was that Maria, his wife, was clumsy, obnoxious even. She was not clumsy in the same way that a cloyingly sweet waitress is clumsy. You know the type: she’ll nervously rattle off the specials of the day with a over-sized smile only to drop a whole tray of drinks later. No, that sort of clumsiness still suggests a slight charm in its ineptitude. Because of her husband’s stature, perhaps, people expected something of Maria when they met her. Instead she came off like a renowned concert pianist who drowsily selects a F# when a simple F is wanted, or worse yet comes to an important concert inebriated, fumbling brashly over the keys, the whole house silent and aghast.

Like many things of import in waking life, the dim flicker of inconsiderateness or any other potentially distasteful behavior on her husband’s part washed over Maria’s lowered eyelids, propped up on those oversized chenille pillows. Lulled by the sherry and the weekend weather report, Maria couldn’t have given a toss if she had heard that the moon was going to be blown up as she drifted still further away, supine freshly pedicured toes alighted on the loveseat’s edge.

Anna breathed heavily and pushed the door open with her strong hands. The sky almost followed her in, heavy like a wet stone. She sat at the farthest end of the bar by the jukebox. Red, blue, red, blue…eight o’clock, the bar half-dead, the barkeep flipped a switch behind a wood-paneled divider. She glanced down and realized her legs were dirty; she had been walking around all day.

Anna was aware that she stuck out sitting by herself at the end of the bar, a glass of water in front of her. Usually she would have brought a newspaper or a notebook or a sudoku or something for Pete’s sake, something to keep her attention diverted from other’s noticing that she was sitting by herself. Did they notice? Well, either way the idea of it made her uncomfortable, nothing more uncomfortable both to the noticed and the noticer than someone too obviously alone in public. Where is Lucie? She pulled out her phone, blushing quietly to herself. Even though Lucie had not called and she had already ascertained the time, Anna stared at the phone display a little longer in a desperate attempt to urge time on. This was one of those instances in which transience was a gift.

“I won’t say it again. You know why.”

One thousand other people were falling asleep watching t.v., deciding dinner, having drinks with their friends, but here she was for absolutely no reason at all, or at least for no reason she could tell, detained by a man the human equivalent of an ellipsis.

“Alright then, if that’s your attitude, then fine.” He nodded and slunk back from the gaze of the streetlight, seamlessly rounding the corner he had come from.

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Thanatology is the study of death, the process and custom and science of dying. Hood College is the only accredited degree-granting institution in the United States that offers a master's degree in thanatology.

Have you ever seen a full-on drag show? I attended one at a nightclub called Club 69. The performance impressed, mesmerized me. While there I talked with the son of a Peruvian diplomat named Alfredo. We drank beers and danced to some kind of pulsating Argentine turbo-tango musica.

At the zoo they let all kinds of ducks (exotic ducks, not just the plain white and brown ones) wander about. There is duck shit everywhere. They also let a few other kinds of animals roam freely. They have "acuti," which are so adorable that customs might forgive you for trying to smuggle one back in your carry-on. The grizzly bear looked powerful; the polar bear looked miserable.

There is a cemetery where all the rich and famous Argentinians are buried. The tombs are ornate, with polished white, gray, and black facades. Some are faced with glass so that the caskets can be seen. Even in the middle of the day it was so haunting that there were certain alleys, crowded with vaulting, tremendous tombs, that I could not walk down the full way. There were many couples on dates. There were lots of dead brigadier generals.

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When I was fourteen my grandmother died from brain cancer. It's something that happened, I don't think about it anymore and it's not what this is about. It's just that she would have been really interested in hearing my stories about Indonesia. She would have been interested in the old Ibus here with their bare chests and long fingernails, carrying their grandchildren in sarongs tired around their shoulders. She'd be interested to know that even people here know about the Native Americans and what was done to her grandfather's people. When I told one man I was American the first thing he said was "You killed the Indians! Your ancestors killed them." I told him I was Indian and he shook my hand. "But only a small part," I said. "My ancestors killed my other ancestors." "Yes," he nodded, "That's the way it is."

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Downtown there is a parking garage located inside a converted movie palace. When entering the garage, you must drive under its marquis which now reads:

I have walked under a movie palace marquis before, and I have driven into an underground parking garage before, but I have never entered this particular location in either of its forms. I do not know anyone who has been to the theatre before or after its renovation either, but I imagine what it would be like to hear them talk about it. Perhaps there wasn’t always valet parking, but ticket costs were comparable.

I learned about the garage palace while watching a special on local architecture. I also learned there is an administrative building a few blocks from the garage palace which has casts of statues from the pediment of the Parthenon located on either side of its entrance steps. I have neither been to see these casts, nor have I seen the actual statues in the British Museum. I have, however, seen casts of these actual statues while visiting the Parthenon of Nashville, which is in itself a scale replica of the Temple of Athena Parthenos. You must enter the Parthenon of Nashville below the actual double bronze door entrance. The tickets cost only $2 after four pm, which is half price.

While in Memphis you can also visit Graceland, the actual home and gravesite of Elvis Presley. The house sits on top of a hill, and in order to get beyond the gates to see the building, you have to purchase some sort of tour. The cheapest tour is exactly eight times more than it costs to see the Parthenon of Nashville after four pm. You enter Graceland through the front door, but one of the first stops, and my favorite stop on the self-guided tour, is down the stairs, in the basement, where you can view the yellow and blue TCB lounge.

The movie palace downtown was transformed into a parking facility somewhere in the midst of Presley’s film career, although it had never shown a film featuring the musical or acting talents of Elvis, since it had closed nearly a decade before. My father tells me that Elvis made more money from his movies than his records, although he doesn’t remember if this is true. Today Elvis’s estate makes a great deal through the sale of tickets to Graceland, which his daughter arranged to have converted into a museum especially for his fans. She continues to take care of the finances, and in return, receives much of its revenue.

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