Islands live comfortably in the literary imagination. Cut off from the mainland and often small or negligible in population, they place characters in inescapable situations, amplify drama, and often suspend the normal rules of mainland society. And islands, as Rachel Carson points out in The Sea Around Us, are geologically transient, altering shapes and even disappearing completely; islands as symbols set the stage for other kinds of instability and ephemerality.
Being from the U.K., I’m also fascinated with the idea of islandness, and what it might mean to be an islander. When an island is not named in a novel, and therefore not tied to a specific geography, what does the notion of an island lend to the narrative, to the people that live there? What does the imagined island invoke?
My novel, Whale Fall, is itself set on an unnamed and fictional island, based on an amalgamation of islands orbiting the British Isles such as Bardsey Island (Wales), St. Kilda (Scotland), and the Blasket islands (Ireland) which, like the island in the novel, were facing challenges around depopulation, increasingly hostile weather conditions, and modernisation on the mainland in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel’s protagonist Manod, an eighteen-year-old girl who grew up on the island, dreams of a different life on the mainland and struggles to connect with the people around her; her physical isolation on an island manifesting in her interior life. On a small island surrounded by shoreline, Manod lives in-between land and sea, but also in-between her past and her present, her present and her possible futures, and between her community, her family and her ambitions.
The eight novels on this list are set on unnamed or fictional islands; making them not grounded in a specific geography of place, but in the idea of an island. These unnamed islands have a global reach across Europe, Asia, East Africa, and North America, but the islands’ conditions—of isolation, of insularity, of instability—point to similar underlying ideas of disruption, allegory, colonial legacy and environmental care, forming an archipelago of novels mapping their connections to each other.
Taranto’s fictional island off the coast of Connecticut hosts the Rubin Institute, a millionaire-funded university staffed by the “cancellees and deplorables” of traditional academia.
It’s one of a few books on this list that uses an island setting for a fabular, allegorical narrative, the island setting allowing for a contained mini-society that reads heavy with symbolism. The novel is sharp and funny, skewering the notion of modern cancel culture with exile to a phallic building. Its explorations of academic and free speech are suitably messy and ungratifying; as on the mutable ground of the shore, you never know quite where you stand.
On a small, unnamed island, a single house holds a strange and otherworldly family. The three sisters at the heart of The Water Cure have been deliberately isolated from the mainland; their parents, Mother and King, tell them that it holds a toxic male population, and build their own society with elaborate, often cruel, rituals, and intense bonds to one another.
But when their perfect island seclusion is disrupted by three men washed up on a beach, the girls’ world begins to disintegrate. Mackintosh takes clear inspiration from other literary islands, The Tempest being an obvious homage, to set up this story of worlds colliding, and the island’s natural scenery provides a dramatic and ominous backdrop with gathering flocks of birds, grotesque washed-up carcasses of sea creatures, stormclouds moving in. I also love its island-y form: short, fragmentary pieces of story, narrated by different sisters, their interiorities constantly orbiting one another.
The transience and instability of islands underpins Ogawa’s dystopian masterpiece, where objects and words disappear physically, and from memory, on an unnamed island off an unnamed coast. As the unnamed narrator finds ways to hide their editor, R, hunted by the authoritarian Memory Police, the island setting forms a topography of loss: animals migrate and never return, domestic and natural objects vanish, inhabitants reach for and fail to reach a forgotten language. It also stages the lives of displaced people – former hat-makers, ferrymen, boat mechanics, writers left adrift after the objects of their craft too disappear.
As a dystopia, the novel doesn’t lend itself to easy political analysis (and is all the better for it); Ogawa’s elusive, dream-like prose and meandering structure are punctuated solely and suddenly by ordinary people taking risks. The instability of the island, the sudden ease with which its shores can alter and dissolve, illuminates this allegory of loss and memory with fitting unease.
Set on the Caribbean island estate of a millionaire white family, Tar Baby follows the romance of two Black Americans from very different worlds: Jadine, an art historian and fashion model who has been sponsored into wealth and privilege, and Son, an impoverished criminal-on-the-run.
When Son is washed-up on the edge of the Streets’ estate, he ruptures the class, education and racial divides that keep him in place, entering a new world of wealth, privilege, and freedom. The island setting stands for an erosion of boundaries, both physically between land and water, and socially. Subversion and rupture is a major concern across Morrison’s work, and the island asks for and offers new ways of living on shifting, tidal ground.
A young girl and her grandmother spend a summer playing, talking and arguing on a tiny, unnamed Finnish island in this novel by the creator of the Moomins. Jansson’s eye looks to the minutiae of the island’s landscape to illuminate the intergenerational lens of the novel, concerning her narrator with the care and preservation of island moss, flowers, rocks. As later on Moonmin island, everything is transient, the island landscape prone to fogs, rainstorms, and tides that sweep things away and disrupt the plans of the creatures inhabiting it.
By The Sea follows two narrators, both immigrating to the United Kingdom and both in flux; Saleh Omar, a political exile attempting to enter the United Kingdom from an unnamed East African island on a fake passport with the fake name Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, pretending not to speak English, and Latif Mahmud, arriving on a student visa and the son of the real Rajab Shaaban Mahmud, grappling with the recent revelation of their father’s secrets and second life. Gurnah examines the bureaucratic and emotional difficulties of movement and migration with an exacting and neutral eye. The novel’s movement between dichotomies, one named island and one unnamed, one ‘legal’ immigrant and one illegal, examines the inner landscape of alienation and exile, and the hollowness of national borders.
A shipwrecked man is rescued by a passing boat and deposited on the eponymous island of Wells’s Sci-Fi classic. As in Taranto’s novel, Moreau’s island is the home of an exiled scientist, beleaguered for his vivisectional experiments on humans and animals. And as in many novels on this list, an island’s boundary-blurring of water and land creates a space where other boundary-blurring can take place. Moreau’s island is inhabited by the results of his experiments, a series of animal-human hybrids including Hyena-Swine, Leopard-Man, Fox-Bear Woman, Sloth-Creature, and Half-finished Puma Woman, who live according to their own set of surreal laws. Wells’s book has clear interest in the separation, connection, and interference of humans and nature, exploring instinct, morality, and Darwinian evolution in the surreal allegory offered by an island’s secluded world.
I found The Colony greatly inspiring while finishing the edits for Whale Fall. Magee’s unnamed island has some geographical models in the peninsulas around the coastline of West Ireland, such as the Aran islands and Blasket islands, and clear literary heritage in J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Colm Tóibín. Yet as its title suggests, Magee’s island is deliberately unnamed to place its themes ahead of geography; it is a novel about colonialism, culture, and language.
Its drama, as with other titles on this list, concerns the arrival of outsiders: Lloyd is a London artist looking to revitalise his flagging career, and Jean-Pierre, a French linguist, charting and recording the island’s native Irish language. They clash over their mythologising of the islanders, whose numbers dwindle in the double-figures, and overlook their impact on this struggling community. While the story roots itself in an Irish perspective, with radio bulletins about the Troubles in Northern Ireland interspersing the narrative, it dramatises the legacy between colonised and coloniser with a global outlook.
Katya Apekina, author of critically acclaimed The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, opens her newest novel, Mother Doll, with a nesting set of characters linked by familial ties and the weight of generational inheritance. Zhenia, a medical translator in Los Angeles, finds herself pregnant. Meanwhile, her beloved grandmother is dying. And, her deceased great-grandmother Irina, formerly a Russian revolutionary, approaches a psychic medium named Paul, begging him to connect her with Zhenia so that she can tell a story that has, for many years, remained a secret, obfuscated by time, geography, and trauma.
In purgatory, where Irina exists as her teenaged self, school uniform and all, a group of people coalesce in voice and in pain. When Paul first hears them, they announce: “We are all dead and none of us have been able to move on. We talk at once. We are aggrieved.” These early declarations reveal the heart of Mother Doll. Apekina, through the two intersecting narratives of Zhenia and Irina, a deep understanding of the Russian Revolution, and a clear-eyed portrayal of how complicated and necessarily fierce relationships can be between mothers and their daughters, asks, in her novel: Is it possible to move through or past trauma by speaking it aloud? If someone bears witness to the parts of ourselves we have tried to separate because of shame, fear, or the unspeakability of an experience, does it make it more bearable to live with or through? How are the excruciating, unspeakable parts of our lives passed down from one generation to another, both through biology and/or through the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives?
I spoke with Katya Apekina over Zoom about the power of female rage, how shame can keep us stuck, and the limitations of language, particularly when describing trauma.
Jacqueline Alnes: What drew you to write about the Russian Revolution, and what did you take from writing with such depth and care about the time period?
Katya Apekina: I’m from Russia and it was this event that ended up impacting my family. No one in my family was directly involved in the Revolution, but they were politically active and it felt like this very complicated thing. On one hand, the fall of the monarchy seemed inevitable, and what happened after was very bad too, with Lenin and then Stalin. My family left in the ’80s, and this was before people were really allowed to leave, and really suffered under the totalitarian regime. Most families did.
I started researching the book around 2016. I didn’t really start writing it until the pandemic and I was thinking about revolution a lot because of what was happening in the U.S. I also was thinking about this desire that I was feeling, and one that my character Irina as a teenager was feeling, of wanting to burn everything down without a clear idea of a next step after that. I don’t think that’s true for all revolutionaries but she was a teenager when she got involved. What motivated her was not a clear political ideology, necessarily, but a feeling of anger, female rage, being on the outside of society, feeling less-than all the time, and wanting to burn it down. And isn’t that relatable?
JA: Part of the book seemed to me to be about agency and guilt and grief, and the way that violence can warp who we are or who we want to be. I was thinking about how young Irina is in some of the scenes. There’s so much about her life at the time that feels schoolgirl-ish. On one hand she seems so young, and on the other hand she has these things where she is starting to witness people in love or wonder what life will look like after this. While writing Irina’s role in the revolution, what did you think about girlhood and identity and the way those things were shaped by these events?
KA: She was sort of guided in terms of her thinking by a very charismatic teacher. For the teacher, a lot of what she was teaching was very theoretical, but Irina was very literal. She wanted action. I can imagine how exciting it would be to be Irina in that situation and feel like you have agency and feel like the things you are doing set off a chain reaction in an enormous historical movement and event. It is very powerful and very exciting but I don’t think she fully understood what it would lead. I don’t think she understood what that kind of violence fully means or what being exposed to war and deprivation and a society that doesn’t function, even if it was functioning badly before. Her girlhood ends.
The way the story is set up, the Irina we are hearing from is just one aspect of a woman who has lived a long life. If you were to talk to other aspects of that woman, she would have very different things to say. Her teenage self ceased to exist once she escaped from the Soviet Union. The person she becomes is very different than her teenage self. We are only hearing from one part of her. I was playing with this idea of parts, a common idea in therapy where you’re made up of many different parts, but the idea that we are a unified self is an illusion. There are often parts of us in conflict with each other. Maybe some people feel more whole than others, but when people go through the kind of intense trauma that she does, that part is separated out. There was blood on her hands, and she was feeling the larger energy of the revolution that was moving inside of her. She became a vessel for something bigger than herself.
JA: Even though she does have parts of herself that are separate, this book made me think about how those parts of us are never really separate; they haunt us and they haunt our offspring. It’s this weird tension between having this part of you who can speak from this place while knowing they can never truly go away even if you are not them anymore.
KA: Right. The pattern is when you reject that part of yourself and shame it, it stays around more. It digs in. It gets louder.
JA: This novel made me think so much about what kinds of traumas are unspeakable and how, even when people do try to put difficult histories into words, parts might be lost in the articulation, in the translation between languages and time, and even in the listening. I took away from the novel that there is power in story, but also an impossibility in conveying a story in all of its wholeness. Did you feel like that while writing?
KA: One thing that I often think about in my writing and in life, too, is not quite the inability for two people to communicate, but the gap that is never quite filled. You’re projecting so many assumptions onto another person, whether you’ve known them a long time or not. You think you and another person have a shared understanding and then it turns out they have an entirely different understanding. Language is so limited in what it can convey.
Books function in a similar way, in the sense that they’re giving you stuff but you project into them your own stuff. The reason you’re affected by books is because you’re bringing so much of yourself and your past into a story that reflects that back to you. It’s almost like windows, right as the sun is starting to set, where you can sort of see into them but you’re also seeing your reflection. There is a desire people have to connect, but at the same time their inability to see past themselves.
JA: Do you think knowing anyone else is ever truly a possibility?
When I had a daughter, I became aware of myself in a chain of women, a part of a series of people, a piece rather than an individual.
KA: I don’t know. It’s funny because having a child, you might think, oh, that’s a person you can know fully because you’ve been there since the beginning. But for me, even when my daughter was a baby, I felt like I didn’t know her fully. She is such a separate person from me. I think I was picturing it would feel like an extension of yourself to have a child, but it never felt that way at all. She has always felt like her own person. This idea of fully knowing and fully possessing are linked for me, and I feel like you can’t fully know or fully possess anybody.
JA: Trauma also impacts that. Thinking about the normal, hard parts of being a human in combination with these familial secrets or obfuscation of pasts due to trauma, how does that play into silence and how much we can know about another person or even about ourselves?
KA: There’s a trauma on a large scale of living in the Soviet Union, which was its own sort of trauma for a lot of people. There’s the trauma of the revolution, the trauma of the great grandmother abandoning her child, which is Zhenia’s grandmother, and that abandonment creating this inability for her grandmother to be a present or “good” mother to Zhenia’s mother, which she then tried to make up for by being a very good grandmother to Zhenia, and having this very different relationship with Zhenia than her mom. You really see how there’s the initial trauma and there’s the ripples from it and the effects of it.
I was talking to a friend, Ruth Madievsky, who wrote All-Night Pharmacy, and her character had not been an immigrant but had been carrying all of her family’s trauma without even understanding what it was. It’s an emotional weight. Zhenia feels it too. Her own life is perfectly fine and yet she’s feeling the weight of all this stuff that has happened to them. Why is she feeling so disconnected from her life when she’s not the one who lived through all these things?
This idea of inherited trauma is really interesting because sometimes grandchildren carry it and they don’t even understand the origin points for the fears they have; they see the effects but not the source, because the source happened before they were even alive. Often it was something that wasn’t talked about, either, so everything is in the negative space of this event and you weren’t even there for the event.
JA: Paul is an interesting character in that he tries to channel Irina’s narrative. The way he reacts to her story made me think about how we are changed by the telling of stories and also when we listen to stories. There are beautiful things that happen, like Paul understanding Russian. But he also turns to alcohol to cope. His body suffers as a result of being a conduit for this story. When we say these stories out loud and when we try to hold them, they impact us in ways that are important but also in ways that are harmful.
The reason you’re affected by books is because you’re bringing so much of yourself and your past into a story that reflects that back to you.
KA: Bearing witness is heavy. It takes a physical toll. This was something that was inspired by me spending a lot of time with my grandfather when he was dying. I was recording his memoirs for him. That feeling of an onslaught of someone pouring their story into you, and feeling like a receptacle for that story, was physically and emotionally taxing. I feel like there was some study where people who bear witness get worn out. Boundaries between people are kind of porous, and that’s what happens with Paul. The boundary between him and Irina becomes too porous, so he takes on parts of her. He can speak Russian and experience so close to himself what she experienced, and that definitely takes a toll. I feel like listening to people for extended periods of time, and interviewing people about things that aren’t necessarily heavy is tiring.
JA: It seems like listening is a form of care, but maybe it’s even more than that.
KA: It’s a form of witnessing. With Zhenia, it’s not her choice. She’s not consenting to some of it. It requires a giving something of yourself to give your full attention to another person and to empathize.
JA: Even while she might not want to listen, she can’t look away. It’s like a compulsion.
KA: She’s also curious. She wants to know, she wants to understand. She feels an obligation to her grandmother to understand. She also resents having to receive this story. It’s a big ask. There’s a point where she’s pregnant, very pregnant, and she’s just full. She’s carrying enough.
JA: So many of the prominent characters in this novel are women and mothers. They seem to carry so much: family secrets, children, their own ailing mothers, and the list goes on. What about motherhood or womanhood intrigues you?
What motivated her was a feeling of anger, being on the outside of society, feeling less-than all the time, and wanting to burn it down.
KA: After becoming a mother, I became more interested in the lives of mothers and a lot less interested in the lives of men. I feel like growing up, I was oriented toward pleasing men in some way, being chosen by them or something like that. I feel like part of the growing up process for me has been not being super interested in that any more.
JA: When I read about Zhenia being pregnant, I imagined this passing down of an inheritance, both physically and also emotionally, of this is who you are. The women in this book are caregivers, and they seem so aware of the harshness of the world or of the things they are supposed to be worried about and those things come out in parenting.
KA: When I was pregnant and when I had a daughter, I feel like I became really aware of myself in a chain of women. In a way, that was almost a zoom-out type of feeling because I was thinking so much about my own mother and my grandmother and I felt like I was a part of a series of people, like as a piece rather than as an individual.
JA: Even thinking about the title, Mother Doll, prompts me into thinking about these dolls that nest within one another and belong together but they are also separate entities.
KA: When my grandmother was pregnant with my mother, my mother had in her already all of her eggs, one of which would become me. Literally a nesting doll. It feels like what was happening to my grandmother during her pregnancy would genetically impact who I would become as a person.
In the Soviet Union, it was common for people to have children really young and for the children to be raised by the grandparents; that was almost the default. I don’t think there was birth control that was very accessible, so it was common for children to be close with their grandparents. The parents were very young and starting their lives, basically, and so I think that bond between grandparent and grandchild is also cultural.
JA: For the people who make up the chorus of the afterlife in your novel, it seems like there are types of pain that will never leave you, that will stay with you into the beyond. I wondered, in thinking about inherited trauma and a desire for release, did you see ways where engaging in practices like storytelling or listening or diving deep into a history became a form of release?
KA: The ending of my book is about the transubstantiation of trauma into something else. The book is saying that if you deal with the stuff, you can then build a life that’s not encumbered by or defined by those things.
My bro Brian used to tell me he loved me. Throughout our twenties he’d say it every year or two, unprovoked, unexpected, and always at night—just like a leopard attack. Brian still lives in our hometown, so for years when I’d visit my family, we’d get drunk together. We met at the only bar in town, The American Legion, or at his house, which had once been a funeral home and still looks like one. We’d drink and smoke and drive back roads to country bars or rendezvous with some friends at someone’s trailer. Brian backed his beer with Jameson or blackberry brandy, and everything got hazy, fast.
Eventually, after all the stories were retold and the town gossip aired, we’d go outside for a smoke. He’d say, “I love you, brother” in a voice that sounded a little like Hulk Hogan. I never saw it coming. Most times I’d choke out the only correct response, but once in a while, my words failed me, and I’d find myself saying “thanks”or“same” or “and you too, good sir,” as if male insecurity had suddenly given me a top hat.
The problem was twofold: I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t know what I felt. There was something inside, a nearly gene-deep loyalty—the sad community of practice that bros forge over slurred nights. But the feeling felt burdened with nostalgia, a Polaroid stained with spilled beer. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the drinking. That’s what I’ve been trying to understand.
We grew up together in the 90s in a tiny logging town of 700 people in the most rural part of Pennsylvania. Our elementary class had nine students. As my family lore goes, he followed me home from kindergarten (my first time, his second) and never left. His grandfather was a barfly who finally quit drinking and obsessively carved wooden birds in his basement, a tactic to help him stay sober. His dad was a hard-working, rakish alcoholic who looked like a redneck version of John Hamm. His dad’s brother had been killed twenty years earlier in an accident with a homemade hang-glider that Brian’s dad was pulling through the air with a pickup truck. The field where he died was left to grow wild.
My dad was a drinker, too, a proud left-leaning factory worker who gave up partying when my sisters and I were small. He turned to sitting on the porch, listening to Led Zeppelin and nursing his arthritis with glasses of sour wine he made in the basement. There were gallons of the stuff, and it made me more popular than I had any right being among the redneck kids in my hometown.
His dad was a hard-working, rakish alcoholic who looked like a redneck version of John Hamm.
In the year 2000, When I was twelve and Brian was thirteen, we rode our bikes to our first real party, in some woods behind a big red barn. I wore a Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt from the Goodwill and we sprayed ourselves with Christmas stocking cologne like it could keep away bugs. We drank Mickey’s Grenades with high school kids and creepy dudes in their twenties who hovered over the girls that were only a little older than us. We smashed bottles against trees and pocketed the caps as evidence. Biking home, we were stopped by our town cops who chastised us for missing baseball practice. They would go on to raid the party, kids scattering into the woods and bedding down in the ferns, like fawns, only to slink home in the morning.
The party had been Brian’s idea, like most things we did. Before he started dragging me around I’d been a bookish, anxious kid with a few buddies. I lived with the feeling that there were a second set of eyeballs perched behind my head that watched fidgeting hands. A second set of ears that heard my voice and made me queasy at the sound. But drunk, everything moved to the front. Drunk, I lived in the world that’s directly in front of my face. I just was, I just did. Words fell out of my mouth and if I regretted them later, what later? There was no later. There was no time.
The word, I think, is id.
The adults in town mostly shrugged about our parties. We were boys being boys. And boys we remained for the next six years, eventually throwing our own parties and running from cops. We spent weekends stumbling around bonfires or at our older friend Cody’s house, fighting over the stereo. Brian and Cody loved country and with enough effort I could drink myself into fandom too. Over the course of a night I’d go from nodding in a corner to screaming Garth Brooks with the bros:
I’ve got friends in low places, where the whisky drowns, and the beer chases my blues away. And I’ll be okay. I’m not big on social graces, so won’t you step on down to the Oasis because I got friends in low places.
I liked that song because I thought it was true. Nobody in my hometown went to college but I was planning to leave those boys. They treated me like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, even if their dreams had already been treaded upon. Cody had dropped out of college and settled at a factory job a few towns away. Brian was living alone, his dad having moved in with a woman in the next county. But he told me not to worry. We’d always have those slurred nights. He saw himself as Johnny Cash, me as Willie Nelson—blood brothers, real highwaymen, outlaws defined by their differences. But between our constant embarrassing fuckups and our diverging life paths, we were more like white trash iterations of Seth and Evan from Superbad.
He told me not to worry. We’d always have those slurred nights.
The first time I saw Superbad—shortly after its release in 2007—I was off at college, having shed the senior sendoff angst at the heart of the movie. It’s a familiar trope: Evan and Seth are high-school seniors whose close, co-dependent friendship seems to be ending as graduation looms. Uncool and horny, and flanked with their spazzy friend Fogell, they try to find booze for a big party, break into the popular circle, and hopefully get laid. Taking place over the course of one night, the plot still somehow feels epic in the way that long drunken nights feel epic when you’re young and the world is endlessly large, but benign.
Seth and Evan don’t get laid, but they do get shit faced and talk through the fact that they won’t be college roommates. Their high school dreams were just that—dreams. But it hardly matters. Lying in sleeping bags in Evan’s basement, they express their platonic love for each other. “I’m not embarrassed,” Seth says. “We should say it every day.”
But bros learn young to speak through the bottle. The next day, their nighttime promises redacted, they partner off with their crushes instead, their friendship serving more like a practice run for romance.
Superbad was directed by Greg Mottola, but carries the hallmarks of the producer, Judd Apatow, a teen take on the bromance genre he developed during the 2000s. The word was coined by journalist Dave Carnie in the mid-90s but wasn’t widely used until Apatow’s work became popular and culture writers began declaring every male friendship a bromance. By 2010, we’d witnessed a decade of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, four years of Dwayne Wade and LeBron, three years of Obama and Biden. But unlike those relationships, centered on shared work and purpose, the friendships of the bromance are brought to us mostly by booze. Even in Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin, where the male characters are all co-workers, it’s a few slurred nights that bring them together. Drinking your way to a friendship that relies on drinking to sustain itself—that’s the experience of most men I know. If the genre gets one thing right, it’s that booze is the tie that binds.
In the summer of 2007, just after Superbad came out, Cody died when another friend of ours drove them into a ravine in the late model Ford Mustang he could hardly afford. The friend, let’s call him Justin, was playing a game of cat-n-mouse with a carful of young women on the way up the hill from a country bar called The Don’t Know Tavern. Cody was passed out with the passenger seat reclined at the time of the crash. He’d been passed out there since getting 86’ed from the bar for falling asleep on his stool. The coroner said he probably never woke up.
There are usually three bros to a bromance and Cody had felt like our third. He was Fogel, an understated, lovable loser that could hold the protagonists together. A big sluggish guy with lazy eyelids, he was quiet, funny, and much smarter than he let on. He lived for those epic nights, though. The spare bedroom in his house was devoted to drinking games. He had a beer pong table signed by everyone who ever played a game on it. It was covered in terrible cliches. The only one I can remember quoted Hunter S Thompson—“too weird to live and too strange to die.”
The last time I played a game on that table, I was on break from my first year of college and the casting, I realized, had flipped. I was the third bro—maybe the fourth or fifth—the token nonconformist, long-hair, stoned. But maybe it had always been that way. Alcohol often tangles more than it ties, and it’s hard now to trace the threads of friends who never knew each other sober.
His house had been a total mess, bagged beer cans stacked to the ceiling of the porch. He’d just gotten a DUI and couldn’t take the cans to the recycling center. His drinking had gotten bad, but I don’t remember asking him about it. I don’t remember ever asking him about anything real, but this I know: after he’d passed out with the stereo blaring, Brian and I gathered the empties and built pyramids of cans around his house. One on the toilet seat, another in the shower. One outside of his bedroom door, rigged to collapse, and another on the hood of his car. The piece-de-resistance was one on his coffee table, head-high and gleaming like a shrine, which I suppose it was. Brian and I stood marveling at our work before we tiptoed away, giggling like imps.
I don’t know if Cody thought it was funny. The next time I saw him was his funeral.
The spare bedroom in his house was devoted to drinking games.
I got stoned beforehand. I don’t really know why. My dad was working, so he couldn’t come, and I sat with the bros in a pew at the old Lutheran church at the edge of our town. The church had been built as a hexagon so there were no corners for the devil to hide in. It didn’t feel coincidental that we were ushered as close to center as possible. We’d held a little wake the night before and the smell of it was leaching from our pores.
The preacher was a local truck driver and amateur singer who spoke about God at the request of Cody’s mother and stepfather and read the lyrics to Lynyrd Skynard’s “Simple Man” at the request of Cody’s father. Had he been a simple man? Fuck if I knew. I knew he liked Jeff Foxworthy and Wu-Tang Clan. I knew he’d been in the gifted program at school. I knew he was great at math. I knew he drove a car previously owned by a disabled guy; he accelerated and braked with toggles on the steering wheel. Once, because he didn’t have a bottle opener, he opened six beers on the trunk latch of that car and drove home from work. When he’d told me that, I broke out laughing.
The funeral was strange, like everyone there was mourning a different person. At the end, the preacher hit play on a boombox he had behind the pulpit. Some shimmery guitars started up, followed by cellos. None of us knew the song until the preacher started in with his raspy baritone: “I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.”
Brian turned toward me and his eyes held the horror of Lee Ann Womack. Next to him, our bro Matt was too distraught for embarrassment. He was the only one of us to cry, and he tried to hold it in as the song continued, each verse worse than the last. At the bridge, the preacher became dramatic, singing in whispers. He was literally pointing at individuals in the pews and making long, rock-and-roll eye contact as he prowled the pulpit. He was staring right at us at the crescendo, telling us we had a choice, telling us not to sit it out, telling us to dance, and when it ended, no one in the church knew what to do next. We were a communion of the stunned. It was the worst thing I’d ever heard. It felt like high parody. It felt like a scene in one of those movies we loved, which is maybe why Brian said what he said.
Matt was crying loudly and Brian turned him. He had one hand clasped on Matt’s knee and another on his shoulder. “Matt,” Brian whispered.
Matt turned toward him.
“That was fucking horrible.”
Matt burst a single note of laughter, a release of air that could be confused for a sob. I thought no one had noticed. I thought we were adults. But when all the mourners shuffled out, I heard a lady whisper, “I hope this is a goddamned lesson to the kids in this town.”
I still think a lot about that woman. Did she want me to hear her? Did she think it would matter? Death doesn’t happen for our betterment. But even if it did, there was no consensus on its lesson. Our dads said sad shit happens. Our moms said get designated drivers. The country songs said Cody would be throwing down in heaven, burning rubber on some golden highway.
And film? Funerals were for sadboy shit like Garden State. In the bromance, it’s always graduations or weddings or pregnancies that signal when it’s time to grow up. The plots can be different, but closeness is what’s at stake. True emotional vulnerability is both the reward and the risk of drinking, but in the bromance, the consequences stop there. Nowhere is this clearer than Todd Phillips’ The Hangover. Three friends wake up in that trashed Vegas suite to find a live tiger in the bathroom and a crying baby in the closet. The real problem is what’s not there. Their memories of the previous night and their buddy Doug. The set-up stumbles onto a darker truth: When you lose a drinking buddy, it’s often hard to really remember them.
He was the only one of us to cry, and he tried to hold it in as the song continued.
Recently, while re-watching The Hangover, I noticed a pyramid of beers in the opening scene and in a flash I remembered Cody’s contagious smile and the sour smell of those cans. Was this where we got the idea? I checked the release date—2009, two years after his death. I wondered if he would have liked it, if he would’ve appreciated the middle-class version of himself reflected back. Brian did, quoting the movie endlessly when he drank.
I was drinking too much and alone when I started rewatching all these bromance films. At first it felt like nostalgia without the sharp pang. There’s a solace in the message: male friendship isn’t meant to last. It has to flame out, like young love, but can be rekindled for a weekend with the right conditions. The trio in The Hangover could just as easily be replaced with Seth, Evan, and Fogell, or with Brian, Cody, and me—men who will never again be as close as they were as kids. So maybe we drink to go back. We drink to go back to the feeling that closeness is possible, even if the same bravado that we try to rekindle is the thing that keeps us apart.
Even though we were young when Cody died, that’s what the drinking fast became. It was an idiotic summer-long wake. The mood was ennui. Woozy-eyed, stilted, drunk. Every night at bonfires or trailers or dank apartments, where his name cooled and became like a blister on the tongue. Because we couldn’t talk about it, because we’d never seen men talk about it, we assumed drinking about it was the next best thing. As to what we did, besides drink and snort Vicodin, I don’t really remember. Once we tried to go fishing together but Pat jumped in the creek, spooking the fish.
We acted like it was what Cody would have wanted. Sometimes Brian would say, “Let’s go see Cody,” and we’d drive my old Buick to his grave, where visitors left Coors Light and cigarettes and a small toy car, Dale Earnhardt’s #3. We’d pour out a beer on the ground for him, probably like we’d seen in some movie. But even then it felt a little like acting. I began to realize that I’d never really thought of him as a full person, as real and complex as me, until he was dead. He’d always just been a bro. What right did I have to mourn? Had I realized what he meant to me after he died, or did his place in my life grow and embellish like the stories we tell ourselves? All this time later, I still don’t know.
A selfish guilt saddled me that summer. That woman at the funeral was right: the lesson eluded me. I dropped out of college. My dad wouldn’t speak to me. I felt if I just stuck around long enough life would begin to make a little sense. But if the bromance teaches us anything, it’s that an era is always closing. Our last hurrah would be a weekend in August, 2007, during the town festival we’d all loved so much as boys.
We drank to oblivion and took all the Vicodin we could find. The pills, an early first wave of the opioid epidemic, seemed to come from everywhere at once: an uncle, a brother, a doctor’s pen. I hardly even knew what they were. I hardly even cared. What even happened that weekend? Man, I guess you had to be there. Our bro Curly got attacked by an angry neighbor with a baseball bat, and Curly fled so fast that he ran straight out of his shoes. Then the neighbor stole his shoes. Cops came, the shoes were returned, all of us under twenty-one had to hide. Our friend Tuft—nicknamed for his very hairy ass—drank a lot of Absinthe and wallowed in a puddle in his underwear on Main Street. Brent hooked up with Brian’s date in the bathroom, where the keg was kept, leaving Brian crushed and the rest of us thirsty.
The mood was ennui. Woozy-eyed, stilted, drunk.
I got so drunk and high that I lost my car, walked home, and lying skyfaced on my parents’ back porch, surrounded by the night hum of Pennsylvania summer, I cried like a kid. When my mother found me, I was maudlin, saying how sad I was, and how I didn’t want to leave my friends, and that they were good friends. Really, except for maybe Brian, they weren’t. But I’d been humbled by grief, disabused of my own invincibility, and I was confusing my private realizations for shared meaning.
At the end of that summer I left town. Eventually I went back to college. Brian found out his twenty-seven-year-old ex-girlfriend was pregnant and moved in with her. (Unlike in Knocked Up, a few baby books and a new apartment didn’t fix their problems.) Tuft got his girlfriend pregnant, too, and by the time I came home to visit they were already joking about the trouble their boys would get into together. Justin was released from jail and bought another fast car. Some of the guys limped to adulthood, and a few others went further into pills and booze, never really landing from their fall from the pram.
Brian separated from the older girlfriend after a couple of years, around the same time he started telling me he loved me. He met a nice woman and had a little girl. He goes to work early and stays away from bars. He tucks in his daughter each night and volunteers on the town council. He cuts firewood for the old people in town. He voted for Trump, twice, because boys will be boys will be boys. That’s part of the reason we don’t talk much anymore, but really, it’s because you can only retell the same story so many times before the humor’s all wrung out of it. You can only toast a dead friend’s life so many times before the life becomes a myth, and a myth makes a hero. How do you think I started writing in the first place? Here’s Seth in the basement, on a laptop, on a word doc, on a page.
“I’m not embarrassed,” Seth says. “We should say it every day.”
I was maudlin, saying how sad I was, and how I didn’t want to leave my friends.
So here it is:
I loved the last time I partied with the boys. It was a cool night in July of 2018 and Brian and I were drinking at the American Legion when Tuft wandered in. A little while later Justin entered, sitting sheepishly at the end of the bar, where he sat for years after the accident, having his two drinks and getting a ride home. Eventually he joined us and before long it was decided that we should find something better to do. With a cooler of bad beer we drove a dirt logging road through the woods with the cruise control set to twelve miles an hour, for safety. We blared those same Johnny Cash songs. We threw beer bottles at trees and shot road signs with a BB gun. I felt a throwback feeling, nostalgia for the moment as I was inside of it, like we were making a low-budget sequel or a one-off reunion. We were. Even in the moment I knew I’d never really hang with those guys again.
On the ride home we leaned out the open windows and screamed that we’d all fallen into a burning ring of fire. But the center of a ring is empty, hollow, and soon the night was over and I was standing in the quiet field behind my parents’ house. The lightning bugs were scrawling their names in the air. I must’ve sat down. I must’ve laid down because the dew had settled on me by the time I woke shivering. I jumped up into the night—alone, spinning, thirty-years-old— and I puked onto my own two feet.
Growing up as a Chinese Indonesian, I never thought a person who looked like me would have a place in literature. My dream of being a writer seemed impossible. To this day, a Google search for “Chinese Indonesian poets” yields no results. The lack of Chinese Indonesian voices, especially in poetry, mirrors a long history of violence, stemming from colonialism and occupation to cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing—resulting in the suppression of our cultural heritage.
During the New Order of Suharto’s reign, a series of anti-Chinese legislation effectively banned the use of Hanzi, erasing Chinese literature and culture. Chinese philosophies, folk religion, beliefs, and traditions were prohibited in Indonesia. Over time, many Chinese Indonesian families fled to other parts of the world. Those who stayed in Indonesia relinquished their Chinese-sounding names—pressured by the government—and instead integrated their surnames into their new Indonesian names, my family included.
The existence of these poetry collections from Chinese Indonesian heritage writers is a testimony to our existence and our resilience. These poems come from the impossible.
In Edward Gunawan’s hybrid chapbook, the speaker navigates multiple marginalized identities: Chinese Indonesian, queer, and immigrant. In all of them, the personal meets the communal, where complex and painful histories fold. Gunawan’s words are courageous and hopeful; they point forward to the future, while also asking us to acknowledge the difficult past.
Will Harris’ debut, which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020, adopts its title from a popular Indonesian slow-cooked beef dish, which takes hours to make. The book begins and ends with rendang. Food, stories, and imagination remain the few connections to heritage for the speaker of these poems. Because the barriers of memory and language hinder the speaker from tapping more into the collective identity, there’s a perpetual search for the remnants of history throughout these poems. When barriers clash, as they tend to do, the personal accommodates the shift that follows.
In the titular poem of Li-Young Lee’s second collection, the city serves as a metaphor for the speaker’s emotional landscape and his connection to his cultural heritage. It’s a place where the past intersects with the present, where memories and boundaries intertwine, and where the speaker grapples with questions of belonging and longing. Although Lee wouldn’t consider himself a Chinese Indonesian, he and his family were Chinese in Indonesia during a time of political and racial turmoil. His father was held captive as a political prisoner in Indonesia before Lee’s family finally fled to the United States. His family’s experience in Jakarta remained one of the few Chinese testimonies that we have against the country’s painful history.
In this collection, the Winner of the 2019 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, grief flows through the personal body and collective bodies, knitting together pieces of history that distance has separated. Each poem is both tender and careful in the exploration of loss, language, and the loss of language, and all the remnants they leave behind. From “Inheritance”: “& if we never named / anything we ate / I wouldn’t have a language to look for.”
T. Liem’s second collection is an ingeniously structured book. The book’s structure serves as a mirror where the first half of the book gets rewritten in the second half, in reverse order (e.g., the last poem in the first section is revisited as the first poem in the second section). The speaker meditates on time, family, relationships, and all their repetitions and reiterations. Both the quietness of waiting and the activeness of listening roam these poems.
The threads of memory and longing in Cynthia Dewi Oka’s second collection interlace the layers of the speaker’s Indonesian heritage and immigrant experience. The speaker explores how individuals salvage fragments of their past to construct new narratives of selfhood and belonging. These poems traverse geographical and emotional landscapes to offer glimpses into the lives of those caught between borders and worlds.
“There is a hole in my history,” begins Cynthia Dewi Oka’s latest collection. The book explores the 1965 anti-Communist genocide in Indonesia, a tragedy that altered the country’s people and trajectory. Assuming the role of a researcher and listener, Oka unravels decades of collective amnesia and propaganda, giving a voice that slices through the silence. Using imagined characters and dialogue, Oka remembers what the country has long tried to bury.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the poetry collection Find Me When You’re Ready by Perry Janes, which will be published by Northwestern University Press in Sept 15, 2024. Preorder the book here.
In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping coming-of-age journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth—movies, lore, graphic novels—these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.
As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Perry Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest in troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.
Here is the cover, designed by Morgan Krehbiel, artwork by James Jean.
Author Perry Janes: “When first asked to describe Find Me When You’re Ready, I found myself replying that it’s both “lonely and playful.” It was important to me to write a book that didn’t concede childhood’s vast swath of experience to a single instance of harm; to uphold the joyous, whimsical, tender, and imaginative; to reflect everything through that lens. I’ve been a fan of James Jean’s art for more than a decade, but when I first saw the illustration here, a piece called Bouquet II, I felt a surge of kinship.
Like Find Me When You’re Ready, the image is full of contrasts and layers. It manages to feel whimsical and violent, playful and menacing, all at once. At a glance, it may look as though the boy is falling backwards into the bouquet of flowers when, upon closer inspection, he is really being pulled by a pair of disembodied hands—but toward safety or danger? The entire composition is awash in deeper textures, as though stirring below the surface is a second image trying to get out. On an emotional level, the image moves me. On a practical level, I continue to marvel at the overlap between Jean’s illustration and the poems themselves: threaded through the book are several motifs, including the image of the maze (brilliantly drawn here in the soles of the boy’s sneakers) and the garden as a recurring site of contemplation. I am forever grateful to Jean for use of this work.
From here, designer Morgan Krehbiel smashed it out of the park. The negative space at the bottom of the frame strikes a contrast to the maximalism of the illustration and lends a further feeling of foreboding. Underneath/inside the text is a subtle swirl of shape and color, hidden but visible. When I look at this cover, the spirit of my debut collection looks back.”
Designer Morgan Krehbiel: “We weren’t sure if we’d be able to use this artwork when kicking off the design process, but it was in the back of my head throughout all the other ideas I explored—so when we got the happy word from the artist, the final cover came together quickly.
I wanted the design to highlight the lush dimensionality of the artwork, so I trimmed it around the organic edge along the bottom of the flowers and chose deceptively simple block letters for the title for contrast. My favorite detail is probably the stroke around the lettering; it’s such a small element but it is brings the text into the world of the image, and our eyes along with it.”
“For weeks I haven’t been able to focus on even the most trivial thing, because all I can think about is the shape of my right foot,” the escalator technician confessed to me. He was clocking out of work. “Look at those escalators I was supposed to be servicing. They’ve all gone haywire, completely insane. Some of them slice the soles off their passengers’ feet when they arrive at the landing. Some of them throw people straight off, like catapults. And others . . . others . . . don’t even move at all . . . .”
I didn’t know what to tell my friend, except that perhaps, for the sake of everyone’s safety, he should take some time off, go to the beach a week or two, relax, and let someone a little more competent—no, more composed—take his job for a while.
“But if I go to the beach, then I’ll have to swim, which means I’ll have to take off my shoes . . . and that will make everything worse. I don’t want anyone else to see it . . . I don’t even want to look at it myself.”
To be honest, I was confused. Looking at his shoe I found no obvious peculiarities. So I asked him what about his foot had him so captivated, so afraid. He sighed, and told me not to worry. After all, he said, it wasn’t my problem, and he didn’t want to make it so, for fear that, once involved, I would, like him, never be able to extricate myself from what he referred to as his “curse of distraction.”
A week later I was back at the mall, and everyone was in a huff because the escalators still weren’t in working order. Those with wounded feet had left their few bloody footprints and collapsed. Bodies trebucheted from the escalators were strewn in heaps across the three floors of the mall. Impromptu medical camps had begun tending to the survivors. Shop owners on the upper levels were organizing in protest because they hadn’t had any customers for weeks: the shoppers could only buy goods from the first floor, and besides, hardly anyone dared enter the mall anymore for the carnage. And people of all stripes, united in rare fashion, were blaming the escalator mechanic.
But this mechanic was no happy exception to the unhappy rule. Indeed, he may have been the most miserable of them all. And he took me aside, clearly in a desperate mood:
“I need someone else to know. I can’t handle this alone anymore.”
Out of sheer curiosity, I assented.
Upon my saying so, the man began to unlace his shoes, which, given the rawness of his grated soles, peeled off with great pain. Now, what he produced from underneath that leather Lovecraft himself would surely have described as ineffable, inarticulable, rapturously grotesque beyond language. But I’m not one to balk at a chance to dig into what others might find disgusting. In fact, I relish it. So, as much as my descriptions may inspire horrific images in your mind, please foreground, even before these images, the great pleasure I derive from relating them to you.
Out from the shoe first came the lower shin, which, transparent like a beer bottle, contained a brown, semi-boiling liquid that resembled—and smelled of—fermented apple cider. Through an opening in its side flew the hordes of fruit flies which, because of an inverted cone produced by the filth inside this cylinder, could not escape once they had entered. As a result, the ankle, which emerged next, was stuffed ever more densely with these insects, alive and dead, and I could not help but fear that its skin, which resembled a dun plastic shopping bag, would soon burst, releasing into the world some unseen and authentically dangerous illness. Out came the heel then, which at first glance seemed a miniaturized waterfall of incredible beauty, but soon revealed itself to be a poached ivory tusk of the recently extinct black rhinoceros, covered in a thick, steamy, oozing coat of Hollandaise sauce. The last thing to produce itself from that shoe was a broken web of muscles and veins, which dangled from the heel to the floor, and a head of hair wetted with spray adhesive: it swung freely, and yet remained bunched together by the congealing fluid it expelled. The flesh of his toes, he claimed, he had lost long ago in some other shoe, as well as their long bones, which once had traveled over the arch of his foot. The entire body part hung there at the end of his leg, pulsing like a heart, expanding and contracting like a lung, the rising and falling of Nature herself, and he looked between it and me through the spaces between his fingers, which covered his petrified face, anticipating the criticism he had feared so acutely those past few weeks.
I was speechless. My words prostrated in silence before my sense of awe.
“Come to my house,” I pleaded. “Please, come to my house. I need to photograph you.”
“What? So everyone will know?”
“No, you fool!” I cried. “Because your foot makes me feel something. And I can’t say the same about many things anymore. How jaded I’ve become! Ever since childhood, I’ve been going along having these things we call experiences—each of which acts, at first, like a key to the next one that comes along and resembles it at all, and, later, like a blind that lies over it. That’s to say, if I haven’t already experienced something in itself, I’ve surely experienced something like it, and the similarity sits there like a lead blanket between the X-ray of my perception and whatever’s going on around me. I’m numb . . . completely numb! . . . Am I making any sense?”
“Mmm . . . I can’t tell.”
“All I mean to say is that I’ve never seen anything like your foot before . . . and it’s liberating, absolutely freeing, to see something entirely new.”
“Well, it couldn’t be entirely new. You just spent a page crafting ridiculous metaphors and similes comparing it to other things you’ve already seen. You’d have been more correct to, per Lovecraft, throw in the towel and call it indescribable, related to nothing, to no word, to . . . .”
In the meantime, the crowd had grown emotional to a point of total incoherence, dragging the escalator mechanic into its bloodthirsty ranks, and the author of this story drunk to such an extent that he is unable to continue writing, viewing his effort—for the time being, anyhow—as a tedium and a failure.
Excerpted from Cartoons, out May 21, 2024 from City Lights Books.
For years I thought myself in competition with another writer—a writer, I should say, whom I’d never met. I first became acquainted with this writer nearly a decade ago when I joined a Facebook group for people applying to MFA programs in creative writing. Ostensibly, the purpose of the group was to exchange information and resources and to support others who were navigating the application process. However, once application deadlines had passed and people began posting news of their acceptances—acceptances that went out long before rejections—the group did more to provoke my anxiety than anything else. Every day in the springtime of that year I visited the group’s page religiously, compulsively, and it wasn’t long before I began to recognize the same name, the writer’s name, as he posted acceptance after acceptance from some of the country’s most prestigious writing programs—programs I had also applied to and would be rejected from in due time.
Eventually my own acceptance letter came, and though I had a relatively idyllic MFA experience, I found myself in the same situation two years later when I applied for post-graduate fellowships. This time I was rejected across the board and experienced a kind of professional déjà vu when one morning I opened an email announcing the winners of one fellowship I had applied to. There, written plainly, was the writer’s name. The following year, I applied to the same handful of fellowships, and the same thing occurred: a series of rejections and one morning an email announcing the writer had been awarded another fellowship. In subsequent years, the trend continued. I continued to write and apply for fellowships and residencies and scholarship programs to summer writers’ conferences, and very often when I received my rejection, I would scroll down and find the writer’s name among the list of awardees.
It wasn’t long before the writer announced he had signed with an agent and sold his first book. When the book was released, it was shortlisted for a national award. By then the idea that I was in competition with the writer seemed a bit preposterous—the trajectory of his career had catapulted so far beyond my own. And yet every time I read his name on some announcement or other, a variation of the same thought occurred to me.
I thought, “That was meant to be mine.”
I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve read in craft books, or heard writers proclaim in lectures or interviews or on social media, that writing is not a competition. It is a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with but one that can be difficult to integrate when, at times, this writing thing feels very much like a competition. When there are only so many slots in MFA or fellowship or residency programs, only so much available page space in publications.
Writing is not a competition.
I’ve written elsewhere about my experiences with professional jealousy and my belief that it is almost always a cover for disappointment. But there’s an important distinction, I think, between professional jealousy and competition. Julia Cameron elucidates this distinction in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity more clearly than anything else I’ve read on the subject of competition. She writes, “You pick up a magazine—or even your alumni news—and somebody, somebody you know, has gone further, faster, toward your dream. Instead of saying, ‘That proves it can be done,’ your fear will say, ‘He or she will succeed instead of me.’”
The driving narrative of professional jealousy is that if I had what another writer has, I wouldn’t feel the way I feel (i.e., disappointed). But professional jealousy doesn’t require me to believe that another writer’s success precludes my own. Professional jealousy doesn’t—but competition does. The distinction between the two is a belief in scarcity.
Scarcity mentality tells me there are only so many pieces of the proverbial pie and only the worthy get fed. It is a mentality that fuels the construct of competition, and when it comes to the profession of writing, it is likely the unfortunate byproduct of trying to create art in a capitalist society in which value is determined by limited opportunities for success. But knowing this doesn’t make the construct feel any less real—or any less difficult to navigate.
Eventually I was able to deconstruct the belief that I was in competition with the writer, but it took years, and looking back I can see that its deconstruction was largely precipitated by two things.
The first was that I began teaching mindfulness practice for an Internet startup.
The term mindfulness practice has become a kind of catchall phrase for a variety of concepts and modalities. The definition of mindfulness practice I personally subscribe to is simply the practice of cultivating awareness, and I believe this practice can be broken down into two key components: nonjudgmental observation and inquiry.
Nonjudgmental observation, or noticing, as my friend Molly—a licensed therapist, life coach, and mindfulness teacher—likes to call it, is the act of paying attention to my physical, emotional, and mental states inthe present moment from a position of neutrality. It involves noticing my physical surroundings through the vehicle of my five senses; noticing any internal sensations present in my body, including how my emotions are registering physiologically; and noticing whatever thoughts are occupying my mind at the time. In other words, nonjudgmental observation is the act of observing what is actually happening.
For me—and for most human beings I know—there is what’s happening, and then there is the story I tell myself about what’s happening. It is the difference between “I did not get the fellowship and that writer did” and “I did not get the fellowship because that writer did.” The distinction here may seem subtle, but those are two profoundly different perspectives, and if nonjudgmental observation asks me to notice what’s happening in the present moment, the second component of mindfulness practice—inquiry—asks me to identify and interrogate the story I’m telling myself aboutwhat is happening.
There is what’s happening, and then there is the story I tell myself about what’s happening.
In inquiry, I identify the story and ask myself questions like, “Is the story I’m telling myself about this situation true? Can I be certain that it’s true? What other stories might I tell about this same situation that might also be true?” The benefit of practicing inquiry in tandem with nonjudgmental observation is that together they help me bridge the gap between what is happening and the story I’m telling myself so that I can take whatever actions are most in alignment with my values, rather than acting out from a place of scarcity or fear.
I had been practicing this approach to mindfulness for nearly a decade, but it wasn’t until I started teaching it to other people that I began to understand that the mechanism driving the story of that writer and I as competitors was the mechanism that drives most of the stories we tell ourselves: the ego.
Like mindfulness practice, much has been written about the ego—by far more skilled and articulate mindfulness practitioners than myself—but in short, the ego is the part of the mind that engages in a continuous commentary on the world around us and the events of our lives. Unlike the part of the mind that is capable of neutrally observing, the egoic mind constantly judges and assesses and busies itself by replaying and recasting events of the past or projecting and rehearsing events of the future. Which is exactly what the ego was designed to do.
Neurobiologically, the egoic mind evolved to perform two functions: avoid pain and seek pleasure. However, the ego is relatively uninventive, because it only has one tactic by which it performs these two functions: it identifies a problem and then finds the solution. That’s it. That’s the only trick the ego has up its sleeve. But it performs this trick remarkably well, and it keeps us engaged in a kind of perpetual easter-egg hunt, rooting out problems (or creating problems where there are none) for the sole purpose of finding that problem’s solution—i.e., to avoid pain and increase pleasure. This was really helpful when we were all living in caves, but is perhaps less helpful when applying to creative writing fellowships or submitting short stories to contests.
But here’s the life-changing bit about the ego, and it is hands down the most radical and helpful piece of information I’ve ever conveyed as a mindfulness teacher: The ego has no investment in peace. The ego is not interested in freedom. It is not interested in serenity or sustained relief. What the egoic mind wants more than anything is to stay in control. Which is why, once it has found the perceived solution to the problem it has sought out, the ego quickly goes to work searching for a new problem to solve. It is a cycle that never ends.
Sometime during my third year as a mindfulness teacher, I read Eva Hagberg’s How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship, which contains a fantastic illustration of the relationship between the ego’s disinterest in relief and the construct of competition. In How to Be Loved, Hagberg tells a story about her arrival at UC Berkeley, where she was one of several graduate candidates vying for a limited number of slots in the school’s PhD program in architecture. When someone asks Hagberg if she’s finding her peers in the program helpful, the question surprises her. “I didn’t feel like I’d come to grad school to make friends,” she writes. “My cohorts were my competition.”
For the egoic mind there is never safety in being equal because equality presents no problem to solve.
Hagberg goes on to explain: “Stepping into the architectural history graduate student workroom, I met my cohort, and looked to place myself on the ladder—smarter than the social historian over here; not as smart as the nineteenth-century-focused theorist over there. Right from the start, I was imbalanced, unequal, already separate, looking for people to tell me how great I was…I starved for the idea that I might know where I fit on the ladder, that I could be better. There had always been safety in being better, never safety in being equal.”
Ah, yes, I thought. There is never safety in being equal.
For the egoic mind there is never safety in being equal because equality presents no problem to solve, which is what makes competition an ideal construct for it. Competition keeps us in a constant state of assessing and comparing our worth in relation to others based on our attainment of what we perceive to be a finite resource: opportunity. Specifically, opportunities that are valuable (and therefore validating) precisely because they are finite.
We are either losing, or we are winning.
The former is the problem, the latter the solution.
The validation of our worth once again rests on scarcity.
This is why the ego thrives on competition.
The second thing that helped me deconstruct the story that the writer and I were competitors truly surprised me—mostly, I think, because the story’s deconstruction was facilitated via an unlikely source. Remember that book the writer wrote? The one that was shortlisted for a national award? I read it. And it was a beautiful book—a book I believed was doing important and necessary work.
It was also a book I had absolutely no desire to write.
And with that revelation, any delusion I had about being in competition with the writer lifted—and my god, was I relieved. Here was a book I was so grateful existed in the world, a book I believed was worthy of all the praise and attention it received, and yet given the chance, I would not have written that book. In fact, I don’t believe I could have written that book, if only because I had no interest in writing it. The writer’s style and aesthetic and thematic concerns were so wildly different from mine. How could we possibly be in competition? The notion suddenly struck me as absurd.
The belief that what is meant for me is always meant for me is not asking me to surrender to some cosmic higher power.
The myth of competition is the myth of meritocracy—the belief that recognition validates the best work as the best work—and the profession of writing is not immune to that myth. We’ve all heard the axiom that comparing works of art is like comparing apples to oranges, but it’s really like comparing apples to poodles to waterslides. All three are delightful in their own right but best suited to different purposes. It is tempting to believe that when I submit a short story to a literary contest or an application to a prestigious fellowship, whether or not my work is selected will be determined by its value compared to the rest of the applicant pool. That is, by whose work is the best. But that’s just a story. What an award or fellowship really affirms is how well my work aligns with the tastes and interests of the selection committee. It is not a determination of value, but of values.
The funny thing is, I already knew this—from my work as an editor.
For eight years, I edited fiction and nonfiction for a fairly niche but well-respected literary journal. Every year during our general submissions cycle, I read anywhere between seven hundred and twelve hundred submissions, and of those submissions I selected approximately a dozen for inclusion in our annual print issue. Over the years I rejected a lot of fantastic work, including work I very much wanted to publish. But not once during my tenure as an editor was I ever forced to choose the better of two pieces for publication. Every time I rejected a story or essay, I did so because it didn’t fit within the constellation of a given issue. The decision to accept or reject was never about worth; it was always about fit. And in that way, no two writers were ever truly in competition with each other for the same creative real estate.
When I read the writer’s book, I realized the same was true for him and me.
We were not competitors. We had never been.
Today when I find myself tempted to buy into the construct of writerly competition, there are two reminders I’ve found useful in recalibrating my mindset. Used together, these reminders invite me to return to the two components of mindfulness practice. The first reminder is a mantra my friend Molly offered me some years ago when I was struggling in a romantic partnership. She said, “Whatever comes, let it come. Whatever goes, let it go. What is meant for you is always meant for you.”
What I love about this particular mantra is its practicality. First, it subverts my competitive thinking by asking me to step outside the framework of the scarcity mentality in which artistic achievement is a zero-sum game. But beyond that, by working backward from this mantra, I can use it as a tool for engaging nonjudgmental observation. That process looks something like this: If I am not awarded a creative opportunity, whatever that creative opportunity may be, it isn’t because someone else has won what I’ve lost. It’s because the opportunity was not meant for me.
How do I know it wasn’t meant for me?
Because I didn’t get it.
The belief that what is meant for me is always meant for me is not asking me to surrender to some cosmic higher power that’s busy doling out and withholding treats, but rather to surrender to the higher power I believe we all must ultimately surrender to: reality. It asks me to notice what is actually happening.
The second reminder comes from one of my favorite modalities of secular mindfulness practice, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living, ACT practitioner Russ Harris advocates for a nuanced approach to inquiry. Instead of asking ourselves if the story we’re telling ourselves is true, Harris suggests we ask ourselves a different question: Is this story helpful?He writes, “You can waste a lot of time trying to decide whether your thoughts are actually true…again and again your mind will try to suck you into that debate. But although at times this is important, most of the time it is irrelevant and wastes a lot of energy. The more useful approach is to ask, ‘Is this thought helpful? Does it help me take action to create the life I want?’”
When I tell myself the story that I am competing with another writer, and I believe that story, I begin to doubt the value of my own work. And it is a short distance from doubting the value of my work to doubting thevalue of myself. Like Eva Hagberg, I begin jockeying for my place on the ladder of importance. My ego vacillates between asserting my worth (“I’m just as good as he is!”) and questioning it (“I’m just as good as he is, right?”). But ultimately that debate doesn’t serve me or my work, and it certainly doesn’t serve other writers or the literary community at large. Simply put, the construct of competition isn’t a particularly helpful one.
Now, it is important to acknowledge that the application of these tools to deconstruct stories of competition does not take place within a social or cultural vacuum. The writing and publishing industry, like any industry, has always privileged certain stories and certain storytellers to the diminishment of others. There are times when creative opportunities are not “meant for us” because systems of oppression and exclusion like racism, misogyny, heterosexism, queer- and transphobia, and ableism have predetermined that they are not meant for us. That’s not a story—that’s reality.
For me the entire point of incorporating mindfulness practice into my writing life and reframing constructs like competition is that the process encourages me to live in reality so that I can align myself with my values and take constructive action in their direction in order to stay within my integrity. A necessary part of that process—especially for individuals who belong to majority cultures—is acknowledging that systems of inequity are very much at play in the literary community. As writers, editors, publishers, and consumers of literature, we must ask ourselves if we truly value diversity and inclusive engagement. If we do—and I hope we do—it is imperative to consider how we are or are not putting those values into practice, and if we aren’t, we must ask ourselves why not and take action toward a more just version of literary stewardship.
In his essay “The Autobiography of My Novel,” Alexander Chee argues that “writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about.” The same could be said about the writing life. When I deconstruct the construct of competition and return my attention to what I truly care about, which is the work, rather than the success and validation of that work, or how that success measures up to the success of my peers, I experience a shift. It is a shift away from the problem-finding-and-solving machinations of the ego and toward the present moment—the only place from which the work can be done.
“What is Meant for You is Always Meant for You: A Mindful Approach to Writerly Competition” was first published by Poets & Writers Magazine (October/September 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Poets and Writers, Inc., 90 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004. www.pw.org.
Translators are an incredibly vital part of the literary ecosystem—not only because they carry books from one language into another, but also because they are generally the ones who find and champion writers in other languages. They contribute to the circulation of ideas and narratives, as well as the formation of what we call “world literature.” Despite all this, translators are often underpaid, their names do not appear on the front covers of books, and their work is largely, as Lawrence Venuti wrote, invisible.
The protagonist of my debut novella, Prétend, is a young literary translator who goes by the names Jean, Jeanne, and John. Aside from engaging in translation, she herself is a translation, navigating multiple identities as she transgresses borders, genders, and languages. She translates poetry for her abusive husband, a very extreme example of an unhealthy translator-author relationship. Later, she starts to translate for another writer named M., who represents more experimental and liberated possibilities for translation. In writing this book, I was interested in dark and messy portrayals of translators, stories where the translator isn’t a servant of the author or a neat metaphor for bridging cultural gaps. Here are seven examples of literary translators in fiction that will give you a better appreciation and understanding of the art of translation.
Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard, translated by Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Originally written in French and translated by the brilliant Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, this is the novel that got me thinking deeply about translation and language. Mauve Desert is about Maude Laures, a professor from Québec who decides to translate a story she finds in a used bookstore. The novel is technically three books in one: the original Mauve Desert, a magical story of a teenage girl named Mélanie who is obsessed with driving her mother’s car around the Arizona desert, lesbians who work at a motel, and a villain named Longman who is also possibly Oppenheimer, Laures’ notes in preparation for the translation, including interviews with all the characters, and then finally, her translation of the story, allowing the reader to observe the differences from the original. Any one of the three parts would be worth a book in and of itself, but altogether they offer a queer, sensual, and immersive portrayal of the act of translation.
Croft is the translator of the award-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, and a major public advocate for literary translators. Her second novel tells the story of celebrated author Irena Rey (she may or may not be based on Tokarczuk), who disappears in her home, the Białowieża Forest, a primeval forest stretching between Poland and Belarus. Eight of Rey’s adoring translators, referred to initially only by their mother tongues, go searching for her. Croft weaves translation together with topics like climate change, slime molds, and mythology to make a modern fairytale. Extinction highlights the power imbalances in published languages (especially the domination of English), and whether or not a translation stands on its own as a piece of art, playing with notions of authorship through the use of footnotes and multiple narratives. All in all, the book is a thought-provoking look at literary translation from one of the most talented living translators.
The Partition tells the story of Ingrid, a queer Korean American adoptee whose bid for tenure at her liberal arts college is interrupted when a translation she published of a novel by the mysterious South Korean writer Yoo Sun-mi is called into question. When Sun-mi arrives in the United States to confront Ingrid face to face, we get a look at a very chaotic translator-author relationship, similar to the one in Prétend. The story raises important questions about who has the right to translate, the weight of identity and language expertise in translation, and the role of translators in helping authors get recognition and literary prizes.
My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan
It makes perfect sense to me that the narrator of this novella, a woman whose immense love and passion for her husband teeters on the brink of hatred, is an English-to-French translator. She considers her words carefully, putting tremendous thought into every sentence. Like all writers, she has certain phrases she favors, as we see in her compulsive repetition of “my husband.” The narrator approaches translation the way she does everything in the novel, with an all-consuming fervor, and a need to maintain control. Reflecting on her translation of a young Irish novelist, she writes, “I entered into her mind and adopted her logic until the mechanics of the whole were revealed to me.” This is a woman with no boundaries between life and work; in a wildly unethical move, she even has her students practice translating transcriptions of private conversations with her husband. Make sure to read the epilogue, which, like a good translator’s note, throws everything into a different light.
This dizzying, hilarious novel is the story of Ingrid, a Taiwanese American Ph.D. student who finds out the subject of her dissertation is actually a white man in yellowface pretending to be a Chinese poet named Xiaou-Wen Chou. We get a wickedly funny portrayal of a translator in Ingrid’s boyfriend, Stephen, the white American translator of the trendy Japanese author Azumi Kasuya. At first, Ingrid sees nothing wrong with Stephen translating Azumi’s work, beyond the fact that she is jealous of their proximity. But as she grows more politically and socially aware, Ingrid begins to take issue with Stephen’s history of only dating Asian women and his supposed authority on Japanese literature. Disorientation is not a subtle satire, but it never feels didactic because Chou expertly wields humor to make her point. When Ingrid starts asking questions about the prevalence of white translators in the Asian literary world, the reader is right there with her. As Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda put it in her essay, The Geopolitics of Japanese Literary Translation: “I am not saying the solution is for all white people to stop translating Japanese. But I am asking why it is that only white people are translating Japanese, still, today, and whether there are historical and structural reasons for that.”
Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot, translated by by Tess Lewis
Nevermore is the story of a woman who is consumed by grief, travels to Dresden, and decides to translate the section “Time Passes” from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The narrator finds resonances between different abandoned places where nature has reclaimed the land, such as the ruins of Chernobyl, the French village of Fleury, and the Scottish island Hirta, and the High Line in New York City. Wajsbrot showcases how the mind of the translator works, offering several possibilities for each sentence. As a whole her portrayal of translation is beautiful, treating it as a kind of healing. It’s also rooted in experience—Wajsbrot herself translated Woolf’s The Waves. Currently, the book is only available in French and German, but luckily for English readers, a translation by Tess Lewis is coming in November 2024.
In this madcap, meta novel by French translator Brice Matthieussent, a translator named Trad starts to take over and rewrite the novel, N.d.T, that he is supposed to be translating. Initially, he is limited to commentary in the footnotes, but slowly he breaks out of that barrier and the footnotes rise to include the entire page. Trad’s actions beg the question: at what point does translation become creative writing? The book becomes a layered power struggle between Trad, the author Abel Prote, and Prote’s characters, David Grey, also a translator, and Doris, a secretary. Emma Ramadan, who translated the book into English, put it best: “The book is an ode to translation in its unraveling, exploiting, and exploding of all existing tropes about translations and their translators.” Revenge will definitely make you rethink translation and in particular, the agency of the translator.
I have a soft spot for stories from Japan written about the time when all the conveniences of today’s society didn’t rule our lives.
Growing up in the suburbs of Tokyo in ‘80s and ‘90s, we had so much freedom. I was three when I was allowed to play with my friends at the park in our condo complex without supervision. I was five when I started crossing stop lights alone to visit my pre-school friend. We all walked to the school under the blazing sun or the harsh winters that gave us frostbite. From the time the school bell rang at 3:30pm to the 6:00pm evening siren that echoed through our town, we played hard. Our parents didn’t schlep us to lessons or organize sports practices. Instead, we crawled under rusty wire fences to an abandoned factory to build a secret base. We ventured into the forest to look for an air raid shelter. We squatted down by an irrigation canal to catch crayfish, only to learn that they eat their babies. If we were hungry, we stuffed ourselves with unknown fruits from trees. I remember spending the night crying under my blanket, worried that they could have been poisonous and praying none of us would be found dead tomorrow.
That society, what I like to call the analog society, was as imperfect as it is now, but we were free.
Kyoko, the protagonist of my novel, is a Japanese widow raising her son in San Francisco. She constantly navigates the different cultures in her life––Japanese, Jewish, and American. Her Jewish-American mother-in-law and her Japanese mother think they know what’s best. And because they have only lived in one country, they are confident what they tell her is right. But Kyoko sees both sides. It frees her and confuses her, and often leads her to unexpected decisions that bring her closer to the people around her.
Here are 7 works of Japanese fiction in translation that explore life in the analog age, an era before we were beholden to our cell phones, social media and the internet.
Rivers by Teru Miyamoto, translated by Roger K. Thomas and Ralph McCarthy
In the 1950s, the working-class people in Japan were trying to build a new life. Some rose and others fell. In the story “Muddy River,” Nobuo whose parents run a noodle shop by the river. Nobuo meets a boy named Kiichi who just moved to the other side of the river on an abandoned barge. We find out that Kiichi lost his father in the war and his mother supports her children by selling her body. Nobuo brings Kiichi and his older sister Ginko to his house. Nobuo’s mother welcomes them. Nobuo’s mother does not ask them anything about their mother. She combs Ginko’s hair, tries to give her a summer dress, and invites her to help around the noodle shop. Nobuo’s father pushes his male customers away to protect them from slander. They know how hard it is to live without a father. They know what the war has done to people. In Rivers, Teru Miyamoto gives life to displaced people. Miyamoto isn’t glorifying the people in post-war Japan, he is depicting the people he met during his childhood in Osaka.
Yoko Ogawa once wrote in an essay that when she rereads a book, she often finds the story isn’t how she remembered and that’s how it should be because readers continue to create their version of the story even after they finished the book.
The Diving Pool is a compilation of three novellas. The tone of the story “Pregnancy Diary” is deceptively peaceful and inviting, but the atmosphere is eerie. Yolks are yellow blood. Kiwi seeds are little black bugs. The macarons in the gratin are intestines stuffed with slimy stomach juices. These are descriptions made by a pregnant sister. Why does the older sister couple live with the protagonist? Where is their parents? We do not know the background of the sister and that is exactly the power of this story because we only focus on what is happening at the present moment.
The Friends by Kazumi Yumoto, translated by Cathy Hirano
Death seemed to be part of our lives as kids. Cicada carcasses scattered everywhere at the end of summer, male feral cats losing fights, and someone always missing school to attend their grandparent’s funeral.Three boys in The Friends decide to spy on an old man who is living on the edge of their town. They want to witness him dying. The old man notices being watched, and their strange friendship begins to form. The story is set in the time when summer vacation still belonged to kids.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
Norwegian Wood is a novel told from the perspective of Toru Watanabe as he looks back on his college days in Tokyo. A novel of love, longing, and nostalgia set against the backdrop of the 1968–1969 Japanese university protests. As a young man in the 1960s, he meets two women: Naoko and Midori. Naoko is a fragile beauty, her youth spent mostly in a psychiatric institution after breaking down over the deaths of her boyfriend and her sister. These two women, the opposites of each other, leave an indelible mark on Toru. But what’s most intriguing about the book is the character Midori. Midori is a woman who says exactly what she wants and how she wants to be loved. She is not looking for perfect love. She is looking for perfect selfishness. The book is set in 60’s in Japan when people didn’t question about male dominant society. You can see how refreshing someone like Midori back then and even the time when this was written in 80’s.
In “A Snake Stepped On,” when a woman steps on a snake, it transforms into a woman in her 50s. The woman claims the protagonist that she is her mother and lives in her house as if it is the most normal thing to do.
Anything is possible in Kawakami’s novel. The strangeness just slips into reality that if you do not pay attention, you will carry it into your day. Soon you will be chasing a snake on the mountain, saying “Don’t go. You are my mother.” In this book, a brother can be invisible still living alongside of their family, and coffee becomes night as you look into a cup. Master of borderlessness, Kawakami can leap across time, space, and body. When I read Kawakami’s book, I believe we can be friends with anyone, a horse woman, an invisible person, or a talking kiwi. I don’t smell time in her book. Things can behappening now or thirty years ago. It’s truly a timeless book and this all comes back to how elegantly Kawakami writes.
In the story “A Slender Back,” Ryōji sees Machiko sitting alone in the middle of the room at his father’s funeral. Machiko was the only woman who stayed with Ryōji’s father. Her smile flickers like a florescent light. He recalls the time he spent with her while his father chased other women. As Machiko endured the father’s behavior, she lost her mental stability.
Megumu’s story sharply captures emotions. Take the scene of Ryōji recalling the time when Machiko cut his hair. She used to be a hairdresser, but now she waits for his father at home making tiny paper cranes. Machiko’s pain is in this line: “There’s something forlorn about our hair, isn’t there, Ryōji… On someone’s head, we caress it––say it’s beautiful, even. But once that hair is cut off and falls to the ground, it becomes dirty to us somehow…” Just in one speech, we get the unforgettable images of loneliness and desperation.
The Eighth Day by Mitsuyo Kakuta, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
In 1985, when Kiwako Nonomiya kidnaps her married lover’s newborn baby, her days as a fugitive begin. She names his baby Kaoru and raises the child as her daughter. Kiwako hides in the cult religious group until the group is exposed to the public eye. She moves to Syodo island and blends with villagers all to find a peaceful life with her daughter. This page turner story sheds light on a woman who committed an unforgivable crime. Kakuta always focuses on the women’s side of stories. You know the book will end with tragedy but she is so good at taking readers through the protagonist’s movement and interior thoughts without ever being confused that you can’t stop reading. Literary, essays, crime fiction, and even the translation of The Tales of Genji, this veteran writer can write anything.
I saw Cecilia again when I turned twenty-four and switched jobs for the third time that year. In the laundry room of the chiropractor’s office, I folded four types of towels and three sizes of gowns, my fingers sidling along seams and clawing the lint screen clean. The towels, which were stored in white laminate cabinets and laid out on the examination tables, had to be folded into fourths and rolled thick as thighs. The fraying ones were retired to a metal shelf along the back wall, a columbarium for cloth. I mourned them all: the aging towels were the easiest to fold, to flatten. They were softer and thinner and hung like pigskin over my forearm, clinging directly to my meat, nursing on my heat. They didn’t get lumpy or beady when I tucked them, and their pleats never pickled into permanence, never stiffened into ridges.
The laundry room was a windowless space at the back of the clinic, painted pink and white like pork belly. I only ever saw the chiropractor and the receptionist when they entered to use the employee toilet in the closet next to the dryer. The chiropractor’s peeing was astonishingly loud, almost symphonic, resonating inside the walls and harmonizing with the retching of the washer. His stream was so insistent, so unflagging, that I sometimes imagined it siphoned directly into the pipes at the back of the washer. It was his piss that filled the machine, battering the glass window, seasoning the sheets. That would solve the mystery of the sheets on the gyrating table, which yellowed too quickly even when I bleached them in the sink, turning the insides of my wrists translucent. The gyrating table was my name for the uncanny contraption in treatment room two, the largest of the rooms. Once or twice the chiropractor had attempted to demonstrate its function to me, even inviting me to try it out myself. It was like a dentist’s chair, slanted at a forty-five-degree angle, its cushions made of foam and green pleather, except you were supposed to lie on it face down, and once you were cupped to its cutting-board surface, it began to rotate and twist and tip and rock and hum and sometimes even shudder. The chiropractor turned it on with a remote control and explained to me that its movements were expertly calibrated, allowing him to deliver the correct amounts of pressure to targeted areas without straining himself or distorting his own spine—but when it was empty, whirring without any body, it looked to me like a severed tongue, a fish flailing to speak. It wriggled in the dark like antennae, trying to tune in to a language it had lost. When I sprayed it down after appointments, patting its glossy flank to soothe it, convincing it not to buck anyone, I squinted at its stillness and imagined what word it wanted to say.
Unlike the chiropractor, the receptionist peed so discreetly that I found myself inching toward the door after she locked it, perching my ear against the thin plywood, listening for the rattle of her bladder. But I never heard anything, not even the shriek of her zipper or the applause of the toilet seat lowering, not even the sound of the faucet fidgeting. I imagined that her pee was like the rain in movies, a shimmering sheet so embedded in the scene that you could no longer distinguish its rhythm from the voices in the foreground, the faces feathering the screen. A rain like bestial breathing. A few times I became so entranced I forgot to flee, and when she opened the door, I was standing there with my ears flexed like wings. I pretended I’d been waiting for the bathroom myself, but I could tell she didn’t believe it, and she avoided speaking to me except to let me know when a patient had left. She began turning on the faucet while she pissed, and the sounds were unsortable, threading together into the weather. When it was time to address me, she knocked on the laundry room door, competing with the sound of towels fistfighting in the dryer, and said, Get the room. This was my cue to wipe down the tables and replace the towels and gather the soiled laundry.
In addition to doing the laundry, which overfilled the hampers and slumped like dead birds on every surface, I mopped the floors, vacuumed the rooms, and cleaned the patient and employee bathrooms. I refilled the soap dispenser in the patient bathroom, which dribbled like a nosebleed, its residue jellying on the rim of the sink. Every hour, I sponged away the gum. The toilet bowl turned brown because of mineral buildup, and although I scrubbed it daily, it always looked like someone had recently stewed their shit in it. The toilet-paper dispenser was broken and had to be bandaged with Scotch tape.
When I stirred the brush inside the bowl, I heard the contents of my own bladder sloshing, slapping all the walls of my body. I became aware that I needed to use the bathroom, but I abstained. I liked to see how long I could wait. My bladder stiffened into bone and became my fist. It tautened into a grape of pain.
The chiropractor claimed that at his busiest, he saw over one hundred patients a day, and though I never knew if this was true, never saw anyone coming or going, I gathered the aftermath of their bodies: alcohol-soggy cotton balls sunken in the trash cans, paper towels souping in the sink, handprints of sweat gilding the tables, bouquets of dark hair arranged in the chamber of my vacuum cleaner. Though the job was full time, the chiropractor said he’d only take me on as an independent contractor, which I knew was just a way of saying I’d have no benefits. My brother told me those were the best kinds of jobs: make sure they pay in cash, he said, you won’t have to pay taxes. He collected bills from handyman gigs and rolled them into sausages, encasing them in socks that were sweat-encrusted and mildewed—a natural repellent against thieves. In my family, we weaponized our stench.
It was Wednesday when I saw Cecilia. Unlike the receptionist, who had to keep track of appointment dates, I never knew the day of the week or whether it was winter, though it was winter. In the windowless room, it was always warm, and the wet fluorescent light flicked my earlobes with its tongue. At work, all conscious thought was caught in the mesh screen of my mind and balled away, and what remained was the beeping of the machine when it was done or overloaded, my fingers groping for corners, the volcanic power of the chiropractor’s piss as it plundered the pipes and grew gold roots beneath my feet. My only aspiration was to expel myself that fluently. On his best days, there was no trickling or tapering off: it ended as abruptly as it began, the stream severed cleanly as if it were snipped.
I learned it was Wednesday because the chiropractor, after exiting the bathroom that morning, turned to me and said, A lot of new patients today, and on a Wednesday. He said nothing else, and the words caught in my mind’s screen, separate from my living. Inside this room I was ghostly, a fly’s wing, leashed to the light above me. I folded to the rhythm of on a Wednesday, pluralizing each pleat, manufacturing halves and then quarters, rolling and stacking, bending and filling.
The receptionist knocked twice, Get the room, so I abandoned the hand towel I was using to wipe the window of the washer, leaving it to puddle on top of the machine.
Inside this room I was ghostly, a fly’s wing, leashed to the light above me.
The treatment rooms lined a narrow carpeted hallway, rows of sliding doors on either side. Unless you dislocated the doors a little, jiggling them in their sockets, they didn’t slide shut properly, or they made a metallic scraping sound that turned your spine to slime. When the doors were left half open, it was a sign for me to enter and clean the room as quickly as possible, without jostling the requisite plastic spine model. Each vertebra was labeled with a number, the spaces between them glowing like keyholes, inviting any finger to try and unlock them. As much as possible, I liked to face the spine while I cleaned; if I didn’t keep an eye on it, I heard the bones jingling like forks. They pricked my skin, took bites of my mind.
The door to treatment room two was open. It was the largest room and had its own gravity, holding the gyrating table in its orbit, and I braced myself for that giant tongue, that half-born word. The room was dimmed to let me know it was dirty, and I entered so quickly that for several steps, for a handful of feathered seconds, I didn’t notice there was someone still inside. I walked toward the cabinet where the bottles of cleaner were kept, the neon liquid sloshing like the acid in my belly. Only when I began to kneel did I see the bright piping of a gown, a hem I had flipped in the right direction, a slight heat still wafting from it.
My head jerked up, and I saw her standing directly in front of the spine model, the table tilted behind her, slick and poised to speak. Her diamonded gown was glowing, so dew-clean that the hallway light clung to her front, and I climbed the lattice of its pattern before reaching her face.
It was a face I had dusted off in my memory so frequently that seeing it now, in the present, made me wonder if this one was a bootleg, if the original had been destroyed to keep me from corrupting it. Her long hair was loose, which was unusual for patients, who were asked to arrive with their hair tied back so the chiropractor could traverse the full territory of their spines. She wore her gown unknotted, the strings limp at her sides like desiccated insect limbs. Her posture seemed perfect to me, not at all like the stance of someone who needed to see a chiropractor, who experienced gravity. A shadow clogged the doorway, and I glanced behind me to see if it was the receptionist or the chiropractor, telling me to hurry up or leave.
When I turned back around, she had taken a step closer to me. Her legs and feet were bare, the gown bunching at her sides, and I tried not to imagine what she looked like from behind. Though she was technically facing me, I felt her true gaze was pointing behind her. The opening in her gown was a flickering eyelid. I looked at the wall behind her, avoiding her face, knowing that it had changed since I last saw her. I didn’t want to look at it now, to reinstate the years between us. I wanted to turn and flee. I wanted the intimacy of distance, to be far enough away to see her entire surface.
Her heat hemmed me in, electrified the air. She was smiling, and her teeth were a single rind of light. I stood slowly, shifting away from their sour radius. The fresh towels clamped in my armpits were slopping out of shape, expanding in the steam of my sweat.
You remember me, she said. She didn’t say her name. Because I didn’t know how to answer, I stepped back toward the door and said I was sorry, I’d leave her to undress. When you leave, I told her, you can leave the door cracked. The lobby is straight ahead.
Cecilia didn’t move. Though the room was sapped of light, her shadow lapped at the floor, licking up my ankles. From where did her shadow summon its water?
She tilted her head, an unfamiliar motion. Cecilia’s movements were never minor, and this slight angling was so foreign that for a second I was comforted, wondering if I’d mistaken someone else for her.
But then she approached me. The spine model shifted into view as she stepped forward, which gave me the strange impression that she’d left her bones behind. That her spine was standing in its previous place, fully assembled, and only the sheet of her skin dangled in front of me.
It was her face. Her narrow chin, which I’d envied. Glistening as if I’d licked it. Even in this dim, I could see the canopy of her lashes, trapping any light that tried to reach her eyes. Because they could not reflect anything, her eyes were quiet as an animal’s, turned inward, preoccupied with the darkness inside her own skull. She still had the mole underneath her left eye, protruding slightly like a nipple, which she’d tried to scrape off with her mother’s As Seen on TV vegetable peeler and which had grown back identical, though she’d claimed it came back larger, fat enough to nurse on. I could see the color of her nipples through the gown. I ducked my head. Patients weren’t required to remove their underwear. The more I looked at her nipples, the more they widened like rings of displaced water, seeping across the front of her gown until I wondered if she was bleeding.
She itched her wrist, dredging up flecks of dried skin. She used to say she would someday scatter her own ashes. The impossibility of this act only strengthened the promise. Many times in my life, I had seen someone across the street or out the bus window, scraping plaque off the roots of their kumquat tree or laughing open mouthed at a flippant cloud or frothing from both nostrils while arguing with a stranger, and the way they were moving their hands and arms—with a fledgling’s awkwardness, elbows crooking like wings—disturbed me into indigestion. Only much later would I realize: my sickness was the shock of seeing her shadow appropriated, her behavior plagiarized.
She used to say she would someday scatter her own ashes. The impossibility of this act only strengthened the promise.
You look the same, she said. Her voice was lower. She glanced down, and it was the first time I realized she was uncertain about how to address me. She rolled her lower lip between her teeth, and I watched it ripple and shine with spit, the slug of my love.
I’ll change, she said, I just really like this room.
I was surprised. The room was so familiar to me I no longer saw anything in it—it was too staged, shaped like a room but not a room, the poster of a seaside view on one wall, the green glass lamp in the corner, the filters combing out the air. Only the motored table remained alive in my mind. I tried to imagine her magnetized to it, her body flung in elliptical orbits, her knees bouncing on the cushions. But when I thought of her lying on the table face down, I could only see her steering it, paddling it out into the day.
Cecilia turned around, ushering the scent of her sweat into the air, the loose curtains of her gown fluttering open in the back. Her skin was so sudden. The white elastic of her underwear, bare as bone, snapped against my throat. I recoiled and scurried out the door, the walls of the narrow hallway grating my shoulders, whittling me down. Behind me, I heard the door scraping shut.
My heart wrung itself out, and I felt the blood return to my wrists and hands and head. Two more knocks on the laundry room door, two more rooms cleared out, and treatment room two was still shut. No light sludging out the crack of its door, but I didn’t want to knock, so I waited until the receptionist let me know that room two needed getting. When I returned to it, I saw that the door was indeed cracked, but so slightly that only a thumb would fit in the gap. That was how she defined an opening.
I cleaned the room slower than usual, searching for a raft of stray hairs or some message she’d left for me. I even checked the ceiling. It would have never occurred to me to do this, except Cecilia used to enter a room with her chin tilted upward, pining for light. But when I looked up, I only saw shadows. Spores speckled the ceiling, fuzzing the light fixture. Repulsed, I lowered my head and knew I would never be able to enter this room again without thinking of the pelt above, thickening by the minute, begging to be petted. Even as I shuddered, I imagined stroking the spores: a row of nipples stiffening.
No message was left behind for me. Only the pile of used towels on the table, the gown flickering on top of it, stirred slightly by the air-conditioning. The gown’s fabric was starchy, the way the chiropractor preferred it, soft only at the armpits and around the neckline, where her sweat and heat might have congregated. I balled it up and tucked it under my left arm, then bundled the towels to bring to the laundry room. When I got back, I sorted only the towels into their correct hampers. The gown I tossed onto the folding table behind me, where the clean laundry was stacked into obelisks. Though I turned my back to the gown, I felt its presence cleaving to me, felt its sleeve holes whimpering for my wrists.
After stacking a load of dry towels, still hot enough to scald my fingertips, I turned back to the gown and lifted it, my nose roaming the fabric. It was bright as the leaf-brittle dryer sheets we used, even at the armpits. I tried to decide if the side seams were damp or just cold. I fluttered the gown flat on the table, looked around quickly, and bent to lick its loins. Like a bird chewing dew, my tongue dabbed at the diamonds patterning the crotch. The cloth was so devoid of flavor that it didn’t even taste clean: it was simply the fabric of absence. It hadn’t lived long enough on her skin to remember anything.
The chiropractor walked into the laundry room, and I shook out the gown and fiddled with the strings, pretending to be pleating it. When I stepped away, my lips lurked in its folds. But the chiropractor didn’t look at me, just headed straight to the bathroom. He flicked the switch, and the light lagged a few seconds before limping in. I saw his shadow coloring in the crack under the door. His piss trumpeted into the toilet, louder than I’d ever heard it. Then it thinned into a hiss, managing a few percussive beats before tapering into silence.
Cecilia was the one who first told me: Boys hold their dicks when they pee, isn’t that gross? We were thirteen and sitting on the curb together, waiting for the city bus. Whenever it arrived, jerking toward us, we made a game of seeing how long we could stay seated before its wheels severed our knees. Cecilia could wait the longest, the bus lunging toward her, the soles of her feet stapled to the street. I would watch the street while she watched the sky, refusing to move until the bus poured its shadow over her head. Then she would retract her legs and roll backward, bouncing up from the pavement.
When she told me this fact, I was so horrified that I didn’t believe her. Haven’t you noticed, she said, that you can never see a man’s hands when he pees? That they’re always in front, like they’re watering something? Guess what they’re holding. With a jolt, I realized this was true. My brother peed with the door open, the only one in our family of women, and from behind, I’d never once seen his hands. He was never holding a book in front of him, or holding a phone to his ear, or simply allowing his hands to slack off at his sides.
It seemed so impossible that I stopped watching the street. If this were true, it had to happen often, boys touching their penises. I’d never once touched myself while peeing, or even while not peeing. The idea hadn’t even occurred to me, touching. Underwear touched you. Toilet paper touched you, brief as a bee. But the directness of a hand was different. I thought everyone went their entire lives never directly touching the places they peed from, and when Cecilia repeated what she’d said, I still couldn’t believe it. They touch it every time? I said. Cecilia looked at the sky and laughed and said they had to. To direct it. The fact that it was a necessary and casual utility—like holding back your hair to drink from a water fountain— shocked me more than anything. It seemed grotesque and barbaric, designed purely to disgust me. But beneath my disgust was a constant awe, the kind Cecilia must have felt when she found a dead squirrel on our street, its flesh freed from the bone by a family of crows.
That is the worst thing I have ever heard, I said to Cecilia. That means they touch it every few hours! She smiled at me and reined in her legs, and I realized too late that the bus was lurching toward us. But we were linked at the elbows, and she pulled me up with her. We boarded the bus together, and I looked at the hands of every man inside it. Seven. Some were tall or old or ghosts. I looked at their hands for some visible evidence of savagery, moles or scales or knuckles poking out like horns. I waited for their hands to be let off their arms, free to sneak inside any skin.
Inside this bus, Cecilia and I were careful to touch very little. Our mothers warned us about the infectiousness of death. Even a safety railing or a bus strap could sicken us, so we pretended to be taxidermy, stiff and leaning against each other. I kept counting hands as they entered and exited, as they touched windows and green plastic seats and nostrils filled with moss and jean pockets and earlobes. There wasn’t skin between anything. The sky slipped and exposed the moon, and I wished Cecilia hadn’t told me the thing she knew. I wanted to know what was safe to look at.
When I got home, I sat down on the toilet. I listened to my piss prattle in the pipes, repeating her name. I didn’t touch anything but the toilet paper knotting in my sweaty fist, the bar of soap made of dog’s drool, the faucet spraying spittle, the frayed towel Ama mended once in a while. I was reassured by ritual. I inscribed my borders clearly. It didn’t matter if Cecilia was telling the truth, I decided, as long as I could inventory my touch, as long as I didn’t slip from my silhouette.
I kept my hands light, stuffing them with feathers and puppeting them in public, teaching them to flit from surface to surface. But they were not alone: they were hunted by another pair of hands, ghost hands grown in the darkness of my body, slicking out of me and into the toilet bowl. Shiny and skinless as organs. When they reached for me, I shut the lid and flushed.
That night, I lay in bed between Ma and Ama. Their creek of sweat hollowed out the valley where I slept. My hands doubled on each wrist, and I felt the weight of both pairs burdening the air, pulping my pelt, smearing me into the sheets. The knowledge of touch was touch.
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