Everyone agrees we need a revolution but no one can agree on how it is to start. In her new book, Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom, writer Camonghne Felix argues it should begin with poetry. “Poetry facilitates the imaginative work that becomes what Chris Dixon calls ‘another politics,’” she writes. Dixon’s framework offered a name for an emerging 21st century anti-authoritarian political current consisting of the cumulative efforts of activists and organizers to transform the world with radical thinking and action. As her contribution to this radical thinking, Bronx-born Felix offers a lyrical manifesto that blends memoir and nonfiction to avow poetry’s transformative promise. Let the Poets Govern declares poetry a requisite teacher for both imagining and ensuring a brighter future.
Felix is currently a professor of creative writing at The New School. Her debut poetry collection, Build Yourself a Boat, which explored multiple layers of trauma—sexual, cultural, generational—was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. It was lauded for being formally inventive, with one poem that unfolds across Google search queries and others experimenting with footnotes. In Let the Poets Govern, Felix again challenges the parameters of the poetic form, this time playing with expurgation. In the book, five poems spawn from historic legal documents and remarks—among them a June 1922 British White Paper on Palestine and an excerpt from The South Carolina Slave Code of 1740—that Felix transforms via deliberate redactions to create new works. In revising these documents, Felix upsets their grammar and offers erasure poems that are responsive, corrective, palliative. In addition, Felix considers the poetic lineage and properties of Negro folk songs, American ballads, children’s nursery rhymes, political cartoons, poems from the West Indies where her ancestors are from, and the writing and thinking of other Black poets. Among them, Nikki Giovanni and former death row prisoner Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams who wrote a poem for Palestine prior to his execution in 2024. To learn the language of poetry, her book affirms, is to learn the language of liberation.
I caught up with Felix over the phone recently to talk about how her book reflects on a life of not only writing poetry but engaging poetically with the world, and how these experiences became catalysts for a personal revolution.
Naomi Elias:A throughline of this book is the elemental power of words. When was the first time you realized language was reality-shaping?
Camonghne Felix: When I was a young protestor, I think that’s when I realized the power of words. I remember after Trayvon Martin had been killed and people were marching through New York City, just listening to the chants, “Whose streets? Our streets.” That was so moving for me and activating. I remember feeling like I was picking up steam, like I was moving faster because I was so moved and guided by that language. It shaped my understanding of what power looks and sounds like and how repetition and call and response become opportunities for power building.
NE: You cite Audre Lorde’s 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” as a guide post that helped you see poetry as an act instead of a tool. What does that distinction mean for you? How have you put that into practice?
CF: When people try to define poetry, they often get stuck in trying to describe the practice of writing poetry. I guess it depends on who you are. Either you approach that in a really romantic way or a really technical way. But we never really ask ourselves whether or not we’re doing poetry versus just writing it or trying to understand it. To me, doing poetry is walking through the world and trying to earn a perspective that is gathered and claimed through the lens of poetry. There’s a difference between saying, “I’m going to sit down and write a poem about flowers,” versus being in the world and sitting with a flower and touching a flower and recognizing its poetic and metaphorical possibilities.
When I was a young protestor, that’s when I realized the power of words.
When we use poetry, we use the idea of the poetics as a way to move people, and some might call that manipulation. We use language as a way to get people to do things. Sometimes, those things are good and sometimes those things are bad and sometimes they’re neither. But that’s the difference, right? It’s like treating poetry as a utility versus an experience of the world and of life.
NE: I generally find people are resistant to poetry nowadays. Reading of it has declined and there are frequent accusations that contemporary poetry is formless and the great works have already been written. As a poet yourself and as an educator, how do you approach people who are unreceptive to poetry?
CF: When I meet people who are frustrated with poetry, I try to explain to them that there’s a difference between a poem and the idea of poetics and of poetics. If you are studying poetry, you’re not just studying the words on the page, you’re studying the conditions and environment that created the poem. I try to just explain to people those conditions. For example, one class I’m teaching right now is a class about poetics. It takes work from a bunch of different genres, subgenres, and tries to explain and analyze them through the lens of poetry and how a poem works. We’re talking about surrealist film, post-modern painting, contemporary painting, sculpture. We’re even talking about landmarks and architecture. This week, we’re going to visit The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory as an opportunity to connect that to this book by Courtney Faye Taylor about Latasha Harlins who was murdered in L.A., which was the beginning of the L.A. riots. I try to introduce people to poetry, not as a thing that you do, but a thing that you engage with and observe.
NE: You intersperse erasure poems—poems you formulate by redacting legal documents— throughout this book. What was the impetus for that format?
CF: As I was writing this book, it felt important to provide examples of how specific documents have shaped the way that we see the world and shaped the world as it is. There’s a lot of hope in this book. Sometimes it’s hard to see, but in these redactions I’m trying to show people that even in the ugliest use of language, language still has the ability to preserve and to recreate. Text and those redactions represent the idea that we can take what is old, deconstruct it, and then approach it with new eyes that allow us to see new potential.
NE: I’m curious about the document selection process. There’s 18th century slave code, No Child Left Behind, remarks on Central America. Could you talk about that and, overall, how the process of crafting the erasure poems was different from how you’d normally write poetry?
When people try to define poetry, they often get stuck in trying to describe the practice of writing poetry.
CF: The erasure poems are really there as a way to tell us something new about history. These are documents that I have paid a lot of attention to because the language has always been really interesting to me. I selected this legislation based on where my fixation was because those fixations allowed me to be the most clear with this idea. Erasure poetry is a form. It’s most famously used in a book called Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. The book takes these documents from a case where a bunch of slaves were thrown overboard and the owners of the ship and the people who had purchased the enslaved people basically wanted insurance money as a way to compensate for “loss.” So, that process of making erasures is not new. It’s a different kind of poetic work. Even though I’m not physically writing, I am trying to source new narratives from material that already exists in order to say something else, which is different from the way that I would write a poem on a regular basis. On a regular basis, the poem would have its own motivation, its own vehicle, whereas these poems have to come from somewhere, some prior material. The process of writing is more like a curational process where I’m looking for language and trying to reshape narrative around it.
NE: How many times would you say you read a document before erasing it?
CF: I don’t know. I read, redact, go back, read what I’ve redacted. It’s a process of going over and over again, reading some parts more times than I read other parts, just going by gut, and then reading and rereading where I feel confused or unsure.
NE: While reflecting on your political career as a speechwriter for Governor Cuomo, you mention the person who vetted you for the position told you, “Cuomo wanted his own Maya Angelou.” That made me squirm while reading. What did that look like? How did you see your poetry being used or misused in the political space?
CF: Well, first of all, I think it looked like just having a name. In order to fulfill the whole, “I want my own Maya Angelou” idea, whoever they select has to have some sort of public reputation. So first and foremost, it was a performance for show. [It] was not about having any kind of respect or reverence for poetry, but rather just wanting to be able to say that there was a Black poet in the administration. I knew that I was being flaunted around and that no one cared what I had to say. I would write speeches that I thought were progressive and generous. And like I say in the book, you write speeches with the hope that you can push your principle and that in pushing your principle that pushes the campaign or government’s narrative and changes the way that laws are working, et cetera. But in this case, it was very clear that no one was interested in listening to me about anything. In some cases that is useful. You’re young and you’re trying to pursue your writing career while having a political career. I was writing poems at work and submitting poems at work, going to school and showing up at 3:00 PM at my job to sit at my desk where I would write a speech and no one would care that it was written except my boss.
NE: You credit poetry with teaching you about the power of fugitivity, and political organizing with furthering that. Can you define what fugitivity means to you and elucidate the connection between your life as a poet and your life as an organizer?
CF: Fugitivity is not just living outside of the colonial, racist, capitalist system that is the United States or that is the state in general, but about pushing by breaking out of those systems—not necessarily to create new systems, but to liberate yourself from the requirements that force you into the conditions the state, or oppression in general, has set up. It’s about intellectually and philosophically and creatively thinking outside of the way that we’ve been told to think and living outside of those borders, which is always pursuing what feels impossible, always pursuing the imaginative. Because to do anything other than that would be to force yourself into the boxes and systems that are killing you.
How that relates to organizing [is], I think that great organizers can sell the prospect of a fugitive future to their people, they understand that in order to provide a new vision, it has to be an original, honest vision. And even if it’s not original—because we borrow from so many places and histories—our communities require that we are thinking very big about what’s possible, and we can’t do that unless we step out of the enclosure.
NE: You began writing this book during the pandemic and then that book completion timeline began overlapping with the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I felt a clear shift in tone and urgency when you wrote about that. How did Palestine shift this book and/or you?
CF: When I first started writing this, it was an entirely different book. I thought I was writing a book about how poetry could help politicians have more effective campaigns, and through having more effective campaigns be more useful in passing legislation. In the back of my head, I knew that that was bullshit, that it was an argument that facilitated more disillusion and manipulation. After the election, as we were in the pandemic, I was just watching things happen. Governments were fucking up, systems of governance were fucking up. And I realized pretty early on, things are about to get really bad. My job was to try to get ahead of it and to try and articulate what that was going to look like. But it took me longer than I thought it was going to take. Writing this book took me five years. I thought it would take me two, maybe two and a half.
Great organizers can sell the prospect of a fugitive future to their people.
In the middle of rewriting this book I went into a very deep depression after watching Israel bomb Palestine over and over again. I couldn’t sleep for days, for weeks. And I’d go back to this book and I’m trying to tell this story about my own evolution, trying to talk about where the world is right now, and I’m like, In what world could I not talk about Palestine? So, I did feel a sense of urgency. I knew that this book wasn’t about Palestine, but I knew that there was no way I was sending this book to the publisher without saying something about Palestine. It had to go in there, and it went in later than everything else, which is why you can feel that turn in urgency and that turn towards a more almost righteous language. Like you said, you can see the shift. You can feel it. I think that it brings us to a loss of continuity that might be difficult for the reader. But there was no way I could make those sections sound like the other sections because there was nothing left but this question of, “What do we do now that we are descending into a much more visible imperialist war?” I knew writing about Palestine was going to hurt me to an extent, that it would be harder to talk about the book, sell the book. But I’m not willing to look back at this moment in 10, 20, 30 years, and think to myself, “Damn, I chose to stay silent,” or, “I chose the bestsellers list.” I couldn’t survive that.
NE: There’s a trend in conservative or repressive eras of artists trying to distance their work from politics, but for you all poetry is political, right?
CF: Yes, fundamentally. And if I did anything else but what I did, I would just be lying. The premise would be completely destroyed.
NE: Do you have any suggestions for companion reading to your book?
CF: People should always read The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Another book it’s important to spend time with is Orientalism by Edward Said. Those are really excellent texts. In terms of poetry, it’s helpful for people to spend time with Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip [and] Black women poets and writers between the ’40s and now, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Octavia Butler, who people say was a witch or could read the future when really I think she was doing exactly what we’re all doing, definitely what I was trying to do, which is tell the truth about what’s happening right now, but tell it from the perspective of the future so that people understand what’s going to happen and where we are by just recognizing the patterns of the past.
Night Night Fawnis without a doubt the Marxist, trans, comedic dystopia we need in 2026. Initially conceived as nonfiction, Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel subverts form to become an inherently transgressive, unauthorized, fictional “memoir” that reads as hysterical manifesto.
Barbara Rosenberg, a character modeled loosely on Rosenberg’s own mother, is a terminally ill Jewish “yenta.” High on opioids, looking back at her origins in post-war New York—where she grew up with aspirations to be a wealthy Jew—Barbara wonders where she went wrong with her estranged trans son and her ex best friend. As Barbara takes an “unrepentant account of all her failures,” she seeks to understand how her child ended up becoming her greatest fear—queer, unrecognizable, anti-capitalist, manly. All the while, Barbara tries to convince her reader that she is justified in her actions as a parent, and can’t we see why she had no choice but to hide that beloved corduroy blazer in the closet? Entrapped in “the bitter breath of aqua net,” Barbara is delightfully acerbic: We almost forget how homophobic, transphobic, Zionist she is. “What makes you a man,” Barbara tells us, “is how you die.” Meanwhile, a woman’s body is essentially a desecrateable thing.
The book draws on influences as vast as Marxism, Hollywood, and even, perhaps, the dark satirical wit of Angela Carter, as it takes surreal leaps. Rosenberg, interrogating American Jewish culpability, writes, “The stylization and submission of catastrophe to the ethereal classiness of [Hollywood] explains the fascination of the boomer generation with Israel and colonizing Palestine.” As with Rosenberg’s first book Confessions of the Fox, the prose crackles. “With yentas,” Barbara tells us, “there’s no defense, only offense.” Barbara never lets us forget it, and neither does her author.
I spoke with Rosenberg over Zoom about films, form, and the forbidden corduroy blazer.
D/Annie Liontas: This book is so funny! I think of humor as the first tool of the defenseless, and specifically of queers, yet so often we yield the power of humor to the political right. How is humor, particularly satire, an act of cultural resistance? Why do we need it, especially in 2026?
Jordy Rosenberg: I love comedy because it’s vernacular. History is lived in the vernacular, resistance is lived in the vernacular, and bits, jokes, and satire are all part of that. So I do think of comedy as part of building a durable culture of resistance that is inviting, provocative, seductive, and a place for the release of anxiety for people who are participating in struggle. That last element—the temporary alleviation of anxiety for readers who might be overwhelmed and exhausted, despairing etc.—is something that my partner, Jasbir, helped crystallize for me as a horizon. This was especially helpful while I was engaged in the often difficult project of writing a book that is a deep dive into a world of transphobes and colonizers. I also think that the satirical mode in particular has a special affinity for focalizing anger in the direction of political action.
D/AL: This book started as a memoir, but I’ve also heard you describe the novel as “70s erotic satire, gutter schtick, and a splash of gothic menace.” Can you speak to the genre and what it means to tell this story in a mode that is uncategorizable and irreducible?
JR: Well I’m not the first person to say that, in part, I was influenced/aggravated by the Rothian school of Jewish American literature. So going back to what you asked about comedy, there’s a certain element of this novel that isn’t only about stealing back parody and satire from the right, but was also about stealing back that kind of libidinal license from a kind of liberal Jewish-American cis male tradition. In this, I would like to think I am taking part in a larger movement among trans writers who have refused respectability politics in all of these incredibly visceral, imaginative ways. This is something that’s particularly evident in the wave of authors writing in or about trans horror, like Grace Byron, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Alison Rumfitt, and Zefyr Lisowski, to name just a few. Horror and satire are incredibly proximate modes. You see that in the Scream franchise, for example, right? There, the self-awareness of horror as a genre doesn’t subtract from the horror—it often just amplifies it, or combines it with laughter. That roving, over-excited affect of terror or laughter—well, it’s kind of fungible.
All to say that, genre-wise, I did try to combine a kind of (righteously) purloined Rothian libidinal license with undercurrents of horror. And all of it, I hope, contributes something to this broader movement in trans fiction that dispenses with the stultifying and unimaginative demands of respectability politics. And then of course, there’s also a very long history of anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian satire that I’m drawing on as well. Orwell speaks about the material impact on his work of having been part of the actual “machinery of despotism.” Having grown up within a Zionist and homophobic household, and in many ways trying to expose and satirize the interiors of those spaces, Orwell’s language did resonate with me. The satiric experiments at play in authors like Emile Habibi and Roberto Bolaño were also important examples. Randa Abdel-Fattah recently had some very compelling things to say about satire on David Naimon’s wonderful Between the Covers podcast, as well.
D/AL: Barbara is intoxicating and charming on the page and yet we understand her to be extremely flawed—Zionist, transphobic—and that, to be in close proximity—to be her child—might be impossible. Is it a dialectical exercise to fictionalize her? What did it take to shape this voice, and what are you confronting with it?
I am taking part in a larger movement among trans writers who have refused respectability politics in all of these incredibly visceral, imaginative ways.
JR: Something I was thinking about quite a bit while writing was the extent to which we unconsciously, melancholically incorporate the speech of the other—even of a parent who we may have had a very difficult relationship with, and whose politics we explicitly reject. What to do about the tangled situation of subject-formation? In many ways, this book is about complicity—our inextricability from the systems we confront. That’s dialectical. And it’s why, I think, I was compelled to write this book as a satiric novel from the perspective of a transphobic, Zionist character (rather than, for example, as a memoir from the perspective of me, a person who has refused those positions). One of the things I was interested in portraying was the ubiquity and ordinariness with which colonial ideology has been normalized within diasporic American households—in depicting a character who enjoys certain forms of power, who identifies in an unconcealed way with supremacist and colonial projects. It had to be written from that character’s perspective—someone who was not going to conceal or hedge or varnish over exactly what those attachments meant.
D/AL: Barbara yearns for family, defining it at one point as “amoeba people . . . individual members making up one entity, one cell, whose limbs reach out in many directions, but all held together by an invisible membrane.” What shapes her ideas of family, especially regarding gender policing? What is Night Night Fawn illuminating about queer and trans folks who are estranged from family?
JR: There’s a certain amount of portability to this feeling of being excluded from family. Certainly, trans people know this feeling very well and have been materially subjected not just to familial estrangement, but abandonment and abuse. But the feeling of wanting an ideal family, or of wanting something from family and not being able to get it, is pretty ubiquitous. Much of this book explores Barbara’s feelings about having been, from her perspective, denied the family that she wanted. She has to share a family with a trans person and for her this is an experience of victimization.
I was interested in exploring certain aspects of a kind of pre-second wave feminist mid-20th century worldview, and how a certain ressentiment gets channeled both into anti-trans animus and, in the case of this character, an identification with a colonial project which she sees as the ultimate locus of a liberated binary gendered discourse. Maybe this is another place where the dialectical aspect gets elaborated—because this is also a character from a working class background contending with certain frustrations with the conditions of her life and labor both at home and in the workplace. But as Sophie Lewis’s book, Enemy Feminisms, and others have pointed out, there’s nothing that has historically prevented some of these rightful grievances about gendered oppression from turning toward what Lewis describes as a “restrictive pessimism” about what it is to be female. Emma Heaney describes cis-ness as “feminism’s counter-revolution,” and I’d say that Barbara is mounting an epic counter-revolution throughout this book.
D/AL: Night Night Fawn integrates film as a way to contextualize Barbara, but also define the cultural era and name Israel’s hold on the American imagination. What is the power of noir films, specifically Sunset Boulevard?
JR: Barbara the character is obsessed with both noir and with Exodus. As for the latter, Exodus was an incredibly central piece of literary and filmic propaganda for people of that generation. As the scholar Amy Kaplan has argued, it “forged the popular American identification with Israel for decades to come.” Ultimately, the film became so influential that Israel’s minister of tourism (as Kaplan notes), said “we could have thrown away all the promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated Exodus.” I won’t give any spoilers, but I will say I was interested in exploring that situation fictionally.
The feeling of wanting an ideal family, or of wanting something from family and not being able to get it, is pretty ubiquitous.
As for noir, I’m interested in noir conventions and ways in which a variety of filmic identifications were coming to shape certain forms of mid-century femininity and aesthetics. Sunset Boulevard is an iconic demonstration of noir form—specifically the ways in which the eeriness of noir voiceover, the fact that we are listening to a placeless voice speaking from an unknown location, gets incorporated so naturally by the viewer. This is something I found beautifully articulated in Theodore Martin’s wonderful book, Contemporary Drift. The entire technology of voiceover means that the voice that you hear when you’re looking at the picture on the screen is coming from a different place than the picture is. In Sunset Boulevard, you realize the film is being narrated by a character who is dead, and so they’re inhabiting a place that is radically outside the frame. But filmic form is about suturing together across gaps, and the viewer incorporates this process with pleasure. The viewer does not have a problem with these contradictions. Sunset Boulevard defined an important zeitgeist for Barbara’s character, so I wanted to explore the significance of it for the character’s world. But, also, Martin’s analysis gave me license in terms of literary form and trying to take risks with contradictions, and then trusting that the reader incorporates them.
D/AL: You set Night Night Fawn in Brooklyn and Manhattan, spanning from post-war era through the 1980s. What were you thinking about when you wrote about this city as a locus of power, and as you captured New York across the decades?
JR: I love something Andrea Lawlor has said about Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which takes place in the 90s: “Well it wasn’t historical fiction when I started writing it.” I grew up in the 80s, and in some ways I’ve been “writing” this novel in my head since then. So there’s a certain continuity, and for me it doesn’t feel like historical fiction. But to a reader, especially a younger reader, of course, it will feel like a different world. There are, for example, glimpses into very specific niches of New York City culture. Studio 54-adjacent teenage life, for example. Or the milieu of garment trucking in midtown in the 60s. Or the life of a small upper east side office workplace during the 80s. My mother, like Barbara, was an administrative assistant in a plastic surgeon’s office, so I was also very interested in capturing some elements to do with the birth and commercialization of plastic surgery. Really, the beginnings of the intensification of a gender binary that has been taken to a comical zenith now.
D/AL: Can you talk about the forbidden corduroy blazer? I think about it every time I walk past my hall closet.
JR: Who doesn’t love a corduroy blazer? There is a recurrent issue that comes up in the book around the trans character’s desire to accouter himself as he likes (in this case, in corduroy). We are talking about the relationship between a desire for gender and gendered identity. I hardly need to say much about this, as Andrea Long-Chu’s iconic essay “On Liking Women” in n+1, has already covered this ground, fearlessly breaking a certain silence around a trans desire for gender. It was such a bombshell when she wrote, “The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.” Part of the point here is that it’s not just that, against all of the medicalizing and pathologizing prohibitions, trans people actually have complex affects and desires, but that we share these complex affects and desires with cis people. And so my own book is much more invested in exposing cis desire, through Barbara, who has an enormous desire for gender—to be a woman, to be part of a gendered binary with her husband, and all of it. In the course of that quest, Barbara becomes, you could say, fetishistically and phobically obsessed with her child’s own gendered desires, which take the form—for Barbara—of a desire for a corduroy blazer.
My decision to centralize and kind of riff on this obsession of Barbara’s around the blazer throughout the novel had a lot to do with everything I just described about gender and desire. But it also had something to do, as an extended bit in the novel, with Marx and the first chapter of Capital, where he lays out the fundamentals of capitalism using the example of a coat. He’s speaking there about how a coat, which is an object, composed of certain textiles, put together by a laborer—and he’s asking how it is possible that an item mediated through human labor comes out the other side as a commodity that erases its relationship to that labor. You don’t see the labor when you look at the coat, you see the coat. How is a commodity able to take on a value that is larger than the wage the laborer gets compensated for? That’s kind of the crux of Marx’s analysis in that book. So the blazer is a Marxist bit for Marx nerds, but I guess also I’m trying to expand on the often gendered dimensions of the commodity-fetish, something which does not get remarked in Marx. So it’s a trans bit for the trans nerds. Or the trans Marxist nerds.
“This is a strange book,” begins a January 8, 1848 review of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. “It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable . . . ” Another review, published a week later, drew similar conclusions: “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it . . . we must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is.”
That may be the million-dollar question. What sort of a book is Wuthering Heights? Like many, I first came across the novel in my teens; unlike many, I couldn’t get through it. If I was too impatient to make sense of Joseph’s Yorkshire accent, I was also too unformed as a reader to probe the work’s complex narrative structure. I was fourteen and had no inkling of puppy love, much less passion. And because I didn’t know passion, I couldn’t understand Heathcliff.
A friend once described me as a late bloomer’s late bloomer. In that long period of my life, spanning a little over three decades, in which I had never been in a relationship, I lived mostly in my own head. Fantasy seemed, at times, preferable to reality, not because I ever believed that what I imagined was real, but because, in being able to control every element of every story down to the most minute detail, I could play God. My mind’s eye gave birth to multiple new selves, all beautiful, rich, coveted, and bearing not the slightest resemblance to reality. That a fantasy frequently ended in tragedy (my make-believe death, usually from tuberculosis or being fatally shot by an arrow) rendered it no less delicious, for the following evening I would resurrect myself and a new story with a new lover would commence.
Perhaps this is why watching Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights felt so familiar. The landscape that Catherine and Heathcliff run through as children is a landscape that possesses an uncanny resemblance to the fantastical panoramas of my own lonely adolescence. And because fantasy owes very little, if anything, to history, this is a world governed solely by whim and the law of individual desire. Dresses can be anachronistic so long as they are beautiful. Feasts are laid out less for human consumption than for the delight of the eye. Few would be able to guess that Thrushcross Grange, which resembles in its exterior an iced sugar cookie, should contain a labyrinth of rooms with no unifying style beyond the ostentatious spectacle of wealth. There is a room for ribbons that is turned, for Mrs. Catherine Linton’s pleasure, into a room for the display of opulent gowns. Most memorably, there is a room the color and texture of flesh that lends new meaning to what it is to inhabit one’s own skin.
Because fantasy owes very little, if anything, to history, this is a world governed solely by whim and the law of individual desire.
As several reviews have pointed out, Fennell’s adaptation of Brontë’s magnum opus significantly departs from its source material; to document these disparities when the differences are both numerous and flagrant seems a meaningless exercise. What’s more, I don’t see much wrong with the degree of departure, whether minimal or extreme. There are no set rules for how to treat the source material, and different mediums require different modes of expression. Suzy Davies, the movie’s production designer, puts it well: “This film was never about documenting the 1800s in a literal or academic way. Instead, it was about capturing the essence of a teenage fever dream—the sensation of first encountering the book.”
I can’t help but feel disappointed both at critics who have extolled Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” and those who have panned it. Reviews have run the gamut, from “sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic” to simply “a dud.” Much of the problem seems to stem from the preconception that Brontë’s novel is a love story. In all the times I have failed or succeeded in reading the book, I have never been fully convinced that Wuthering Heights is a romance, or more accurately, that its most foundational element is the love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. We tend to look for what we want to see on the page, not what is actually there. In reading Wuthering Heights, it’s easy to discern how a combination of atmosphere and titillating storytelling can render the mind susceptible to extracting specific moments and specific lines at the expense of others. Who, after all, can finish Brontë’s work without remembering Catherine’s cry, “I am Heathcliff!”
This all boils down to a certain amount of delusion around love: its addictive nature, its inextinguishable flame. That is, the belief that love is not love if it isn’t immortal, if it fails to live beyond the grave. Love is not love if one is not willing to kill for it, to give up one’s life for it, to exercise violence and exact vengeance on its behalf and under its banner. Love is not love if you do not place someone’s well-being totally above your own, if you do not sacrifice yourself to it, if formerly two separate selves do not merge wholly and completely into one. This thinking may be why we remember Wuthering Heights more for Heathcliff’s extreme—and insane—devotion to Catherine’s memory than as a story about generational abuse, otherness, and redemption. It is also why, regrettably, we remember Wuthering Heights less as an exemplar of vicarious, vivid, and vivacious storytelling than for the love story that was never really the crux of what is, from first page to last, a passion project: a passion not for romance but for, above all, the act of creativity and the pure, unadulterated joy of playing God in ink.
This is how the novel has always struck me: as a gratuitous exercise in artistry and play, in the kind of explosive energy that will unfold on the page when, for better or worse, the imagination is loosed like a dog that has been liberated from its leash in a park. How else to explain the layers of narrative that remind me, at times, of a mille-feuille? Revisiting the work in my early thirties, I noticed as I didn’t before the delightful recklessness, the heedlessness and risk-taking of Brontë’s prose. I laughed at Lockwood’s ineptitude and buffoonery, his pomposity, his romantic nature that allows him to be so easily beguiled by a pretty face and to fancy himself in love. In the first pages alone, a comic scene unfolds that sends the whole household into uproar. If there is passion, then it is passion made vivid to the point of fluorescence with melodrama.
Wuthering Heights is, in a nutshell, a noisy affair, raucous with Joseph’s ear-splitting outbursts, with Nellie Dean’s sanctimonious need to be right, with Linton Heathcliff’s whining, with violence and kidnapping and elopement and death and ghosts. In its ingenuity, its surrender to the spirit of its diverse and strange cast of characters, Wuthering Heights is more instinct than strategy, more id than superego, more the splatter of ink that leaks from a broken nib than a smooth and unbroken line. Thomas Wolfe is reputed to have said, “Writing is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.” I feel something different at work with Brontë. Even when I disliked the book, I always sensed how fun and, more vitally, how free it was. So often do we harp on the struggle of writing that we forget that pleasure can and frequently does accompany the uphill battle to put words on the page.
Fennell’s film is a testament to the contagiousness of that energy and pleasure. For all its adult themes, it’s a fantasy of the kind that precedes actual experience of the realities of the world; its stunning aesthetics betray, at its heart, a cluelessness. The hodgepodge of erotic imagery scattered throughout scenes recollects the giggles that would inevitably spread like wildfire in a classroom whenever someone happened to mention boobs or dared to say the word “dick” or “fuck” aloud. Tellingly, even symbolically, there is no nudity in Fennell’s movie: no breasts or buttocks or penises. But there are plenty of pig’s feet; there is the underside of a snail leaving a trail of slime across a glass pane. There’s the slap of wet dough and the meticulously handcrafted book Isabella Linton presents Catherine, which highlights more than one erotic feature in its pages: a pop-up of a phallus-shaped mushroom, a flower that resembles vaginal lips. Sex is clean, and its participants are, most of the time, even formally dressed for the occasion.
In one revealing scene, Catherine screams at her good-for-nothing father, as she stamps across the courtyard of Wuthering Heights, “We’re all ill! We’re all ill because of you!” This line hits at what Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is about. None of the characters know what they’re doing or how to go about getting what they want. Everyone is suffering under some form of delusion. Except for, surprisingly, Zillah, who has left the service of Wuthering Heights, married, and become a mother of a little boy, no one really grows up or moves on. With guardians like Mr. Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, maybe they don’t know how.
So often do we harp on the struggle of writing that we forget that pleasure can and frequently does accompany the uphill battle to put words on the page.
If Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is meant, to quote Davies, to replicate “a teenage fever dream,” it also warns of the dangers of being caught in the stage of hormonally fueled fantasy for too long. There is a difference between the love we imagine and the love we practice, and “compromise,” so integral to real life and to navigating any relationship, is not a word recognized in the world of this film. No one surrenders, except to their own fantasy of what and how things should be. Everyone clings. Edgar Linton deceives himself that his wife is perfect. Isabella allows herself to be treated, literally, like a dog. Nelly guards the only thing that gives meaning to her life: her proximity to those in power. And Catherine and Heathcliff abjectly fail to grow out of an adolescent hedonism; their creed remains, we can do anything we want, so long as we are the ones doing it. Appropriately, the film concludes with flashbacks to Catherine and Heathcliff’s childhood. This move is sentimental, even predictable, a play for easy audience tears. But the bigger lesson may be that if one can’t look forward, one runs the risk of living forever in an idealized past. And lest we forget, the film ends in tragedy.
While watching Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” I thought a lot about my debut novel, a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I wrote it a few years out of college, having just been fired from a dead-end job I despised. I was twenty-five and had never had either a boyfriend or sex. My parents were filing for bankruptcy, and I was about to lose my childhood home. Some, or possibly most, of that pent-up frustration came out in the span of three months in a first draft of a novel that I composed while sweating in an airless basement I would very soon never have the privilege of sitting or typing in again. All of my fears and wishes for the future somehow found their expression in that first book. I had no idea what I was doing.
The end result was a fantasy. My protagonist not only gets her happy ending but also has a lot of fine, robust sex in between. I wondered that I could write about positions, about the sensation of lying naked beside a lover, without having experienced any of what I described. My inspiration came from what I had consumed in books, movies, and porn, from my introversion and isolation, from the buzz of sexual frustration and my despair at repetitive encounters with unrequited love. By and large, critics were much kinder to my first novel than readers were. Many were furious, outraged to the point of being almost comic. What I’d done to Austen was disgraceful, they declared; what right did I have to rewrite, to retell, to revise, to essentially destroy what had already attained the highest echelon of literary perfection. So, the litany of complaints went on and on—and on.
If I could, I’d inform the Janeite mob at my door that my treatment of Mr. Darcy and Lizzy, of Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, of, notably, Mary Bennet, had nothing to do with them. I did not think of them. I didn’t want to think of them, not out of any disrespect, but because all that mattered as I was writing the novel was the absolute, all-consuming urgency I felt in transplanting my vision onto a preexisting world that had become so intimate to me that I had grown bold enough to wish to change the scenery and the weather, to shift the furniture and swap the curtains, and to rearrange characters as if they were my own playthings. You don’t do that out of hatred or scorn. You do that only when a book becomes so alive that you cannot remember who you were before you read it, when your tongue takes on the rhythm of its language and lines, and when the impulse to rummage around inside of its world becomes all but irresistible. In short, it is out of adulation—and out of love.
I sense the same impulse in Fennell’s adaptation. This is surely a personal vision, and because it is so personal, it will be, at times, moving, and, at times, ridiculous. The trailer for the film describes it as, “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time.” I don’t think, however, that this is accurate. Rather, I would say that Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is inspired simply by her love for a truly great—and truly strange—novel, that the passion which drove her to undertake such an ambitious project is the same that compelled Brontë to write the book. It’s a bold move, and it takes courage.
There’s a scene in the film where a shivering Catherine complains of the cold. Heathcliff offers to build a fire, but they cannot spare the firewood. After a brief exchange, Heathcliff stands up. He slams his chair against the floor, again, then again, until it breaks. With the remnants of the chair, he builds a fire; he will not see Catherine cold.
This scene doesn’t appear in the book. One could say it is cheesy, the stuff of which so many romances are made. But in its simple and unapologetic expression, it’s refreshing, too. We all wish that someone might break a chair to pieces if it meant we would not be cold. We all wish we could be loved so passionately. And who can say that such a moment or something very like it did not or could not happen in those gaps of the novel in which a reader’s imagination is given space to ferment? I recall one of my favorite lines from the book. In describing Heathcliff and Catherine’s final embrace, Brontë writes, “They were silent—their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other’s tears.” The edges of book and film begin to blur, and I wonder what memories these characters might have recalled, whether their youth came back to them, or whether they reveled, even fleetingly, in a glorious and unrealized future in which things had turned out different.
Kelsey L. Smoot’s debut full-length poetry collection, SOULMATE AS A VERB, is a necessary addition to a long lineage of works beckoning us toward love and liberation. It invites us to examine who or what can be a soulmate and wonders what the world would look like if we were soulmates to not only our partners, but our friends and family, ourselves and community. The collection is equal parts tender and witty, teeming with clear-eyed hope, much like the author themself.
I first met Kelz through a friend who recommended them as an editor saying, “He effed my poem up!” And they did indeed, eff my poems up. From there we built our friendship brick by brick, which we cemented through hours-long conversations on new and vanquished loves, lost friends, Palestine, and weird telemarketing calls. Before I read the book, I had the pleasure of experiencing firsthand how Kelz soulmates as a verb.
Kelz and I met at my home over warm cups of ginger tea to chat late into the evening about bodies, revolution, and poetry.
Nadia Said: Let’s get into SOULMATE AS A VERB. I’m curious about the title.
Kelsey L. Smoot: Actually, it’s a quote from my brother, Spencer, for whom the book is dedicated. He and I were having this conversation about my sordid dating life. We kept having the same conversation over and over, and [I was saying], “God, where is she? Where is my soulmate, my true love?” And one day he was just like, “Bro, I just don’t think that’s a thing, not in the way that you’re saying. I think that to have a soulmate connection requires a level of work and intentionality and choice to lock in with someone. Yeah, there’s chemistry and attraction and butterflies and all the things that would typically conjure the concept of romantic love or attachment, [but] I think that the biggest component is that you just choose. You choose to do a soulmate connection with someone, you choose to soulmate as a verb.”
We have soulmates throughout our lives.
It was a really special moment when he said that to me. He also was just kind of like, “Look: you and I are soulmates.” We have soulmates throughout our lives. And it’s not because we were predestined to run into each other and have this perfect connection. It was because we put in the work and had years and years of scaffolding this big love and trust and mutuality. And so I think when I started to blow that concept out in a macro context, it just made me realize how important it is to view people in all different capacities of our lives as potential soulmates. What does it look like to choose a really embodied and kinetic version of love that insists upon deliberate choice?
So when I was pulling together this collection, when I actually first pitched some of the poems in here to Dopamine/Semiotext(e), I sent some of these poems to Michelle, my publisher, and she was like, “These are great poems, but do you have more? Because we’re not doing chapbooks.” And I had submitted a chapbook. I don’t even remember what it was called. But I always knew my first full length collection was going to be SOULMATE AS A VERB. I just remember looking at my computer being like, oh my god, how am I going to pull together a book? And then there was a lot of writing new poems and rearranging things, but ultimately just as it began to take shape and these other projects that I had previously done started to feel like they were coalescing in a greater story, I knew that that story was SOULMATE AS A VERB.
NS: While reading your book, I was reflecting on this essay by Fargo Tbakhi called “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” in which he speaks on the nature of craft as an institutional tool designed to reinforce systems of oppression and the need to be sharp, direct, and precise with our poetry. I feel like that’s something that you do quite beautifully in SOULMATE AS A VERB. You just really named the things, and I wanted to know if that’s something that you had to labor intensely over, or if it came out organically?
KLS: It’s interesting because I would say that I have nuanced feelings about it, in that as a self-trained poet, I feel like I came to craft later. And so for me, my first stabs at writing poetry felt in some ways unruly but in other ways really stilted. I think that I just thought poems were a bunch of really confusing words put together as word salad. I just didn’t have a deep knowledge of a lineage of poetics. I hadn’t ever studied poetry. I didn’t have an MFA. So because of that, I think I had kind of a layperson’s understanding of poetry. So over time, once I started engaging other poets, reading other poets’ work, being in community with other poets that I admire, [I felt] like their poems really resonated with me in a different way. I think that that did challenge me to really start to take seriously figuring out what my true poetic voice is. I do think that folks who come from different poetic backgrounds, who aren’t trained in academia, can feel an emphasis on craft leaves them out of the conversation. But I definitely urge a querying of craft and a praxis of writing that insists upon both engaging in the lineage and also challenging that lineage or deviating from it to make a particular point or to stylistically identify one’s own social and literary prerogative in writing.
NS: Oh wow, that makes a lot of sense. It also sounds like you were getting these formal tools to help you write the poems, but at the same time, kind of retrofitting them. Being like, no, actually, I’m going to take this and use it toward this purpose.
KLS: Yeah, I definitely felt like I was getting concepts and theories that felt really helpful to understanding things like racial justice and gender ideology and transgender ideology and queer of color critique, but I still was [wondering] how [to] write about these things in a way that is more reflective of how I relate to the world, which is much more creative and imaginative and undefined than maybe some of my more serious prose writings were allowing for at the time.
NS: The book is divided into four sections: chest, ribs, lungs, heart. I would love to hear more about the significance for you about that. Why those body parts specifically?
KLS: I’ve always had a preoccupation with bodies. I like bodies. I think they’re so strange and wonderful. Having a concept like a soul as a main thematic muse in this work [is] like a guiding force or a balustrade for this work to rest on. I also wanted to ground that in something that typically, at least in Western culture, we associate with a soul, like a body. And so I wanted to locate different movements throughout the book in different spaces in the body. I also have a really particular relationship with my chest because I had top surgery four years ago now, and a lot of these poems were written after that timeframe. When I got top surgery, it really punctuated a very particular moment in my life. And I think my chest now has become symbolically really representative of my engagement with the world. I think about the fact that I’m physically closer to the world now than I was before surgery. And I just remember things like putting a seatbelt on in my car, like the weight of it was different against my flat chest. There’s just a way in which having this surgery felt like it brought me closer to the world. But I would also say that my chest feels in some ways like armor. Like it shields me from certain types of transphobia, queerphobia, [and] misogynoir that maybe I used to be more subject to prior to top surgery, because of the meaning that we assign to chests, right? So, it’s this vulnerable space of entry for me, but also this protective space.
By the time 200 years have passed by and whoever’s left on this rock finds this book, are they in a better place? Do they understand the ways in which we needed each other in this moment?
And so, thinking about the way that the poems move throughout the text, I think the poems in the chest section are looking a little bit more externally. They’re more externally facing. They’re kind of toying with this idea of the outside bumping up against me and the ways in which that informs my lived experience, and then each layer becomes more intimate. So then we go into “Ribs” and obviously that’s the kind of protective shell around the organs that are most vital. And then we go into “Lungs,” which are the outer encasement of that really important organ. And once we hit the heart, that’s where we find the life of the body formed and sustained, and that’s also symbolically where the soul lives. It’s the innermost layer, so I wanted to create a feeling of deepening in intimacy but also in conviction, because some of the poems that we get to when it gets to “Heart” are the poems where I’m really like, okay, you know what, fuck all this love shit, I’m saying it’s Free Palestine, bitch, so that to me really symbolizes both getting to the core of the issue and getting to the softest, most tender place in myself that’s fiercely protective of the people that I love, my soulmates, and trying to create that narrative. What does it mean when we get to the end of the book and I say, “throw this shit in the fire?” It doesn’t even matter what this book says. By the time 200 years have passed by and whoever’s left on this rock finds this book, are they in a better place? Do they understand the ways in which we needed each other in this moment?Or, well, I don’t even want to speculate as to alternatives. We’ll say that my descendants, looking at me in the future, will pour one out for an ancestor and know that part of my offering to them is these poems and wanting them to know that I love them already and I think they have everything they need to create a future that we can’t even fathom right now.
NS: As this collection enters the world, how do you hope it participates in conversations beyond poetry, whether on care, liberation, or collective survival?
KLS: That’s such a beautiful question. I really hope that anybody who reads this collection feels emboldened to engage love as an ethics and a practice. I think that love is a really awesome thing that can just happen to you. One day you can just wake up and realize I love this person. And it’s just the chemicals in my brain and how they respond when I look at this person, and that is a wonderful type of love that I’m also totally obsessed with. But then there’s just this other idea of just [giving] a fuck about somebody else, right? Make that choice, whether it’s just growing one’s own capacity for a radical empathy and a concept of love that is not limited by romantic connection or sexual attraction, right? To really go as hard for this person that lives halfway around the world as I would for my best friend. How does that allow for a whole new type of meaning creation between humans, right?
I really hope that anybody who reads this collection feels emboldened to engage love as an ethics and a practice.
One thing I pride myself on with regards to my poems is that a lot of them are calls to action, engaging with the concept that I think we have a human responsibility to bear witness to each other’s suffering, to hold space for each other’s growth, to challenge each other to look in a mirror sometimes and engage in hard truths. I think that just having that orientation to poetry means that I want these poems to do something for people. I don’t want them to just be a fun experience. If it feels good, warm, [and] fuzzy to read one of my poems, cool. That’s wonderful. But I also want these poems to trouble people and to make people feel uncomfortable and challenged. It’s not lost on me that one of my favorite lines in my poem “Bricks” is “I hope white people hate my shit.” It’s not that I don’t fuck with any white people. I have white people in my family! [laughs] That line is a systems critique, right? It’s an idea of no, I’m not going to be your token or a magical, mythical Negro who is writing these really interesting race poems for you to sit around and talk about in these super inaccessible intellectual spaces. I want a white person to get through this entire book and be like, “I love this shit” and get to the last poem and be like, “I don’t know if I love this shit anymore.” I think that’s an important moment. And I always tell people: The types of poems that I like are poems that have enough space in them for the reader to meet me on the page, for them to come to this work with their own predispositions and prejudices and heartbreaks and assumptions. And imbue these poems with their own meaning. Their own interpretations.
NS: What is striking about this book specifically is that you’re not being like, come bear witness to this. You’re like, come get in these motherfucking trenches.
KLS: Hey, get down here and look, and see it, and feel it.
NS: And you’re even like, dig in this mud and you’re gonna be in this shit too!
KLS: Yeah, get dirty with me. I think that’s a beautiful way to put it. I view these poems as very much an invitation. And so, to that end, I do hope that these poems are in conversation with discourse around justice. I hope that these poems are in conversation with community organizers and activists who are actively doing the work of being in resistance to genocide. I hope that these poems feel like they can be a space for Black queer scholarship. I hope these poems find their way into classrooms where students are looking for words to help illuminate their relationships to theory. I hope these poems can be a stopgap for different kinds of silences that exist across the archives. And yeah, I have a lot of lofty goals for these poems, but at the end of the day, I want people to read them. I want people to be excited by them. I want people to sit with them and marinate on them and reflect on them.
“Please Accept This Token of Thanks” by Christine Vines
My sister raises her glass of sangria and clutches her heart, sequined top and cleavage trembling with her gratitude. “You guys are the sweetest,” she says.
It’s her birthday and the three of us—Valda; her best friend, Harriet; and me—are splitting a carafe of prickly pear sangria on the rooftop bar at El Nido. It’s been impossible to get into this place since it opened. I had to book our reservations a month ago and couldn’t get anything earlier than 9pm. Not ideal for a Monday night, but Valda loves exclusive things and I’ve insisted on treating.
Granted, a month ago I thought I’d have a job by now and would be paying for our dinner with real money. I’ve been trying not to use my TOT card unless absolutely necessary, but seeing as I’ve been staying on Valda’s couch for three months, this probably qualifies.
Our server appears and asks if we’re ready to order food. Valda and Harriet nod and work their way down the list of tapas we decided on—Padrón peppers, jerk mussels, dates, mushrooms, calamari, beet salad, lobster thermidor, and sea bass, which are all somehow priced like mains. I try not to do the math in my head, so instead I admire our server’s balayage and wonder if she paid for it with money. It looks expensive. Which I guess is another way of saying it looks good.
When I step inside to find the bathroom, I catch sight of a lanky man hunched in a familiar way over his cocktail. My face goes numb. He throws his head back too far in laughter and I know it’s him.
Years ago, Sam worked at the textbook publisher with me. Just a blip before moving on to the bigger things that had always been waiting for him. Data was a beautiful thing in his hands. Complicated sets poured themselves effortlessly into visuals. The one time we slept together, back when I was harboring delusions of us moving to the Hills and presiding over the city as some kind of power couple, I pictured a time-lapse video he made of phonemes in languages over time—dots migrating across a map of the world that swelled my tongue with longing.
Sam’s work runs on the front page of the Chronicle now. I know his stuff before I even get to the byline. It pulls my eye out of the stories and sets off a hunger in my chest. It’s always the most elegant thing on the screen, a dancing, interactive chart that lights with color as you move your mouse.
I emailed him last year to ask about any job openings at the Chronicle. I’d taken three pay cuts at the textbook publisher by then and knew I wouldn’t outrun the layoffs forever. It was a humiliating email to send and even more humiliating to receive his reply: Audrey, hey! Good to hear from you. Unfortunately nothing that I know of. You’re still at AdAstra, huh? Can’t believe you’ve stuck it out all this time. Good for you. S
1) My name is Aubrey, not Audrey. 2) Obviously I’d memorize this email and the word good would forever lose its meaning.
It’s true that I’m probably not qualified to work at the Chronicle. I’m a good designer, but I can be clumsy with code. I’ve been trying to remedy this, sitting on Valda’s couch all day fiddling with Python and R, trying to animate my static charts and plot in 3D.
I haven’t emailed Sam since I lost the job at AdAstra because the only thing more humiliating than telling him I still work there is telling him I work nowhere.
I force my shoulders back and approach his table. The woman across from him is glamorous and poised. High red ponytail. Gold cuff wrapped around one bicep like something Cleopatra might wear. It makes me think of the interview tip I read, to Wear a fashion statement to spark conversation. I’m wearing a plain gray dress and a silver necklace with a tiny A that hangs below my collarbone. If my outfit is making a statement, it’s whispering.
He sees me and his eyebrows go up. “Audrey, hi!” He asks how I am and introduces the redhead as simply Genevieve, which means they are on a date.
I tell him about the layoff in the brightest tone I can manage, one that indicates it’s no big deal, an opportunity for better things. I smile and remember to Look your interviewer in the eye. “The Chronicle doesn’t need anyone, do they?” I ask, as though this has only just occurred to me. Demonstrate that you’ve familiarized yourself with the company’s work. “I saw your piece about cell phone usage policies and car accidents last week—it was amazing.” I don’t mention that I locked myself in Valda and Dave’s bathroom with it and masturbated on the fuzzy bathmat. Car accidents are not sexy, but the chart was so streamlined and clean and I kept thinking of his fingers moving across the keyboard, punching enter in the same gentle, decisive way he’d curled them into me.
“Oh gosh, thanks,” he says, as though he barely remembers this chart. “But damn, yeah, I don’t think we’re looking for anybody right now.”
“Well,” I shrug, “if anything comes up, I’ve been fleshing out my portfolio. Working on animating a multivariable set right now.” These are probably second nature to Sam, so not a great brag.
“Oh, well, cool.” He nods. “If you want any help, I’d be happy to look it over for you.”
“Wow,” I say. “Yeah, I mean, that’d be great.”
I wonder if Genevieve will feel threatened by his offer, but she smiles brightly.
“Sure,” Sam says. “Send it over. I’ll take a look.”
I think of Valda and her friends, how casually they thank one another for favors with lavish spa days and expensive wine. If I had real money, I could send a fancy fountain pen to Sam’s office later, with a note that says, Thank you for your genius eye! Instead, I take out my phone and say, “I actually won the TOT lottery after the layoff. I’ll send you some TOTs right now.”
They’ve been running a pilot lottery system since the bill passed two years ago. Only ten percent of applicants get approved; it was such a relief when mine went through.
“Oh, cool,” he says. “I mean, you don’t have to.”
People say this, but as with real money, it’s just the cue to say, “I insist.” Which I do.
Between courses—glistening bowls of peppers and mussels, cheese-crusted lobster, all of it outrageously delicious—Harriet asks if I’ve heard anything more from Freeman & Freeman. A week ago, I had a preliminary interview at the finance company she works for after she referred me to HR. It went about as well as it could, given that no part of me wants the job. Or, I should say, only the part of me that wants an apartment of my own again and money for food.
When Harriet told me they were hiring a data visualist at Freeman & Freeman, I’d been staying with Valda and her husband Dave for two months already, listening to Dave every day on his headset through the thin office wall. “Oh, great,” I said, trying to believe it could be great. When she forwarded my resume to HR, I sent her a hundred TOTs from my phone and the caption 📈🤓🤞!
I tell her I’m still waiting to hear back about the performance task I sent in. The datasets they gave me to visualize were complicated and deeply uninteresting. Risk assessment, revenue trends. Analyzing them felt like dragging my brain over gravel. At AdAstra, I made charts of whale migration patterns and human lifespans throughout history. “They said I should hear back tomorrow if I’ve made it to the next stage.”
“Well, I have a good feeling about it,” she says. Harriet is the kind of person who has a good feeling about a lot of things.
When the server with the balayage drops off our check, I lay my TOT card on the tray and slide the A on my neck back and forth on its chain. Like all TOT cards, mine is bright yellow—a horrendous, almost chartreuse that calls as much attention to itself as possible. I’m sure everyone on the rooftop with us can see it. It’s awkward enough using it at the grocery store or on the bus, but here, where churros are thirty-five dollars, I feel like I’m committing a crime. Valda and Harriet generously ignore it.
I remember standing at the voting booth two years ago, clicking Yes on Prop 10: Alternative Banking, and feeling magnanimous. What were a few of my tax dollars to help “redistribute access to those in need”? The FOR column in the ballot booklet listed endorsements from every major state politician and researchers at prominent universities citing the psychological benefits of gratitude. Take your thanks to the banks! The AGAINST column was blank. Now I imagine filling the space with the word “humiliating.”
Still, of course, I’m grateful for it.
When our server comes back, she lifts the check tray and makes only the subtlest of glances around the table, as if wondering which of us is responsible.
A minute later, she returns with a strange look on her face. “Um, I’m sorry,” she says to the table. “This card has been declined.”
“Really?” There’s no way I could’ve maxed it out already. I’ve only had the thing since I lost my job and have used it as sparingly as possible.
She nods. “Do you have, um, a debit card? Or a credit card maybe?”
“Shit.” My spine curls. I dig through my purse, even though I have neither of those things with me and no money in the accounts anyway. In a zippered pocket, I find two yellow tokens worth approximately 3% of this meal. I can’t decide if it’s worse to procure them.
Valda interrupts. “I’ll get it.”
Harriet puts out a hand. “Absolutely not.” She looks up at our server. “It’s her birthday.”
“Happy birthday,” our server says uncomfortably.
Harriet opens her purse. “I’ll get it.” And as easily as one might hand over a napkin, she deposits her blue credit card on the tray.
I check my account from my phone and it reads Uh oh! No remaining Tokens of Thanks ☹️.
I scroll back through my payments looking for the error, but the math, somehow, adds up. The payment I sent Sam an hour ago maxed it out.
I don’t know how it happened so quickly. The amount I was approved for seemed astronomical at the time. Plenty to tide me over for a brief stint of unemployment. The woman who approved me recommended I pay it off in increments every month. “Some users like to select a recurring date to come in. We can book you for every month on the 1st? The 15th?”
I was in the middle of a fight with my landlord at the time, a woman who’d been terrorizing me ever since she’d found out her rent might be arriving in TOTs. She’d turn the water off at random intervals, “in case someone needed to fix the plumbing.” She’d taken two of my windows from their frames and put them in storage, claiming “new ones were on the way.” Flies and bees wandered in freely, and every time I left the apartment I worried my things would be stolen. During my approval call, a squirrel let itself in and knocked over a plant.
I swished at it with a flyswatter and told the woman on the phone I’d have to figure out my payment plan later. “Your limit is on the higher end,” she said. After I’d been selected, I filled out a long questionnaire intended to determine my gratitude capacity. Thankfully, gratitude has always come naturally to me. “I don’t recommend paying it off all at once. Some users find this experience taxing.”
I’d heard grumblings to this effect—a couple of people at AdAstra had accounts—which is maybe why I’ve been putting it off. Also, the Alternative Banking Office is all the way across town and I don’t have a car. I wonder if the tokens in my bag—the remainder of a bonus from when I opened the account—are enough for a ride there tomorrow.
The server returns with Harriet’s card and smiles brightly at her. “Thanks so much.” She turns to Valda. “And happy birthday.”
Valda has a meeting up the 101 the next morning, the wrong direction from the ABO, and Dave has a consultation with a big prospective client, so I tell them I can get myself there. Dave never lets me drive his precious Audi, and the tokens in my bag are only enough to borrow his bike anyway. This is the sort of thing I once imagined would be free—a single ride on a bike that belongs to my brother-in-law. But I hand over the tokens and try not to feel rage as Dave pokes at them in his palm. Nothing is free here.
“Height okay?” he asks, headset already fitted behind his ears, doorknob in hand. He can see that it’s not, and I can see that the answer he needs is yes.
I give a thumbs up and he closes the door to the garage behind him.
The seat must be too high by six inches. I pray it’s one of those easy-adjuster posts, but it’s not. No toolbox or wrench in sight. I hoist myself onto the bike and wobble my way across town, overlarge helmet shifting on my head. It feels like someone is taking a potato peeler to my calves. At red lights, I fall gracelessly, bruise my pelvis on the bar. When I get to the ABO an hour later, I’m so tired I can barely lift my arms to lock the bike.
Entering the lobby is like stepping into a child’s birthday party. Blinding yellow walls. The words Give thanks! and You’re very welcome! in person-sized letters across them. Smiley faces in the exclamation marks.
I tell the woman at the front desk I’m here to pay off my charges. “Wonderful.” She smiles. “Do you have an appointment?”
I explain that my card maxed out last night and I came right away.
“Oh, hmm. Maxed out?”
I nod.
“That may be a slight problem.” She types something into her computer. “There’s a surcharge for walk-ins, so you’d need to have some cushion in your account.”
Shit.
“We have an appointment. . .,” she scrolls, clicks, types, “. . .next week if you want to come back then?”
I imagine biking back across town. A week without spending. I need TOTs for everything.
“I. . . can’t.” I look around the room, at the few people filling out forms or waiting with a clipboard in hand. “Can I wait here, maybe, until there’s a cancelation?”
She offers a sympathetic frown. “That would still be a walk-in, I’m afraid.” She must see the distress in my eyes, because she reaches out a hand and lays it gently on mine. The nerves in my fingers throb, skin rubbed raw from gripping the handlebars too tightly. “Let me see what I can do.” She gets up and disappears behind a yellow door.
When she returns, she’s smiling like the exclamation marks on the walls. “Great news. I spoke with my manager and he says he’ll waive your surcharge if you clear the account.”
“Clear the account?”
“Just, pay the whole balance today.”
“Oh.” I exhale. “Sure, I can do that, sure.”
“Perfect.” She hands me a form to fill out and a yellow pen. “Oh good,” she says. “You brought a helmet.”
When my name is called, a man with a retractable keycard swipes us through a heavy door into a yellow hallway. We pass door after door, behind which I hear muffled music or silence. As we turn the corner, a door marked Room 7 opens and the sound of weeping escapes. The words “I am” pierce the hall. A man in a yellow lab coat locks the door behind him. He makes a quick Yikes or Woops face at the man I’m following.
“Is that person okay?” I ask the man with the keycard.
“He’ll be fine.”
We turn down another hallway. “He didn’t really sound fine.”
“Have you been here before?” he asks over his shoulder.
I shake my head.
“It’s all non-invasive. Completely safe, medically-speaking.”
“Medically-speaking. . .” I read all the paperwork when I was setting up the account—my mother taught me to never sign anything without reading every word—but the section about the repayment process was just a long, scientifically dense description of a brain scan.
He waves his hand dismissively. “The rooms back there are for small debt. Some people just bring the dramatics.”
I want to ask how my own debt ranks, but the man stops and unlocks a door. I feel a little woozy, but I follow him into another wing, then into a small room, covered floor-to-ceiling in yellow padding.
I stash my belongings in a cubby by the door, and the man gestures to a barber chair in the middle of the room. The chair faces a big-screen television and what appears to be a giant thermometer. A long, white wire dangles above the open seat.
“Go ahead and make yourself comfortable. You’ll have a few minutes to clear your mind, then one of our adjusters will be here to help you with the process. Any questions?”
I think about asking if it hurts, but he says, “Okay then,” and slips out the door.
My tailbone stings as I lower myself into the chair.
Eventually, a knock.
“Yep,” I say.
Another man in a yellow lab coat enters, introduces himself as Cameron. I focus on my gratitude that it’s not the man who made the Yikes or Woops face. He settles onto a stool beside a panel of controls and a computer.
“So, Aubrey. How’re we doing today?”
It doesn’t escape my attention that Cameron is extremely attractive, though I’m not sure if this is objectively true or if he just got my name right. I tell him I’m good.
“Great.” He smiles. “I’m told this is your first time.” I nod and he identifies the wire dangling in front of me as the sensor, shows me how to separate the end into two buds that fit in my ears. “Comfortable?” I imagine he’s holding me from behind, moving the hair off my neck. I say yes.
“Okay, so I’m going to read through your payments, and I want you to think back to the moment of exchange. When you visualize it, a clip from your memory will appear on the Memovision,” he gestures at the TV, “to help you reenter the experience. Then this big guy over here,” he points to the thermometer like they’re old friends, “will take a read on your gratitude levels. When you’ve filled the gauge all the way up, we can move on to the next payment and do it again. Sound good?”
I nod.
“Great. I’m just going to read the company statement before we get started.” He flips a page on his clipboard. “Financial distress has been shown to impact physical and psychological health, leading to higher rates of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and suicide.” His voice is strangely chipper. “Fostering and acknowledging gratitude, on the other hand, decreases stress hormones and feelings of anxiety. Regularly practicing gratitude may lead to lasting changes in brain chemistry that promote happiness and wellbeing.” Cameron looks up, smiles. “Today, we’re collecting the necessary receipts to maintain public support and keep this program alive. Incidentally, we’re also providing the client—Aubrey Cline—an important opportunity to spend time with the gratitude they’ve been cultivating since their Alternative Banking account was established. We’re honored to be working with you toward this mutual goal of improving your health and wellbeing!” He turns the clipboard around, hands me a yellow pen. “I just need your signature here, acknowledging the purpose of today’s visit.”
We’re also providing the client an important opportunity to spend time with the gratitude they’ve been cultivating.
I read the page, like my mother taught me, and sign.
“Okay, we generally start with the smaller payments to ease you in. Work our way up to the big stuff.” I imagine one of his fingers slipping inside me, then another. My chest thrums, pelvis aches. “Ready?”
“Um, yeah.”
He begins with a day in the grocery store when I toppled a corner display of limes. The Sprouts interior appears on the Memovision in soft-focus. It’s the same day my last paycheck from AdAstra came in and those limes felt like my whole life scattering across the produce aisle. A woman weighing grapes stops, bends to pick up the limes between us. “Limes on the run,” she says, like we’re playing a game. Later, when she wound up behind me in line with only a handful of items, I told the cashier to add them to my bill.
It’s immediate, the feeling that washes through me for this woman. A digital simulation of mercury flies to the top of the gauge. A soft ding sounds.
“Wow,” Cameron says. “That was fast.”
A loud part of my brain wonders if he finds my gratitude attractive.
Cameron reads a series of payments to strangers or people I barely know—bus drivers, cashiers, baristas. Every time red fills the thermometer in a matter of seconds. Red, ding, red, ding, red, ding. A heaviness sags in my chest, but for once I feel powerful, capable. “Whaddaya know,” Cameron says. “No assistance needed.” He laughs, and I think I detect a flush in his cheeks.
Next is a payment to my mother who lives across the country. The Memovision lights up with the soft green of my old living room. Looking at it again makes me sad. My hands appear onscreen, taping up a box, writing KITCHEN on the side of it in Sharpie. My mom comes through the door carrying two pizza boxes and a bottle of wine. “Guess who does To Go food if you ask nicely?” She opens the boxes to reveal sourdough pizza from the fancy restaurant up the block. “Mom,” I hear myself say. “I thought you were gonna get sandwiches from the deli.” “Well,” she says, “I thought this would be a nice treat. No reason.”
Of course, there was a reason. It was my last week in the apartment because my landlord had flat-out refused my TOTs when her harassment campaign hadn’t done the trick. I’m pretty sure this is illegal, but she threatened a lawsuit and I didn’t have the money to gamble on it. It had been ten years since I moved into that rent-controlled studio and my landlord had been itching to get me out ever since rents had skyrocketed. I knew it distressed my mother that she couldn’t help—Valda and Dave had bought their house with a down payment from Dave’s parents—and shame burrowed into me for causing her that. “Let me get it,” my old self says, tapping out the payment on my phone. “You came all the way here to help me move.”
I look over at the gauge and the red wobbles around the mid-point, rising and dipping a few times. Embarrassed, I glance at Cameron, who gives a breathy, sympathetic laugh. “Moms,” he says. “Always tricky.”
But my mother is not tricky and I was grateful. I remember it. Onscreen, my past self slips into the bathroom, sits on the closed toilet. I hear myself start to cry through the speaker and wish Cameron would look away. The gauge dips again. No, I think, no. I close my eyes and imagine digging through a sandbox of my shame, excavating handfuls until I knock against something buried there. I open my eyes. The red climbs in the gauge. My neck cramps, shoulders tense. Ding.
“Doin’ alright?” Cameron asks.
I nod.
“That’s right, you’re a pro.” He smiles coyly and reads my payment to Harriet. Already, nausea twists behind my eyes. On the Memovision, Harriet sits beside me on Valda’s couch, looking over my resume, assuring me brevity is fine. Freeman & Freeman will love that I’ve been at the same company for so long. “Okay,” she says, “I’m doing it.” She attaches my resume to the email she’s written, clicks send. Her computer makes a whoosh.
Current-me has the impulse to check my phone. It’s possible there’s already an email in my inbox, inviting me to a second interview or beginning, Unfortunately. . . Both possibilities make me feel ill.
I glance at the gauge and am dismayed to see it’s mostly empty, the red hovering at the one-third mark. I was grateful to Harriet—of course I was—and it feels unfair that I should have to prove it. The red dips lower.
Onscreen, Harriet closes the laptop and pours us glasses of white wine. She pours another for Valda and the three of us cheers. “To a bright future for little sis,” Harriet says. I’m older than Valda by two years but her friends always forget this because I’m single and broke.
Valda smiles, features blurrier than Harriet’s. “To movin’ on up.”
When I saw the starting salary at Freeman & Freeman, I thought it was a mistake. It was three times what I’d made at AdAstra. Harriet grimaced when she saw the listing. “I guess our charts people don’t make a ton,” she said and I wondered, for the first time, what her life was like, what it meant for numbers like this to look small.
The red in the gauge drops to the one-fourth mark. I grasp the leather armrests, palms beginning to sweat.
“Would you like some assistance?” Cameron asks.
My heart beats loudly in my ears. I want to say no, but the red drops further. “Um, okay.”
Cameron scoots his chair in and twists a few dials. He types, clicks. “Alrighty. So. It looks like this position is quite a lucrative one, given your employment history.” Cameron can see my employment history? I tell him I’m grateful for the opportunity. But the red drops again.
He looks back at the computer. “Okay. Well. It appears this recipient—Harriet—hasn’t referred anyone to the company in,” he scrolls, “three years.” He looks at me and my heart knocks against the center of my collarbone. I wish Cameron were less attractive so I could focus.
“Her last referral was fired after some account mishandling. Lots of internal drama. . .” His eyes move back and forth across the screen. “Wow, a whole restructuring of the department ensued. She’s been reluctant to attach her name to applications since then.”
The red wobbles and I close my eyes. I didn’t know any of that. I feel a tenderness for her, a growing warmth. She must believe in me, or really love my sister, or both. I open my eyes and the red is rising steadily, slowly. My arms grow heavy. Chest tightens. Ding. I exhale.
“Great,” Cameron says. “Great.” He clicks the mouse and asks if I need a break. I can’t leave the room until the session is over, he explains, but I could stand up, stretch my legs. I shake my head, wanting this to be over and still wondering if I can impress him.
It seems to work, because he says, “Dream client.” He blushes. “Just, sometimes people take these long breaks. Like, totally, move around a bit. It’s when they start staring into space for an hour that I’m like, that can’t be helping? Definitely not with my commission. If you request me,” he says, “I can work your account every time.”
I’m starting to feel like I might throw up, but I say, “Yeah. Definitely.”
Then he reads my weekly payments to Valda, which he decides to lump into one large payment with a keystroke. My hand appears on the Memovision, carrying suitcases into Valda’s apartment, stacking them in the corner of Dave’s office beside the pull-out.
I’m scared to look at the gauge. I’m grateful, so grateful, but I’m aware of other feelings closer to the surface. Shame, annoyance. A general sense of inadequacy for mooching off my little sister. The loathing that surges whenever Dave is around.
When I do look at the gauge, the red is all over the place. Quivering, jumping, falling. Cameron says, “This happens with recurring payments. It’s aggregating data over time, so it may take a minute to settle.”
When I first mentioned rent to Valda, she made a face. “Rent?” But Dave interjected that they’d probably have more expenses with a third resident. “Might as well take some help from the government.” I’d been happy to—wanted to—send her a TOT payment until he said that. It felt good to know I could offer something. But Dave saw it as the government’s money anyway, as rightfully his. Suddenly I wanted Valda to put her foot down. To say, Aubrey doesn’t owe us anything. Aubrey’s family. Aubrey has worked her ass off and we only have this house because someone else put down the money for it. Instead, she shrugged. Said, “If you really want to.”
I watch breathlessly as the fluctuations slow and the red teeters in the middle. Not terrible, I think. Then the red spikes once more and drains almost entirely from the gauge. Shit.
“Okay, well, no worries,” Cameron says. “That’s what I’m here for.” He toggles some buttons, types. “So.” Bounces his head as he reads. “This payment is significantly lower than the rent in your prior apartment.”
I try to focus on the amount I’m saving, but the Memovision displays a bleary image of Dave’s office as my alarm goes off at 5:25 a.m. He works for a travel agency headquartered on the other coast, so I need to be out of the room by 5:30. Like every other morning, I strip the sheets from the pull-out, fold it back up, drag the marble coffee table back in front of the couch so it all looks untouched. Dave knocks on the door at 5:29, says, “Okie doke,” a phrase I’ve come to loathe.
The sliver of red that was visible at the bottom of the gauge disappears and a sound like a car alarm comes through the speaker. I startle and Cameron shouts over the noise. “It’s okay!” He twists a dial. “Let’s do a counterfactual, okay? You’ll have a little more control there.”
I don’t know what that means, but I nod.
“I’m initiating a park sequence!” he shouts. Clicks, types. A dimly lit park appears on the screen. Chain-link fence, dead grass, a single bench surrounded by broken glass. It looks like no park I’ve seen in town, but Cameron tells me to envision myself there.
It’s hard to imagine anything with the alarm still blaring, but sure enough, my body appears onscreen like a character in a video game. I’m wearing grimy sweatpants and a sweatshirt I do not own.
“The sun has set,” Cameron shouts over the alarm, “it’s getting cold.” My avatar shivers and I feel it too. “You lie down on the bench and try to sleep.”
My avatar approaches the bench. It’s covered in bird shit. I look at Cameron and he nods, encouraging. Surely this is not actually the alternative to staying with Valda and Dave? Couldn’t I have flown home and stayed with my mother? Built out my portfolio from her bedroom while her book club drank margaritas down the hall?
The park onscreen begins to melt and Cameron says over the alarm, “Ope, ope. Gotta focus. We’ll have to reboot if you wipe this scene.”
I inhale and feel the night chill again. When my avatar lies on the bench, the metal is hard and I feel it in my hip. Or maybe that’s from this morning when I fell off Dave’s bike.
I think about how this is the reality for so many people, people who are not me, and I recall the give of the pull-out couch in Dave’s office, the goose down duvet Valda pulled from storage. The alarm goes quiet and I try not to think about the ethics of using other people’s misfortune to pay off my debt. A tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. The park fades from the Memovision and Valda’s living room replaces it, my legs folded into the sectional, computer open on my lap to a screenful of code. The red climbs incrementally as I focus on the warmth, the WiFi, the fridge full of food. Dave’s voice comes through the walls. “. . .fewer of our deliverables. . .” His work-laugh is a stone skipping water. “. . .absolutely position this to your liking. . .” Their Pomeranian, Randy, whines to go outside. It’s my job to walk him now, to feed him and pick up after him, since I’m “free all day.”
The red dips again. My throat tightens. Something scrapes in my lungs.
“If I may,” Cameron says. “This payment was made to—,” he checks his screen, “—Valda Cline?” I nod. “She hasn’t made many appearances.”
I see far more of Dave than I do of Valda, but it’s true the payment goes to her. I breathe and remember the day I moved in. On the Memovision, she FaceTimes our mother and says, “Guess who gets a permanent sleepover!” When she was little, she used to beg to sleep in my room. She’s thirty-two now and works eighty hours a week, but insisted this arrangement would be fun, would be just like when we were kids. The red totters in the gauge, climbs slowly.
It hasn’t, of course, been just like when we were kids.
When we were kids, there was no Dave, asking every day when I think I’ll have a job. No Dave, planning extravagant outings every weekend—wine country, hot springs, trips to Hawaii—because he knows I can’t afford to come. I keep expecting Valda to notice, to suggest we stay in and play board games one weekend. Valda and I grew up with the same lack of money, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she pouts and calls me a party pooper for never wanting to use my TOT card on fun things. “You have free money right now!” she says. “Live a little!”
The red in the gauge is erratic again—down, up, back down. All of these things have unfolded on the Memovision.
“Hmm,” Cameron says. “How about another counterfactual? We can do something a little more targeted.”
“Um. I don’t know.”
Cameron nods. “They can be uncomfortable, but they’re a very efficient way of extracting gratitude.”
The word extracting makes me shiver.
“Let’s just try it out, see how you do.”
I say nothing and he taps the keyboard. My avatar appears onscreen again, this time in a yellow sundress I’ve never seen before. A living room materializes around me that looks like a set from a play. Bland hotel art surrounds a giant wall mirror. “This is your home,” Cameron says, and I think, Mine, okay, I could be grateful for that.
A man walks through the door in a blue business suit, sets a briefcase on the ground. He looks not unlike like Sam. “Honey,” he calls to me, “I’m home,” even though I’m standing right there. My avatar walks to greet him and I decide to indulge this hypothetical with a long kiss, a bit of tongue. The character onscreen doesn’t seem to expect this. He freezes momentarily, says, “Thank you, my wife.” Then something changes in his demeanor. He lifts his nose, sniffs. “Where is dinner?” he says angrily. “I have worked all day and am hungry.”
I stifle a laugh. I, too, have been cooking dinners for Valda and Dave. Because they have worked, because I am “free.” It’s not exactly the same tired plot here, but it’s not so far off.
I imagine my avatar saying, “I’ve been busy today too,” and she does. “With the baby,” I add, for maximum defensibility. A crib pops onto the screen. Cool. Just like that, a baby.
“Our baby does nothing all day!” my husband shouts. “Just like you!”
Jesus, I think, and my avatar repeats this. “Jesus.”
“What did you say?” he screams. I don’t know who wrote this script, but we’ve gone from zero to a hundred. My husband grabs my avatar by her dress collar and throws her to the ground. My jaw drops. What the fuck, I think. My avatar says, “What the fuck.”
“You are useless,” he screams. Veins pop in his neck as he lifts my avatar by her waist and throws her directly into the mirror on the wall. The mirror shatters and rains down around her.
“What the fuck,” I scream.
“What the fuck,” my avatar screams.
My head throbs like it has hit something. I close my eyes to block out the scene. No fucking way am I doing this. Getting gratitude this way. Extracting. My mother has alluded to the three years of her marriage to our father, before she left him, before he lost parental rights. I know it involved yelling, broken things. But I open my eyes and the red climbs in the gauge. My stomach turns.
I feel nauseous, heavy-limbed. I focus as hard as I can on Valda. Guess who gets a permanent sleepover! Finally, her face overtakes this horrible scene on the Memovision. I’m so relieved I could cry—Valda hugging me from behind when she gets home from work; Valda listening to me talk about the new chart I finished, even though she still doesn’t understand scrollytelling; Valda loaning me a dress for the Freeman & Freeman interview. The red passes the halfway mark, the two-thirds, higher. I feel all the bones in my ribcage when I breathe.
I’ve been trying to make myself small at their house—never leaving a dish unwashed or a crumb on the table, keeping my belongings folded and stashed in suitcases. Last week, I was curled into a blanket in the corner of the couch and Valda accidentally sat on me. “Oh my God!” she said. “I thought you were a blanket.” I felt strangely proud. She sat back down on me intentionally. “Best blanket.” Now, in the barber chair, the memory of her weight in my lap grows, expands. Crushes something in my tailbone. I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe?
“Stop, stop,” I gasp. I want to tear the sensors from my ears, but for some reason, I can’t. My arms won’t move. “What’s happening?”
Cameron hits a button. The Memovision pauses on a close-up of Valda’s face. “You okay?”
I tell him my arms won’t move and he says, “Shoot, okay. We’ll take a break.” He retrieves the clipboard. Flips several pages, scans. “Are your fingers tingling?”
Yes, I realize, nodding.
“No problem. We can work that out.” He scribbles something on the clipboard and rolls his stool over to mine, asks if I consent to a massage.
“Um, okay.” I feel myself blushing.
He lifts my left arm and, to my horror, I feel nothing. I ask if I should be worried about that and he says, “Nah. The feeling will come back in a second.” As he massages my arm, he says, “I know this can be a little—unsettling. But the research on gratitude shows tons of benefits. Reduced stress, stronger immune system. You’ll even sleep better.”
I’m having trouble listening, because the feeling is returning to my left arm and Cameron’s touch is soft and gentle. He rolls to my other side, works his way down my right arm. My palms begins to sweat. I realize I’ve been sweating for a while. My left hand comes away slick from my temples. A faint odor’s coming off me. “Could I, maybe, have a towel?”
I once read that a post-workout flush is attractive to potential mates—something about replicating the exertion of sex—but I’ve never sweat sexily. Valda calls me a lollipop when I get home from a run, my face bright red. When I can lift both arms to his satisfaction, Cameron digs through a drawer and tosses a hand towel into my lap.
“Okay.” He marks something on his clipboard and looks at the gauge, which seems to have emptied again during the massage. “We can finish this payment now if you want, but I’d suggest we move on and loop back at the end. Clear out what you can first. Bigger doesn’t always mean harder.”
I flush and feel crazy for hearing innuendo in everything he says. “Okay. Sure.”
He taps the keyboard. “Alrighty then. Only one other payment.” He sounds delighted, but I know which one it must be. I don’t understand how it could be bigger than my weekly rent, but Cameron adds, “This one does come with an overdraft fee. Pretty hefty, I’m afraid. That’ll get ya.” I take the opportunity to bury my face in the hand towel and soak up the sweat that drips from my hairline. The fibers are rough against my skin.
“Ready?”
I breathe in the scent of lemon detergent and something plastic and wonder what will happen if I don’t move or respond.
“You’re so close, Aubrey.”
My neck seizes. I can feel the hollow in my chest where something has been wrested from me. There is, I imagine, an inverse correlation between gratitude and the amount of gratitude demanded of you. I see the scatter plot in my head and the dots dropping sharply off, stray limes rolling down a hill.
“Not to rush you, but my lunch break is coming up in a few minutes here.”
Behind the hand towel, I imagine finishing this session in time for Cameron’s break, joining him at the seafood restaurant on the pier. We share a prawn cocktail and he confides in me that the inverse correlation is real, thathe’s never seen anyone muscle through every payment so quickly. I inhale, sit up, set the towel on my knee. “Okay.”
Cameron smiles, reads the payment, and the screen displays the inside of El Nido. My chest constricts as Sam offers to look over my portfolio.
Even before the overdraft fee, I sent such a big payment because I thought he might not do it otherwise. Also, I wanted him to know I didn’t expect anything because of our history, that night on his rooftop in the fog.
I want to die, because even Cameron knows my name is not Audrey.
Before I can stop it, the restaurant fades from the Memovision and Sam’s rooftop comes into focus. I hear myself moan through the speaker in the ceiling. Sam’s bare chest appears, his thin muscled arms reaching up to me, patchy chest hair gold under the string lights. I’ve masturbated to this memory for years but it’s a shock to see it onscreen.
Cameron hums uncomfortably.
I look over at him. “Sorry. How do I turn it off?”
“Just—” My voice moans louder through the speaker. “Ah, really concentrate on the moment of exchange.” This, too, is a moment of exchange. But Cameron reads the payment again and the Memovision cuts back to El Nido.
Sam says, “I mean, you don’t have to,” waving a hand that’s been inside me, fingers I’ve sucked on.
I look over at the gauge, but before a reading can appear, my moans siphon back through the ceiling. Sam’s rooftop is back. Fog closing in on us. So low it obscures all the neighboring buildings and creates the impression we’re alone up there, fucking inside of a cloud.
“Um, let’s—yeah, let’s back up.” Cameron rereads the payment. El Nido rematerializes.
Sam says, “I mean, you—,” but the frame freezes and the audio of us breathing and moaning plays behind it.
“Fuck me, Audrey,” Sam says, somewhere off-screen, and just like that I want to die, because even Cameron knows my name is not Audrey.
Apparently the frozen picture of El Nido is enough for the gauge to take a reading, because a moment later, the alarm is back. WAH WAH WAH. “Yes,” Sam cries, “fuck yes.”
Cameron shouts the payment again, but the alarm and the moaning carry on. He clicks frantically at the computer. Grabs a phone from the wall. “. . .screen is frozen. . . what do I do. . .” When he hangs up, he types, shouts, “We’re gonna try some music, okay? Sometimes music,” he taps his chest, “gets deeper.”
He pulls a lever under the desk and the lights dim. A disco ball descends from a hole in the ceiling. “Really try to focus on the payment,” he shouts, as Celine Dion competes with the breathing and shouting and moaning and alarm. Dots of light spin over us and Cameron cranks the volume until Celine’s is the loudest voice in the room. I’m thankful to be here, she sings, thankful to feel clear. . .
I don’t know how I’m meant to focus on anything right now, but I try to get the picture of El Nido on the screen to move. Sam’s face is frozen with his lips puckered. It’s basically impossible not to think about kissing him. Not to remember how, at one point, he wanted that.
As though someone has turned up the volume on our sex track, my voice climbs over Celine’s. “Tell me how you’d chart this,” I say, panting. Sam, distracted: “Chart what?” “This,” I say. “How good I’m making you feel.”
I only vaguely remember saying this, but hearing it pumped through the sound system at full volume, my stomach turns, face heats. I don’t know how to make it stop.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “So good.” I remember being frustrated by that, because it wasn’t what I’d asked. I’d wanted axes, plot points, code. Now I want to vanish. The memory of Sam’s rooftop is spoiling. Cameron, Celine, the disco ball—they’re all ruining it.
I pull the wire sensors from my ears, but this just skips the audio on our sex track so the last few seconds play on repeat. How good I’m making you feel, my voice says. Sam’s Oh yeah. So good.
How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.
Celine and the alarm carry on in the background.
I turn to Cameron. “Can you turn it off?”
He lifts his palms. Shouts, “It’s stuck.”
It feels like I’m cracking down the center, listening to this terrible remix, Sam’s frozen lips puckered at me onscreen. I push myself out of the barber chair and feel my legs protest. I’m not sure they’re going to hold me. “Can you let me out?”
Cameron grimaces. “Safety regulations. We can’t.”
Whose safety?, I wonder. “Please, I need a break.”
He shakes his head at the door. “No can do. But. . .” Flips through the pages on his clipboard.
A whole chorus backs up Celine. Thankful to be here.
How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.
When he finds the information he’s looking for, he digs through the desk drawers and tosses me a pair of noise-canceling headphones. “See if these help,” he shouts. “Maybe we went the wrong direction with the music.”
I turn them on, fit them over my ears, but all they really do is dampen the lower register, muddying Sam and Celine. The alarm comes through unhindered. So does my voice. How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel.
I stumble toward the back wall, as far from the speaker as possible. When I get there, my legs buckle under me. I slide down the yellow padding. My head spins with the pinpricks of light.
I think of the voting booth, my ballot booklet open to Prop 10. I imagine adding my gratitude scatter plot to the AGAINST column, the caption Mathematical impossibility. Nowhere did it say you’d feel like a person turned inside out. Nowhere did it say your nose would try to split your face open.
I realize I’ve been banging an open palm against my nose when a trickle of blood makes it into my mouth. I wish I could throw up or pass out. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. I knock my head against the wall and suddenly I understand why it’s padded. An impulse I’m unfamiliar with takes over as I bang my head harder and harder. Cameron’s on the phone again, gesturing agitatedly at his screen. My head bounces off the cushioning. I can almost feel the vomit creeping up my esophagus.
When I got the stomach flu growing up, my mother would sit on the bathroom floor with me and rub my feet. Valda, who never seemed to catch anything, would lie beside me, feet in the air. “Me too! I’m sick!” she’d cry. She always wanted to be where I was.
Last weekend, when Dave surprised her with a romantic birthday getaway, her voice hitched. “I wanted to celebrate with Aubrey, too.” Dave told her she’d love the hotel he’d booked, plus it wasn’t refundable. “I guess we have our girls dinner on Monday. . .” At the time, I thought she was looking for excuses to go, but now I wonder if she was buckling under pressure. If she misses our old dynamic as much as I do. “You know Dave,” she said to me once. “Loves to get his way.” A protective tenderness rises in me.
I try to push myself up, but my legs are too weak. I tip onto all fours and drag myself toward the barber chair, knees burning on the glowing carpet.
How good I’m making you feel. WAH WAH. Celine must’ve changed keys, because the words thankful and alive seep in through the headphones.
The chair seems impossibly high when I get to it. I slump onto the metal footrest, try to still my vertigo. I wish the disco lights would stop moving.
Suddenly Cameron’s crouching beside me, asking if I want help up. I nod and he grabs me under the arms, lifts clumsily. I feel like a baby being hoisted by someone who doesn’t like babies. I’m achingly aware of the sweat dripping from me, the odor clinging to my shirt. WAH WAH. How good I’m making you feel. He sits me in the chair. I feel the nausea rising. I lean forward and the headphones slip from my ears, clatter onto the floor. All the sounds barrel back at me. WAH WAH. Oh yeah. So good. How good I’m making you feel. I vomit onto my knees. It’s mostly stomach bile because I didn’t have breakfast.
“Oh boy,” Cameron says.
“Sorry,” I groan. I’ve splattered his pants and shoes. “I’m so sorry.”
Cameron picks up the phone again, asks for help in Room 14. I’m no longer a dream client. Celine’s back to singing about butterflies. My ears clog. Brain blisters. I dig my fingers into the leather armrest and one of them sinks into a hole there, finds rough-edged metal beneath. I rip at the hole until the metal edge is exposed and wonder if I could use it to crack my head open and make this all stop. Safety regulations.
Cameron must see me fiddling with it because suddenly he’s retrieving Dave’s helmet from the cubby. “This is probably a good idea.” He sits me up and sets the helmet on my head, snaps the straps—too loosely, I think—under my chin. His hand comes away flecked with blood and vomit. He wrinkles his nose, wipes it on his yellow lab coat.
“Sorry,” I repeat. Somehow the helmet makes the possibility of death via armrest real and I feel a little afraid of myself.
Cameron proffers the dangling sensor like a rhetorical question. I can feel his desire to be done, gone, eating lunch in a fresh pair of pants.
I wonder what it would take to get me out of here, to never do this again. Suddenly, I want the Freeman & Freeman job. I can see that life now—bored out of my mind every day but going to wine country with Valda on the weekends, living in my own apartment. I’d be the one people sent TOTs to: Thank you so much for letting us crash in your spare bedroom! I’d get to say: There’s no need. Or, It’s really okay. Maybe I’d even have a rooftop that occasionally flooded with fog. I take the sensors from him.
“The control room is working on a full reboot,” he shouts over the noise, “but it’ll mean starting over.” I can hear the annoyance in his voice, so I try not to gawk at him. “If you can get this thing filled up before then, that’d be—you know, great.” The thermometer is still at zero, the alarm blaring alongside every other sound.
I fit the sensors into my ears and wonder if this will actually kill me. There’s no way I’ll be able to start over. I feel myself beginning to resent even, for some reason, the lime lady from Sprouts. The Memovision’s still frozen on Sam’s face at El Nido—eyes half-open, lips protruding. Stupid of me to have sent so much. I try to focus on the generosity of his offer—the measly half an hour it’ll take from his life. No, not that. The kindness of helping an old friend. The alarm falls away as a tiny bit of red shows in the gauge. I feel faint. Celine and the sex sounds carry on. A slow-burning rage grows in me—that I can’t just thank Sam with money, the way Valda and her friends do. Gift cards and bottles of wine they deliver and never think about again. Sam’s giant puckered lips taunt me, incense me, and his face begins to fade.
I’m doing it. Rage must be the trick. But then a new, blurry face replaces Sam’s. Eyes half-open, lips protruding in almost exactly the same way. Dave. He’s too close to the camera—to me—and I know what this memory is, even with the voices of Sam and Celine playing over it. It’s 5:31 a.m. I’ve overslept. Dave makes awful, kissing noises like he’s coaxing their dog out of bed. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Am I gonna get this minute back?” Even now, I can feel the pressure of his thumb on my mouth, wiping at my drool. The revulsion washing through me. The horror of the seconds I lay there, wondering what exactly I owed him.
I wait for my past self to scramble out of bed. Tell him not to touch me. Instead, a yellow haze takes over the screen. No, not the screen. My vision is yellowing out, the way it does when I stand up too fast. “I—can’t see,” I say, breath catching. I’m not sure the words have made it past my lips. There’s solid yellow everywhere.
Thankful to be here, thankful to feel clear.
How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good.
I hear myself crying and it must be my current self because something salty drips into my mouth. My lungs are hollow. Fingertips tingling. I need Cameron to hear me, to get me out. I remove a foot from the footrest and feel for the carpet. Push myself up, take a step.
Everything goes black.
Suddenly, I’m sitting on a rocky outcropping at the beach with Valda and our mother, feet dangling into the sand. It’s eight years ago. Valda’s about to start law school and our mother has come to help move her in. Valda never even visited the other schools she got into. She wanted to be here, where I live, to drink cheap wine with me by the ocean, as the three of us are doing now.
We sip from compostable cups and discuss all the things we’ll do together now that she lives here. Hiking, farmers markets, five-dollar Tuesdays at the cinema. Our mother sets her cup at her feet, grabs one of our knees in each hand. “My girls.” She tears up. “My girls.”
Then, disco lights spinning. Celine Dion crooning about paper dolls. How good I’m making you feel. Oh yeah. So good. It takes me a moment to understand where I am. Dave’s face is frozen on the wall, at a strange angle. I must be on my back, facing the ceiling. Something trickles into my eye and I lift a heavy hand to wipe it away. Blood. My forehead is throbbing. I feel around my head and find a helmet there, Dave’s helmet. It has slipped so far back as to be useless. Did I hit my forehead on the way down? Death via armrest.
A ding sounds and I think, deliriously, I’ve done it. Filled the gauge. Finally, finally. But the gauge, even from this angle, shows the same tiny sliver of red. No, it turns out, I’m not sufficiently grateful. Not to Sam, not to Valda. Certainly not to Dave. This is the ding, I realize, of my phone in the cubby. An incoming email. We are pleased. . . We are sorry. . .
I close my eyes again, hoping this will return me to the beach. But the music and the voices loop faithfully—Oh yeah. So good. Soon fingers are prodding into my neck, feeling for a pulse. I open my eyes. Someone—not Cameron—bends over me. She looks familiar. She takes my hand in hers and I realize it’s the woman from the front desk. She doesn’t look fazed by the sex noises or the too-loud music. “Aubrey,” she says, and the sound of my name is like a caress in my hair. “Are you still with us? Can you keep your eyes open?”
I try to do what she’s asked, but my vision begins to yellow again. The woman goes in and out of focus, yellow smoke I try desperately to clear. “Is the man in Room 7 okay?” I croak. She glances away from me, perhaps at Cameron, whom I can no longer see. “Room 7,” she says uncertainly.
My eyelids grow heavy, close. A far-off voice that sounds like my own says, Let’s do a counterfactual.
Valda and my mother and I dangle our feet into the sand at the beach. Valda laments that her sublet has fallen through at the last minute.
“Just stay with me, Val.”
“Are you sure?” she says. “I know you’re tight on space.”
I wave my hand. “Of course. As long as you need.”
A distant voice says, This is not an appropriate counterfactual. The voice sounds like mine, siphoning through a speaker in my ear canal. Another voice pipes in: Aubrey? Are you with us? Can you stay with us?
“Okay!” Valda leans over our mother to cheers her cup of wine to mine. “Permanent sleepover!”
My mother taps her cup to ours and we laugh.
“Not permanent,” Valda promises.
“Temporarily permanent,” I say.
A woman appears beside us on the sand then, forehead bleeding profusely. Blood dried under her nose. Vomit stains on her t-shirt, pants. She looks like me. She gestures at the three of us, addresses someone I can’t see. “You’re not getting this,” she says. “You’re not measuring it.”
Measuring what?, I wonder.
“There’s something you can use here.” She begins to cry. “I know there is.” Her voice cracks, her edges blur. “Please,” she turns a hazy yellow. “Please.” She flashes a blinding chartreuse and is gone.
Someone down the beach turns on a portable speaker and Celine Dion comes through, singing about butterflies and heaven. From somewhere far-off, voices I dimly recognize.
There aren’t many writers from my hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas—at least not when compared to larger cities and places more proximal to an elite college. So, when I came across a short story collection called Corpus Christi with a photo of a wind-whipped palm tree on its cover, I was eager to know everything about its author, Bret Anthony Johnston. Johnston grew up in Corpus Christi and briefly toured the country on a professional skateboarding team before enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Now serving as the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, he’s been publishing critically acclaimed fiction for two decades, including the novels Remember Me Like This and We Burn Daylight. This spring, Johnston makes a triumphant return to short stories with Encounters With Unexpected Animals (the opening story of which can be read in Recommended Reading!), his first collection since winning the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award in 2017 for “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses.”
The stories in this collection are cinematic in a gritty but empathic way—think Sean Baker or Chloé Zhao. They drop the reader into the unglamorous lives of deeply flawed people who want to do the right thing, sometimes can, but more often, through some fault of their own, don’t or won’t. His characters lie and steal and hurt and conceal, and despite this, we know they’re doing the absolute best they can. We know this because his characters share aspects of ourselves, or people we love.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Johnston via Google Docs about our shared hometown, the overlap between writing and skateboarding, and drafting towards revelation.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James: This is your first short story collection in almost twenty years. I’ve been expecting a new collection since you won the Sunday Times Award in 2017. I don’t want to seem impertinent, why has it taken so long for you to return to short stories?
Bret Anthony Johnston: I’m a stupidly slow writer. I find writing so difficult—and unlike most everything else in life, it gets harder, not easier, the longer I do it—so any number of these stories took dozens of slow-ass drafts. For example, “Atlee” took almost ten years. I’m also a writer who’s always working on more than one project at time, knowing full well that each will run off a cliff at some point, so most of these stories were written while I was drafting We Burn Daylight. When I’d get fed up with the novel, I’d move to a story. When that story tangled into a knot I couldn’t untie, I’d go back to the novel. For better or worse, I’ve never asked—let alone expected—my writing process to be easy or fast. Efficiency is, I think, antithetical to imagination, experimentation, and empathy.
EGJ: I was happy to see that several of the stories in this collection are again set in our shared hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas. I don’t live there anymore, you don’t live there anymore, and yet, Corpus Christi seems to have this gravitational pull. Is every writer just obsessed with their own hometown?
BAJ: At the risk of sounding like a heady goofball, I’m fascinated by Corpus because it feels like a city that has everything it needs to thrive and yet never quite does. The city feels hopeful, but also maybe tragically flawed. It’s geographically liminal—a weirdly far drive from major cities in Texas and Mexico—which makes it a hassle to reach or leave. There’s a rare and undeniable pressure that radiates from such a place, a sense that the world doesn’t extend beyond the city limits. That isolation shapes everyone who lives there.
Efficiency is, I think, antithetical to imagination, experimentation, and empathy.
And, of course, the city is so multi-faceted—the naval base, the shoreline and beaches, the farms and ranches just outside of town, all the mineral rights money and all the poverty, its beauty and the large-heartedness of its citizens, the terrifying things that are happening to the bay. So many of the struggles that we’re facing as a country have long defined the Coastal Bend. In holding up a mirror to Corpus, you see the whole of America in its reflection.
EGJ: The characters in these stories feel like they want to reach across a great divide and touch the people they love. But for whatever reason—fear, or loneliness, or inexperience—they can’t. Was alienation top of mind to you as you were writing?
BAJ: Not at all, but I’m persuaded by your thoughtful reading; now that you’ve said it, the idea resonates with me and feels true. I’m just not a writer who thinks in those terms; I’m consumed by the matter in the stories, the external and internal landscapes of the characters’ lives, and because the characters aren’t prone to meditating on the aboutness of their situations, I’m not either. I cast my lot with William Carlos Williams’ “no ideas but in things.” So, I’m all the more grateful—and edified—when good readers like you devote such attention to the characters and thus complete the story.
EGJ: In the opening story, “Paradeability,” you take us inside a Houston clown convention. Other stories feature a car salesman, a horse stable manager, a Dairy Queen worker who’s ferrying a truck full of stolen toys up from the Rio Grande Valley. What kind of research do you do for your stories?
BAJ: Ultimately, it feels like an act of paying attention, of noticing, an abiding kind of openness. I do a lot of research—like, a lot—once something has arrested my curiosity. “Paradeability” started on a skate trip to Houston. When I walked into the hotel, there were roughly 400 clowns in the lobby. Anyone with a fear of clowns would have passed out. I was absolutely thrilled. It was an annual convention, so I snuck into a lot of the panel presentations when I wasn’t skating. Then I read everything I could find about clowns. It’s basically the same process for every piece of fiction I’ve ever written. For me, research liberates rather than silences the imagination, and I’d like to believe that it brings a sense of verisimilitude to the stories, that the details immerse the readers in the narrative. Edward P. Jones once told an audience that the key to writing was finding ways to “bamboozle” the reader. If I’ve ever succeeded in said bamboozling, it’s due in large part to how much research I do.
EGJ: One of your stories ends with the line, “He’s waiting, whiling away the hours until a storm gathers and his son can appreciate the painstaking labor of hope, the coded, sheltering lessons of sorrow.” That’s so beautiful. Can you speak a little bit about what you meant?
If the pages are only confirming my own ideas, I haven’t taken them through enough drafts.
BAJ: In my experience, Texans tend not to talk directly about things like loss and grief and fear and hope. Rather, they articulate those emotions through veils and gestures, the understated vocabulary of their proximity or with the currency of their presence, their labor. To a lot of people, such reticence might seem maddening or unhealthy, or it might be mistaken for a lack of emotion. I get that, but for better or worse, the characters that animate my imagination are the ones who are, as you so astutely recognized, alienated, and one stripe of that alienation is voicing their pain. They’re not fluent in the language of themselves.
EGJ: Do you have a favorite story in this collection?
BAJ: I’m a writer—and reader—who longs to be surprised on the page, and each story in the collection surprised me at some point, so I feel indebted to them in different ways. But they were all so damned difficult to write that when I think about the stories now, I mostly remember all the ways they tried to break me. My favorite story or book is always the next one.
EGJ: I recently rewatched The Shining and, when we got to the part of the movie where Shelley Duvall is running for her life and sees the two men—one in a tuxedo and one dressed as a bear—engaged in something behind a partially closed door, I thought that that scene is a perfect distillation of what a short story is. It’s a glimpse into an entire world. We don’t know who these men are, or why they’re dressed the way they are, but we’re shaken to our core.
What appeals to you about short stories? What advantages, if any, do you think they have over novels?
BAJ: The best stories focus our attention just as a photographer’s aperture does. They exclude what isn’t essential or enhancing. There’s an impossible precision in a great short story, even longer ones, and the combination of such imaginative attentiveness and precise language can result in a transformative reading experience. The writer and reader can come away feeling not simply like they’ve written or read the story, but rather like they’ve undergone it. Novels change our lives incrementally; we age with them, which is just so beautiful. Their impact is gradual, almost sedimentary. But there’s an urgency when you’re reading a short story. We read them and experience something akin to alchemy. The elements of our existence are transformed almost in a breath.
EGJ: I read in an early interview that you write something like 20 to 25 drafts of a short story. Is that still true? What is it that you’re drafting towards?
BAJ: Alas, yes. Ultimately, I suppose I’m drafting toward some kind of revelation. Whether emotional or intellectual or narrative or linguistic or even syntactical, I want the work to surprise me. If the pages are only confirming my own ideas, I haven’t taken them through enough drafts. I trust my stories most when they prove me wrong.
Skaters and writers are misfits who aren’t afraid to fall.
But it’s also so much more pedestrian than that. Each draft becomes a bit more readable and, simultaneously, more itself. The story emerges draft by draft, and I’m working to rinse myself out of the pages, to get out of the characters’ way. I have no idea where we’re going, so it’s not even like the character is driving the car while I’m riding shotgun. It’s more as though the character is driving and I’m locked in the trunk. It’s terrifying and dark and bumpy and disorienting and out of my control. Dozens of drafts later, the car stops and the trunk opens and as the light pours in, I realize we’ve arrived at the only place we were ever meant to go.
EGJ: What makes a story collection feel thematically tied together to you? Can you speak about how you chose the stories for this collection and how you decided to order them?
BAJ: In the purest and most satisfying sense, I suppose it’s an overt or intuitive association that binds the stories, some authentic connection that invites the reader into the collection and creates some subtle suspense around how each story will uphold or vary the theme. From Winesburg, Ohio [by Sherwood Anderson] to Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones to The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham to countless others, there are myriad collections where the effect is thrilling and astonishing and moving. In other cases, though, the so-called thematic links can feel market-y and forced, maybe because the industry doesn’t at all trust readers to embrace a collection of disparate fictions. I have more faith in readers than that. I really do. For those of us who love short stories, I don’t think we give a rip how they’re packaged. We just want stories that quicken or break or restore our hearts, stories that deepen rather than solve mysteries.
EGJ: You devote the last paragraph of your acknowledgements to your passion for skateboarding. “[These stories] wouldn’t have even been started if I’d never stepped on a board.” I have this theory that talented people are usually talented in more than one area, and that those talents tend to feed and reinforce one another. Clearly you have a talent for skateboarding. Can you say a little about how skateboarding influences and maybe improves your writing?
BAJ: I’ve had similar observations, which I’ve likened to certain folks having a capacity for learning, a kind of default humility that allows them to commit to the process rather than the product.
As for skating and writing, I see numberless similarities between them. On the comic (but also unassailably true) side, writing is a lot less painful than skating. If a reader or fancy-pants publication skewers your book in a review, it can really wound you. You can get awfully rattled, and it completely sucks. And yet, to my knowledge, a bad review has never knocked anyone’s pelvis out of alignment.
Ultimately, though, skaters and writers don’t fit into mainstream society. We’re always on the fringes, paying attention to what others don’t and prioritizing what most everyone else takes for granted or willfully, callously ignores. What’s worse—(read: infinitely better)—is that we’re choosing the fringes. We’re actively and consistently rejecting what everyone else calls normal, what they’re striving so hard to acquire and consume. We’re willing to try a trick—or a sentence, a paragraph, a story, a book—for years until we ride—or write—away clean. We navigate the world differently, and it can make civilians very uncomfortable. We’re misfits who aren’t afraid to fall. We’re delinquents who break the rules, and we’re dangerous because we’re ready to bleed for what matters, for what we love.
The following things happen in my body when I think about writing this story: my chest tightens, my breathing gets quicker, shallow; a tingling sensation covers my arms; the skin on my forehead seems to tighten itself around my brain. I mostly think of the story in the shower where nothing but a stream of water can distract me. Sometimes, I have to rush out so I can lie down and catch my breath. My therapist tells me my entire body seems to be protesting against putting these words to paper. She suggests I call it an emotional journal instead of a story, which I immediately think is corny, but just as instantaneously find myself comforted by. I have all the facts, I just need to arrange them, I keep telling her. Yet, through five months and three drafts, I have made no progress. Forget the story, she urges, Tell me: why is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan so important to you?
It is a question I am asked frequently, and invariably respond to by narrating the same episode. It was 2023 and my Nanu was dying in the hospital: room 36, last one on the left. I remember the rain refusing to stop for days on end, a growing sense of suffocation as the greyness enveloped us. The silence in the car after Papa dropped Mamma to the hospital for the night. Nani and Chhoti Nani, who had spent the day with Nanu, sat in the car to be dropped back home. Slumped in the middle seat, I watched the rain forcefully hit the windshield. There was a vacantness in all our eyes, a veil between us and our immediate surroundings. None of us were really in that car at all. That morning, I’d finished Albert Camus’ The Stranger and was thinking abouthow it would likely be the last book I ever read with Nanu still alive. The book had made no sense to me;, when I googled its themes, meaninglessness of life had been the first one to come up.
In 1990, over a decade before I was even born, American singer Jeff Buckley discovered a qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: a sixteen minute-long composition of “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” the song that–he confessed to the Pakistani singer a year before both their untimely deaths–saved his life. “If you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground,” Buckley wrote about Khan’s music. “Your soul can fly outward stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.”
I was lifted up, above myself, above everything, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang.
In the years since Nanu’s passing, I have repeatedly failed to describe what exactly happened to me—to us—in that moment when the song on the car radio changed. Buckley’s words, written over three decades ago, best encapsulate the near-spiritual experience. I was lifted up, above myself, above everything, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang. Then, just as gently, I was returned to the world. I straightened up, looked around: had anyone else felt the shift? For one second, I thought I was alone—until I noticed the expression on my sister’s face slowly transform, my Chhoti Nani starting to hum softly. “What song is this?” Deeti asked, and Nani named the first qawwali Buckley had ever listened to, the one that had saved him, that was now proving to me that life was not in fact in fact meaningless despite what Camus said, that there was more to it all than just death, than hospital room 36, last one on the left. The veil had disappeared; through the greyness, a thin shaft of light had entered.
Two years after Nanu’s death, clearing up a spare room in his home, we found a tattered, yellowing piece of paper: a certificate of registration issued to him in July 1948 by the Government of Bombay. He must have been nine years old. “Name of refugee,” it demanded, followed by “address before evacuation,” “present address” and “name of head of family.” Under “identification marks,” someone had scrawled: “Left eye has.” I do not recall any marks by his left eye. I remember a small mole above his lip and the pale grey of his eyes, something I forever secretly hoped my own children would inherit. Even these details come to me now vaguely: I know as if by muscle memory that they were there but it feels almost like fiction. No image comes to mind when I think of them.
I’ve always believed I’ve done a good job of grieving Nanu, of leaving him behind like you’re meant to leave the dead. Of wringing the sadness out of me in the weeks following his passing, when I’d find myself lying drunk on the bedroom floor, desperately calling every number on my phone so I could talk to someone, anyone about the gaping hole in my chest. At parties, imitating Shalom Harlow’s catwalk would suddenly turn into sobbing on the bathroom floor after vomiting every sip of Old Monk I’d gulped down earlier. Friends would drop me to my doorstep. Once inside, I’d scream at my father about how Nanu had suffered, was suffering, would forever be suffering, and everyone who claimed he’d died peacefully was only lying to console themselves. I screamed over the red marks the oxygen mask had left on his forehead, over how the last thing he had ever said to me was that he couldn’t breathe. Alone in my bedroom, when all my incessant phone calls went unanswered because it was past two in the morning, I would dissolve into tears, then type “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai” onto Spotify.
The night Nanu passed away, his body was taken home, laid out in the hall in a steel freezer.
It was not rare for Khan to sing about alcoholism, lost love, a mohabbat so powerful it transforms into devotion. These themes were especially resonant in my life once Nanu was gone. It was, as Philippe Ariès wrote in his book Western Attitudes Towards Death: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” Except Khan did. In “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” he sings to his beloved in Urdu: “I blame your gaze for this perpetual intoxication / For teaching me to drink wine.” In “Intoxicated”—from his collaborative album Night Song (1996) with Canadian musician Michael Brook—he croons: “Why does the cloud sway? / Maybe it is a drunkard, too / With a carefree gait / and rose-coloured eyes.”
What I found in Khan, thus, was not just the feeling of flight Buckley described but also compassion, an understanding of the agony it takes to drive one to addiction. Less than a month after Nanu’s death, I found myself in the hospital with two IV tubes jammed into the back of my hand to replenish my electrolytes. I had mild alcohol poisoning; I had a faint memory of kissing a stranger at a nightclub, then sobbing inconsolably as I told him I’d recently lost my grandfather. It was only two years later—by this point I’d grown used to sobriety—that I learnt that Khan’s references to alcoholism were metaphors, that qawwali lyrics are rife with these forbidden references as allegories for devotion.
Perhaps because I’ve let it all out but more likely because I cautiously avoid any thoughts of him, I can now discuss Nanu without displaying any emotion, so much so that I find myself surprised whenever my voice cracks or a previously unexplored regret formulates itself. I always tell people I found Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the perfect time, that he assuaged the pain of losing my grandfather. Never before have I allowed myself to think about how his music could have been something we shared: a bridge between two generations in a time when we otherwise scrambled to find things in common to talk about. In his final months, Nanu would beckon my sister and I to sit next to him, then ask if we could play him some songs on our phone. With him peering into our screens to watch the accompanying music video on YouTube—usually from Baiju Bawra (1952) or Mughal-E-Azam (1960), black-and-white films he hadn’t fully watched in years—my sister Deeti and I listened to these tunes so much that we learnt the lyrics by heart. The night Nanu passed away, his body was taken home, laid out in the hall in a steel freezer. Seated next to it—on the same navy blue sofa-cum-bed Deeti and I had slept on as children exhilarated at the prospect of sleeping over at our grandparents’ home—I breathlessly created a playlist of all the songs he loved. It was on YouTube because many of the songs weren’t available on Spotify.
There was another thing Nanu longed to see on our smartphones, through which, he now realised, he had access to the entire world: the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan. Again and again, he would ask us to look up this place that seemed to have reappeared in his memory now that he was an old man. On my web browser, I would pull up image after image of the dusty city; on YouTube, we’d watch travel vlogs with no more than a hundred thousand views of men there simply going about their daily routines, driving around or eating street food. The city was ordinary and unremarkable in almost every way if it wasn’t for the fact that my grandfather had once been a boy here.
In 1948—three months before Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Faisalabad and a year after the British initiated the Partition which split India and Pakistan into two separate states—Nanu and his family migrated to present-day India. It was here, in Mumbai, that he lived the majority of his life: here that he got married, had a daughter, saw his parents die, his two granddaughters excitedly pull open the navy blue sofa-cum-bed for sleepovers, the same sofa-cum-bed they would sit on the night of his death. Yet it was Dera Ghazi Khan he remembered as he slipped away. His childhood, his hometown, the winters in a country that would no longer permit him entry.
We lost Nanu’s refugee certificate the same day that we found it. Who had it last, who kept it where, in which folder; none of us could understand where it was gone. Kneeling on the concrete in the afternoon sun, Deeti and I spent an hour rummaging through two bags of trash from the residential complex, tearing open envelopes, rifling through spam mail, papers and cardboard, trying to find the tattered, yellowing document. When we failed, I tried to comfort myself by repeating that it was only a piece of paper, that I still had a photograph of it I’d sent to my friends, that a mere document could not sum up Nanu’s life; we had not killed him again. But the truth of it was that we had lost tangible evidence not only of Nanu’s existence but of his suffering, his displacement, the very memories that haunted him in his final years. The feelings from his life—the yearning for home, the way he tightly grasped my hand every time we watched vlogs of Dera Ghazi Khan—remained, but the facts were gone.
Ultimately, what this story comes down to is facts and feelings. I have all the facts of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s life, as I tell my therapist. I am aware that only this objective information is believed and taken seriously. Statistics, numbers, neutral, verified accounts are quoted in arguments, considered truer than the lived experiences of thousands. Yet it is my feelings that threaten to spill out: the many emotions surrounding Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and by extension, the death of my grandfather, that I am unable to confront and articulate. In her 1998 book The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia documents oral testimonies and personal chronicles from the 1947 Partition, placing people rather than high politics at the centre. “The ‘history’ of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that had led up to it,” she writes in reference to the books she had read so far on the subject. “These other aspects–what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the ‘human dimensions’ of this history–somehow seemed to have a ‘lesser’ status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture ‘factually.’”
On the 7th of May, 2025, India launched missile strikes against Pakistan in a military campaign codenamed Operation Sindoor. To write this, I had to look up the date on Wikipedia. The facts of the conflict–dates, month, who attacked whom first, when a ceasefire was declared, then violated–escape me entirely, no matter how much I try to remember. What I do remember is how it felt.
Our fates lay in the hands of a few powerful men with their own ulterior motives.
I remember the cold panic that washed over me when my sister burst into our bedroom with the news. The realisation that every mundane ritual we had taken for granted—a trip to the mall, a Friday night at the club, a simple plan made days in advance—was now a thing of the past. A sense of dread permanently stalked me; I felt as though I was walking through a haze. It was raining again, giving everything the quality of a bad dream, a repetition of the past, a nightmare we just couldn’t shake off. I flinched at every small sound: air strikes? Bombs? Near my father’s office, the police conducted a mock drill. There were rumours of a city-wide blackout scheduled for that afternoon. I remember repeatedly asking my parents, every stranger, every shopkeeper I met what they thought was going to happen despite knowing that they didn’t have any more information than I did. I refreshed the news frantically every few minutes. My main question was: could my sister and I still throw the house party we’d been planning for days?
At the party, I got drunk for the first time since Nanu’s death. Kept melting into tears the same way I had three years ago. It was inconceivable to me that every minute detail of our lives which had before seemed so fixed, could be transformed entirely by something so outside our control; worse, that our fates lay in the hands of a few powerful men with their own ulterior motives. In my first therapy session, I fretted over how helpless I felt, how intent I was on throwing this party because it was the only thing currently in my power. I panicked about Khan’s music being banned, despaired over the hopelessness that I was beginning to feel at the thought of not being able to hear his voice. What I really wanted was not to throw a house party or listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. What I really wanted was to know that I still had the freedom to.
Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson describes the nation as “an imagined community”, positing that the idea of this community is appealing to so many because “regardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”
The 1947 Partition led to two such imagined communities: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, more manmade borders, the British’s parting gift. “Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan,” notes Butalia. “Slaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned.”
This was the political landscape that Khan was born into, in the newly formed Pakistan. Watching his interviews, I am often surprised by his gentleness—so different from the emotional violence of his music—by the way he talks about India and Pakistan as if they never separated and continue to be singular. Because I was born over fifty years after the Partition, after the idea of these two dominion states had long seeped into public consciousness, India and Pakistan seemed, to me, two fixed entities, permanently divided, as if they had existed as separate nations since the dawn of time and would continue to eternally. But Khan—like my grandparents—seemed to speak of this division as a mere blip in many thousand years of history, a phenomenon he couldn’t quite understand, a fresh, temporary idea that at any time could be undone. In interviews, he frequently mentioned India alongside Pakistan, citing the shared cultural heritage of qawwali, which was created in 13th century Delhi by musician Amir Khusro. The purpose of qawwali is not just entertainment, he told The New York Times, but to spread “the universal message of love and understanding.”
In addition to other ritualistic practices like whirling and sama, qawwali is a part of Sufi tradition, which Khan followed. Sufism, which falls under the umbrella of Islam, is a mystic body of practice characterised by its values of spirituality, tolerance and peace. Khan epitomised these beliefs in his advocacy for a friendship between India and Pakistan. He spoke mournfully of his attempts and failures to persuade the government of his nation to launch diplomatic initiatives welcoming Indian musicians, of how there should never be restrictions on art (“An artist belongs to everyone”). Months before his death in August 1997, the 48 year-old singer gifted a song titled “Gurus of Peace” to Indian composer A.R. Rahman’s album Vande Mataram (1997) which celebrated fifty years of India’s independence. This was amongst his last recordings.
In the final days of the 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s official Instagram account became unavailable in India, as did the accounts of other Pakistani musicians such as Ali Sethi and Atif Aslam. “This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content,” the social media site states. Audio streaming platforms in India initiated the process of removing works by Pakistani artistes from their libraries. Television shows created in our neighbouring nation were pulled down across channels in India. The imagined community, I realised, is not just united for a cause but against one: a common enemy, the neighbour who becomes even more remote from us, more otherised and demonised, when we are unable to engage with their art, their stories, reckon with their humanity. “Sometimes,” Butalia writes. “State power can be called into the service of suppressing memory… The opening-up of the field of memory, the entry of artists, musicians and others into it, is not something that serves the interests of a right-wing government which would like to build a majoritarian nation and therefore memory work that references Partition is now often labelled anti-national, and attempts to cross our borders are seen as betrayals and as anti-patriotic.”
To censor is to kill—or at the least, to desensitise one group to the murder of another. On social media, I saw a cousin in his thirties celebrating missile strikes that had led to civilian casualties in Pakistan, writing on his Instagram story: “Take that, Porkies.” I received a video of another cousin, only five, euphorically chanting, “Death to Pakistanis.” Thousands of Indians called for war.
It is stories, feelings, memories, that make up a life, a generation, a history.
Three of my grandparents migrated across the border during the Partition, so I grew up on oral histories like the ones Butalia documents, on tales that seemed almost mythical, from a time and land far, far away. There was my Dadi’s cousin who was stabbed multiple times on her journey to India but survived, there was her family desperately hunting for food every time the train stopped at a railway station. Trains sped past piles of human bones. There was Chhote Dadu, whose voice still cracks when he remembers the years he was forced to spend away from his father and siblings because none of their relatives in India could afford to care for the entire family together, the years he pretended to dislike milk because he knew his family couldn’t afford it. There is Chhote Dadu, now in his eighties, perfectly drawing the layout of his Lahore home that he had to abandon at the age of five.
The truth is that no matter how many facts and statistics we hear–how many dead, raped, displaced, lynched–it is ultimately the stories, the art, the narratives that touch us, that let us understand another nation, another religion, another way of life. “What a ban does,” writes Anuradha Banerji, “is deny you the chance to weigh the record for yourself. It turns a citizen into an audience by severing your ability to compare accounts, test claims and decide where you stand… They train a public to prefer echo over argument.” If these narratives, this art, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s attempts to reach for peace, are censored, then the Partition is not just a tragic event that took place in 1947. It is something that has continued to happen ever since, that happens now, that will forever be happening. Because it is stories, feelings, memories, that make up a life, a generation, a history.
Growing up, I knew my Nanu to be the quietest, gentlest of us all. While my other grandparents’ personal histories poured out as I lay in their laps and listened intently, Nanu remained tight-lipped, only answering questions about his childhood upon our insistence. Consequently, I was cautious when I asked him these questions, framing them tentatively because it seemed as though his pain was always too close to the surface, that it would brim over if we poked or prodded too much. The few stories he told us were laced with an ache I could never understand the depth of, that I perhaps only felt a fraction of when I lost him. Butalia stresses “the importance of remembering a violent history, for the sake of those who lived through it and died, and equally the sake of those who lived through it and survived.” Nanu came from a land I may never get a chance to see, spoke an Afghani dialect of Punjabi I never got to hear because only his parents and brother understood it, because his family suppressed, eliminated this language in an attempt to fit into what would be their new home for the rest of their lives. I never fully understood Nanu’s suffering, his isolation, which has perhaps made me even more sensitive to it, more apprehensive of writing this story, more fearful of what we lose when we lose art, music, stories from beyond borders. What we lose is not just a language, a culture, the potential of a more expansive brotherhood that goes beyond the limits of manmade boundaries. What we lose is something more intrinsic: our kindness, our empathy, our humanity. The memory that this was once a shared history and even today, continues to be. We lose the ability to look at someone, who may, at first glance, seem completely alien to us—a 48 year-old Muslim qawwali singer from a newly-created Pakistan, for instance—and realise: I see parts of myself in you.
Written at The Art Farm Residency in November 2025, Goa.
When I was twenty-two, I came across Larissa Pham’s Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy in a bookstore in Oregon and could not put it down. Perhaps it was because the narrator was approximately the age I was and drew her experiences out in artistic fragments, phone calls, and reflections that gave shape to the feeling of being lost. Pham’s voice was instantly familiar and granular. There was a level of control and precision in the writing that felt masterful. She could point out a speck of color then lift the reader out of the room and, further down the page, relate a brushstroke or a heart-shaped bruise from 1980 to female self-mortification in the digital age.
After finishing Pop Song, I craved more of her epiphanies. Fortunately, she had a monthly column at the Paris Review Daily called “Devil in the Details” which was chock-full of them. Her art criticism and commentary were brilliant—in the sense of being erudite, precise, and also illuminating, uplifting, vibrant. No surprise then that Pham’s recently published debut novel, Discipline, likewise revolves around aesthetics, love, nostalgia, and ways of looking at these things simultaneously until they blend into each other and you finish the last page wondering if, after all this time, they were all, always, the same word.
In Discipline, a young novelist named Christine goes on book tour across the country and soon encounters eccentric strangers, precocious students, a few people from her past, and an aging painting professor. Each stop brings back another version of herself. Each stop feels auspiciously haunted in Pham’s evocative and minimal, yet exacting, prose. The second half follows Christine to an island in Maine and becomes a reckoning and excavation of a particular month in her life that completely altered her personal and professional trajectory. The novel dives into metafictional questions asking not only: What is the purpose of art? But also: What is the purpose of the past—or, more accurately, of returning to it? Pham collects bar conversations, scenes in museums, and iconic moments from art history and, in a literary magic trick, weaves them into a tapestry held together by a single, fine thread. Her protagonist, however, might just threaten to tear the whole opus apart.
From Portland, Oregon, Pham spoke with me over Zoom about the uncanny doubling of life and art, her transition from memoir to fiction, complex relationships with painting and people, the melodrama of quotation marks, and more.
Kyla D. Walker: As a novelist on book tour for a book about a novelist on book tour, how has that experience been? Does it feel a bit uncanny?
Larissa Pham: There has been a funny kind of resonance because I didn’t get to tour for my first book, Pop Song. It came out in 2021—still pretty deep within the pandemic. I was really sad that I didn’t get to tour, and so a lot of the scenes in Discipline where Christine is on tour were completely imagined. It’s interesting to realize that I was kind of right. There are ways that I feel now where I’m like, I was just guessing that someone might feel this way, but actually it does feel this way. There have been a few moments of doubling.
A specific example is in the first chapter: Christine is talking into a mic and there’s a lot of lag on it. It kind of throws her off. In one of the first readings that I did for this book, I also was using a mic that had a ton of lag. It was distracting, and I was actually reading the line where Christine was talking about the lag. It was very meta. Life imitates art.
KW: I’ve often heard writers say their second book feels like a reaction to their first. Although Discipline is fiction and Pop Song is a memoir-in-essays, did you feel crossover in terms of approach, or a craving for an entirely new experience of writing?
LP: I think I would be lying if I didn’t say that at least part of Discipline was a response to having published a very intimate look at my own life through Pop Song. It is such a tender book—and one where I write about other people—whereas with Discipline, nothing that happens to Christine happened to me in the same way. It made me ask: “What is our responsibility when writing things about other people?” That question grew and grew. I became interested in expanding it into the scenario that Christine finds herself in—she’s written something that is true to herself but not to this other person. It’s really exaggerated… and it’s life… but it’s not life. I became interested in the consequences of publishing.
I became interested in the consequences of publishing.
Both of my books are in first person, and the other thing that I was interested in doing with Discipline was trying a different kind of voice. I wanted Christine to feel a little bit held back, restrained, cooler. She’s a very different person than me, so I was interested in writing a narrator who is withholding from the reader.
KW: Did this foray into fiction feel more liberating, or was it intimidating to not have the structure of reality to lean back on?
LP: Liberating. Yes. I love it. I love how free fiction is because it’s not like you can’t use life—you definitely can. But you have so much more freedom with it.
KW: Let’s talk about the title a little bit, there’s a clear double meaning with “discipline.” Did you know that that was going to be the title when you started, or did it come later? And what do you think about it now?
LP: It was not the first title of the book. Originally, the frame of the project and the title was “10 American Paintings” since it was going to be made up of meditations on 10 American paintings—which is why there are five American paintings. Pretty soon I realized that was not the structure for the book, so the second title became “Tracks.” I was thinking about the way a hunter follows the tracks of an animal. It was a little creepy and a bit too oblique for the book. I arrived at Discipline after writing the chapter where Christine and Francis are hanging out. There’s that line where Christine says: I’m not like you, I lack discipline. And something about that line opened up the possibility for the title of the book.
KW: Going back to that idea of tracks and this almost ominous presence of subjectless emails and mysterious phone calls, there seem to be some psychological thriller elements within the novel. Were there aspects of craft that you felt helped tap into this more, like figuring out the right pace of the plot and how much information to reveal?
LP: I don’t read a ton of capital T thrillers, but I do love a really well-plotted book. Two books that I had in mind while I was writing were The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, which is marvelously plotted. I was thinking about her pacing and the turning points in that book. And then I was thinking about The Round House by Louise Erdrich, which is just incredible. The way that she builds tension is amazing because the point of telling is actually not present tense. The narrator is reflecting on something that happened when he was young, but the way that Erdrich is writing makes it like he doesn’t know what he’s thinking, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. I was interested in building suspense and tension through little details like those phone calls and emails and moments of instability, but also on a decision-making level, having Christine either do things without explaining why she’s doing them or do things because she doesn’t fully understand why she is doing them. Having her be a little bit mysterious to herself was interesting to me.
KW: So much of the novel is centered around Christine’s memory, this return to past selves, almost like there are ghost layers of herself, coats of a painting. Was that the aim from the beginning—to have this return and reckoning?
Art has unbelievable power and also, we can’t decide what that power is.
LP: I love the way you phrase it, this idea of a return or encounter with the past. I knew to some degree that the book would have simultaneous forward and backward movement through time because I think that’s the way a lot of contemporary novels are structured. You have the “what are they going to do?” and then you have “how did they end up this way?” Two threads.
I wrote the book chronologically, so I started at chapter one and ended at chapter eight. I wanted to structure it in increasing closeness, as in the first person she meets is a stranger, then an acquaintance, then an ex, then her former best friend, and then we get to Richard, who’s maybe the closest and most complex relationship. I’m interested in texts where you get to know someone better over the course of the book. I think that’s what happens with Christine, but it wasn’t 100% deliberate.
KW: That’s fascinating, I definitely see that progression.
In general, how do you think motion serves Christine throughout Discipline? She’s moving through the country physically, then there’s psychological motion, and on an even smaller scale, we see her moving through museums quite often, walking through exhibits or galleries with characters in flashbacks. Was there something you were focused on portraying through movement?
LP: Yes, I thought it was important that Christine can’t go home. I wanted to set up a scenario where she couldn’t turn back. She needed to be constantly moving forward. Part of this movement is self-determined, right? She’s scheduled her book tour, but then obviously she gets derailed and ends up in Maine. That’s where she doesn’t move at all. She’s spending weeks on this island with this guy. But it felt important to at least start her off running from something. Like, she can’t put the genie back in the bottle if it comes out. People have read her novel. She’s got a subletter in her apartment. She can’t go home.
KW: In the middle of the book, Christine and Francis have a really fascinating discussion about the pointlessness of art. Through the writing of this novel, have you come to any conclusions, or perhaps a different perspective on this than your characters?
LP: I feel differently about art than my characters do. For Frances, it’s very utilitarian. She’s like, I know if I make these paintings, they’ll sell, and if they sell, then I keep getting to make more paintings—so this is what I’m doing with my life. And then for Christine, I don’t think she necessarily realizes how important her text might be outside of herself. It’s such an individual story of catharsis for her. I don’t think she’s even thinking about her audience in a way that I, as her writer, have been forced to consider the role of art in the world. Now that I’m talking to readers, I think Christine is underselling art a little bit. For my part, I fall somewhere in the range between thinking art has unbelievable power and also thinking that we can’t decide what that power is. If you go into making a project and you’re like, this is going to change the world, you might be setting yourself up for failure because you don’t actually know how people are going to respond to what you make. But if you make something that is true and beautiful and interesting and exciting to you, then I think the chances are very high that other people will find it interesting and true and beautiful.
KW: Throughout the book, dialogue exists without quotation marks. I’m always curious about stylistic choices by the writer. Did that decision feel specific to this story, and were there implications that you were trying to make by not including quotation marks?
LP: I stopped using quotation marks for dialogue in graduate school because I was working on this historical novel project in third person, and I was having a lot of trouble with tone. Using quotation marks made dialogue feel stagy. I felt it was drawing attention to itself, and I needed it to not take so much precedence in the text. So I stopped using them.
About 20 pages in, I was like, I need to give this woman a name—she needs to be her own person.
But also, I read this novella, Ghost Wallby Sarah Moss. The narrator is a young woman who is not really able to express herself. Her father is abusive, and there are lots of moments in the book where she says something, and you think the whole line is dialogue. Then you get to the end of the sentence and realize she hasn’t said that last part out loud. So she’s expressing herself, and then you hear her thoughts that no one else does. I was really interested in that slipperiness. I was interested in not having a clear separation between speech and narration. I like the instability of it, and I like that Christine is our vessel for the whole story, so you have to assume she’s reporting the truth.
KW: Right, exactly. There’s a quote near the end that I really love where Christine says: “The moment where it changed, where the writing went from a process of trying to understand what had happened to me to a process or creating something new occurred not during the first draft or even the second, but the third. It was when I started to think of it as a book in earnest, to sculpt it, pull a form out from my life’s shapeless contours.” So gorgeous, that idea of going from experience to art. Did this feel true in the writing of Discipline?
LP: I have to say, that’s all Christine. I was really interested in having Christine and Richard talk to each other. That was the moment I was writing towards the whole time: getting them to the island and having them hash it out.
Christine started out as an unnamed narrator. There was a moment about 20 pages in, where I was like, I need to give this woman a name—she needs to be her own person. So I think maybe that was that moment of separation where I was like, this is going to be a project, it’s going to be something. I will say that I have felt what Christine experiences, usually when writing an essay or something where you’re like, first draft: get your thoughts out; second draft: you make it nice; third draft: you start refining and making it into an essay, rather than this pile of guts on the page.
KW: My last question is about the cover. As someone who writes a lot about art and has so many great essays on aesthetics, what is the cover of your novel portraying, and how does it perhaps add to the story?
LP: I love this cover. I think it’s really well done. I didn’t think I wanted a face when I sent over my vision board. In the book, Christine thinks her own cover has too many colors, and so I’m not surprised that my cover is black and white. There’s a moodiness to it. I like that the face draws you in—you see her and you wonder: Is she floating? Is she sinking? Is she swimming? Is she drowning? And then, of course, her face also looks like an island. If you look at photos of islands in Maine, they look like that. There are these little humped dark shapes on the horizon, and then there’s all this water in front. It’s an illusion cover.
“Wyoming,” an excerpt from Good Woman by Savala Nolan
We pulled off the freeway and into a parking lot because we were hungry and we had seen a sign for a franchise steakhouse glowing white against the sky. The parking lot was massive, outsize like so much of the middle of the country, and empty. We crossed the concrete, probably holding hands, and settled into our booth. A waitress gave us laminated menus. We ordered steaks and they came and we ate, the steak salty, ice-cream scoops of butter melting on the baked potatoes, the soda cold and sweet.
I noticed the men in the adjacent booth, maybe because they’d noticed me. They were behind my then fiancé. Three or four of them, two facing me. White, middle-aged, rough. Work boots and dusty brown Carhartts, hair matted from the baseball caps set upside down on the table. Men just getting off work, men without their wives. One of them kept looking at me. Flirtation? Not quite—the shine in his eyes was attraction, but it wasn’t friendly. Our eyes kept meeting, though. A ways into our dinner, we were looking at each other again, and before I could look away, the man said porch monkey. He said it to me, and not to me. He was telling a story to the other men, a story that included that phrase, and when he said it, he’d made sure to be staring at me, his expression cocksure and unhurried. I heard it, and it was also as if I didn’t; a brief wave of dissociation.
Mine was the only Black face I’d seen for 500 miles, which was okay, in a way—I’d spent the drive from Nevada to Wyoming focused on the lonesome, rough beauty of the place: spiny mountains, Porter’s sagebrush, and blazing star flowers thick in the prairie grass, river water the color of brandy under the blue firmament. There in the steakhouse, I looked at my fiancé. I could see he was tired, his eyelids low on his blue eyes, his brown five-o’clock shadow two days long. He stared into space. He hadn’t heard porch monkey. But I had, the speaker’s eyes on mine, his face bright and pink with satisfaction, nearly postcoital, his arm slung across the back of the booth. I leaned toward my fiancé, felt the table press into my stomach.
I said, “You didn’t hear that, did you?”
He shook his head. “Hear what?”
“The guy behind us said porch monkey. He was looking at me.”
“Huh?”
I was whispering. Barely audible. So I repeated myself, adding, maybe unnecessarily, “Like, the racial slur?”
We hadn’t paid the check. We hadn’t even finished eating. But, his face impassive and his body moving slowly, he gathered his baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt from beside him. He stood up, quietly told me to get my purse, and headed to the hostess station. He didn’t look at me. The hostess appeared, her smile wide, her hair clipped back from her face. My fiancé told her we needed to pay the check. “Oh, okay!” A bit of confoundment in her voice. I saw something palpitate through his body, maybe anxiety; when I see it now, I rub his shoulder and ask, You okay, hon? He kept clearing his throat and looking around, wrapping the knuckle of his pointer finger on the hostess station. I wondered if he was going to add something like, Those guys are harassing my fiancée with racist language. He didn’t. Nor did I; speaking for myself, in this moment of hazard with strange men, did not feel like my place while I was standing next to my fiancé. The waitress typed into a little machine or flipped her pad or took his credit card, and we settled the bill and walked through the double doors into the big, empty parking lot, the Wyoming sky cavernous, dark, and daunting. We stood beside the two-lane stretch of Interstate 80, which runs from the Pacific Ocean to New Jersey, and the roar of big rigs drowned out anything we might have wanted to say.
Some guy called me a porch monkey, and my fiancé got me out of there. Like a good father, like a guardian angel. He did the right thing by any reasonable measure, and I never forgave him for it.
What I wanted was for him to fight. Physically. For me. I wanted him to observe my peril and respond, like a soldier. I craved a physical demonstration of my worth, his body the vessel and medium for the proof. Even as I whispered to him across the Formica table, the fatty rinds of our steaks turning opaque as they cooled, a part of me was already imagining him standing up—six feet, two inches of masculine pride, of indignant protection—and confronting those racist hicks with his fists. Strong fists, a mechanic’s hands, hard and skillful. The idea thrilled me; it unnerved me, which is itself a kind of thrill, too. I imagined him swinging his arm into the meat of the other man, my then fiancé’s arm, which was skinny and freckled and pale and lay warm around me at night. I imagined his arm a rifle, oiled and loaded, deployed in my defense. I imagined a brawl, my fiancé’s hair askew, his mind blank, instinct taking over, a pure, manly, punishing desire to avenge me. The ferocity of a dog. The other guy would lose, obviously. And in the cheap hotel where we were staying, I’d tend to my fiancé’s wounds with the keen intuition of an auteur. Scene: She wets a scratchy white washcloth in the bathroom sink and dabs it on his lip. He winces. She holds a bag of ice to his knuckles. She bends forward and lightly kisses the bruise spreading on his cheek. She whispers, Thank you, baby. He pulls her close. They look into each other’s eyes. They clutch, they kiss, they fuck. She, in gratitude, a damsel saved. He, in search of relief, in search of calm after being plunged into the most choppy, sightless depths of his masculinity; he’s kicking for the surface; sex, release, her body—the only way to reestablish his equilibrium.
That’s not what happened, though. There was no vengeance, and no subsequent merging of pleasure and vengeance, our normative gender roles eroticized and tightly coiled. Because his instinct wasn’t to fight. He didn’t talk to those men or shoot them a warning glance, let alone go ham. He didn’t engage them at all. Without even looking at me, he said, Let’s go, and hovered his hand on the small of my back as we wound through the restaurant to the hostess, and he pulled out his credit card, and he held the glossy wooden door for me and lead me to the Days Inn or Holiday Inn or Super 8 where we were spending a night on our drive from San Francisco to Detroit. He got me out of there, but I still felt exposed and diminished. It seemed I was (was I?) not worth fighting for. Whose gaze was I in? Which is to say, who was seeing me more powerfully in that moment? My fiancé, as he stared into the middle distance of the restaurant, as he steered me from the room without comment? Or those strangers, homing in on my race, homing in on this reality of my existence, making contact?
I thought of fairy tales, where the girls worthy of avenging are always an over-the-top version of mainstream pretty (big, dopey eyes; impossibly pointed noses; impossibly long, generally straight hair). That is their common denominator. I didn’t really see myself as pretty then, and when I did, it was fleeting and footnoted; I was pretty because the light was good and my lip gloss was sparkling, or I’d managed to avoid carbohydrates for a few weeks and the curves around my tits and waist were especially pronounced. Perhaps his choice not to fight for me was a sign of my ugliness.
There was no vengeance, and no subsequent merging of pleasure and vengeance, our normative gender roles eroticized and tightly coiled.
Also in fairy tales: The men worth their salt always avenge. They ride into battle. They fire their weapons. This is what makes them heroes. They clock and pound and make quick work of sweaty, steak-filled yokels in a greasy spoon outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. But not my man. He chose to leave, to, in effect, run away. Like a kid hauling ass from bullies, scrambling. Sensible, yes; I know that. I know that. For one thing, Wyoming was and is a permissive open-carry state. A wrong move and we might have been shot, our blood left in that gusty, bereft wilderness forever. But still. He chose something quiet, passive, and unseen, and in a corner of my mind, he suddenly flickered, the image of him no longer solid but blinking in and out; he seemed, despite my progressive politics, like less of a man.
That moment, in which I experienced our shared diminishment, still pokes me a decade later. (Hero status precluded. Damsel status denied.) I still sometimes consider what his choice—not to risk his own body, not to damage someone else’s body on my behalf, not to fight—might mean about each of us. I know him better now than I did then; I know his tendency to avoid conflict and limit exposure. Perhaps that’s what drove him, plain and simple. And perhaps I should be unambiguously thankful for it—my own tendencies are different and not necessarily better. On a New York subway, years ago, a man made a V with his fingers and wiggled his tongue between them, staring at me, raising his eyebrows. The doors opened seconds later, and it was my stop, so I stepped onto the platform; then I turned around, flipped him the bird, and shouted, “Fuck off, loser.” He stood up and lunged across the car, toward the open doors, toward me and my mom on the platform, my mom’s mouth open as she stared at me, not believing I’d antagonized him like that, my body rigid and prickled with the adrenal rush of being in a man’s crosshairs. Then the doors slid closed, keeping us and that man apart. Hand on her hip, her expression still disbelieving, my mom said, “Jesus Christ! Now, what did you learn from that, Savala?” Scoffing, I said, “Next time I’ll wait till the doors are closing.” Indeed, if my fiancé hadn’t been with me at that steakhouse, I might have said some hothead thing to those hicks myself. Screw you. Go to hell. Dumb. Incredibly stupid. But it’s my nature, or it’s my learned response. It’s what comes out when I can’t take it anymore.
In the hotel room, the sheet pulled up to my chin, I continued to ruminate as he slept. Or maybe he didn’t fight because I’m Black. Black women, even pretty ones, have such a precarious foothold in femininity, in the pink, satin-lined box where they keep ladies. That box that dudes carry in the crook of their armored arms, held tight to their chain-mailed chests, as they ride to battle for honor. We don’t really get to be women—in the sense of tender, soft, and in need of protection. They sack no villages and storm no castles in our gentle name. They prefer to send us into battle before the men, thinking us a front line of strong, indestructible things-with-vaginas. Is it possible that, though he loved me, loved me enough to “make me his wife,” to slide a diamond on my ring finger, some wire did not trip? Some alarm did not sound? Maybe his own internalized sense of Black womanhood left him feeling lazy, or reluctant, or useless, like I didn’t really need shielding because I, ever strong and not-quite-a-lady, could shield myself. He probably couldn’t see that some part of me, stuck in a culture that keeps my grip on normative femininity tenuous while telling me I must be normatively feminine, needed him to play the Man. I needed him to be my foil, against which my femininity could show in doe-eyed, blushing relief; if he didn’t play the Man, if his behavior crept across the line into the “feminine” space, then there was even less room for me to be the Woman. I wanted him to fight because any infringement on the feminine space I tried so desperately to occupy was, on some level, personally threatening—even an “infringement” as wise as his choice not to fight a crew of roughneck strangers.
This is not a need I’m proud of. It’s not even a need I strongly relate to when I happen to be residing in the more mature, evolved parts of myself. But we all have parts of ourselves that are young, that are stuck in childhood and adolescence, from which we’ve never effectively extracted the doctrines that were pressed into us. Doctrines about what it means to “be a man,” and what it means to be a woman (a “lady”). Mythologies that make someone else’s so-called gender-appropriate or gender-inappropriate behavior a signal of our worth. If your girlfriend won’t shave her legs, or is taller than you, or doesn’t want babies, is she less of a woman and are you, therefore, less of a man? If your boyfriend doesn’t like sports, or wants to paint his nails, or has small feet, is he less of a man and are you, therefore, less of a woman?
I don’t think my fiancé and I ever talked about that night; not when we got into the hotel room, not on the next day’s drive, not ever. Not in the ten years I’ve repeatedly thought about it. I didn’t want to point out my needs, or his deficits. I once asked him if he remembered it, though. He was packing his bag for work the next day, and I was reading on the couch, the sound of our daughter’s music box tinkling through the wall. Remember that night in Wyoming when we were having dinner and those guys called me a porch monkey, or just kind of said it to me? That’s what I asked. I do, he said, and that was all.
I also consider what his choice—not to fight—might suggest about how clearly, and even whether, he sees me. Whether he perceives and comprehends my female, Black body as something exquisite yet undefended in any and every space, because all spaces are acculturated. Maybe the answer is no; I didn’t get the gift of my husband’s aggression where I wanted to, where it might have protected me, or made me feel treasured, because he couldn’t see that I needed it.
Where have I seen his aggression? When he’s watching football, of course. And when we have sex. There are overlaps. Like many men, his noises in both are similar. The grunts and ohs of two-point conversions and interceptions and fumbles so very like his sounds in response to my touch, or to touching me. The players with their pads and cleats and taped-up fingers, running familiar routes, leaping over and shoving through piles of other men, extending their arms to the spiraling pigskin and yanking it to their chests, stiff-arming as they dance down the field. This is mine, fuckers. When he watches those games, every autumn and winter Saturday, he comes alive. The animal in his soft-spoken, glasses-wearing, Atlantic-reading person becomes visible. Not everyone knows that animal, but I do. I see it in my bedroom. I often convert myself for its expression. I want him to be able to feel like a man. I’m often told how “strong” I am; I am a strong woman—who gets off on that? So I fold and subsume myself into the familiar tropes of a girl wanting it, a girl who feigns mild resistance but who, we all know, is deeply ready for a man’s old-school, primal strength in the only place he’s still allowed to show it, damn it. Arms above my head, his hands around my wrists; eyes looking up, the girlish gaze, the innocent-yet-slutty affect; hips bone to bone; mouths lip to lip; words in my ear; bending forward and over backward. This is sex. It’s a portal for both of us. We go somewhere; we’re not who we are—me with my strength, him with his tender insides. He gets to be rough—not in the sense of causing pain, but in the sense of governing and controlling. Like men back in the day. Or maybe like men today. I get to be—what? Wanted? An object of enormous, fervent desire. Does that work for me? Physically, sure, okay, I guess so. Come for me. I will, and sometimes twice. But does it feel good? Does my pleasure have to merge with my subjugation? Does his pleasure have to come through dominance, swung like a bat, at me? I have tender insides, too. You know, that’s what those players are doing—they’re dominating. They’re kicking ass. The win goes to whoever wants it most. Anticipation: He says oh!, his arms fly up into a Y, he stands up from the couch—will it happen? yes! touchdown—he whoops, he pumps his fist. I don’t care about this game. I don’t like this game. I think this game is bullshit. But even I cheer.
Desire, desire everywhere you look: my desire to be left alone, to have my personal space respected by those men, their desire to engage (harass) me, my fiancé’s desire to protect me (I think) without any risk to himself (I think), my desire to feel the armor of my fiancé’s public protection. Desire is good. It’s the primary force of life. But it is also an indication that something is off, that the present moment isn’t quite right, isn’t quite good enough, that whatever it is you have, you want something different. Whether you are asking someone to pass the salt or asking someone to marry you, desire acknowledges some inadequacy in the status quo, some need or wish for things to be slightly, or significantly, different. Desire points to what we lack, or think we lack. It is a signal to scratch an itch, to solve a problem, to make yourself feel better.
He seemed, despite my progressive politics, like less of a man.
Of course, male desire is primus inter pares. We go out of our way to anticipate it, respond to it, and learn from it, perhaps because male desire can be not just consequential, but dangerous. Dangerous to women in a million practical ways (need I list them?), and dangerous to men in existential ways. Scholar Katherine Angel analyzes male desire in the realm of mainstream pornography, arguing that the recursive hostility toward women in these videos (“Take this, bitch. You fucking love it, bitch,” Angel offers) has nothing to do with female sexuality and is, instead, a way for heterosexual men to work out the aggression they feel toward their own weakness. In Angel’s vision, this weakness is part of desire; desiring a woman (or any partner) opens the doors to all kinds of experiences that frustrate the archetypal ideal of men as masterful and stoic and strong. To desire is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability is incompatible with normative masculinity, with what we think of as “manly.” Yes, “real men” are supposed to want women, but embedded in that wanting, deep below the surface, is, by definition, vulnerability and exposure. In pornography, we avoid this problem—that men have no choice but to experience vulnerability when they seek intimacy, and we don’t like vulnerable men—by making women wear the costume of vulnerability, and then having men react to it with despotic force and authority. Women wear the vulnerability because men cannot; to do so would be a profound threat to their normative social dominance, to their very identities as men. When the male actor gags and punishes the naughty virgin, or fingers the sleeping babysitter, or creampies the tight-assed MILF, what he’s really doing is gagging and punishing his own vulnerability—it’s just wearing the costume of a chick. My husband and I don’t have the kind of pornified sex Angel describes. And thank God. But her point landed for me. There is some of this dynamic at play; I recognize the idea of a man exorcizing the demons of his vulnerability through light, garden-variety domination of a woman’s body.
It seems obvious that he’s learned some of this, over the years, from porn, and some of it, also over the years, simply from observing what “real men” do in life. As have I. My willingness to contort for him—meaning, to bend into a shape that can be dominated—to invite it or at least make space for it with my own murmurings and expressions and body language, comes from what I’ve seen, too. It’s a way for me to be, or appear, feminine in the “right” way, where “right” is dictated by a lifetime of Disney movies and sexist media coverage and, here and there, forays into free porn driven by my own curiosity. What is it that men like? How do people act and what do people say when they have sex? What does sexuality look like? Porn is one way to answer those questions;1 it is also one way to ensure, before we understand the negative consequences of that assurance, that the sex we have is inspired by our relationships to dominant culture,2 by what Audre Lorde calls “external directives.”3
It also seems obvious that whatever those hicks in Wyoming were trying to do to me, it was, at its essence, some version of Take this, bitch. Some version of sticking their cocks into me against my will. Metaphorical cocks—there is a difference between a racist remark and rape. But cocks, nonetheless. Meaning, their strength, their impunity, their license to invade, their privilege, their sense of centrality and entitlement, their desire to belittle and dominate. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said that pornography is nearly impossible to define, but you know it when you see it. Those sad, racist, little men in the adjacent booth, their offhand, blunt utterings of porch monkey, the way in which their voices remade the space around me, so that I was no longer in a restaurant booth with my fiancé but in the center of a bull’s-eye, alone, as they watched. They were aroused by their power to do that, to transport me from one space to another without my permission. They were aroused by their right to make me take it. I know it when I see it.
It may be a lamentable truth that I wanted my fiancé to fight those Wyoming morons because I’m steeped in normative bullshit about what “real men” do, and because I wanted him to publicly confirm my femininity and his masculinity. But it is also true that I wanted him to fight because, in that restaurant, his aggression would have been more than just the “real man” impact of fist on flesh—it would have been speech. An offering. It would have been him lifting the chalice above his head and saying, to me and in front of everyone, I got you.
Aggression—or lack thereof—is a form of language. It communicates. It communicates to someone (a child, a stranger, a crowd), and it communicates something specific (I can over-power you, I will—or won’t—protect you). In our bedroom, when we’re alone and, despite our lefty sensibilities, both ultimately oriented toward the crescendo final act of his orgasm, my partner’s aggression speaks to me. It tells me that, to a larger or lesser degree, in at least this one realm, he needs to dominate me. I know what he is thinking; the loop of our communication is complete, and I therefore feel, if nothing else, existent. But I’ll never know what he was thinking in that restaurant. He might have been upset but hoping to avoid a public freak-out (meaning, me freaking out); he might have been scared for his own body—he’d be the one throwing and taking punches, after all; maybe to fight would have been, paradoxically, to reveal vulnerability, the vulnerability of loving me—and he did not want to experience that. I’ll never know what he was thinking, and so I don’t know what he observed; I don’t know what he saw and how it fit or did not fit into his worldview. Nor do the porch monkey guys with their dirty baseball caps and mugs of cheap beer. Nor does the hostess who cheerfully wrote up our check. Nor does anyone. He gave no testimony. So, there’s no story being told, its concentric circles rippling out from dining room tables in rural Wyoming houses, moving along like tumbleweed, creating, eventually, an indelible ripple through town. There’s no mark. There is no record. There’s only the fact that I still think about it, and nobody else does.
Aggression—or lack thereof—is a form of language. It communicates.
Well, why don’t I just ask him? What he saw that night and what he made of it. I don’t ask because my ex-husband is not a talker. He is, in that way, very much a “real man.” We joke that I say more in ten minutes than he says all day. He is also a “real man” in the sense that he doesn’t deeply plumb his emotions. Most of the time, his feelings are a mystery to me. Door locked, curtains drawn. I do see him delighted—our daughter is a delight, with her corkscrew curls and slender feet and hammy, head-thrown-back laugh. And I see him angry; I know he’s really pissed when his voice starts to shake. Psychologists consider anger a secondary emotion—meaning, one that rests on top of, and therefore conceals, an emotion that is more disturbing or taboo to feel, an emotion that one is not allowed to express. Sorrow, despair, grief, terror, for instance. Any of those might be under that shaking voice, that tight jaw. Sometimes he is so angry his eyes well up; what is under those tears? They don’t fall. They are, I guess, reabsorbed into his body. If I ask him what he’s feeling, what’s going on, he will usually say, I don’t know. And if I were to ask him what he felt that night, what he made of what he saw, what was driving him, he would almost certainly say, I don’t know, too. This would be its own fresh pain. My muteness keeps our peace.
It occurred to me only recently that my then fiancé, perhaps, did not know what porch monkey even means. Do all white people know the vocabulary of white racism, even the ones who aren’t overtly racist? Even the ones who would never, could never? I picture little white children gathered for story time, graham crackers and cups of milk and knee socks and sweet upturned faces, Mom or Dad reading from the Book of Whiteness, explaining the slurs and insults they should know even if they never use them. I texted my cousin, Do you think most white people know what “porch monkey” means? She’s white. She replied, Maybe? Ellipses. Then, I think it would ring a bell as racially problematic even if they weren’t sure of the particulars . . . I wonder if all men know the vocabulary of misogyny, even the ones who call themselves feminists. They must. They, too, see the films and TV shows, they see the magazine covers and read the books, they listen to the music and sing along, they, too, know history. They are sentient beings. They can observe who has been president and who the CEOs are and who gets raped and butchered and who gets paid more and who takes it.
There’s a certain type of man I call a voting-booth feminist. He’s down with Kamala Harris. AOC rocks. He’s even kind of intrigued by Sarah Thomas, the first woman the NFL hired to be a full-time official. But he doesn’t, like, pick up his socks. He doesn’t cook much. He doesn’t clean much. He doesn’t watch chick movies or read women authors. He doesn’t decide to watch only ethical, feminist porn, preferring the free shit that works as fast and reliably as thick lines of good coke. If there is a way to integrate his so-called feminism into his private life, he doesn’t see it. Which is to say, he doesn’t want to see it. I know a lot of these men. They’re a lot like a certain type of white person who says they don’t have a racist bone in their body.
He would object to this assessment, but it’s possible my husband sees my womanhood more through the lens of his own sexual desire and domestic needs than through the lens of my precarity and his responsibility, both political and personal, to respond to it. It’s possible he sees my Blackness only peripherally, too; if Blackness is a kind of profound otherness to most white people, maybe I’ve grown “less Black” to him as I’ve grown more familiar. Familiarity can be good; I long for it—I want him to see my hair as just hair, hair like anyone else’s, not “Black hair.” And it can be bad; I bristle at it: I want him to understand that I don’t just have hair, I have Black hair—with all the politics and drama and history and promise that designation bestows. He can’t win. Nor can I. But it isn’t about winning; it’s about being seen. I am the most compelling evidence of my existence. I want to be witnessed. Like my existence, or don’t—here I am, either way. I wanted my then fiancé to be present so that he—not as some power-holding white man but simply as my partner, or, even more simply, as someone who knows me—can verify that I, that these moments in my life, took place. I want my testimony corroborated. And I want him to have personal knowledge of my life, of this part of it. Not because these wounds and vexed realities form the core of my personality—they don’t; marginalized people are always overidentified with their social and political struggles, are too often defined by how they are impacted by and resist their oppressions, and that’s not what I’m talking about. I am simply stating that, because these wounds and vexed realities are part of my life, loving me, knowing me, and seeing me require that you see them, too.
Would that I could control how I’m seen. Would that I could solve this being hyper-visible or invisible in a given moment, in a given interaction, and simultaneously. Would that being seen as a woman, and a Black woman, was as simple as seeing a sign glowing against the night sky, or seeing—reading—the face of a pissed-off white man. Wishing does not make it so. Still, I pick up dandelions, little ubiquitous weeds, this plant that grows anywhere, even in spent, empty soil, even where no one wants it to grow, and blow their ethereal seeds into the air. My breath rushes over the bloom. It spreads private aches, the kind you can’t speak aloud to the people you wish could hear you, setting them loose on the wind.
Actress and activist Jameela Jamil has observed that learning how to have sex by watching porn is like learning how to drive by watching The Fast and the Furious. ↩︎
My phrasing is a riff on language from scholar Kevin Quashie, who, in The Sovereignty of Quiet, describes “pleasures that are inspired by familiar or social relationships or identity” as opposed to those that come from our authentic, unsullied interiority. ↩︎
Language from Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde. ↩︎
From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
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