Estate

Oranges were unknown in Gaul for a thousand years. Stories of the fruit’s sweetness and thread-like delicacy were first spoken from the lips of farmers coming back to Paris and the lowlands after the crusades, ordinary plowmen-turned-soldiers returning to their farms, scrawny from hunger, their faces dusty with powdered blood. They described the miraculous reviving power of a beautiful, perfectly dimpled, sun-bright fruit, plucked from city boughs on the streets of Jerusalem.

After the more liberal trading of the Valois dynasty (the 15th century), oranges were bartered across Iberia and presented as balmy gifts to the French court. The Sun King—Louis XIV himself—grew particularly enamored. This sugared flesh, he wrote to his minister of trade, this pungently burned, acidic scent, it is medicine to me. He liked devouring one in twenty seconds, whole, in lieu of a post-supper flambé, firm in his newfound belief that the hide and seeds aided good digestion. When stocks ran low, he ordered his naval officers to scour the Mediterranean coasts for trees he might uproot, buds he might steal. He required the kitchen staff to build pyramids on tables for breakfast. He pressed juice from a pestle and called it sang de dieu. Even the dyed color of the sun famously emblazoned on Louis’s personal standards changed from a Vulcan red to a warmer, genteel orange lumière. Then suddenly, halfway through his reign, Louis began planning an orange grove that might serve to anchor his father’s neglected, half-finished estate in the countryside, roughly fifteen miles from Paris, beside the village parish of Versailles. My new grove, he told Queen Maria, shall be a prayer to posterity. He envisioned the place as a national sanctuary, open to ordinary Gallic folk, Frenchmen who shared his sentimental streak.

The first wobbly saplings he tended himself, standing nude in the royal baths and gardening in tubs of soap-gray water, using barber’s shears to clip withering or brown leaves, which fell to the foam and floated between his knees. When the country estate was nearing completion Louis personally transferred his saplings to the country, handing them to Mansart, his garden architect (calling them mon heritage). Château de Versailles grew up around the orange trees, in a manner of speaking.

Louis often swore he smelled them upon waking, the back rim of his tongue slavering. When seated on the throne and dressed for official business, he often gazed into his empty hands and felt an imaginary heft “like a young breast.” He invented an outdoor game with several of his mistresses, seeing who could toss an orange highest into a cracked blue sky, the color contrast producing an almost religious ecstasy, which led to the second half of this game, devouring oranges by the segment during sexual play. Indeed, ripening oranges created a rather exuberant frisson in his majesty. On nature walks in his young grove he enjoyed nothing more than to hike his breeches and mount the first strong bough he could find, squeezing it between his thighs and inhaling the sweetness layering the air. His beloved oranges would perfume the years Louis suspected he had left upon this earth—such was the point. The trees would write his signature upon the land, and persist in growing long after he passed away.

He was half-right. Even as late as 1920, eight of the Sun King’s original, personally planted trees still enjoyed robust health. Eight that had been pampered as saplings in those royal tubs, eight sunk into the loose French soil by Mansart who knew a thing or two about longevity in fruit planting. Eight to signify an eternally youthful, ever-replenishing balance of the robust Gallic monarchy. Eight that grew to deep yield and flowering shade by the time Louis XIV, at the curtain of his 72-year reign, laid his aged body upon tissue-thin sheets of Giza cotton and breathed his last. Eight trees: seven more than the number of his grandchildren who survived the Terror.

Daily Affirmations

In the spring of 1975, a stucco storefront opened in Clearwater, Florida. Locals had noticed a new kind of arcade-style commercial property realtors had taken to calling a “strip” shopping mall, with units sunk into the same concrete mold in the style of a gallery. A tax services company sat on one side and a bail-bondsman on the other. Between them a sign was hung bearing the words UNITED CHURCHES OF FLORIDA.

There was no legitimate company by that name, and no such confederation. The name had been chosen by the storefront’s owner especially for its blandness, as he had private affairs to conduct. Who, he told his companions, would bother knocking on that door?

On paper, the founder of United Churches of Florida was a pulp science-fiction writer and former Army brat from Tilden, Nebraska named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. For the past twelve years he had been circumnavigating the globe on a sixty-foot pleasure vessel he’d christened the Apollo, fleeing multiple charges of tax evasion. He’d been expelled from over twenty seaports along with a sizable cabal, loyal adherents of a program of behavioral philosophy Hubbard created some years ago, during a period of intense novel-writing—he’d previously specialized in three-page stories set on distant planets—and which Hubbard had christened Scientology.

Unbeknownst to his various disciples, who considered Hubbard an authentic, possibly alien genius, the CIA had begun tracking the Apollo after hearing a bizarre tip on ship-to-ship radio traffic that Hubbard was serving as a clandestine agent. More than this, said the anonymous report, he had been part of the agency’s most important employ, a high-level black-operations officer with top clearance, having started his service during the dark, early years of the agency, in the tumult following World War II.

Hubbard had indeed served in the U.S. Navy, that much was clear, for naval records reflected his service, but that was all. The agency had uncovered evidence of someone having attempted to falsify his service records by pumping them up to reflect a more battle-scarred experience. This lone detail raised a flag, for it was a typical black-operations cover. Another flag: no one at the agency from those years had been able to either confirm or disprove Hubbard’s service. Not a single agent recalled ever working with, speaking to, or meeting him face to face. And Hubbard was, to put it mildly, memorable: a wheezing, wispily-red-haired, alopecia-stricken, halitosis-and-dandruff-suffering, balding toad of a pale white male with a trick back and a twitchy, giggling manner, along with a mouth of rotten teeth and a dismaying sex addiction made all doubly desperate by his conviction that women found him repellent. Such a persona caused agency personnel to speculate Hubbard’s identity had to be an elaborate cover, he had to have worked black-ops, by God, he just had to be one of the anonymous legends. He was put under surveillance by active maritime agents. After eight weeks of research and infiltration, they unveiled a much simpler story, and the CIA dropped pursuit. The inter-agency report, shared with European Interpol as well as the FBI, concluded:

[Hubbard] is a shrewd businessman who has parlayed ‘religion’ into a multi-million-dollar business by taking advantage of that portion of society prone to fall for such gimmicks

Enfeebled in body by his late sixties, Hubbard was also powerfully homesick; he longed to spend his autumn years living in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains. Lawyers found an opening: if “Scientology” could establish a branch not in Colorado but in Florida, a state known for its lax laws concerning the legitimacy of any such enterprises, its leader would be permitted entry as a type of diplomat, a credentialed representative of that religion’s overseas mission, no matter how many taxes he had personally evaded. Scientology moved in and established a beachhead in the Clearwater strip mall.

It was all for naught; Hubbard was dying.

With new converts coming onto the Apollo every week to wish the prophet well, Hubbard could no longer hide in his quarters, claiming that he could only receive visions when completely left alone, recording the holy scripture of those alien forefathers who had chosen him as their vessel. His physical decline was obvious, and yet a majority of his followers were convinced the man was immortal. Confused, they argued among themselves, claiming his poor health was not merely evidence of a martyr-like devotion to the faith but could also embody Docetism (the belief that the messiah appeared in a sickly form on earth, while a true immortal form thrived in outer space). A few disillusioned followers decided that Hubbard’s physical deterioration flatly contradicted his many bizarre health claims, which he had been trying to sell for more years than he’d been writing science fiction—for example, that bouts of intense monastic concentration could defeat shingles. On his deathbed, everyone noticed, Hubbard was covered in shingles.

L. Ron Hubbard died of organ failure in the winter of 1986, aged seventy-four. Personal effects in his private safe amounted to over three thousand legal pads obsessively scribbled over, a life’s work dating back to his time as a college student and up through the years riding a desk and pushing pencils for the U.S. Navy, onto his early drafts as a deadline writer, his failed salesman gigs, his failed marriages. Strangely, to those who found the journals, no alien visits were recorded. There was no religious talk, no outer space visions, no fantasy. The jottings were normal if not eye-crossingly dull. Pages overflowed with fragments of daily observations, descriptions of weather and lunches, benefactor names he told himself to remember, mathematical computations of monthly budgets, some grocery lists, novel and story ideas, but mostly, thousands of one-line self-affirmations. On every single page, at least two or three personal asides and exhortations had been jotted down: they were Hubbard’s notes to persist, to endure, and to believe. Scientology’s creator composed his own destiny this way, envisioning if not willing success, secure in the privacy of his own modest hopes.

You are not repellent to women.
Your back is fine.
You do not need to invent fictions to impress people.

His Way

Near the end of 2019, two former Iraqi archaeologists were killed by mortar shelling in the suburb of Babylon, having joined ISIS in the wake of the most recent civil war that erupted between Shia sects in a turbulent area south of the capital, some fifteen years after the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. Their journey to martyrdom had begun that first year, in fact, on a certain afternoon when a forty-foot statue of Saddam was toppled and yanked from its base in Firdos Square, Baghdad.

On April 9, 2003, the Americans had reached the capital city at last. Iraqis were discovering that the fearsome dictator had fled, Baathists were being rounded up and jailed, and the streets were rejoicing.

George W. Bush, the American president himself, magically appeared on television screens within that same hour—his smiling face broadcast in cafés, car garages, shopping malls—with a message meant to reassure Iraqis of his personal respect and admiration for them, and how he knew in his heart that Iraqis were a good and gifted and peaceful people, for theirs was a country with a long dignified history. The nightmare of Saddam, he said, will soon be over.

During the roughly four minutes it took to broadcast Bush’s recorded message, the National Museum in Baghdad was looted by a mob. Papyrus leaves featuring the first-ever recorded writing, jewelry from Cyrus the Great, Sasanian arabesques, and over 11,000 cylinder seals of long-gone empires all vanished into the gray and black markets, never to be seen again. Dozens of Iraqi archaeologists fearful of such an eventuality had, just prior to invasion, provided coordinates of the National Museum to coalition forces, along with several dozen other Iraqi cultural landmarks for protection, though only the Central Bank in Baghdad wound up securely safeguarded.

Relic-looting continued throughout museums, civic buildings, and residences across the country for several months. Archeologists could see, in real time, actual theft of priceless antiquities through the very same cameras filming American Marines bringing freedom to Iraqis, and then standing by while dazed citizens were interviewed about what freedom meant to them. Yet another irreplaceable relic would be captured, on camera, hoisted on a looter’s back and hauled over the remains of a house in rubble, a smashed window, a blasted door. One archaeologist wept while telling the BBC that what they were witnessing could only be comparable to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258.

Back on April 9, an American corporal serving with the 4th Marines named Edward Chin found himself at the base of a statue of Saddam Hussein. It was an accident of timing: he happened to be picking his nose at the statue’s base waiting for orders when his higher-ups excitedly said that Fox News cameras had made it to the square, and certain Iraqi men in the crowd, along with Chin’s fellow Marines, had struck up a conversation about the historical import of the scene they knew would soon unfold. The statue was coming down. Simply due to Chin’s location, the crowd began egging him on. Using a rope, he climbed the statue. “Giving insult” man to man, as a cultural tradition, held an almost otherworldly power for Iraqis, or so Chin had discovered during his time in country. After scaling up to Saddam’s enormous face he did not know exactly what to do, but he pulled from his gear an American flag. Gleefully, Chin unfurled it, flapping across Hussein’s face.

All cheering stopped.

Chin later told an interviewer on Good Morning America that he’d been “sort of surprised” by the silence. He walked among stunned locals in his battle gear, gamely trying to smile, giving thumbs-up to scared and confused passers-by, assuring those who frowned at him that he only meant to insult Saddam, only Saddam and not regular Iraqis, and he apologized if that was the case. Anyway it wasn’t up there very long. For hours he continued to explain himself. He meant no harm.  He was a passionate patriotic guy like President Bush, remember Bush, on the TV? Saying he personally admired Iraqis? That was just his way, Chin’s way, of taking part in history.

Saddam Hussein’s way had been to study and copy Joseph Stalin’s grip on the imagination and iconography of an entire people. Ever since capturing the presidency in 1979, Saddam had issued thousands of orders for the construction of his own likeness wherever he could, swapping ancient faces with his own face, replacing famous scenes of Saladin, Nebuchadnezzar, and even Mohammed with scenes featuring Saddam. At the start of the invasion, when Saddam’s Republican Palace had been overrun by American troops, the commander waited several hours for news cameras to show up so that an enormous Saddam statue, the one that gazed upon the murderous comings and goings of his Baathist regime, might be destroyed for good by a rocket-propelled grenade. A wrought-iron Saddam in Basra was pulled down by British troops, and then one in Karbala, twice as large. None were captured as vividly for posterity as the forty-foot Saddam in Firdos Square that, prior to toppling, had momentarily been “defaced” by the American stars and stripes. Indeed, jihadists of the first insurgency against occupation forces took to trading photographs between themselves of the Firdos Square desecration, pictures showing a hapless grinning Marine on top of Saddam and spreading that odious flag, another testament to American arrogance.

A pair of archaeologists from the University of Baghdad (Daoud al-Maliki and Taha Maruf) observed the desecration of Saddam firsthand. Cameras found them in the crowd weeping, but not from happiness; they explained themselves. Each man had felt profoundly distressed in his soul by something only archaeologists would understand, for while these men loathed and hated Saddam, they loathed the poison of propaganda more. Propaganda obliterated truth and history like a bomb. What they were witnessing was the erasure and substitution of lived history, of Iraqi memories ceding to some nonsensical official story, and time itself becoming meaningless.

In the end, among the over-170,000 pieces looted from the museum in Baghdad was a pristinely preserved marble head depicting the Roman god Apollo, an unusual relic, to be sure, a copy of an original made in Greece and brought to Babylon in 323 by the conqueror Alexander the Great, who kept Apollo’s head in his one of his golden tents to watch over him as he slept. Allegedly, the pilfered head was at Alexander’s bedside when he took ill and died—not more than twenty feet from the actual spot where Saddam Hussein would build his last residence, a winter palace, a few millennia later, and where the head of Apollo ended up stashed for a time. Saddam rarely visited that residence; something about the particular location made him uneasy. It had been cursed by a primeval spirit, he believed, haunted by puckish jinni that clung to the grounds with an animal rage, as if something had upset them in the past and Saddam could not find out what it was. One weekend, in a fit of pique, the dictator ordered all historical artworks out of the house and donated to the National Museum. A single work of art remained, a ceiling mural in the great room.

It was that same room where the bodies of the two Iraqi archaeologists were found, the men having long ago grown out their beards and taken up Russian AK rifles to fight for a caliphate dream. They died in a gunfire exchange with al-Sadr rebels who briefly controlled the region from 2018 to 2019. Maruf and al-Maliki were good fighters, but known for taking off for days at a time to seek out worthless objects in the rubble—an official seal of the old Baathist regime, a Swiss fountain pen once owned by Saddam’s eldest child Uday—anything of the lost, frantic, disjointed past they felt had to be kept in mind and saved for posterity once the fighting stopped, once a caliphate was triumphant, and true Muslims again ruled the Levant. Each man carried a bulging knapsack at all times, stuffed with whatever pieces had been scavenged after gun battles. Both sacks, like everything else in the area, had vanished.

To this day, Saddam’s winter palace remains abandoned. The outer walls dotted by mortar and rifle-fire, the inner walls festooned with graffiti in both English and Arabic saying FUCK YOU SADDAM and INFIDELS ROT IN HELL, the structure is a monument to entropy, every door pried off, every shard of window-glass stolen, all the French chandeliers stripped for parts and the Persian rugs shredded to tatters. High enough to discourage any other desecration but gunfire, the ceiling-mural of Saddam’s great hall has been left intact, some thirty feet by forty feet depicting a panoramic history of Mesopotamia, date palms and dunes, crescents and towers, Sunni and Shia, and the former three-starred flag of Iraq, flying mutely and innocently at the center.

Between This Life and the Next

The last words of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa remain a subject of debate among literary historians and biographers. It is an irony that Pessoa himself would have loved to exploit, for throughout his years as a writer and journalist he exhaustively deployed alter-egos, his famous “heteronyms” that permitted the author to play upon the subject of personhood itself. As the godlike creator of between 80 and 140 imaginary selves, Pessoa had already killed half of them, in one way or another, savoring their deaths and somber obituaries and competing “final words” for years—before that fateful winter of 1935, when Pessoa (the real one) was rushed to a Lisbon hospital complaining of high fever and stomach pains.

It turned out only one of his selves would die this way, in some rickety public hospital, of pancreatitis and a diseased liver. Only one would write, with an unsteady hand, the last line of his journal: I do not know what tomorrow will bring. Pessoa knew he might be nearing the end, but then again, what if? On his deathbed, he distracted himself with various fantasies of his remaining alter egos and their infinitely interesting, unwritten fates, the selves he hadn’t killed yet and who would in theory live forever, untouched by death or disease, and forever enraged about the state of the world.

As a reader Pessoa was a connoisseur of historical quirk, the bizarre telling gesture that often emerged from the murk of the past. He spent his last day in bed reading. A footnote in Voltaire caught his eye. Voltaire mentioned in passing how the concept of happiness, in the original marketplace Greek, might best be translated as “led onward by a devil or demon-spirit.” Oh!, thought Pessoa, laughing with micro-convulsions of delight, Oh god, yes, absolutely perfect. In this unexpected thrill of creative energy his fever briefly abated, his eyesight seemed to sharpen, his thoughts cleared like a country road after a morning rain, and he felt something like a groundswell—one more heteronym left to write, perhaps, the story of a wealthy lisboeta who believes he has lived a good life but who winds up in hell. A comedy, naturally. Pessoa blinked at the open page of Voltaire. He needed something to write with. He turned to a nurse standing guard by the window. She had clearly been posted there to help the writer with his night-time inspirations. It was not, in fact, a nurse but a hat-stand. The nurse did not move, nor respond to his inquiries. He tried again, though the effort to raise his voice was painful. Madame, said Pessoa, coughing, trying to sit up, if you please, Madame. Hand me my glasses. Pessoa was still wearing his glasses; he meant to say pen. And then he died.

The Minister of Loneliness

The prior minister in my current role, I was told, did not have the infrastructure or emergency funds to sustain a portfolio of loneliness. The authorities simply noted that isolation in the year of quarantine is palpable; it has taken on catastrophic proportions comparable to the plagues of ancient days.

Frankly speaking, the ministry position is a file shuffling job in a virtual sense, a documenter of records and data on the correlation between the Great Panic and the psychological effects of isolation. A glorified clerk, more than a minister, if you will. It’s not a role that involves the abatement of loneliness.

Rather, the minister is a processor of loneliness, and sort of bureaucrat, if you will. The Minister of Loneliness is not a counselor of lonely hearts or other such romantic fancies. The invitation for the job arrived over the invisible transom, thanks to the information brigade with its bits and bytes of data, an invitation which I scoured in a compulsive yet amateurish manner to pass the hours of sheltering in place.

The analysts of yesteryear used to say, geography has nothing to do with leaving behind your negative experiences; the abyssal terrain of memory will follow you like the tail of a runaway gecko. You see, I don’t mind living a small life. I’m not called to settle the moon. Despite the dire warnings of our virologists and epidemiologists, we lived close together in the urban zones across the world, cocooned in an illusion of safety, ignoring the early signs of the Great Panic. Years ago, in the migrant generation of my grandparents, the nations each sent a colony of people to settle the moon. Admittedly, it was a failed experiment – the colonists were sickened by the poor air supply, and thousands perished in the biodome. It was neither a viable solution for overpopulation, nor a feasible strategic investment in human life as we knew it, but rather, a stupid plan to purge humankind of all diseases, in other words, a gene genocide.

As the Minister of Loneliness, I look at the stars not as a program for my life, but as signs of a creator who placed each little fire in the heavens. To remind myself about the life before the Great Panic, I write a list of activities I used to relish. If the Minister of Loneliness can’t handle solitude, then how will she process loneliness during the Great Panic? By mirroring what I’m hearing and listening to what’s not said; untying the knot of each irrational fear by asking questions; pointing at jars of olives and sweet pickles at the open-air market; shaking hands with strangers at the bus stop, or vice versa.

In a quarantine dream, the world and its pantries of abundance have reopened with a global puff of flour, pouring a wealth of refined wheat and sugar into the world. I bake a chocolate cake out of a box, scissoring the bag with puff of dehydrate, powdered buttermilk, flour, and cocoa. I use eggs, extra virgin olive oil, and a quarter cup of bottled water to moisten the cake flour. I pour it into nine-inch cake pans. After the cakes have cooled, I frost them with a tub of whipped cream, and sprinkle half a cup of shredded coconut, a quarter cup of chocolate shavings, and chopped strawberries. I had no one to enjoy the cake other than myself, so I put it in the basket and lower it on a rope to the street. Partway down its journey, the ashen mourning doves of the city emerge to consume mouthfuls of the cake until none of it remains by the time the bucket touches the sidewalk. The mourning doves, cooing with grateful contentment, swoop up in flock and circle above the rooftop before flying back to their nests tucked in the nooks and crannies of the city.

I assemble a blackberry fruit tart with a buttery, flaky crust made from a tin of shortbread cookies I find in the back of a cabinet, and it’s the green parakeets who receive the blessing, then the crows, ravens, and grackles for morsels of the pistachio ice-box pie made with a graham cracker crust and a pudding mix folded into whipped cream. The glossy cream cheese and guava jelly crescent rolls were the favorite of the pigeons, and the mockingbirds swooped upon the hot cross buns made with a brioche dough. The organic strawberries fattened by alfalfa meal, by the way, were big as my fists, mashed to a bloody pulp in the mouths of feral parakeets. When I wake, the world is still on fire with a massive infection, and there is no place to run from the phobias contributing to the Great Panic. Each individual must go on lockdown, sheltering in place to avoid breathing on others until the world opens up again.

In the ministry of loneliness, with my parish of none, I go incognito by turning off the information brigade, the only endorsed chatter in the lockdown. If I don’t hear about it, I am not responsible for it. The weather is hot and dry as midsummer. In the night, I wake with a sore throat, the right tonsil precisely speaking, and look up the possibilities of what this might mean. A bacterial infection like staphylococcus, infected tonsil with tonsillitis, a tonsil with tonsil stones, or soft uvula abrasion from loud snoring? At the back of my mind, I’m aware this could mean I harbor the contagion of fear, lying dormant and asymptomatic in my body, now surfacing as tonsillitis, grazed lightly by a silver spiral of fear. I try ice cream first, then hot milk and honey to coat my throat, anti-inflammatories, and finally, daub the back of my throat with a mixture of aloe vera, oregano oil, and antibacterial ointment in a base of petroleum jelly. With a flashlight to the back of my mouth, I could see the telltale inflamed tonsil peeking out like an angry cockscomb out of the corner of my gullet.

For decades, it was the fear of a generation who suffered aviophobia, a fear of airplanes, and now the little children do even not remember their parents warning about it, and how the parents of their parents recall the images of planes falling on their vintage television sets and splashed across the pages of their newspapers, the plumes of smoke rising out of the twin skyscrapers. Do you remember where you were, what you were doing? Yes, I was speaking with my mother on the phone, the landline, not a mobile device, and she dropped the phone in the dish washer. No, I was getting ready for school, putting my bologna sandwich in my backpack. It was not yet the age when we could livestream events. The morning news anchor was not his usual chipper self, while the newsroom behind his head showed a whirlwind of people and papers in chaos. Now the fear has dissolved into the generalized routines of the populace, especially when we use documents to identify ourselves, and we remove our shoes for flights. How do we demonstrate who we truly are in an age of dissociation, of likes and dislikes popping up like assorted gumdrops and lollipops?

In the Great Panic, I can’t help thinking of the bird pneumonia carried by feral urban birds, not to mention the diseases infecting cats and people. I miss going to the market and picking up an eggplant, then a chayote pear. I miss riding the subway, the lime-colored tunnels of light. I miss the man who played the violin, busking for cash. I miss the for-sale signs propped up inside car windows. I can’t remember the last time I wore heels as I walked in soft-soled flats all over the city. I love flats, my unapologetic flats that say to the world, my soles will be with me the rest of my life, even if they’re unflattering. My flats traveled all over the city of champagne bakeries and chocolate fountains, its dumpling dens and greasy spoons. The city with its clotted cream fog rolling in from the bay and its nightly mood swings from one dive to the next had no idea what await beyond this short season of neon lights. Perhaps short isn’t quite the right word, I muse. Blessed, I whisper, looking down at the stockinged feet I’ve had since the shelter-in-place order began.

Is it too late for the information brigade to design an underground world in cyberspace where bibliotherapists research ancient books of wisdom and poetry as guides for healing, human empathy, and revelation? One where bibliophiles, lovers of books, serve as apothecaries to the drams and draughts of the past? The musty fragrance of the physical books offers consolation in the caves, where consumers of information would slowly pore over the histories and catalogues of yesteryear. Pods of capsules of time, the books would unveil their arcana about making sourdough starter in jars, using aluminum foil and baking soda in hot water to polish tarnished silver, and how to pickle one’s own capers in vinegar and wine, if one wished to do so, those unopened flower buds, the color of avocado flesh under the rind.

A pinking moon like a blushing cheek swooned over the city, a supermoon the color of raspberry lemonade, and for a minute, its witnesses were calmed by its glow. The information brigade, however, reported that it took on a canary tone like tooth enamel while it soared above our sleep. Only in dreams, the pink moon was the color of quarantine, a swirling bottle of the city’s mood in the foaming language of a fountain drink, or a glass of hibiscus tea spilling into the nocturnal clouds. The Minister of Loneliness picks up a spy glass, a brass, one-eyed telescope of sorts, and points it at the moon to see if it is a glass of pink lemonade.

Nope. In the rays of the moon, I dream of a labyrinth of honeycomb tunnels where the Minister of Loneliness is quarantined, a raindrop of vaccine against fear itself flashing its golden, quadrivalent eye in the lights at the end of every passageway, targeting flu strains cultivated in cell cultures, not in millions of eggs laid by government chickens. For this elixir of immunity, the vaccine is dyed red as prosperity eggs, as if prepared for a baby’s one-month birthday, when her name is finally announced to the world. Let us rejoice, for this child has survived a full month and beat the odds of death itself, at least, for now: her immune system has fought off the bacterial strains and toxic nitrites in the underground well water, the cross-contamination of a bovine caseinate formula boiled in a kitchen pot, the hands and feet of many relatives in the nursery. On a scrap of a paper bag, I write out a gratitude list starting with unbleached bread flour.

If Anybody Could Have Saved Me It Would Have Been You

She is sitting on the beach eating a chocolate chip cookie housed in a metal canister per the sort of metal canisters she imagines midcentury soldiers’ wives packed for their husbands to take to war. The day is hot, and the sun melts not only her and her fellow beachgoers’ skin, but also the chocolate chip cookie housed within the metal canister whose history she can only imagine. She touches the melting chocolate chip cookie with her finger, then touches her cell phone’s liquid crystal display screen, which therein contains a facsimile of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter written in 1941, just after World War II began.

Dearest, the letter begins. I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

Virginia Woolf did not do the best thing to do in the ocean. Rather, she did it in the River Ouse in Lewes, East Sussex, England. Three miles away, in the nearby village of Rodmell, she and her husband Leonard—to whom her suicide note was addressed—owned a weatherboarded cottage. There, she wrote Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years, Mrs. Dalloway. In 1910, 31 years before her river death, Virginia Woolf—then Adeline Virginia Stephen—had been institutionalized after attempting suicide twice, once by trying to jump out of a window, and once again by overdosing on Veronal. Woolf may have had bipolar disorder, sources purport, but words make things name themselves (a poet once said), and I distrust that we can precisely language anything our minds do, seeing as no mind is the same, despite the ways our minds all spin out from time to time.

The waves are now lapping against the shore, and the girl on the beach is re-reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter with my finger. As was aforementioned, this letter was written to Leonard—her husband, not Cohen nor Bernstein. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you, she wrote, reaffirming the myth that anybody can rescue anybody. But maybe love can save—meaning to keep safe, to avoid the need to use, to preserve the soul from damnation—a person, or maybe another person’s attention can save another person, or maybe if adults failed to tell us good job and I love you when we were small, nothing can save us but ourselves.

After reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter on the beach, whose sand is hot and therefore makes her skin stick to body, she walks back to the train past the bar where an elderly man is drinking. Hello sweetheart, he says, and she winks at him, but he cannot see her eye because it is covered by plastic meant to protect her irises from the sun, and she cannot see what he is drinking because her vision is tinted. On the train, she misses the elderly man, not because he is memorable but because there is no one else to call to mind.

A lie?

A lie.

First, she thinks of her former beloved, and then she thinks of the elderly man. He was sitting at a bar without sitting at the bar, for in fact, he was sitting outside of the bar where he was drinking. Scanning the train with her tinted vision, the girl considers the straight line of energy required for the train’s bars to extend from the train’s ceiling to its floor, much like the elm tree behind the weatherboarded cottage in a village where she has not yet moved, and which she cannot call to mind because she will not move into the weatherboarded cottage for several months and thus has not yet made its acquaintance. But we know things before we know things, she intuits, and so somewhere within her consciousness she lets herself visualize it and subsequently feels quiet and adrift from her present reality, though she does not let herself know what she knows despite the fact she knows it.

In the past, when she was eating a homemade chocolate chip cookie housed in a metal canister per the sort of metal canisters she imagines midcentury soldiers’ wives packed for their husbands to take to war, she did not feel adrift in quite this exact way, nor did she feel out of tune with her consciousness’ registers of knowledge. In other words, she did not feel the detachment of her mind from her body, nor did she fear the repercussions of exiting the beach to re-enter the world. Nor did she imagine herself to be anywhere but on the beach, albeit now, writing this, she feels an ocean in her torso, and this ocean provokes her to once again return to the actual ocean, into which she might step without clinging to reality; into which she might wade with the insistence of one who has also made peace with her grief. In this wading, she will let the water carry her away until I, too, am asleep near the bottom of it. 

Red-Trimmed House

From the northeast corner of the house, through the window at the top of the stairs, we could see the buds of the fruit tree, pink and soft in the last days of spring. The bare branches had grown new leaves, and by the time the sun warmed our skin, their fruits were beginning to emerge. Red seeds, they looked like, about the size of acorns, but they weren’t close enough that we could really see them, even though the branches could scratch the window at night when the wind made its way through the pines. If the tree had been a bit older, and us a little lighter, we might have climbed out of the window and into its branches to escape for a little while.

The webs appeared a month or two later, arriving like little packages too tightly wrapped to tell what was inside. We could see that they were denser than a spider’s web, and not built for the same purpose. The white lines crisscrossed, threads of thin, soft sheets. They spun larger without us noticing until they were big prisms surrounding the fruits and the leaves with irregular planes. Just a few branches—they didn’t cover the whole tree. They looked just like cocoons from where we saw them, cocoons big enough to hold a bat, probably. They got to be a couple of inches across, and about as long as my arm, up to the elbow. And that’s when Papa said he had to go to the store, and after he went to the dump he drove to the store and bought himself a long stick, and the stick came with a long blade. We watched him from the window, his arm now a straight black shaft with a scythe on the end. So easily he sliced off those cocoons, letting them land on the damp mulch below, so gently they might have bounced if they had not been so light. The tree was unburdened now, lifting only its own fruits and leaves.

Later, we saw the black bin outside the garage, left from Papa’s trip to the dump. Papa had forgotten to wheel it back in. Papa was glad to have saved the tree. We asked about them at dinner, those prisms and how they had looked up close. He had wanted to show us, the way they were spun, the way the little eggs sat within the planes. And the bigger ones too, so many of them, sharing this one cocoon. Hundreds, there must have been. And what did you do with those cocoons, we asked, and Papa had not been forgetful. The bin was full of water, and the cocoons were sunk in there, and I knew they were still hugging their branches, waiting to drown, waiting in the dark underneath that tight black lid. But the small ones had been able to swim; they swam within their cocoons, Papa said. They didn’t die. Come see. They’d crawled up the sides to where it was dry, and there they were, clinging to the lid. Now he stuck out his finger, his finger a shaft jabbed straight into the small bodies until they fell. Too many remained to kill in this way, so Papa wiped them off the lid and threw them into a bag of trash. Hundreds, he said, there were hundreds of them, if a hundred is just ten by ten. They suffocated there, the little ones in their cocoons, and went back into the bin, the bin now drained and dried and wheeled back into the cold garage. Papa drove to the dump again and came back and looked happy about his new tool.

Receipt

This was meant to be your day of resisting temptation, but more important than money is generosity. You will make this quick. You begin in the large sale section, circling a sea of racks, but the large t-shirts are stained with trendy brand names and stupid slogans and none of the pants appeal to you. You descend to the men’s department. One plywood surface is full of sweatshirts in tan, grey, and pink hues, on sale for $29. One of these might do, but the collar is just a bit too high, and that logo. You find a separate sale section. Hats, boxers, ugly shirts, polyester and rayon. At the end of the shirt rack, in the farthest corner of the store, you find a black terrycloth short-sleeve shirt. $14.99. The material is cotton and cheap. You can see through it. But it would do as an extra gift to round out the package. You walk by the sweatshirts again but the small logo is still there. You find the two lanes for checkout, one to the right for the human cashier and one straight ahead for self-checkout. The cashier looks bored and you are tired. You move forward and scan the tag yourself. It rings up as ten cents. The two employees standing behind you are still exchanging jokes, maybe flirting. Can they see the massive screen of your register? Should you say something? You decide not to say anything. You stand there and wait for the machine to roll out a disproportionately long receipt. At the door, someone says something. You turn to them with fear, and they repeat it: Goodnight. Good night. You get away feeling like you have gotten away with something and descend into the subway. Home again. You eagerly pull out the shirt and feel a hard lump. The security tag is still attached. Google tells you that the tags are full of ink, so that if you try to steal, you will have blood on your hands, plus the goods will be ruined. You could return the item to the store and ask them to remove the tag, but then you would have to show them your disproportionately long receipt to prove that the item is in fact yours, and then they might see that you had only paid ten cents for it. No, you’ll have to pry it open. YouTubers show you how to do it—strong magnets can convince the devices to open—and end with disclaimers that they did not in fact steal the items. Another method involves the use of two forks in a rocking motion. You opt for the screwdriver instead. Your leverage is good, and you manage to yield a nice margin on one side and then the other, but you have to keep circling the central prong because widening one side causes the other to close up. Your clearance is now half an inch wide, just enough to slip in the metal shears. But the metal shears are dull, and your cuts become increasingly violent in your impatience. There. The deed is done. You remove the round black lump and its bent plug from the shoulder. But now the t-shirt has a hole in it from your blind probing. With your needle and your black thread, the last length on the spool, you sew up the hole just like your mother taught you, first circling the event with small stitches in and out through the intact perimeter and then closing it up with one cinch.

Bed Springs

A short story about a couple whose marital troubles are channeled into an ongoing, accelerating frustration with the conditions of their mattress, which, rather than their difficulties with each other, they cite as the reason for their lack of sleep, restless demeanors, and increasing anxiety. This leads to an endless search for a better mattress, which inevitably adds to their troubles those of financial insecurity and the physical strains brought on by the recurring trips to mattress discount stores and repeated trips up and down their third-story walkup, with and without a mattress bridging their cold shoulders.

Once the economic toll of again purchasing a new mattress clearly becomes untenable, the couple turns to mattresses they find on the street. Through these dirtier acquisitions, they begin to also take on the psychic weight of their neighbors’ marital troubles—a blood spot there, bed bugs everywhere, copious urine stains, and unreadable traces index the unspeakable plights of the others they hear arguing on alternating weeknights, or see returning hand in hand from the grocery, or nod to across the subway platform each morning, or pass on their way to the bodega at night.

While chatting casually, laughing, gleefully, even, for example, they have sex, but, finding it unfulfilling, spend ten postcoital minutes discussing the relative merits of the springs on this mattress compared to the last and decide that it did not provide enough give for the positions that would have given them satisfaction.

A month later, she announces at breakfast that she has noticed a decided slump in his shoulders, an irregular curve that begins at the nape of his neck and gently holds the S curve of his scalp at a low angle, as would a slack line. It’s not firm enough, he complains, and she knows what he means.

They had begun with the pillows: Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, insubstantial, IKEA, his deceased grandmother’s, her childhood’s. None provided quite the right level of support. Switching sides of the bed similarly provided little relief, though they did have a discussion about the tissues he found stuffed into the crack between the wooden siding of the bed platform and the mattress.

They take a trip to Home Depot that May to purchase some plywood to line the underside of their box springs, a DIY solution he had proposed in hope of solidifying their mutual commitment to this bed, this mattress, his back. She runs her finger along the rough surface of the boards, procuring a splinter.

One morning, she wakes to a high-pitched whine; the window has been left open in winter, introducing a strong, cold breeze, which in turn gently rocks the closet door back and forth on its old hinges. Dutifully, she rolls back the clammy blanket from her chest and lifts herself from her foam imprint. Before closing the closet entirely, she sees (nearly glowing in the light of dawn) an air mattress folded tightly on the top shelf. It has traditionally, in their household, been reserved for guests, but now, she reaches for it. It is inflated by mid-morning and remains so until the subsequent evening, when she warmly suggests that they try something new. He complies, eagerly. By morning, her shoulder blades make contact with the hardwood floor.

It ends only when their landlord complains about the number of mattresses in plastic wrap that have been abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the building over the past few months, in increasing numbers—a sign to current tenants and potential future renters that the building is unclean. Soon evicted by force of increasing monthly rent, they begin their search for a new studio, but, finding that their respective commutes from affordable boroughs will likely have to increase, they find that they would instead, perhaps, be better off finding their own respective places, at least for the next year. Rather than returning to the mattress store in search of two comfortable twin mattresses, one for each apartment, they agree to retain the mattresses of the previous tenants of their new respective rooms.