Bookmarker tag: inspo/characterisation (59 notes)

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in the stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

[...] Ironically, a good part of his anticorporeal stance (it was his idea to call having a body Corporeal Punishment) derives from his non_fatal flaw, the skin trouble, the skin trouble itself deriving from a weekend years past, just before a cattle call for a Wisk spot he didn't get, a weekend of solo camping and getting-into-collar-soiled-character, with a tent, in the Berkshires, West of Boston, during which he'd contracted a mild spatter of poison sumac, and had purchased a discount generic brand of poison-sumac medicine he curses now and forever (like most terse-labeled generics the product was untrustworthy, turned out in fact to be medicine for the _sumac, not the sufferer therefrom, but if the label says MEDICINE FOR POISON SUMAC what the fuck are you going to think, standing there?) that had set his face, neck, chest and back aflame: pulsing, cystic, volcanic, allergic, clotted, almost sacredly scarred. The sumac is so bad it hurts--which of course is a constant reminder that it's there, on his body--and it won't go away, no sooner healed by brand-name antitoxin than reinfected. The whole thing's just pretty loathsome, and you can bet Sternberg loathes it. He's unhappy, but in that comparatively neat and easy way of those who are at least pretty sure they know why they're unhappy, and what to curse, now and forever.

Cause it's only dark, generally, back there in his eye's guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it'll heal, anyway. It'll come around. It's all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it's the sleep before dark that's most important. Like don't cry: you're better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.

Here's the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It's darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O'Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.

Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing. Sternberg's not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He's not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place ... Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to his slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between is eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head's blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn't take genius to figure out that you've got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst's cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he's messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of.

[...] precious time was lost before he could even think about how to set up a workable schedule for maximally efficient reviewing for the exam, even mentally, which he did every day. His great weakness was strategic organization and apportionment of time, as Reynolds pointed out at every opportunity, enjoining Claude to for Christ's sake just take a book off the stack and study instead of sitting there noodling impotently about how best to study. [...]

Justin reciprocated Superking Son’s snubs. He ignored Superking Son’s directions and went through practice entirely on his own agenda. That first week, Superking Son and Justin interacted only through overriding each other’s instructions to Ken, Justin’s hitting partner. Every practice, Superking Son told Ken to practice drop shots, Justin said smashes, Superking Son yelled at Ken for not doing drop shots, Justin still refused to change drills, Superking Son made Ken do laps around the court for undermining his authority, and so on until Ken bailed on practice, hid in the locker room, and smoked a cigarette for his anxiety. (He stole packs from his dad, who bought them wholesale from Costco. His dad gave them out to relatives in Cambodia like candy, in an effort to pretend he was some hotshot American business tycoon.)

I feel like shit lately, she said. All this stuff at home, I don't know. You think you're the kind of person who can deal with something and then it happens and you realize you can't.

I know. I could have told you and I didn't. But at some level I still see you as the person who broke my heart and left me unfit for normal relationships.

You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi's rich, Nick's a man, I can't hurt these people. If anything they're out to hurt me and I'm defending myself.

Recently I met a man on a bike outside a produce shop, around the same age as my husband and visibly fatigued, sweat dripping down his ashen face. He asked the owner of the shop for a glass of water, and she acted as if she hadn’t understood, though it’s the same word in Portuguese as it is in Spanish: água. I bought a bottle from the fridge and asked him his name. He looked up when he heard me speak. Jesús was his name, he had been in Boa Vista for six days, and the only money he’d made was twenty reais (around $5) for mowing someone’s lawn. Another migrant had lent him a bike so he could look for work. I told him it was dangerous to be out at midday. It was over 100 degrees, and the streets were deserted. He would do any kind of job, he went on, he only wanted to send his mother food for her to eat. That’s how he said it, comida para ella comer. I went to the car to get some groceries. His face tightened as he looked into the plastic bag, not from disappointment but because he clearly despised himself; his need for water, his need to eat. He took my hand, squeezed it gently, and got back on the bike.

I teach a creative writing class at the immigrant aid center inside the university. In a recent class I asked my students to write down a memory, any memory, using all five senses. A 15-year-old girl stood up to share hers.

“My happiest memory,” she began, “is waking up in my bed . . .”

Then she was crying too hard to continue.

My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook - I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing - I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm - I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.

That must be what the great artists see and paint. [...]

Considering how versatile Lenski appeared to be, how thoroughly he could explain anything related to our school studies, his constant tribulations at the university came as something of a surprise. Their cause, it transpired eventually, was his complete lack of aptitude for the financial and political problems he so stubbornly tackled. I recall the jitters he was in when he had to take one of his most important final examinations. I was as worried as he and, just before the pending event, could not resist eavesdropping at the door of the room where my father, upon Lenski’s urgent request, gave him a private rehearsal by testing his knowledge of Charles Gide’s Principles of Political Economy. Thumbing the leaves of the book, my father might inquire, for instance: “What is the cause of value?” or: “What are the differences between the banknote and paper money?” and Lenski would eagerly clear his throat—and then remain perfectly silent, as if he had expired. After a while, he ceased to produce even that brisk little cough of his, and the intervals of silence were punctuated only by my father’s drumming upon the table, except that once, in a spurt of rapid and hopeful remonstration, the sufferer suddenly exclaimed: “This question is not in the book, sir!”—but it was. Finally my father sighed, closed the textbook, gently but audibly, and remarked: “Golubchik [my dear fellow], you cannot but fail—you simply don’t know a thing.” “I disagree with you there,” retorted Lenski, not without dignity. Sitting as stiffly as if he were stuffed, he was driven in our car to the university, remained there till dusk, came back in a sleigh, in a heap, in a snowstorm, and in silent despair went up to his room.

Autumn came early that year. Layers of fallen leaves piled up ankle-deep by the end of August. Velvet-black Camberwell Beauties with creamy borders sailed through the glades. The tutor to whose erratic care my brother and I were entrusted that season used to hide in the bushes in order to spy upon Tamara and me with the aid of an old telescope he had found in the attic; but in his turn, one day, the peeper was observed by my uncle’s purple-nosed old gardener Apostolski (incidentally, a great tumbler of weeding-girls) who very kindly reported it to my mother. She could not tolerate snooping, and besides (though I never spoke to her about Tamara) she knew all she cared to know of my romance from my poems which I recited to her in a spirit of praiseworthy objectivity, and which she lovingly copied out in a special album. My father was away with his regiment; he did feel it his duty, after acquainting himself with the stuff, to ask me some rather awkward questions when he returned from the front a month later; but my mother’s purity of heart had carried her, and was to carry her, over worse difficulties. She contented herself with shaking her head dubiously though not untenderly, and telling the butler to leave every night some fruit for me on the lighted veranda.

[...] As I reached the top, my livid light flitted across the six-pillared white portico at the back of my uncle’s mute, shuttered manor—as mute and shuttered as it may be today, half a century later. There, in a corner of that arched shelter, from where she had been following the zigzags of my ascending light, Tamara would be waiting, perched on the broad parapet with her back to a pillar. I would put out my lamp and grope my way toward her. One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things, about many other things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words—but the ancient limes crowding close to the house drown Mnemosyne’s monologue with their creaking and heaving in the restless night. Their sigh would subside. The rain pipe at one side of the porch, a small busybody of water, could be heard steadily bubbling. At times, some additional rustle, troubling the rhythm of the rain in the leaves, would cause Tamara to turn her head in the direction of an imagined footfall, and then, by a faint luminosity—now rising above the horizon of my memory despite all that rain—I could distinguish the outline of her face; but there was nothing and nobody to fear, and presently she would gently exhale the breath she had held for a moment and her eyes would close again.

But in England, at least in the England of my youth, the national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork were not conducive to the development of the goalie’s eccentric art. This at least was the explanation I dug up for not being oversuccessful on the playing fields of Cambridge. Oh, to be sure, I had my bright, bracing days—the good smell of turf, that famous inter-Varsity forward, dribbling closer and closer to me with the new tawny ball at his twinkling toe, then the stinging shot, the lucky save, its protracted tingle.… But there were other, more memorable, more esoteric days, under dismal skies, with the goal area a mass of black mud, the ball as greasy as a plum pudding, and my head racked with neuralgia after a sleepless night of verse-making. I would fumble badly—and retrieve the ball from the net. Mercifully the game would swing to the opposite end of the sodden field. A weak, weary drizzle would start, hesitate, and go on again. With an almost cooing tenderness in their subdued croaking, dilapidated rooks would be flapping about a leafless elm. Mists would gather. Now the game would be a vague bobbing of heads near the remote goal of St. John’s or Christ, or whatever college we were playing. The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connection with me. I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret. As with folded arms I leant my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates.

The weekend her father left – left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back – he had said, ‘You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.’

And I had said, ‘Are you on crack?’

And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, ‘Yes, a little.’

Lana, the joyful, curious chimpanzee who learned how to use the computer to talk to Tim, ended up being kept in the lab at Yerkes and became part of the breeding programme. I recently met a woman who worked with her on that original language study. She had returned to Yerkes and met Lana again, forty years later. She said that Lana clearly remembered her. Lana had had several kids at Yerkes, all of them taken away from her for various studies. The woman said that Lana’s eyes were distant, and sad.

he braided hair so elaborately that in high school she started charging for it. She ate frozen waffles out of the freezer, claiming they tasted better that way. She would dive off any rock, cliff or board without hesitation. When she shaved off her long hair, when she went swimming in the icy Atlantic in December on a dare, when she stood up to a teacher who accused her of cheating, we thought she was brave, and she was brave, no question. Our daughter was brave. Even after she became addicted to heroin. Maybe especially then. The things she did. The places she went. When I said this at Family Day during one of the many excruciating Family Days we went to – Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona – people acted like I was Susan Sontag saying the men who flew into the World Trade Center weren’t cowards.

Now that I’m older, I suspect my mother used marriage as a way to reinvent herself. As if she could slough off the past and emerge whole and unmarked, ready to slip into the circumstances of someone else’s life. Her own circumstances, the ones she was born into, were poverty, eight younger siblings, a brick and aluminum bungalow, a backhoe parked out in the yard. Thick, golden-brown hair that fell to the middle of her back. Eyes the color of an azure butterfly. A tall, graceful frame. The broad-faced bone structure she inherited from her grandmother. An accent that wherever she went would betray her origins, a variation on the Ozark hillbilly and Deep South. When she left the small town where she’d grown up, she found a dialect coach and “neutralized” the accent. Evidence perhaps that she had ideas about the kind of person she wanted to appear to be. Also that she understood how to cork the past, contain it inside her.

[...] she had to wait for an uncle in Havana to find a husband for her - she had been a matrimonial defective, a reject. To come out of it gave her a revolutionary impulse. There was going to be no sign of her early humiliation, not in any form, no bitter residue. What you didn't want you would shut out decisively. You had been unhealthy, lumpish. Your fat had made you pale and clumsy. Nobody, not even a lout, had come to court you. What do you do now with this painful record of disgrace? You don't bury it, nor do you transform it; you annihilate it and then use the space to draw a more powerful design. You draw it in freedom because you can afford to, not because there's anything to hide. The new design, as I saw it, was not an invention. The Sorella I saw was not constructed but revealed.

[...] Relatives were sympathetic, but this sympathy of aunts and cousins Max sensed to be self-congratulatory. He coldly rejected it, looking straight before him and lengthening his straight mouth. When people spoke sympathetically to him about his daughter, he seemed to be considering the best way to put them to death.

My uncle Bobby, who hauled dirt for a living, spent his final moments of life jerking his leg to depress the clutch while lying in a hospital, his body determined to operate his dump truck, clutching and shifting gears as he sped toward death on a hospital gurney. “He died on the job,” his two sons said, unmoved. Bobby was too mean for them to love. Scott and Andy had been forced to oil Bobby’s truck every Sunday and now he was dead and they had Sundays to themselves, to oil their own trucks. Bobby was my mother’s brother. Growing up, we’d all lived together. My mother worked nights, and Bobby was what we had as a parent. Done driving his dump truck, he sat inexplicably nude watching TV and made us operate the dial for him, so he wouldn’t have to get up. He’d fix himself a big steak and give us instant noodles. Sometimes he’d take us to a casino, leave us in the parking lot with bottle rockets. Or play chicken with the other cars on I-80, with me and Scott and Andy in the backseat covering our eyes. I come from reckless, unsentimental people. [...]

Ardito! Your name means courage, as their first commandment went. Run into battle! Victory at any cost!

Switzerland for schooling.

Holidays at Como. Waiting in short pants. Waiting for a shiny car to come and take him. His father’s driver.

The occasional weekend in Brera. Trips to Rome with his father, twice visiting Cinecittà to see producers his father knew. Movie stars. Sports cars like wraparound sunglasses. Umbrella pines above the studio café, Sandro unsure how to speak to his own father. Sipping his aranciata as a camera slid past on a dolly — it was a big black heart, with its two film reels, a heart or an upside-down ass, and the cameraman peered through its viewfinder, trailing the slinky steps of a woman in a white dress.

A JOKE OFFER from a friend—Three bucks if you do my algebra—and he finds himself with easy pocket money. So easy, in fact, that he starts to advertise. Assignments completed in any subject except foreign languages, at any desired quality, as fast as you need them. It takes a while to find the right price point, but when he does, the clients fall in line. He experiments with volume discounts and pay-ahead plans. Soon he’s the proprietor of a successful small business. His parents are relieved to see him doing homework again, for hours each night. They love that he stops bugging them for cash. It’s like win-win-win. Morning in America, with the free market doing its thing, and Adam goes to bed each night thankful to have been born into an entrepreneurial culture.

He’s quick and conscientious. Every assignment is ready by deadline. Soon he has built the most reliable and respected cheating franchise at Harding High. The business makes him almost popular. He socks away most of the cash. There’s nothing he can spend it on that gives him more pleasure than looking at the balance accumulating in his passbook savings account and calculating dollars per duped educator.

Demanding work does requires sacrifice, however. He’s forced to learn all kinds of interesting things that shouldn’t interest him.

AT HOLYOKE, Mimi is a LUG: lesbian until graduation. It’s the same at half of the other Seven Sisters colleges, rounded up. Scissors and paste, they call it. Fun, sinning, healthy, shameful, sweet—great practice for something. Life, say. Whatever happens after school.

She reads nineteenth-century American poetry and drinks afternoon tea in South Hadley for three semesters. It beats Wheaton. But one April day she’s reading Abbott’s Flatland for a sophomore survey called Transcendence, when she reaches the part where the narrator, A. Square, gets lifted out of his plane into the expanses of Spaceland. Truth comes over her like a revelation: The only thing worth believing in is measurement. She must become an engineer, like her daddy before her. It’s not even a choice. She’s an engineer already, and always has been. And as with Abbott’s Square, the minute she comes back to Flatland, her Holyoke friends want to lock her up.

She transfers to Berkeley. Best place for ceramic engineering she can find. The place is a staggering time warp. Future masters of the universe study alongside unrepentant revolutionaries who believe the Golden Age of Human Potential peaked ten years before.

She thrives, reborn Mimi, looking like a diminutive Kazakh carrying a programmable calculator, and, in the estimation of many, the cutest thing ever to mouth the Hall-Petch equation. She savors the eerie Stepford Wives climate. She sits in the eucalyptus grove, the trees that explode in the dry heat, solving problem sets and watching the protesters with their placards full of all-caps slogans. The better the weather, the more irate the demands.

The month before graduation, she dons a killer interview suit—sleek, gray, professional, inexorable as a NoCal earthquake. She interviews with eight campus reps and gets three offers. She takes a job as a casting process supervisor for a molding outfit in Portland, because it offers the most chance to travel. They send her to Korea. She falls in love with the country. In four months, she learns more Korean than she knows Chinese.

THE BRINKMANS TAKE TO READING, when they’re alone together. And, together, they’re alone most of the time. Community theater is over; they haven’t acted in a play since the one about the nonexistent baby. They’ve never said out loud to each other that their acting days are over. No dialogue required.
In place of children, then, books. In their reading tastes, each of them stays true to the dreams of youth. Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race. Dorothy needs wilder reclamations, stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person’s ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

Ray’s shelves are organized by topic; Dorothy’s, alphabetical by author. He prefers state-of-the-art books with fresh copyrights. She needs to communicate with the distant dead, alien souls as different from her as possible. Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn’t mind skipping the author’s philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

Life in their forties. Once any given volume enters the house, it can never leave. For Ray, the goal is readiness: a book for every unforeseeable need. Dorothy strives to keep local independent booksellers afloat and save neglected gems from the cutout bin. Ray thinks: You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome you picked up five years ago. And Dorothy: Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

The days were long. To break up the monotony of topping garlic, I would rise from my stooped or kneeling position and treat myself to a long, luxurious, cone-shaped cup of water at the Igloo cooler. Others would gossip, joke around, or sing along to the lachrymose rralcheras on their transistor radios. But of all the workaday distractions, none were no fascinating as the oracular musings of Primi. The workers would sporadically lob questions at him, and he would swat them back with elan.

"Primi, you wanna get married? Don't you wanna wife?"

He mulled over the question like an ascended guru.

"No, ese. I don't have money, so I can't attract someone better-looking than me. Imagine a woman with looks like mine. Sad, huh? Nope. Chafe. No marriage. Besides, it's cheaper to rent."

"Primi, what's the best beer?"

"Whichever one is in my hand, loco."

"Priori, why do dogs love humans?"

"If you gave me free cans of meat and cleaned up my caca, I'd love you too, homeboy. Woof."

I am not an overly confident person. Not physically. It's all I can do to stand my full height. I have an enduring terror of photos. There are many photographs of me trying to escape the camera, or looking tense and unhappy at having been caught in frame. [...]

Let's be Beage. Age forty. White. Brown hair. Six feet tall, maybe two-hundred pounds. Married twelve years to the girl we got set up with after college, who teaches history to middle school kids. Let's live in a townhome in a suburb of Washington, population 71,000, with our two sons, Oscar, nine, and Jack, four, and our dog, Melvin, and drive thirty minutes to work at an engineering firm, where we and the team we lead help rezone properties for developers to build what they're dreaming of. Let's drink beers at our work lunches, wear sideburns that border on muttonchops, and buy a leather iPhone case that looks like an old prayer book. Let's believe in God, but skip church. After the kids are in bed, let's record songs on our iPad in our basement, where our kids keep all their toys and we do the same, our guitars and amps and accordion and pedal organs and our bottles of Scotch tucked away in closets and cabinets. Let's mow our own lawn. Let's have a car payment. Let's have a mortgage and a habit of railing against home ownership, which we call a crock. Let's have, overall, a softness that makes us attractive in a spatial sense, makes it easy for people to want to get close to us. Let our talents glean to music, and let's develop those talents to where we can pick up any instrument handed to us and play "I"m a Believer" or "In My Life" well enough for everyone in the room to sing along. But mostly, let's play those songs alone, in our basement, our friend since fourth grade living 2,800 miles away, where his guitar case sits behind his bedroom floor, coated in dust.

There was a group of us young people, closer than brothers. Raymond, the short-sighted little tough with a sarcastic bent, went back every evening to his drunken old father, whose neck and face were a mass of fantastically knotted muscles. His sister, young, pretty, and a great reader, passed her timid life in front of a window adorned with geraniums, amid the stench of dirty old shoes, still hoping that, some day, someone would pick her up. Jean, an orphan and a part-time printer, lived at Anderlecht, beyond the stinking waters of the Senne, with a grandmother who had been laundering for half a century without a break. The third of our group of four, Luce, a tall, pale, timorous boy, was blessed with “a good job” in the L’lnnovation department store. He was crushed by it all: discipline, swindling, and futility, futility, futility. Everyone around him in this vast, admirably organized bazaar seemed to be mad, and perhaps, from a certain point of view, he was right to think so. At the end of ten years’ hard work, he could become salesman-in-charge, and die as the head of a department, having catalogued a hundred thousand little indignities like the story of the pretty shop assistant who was sacked for rude behavior because she refused to go to bed with a supervisor.

[...] I had often met Soudy at public meetings in the Latin Quarter. He was a perfect example of the crushed childhood of the back alleys. He grew up on the pavements: T B at thirteen, V D at eighteen, convicted at twenty (for stealing a bicycle). I had brought him books and oranges in the Tenon Hospital. Pale, sharp-featured, his accent common, his eyes a gentle gray, he would say, “ I’m an unlucky blighter, nothing I can do about it.” He earned his living in grocers’ shops in the Rue Mouffetard, where the assistants rose at six, arranged the display at seven, and went upstairs to sleep in a garret alter 9:00 p.m., dog-tired, having seen their bosses defrauding housewives all day by weighing the beans short, watering the milk, wine, and paraffin, and falsifying the labels ... He was sentimental: the laments of street singers moved him to the verge of tears, he could not approach a woman without making a fool of himself, and half a day in the open air of the meadows gave him a lasting dose of intoxication. He experienced a new lease on life if he heard someone call him “comrade” or explain that one could, one must, “become a new man.” Back in his shop, he began to give double measures of beans to the housewives, who thought him a little mad. The bitterest joking helped him to live, convinced as he was that he was not long for this world, “seeing the price of medicine.”

[...] Twenty-five years old, he is a young rogue who argues like a cynic. He has an infant prodigy’s capacity for absorbing knowledge, a sense of history, merciless views on his elders, and a love for a theoretical working class beside which the actual working class is only highly imperfect human material.

The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers — red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike: EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.

I wonder what the bike owner brought to the Twin Towers that day. It was September, a mild day, so maybe an iced coffee. Black. Probably a scone. Maybe a $4.50 breakfast. A 15 percent tip would be sixty-seven cents. A 20 percent tip would be ninety cents. A generous person might tip a dollar. My father would travel anywhere for a dollar. My father would chase a dollar down the road, a dollar blowing in the winds of a hurricane, even when there was an equal likelihood of getting swept up by the wind. My dad would always take the chance. A dollar is a dollar.

“Sure, sure,” Genevieve said. “I mean, no judgment.” She said this without apparent irony; Genevieve was the most judgmental person Meg had ever known. Without her usual eyeliner, Genevieve looked like a child, her round face puffy, lips swollen from sleep. She was not conventionally beautiful, but Genevieve harbored a self-assuredness that drew people to her, broken people who longed to be told how to live, and with whom Genevieve amused herself temporarily before gently breaking their hearts. She possessed the unyielding self-esteem of a person with rich parents who loved her unconditionally, who called her every Sunday evening, hoping she’d soon tire of her West Coast experiment and move back to Connecticut. Genevieve would have been capable of using Roger for sex, laughing in his face when he told her he loved her, but Meg had known too much of life to treat people so casually.

Oil is one of the last avenues of blue-collar opportunity in this country, one of the few sectors open to working-class men—outside of sport—that still pay well. The oil workers I knew were always trying to redress this imbalance by spending their wages as soon as they got them. They bought powerful cars on finance, expensive clothes, good shoes, strong cocaine. They went to the gym, bench-pressed weights, and covered themselves in tattoos (it seemed a cultural practice somehow related to the job, as miners in South Wales used to gather in chapel to sing). They stayed single longer than most men in the provinces, and even their marriages had a provisional feel, as if they might be dissolved at any moment. They were interesting. The sort of people you’d want at a house party, provided the house wasn’t yours.

I turned to look at the man who’d spoken. He looked back at me. His look said he knew all my secrets, and found them unedifying.

“Who’s this then, lad? Your eldest?”

The others laughed.

“Didn’t like that, did she?” said another.

We went around the corner, out of sight. I could feel the malevolent force of the men at my back. I wished I’d let him come alone.

“They were rude.”

He glanced over my shoulder.

“I told you. The rules are different offshore.”

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades.

We were a small clutch of a nation between the wars, mapping and re-exploring. We gathered at Dakhla and Kufra as if they were bars or cafés. An oasis society, Bagnold called it. We knew each other’s intimacies, each other’s skills and weaknesses. We forgave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. ‘The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.’ That was the real Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog.

He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word – the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.

When he talked like that she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual. For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance. Just as, for him, the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies. He assumed he was experienced in the ways of the world he had essentially left years earlier, struggling ever since to explore a half-invented world of the desert.

He himself would have been happier to die in a cave, with its privacy, the swimmers caught in the rock around them. Bermann had told him that in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock. But she was a woman who had grown up within gardens, among moistness, with words like trellis and hedgehog. Her passion for the desert was temporary. She’d come to love its sternness because of him, wanting to understand his comfort in its solitude. She was always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy wetness, climbing back in from his window that rainy night in Cairo and putting on her clothes while still wet, in order to hold it all. Just as she loved family traditions and courteous ceremony and old memorized poems. She would have hated to die without a name. For her there was a line back to her ancestors that was tactile, whereas he had erased the path he had emerged from. He was amazed she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself.

After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself. It was painful to watch, because Clifton could not see it, her self-education. She read everything about the desert. She could talk about Uweinat and the lost oasis, had even hunted down marginal articles.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don’t believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.

Random moment earlier tonight: out of the blue Todd asked everyone in the Habitrail 2, “When they make processed cheese slices that are only 80 percent milk, what’s the remaining 20 percent made from?”

Michael replied instantly, “Why, nonmilk additives, of course.”

In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf—so it seemed to those who from out in the wood lecture halls watched his eyelids slowly granulate, spots and wrinkles grow across his image, disintegrating it toward old age—a hostility, a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all, the bond must be improved on—some students even read "transcended." That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond—where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!

It never occurred to my mother that things could have been different for her. When she saw a problem, she thought only about how she could solve it herself, not whether she could appeal to others. The charisma she possessed, and the authority she commanded, made her independent from other people, sometimes too much. The only weapon she could offer to other women was her own strength. The only defence she passed on to me was her example. I grew up seeing how people were deferential to her, as if intimidated by her—not just the pupils in her class, the children in our neighbourhood, and us, her own children, but also quite a few adults, including men. I wondered where her power came from, and thought that perhaps she instilled fear in others because she was never scared of anything herself. But when I tried to be like her, and sought to control my fears, even dominate them, I struggled. I realized that she was an impossible model to follow. My mother did not fight and conquer her fears. She never knew fear in the first place.

I caught Adam staring at me. He stared at me a lot lately, but he never asked questions. I had begun to go outside at night and lie on our hammock. Adam resented it. He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy. “But you hate going outside,” he’d say. And yet, there I was, outside, busting open the contract he held on me. He’d go back in and put the kids to bed and I would look up at the sky. You could see some stars where I lived. You could never see them in Manhattan. That was one advantage of this place, I guess.

What are you reading at the moment? he asked me. Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac, I said (I fluffed it). Bullshit, he said. Don’t tell me, he said. Charles Bukowski. William fucking Burroughs. Patti fucking Smith. Jim fucking Thompson. Hermann fucking Hesse (Bullshit von fucking Bullshit). Try this on for size, he said (and he pulled out a copy of Diary of a Madman by Gogol from his rucksack). Read the Russians, he said. And forget satire, he said. And forget metaphor, the Russians have no truck with metaphor. And forget time, they have no truck with time, either. When you read Gogol it’s neither yesterday, today or tomorrow. You ever heard John Coltrane? he asked me. I have Kind of Blue, I said (he’s on there). Bullshit, he said. You need to listen to Ascension. You need to listen to Meditations. You need to listen to Interstellar Space. You need to wake up to now, my friend. He stubbed out another cigarette. I need to get to sleep, he said. You have no idea the weight of my brain right now. I told Samantha. We have a visitor upstairs (I said).

[...] It was as if Mr. McAfee too were broadcasting from somewhere quite distant, telling about things Tim would not be sure of in the daylight: a brother who'd left home one morning during the depression and got on a freight and disappeared, later sending them this one postcard from Los Angeles, and Mr. McAfee, just a boy, deciding to follow him there the same way, only that first time he got no further than Houston; a Mexican girl he'd been with for a while, and she used to drink some stuff all the time, a word Tim couldn't make out, and she had a baby boy who'd died from a rattlesnake bite (Tim saw the snake, headed for him, and bounced up out of the dream in terror, yelling), and so one morning she'd just gone away, like his brother vanished into the same deserted morning, before the sun was even up; and nights when he would sit by himself down around the docks and look off into the black Gulf, where the lights ended, just cut off and left you this giant nothing; and gang scuffles, day after day, up and down the neighborhood streets, or fights out on the beach in the summer's harsh sun; and gigs in New York, L.A., bad gigs with tenor-sax bands it was better to forget only how do you? [...]

Everyone in Lorenzo Proietti’s generation got a digital camera for graduation. This was the height of the DIY fad, when Clerks and Il Caricatore had captured the imagination of the untalented. Lorenzo lived with his parents, his allowance 100 euros a week. A cousin at RAI got him an internship at Porta a Porta, which turned into a production assistant gig there and at Buona Domenica. These were bullshit shows for the bullshit public. Lorenzo lent a hand on the set of Boris, the comedy series/indie sensation. (He was twenty-six.) This was when you first heard the “I’m a filmmaker” line, and his version of the English word was impossible to replicate—it was affected, exaggerated, nonsensical somehow; he managed to pronounce it without an r at the end. G. won a prize from the Comune di Roma, which belatedly convinced Lorenzo, at thirty-four, to apply to the New York Film Academy. New York was brimming with the children of the Italian elite—left-wing politicians, journalists, entrepreneurs—and they were all eager to become cineastes. They were at NYU, they were all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. The two of you left for New York, determined to test the waters. Lorenzo’s philosophy grant was your excuse, but if connections were made and the vibe was right, Lorenzo would enroll at the Academy.

You come from a good family: your parents used to vote for the Communist Party; they taught you to make time for the soup kitchen on Sunday mornings, to spend late winter afternoons at nursing homes, at senior citizens’ dancing groups. But your progressivism was unanchored from theory, estranged from the Marxism you never even knew you had outgrown. What was once open-mindedness became pure exoticism: culture was for collecting. You’re only good for hailing cabs and booking flights that expand your carbon footprint. You refresh ryanair.com while—far from your eyes and farther from your heart—exhausted old ladies crouch on their knees in an industrial Chinese suburb, pulling obsolete cell phones from heaps of waste, from the sewage of techno-capitalism. You watched the Edward Burtynsky documentary that night at the Kino club, the one with the uranium mines and the nickel residue piercing the dark Ontario earth like lava, and those old Chinese ladies, hunched over piles of electric circuits…

“I’m sorry. Please, sit down.” He takes a sip of the Orange Crush through a straw. “I was just surprised to hear from you. I get…emotional when a woman enters my life like this. I start wondering if I’m ready to give her everything she needs. Take your time, tell me everything.”

Not taking into account the many waitressing jobs she had in Los Angeles while she was staying at her aunt and uncle’s when her parents were fighting too much, she worked as an intern at a casting agency (still in Los Angeles), then spent a year at a kibbutz in Israel, came back to study political science at Columbia, went back to the kibbutz, came back to Columbia for j-school. After graduating she started traveling around using her father’s money, stringing and writing wire stories she’d try to sell to the agencies. She started taking pictures while working for the wires and has now stopped writing. She has been through war, and so whenever he is with her, what Berengo thinks to himself is: “The fact that Vera is going out with me means that what she does is worthless. You can’t stare death in the eyes and then fuck me. I am the Untruth. I am Unimportance. And I’m not even your husband, in which case at least I’d understand that you needed stability to compensate for your adventurous lifestyle.” Maybe, I said to him, what she sees in you is a sense of death that’s similar to what she feels when she’s actually in the war zone. “That’s a very flattering reading,” Berengo said. “But my actual issue is: I think these photographers are posers. Their entire life is a pose. They have these conversations where they call each other bro. They look after each other. They host these beautiful dinners. There’s the one who’s great in the kitchen and the one who’s really, really terrible, and that’s just more reason to love him. You eat by candlelight. The people there always look like they just got back from a Vanity Fair party that they didn’t really care about going to or from a charity block party in Harlem. Or from Lebanon. They have the same attitude whether they’re coming back from Lebanon or the Vanity Fair party: it’s hell out there. Their conversations are uninteresting because they all say the right things. They’re intense. They pick up nice tans while they’re out taking pictures of torn-up bodies and piles of rubble. They dress well. Their coats, their shirts. They get along. Their walnut bread is delicious and homemade. And then when you’re busy hating on them, a friend suddenly calls, and you overhear the following exchange: ‘Hey, buddy, you dickless cunt,’ Vera says. She’s calling someone a faggot, then hands the phone over to another photographer who says: ‘Hey shithead, two months in the hospital doing nothing, you should be ashamed of yourself!’ All those around the table look at each other, sort of uncomfortably. Vera’s eyes well up, and she has this angry look on her face. Someone gets up to take the cheese board into the kitchen, all of this in candlelight, by the way, and someone says into the phone: ‘No, no, I’ll come over myself and stick it up your butt!’ When they hang up I find out it was a friend of theirs who lost a leg. I’m not sure where, some war zone. He’s gone through surgery over thirty times, and they even removed a flap of skin from his asshole to patch up another hole in his stomach or leg—again, I’m not sure, I didn’t totally follow. Talking to each other like that is their code, the way they show their brotherhood: they grieve, and they’re brave. And then Vera fucks me, which means her bravery is a pose. She should despise me. I mean, these people make you think that God has to be a hipster, because he allows people like that to see the truth. The affectionate gatherings, the perfect dinners, the perfectly formed sentences about how hard it is, actually, to be there on the front line, but oh the memories. The only possible escape from this is to think that if you fuck me, then maybe you’re a fraud. I mean, I’m sorry to go on about this. It’s just that they’re real people.”

He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.”

It took balls to do what he did because if he failed—and he had failed—he’d end up where he was. He hadn’t accomplished the things of which he’d dreamed, and now he couldn’t even get done the very basic things that most adults did—like pay his bills, for example (a most unpleasant form letter—and purple—was lying on his cluttered desk, somewhere, from Commonwealth Gas), or alphabetize his books. And when he tried, when he took the books off the shelves in order to put them back in alphabetical order, he became so discouraged at the impossibility of categorizing them properly that he just left them lying there, heaped upon the floor. He worked out a lot but he didn’t apply moisturizer to his skin at night, and he seldom flossed. And then there was the Google. . . . Whereas Katie, Katie was the sort of girl who, when she replied to e-mails, spliced her responses into segments, in which she answered specific points, which were set off from the margin by little arrows. This just wasn’t something Sam could do. He was always writing people back about other things.

And yet Katie seemed willing to sit there. Was she dumb?

Suck it is Danny’s favorite phrase, which he employs as a general greeting. Sometimes he inflects it as a question: Suck it? Directed at a female, it might often be appended: Suck it, sista. This is only for staff members, of course; our patrons will more likely get an egregiously enthusiastic What’s up, my brother? accompanied by a handshake/backslap combination. (If you’re one of his friends you might receive a more sincere What’s up, my fucking brother?) Egregious enthusiasm is Danny’s trademark—he can transmit his buzz and momentum to anyone at will. This is called charisma. His charisma—any charisma, I suppose—is entirely performance, yet in being never more nor less than a performer he somehow remains endearingly genuine. He might embrace a beautiful woman, kiss her on both cheeks, escort her to the bar—What do you like, sister, what do you want? Cosmo? Martini? Chardonnay? Tequila? Tongue kiss? That’s what I thought—Ethan, get my lover here a glass of Mer Soleil, thank you brother—Good to see you, love—and as soon as he spins around to answer your question mutter Dirty whore, suck it.

Almost every question must be brought to Danny, because it’s his restaurant. These people want a booth instead of a table, ask Danny. You want Friday off this week, ask Danny. The guy said his steak looked more medium than rare and he wants a different one, better check with Danny. Music’s too loud, lights are too low, the room’s too cold, tell Danny. You want to go to Silver City, ask Danny—he’s king there and she’ll fuck you for real in a back room at his word. You want tickets to the game or an eight o’clock reservation at Tei Tei, which doesn’t take eight o’clocks—Danny will work it out for you. You need a bump, ask Danny—but not until after service, he never starts till almost everybody’s out of the building.

But suddenly, there’s Macario and how many others rushing the podium. They pull out their banners: Save the I-Hotel! Fight the Eviction of Elderly Tenants! Shame on you, Simon Solomon!

At precisely 5:12 a.m. Macario speaks: Mayor Alioto and the people of San Francisco. The Great Earthquake destroyed our city. It destroyed all of Chinatown, but we Asian Americans labored to rebuild this great city. Now another kind of earthquake seeks again to destroy our communities and to replace our homes and neighborhoods with financial buildings and parking lots for the rich . . .

That’s the mayor’s Earthquake Party.

I admit. I’m surprised. Life takes that kind of turn. A clumsy kid who just listens suddenly gets some guts. Spits out the cork in his throat. Maybe Phil’s thunder in his chest makes its way out.

How many years Joe’s running the I-Hotel? Maybe not forever, and nobody knows how he starts. Gets the manager’s room with his private bath and all the keys, decides if there’s room for you at the inn, collects your money. For some, there’s always a room. For others, don’t bother. For Joe, it’s about loyalty and protection. You in his brotherhood, you stay there. Sometimes I think, who else could do this job but Joe? Think about the tramps and lowlifes coming through. Pimps and hustlers. Addicts and ex-cons. Joe might give you a slim chance, but he wants it respectable and quiet. He’s keeping the rooms for his brothers. Nobody breaks Joe’s rules. How many times I see Joe arriving at somebody’s door with his baseball bat. Guy might be naked. He’s got to run out the hotel or take his medicine. How many rules Joe’s got to break to keep this kind of peace?

Over the years, Joe’s rubbing shoulders with the guys who rise to the top. In case you forget, city’s a port. Tough guys rise from the dock to do the work of the people. Longshoremen with connections up and down the coast, up to organizing us Alaskeros. An injury to one is an injury to all. And just in case, he coaches boxing to every new generation. So when the I-Hotel gets threatened, he gets the ear of the mayor himself, old family friend. Probably taught this kid his jabs and hooks. Don’t let the mayor forget where he comes from.

The most striking of the three, but only because of his quality of charm, was Paul Blackenhurst. He was the young man I used in Frontiers of War for the character of 'gallant young pilot' full of enthusiasm and idealism. In fact he was without any sort of enthusiasm, but he gave the impression of it, because of his lively appreciation of any moral or social anomaly. His real coldness was hidden by charm, and a certain grace in everything he did. He was a tall youth, well-built, solid, yet alert and light in his movements. His face was round, his eyes very round and very blue, his skin extraordinarily white and clear, but lightly freckled over the bridge of a charming nose. He had a soft thick shock of hair always falling forward on his forehead. In the sunlight it was a full light gold, in the shade a warm golden brown. The very clear eyebrows were of the same soft glistening brightness. He confronted everyone he met with an intensely serious, politely enquiring, positively deferential bright-blue beam from his eyes, even stooping slightly in his attempt to convey his earnest appreciation. His voice, at first meeting, was a low charming deferential murmur. Very few failed to succumb to this delightful young man so full (though of course against his will) of the pathos of that uniform. It took most people a long time to discover that he was mocking them. I've seen women, and even men, when the meaning of one of his cruelly quiet drawling statements came home to them, go literally pale with the shock of it; and stare at him incredulous that such open-faced candour could go with such deliberate rudeness. [...]

I told Elena to cancel a meeting and an appointment. He spoke all morning, simply and clearly, about their relationship, about her arrest.

I am a defense attorney. I’m cynical. I am a material person, a greedy man. I told him I would take the case for nothing.

“No. Thank you,” he said. “Just please tell her that you’re doing it for no charge. But it’s my fault she got into this trouble and I want to pay for it. What will it be? Five thousand? More?”

“Two thousand,” I said.

“I know that’s too low. How about three?”

“Deal,” I said.

Siobhán was positive Jess had met him at some party or other, their wedding at the very least. As if Jess would be able to recollect all three hundred people who’d attended Siobhán and Patrick’s wedding seventeen years ago, after an entire bottle of prosecco and a mishap with the shuttle bus. As if she ever talked to anyone at those parties other than the people she already knew. That was Malcolm’s thing. He was the host of their table. He was the host of the elevator that brought everyone to the top floor. He was the host of the line that snaked its way to the buffet, cracking jokes and pumping the hands of everyone he knew and hadn’t seen in ages. [...]

Jess used to say that he wasn’t himself until he had people around, until he had other moods and personalities to react to, and he resented when she said that, as if he were incapable of self-reflection, but now he sort of knew what she meant. It wasn’t that he disliked being alone, it was more like he felt muted, not completely awake. He held a bag of ground coffee, considered whether he could rig up a percolator on the stove if he found matches to light the pilot. And then, after standing there another minute, he heard the crunch of snow under tires, as if from his dreams.

He imagined barging in, finding Bratton, throwing him through his giant picture window. He didn’t give one shit if the guy’s kids watched him do it. He had twenty people who’d vouch for him, say he’d been on their couch playing Go Fish with their families all day. And Jess. What a liar, what a—But none of the usual words felt right. And it hadn’t felt good, even in his imagination. As soon as she opened Bratton’s front door and stepped outside, he felt most of the rage evaporate, and instead he felt hollow, tired, adrift. There was his girl. She was just standing in a different house.