Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Features • Winter 2015 - Possession
I found out I was a man when I was nine years old.
Next to a small woodpile deep in the mountains of Kobe, my grandfather grasped my hand and put a centipede on my wrist.
“Take it,” he said. If I hadn’t smiled at its 100 orange legs, if I had recoiled instead, then maybe ten years later I would have been on that plane from Logan Airport, running towards his hospital. But when the bug coiled, my arm calmed, and I cupped the centipede, feeling my palm warm. I asked if it was poisonous.
“Men are not afraid of bugs,” he said.
So I shed my girlhood for ten long summers, and sat in my dorm room at the age of twenty, getting ready to take a bath, as my grandfather went on dying.
“Catch a flight immediately after your test, then. He’s stable right now.” My mother’s voice echoed on the tiles. Her piano-teacher voice. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Call me if anything changes.”
I set my phone down, and walked to the bathroom to fill the bath with water and set the temperature to scalding, boil-a-lobster hot. I sat naked on the white cold tile floor. My ass numbed as I waited. This was part of being a man, being able to stand the heat. This was part of being the eldest of five granddaughters, and being the only son. I dug my feet into the water, my toes leaping from it without my consent. Soon my feet lost feeling and I inched my thighs in, clenching both sides of the bath for their cold support. I watched my body swell, pinked, my skin crying. I lathered. Every summer after Kobe, my mother used to try to scrape the tan off my skin, to expose the warm whiteness of woman. She would sweep my rail body with its lack of fat or breasts, her hard fingers pinching my chin left and right as she scuffed my neck. I was burned, tarnished. Eventually she taught herself Photoshop and used that to bleach my skin.
My mother was the only one who never accepted my manhood. But even she did not make a sound when my grandmother wrapped up my long thick hair and snipped right under my ear with her gray pearl-handed sewing scissors until the rest of my hair was the same length as my bangs. She was looking at her stomach, her chin from that angle crumpling in unexpected elderly folds.
She left the room as my grandmother told me to join my grandfather. He was cutting wood.
***
My grandfather liked simple things. He wore the same sweat-stained baseball hat on his head for 22 years, but he married a woman who likes to cover her long, white fingers with amethysts. A single flaw mars her hands: an index finger crooked at the first joint to the right, bent permanently in the angle at which she pinches her embroidery needle.
Their house is filled with dozens of tapestries of embroidered cloth, not Bible verses or proverbs but explosions of vicious color, fierce shrimp and fields of flowers and dancing children and red Noh masks and castles in Scotland. She started one every time my grandfather left for a business trip, and he framed each one once he got back. Tens of thousands of stitches formed neat silk bandages over clean white cotton.
A few years after he resigned from his job as the vice president of a metalworking company, he started learning Korean with a female Korean tutor. A few months later, my grandmother caught him trying to sneak out of the house with the second-floor air conditioner.
That was when my grandmother accused him—for the first time—of having an affair.
“It’s summer,” he said. “Her children need it, and they don’t have the money to buy one. No one was using ours, anyway.”
“I don’t accept that,” my grandmother said.
I knew instinctively that he was innocent. My instinct was supported by more than the childish belief in the faithfulness of grandparents, stronger by far than the belief in the faithfulness of parents. The idea was that if they had lasted for 50 years in the prime of their lives, they had basically mastered the art of overcoming anything that could break them apart. I knew because he once said that the man of the family could not be weak, because others were.
***
In kabuki theatre, men who play women are called* onna gata*. *Gata* means mold, an example to follow. The delicate, settled gestures of kabuki men who play samurais’ wives, the lovelorn daughters of merchant families, or Yoshitsune’s mother are cast as the highest examples of form and motion for women to shadow. Successful kabuki actors are immortalized for their craft in “femininity,” and are often heralded as national treasures. Yet when women play men, they are called *otokoyaku*. *Yaku* means role, and connotes a kind of show. In the Takarazuka Revue—formed as an all-female counter movement to Kabuki 100 years ago—*otokoyaku* waltz on stage with four-inch heels, silver glitter eye shadow, and a seven-foot-tall feathered peacock tail harnessed to their backs. Their masculinity is an artificial interpretation, in which supposedly ideal male characteristics—constant declarations of love, chivalry, and honor—are acted out on stage. Audiences and fan groups are overwhelmingly women.
In the bath, I recall a page from a Takarazuka magazine that I used to subscribe to about a prominent Takarazuka actress. She had chain-smoked her voice to gravel from the age of fourteen, lowering it to the optimum male pitch, a feat made more impressive by the fact that she remained disgusted by smoke. She signed an agreement that detailed that when she married, or entered anything that could be taken as a sexual relationship—this included talking to anyone who was not a brother or a father in any personal or private setting—she would have to resign. She applied as an *otokoyaku*, cropped her hair, and watched Marlon Brando movies, absorbing male mannerisms. After 25 years of daily ballet training, singing lessons, and a grueling professional career on stage, she left the company to follow the musical troupe’s motto: “Takarazuka men become good wives and wise mothers.”
“At least I’m a woman,” I said one summer, following a dinner during which my grandfather had told one of his war stories. My mother was drying a kettle with my aunt and my grandmother. We had a little assembly line going on, and I was in charge of suds.
“Oh, are you one, now?” My mother took a white plate and raised it to the light. She then returned it to my basket, to wash again. “Tell me, exactly, how are you a woman?” My aunt laughed, and my cousins looked at me, washing carefully.
***
My grandfather used to go to the bathhouses with the workers from his father’s coal mine in Pyongyang and scrub their backs with soaped cloth just as roughly as they scrubbed his. He and his six younger sisters were born and raised outside of Japan as part of the colonization project in the Korean peninsula. My great-grandfather, along with ten other Japanese employees, oversaw hundreds of Korean workers, and sent coal for the war effort.
Near the company houses, there was a steam bathhouse, a tennis court, a swing set, and a makeshift baseball field. In winter he would skate on frozen rice paddies, and on his way home from the bathhouse, his wet towel would quickly harden into slabs of cloth ice. On sunny days, young Korean girls took turns swinging themselves high up into the air, their skirts flying in streaks of red. He took care not to watch.
My grandfather did not doubt that Japan would win the war. His father enlisted in the military, so my grandfather dreamed of joining the air force. Naturally, he skipped school with his friends most days to go to the aviation base, camouflaging planes with grass.
On August 15, 1945, my grandfather’s best friend told him that there was going to be a big announcement on the radio. My grandfather assumed that Japan was going to declare war on the Soviet Union. They gathered in the makeshift baseball field and stood to attention as the announcer told all citizens to rise.
At first, he did not understand the radio address. The radio waves were weak, the voice unsteady, using honorifics that were beyond his sixth-grade comprehension. The voice spoke soft and high, resembling that of his mother.
It was the voice of the emperor. He told them that the war was lost, that he had agreed to an unconditional surrender. That he was no longer god, but a man, just a man. They sat on the sand mound in the baseball field, and the swings were still, although the sun beat down on their necks. No one moved, but even the heavens were changing.
For a year, his family worked in the mines. Their belongings were taken and distributed among their former workers, or burned. They lived where they had housed the Koreans, where the red clay walls that invited the wind. The temperature dropped below -33 degrees Celsius. He carried pieces of heavy rail and lumber to the station and back in endless loops, tracing the steps and paths made by the friends who used to teach him Korean songs, laugh at his accent, and give him cigarettes while they all waited for his father to finish his turn in the bathhouse. These men now called him dirty, as he had teased them a year ago. One wore his father’s best coat.
By 1947, it was time to leave his homeland. It was past time. They had started to hear rumors of Japanese colonists killed by Soviet troops, by the Chinese, by the Koreans, all of whom were heading steadily south from the north. The Soviets were going to close the 38th parallel, and soon. His father started to make plans for the family to cross the parallel into American territory without him, before the border closed. His father would be forced to continue working in the Korean mines for a decade.
One day, my grandfather saw a blonde woman in a red dress standing with an officer on the station platform. She was tall, laughing, using her height to scan for someone in the crowd of troops. The officer’s chin dipped as he looked at her. My grandfather tried not to watch as he continued to walk on, hauling his rail to the mine where there was no color.
Each repatriate had a moment of realization that Japan had truly and irrevocably lost the war. For some, it was the radio address. For my great-grandmother, it was when she saw ashes instead of Tokyo. For my grandfather, it was seeing the blonde woman in the red dress, waiting on his station’s platform.
In the end, there was no safe way to cross the 38th parallel. My grandfather’s family and a few other Japanese families hired a boat to get to the south by sea, deciding to risk routine checks by Korean and Soviet troops who had prohibited any Japanese from crossing the border. When they got on the boat, his mother handed my grandfather the baby, his infant sister.
“Please take her,” she said. She then guided his sisters to the crates they would hide in for the five-day trip.
He carried his sister to his crate. He knew what this meant, what he had to do. What only he could do, because their father wasn’t with them anymore. When she cried. When Korean soldiers knocked on top of his crate, checking for warm bodies, listening for living sounds. He looked at his sister’s pink, cold nose pressed against his chest.
Her mouth was barely the size of his thumbs pressed together.
***
I got out of the bath and wrapped a towel slowly around my breasts. I fumbled in my dark room to my desk and took out a piece of notebook paper, folded in four, which I had stuck in my wallet. I hadn’t opened it since last summer, when my grandfather was in remission, when the steam was still curling in my hair and he had pushed a glass of orange juice towards me and told me to write down everything he said. On the paper were the names of a generation of men and women who left their childhood behind to raise a country out of ashes. And then there was me. I had finished my orange juice; my grandfather told me to go upstairs and sleep.
***
When I arrived, everyone was getting ready for the fu- neral, occupying the two rooms on the second floor of my
grandparents’ house: The women’s room and the men’s room. My room was full of strangers, except for my sister. She was looking in the mirror, tying up her hair. My sister, the daughter who knows before being told that she should divide her favorite type of cake into four, and that she should take the smallest piece.
“Why weren’t you here?” she said.
“What? I had a test, how could I know, dad told me I should stay in Boston.”
“You know he asked for you. He asked for you, he wouldn’t stop, he just sat there on the hospital bed connected to all these wires and asked why you weren’t there, kept on saying your name, like I wasn’t even there—”
My chin is almost on my chest, I feel so tired. Take it, take the centipede, its not poisonous; you just have to look at it carefully. Where did it go? You should’ve taken better care of it.
“I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I wanted to be there.”
“Try telling him that,” she said, and retied her ribbon. If only I were a girl who cried. I get up and leave the women’s room, to stand in the hallway between the two rooms. On the roof, the cicadas scream and call, and soon I am calm, but not quiet.
Features • Spring 2012
I.
In the myth of Narcissus, the boy returns to his room late at night. He has had a few drinks and is alone. At the party, a silent man followed him around and wouldn’t shake. Narcissus wonders what his famous face looks like tonight, through the sweat and smoke of the party. He opens his laptop, still logged into PhotoBooth. The webcam’s green light shocks back on. His face fills the display. It is as if the screen remembered him.
II.
Late one afternoon in January, a boy sat in my dorm room loading a movie he had brought with him. Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses flickered full-screen on my laptop.
“There’s only one good scene,” he said, like it was the best swing at the playground. Fastforward: Truffaut’s character Antoine Doinel is standing in a bathrobe in front of his mirror. He is looking at himself in the glass and spitting out the names of his two lovers and then his own name, over and over.
“Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel...”
“My film TF told me about this movie,” the boy said, pausing it. Antoine Doinel’s lips froze, pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss his mother, or his own mirrored face.
“I think I’m going to write my paper on it,” he said. “Talk about Lacan, throw in a little Rorty, mention Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror” in a footnote, and call it a day. Even has a title already—‘The Mirrored Stage.’ Get it?”
“Nice,” I said, looking at his hands, curled on the keyboard.
“I actually made my own version of this bit last night,” he laughed. “I don’t think I’m going to upload it to my YouTube account or anything, but you want to see?”
“Sure.”
He double-clicked on a file on his desktop. His background was a picture of him swimming in a lake, probably near his home in Connecticut. QuickTime opened, and the video began to play.
In the video, the boy stood shirtless in front of his computer. He looked startled at the sight of his own chest. He moved in close to the display—he must have been using PhotoBooth—and his face glowed pale. Very quickly, in a bad French accent, he began to chant “Antoine Doinel.” His eyes were very still, looking straight back out at me as he looked into the webcam. After about fifteen seconds, he backed away and began to say his own name instead.
The space where I was sitting reappeared. I imagined him saying: “Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz...”
A minute in, the image froze where the playback ended. His face became a million pixels suspended mid-moment, lips pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss—anyone. I was not sure that he ever had before. The back of my neck was slick with cold sweat. He put his real hand to it, and my real skin. We did not turn our faces from the screen.
III.
At age thirteen, I made a Xanga, then a LiveJournal. I wrote my heart out and shelved the contents online: my secret book of lowercase i’s and emoticons, my pitiable self-pity. Sometimes I even made up cool-kid tales about my digital alter ego, “julian gewirtz,” who faced problems I’d heard about on the radio or in books. No one could tell the difference. My friends commented, droll as robots. The more vivid, the better—and I admired the most exciting diarists among them, like my friend Aviva, who was in the year above me in school.
Years later, on the second day of 2009, I moved to Beijing to study Chinese. I knew no one there and was terrified to be going. Aviva was the last person I said goodbye to. After we hugged, she called back from her car, “Skype me!”
At the end of my second week in China, I was as friendless and forlorn as I’d worried I would be. Aviva and I exchanged emails about finding a time to talk. After dinner in China, just after Aviva woke up in New York, I climbed into bed with my computer and logged onto Skype. A bubble popped up on my display: Aviva’s call.I hadn’t used Skype much before. When videochatting on Skype, a large box takes up most of the screen—let’s call it the thou-box—showing the person you’ve called. A smaller box, the Ibox, shows you your own image. In this way, you can see what the other person sees in his thoubox, and your faces appear together, as if you’re in the same room. My friends had been on Skype long before I’d even heard of it.
Aviva’s voice came through sounding like a present packed with tissue-paper. “Let’s try the video?” she asked.The thou-box holding her face sputtered onto my screen. As I searched for the button to turn my webcam on, my I-box was still dark. Aviva’s face froze, and her voice went out.
“What’s going on?” she typed in the chat box.
“No clue,” I responded.
“Oy. What should we do?”
“Want to try again?”
We did. No luck.
“Another time, then?”
“Too bad. Sure. Just let me know.”
“Alright.”
“All right.”
“I thought either one was fine.”
“Maybe.”
“Bye!”
“Bye.”
I stopped typing and closed the chat box. My laptop hummed hot against my thighs. Inside the machine, its binary heart whirring, could the home I missed be processed? *Oh, one—*
* * IV.
Last month, E. was sick at home and thought up an experiment.
She set her laptop and her brother’s side by side. She opened Skype on both computers and called her brother on Skype from her computer. From his computer, she picked up. She accepted her request to video chat. Both screens glowed more brightly. In the I-box, she saw herself. In the thou-box, she saw herself. Then she turned the screens toward each other and lowered her face between them. In each I-box, a small thoubox appeared, and a smaller I-box within, and a smaller thou-box within again.
You can get lost between the screens, if you let yourself.
V.
On one Friday morning, I had a very clear story in my head when I woke up. I’m still not sure about it.
It was a Friday night, the last time we were together. The hallway at 21 South Street was very dark. No lights were turned on in the office. We sat in old wood chairs and were not speaking. My computer rested on the desk beside him, its pale plastic logo undulating. Upstairs, a few people were dancing to The Supremes. “Reflections” came on. *In the mirror of my mind, I see reflections of you and me, reflections of the way life **used to be, reflections of the love you took from **me.* It’s all in the voice.
I wondered which room was darker, down here or up there. I wondered whether having more people in a room added any light, or took any away. There were three feet of room between us, three feet of silence, and then he stood up and walked out the front door.
I didn’t move to follow. The only thing I could think to do was open my laptop. The room became much brighter. I went to Facebook, typed in his name, and looked at pictures of his face. I could not get through to it. I don’t remember what song the people upstairs danced to next.
Since that night, I have searched online for his last name so many times that those letters are working their order into my fingers. Have the small muscles in my right hand actually reorganized, rearranged to spell it out?
I have been trying to get him back from the screen, and the screen has gotten back at me.
VI.
I took my first computer class in third grade. The teacher, Mr. Peters, was about sixty, as old as Hewlett-Packard. He was deeply tanned, with a crew cut that sat unnaturally on his big head, like a too-tight silver helmet. In class, he held speed-typing competitions and showed us how to use the internet. My parents were delighted that I was getting a true twenty-first century education even in 1999.
One morning, Mr. Peters was explaining to the class the way that computer processors worked. I was bored. My gaze wandered to the bulky monitor, which we hadn’t been allowed to turn on yet, though below the desk the processor was already on. I saw my face reflected in the monitor’s dark, convex glass.
A few weeks before, Mr. Peters had given us an old computer to “dissect.” The machine was on a table in the middle of the room: the girls held back, but the boys swarmed it. We clawed at the box, ripping off the hard black plastic, tearing through the wires, pushing our fingers hard against the sharp metal shapes of the motherboard. The other boys in my class—one would not exactly call them my friends—pushed me to the side with an accidental elbow to my ribcage. I spent the rest of the period watching the action. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was no blood.
Mr. Peters was still talking. Suddenly he was pointing triumphantly in my direction. “Just like how your brain works!”
I began to blush, but the head-rush didn’t stop with my cheeks. I felt a hundred wires—red, yellow, blue—quivering inside my skull. Copper plates, cool to the touch, pressed against bone. My eyes widened, screens opening onto a world of glimmers and beautyless bits. The classroom around me, the students at their desks, even Mr. Peters, were all flickering furiously. I was surrounded by holograms.
And then it stopped. No one had noticed. My chair was hard beneath me. The monitor was still dark. I do not have a computer in my head.
VII.
When I boarded my flight to Paris, I checked my email on my phone. Rachel, one of my oldest friends, had sent me a picture she’d taken of herself, a “selfie,” with a tray of fresh-made croissants: *Self-Portrait* with Baked Goods. She was living in Paris, studying patisserie on a lark before starting at Yale. She wrote, “I’ll keep them warm until you get here!”
It was the November after we’d graduated from high school, the November of our gap year, and we were going to travel together. When I got off the Metro by Rachel’s apartment in the 4th, the sun had just crept over the horizon. A pinkish light filled the city’s bare trees, as if they were loaded with cherry blossoms. I felt tired and dirty. Few people were up yet. I noticed a woman walk past me. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and white wedges, but I couldn’t see her face. She paused quickly to fix her hair in the screen of her smartphone, then hurried on.
I dropped my bags at Rachel’s. She gave me a cold chocolate croissant and bad coffee and ran off to class. The croissant was delicious.
I spent the day around the Marais. I went to a well-lit parfumerie and dabbed a half-dozen scents on my arms. I became a waft of lemongrass, vervier, clove, drifting through the city. I ate an omelette at Café Beaubourg, next to the Pompidou. I sat out in the Place Igor Stravinsky staring at strangers—cruising or people-watching, the difference is hard to remember—but didn’t meet anyone new.
The next day, Rachel was still busy with school. I went out to Versailles for the afternoon. The sky was one white cloud. I dawdled through the perfect gardens and the empty palace. I walked through the Hall of Mirrors. It must have been more impressive when Louis XIV built it, back when mirrors were rare and marvelous, like a wall of man-made diamonds. But now? The room was very chilly, and the pale sunlight glaring on the polished floor startled my eyelids closed. Shielding my face, I walked up to one of the mirrors and gave myself a looking-over. I noticed that the skin on my left forearm was red and raised. It didn’t look good.
I hurried back to Paris. Maybe I’d been allergic to one of the colognes, had contracted a horrible skin infection in transit, had an STD, had scarlet fever. What I didn’t have in Paris was a doctor, and Rachel was at school until the evening.
I got on my laptop and searched the Internet for pictures of something that looked like whatever was breaking out on my arm. I didn’t find anything that matched, so I decided to crowdsource. I pulled out my iPhone, took a picture, and uploaded it to an online medical message board. The caption on the photograph: “Does anyone know what this is?”
The next morning, I woke up early to re-pack. Rachel and I were heading off to Vienna. I was happy to notice that the rash had disappeared. I never checked to see if my post had gotten any replies.
In Vienna, Rachel and I went to the opera and the museums. She brought her sketchbook to the vast Kunsthistorisches Museum. I left her in a room of statues.
The first time I read John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” too early in high school, I wasn’t sure whether the painting that the poem reflects on really existed. “The portrait / Is the reflection once removed.” But there it was, Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, a small, dark circle framed on the museum’s wall. The sheen of the oil paints really did make its surface look like glass. I spent a few minutes watching it.
I don’t normally like to take tourist photographs, but—perhaps because I had been rereading Ashbery—I decided to take a selfie with the Parmigianino painting. All I had with me was my iPhone. I held it in front of me, my rash-free arm crooked so that I could position the painting in the frame. I saw my face in the screen, and Parmigianino’s behind. My thumb pressed a silver button, and the shutter clicked.The picture came out passably: not too blurry, with decent lighting for a smartphone photo. A piece of my hand holding the phone intruded at the bottom of the frame, bigger than my head—I’d kept it there too long after clicking the camera button. I looked a bit confused, but that was all right. I was a bit confused. I wandered back to find Rachel.And I deleted both the photos from my iPhone. I didn’t need to look at them again.
Poetry • Spring 2010
born: drops, of water, of
sliding, of walled air
deciding *through,*
* *
*through*: the bough
bows its gem-pimpled palm:
yielding, desertion, one
gesture, a fresco, the
three lives (chaos
clear flight and chaos) speak
*nothing*; *rustle*;
*nothing*: the hand
behind’s a master’s: look,
varnish in-
-visible, doorholding
air
Features • Winter 2011 - Blueprint
It is 1923 and we are in Weimar, birthplace of the Republic.
This is a time and place of hands. Define hand: a circle with five appendages. A thing that sometimes holds pens and sometimes pulls triggers. A thing which can turn levers, move gears and belts, hold bars on trams or anchor a line of fingers. In the metropolis, hands become tools; a person becomes what he can create.
Enter the Bauhaus—tracing to “Bauhaütt,” a pre-modern guild of cathedral builders. The school planned to construct a utopia which was either spiritual or socialist, depending on whom you asked. Before its students could work toward a new reality, however, they had to learn the basic building blocks. In the Preliminary Workshop, pupils experimented with paint, textiles, glass, metal, and wood. Unlike other art schools of the era, the Bauhaus emphasized teaching theory through touch. For the first six months of tactile learning, students created nothing. No ideas, no concepts—just breaking, molding, and watching materials until their textures felt like a second skin.
Geometric structures were stripped to their essences. A painting, lines and yellow/red/blue; a chair, a leather strip and a curved metal rectangle; a house, a white cube with windows in which each verb (dine, bathe, lounge, cook, sleep) got its own room. Art was craft and craft was art. Architecture had to become as efficient and simple as a gear if it hoped to create a movement.
For the essence of an era is not contained lazily within fading relics or daydreams. Modernity does not lie with what people miss or idealize, but sprints with concrete objects, those things without a history or theory to dull their vitality. Grit, deviance, speed: modernity is what moves. To reach the masses and create something new, the artist must embrace whatever new forms people see and touch.
The Icon
Lady Gaga is not a star. A star is soaring, timeless, transcendent—the celestial body inhabits the sky and we gaze at it from below; there is great distance and great beauty. Lady Gaga wears meat and drives the Pussy Wagon and tweets, “It is a promising day when your eyelash falls in your Folgers.”
An icon has more earth to it. It is constructed by its time and place, and solidifies the intersection between the two; it condenses a movement (toward God, toward equality, toward revolution) into a form. An icon is not nebulous; we can grasp figures like Jesus or Che. And because we can grasp them, we can deconstruct them, analyzing their parts to understand the essence of an era.
Lady Gaga is an artist who knows her materials. On The Fame and The Fame Monster and through the videos, photos, tweets, websites, facebook posts, and online articles her albums have spawned, she self-consciously models herself after icons to comment on modern celebrity. Yet her work is more than a strange spectacle or a Warhol-esque imitation. Lady Gaga seizes the mundane materials of digital culture to reach the masses and, ultimately, to build toward social and political equality.
To understand how a meat-wearing Pussy-Wagon-driving twenty-four year-old woman might just change the world, however, we must first analyze those materials. She and the Haus of Gaga, her Factory, have built an addictive interactive image, and the space she inhabits—the touch screen—shapes her form.
###### Material 1. Screen name
Self-invention is nearly impossible without a good name. Though Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta had belted out countless songs at the Convent of the Sacred Heart as Adelaide in a production of Guys and Dolls, then at NYU, then at seedy Lower East Side bars, she still couldn’t get a record deal. She wasn’t classically beautiful, and she wanted to sing rock ballads on the piano. From a record company’s perspective, she just wasn’t the greatest catch. She wanted to do something new, and her Italian-American birthname wasn’t punchy enough for the image she wanted to create. So she started searching for the right combination, the one that would attract followers and ultimately define her image.
In the end it required an element of (technologically manufactured) chance. Each time she walked into the studio, Ray Fusari—her manager and boyfriend at the time—sang Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” as if the music cued her entrance: “Radio, what’s new? Radio, someone still loves you.” He sang it often enough that it became something to text about. One such conversation produced one of the more generative autocorrects in the history of T9: as Fusari tells it, “somehow ‘Radio’ got changed to ‘Lady.’ She texted me back, ‘That’s it.’ After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She’s like, ‘Don’t ever call me Stefani again.’”
And she meant it. Outside the studio, in any reality digital, visual, physical, or otherwise, she performs her invented image. When a magazine reporter called her Stefani, she sincerely replied, “But Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.”
Material 2. Screen
Lady Gaga has over one billion YouTube views. If fame can be quantified (and if this is how we quantify fame), she has more of it that any other current musician except Justin Bieber.
But Bieber’s music videos are three to four minutes long. They show a cute boy courting a cute girl in a bowling alley. Lady Gaga creates six to nine minute mini-movies, complete with opening and closing credits, that rarely relate to her lyrics and never so much as pretend to relate to reality.
Take her latest saga “Alejandro,” a dark mixture of Madonna and Cabaret filmed under a sickly green tinted lens. Gothic Queen Gaga watches her army of militant gay monks (they wear black tonsure wigs) stomp, wrestle, dance, and carry symbols. When Pageboy Gaga tries to play S&M with her soldiers, they consent and fool around a bit with straps on stark barrack beds, but they are far more interested in playing with one other. Later the video breaks from the homoerotic cabaret so that Lady Gaga can mimic two gay icons. These segments are appropriately shot in black and white: she struts about like Liza Minelli in a bell-bottom romper; wearing a leather jacket and nothing else, she stands before a cross and sings into an old mike like Madonna. At the end of the video, Nun Gaga confirms her celibate devotion to iconography by swallowing a rosary. Then, like burning celluloid, her eyes and mouth disintegrate.
Lady Gaga has said that the song is about loving gay friends and not being loved back, except as an icon. It clearly also takes pride in being different. Cute boys, cute girls, and bowling alleys are sweet to look at, but deviance fascinates. Porn, musicals, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, animated, and B-movies distill entertainment to its essence—the guilty pleasure exists a few standard deviations beyond reality. When we watch these genres, we escape our bodies and fulfill our inner, imagined selves. Though guilty pleasures always entice, they also shame us for what society considers low-brow. But we can’t stop consuming—especially when a video costs nothing to watch and is screened within the privacy of our own MacBooks.
Material 3. Constant Updates
Sometimes we need her to change her outfit twelve times in one video. Sometimes we need her to change her outfit five times at the Grammys. Sometimes, we need her to post two new tweets in one day. No matter the form, Lady Gaga continuously adds to and refreshes her unique online image.
Material 4. Access Anytime, Any Place, Anywhere
Lady Gaga always performs. Whether in a video or in a yoga studio, at her sister’s graduation or on the red carpet, she is constantly a thing to be looked at—because, as we all know, Lady Gaga wears crazy shit.
Material 5. Persona(e)
Her crazy shit is mostly sexy: she lacks containers (no pants, no shirt, no bra) and flaunts exhibitors (high heels, red lipstick, and platinum blonde or banana-yellow hair). Yet her sexiness transgresses labels like masculine, androgynous, transvestite, or feminine. She’s just Gaga, which is a hyper-sexualized bit of everything.
At times she looks burlesque (fishnets), futuristic (rotating metal circle dress), fantastical (plastic bubbles), monstrous (black latex from head to toe), cartoonish (Kermit the Frog heads) and/or bizarre (sparkly lobster headpiece). But Lady Gaga is always her image and always a pastiche (“I am what I wear”).
Material 5. Links
If you wanted to, you could describe every Lady Gaga video through its pop-culture allusions. In “Paparazzi” Lady Gaga falls into a Vertigo vortex, then returns from the hospital in a gold robot torso and forehead reminiscent of Metropolis’s Maria. In “Bad Romance,” she emerges from a white coffin labeled “Monster” in Where the Wild Things Are white latex; in order to say “I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much,” she sings, “I want your Psycho, your Vertigo schtick/Want you in my Rear Window, baby you’re sick.” Unlike other celebrities, Lady Gaga’s name is never mentioned in the press for going to rehab/jail or leaking a sex video. These celebrity scandals are performed in her videos; her art, videos, and costumes become her spectacle.
“Telephone” is her most masterful pastiche. She links Kill Bill (Pussy Wagon, women on revenge) with Thelma & Louise (two women on the run for murder) to create a plot, then sprinkles in too many proper nouns to count: Beyonce, Pulp Fiction (“Honey Bee” riffs on “Honey Bunny”), Old Glory (stars-and-stripes placemats, acrylic nails, bikini and onesie), reality television (Poison TV mimics a Food Network segment, Jai Rodriguez from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), consumer culture (diner, Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Diet-Coke can hair rollers), and product placement (Virgin Telephone and Polaroid).
Images that consist only of pop-culture references lack anchorage. Some might say Lady Gaga reaches Baudrillard’s fourth level of simulacra—an image that relates to nothing but other images. However, she not only links to other images (hypertextuality), she links those links to herself (intertextuality). “Telephone” picks up where “Paparazzi” left off. In “Telephone,” her opening band appears in the booth behind Bo, and her sister appears as her jailbird friend, and a fellow prisoner wears the diamond-shaped earbuds she sported in her “Bad Romance” bathtub and now sells on ladygaga.com. But like hypertextuality, intertextuality must avoid obnoxious narcissism or a tangled post-modern network—for the audience to truly engage, the text needs to have heart, a weight to it.
Material 6. Keyboard
Lady Gaga doesn’t just tweet about eyelashes. Her feed overflows with love for her “Little Monsters.” She tweets, “celebrate yourselves!” and, “I heart lilmonsters”; and whenever her deviant self-invented image breaks the system that favors cute boys courting cute girls in bowling alleys, it is a shared success: “Monsters have 6 Grammy nominations!”
She knows how to reach her fans. Usually the mass ignores, marginalizes, or persecutes artists who make strange things that we’re not comfortable calling art. But as of December 3, 2010, Lady Gaga has accumulated 24,164,851 Facebook page “Likes” and 7,252,432 Twitter followers. For Lady Gaga knows how to make what we see and touch—images—into a site of meaning, and deviance into a form of empowerment.
Some would say that watching is an inherently selfish act. It gives us pleasure to wonder how we would act in a fantastic scenario, to desire a flat image that can’t respond or reject and to add fences around our identity as one who belongs (to the fan-club, to the club of viewers who will now “get” a reference to that video, to the elite club who claims superior cultural clout or the authority to judge, dismiss, and/or satirize another’s work). In its crudest interpretation, solipsism is what compels people to watch. Look at the YouTube comments: thread after thread of projected pride.
But Gaga recognizes that this is a mean interpretation of her work and our culture. When someone makes a YouTube video, posts on a blog, or updates their Facebook status, she wants her inner thoughts, desires, and image to be affirmed. Even better than watching alone is finding someone else, a fellow fan or satirist, to watch with you—this takes the shame out of it. When someone else sees what we see, and makes it known through a comment or a “like,” it’s a form of contact.
If legislation, society, your school, or your parents call you deviant and tell you to be ashamed of your identity, the screen might provide the only sense of belonging that you can find. Lady Gaga does not judge, retreat from, or ignore what older generations deem the sinful, frivolous or dangerous signs of modernity. She embraces our instant digital age and non-normative identities. She pours her soul into her image until her manifest form becomes the essence of herself and ourselves and our era—Lady Gaga sees the materials, what we see and touch, and acts accordingly.
The Movement
In recent months Lady Gaga has dedicated her digital, physical, and artistic self to fight for gay rights. Born this Way, to be released in February 2011, is already lauded on BGLTSA blogs as a new gay anthem. At a recent concert, Lady Gaga sang the chorus; one fan recorded it and posted it online so all the Little Monsters could enjoy Lady Gaga belting, “I’m beautiful in my way, ’cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track, baby I was born this way.”
But Lady Gaga doesn’t just affirm self-invention, instant digital age, or non-normative identities. Because she knows how we interact, and supports and participates in our forms of interaction, she can use that interaction to effect change. On October 17 she tweeted, “We reached 1 Billion views on youtube little monsters! If we stick together we can do anything. I dub u kings and queens of youtube! Unite!” On November 30 she and other celebrities staged their online deaths (no tweets, no Facebook updates) until their fans collectively raised $1,000,000 to fight HIV/AIDS at buylife.org. By December 3 they were all “alive” again.
She fervently worked to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she spoke in Maine, she spoke in DC, she posted a video speech, she tweeted about it with Harry Reid. But she wants more than to build a new political structure. Her tweets build an image of her concerts as events that reach something close to an egalitarian utopia: “Never could I have imagined the connection we share. Hrvatska, 2nite there was no politic, no economy, no society. Just us. Monster ball.”
When millions of eyes gravitate toward a distinct image like this, it must mean that the new form is one that is necessary, a relief rather than a threat. An icon is one who is particularly adept at sensing in advance the way the tectonics are shifting, and has the courage and vision to bring the movement to the surface.
Once students knew the materials, they could begin to build. The Bauhaus believed the essence of objects—geometric forms—would free modern man from spiritual or economic oppression. And by building together, they could restructure society. As the Bauhaus Manifesto ends:
Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise toward the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Fiction • Commencement 2009
I
That night, as they did regularly on Friday evenings, James and Elizabeth made love before going to sleep.
Their bedroom, which Elizabeth had done up, was timidly, tastefully decorated. Next to the window that faced the bed hung a reproduction of a Van Gogh which Elizabeth had purchased after an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. Next to it, in silver frames, their son Adam’s grammar-school efforts were arranged vertically, and a photograph of Adam standing naked with a wiffle bat in his hand stood on James’s dresser. There was a fire place, seldom used, and an electric heater because Elizabeth was frequently cold at night. James kept a night table next to the bed, in which were birthday cards from Adam, old batteries, scraps of paper on which he sometimes wrote down his dreams (“Dad slips on the ice and I just let him fall”), and all of the other indicators a man accumulates which show what he has done and what he has failed to do.
Atop the nightstand was James’s bedside light. He switched it off. Now the room was quiet, dark, the bed inviting and warm. Wordlessly he reached his arm across under the covers, where he knew her body would be waiting for his fingers, his hands, his legs and belly and cock. For this was the baffling wing which kept their marriage aloft—the outboard motor that growled them to harbor each night when sails ripped: no matter what happened during the day, they were in one another’s arms each night with the same passion. Of course he had desired younger women—what man his age hadn’t?—and he had, it was true, sometimes fantasized about his patients. But not the way he desired Elizabeth. And now, with his hot hands cupping her breasts and his lips against the soft, cool skin of her cheek, he was reminded once again of the complexity of the whole situation. That, and how much he looked forward to the sex, complexity be damned.
Gently, skillfully, he kissed down her neck. Did he think about how her body used to be, these evenings when they lay together, a man of 66 and a woman of 55, and made love? How could he avoid remembering? And it was true: he readily made pictures in his mind of his wife’s younger body, the harder belly, firmer breasts and lighter-colored nipples, the wetness between her legs which had come sooner and more completely. Yet he forced himself to be reasonable. His own body no longer worked in the efficient, forceful way that it had when he was young. That was what happened: age set in like a hard, hard frost. You watched yourself get colder and weaker, watched your once-strong limbs wrinkle and lose their agility, were kicked and beaten like a dog, until finally, towards the end, just when you couldn’t believe it would get any worse, any less bearable, it did: and that was death. Boom. Just like that.
“Lizzie,” he said. “Have you been waiting for me to come to bed?”
“I may have been,” she said. “I may have gone to sleep if you hadn’t come in when you did.” They both laughed. All of the things that were ponderously difficult in daylight -- teasing, competing, being vulnerable -- were pure ease when they were in bed together. Sex was easy between them.
“Is that so? I guess you really make the rules around here,” he said.
“Mmmm,” she murmured, and then she took him in her hand. Rather than hurry, as they had when they were younger, James and Elizabeth made love with dilatory patience, they had learned to enjoy the details of each other’s bodies, even though, James thought, their bodies were fast becoming flabby-assed and worthless. How nice it felt to slip himself uncovered into his wife of 28 years! They made love traditionally, with Elizabeth lying on her back and he on top of her. That way, there were no decisions to be made when they went to bed. She pressed her body into his, and with her hands she worked the skin of his back. When he bent his head to lick the impression between her collarbones, he tasted salt, and he could smell his own smell, too, coming from underneath his arms, when he turned his head, and he liked it—the salt and the sweat—because, well, he wasn’t certain why. As a boy, in the schools he attended near his father’s air force bases, he would bathe himself meticulously; he was not one of the boys, even at nine or ten years old, who had to be reprimanded for failing to clean behind his ears. (In fact, he liked it—in the whirling sequence of homes and schools that had made of his boyhood an endless learning and relearning, it had been his body, his own, compact body, which had come to be consistent and familiar. Perhaps this was why, when he showered, he never deviated from his washing routine.) Elizabeth made a wonderful, whimpering sound; he spoke her name.
Sweat. The smell of it, the feeling of it. Flag football outside bases in Virginia, Colorado, the hot wind cold against his damp face as he rode his bicycle through blooming, fragrant fields in optimistic martial towns. Again he brought his lips to her throat, and again the saltiness exhilarated him. They began to crush into one another quicker and more closely, until, without warning, he felt the familiar feeling, the atavistic whorl in his belly which told him that it was about to be over. “Lizzie,” he said. Begging, ragged hat in eager hand, his body shivered against hers. It was happening, he could feel it, and he could feel her own orgasm gathering itself together like summer wind whipping at hot air. Here it came again, that knock-out sound!
As a young woman, she had come self-consciously, as though surprised by the way her body responded to his. Now she was older, the shame didn’t matter. And god, that sound, that sound. The whorl in his belly tightened, until, finally, it raveled unbearably and, just as quickly, unraveled; everything ran out of him. A moment later, Elizabeth drew her breath deep into her lungs, cried out, and fell back against the bed, her muscles loosened and her eyes closed. “Oh, baby doll,” he said.
In the bathroom afterwards, washing his face and fixing his pajamas, he felt in his hands a kind of blood-spun throb. Again they were no longer the hands of an old man, but the powerful implements of a youth, filled and animated with marvelous liquid from his old, pathetic heart.
One week later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He received a call from Adam, who sounded concerned.
“Champ!”
“Hi, Dad,” said Adam.
“So. Mom told you what’s happening? My goddamn prostate is eating me alive.”
“What are you talking about? When did you find this out?”
“I went in for a PSA last Thursday, because my cardiologist recommended it. I am sixty-six, you see, so I am at elevated risk. Now the cardiologist, having nothing to do with my prostate, did some blood work, and the PSA came back higher than it ought to be. Four days later, here I am. They’re doing another blood work-up, then I have an MRI this afternoon. Dr. Blumenthal says he should know by Wednesday morning whether it’s wise to operate. He said it doesn’t seem to have spread, so a short surgery should take care of it.”
Adam knew his father’s medical history as a cautionary tale against which doctors annually compared the workings of his own body. But in crisis his father always chose the most clinical language possible, which led Adam to feel, when James talked about his heart problems or, now, a high PSA, as though they weren’t talking about James’s body or even Adam’s but about a third, hypothetical body, which contained cholesterol plaque rather than a heart and produced seminal fluid rather than come.
“And if it has spread,” Adam said, “what then?”
“Well, then we’ll deal with that problem. It really is an easy surgery, you know. They remove the prostate in what are called ‘frozen sections,’ making biopsies as they go.” James had a deep and longstanding appreciation of advancements made by the medical profession, even though he himself had practiced psychology and knew nothing of the human anatomy. “If it hasn’t spread beyond the prostate itself, then they take it out and I survive.”
“Listen, dad, I’ll be on the next bus to Sweet Haven.”
“You will not come home for this. In two weeks, when I’m all better, Liz and I will come to Montreal, like we planned. That’s when I want to see you, and not before. What’s going on here is not really life-threatening surgery.”
“Are you sure? I would come down in a heartbeat.”
“I’m sure,” James said. His voice sounded confident, comfortable.
“I love you, dad. Can’t wait to see you in a few weeks.”
“Love you too, champ. Thank you for calling.”
James put the phone back in the breast pocket of his sport jacket, along with his money clip and his two-by-two-inch leather book of photographs. It was only six in the evening, still too early to go to the bar for a drink, and so he spent an hour rearranging furniture in the small office that he’d made for himself in the back room of his house. He switched the Matisse collage with the print of Paul Klee, then switched them back. He gave the squat Moroccan cushion a kick with the tip of his shoe, to move it further from the armchair, then sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and put his head in his hands and wept inconsolably for half an hour, brushing the tears away roughly, angrily, with the heels of his hands.
At this moment, James wanted nothing more deeply than the company of his son Adam. How truly stupid he had been on the phone a moment ago. If he died in surgery, and Adam heard of it over the phone from Elizabeth, what then? To what end would he have prevented his only son from returning to Sweet Haven to see him through departure on what might be his final journey into anesthesia? Yet if he made it through alright, and really did come to Montreal in only three weeks’ time, how proud he would feel to have exhibited such bravery and composure before his wife and son!
Inside his the closet hung a full-length mirror. Now he rose and went to it and lifted up his shirt. A thicket of black and white hairs sprung into view. He had seen the diagrams in Dr. Blumenthal’s office; he knew that four inches back from the root of his penis cells were dividing maniacally at fantastic, exponential rates. Hating his body, and frightened of it, he had the urge to reach his hand through his stomach and rip the bloody red gland out with his fist. James wondered whether every sick man felt this way about the horrible organ which was the source of his affliction, and it occurred to him that surgery was simply the realization of the desire to bite off the trapped paw, to rip out the failing liver or lung or kidney and once more be uncontaminated by disease.
Inside his desk drawer, his copy of *Anna Karenina* waited for him. He had only made it half-way through before giving up, but he remembered a particular passage which he had been wanting to consult since first hearing the diagnosis. James took it out and flipped to page 461:
He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.
This had struck James hard. He agreed with Tolstoy when he said, “His sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them,” but then he disagreed when he said, “He felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.” Wasn’t everyone hiding their wounds from everyone else? What was so goddamn unequal about it?
Even thinking rationally like this calmed him. There were other things in his office as well which took his mind off his traitorous prostate. For instance: the keys to Adam’s 26th birthday gift lay in the drawer next to Anna Karenina. A strong, beautiful stallion emblazoned the head of the silver key, and in James’s garage the red 1967 Mustang awaited its hour. He’d found it online for only $19,700 – not too bad now that Elizabeth’s restaurant was doing well. For months he’d spent afternoons with the car, redoing the paint job entirely by himself and fixing the roof and cleaning the engine. Nearly every day he considered keeping the car for himself, but a Mustang in the hands of a young man who was just starting out was a powerful thing. He wanted Adam to have it, with no strings attached, and be free.
When he came home from his walk, Elizabeth was waiting for him in the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee with two hands.
“Adam called me today,” he said. “I told him that I didn’t want him to come home.”
“I think you’re being silly,” she said, “but if that’s what you want…”
“What I’m afraid of is that when I’m in surgery they will find cancer cells on the surface,” he said. “Then I’ll wake up and hear the bad news. It sounds as though that hormone therapy is really a death sentence. He said that some people decide to do nothing, they just do ‘watchful waiting.’ There’s a euphemism if I ever heard one.”
“Either way, I will be there next to you when you wake up.”
“I think the surgery is the best thing. Radiation has too many side effects. I’m old fashioned, Liz; I said to him, ‘Let’s just go in and get it out.’”
“That’s what I would do too, honey,” she said.
“Do you want to eat something? I made a roast chicken.”
When they had eaten, and finished a bottle of wine between them, James and Elizabeth went upstairs to the bedroom. That night they made love as though it were the last time. It would really be a shame, he thought, never to feel this way again.
On Wednesday morning Elizabeth woke him up at four and drove him to the hospital. He was hungry, because the doctors had prohibited him from eating dinner on Tuesday, and he sat upright in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap, trying to keep his breathing even. What happened next he would remember only in shreds, in the feeling of the blue gown tied around his back and the look of the florescent lights above him when the anesthesiologist administered the shot. Then nothing. The operation would take four hours.
When he came to his mouth was dry, and he asked for a glass of water. Elizabeth was there, smiling. “Everything is fine,” she said. “They got it all.”
But everything was not fine. Though he may have been, as Dr. Blumenthal told him, a very lucky man, he had not escaped prostate cancer entirely unscathed. The in-surgery biopsies had revealed cancer cells dangerously close to the surface of the prostate, and the urologist had decided to remove both neurovascular bundles rather than only one, as they had discussed before the operation. James Loveland would be impotent from now on. “Both?” he said. He was still groggy from the anesthesia but his eyes sprung open and he drew a hard breath. He could barely get it out: “More water, please. Cold water, if you have it.” But he was thinking: no, no, no, no, please, no.
What is there to do in a hospital bed, such as the one in which James found himself for three days after his surgery, when you’ve turned the lights out for the night? What is there to do if you can’t sleep? If, even when you can, your terrible dream comes back, same as it was when you were a young man? James Loveland woke at 2, 3, 4, 5 a.m., furious with himself for arriving late and missing the train. It took him a moment, whenever he woke up, to remember where he was and why he was there. It took him a moment to remember that he would never know what sex was like again. What would he have done differently if he’d known that sixty-six was to be his unlucky year?
James tried to remember the women he’d slept with as a young man. The list with pitifully small, and he found it difficult to retrieve details -- particular beds, bodies, smells. He’d always assumed he would have more.
II
In November, Adam went to visit his father. It really was an incredible inconvenience; Zoe, his girlfriend, hadn’t wanted him to come.
The taxi shivered up the driveway, crunching down leaves from the oak, elm, dogwood, beech and maple. He slammed the door and shouldered his overnight bag, then walked up the curving brick path to the front door. It was after ten in the evening. He pressed the gold button. From inside its white plastic housing on the kitchen wall, the electric doorbell rang. It had been one of Adam’s first lessons in carpentry and electronics to replace, as an eight-year-old boy, the family’s old tube-and-hammer doorbell with a speaker box.
A moment later, light spilled from the old iron fixture beside the door. James always turned the outdoor light on first, in part because he liked to identify his guests before being identified himself, and in part because he mistakenly considered it a courtesy to blast them with light while the vestibule was still in darkness. Adam imagined him standing in his slippered feet on the cold blue tile of the vestibule, cinching his robe more tightly around his waist. “Coming!” he called from inside. More lights came on. “Coming.” His voice was louder now, and the deadbolt burrowed into the side of the door. Adam was determined to stay only one day. He knew that if he lingered in Sweet Have too long, he might return to Montreal and find Zoë gone. His father’s voice called again. “Adam Sidney?”
“Hi, dad.”
It opened. “Adam!” His father’s arms had some of the old strength back, Adam could feel it when they embraced. “Boy, it’s cold out here. Come inside. I’ll make you a drink.”
The house was cold, too, because James, to save money, refused to run the heat higher than was absolutely necessary for the survival of biological organisms. It seemed to Adam that a man recovering from cancer might want his house heated to a reasonable temperature in autumn, but he resolved to say nothing; it had been six years since he’d lived in Sweet Haven—it was time to let the setting on the thermostat go unremarked.
“Why don’t we visit in the kitchen,” James said. “It’s cozy in there.”
“Is mom home?”
“She’s at work. What would you like? I’m having bourbon.”
“Bourbon’s fine.”
“We have so much to talk about! Here; I know you take ice. Sit down. So, tell me what’s up.” James pronounced “what’s up” as two separate words.
“Dad. I’m sorry we didn’t have much time together in Montreal. Is everything okay? It’s only been two months since the surgery.”
His father shifted in his seat. “That long? It feels like ages ago now.”
Neither man wanted to laugh; both laughed.
“Not ages, dad, only a little while. What do the doctors say?”
“Well Blumenthal refuses to say I’m cured, you see, he says we need to wait years to be certain. But I feel fine. Everything works almost like normal. Lizzie told you about what happened, I bet.”
“Mom didn’t tell me anything.”
“Of course she didn’t,” James said. The kitchen windows were black mirrors; Adam could see himself, holding his drink, reflected above his father’s head.
“What’s wrong? Did it spread?”
“No, no, no, no. They got it all.” His father shivered underneath his robe. It was too much for Adam: “Will you please turn the heat up, dad? If you don’t turn the fucking heat on then I’m going to leave.” Then, thinking his father might be more likely to act if he could preserve his dignity, he added: “I’m really getting cold.”
James shuffled across the room and turned the dial reluctantly to the right. In the basement, the furnace gasped. Then, rather than return to the table, he busied himself with an unnecessary inspection of the thermostat while he said, “They took out both neurovascular bundles. My”—he paused, looking for words, facing away from Adam—“my evening schedule has been considerably freed up.” James looked up from the thermostat. “It may take a few minutes before we get the benefit of it,” he said. “Would you like to make a fire with me? The living room can be much cozier with a good fire going.”
“Sure. Let’s make a fire.”
“We have plenty of kindling,” said James, leading the way to the living room.
When they had it burning, they sat close to the wire screen. Adam was gratified to see that his father no longer shivered. “I’m sorry, dad,” he said.
“Me too. It’s a hell of a thing.” He repeated, more to himself than to Adam: “A hell of a thing.”
“What time will mom be home?”
“She may be out late tonight,” said James. “But hey—now that you’re warm, I have something to show you. Something to give you.” He rubbed his hands together with eagerness, got up from the couch and left the room. So his own father—the father whose genes he carried—couldn’t make love. And now his mother was out at work? At 1am? Then James’s quick, slippered steps.
“This is something I’ve been working on for a long time. I know your birthday is still two weeks away, but who knows if you’ll be home for it, so tonight’s the night.” From across the room, he tossed Adam a small black box. Adam caught it in one hand. “Open it,” he said.
It was a silver key with a stallion on the head. “Come. I’ll show you what it does.” The garage was separated from the house by a small cobblestone path, which, like the driveway, lay under leaves. “Wait here,” said James, and raised up the overhead door. A shining red Mustang—probably 1966 or ’67—crouched in the dim light. “It’s for you. Isn’t it something? I’ve been restoring it. Start it up: listen to it!”
Adam had never owned a car before. When he turned the key, it purred beautifully.
“Dad, this is incredible! I can’t believe you did this.”
James was obviously pleased. “You see?” he said. “You can go anywhere. And this way you can come and visit me anytime you want. If you want, that is. No buses, no planes—you just get in and go. It’s a beautiful drive through New Hampshire if you cut through the White Mountain pass.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Adam. “We’ll have to go out in it sometime.”
“I thought tomorrow we could take a drive.”
“Tomorrow I can’t; I really have to get back to Zoë. I only meant to come for a night, to make sure you were doing okay.”
If James was hurt, he hid it well. “Yes, go back, definitely. Another time. And by the way: when you do go back, give this to Zoë. She’ll like it.” It was a photograph of him as a baby, which he had seen a thousand times, blown up the size of a postcard. “You want me to give Zoë a photo of myself?”
“Trust me,” said James. “She’ll love it.”
“Dad, are you sure you feel well? If mom isn’t going to be around that much, maybe you should get someone to come in once in a while. To clean up and all that.”
“I’m only sixty-six years old, Adam,” James said. “I’m not dead yet. So tell me more about Zoë.”
Adam told his father. It took a long time to explain everything; at four in the morning they were still going, talking and drinking together as though they were brothers. They stayed up until Elizabeth’s car came up the drive. Then they went upstairs and said goodnight, like brothers do.
Adam knew that his lover would be there for him when he got back to Montreal.
Features • Spring 2011
The call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo than in Istanbul or Beirut. Walking through the old city—a disorder of cobbled lanes, Moorish architecture, and bazaars spilling over with hammered copper pots, communist kitsch, and bright wool Bosnian kilims—the call of the muezzin comes softly at first. A single cry drifts in from the distance, then is joined by another, and another, lapping over each other, building to an eerie harmony, a song sung in round.
Minarets scatter the skyline, rising above the corrugated tile roofs like ancient gnarled pines in a forest. The mosques in the old city date back three, four, five hundred years. The muezzins’ calls began at the oldest of these, a short walk away, across the turbid shallow waters of the River Miljacka. The Tsar’s Mosque, as it is called, is squat and unremarkable. Built in 1457, the building is as old as the city itself. It is named for Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror: the man who turned Constantinople into Istanbul and brought much of the Balkans into the expansive fold of the Ottoman Empire. Sarajevo was founded at Mehmet’s orders, to serve as the capital of his new province. This mosque was duly erected.
It was a fitting beginning for a city that overbrims with houses of worship. Long before Ellis Island and the multicultural metropolises of the 21st century, Sarajevo was among the most diverse places on the planet. For hundreds of years it was one of the few cities where one could find a Catholic cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, and an onion-domed Orthodox church together on a single street. Inside the tchotchke stands and hostel rooms you can still find the old tourism posters from the 60s and 70s that proudly proclaim Sarajevo “The Jerusalem of Europe.”
The diversity of this place is, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of history. The Balkans have always existed on the fringe of empires, as a much-fought-over domain at the center of their territorial ambitions. Through the centuries, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians, Turks, and Austro-Hungarians came, saw, conquered, and in time retreated back from whence they came. Each left echoes of their presence: some words from their language, some converts to their religion, some favorite food or drink or art form. The language—called Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian, depending on whom you ask—reflects this tradition of borrowing and lack of cultural consistency. “Tea” (*?aj*) comes from Turkish, “water” (*voda*) from Slavic, pronouns from Latin. The Balkans are the great palimpsest of history.
***
It’s hard to believe, after years of war and ethnic strife, that the name *Balkan* once evoked this kind of diversity. The name—derived from the range of mountains that run up the peninsula’s spine—has taken on an altogether different meaning in the Western lexicon, *balkanization* now signifying an injurious breakup of a whole into small, hostile parts. All complex entities, from corporations to African states, risk the fate of balkanization: *out of one, many*. A sense of spoiled potential hangs in the air here. The diversity of this place was once its selling point, a source of pride. But it also proved to be its downfall. When else has a city gone in ten years from Olympic host to war-zone? The wooded, rolling hills that cradle the city were transformed from ski runs for the world’s finest athletes into a shooting gallery for heavy artillery and Serbian snipers.
The siege of Sarajevo lasted for nearly four years, longer than any other siege in modern history, three times longer than Stalingrad. When it was all over, ten thousand people were dead and fifty thousand wounded. One in two citizens reported seeing a family member shot and one-third of the population had fled for their lives. The renowned national library was burnt to nothing but ash.
There is a famous photograph taken by Annie Leibovitz during the war. It shows a bicycle collapsed on pavement, a crescent of blood smeared against the pale ground like a stroke in Chinese calligraphy. Leibovitz flew into Sarajevo in 1993, a year into the siege. On the drive back from her meeting with the newly crowned Miss Besieged Sarajevo, a mortar crashed to earth ahead of her car. “It hit a teenage boy on a bike,” she wrote, “and ripped a big hole in his back. We put him in the car and rushed him to the hospital, but he died on the way.”
***
I didn’t see the photo until after my own visit to Sarajevo. It captured something distinct and plaintive about the place that reflected my own experience. By the time I started poking around the Balkans—fourteen years after the conflict’s end—the stains of war remained everywhere: the spray-painted warnings of mines; the disabled ordnance sold as souvenirs; the colorless blotches left by exploded shells on building fronts, like pox scars on a face.
On our last afternoon in Sarajevo, my friend Chelsea and I wandered away from the center of town. We posed for pictures on the Latin Bridge, the spot where Franz Ferdinand met his fateful end in 1914. We clambered around the old Olympic stadium, and rested with a couple of cans of beer in a strikingly green park. We later discovered that the park was a memorial and graveyard to some of the fifteen hundred children who died in the siege. Here again was this incongruity, this friction between the visible and exterior and an unnerving evil that always seemed to be lurking beneath them. The hills surrounding Sarajevo shelter the city in a cozy embrace, but during the war they made escape impossible, as their vantage enabled Serbian militia to rain death down on the city. The diversity of the Balkans is both its distinction and the root of the war that ripped Yugoslavia apart. This is what I think so many outsiders have found troubling and beguiling, fascinating and repelling about this place. This was the carrion-smell that attracted the vultures of death here in the 90s, and this is what first drew me to the Balkans.
***
I spent six weeks in the Balkans. I went to class, traveled on the weekends, became a connoisseur of Croatian brandies, and tried to fathom the place. The Balkans are the Gordian knot of geopolitics, full of divisions so subtle as to seem wholly imperceptible to the outsider. It was not until around week four that I began to get a handle on the ones between Croats and Slovenes, Macedonians and Kosovars, Stokavian and ?akavian dialects, and so on. But just at the point when I hoped coherence would set in, I only grew more confused.
As our lectures recounted the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed—the ethnic cleansing, the churches filled with people and set burning—it gradually felt less foreign and perverted. Had I assimilated the Balkan mentality? Was this normal, inevitable, unavoidable? Was it simply the sanitizing gap between experiencing atrocities and learning about them in a classroom? It wasn’t that the war existed in some distant past. My classmates from Serbia and Croatia had all been touched by it. We talked about it a bit: a father gone fighting for years, a brother wounded by snipers, sleepless nights spent huddled in bomb shelters. They seemed to accept it all so matter-of-factly. I suppose these things are different when you grow up with them.
One Monday I received a call from Matija, a friend of a friend who had offered to show me around. Matija was a man on a mission. “Plan for Thuseday,” he declared. “Take a train to Sisak. We’ll look around. It was important city. Then will drive to Petrinja. That is a city that was devastated during war. After that I’m going to Zagreb, so you’ll be co-driver. OK?” I must have dithered for a moment too long, because before I could answer he was demanding, “When can you take train?”
“Hold on, was that Tuesday or Thursday?”
“Thuseday.”
“Thuseday?”
“Yes, day after today.” He was getting impatient.
“Oh, yes, of course. I’m free at four.”
“Mm. Arrival should be in one hour. It is small station, however, it is the only station that looks like one. More or less. Until Thuseday,” he said and hung up. Nothing quite like Slavic hospitality.
The day was broiling and the train airless. When I arrived in Sisak, my clothes were soaked and plastered to my body. Matija gave me a quick tight hug and started walking. Sisak is an ugly but tidy industrial city. Smokestacks fill one end of the sky. The streets were empty, and it was silent save for the murmur of cicadas. We walked along the river. A few Roman columns stood uncomfortably between communist-era tenements. We crossed the river and walked up a hill into a neighborhood of small neat suburban houses. He gestured ahead to a house on the right, where his grandparents live. He told me that in 1995, when he was ten, fighting broke out again between Croatia and the breakaway republic of Serbian Krajina, in what now lies within the southern and eastern borders of Croatia. His mother worried that the Serbs would bomb Zagreb, so she drove them out into the country to stay with her parents until things cooled down. Gesturing to an overgrown vacant lot on the left, Matija said that during that night back in Sisak a deafening noise woke everyone up. A bomb meant for the nearby power plants had flattened the house across the street.
We went into his grandparents’ house to wait for his friend Helena. His grandmother cooed over me as she force-fed us from a seemingly limitless supply of plum dumplings. His grandfather meanwhile held forth, enumerating Croatia’s contributions to the world: the necktie, the fountain pen, the torpedo. The list went on. Helena arrived an hour later. We drove off to her hometown, Petrinja, which had seen some of the heaviest fighting in the ’95 campaign. We got out to walk around in a few places, stopping to look at an old stone fort and a 16th century battlefield, then drove up out of the city, pulled off onto a gravel road, and stopped. We were surrounded by trees. Below was an idyllic meadow, tall with grass swaying in the breeze. It all looked like something out of a Grimm fairytale. Helena told us, as Matija translated, that Serb paramilitaries marched twenty-two Croats from the town into these woods. They shot them, then buried them in a mass grave near this spot.
We drove on, stopping again by the side of the road as we neared the outskirts of town. Here there was a simple wooden crucifix in the middle of a field. Helena said that this had once been a church that had been bombed during a service. This was the exact day it had happened, nineteen years ago. She added, almost as an afterthought, that her parents had been killed inside. It was all so sober and unsentimental. She didn’t even change the tone of her voice or run her hand along the cross.
Matija and I drove back to Zagreb. He asked me to explain something that he’d been wondering about for years. Of course, I said. “I have tried and I don’t know .... Baseball,” he blurted out, “how does it work?”
Matija dropped me off at my hostel and said goodbye. I went up to my room, exhausted from the long day, and got ready for bed. I couldn’t fall asleep, and so finally I went out for a walk, bought some ice cream and brought a tall beer back to the room. Suddenly I was overwhelmed. I started to cry. It was over as soon as it started. But in a way I felt relieved. I don’t know anything about war or hardship or loss or post-traumatic stress, and I still didn’t understand the stoicism of the day, the *unfeelingness* of the entire place. This was, after all, a people which stereotype faults for volatility. I didn’t know what I had just felt. But in my confusion, tears were confirmation that feeling did still exist. The gesture reassured me, and I was thankful for it.
***
Every Yugoslav remembers May 4, 1980: the day Tito died. Though twelve years would pass before the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed under myriad internal pressures, the nation’s decline became inevitable on this day. Yugoslavia was more of an idea than a country anyway. Tito was the prime salesman of this idea. The force of Tito’s personality literally held the nation together. People recognized that he was a dictator, but he gave them a nation based upon grand ideals, a nation that was a player on the world stage, a nation that they could believe in and be proud of. Who cared if your ruler was an autocrat if you had all that? After Tito, the idea of Yugoslavia slowly lost its cachet. As people stopped believing in the idea of the nation, politicians stopped talking about the good of Yugoslavia, and started addressing their local constituencies, Serbs and Croats and Slovenes.
I saw an old Slovenian propaganda poster once in a Ljubljana museum. It showed the growth of an apple from naked limb to fruit, in five panels. The apple represented Yugoslavia and the panels were each labeled with a decade. The 1940s are a bare branch. Over the next three panels, the apple develops into a large ripe fruit. In the last panel, the 1980s, only the core is left, dangling. Slovenia—the most developed, the most homogenous, and the most “Western” of the republics—was the first to withdraw from the federation. Slovenians no longer saw any value in propping up Kosovar villagers with the fruits of their industry, so they removed themselves from the social contract that was Yugoslavia. Now, Slovenia is the only ex-Yugoslav state to have been invited into the EU.
To some extent, our sense of ourselves is always filtered through the eyes of others. Yugoslavs once took pride in their country’s complexity and untroubled diversity. But since the wars of the 90s, they have lost the self-assurance of a confident nation, of Americans, Frenchmen and Argentines. Since Yugoslavia splintered into a bloody mess, they have realized the connotation that the word *Balkan* now holds for Western ears. They are scared to death that they too will begin to think about themselves in this way. And so they tend to dismiss the war, disregard its causes. It is not consistent with their self-image, so they go to great lengths to try to disprove the negative stereotypes. They try to harbor no grudges, to remain unsentimental.
***
Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, before the strident nationalism and petty border wrangling, each republic in the federation could have been personified, with certain character traits. Imagine Yugoslavia as a family in a sitcom, with Tito as the lovable but hard-nosed father. Serbia would have been the stern athletic elder son, tough and devoted. Croatia: the elegant, pretty, popular one. Slovenia was smart, serious, maybe a little socially awkward. And Bosnia was the dysfunctional, jokey class-clown, always making ironic asides, making light of adversity in order to beat it.
The Bosnian comedy group Top Lista Nadrealista—“Surrealists’ Top Chart” in English—began producing a popular radio comedy show during the ’84 Sarajevo Olympics, consciously modeling themselves on Monty Python. As the country unraveled, they moved from radio to television, and their sketches shifted from silly fun to political burlesque. They kept on producing darkly absurdist humorous sketches through the long siege of Sarajevo. One skit constructs a farce out of the grim reality of life in a city surrounded by snipers. The actors run a relay race that involves collecting buckets of water from a well while prancing back and forth to avoid the sniper shots that ricochet around them. The lunacy of this setup is only amplified by the fact that there are actual snipers firing on them. The bullets whipping past the players are real. But the misfortunes of the 90s eventually dampened this comedic spirit. Two of the original Nadrealistas tried to resurrect the group a few years back, but the new program failed to find an audience. Sarajevo now seems a deeply melancholy place, downcast in spirit and dour in mien. Even the call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo.
Something of the old spirit still endures. If you direct your gaze downward while walking Sarajevo’s streets, you will sooner or later spot a bright red rupture blooming in the pavement. These are gashes caused by exploding shells during the siege. Rather than smooth them out and repair the damage of war, the city filled them with red resin. They are meant to commemorate the dead and transform the scars from the city’s darkest chapter into things of beauty. There are hundreds of these scattered around Sarajevo, and each is unique. Looked at with a sanguine eye, it resembles a flower. And so it is called a Sarajevo Rose.
2026