I.



There was a mist over Scotland and there was a moon in the sky. But opinions differ as to which made 75 people die. The bridge was long, the longest of its day. It spanned two miles from Dundee to Wormit across the Firth of Tay. 



In 1871 the North British Railway Act received the Royal Assent. Government funds were lavishly spent. Within the year the Tay Bridge’s foundation stone was laid. However, to the depth of the central waters, little attention was paid. The bedrocks descended too deeply to support the originally planned piers. As a result, project completion was postponed seven years.



The architect was Thomas Bouch, of English descent. He revised his plans to great extent. The piers were set deeper and spaced more widely apart. The superstructure girder spans were thus longer than envisioned at the project’s start. But Bouch pressed on, getting his revisions approved by the Board of Trade. And so the first fatal error was made.



 



 



II.



William Topaz McGonagall was the town of Dundee’s most ardent supporter. But his time there was not without turmoil, often spent flirting with Edinburgh’s border. His father, quietly Irish, was an heirloom weaver. McGonagall soon caught his father’s occupational fever. The job was short-lived, as Scotland traded in its craftsmen for the Industrial Revolution. The transition was only the businessman’s solution. 



McGonagall, tasked with feeding a wife and seven children, still longed to weave. In the year of 1877, a revelation from within he received. He reported a “strange kind of feeling” that lasted precisely five minutes long. He knew then and there that to be anything but a poet would be existentially wrong. On the spot he sat down and wrote his foundational poetic feat, “An Address to the Rev. George Gilfillan,” an ordained pastor and poet in Dundee. The first of over 200 obscure works by McGonagall it would be. 



For one poem in particular, “Tay Bridge Disaster,” McGonagall is known. Its opening verse shall be presently shown.



*Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!*



*Alas! I am very sorry to say*



*That ninety lives have been taken away*



*On the last Sabbath day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



 



III.



The last Sabbath day of 1879 was December 28. Many onlookers that evening reported forewarnings of the bridge’s impending fate. At a quarter past six a northbound train crossed the bridge, sending sparks in the air as the wheels grated against the railing. But few suspected the bridge would soon be failing. To be sure, there had been worries of structural flaws. Many passengers experienced unstable transport, though of unknown cause. 



But Bouch was the most respected architect of his day. If he spoke with confidence then there was nothing left to say. Indeed, immediately following the completion of the bridge, Bouch was knighted by the British crown. Queen Victoria ensured he was of great renown. So when the next train passed through Dundee on the last Sabbath day of 1879, none feared the worst. Not even Bouch, who in structural integrity was so well-versed. 



 



IV.



McGonagall declared 90 lives had been lost that night. In fact, the train had carried only 75 passengers, but he used poetic license, as well he might. And there was no doubting the burgeoning poet’s genuine dismay. Only one year prior to his masterpiece, he had penned an ode to the bridge titled “The Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay.” To McGonagall, the bridge was the pride of Dundee. He rhymed with this much in mind in his poetry. 



To the rest of the town, McGonagall was a landmark in his own regard. His talents extended beyond that of a bard. Before his five-minute poetic revelation struck, McGonagall toiled in the works of Shakespeare. And so a theatrical homage he determined to engineer. Rehearsing “Macbeth” with fervor, he auditioned for the title role at the local theatre space. The producer offered to give him the role if McGonagall paid “a large sum,” a proposition the newly minted actor chose to embrace. On opening night, the theatre filled with friends of McGonagall who were prepared to witness a train wreck. McGonagall made the performance worth his paycheck. Upon the utterance of his first line, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” the crowd erupted into a standing ovation. With welcomed interruption he proceeded in his oration. In the final scene, sensing that the actor playing Macduff was jealous of his reception, McGonagall refused to die. The sword fight lasted for many minutes as MacDuff’s would-be lethal blows all seemed to go awry. At last, the actor burst into a rage and cried out, “Fool! Why don’t you fall?” It simply took a certain strand of Macbeth to have such gall.



But there would be darker days ahead. Days when he would memorialize the dead.



 



*’Twas about seven o’clock at night,*



*And the wind it blew with all its might,*



*And the rain came pouring down,*



*And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,*



*And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-*



*“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”*



 



V.



The weather was unkind on that last Sabbath day. A westerly gale chose to blow across the Tay. Winds blew often and winds blew strong. But that day, the wind blew particularly long. Joints in the bracing bars protecting the rail chattered. Stress on the bolt holes led to cracks and fatigue from being endlessly battered. Many times the rail had supported trains upwards of a hundred tons, filled with coal and stone. But though the structural piers when blown by wind would sway, the continued loosening of the joints went unknown. The six o’clock train, destabilized by both wind and loosened joints, caused the rail’s safety tie bars to break. But in the dark of night there was no damage to visually intake. 



 



VI.



McGonagall’s rise was swift. He knew he needed to share his gift. He quickly determined the obvious path to the top of the poetic scene. And so he set out to impress the Queen. From Dundee to Balmoral, 60 miles he walked. Despite walking straight into a thunderstorm and then a mountain, he never balked. Soaked and starving, “I am the Queen’s Poet,” he told the palace guard, and for a response proceeded to wait. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the Queen’s Poet,” the guard said, irate. Poet laureate he was not meant to be. He turned around and walked back to Dundee.



 



*When the train left Edinburgh*



*The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,*



*But Boreas blew a terrific gale,*



*Which made their hearts for to quail,*



*And many of the passengers with fear did say-*



*“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”*



*But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,*



*Boreas he did loud and angry bray,*



*And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay*



*On the last Sabbath day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



* *



VII.



Boreas blew winds at an estimated force of 10 or 11 on the Beaufort scale. For comparison, 12 is a hurricane and nine a strong gale. With the already weakened joints, a slight misalignment in the tracks would cause increasingly severe wind-induced oscillation. Defective cast iron lugs created a situation prone to devastation. Observers marveled at the sight off of Dundee’s coast. The bridge’s high girders wobbled the most.



 



VIII.



McGonagall lived in a world unlike today’s, in that it was in a different century. It was equally easy for a poet to wind up in debtor’s penitentiary. Making a living on poetry was no simple task. Few would ask to buy his works, even those he would ask. He still took to the streets daily, selling copies of his poems to passerby. He resolved to rake in pennies or at least try. And try he did, with notable success. Not in selling his poems, but in getting friends to bail him out in times of distress. It was with said friends’ donations he published “Poetic Gems” in 1890, his first collection. Critics hailed it as a beacon of imperfection. 



The book brought him great publicity. Dundee viewed him as a unique voice with unparalleled authenticity. Soon he performed his poems nightly in taverns and bars. The gigs were not without harm, and he came away with many battle scars. He was often at odds with his audience, due to his staunch opinion that none should drink. Not highly of this opinion did the bar patrons think. McGonagall’s view on publicans was grim. As he often pointed out, a publican was the first person to throw a plate of peas at him. 



 



*So the train sped on with all its might,*



*And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,*



*And the passengers’ hearts felt light,*



*Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,*



*With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,*



*And wish them all a happy New Year.*



*So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,*



*Until it was about midway,*



*Then the central girders with a crash gave way,*



*And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!*



*The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,*



*Because ninety lives had been taken away,*



*On the last Sabbath day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



* *



IX.



At 7:13 in the evening eyewitnesses saw the train reach the south end of the bridge with unease. Sparks flew as the cars shook in the unusual breeze. Seven minutes later, a markedly forceful gale on shore was felt. In the train, each passenger was decades away from being offered a seatbelt. The train wobbled and wobbled, then wobbled too much. Off the tracks went the train at the Storm Fiend’s touch. The central high girders collapsed one by one. Into the Tay went the train, and 75 lives were done. 



 



X.



McGonagall was soon in financial straights once more. Maintaining a standard of living was quite the chore. So he took to the circus, as any performer would do. And at him, spoiled foods the audience threw. But McGonagall put up with the chaos, returning home each night with 15 shillings for pay. There was profit yet to be had from the tale of the Bridge of Tay. 



Until, at least, the circus became so popular and crazed that Dundee officials decided to shut it down. McGonagall promptly put on his poetic frown. But his poems in protest did not shake the law. His relations with the city would never quite thaw. He became mocked in public and hassled in streets. Few cared to buy his poem sheets. By 1893, he threatened that if treated so poorly, he would leave Dundee. It became a town joke that he would surely stay another year once he realized “Dundee” rhymed with “1893.”



For one reason or another, McGonagall left in 1894. Dundee saw little of their poetic pride anymore. 



 



*As soon as the catastrophe came to be known*



*The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,*



*And the cry rang out all o’er the town,*



*Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,*



*And a passenger train from Edinburgh,*



*Which fill’d all the people’s hearts with sorrow,*



*And made them for to turn pale,*



*Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell *



*the tale*



*How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath *



*day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



 



XI. 



The fallout fell quickly. Blame was layered on the architect Bouch damningly thickly. The Tay was poorly built, the press declared. To think not a single life had been spared. Vehemently Bouch did protest. Had it not been for the wind, he claimed, those 75 lives in peace would not rest. Surely the train had been blown off its track. And this was the train that broke the camel’s back. The Court of Inquiry did not agree. Eye to eye the Court and Bouch could not see. The Court announced the bridge “badly designed, badly constructed and badly maintained.” In the public’s opinion, Bouch’s fault was ingrained. A bridge he was building at Montrose was promptly demolished. His reputation could never again be polished. He grew sick and weary in his public flogging’s stead. Within months he was dead.



 



XII.



McGonagall, meanwhile, at last received the royal treatment he desired. According to a letter surreptitiously delivered one otherwise uneventful day, by King Thibaw of Burma his poems were admired. As the letter declared, McGonagall had been knighted. Now known as “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma,” all past wrongs had been righted. Pleased with his legacy, there was little left for the Knight of the White Elephant to do. And so McGonagall died without a penny to his name in 1902. 



Today he is known popularly as the worst poet of all time. Reasons cited are his total ignorance of meter, his obscure wandering content, his misaligned metaphors, his abrupt moralistic endings and (perhaps) his simpleton rhyme. But some are suspicious of this master of poor verse. They think the bad bard could have been much worse. Some believe his works and public shows were in fact brilliant displays of early performance art. Much like the cause of the felling of the Tay Bridge, we may never know the degree to which he was smart. 



But there is no need to quarrel over problems like those. There is only the problem of more of his prose.



 



*It must have been an awful sight,*



*To witness in the dusky moonlight,*



*While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,*



*Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,*



*Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,*



*I must now conclude my lay*



*By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,*



*That your central girders would not have given way,*



*At least many sensible men do say,*



*Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,*



*At least many sensible men confesses,*



*For the stronger we our houses do build,*



*The less chance we have of being killed.*

On the first day, I told Shadman that his true love left the house every morning at seven thirty three in order to empty the garbage.  She stepped gingerly over the double layer of bricks that separated the pavement from her family’s garden, in whose corner there was a trash can where she deposited the remains from last night’s meal.  Usually the plastic Key Food bag would leak grease at the bottom and have noodles hanging off the over-stretched handles.  At seven thirty seven she’d be outside again in order to lock the door and run around to the front of the house to catch the seven thirty nine bus which carried her to Kings Highway and, I presume, beyond, but I didn’t tell that part to Shadman because it wasn’t part of our promise.



In school everybody called Shadman “Brown Bear” for all the obvious reasons.  The promise I had with Shadman was for me to tell him one thing about his true love each day while we sat in my backyard doing whatever it was we always did.  We were ten then when we started it, but this game went on for a long time.  Shadman couldn’t find out about his true love himself of course because he lived 15 blocks east, closer to Flatbush, and she took a bus to school, far away.  But she was my next-door neighbor.



The first time we saw her together was the second time I had seen her, and she was long legged and dark haired enough to make us both turn the corner and hide in the bushes while she was still three houses down.  As she approached we furiously elbowed each other silent, thrashing leaves into each other’s eyes.  I got a thorn stuck in my pinky.  When she walked by, head turning neither to the right nor to the left, a scent of crushed wildberries overcame us, and her hair was dark like Shadman’s mother’s, and straight like lines drawn in glass. 



The second thing I told him was that his true love was a girl.  When I had started saying this, prefaced by the statement that I was going to say the second thing about his true love, Shadman’s eyes had gone wide like he was about to hear the Word or the announcement of Lebron James’s signing with the Knicks.  When he processed what I’d said his eyes got narrow and he hit me hard in the shins with a whiffle ball bat that I’d made heavy with many-colored duct tape.  I got angry and instead of telling him about the intricacies of her skin I said that her father wore a button down shirt to work. 



 



I saw her father leave for work every morning—he drove.  He came out of the house by the front door, suitcase and tie flying, throwing the papers he was always clutching to his chest into his car through the back window.  Shadman’s true love always waved goodbye to her father from the front door.  Then she would gather her books for the long trip to wherever school was hers.  Sometimes she would peek her head out the doorframe to eyefollow his vanishing car under the trees and I imagined that she could see me, peeking through the curtains, but of course she never did. Then she’d go take out the garbage. 



The third thing I told Shadman was that once, her glasses had fallen off when she went to push her hair back.  I told him that when she grinned, the edges of her cheeks went up towards the corners of her eyes, and her eyelashes bounced up and down.  I said that she wore a blue bracelet on her right wrist.  Number six was that when she was in the shower, she sang “Stitched Up,” the John Mayer song.  It was hard for her to keep her voice low and raspy like his, and I imagined her cupping a hand over her mouth to hit the low octaves.  Seven turned into a field trip, as I showed him the corner where she got on the bus every morning.  This was the same corner that was home to the foul pole of mine and Shadman’s home run derbies.  For the eighth thing that I told Shadman I said that she was Asian, and he scoffed at me and said he already knew that.



Before I told him the ninth or tenth thing I asked him if he realized that I got the idea for this whole charade from a movie, one of my favorites, in which a shrimpy circus owner tells the actor who plays Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars that he’ll tell him one thing about the girl of his dreams every day as long as Obi Wan repays him in constant servitude.  The things that he told him went like this:



 



“She like roses!”



Then Obi Wan would say,



“Roses!”



And repeat the word,



“Roses!”



while he raked the hay, or cleaned the elephants—“She like roses!”—or stood in the middle of a spherical cage yawning with the whine of high speed motorcycles.  In the end the circus owner turns into a wolf, or a bear, or something heavyhaired like that, and relents.  It’s a fairy tale ending of course.  He tells Obi Wan all about Obi Wan’s true love, and then the story goes on from there, and Obi Wan brings his true love roses and eventually he goes to war and fights Commies and Siamese twins and all that, but at the end he sees his true love again.



Shadman said,



“Right, but what’s the ninth thing?”



“She’s a lefty.”



“Not good enough.”



“She only has four toes.”



“No way you could know that.”



“She has a boyfriend named Athens.”



He pushed me and I fell backwards and my head hit the pole of the basketball hoop.  It was one of those bumps where a piece of my head swelled into a lump immediately.  I bit my teeth together so hard they went into the wrong grooves and I swung at him from the floor.  I missed.



“Don’t say that,” he said, pointing an angry finger at me.  “You’re making that up.”







The very first time I had seen her I had not been with Shadman and she had been moving in with her parents.  Their moving truck was big and purple and said, “We Bump Less” on the bumper.  She hopped out of the cab and stumbled a bit over the sidewalk, but caught herself before tripping.  She saw that I had noticed and grinned at me, her cheeks collapsing into her eyecorners.  My father went up to her father and said, “Hi,” drawing out the ending, as if it meant more than two letters.  My mother shook hands awkwardly with her mother which was awkward because my mother hugged everyone.  My father had on his Firehouse 92, “The Nut House!” t-shirt which he wore every Saturday, and the faded jeans that he put on after one o’clock. 



Shadman’s true love’s father wore a nice watch and smiled nicely, I thought, and he introduced himself and his petite wife.



“And this,” he said, turning to true love who came hopping up beside him, “is Lily.”



Lily!



 



The first time I talked to Lily it was snowing out, even though it was only November.  It was the type of snowfall where the best snowball packing snow was on the car windshields.  Shadman and I would have snowball fights with the windshield snow, and when you walked down the street you could see angelfingers on the glass over the dashboards where we had gathered the stuff into clumps and tossed it. 



I was shoveling my front stoop, waiting for Shadman’s mom to drop him off, when Lily got off the bus at the bus stop on the other side of the street.  It was one of those days when the street looked only half as wide as it normally did, because the snow was piled up on both sides, and the middle was merrily white, and there wasn’t much slush going black from the smog.  It felt like a snowday even though it was the weekend.



Lily saw me from across the street and she smiled at me.  She waved.  She bent down and her hands were fumbling in the snowdrift and I noticed that the buttons on her jacket were robin-blue.



She was walking towards me with one hand behind her back, and I didn’t see the snowball sticking to her mittens until she was five feet away.  When she threw it at me I was too surprised to avoid it, but when she laughed at the kaleidoscope it made on my chest I laughed too, and got her back with a nice firmly packed one right to the thigh. 



She laughed while she brushed it off.



“You’ve done a nice job shoveling here,” she said.



“It’s not a big deal,” I said.  “I can do yours too if you want.”



“No, no, that’s my job.”



“That’s what my dad tells me too!”



She smiled and didn’t answer, so I said, “I like your buttons.”



She looked down.  “The blue ones?” she asked.



I nodded. 



“Me too.  Blue is my favorite color.”



I said that was cool, I liked blue too.  Also that it would really not be a big deal at all for me to shovel her front.  But she said no, no, that was her chore, and actually she’d better get to it.  I said well I’ll see you out here.  She said it’s a date.



 



Shadman has a round face and there’re stretch marks on the sides of his belly where the fat came dripping off when he started to play in the community soccer league.  He had always been rolypoly before but now he was skinny and baggy, the folds of his skin like the loose jeans our friends would wear to school, the type that falls down without a belt. 



Shadman loved soccer, particularly the way they served donuts on the sidelines during halftime.  His mother, who was only adoptively American, would pack sandwiches for him stuffed with rice and barley and pieces of chicken, enclosed in thick rolls of hot bread.  These would be packaged like sausage links and wrapped in tin foil, and when Shadman’s mother handed them to him at halftime they would tend to be greasy with kitchen oil. 



Usually I ate them.  I could afford to because I played goalie most of the time and stood just outside the net waiting for something to happen.  My goalie gloves were always greasy from reaching into my pockets and eating bits of the chicken.  Once, Shadman tripped in front of the box—he played defense—and the other team’s forward went right past him, just me and him and the ball.  I had my right hand stuck in my pocket fingering for the last bit of rice.  I almost blocked the shot with my left hand but the ball spun off behind me into the net.  The kid threw his hands up and started running downfield. 



“Sorry man,” Shadman said.  I flipped him off and spit in the grass, rubbed it out with my shoe.  I looked behind me instinctively to make sure that Lily wasn’t watching.  Sometimes she went for a walk around the park and she’d stop for a second at the soccer games.  I’d wave from the left goalpost.  She’d stop at the midfield out-of-bounds line where all the parents sat, and say hi to Mom and Dad.  Once I asked Dad what she says to them and he said “Tuh,” and shook his head towards Mom.



“We talk about great films, Johnny,” he said and rolled his eyes. 



Then she’d walk back towards home.  I began to notice the way that the back of her neck curved into her shoulders.







When I get angry at Shadman he knows it.  There were often times soon after we’d met Lily when I’d be playing in his backyard and for one reason or another we’d be in a raging fight, and his mother would have to come around, straighten the hair out of her eyes, and yell at us sharply.  How old are you, really?  She’d bring us back inside and make me sit in one corner in a wicker chair while Shadman sat in the opposite corner.  At first we stared over each other’s heads but then we just looked down at our hands.  I’d trace patterns in the bamboo platform between my legs.  Eventually he’d start to fake-dance in his chair, swinging his hips back and forth, humming pop tunes.  Then he’d do the trick with his fingers that makes it look like his thumb is torn in two.  When I kept ignoring him, he’d whisper, so his Mom couldn’t hear, “but I wanted to be head architect of the fort.”



“You were head architect last time!”



“You promised that I could be for two times in a row.”



“You hit me in the neck when we played whiffleball.”  



“You could’ve jumped out of the way, stupid.”



Shadman’s mom walked back in and I flicked my nails against my thumb.  He rolled his eyes when she wasn’t looking.  I wanted to laugh but I didn’t, I kept my mouth tight.



“Tell me the one thing,” he said.



I ignored him.



Shadman leaned forward and whispered, “Tell me!”



So I leaned back and traced my initials into the wicker patterns.  I said,



“But then I get to be head architect.”



He nodded hungrily.



“So her favorite color is red.”



He jumped up and shouted.



“Red!  Red!  She loves red,” he said.



 



Sometimes, when it’s sunny out, I like to sit at the window after school and watch Lily while she sits outside on her porch, reading.  Mom walks by and says, you still like watching for Dad?  I say yup, and she puts her hand on the back of my neck.  Lily is curled around her book and I can see the way her hair falls, and how many pages she reads a minute.  Some other things I like now that I’m older: soccer, ESPN magazine, knowing the exact number of steps in every stairwell of my junior high.  I thought about writing a poem to Lily for English class but it didn’t work.  I wrote about Shadman instead, and my mom read it and showed it to Shadman’s mom, but I made them promise they wouldn’t show Shadman. 



The poem was about hanging out in Shadman’s room and the posters on his walls.  It wasn’t about any time in particular, exactly, but when I read it over it reminded me of the new game we’d play in his room, now that I’d stopped telling him new things, because I said he knew pretty much everything that I did at this point.  So we entertained ourselves, while playing videogames, by repeating old numbers.



“Four,” he’d say. 



“The blue bracelet.”



“Six.”



“The thing that you hit me for.”



“Seventy-seven.”



“Her hair looks blueish when it’s sunny out.”



“I told you that one.  And I thought that was fifteen?”



“Maybe.”



Shadman jumped up and eased a piece of paper out of one of the hardcover books on the table.  He took a pen from his pocket.  He’d begun to carry pens in his pocket.



“We should write these down,” he said. 



I watched him carefully fold the paper at the top, and above the fold write in neat letters, List.  Underneath he put the numbers from one to thirty-seven.  This was taking forever.  Then as an afterthought he came back to the heading and wrote, underneath it, What We Know About The Girl That Lives Next Door To Johnny.



“Yo, this is a bad idea,” I said.



Shadman kept writing numbers.  38, 39.



“What if she finds it?”



His 40 was loopy at the corners.



“Shadman, that’d be so weird!”



He looked at me, surprised, and said, “We have to tell her about it eventually.”



I asked what he meant.



“You know, she’ll eat it up.  Two guys writing things about how great she is without her knowing.  We’ll show her the highlights.  The top ten.  She’ll think it’s really cute and then I can take her to the movies by myself.”



I grabbed the paper from him and ripped it into shreds, threw the shreds at him so they kaleidoscoped on his chest.  After Shadman’s mother came up to ask what the hell was going on we stopped shoving.  I went and sat in one corner looking at the computer desk and he took up the opposite one and hit Start on the video games.  For a while Shadman’s mom stood in the doorway, pushing the straight hair away from her eyes. 



 



A couple of days ago we talked to Lily for the first time together, on the bus coming home from school.  It was cold out so we hadn’t wanted to walk.  We were in the back sharing Shadman’s iPod when his eyes lit up and he nodded towards the front. 



He jumped up and started swinging towards her, switching hands from one hand-hold to the next.  Halfway there he turned back to me and mouthed come on, like I was crazy to be waiting, but I rolled my eyes and leaned back.



He stepped on an old lady’s shoe and said sorry, then squeezed past a baby carriage.  When he reached her, her back was towards him, so he tapped her on the shoulder.  She had earphones in.  She took them out.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying.  At one point she put her hand on his arm, right above the wrist, and laughed.  She nodded a couple of times up and down and widened her eyes.  She shifted her weight to her right leg.  She waved at Shadman when he waved at her, right before he turned around and started walking back to me.



“Did you see?”



I handed him back his iPod.  “Sure.”



“She was everything you said she was.”



“Right, obviously.”



“And,” he said.  He paused.  “Well, I’ll tell you later.”



We sat there. 



“What,” I said.



He lowered his voice.  “She said we had a date.”



He looked back towards the front where she stood.  He asked, “should I bring flowers?”



 



The thing about Lily was that she was an away-from-school girl.  None of the girls in me and Shadman’s class were like her.  They were pushy, taller than we were, always pointing and laughing when we stood up to go to the bathroom or whatever.  I always had to step over the legs of Sophia, the worst one, to get to the door, and she always wore tight jeans that were lighter at the bottom than the top, and she would refuse to move her legs even a little bit.  I’d accidentally brush up against her and she’d make that “tuh!” sound, point her thumb at me like check this guy out, and when I said sorry she rolled her eyes or turned to giggle with her friends on either side.



Lily wasn’t like that.  When she sat outside reading she always had sweatpants on that bunched up around her waist.  If she saw me I imagined she would pat the chair next to her and say to come sit.  She’d show me the book cover and read me the first few lines from page 77, and I’d nod as if I didn’t know them already, know that the first words were *That afternoon*, and that the page ended with *and later, following along, Jackson paused a minute and set down his sword beside the heavy wrought iron gates.  He watched while the peasants brought the wheat and barley up to the*



 



I had fitful thoughts about the two of them for days.  Us living in the same house together, I don’t know why, in bunkbeds, me on the bottom and the two of them on the top, his leg hanging over the edge.  I took our soccer pictures off the fridge. 



School was a mess.  I’d turn to look at him right before the bell would ring for passing and he’d always have this look on his face, smug. 



“What?” he’d say, and smirk.



At home he came over like always, to play in the backyard.  We’d recently gotten a ping pong table that was in the garage.  We stood out there at opposite ends of the table with the radio on.  I had bloody ideas.  First I would throw my paddle at his face.  He would duck and it would hit the Styrofoam boxes of Christmas ornaments behind him.  I would flip the table over on its end.  He’d be stuck between the old wooden ladder alongside the wall and the bikes that would fall in a heap.  Then I’d start throwing things at him, baseballs, bats, more paddles, the old stereo.  When he was lying on the floor with the inside of his elbow over his eye I’d jump over the table, stand over him, hit him in the side of the neck.  I’d pick him up and throw him down so the ping pong table would start warping on one end. 



“Have you seen Lily?” I asked him.



He nodded.  “Yeah it was fun.”



“What was?”



“You know.”



I was throwing the things back in the garage and they were landing with loud noises.  Shadman looked a little jumpy.  I think he was afraid of me.



By the time everything was back in his mom came.  As usual, she rang the bell in the front, and we could hear her and my mom talking even though the windows were closed.



“Shadman!” she called.  He got up. 



“Later man,” he said.



I stayed outside and practiced my soccer kicks. 



 



The repetition of it was beginning to bow the red fence.  It was about to be dinnertime when Lily walked by.  She didn’t see me at first, and she turned around behind her to beckon towards somebody out of sight.  I kicked the ball against the fence.  It ricocheted against the chain link and she looked up. 



“Johnny!” she said.  I opened the gate to come out.  There was a short guy standing behind her, wearing a Yankees cap and carrying Lily’s bag.  She turned to the guy.



“Amir, this is my next door neighbor Johnny.”



He said hi.  He leaned forward with his hand stuck out.  I thought he was going to slap me five, but he wanted a handshake.  Our fingers fumbled.  



“How was school?” she asked.



“Not bad, not bad.”



“Ready for break?”



“Yeah it’ll be nice.”



“I know same.”



Amir grinned at me.  “You play soccer?”  he asked.  I told him a bit. 



“Cool,” he said.  His fingers reached for hers.



“How’s your friend?”  she asked.  She laughed.  “Shadman.”



“Yeah,” I said, “He’s ok.  Just left actually.”



She turned to look at Amir, who stared at her blankly.  He mouthed the word *Shadman*.  She pointed towards our little patch of garden, with the gnarled berry tree whose trunk was weathered like an old man’s face, the flowers trampled from soccer balls, the basil growing up against the fence, the bits of trash stuck in the crumpled leaves.  She pointed at the flowers.  His eyes widened and he started laughing.  She started nudging him towards her door.  He put a hand up to say goodbye.



“Anyway, we better get going,” Lily said.  She was laughing.  She touched my shoulder.  “See you soon.”



“Hey nice to meet you man,” said Amir.  He kept giggling.



“Yeah same.”







I think the very last thing I told Shadman about his true love was that it was her job to shovel the walk in front of her house when it snowed.  This satisfied him and he reminded me of it every time we went shoveling together.  Neither of us saw Lily much any more.  He’d two-hand force his shovel into a particularly deep snowdrift, lean on it, take off his Knicks beanie to wipe his forehead and say,



“I bet she’s doing this right now.”



I’d *tuh* and say, “Yeah.”



We shoveled for money unless the people were old, then Mom forbade us to ask for it but we did let them know that yes, we were hungry.  This year we shoveled an entire driveway for what felt like hours, and at the end the guy gave us four crisp twenties, and said get yourself something nice.  But the shoveling had been so long and so hard.  It was like shoveling an entire soccer field.  It was just Shadman and me by ourselves for a long time.  It wasn’t snowing any more.  I made the same motions over and over again.  I was sweating and grunting and tossing snow left and right like an animal.  Towards the very end I didn’t feel human at all, and I couldn’t think how I was related to someone like Shadman, or the guy paying us, or anybody else.  I felt like a bear, transformed, all sweaty and hairy in my nylon jacket, my arms and legs too long with tiredness, sweat spots appearing on my clothes.  I kept tripping over my shovel.  We kept working and I got more and more uncomfortable, my back sticking to my turtleneck, my blood going like mad. 



Walking home we dragged our shovels behind us.

It wasn’t until about the fourth time that I drove back from New England to the Philadelphia suburb where I grew up that I began to notice the thickening light. It’s a subtle phenomenon. The visual recalibration doesn’t really kick in for sure until I’m past New York City, driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, and watching pine trees rush by on either side of the car. In Boston, the sunlight is pure and thin, and in the late afternoons it comes slanting in at a low wintry angle and turns white steeples the color of cantaloupe flesh. Mid-Atlantic sunlight is more substantial stuff––yellower, too––and it’s rich with dust or pollen or rain vapor. I like each kind at different times. If I’ve been home for more than a few weeks I get anxious to leave, and the splashes of northern light that set the Maples ablaze every fall are refreshing to the point of disorientation or even joy. But the light holds more in Wallingford––more heat, more water, but also some twenty years of layered familiarities, all of which fan out and crowd in every time I drive back. Home is uncomfortable, but it’s my everyday jacket.







The first time I heard the band Neutral Milk Hotel was in a high school philosophy class. Each student brought in a recording of what they thought was a good pop song, specifically good in that it measured up to David Hume’s criteria for aesthetic excellence (for public school, this was a pretty creative class). I brought Bruce Springsteen. My friend Peter brought Neutral Milk Hotel. He played “Holland, 1945,” the sixth song from their second album, *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea*. It begins with a second or two of upbeat strumming, and then there’s a goofy little count-off––“two, one-two-three-four”––at which point the song really begins with what sounds like a fuzzy explosion. The low-fidelity sound is completely intentional. Released in 1998, *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* was recorded on a four-track tape machine, and there are moments on many of the album’s tracks when a high vocal line or screaming brass chord will overload the apparatus and set the whole sonic space buzzing, which is exactly what happened to my seventeen-year old brain as I sat in philosophy class listening to “Holland, 1945.” I could not have articulated the transformation, but I was aware that something inside had come wonderfully unhinged.



I bought the CD as soon as I could, and for a year or two *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* was the greatest music I had ever heard. My mother, who sometimes tried to be interested in the music I liked, hated Neutral Milk Hotel, which was an added bonus. She hated everything about it that I liked: Jeff Mangum’s keening vocal overconfidence, the way the instruments whip every song into a frenzied volume contest, the insane melodicism. My father heard Neutral Milk Hotel one time that I can remember, and only just the first thirty seconds or so before he reached for the volume dial on our car stereo. I don’t think we said a word about it, and future car trips were soundtracked by an innocuous mix of Bob Dylan, The Who, and Steely Dan. The album did what it was supposed to do to my parents: it pushed them away. Liking music that makes the veins bulge in Dad’s forehead is one of the things that makes being a teenager worthwhile.



Pop music is generationally specific, much more so than other kinds of culture. Moviegoing is a lifelong habit, and children actually spend a lot of time trying to sneak into the violent, sexy films that their parents go see on the weekends. (The MPAA ratings system, authoritative and opaque, adds to the mystique; I remember shutting my eyes in the theater when Kate Winslet disrobed in Titanic, thinking that PG-13 made it literally illegal for 12-year-old me to be seeing her breasts.) Literature is either neutral or shared ground. Catcher In the Rye and On the Road have been teenage bibles for more than 50 years. I have the sense that I missed out on the real golden age of teenage rebellion, the ’50s and ’60s. Then, adolescents were members of the first generation to be fed on the explosion of pop culture that took place in the wake of WWII. As the Hollywood Production Code withered until its death in 1968, movies, which had always managed violence, began for the first time to get bloody. The Sexual Revolution had literature to match. Philip Roth and Bonnie and Clyde stirred up levels of parental outrage and indignation that I do not know and cannot really imagine. My bloody movies look like my parents’ bloody movies, only a little more so, and as a teenager my books were mostly theirs to begin with.



Pop music is the exception. The last three cultural figures who really made parents angry––the rapper Eminem, the rock musician Marilyn Manson, and Britney Spears––are all pop musicians. This has something to do with the nature of music, which, as sound, can never be completely ignored (there is no aural equivalent to shutting your eyes). The phenomenon isn’t only physics, though. People tend to figure out their musical preferences by the time they can’t go on calling themselves “young”––somewhere around age thirty––at which point the individual canon gets closed down. New music agitating for admission runs up against ears that are not only deaf but hostile: “Turn that crap down,” or, in my father’s case, he turned it down for me.



 He would never have unplugged the DVD player, and my mother never snatched a book out of my hands. For kids growing up in the last years of the twentieth century, pop music was the only available way to piss off your parents with culture.



The other part of what gets parents so mad about music is the fact that pop songs inspire teenage devotion in ways that books and movies can only dream about, and although taste differs wildly from teenager to teenager, everybody falls in love the same way. A 17-year-old who gets into Japanese art rock and a screaming tween at the Jonas Brothers concert are going to be completely different kinds of cultural adults, but they have more in common than they realize, and neither one could begin to articulate or justify their taste in a meaningful way. Teenagers who can explain what makes the music they like good are improvising liars. Their words are vague units of praise that filter in from friends and media. Their words should not be taken as anything more than affirmations of love.



But despite the fact that adolescents and language have a hard time getting along, teenagers are very good pop music listeners (they are also frequently great pop music makers). People become better readers, watchers, and lookers with age, but the ability to hear pop songs honestly decays over time and, almost always, eventually disappears completely. What makes adolescence and pop so well suited to each other is that inarticulate love, because pop songs are also bad with words. Lyrics matter to an extent––and, because they can be quoted, they’re much easier to describe and talk about than beats and tones––but even the greatest songs turn into crude sentiment when reduced to words on a page. Some musicians don’t realize this and become awful poets. (Joni Mitchell, from her poem “Bad Dreams Are Good”: “We have poisoned everything / And oblivious to it all / The cell-phone zombies babble / Through the shopping malls.”) What matters are the sounds. The explanatory power of a pop song operates largely outside language, and teenagers, who have no idea how to articulate the biological and emotional lurchings going on inside them, were made to have their lives explained by music. In the little office where my high school newspaper was edited and laid out, I worked with three guys who became some of my closest friends, and when they began to listen to The Magnetic Fields, I knew that I had to do the same. When I began to actually like The Magnetic Fields, I knew that something good was happening. Pop music told us that we fit together, which is something we could never have told ourselves. When adolescents fall in love, they make mixtapes. Pop music is teenage talking.



Jeff Mangum has said that *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* was vaguely written around dreams he had about Anne Frank and her family during WWII, but lyrically this almost never gets more specific than on the first song I heard, “Holland, 1945,” where Mangum sings,







The only girl I ever loved



Was born with roses in her eyes



But then they buried her alive



 One evening, 1945



With just her sister at her side.







That the album would be about Anne Frank makes sense in that the catastrophe of her adolescence was reflected in the catastrophe of history that trapped her in that little attic. On the album, this collection of personal and historical earthquakes leaps out of the speakers like a circus. Mangum loved the carnivalesque aesthetic of early twentieth century Penny Dreadfuls, the kind of vulgar gothic atmosphere suggested by woodcuts and hand-set type, semi-handmade products of an industrial age. The album’s lyrics were printed on a single sheet of paper––broadside style––rather than in the traditional tidy booklet. The record’s influence has turned out to be huge. In the late eighties and early nineties, the sound of indie rock was a kind of self-conscious laziness, an awkward, witty ugliness that viewed the tidy traditions of pop music as lame jokes. Neutral Milk Hotel, at the very end of the century, took that sound, that racket, and wrote pop songs with it, songs with melodies and sing-along choruses. What’s followed in the last 10 years has been a much prettier kind of indie rock. Many of the bands following in Neutral Milk Hotel’s wake, however, have nostalgically treated history as a simpler time when communities were close-knit and knitting was an everyday practical task. Neutral Milk Hotel looked back and saw a chain of disasters, one following another in horrible inevitability. They channeled that kind of history––itself trapped in a perpetual, thrashing adolescence––through sex, confusion, and longing.



None of this occurred to me at 17 because none of it needed to. Nobody ever asked me to justify my musical preferences and as long *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* kept explaining me to myself on a day to day basis I was happy. The everydayness of pop music is built into the medium; since most albums are a little less than an hour long, it’s possible to listen to a record hundreds of times in a single year, at which point the music enters into a kind of symbiotic relationship with the people and situations it renders intelligible for the listener. People pay an enormous amount of attention to the specifics of their listening: cracks in a CD jewel case, abrasions on the sleeve of a vinyl LP, the way a car stereo’s cheap speakers warp the sound of a particular song. This turns into fetishism at a certain point, but what lies at the root of all this obsessing is the fact that music refuses to be heard in a vacuum; it lives in its contexts. When I listen to *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea*, part of what I’m hearing is this:



The house here I grew up is a colonial pile of fieldstone with a big lawn, and it was my job to mow it during the summer. For the parts tucked in close to the house, I had a gray push mower with a black nylon bag hooked to the back which trapped the cut grass. Depending on how long it had been since I last mowed, I could walk back and forth for about 15 minutes before the bag filled up. Then I would roll the mower to a patch of woods that sloped down from the edge of our driveway and tug out clumps of grass with my free hand. This usually made me sneeze, and sometimes I would itch all over. For the more open spaces of the yard, though, it was possible to use our riding lawnmower. It had a yellow seat and a green chassis, and although it was also equipped with bags and a black chute which could be set up to collect the grass, I was usually allowed to leave them in the garage, which meant I could mow whole sections of lawn in big, uninterrupted swoops. I did this once or twice a week.



By the time Mr. Adams’ philosophy class and the school year had ended, I had memorized every word of *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea*. The difficult part was finding a time and a place to sing along. Singing in the house, where any family member could have heard me through my bedroom door, was out of the question. I could sing while driving a car, but everyday drives never lasted for more than 10 or 15 minutes, and what I wanted was to yell my way through the album from start to finish. At the beginning of the summer, I bought an iPod.



Once I wheeled the John Deere out of the garage onto the driveway, once I made sure to fill it with gasoline from the plastic tank with the yellow nozzle, once I was perched up on the seat, I threw a pair of enormous headphones over my ears, the kind that make big foam half-spheres and do a fair job of blocking out noise. With the album beginning to play, I stuffed the iPod into a cargo pocket and drove around to the back of the garage, where I began to mow the lawn.



The riding mower’s engine was not quiet, and with the blades turned on the machine made an incredible noise, which meant that I had to jack the volume all the way up in order to hear the music. More importantly, the mower’s racket made my own singing inaudible to anyone other than myself. It was actually more like halfway melodic screaming. Mangum’s voice peaks about two or three whole steps out of the highest parts of my vocal range, but the lawnmower gave me the luxury of not having to quiet down when my high baritone gave out. I sang in choirs in high school and never quite learned not to jut my head forward and tighten up my neck trying to sing high notes. Yelling incomprehensible code at nothing in particular, with those big headphones strapped from ear to ear, I probably looked like an autistic war veteran up close. From any distance, I was just somebody mowing the lawn, the big machine’s insect hum as appropriate and unremarkable in the suburbs as traffic in a city or surf on a beach.



Even with his voice like a fractured air raid siren, Mangum’s melodies are muscular, and so the songs on *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* are desperate but sexy. It is not easy for teenagers to feel sexy, and Mangum is wonderfully gentle and strange about how two people learn to use their bodies. On “Two-Headed Boy” he sings, “Catching signals that sound in the dark / We will take off our clothes / And there’ll be lacing fingers through the notches in your spine.” He knows that sex is a threat, ominously repeating the words “semen stains the mountaintops,” on the song “Oh, Comely,” but he also understands adolescent sex as an alternate world, a woods, an attic. My girlfriend and I would set alarms all senior spring, waking up at four in the morning in her basement or our guestroom, and drive one another home, our fathers both inconveniently early risers. My house is old—it makes noises when you breathe, and so I had to work out a way of climbing the stairs slowly, resting my feet on the outer edge of each step and trusting as much weight as possible to the less creaky railing. I don’t have to sneak out of people’s houses anymore, and I don’t get grounded for staying out late. But fear and magic are partners, and one disappears with the other. I learned this riding the lawnmower, with headphones. 



I haven’t listened to *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* very much since I finished high school. I hear “Holland, 1945” at parties a lot, almost always near the end of the night when everybody is dancing and wasted. Usually I dance along and yell the words, but one time I threaded my way out of the crowd and found my coat, and it wasn’t troubling at all. I had something else to do. What makes you dance is a song’s visceral relevance, and when I hear Neutral Milk Hotel now I almost always think about mowing the lawn. My listening doesn’t free-associate anymore. It has lost its creativity. My listening has lost its creativity. Nostalgia always does this: think of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, angry and boring, drinking his way through “As Time Goes By” over and over. Listening to *In the Aeroplane Over the Sea* now feels almost tacky, which is not to say that I don’t do it. Listening to it in Wallingford would be nearly vulgar.



I was at a recent holiday party when I heard that Neutral Milk Hotel’s guitarist, Julian Koster, would be showing up to sing Christmas carols. He walked in wearing a festive sweater––ironically festive?––and sat down near the piano, and then presented us with his saw, which he had named Badger. Using a bow, he played Christmas carols on the saw at an easy tempo. Between songs he would bend Badger towards the audience––his way of “bowing” to our applause. In an incredibly soft, childlike voice, Koster told us that Badger was eight years old, and that, like all saws––and surely we knew this, being educated college students––Badger would stay the same age for his entire life. He also told made-up stories about each of the carols, how they had been smuggled across the borders between European countries, cherished by clockmakers and peasants, and how the songs had eventually made their way into his possession. Right before I left, at the end of Badger’s third song, I thought to myself, “This may be related, in a distant way, to the music you made back in 1998, but it has nothing to do with the music I heard.” I left with two friends, and I walked back to my room through the cold to study. When I hear the album now, and especially when I hear the song that inaugurated my relationship with it, I hear it through the wavy haze that comes off the summer suburban asphalt. I see myself drenched in mid-Atlantic light. And I wake up from the adolescent fever dream––if only halfway––and I listen to something else.