Kate Massinger

I stood in the backyard in Berkeley (behind the tree, next to Marion’s easel and paints) and flicked off the little red safety.



Marion was inside, in our dirty kitchen, heating water for pasta while dicing sausage for sauce. *If I don’t come back in a few minutes*, I had told her, *something is wrong*. She had laughed at me.   



I pointed the capsule towards the ground. I offered a licked finger to the wind, but it didn’t cool. It was a still July evening in the East Bay. *Check for a breeze*, my boyfriend Jared had told me, and then you can test it. *You won’t be able to use it when you need it if you don’t test it. *



I wrapped the capsule’s Velcro handle around my fingers, and pushed the trigger down.



Not much happened. A stream of liquid coursed out. Fixated, I held the plastic down a little too long, then pulled my finger up too slowly at the end—the fluid dribbled, pooled on the ground. A successful test, and now I knew. It only took one press of the button: brief, decisive. The packaging said the capsule contained 20 sprays, and that one had been worth maybe 2. At the end of the summer, I still had 18 left.



I flicked the little red safety on, and went back inside the house. I tucked the capsule into a pocket of my purse, easily accessible to desperate hands, and went into the kitchen to help Marion with the sauce.  



 



***



 



The active ingredient in pepper spray is oleoresin capsicum, an oily resin that makes eyes burn and swell shut. It’s the same stuff that makes a good salsa. Last spring, chopping jalapeños for chili, I got a little juice on my hands and forgot to wash them. Thirty minutes later, after an absentminded rub of the eyes, I found myself bent double over a gushing sink, trying desperately to pry my eyelids open so I could flush them out. It felt like I was going blind. Even when I managed to force my lashes up, light and air made my whites and pupils sizzle, my vision blur. This pain came down to capsaicinoids, the compounds that make up oleoresin capsicum and determine its strength. The habeñero pepper rates 350,000 Scoville heat units. Pepper spray rates over five million.



A 1994 US Department of Justice report makes a strong argument for pepper spray as a weapon. It’s more potent than mace, affecting not only on the eyes, but the breath— inhaled spray swells mucous membranes along airways. Pepper spray rarely kills but almost always incapacitates, providing a viable alternative to guns and even tasers. Unlike tear gas, it works just as deftly on the drugged and drunk. It doesn’t linger on clothes; ventilation, soap, and water clean it right up. It’s great for riot control but banned in international war.



Civilians have access to the same caliber of pepper spray that law enforcement officials do. Sometimes it’s misused, but not often. Another Department of Justice report, last updated in 2011, documents 63 cases of death in police-civilian interactions where pepper spray was involved. Of these cases, most credited the cause of death to heart conditions or drug overdoses. In the few cases where pepper spray did link closely to victim death, causing positional asphyxia, it did so by exacerbating pre-existing asthma or other respiratory conditions.



 



***



 



I bought the spray last summer while working in the Tenderloin, a pocket of San Francisco named for an analogous neighborhood in New York City. Urban myth credits the name to a ‘hazard pay’ bonus for law enforcement officials, cash that the cops put towards fine cuts of meat. There are other namesake rumors: paid-off bribes (more money to eat well) and prostitute thighs (a different kind of flesh).   



Bad things happen everywhere. This is what I tell my nervous grandparents every time I pack a suitcase. One gathers stray caresses in Prague public squares, shares bedrooms with suspicious strangers in São Paulo hostels. But men also follow footsteps in the heart of affluent Cambridge, and malls get shot-up in my own small Oregonian town. Really, no city is immune. One must travel anyway.



The Tenderloin’s statistics, while troubling, are brighter than Rio’s or Harlem’s. And yet, this place shook me; it scared me.



The first day I went into the office, I mistakenly exited BART a few blocks too far from the building. To get where I needed to be, I had to cut through Civic Center-UN Plaza.



Civic Center-UN Plaza is officially the home of the glistening San Francisco United Nations building, bounded on one end by a city hall on a hill. Unofficially, it’s home to a huge encampment of homeless men, women, and children. There are needles in arms, wheelchairs, rooted up trash cans, women in short skirts soliciting, women in long skirts screaming. There is hunger there, the pervasive smell of urine. Cops with large guns stand outside the government buildings, surveying the squalor with guns slung across their chests. It’s far from a slum. There are theaters in the Tenderloin, and restaurants, and schools. Still, it is something to break a heart: to watch the men with briefcases and women in blazers walking at a clip, brushing off need like a pesky fly; to crane a neck at those government palaces, looking down on their Americans with chilled apathy.



The first day I went to the office, I was wearing a knee length skirt. That day I would learn that this look was too formal for the office’s casual vibe—and also, that this was much too much leg to go incognito. I had my phone in my hand (big mistake) cluelessly staring at a map. By the time I got to the center of the Plaza, and realized that I should have traced the perimeter, it was too late to stop.



“Hey beautiful,” a man leered, lurching in front of me. Whistles sprouted from points on the square. The sun was bright. I vaguely processed, heart throbbing, that I was getting too much attention. Too many eyes were on my legs, and on my purse. It was 10 am (I had been asked to come in late that day) so no other employee was out on the street. I was being followed, surrounded. Stubble floated in and out of my vision, deep voices in and out of my ears. I tried to decide: Should I smile? Should I frown? Which would provoke less of a response? I made it to the door of the building, fumbled with the lock. When the surly security guard let me in, I was sweating.



My least favorite part of each day was walking to and from work. Sitting at my cubicle, time ticking towards 4 o’clock release, I would shiver at the screams wafting up from the sidewalk—the cries of one woman, the same each day. My second day, walking from office to BART with a fellow intern, I made eye contact with a woman sitting on the ground. She stood, yelled, and pitched trash at me, hitting the side of my face. I covered my head with my purse and power walked for the BART entrance. The next week, I watched a man pick up a needle and inject it into his arm at the bottom of the subway stairs.



To get to and from my house in Berkeley, I walked down Shaddock Avenue, away from the tourist ice cream shops and into quieter residential areas. A man got down on his knees and proposed, citing my smile and eyes as rationale for wanting to marry me. A man on a bike shrieked as he careened into my path, shirtless and wild-haired. Two men called out to me as I strolled to work; when I didn’t look back at them, they whispered “bitch, you bitch” and wove through the crowd to keep up with me. I picked up my pace. That was usually my tactic: move faster.



I hate to admit how scared I was—I, who carry a stamped passport, I, who know the tactics to defend myself—a poke to the eye, a knee to the groin—and the right words to yell—‘Fire!’ or ‘Get away from me!’—and the wrong things to do—no solo taxi rides late at night, don’t wear your flashiest jewels on BART, don’t engage anyone on the street in conversation. The experiences I catalogued were disconcerting, but I know (and knew then) that they were far from true horrors.



I felt elitist in my fear, petty for wanting to protect myself. These were people without access to toilets or nutritious food, people with yellow eyes and sallow skin. Most of those who yelled at me were obviously out of their minds—schizophrenics, or deranged from drugs. My fear didn’t strip me of compassion, but it did make it impotent. Instead of handing out bottles of water and Band-Aids, I was scuffing past the debris, secluding myself in a cubicle, getting away from it all at any cost. On the train, I thought about the Gospel healings—equating the lepers and spirit-possessed screamers of Galilee to the junkies in the Tenderloin. What a thing it would be to make illnesses jump into pigs, to make this nation well.



 



***



 



Pepper spray is legal in all 50 states. In some, like my home Oregon, that’s a general ‘go ahead;’ in others, it’s qualified. In California, I could order a capsule on Amazon, provided I was over 18 and purchasing less than 2.5 liquid ounces. Most of the regulations are of the non-minor, non-felon sort. Many states restrict carrying in public places like schools. Of course, abuse is a crime, and pepper spray cannot be carried onto planes.



When I returned to Boston with spray in hand this fall, a local told me I was a criminal, that you needed a firearms permit to carry pepper spray or mace in Massachusetts, and that you could only purchase them from a registered firearms dealer. That regulation has changed, though; the local was ill-informed. As of September 2014, a provision in a new piece of state gun legislation makes it no longer necessary to carry a permit to buy. (Massachusetts had previously been the only state with such a rule in place.) You still have to buy from a dealer, and you can’t order through the mail.



The other interns in my office carried pepper spray. My parents advised me to get some. But ultimately, I ordered a capsule of Sabre because Jared asked me to. He came to visit me for a week, walked my streets. We ate yellow curry in Berkeley, hiked from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge. We also went to my office together. After his plane ride home, I received an email. It contained several links to Amazon pages.



*Please, please buy at least one of these. They cost practically nothing and they're a good investment for you even post-San Francisco, since you'll almost certainly be jogging and commuting in urban environments.I do think it will make you feel a little more secure and empowered. *



*I want you to get serious about learning to defend yourself. *



 



***



 



Growing up, my dad kept a baseball bat under my parents’ bed. He has retained all his muscles and used to play shortstop in high school. I have no doubt he could seriously wound or even kill an intruder with a few fell swings.



When I walk through a parking lot after a late night movie, I hold my car key between my fingers, ready to enter into an eye or slide up a nostril. In middle school, us girls sat on the gym floor with the physical education teacher and identified other common purse items that could be used as weapons: a comb, an uncapped pen.



My grandfather has owned guns all my life. He takes them to the Alaskan wilderness to hunt, hangs the heads of the animals around his pole barn.



But baseball bats are for baseball, keys are for driving, combs for brushing, pens for writing, and in this case, guns for hunting. There was something different about buying this spray.



What does it mean to carry something meant for hurting, and only for hurting? To carry it from a house in Berkeley, through the stiff air of the subway, down the blocks of the Tenderloin, into Celtic Coffee to get a Thai iced tea, and into a law school where women wear pearls?   



On a practical level, it would mean simply this: if someone came at me with a knife, or a gun, or a bicep, on my way to work or going home or going out, I would have a few extra seconds to escape, to shout for help, to get out my phone and dial three numbers. And that felt good. That’s why women buy this little container of liquid: to keep us out in the streets, going to work for legal think tanks, and having fun with friends.



On a philosophical level, it felt strange, even wrong. Nothing happened to me that summer in San Francisco except those catcalls—at most, there was the incident with the trash. I always walked to work in daylight. I never witnessed any crimes.  



And yet, I learned to avoid the inconvenience of others’ suffering—even though doing so made my conscience groan. I always picked a man in a suit to follow. I covered my wide eyes with sunglasses, and cast them down. I converted my nervous smile to a flatline frown. I never held my phone outside of my bag, and I clenched that zippered bag under an arm. I wore pants instead of skirts. I took the shortest way around the block. I held my breath to keep the urine stench out. I waited eagerly for market days, where the plaza was filled with stalls of zucchini and berries and I was assured an undisturbed walk. And I had that little canister in my purse: tested, ready to really hurt someone, someone on the kinds of drugs and with the kind of lung conditions one acquires from living outside that, with oleoresin capsicum in the mix, could maybe, it’s possible, result in death.



 



***



 



There are plenty of make-it-yourself pepper sprays on the Internet. Most recipes require crushed chili peppers and ground black pepper, heated and strained. Some claim Tabasco sauce will do the trick. Generally, the comments are more horrifying than the instructions.



 



*If a man dares to hurt me or rape me then I would do everything I could and if he goes blind he deserves it. He's evil and should be punished. If he's blind he will never do it again that's for sure.*



* *



*A knife would be backup to the pepper spray in case that does not subdue them.*



* *



*This pepper spray is a good one to use on incoming border crossers btw.*



 



There’s fear here, and perverted righteousness, too. I don’t trust the administrators of that justice—including myself.



 



***



 



As we strolled from a Tenderloin theater, a man grabbed my friend Ben by the arm, clung to it like a child, and wished him Happy Birthday again and again. The week before I arrived, Civic Center bloodied with an afternoon shooting and a woman named Kate was killed on the piers. One July day, there was a stabbing on the BART line I took to Berkeley; someone had knifed a transit employee while he stood post in his booth.



Nothing out of the ordinary for a city, but just enough to sustain my fear. It fed on of urban myths about meat and newspaper headlines about violence, on the worries of those who loved me, on possibilities. Fear settled itself over innocents, fogged my judgment. Nothing happened to me, and I did nothing. I rode BART in guilt. Women slumped in their seats trying to sleep, men with black garbage sacks mumbled songs to themselves, and I tried to focus on my book. Making eye contact would probably be okay—but what if it wasn’t? So I didn’t.



The pepper spray felt ridiculous. Could I even whip out the capsule in time, flick off that safety, press the button for the right duration and with the right force, when I really needed to? I wasn’t sure if I could. I was glad that I had it, sometimes: when the sky got dusky, or I heard the “bitch” whispers snaking behind me. The pragmatist rejoiced at those moments. Of course, I could hurt them if I needed to. I could and I would, I told myself. It was legal, I was exercising my shot at self-defense. But the idealist was saddened by my acquiescence to fear—my impulse to fight off the dangerous world with tooth, nail, and spray. I couldn’t tell how justified that impulse was.



 

Like all great genesis stories, this one begins with words.



My brother Ben and I were in the backyard, ages three and seven respectively, replaying the usual game of “restaurant.” Our kitchen was stocked with pebbled meat paste and stoney buns, our dining room an avant-garde array of Wiffle Balls and hula-hoops. Business was booming, and so was boredom. A plot twist was in order.



A customer, conveniently imagined by my brother, complained of rocks in her food; just like that, Ben and I were freed from the tedium of fry cookery. We scanned the verdant plane in front of us: pinking dogwood tree on the left, weathered play structure to the right...slide, ladder, swings. Swings. With a whim, those flappy yellow cradles turned to gliders: precious points of access to thinner air, means of purging our impatient energy.



Yet even flight could not satisfy for long.



“The controls are going out!” I screamed, tugging the ropes of my swing to shake its wooden frame. Taking my cue, Ben began to keen: “We’re crashing, we’re crashing!” We tumbled from the cloudy apex of our paired arcs, pitching and reeling into what would become the defining adventure of our twinned childhoods.



Noses and piggy toes buried in grass, we lay quite still.



“Where are we?” Ben peered at me, a dun colored baby bird dressed in athletic shorts. His baseball head, smooth and round, featured keen blue eyes. Normally sharp, the eyes were further whetted to a point, honed by all of the anticipation that a big sister can foster in her little brother.



The answer came quickly.?“We’re in Greshema, John.” Ah, there it was. A new game and a new word. Let there be light. Anticipatory, I scuttled across the grass, knelt into the shrubs, and let Ben hold his peanut butter breath.



From the lavender bush, my brother watched as an unfamiliar character emerged. I spread my plumped little calves, crossed my arms, crinkled my brow and beamed a smile. Now I was what I knew a man to be: a kneaded conception of fathers, grandfathers, chapter book heroes, and newscasters.



“Hello,” said the unknown Gresheman. His timbre was an eight-year-old treble, maneuvered into an unconvincing lower octave.



“I’m Kollini.”



 



Immediately after our introduction, Kollini (playacted by me) baptized Ben and I with new names: Yonder and Sora. Miniature husband and wife, Ben and I were Yonder and Sora in the two different backyards of our two different houses. First, we lived in the play fort, later, in a different, roomier play fort, and finally on taut trampoline blackness. Greshema was a fluid place, unconcerned with logistical technicalities. Redrawing borders to accommodate new school zones was never an issue.



Kollini was, of course, ever present. In our first backyard, he lived atop a large decorative boulder; in our second, he upgraded to the under-the-deck suite. He definitely had dreadlocks, rarely wore a shirt, loved to roast red meat, and was a philosopher-musician. He had a jolly voice, probably inspired by the stylings of Tigger.?Kollini, our dearest friend in Greshema, was simply one character of many. With a cast of almost two dozen personalities, Greshema was a well-populated land that packaged itself into neatly monogamous relationships. Yonder and Sora, Kollini and Gina, Saka and Shing Ying, and Shakayao and Preña all made their homes in various corners of the backyard, settled between branches and tucked inside of shrubbery. Not everyone in Greshema was married. After all, Ben and I knew some single people, so any projected world had to incorporate a few. Old Woman, a wise storyteller, made soap from sundry flowerbox herbs. Coach, a bachelor who lived in the arborvitae, was the local cheerleader. He coordinated all of the festivals, sporting events, concerts, and circuses that constituted a holistic Gresheman life. Yonder wasn’t so fond of Shinee, a frizzy haired ginger who sometimes sprung from the gardenias. Her desperate crush on him, a passion she expressed by jumping on his back and tugging at his hair, infuriated little Yonder. Shinee came out when I wanted an excuse to bother.



In spite of this vast congregation of faces and plots, an outsider observing Greshema in motion would see only two people, not twenty. This was no game for friends and next-door neighbors. There was too much history to cover, immense sanctity attached to the convoluted names and politics that a stranger was sure to get wrong. The shortage of children in our immediate family complicated Greshema’s demand for multiple personalities. Ultimately, the solution was a simple and bossy one. Ben would play Yonder, and I would play everyone else. As such, Yonder lived in a world completely outside of his control. A mind four years more developed than his, well versed in historical fiction novels and the tropes of children’s fantasy, spun him up in mythic candy floss: in exaltation and conflict, surprise illnesses and miraculous healings, storybook trials and perfect redemptions. Through it all, Yonder’s best friend was Kollini. Ben’s best friend was me.



 



Greshema was a moveable feast of storyline; the game could thrive anywhere. When Ben and I were at our cabin, clambering over boulders and between thin trees, sucking at the spiced Cascadian air, then Yonder and Sora were in Australia, visiting dear friends Batman and Batgirl. When Ben and I were at the beach, Yonder and Sora stayed with a quiet scholar friend, Tom (the appropriated name of our grandfather), and his wife Cecelia. Grandma’s house was Asia, where Buzz Lightyear (who happened to be Yonder’s cousin) and his wife made their home under a willow tree. The logic of these distinctions always made complete sense. Continents of the adult world calmly submitted themselves to the continents of ours.



Traveling the globe in Mom’s minivan, Ben and I would bicker. I would sit with a stack of chapter books, reading them as if the task were salaried. Ben would arch a finger and poke my shoulder repeatedly until I slapped him away. In response, he would attempt to steal my share of the bagged snacks. Once home, I would tease him relentlessly or abandon him for some melodramatic journaling. Ben would retaliate by sneaking into the piano room and giggling at my mistakes. He liked to pinch my legs with all five fingers. One time, I kicked him below the belt.



Yet while a significant part of our day-to-day relationship was defined by clash, our games (Greshema chiefly, but others too) were escapes from the grind of siblinghood. In our makeshift spa, I made Ben over with hair gel and various flavors of chapstick. The two of us went “camping” with our plastic baby dolls. We played stuffed animals and Pooh Bear Lego construction site, “school” and “hospital” and “art gallery” and “circus.” We ran our own business called Office Co. Each Christmas morning, we woke unnaturally early and lay on our backs like mummies, deliberating over what Santa’s gifts might be. We wrote puppet shows. We created elaborate brackets for racing Hot Wheels and rubrics for trading Halloween candy. Imagination was our saving grace. It mined away hot, disparate layers of age and gender, exposing the cool and bedrock affection beneath.



 



Every proper game needs a villain; Greshema had several. Piggy and Mrs. Piggy Poops, along with their accomplices, Moosey and Mrs. Moosey Van Moosey, were the supreme mischief-makers in Greshema. They vandalized Yonder’s house with ashy paint, poisoned his food stores, and kidnaped his pets. Piggy and Moosey spoke in high raspy voices, moved in sporadic twitches. Their titles were their only endearing traits. Although Yonder was infuriated by Piggy Poops’ shenanigans, one mention



of the swine’s full name would dissolve the hero into giggles.



Conflict was essential to the flow of our game, and Piggy and Moosey reflected the largest injustices Ben and I ever faced: classmates that didn’t share the scissors or smushed precious clay projects, parental chastisement, cookies we stole from each other. Generally, though, Greshema was a serene land, just as ours was. Its constitution, bound in stapled orange construction paper and decorated with a silver paint pen, outlawed wars and money. Everyone had someone to love. Everyone had a bush to shelter under. No one was mentally ill. Nobody aged, and nobody died.



 



Two and a half years ago, Ben and I stood on the outskirts of Asia (our grandmother’s backyard), ages fourteen and eighteen respectively. We surveyed Buzz Lightyear’s old stomping grounds with trepidation. This part of our game, Grandma’s realm of berry picking and frogs in the hot tub, had denatured itself. The lake with ducks did not delight. The wispy cat, wandering around the edges of the patio, skulked with head down.



As Kollini and Yonder, we caught fish with our bare hands, pulling the silvery figments from chalky rivers of bark dust. We served as delegates at global leader King Continent’s terrifying meetings, fighting for the sovereignty of a suburban backyard. We wrote songs at harvest time, facing the chilling possibilities of starvation before heading inside for Mom’s pasta with sausage. When Piggy tried to fool us by putting on a disguise, impersonating one or the other of us to try and spark a fight, we could always tell that it was him. Piggy was a good actor, but Yonder and Kollini knew each other as only the dearest of pals can.



Now though, Kollini and Yonder seemed distant, treasures interred in a safe, combination forgotten. Now we were plain old Kate and Ben, no longer muscled and dirt-smudged, drained of omnipotence and tidy endings. Frightened, we watched as our mother and her brother embarked on another distinctly sibling adventure, off to uncharted lands. We knew that this journey was in store for us, too, and we felt utterly unprepared. Mom and Uncle Gregg were laying their mother to rest.



Ben looked at me. A masculine chin was scooping the baby fat from his cheeks, cheeks six feet up and brushed with acne. The clean, sweet blue eyes, though—those were the same perpetual gems of my little brother.?



“Do you realize that we’re going to have to do this someday?” he asked me.



?“Don’t say that, Ben,” I said.?



Yonder trusted his sister and friend to make things right. I, Kate, helped Ben with math homework. When we were played cooking show, I, Kate, made him frozen waffle sandwiches. Later, I read him bedtime stories. In Greshema, I, Coach, gave Yonder the gold medal at the karate contest. I, Sora, I forgave Yonder for carousing with Kollini.



I gave him waffles, stories, and answers, and I tried to make them nice ones. Yet now the adventure was cruel. Greshema was inaccessible by boat, plane, or train, and I was as lost as the brother I had always tried to lead.



 



The last time Ben and I saw Kollini in the flesh was before our final move. Now, at seventeen and twenty-one, Ben and I have never tried to pencil Greshema’s landscape onto our new yard. It has no fence. We are too big to crawl under the trampoline to sort our foodstuffs for winter. The impetus behind 95% of the characters lives in another state, procuring a Bachelor’s Degree. We’re older.



He’s no longer corporeal, and he doesn’t like to play, but Kollini hasn’t abandoned us quite yet. When he reveals himself, occasionally, it is not in Greshema, but in lengthy letters, or over brunch tables, or in the contours of frozen yogurt. He taps the wires of phone conversations Ben and I share, listening to talk of girlfriends and high school and the complicated quest for faith. At my Grandma Nette’s funeral, Ben and I clasped our hands on a lighter, illuminating a purple candle of remembrance. Kollini was one of the mourners.



Sometimes I feel like Kollini’s going to disappear someday, that Ben and I will find ourselves abandoned. When I don’t call or text enough, or when I consider never moving back home, or when I simply don’t go home for months and months, I hope he doesn’t give up on me, on either of us. I hope he grows up, too.



 



Every childhood winter, without fail, Greshema’s lawn grew crispy with frost and the trampoline veiled itself in rain. Mom would require a few months of indoor revelry, laced with art projects and Mario Kart races and blanket forts, and we would comply. Greshema was still there, of course. There was something about the characters that could only exist outdoors, in the backyard, where the housecat tigers and lapdog wolf roamed free.



Each spring, the reunion was sweet. On Oregon’s first warm day (sometimes the second but never too late) Kollini emerged from under the deck. Immediately, he would begin to scribble a list of plans: “Let’s hunt, let’s fish, let’s run a race, let’s exercise, let’s play with the Gresheman wolf, let’s have band practice!”



Band was one of Greshema’s most joyous pastimes. Yonder was the dancer. He had center stage to perform his leaps and twirls, but there was really no competition. The star of the show was always Kollini.



Kollini played the two sticks. A traditional Gresheman instrument, the two sticks were a pair of shiny plastic baseball bats, one black, one yellow, one clenched firmly in each hand. They were tapped together in syncopated rhythms, swung about in the air like flags, accompanied by Kollini’s lyrical voice. He played songs like “The Fish” and “The Tiger.” “The Finale” was a perpetual crowd pleaser.?



The two sticks were joyous, mirthful, entirely senseless. As Kollini played them, Yonder danced in glee, tracing spirals around his blood brother. Neighboring houses heard the shrill melodies and incessant banging with annoyance. The rich symphonic chords did not ring for them; they could not feel the pulses of fraternal ritual.



When our own house inevitably announced dinner, emitting tasty scents and Mom’s exasperated voice, Ben and I peeled off our Gresheman names with regret, probably fighting about when we would put them on again. After one of those summers, we never would. Our hours in the game would pass away.



As Ben and I dashed from yard to house for chicken and dumplings, as we said goodbye at a dormitory door, as we gain educations and in-laws and paychecks and the salty loves and losses of age, the thwack of the two sticks endures, envelops.



Our hearts keep time to the beat of our world, and our friend Kollini hums along.



 

 We go clockwise around the circle of folding chairs. Most of us are shy. We say our names and, per our leader’s prompt, something we like about Quakers. A shiny-headed man with a gold-tipped cane is one of the last to speak.** **



He sits close to me in the circle, wearing a dark blue suit and loafers and clutching two books to his lap. One is a Bible. He does not wear a wedding ring. He shifts positions constantly, putting varied amounts of weight on the cane as he tries to sit up straighter. He struggles to get his sentences out, lips moving frantically around sounds he cannot make. His dark eyes bug with the strain. When the words emerge they are painstakingly placed, each one a piece of fragile glassware set on a high shelf.  



“I….am….in love….with….God.” 



The sentence takes a good fifteen seconds to emerge. By the time it does, the Quakers and I are transfixed; we’re staring at him, and everyone is smiling. Mehmet Rona’s face splits into a grin. Exhausted and pleased, he snuggles back into his chair. Silence. 



I think: My God, this man is a prophet. 



Mehmet Rona has presence. In another life he might have been a politician or a door-to-door salesman; people are drawn to him like moths to light. At our break for tea, he moves around the circle to take hands, kissing fingers. He offers a ride to a woman when he learns she doesn’t have one. I tell the group I’m interested in conducting interviews with Cambridge Quakers, and am met with suspicious looks. Mehmet speaks up. “I’m…..in,” he proclaims, shakily raising a fist to the air. Everyone laughs. I flush to my scalp and beam at my bald knight in shining armor. 



Mehmet the prophet speaks boldly. This particular session of New Lights (an evening teaching group affiliated with the local Friends Meeting) is predominated by ‘non-deists.’ Mehmet, quite obviously, finds their opinions blasphemous. He squints his licorice eyes in frustration when someone conflates God with natural beauty, or identifies Him as the creative impulse they feel before penning poetry. Mehmet adores the Friends Meeting. He exalts its prison fellowship and commitment to the poor. As a vegetarian pacifist, he’s at home here. Nevertheless, his God is bigger than a landscape or a good idea. I know he wishes he could speak more. When he does, everybody listens.  



“The Quakers are hungry for Christ,” Mehmet tells me later, in private. “And they deny it.”



 



***



 



The Society of Friends first coalesced in 17th-century England around a group of Puritan dissenters: the most famous of these, George Fox. Shepherd and shoemaker turned theologian and preacher, drawings of Fox portray a hook-nosed gentleman dressed like the beloved oatmeal mascot. (Contrary to popular belief, Quaker Oats claims their beaming front man is neither Fox nor his contemporary, William Penn; he’s a fictional Friend named Larry.)  



Depressed and dissatisfied by clerical advice and the political pandering of the English Civil War, Fox eventually accessed what he identified as true authority. In solitary prayer, he heard a voice: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” No bishop’s robe or hefty tithe could improve or subsume Fox’s own intimate access to God. There was undiluted wisdom straight from the fount, and it was there for everyone. Fox and his followers envisioned their sect as “primitive Christianity revived.”  



But at the Cambridge Meeting, most of the Quakers are not Christians. 



Quaker worship means sitting in silence for exactly one hour. In Cambridge, that entails filling a bare, tallow-colored room with a predominantly white congregation, shoed in Birkenstocks and draped in scarves, mostly elderly. Some gaze at trees out the window. Some stare at their hands. All mediate, or talk to a higher power(s). Many are Buddhists. Some are atheists. Some are Jewish, some are lapsed Catholics. No text is read. No songs are sung. “Quaker” in Cambridge is a far cry from Fox’s unfettered but rigorous Protestantism.  



The hour of worship isn’t always *entirely* silent. An individual can speak if he or she is ‘quaking’—overcome with the impulse to ‘give a message’ to the Meeting. Anyone can do this. As one member tells me, the Quakers are not so much a society of laypeople as they are a society of clergymen—each ministering to their own conception of God. 



At the close of the hour, before homemade breads and tea, there are announcements: for climate change walks and camp-outs at nuclear power plants, for Israel-Palestine video screenings and singing in the streets. At Meeting, earthly actions collapse into religious worth. They are the sum of faith. The Quakers do good, even though at times they feel more like a left-wing service club than a unified religious community. 



In the midst of it all, there is Mehmet, a bald sore thumb, proclaiming the Gospel whenever he can get words out. Why does he stay—why doesn’t he find a Baptist congregation to join, or a Catholic priest to hear his sins? It’s because in theory, what the Quakers have going on appeals to him—this unmediated means of communing with God. 



 



***



 



Talking is hard labor for Mehmet. I watch flashes of delayed electricity working in the muscles of his forehead, popping his veins in frustrated embarrassment. Tongue, teeth, and lips collide and tangle. I silently cheer when they manage to cooperate, spitting out a word or fragment. Mehmet has primary progressive apraxia of speech. Often, the condition is caused by a left-hemisphere stroke—I’m not sure if this is what happened to him. 



The eating itself is calming to Mehmet; the waitress knows him by name and meatless order. Mehmet comes to the Plough and Stars almost every day for lunch. It’s close to his apartment, accessible even with heavy dependence on a cane. We’ve got our hats and coats in a bundle together on the chair, and Mehmet is leaning forward to speak. Without his disease, he would be a lecturing professor, holding all the cards of wisdom and prestige. He dresses like an academic, clad in a dark suit jacket and sweater. But the power dynamics are wonky. I am the one that can articulate quickly, pulling words from recesses with ease. 



It is poignant that the man who for decades practiced silence as spiritual discipline is now confined to it. He takes it lightly—“God wants me to shut up,” he chuckles—but still, it’s sad. Mehmet made his living as a renowned physicist; now, equations and proofs pool in the contours of his brain. Mehmet is funny; when he makes me laugh, his face goes radiant. 



Mehmet loves words, and actively seeks God in collections of them. “The…Bible is prose….written…in poetry,” he opines. In 1989, hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, he read both Homeric epics, plowed through the King James Bible in its entirety, and taught himself Ancient Greek.  



 



***



 



I’ve been attending Quaker Meetings for months. They aren’t easy. The noisiness of my own body is an impediment—the grumbles and pops of a stomach, the creaks of a tense jaw, the scratch of denim as I cross and re-cross my legs. I am so noisy. 



In Morning Meeting, attendance 150 on average, ‘settling’ takes about fifteen minutes. That’s how long children are required to stew before being released to Day School. Tiny cries produce parental shushes. Little boots bump the benches. I like having the kids around. They give me cover to get comfortable.  



It’s 10:35, and the room has filled. Nestled in my pew, I dispose of the ideas that come to mind most readily. Those ones are never about God. I fret over academic assignments I need to complete, wishing I had a pen and pad to make lists. God keeps the lilies and the sparrows, but what about me, bearing the petty burdens of grocery bills and cover letters and homesickness? I don’t know what it will be like to not have a bedroom at home next year. I don’t know how I will get up in the morning without hearing my roommates bustling around, turning on the shower water. But these worries lack gravitas; they aren’t noble. Can You speak to my condition, Lord? Even if You could, why would you want to?



This isn’t what I went to spend my hour on. 



 I picture a broom, knocking down cobwebs from the eaves of my brain—a pair of hands taking out the trash. I know the dust will be stirred up when the Meeting is over. For now, I move it into the corners. 



Next, I must try not to fall asleep. Once, in Morning Meeting, I gave up. I slumped against the tallow-colored wall, closed my eyes, and shamelessly dozed. Every morning is a battle with leaden eyelids. I worry a little about how my mouth might hang open, how my breathing might grow labored. Perhaps I even snore a little. 



I hear the spoken messages: a confession, a snippet of policy talk. I join the singing when it arrives (the same guy sings “Give Peace a Chance” almost every week.)



Finally, I approach something like prayer. It is shocking how tiresome conversation with God is these days. I must knead myself into it. 



The Quaker meetings put the impetus on me. If I want to have an experience of worship, I must focus. There is no guidance from a speaker, no set of songs or parcel of text, just the cloudy space of my own thoughts. For some, like Mehmet, this is where the God of Israel lives—speaking into grey slimy tissues, washing them clean.  



 



***



 



Turkey, the 1950s.Six-year-old Mehmet lived with his parents (culturally Muslim atheists) and his older, adopted brother (Armenian by birth, converted to Islam while living in Turkey).  



The Armenian brother, disgusted with his father’s cankerous doubt, demanded that a lamb be sacrificed. His sin brought shame on the household; atonement was necessary. A lamb was ordered. 



“I….played…with…the…lamb,” muses Mehmet. The sentence comes out surprisingly fluid, not much space between the words. I envision small, brown Mehmet in dust or grass, running wool through his fingers and kissing a pink nose. They’re running together, two young created things. I can see this in Mehmet’s eyes: unadulterated joy, decades old, all the fresher for being stored so long. 



The next day, a man with a mustache arrived at the house and took the lamb from Mehmet. I imagine it came away from his scrawny arms with a bleat, a panicked scuffle of hooves that struck his collarbone.



“I…made…eye…contact….with…the lamb…at the moment…of slaughter,” stutters Mehmet. By this point I’m glued to him, elbows forward on the table, water glass and pen alike forgotten. Recollected blood runs in Mehmet’s irises: life leaking crimson for the sake of his father, whom he loved. But was it really necessary to kill the innocent? 



“It…was…that…moment…I…found…my…religion,” whispers Mehmet. The blood in his eyes turns to tears. I flush. Mehmet pauses. He rasps a little around his breath. His tears collect, almost to the point of spill. 



“You…write…” says the old man, “…I…collect…myself.”  



Mehmet has lived a life of visions. In 1973, he was living in Ankara with his wife Josephine, teaching physics at a university. One night, he sat straight up in bed, waking his bride. She noticed fuzzy light, a halo maybe, tangled in his hair. 



Mehmet dreamt he was strolling into his living room. In the dream, he peered at a print of *Mona Lisa* hanging on the wall. *La Joconde*, Mehmet insists, became the Virgin Mary. Hand outstretched, she tugged Mehmet into the canvas. Suddenly, he was in Biblical times, the illustrations in my purple book blown to size. Mehmet doesn’t provide details of what he saw after that. It’s enough to know that he saw something. 



Mehmet’s official conversion was anticlimactic. In 1981, during the baptism of his godson, a priest asked the Turkish professor if he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Mehmet, of course, said yes—he had for decades, even if this ceremony was his first time articulating the choice. “That’s so beautiful, so subtle,” I murmur. “After all that time.” Mehmet approves: “I’m…glad…you…see…the…beauty…in it.” 



And how did Mehmet become a Quaker? The whole thing is a big joke. He made friends with a man named Michael Shannahan, an Irish guy with seven children. After a few months of shared meals, Mehmet asked Michael to introduce him to his parish priest. Stereotypes were foiled; Michael was a Quaker. From then on, Mehmet was a Meeting-goer. 



Mehmet has lived a life of tragedies. Michael Shannahan went through a horrible divorce with a wife “addicted to being pregnant,” and drank a lot. For months, Mehmet spent all his free time sitting with his friend. Mehmet’s motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down for a year and a half. His own marriage with Josephine crumbled. This mysterious illness rendered him mute in all settings except the most controlled and intentional. And yet he is all praise, all love. 



Mehmet has arrested me. He grasps my hand when proving a point. He makes me order dessert, and won’t let me pay for my meal. Eying my notebook, he tells me he has a “similar fetish” for luscious journals and smooth pens. He praises my home city. He tells his waitress friend what to do with his untouched half of pizza. “Oh, Gary?” she says. “Of course.” It’s Mehmet’s ritual to apportion his meals to the needy. For all his etherealness, Mehmet is a man of the people, offering rides and food and compliments with abandon. “My…whole…life,” he tells me, “people…have said…I have a…transparency…for God. I…leak…my faith.” 



It’s true: Mehmet has a rare life of allegories, a symbolic pattern you can’t ignore. The Lamb of God, the faith of a small boy. The silver tip of a knife pulverizing innocence, all the sadness of the world spilled from sheep veins.  



Mehmet himself is a symbol for holy silence. In the still of Meeting, he comes to know a Lord he has always encountered through noticing and listening and the love of others—not through traditional avenues. “My…relationship…with Christ…is very intense,” he says. Natural. Felt. “Meetings…help me…to organize that.” His relationship with people is intense too. “You…have to love…other…human beings,” he insists—a simple sentence made overwhelming by palsied hands and desperate eyes. He wants me to understand—there are so many ways to know this God. One’s own mind can be a cathedral; one’s own life can be the liturgy. 



 



***



 



When I was a child, God and I met in silence. Like many American families, mine didn’t attend church. Yet even without a pastor’s spoken word for it, I always knew God existed. I liked Him. Whenever our cat got lost in the fields behind our house, I wrote God suppliant letters in fat felt marker. I plunked His spirituals in my piano lessons, singing along as I practiced. 



I never learned about God. I had no sermons to listen to, no Sunday school lessons to complete, no verses to memorize for candies. I hadn’t heard any of the gossip: that some people didn’t believe in Him, or denounced His definition of justice, or found his Son’s claims—the one Way, Truth, Life, etc.—restrictive. My relationship with the Creator was all intuition and innocence. After bedtime, door closed, I thought over spelling tests and worried about friends at school. I felt listened to. God was my friend. 



When my father sang to me in the bathtub, or directed magic shows with me, or helped me with math homework, God was there. When my mother gave up her teaching job to raise me, shuttling me to the library and the zoo and the dentist, God was there. My parents indefatigably modeled sacrifice and adoration, and we never stepped foot in a sanctuary. 



As a little girl, I remember feeling guilty about not going to church. I wanted my family of four busy on Sunday mornings. I wanted us to acquire teachings and talk about them together, or pray before dinner like my friends’ families. I wanted us to follow the rules. Now as an adult, I choose a church with a sermon and songs and communion and structure—because there’s something good about that too: having spoken norms and covenant community and a pastor I trust to keep me on my toes. Church matters.  



But “the church” is fluid, and Mehmet understands this, the Quakers understand this: how God can operate covertly, in an unstructured Sunday service where there is nothing but calm, in the six other days of a week. And while I’m personally convicted that God must be at the center of the Meeting in order for it to operate as a religious community—a God that looks like Christ—I find the fluidity somewhat refreshing, indicative of how invasive He can be. 



God is vast. This has always been an idea that both terrifies me—how can I believe in something I can never see the boundaries of?—and comforts me—that’s what faith is all about. And don’t you want faith in something your limited mind can’t fully comprehend, can never completely espouse in a sermon or hymnal? 



When I rise to leave the table, Mehmet embraces me. He kisses me on the cheek twice, warm and soft, loneliness incarnate in the way he holds me close. He tells me he’d like to keep getting lunch, please. I feel unconditionally loved in the grit of the city. I feel touched by God.