Sally O'Keeffe

Fall 2021

Eating Applesauce

Aidan Forster

On the eighth day, coquelicot,
wearing my Armageddon earring,


my faggotry jumped to its death
from the foam spire of its death.


& on the ninth: in paradise, titmice
scrubbed its pearls with aftermath flax.

 
From its suicide note: So men might
once again flip you buffalo nickels.


The being inside my having been so
delicately razed itself into wondrous pink.


Meaning my faggotry carried all of astrology
& I wanted only the varmint baubles,


little sex cowlick with which I coaxed
maw into morrow, morrow into morning.


How many times could I wake like that:
gowns & waxwings, the paler gust before


the gust that everyone remembers with a notch
in the wall when a prodigal boy molts past his pastness?


How many times could I join the hundred
apocryphal boys nursing their empire stitch?


Their faggotries, too, nixed themselves
with lovability’s long & bedazzled shears:


drowned in a tub filled with pink milk,
Alice’d by an extra-large bottle of Rush.


To build trust, we plunged the javelin of fey
suspicion, deep & darkling, inch by inch,


deeper into each other. I think we sought
a new unto, as in the boys we barely let


ourselves struggle to be, as in two yuan
pieces, silver & tinkling, nearly crushing
each other into the bottom of a celadon
demitasse given as a gift by a lover who,


nightly, conspired to push our faggotry
from the glottal stopgap of the word


he never said but always meant: not fickle, no,
not fanged—but blood, yes, & its heavy shimmer.

Poetry

Poem in Which My Faggotry Fakes its Own Death

Robert R. Thurman

PRESS 14

Lear Through the Wind

CONVERTER

Marlene Anderson

Untitled

Karly Hou

Ruminate

Vicki Xu

“When I think about people, I think about space, how much space a person takes up and how much use that person provides,” begins 

 by Weike Wang. Our narrator is Joan, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-American whose life happily revolves around the New York City hospital ICU, where she works as a physician. But when her father dies unexpectedly from a stroke, and her mother returns to America from China to “become friends” with her children, and her brother and sister-in-law mount pressure on her to settle down in the suburbs and start a family, and the coronavirus pandemic shuts all life down, Joan is forced to question her workaholism and define her own cultural beliefs.

Binaries give structure and conflict to the story: Joan and her brother, work life and domestic life, America and China, present and past. Where Joan wants nothing more than to be an unnoticed cog in a machine, her brother Fang aspires only to climb ladders. “This is our chance,” he tells Joan during her undergraduate studies at Harvard, “don’t throw it away.” In the present, he and his wife Tami foist their own expectations for family and community over and over on a resistant Joan. Her new next-door neighbor, Mark, does the same but with entertainment—he unloads a green suede chair, then stacks and stacks of books, then an old TV onto her so she can watch 

 and orient herself in American culture. She is perturbed by his eagerness.

Joan feels familiar, if a little exaggerated. (It’s hard to imagine anyone who has gone through at least fifteen years of schooling to not have at least heard of John Steinbeck.) She is one archetype of Asian America, the child of immigrants who strives above all to find control in a country to which her existence has only ever been peripheral. “It wasn’t glory that had drawn me to healthcare but the chance to feel pure and complete drudgery in my pursuit of use,” she explains.

In fact, most characters are archetypes. Fang is a hedge-fund manager with an unspoken inferiority complex, who takes all opportunities to show off his wealth. Reese, one of Joan’s fellow physicians, constantly makes unintentional offhand remarks about Joan’s gender; Mark, though well-meaning, continually oversteps boundaries. “[They were] brought up with different rules,” Joan gripes of Reese and Mark; “yes, push back, provoke, assert yourself, some trouble is good, since the rest of us will always go easy on you and, if anything, reward you for being you.” Whereas she, the daughter of immigrants, “is a daughter of guests, is a part time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow.”

But just because the characters are archetypal doesn’t mean they’re simplistic. Forced to contend with conflicting viewpoints on family, work, and identity in one place, Joan begins to articulate her own. She cannot change who she is, and she cannot expect herself to change others. “Why try to explain yourself to someone with no capacity to listen?” Others might find fulfillment in family or marriage; her fulfillment is work. This experience of being misunderstood provides a heightened level of understanding of those around her. When the coronavirus pandemic hits and frustrates Joan’s mother’s attempts to book a flight back to China, and Fang and Tami begin treating her increasingly carefully to entice her to stay, it is Joan who realizes what her mother is unable to say—“Just because I’ve lost my husband doesn’t mean I’ve lost my mind, and what I need help with is not money or food, it is something else entirely.”

The emotional core of the book is built through similar sharp epiphanies. Weike Wang’s writing is precise and measured, just like Joan herself. The prose does not draw attention to itself, as Joan would not want herself as the center of any story, but the characters come alive underneath. Told in a series of brief linked episodes, the story moves seamlessly between Joan’s experiences in the present and her childhood memories, indicating how memory informs experience and present emotion is continuous with past emotion. We slowly realize that the binaries are not so binary after all: Joan cannot be separated from her roots, which are part of who she is. We are right there with Joan as she remembers her father abandoning his frugality to take his family around town in a money-green Mustang for a day. Or as she shares the out-of-place feeling with her mother, who has freshly returned from China, in her brother’s grand gated house in Greenwich. Understated but quietly powerful, these snapshots stay with me long after I’ve closed the book.

In the end, no facet of Joan’s life is left behind. What makes 

 special is how complex and all-encompassing it is. The story is not just about Joan and her grief, not just about Joan and motherhood, not just about Joan and her work, not just about Joan and her Asian-Americanness—but altogether, a person in her entirety, handled with nuance, an incredible balancing act.

When praising her work ethic, the director of the hospital once likens Joan to a spinning cassette tape, dependable and constant. Joan A to Joan B, Joan B to Joan A. It’s a comparison that denies her directionality. By the end of the story, however, Joan is in a decidedly different place from where she started. Her relationships with her family and coworkers have transformed, and though not all her issues are resolved, Joan is finding her balance. Joan will be okay.

This book was provided as a NetGalley from Random House.

Notes

In Joan is Okay, A Doctor Rearticulates Her Relationship to Work

Self-Portrait in an Armchair

Xiadi Zhai

on Monday evening, bleeding between
bricks & concrete, indecisive direction,
improper & traversing. weight
lurching, we force forwards. when a prophet
makes a mistake, I am not equipped
to forgive. even if he asks. sweating, knees
buckling, bobbing. we plead. jolted over
curbs & branches, I recite the Lord’s prayer
for the first time in ten years. somewhere,


a boulder stumbles off a cliff & hits
nothing on the way down. call &
echo as response. no trespass of mine has
been forgiven, Jeremiah shifts no
gears. uphill, wobbling, winded. light
splitting, we meet
the end. amen. shake hands, rinse
wounds. a red light in Asheville. small
rabbit in the beam. baby brother, bouncing baby,
your beautiful brother! yours. black snake
electrical cord. fan whirring down. how to speak.


black around neck. how to speak. winding
down. still brother, yours. look for no
transgression, look & it ends & it vaporizes. bearer
of bad news, mouthpiece of messages
bleeding between cracks. webbing between
fingers. veins inside ankles. call to me &
I will answer & yet I call wanting
silence in return. once I return
home, Jeremiah walks back alone.

JEREMIAH BIKES ME HOME

Existence circa 2017

We began each meeting with a hyacinth, to deny the Hole its hold on our lives. Our trusted servant, Father Brown, distributed flowers and heirloom glasses of cool water. We dipped our hyacinths, blush-quick and simple, and removed them, even simpler. Another dip, and another, and the dormant lacquer of a different, frightening flower cast itself over the stem we thought we knew. The third dip was the worst, no matter how many sessions we’d attended. Billy the Medicare salesman always shook so hard small droplets of water skirted from his wrist. But Father Brown’s voice reassured us that the hyacinth we held and the hyacinth in the water were one and the same, and he removed his flower and flourished its formal singularity, and we all relaxed. The water, although not the Hole exactly, could mimic the Hole’s obliterative properties. In the Hole, the flower became other-flower, its petals the very petals of its prior aspect’s doom.

Every Wednesday night, we pour gallon-jugs of Dasani into somebody’s aunt’s filigreed pitcher and make the Hole. Here, we make and unmake the Hole, Father Brown tells us, quoting from Azazel Anonymous’ 

. When Father Brown asks us why, we recite the answer in unison: to remind ourselves of our relationship to ourselves.

I knew things had gone too far when I walked into Henry’s Blue Ribbon Barbeque to interview for the studly sign-twirler position and realized I’d fucked the other candidates. If my porcine caricature of an interviewer, in what I imagined to be a rare moment of Polo-clad whimsy, asked me to describe the exact dimensions of each of their cocks—whose balls swayed like candied pinecones when we kissed, which mushroom heads were safe to eat and which would send you to the Minute Clinic, who licked the gossamer-pale webbing of skin between my index and middle toes until I came on his 2018 Clemson Sugar Bowl blanket—I could. Idling in the blue-tiled lobby, we eyed each other the way packs of large cats eye dummies stuffed with cameras on cutting-edge National Geographic documentaries. The smell of slow-roasted pulled pork thickened in the air, juiced and herbed and dripping. It frightened me, this proximity to the things I had once envied so much as to occupy, however briefly or illicitly, in posh condominium living rooms and used bookstore bathrooms and the big sexy room of an empty soybean field in the middle of night.

But what frightened me more was the idea that I’d fucked everything that looked like me. Or that I’d fucked everything that imagined itself as similar enough to my idea of myself that it might waltz into Henry’s on a Sunday afternoon and compete for the privilege to wear the little strap-on hooves and furred loincloth and stuffed russet sash of the Henry’s mascot costume. Somewhere deep down, we all considered ourselves a dead ringer for Satan’s go-go faggot, so terribly spurned as to slink the long way from hell to this sad corner of South Carolina to sell prime cuts of beef brisket to women in camisoles.

The interviewer called someone back, a blonde with an incredible desire to be physically crushed during sex, and I knew I needed to get out of there. I needed to reassure myself that I hadn’t fucked myself out of myself, that there was enough of me in the world to still call to whatever about me I might find pleasurable and debonair and charming. I needed it, clearly, differently, in some other and unexpected way. I left Henry’s before the first interview finished, pork scent cloying in my hair, Grindr opened before I’d even reached the driver’s seat of my sad blue Hyundai.

If our meetings took place in a novel about the redemptive qualities of incredibly ordinary men, we might call ourselves a ragtag bunch, and smile while doing it. Father Brown and Billy; a furtive band of married heterosexuals whose “names”—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jim—had clearly been selected for the express purpose of concealing their lives from our circle, however much we might try to help them; Lawrence, who worked as a perpetual substitute teacher; Helmut, an aging leather daddy from Chesnee; an ever-shifting collection of heteroflexible line cooks from the wild game steakhouse half a mile from the mall; Blake and Jacob, boyfriends and high school seniors; and a cast of occasional newcomers. We always spotted the newbies before the meeting began. Timid and rattled by their time in the Hole, they wouldn’t speak until spoken to, and they wouldn’t stop once they started. They trawled our most terrible memories of our times in the Hole: Azazel twisting our bodies into things other than themselves, different, yes, but still so far from the most beautiful things in the world. We looked back on our old bodies from our new ones, and the distance crushed us. We could change so much and still never be enough. 

 The newbie might ask, and we’d suck our teeth and nod and maybe pat his short-sleeved arm. Everyone saw something different, we knew, and became something else. Words couldn’t quite explain it, couldn’t quite tear down the miasmic wall between yourself and yourself, the wall that was the Hole.

I showed up to the gloryhole fifteen minutes early. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of these things, but I wanted to impress the protean but shadowy idea I held of AzzAzzel, the gloryhole’s meister. So far, I pictured him as a plush pair of floating 

 lips, poised atop a placid void like twin strawberry slugs. On Grindr, I couldn’t discern what exactly AzzAzzel used for his profile picture. I’d maximized my iPhone’s brightness, wondering whether he sported Grindr’s automated black square or if his image’s darkness held something more, some slight twist of skin or tooth or hair to picture as he sucked my cock, but I’d found nothing.

As I walked to the specified warehouse—an anterior wing in the ungentrified half of the old textile mill complex, no small-batch kudzu kombucha cat cafes to charm or deter me—I reveled in the sheer faggotry of my decision to visit a gloryhole. I kept thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this, as if I really could believe it but almost couldn’t. I imagined a gaggle of big-breasted car saleswomen and Little Miss Greenville Counties and Vanna White’s ogling my advance, saying, We can’t believe you’re doing this either, babe, as if they really couldn’t believe it but almost could.

I nearly tittered, pushing open the rusted double doors to the warehouse, as if I’d never done something lewd before, something sexually indiscreet and technically illegal. I was visiting the gloryhole the way rich white women visited wellness retreats in adult-sized treehouse communities on Hilton Head Island. I was taking time and space for myself, I thought, stepping over a haphazard array of metal beams and picking my way toward the back wall. I could see the hole, a darker darkness in the dark room, a perfect circle cut out of an entirely smooth and sable portion of the wall. I was transforming, I thought, into a sexier, cooler, better version of myself, one I’d most definitely want to fuck if I could. I pushed my jean button out of its loop and fiddled with my cock, already half-hard, and sauntered up to the hole, ready for anything.

After collecting the hyacinths, Father Brown led us in our twelve steps. We loved this part the most because we could trust in its sameness. The steps never changed, and therein lay their promise, the radiant and gilded rungs of a ladder out of the hole of the Hole’s memory. We’d stand and intone: 

We admitted we were powerless over the Hole—that our minds had become unmanageable. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves had rendered us unbeautiful. We chose to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood him to command the One who had hurt us. We made a searching and fearless formal inventory of ourselves. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our time in the Hole. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of desire. We humbly asked Him to remove our fear of dissolution. We made a list of all the fantasies we had harbored and became willing to make peace with abandoning them all. We made direct sacrifices of such fantasies whenever possible, except when to do so would injure ourselves or others. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were lustful properly admitted it. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for deliverance from the Hole and the power to carry that out. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to warn others about the Hole, and to deny the Hole in all our affairs.

I pulled out my cock and waited for the magic to happen. Or, more specifically, I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet and waited for the lusty little bellboy of perverse sexual encounters to beckon or nod or knock on the gloryhole’s frame and somehow indicate when and how quickly I should sink myself into its dark interior. I didn’t want to catch AzzAzzel unawares; I didn’t want to be rude. I imagined he must have a cocksucking ritual. A special White Barn candle, maybe sage and green tea, that he lit in the mysterious hovel of the other side of the warehouse wall, or a Spotify playlist whose rhythms he massaged into his patrons’ members with his tongue. I looked into the hole, hoping I might catch just a morsel of form with which to tantalize myself. At first, my gaze skittered over the black-on-black uncertainty of the hole, its outline barely distinguishable from the wall. After a full cock-handed minute, tacky globes of precum trickling over my knuckles, I almost gave up—not just on my peeping search-and-rescue mission, but on the entire notion of successfully visiting a gloryhole. Could I really reconnect with my desire to be desired, my desire to desire in others what they desired in me, in the splintery circumference of a hand-hewn hole in what would likely become a vegan astrology small press? My cock wilted from the existential pressure, but as I looked away from the hole, I saw something: a twist of topaz light, small as the sheep a fairy might count as it fell asleep.

I furrowed my brow and studied the hole, suddenly privy to the extreme intricacy of its hue. What I’d previously perceived as a scrim of unchanging darkness I now recognized as a spectrum of kaleidoscopic forms: weird sisterhoods of violet pentagons linked at their fifth points, algal blooms that would vanish in pure sunlight, the papery blush of a thousand trees shedding wirrah after wirrah of thin black bark under a heavy new moon. My ears filled with the low sibilant thrum of fool’s gold on deer antlers, as if a circle of ancestral hunters timed their glint-heavy strikes to the pattern of my breathing, trying to light the most terrible fire in the world. The wind—tumbling and traipsing through the gaps of the warehouse walls—sidled up to my forearms and shins, lapping against my small waves of black body hair.

I felt myself on the precipice of the most incredible feeling available to faggot-kind, the pearl at the heart of a world not designed for my love. I stepped toward the hole as if meeting my partner at a debutante ball for future sodomites. I wanted to be inside the hole so badly, so completely. My entire self wanted to be pulled through my cock’s angry cyclopean eye and into a world beyond imagining. I wanted to give myself fully to the thrall of the hole with no thought of what was already becoming my other life, the lattes and loan debt and lawnmowers of my days before. As I watched myself disappear into its maw, I closed my eyes and saw a white hand, its index finger hooked as if propping up a delicate chin.

After our first few sessions, we all agreed that the winds in that place—the winds in the Hole—were the worst part of the entire experience. Although everyone endured something different, we all felt the winds. Not the timelessness, so much as its chafing on the skin, or what could be called skin. Not the darkness, so much as its tongue, lapping the most secret parts of our bodies. Not Azazel, but his gaze, a zephyr applied with a fright pipette, right between the eyes.

I couldn’t explain the how of what happened, but I could explain the what. When AzzAzzel wrapped his lips around my cock, a splendiferous wash of liquid velvet, I nearly sagged against the wall, overcome with a pleasure I never knew my body could produce. It was as if AzzAzzel unspooled the chromosomal thread of desire itself from somewhere deep inside my body, a place both of me and apart from me, and wound it over my skin. I tried to track the rhythms of his movement, but I couldn’t follow for more than a few seconds. I wanted to lose myself in the version of myself to which he delivered me, one capable of otherworldly ecstasy.

I pushed myself even deeper into the hole, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself somewhere else, tethered to what I understood as my body by the slick metronome of AzzAzzel’s mouth, but otherwise floating, loose, un-constituted. I tried to blink but realized I couldn’t. I tried to lick my lips but felt the impulse stutter on its way to the idea of having lips and a tongue. I didn’t have eyes anymore but existed, rather, as a partial distillation of my own ability to see, and I supposed the same went for the rest of my senses. I tried to slap my arms or legs or stomach, to draw the bilious ghost I feared I’d become back into my reliable if occasionally unsatisfactory body, and found that I couldn’t, that I didn’t have a stomach or a hand with which to slap it. Panic mounted inside me—or I mounted inside panic—a foam of pure feeling sluiced over the series of surfaces I considered myself. One little pink fractal caught sounds, the same blood-bound thrum from before, and a chartreuse bowl seemed to collect sensation and ferry it to other glassy constellations through small white tubes. A circle of wand-like protrusions snagged little raptures of visual data, impressions of color and form and shape, then garbled them into a dark attar that dripped continually onto a long, low, corrugated plate, never filling or draining. What I would have called the feeling of AzzAzzel’s mouth on what I would have called my cock persisted, as if cradling these strange menageries of being. I latched onto it, a cerulean cloud billowing and contracting with the rhythm of his mouth, as the only thing with which to recognize myself. I didn’t know what to do about what I’d become, and I didn’t know what it meant to not know something or to be able to do something even if I did know it. I tried to generate the sensation of squeezing my eyes shut, and I focused my energy on AzzAzzel’s tongue, and when I “opened” my “eyes,” I was standing in a garden and staring at an incredibly old but beautiful man.

Father Brown described Azazel opaquely, as if doling out liturgical porridge at a group home for the sexually otherworldly. Azazel, he would say, is the cause of human sin. Azazel, he would assert, is the jeweler of human demise, handing out baubles to anyone with a penny and a wish.

Something was wrong about his face, and something was right about my body. I let these facts bloom and twine into each other until I felt newly stabilized in what seemed to be my original body. I wiggled my fingers and toes, I blinked three times in a row, and I twitched my cock. I found everything in working order, and I didn’t want to question my miraculous presence in myself as myself lest I unfurl into a collection of cosmic pinwheels.

I studied the old man’s face. Something about its arrangement was fucked up in an incredibly precise way, as if God had selected the most beautiful features from a hundred faces and lovingly, carefully, slowly blended them into a single face, at once radiant with the minty verve of youth and lined with the grace of an aging queen who started moisturizing at sixteen and never stopped. His eyes were entirely black, and I quickly looked away, loathe to traipse through his gallery of non-Euclidean torment again. Waves of creamy fabric tumbled over his body, obscuring and suggesting in turn, and I struggled to pinpoint anything definite about what he might look like. Was that mass at the robe’s lower center an enormous bulge? Before I could even pucker my lips into the precursor of the “w” in “where the fuck am I?”, the old man spoke.

“Where do you think you are, boy?” His eyes, previously trained on some point beyond me, swiveled to my face, and I winced and glanced away. He raised his hand, peppered with a clutch of blue veins, and gestured to his left. I turned and surveyed his little stretch of beyond.

We stood in a small clearing coated in a luscious and grassy pelt—like the pinky nail of God, I thought, pristinely manicured by solar winds. A tiny golden cap sat on the tip of each blade of grass, fashioned by small and industrious golden beetles in the hour between waking and sleeping in the human world. The human world? I thought, alarmed by the casual scrim between myself and what I imagined to be my home. But before I could pursue the feeling, I felt the boorish string of human attention pulled taut from my toes to my scalp, and I raised my head to look into the distance.

Concentric rings of flowers swirled as far as I could see: forsythia and jessamine and marigolds, sunflowers and wisteria and daylilies, gloxinia and pennywort and saxifrage, arranged in clades of lush hues, the rings counting the years since the birth of beauty itself as a concept and a thing to be seen, touched, loved. The blossoms stirred ever so slightly in a breeze that seemed to issue from the old man himself, as if his every shift of weight elicited an equal and opposite tremble from the pollen-clad hearts of every flower in existence.

I tried to imagine a world beyond this one but couldn’t. Or, rather, I felt that I could, but I didn’t want to.

The old man flicked his ring finger and my head swung toward him. Suddenly, I wanted to become the lustful apogee of calamitous beauty, a paragon of grace so imperious as to topple even the suggestion of another world’s mountain. I wanted the old and beautiful man to fuck me into myself, deeper and deeper, until I molted from my sad, blemished, erratically hairy skin and cracked into the juicy cortex of devotion itself.

The old man nodded, granting me permission to speak.

“Heaven?” I asked. “Is this heaven?”

The old man guffawed—I couldn’t describe it any other way. His jaw opened as if forcibly unclenched by an efficient gargoyle, and a series of short and blocky slabs of sound rang through the air, like congealed moonlight slapping the meat pocket on a lunch tray.

“Not quite, boy,” he said, studying the cool daggers of his nails. “No, this isn’t heaven. But it is paradise.” He paused, expecting a question, and then continued. “In my garden, you can have anything you want, be anything you want.”

“How did I get here?” Spurts of sugary dust rose from the crooning faces of this realm’s flowers. In their queer orbits I saw the decadent fractals of past and future empires: skyscrapers in ruins, the ocean truly dark and Merlot-sour, whores of Babylon seated in high-tech pink plush gaming chairs, crushing teenagers at MMORPGs.

“You came through the hole,” he said. “Or, you came, but you didn’t cum—we haven’t gotten that far.” The salt-slick pulse of his tongue on my cock, I realized, had diminished, now the heartbeat of a small mammal on another plane, trickling through a hole in the portico of space and time.

I nodded, unable to speak. I felt privy to the turning of something enormous, a zone inside of my idea of space itself swiveling on a hinge I’d never noticed before but couldn’t possibly ignore now.

“All you have to do is say my name. I believe you already know it.”

I imagined he expected befuddlement, a disco-dark otter slowly and unsurely fondling the cosmic heft of being and having anything. But I’d already reached a critical conclusion: this was exactly what I wanted.

“I’ll stay, Azazel,” I said. “When can we start?”

Of course, we all did our own research about Azazel after Father Brown gave us the name of the thing that had become so central to our understanding of our place in the world, or beyond it. We learned that Father Brown had not deluded us. Although man had selected himself for sin in the garden, Azazel gave him the trinkets with which to consummate it: warfare, eyeshadow, witchcraft. Outside of our AA warehouse, we approached the world with fear. If Azazel was truly the progenitor of sinful artifacts, might any small and errant thing—a Nyx Cosmetics jumbo white eyeliner pencil, a Wendy’s double-Baconator, an heirloom butterfly knife—not be detritus from the Hole, a way for Azazel to exert his hold on us? When we presented Father Brown with these concerns, he calmed us, promising that Azazel, due to certain limitations of quantum barriers and metaphysical knobs, bits, pieces, and bolts, couldn’t actually leave the Hole. His world and our world remained fundamentally separate, connected only at the Hole’s single point. This, he reminded us, was why we needed AA. We needed to train ourselves not to remember objects as they were before, but to create new futures for objects as we might know them, fresh and dewy and promising.

I never would have guessed how simple it would be to become the hunkmaiden of sheer and incredible beauty. But nothing, it turned out, could have been simpler, in this world or the old one.

After I said Azazel’s name, the exquisite grasses of his paradise cleft twisted and rose into a king-sized bed, complete with a woven comforter and throw pillow set. Azazel tossed aside his robe and revealed that he did, in fact, have an enormous cock, one of the largest I’d ever seen. It already leaked precum which, when struck by this zone’s eerie light, reflected the essence of my own name, a navy aura overlaid with a coral sheen. Azazel patted a grassy towel placed in the center of the bed. Obedient to the narrative thrust of this fantasy, I mounted the bed and assumed the position: face down, ass up, apparently the same in every astral plane. I hadn’t considered myself a powerbottom in the old world, so I tensed in anticipation of being entered, and tensed more when I realized I was tensing. Azazel placed his hands on my hips and a pulse of calm tingled through my entire body, as if a beautiful woman poured water from an ancient silver demitasse into and over every naked inch of my skin. I could feel my hole relaxing, expanding without loosening, as if I’d been blessed with incredibly flexible yet resilient anal musculature. When Azazel entered me, it felt easy as anything, easy as corn silk fluttering in a summer breeze or the surface of the earth moving three-and-a-half centimeters to the left every year, so dependable and measurable as to merit its own science.

Nothing had ever felt better than Azazel inside my newly refurbished pussy. I’d won every trivia night in every gay bar across America at the same time, and my student debt had vanished, and I’d never ignored emails from my grandmother with links to TEDx talks about the power of the evangelical handshake—or, that’s what it felt like, everything righting itself, everything always already having been right and thus not in need of any righting to be perfect. I arrived perfectly at the perfect center of every perfect thing and became it. I’m blossoming, I thought, the chthonic rhythm of Azazel’s thrusts timed to the very pulse of energy and matter through and around the earth, into a beautiful young center of the universe.

Fiction

Azazel Anonymous

Corley Miller

Eileen didn’t expect to enjoy the bunker, even when she heard she’d been selected as staff. She imagined crates of canned food piled at foot-thick doors, stalactites over itching bunks, corridors reeking of mildew. And Nico hadn’t even applied, so—what did love weigh? This was on the second day, when the fever was still confined to Indonesia.

When she arrived: a bright octagon hollowed from a New Zealand hillside. Solar-powered touchscreens and, even on the staff floor, a jacuzzi. Bedrooms the size of the apartment to which she’d clung through four years as a surgical resident in Williamsburg. Carpets and paintings in the corridors, and a minor van Gogh outside her room.

A park, even. Seven square and pathless miles of stern Matai pines and slim Kahikatea under a translucent dome. Ventilated, somehow. When it was built, in the eight hours of attention Twitter paid to the lifestyle-mag feature—Charles Peal’s Post-Everything Paradise—Eileen had tweeted ice-hearted private equity ghouls eating the heart of our society so they can survive the collapse they’re creating.

Now each dawn she walks to a meadow in the park’s northeast corner, where clover and cranesbill strive up to be drenched in sun. On the east verge there’s a nest of hawks. She found it on the second day, after dinner. A tall, red-breasted bird returning to a bleached treetop. The mate proud on a basket of sticks: black-winged aristocrats. Hooked beaks scorning the Zealand spring. In her purple notebook she drew one. It came out a lump.

Plenty of time to learn. From the stiff bird book in the maroon library, she named them: swamp harriers.

Today she can’t find the nest. Crossing the meadow leaves an apron of dew on her pants. At the tree’s base she finds a strange debris: the nest, fallen from somewhere, filled by a squirming fledgling. It’s featherless. Not quite a bird yet. It wobbles. Works an unsharp jaw. A hot poker of love is quenched in Eileen’s heart.

Birds are viral vectors, was the last thing the scientists managed to learn. Reservoirs.

Not every bird. And Peal closed the dome pretty early—probably not this bird.

Still, she stays six feet away. Finds a long branch and uses it to nudge the nest back together a little and push it toward the base of the tree. Tosses a bit of jerky at the chick, hoping that’ll help. Searches the sky for absent parents.

Eileen walks back to the complex slowly, with one hand on her lower stomach. She’s alive and there isn’t yet a bulge.

When she’s halfway back she hears the alarm. It bores a low E in her temple and then she’s running, pushing through the wet brush onto the lawn, touching her pulse in the airlock.

It’s the same people, the only people, in the Operations Room: Norman and Kennedy, staring at the wall of screens.

They’re watching a scuffed gang of survivors. Eight of them. The genetic elite in scrounged rags. A homemade paint-on-bedsheet banner reads NO INFECTIONS / NEED DYSENTERY MEDS. There’s a little girl, maybe eight, holding a distended stomach and walking towards the huge main gate.

Eileen looks at Norman, who’s technically in charge. Sitting in the big chair flipping the cover on the incinerator button open and shut. Other hand exploring his pec under the green sweatshirt. Boston Celtics. Eileen hates him serenely. A salesman, before.

“You are eight meters away from our cordon,” he says into the microphone. “Stop now.”

Eileen’s job in the Operations Room is to maneuver the cameras. Because apparently in Charles Peal’s billionaire mind the life-and-death decisions could not be given to a doctor but required a goon. Only a goon could be trusted. She’s going for a close-up when a woman comes up right behind the kid, puts a hand on her shoulder. Not an actual mother, Eileen thinks—a mother of choice. She would have liked to choose. Imagine: a goonless apocalypse.

The survivors say something that the outside mics don’t quite pick up.

“Probably amebic dysentery,” Eileen says. “We’ve got, like, a century’s supply of tinidazole down there.”

“Ninety-nine point seven percent lethality,” says Norman, like that was the only important thing.

“They’re not really asking to come in,” says Kennedy, who’s twenty-two. Basically a child. “We could, like, make a big slingshot. And open the door thiiiis much.”

“Ninety-nine point seven,” says Norman. “Drowning in your own organs.”

“That’s not the actual method—” Eileen starts.

“We could send it out in one of the drones,’ Kennedy says.

The woman takes a step forward. The girl follows her.

Then eight fat stalks of flame bloom under the woman’s left foot. She’s ashed in an instant: pollen of cinders bearing south-southeast in the spring breeze. Further back, the girl’s ignited by the heat. Red leaves furling on her old clothes. Blind and backwards she runs.

“I think we could maybe have found a way to innovate, there,” says Kennedy.

The girl’s skin boils as she runs. Eileen suffers an obscure collapse. Here with a goon and a child, killing. For three breaths she feels an enormous pressure to die. When she doesn’t, it’s like every single rule—everything from 10th-grade Cotillion to Charles Peal’s 400-page Bunker Guidance Manual—has boiled out of her.

“Let’s watch The One Where Nana Dies Twice tonight,” says Norman, who’s a fiend for Friends.

“That was monstrous,” Eileen says. She needs to throw up, she thinks. Or maybe kill Norman.

“Fuck, Eileen. There’s work to do!”

“We never know what day they might arrive,” says Norman. “So we have to be ready.”

Eileen does throw up: in the staff toilet on the way to the freezer room. But after lunch she goes back to the meadow, where the little bird’s still screeching and struggling. Maybe a ten percent chance it’s a carrier. Maybe twenty. She wraps it in her sweatshirt and brings it back through the dark wood to the bunker. It’ll kill her, or she’ll save its stupid little fuzzy life.

Kennedy Peaks filled out the bunker application form at an improv troupe party sophomore year, through the haze of three lime-a-ritas and two hours of yes-and flirting with a junior named Catlin, who he’d thought to impress by wittily filling out the questionnaire:

I am an extremely talented panicker…I will ensure the entire bunker is filled with nostalgic clutter.

Catlin’d rewarded him with four minutes of weirdly rigid kissing, then a year and a half of standoffishness. When he learned he’d been picked, and had ninety minutes to reach a private airport outside Madison for a drone flight to New Zealand, he thought of Catlin. On the second sleepless night in the bunker he found her Instagram account, where Bloody Mary brunches had, over the last two weeks, transitioned first to jokes about hemorrhagic Marys, and then to a couple days of optimistic thumbs-up-in-the-hospital posts, and then the pure wretched farewells and I-love-my-mother and please-can-someone-break-into-my-apartment-and-feed-my-dog posts to which Kennedy had, weirdly, begun to lose sensitivity, because by then they were a genre, the only genre.

His mother, in particular, is dead. She’d called while she was driving his father to the ER in Waukesha. Kennedy tried to reach her twenty-three times after that. She was too busy dying, he guesses. Not much comfort. The first week in the bunker he spent regretting his survival, crying and masturbating, building little shrines. Kennedy’d been at a loss before, about stuff like whether vodka or gin made for a better post-show party, or what seminars to sign up for at the Peal Freedom Leadership Institute he’d won a fellowship to between junior and senior years. Which was weird: he mostly remembers people trying to hook up with each other by trading Ronald Reagan quotes.

But he’s never been at a loss about just how? How to live? That first week, the chore list—8:30 am check solar batteries, 9:15 am inspect south comms array—was the only thing that kept him alive.

It had come, of course, from Charles Peal. And sometime in that second week he’d had this breakthrough, this moment of clarity: while Kennedy was trying out for improv Charles Peal figured out how to survive the actual end of the world. He does remember hearing Charles Peal speak at the Institute, talking about the can-do spirit and the zone of influence, and thinking: hey, this is a lot like yes-and. And now he thinks: this whole hemorrhagic fever has proved Charles Peal right about a whole lot of things. And: it was a great idea to build a bunker, and to become a billionaire. And then: what if I handle the apocalypse like Charles Peal? What if I try to yes-and this motherfucker?

He’s not quite up to that, not every day. But he thinks he can hold it together until Charles arrives, and that Charles will have some kind of a plan—some way to get things back together. To start over. For the last eight days Kennedy’s been improvising. Engaging Eileen and Norman in rounds of One-Word-at-A-Time, doing new characters for every chore, trying to help everyone get through it. Just until Charles comes.

And so Kennedy Peaks is trying to meet this morning’s incineration fight with his very best yes-and: yes, that was harrowing, and they all just need to really come together in this difficult time, with some good improv games. Usually they all gather in the Entertainment Grotto after evening chores, and Kennedy’s even written up little cards with the rules and some good prompts, Foreign Film Dubbing and Story or Die and Sit-Stand-Lie, and he just knows it’ll get things back on track.

“Hard day,” says Norman, “We’d better watch something funny, to take our minds off it.” Everyone knows this means Friends, because Norman has this thing about Friends, and because he’s literally already gotten out the commemorative DVD case, which, the walk-in DVD room initially felt antique to Kennedy but now that the internet’s winking off seems like another smart move by Charles Peal.

“How about a zombie movie,” says Eileen. “Where they all die.”

“That might be too on-the-nose,” says Kennedy. “Listen—”

“We have to take our minds off it,” says Norman.

“Norman, I actually had a different idea for tonight,” says Kennedy.

“Are we even sure that they have porn?” asks Kennedy.

“How could you plan to survive the apocalypse without porn?”

Kennedy tries to point out that it might be embarrassing to know what kind of porn the Peals had picked out, while serving as live-in staff, and to argue they should be doing something together and not just watching something together.

“Who cares what they think,” Eileen says. “We’re here. We survived.”

‘We should still be considerate,” Norman says, “just in case.”

Kennedy tries to explain the rules for Story or Die.

“That’s morbid as shit,” Eileen says, without missing a beat. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if we impress them,” she continues. “You’re both just living in the past. Like it fucking matters. We’re all just animals going around incinerating each other until we die, anyway.”

“Eileen, we’re watching Friends. That is an order. I’m ordering you to watch Friends with us.”

“Do you want to pick an episode?” Norman asks.

Eileen looks at him. “Yes, Norman, that is what I want today. I want to pick an episode of Friends.”

Norman looks really pleased as he hands her the DVD case. And then Eileen shoves the entire thing in the slot in the wall marked INCINERATOR, and flips Norman off with both hands, and stomps off toward the staff quarters. Norman curses after her, and then runs into the DVD room to look for another copy, and Kennedy Peaks—who is, after all, twenty-one years old, and who was a pretty good ultimate frisbee player and moderated a couple of subreddits and was really looking forward to graduating from college in just two months—thinks to himself: how would Charles Peal handle this?

Norman makes a point of carrying the new incinerator cartridges down himself: leadership. Heaviest shit in the bunker, a searing half-mile rep. There’s a handcart, and there’s already two years’ supply in the incinerator bay anyway, but he loves the thought of the muscles, splitting and knitting and holding. And the pain’s better, by about infinity, than the million nevers that the bunker hits him with, whenever he’s idle for a moment: never the meetings in Parsippany, never the rounds of shots in test tubes, never the desk guard printing a picture of his smile on a curling paper badge. Never the Celts, the Pats, never the drop of the bass or Sweet Caroline, or—never, never, never.

If Norman got to choose, he’d want to be quarantined with Phoebe and Rachel, easy. Easy. But if he couldn’t just choose the chicks? Still Phoebe, also Joey. Even though Rachel’s hotter, to him. Because those are the two who just love it the most. Love it: the way Norman does, or did. Being alive. He’s memorized every episode. Except for season nine, out of protest. At quiet bars it’s how he used to hit on girls: says that he thinks Friends is like the actual Bible. Everything you need to know to live.

On the day he left, Boston hadn’t gotten its first case yet. He looked down at Fenway and Gillette from the drone and thought: what am I doing? Everything’s fine. And then he’d thought: this will be like Friends. We’ll live in two apartments, and we’ll have jokes and play weird games and somebody will have a guitar. And eventually Norman was going to marry somebody, one of the other bunker people. Because Norman’s like Chandler. But also like Ross. And also like Joey, because he’s hot. So he was going to get married.

Instead there’s Eileen. Who’s cute, but is like the sentimental parts of Phoebe without the fun parts. The kind of person who thinks more about who’s getting incinerated than about who’s reducing their exposure. The kind of person who probably had a lot of complaints, who probably listened to NPR, even back then when things were great.

Last night Norman had thought he wanted to watch The One Where Nana Dies Twice, even though it’s not his favorite, because it had the death, that wasn’t death, but was, and this whole we-can-continue message, which he thought Eileen needed to hear, but it was like she didn’t even give a fuck what he was trying to do for her.

Which Norman was initially calm about, both because he was in control and because he was sure that there’d be a backup copy of anything as important as Friends, but then there wasn’t. And he’d been sitting there in the DVD room, which has this really nice carpet and an actual chandelier, and he’d realized he was never going to see Friends again.

Which. Was more difficult, somehow, than it’d been leaving Boston. Because now it’s like: where is he going to get that melt from? That feeling of everything’s okay, and all the problems are little, and everything will go on forever, and it’ll just be whatever we can solve in thirty minutes, with our friends. In the ten minutes he spent looking for another copy of the DVDs he felt like his face was going to melt, because never-never-never.

Norman sat down in the DVD room. He was in control, so he didn’t let himself cry. He set a timer and he let himself make really big sad faces, and he let himself tremble, for exactly 150 seconds. Then he counted to ten, and did twenty pushups, and used his commander code to go into the medical storeroom and take two xanax, and then he went to sleep.

It isn’t till he stacks the new cartridges on top of the old, in the big square pile, that he thinks of it. What he needs is a project. A really big chore. And what Eileen needs is Friends. To get that it isn’t that serious. And that they’re all Friends. And also he, Norman, needs Friends. And he has it memorized anyways.

So he uses his commander code to go up to the Peal residence floors, where technically he’s not supposed to go. And he feels a little weird about this, but not too weird. Because if Charles Peal wanted it to be more like Friends, he’d have gotten better people. Norman has some things to tell Charles Peal, about some of Charles Peal’s decisions. But right now Norman is going to make it more like Friends. Charles turns out to have a lot of great Ross and Chandler clothes, and Naomi Peal has everything you need for the girls, but he has to scrounge a little for the Joey outfits. With the colors.

But by dinnertime? By the time he’s usually sitting down to watch Friends? Instead he’s in the Peal’s living room, with two cameras pointed at him, doing all the Chandler lines from The One with the Embryos. He’ll do Joey next, and then Ross, and then he’ll see if he can pull off the girls. That’s what’s going to fix this.

The best thing Eileen could find for the bird was the second-smallest dollhouse. A Tudor. The facade hinged out so the Peals’ future child could look into all the rooms. Eileen smashed the little settees and four-poster beds and used the debris to make a nest in the dining room. Laid the little bird in there—wearing gloves, and bandages underneath—under a tiny oil replica of Starry Night. Has been trying to arrange some kind of warming system: a hot plate glued to the Grand Foyer, just beneath.

Imprinting, she keeps thinking. She has to be screwing it up. Even if it survives it’ll wander the world not knowing it’s a hawk, thinking it’s an Eileen. What a fate, she thinks. But each evening she slides the house closed, and each morning finds it lying on its downy face, like a victim in a film, and every time it isn’t dead she feels like, okay, I can go on.

Still, she’s taking her temperature every hour. An ominous 98.9, this morning—still within the range.

She’d found the hawks on her first walk, the day she’d skyped Nico the single time, when he’d tried to cough “Someone Like You” as a joke and then shown her the blood on the Kleenex, and they’d bickered about how dark the sputum, whether he was in stage two or three of the virus, whether the color balance on her screen was off, and she’d also asked how he was doing.

“Bad. You know,” he’d said, and then they’d separately realized that she didn’t know: the only way to know was by dying.

When she called the next day it rang for hours.

And the job had turned out to be: keeping the lie, the imprint of that life alive. A dollhouse: polishing mahogany and defrosting vacuum-sealed pork cutlets, so that exactly two people plus whatever progeny could live exactly as they had. At the impossible gilded apex of human history. Wherever they were, anyway—“concluding business, taking extraordinary precautions.” Squeezing a last billion from the broken world, she’s sure.

But these birds. Building a home from spring’s rubble, the jetsam of last winter’s dying. Life in a knuckled whorl of dead things.

Partly she can’t name the bird because she’d talked about names with Nico, on that last call. Eileen had liked “Nico,” but Nico couldn’t bear it. Said it sounded like an epitaph.

Norman with his Celtics sweaters. With his Friends. She went into the DVD room at 3am last night. Mausoleum. Incinerated every Jennifer Aniston title she could find. Consoled by their unanimous badness, as films. Just to prove there was nothing. No friends, no Celtics, no neighborhood—no rules. Only the life you could make. What she’d really wanted to do was run out into the infected world, shaking her hands and pressing wet, live things onto her face. But the doors were literally locked, so: this bird.

Which may kill her. Or kill Norman. Even trade, maybe. All of them, and then the Peals when they arrive in their drone?

Fall 2021

Fall 2021 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Poetry • Fall 2021

Poem in Which My Faggotry Fakes its Own Death

Poetry • Fall 2021

JEREMIAH BIKES ME HOME

Notes from 21 South Street • Fall 2021

In Joan is Okay, A Doctor Rearticulates Her Relationship to Work

Fiction • Fall 2021

Azazel Anonymous

Fiction • Fall 2021

Survival

Art • Fall 2021

Eating Applesauce

Art • Fall 2021

PRESS 14

Art • Fall 2021

Lear Through the Wind

Art • Fall 2021

CONVERTER

Art • Fall 2021

Untitled

Art • Fall 2021

Ruminate

Art • Fall 2021

Self-Portrait in an Armchair

Art • Fall 2021

Existence circa 2017