Spring 2013 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

“Reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand,” said Marianne Moore about her friend and contemporary near the end of Barnes’s career. “The Perfect Murder,” printed by The Harvard Advocate in its 1942 75th Anniversary Issue, exemplifies the curious linguistic prowess that Moore praises. In fact, the study of “foreign [languages], which you understand” is the very occupation of Barnes’s protagonist, Professor Anatol Profax, a dialectologist (specialist of tongues). A crossbreed between Middlemarch’s intellectually stubborn Casaubon and Baudelaire’s voyeuristic flaneurs, Profax harbors his cherished work in the crook of his elbow as he haunts the streets with a removed aspect and attentive ears. He records the “figures of speech and preferred exclamations in all walks of life” in order to classify species of speakers. He bunch-indexes (Barnes’s term) the inarticulate of England, France, and America as “The Inveterates” and devises other groupings—among them “Excitable Spinsters” and “The Impulsive”—along lines of fanaticism, eloquence, and verbosity. Profax’s scrupulous science literalizes what Moore recognized as Barnes’s genius: she paid close attention to the subtleties of expression, and did not underestimate the potential of a single language to spawn multitudinous variations.

The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer, 1899. Image courtesy of metmuseum.org

Hesiod’s Theogony starts off by telling where the story itself comes from: the muses teach Hesiod a song while he shepherds his lambs. His poems are created by the divine. They’re passed on by the voice of a goddess as it takes over his lungs.

I.



Love is an act of collision. Two bodies come together and react. When things go well, a mutual bond will form between the two. They can each maintain their prior self while remaining attached. A healthy relationship takes the form of two stars colliding, forming a binary system in which they dance in a shared orbit.



But many things can go wrong with collisions. In some cases, both bodies will explode.



There are other, rarer instances, in which one object travels at such feverish high speed, and is so much more massive, that it will devour the other.



One such collision almost came to completion five years ago. On Monday, December 7, 2008, the Texas police ran into the home of Christopher Lee McCuin to find him sitting at the kitchen table preparing to eat dinner. He had an ear boiling on the stove and a chunk of raw meat on his plate with a fork set neatly beside it.



Upon seeing the police enter, McCuin bolted towards the door and managed to escape from the house. They chased him down shortly afterwards.



He had put much preparation into his meal. He had caught the food on Friday when he asked his girlfriend, Jana Shearer, 21 years old, to discuss some matters regarding their relationship.



When they had finished talking, McCuin beat her repeatedly with a blunt object. It only took a few collisions for her to fall dead to the floor. After that he spent the weekend further mutilating the body, carving out pieces from various parts of the carcass.



After an entire weekend of work, he went to seek out his girlfriend’s mother. “I want to show you what I’ve done,” he said. She followed him into the house, and he told her to look into the garage.



The mother put her hand to her mouth and ran screaming out of the house to find a policeman.



In the meantime, McCuin prepared his meal, setting up his last act.



Perhaps McCuin carved out even more pieces from the body after the mother left. Maybe he already had the pieces sitting in the fridge. But the collision had already happened, and the reaction was now in full speed. With the police’s entrance, though, the completion of McCuin’s task was foiled: The reaction was cut short.



II.



There is a predator in every ecosystem. When it comes to chemistry, water is like a piranha. It is designed to rip apart whatever it lays its hands upon. Two hydrogen atoms are posed like guns on either side of the oxygen atom. With their slightly positive charge, they will stick to any sort of negative charge. The negatively-charged oxygen, which is twelve times more massive than hydrogen, floats like a giant. It is drawn towards any positive mol- ecules in the vicinity. With just three atoms, the water molecules are fully equipped to tear apart both spectrums of charges.



But water never acts alone. Rather, it hunts in packs.



Take, for example, the dissolution of sodium chloride in water. This molecule is simply one sodium atom bound to a chlorine atom. The sodium carries a negative charge and the chlorine a positive charge. The moment this molecule comes into contact with the aqueous environment, the water molecules swarm the foreigner and prepare to attack. The ones on the chlorine side reorient themselves so that the hydrogen molecules bond to the negative charge. On the other side the oxygen atoms stick to the sodium ion.



In an instant, everything is set.



With their teeth clenched on the skin of its prey, the water molecules start to pull apart in opposite directions, tugging until the carcass is ripped in half. The remains float off in the water, and the water molecules move on, satisfied with their meat.



More than seventy percent of our body consists of this water. We are carnivores.



III.



Of all the senses, touch is by far the most intimate, for it is the only sense that causes our bodies to change.



The least penetrating sense is vision. Light simply hits the eye. Smell penetrates the body a bit more: Little bits of the environment enter our noses, and some particles bind to the appropriate pore in our nose. The tiny hairs inside the pore are pushed to an angle, triggering a neural response. In order to taste, tiny hairs in our taste buds spark a nerve impulse. Sounds are perceived when the hairs in our inner ear vibrate from the sound waves.



But this is all superficial. It’s simply hairs moving or bones vibrating. The actual shape does not change.



Now take touch. We are able to feel the world thanks to Meissner corpuscles, tiny oval-shaped organelles. They are located everywhere in our bodies—underneath the skin, on the linings of internal organs. Whenever our bodies come into contact with another surface, the corpuscles in that area compress and immediately fire back signals to the brain, as if information was being squeezed out of them.



When our bodies are still, there is no contact, and the Meissner corpuscles in these areas start to lose their sensitivity. They stiffen, become less responsive, and eventually stop working.



When we finally do give them the stimulation for which they were designed, they immediately light up and send joyful electric pulses to the brain. Just as glow sticks only glow when they are bent, our bodies slowly light up as we move each individual body part. After a full session of stretching, every part of the body is stimulated: The internal organs have massaged each other, and bone and muscles are twisting and turning and rubbing, as if reciting an old song thought to be forgotten. By the time we have finished exer- cising our entire body, we are glowing.



Every action has an equal and opposite reac- tion. A transaction happens when two things touch. That is why newborns that go for too long without being touched will die. That is why we can tell if someone is alive or dead just by putting our hands to their skin. It is through touch that the body is able to live. If we stop moving, the body will forget that it is alive.



IV.



In the movie *Perfume*, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is overtaken by love. Born and abandoned in a fish market and raised in an orphanage, he grew up as a strangely detached boy with a superior nose, which led him to seek out the best of aromas.



One night, he smells something particularly beautiful and follows the scent until he finds its source: a redheaded maiden selling strawberries in the local market. He follows her, unable to resist.



Jean-Baptiste startles the woman and tries to quell her screams with his hands. Having never touched or been touched by anyone in his life, he clenches her neck too hard and kills her. She falls to the floor. He touches her again, but she is not alive. He smells her, but the smell is gone.



From then on, he can think of nothing but that marvelous odor: he seeks to create the finest perfume in the world. After seeking the ap- prenticeship of a local perfume maker, Jean uses the perfume boiler in the basement to extract oils from various objects.



He begins with roses. But even with the finest flowers, he cannot find a scent anything like the maiden’s, and so he starts experimenting with objects more like her body. One by one, the girls from the town start disappearing. Naked bodies of beautiful women appear around the city. From each of these bodies, the hair has been removed.



It is this hair that Jean uses to extract the finest scents.



Over time the town is flooded with the fear of a serial killer. Jean flees from the city and goes to the country to work in a perfume factory with better scent preservation techniques. On his way there, Jean realizes that he has no scent of his own.



Once there, he continues to kill in secret and eventually obtains the perfect prey: a most beautiful redhead who he believes will bring forth the magic scent. By that time, however, the town has exposed him as the murderer and plans to hang him for his crimes.



Just before his hanging, Jean takes the perfume from his pocket and lets a single drop fall onto his skin. The scent expands like an atom bomb in the air, and the town is stunned by the heavenly smell. A calm, golden spray settles on the citizens and they advance into a massive orgy. Skin touching skin touching skin—the people are engulfed in love and forgive Jean for his murders.



The perfume has given him the power to rule the world, but Jean still has no scent. He realizes that he has nothing to give to the world: He can never be loved. He heads back to the fish market where he was born and decides to end his life. He pours the perfume over his body. The nearby crowd surrounds him and devours him, piece af- ter sweet-smelling piece.



All the love in the world, condensed into a single collision.



 

*Day 1*



The blinds are, as standard, set at that particular angle. They hide you but show what’s going on outside in ribbons. What’s going on outside is every so often a car comes into the lot and every so often a car comes out. Now a white Estate comes in and a guy gets out of the car and looks around the site and locks up his car. He looks at himself in the car window. Because the motel is on a highway and the land is flat and undeveloped, you can see when the sun is about to set. Almost hour by hour you know the time by how glorious the road and the forecourt are. 



I imagine I’ll hear things from next door, but even when I strain, I can’t hear anything, just the hum of my own refrigerator and the highway. I don’t know how many people make noise when they’re having sex. I think about that. It’s not just pleasure. After the sun sets, rush hour ends and the highway is a steady one, two cars, then nothing, three four five, then nothing. 



 The small Indian woman who owns the motel comes out of the office and crosses the forecourt to a laundry room. She’s wearing slippers and, looking out once around the parking lot, disappears quickly inside the shade of the room. She doesn’t speak English but her son does, so he deals with the customers. The two pass each other on the forecourt occasionally, going about their business between the office and the rooms. If there’s something to say, they say it, but if not, they pass each other in silence. 



 It gets dark after a few hours on the bed, tossing and turning, watching the parking lot, counting out my food, measuring the portions I’ll have for tomorrow’s meals, looking at the map. The idea was to try to write with fewer distractions than in the city. Instead I give in and get my pajamas from my bag and undress behind the bed, looking through the ribbons between the blinds to see if anyone is there. 



In the dark, it’s not really dark. I pull the stiff sheets from around the bed and get under them. There are still cars coming in and out of the lot every few hours. I can’t sleep. I keep thinking someone is knocking on the window and on the door. The fan is on low cold fan, and makes a nice, slow sound. 



*



“You don’t want to go there,” the off-duty cab driver had said. “It’s cheap, but it’s not worth it.”



“What I’ll say is that I would sleep much better if I knew my niece was at the Good Value down the highway than if she was at The Rest Inn.”



*



*Day 2*



In the morning, the walls of The Rest Inn Motel are yellow and shiny as butter. The highway is suddenly loud at rush hour and then goes quiet again. The small woman and her son are standing in the doorway of the office, talking. She has a broom in her hand and brushes some dirt from the gutter running along the wall, to show her son what she means. The parking lot is mostly empty so that the front of The Rest Inn looks almost like the front of a regular home. I doze in the bed; the sheets are still stiff. The sun enters in ribbons. I fall back asleep. The day stretches out in front of me. 



 It’s something to have nowhere to be. In my pajamas, I go to the bathroom and check what I look like in the mirror. I comb through my hair with my fingers and put on my shower slippers. I’m of a mind to go outside and stand on the threshold, since I’ve paid for it. So I go to the front door and walk out as if I’m living in a house, as if I’m going onto my own porch to let the cat in. The light comes in suddenly, the room is quarried—I can see everything inside, the stiff sheets, the refrigerator, the carpet and the fire alarm on the ceiling. There is a moment of silence on the forecourt and the highway. I step outside onto the little sidewalk and feel the heat of the midday through my pajamas. But then a black Range Rover turns off the slip road into the lot, and I look up to the sky quickly and turn inside, closing the front door behind me. 



In the shade, I resolve to explore the neighborhood. 



I take out my map. Neighborhood seems a strange word. The Rest Inn Motel does have neighbors—an auto repair store and a car dealership are among the highway-facing properties of the same service slip road, before it and the highway become more hostile and fade loudly towards the coast. I look at the map and think of an impossible walk following the highway to its natural conclusion, along the shoulder where there’s no sidewalk and the trees overhang and force you into the path of the cars. 



It’s four in the afternoon before I am comfortable enough with my route, and have packed my bag with some cheese and a bottle of water, and have washed my hair. Taking my key, I shut up the room and walk with purpose, as I have planned to do, across the busy forecourt, past the woman standing in the shade of the office, onto the slip road, before turning right and starting off along the highway. The cars are a steady one two three four, and as I keep walking the frequency gets higher and rush hour begins. 



 From the map, I know that directly under the highway is an area of green parkland, with two large ponds and a bridle path running the length of it. To get there, you have to duck under the highway. There are trails downhill behind the shoulder or, if you turn off a short way down the highway, there’s a riding school whose paddocks will also lead you downhill beneath the road. When I go through the riding school, a group of girls on break are sitting on a picnic bench, waiting for a lesson, dressed in jodhpurs and t-shirts. I ask the tallest where I can find the bridle path to the pond. They all point in the wooded direction behind the horses.On the map, the park is a long green shape, tapering to trails at either end. When I get to the wooded entrance, the sound of the highway dims, replaced by the sound of the trees, of wildlife both winged and footed, and past that, the sound of almost still water. I follow the bridle path through the trees and see through, eventually, to the dark, sparkling source. It is a small lake. Ducks and swans are sailing from one bank to another. I set up on a bench by the water’s edge and take off my shoes and let my feet catch the sun. I eat my little lunch. 



The water close by is in shadow; it is a dark photograph. The swans draw on the water with their beaks, biting imperceptibly, white trails on the surface, every so often finding a long wet life and swallowing it whole. 



 But I am anxious to get back before it starts to get dark. I pack up and follow my footsteps back to the motel. When I turn in from the slip road, I see the woman finishing a load of laundry. As I cross to my room, slipping my key out from my pocket, she smiles at me and I smile back.



Inside I look at the dinner I had planned. I have a tin of beans and no tin opener. I try my little scissors, tweezers, a pencil. Nothing works, so I lock up the room and go across the forecourt to the office, whose door has been left open in the evening heat. The office is a meter square or so of standing room and a glass window with a desk behind it. There’s a buzzer to press for assistance. I press it and wait. A quiet voice says something. A minute or two later, the little Indian woman appears behind the glass window and smiles, and I ask if she has a tin opener. She doesn’t understand so I mime a tin opener. We laugh, and she disappears again. Her son comes in instead, smiling like his mother, and slides a tin opener under the bank slot of the window. 



After I eat my dinner, sitting on the stiff sheets of the bed, I go back across the forecourt in my bare feet and try to hand the tin opener back through the bank slot. 



“Do you have more cans? Keep it! Keep it if you need it,” says the son, so I do. 



At night, cars come in and out of the lot. I lie in bed and watch through the blinds. 



* 



The first ever motel was the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo in California. It was 1925, one of the first years there were cars everywhere. 



The first motel looked like The Rest Inn with its Spanish white walls and simple square windows and tiles on the roof. 



There was a little chapel-shaped building on the end of the terrace of apartments, which was a bell tower. 



*



*Day 3*



The fan is on* low cold fan*. The lights in the bathroom are on and come out onto the carpet and into the daytime shade of the bedroom like a television. The bathroom is cool and smells like mint. When I’m inside it with the door closed, I feel that I am in a cell in the motel room, and that this cell is the heart of America. 



With the borrowed tin opener, I open my can of macaroni and eat it for lunch. Then I go to the park again, as if to a job, along the roaring highway, past the girls at the riding school, past the benches along the lake’s edge. This time I keep going past the lake, along the bridal path, through its dark and quiet stretches, till I can’t see the water between the trees when I look back. The first thing that appears from the woods is the quiet, low-lying lot of an elementary school, two boulders marking the end of the bridal path, and the gull-like birds swooping over the orange roofs. 



Babylon is a small town, bright with seaside light. The main streets curl around the railway station and, further out, the playing fields of the elementary school and a high school. The basketball and tennis courts are deserted except for some kids sitting on bikes behind the netting of the basketball court as if they’re watching a game.



I walk all the way to the train station and up the stairs to the platform. The trains sit in the downbelow station tracks, silver backs all together, still, but not really still, like alligators who are sunbathing. The departure board flickers with names of final stops like Montauk and the main ones in Manhattan. The buses line up outside the station for trips to Robert Moses Beach. Any of these places are places I could go. But instead I turn away from the platform. I head back to The Rest Inn, having paid for another night. I look forward to seeing the woman and her son, as if they’ve been waiting up for me, in the office, the light making a rectangle across the forecourt, mosquitoes dancing in its beam.



 

According to local runners, the stage that separates the “Bushmen from the boys” during one of Botswana’s largest road races is the one that extends up the reticulated paths to the peak of Kgale Hill, Gaborone’s highest point. It is attainable only by conquering the unmarked, seemingly impassable routes of dense bush and sheer rock face that lead there. Kgale protrudes like a tubular knot from Gaborone’s otherwise unblemished flatland of saltpan and packed dirt, a nodule of soursop, baobab, bunch grass, camel thorn, hairy acacia and tangled hybrids all the same grey-green color. Experienced racers veer off Quarry Road at a predetermined entry point and begin their climb. Racers run in teams, and there is a tradition, the twilight before each race, to trawl about with teammates around the sides of the hill, braving the crepuscular insects and nocturnal fauna with rakes and machetes, cutting down the ziziphus and taller acacias to mark their own paths and ob- scure all the others.



 When I joined a team myself in 2009, my team- mates, a couple of students and other teaching aides from one of the capital’s primary schools, assured me that this annual attack on Kgale’s landscape didn’t do much more than rearrange the entropic mass of gnarled branches and undergrowth. The hill, after all, didn’t look much different the next morning. It’s endured far worse over the years, they said, and maybe they were right: Since



the 1920s, when the earliest Roman Catholic mis- sions settled at the base of the hill, the site has held the country’s first secondary school, a Setswana-language newspaper, and a television transmitter. While each, in turn, provided citizens of Gabo- rone with education, information, entertainment, and a spiritual alternative to the Anglicans that had arrived in the nineteenth century, each also contributed to a gradual scaling back of the Kgale habitat, forcing its wild mélange of desert plants and wildlife into a slow retreat up the slopes, beaten back by an expanding network of newly paved roads. In the 1970s, the closest thing to concrete in Botswana was the solidity of the sunbaked saltpans, but now, Kgale, Setswana for “the place that dried up,” has parking lots and squat buildings lodged into its base like stones caught in tumbleweed. So this year, at twilight, runners grabbed their trowels and cut divots into the slope, uprooting medlar and mimosa and scarping anything on the hill that seemed to promise a direct path to the new satellite radio receivers at the summit.



By nightfall, some men began drinking from saggy cartons of fermented sorghum, forfeiting the early morning race. They weren’t visible in the dark until the first small brushfires flared up and snuffed out, when a texture of light and shadow passed across their hands and mouths and their bodies seemed to freeze briefly in the interstices between the trees, when seeing was suddenly charged with a sense of scandal. The dry air was filled. After the police had cleared everyone out, the hill, briefly overrun by swarms of smoke and sirens, settled down again. From the flatbeds of pickup trucks and the back windows of mini- buses, the hill seemed squatter and squatter as it receded from view, pulled into the earth as the many teams drove towards the lights of the city.







*



 



Far north of Gaborone, the waterways of the Okavango River Delta are so clear that you can tell when the silt of its riverbed changes colors. The different shades of red desert sand mix with the rich dark soil. Grey spotted fish swim through the water with a torpid solidity, like dislodged, floating stones. The mokoro are hand-carved ca- noes sturdy enough for one passenger at a time. You must use a pole to propel your boat across the surface: oars entangled in the papyrus marsh. During the dry winter season, the water recedes from its depositories in the Kalahari Desert and pools like stagnant moats around the resorts fur- ther north. The visiting tourists shift their interest from wildlife safaris in the Delta to desert tours on 4x4 adventure vehicles and bus rides through game reserves. The hotels empty out during the daytime excursions, but there’s not much to see during the winter other than distant herds. The passengers return covered in dust kicked up by the vehicles’ tires, interminable gestures in the dirt.



This is also the only time of the year that the desert is cool enough to walk on without shoes, though, so during my week in the delta while on leave from teaching in Gaborone, I spent most of my time on foot. Free from the winds that signal the brief transition between seasons, the Kalahari settled down. The dry air sharp in the lungs. I learned to run on dirty blisters and sandpaper skin, the broken surface of the saltpans tearing through my sneakers’ rubber, soft cuticles shorn after just two days on the cracked earth. Acedia, the noonday demon, the earliest manifestation of spiritual malaise, is said to have originated on the backs of the religious ascetics during their third-century trials in the Sahara Desert. Every mirage a temptation to slide beneath the sand. As a cross-country runner in high school, I only knew how to counteract boredom through the monotony of long-distance runs. The stillness counted along the beats of metrical strides. Time swallowed by the silky dunes.



After droughts in the Kalahari, the desert flora withers and no longer holds the sand in place; instead, it is lifted up in plumes during wind- storms. A few miles outside Gaborone, the first thing the disembarking passengers at Sir Seretse Khama notice is the air. It tastes. It leaves a thin gruel of desert dust under their tongues, a scum of sand and saliva along their lips. Sand accumu- lates around doorways and in carry-on luggage, as if sifting through fabrics or funneling through keyholes. The taste follows the visitors into their taxis or buses, whose seats and floor mats are already heavy with it. It is only within the city proper that it seems to dissipate, replaced by the smokes of intermittent veldt fires fed on the dry air and by the pollution of the capital’s urban sprawl.



Running in the capital during the winter season was impossible for my untrained lungs until I had built up my stamina in the Okavango region. The taste of the air abruptly changes upon arriving in Gaborone. It is saturated with the vapors of paraffin, firewood, and leaded petrol, which was sold in city filling stations as late as June 2011, despite the government’s putative regulations. That same year, the World Health Organization published an eight-year study of the average concentration of air pollutants in the atmospheres of 1,100 major urban areas. Gaborone was the only African city in the bottom twenty-five, the most polluted city on the continent (despite its relatively high per capita income).



Aeolia, the phenomenon of terrestrial reshap- ing that produces the taste of the air after windstorms in Botswana, is named after Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds. For years, scientists have predicted that this natural process will allow future windstorms to carry the desert’s soluble iron—the Aeolian deposits—in concentrations heavy enough to spark new growth cycles of underwater ecosystems in the Southern Ocean. Today, competing studies claim that the same Aeolian winds carry Gaborone’s pollutants be- yond its borders to the eastern regions of the sub- Sahara. In the Kalahari, I could draw sand from the air and grind it in my teeth, feel its coarseness in my throat. I could run until my tongue felt salted. The mesh and sponge of the upper respiratory tract are natural filters, but porous ones. Sulfur dioxide is small enough to coat the lungs. It diffuses into the blood.



 



*



 



In 2007, Kgale Hill was introduced to an international audience when two British filmmak- ers and Mirage Productions leased the hill from the Botswana government for ten years. They chose the site to film an adaptation of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith’s series of novels about a smalltime investigational practice that operates from the foot of the hill. The detective, a sententious Motswana woman who meditates on the identities of suspected insurance scammers and petty thieves under the shade of the acacias and baobabs, chooses the spot for its shelter and distance from the rising hubbub of Gaborone. Kgale is somehow in better touch with the pride of Botswana, the detective believes, than the new businesses thriving in the capital. After the hill was leased, the Botswana government invested in the Mirage project to preserve the sets for visits by tourists. Though plans for further adaptations of the nov- els have stalled after a short-lived television show on BBC and HBO, the hill continues to uphold an identity as “Kgalewood.” A mummified set, an empty lot, and a tourist center provide a space for a group of local producers and actors to hold film classes, rent equipment and attempt to contribute to a burgeoning film industry.



At the time of the race, though, the film crews are scrapping together a running team of their own, maybe to entertain themselves during a long and unusually wet winter, maybe to stir up some publicity for their projects, but officially to raise money for a Gaborone film production company that has emerged from the Detective Agency project. Batswana citizens worked and trained as members of the show’s crew during its shoots, and the Kgalewood sets are actually involved in supporting and supplying local film projects and productions.



Team Mirage doesn’t participate in the reshaping of Kgale’s landscape during the revelry before the race. Some say that they called in the police at the first sign of smoke, annoyed by the noises and stones that would occasionally slam against their trailers at the base of the hill, wary of damage to their sets. There are murmurs about the irony of their protests to a bit of ritualized razing, given that the film crew has done more to disturb the ecosystem of Kgale over the past two years than any other establishment in the past century. During the shoots, floodlights glare up and down the hillsides, pushing flocks of birds to the hill’s north face and provoking howls from tree-dwelling animals. Mirage also paved much of the ground and stationed dumpsters, trail- ers, and equipment trucks at the base of the hill throughout the season, attracting some animals and frightening others away, but most of all carving another concrete niche into a hill studded with increasing numbers of them.



During some training runs up the hill, while testing out different routes and examining bluffs for places to climb up the steeper parts, a local team caught two Mirage team members film- ing them just above the rocks and tore off their camera’s viewfinder. Many doubted that the British filmmakers would be competitive enough to scout other teams in advance, but every team had its own strategy for summiting the hill: tackling it vertically by climbing up portions of the south face, or moving laterally, stabbing upwards wherever the trees gave way to an opening. From the summit, the view of the city below would open up. The finish line, marked by a banner rendered impossibly bright by that hour’s sun, would practically guide runners to a course straight down to it. Teams tried to mark paths for themselves in advance, guarding the results of their reconnaissance and hiding their intentions from others, so after the fight in the hills the local teams devel- oped an unspoken rivalry with Mirage. Some undoubtedly fanned the flames for more political reasons—in 2007, many had spoken out in support of regulating the studio’s right to film with bright lights at night. To motivate themselves, some teams have declared the aim of this year’s race as “Take Back Kgale Hill.”



 



*



The students on my school’s team, Karabo and Henry, hailed from Orapa, a mining town 250 miles north of the capital, a place dug into the earth between the Okavango and Gaborone. The diamond mines, four pockmarks in a rock face, are covered by yellow trucks that claw along its face like hornets patching together the entrances to their nests. The Botswana government shares an equal-stakes ownership over these mines with the Debswana Diamond Company, and the partners have been slowly boring into the earth by shaving off layers of dusty Kimberlite volcanic rock in which the diamonds are embedded. Families in Orapa are intertwined with the larger organization of Debswana, which provides its workers with houses, elementary schools, medical care, a hospital, and HIV-AIDS testing. In 2008, Debswana’s parent company, De Beers, pioneered a Forevermark publicity campaign, in which all Botswana’s nationally produced diamonds are identified with a number at their source and thus guaranteed early to be conflict-free. In a continent whose diamond exports are besmirched by the blood diamond trade, the Debswana-Botswana partnership has been, to some extent, a model of a healthy relationship between a corporation and a government with mutual interests in the health and economic success of its citizens, as well as the reputation of its nationally produced diamonds.



Karobo began his track career around the age when American students begin junior high school, joining a Debswana-sponsored team and running laps around the tracks that circled the fences around the mining zones. While on the team, he met Henry, from Letlhakane, a suburb of Orapa. Henry was the son of owners of a cattle post that once surpassed 100 acres before much of the land was bought out and fenced off by De Beers. The first time he and Karabo trained together, they were the youngest runners on an airplane en route to Mount Kilimanjaro, where the company’s team spent a week elevating their red blood cell count by living at high altitudes. The runners from Orapa had wondered if the trip would be the first time they would see snow, but they took photographs of a craggy peak that, from the air, didn’t look all that different than the opening of a diamond mine. They were shocked by how clear the air felt, how far they could run without gasping. After the length of the trip, the runners who’d avoided altitude sickness during the two weeks midway up the mountain held a 5k race at sea level. The two youngest, Henry and Karobo, were the only ones to finish.



While other members of the team trained to- gether over the summer, Henry invited Karabo to stay at his cattle post. They ran laps around boundaries of the land—the river delta to the north, the De Beers fencing to the east—a course that ran straight through unkempt bushland before breaking into open fields spotted with hillocks of grazing bulls. In the morning, the men emerged from their too-small huts and tended to a fresh breakfast with sharpened knives. Afterwards, hounds chewed at the scraps, dipping their snouts into puddles of the youngest blood in the world. Karabo turned away to the sounds of lapping blood as flies sucked loudly on the spattered dirt, as cows lowed in the distance. After his morning run, he was immediately put to work, and the men were hard on him. The Botswana government has pressured landowners surrounding the four main mines to sell their land for a kind of modern-day prospecting; the land is leased to the company indefinitely and sold back at decreased rates to the local landowners if nothing is found. But years can pass before this process is completed; in the meantime, the land lies fallow and becomes overgrown with opportunistic desert flora, thorny grasses, and tough shrubs that take months to clear out because their roots extend all the way to the thin reservoir of moisture deep underground.



At night, Henry ran among the sleeping bulls. As a child his father had taught him the myth of Mantis, the legendary originator of the earliest Bushman, whose wife showed mankind how to find food, whose sons ran so fast they pulled the first grains from the wind, their steps so light they barely bent the stalks of savannah grass. The two young runners wouldn’t truly become friends until they both found themselves on the school team in Gaborone that fall. Yet on the cattle post, Karobo held his own. Clearing land for planting, sowing sorghum for fermenting, learning to cut the necks of goats and skin their hides, and playing with the young twins, he trained for his move to Gaborone. The twins chased him, hand-in-hand, their shadows lengthening far ahead, skipping along the first few meters of his run before losing ground to his long strides, screaming in laughter and encouragement.



 



*



The mutual interests between the government and Debswana have also aligned in their handling of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which has forced evictions of indigenous Bushmen living there. A British mandate founded the reserve in 1961, just before the first diamond deposits were found in Orapa, in a promise to provide the Bushmen “the right of choice of the life they wish to follow.” Under the pretensions of preserving the region for grazing, the Botswana government evicted six communities from the center of the reserve, banning hunting, requiring permits for re-entry, and relocating the displaced to the fringes of the reserve in New Xade. The government had handed over control of the Gope area, including its underground water reserves (an essential component to cooling the mines’ heavy machinery), to Debswana after evicting the Bushmen from the area in 2002. Campaigns against the development of Gope, Setswana for “nowhere,” eventually led De Beers to sell the undeveloped land to Gem Diamonds in 2007 for only a fraction of its projected net worth; the Botswana government, in turn, allowed the new owners to begin construction of a mine in 2011. Debswana has continued to thrive by focusing in recent years on the development of a new diamond mine in Damtshaa, developed the same year the company acquired both Gope and a coal mine in Morupule. Though the Bushmen have successfully sued for their right to reenter regions of Gope, no case has yet required the government or a diamond company to provide the natives access to their original water sources. The decisions are thus rendered effectively de jure.



It is a cruel irony of the government’s partner- ship with Debswana that the ongoing human rights crisis of the Bushmen’s relocation hinges on governmental claims of protecting the savannah environment. The carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide in Botswana’s atmosphere are traces of more than just its dependence on coal energy, lack of pollution controls in the capital city, and advanced industrialization relative to the rest of Africa—the chemicals also begin to tell a story of the nation’s economic success over the past half- century. Botswana’s growth in GDP since the discovery of diamonds in its Boteti Sub-District in the 1960s is attributable to its government’s 50% stake in Debswana, which owns, in Orapa and Jwaneng, the largest and richest diamond mines in the world. Debswana’s network—which also includes Orapa’s two satellite mines in Letlhakane and Damtshaa—is also the world’s most valuable system of diamond production. The government’s investment in the company has fueled national employment and economic growth rates for decades.



The success of the diamond mines has also fueled, incidentally, most of Botswana’s other industries and private residences. Debswana owns the Morupule Colliery coal mine, which, after an expansion between 2010 and 2011, enabled the Botswana government to wean itself off of dependence on South African plants and thereby provide its industries with domestically produced power for the first time. Coal, the most abundant and cheapest fossil fuel to transport in the sub-Sahara, is also the most carbon-intensive: it is one of the culprits behind Botswana’s air pollution ratings. It is also the future of Botswana’s economy: this year, the mine consultancy agency Analytika Holdings estimated that diamond production in Orapa and Jwaneng will not be able to sustain its levels beyond the next decade. Seizing upon its stake in the Morupule Colliery as a means of diversifying its role in the nation’s economic future, the Botswana government began seeking investors in March 2013 for a proposed $11 billion railroad between the Morupule region and a Namibian port. Beyond fueling its own citizens and domestic industries, Botswana is attempting to become as significant an exporter of cheap energy as it was of expensive diamonds: the government’s plans include hitting a target of 60 million tons of coal exported per year within the next decade. Morupule currently produces one- twentieth of that amount.



Crucially, too, coal represents another boon for the Botswana government. By unilaterally attracting investors to the railroad project who could support such lofty export targets, thus shifting its focus from diamond production to coal exports, the government would produce seismic shifts in the Batswana economic hierarchy. Debswana will inevitably fade in importance as the economy diversifies and diamonds are diluted. For the first time since 1969, the government’s handle over the country’s economic lifeblood would then be free from the ties of a multinational corporation. Its interests would no longer lie in clearing out space for expanding diamond mines, but in establishing transportation routes for a single network of coal mines in one corner of the Kalahari Game Reserve. With diminishing economic incentives for forced evictions, but newfound incentives for legitimately combatting environmental pollution, the government could find it actually advantageous to preserve the savannah, maintaining the integrity of its original habitats and respecting the rights of its legal inhabitants.



 



 



*



Karabo and Henry are fast enough to qualify as individual racers in the professional division. This takes place before the heat kicks in and begins to threaten runners with serious dehydration during the long flatland stretches from the starting line to Kgale. They choose, however, to stick with the team event, to give us a chance against the Debswana team. A mixture of students who continued their primary school studies in Orapa rather than gravitating to Gaborone, and employees who had run with the company for years, occasionally provides the national team with a recruit or two. This recruitment makes De Beers’ involvement in a Gaborone race somewhat more palatable to the local teams, because the health of runners in Orapa is tied to the health of the national team (which most recently produced Amantle Montsho, the World Champion 400m sprinter). A symbiotic relationship between corporation and country is also evident in the company’s reliance on a healthy and loyal workforce in Orapa. The Botswana government’s legislative maneuvers to free up natural resources for mining operations in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve further contribute to this dynamic. Yet this comes at the expense of the rights of an entire indigenous population and the environmental health of the entire South African region. The relationship between De Beers and the Botswana government is unusual and occasionally uneasy, but at times like the Kgale Hill road race it becomes clear there’s a right team to root for, the local favorite over the visiting behemoth.



Karabo and Henry finished first and second in the amateur 15k. The Mirage team didn’t even field the full five members. At least one member of most local teams never finished, lost on the way up Kgale, whose overgrown flora obscures any direct view of the peak until it’s already been reached. Runners skilled enough to claim the hill, past the thick trunks of leadwood trees and the stately obelisks of termite mounds, would find their view obscured not by overhanging branches or vines but by a mazy tower of electrical cables and intertwining TV and radio antennae. They’d pause to look over the path, the spots where they felt hopelessly lost and their teammates’ paths diverged, the shining tubes of the trailers at the base of the hill, and, over the shimmering air of the saltpans, the single asphalt road leading out of Gaborone and north 250 miles, to the eco- nomic heart of the nation. But, turning around again, they’d see the city itself and its surround- ing roadways leading to Kgale, cars streaming towards the hill to pick up the exhausted contes- tants, the mass of spectators welcoming the first ones to arrive at the banner burning brightly in the midday sun.



 



 



 

A gallon of honey weighs about twelve pounds. In a single worker bee’s life, she will produce about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. Before venturing out of the hive, she will be promoted through a series of jobs. After cleaning cells, nursing the young, and producing wax, she will finally depart. The bees we often see flying alone, buzzing through flowers and trees, could easily be in the last days or hours of their lives. 



*



Pets are ubiquitous in American life, both rural and domestic. Pets, in general, are a luxury. They spring from a deeply human need to care for and be cared for, thus becoming human-created objects of affection. Owners give their pets anthropomorphizing names, attempting to incorporate them into the family to further legitimize their existence and belonging in the home. 



 Beyond the hearth, many livestock bear names as well, symbols of an inevitably growing sense of attachment to the cow or chicken. But the names also serve a pragmatic purpose of differentiating Bessie from Bertha. Livestock provide milk in the morning and eggs for lunch. They are the source of wool that can be spun into skeins of yarn. For special occasions, the livestock serve their purpose, owners will kill them, and then barbeque and eat them. Livestock in rural settings play a utilitarian role in everyday life. 



 On many agricultural farms one will find beehives. Bees play a vital role as pollinator, ensuring that crops will bear fruit. Bees are a source of honey and wax, which can be sold as candles, soap, and lip balm. The herd, or colony of six-legged livestock, lives as a unit, wrangled and controlled by its keeper. 



*



In second grade, one of my first homework assignments was to conduct a survey asking my family which animal they liked most. My dad and I liked cats. My brother liked frogs. My mom, in turn, told me she liked humans best. Her comment struck me: We, of course, are animals too. In spite of my mom’s aversion to the idea of pets at home, she eventually agreed to adopt a cat. At the animal shelter, she was drawn to the most docile kitten and together we decided he would be easy to take care of and train. We soon found out that his lethargy was a manifestation of a feline autoimmune disease, and we had to put him down. Though my mom cried every time she read Charlotte’s Web to me, as we bid our kitten farewell, we were all embarrassingly relieved. 



*



There has been a recent movement to bring bees into the urban sphere. In tandem with urban agriculture, urban beekeeping attempts to insert the countryside into the city. With hives on the roofs of the London Stock Exchange and of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, bees recently have found themselves in high places. New York and San Francisco have been leaders in this new movement, as part of a broader effort by its inhabitants to return to their rural roots. These are two of America’s most densely populated cities, but also two of its most green-conscious; Central Park and Golden Gate Park counteract the cities’ otherwise concrete sprawl. In fact, the two cities’ sheer urbanity might be the driving force behind their search for the pastoral, their yearning for a breath of fresh air. Urban professionals hang up their jackets and heels and don beekeeping suits. With this new uniform, they step out into cramped backyards or balcony rooftops to systematically comb through each frame of the hive. In that fleeting moment, the city’s ambulance sirens and car horns are mute: All they hear is a rural buzz. 



*



Urban beekeeping has reconceptualized bees as pets rather than as livestock. The practice reshapes the utilitarian as hobby and luxury. City dwellers do not need bees for their honey or wax. The supermarket, just a five-minute drive away, has shelves of it. But having bees in a city creates an artificial need that is pleasing to satisfy. The hive becomes another manufactured object of affection that requires maintenance, just like a dog that needs to be washed and walked. Yet unlike dogs, bees cannot be kept on leashes. Nor do they need to be. A keeper can make sure mites have not infested the hive or protect the hive from the cold of winter, but bees are largely self-sufficient. They gather their own ingredients and make their own food. They build the wax infrastructure of their home. Their survival hinges on their own work. Yet once human help is introduced, the bees lose this ownership over what they make. It is the keeper who bottles and sells the honey, gifting it to neighbors or manning a stand at the urban farmer’s market. The bee lives its life to add a drop to the bottle. 



A bee is an odd kind of pet because, unlike the kitten, the individual bee is essentially meaningless. A hive of bees functions collectively. A beekeeper is the owner of the hive, but cannot keep track of every single bee’s whereabouts in the way a shepherd watches over a flock. Driven by pheromones, in delicate choreography, worker bees, drones, and the queen each fulfill their own function as part of the larger whole. Within this framework, individual bees are given very specific roles and duties. It is difficult to detect an individual personality. Yet as a dynamic whole, the hive develops a collective voice that speaks and reacts to the outside. Most twentyfirst-century Americans tend to gather together as well, living in cities even when plenty of empty open space is available elsewhere. People put up buildings, find jobs, and settle into their routines. Like bees, people are social animals—they find security in being part of something larger. Beyond one’s own sense of belonging in an urban, metropolitan society, there is an ineffable attraction to the apiarian microcosm. We cannot help but hold up a wax-coated mirror to our surroundings.



Bees have a hypnotic buzz that ranges from calming white noise to an aggressive, pointed yell. The hive in aggregate, rather than the individual insect, becomes the pet, and as a pet, bees are dangerous. Each year, more deaths are attributed to bee venom allergy than to shark attacks and mountain lion mauling. An attempt to name bees, in the way that humans often name other animals, inevitably fails. The hive can never be fully anthropomorphized in the way the way traditional mammalian pets can be. 



In English, ‘pet’ can be a noun or a verb. A pet is a domesticated animal kept for its companionship or pleasure; to pet means either to make a pet of something, or to fondle or stroke. The idea of domestication and care are thus intimately tied to touch and physical affection. Bees can be taken from their native tree trunks and put into stone-grey boxes and transported to the city, but they are never quite domesticated. Keepers care for this larger organism, but coddle them only through a protective suit. One never pets the bees, but instead calms them with a smoker. One can grow attached, but always from a distance—a distance maintained even while bottling the bees’ honey and enjoying beeswax candlelit dinners, connecting with the days of a bucolic past. 



*



Bees, up close, are furry, soft creatures. Often flying quickly, bees can seem a blur to the human eye. Yet their menacing black eyes stare down their environment. The sharp angular legs and pointed stinger in the rear contribute further to this odd contradiction.



One can smile at the bee’s earnest quest for pollen, but the bee will never smile back.



 

The body near the screen tests itself, rests on itself, akimbo as windowcurtains pinned

back, just a touch, green kimono cinched in pale rope, as one might flinch if

pressed into soul’s glinting weight. Quick now, quick, those little lamps

have all burned down, now your blue dune of breastbone isn’t

seen except as remembered, and I will not sleep turned

in here, will not sleep anyplace else than curled in

streams panned with gold and no, this day is no

such, pinching into its vise, steadies itself for

night’s oiled blade, pillow-cold,

inevitable, not this twisting,

not I-who-cut-out,

not I-who-knew-

who-sang-

I. 

*On wet grass *



Coldness, the small knife splitting the bud,

the wink of the shears cutting the hedge. The

angel flattening its palm on grass, lifting its

hand to show the gorgeous cross-tangle of

morning, wet with predictions. The child’s

mouth opening, the poppyseeds swirling,

black wind-bound away from their red.



*On Anna Karenina *



How delicately we use the word *ruthless*.

The dancer wraps and unwraps this word

round her torso like silk. And Anna’s body

stretches onstage, neck tense, legs untender,

train shrieking up through her spine, steam

filling the throats of the audience.



*On unrequited love *



Pitiless line of white along the Scottish

lake. Man throwing the split twig to the

injured dog, the fissure in the water-rock.

Two schoolboys with dirt-stained faces

unbuttoning their uniforms. The smell of

used-up flesh climbing the birch tree.



*On Nagy Diófa utca *



The man with his cart sagging under plastic

bags filled with rain. His pillow-case. The

bookstore behind him, lit-up. The garden

deep inside where sleepy children comb

each other’s rain-wet hair. 

I was having lunch on the Quai des Célestins the first time he called. It was somewhat of a nice day, I think. Monsieur Leduc ordered the veal cutlet and I think I ordered the pasta. Or maybe I ordered a salad. Yes, I ordered a salad, now I’m certain of it. The wind was gentle, only a breeze really, and I remember thinking, when there is a breeze like that one should always order something light. I looked at Monsieur Leduc’s veal cutlet as it arrived in the hands of the maître d’, and then I looked out at the Seine and the trees that lined it and I thought about how I had really made a perfect choice with the salad and that Monsieur Leduc very likely already regretted having ordered the veal cutlet. Or that at the very least he would regret it later as he went home and thought about it. The breeze then came to our table as if waiting on us. It lingered for a very short time in my hair, and then it lingered slightly longer on and around Monsieur Leduc as though berating him for his choice, as if frowning down on the veal cutlet. I smiled at the intimate moment we shared, the breeze and I. What’s the matter, I think Leduc asked me, but I said nothing. How’s the veal? I asked, starting him on his way. When I was home, Esmé told me about the call. I thought nothing of it.

He didn’t call again until the week after, when I had all but forgotten about the first call. What you have to understand is that they call me all the time. All day long they call, almost all of them madmen of the first order. I have a story, they’ll tell me, this without exception followed by a promise. Inexplicably, they think that making a promise somehow makes it all better. I’ll want to listen to their story, they say, because it’ll knock my socks off. They don’t mention that they’ve told their story to countless others like me before, sometimes for years and years, and so they go around peddling their miserable stories like so many salesmen. I know it, I can hear it in their voices, like an undertone only I can hear that’s whispering to me to get out, to get out of the conversation at once.

Sometimes when a certain detail has piqued my interest just enough for me to follow up, ask an innocent question, they’re incredulous. They can’t believe it.

Naturally, I thought it had to be one of those and I didn’t give it another thought. And when I missed his second call, I still didn’t give it a thought, but at least I recognized the name. Fournier called again, Esmé said to me and I remembered the previous time she’d said the name, the week before. Or perhaps I thought it had been a different Fournier then. With so many calls, and so many Fourniers, who’s to say what’s what. But in any case, there was a name now and I most definitely recognized it when he called for the third time, the very next day.

“Fournier again,” Esmé said.

“What does he want?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Is he crazy?” I then asked. Esmé knows about the madmen. “I don’t think so,” she said. “But then again, who can tell?”

I can tell, I thought, but didn’t say.

Instead, I asked: “What did he sound like?”

Esmé thought for a moment, then decided something for herself.

“Like he wears a hat,” she said. “Not when the weather demands it, but incessantly.

Like he wears a hat all the time. You know the kind.” As a matter of fact, I did.

I waited for the call then, even canceled an appointment I had in the afternoon with the president of a company that sold running shoes. It was a very important meeting, and yet I canceled it without a moment’s thought. Why did I do it? I have no explanation. It was unheard of for me to cancel an important meeting like that. Only the week before, I had received evidence, incontrovertible proof, you see, of that company’s fraudulent activities, and I had been waiting anxiously to sink my teeth into David Bordelon, their president. And then I canceled, just like that. Called him and said I was feeling ill, could we meet another time. But I knew we wouldn’t meet again, that this had been my one golden opportunity to nail the man down and that I had missed it, and tomorrow already it would be too late, and it was all only so I could be there, at home, when the man Fournier called, a man who might or might not be wearing a hat when the weather didn’t call for it. I was out of my mind. And needless to say, no one named Fournier called all day. I waited like a foolish person, and in the evening, on top of everything, I became paranoid. What if the man Fournier had been a device, I began to think, and my mind took off as though a lid had been opened. What if Fournier was really Bordelon and he was having a good laugh over it the very same moment. Or he had been sent by Bordelon, this seemed to me somewhat more likely. That Bordelon had sent him to get me off his scent for just that one day, that one crucial day that was all he needed in order to get away. But then the phone rang and it was Fournier, and at once I knew that I had been right to cancel after all. I picked up the receiver and said:

“Yes.”

“Is that Pacquet?” “Jules Pacquet, yes.” “Fournier,” he said.

I said nothing, waited. It was obvious he was wearing the hat even now, and I could hear that he was indoors, and mind you not in a booth or a restaurant or any place that he would leave again, but in a house that belonged to him. It was in his voice: a proprietor’s voice. And through it all, he wore the hat.

“You’ll find what you’re looking for on the No. 38 bus,” Fournier said in an assured baritone. I thought that I had misheard. I asked him to repeat himself, and of course it turned out that I had heard him very well the first time. “What you’re looking for,” he said. “It’s on the No. 38 bus.” Said it and hung up. For some time, I sat and pondered the phone and the man who had been on the other end only a moment before. I began to think about the most inconsequential things, mostly about the hat and what model it would be. I thought it would be the gentlemanly kind, certainly no gaudy affair. The hat in Fournier’s case, I was sure, was meant to obscure his person, not to flaunt. Never to flaunt. I imagined a wide rim and a color like packed dirt. About all of this I felt fairly confident. It was only much later that it came to me how strange it had all been, that here was a man who pretended to have this knowledge. Worse, who pretended to know me better than I knew myself, who made suppositions about me, and yet didn’t know the hour I would be home, who had tried three times already to reach me unsuccessfully. It was maddening, to say the least. What did Fournier suppose I was looking for? That should have been the question to ask myself, and yet all I thought about then were the different kinds of hats I knew and the voice on the phone and how I couldn’t help but think that the name Fournier was as false as the hair underneath the hat.

One day I went to sit on the bus. It had been several weeks already since Fournier had called and the whole affair had comfortably settled in that region of the mind that we reserve only for the most important matters. I routinely dragged it out, almost every day. Held it, so to speak, up to the light of day and observed it from all angles, then put it back until the day came when it would feel right to go out and sit on the bus. I was confident that I would know it in my heart when that time came, and when it finally did I went out to the Gare du Nord and sat on the No. 38 bus.

I entered at the front, paid my fare, and took a seat in the back, from where I could see everything perfectly. I even wore a hat, a wide-rimmed hat the color of packed dirt. It had taken me almost two weeks to get it right. There had been no shortage of wide-rimmed hats of course, but then the color didn’t match, and sometimes the color was perfect but the hat ridiculous, and so it had gone on until I had found the one that was just right, and I bought it to wear on the bus. I don’t know if I expected Fournier to show up or not, but in case that he did I wanted to let him know that I was on to him, that he wasn’t the only perceptive one in Paris. That I had knowledge, too, of a kind. As I sat in the rear of the bus, I pictured what his reaction would be when he saw the hat. That it would make him uncomfortable was almost certain; men like Fournier hated to be found out. Maybe he would even leave the scene, I thought, and his flight would give him away.

But I was the only one on the No. 38 bus that morning with a hat like mine. There was a gentleman with a black hat, sitting right at the front, almost next to the driver. However, I ruled him out at once, the hat being much too small; he wasn’t Fournier. In the third row, a woman sat wearing a trumped up thing with whole fruit in it: peaches, mulberries, and even a pineapple that was perched precariously on the side, waiting to slide down in a big way and take everything else with it. The rest of the crowd, hatless. I leaned back in my seat, feeling somewhat dejected. So Fournier hadn’t shown, it was disappointing, but what had he wanted me to see? I looked around; focused. The bus made a stop and a breeze entered along with several distinctly Parisian characters, all of whom seemed to wear matching frowns, maybe because it was cold, or because St. Germain had lost again the night before, or maybe because they were all miserable scoundrels; it didn’t matter. The breeze was in their hair as they came in. It ruffled the hair as if it were pointing them out to me that way, one by one, and dismissing them all as objects of interest.

I rode the bus like that all the way to Porte d’Orléans and back. And then I didn’t get out either but remained sitting in the back as though I was in charge of something official. Several times the driver of the bus noticed me. I saw him eyeing me carefully in the mirror. I smiled, tipped my hat. He shrugged and drove on, and like that we had reached a deal to stay out of each other’s way. At each turnaround I went and renewed my fare and then returned to the back of the bus to await the next load of passengers, and every time we made a stop the breeze entered as though sniffing for explosives. But we never found anything, the breeze and I, and after a while I found myself drifting off.

I returned the next day, and the next. More than two years, I rode the No. 38 bus like that, the first to board it in the morning and the very last to leave it late at night. I became a fixture. People greeted me. They seemed to like seeing me there, in the back of the bus, already waiting for them when they came in. Mostly they were the same people every day, and I soon knew their routes, and because I chatted with quite a few of them I knew their reasons for being on the bus and their ways of employment and their outlook on life. The driver never once asked me my business. And when at last I found out what Fournier had wanted me to see, those two years seemed like a small investment indeed and worth, so to speak, every moment I had spent on the bus. It turned out that I had seen the man every day. Perhaps I had even talked to him once or twice, I can’t remember. Yes, I think I talked to him and that he had said he was an office worker of some variety, that he worked in an office near the Lycée Charlemagne. Or that he worked in the Lycée itself. In any case, I had never given him a thought, maybe because he appeared to be the kind to whom nothing of consequence ever happened, or maybe because he was on such a fixed route; all his days seemed alike. But boy, was I was wrong, and it all happened in the blink of an eye; one moment he was looking out the window, distracted perhaps by some festivities, and the next he was coughing. I was sure that he had coughed. I looked around; I was the only one who had seen it. It never happened again, but I was sure that I hadn’t been mistaken, that I had really seen him cough and that his breath, for one moment, had rattled. I was sure.

Then he had covered it up with his right hand and looked about at the other passengers, not with embarrassment but something else. But they had all been too distracted by the festivities outside to notice. All except me who had just happened to glance at the man at the right time, and I had seen it. I quickly looked away, out the window, and made it a point of not looking at him again. When he got out, I noticed that it was on the Rue de Seine, and then I reclined again in my seat, certain that he was a careful one and that the following day he wouldn’t be on the bus.

I was right; when we arrived at his usual stop the next morning, he wasn’t there. I looked around for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. It took me a few days to learn that he lived indeed on the Rue de Seine, on the fifth floor of a yellowish building with peeling plaster on the corner of Jacques Callot. The shutters were drawn, the light behind them weak. The name on the plaque said Petit. For days after the incident on the bus, he remained indoors, never left the house. When at last he emerged, he had the look of a small rodent sniffing the air for danger. He looked both ways twice, seemed to hesitate, didn’t see me, then headed out. I followed him to work, sat in a café the whole time that he was inside, and when I saw him come out again in the evening, I followed him home. It was then, as we once again approached the Rue de Seine, that it hit me with perfect clarity that I had in fact been there before, on that very same street, many years before, maybe going back as long as thirty years. All thoughts of Petit and of why I was there in the first place were as if wiped away. My sole focus was now the street. There was a shop there, I remembered as I looked at the yellowish house in which Petit lived. The fact that it was Petit’s building seemed of no consequence anymore. My long chase after the man, forgotten. What was important now was that I had been there before, and that I remembered a certain shop, one where they sold books of a very special kind; they were all about mountains, if my memory didn’t deceive me, and about the art of mountaineering. I had in my youth become endlessly fascinated, you see, by mountains, and had even gone to scale quite a few of them, that’s why I had sought out the shop. It was the only one of its kind I ever found. All the other book shops had some literature on mountains, but only the one on the Rue de Seine had made the mountains its only focus. It soon became, for the while at least that my obsession lasted, like a second home to me. On a whim, I abandoned my stakeout of Petit’s house and went to look for it, found it just around the corner. I spent much time browsing the shelves in a fog of memories, rereading all of the old books and the new ones, too, that had been published, and becoming by all appearances quite lost. It all came back to me then, surrounded by those books: the strain of the climb; the winds; the cold; the lure of the summit. And how very fitting that Petit would choose to live here!

At one point, months had passed, I simply left the shop again and resumed my vigil of Petit’s house. I was relieved; he still lived there. I resumed also my route each day to the Lycée and back, but I never saw him cough again. However, one morning when we had almost reached the Lycée, I rounded a corner just in time to see him massaging his shinbone, as though he had bumped it. Another time, on an empty street near the Saint Sulpice, Petit looked about and carefully sneezed.

“Alright,” I said to myself, “You really have no choice here anymore.”

I decided to enter Petit’s apartment. One morning, I waited for him very early; watched him emerge from the building in his very squirrel-like way; then went and picked the lock. I found the place terribly tidy, and thought I understood: Petit couldn’t afford to be messy and had thus arranged his life in a most uncluttered way. As a consequence, I found the evidence I was looking for with ease: medical books, handkerchiefs, cold remedies. I touched nothing, left the building as though I had never been inside. The next morning, for the first time in more than two years, the No. 38 bus left the station at the Gare du Nord without me.

It was about a week afterwards that the phone rang. Esmé was outside and I answered it. “Pacquet,” I said.

No answer came, but I knew it was Fournier. He was wearing the hat.

“Have you found him?” he asked. The voice was deeper than I remembered, almost a bass. “I found him,” I said.

“So, what will you do?”

I said nothing, let the silence stretch. Impossible to say how long we stayed silent like that. Maybe we worked something out then as we stood there, me in my loafers and a bathrobe and Fournier standing gauntly in some hallway with the hat on. Maybe we worked out a deal of some kind, an unspoken agreement. Then again, maybe we didn’t.

“Goodbye,” I said at last, unsure if there was still anyone at the other end who could hear it. I waited some time.

“Goodbye,” Fournier said.

For a long time, I remained like that with the receiver in my hand.

Now I am again on the Quai des Célestins, on a day as lovely as any in Paris. Leduc is looking at me quizzically, a curiously fluffy drink before him that looks like a piece of cloud is floating in it. He points at the salad; I shrug and smile. His plate arrives. He hasn’t learned; it’s again the veal cutlet. When I tell him that it has been three years almost to the day, he seems unsurprised, smiles politely. He doesn’t remember a thing, of course. I look around for the breeze then, find it at the next table taking issue with someone’s pork chops, and sort of make an apology for Leduc. The breeze comes to ruffle us both, as though it’s immensely glad to see us, really just immeasurably glad, and I look out at the river and the same trees that have lined it for so long, and I think about what I know now: that on the Rue de Seine, on the corner of Rue Jacques Callot, lives a man with a cough. He’s the only one on the Rue de Seine with a sniffle, the only one in Paris whose hair, in time, will whiten; the only one whose life will end. And then I think that it would rather please me to scale a mountain again, and that it would really be a hoot if I went and asked Petit to accompany me. 



 

When we finally get home and my mom unlocks the car, I leg it up the stairs to my dad’s room and tell him, “Dad, I’ve been losing so much weight these last weeks, maybe soon I’m not gonna be the fat kid any more.”

My dad looks up from his bed, and he smiles like he usually does. Like he wants to grin like a mad dog but he’s too tired to try, even.

“I’d give it until the weekend at least, Jim.”

I can never really tell when Dad is joking. Mom says that’s just his sense of humor, but I reckon it’s dumb. Number one, because most of his jokes aren’t funny anyway, and they’re usually about things that are meant to be serious. And number two, because if a joke isn’t funny, then how do you tell it’s a joke not a lie?

Usually Dad keeps his door shut, and I’m only meant to bother him if it’s something important. I don’t really mind that Dad’s always so tired. He’s run out of steam a bit, that’s what my mom tells me, and it doesn’t matter much because Mom’s always there if I need something. Plus he’s sick—I know he’s sick— but I also know Mom thinks he’s making it up sometimes, because I heard them both arguing about it just a few days ago.

Until the weekend at least, that’s what I’m thinking as I walk down the stairs and then into my room. Mom’s cooking dinner, I can hear her in the kitchen. I shut my door. Now Mom, she doesn’t think I’m fat at all, which is why I can only bring up the whole fatness thing with my dad. You ask Mom, she’ll say I’m crazy, she’ll say I’m a perfectly normal shape for a thirteen-year-old son to be. But I know that once you’re thirteen, you’re not a kid any more. You’ve got to be a man, and you’ve got to do it quick else life just passes you by. By now I’m getting too old for the puppy fat routine. Obviously Mom’s just being nice, because she’s like that, and besides she hates to think there might be anything wrong with me. Still, I’m clearly pretty soft around the edges. (You can tell that just by touching my edges. They’re pretty soft.)

I’ve realized that it’s actually Mom’s fault I’m fat. She is feeding me things all the bloody time, these days, and I wonder if she’s chubbing me up for some reason, though I can’t think why. Unless she wants to be the only one who thinks I’m perfect, like, forever.

Mom can be too much sometimes. I really hope she doesn’t mind when I stop being fat anymore. See, I’ve been carefully watching my food intake recently. When I turned thirteen last month, I realized it was time for me to grow up and be sensible. Not be Mom’s kid any more. First I added two new lists to my List Book. “Things I should eat more of to make me skinny” and “Things I should eat less of because they make me fat.” The second list is much much longer and it’s getting bigger as I read more about this stuff. Turns out there’s fat and sugar basically everywhere. I am also learning to stand my ground with my mom now, whenever she tries to feed me fatty foods. Like last week, when Danny Zhu came over to watch the Sydney FC game, she came knocking in the morning and she wanted to make us pancakes, so I told her straight up, I said, “Mom, piss off, we don’t want your pancakes,” and she did.

I’ve been losing weight fast since my thirteenth birthday. I started keeping the List Book then, as well. I didn’t start doing all of this for Sara B., but at some point I just forgot all the reasons that weren’t her. Especially since what happened at camp—but that’s a different story.

Standing my ground is getting easier as I become thinner, because no one takes you seriously when you’re fat. That’s something my dad told me. And I need to be taken seriously soon, because if I can thin down fast enough, then I’m finally going to talk to Mrs. B. this Friday after school.

I open up a fresh page in my List Book, and I write along the top: “Things I will say to Mrs. B. at the occasion of my thinness.” Underneath I add: “Start—Hi, I know your daughter. We’re friends, maybe more. Maybe I love her. But this is about you. She needs you to be better.”

That’ll do for the first night, I reckon.



*



Tuesday after lunchtime we have sports day, so all the boys and Mr. Harrison mosey down to the oval for cricket. It’s hot, the kind of hot I hate, the kind where I can already feel the sunburn growing on my neck and on my arms. Usually I go walkabout at this point—as Mr. Harrison put it, I’m the worst damned player in the school and there’s daylight between me and the next bloke—but out here, today, I feel like I’m as thin as I’ve been all my life. Anything is possible, and it’s time I joined in.

I grumble under my hat in the outfield, and the kids don’t let me bowl. They put me down 10th to bat, that’s last, and so I camp out in the stands with the others while they talk all their usual horsecrap. Who pashed who, who got who to show him her tits, who got who to touch his youknow. Tom Burrows is standing up now, telling some story and gesturing like he just caught a fish and It Was This Big.

“I’m tellin you boys, she had nipples like malt balls, this girl, the size of bloody malt balls!”

It turns out he means some girl down at the surf life-saving club, so I start to zone out. I quit the life savers myself, about a year ago, back when we all used to pile down to Dee Why beach every Sunday. One time I was standing knee-deep in surf while Sam Sheffield was going on about something or other, and I couldn’t help looking at the outline of his ribs, how you could pretty much count them all and how there was hardly even an ounce of fat on his whole torso. I was wearing a rash vest at the time, because Mom and Dad both said I’d get sunburn without one, and it was tight like it’s meant to be, but when I was looking at Sam Sheffield, the thing started feeling too tight, unbearably tight, sucked in close against my gut and tubby chest, and all I could manage was to breathe deep and wonder how it looked to all the other kids. That’s when I quit the surf life savers, and that’s when I decided I would only go down to Dee Why beach on my own.

Quitting the surf club definitely wasn’t good for my popularity. Not that I’m, like, bullied or anything. It’s just I always feel like I’m on the outside, looking in on stuff. Sometimes all the boys say I’m gay, because I’m never down at the beach with them and I never have girl stories for them. They would let up completely if they knew about Sara, of course, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell them about all that. No way Jose.

It’s a tired walk back up the hill and then we’re waiting to get picked up outside the Dee Why Elementary. Danny Zhu’s dad comes and gets him right away, so it’s only me and Sara sitting there, which is just how I like it in fact. It used to be just Danny Zhu and me who got picked up, but Sara B. came new to our school this year, so now it’s the three of us. Mr. Zhu is always on time, actually, so most days it’s at least ten minutes of just Sara and me together.

At our school it’s embarrassing to get driven home, because only the rich or the precious kids get picked up, and the rest of our mates sometimes jeer on their way to the bus. It used to bother me, but now I don’t mind, not since Sara started waiting here as well. Truth is the time I like best every day is between 3:00 and 3:15.

What we do is we sit on the fence, which is made of chain links but has wood on the top. The wooden beam is a perfect height for sitting—perfect for her, I mean, because her legs are longer than mine are, whereas I have to jump a bit to get my arse up there, which is not an easy maneuver for a young man of my proportions. So we sit there and swing our legs, and they go clink each time we let them drop on the chain. My mom always turns up Flood Street from the right and Mrs. B—that’s Sara’s mom—she always shows up on foot on the street corner down a ways to the left. She parks around the bend and then they drive home from there, Sara told me.

What I know about Sara is this. She is from Serbia or Croatia or one of them, I don’t remember exactly, and either her dad is still there or he never came to Australia for some other reason. There were troubles there when she left. We call her Sara B. because her last name, which starts with B, is really long and no one can pronounce it, not even me, and believe me I’ve tried. She is new at our school this year, which means I’ve known her two months already. It didn’t work out at her old school but Mr. Harrison wouldn’t tell us why—there are plenty of rumors, though, like some people say that she was kicked out for smoking or having sex or whatever. That was in the South, down Kurnell way. The lads say Sara had a boyfriend from the eleventh grade, but he got arrested at the Cronulla race riots for beating up an Indian kid and they stopped going out soon after that. Tom Burrows thought it was hilarious when he found out, because the Cronulla riots were all about the Arab immigrants, not about Indians at all. “Who the fuck has a problem with the Indians anyway?” Alex Spiros said, in between laughing.

The other girls are pretty nice to Sara, but they’re scared of her as well, probably because she’s tall and skinny and she’s started out with decent boobs already. Sara doesn’t fit in all that well at school, either, but I reckon it’s for different reasons from me. She seems like she’s older than the rest of us somehow. Mostly she seems pretty sad, but I know her better than most people and there are times when she smiles and you can tell she really means it.

She’s grinning like a dumb mullet right now, in fact, because she just won The Game for like the third time in a row. The Game is something we do while we wait for our moms. It’s easy to play, all you do is you sit on the fence facing the street and you throw a little pebble over your head into the empty playground that’s behind you. The winner is the first person to hit the big DEE WHY ELEMENTARY sign, which is twenty whole yards away and high up in the air but it makes the greatest sounding pong when you do actually hit it. We are getting pretty good at The Game, though still some days no one manages to win. One time Danny Zhu hit the sign right away, so we secretly decided never to play it until he had already left.

“Did You Know,”Ana says, with a look on her face that shows she’s thinking mischief, “Did You Know that a woman who robbed a bank in New York City came back a few days later and returned it?”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Well, she didn’t return it all. She stole a thousand bucks and brought back an envelope with only seven hundred in it, and she wrote on it ‘I stole this money from your bank on Friday. Sorry.’ Then she went to buy a bottle of whiskey, and when she got home the police were waiting for her!”

I heard this one already, but I can’t watch Sara laugh without me laughing too, so my laughing isn’t fake, not one bit. I clear my throat.

“Well,” I start, in my best game show host voice. “Did You Know. The Ukrainian army has trained a bunch of attack dolphins—and last week a few of them escaped. They say there’s now a little gang of attack dolphins lost in the ocean, guns and knives attached to their noses.”

“James. This is bullshit. I’m calling it.”

“No! I swear. Fair dinkum. On My Honor.” I offer her my pinky, and we pinky-swear like usual. “Hey, and you know why they think the dolphins ran off?”

“Why?”

“They’re all out there—these trained bloody killer dolphins—they’re all out there looking for mates! They’re looking for love.”

I laugh and look over at Sara but she’s turned away up the street already. I remember that I’m still holding onto her pinky, with my stupid sweaty needy fatboy grip, so I pull it away. I pretend to look out for my mom while I listen to Sara’s feet going clink, clink, and clink on the wire chain fence.

“Jim,” she starts.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry. Sorry.”

Clink, clink, clink and now my mom’s here, 3:15 on the dot, so I grab my bag—which still has the smell of forgotten banana somehow—and I walk over to the car wondering why I thought things would be different now.

Mom is asking me how my day was, and I’m not going to say what’s bothering me, so I tell her instead it was fine. I don’t ask how hers was. Usually Mom asks me about the kids in my class, with the names all wrong half the time, and I’ll answer her as honest as I can without risking anyone for getting in trouble. The parents all talk to each other, see. So, for example, I told her last week that Sally Rourke is sitting on her own, now, but I won’t tell it’s because Sam Sheffield said he saw her pashing Alex Spiros behind the tuckshop one lunchtime and now everyone says she’s a slut. This year especially I’ve got real good at making stuff up for my mom, but the fact is still it’s really hard to tell her about a world with none of the important bits in.

“Great,” says Mom, and then there’s silence as we drive up to the Head where we live. I’m still thinking about Sara when Mom smiles and puts her hand on my hand, and I think how it must suck to love someone so much when you have nothing to talk with them about. We drive on past the beach, and I close one eye then the other, making shapes with the bird shits on the windscreen.

Dad’s door is closed when we get home, so I tiptoe back downstairs to my own room. I wanted to tell him thanks for this book he gave me—it’s like Singin’ in the Rain, which is my favorite movie and has my favorite actor Gene Kelly in it, except as an illustrated comic. I let Sara borrow the book when we were at camp, and she said she liked it but thought I reminded her more of the funny guy, the Donald O’Connor one, than the leading man, the Gene Kelly one. I pretended I wasn’t hurt, but I took the book back right away and I didn’t let her have it again.

I shut my door as well and I pull out my List Book. To the list “Did You Know,” I add a newspaper clipping that my mom left out for me about some Russians who ride bears for a sport. To the list “Things I should eat more of,” I add: lentils? Then I read two more pages of Singin’ in the Rain and throw the book away.

I hope Sara got picked up at an OK time today. You never know when Mrs. B. will come to get her— sometimes she’s very late, but then sometimes she arrives right on three and I wait a lonely fifteen minutes until my own mom gets here. See, after I started talking with Sara on the fence after school, I asked Mom to come at 3:15 every day. I said we had to stay and clean and maybe she didn’t believe me but she didn’t say anything because Mom’s nice like that. So now I wait with Sara every day, and even though Mrs. B. is unpredictable and my own mom never comes late, I get to sit with her for a while every day and think: look at us both, here, discarded and true.

One time, a few weeks ago, Mom drove me to the movies after school. It was 5:30 already and getting sort of dark when we came past the school and I saw Sara B. sitting all alone on the fence still, turning her neck one way then the other, still just waiting. As we went past, I thought I heard the clink and the clink of her feet on the fence, but I know that I imagined it, now. That was the night when I started to hate Mrs. B.

After dinner, I lie in bed and try and think of better things, but all I can picture is Sara sitting there, waiting to be picked up still, with her feet swinging clink on the fence, with her useless mom nowhere to be seen and with me stuck in the car, not getting out, not asking Mom to stop, not even wanting to explain why we should pull over and help.

I open up to the list of “Things I Will Say,” but I don’t know what to add. It’s alright. I have time, still, at least. I have until Friday.



*



On Wednesdays, we get an earlymark because the French teacher got fired for saying fuck to a student, and the school hasn’t been able to find a replacement yet. I wonder why we bother learning French when there aren’t any French in Sydney anyway, not even one who can teach us.

I still have the taste of almonds in my mouth from lunch. Almonds are very healthy, it turns out, even though they taste like cardboard and they stick in your teeth. We’re doing history, and Mr. Harrison is talking about the Gold Rush—how once the Australian prospectors rose up and chased all the Chinese miners off their settlements. Sara is paying attention when I look over, so I find myself watching the slope of her shoulders and I wonder what it would be like to hold them both. I can’t really imagine it. I was never very good at imagining. I keep thinking: could I do that, really, with this body? with these hands?

I wish we could just talk about camp, Sara and me. It got hard to talk to her right when I thought that it would get easier. Last week the school took us all out to this old Gold Rush town—it’s the same one every year—and we were supposed to be panning for nuggests in the muddy little tourist pond all day. Sara looked bored as hell, and I was too, and then I started watching the curve of her neck as she pretended to pan, and how her things nearly touched where her skirt ended but didn’t. She caught me looking, I blushed, then she came over.

“This camp is shithouse,” she announced.

I agreed and she led me off away from the group and into a fake mud hut, which was filled with a fake miner family cut out of cardboard. It was cool inside, and we got to talking like we used to. I told her I missed home, still, kind of, and asked her did she miss home as well? That’s when she turned to me with her eyes wide open and said, “You have no idea about my home, do you, Jim?”

She never really talked about her family before, especially not her mom whenever I asked. But in the hut she told me everything, or it seemed like everything at the time. Sara said camp was a holiday for her, because at home she finds there’s so much stuff to worry about. Things had got better, but still some days, she hardly ate anything at all. She said at her old school, they called her a wog because her mom didn’t speak much English and she didn’t dress the right way for school at first. Before they moved she was in big trouble at school because she refused to sing the national anthem in assembly—she hasn’t sung it once since a window of her house got broken by a brick wrapped in an Australian flag.

And her mom? Well, Sara loves her like mad, but she is always looking out for her, always translating and running around helping her with moving, looking for jobs, getting her a driver’s licence because the government won’t recognize the one she got back home.

I said I didn’t think it was fair for her, for Sara. I couldn’t imagine my own mom asking me to take care of things like she does.

“It’s not the best,” she said, “Of course it’s not. But my mom and me, we’ve been through stuff. I never had a dad—it’s just her and me. Maybe you don’t get that.”

I didn’t say anything. What do you say to that? All I could think of was Sara sitting there alone on the fence while she waits, not even angry, only worried. Girl like her should be in the middle of everything, not the one worrying.

But still she put her hand on my shoulder, and I felt light underneath her for some reason, as if all of a sudden she was the fat one and I myself weighed pretty much nothing.

“It’s just—it’s good to know there’s guys like you.”

We stayed there saying nothing for a while, and the she turned around and asked me if I wanted to kiss her right there, just this once, and I must have said yes super quick because she laughed and smiled and moved her mouth to my mouth, then I felt her breath all warm on my lips, and I began to relax, met her tongue with my tongue, closed my eyes to shut out all the cardboard miner kids. It felt like I was swimming. Then I put my hand in her hip, which I thought was what you’re supposed to, and started lifting up her top, but then she pushed it away, frowned, and rushed off so I had to follow her to the rest of the group where Lily Kim was sure she’d struck gold but hadn’t.

I don’t know what I thought would happen when we got back. Maybe she felt bad for telling me all the stuff about her mom. Or maybe she felt dumb because she went and kissed the fat kid on school camp. I wonder if she’ll be my girlfriend when I stop being fat anymore. Or if she’ll be my girlfriend me when I show that I can stand up to Mrs. B. for her.

It’s 2:30 and Mr. Harrison lets us out early like usual, and we go for a walk around the school, which is usual for us on a Wednesday. We walk without saying anything. I start trying to tell her about the Russian bear riders but she cuts me off.

“Jim, I’m sorry about camp. It was stupid. I was stupid.”

My hands are sweaty. I can’t think of anything to say, just a whole load of half-things. I try to grab her hand but she yanks it away. I need to not be nervous. I need to not be the fat kid, and now.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I just wish you didn’t have to worry all the time. I just wish your mom—”

“Jim, you don’t get it. There are some things you just don’t get, alright? And you’re not going to get them. So quit.”

It’s 3:18 by the time we get back to the fence, and we part ways when we see her mom on the corner, black sunglasses and crazy hair, and my mom in the car, and it’s all quiet on the street while the both of them are just waiting.

When I get in the car my mom says: “You are sunburnt.” I shrug my shoulders. I don’t want to talk to her. Not now not ever.

“You don’t have the skin type for this kind of exposure, Jim, not in the summer. Look, your face is pink. Do you even wear your hat?”

“Whatever.”

“Who was that girl, the one you wait with? Is she your friend?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

Mom has no idea what she’s talking about. I start to feel very tense. Why does she want to know all this stuff? What will she get out of having this information?

“What’s that game you play, Jim, when you’re throwing the rocks?”

“Mom,” I say. “Whatever.” I can see in the mirror that she’s hurt. Now I want to say sorry. But I don’t know how.

Back at home, I rush off to the beach, which is where I go after bad days. This is a bad-bad day, so I don’t swim, I just run all the way to the boardwalk and then I sit on the bench, red and sweaty, watching the ocean like I’m so thirsty I would drink the whole thing if they let me.

There are still people hanging around on the sand and in the surf. It really is bloody hot, still. On a day this hot, people stagger around like they’re carrying a weight on their shoulders—they move slow, sweating just from the exertion of being there. It’s weird how the word for light means the opposite of heavy but it also means the sun, which seems to weigh everyone down so much. There’s a bottle rolling along the boardwalk, and it’s about to roll into the ocean. I take two steps to stop it, but then I feel awfully tired, and I remember how stupid I look when I run, so I let it go and it plops into the sea, probably on its way to kill a dolphin or something.

Back home, I can’t even face Singin’ in the Rain. Maybe I am the Donald O’Connor one, after all that, maybe this is how it goes for old Jim. I want to be the leading man, damn it, her leading man. I turn over and add a note to my List Book that I should eat dark chocolate instead because milk chocolate makes me fat. And then I go to sleep.



*



On Thursday, when we get out of class, we wait in silence for a few minutes. At 3:04, I see Mrs. B. appear on the corner, with those sunglasses still on and talking on her cellphone like she does. Sara gives me a look, then hops down to meet her. I usually feel robbed on days like this, watching them walk off down the street together while I wait up here alone.

After what Sara said about her mom’s licence, I decided probably they don’t have a car. Sara must lie for her mom’s sake. I wonder why Mrs. B. wears glasses all the time, who she talks to on that cellphone, all that stuff. I am losing The Game while I think about these things. I know that Sara should have it better, but I can’t figure out what I could say to Mrs. B. to make her fix it. Still, I’ve got to do something.

When Mom comes, I tell her my day was fine and she seems happy enough to sit in silence.

Today was a good-bad day, so I walk down to Dee Why to swim. I let Mom put a hat on me as I run through the door. I also wear my rashvest. Despite being English, Mom tans OK, but Dad is really pale too and I can’t tell if it’s just because he never goes out except for work. I can’t see tired old Dad carrying the weight of the sunshine for long. I wonder what he’s scared of, my dad, that my mom isn’t.

The ocean is wild today, and there is seaweed absolutely everywhere on the beach. It’s alright in the public baths, though, and that’s where I usually swim anyway because there’s no one there in the evening. I strip down, jump in, and lie backwards on the water, watching stars and clouds up above me. If I stay totally still, then all I can hear is the waves on the cliffs, nothing else, just the sound of the ocean and me—and then when I move in the water all I feel is the water rushing past, first it’s slow like I’m slow, then it’s just as fast as me when I speed up, start to take over, splashing and kicking at the water around me thinking this is it, alright, this is how you stop being scared of the dark.

On the way back up to the street, I see her there, Mrs. B., on the same park bench that I sit on after bad-bad days, holding her hung-up cellphone in one hand and staring out to sea with the sun going down behind her. Does she just likes to sit there, I wonder, or did she have a bad-bad day as well. Mrs. B. is slim, and her skin is really tan—she looks like she belongs here, on the beach, more than I do at least. The pasty bugger I am. For a second, I wonder if I should talk to her, but I think of my list back home that I haven’t even finished and I realize that I’m nowhere near ready at all. Plus I can’t figure out what she’s doing here, or even what she might be thinking.



*



I’m jumpy all day, on Friday. Not even the beach calmed me down entirely, and I added a heap of stuff to the “Mrs. B.” list last night that I’m not really sure about. At recess, I try to go over all that stuff. I would start by introducing myself and saying how I got to know her daughter. That would lead into something about how sad Sara has been, and how she has to worry about things she shouldn’t. And so on. I join in the lunchtime cricket and I do OK bowling. When I yawn and stretch, it feels like my whole body is thinning, growing. I grab around my gut, and there’s still soft there, but I don’t know if there’s enough to call me fat anymore. I reckon my Dad had it right, after all. I wonder what I can’t get done today.

In afternoon math, while I wait for the bell, I look over at Sara and I wonder what she will think. Obviously I am trying to help her, not hurt her. But maybe she is angry at me because of all that. I try to catch her eye. She does not look over. Today it’s just me.

At 3:05, I am going over it all in my head, but it sounds stupider and stupider the more I do. Sara and I are playing The Game without talking, always missing.

Then Mrs. B. is at the corner, and I take off like a rabbit down the hill towards her. “Hey,” I call. “Mrs. B.!”

Only then do I realize no one calls her Mrs. B. who can pronounce her last name, and I don’t know her first name either, so I don’t have anything to call her at all. I’m really going to shit this up, now, aren’t I.

“Hi,” I say, catching my breath as I stop. “Hi.”

Mrs. B. takes off her glasses. She has bright green eyes. My palms are sweating.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.” I can hear Sara coming down the street. The trees are losing their leaves already. I see a little dirt on my school shoes. “My name is Jim. Jim Watson. I’m, um, I’m Sara’s friend.”

“Yes. Jim. I know Jim.” Her eyes are very green. And soft. Sara’s just arrived behind me. I summon my accusations. My bag is still giving off banana smell.

“Well, Mrs. B. Um, I’ve been talking to Sara a lot recently, and—”

“Sara, you are right!” Mrs. B. calls over my shoulder. “He does look like the funny one.”

My palms are still sweating. Sara is scared, I can feel it without looking. What does she think I’m going to say? I can feel my neck burning in the sun. What am I supposed to know, and what not?

“Yeah. So I just wanted to meet you, basically.” I put my pudgy, sweaty hand towards Sara’s mom, and

Sara sighs with relief when I do.

Mrs. B. shakes my hand, really gentle. Sara and her mom seem to think this is funny. I can’t tell if I’m being weak or strong. All I know is I’m tired, and it’s hot, so bloody hot, and I just want to go home. “Cool,” I mumble, turning back up the street, and I think I see a smile on Sara’s face as I go. Which seems more important, now, anyway, than whether I’ve messed this up or not. So now I’m smiling too, a little, while I limp up to where we usually sit on the fence.

When Mum finally pulls up on Flood St., I am still throwing pebbles over my shoulder. Only I’m not swinging my feet, because there’s some kind of miracle that’s happened and I don’t want to break the spell, not with anything. Every time I throw a stone, I hear a little pong, literally every single time, and now I’m in the zone and every single bloody pebble’s going straight bang smack onto the DEE WHY ELEMENTARY sign then bouncing off onto the ground. I can only imagine how the pile looks underneath.

But Mom’s here, now, and I’ve got to run, I’ve got to go, so I don’t even have a look at the sign, I just jump in the car and she drives off while I try to explain to her the rules of The Game and why no one will believe what just happened when I tell them, no really, Mom, no one.