Spring 2014 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

I. 



 



Will I eat the rotting apple before me. 



Is that why you left it, inclining toward 



 



the blank-faced compass, oblique to 



the violin missing a string in spilled 



 



wine from the overturned chalice, 



pooling at the chipped carapace 



 



of a turtle. And whose skull is that, 



also chipped, also slow on the cloth. 



 



II. 



 



Am I obliged of this cluster to pluck



the fragile ones. Just as in the anatomy 



 



of woman every station must have



its briny tubes. Just as in the anatomy



 



of choice every action need not have will 



behind it which is to say choice does not 



 



in the penumbra of utility 



reveal preference. 



 



III. 



 



But I want to engage. Want to tell 



you all I have learned about will 



 



in the intervening years.



If I peel the apple I can soak it in 



 



vinegar, carve out a face and 



leave it to dry in the sun. 



 



Let it shrink into a head 



swathed in the tablecloth



 



shrouded in shouldness. 



Perhaps it will remind me 



 



of normativity. Or of



the grace with which we used 



 



to put one foot in front of the other 



to walk or of the inertia that has since 



 



filled in the roads around us. 



Reminders, remainders, remedies— 



 



have I solved your tangram, 



did I play the right game, 



 



my scarecrow is small but vain



 as I am—void, pour, *drain*—



 



the difference is its flesh, 



which is now preserved— 



 



my scarecrow will remain



on this table in this foyer 



 



until you move it, which know- 



ing you will be when you tear up



 



a letter you believe you never 



received. I will believe the same. 

I’m really a fan of the rabbits, of slender ears

of their long left ears, fickle, triangulating signals from the wind, beneath the bushes beside the large ferrovitreous cistern collecting dimensionless shadows of European attitudes. Now the right ear bends, turning toward ground the innominate blades under snow here.

Now I’m really a rabbit, mostly dishabille,

a shapka-ushanka with flopping ashen flaps above, bobbing below, my peculiar ears.

Here I’m down on fours and my legs

learn new syntax from the available experience of lassitude proffered by vernal narcoma.

Now I’m not worried if I have stipend in backlog with which to purchase utterances of the coterie or nibble the ivory indices of semophones. Here weightless excuses sink into deep wellsand anchorites emerge from ochlophobia to diveinto the ice covered river intothe yellowmost layer of scaffold, of secondhand sulphur, down the clear river-torso, skimmuddied toesconjured by buoyancy stiffened by cold.

Now, the rabbits are speechless.

All these worries submerged in praise!

As a fan, I’m curious by megawatts, stupid by cocktail;

I chase with abandon. I kick in the snow, shoot up

white hurricanes, flares reflecting frightened Andromeda. The warren, below roots and rubble under cedars, is too smallfor my biophysical exuberance; the undercarriage of trees disorients me.

Now I’m here, and I will be here

until it’s time to rub against the clock,

against the changeover at the rotary. I turn sinuously, I accelerate out of lens focus,

beyond the pointillistic boundary.  

  today I heard the capitol catch



fire     like a burning bush



      all I could see were ground glass and



sun      it was the FARC   I assume  since



sendero is dead even though homes 



in Lima still shine in a myelin



sheath    insects on their  backs



  under tearing star



      at  least that is what I 



see   from here      like a million 



trembling stitches on a floor rug    



 



 



      I can also see capitalism     DOUBLE 



JEOPARDY    and the answer:   What is



trite         ca-pi-ta-lis-mo     I can hear



    it is a white sphere   so smooth



I want to stroke   with



vibrating fingertips    string it  



onto a thread    wear it like a cross 



perched always between my 



breasts     keep it moist    screen its golden



eyes from  the stubbled capitol



shifting between relapse and   remission



        viscous black splotches wave from



silvery column      physicians have



diagnosed     so I’ve been told    the



ailment        confusion of self and non-



self       and are beginning administration  



of a cure          oh   why do you keep  



pulling at your scalp          lab coats always



reminded me of Miraflores      of Dracula



of mountains of lime



 



 



once I threw two handfuls



at my face       stood at the center of



the highway at the foot of my home



and almost thought I felt



my heart    beat white      tightroping



along the yellow painted line   I walked



in silence until midnight 



 



     to my left waves fell   silhouettes



of piled trash became far red hills



and the road smelled of salt and beer 



     alive       you and I   looked



at the world sideways and



missed all the shapes I now see



   from above and below



 

Down the passage we did not take



Towards the door we never opened



Into the rose garden. My words echo



Thus, in your mind.



– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets



 



We may therefore conceive God to be the natural maker of the bed, and in a lower sense the carpenter is also the maker; but the painter is rather the imitator of what the other two make; he has to do with a creation which is thrice removed from reality. And the tragic poet is an imitator, and, like every other imitator, is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.



– Socrates, Plato’s Republic



 



The front page of the website for artist Alisdair Hopwood’s False Memory Archive, currently on tour in Edinburgh and soon to arrive at London’s Freud Museum, declares: “WE NEED FALSE MEMORIES.” One could interpret this phrase in one of two ways: the utilitarian—the collective is in need of false memories for its project; or the more abstract—we human beings rely somehow upon a fabricated notion of the past.



The False Memory Archive is based on both principles. As artist-in-residence at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, Hopwood wants to combine the techniques of contemporary art with the latest psychological research. Visitors to his website are invited to type a false memory (“a distorted or entirely invented recollection of an experience”) into a window; the submissions are then collected and arranged into a spare, sleek installation, all black text on white columns and walls. The memories range from the poignantly comic (“I thought that my mother left me for 2 years when I was a child to look for work. I found out in my 20’s that she only was gone for 2 weeks”) to the simply odd (“My mum passed a raw garlic clove from her mouth into mine, in the kitchen”). Others are more uncanny:



 



I remember biting into a mouse when I was four as a child in Indonesia in order to make my brother be quiet. I was sitting outside in the garden making mud pie and he just kept talking. A mouse ran by and I bit into it. Blood filled my mouth and ran down my face. My brother and the rest of my family have assured me this has never happened.



 



For psychologists, this phenomenon is well-known and well-documented. Multiple studies over the past several decades, spearheaded by scholars like Elizabeth Loftus, have confirmed that memory cannot be trusted. Childhood hot-air balloon rides or trips to the mall (with hometown details provided by a family member) can be virtually implanted in a participant’s mind, so that he or she is firmly convinced that the nonexistent event took place. These false memories are known to increase with age, as the knowledge and experience gained by children create a more cohesive and fully integrated network of conceptual representations. Ribot’s Law suggests that older memories are more stable, since the more a memory is revisited, the more it is consolidated into other, overlapping recollections. But a recent experiment in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology examined an exception to the law, finding that false memories based on images or scenes rather than vocabulary are more easily implanted in children than in adults. At all ages, most signs show memory as functioning less as a camcorder—press play and the scene unfolds, just as it was experienced—than as the concentric ripples formed by a pebble dropped in a pond, expanding, loosening, and eventually colliding with obstacles that interrupt and warp its tidy path.



Common sense still might seem to challenge these findings. The reliance on eyewitness testimony in courts has failed to ebb, even with initiatives like the Innocence Project, which have sought to expose and overturn false convictions based on witnesses that turn out to have misremembered a crucial scene. But in its revisionist account psychology has mirrored a recent literary trend. The slim memory novel has come to dominate lists and awards: a kind of novel increasingly concerned with the causes and consequences of, and opportunities resulting from, a faulty interpretation of the past. The narrator of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, claims near the start to be recalling “approximate memories which time has deformed into certainties.” Some reviewers criticized the novel for a myopic thematization of memory. Qualifications abound: “That was my reading then of what was happening at the time. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” The novel is strongest when it departs from such commentary to return to the story, centered around one crucial misremembering during the narrator’s adolescence. Given the blandness of the narrator’s present he returns to the trotted-over, if still enigmatic, past, when his first girlfriend, Veronica, left him for his first true friend, Adrian. Tony, the protagonist, subsequently dashed off a spiteful later to Adrian, before learning weeks later that Adrian committed suicide. Adrian, with a kind of clever, slightly irritating intellect, had been the center of Tony’s group at school; he would ignore a history teacher’s questions before responding to his admonitions with, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” The rest of the novel relives, reinterprets, and ultimately revises this event, which ends up as an airtight example of Adrian’s dashed-off response.



Barnes’ novel extends the terms of Hopwood’s project—applying false memories to the very nature of memory. It takes its place among other recent fiction dealing not only with fickle memories of events but with the fickleness of interpretation at the moment in which a memory is created. Alice McDermott’s Someone, published last fall, is composed of a series of memories of an Irish Catholic woman. Her memories are simultaneously unique and undifferentiable; “Someone” could be anyone, but is christened in this case with capitalization and choice. Selection, indeed, is what structures and limits the book, the chosen memories unfolding in a loose narrative, in quiet scenes. It is the conscious selection of memory, rather than the phenomenon of memory itself, that creates or imposes meaning upon a life.



As a character in the short story “What is Remembered” by Alice Munro (another memory-driven author celebrated this past year) thinks, “The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything—and, by remember, she meant experience it in her mind, one more time—then store it away forever.” But memory, she learns, doesn’t work like that. A brief affair with a doctor who later dies in a plane crash resurfaces again and again, in later years, and yet never in its entirety. Instead she hears a scrap of a phrase, or catches a glance between a couple: “She would keep picking up things she’d missed, and these would still jolt her.” Never, in these recollections, can she remember what the doctor looked like.



 



**



 



These characters’ failures to recall, coupled with earnest appeals to remember, are troubling on a deeper level because they come to challenge or at least call attention to the central conceit of storytelling: “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” What else is fiction but an attempt to implant false memories in a reader by constructing a make-believe world? Of course, this conceit is no secret to most; the phenomenon is as old as the novel itself. Long before the modernists began a concerted attempt at laying bare the device—think of Georges Braque’s trompe-l’oeil nail in Violin and Palette, a reminder that the painting is only just that—storytellers questioned and played with the terms of this deception. Literary scholars like E.C. Riley have argued that the emerging genre of the novel at the end of the16th century, under Cervantes’ revolutionary aegis, was host to a particular vulnerability of the status of truth and fiction. Poetry had shed the necessary trappings of truth-telling and instead it was the novel that would come to concern itself with the role. Books in this genre—Don Quixote is a prime example—would often be framed as a memoir, or as a series of documents collected and arranged by an author who claimed only the role of editor. (Such a conceit would persist: Robinson Crusoe, after all, was structured as an unwieldy autobiography, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque….) Yet even Cervantes would tug against the truth-telling dictate throughout the Quixote. He played on cultural prejudices in creating a fictitious “author” of the text, Cide Hamate Benengeli, an Arab and thus thought to be wily and dishonest. And Don Quixote’s mad attempts to become a hero, his tendency to read danger and adventure into a windmill or a procession of nuns, come from his firm conviction in the verisimilitude of the books of caballería that he has spent his entire life reading—books that similarly position themselves as fact. His is little different from Tony’s fear in The Sense of an Ending—“that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”



In Part I, Book IV of the Quixote, the priest holds his audience enraptured by reading a story: El curioso impertinente. In this, one of many stories-within-a-story, the friendship of two young caballeros, Anselmo and Lothario, is tested when the latter asks his friend to court his own lover. The test of loyalty backfires and the majority of the characters end up dead, or at least distraught.



“There’s something of the impossible in it,” says the priest, closing the book, “but in what refers to the way of telling it, it doesn’t disappoint.” This is the first case of many in which style clambers up and over “truth,” in which the artifice of storytelling—the construction of false memories—is privileged over a one-to-one adherence to reported fact. “Fictitious stories are good and delightful to the extent that they approach the truth or the semblance of it,” the priest later proclaims in Part II. But the novel seems to hint that his is an antiquated, even reactionary approach to literature. In the famous book-burning scene, Quixote’s loyal friend Cardenio begs the priest not to hurl into the fire all the hero’s books that are not true. Even while admitting their unworthiness astride the pillar of Truth, he appeals, instead, to style—to beauty—as a justification for longevity. Beauty is truth, truth beauty: The artist’s trump card has long been to elide the difference between the two.



 



**



 



The malleable boundaries between truth and fiction are belied, today, by the distinction and codification of separate genres: between “fiction,” for instance, and “memoir.” But the debate has never really gone away. Part of the appeal of Hopwood’s project is the interest, the shock, at realizing the possibility of false memories: a possibility we nevertheless act out on our own. For Hopwood, this reaction has an ethical dimension. “If we accept that autobiographical memory is a ‘creative act’ and that the fictive plays an important role in understanding the formation of a subjective truth,” he has said, “then how can we attempt to objectively identify and challenge pathological delusions, misinformation and damaging myths?” What is the difference, he seems to be asking, between the fundamental blur between truth and fiction, and the calculating attempt to manipulate those categories for a particular political or social purpose? On the one hand, of course, the “narrative moment” continues to envelop the academy, starting from the assumption that history itself is a narrative, that personal misremembering is paralleled by social forgetfulness that scholars should still try to remedy, all the while acknowledging the partiality and contingency of their own efforts. But on the other hand, we place such a premium, still, on truth-telling, on integrity. It is a commonplace to note that a writer who has something to say would, 50 years ago, have written a novel; today, he writes a memoir. According to Nielsen Bookscan, there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of memoirs published since 2004. Despite a possible understanding that Truth is gone and no replacement (happiness? community?) has yet taken the crown, we yearn nevertheless for “real” stories, for true tales. And when they turn out to be false, we are hurt, and angry—as in the revelation that James Frey had fabricated parts of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, embellishing details of criminal action and jail time. Amid the frantic Oprah invites and dis-invites and publishers’ waverings lay deeper and more unsettling questions regarding the integrity of those who use their own past as material. At the time, Michiko Kakutani argued that the affair signaled the seedy underside of the postmodernist move toward skepticism, toward questioning the authority of narrative, firmly established over in the deconstructionist camp. See what happens when you poke holes in capital-T Truth? she seemed to be pointing out. Without a single overarching narrative a certain responsibility to facts was lost; Frey could justify his actions by maintaining that what he wrote about felt true. He could claim, disingenuously, that it was true somehow in another, greater way.



Kakutani’s analysis is overly simplistic. Few would claim that memoir is no more than a simple compendium of listable, checkable facts, just as few would deny that fiction draws on the author’s life. Certain kinds of fabrication are accepted as a matter of course. And this has been true long before the deconstructionist turn; Rousseau’s Confessions are packed with self-conscious claims to truth-telling along with stories told in such detail that some fabrication is undeniable. Memoirs and biographies are full of long, quoted, dubiously accurate dialogue uttered years or decades before publication. It would seem that what scholar of journalism Norman Sims has called the “reality boundary” is more akin to, to borrow a phrase from the scholarship of imperialism, a permeable and malleable “contact zone.” And in some cases—though, crucially, not others—the reader accepts this willing suspension.



But Kakutani is on to something when she bemoans the single narrative’s fragmentation into multiple truths. Frey’s justification for fabricating elements of his own life was based on a tale of suffering, in a book centered around addiction and recovery. It is a similar argument to that of Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried, which distinguishes “happening-truth,” the facts on the ground as the narrator fights in Vietnam, from “story-truth,” the constructed narrative that somehow becomes truer than the grouping of facts in its ability to help in the recovery from trauma or in dealing with horrific events. O’Brien’s book toggles between the two. Can we equate different kinds of suffering—slaughter in Vietnam and drug and alcohol addiction? Can we distinguish them? In any case, The Things They Carried is—how significantly?—a collection of short stories.



Once Primo Levi had written Survival in Auschwitz, a memoir of his experiences in a concentration camp during World War II, he found that this was somehow not enough—that he would need to return to it once again through fiction. “The problem of being a counterfeiter, of feeling false, worries me,” he said in an interview once. “There’s a clear difference between telling stories you claim are true, and telling stories like Boccaccio.” But it was a question he would admit he was unable to resolve. Still, though, the incommunicability of Auschwitz, the struggle to fully encapsulate it in prose, is never equal to a denial of Auschwitz. This is, perhaps, the anxiety Kakutani signaled: the possibility of a slippage from questioning the truth of the past, from challenging an authoritative narrative, to denying that horrors took place. And the response—to write fiction out of fact in a way that restores truth to what seems devoid of fact or sense—can seem, as Levi intimated, heretical. The danger, of course, becomes that existing structures of power—the figures, governments, and institutions responsible for transmitting the past—invariably privilege certain of these narratives over others. The multiplication of possible histories, rather than a mounted challenge to History with its own limitations and prejudices as such, becomes itself vulnerable to a hierarchy of validity.



 



**



 



Hopwood’s project is situated firmly within the assumptions of the archival trend. Gaining momentum and credibility, especially since World War II, the archive serves perhaps to counter the shortcomings of narrative proliferation. It proposes an alternative to the memoir, a competing textual form in which to chronicle the past and even its slippery spirit. The installation is not only a compendium of false memories but a false memory archive, one in which they can be stored, searched and, crucially, remembered. Archives, so fraught with controversy and meaning decades ago, have come to be a central part of modern life. On the outskirts of European cities; in the damp basements of municipal courthouses; encased within Google’s whirring steel data repositories in Nevada and Arizona, information is accumulating. The origin of the archive is the anxiety of forgetfulness, of false or lacking memory. And its central question is what to include, and what to leave out—a question so provocative, with so much at stake, that increasingly little is left out at all. The archive, with its material evidence and concrete documentation, might seem to support a single narrative of the past. But as more and more is recorded, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile all the evidence, to funnel all this data into one consistent story. The story fractures, again, into fragments of history, as the archive once again promotes a variety of interpretations on what has gone before. In a way, this process restores agency and importance to lives so casually extinguished. The oral history collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, seeks to record and publish testimonies and interviews with survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. The few available journals or other documents written by African-American slaves accomplish a similar goal. But the process also signals what historian Pierre Nora has called the effect of a new consciousness: “the clearest expression of the terrorism of historicized memory.” With our e-mail histories recorded, centuries of censuses filed, and correspondence sanitized, stored, and uploaded so as not to allow the edges of ancient pages to crumble, it is no longer clear where the archive ends and reality commences. It becomes difficult to separate the significant from the superfluous and, more importantly, to make the active, ethical choice of what to remember and what to allow to slip away.



 



**



 



Kierkegaard believed that a person’s resilience could be measured by what we tend to consider the opposite of memory: the ability to forget. Not by his or her forgetfulness—rather, by the active effort to clip away the unneeded and un-useful. In the process the two become more alike than distinct, and personal identity emerges: “the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world.” To decide what to remember and what to forget becomes another way of deciding what kind of person one would like to be.



If the rise of the archive is linked to the ethical task of preserving forgotten or underrepresented narratives, confirmed through historical rigor and social validation, the personal dimension of truth, fiction, and memory forms a more dialectical relationship. Autobiography and memoir may rest on self-deception, but even memory is similarly vulnerable to mistakes and misinterpretations. And even memory relies upon a construction of the past in which the conventions of style and genre dictate and determine how we talk about ourselves. The participant in the False Memory Project with the mother who left to look for work could employ that event as one example of a broader narrative of a lonely, isolated childhood, which becomes one explanation of a life spent in search of community and companionship. Just as fiction plays with lived memory and forgetfulness, real-life memory draws upon the tools of fiction in both creating and limiting its potential.



In some ways, all identity can be understood as narrative identity. Individuals, strung between contingent “human time” and deep “historical time,” struggle to understand their place and function within their own particular moment; in large part this takes place when historical time becomes human time by being articulated through a narrative mode. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur puts it in Time and Narrative, “Narrative attains its full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” In many ways, this process is a part of life, not just a part of literature: We make sense of and, in a certain sense, construct our own identities by telling ourselves stories about our own lives—making identity mobile rather than fixed. Psychologist Jerome Bruner, who has worked on narrative for decades, goes further. The ways of telling and of conceptualizing, he argues, become so rigid that they end up structuring experience itself—not only guiding the narrative of a life into the present, but also helping to structure it into the future. “In the end,” he has written, “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we tell about our lives.” A life as led becomes no more than a life as told.



 This process is at the center of Hopwood’s False Memory Archive. “What’s interesting is that the submissions become mini-portraits of the person,” he has said, “yet the only thing you are finding out about this person is something that didn’t actually happen.” What he calls a “lovely paradox” actually defines all memories, not just ones that turn out to be false. But the relationship between the two—the indistinct but visible line between stylized memory and falsified events—does tell us something about the possessor of these memories. Perhaps, then, the conscious fabrications of Frey and others frighten us so because they are exaggerated examples of what we all do, constructing narratives that help to explain the past and lay the groundwork for the future. Conscious fabrication is a particularly egregious method of telling a story that reveals who we wish we were, rather than who we are—revealing, too, how the two are not as different as we would so often like to think.



 

Age 370—1934



Seated at the organ in the Stratford church, a man performs Rheinberger’s Sonata No. 4 in A minor. His back to the audience, he cannot see the procession leaving the pews to place wreaths on the grave. The only man who remains seated scribbles a note that reads, “having the air of being between a yeast factory and a steam laundry,” then adds in the description “ecclesiastical meander- ing” and underlines it twice.



Before the organist moves to the Choral Song and Fugue, he turns around and squints at the de- parting patrons. Today they remember birth and death, and he as the organist celebrates through music.



The reporter writes down another note: The second piece is “the dullest ever composed.”



Next year the player will return, and he will play something less bright. He will not play something less dull, because he does not believe his performance was dull at all.



Age 50—1614



Bonfires rage in the center of each village and public displays of celebration explode to honor Elizabeth I’s ascension. Everywhere the royal carriage rides, bells follow. Inside, James I listens to cheers for his predecessor. For the 44th year in a row, the people of England celebrate their previ- ous monarch with a secular jubilee.



The first 12 anniversaries of the Queen’s reign passed without national fanfare. Royal pageantry limped through the streets on occasion, but the invitations to annual parties arrived only with a papal stamp of approval. Even with the Reforma- tion, British holidays derived themselves from the Church’s holy days, at least until the 12th anniversary of Elizabeth I’s ascension, when the guest list was cut down to the Commonwealth. Once church bells rang for a national monarch, revelry in recent history replaced ancient holidays on the British calendar.



On November 5, two weeks before the coun- try celebrates its queen, bonfires and bells also harmonize. Parades pass though the centers of villages, with each patron rolling his or her own beer keg. The people cheer as loud as they will for Elizabeth I in two weeks’ time, if not with the same clarity.



Gunpowder Treason Day arrives in the town square with the official sanction of Parliament, and the social approval of the clergy. Soldiers march the streets with unloaded muskets, cele- brating nine years of separation from Guy Fawkes and his 36 barrels of gunpowder. The plot to shatter society failed, and to celebrate, the House of Lords feasts to the sound of ceremonial cannons.



A bishop preaches the endurance of the Anglican Church against the Catholic menace, and the pews listen to his words. He praises the state, the lords, even the commoners. The commoners cheer outside the church walls, pausing only to change kegs. 



Age 10—1574



Inkpots empty as Latin becomes English and sunlight enters the classroom from the west. Each bench matches a wooden desk, and the desks come from the same tree as the crooked beam across the ceiling. Below the bend in the beam, Will looks at the sun through the grates in the window, and predicts no more than 15 min- utes before the light departs and candles arrive.



In the corner of the room, Headmaster Jenkins watches the sun and knows it will set in ten minutes. From six to five each day, he teaches boys fromtheagesof7to14howtogivelifetoadead language. This process repeats every day, except on weekends and Church holidays. Today is no different, except that it is St. George’s Day. It is also Will’s birthday, but no one minds either way.



While Will copies the motions of his fellow students, each translation revives a society known for power, prestige, and birthday celebrations. In that era of Roman domination, sons received to- gas from fathers, sisters and brothers exchanged jewelry, and even slaves honored their masters with shards of amber. Well-wishes arrived during the birthday feast in verbal exaltations from those in attendance, as well as tender letters from those out of town.



Exotic dancers poured wine throughout the night while a pig roasted on a spit and another bled in the temple. Other partiers placed wine and flowers at sacred altars, and some birthday boys performed dances not to the gods, but to the genius. Viewed as a guiding spirit through a man’s life as well as a medium between the gods and men, Romans treated the genius as integral to a man’s identity, and used birthdays as an oc- casion to honor and worship this being.



Will’s genius may be watching over him in En- gland, but he shows no signs of worshipping his guardian. On his tenth birthday, his arms write without the clang of jewelry, covered by a coarse tunic rather than a silken toga. As the sun sets on Britain, Headmaster Jenkins sets a candle in front of Will to illuminate the past, not for wishes. As this light shines on Will’s translation, more candlesticks join in brightening the classroom against nightfall.



When the evening bells chime to usher the students home, the thought of a birthday does not cross Will’s mind. He walks home over the cobbled roads with a Greek mentality, uncon- cerned with celebrating ten years on Earth. The



only celebration of birth in the ancient Greek culture occurred after death, when relatives and loved ones mourned their lost companions through joy rather than sorrow. But this view is unknown to this Latin-educated Elizabethan. The lack of excitement from the day carries into sleep, from which he will wake up tomorrow to repeat the same routine. In his dreams, he might imagine presents piled high around roast chick- en bathing in mists of wine. More likely, he will dream of nothing.



Age 35—1599



Groundlings wait for the start of the new play, one penny poorer, the smiles across their faces concealing the rotten tomatoes in their hands. Above, the middle class sits in boxes, having paid twice as much for the right to sit and throw toma- toes rather than stand with the filth below. Some sit on cushions, for three pennies.



Around the playhouse servants serve food and drink to every guest. From the top gallery, Thom- as Platter and his group of Swedish cohorts look down on the platform. Offstage hide the only fac- es without smiles, each crouched in character for the first scene.



The play begins and five actors walk onstage in togas underneath Elizabethan jackets. A spot in the crowd only guarantees sight of the jack- ets, relics of powerful lords bequeathed to greedy serving men; they pawned these beautiful gar- ments to actors for a few pennies.



Tonight’s premiere of Julius Caesar seizes the contemporary fascination with Rome, throwing Latin lingo at the audience ten times before this tragedy of history ends. Halfway through his play, Caesar dies, and Brutus fills his void with speculation and indecision, crying out to no one but the audience over the tension between “the genius and the mortal instruments.” His manic counterpart, Cassius, does not blame his genius for anything, but does forget to thank it when he remembers, “This is my birthday; as this very day / Was Cassius born.”



In lieu of pageantry, Cassius celebrates his birthday on the battlefield. He commands his subordinate to stab him; he’d rather die than face defeat. Fewer than five lines after his death, news of victory reaches Cassius’ body, but he does not hear the turn of fortune. Instead, his blood runs over the blade, a respectful sacrifice and cele-bration to remember his birth and death. Brutus meets death in a similar fashion, shaking hands with the afterlife through the blade of his own sword. He runs on the sword, but again, the hilt is held by another man.



Once the performance ends, the Lord Cham- berlain’s Men walk on stage. Fifteen actors wide, they break out into dance: One wears a jacket, two wear gowns, and all celebrate. In the audi- ence, Thomas Platter and his compatriots ap- plaud their choice of spectacle for the afternoon. With two other plays across the Thames, they are content to have viewed what Platter wrote was an “excellent performance.”



Age 284—1848



Men gather to celebrate Will’s birthday in a building named after him. A reporter arrives and believes them to be distinguished, but their drinking habits quickly corrode their landed ti- tles. Scribbling down their names, he notices that around their pomp and circumstance, the town of Stratford is as empty as usual.



Inside the building toasts commence before dinner, and continue as men wash down the roast with the wine. One man jumps from his chair at the first opportunity of silence, raises his goblet, and cries, “To the health of the immortal Poet.” Others follow his example and down their liquor to the spirit of poetry and her poets.



Once the lesser dignitaries finish opining, his Lordship, MP, rises from his seat and clears his throat.



“I am glad of the opportunity of appearing here as your representative, and I do declare, you are most ready to pay homage to the foremost genius of our country.”



The crowd cheers and he continues:



“The writings of Shakespeare have contributed in no inconsiderable degree to augment the con- sideration and influence of England.”



They cheer again.



“Even in America they cheer for Shakespeare. In France, they discarded the heresies of Voltaire and admitted his eminence. And do not forget Ireland, for which he joins with the poets of En- gland and Ireland to bring justice to the West.”



The cheers shake the smooth timbered ceiling.



“Remember, the poet Moore still lives among us, and long might his myrtle be gilded with the mild and genial radiance of a protracted sunset.”



Spirits splash over the lips of the drinkers, and the living celebrate their current poet laureate at an event for the great playwright of the past.



At a nearby hotel, a lesser crowd performs the same celebration, with the same display of feel- ing.



Age 324—1888



“The entertainment is addressed to both phys- ical and mental nature, and begins with the first course: the intellectual salad.”



A plate sits before each woman, filled with lettuce leaves made of tissue paper. One shade of light green reads, “There’s a special shade of providence in the fall of a sparrow.” A blade of imitation grass whispers, “Truth needs no colour—Beauty no pencil.” The bottom of the salad molds to a crumpled, yellowed scrap, with the words “Nature hath formed strange fellows in her time” faded into a crease. One particu- larly loud guest guesses Macbeth for each quote and receives nothing but a frown. For most of the guests, the scraps of paper mix without effort into their knowledge of folios and quartos.



One book rests above each plate on the im- maculate tablecloth. The hardcover is too big for the palm of your hand, but just the right size to slip into a pocketbook, or a back pocket. Gilded pages slip underneath the fingertips of a reader, and golden leaves wrap around the spine to gar- nish The Shakespeare Birthday Book. There is no dedication or inscription in the front cover, other than one that begins midway through a line:



My blessing with thee, And these few precepts in thy memory.



After alternating between title page and blank page, Will watches his own words in profile. His head, bald up to the crown, faces right. A tex- tured tunic wrinkles around his shoulders, and the rest of the picture is unfinished. The next page brings the reader to The New Year, and the start of the birthdays. With each new day, two to three quotations prompt the reader to celebrate. As years pass, the book will fill with names, and each name will be linked in ink to Shakespeare.



While the ladies of the Fredonia Shakespeare Club finish their celebration of Will’s 324th, 366 days await to be filled by birthdays living across the page from quotations.



Age 102—1666



Will rests in his coffin. His arms are crossed, but his eyes are not closed. His eyes are nowhere, in fact. His flesh has decayed, completely, leav- ing only a skeleton under concrete.



The epitaph reads:



Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.



At the foot of the grave rocks a crooked wood- en sign: “Here Lies William Shakespeare 1564– 1616.” Wreaths offlowers cover this ephemeral inscription; both will disappear within one year.



Age 300—1864



A wooden edifice obscures the source of bells chiming at noon. The streets snake around the structure, empty, but a brisk wind hints at the in- coming wave of visitors intent on overwhelming the town. Tacked to the front of the temporary structure, a bulletin announces the festivities for the coming week.



A banquet is the only event on April 23, and will be presided over by Lord Carlisle. The cost to attend is 21 shillings, which entitles one to en- trance and food. In the evening a grand display of fireworks will shoot over town. This is the only free event of the weekend.



On Sunday there are no events.



On Monday 500 singers, 120 instruments, and one conductor will perform Handel’s Messiah. In the evening more music will be performed, accompanied by words from Shakespeare.



Twelfth Night opens on Tuesday for one per-



formance and 5 shillings. Immediately afterward a staging of a new comedy written by Lord Dun- dreary will appear in a new farce. Tickets are, again, 5 shillings.



Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, and Hamlet all squeeze into Wednesday, and music returns on Thursday for a collection of music from the plays of Shakespeare.



The festival will close on Friday, six days after it opens, with a Grand Fancy Dress Ball. Those who cannot afford the 21-shilling surcharge are encouraged to attend the exhibition in the town hall, where portraits of Shakespeare will stare at 19th-century faces.



One week after the festival the wooden theatre will be destroyed, and all productions will return to the permanent Stratford Theatre.



Age 450—2014



Websites announce local celebrations for Shakespeare’s 450th birthday party. Stratford hopes to attract tourists to balloon its population of 25,505. Each year 4,300,000 people visit, but this year the local government hopes the streets will overflow with pageantry. France celebrates a tercentenary-and-a-half with public forums and discussions. Elsewhere in the world, those with- out an invite to the official party can celebrate by continuing to attend plays.



In a library, The Shakespeare Birthday Book rests filled with names in quill, surrounded in all directions by books printed in presses. Out- side pubs, Saint George’s flag flies, sometimes, but most establishments remain the same. The buildings in Stratford stand, and they are still wood. No one performs the Fugue on this day, because it is dull. Latin is dead, and so is every- one in this piece.



Will does not care how you celebrate. By this time he’s a flower, or maybe even just grass. 

I.



There have been only eight reports of self-cannibalism recorded in scientific literature. The most recent case occurred in 2011 when a 28-year-old man from Australia, in a pit of depression, cut off one of his fingers and ate it. The most historic incident dates back to 1964, when a psychotic male from the U.S. ate copious amounts of skin, subcutaneous tissue, and blood from his shoulders. 



The concept of self-devouring, however, goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks. Erysichthon, the arrogant king of Thessaly, had plans to build a great feasting hall. Only the finest oak trees would be fit for such grandeur, he thought, and marched his servants to the sacred grove of Demeter. There, he found a beautiful oak tree grow- ing at the center and ordered his servants to cut it down. They refused, however, to bring down the tree of a god. 



So the king took the task upon himself. He picked up the axe and swung it, making a deep indentation from which bright blood poured. Erysichthon ignored this ominous sign and continued hacking at the tree, each swing widening the red puddle at his feet. In time, the oak fell to the ground, and he carried the blood-soaked wood home, sure that it would be enough to raise his visionary hall. 



When Demeter discovered the death of her tree, she decided that Erysichthon would be haunted with an insatiable hunger no matter how much he 



ate. She ordered Famine to breathe into his stomach every night and day. Famine did as she was told, and the following day Erysichthon woke up feeling hungrier than he had ever been. He went to the great feasting hall and demanded the largest meals of lamb and egg. Yet the end of every meal left him wanting even more. Each day passed, and food became Erysichthon’s greatest desire. He did anything just to get more food, selling his land, his animals, and his castle. When his riches were exhausted, he sold his own daughter into slavery. 



Yet the hunger persisted, and Erysichthon only grew weaker with each passing day. The hunger finally drove him insane, and in a final act of desperation, he ate his own body. He chewed first at his fingers, then his wrists, licking the sweet blood that poured down his elbows, and then ate his elbows, too. When his arms were gone, he curled up to tackle his toes, sucking each one off one by one. He then gnawed on his shins, taking off the kneecaps from their tendon source and crunch- ing them between his teeth. Death walked by this debacle and took pity on Erysichthon, who was at this point nothing but a head and bleeding torso. With one sweep of his hand, Death put an end to Erysichthon’s suffering right as he was about to eat his own tongue. 



II.

In order to survive, a cell must eat itself. Sometimes proteins are born misfolded and misshapen, presenting a threat to the system, and at other times an organelle will come of age and fail to function. These misfits are dangerous and marked as good candidates to be destroyed. 



The hunter is the phagophore, a U-shaped membrane whose only function is to find the inept proteins. Once it binds to one, it wraps it arms around the cargo and encapsulates it. This newly formed vesicle, called an autophagophore, then delivers the trapped proteins to the lysosome, the mouth of the cell. Once inside the lysosome, the proteins get shredded to pieces. The remains of the dead are recycled into new organelles to carry the cell’s functions forward. 



This process is called autophagy. Some small amount of self-digestion is needed in every cell for quality control. In times of starvation, how- ever, when either oxygen is low or nutrients are scarce, the rate of autophagy increases, and the cells will devour themselves. 



III.

The Dictyostelium discoideum, or dicty, is a type of slime mold. Under natural conditions, it exists as a single amoeba meandering and sliding through its moist home. It enjoys feasting on bits of bacteria that fall in its path. When food is scarce, however, something magical happens. Within six hours of starvation, as if a conch shell had been blown to signal battle, hundreds of dicties from other lands march in and gather around a single point—the dicty that made the initial call. Once enough warriors have gathered, the mass begins spiraling counterclockwise, like an infant galaxy discovering its core. Streams of dicties flow into this mass until it becomes a mound-shaped colony. The mound bubbles and morphs, throbbing with the lives of a million hungry dicties. It stretches and widens and becomes a slug, with a head and a tail and fake little feet that then send it lurching forward in search of food. 



The slug knows to search for heat and light, both of which promise a feast of bacteria. When it senses that it has arrived at a good place, the slug flips over and rams its head into the ground. The dicties at the head—the most starved of them all—die, and their wet bodies, smashed against each other, anchor the slug. It then comes time for the ones in the middle to sacrifice themselves. Their bodies pile and crystallize on top of each other to form a stalk, growing increasingly higher. Once it is high enough, the remaining dicties join together into a little sphere and become spores.

And like this the mass of dicties, in this fruiting body, wait for rain to come. Eventually a drop falls hard enough on the tip of the fruit, and the head explodes, releasing the spores to the wild, where they may grow in some merrier home. 



IV.

There is no law against cannibalism in Japan, which is how 22-year-old Mao Sugiyama got away with cooking and serving his own genitals to five guests at a Tokyo banquet. 



Sugiyama, an illustrator, considered himself asexual, and before his 22nd birthday had surgery to remove his penis, scrotum, and testicles. Following the procedure, he asked the surgeons if he could keep his excised genitalia. They handed him his frozen organs in a small plastic bag, which he kept in his freezer at home for the next two months, free of infection. 



His original plan was to eat his own penis, but after careful deliberation, he decided on a different course of action. Two months after the surgery, on April 8, 2012, Sugiyama posted the following announcement on Twitter: “...I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen.... I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” He also announced that the organs were free of venereal diseases, that they had previously functioned normally, and that he had not been receiving female hormonal treatment. After much interest, Sugiyama also announced that he would take care to follow Japanese food safety and medical waste regulations. 



With the help of three event planners, the Ham Cybele Century Banquet was hosted on May 24, 2012 in the Suginami ward, a residential area in western Tokyo. Seventy people showed up for the exclusive event. From among them, the highest-paying bidders were chosen to dine on the fine meats; each paid 250 dollars for the experience. The first was a 32-year-old male manga artist who thought the gross act would be good research for his own work. Following him was a 30-year-old couple who just wanted to know. Next came an attractive 22-year-old woman. The fifth was 29-year-old event planner Shigenobu Matsuzawa, who wanted to take part in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The sixth person did not show up. 



A short piano recital marked the start of the event. Sugiyama emerged soon afterwards, adorned in a crisp white frock and chef’s hat to greet his applauding audience. A small rectangular table with a red tablecloth greeted him at the center of the hall. His cooking materials lay waiting on the surface: a single portable gas burner, a small metal pot, a steak knife, a container of soy sauce, a napkin, and a single lemon. The room of people watched intently as he sliced up all six inches of his penis, cut his scrotum in half, and sautéed them with cooking wine and a bit of parsley. Those who weren’t able to eat his genitals were instead served crocodile meat. 



 



Sugiyama finished within minutes and served his carefully sliced manhood to the five chosen diners, who all signed a waiver relieving him of any responsibility if they became ill. The meal came with a side of button mushrooms. One of the diners later commented that the meat was rubbery and tasteless. 

Once when I was very young, the girl I loved had a seizure in the deep end. Her name was Melanie Fitzgerald, and I didn’t much like her. We spoke very little, and when we did, it left an ugly, pitted feeling in my stomach. The dull features of her face scrunched tight around the nose, and the ends of her mouth were in the habit of turning inward and down. We were playing Marco Polo, a group of us, the tall boys inching along the sides of the pool to six feet. And she followed them, her hair fanning flat where it met the water. She walked until the water kissed her chin. It was midday, and the sun made her hair shine like lacquered wood.

I could feel the pool jet against my stomach, as if it were trying to burrow deeper under the skin. It seemed a very pure force. When I turned again she was facedown on the water’s surface. Someone was shouting, the lifeguard maybe, or one of the tall boys. They dragged her to the stairs at the head of the pool, where she floated in the gentle tide like a skiff.

We exited single file from the pool, and as I left, I felt her hair tickle the back of my legs. For a moment I grew warm all over. The water winked and dimpled in the sunlight, so that everything shone impossibly white. Two of the tall boys had their hands about her wrists, anchoring her, and there were many other children shivering poolside to watch the spectacle play out.

In the locker room later—after the ambulance had arrived, and all the tall boys were in the showers making jokes—I rubbed my legs until I didn’t feel anything at all, just the raw red make of my skin, the dead memory of her hair along my legs, how real it felt, even then.

My name is Dr. Isaac Lahm, and I’m the associate director of the Munich Zoological Institute, next in line for the directorship once Pfizer steps down. When people ask me why I study bees, I joke that it’s for the honey. But I know better. I know that if we are to have an appreciation for the fundamental laws of life, an understanding of how the human body functions, we must study the sensory capacities of the world’s most marvelous creatures, such that we can compare our quirks to theirs, the human eye to the bee’s visual system. Inevitably, said comparison welcomes debate, and it’s why I’ll be arguing against a young man named Reus from Berlin at a conference in a few days’ time. Young Reus refutes my theory that bees are color blind. In the March 1916 edition of Zoologischer Anzeiger, he outlines an experiment that claims the following: Bees associate a reward with color and thereby see hue. Though I fear the threat of an eager up-and-comer, the awards and publications on my wall stand for something. I believe young Reus wants my job. Clever boy.

     We’d been living in Madero for months of silent siege when I got a toothache on the right side of my mouth. It hurt like hell. I chewed only with the left side of my mouth for ten days while I tried to find a dentist that would take the insurance that Katherine got through the school. Most places didn’t take it because it was cut-rate. You’d think they’d give teachers better benefits. I started to worry that the right side of my face would become sallow and emaciated from lack of use. I knew it probably wouldn’t, but I grew out a beard just in case. I hadn’t grown a beard in several years, and when it came in I was surprised at how much gray was in it. I shaved it right off. I did eventually find a dentist that took the insurance, but his office was in a little town called Venero. It was a half an hour away, in a valley up in the mountains. The only opening was on Friday morning that week. I would have to take a whole day off of work to go.     I spent that Thursday framing a house with my foreman Eric. A guy from a neighboring town had done the plumbing the day before, because I was Eric’s only employee and didn’t know how. Eric didn’t like being called the foreman, but I thought it was funny. I liked working construction even though I had to wake up so early. There was something peaceful about the rhythm of it. I liked it much more than wait- ing tables, or tending bar, or moving furniture like I had done in California. When I told Eric that I wasn’t going to be able to come in the next day because of my appointment, he wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing to do. It wasn’t as if I was playing hooky to have fun.     Venero used to be a mining town. The mine was still there, but it employed so few people it wasn’t really reasonable to call it a mining town anymore. At least that’s what Eric told me when I asked him for directions. I had never been. His uncle used to work in the mines, he said. They mined molybdenum, but his uncle didn’t know what the company used it for. To him, it just looked like the lead in pencils.     Molybdenum is mixed with steel to make it stronger. I looked it up in the library a couple years ago.     When I came home from work that Thursday, Katherine was sitting in the living room. The house was cold. We were in a standoff; neither of us wanted to be the one to turn on the thermostat for the winter. As I sat down on the couch, she got up and walked into the bedroom and closed the door. I went into the kitchen and began making as much noise as I could but she didn’t come out and eventually I got tired and stopped. I sat down at the kitchen table. She came into the kitchen a little later and poured herself a glass of white wine. As she walked back to the bedroom, she spilled a little wine on my sleeve. I knocked the chair over as I stood up. She said it was an accident and that if I was going to yell I could leave the house. I smiled and said that it was fine and then I shut myself in my office until she had gone to bed.     That night, my tooth hurt too much to sleep. I tried every trick that I knew of to drift off. Nothing worked. I massaged my cheek with my fingers, which seemed to help, but my hands were so cracked and dry that my cheek began to chafe and so I stopped. I had given up trying to use lotion to make them better, because the lotion made my palms soft and they would rip open when I worked. Katherine didn’t like the lotion. She preferred it when my hands smelled like sawdust. I sat at the kitchen table the whole night, with only a candle for company, but it burned down to a nub and died out. I was left in the silver light of the moon.     We’d been fighting a lot. They weren’t loud and fiery fights like we used to have in the old house. I never hurt her. Several times I flipped the kitchen table over onto its side. The first time her grandmother’s vase was on it. The subsequent vases that she put in its place were cheap and from secondhand stores, so breaking them didn’t mean anything and I stopped flipping the table over altogether. I moved on to all the other stuff that made our house our house. When we moved, we didn’t take any of the things we owned. They were all replacements. They didn’t mean anything to us.     Our new house is bare. It only has the furniture it came with.     These quiet fights were worse though, worse because they were slow and deliberate. Katherine was a master at fighting like that. Not me though, it ruined my digestive system. I didn’t have the nerves.     I want to blame Katherine’s drinking for our fighting but that isn’t fair. It wasn’t why we were fighting, and she really only started seriously drinking after we moved to New Mexico. She handles drinking much better than I do. I wasn’t drinking back then; I’m making up for it now. This is how it went: half a bottle of Chardonnay before dinner, half a bottle with dinner, and half a bottle after dinner. Out there, the air was so dry that the chilled bottles didn’t sweat and leave little wet rings when she took them out of the fridge and left them on the table. She was very regimented about it; she didn’t let it affect her career. She woke up every morning, right when I was leaving for the construction site, to get ready for school. The children at school didn’t call her by our last name. They called her Ms. Katherine.     When the sun crested the mountains I went into the bedroom to change my clothes and brush my teeth. I wanted to leave before Katherine woke up. She was asleep, but she didn’t look peaceful. Her lips were pursed and her brow was furrowed. When we first met, she kept a dream journal, but she didn’t both- er anymore. She said that she had the same dream over and over—so many times that she had stopped keeping track. I told her she should go see someone about it, but she never did. She said she didn’t dream when she drank. She told me once about the dream. It wasn’t unpleasant.     The road to Venero went through the foothills. It went up and down. I had to go as fast as I could on the declines to build up speed for the climbs. My car was little and old and I was worried that it would die. It wasn’t used to high elevation. At the beginning of the drive, at lower altitudes, the aspens which were interspersed with the pine trees had yellow leaves, but as I climbed, they became barren. It seemed to me as though I was driving outside of time, and I didn’t mind the idea of going on forever, climbing and climbing, until everything turned white.     As I drove, I thought about how my older brother and I used to hop the fence around the orchards in the fall when the branches were heavy with apples and the leaves were yellow and red. We tried to catch the falling leaves as they zigzagged through the air. We climbed the trees and picked apples to fill our shirts with. We ate until we were swollen and had bellyaches. Then, we would lie under the trees in the dappled afternoon light and drift between napping and talking. Later in the fall, when most of the apples had fallen off of the trees, we would take turns pitching the partially rotten fruit to each other and batting with a branch. My brother’s swing was all wrists. He would cushion the apple with the stick and then flick it, whole, up into the blue afternoon. I didn’t have any finesse and every time I hit I sprayed chunks of apple everywhere and they coated our clothes and it drove our mother crazy.     My brother passed away a little while before Katherine and I moved from Menlo Park. It was nothing dramatic. He didn’t even live in the town. One minute he was there in my mind, then the police called and he was gone. It was a stroke. I hadn’t seen him for years, and if they hadn’t called, he would have gone on living in my mind forever. I waited a week or so to tell Katherine. When I did she put down her book and walked over and hugged me from behind. At first I tried to brush her off but she hung on, like she was riding a bull. Suddenly all the fight in me, all the stubbornness, left and I let her hold me. She never said anything about it after that, but when I wanted to move I think she understood. The house, our childhood home, was unbearable for me after he died.     I thought that Madero would be the perfect town for us to move to. It was small and quiet. There were mountains and a river. Katherine got a job at the local elementary school and I worked construction. But I didn’t realize how dry it would be and how empty. The sky was huge out there and blue, but the earth was flat, except for the mountains, and there were times, when the wind whipped up and I looked out the window at the expanses of sagebrush and the lonely mountains, that I felt as if I were the only person in the world. The air there was too light and arid, and it almost felt like there was no air at all, that each breath was futile.     I arrived in Venero fifteen minutes early for my appointment. The only buildings on the main drag were a couple of houses, a gas station, and a liquor store. At first I thought that I had arrived at the wrong place. The office was in a doublewide mobile home that sat on the ground. It didn’t look like a dentist’s office, but it was the right address. I opened the dusty glass front door and a bell chimed feebly.     I don’t really know how to describe the place. There was a small reception area, stocked with old magazines and a slumped couch. Through one door a dentist chair and tools were visible. An old woman sat reading a fading magazine behind the receptionist’s desk. Cages and tanks that were full of small animals occupied the rest of the office, which was most of the space. The carpet was green and there were wood chips everywhere. I remember that the office smelled of disinfectant and cedar and animal urine and the combination stung my nostrils and made me nauseous. I stood in the doorway surrounded by falling dust particles that were illuminated by the beams of light that streamed through the door.     The receptionist looked up and greeted me. Her face was deeply wrinkled and her black hair was held tightly back in a bun. She wore shabby clothes and spoke with a thick New Mexican accent. Her teeth were perfectly straight and white. She asked me to fill out some forms but she didn’t have a pen and neither did I. I asked her about the animals and she told me that the dentist ran the only zoo in Venero. She told me too that I was welcome to look at the animals while I waited. Other than us, the office was silent.     The cages were stacked against the faux wood walls. The glass on the tanks was smudged and dirty. I walked through the office, looking for some sign of movement. One of the big tanks had a rattlesnake in it, or at least that’s what the plaque on the tank said, because the snake didn’t have a rattle. As I looked at more and more of the animals the more uneasy I felt. The dentist came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped. His hands were strong and weighed heavily on me. He was a tall man with white-blond hair and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore high-waisted jeans and a plaid shirt with a bolo tie. His face was wide and shiny and he smiled with his mouth open and his teeth slightly gapped. He told me that he had caught all the animals himself and that he had the largest collection of monitor lizards in the state. He asked me if I had seen the caiman. I had not. His breath smelled sour. He led me by my shoulder to his prized possession, the one animal not from New Mexico, at the far end of the room, in the biggest tank. I didn’t want to look.     He’s beautiful isn’t he, he asked me. I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I looked into the black and beady eyes and could not look away. The caiman was motionless, and for a moment I thought it might actually be stuffed, but there was something alive in its eyes, some malice. The pit of my stomach was cold. We might have been standing there for ten seconds, or ten minutes, and I think I would have kept standing there if the dentist hadn’t turned and told me to follow him into the back room where the dentist chair was.     The dentist chair was old and turquoise, ripped on the arms. He sat me down and tucked a bib into my shirt. I was staring at the ceiling, which was stained brown from water that had leaked through the roof. The shelves that lined the walls were filled with animal skulls. They were yellow and they all had big teeth. Under each skull, there was a handwritten label. There was a javelina from Texas and a wild boar from Colorado. There must have been at least a couple dozen of them. I was grateful when he turned on the bright dental light, which blinded me.     He injected a lot of Novocaine into my gums. The shot hurt, but soon I could not feel his strong and gloved hands as they moved my jaw. He used a tiny drill and all I could sense was the vibration that it sent through my skull. But I heard the whine of the motor and smelled burning tooth and felt the dust the drill generated at the back of my mouth. I think I would have gone without the Novocaine if I didn’t have to smell that smell. It scared me.     He was a good dentist. He worked quickly, and he didn’t ask me any questions. He told me that when he first opened the office children used to come in and look at the animals, but it had been a while since anyone who was not a patient had been in and even the patients no longer took an interest. He lived in a town south of Madero and commuted to Venero a couple of days a week. He told me that he didn’t work in the winters and that he had to pay someone to come in and clean the tanks and feed the animals. He lost a few animals every winter. He didn’t work in Venero in the winters because he was afraid of driving through the mountains on icy and snowy roads back to where he lived. He said, If your car breaks down on those roads in winter, there’s nothing left to do but the dying.     He finished his work, switched off the light, and sat me up in the chair. He had a blue surgical mask on. He told me that I was all set and that they would mail me the bill. I thanked him, but could not pro- nounce any of the words because of the Novocaine. When I walked through the main room, I kept my eyes forward and unfocused.     On the drive home I kept looking in the mirror. I thought that was what I was going to look like when I was old, when all the vitality had left my body and my skin was loose.     I kept poking my cheek with my finger to see if I could feel anything. I couldn’t. I thought about what he said, about dying at night in the mountains, about freezing to death, about numbness.     Katherine and I drove when we moved out there in the winter. We only got part of the way on the first day and so we stayed in a hotel in some run-down little town. When we got up in the morning to keep going the windshield was frosted over. We didn’t have an ice scraper—we didn’t know it got that cold in the southwest—so I had to drive with my head to the side, looking out of the little patch of windshield that the weak defroster melted clear. Whenever the highway turned towards the sun the frost on the windshield lit up into a brilliant glow and I could not see a thing and Katherine would begin to fidget nervously. But I kept driving.     I got home and walked straight to the bedroom. I lay on top of the covers and fell asleep. I did not have any dreams. When I woke up, the walls were tinted orange from the setting sun. I had drooled all over the pillow. When I walked in to the kitchen Katherine asked me if I was having a stroke because of how the right side of my face sagged. Then she laughed.     It wasn’t until dinner that I was certain that I had to go back. Katherine and I sat across from each other at the table with our heads down, looking at our plates. Usually, I tried to ask about her day and talk to her. Dinner was the only time that we could talk, when she was just drunk enough to speak and not drunk enough to be mean. But I didn’t say a word that night. I was thinking about the animals. I thought of the cold wire cages. Even though it scared me, I felt sorry for the caiman. I was chewing, but I was not paying enough attention and my cheek slipped between my teeth and I bit down on it. I did not feel it, but I tasted the blood.     I don’t know why I felt that way. Once, when I was a boy, my father and I went on a hunting trip in the Rockies. We flew to Colorado. It was my special trip; my brother didn’t get to come, and it was my first time on a plane. My father had paid for a guide and a crew to take all of our gear. All I had to carry was my rifle. It was a .22. I don’t remember much of the trip anymore-–the camping, the food or any of that-–but I do remember shooting a deer. My .22 wasn’t really supposed to be able to kill anything, but the deer had popped up just in front of us, close enough that the little bullet could do damage. I remember being scared, scared that I would miss when my father whispered for me to shoot and that I would disappoint him. But I shot and hit the deer in the side. It didn’t die right away. It fell to the ground and lay breathing great gulps of air, its pupils so big that its eyes were black and they drew my own eyes with irresistible grav- ity. My father told me to shoot it again, behind the eye, and I did. My father patted me on the back, but I didn’t feel anything, not pride or empathy. I just wanted to go home.     I washed the dishes slowly, and when I was done, my hands were wrinkled and peeling. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Katherine to go to bed. She was already done with her drinking for the night, and so it was only a matter of time. As I waited, the Novocaine wore off slowly and my jaw began to ache. It was a dull and pounding pain. Finally Katherine went into the bedroom and closed the door and I was alone.     I waited until I thought Katherine was asleep before I snuck into our room. I fumbled through my dresser in the dark and put on a black pair of pants, a black sweatshirt, and running shoes. I guess I made too much noise, or maybe I was acting suspicious all night, because Katherine turned her light on and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I had some business to take care of. I tried to make it sound important. She laughed through her nose. What business do you have, she asked. I told her what I was going to do. I was always honest with Katherine. I was sure that she was going to try and stop me—that she was going threaten to call the cops or turn me in. But she didn’t. She asked if she could come.     We got into the car. Katherine wanted to drive, but she was drunk. It was crisp out and the moon was almost full. I drove the same route that I had driven earlier. We didn’t talk on the whole drive, but it didn’t bother me. Katherine rested her head against the window and I wasn’t even sure if she was awake. Under the light of the moon the surroundings were a colorless gradation of gray.     Katherine and I used to sit on the fire escape outside of the window of our apartment when we first moved in together. It felt more real, somehow. When we were down on the street surrounded by buildings I felt like I was on a stage and each action was mimed. But on the fire escape we could see the curvature of the earth. We would smoke cigarettes and watch the ashes fall slowly, like leaves. Katherine was afraid of heights and I used to climb on the outside of the railing to scare her. Then she would grab me and hold me close and kiss me.     I pulled into the parking lot and turned off the headlights. We got out of the car and Katherine went and tried the front door, which was locked. I had a tire iron in the trunk and I got it out. I had never broken a window before and my first tap on the glass was too soft. Katherine asked if she could try. She put her whole body into the swing and she smashed the window. We both stood still as we waited for an alarm to sound, but the night was silent, other than the soft clicks of the car engine as it cooled. Katherine went and got a flashlight from the glove compartment. I reached through the hole in the window and unlocked the door. When I opened it, the bell chimed and echoed through the dark room.     Katherine swept the flashlight around. The soft yellow beam reflected off the tanks. I told her to turn it off so our eyes could adjust. There was enough moonlight to see, if we waited. We stood still in the silence and I heard Katherine’s rapid breathing. When at last our eyes had adjusted, we stepped carefully over the broken glass and made right for the cages.     I picked up a tank and walked out the front door. In the silver light it was difficult to see the plaques, which were often cast in shadows and so I didn’t know which animal I was carrying, but it didn’t matter. It was surprisingly heavy. I took the lid off and tipped the tank on its side. I left it like that and went back inside for more. We ferried the animals out one by one, letting them go into the night. It was hard work, the cages were heavy, but my adrenaline was pumping and with each animal we released I grew more invigorated.     It seems silly now, but while we were in that office, in the pale moonlight, I thought I fell in love with Katherine all over again. We passed each other as we moved in and out of the door and I caught a whiff of her hair and we brushed shoulders, gently but consciously. With the lighting and the emotion it seemed as though that moment had been spliced in from some reel of film from long-gone days.     We had moved almost all the cages, laying them on their sides in rows in the gravel parking lot. I carried one particularly large tank out and took the lid off. As I tilted the tank onto its side, I felt a stinging pain in my right hand. I flung my arm backwards instinctively and the tank fell and shattered. A snake slithered swiftly out of the tank and into the night. The rattlesnake. I put my hand between my thighs and Katherine came running outside to find me on my knees. She asked me what had happened and I explained, the best that I could. Her eyes were wide and she swayed slightly in place as I held my hand up and she looked at the two puncture wounds. I started to suck on the bite, but Katherine pulled my hand away from my mouth. She thought I might poison myself that way. I didn’t know if she was right and so I stopped. Neither of us knew what to do, neither of us knew much about snakes. She wanted to call an ambulance but I told her we couldn’t call 911 from the dentist’s phone because then they would know it was us who had let the animals go.     I like to think the snake tried to warn me but couldn’t because it didn’t have a rattle. I like to imagine it shaking its tail vigorously and in vain. After the incident, I looked up everything there was to know about rattlesnakes. I have become an expert.     People don’t really die from rattlesnake bites, at least not unless they are in the middle of a desert. The venom takes hours to be lethal. But in that parking lot I didn’t know if I was dying or how much time I had left, which was worse in some ways than knowing for sure. Then at least there is nothing left to do but the dying.     My favorite fact about rattlesnakes is that they give birth to live young.     The nearest hospital that I knew of was in Madero. I told Katherine that we had to leave. She wanted to drive, but I couldn’t let her because she was drunk. I started the car and the headlights illuminated the whole scene in yellow: the faux stucco, the shattered glass tank, the dark and gaping door to the office. The only animal left inside was the caiman.     I put the car in gear and eased onto the road. I leaned over and put my right hand as low on the floor as possible. I knew that slowed the spread of the poison. I was leaning over towards Katherine and had to crane my neck to look out of the window. She reached over and caressed my cheek and I almost jerked away because her fingers were so cold. She stroked my cheek in a way that she hadn’t done in a long time. Beneath her fingers my jaw was aching. With each beat of my heart I thought I could feel the venom advancing up my arm. I thought about what the dentist had said about his car in winter. How much nicer it would be, I thought, to freeze like that, to fall asleep, than if we got stuck now. Katherine would have to watch me and I would have to watch her watch me. There would be no dignity in that. With each hill I held my breath and as we crested it I let it out slowly.     Katherine began to cry. I wasn’t sure if she was crying for me because she thought I was dying or for some other reason, and I didn’t ask. She told me that she was sorry, but she didn’t say what for and I felt as though her words were not for me. She asked if I remembered how we had met and for the first time since I was a boy I lied. I couldn’t recall a thing. She said that we were stupid, that this was stupid, to let those animals go. They are probably going to die in the wild, she said. And I knew she was right. She told me that she wished she had been bit too. She said that we both deserved it.     The pain was spreading up my arm and my tooth hurt and my neck was sore. My heart felt as hollow and empty as a swallow’s nest and I wanted to get as far away from Katherine as soon as possible, but I was afraid to lift my hand.     We got to the hospital and went into the E.R. I was embarrassed when I saw how unconcerned the doctor on call was. We sat on the plastic chairs in the waiting room, Katherine with her head lilting, and me with my chin almost on my chest. I thought about my brother, about how he had gone too quickly, about how he had died in a phone call. I felt as though I had an hourglass emptying sand into my limbs until they were heavy and hard to move. I felt tired. A nurse called my name and I got up and walked towards the double swinging doors. Katherine called out. She asked me if things would get better and I looked into her fearful and bloodshot eyes. Yes, I said and I turned and walked through the doors.     Some people think that, when cornered, a rattlesnake will bite itself with suicidal intent. This is not true. When cornered rattlesnakes strike out at anything that moves, including their tails. When they feel yielding flesh beneath their fangs, they will release venom. Rattlesnakes are immune to their own poison and they rarely die from this.