POST TRAUMA

The girls hold each other up.

Cameras blacken and turn the fire

engines quiet.

                            An ambulance stalls.

When I see the yellow tape cross the stairs

into the station, I become part of the tallest building,

steady the sun on the sidewalk. Moths rummage

the stomach. The eye strains

sand from water. Sounds

                                                 come from boys

braced against a blue mailbox.

I almost do not believe. They are whispering

about me. They are saying something

about the devil. And not a word

about the boy who dared to climb a train.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, PART IX: FREDDY VS. THE MADSEN BROTHERS

Part I

 

1984.

A grainy picture, speckled with static and imbued with blue as if someone had taped cellophane over the television: this is how I saw the original, the first, the best. The sound was harsh or, at times, muffled and inaudible. My parents had left me with my brother Owen for the evening. He was fifteen, five years older than I, and said, “Tonight, we’re going to watch what I want to watch.”

The commercials for A Nightmare on Elm Street had been playing for weeks, and the other kids in my elementary school were already talking: “There’s this burned-up guy, and he kills you in your dreams.” Until then, the scariest movie I had seen was Godzilla vs. Megalon, and I cowered in the couch as Godzilla battled a humongous cockroach with a drill on the top of its head. They trampled Tokyo, kicking cars out of their path, snapping telephone poles like toothpicks. When it seemed as if the cockroach had won—Godzilla lying on the ground, foam oozing from his mouth—I started to cry, and when my brother saw what I was watching, he said, “Paul, you’re such a wuss.”

Our parents forbade Owen from seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he snuck in after buying a ticket for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. He smuggled our video camera—the size of a cereal box—into the theater. And now, I was his test audience.

He watched as I squirmed and shuddered. At one point, a silhouette rose, and I thought Freddy was emerging from the television screen (he has a penchant for materializing out of solid objects), but it was only a lady going to the restroom. On the tape, Owen admonished: “Move it, bitch!” Occasionally, the picture jiggled as he repositioned the camera on his lap. His jeans rustling, the squeaking of the seat: these became dead leaves blowing down Elm Street, the scrape of Freddy’s fingernails against pipes.

I thought Owen would protect me, but when Freddy sprang from the shadows, I jolted from my seat, and he pushed me away. “God damn it,” he said. “If you’re going to be a pussy, I’ll turn it off right now.” He pulled the bag of potato chips closer to him, and his tube-socked foot pushed a Coke can off the coffee table. The music started screeching, and I covered my eyes. “This part isn’t scary,” he said. “It’s cool.” When I unlaced my fingers from my face, a geyser of blood erupted from a bed.

For weeks afterwards, I had nightmares. None involved Freddy, but I remembered Owen walking ahead of me, wearing his blue NASA T-shirt. I saw the back of his head, brown curls sticking out like coils of wire. I ran towards him, but my movements were labored, as if I were running through Bisquick batter. I fell further and further behind, and with each step, I became more and more frightened that I was going to lose him.

After the movie was over, he asked, “Wasn’t that awesome?”

I was still quivering.

“I bet none of your friends have seen it yet.”

I shook my head, not wanting to seem uncool.

“You should tell all of your friends how sweet that was.”

“Okay,” I said.

He leaned towards me. “Good,” he said. “If any of your friends wants a copy, tell them to give me a blank videocassette and six bucks.”

 

Part II: Freddy’s Revenge

 

1985.

Once Owen got his driver’s license, he disappeared frequently. He saw Freddy’s Revenge at a drive-in with two friends Dad disapproved of. He skipped dinner that night, and my parents and I ate in tense silence. Dad stabbed his pork chop with his fork and chewed as if the meat wouldn’t break apart.

I stayed up until I saw headlights come into the driveway. I listened: the grind and crank of the parking brake, the transmission winding down like an asthmatic. Owen, smelling of beer, stumbled up the stairs, and I tried my best to quiet him. I didn’t want Mom and Dad waking up.

“How was it?” I whispered.

“Not as good as the first.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed down, propping himself up.

“Was it scary?”

“Nah,” he said. “It was kind of gay.”

The floor creaked. He had trouble going faster than a shuffle.

“What do you mean, “gay”?”

“Like in the first one, you see a tit, but in this one, there’s no boobies anywhere. Just sweaty guys walking around in their underwear.” He leaned against the wall. “And there’s this one part where an old guy’s naked ass gets whipped bloody. That’s totally gay.”

Looking back, Part II is totally gay; or at the very least, homoerotic. Phallic signifiers include a pop gun held crotch-high, a snake wrapping itself around the protagonist, and, of course, Freddy penetrating male bodies with his trademark fingerknives. I won’t even mention the disco-housecleaning scene. Some critics contend that the film reflects mid-80s conservatism; for instance, the predatory coach who sets his lascivious sights on the protagonist arouses a horror rooted in homophobia, rather than in Freddy himself.

But back then I was eleven, intrigued. “Gay” was how you described someone one step down in the social pecking order; how could a movie be gay? I’d never seen another man’s backside before, although I’d been spanked: once for talking back to my mother, then again for skipping school. But whipped bloody? The thought made me shiver.

“Gross,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “gross.”

Months later, my parents and I were browsing the video store when I saw the cover for Part II. The still photo: a shirtless guy, hair wet and slicked back, water beaded on his face, holds up Freddy’s glove. Was he in his underwear? Was he the one that got whipped? I brought it to my parents and begged to see it, but Dad replied: “You’re too young for that trash.”

So I did what every red-blooded adolescent does: I finagled a sleepover at a friend’s house. He had laissez-faire parents who had no problem renting an R-rated movie for us. I sat on the far side of the sofa, away from my friend as the movie flickered into life. I clasped a pillow to my chest and pretended not to be transfixed when this ugly, scarred monster, who had slowly been taking possession of a teenager, burst fully formed out of the beautiful boy’s body.

 

Part III: Dream Warriors

 

1987.

This is where everything changes.

With Dream Warriors, Freddy hits the big time. Dokken, whose logo embossed three-ring binders of countless freshman girls, sings the theme music. Indeed, Freddy, with his sardonic one-liners and uncanny ability to pinpoint his opponent’s weakness and exploit it in the most gruesome way possible, becomes a pop- culture phenomenon. Part of the thrill of a prototypical slasher film, I’ve read, is the conflicting identification process that the audience undergoes: they see themselves as both monster and hero.

In the meantime, Owen fed me a stream of gore: the entire Friday the 13th opus, Sleepaway Camp, any movie featuring a knife, blood spatters, or a chainsaw on its cover. He also used me as an alibi: “I’m taking Paul to the movies.” If my parents gave me money for candy or popcorn, Owen confiscated it. Babysitting fee, he called it. He bought my ticket, and while I watched the movie, he went elsewhere. Afterwards, I was expected to wait. Every Friday night around eleven, I sat on the curb and watched boys leaving with their arms around their dates, watched them drive cars blaring heavy metal from tinted windows, rolled down halfway. The parking lot emptied before Owen picked me up, the theater lights off, me in the dark.

After Dream Warriors let out, I waited three and a half hours. Security drove by twice, and I told them that my ride was coming any minute now. On their third and fourth patrol, I lay in the shadows near the dumpsters, imagining what my super power would be. Magic? Kung fu? More than anything, I wanted to be like Kristin, the heroine: able to bring anyone I wanted into my dreams.

When my brother finally arrived, I was standing in a field of broken glass. For the last hour, I wandered the parking lot, picking up empty beer bottles, and throwing them hard against the wall of the theater. The shattering, the shards, the glints of light from the highway—I felt powerful.

“I’m sorry, man,” Owen said. “Guess I lost track of time.”

I crossed my arms, refusing to speak.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Let’s get something to eat.”

We went to a Village Inn far from our house. “Get whatever you want,” he said, eyes bloodshot. The lamp hanging over our table gave him a dusty aura.

I ordered a hot chocolate, which my parents never let me get because it had too much sugar. We ate our burgers in silence. He reached for my French fries, but I pulled the plate away from his greedy hands.

“If Mom or Dad asks why we’re late, tell them the truth, okay?” He slumped in the booth, his boots sticking into the aisle. “Tell them I took you to get something to eat.”

The waitress came by with our bill.

“I know you’re mad at me,” he said, sitting up. “Let me make it up to you. Do you want to drive my car?”

I nodded. I’d never driven my brother’s car.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes,” I said. I was willing to make that concession.

“Good. Pull the car around front and get in the passenger seat. Honk the horn when you’re done.”

My father had been giving me lessons in the family Buick, but kept one hand on the parking brake, ready to pull it back at a moment’s notice. Even though my brother’s VW Rabbit was smaller, the seat was set way back so that I couldn’t reach the pedals. As I fumbled underneath for the lever, I found a chain of foil-wrapped condoms.

Five seconds after honking the horn, my brother tore out of the restaurant and jumped into the car. We squealed out of the lot. I looked behind us and saw the manager, his red tie flapping like a panting dog. He was yelling, but I couldn’t hear anything over the revving engine.

“We should do this more often,” Owen said, accelerating into the night. “Just the two of us.” I was hyperventilating, the buzz running through my hands and feet. I was scared. Not jump-scared like when a cat comes screeching out of nowhere, but scared like the person in the audience who murmurs, Look out, look out, he’s right behind you!—the fear of a person who isn’t prepared for what comes next.

 

Part IV: The Dream Master

 

1988.

I admire the series’ willingness to kill heroes. Nancy survives Part I, but dies in Part III. Kristin bests Freddy in Part III, only to succumb in Part IV.

Owen had gotten kicked out of the house by Part IV. He couldn’t hold a job for more than three weeks. His stints as a line cook, golf caddy, and parking valet ended when he, respectively, slept through three shifts, smoked weed in the clubhouse, and stole money from people’s glove compartments. When he drove drunk into a ditch, totaling the Rabbit, my Dad told him to leave. He packed his belongings in black trash bags. He crashed at a friend’s place before finding an apartment, which he shared with three roommates.

For a while, I worried that my parents would tighten the screws on me—curfew, withholding car keys—but I was the good son. I had compiled a list of colleges I wanted to attend and left it where they could see it.

Every three weeks, Owen called for money. Dad obliged, mostly, but those times he refused, Mom would send me out the next morning with an envelope. I usually skimmed ten dollars off the top. Deliveryman’s fee. So when Owen called to talk to me, I was surprised. Mom said, It’s for you, in a voice that made me think that someone had died.

“Do you want to go see the new Nightmare on Elm Street?” he asked. Metal clanged in the background, as if he were in a junkyard. “I hear it’s awesome.”

“Sure.” Our conversation felt like a long-distance call, like we didn’t want to rack up charges.

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.”

When I told my parents that I was seeing a movie with Owen, they looked at each other like it was a bad idea. My horror movie habit was worrisome enough. Now, they were concerned how else my brother might influence me.

“Midnight,” Dad said. “No later.”

In the car, Owen reached towards me like he was going to muss my hair, like he did when we were younger, but punched me in the arm instead. “Why do you always have to dress like a doofus?” he asked. At the theater, he made me buy the concessions and upgraded the large popcorn to an extra large tub with lots of butter. He kept it in his lap until there were only broken pieces and old maid kernels left. When Freddy made his first kill, my brother raised his arms in a headbanger’s salute, and I saw that the lettering on his Poison T–shirt had chipped off until only a ghost of a lower-case “s-o-n” remained. His jean jacket had holes in the wrong places for them to be deliberate. And he smelled the way Freddy might: smoky, sour, stifling. When he laughed, people in the rows ahead of us turned and glared. I sank low and shook my head when he offered me a sip of the soda I had bought.

Afterwards, in the lobby, he clapped my shoulder. “Wasn’t that great?” he asked.

“Don’t be gay,” I said, ducking away. I let him walk a few steps ahead. I knew I could catch up if I wanted.

Years later, in grad school, I defended the movie: “Clearly, it’s a Marxist text,” I said. “Freddy, a patriarch who commidifies and consumes souls, is defeated when Alice, in a show of unity within social class, absorbs the powers of her dead friends. Sure, its surface is capitalist and bourgeois, but the use of Brechtian aesthetics and alienation effects add a subversive, avant-garde subtext.”

“Yes,” my professor said, “but you seem to ignore the fact that the film was crap.”

 

Part V: The Dream Child

 

1989.

Coolest death ever: The victim, Mark, is sucked into a black-and-white comic book by Freddy. Mark is still full color and whimpers as Freddy terrorizes him, destroying the scaffolding around them. But when Freddy mocks a girl that Mark had loved, he morphs into a superhero with guns strapped to his arms and shoots repeatedly, until Freddy falls to the ground, perforated. But before the audience can relax, Freddy rises as “Superfreddy,” impervious to bullets. Mark quickly runs out of ammo and backs into a wall. With the first slash, Mark, who has now been transformed into a two-dimensional drawing, bleeds out his color, which collects in a pool at his feet. He’s as pale as a pen-and-ink drawing, and Freddy rips him to shreds.

Or so I’ve been told.

Owen was serving an eighteen-month sentence for driving with a suspended license. The car was stolen. And there was a switchblade under the passenger seat. Dad didn’t disown Owen as much as he started forgetting Owen. He took Mom and me to the photography center at Sears and slid the new three-person family portrait in front of the one that included Owen. Whenever someone asked, “How’s your son?” he’d reply, “Oh, Paul is doing great.”

Mom and I paid Owen a visit in early September, a month after the movie’s release. Our time was limited to twenty minutes, and as Mom spoke with him, she started choking up. Owen rolled his eyes. She beckoned me over to talk while she composed herself.

Owen had grown a beard, and his hair was long and shaggy, covering his neck. His hands were brown and rough, like he’d been breaking rocks all his life. People had always said that the resemblance between us was strong—I thought I was better looking—but when my reflection on the plexiglass superimposed onto his face, I felt like I was looking into my future: me, with a few extra pounds, six inches taller, dark lines of worry etched into my face.

“I need you to do me a favor,” Owen said. His voice had ragged edges. “Go to my apartment and grab my stuff. Just cram everything into some bags and hide them in the storage room at home. Can you do that?”

Here he was, behind bars, still bossing me around.

“I’ve got a Nintendo,” he continued. “Keep that for yourself.”

Most of my friends had Nintendos, and it was a pain going over to their houses to play Super Mario Brothers. Whenever it was my turn, they chastised my lack of gaming abilities: No, you’ve got to jump on the mushroom, then over the pit.

“Just promise me something,” he said. “Promise that you’ll wait to see The Dream Child. You can’t see it without me, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

“All right!” We high-fived either side of the inch-thick glass.

I was too late, of course: his roommates had already sold the stereo system, the cassette tapes, and rifled through his closet. At the foot of his bed, however, was a two-foot-high pile of clothes that reeked of cigarette smoke. To my surprise, at the very bottom of the pile, as if he’d hidden it for me, was the Nintendo. I wrapped it in a pair of jeans to slip it out, and when I got home, my fingers trembled as I connected the cables. On the underside of the console, written in permanent black marker: Property of Danny Biemiller. I’d never heard of him.

I never got the chance to see The Dream Child with Owen, and only recently put it in my DVD player for my dissertation. Drew, my boyfriend, who freaks out if you yell “Boo!” in a dark room, sat down to watch it with me.

“These movies are hilarious,” he said.

I had read about the movie extensively; I knew its plot, its structure, its contribution to the Freddy mythology. It was all spectacle, no specters. And yet, when the sound of ripping flesh heralded the opening credits, I had trouble breathing. Drew paused the movie, and red slashes froze on the screen; the words A Nightmare on Elm Street had not yet emerged from them. I hit stop and buried my head into Drew’s chest.

It’s still the only one I’ve never seen.

 

Part VI: Freddy’s Dead, The Final Nightmare

 

1991.

Lamest death ever: Freddy draws a stoner into a psychedelic television show, which devolves into a poorly animated video game. Using a joystick, Freddy knocks the guy around, makes him hop back and forth. His friends attempt a rescue by detaching the controller, but Freddy has a PowerGlove, which was, back then, an exciting development in Nintendo gaming. The stoner is knocked into a mob of angry father figures wielding tennis rackets and is, presumably, pummeled to death.

I wanted the movie to be better than it was. During the previews, I jittered. Owen knuckled me in the leg and whispered, “Quit shaking the whole goddamn row.” I couldn’t help it: not only had this movie been touted as the definitive end of the series, but I had also sneaked out of the house for the first time. I followed the path Owen had taken for years: open the second-story bedroom window, dangle from the ledge, drop into the wet lawn below. Nothing was going to keep me from enjoying this movie, not even the fact that my parents had grounded me for two months.

Earlier in the week, I had been at K-Mart to buy a new game, but the Nintendo cartridges were stored in a cabinet that had to be opened by a cashier. It was a lot of trouble. But as I was leaving, I noticed Marble Madness on a stack of steering wheel covers in the automotive aisle, as if someone had changed his mind on the way to the checkout. It wasn’t a game I particularly wanted, but no one was around: no shoppers, no workers in their red polyester vests. So I shoved the game into my waistband and untucked my shirt. And suddenly, I was no longer a Goody Two-shoes who collected comic books and occasionally cheated at Dungeons and Dragons; I was bad. My fingertips and toes tingled. It felt like I was breathing helium. When I noticed the rectangular bulge in my stomach, I hunched over. I looked for security, double-checking each aisle, but no one was following me, no one that I could see. But, at the exit, a heavy hand grasped my shoulder with a grave, “Come with me, son.”

Dad picked me up from the holding room. In the car, the air between us crackled. I rubbed my wrists, trying to erase the red handcuff gouges on my skin. At home, Mom was preparing dinner. When I explained what had happened, she slapped me, then went back to chopping celery. I remembered this same silence from when Owen had lived at home. Each time the school called with a delinquency report, we ate dinner with disappointment hard and cold in our throats. I only caught the periphery of the emotion then, a hand-me-down sadness. Now, I felt as Owen must have: caught in a nexus of shame and resentment, unable to say either I’m sorry or Why won’t you say anything?

I think the early ’80s mantra of teenager control—never yell—had affected my parents unexpectedly. When my father’s anger emerged, it resulted in a complete communication collapse. That night, he only said one thing: “Jesus, two fuckups in one family.” But the comment wasn’t directed at anyone. It was a thought that had mistakenly taken form. Mom wrote her feelings on a yellow legal pad, in which she apologized for striking me and outlined my punishment. I found the note pinned to my door the next morning as I was getting ready for school.

This was in my mind as I sat in the theater. I wanted to have a good time—that was the whole point of sneaking out—but the movie was a total letdown. Owen laughed out loud at scenes that made me cringe. The 3-D effects gave me a headache. Even worse, Freddy was given a bizarre backstory: he had a wife and a daughter. America’s favorite psychopath was a father.

After the movie, I ripped the earpieces off my 3-D glasses, punched my thumbs through the red and blue cellophane, and threw the scraps at the screen. As he drove me home, Owen talked about how cool it was when the girl wrapped the cord of an electric coffeepot around her arm and pounded her abusive father’s face into putty. I commiserated, telling Owen of my grounding, adding the same indignant huffs that I’d heard him use. When I was done, he said, “You’re such a dumbshit, Paul. Don’t you know that those globes in the ceiling actually hide cameras?” Without swerving the car, he nailed me hard in the chest, in the muscle where it would leave a bruise.

At home, my parents’ bedroom was dark. As I unbuckled my seat belt, Owen leaned over and said, “If anything ever happens to Mom and Dad, you’re the one who has to bail me out. You know that, don’t you?” When I didn’t answer, he opened the ashtray and threw the contents at me. “Stupid fucking idiot,” he said. The passenger door shut itself as he peeled away. I brushed myself off, then realized that I was locked out. There was no way to reach the window. When Owen snuck out, I had always been there to open the door for him. But I had no superpowers, not even in my dreams. I couldn’t conjure someone to open the door for me.

The ash stung my eyes, and I closed them. I sat on the stoop, shaking my head, trying to wake up.

 

Part VII: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

 

1994.

Owen called my dorm at Columbia. He didn’t announce himself. Just asked, “So what was that all about?”

He was working as a bouncer; I was preparing for midterms. The previous semester, I had been given a foundation of Freud, Jung, and Foucault and was now wading through Mulvey, Bazin, and Silverman. The twice-weekly screenings in an auditorium classroom, sitting at cramped desks designed to prevent comfortable slouching, had already resulted in three nervous breakdowns. A group of us realized that our sanity required a momentary escape from the Bergman oeuvre, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was our trashy fun du jour.

But I found the film fascinating rather than mindless, and now that I was a film studies major, I wanted my brother to cease being a passive observer. I wanted him to engage in the issues the film raised: the collapse of the nuclear family; suburbia as wasteland; the narrative of self-esteem and self-reliance. I wanted him to go beyond the body count.

So I explained: New Nightmare jettisons the schema of the original series for a more postmodern, self-reflexive stance. It creates a liminal space that exists between story and reality. Its meta-movie qualities (the “fictional” Wes Craven writes a script which is exactly what the actor Wes Craven performs) help blur the lines between ‘real’ and ‘not-real.’ The parallelism between the ‘real’ of the movie/the ‘not-real’ of the movie-in-a-movie and the ‘real’ of the audience/the ‘not-real’ of the movie evokes a disjunction, a fission between levels of reality. It begs the questions: What is reality? What is fiction? What is a story, and what are actual events in someone’s life? Are these lines as distinct as we’d like? And what happens when someone (or something) transgresses these lines?

“Oh,” said Owen. “So that means Freddy’s dead for good, right?”

Yes, I assured him. Freddy is dead.

 

Part VIII: Freddy vs. Jason

 

2003.

For years, a rumored showdown between the two great horror franchises of the ’80s circulated on the Internet. Various treatments and scripts had been pursued and rejected. And now, almost twenty years after the first Nightmare on Elm Street, the two icons will go head-to-head.

I can already imagine Owen’s enthusiasm: Wasn’t that cool how Freddy burned that dude alive? I really hoped that it was gonna be gorier, but they’re probably saving some for the sequel. I’m glad he’s back, after all this time. I’m sorry we didn’t see it together, but it’s in my blood, man, and I know it’s in your blood too.

Owen had cleaned up: he had a steady gig as a warehouse night watchman, a girlfriend—all the trappings of reality. Dad had even welcomed him back into the family. He told me how Owen had him pretend to be a former landlord so that he could rent an apartment, how Owen tried to get him to invest in a downtown parking lot that would be converted into condos any day now.

“Since when did your brother know anything about real estate?” Dad asked me.

I had just started my master’s program and lived in a studio above an Italian restaurant.

“Search me,” I said.

When I last spoke with Owen, he was still freaked out about my being gay, but said that as long as I was happy, he was fine with it. He was proud that I had gotten so far in school; he couldn’t wait for my graduation, and I made him call me Dr. Paul, even though I hadn’t finished.

He’d already been dead for three years when we had that conversation. The police said that there’d been a robbery at the warehouse, and he was shot trying to stop it.

Bullshit, he said. I fell asleep on the job and you-know-who got me.

Really?

God’s honest truth.

Am I in trouble? I asked. What’s keeping him from getting me?

He started to answer, but I woke before he finished.

I only catch glimpses of him now: his elongated face in the convex security mirrors that stores hang high in the corners. Or, on the street, a whiff of dusky cigarette smoke makes me suspect he recently passed by. Once, when I was stuck on a Byzantine problem in my dissertation, his voice, distant, distinct, called out: Duh, Dr. Paul. Lacanian levels of observation.

I relish the signs of the new movie’s arrival (the machete-versus-claw poster, the trailers pulsating with subsonic bass and sharpened knives) because it is in my blood, the blood that brings life to fear, that gives meaning to anyone who’s ever walked down a dark street by himself.

We who watch horror movies know three simple truths: first, you can never escape your dreams; second, when you’re alone, the world is a darker and much more dangerous place; and finally, most importantly, you can never kill the monster.

But you can be ready for him. When Freddy comes for me one of these terrible nights, when even Drew can’t wake me, my brother will rise up and say, Man, you’ve picked the wrong brothers to fuck with.

THE FALL OF ROME

He shouldn’t have worn sneakers. That was a mistake. A shower would have helped, too. Why could he never remember that skipping a shower didn’t lend him a feeling of rebelliousness, as his mirror would like to have him think, but only made him feel slimy, insecure? Conner stopped to retie his shoelace in front of the library. The library was closed now, as were the dining halls, the student center, and the university bookstore; a week ago Conner had sold back his books for Professor Palma’s course, Ancient Rome. Forty-one dollars and ninety-three cents. Conner felt guilty for selling these, and so had kept The Twelve Caesars by way of apology. He’d imagined Professor Palma watching him from a hidden window, nodding.

The campus in summer had always pleased Conner. He walked through the rose garden watered, dusted, and weeded only for him, it seemed, and across the quad, where frisbees no longer sailed; through the memorial tower archway, whose marble crest Conner had never taken the time to read—it was a luxury that he could now, if he wanted to. If he wanted to, he could do just about anything. He stepped out of the way to let a grounds crew pass.

When he entered Professor Palma’s office, the professor greeted him by saying, “Looks like you’ve been shorn.”

“Shorn?”

“Your hair.” Professor Palma gestured Conner to a leather chair. Conner sunk into it, so that his eyes were barely level with Palma’s desk. “You’ve cut off your long hair.”

“Oh,” Conner said. He hadn’t cut his hair. It was odd, seeing Professor Palma seated behind a desk. Conner had never noticed, until now, how mottled his beard was. Up close, you could see patches of red, brown, blond.

“My mother always used to call that a summer cut. Every June she’d take me and my brother to the barbershop. They’d put a wooden board across the chair, to make us higher. Afterwards, we’d get to pick a prize out of a plastic barrel. It was called Joe’s Secret Barrel. How do you like that? Joe’s Secret Barrel.”

“Joe’s Secret Barrel,” Conner said. “Well.” He felt himself smiling his nervous smile.

“Comic books, mostly. And bubble gum. Bazooka Joe.”

What would happen, Conner wondered, if he never got around to asking his question? “Professor Palma,” he said. “I have a small problem I’d like to bring to your attention.”

Professor Palma nodded. “I see.” In class, Professor Palma sometimes steepled his hands across his face in the middle of lectures. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he’d say, “let me submit the following.”

“It’s about my final grade,” Conner said. “You gave me a B-, which I totally understand, because of the midterm and everything, but the thing is—” Conner suddenly had no idea how he was to finish the sentence. How did anyone know how to finish their sentences? Professor Palma was looking at him like he was explaining how to butter toast. “The thing is, I was wondering if there was any way you could change it to a B+.”

Professor Palma drew his lips together and nodded. “I see.”

“I’m really sorry to ask,” Conner said. “I know how annoying grade change requests can be. That’s why I didn’t email you about it. I thought a meeting would be better.” He offered a clumsy smile.

“A meeting,” Professor Palma said.

“Right.”

“Face to face. Mono e mono.” Professor Palma chopped the air with his hand.

Conner nodded. Behind Professor Palma, he noticed a bulletin board crammed with postcards, cartoons, photographs. In the largest photograph, Professor Palma was standing atop a windy mountain, a woman beside him, a little girl in a pink baseball cap clutching Professor Palma’s leg.

“I’m not quite sure where to begin,” Professor Palma said.

“I’m sorry,” Conner said. “I’m only asking because I think my participation towards the end of the semester really picked up and I didn’t miss a class all year and,”  Conner felt himself losing some sort of advantage, “and if I get a B+ I’ll be able to go to the honors graduation ceremony next year.” Why did he always say more than he wished? He felt his face grow warm. “My parents are coming,” he added, idiotically.

“Well, that’s quite a lot for us to think about, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Professor Palma next addressed his fingers, which were quite large, Conner noticed. “Please know that I’m not in the habit of giving grade changes, although my students seem to be forever in the habit of asking for them.”

“I know.”

“Students seem to think that a grade is something negotiable. I’m not sure why this is,” Professor Palma said, then raised one eyebrow, “but I have my theories.”

Conner, expecting one, was surprised when the professor only opened his desk drawer and rummaged through. The open drawer gave off a smell of chalk dust and damp wood. “As I was saying, I have my theories. A part of me wonders if the feeling of negotiability arises from a student’s sense of entitlement, a problem I’ve wrestled with all my academic life, but more in recent years. I wonder if there’s a new breed of student on the rise, quick and on the make, philosophically opposed to failure, but morally blind to failure’s lessons. Do you see what I mean?”

“Mmm.”

“And another part of me wonders if, as students evolve, as a university certainly hopes they will, their thinking evolves too, and, attendant to this growth—I think of it as peeking over a high fence, for some reason—is the slow realization that all grades, as all knowledge perhaps is, are inherently subjective. Am I right? That question of ‘What really is the difference between a B- and a B+,’ or that nagging question ‘What are the clear, defensible, and unalterable criteria for an A?’”

“Right.” The flesh around Professor Palma’s eyes nurtured a single brown mole. “I see what you’re saying, but it’s more that—”

“The Unanswerable Question!” Professor Palma laughed, as if this had been a joke between them all along.

“Right.”

Outside, two pigeons landed on the sill of Professor Palma’s window. They made a noise like iced tea pouring into tall glasses.

“I wouldn’t ask. Normally, I mean.”

“My wife says I have too many theories about things. A little secret for you to remember: no one knows you better than your wife.”

“Right.”

Professor Palma looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, but I’m meeting someone else at noon.”

“I’m sorry to ask for this,” Conner said. “I really am. But I’m not asking because I think an exception should be made for me.” He tried to read Professor Palma’s expression, but the expression conveyed only imperfect vision, cloudy skies, and a single, unasked question: was it Colin or Conan? “I’m just asking because I think I’ve earned it.”

“Well, I’m sympathetic,” Professor Palma said, “to a point. But you most certainly are asking that an exception be made for you. That’s without debate.” He continued before Conner could point out that one of the pigeons had now made its way inside the office and was currently bobbing towards the glinty magnifying glass atop Professor Palma’s Oxford English Dictionary. “But I suppose that’s the human condition, isn’t it? Thinking an exception will be made for us. Hoping the universe is Godded indeed, and hears our call.”

As if a punchline, the phone rang.

“Excuse me.” Professor Palma picked up the receiver. “Yes, speaking,” he said. “The Camry. Right. Yes, I spoke to Henry about that. I said I spoke to Henry about that. Right.” The pigeon, forgetting the object of its desire, was now sitting just inside the window. It looked at Conner without really looking at him, somehow. Eyes like shrunken pennies. “That’s not what Henry said at all.” The professor shook his head. Was the change of grade form in his desk? Conner wondered. “Well, you’ll have to let me talk to Henry about that,” Professor Palma said. “I said you’ll have to have to let me talk to Henry about that. Right. Fine. Yes, that’s my home number. Right.” He hung up. “Mechanics,” he sighed. “But of what?”

“Professor,” Conner said.

Professor Palma checked his watch again, then pulled a carbon ledger from the desk drawer. “I will keep this with me,” he said, “as a reminder of our meeting.” He filled in a few lines, then folded it in half. “I will keep this with me and think about our meeting.”

Conner felt the advantage swing his way, like a hurled rope. How could he mention that the form needed to be submitted by tomorrow? “Thanks,” Conner said. “There’s just one more little thing. It seems that the deadline—”

At that moment, Professor Palma’s door flew open. A beautiful, impossibly skinny woman entered the room and immediately began swatting the pigeons away with a rolled-up newspaper. “Dirty, filthy birds!” she cried. She knocked into Conner’s chair. “Why do you let them do this, Gerald? Why?”

“Calm down, Magda,” Professor Palma said. “Please.”

Magda closed the OED with a sudden, thunderous clap. “Making filth on these beautiful books. Please to go! Go!” She chased one pigeon out the window, then cornered the other near Professor Palma’s bookcase. The pigeon bobbed its head and spread its ugly wings. For a moment Conner was afraid the pigeon was going to fly around the room, when Magda unrolled the newspaper like an enormous catcher’s mitt and, with one, startling motion, scooped the bird up and deposited it out the window. “There!” she said. She pushed the window down, which screeched to a close. “Filthy birds.”

It would be hard to say that anyone looked attractive scooping a live pigeon into a newspaper, so how had this woman managed to do so? Perhaps it was the breath heaving in her chest, or the way she now brushed her gorgeous, silky hair—it really was silky—from her eyes without the least trace of self-consciousness. Maybe it was the clothes she wore, a white halter top and strangely dark, European-looking jeans, cut low enough to expose her brown stomach, with its taut belly button like a punctuation mark. But, more likely, it was because Conner had been in love with this mysterious woman all semester. Magda. This woman who sat in the front row, challenging Professor Palma with her sharp, angry questions, flipping the pages of her exotic notebook with a barely contained rage, crossing and recrossing her long legs from which expensive-looking, high-heeled shoes dangled, even on snowy days. His friends had a name for her, one of Conner’s inventions. Frenchy.

“Do you know Magda?” Professor Palma said. “Magda, this is—”

“Conner,” Conner said. He shook her hand, which had rings on every finger.

“Magda is helping me on a dig this summer,” Professor Palma said. “In lovely Tunisia.” He laughed like this, too, was some sort of joke.

“Oh,” Conner said.

“These filthy birds, I hate them. Why do you let them have their way, Gerald?”

Professor Palma made a beats me face. “I suppose I’m too soft,” he said.

Magda made a tschh noise, then pulled a spool of tape from her purse and tossed it onto Professor Palma’s desk. “This won’t work,” she said. “They fall down.” She removed a bundle of yellow flyers, half-sheets of paper bound with a rubber band. “Please try something else.”

“Magda is helping me look for volunteers for the dig,” Professor Palma explained.

“Every one, down. I go back, try again, but forget it. Down again.” Magda lifted a stapler from Professor Palma’s desk. “Maybe this,” she said. She tried stuffing the stapler in her purse, but it wouldn’t fit.

“I was just telling Conner that I was on my way to another meeting,” Professor Palma said. “With Dr. Ancusi.”

Magda threw her hands up in the air. “Why? We’re never going to get out of here. Already it’s—” she checked her watch. “Please, come on, Gerald.”

The rope that had once swung so close now made a second appeal. “I could help,” Conner offered. “I mean, with the flyers. It’s no problem.”

Professor Palma looked not at him, but at Magda. “Sounds like you’ve found a volunteer,” he said.

Magda sighed. “Fine,” she said. “If this is how you do it, Gerald.” She handed Conner the stapler. “But we’re leaving soon, right? I’m so hungry.”

“Right,” Professor Palma said. “We’ll meet back here in fifty-five minutes or so.”

“Fifty-five minutes or so,” Magda said. “You American men. Can’t even say ‘an hour’ without covering your tracks.”

When they were about to leave, Professor Palma glanced at Conner and said, “I’ll be thinking about our meeting.”

 

Outside it was getting cloudy. It would be a rainy day after all. How had Conner not noticed the saplings along the college mall offering up their silvery undersides like raised pom-poms? Clouds gathered above the administration building, blanching the gold from its dome. He and Magda walked along the mall, where work crews were repairing the pedestrian walkway, whose intricate brickwork had always secretly pleased Conner. He liked it that the university lavished so much attention on his walk home, to the dining hall, to the classrooms where he was so often a star.

“Already they fall apart,” Magda said. She kicked a small stone a remarkable distance. “A quarter million dollars, for what?”

“Yeah,” Conner said. “It’s crazy.” He had already given up on flirting, from the moment Magda descended the history department stairs in twos and threes, leaving him to his hurried, but cautious single steps behind her. But maybe he’d given up too soon. Although it was growing darker, Magda donned a pair of enormous yellow sunglasses.

“This whole place is crazy,” she said. “Look!” She pointed to the workmen walking the scaffolding outside the geology building. “The whole place falls down. They throw money away on nothing!”

Conner nodded. Listening to Magda, with her waving arms and mirrored lenses, was like being scolded by a gorgeous, fantastic insect. “I know,” he said. “This place drives me crazy.”

They separated to place flyers on the notice boards flanking the walkway entrance. The boards were freckled with concert notices, sublet announcements, weeks out of date. It saddened Conner to think of the old notices; he didn’t like their suggestion of empty apartments, darkened stages, of good times long gone. He stapled Professor Palma’s flyers atop posters for free condoms. Want To Earn $$$ AND Discover The World? the flyers began. Conner couldn’t imagine Professor Palma thinking up the dollar signs. Maybe those were Magda’s idea.

She returned to him now, and began her conversation again as if no time had passed whatsoever. “They throw away what is worth keeping and keep everything that is junk. Junk!” She ran ahead to the next board and stapled three flyers in the time it took Conner to staple one. “This is a junk place, right? Just look around. Tell me this isn’t!” Before Conner could answer, Magda grabbed a handful of his flyers and began stapling them to a large tree.

“Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Conner said.

Magda turned an angry look on him. “Why?” She punctuated her question with a punch of the stapler. “Why should we care when they don’t? Tell me why.”

“Well—” Do not say, Because I like these trees. “Because I don’t think that’s what Professor Palma wants.”

“Ha!” Magda said. She ran ahead to the next tree and stapled another flyer. “There! That’s what Professor Palma wants.”

Conner, sensing whatever chances he had of gaining Magda’s interest slipping beyond his reach, grabbed one of the tree flyers and tore it in half. “I don’t think so,” he said. He stuffed the torn flyer into his pocket.

Magda looked at him with what seemed new respect, he thought. “Ha!” she said, then raced to another tree, stapling two flyers at once.

“Not the trees,” Conner said. He tore the flyers down, but Magda only laughed and darted across the quad, where a grounds crew was distributing mulch beneath a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Garden was intended to make Jefferson look deep in pastoral contemplation, but somehow conveyed the sense that he was horribly lost and preposterously overdressed, a wedding guest wandering from a wrecked car. When Magda passed the crew, the three crew members stopped working, gawked. “I’d run too, boy!” one of them called to Conner. Conner turned to acknowledge him, but only caught Jefferson’s bronzed gaze.

“You have very high morals,” Magda said when Conner reached her. She swiped the rest of Conner’s flyers from his hands. “You are a moral person, right?” She laughed, then stapled a clumsy row of flyers along a low tree branch. “A good boy.”

Conner was about to contradict her, when the clouds opened up and rain began to fall. He pulled the flyers from the branch. “It’s starting to rain,” he said.

“But not on you,” Magda laughed. She kept stapling the branch, testing him. “Not on the perfect student.”

I’m not the perfect student, Conner wanted to say, but, in a way, he was. He had a high grade point average, arrived early to every class, pledged the best fraternity, volunteered to lead blood drives, food donations, Toys for Tots. Would you like to lead this class? one professor had written across the bottom of his essay exam. Let me know when you need a letter of recommendation—please! But, for all his other successes, Conner had failed to gain Professor Palma’s admiration. Every day, he’d sat in the front row, taking copious notes, raising his hand to nearly every question. He’d memorized whole passages from Suetonius, and occasionally worked these into his responses, hoping Professor Palma would recognize them, but Professor Palma only nodded, dismissing him. “Yes, well, there’s that, of course,” he’d say, then call on someone else, his gaze passing over Conner like a swift cloud. When Magda spoke, Professor Palma nodded enthusiastically, said, “Yes, right. Good observation,” or, most aggravating to Conner, “That’s perfectly said.” Each week Conner kept a private count of who had raised their hand more often, him or Magda, making sure to keep ahead. Now, he watched her staple another flyer to a sapling still tied by ropes, and wondered if she and Professor Palma were sleeping together.

“We should get out of this rain,” Conner said.

Magda ignored him. “Who cares if it rains?” she said.

“Well, I’m going back.”

Magda turned to face him, revealing, for the first time, the outline of her breasts through her rain-soaked shirt. She smiled a crooked smile. “So, go back, then,” she said. There were tiny beads of rain on her sunglasses, like jewels. It began to pour.

Conner was deciding whether he really wanted to leave or not—what did that smile mean?—when Magda broke into a sprint and ran to the Jefferson statue, where the grounds crew had since fled. Conner followed her without trying to appear to. Magda was eyeing the Jefferson statue for a likely staple spot, when she took one flyer and speared it over Jefferson’s bronze quill. The flyer sagged in the rain, but Magda had places for others: the points of Jefferson’s three-corner hat, his pondering finger—raised, as if asking a question—even, against all physics, the tip of his nose. Conner stood behind her, watching her handiwork. Then he stepped closer and found himself touching her shoulder, her damp, exciting shoulder. “Magda,” he said. But Magda sped away, laughing. Conner followed.

“You made him into a clown,” Conner said, when he reached her under the memorial tower archway. He wanted his tone to be conspiratorial, but it came out as an accusation. He could not catch his breath. Magda was watching the rain, her arms hugged to her chest. She shrugged. “This place makes lots of clowns.” They stood that way for a while, not talking. Conner wondered whether he’d done the right thing, touching her, then felt angry at himself for worrying about that. Why wouldn’t Magda face him?

“Do you know they want to get rid of Professor Palma?” Magda said.

“They do?”

Magda nodded. “They say they want him to retire, but they just want him out.”

“Oh.”

“But Gerald wants to stay. He wants to stay, but they want him to leave.” Magda made a noise that Conner thought might mean tears, but when Magda faced him, she was not crying. “It’s crazy. Even his wife—his own wife!—wants him to leave. Can you believe it? For what? So she can play golf and drive a big car. Gerald would die living that way. Can you see him playing golf?”

Conner could very well see him playing golf—he was surprised he didn’t already, actually—but shook his head no.

“No,” Magda said. “But his wife—” she waved her hand. “Don’t let’s talk about her.”

Conner stepped close enough that he could see the gooseflesh of Magda’s damp arms. A thin bracelet clung to her wrist, made entirely of string. In class, she sometimes pared a large apple with a small knife while Conner watched, the lecture a sudden jumble of slides and maps, Professor Palma’s voice a radio from a passing car. “I’m sorry,” Conner said.

“For what?” Magda said, then began to cry. When Conner placed a hand on her shoulder, Magda pushed it aside. “You shouldn’t pay attention to a woman’s tears,” she said. She walked to the other side of the archway, peering out at the rain falling across the quad. At times, the rain blew in from the archway, but Magda did not move to the middle where Conner stood, so he wondered if he should approach her again.

“I’m so hungry,” Magda said, to no one in particular.

“Yeah,” Conner said. Once, he’d followed Magda after class. Just for a few moments, until she turned towards south campus, walking against the traffic lights, her notebook clutched beneath her arm. Conner stopped at the light, feeling suddenly ridiculous and creepy. What was he doing?

“I’m so sick of this,” Magda said, but Conner couldn’t tell if she meant the rain or university or something else altogether. But he knew one thing, and it was a surprise to him: he was about to approach Magda and put his arms around her, gently, if she would have him. If she would have him, he would lean in for a kiss.

“I’m so sick of waiting,” Magda said. She wiped her eyes. “I really am.” And, before Conner could reach her, she was off running again, through the rain and across the quad, puddles exploding from her feet. Conner hesitated, then followed. Thank God, he thought, as he reached the history department, where the door was still flung open wide, rain blowing in. Thank God I didn’t.

 

Conner found them in Professor Palma’s office, Professor Palma donning an enormous raincoat thirty years out of style. Magda was behind him, looping a thick belt through the coat, straightening the shoulders.

“Rain gear,” Professor Palma said. “Ah, who knows the caprices of the weather?”

“Please keep still,” Magda said. She reached the belt around him, then tightened it in the front. “You move, it’s not going to work.”

“I’m under strict orders, as you can see,” Professor Palma said. He had his arms raised like a child.

“I see,” Conner said.

“I was just telling Magda, as it turns out I didn’t have a meeting at all,” Professor Palma said. “I had my days mixed up.”

Magda clicked her tongue. “You get everything mixed up, Gerald.”

“I make no argument. Guilty as charged,” Professor Palma laughed. Conner offered a weak smile. How good it would feel to leave this office. How good it would be to leave this campus. Why had he come here in the first place? “But I’ll have you know I made a nice hour of it, listening to the rain and catching up on my reading. It’s a fortunate day when I can find the time to catch up on my reading.”

Conner was about to mention the deadline for the grade change, when Magda pulled a floppy rain hat down over Professor Palma’s ears. “There,” she said.

“Well,” Professor Palma said, “as you can see, it looks like we’re about to depart.” Magda placed a folded umbrella in his hand. “Whose is this?” he asked.

“Yours,” Magda said. “Let’s go, Gerald. I’m so hungry.”

“We’re going to eat,” Professor Palma said, “but I’ll be thinking about our meeting, won’t I, Colin?”

“Thanks,” Conner said.

“Gerald,” Magda said. She tugged his sleeve.

“You can leave the rest of the flyers on my desk,” Professor Palma said. “I hope I can trust you to close the door behind you until it clicks, if you don’t mind. We seem to be having a small food emergency here.”

Magda pulled Professor Palma out the door. “Oh, he’s very trustworthy,” she said. “He’s got high morals.”

Professor Palma seemed not to hear. He gave one last look at Conner, his smiling head pinched between the folds of his rain hat, a look that conveyed how happy he was to be bundled in his coat, a meal on the way, the pleasure he took in being someone who could be looked after and adored, whose most minor requests were matters of consequence, someone who, despite all his years, still mattered, who deeply, deeply mattered. “Until it clicks,” he said.

Conner stood in the office until he could no longer hear their footsteps. The rain beat against the windowpanes, closed now. He placed the flyers on the desk and was about to leave the office when he saw a solitary piece of paper in the trash can. The grade change form, still folded in the middle. Conner unfolded it to find that Professor Palma hadn’t filled in a thing, except, absurdly, his signature at the bottom. The signature was oversized, nearly illegible. Conner folded the form into his pocket.

And it wasn’t his walk across the rainy campus that perplexed Conner, nor was handing the slip to the woman at the registrar’s office, who barely read it over while chewing a pen, nor was it the ease with which he’d found himself saying, “It’s an A,” when she asked what grade to enter—none of these things troubled Conner on his walk home. Only this: why, with all the rain shading them from the world, with its sudden loan of permission, why hadn’t he the courage to kiss Magda?

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE GLASS MOUNTAIN

“Quiet, now,” she told us. “It’s like Tinker Bell.”

“What’s like Tinker Bell?” Gnome asked. It was a stupid question, but we forgave him because his eyes were the color of a sandstorm, and he sat still as an injured bird.

“If you don’t believe, it won’t come true.” Aunt Halina was patient with these types of questions. She wasn’t really our aunt. She smelled like melted butter, and she had a scar on her chest that she wouldn’t let us see. She started the story again.

“The glass mountain is very far from here, but you can find it if you know where to look. Past the dirt road that forks toward the empty sea, past the tree whose white flowers yawn open for the moon. Past the stone pillar shaped like a monk. If you are faithful, the mountain will let you find it.”

Eva and I had heard the story at least seven hundred times. It was our favorite. We even liked it better than the ones Halina told about her dead husband, Fillip, who had worked on a barge, and the parties they had floating in the middle of the river. Gnome, on the other hand, was new. He sat on an upside-down bucket, holding his breath, listening to the sounds of the world getting dark. We were jealous of his hearing the story for the first time. Eva picked a daddy longlegs off the screen door and dropped it on his shoulder.

“Does it break?” he asked. He cupped the spider in his palm and released it into the grass. Eva pouted.

“It doesn’t break,” Halina pronounced solemnly.

“Are there princes?” he asked.

“The princes all die, you know,” I told him.

Halina put on her splinter face, and it stuck inside me until I squirmed. “Hanna exaggerates,” she said. “She’s not to be trusted. She doesn’t believe.” She leaned in close to Gnome and put her hands on his sunburned cheeks. “Do you believe, little Gnome?”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe.” His ears were kind of pointy, and out of all of us, he was the one who looked like he belonged in a fairytale.

Eva let her head plunk against my shoulder. The stars were blinking awake in the summer blue sky, egged on by crickets and lovelorn frogs.

“We’ll begin again,” Halina said. “The glass mountain is very far from here.”

 

The glass mountain was just a story, but we pretended to believe it so Halina would tell it over and over again until we felt like we understood. The story went like this . . .

Sometimes you didn’t know you were at the glass mountain until you walked into it. The townspeople used to find it by the smell of dead birds at its base, but at some point the birds learned to fly around it. The glass mountain was smooth and heartless and perfect. At the top, a princess lived in an enchanted castle, hidden by the clouds. The princess didn’t have a name. Of course, she had a name before, but when the witch flew her up to the castle, she cast a spell. If the princess ever spoke her name again, the castle would shatter. Glass would rain down on the people she loved—her mother, her father, her sweet, tone-deaf sister whose lap had always been her pillow.

In front of the princess’s castle, the witch planted a tree with white apples. She sent a sparrow down to the town with a message—if any man could make it to the top of the mountain and pick one of the apples, the princess would be saved. The witch wasn’t jealous of the princess’s beauty, though the princess’s hair was made of crushed moonlight and her eyes were violet-bright. The witch was under a curse and had not slept in seven years. One afternoon, the princess wandered into the witch’s field and fell asleep in the goldteller flowers. The princess didn’t wake until the witch had her in midair.

 

Part of the reason I loved this story was that I related to the witch. While Eva would fall asleep during a five-minute car ride to the grocery store, I stayed up nights staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, turning the dripping spackle into shapes and characters, creating stories about an evil school bus driver who captured children and drove them to the forest where she kept a secret lair. Some nights I pretended to be sleepwalking, and I’d wander out of the house and into the yard, feeling my way past the trees blindly, arms extended, mouth half open and drooling. Which is how I discovered Gnome, a few weeks after he moved in next door with his father, curled up in our garden and watching me silently.

 

The rescue missions were constant and ill-fated. A knight would ride his horse partway up the mountain’s slick surface then slide back down and break his neck. The men of the town dug a mass grave nearby, but the bodies of the horses were too big to fit. Inside the windows of the princess’s castle, fingerprints and nose smudges accumulated. The witch cursed her with sleeplessness, and she sat, listening to the high, harsh scratching of the glass, the screams of the horses, the dull thuds when men and animals landed on the ground. She wished they would just stop trying. She wished she could lay her head in her sister’s lap and sleep.

 

Gnome’s mother had died of lymphoma the year before he moved next door, and his father, a brisk and obsessively neat lawyer, didn’t like stories. He thought they were indulgent and, more importantly, useless, since they were incapable of beating back grief. Gnome’s mother had always used different voices when she’d told him stories, and sometimes she’d even made shadow puppets to highlight the most dramatic scenes, such as when little boys fought ooze-dripping monsters and won using the improbable technique of running through the monsters’ legs. Gnome told me all this under the tent created by an overhang of ivy off the side of his garage, a place infested with mosquitoes due to stagnant water trapped in warped gutters, a place where it was impossible to sleep and where night after night we tried.

Eva, with her easy sleepiness, was banned from the spaces that Gnome and I inhabited. I held tight to the excuse that she was too young and the tent was too small, but the truth was that I was jealous of my time with Gnome, just as I was jealous of my time with my sister. I was careful to guard against overlap, protective of what belonged to me alone. Eva didn’t know of Gnome’s desperate fear of hospitals, the way he turned pale and sweaty when he heard his mother’s name. Just as Gnome didn’t know of Eva’s dreamlife, the way that in her dreams she slept behind glass, the way that this was peaceful for her.

Eventually, Gnome’s father started dating a woman with eyes and hair that matched his dead wife’s, got remarried, and moved Gnome away from me, but for a few summers, at least, he was mine, curling at night like a fern against my body as we hunkered down in the green scents of our hideout. I even let him tattoo a mountain on my back with a safety pin and a licorice-scented marker, let him carve me with pinpricks that ascended toward my neck. When my back got infected a week later and landed me in the hospital on IV antibiotics, Gnome didn’t come to visit. I told Eva that the pain was worse than anything else in the world, so she would blow on my skin when it started itching. When the scabs fell away and uncovered the scars, I missed the hot salve of her breath.

 

In seven years, only one knight came close to saving the princess. He arrived in golden armor, and in the sunlight, he looked like a man made of fire. The princess bowed her head when she heard him charge, but the sound she expected, the sound of gold kissing glass, was replaced by the sound of horse hooves cracking their way closer. From her window, it looked like the knight was riding on sky, and he leaned forward, readying his burning body to pluck an apple from the tree. Just as he approached the peak, the witch, who had turned herself into a hawk, sailed down and sunk her talons between his horse’s eyes. The horse fought for only a moment before it began its downward slide, its hooves engraving the mountainside with a deep furrow.

The princess listened as the townspeople began digging a new grave. She lay her head against the window and closed her eyes.

 

Eva became obsessed with saving things. I tried to tell Aunt Halina that the story was going to kill my sister, but by then she’d decided I was not a reliable source of information. Eva’s crusades were always huge in scope, limited only by the shortness of her legs and her attention span. She once spent the entire month of June going door-to-door and asking people not to kill bugs they found inside their houses, to instead scoop them up with a newspaper and release them outside. The summer she was eight I convinced her that the clouds were going to retire at the end of the year, and she tried to build a ladder tall enough to reach them, to try to talk some sense into them. That was the summer she broke her leg.

 

In the winter of the seventh year, a young man arrived at the glass mountain at dawn. His shirt was dirty, and his pants were shredded over his left hip. He didn’t have a horse, but he’d tied the claws of a wildcat to his hands and feet. As he stood at the base of the mountain and pressed his pale forehead against its cool surface, the townspeople crowded together and gossiped. He was much too small to have killed a wildcat. He was so skinny a wildcat wouldn’t eat him. Death by a wildcat would be a kinder fate than death by the mountain.

It began to snow. The young man smiled, blushed, and started climbing. A thin layer of glistening white settled on the glass so that the outline of the mountain was clear against the horizon. The young man’s movements were slow and careful—first one hand, then the other, then each foot behind him. This was going to take a long time, the townspeople thought. They wrapped themselves in blankets and got comfortable.

When night came the young man could go no further. The glass was too steep, and he was tired. His hands were crusted with a thin layer of frozen blood from where the claws had worked into his skin. In the morning, he thought, he’d just let go, let gravity carry him down to the pretty white grave below. But tonight, for one night, he would hook his claws on a glass ledge and sleep. He dreamt of falling through the glass and landing on the mountain’s inside. He dreamt of shattering glass and the sky rushing up around him.

At midnight he was woken by the calls of a hawk flying down from the apple tree to inspect the shadows. Hunching his shoulders, the young man braced himself for the waking sensation of talon tearing through flesh, and when the bird had him fully pierced, he reached upward, releasing the wildcat claws and holding tight to the bird as it carried him up toward the castle. At the apple tree, the hawk swooped down, heavy with the young man’s weight. He had dreamed of this too. He pulled his father’s knife from his pocket, sliced cleanly through the bird’s woody legs, and fell through the silvered branches to the ground.

 

The rest of the story—the young man throwing his white apple at the dragon and freeing the princess—we hardly cared about, fixed as we were on the moment when he plucked the splinters of bird feet from the unraveling skin of his shoulders. But Gnome wanted more of the story, more and more, until he was so full on it he could finally curl up and sleep.

“Then what happened?” he kept asking.

Aunt Halina indulged him, telling him how the body of the hawk was found days later in a neighboring town, telling him how the dead knights came back to life at the bottom of the mountain, mounted their dusty horses, and rode off with their shining armor into the winter light.

Eva had fallen asleep by this point, her melon-heavy head in my lap, her lips blowing kisses at the sky. “Why didn’t the mountain ever shatter?”

Aunt Halina would answer questions about anything, all the hard ones that our parents would ignore, about her dead husband, our dead dog, the dead baby that was found in a dumpster that we weren’t supposed to know about.

This question stumped her.

 

When Halina died, years later, I was in college, where my sleeplessness had grown deeper and settled in under my eyes. A few days after her funeral, I got two letters in the mail, which I took to the basement physics lab where I worked as a research assistant. A tree had recently fallen against the building, damaging the ventilation ducts in the basement, and the ducts that had been rerouted into our lab carried with them the smell of outside, frozen grass and rotten leaves that were thawing and cooking in the steam heat. I’d been up all night talking to Eva, who was wearing headscarves and stringing her apartment with Christmas lights in Halina’s honor.

The first letter was really a postcard from Gnome stuffed inside an envelope with a postmark from Chicago, where he was in law school. I read it absently, wondering how he’d heard, if his ears had finally rounded out, if he’d turned out handsome and well-rested. I hadn’t seen him in almost eight years, although we’d been writing to each other, sporadically, since the summer he moved away. I read the card a few times before I finally caught his postscript: I hate law school. Every time I dream about you, I wake to the sound of shattering glass.

The other letter was from Halina, sent by the executor of her will, and it smelled like melted butter when I opened it. She’d left me a box of seeds she’d dried from her flower garden, a photo album filled with pictures of her as a young woman, wearing scandalous dresses and dancing on a barge, and her wedding ring. She’d also left me a key I was supposed to give to Gnome. Tell him he was my favorite, she’d written. And tell Eva she was my favorite. You were also my favorite.

I smelled the letter for as long as it took me to start crying, which was longer than it should have. My eyes had been awake too long, and they were reluctant to produce tears even when I told them to.

 

Eva died three months later. She’d come down with a fever in Puerto Rico, where she’d been busy with her new crusade of saving the baby sea turtles, and by the time the doctors had found the welt from the spider bite in her armpit, there was little they could do. Gnome showed up at my apartment two days later, his body slim and drooping like a willow tree, wearing a tie and sunglasses and carrying a vase filled with ivy. He offered to go to the airport and wait for her body to arrive. He offered to drive me to the funeral.

“Where are your things?” I asked him.

“I didn’t bring any,” he said.

The Puerto Rican funeral parlor hadn’t put any makeup on her, and when they opened the casket at the funeral home, her skin was covered with purple splotches that fanned out like spiderwebs. My parents left the room. Because Gnome put his hands on my shoulders, I tried to stay calm and resist the urge to vomit. I wanted to give the director instructions—make her look natural, not too much rouge or lipstick, no blue eye shadow—but I couldn’t.

“She’ll need something else to wear,” he said. They’d sent her to us in what looked like a tie-dyed bathing suit cover-up. “Do you have any of her clothes? Are you the same size?”

I couldn’t speak. All I could hear was shattering, and when I opened my mouth, no words came out. We’d never been the same size, but in my mind, I slipped on her clothes, her swollen skin, her spider bite.

“I’ll bring something this afternoon,” Gnome said. Then he reached across me and closed the casket.

 

After the funeral Gnome disappeared for a week. When he came back, he had a tent and a sleeping bag strapped to his back.

“I forgot to give you your key,” I told him.

“I dropped out of law school,” he said.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m going to go find it,” he said.

“Find what?”

“The mountain.”

The sun was setting behind him, and I squinted my eyes and looked for a line of glass in the distance. All that I saw was red light flooding the doorway and the glowing outline of Gnome’s darkened body. I was tired.

“Come with me,” he said. “I want you to come with me.”

When I turned to go inside, I had to step over the failing branches of his shadow, tilted in a puddle of purple red light. He waited in the doorway while I gathered my things.

 

We headed west. It was already dark when we left, so after a few hours of driving, we pulled off onto an abandoned road and found a patchy forest to camp in. The ground smelled like burnt wood, and the dew crept up around the tent while we drank cheap whiskey to keep warm. With the wind blowing in the branches above us, it sounded like the trees were singing.

“She always had a crush on you, you know.”

“Who?” Gnome asked. “Eva?”

“She used to put apples outside her bedroom door before she went to sleep, in case you came at night to rescue her.”

His face screwed up, and I could tell that it upset him to hear this, but I kept talking, telling my sister’s stories, listening as her name filled the dark spaces between us, until I felt too tired to talk anymore.

Neither of us expected to fall asleep, so Gnome took out a can of Sterno, and we roasted marshmallows and ate them until they made us sick. Part of me kept expecting him to lean over and kiss me, even though it was only partly what I wanted. I’d kissed Gnome before, a million times, behind a curtain of ivy, with bugs crawling up our legs and biting us. I wanted it and didn’t want it the way I wanted and didn’t want physical pain. Just before the Sterno burned out, Gnome pulled up a pantleg to examine a mosquito bite, and I suddenly wished that I had shared him with Eva, wished that I had shared them with each other. I was waiting for the light to go out so I could cry.

I didn’t really want Gnome to kiss me. I wanted him to let me sleep in his lap like a sister.

 

Day two on the road we ate raw potatoes from a vegetable stand. A hummingbird flew in through the rear passenger-side window and rammed its tiny, panicked body into my headrest until I shooed it out with a newspaper. Gnome got an angry call from his father, so we found a nice, quiet river, made a little boat from sticks and leaves, and sent the phone sailing away from us.

“I would’ve been a terrible lawyer,” he said. “I’m too gullible.” Then he added, “Not like you.”

The breeze gave out, and through the water, we could see a wreath of minnows encircle the makeshift raft, until the phone started ringing and the vibrations made it capsize.

“It’s not so different,” I said.

“What?”

“You believe in things that couldn’t possibly be true, like Halina’s stories. I believe in things that sound like they couldn’t possibly be true, but they are. Dark matter. An expanding universe. I believe in alternate dimensions.”

Gnome stared into the water for a minute as his phone sent up bubbles like a cartoon fish. “That’s a start,” he said.

The next day we gave up on direction and took roads based solely on their names. Rabbit Hash Road. Bliss Boulevard. Lonesome Highway. We counted roadkill and hitchhikers and honked when we saw someone litter. Through the open windows, it felt like summer. We talked about home and the nights when we had known each other. We talked about Eva and the things she’d never get to save. We compared the sunburns on our forearms and breathed the sticky air.

At sunset, we drove into a lumberjack festival. From the car, as we approached the river, all we could see above the crowd was a line of men running on the water. Gnome reached over and grabbed my hand.

We made it just in time to see the chopping competition, the men hacking fiercely at their piles of wood, and we browsed through the winning stumps from the chainsaw carving competition. Gnome bought us T-shirts and homemade sausages, and we sat at a picnic table with a family who didn’t have nearly as much awe for the festivities as we did.

“If you think this is something, you should drive out to Spangler,” the woman said. From her cooler she dispensed juice boxes to her writhing sons and a beer to her husband. “They have an arboretum with all the weeping trees you could ever imagine.”

“I can burp the alphabet,” the younger boy announced.

“Jacob.” The father made an unpleasant face but went back to his sandwich when Gnome started belching the alphabet backwards.

“They built the whole thing around these Japanese trees called star magnolias. They don’t know how they got there, but they’ve been there for ages. Huge flowers, like blown up softballs.”

“White flowers?” I asked.

Gnome wasn’t listening, distracted by the eruption of a war sound from the other side of the crowd. The boys shot up and began tugging their father’s arms.

“It’s the Super Chain,” he said. “They rig up a chainsaw with a motorcycle engine.” He signed to his wife that he was taking the boys to go see it. Gnome trailed off behind them.

“White flowers?” I had to yell to be heard.

“It’s in Spangler,” she shouted. “A couple miles past the Stone Monk. Just stop and ask for directions. People around here are friendly.”

 

We were driving again, avoiding the question I would’ve asked before we left, had I actually thought we would find the place. What would we do when we got there? Gnome had returned from the chainsaw exhibition with mild hearing loss and a glinty axe whose handle was stained with hand sweat.

“Hold it,” he’d shouted, placing it in my hands. “It’s heavy.”

Behind us, dust bloomed wide across the road. We drove with the music off, bracing ourselves for what we could brace ourselves for. When we found the Stone Monk, we got out of the car and stood back from the tourists and their pictures. Neither of us had brought a camera. The monk’s head was pointing downward, in a pose of apology or shame.

At the arboretum, Gnome took a white flower from a star magnolia and hooked it through my hair. I felt shy about plucking flowers from the tree, so I gathered them from the ground and dropped them in my purse. For a moment, I thought I’d press one in a book and send it to Eva, and then I remembered. The petals left white dust on my fingers. They smelled like crushed moonlight, the way I’d imagined it to smell, after traveling through cold space to squeeze though curtains of ivy.

“Where does this road go?” Gnome asked a man with a rake.

“Landfill,” the man told him. “Where the lake used to be. The road keeps going, I think, but I wouldn’t drive that way without a gas mask.”

“What do you think?” Gnome asked, back in the car.

“Landfill or bust,” I told him.

He reached up and adjusted the flower behind my ear, and I could see that he was afraid. I wasn’t sure if he was afraid that we would find the thing or that we wouldn’t. Most likely, he was afraid of the same thing I was—the wakeful space that would come after.

“Drive,” I told him.

 

The glass mountain is very far from here, past the dirt road, past the empty sea, past the stone monk with his eyes that look like mourning. The glass mountain is smooth and heartless and perfect.

Inside the car, it smelled awful. Outside the car, it smelled worse. We stood together and pressed our hands against the glass, so cool, so quiet, so beautiful. I wished Eva were there to see it. I was tired, and I wished Eva were there, so I could sleep.

Gnome got his axe from the car and stood at the base, staring up at all that glass. His eyes looked tired. There was no castle at the top. The mountain had brought us to it, and we stood there, obedient, waiting to find out what happened next.

Gnome raised the axe over his head. His name wasn’t Gnome, but I had found him in our garden.

I was afraid that if I said Gnome’s real name, everything would shatter.

THE DOGS

The wide range converges.

The moon dilutes itself on the plate.

 

A blue shape, a coat of sorts, wears itself out.

They drift now, as if laced together,

 

into the long distance. The path to the bridge

now farther away and beyond recognition.

 

The monument of want cannot predict this mapping, and they,

running tonight, shelve the directions.

 

As though following up wood stairs, their ears move

back, swiftly, bathed in salt.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THE VOICE BEFORE

Echoes uncurl down this canyon

     like patient honey rolling. Rocks repeat

everything I say. A tree falls

               as many times as I can hear it.

 

My body in shadows—misshapen

     echoes of light thrown

through cedars and ivory birch.

               You are the body in my throat,

 

pitched into this low vein of earth,

     cast over bald stones, pierced

on tentacles of aloe, and gummed

               in their heat-split stalks.

 

What was that voice before the voice released,

     the unheard body, the naked, shivering

idea of sound? What are you now, climbing toward

               my mouth out of the canyon mouth,

 

surrounding me with screams of torn

     clover and broken shale, a body broken whole

from my teeth? I would lay out

               the prairie of my tongue, my throat,

 

but you do not want return

     as I do. You have grown too thin

in the shape of air, in the sound of yourself,

               for bodies anymore.

 

               The first sound was an emptying.

The first return, departure.

WAKING AT NIGHT

The blue river is grey at morning

and evening. There is twilight

at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark

wondering if this quiet in me now

is a beginning or an end.

The Courtney Holley Literary Award BIG MOON OVER THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The herd is strong in me. It steers me when I think.

I feel it grunting in my stomach when I sleep.

I walk with my herd invisibly around me.

All my confusions are forms of loneliness.

 

But you keep your distance as if it were money

and smile on all roofs with superficial light.

Remote therefore happy, you swing

above the neighborhood’s dust, rumble, and gas.

 

Anyone looking up admires you.

And how we do look up, all together.

Our guts and throats silent as scared crickets,

we cease for a long moment our chewing.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award SEPTEMBER

A tropical storm grows in the Atlantic with your name.

We listen to warnings on the radio as we drive to the shore,

passing boarded-up houses and closed storefronts.

The tourists head west, crowding the highways out of town,

and we move through the empty streets faster than

we have all summer, arriving at an abandoned beach.

I watch you smoke a cigarette without using your hands,

your lips holding it in the corner of your mouth, the same way

your father smokes. You wait for what the storm brings in,

schools of baitfish and the bigger fish that eat them,

while I walk the tide line looking for unbroken shells.

When I stop and look back, I’ve wandered so far away from you

that I wonder if you have noticed. I am so far away

that it looks like the waves will eat you before I can get back,

but with each step you are still there, your hair tangled with sand.

The heron we feed returns, but the hermit who lived

in the army bunker back in the estuaries is dead, killed

by a group of drunks. We can see his boat from here,

tied to the dock, resting in the bay. I don’t know if anyone

will bring it in before the winds come. The same hounds

always ghost on my corner, but I can’t tell the difference

between instinct and anxiety. I find salvation in these mornings,

waking with you on threadbare sheets, returning to the water,

but we drift away from each other. I think it is a problem.

ARRIVING

What do they say about the land of the dead?

About the ceremony of the body?

About women in long dresses?

What do they say about the innocence of the flesh?

What about the endeavor in nature

at ease with the dance and music?

Long ago, beyond graves, are worlds in state.

The cities still there in ruin. The neck of the ibex.

Walled gardens surrounded by desert.

Imagined lions guarding the gate.

All as it was before.

Worlds out of time still exist.

Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering

just as the poem lasts.

In the concert of being present.

I have lost my lover and my youth.

I want to praise the meadow, the horse

rolling over in the river with me

as a girl underneath it. Surviving to see

the ferns in the woods, sunlight on blond hills.

And the aged apple trees

in a valley where there used to be a cabin.

Where someone lived. And where small inedible apples

grow. That the deer will eat.