Hand and Shadow

We’re terrible with facts but decent with details, an inconvenience that courts trouble. Imagine a hunter committed to the long stalk but indecisive before a kill. That's us--but how can we regret our hesitation if a life has been spared? There’s a passage from a book we once read, the book’s title now lost to us, the passage written out in our own hand years ago in a blue notebook. Sir David Attenborough on the Bushmen of the Kalahari, their most time-worn hunting strategy. 
Since we’re unsure here, we can quote in full: 
An even more ancient and arduous method does not require any weapons whatsoever, only an endurance beyond our imagining. 
The first hint of an animal’s passage—nouns, verbs, pronouns, conjunctions. It’s decades old but on the move, searching for water, maybe, or high ground. The handwriting’s familiar but the animal’s habits are unusual. 
Having found possible prey, Sir David writes, an eland perhaps or a giraffe, the hunter frightens it so that it runs. He then follows at a steady pace and catches up with it so that before it is properly rested, it is put to flight once more. The pursuit continues in this way, through the hottest part of the day and beyond. It may take hours. It may even take days. Eventually the animal, deprived of any food or drink, collapses. 
Shades of Aesop, the tortoise and the hare. The rules of the race revised so the hare is chased down by the tortoise, outpaced by a murderous focus. 
But the hunter has also suffered, Sir David is quick to reminds us, and may be close to collapse himself…barely enough strength to complete the kill. 
But the killing, best believe, gets done. The corpse conveys upon its killer hunter-status. Only death can confer such an honor. That’s why copy and paste from one digital document to another won’t do: the passage has to be channelled through our nervous system, scribbled with a .oo5 Pigma Micron with our own hand. It took maybe three, five minutes to transcribe. Freshly killed, there it lay in the blue notebook, its dead live eyes marbling up at us. We closed the notebook. We followed the tracks of our pulse out the door, down the stairs, beyond the house and into the low-key centrifugal swirling of a neighborhood, its many falling leaves and dog walkers. We’re a dead man. We’re a self now, aware. 

*

What makes a huntsman? Spear gripped between thumb, fore, and middle finger, we poke the creature asleep before us—is it prey? We’ve been asking the room for a friend; it’s sent one from the twentieth century: The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, on the cover a black-and-white photo of Tal hunched over a chess match in progress. 
Mikhail was a fine huntsman. Life and Games a record of his finest chases. Details of each game, the moves involved, transcripts from interviews and a huntsman’s commentary on his opponents. For a long while he won more than he lost, until poor health and drinking took his luck away—after which the losses outnumbered the victories. He was worshipped in Latvia in his time and is the favorite grandmaster of our friend Vanya. Vanya born and raised in Mostar, drinker of kerosene while a refugee in Turkey, now a tech drone and retired metalhead in Kentucky. He’s thrashed us cleanly every time we’ve challenged him at chess. Years of tutelage as prey, we’ve learned what it feels like when our skull crackles between thirty-thousand pounds of pressure, caught between Vanya’s slowly closing jaws, white castle to black king, checkmate. Perishment is a requisite part of the learning process. Consoling us after yet another slaying in ten moves, Vanya assures us: across his career an accomplished huntsman will have perished as many times as he's been resuscitated. And here’s the cruel trick: only another killer can resuscitate you. 
Take Mikhail. He practiced these exchanges between hunter and prey daily since he was a youngster. How many kidney operations did he have to get through across the course of his life before he was allowed to die? Three of nine chapter titles in Life and Games acknowledge the problem: 
5 Unwell Again
6 Recovered
8 My ‘Death’ and my New Life
Over beers the other evening, Vanya asks again—asks every time you have a chance to sit across from each other—“How do you like your job?” He hopes a little of the shine has come off, to hear a little complaining. It’s in his nature, he’s Bosnian; happiness—other people’s, his own—no matter how briefly savored, is fundamentally suspect. Our job? To spite him with the truth, we tell him: we still love it. “Fuck, man,” he says. “I liked you better when you were depressed.” Finally we’ve found a way to outmaneuver him. We buy him another round to put him in check, but buy ourself one as well. A pair of stouts dark and thick. 
We toast his defeat by quoting back to him one of his favorites, the late wily huntsman and  Magician of Riga: I fell into a trap, so as then to catch my opponent in it. 
The trap is our good health, we cheer to it, sip together towards the dregs

of our mugs.

*

Zlatan has retired. At the age of forty-two the great and terrible Zlatan has tied the laces of his boots together, hung them around the neck of the nearest reporter. Microphones loved him as much as mere mortals hated him. He hated them back, even the gods among them. “He is not a man,” books have overheard him say of Pep Guardiola, and from a certain angle, a Zlatan angle, this is true—Pep’s proven his immortality as much as Zlatan. When one god clashes with another, they can’t occupy the same Valhalla. Zlatan of Sweden couldn’t cut it in Pep’s Barcelona, so he left and conquered Paris. When he opened his mouth, almost everyone laughed: his outrageous dismissive remarks were brutal wit. Twenty-five years have passed and he ends his career in Milan. When he shuts his mouth, will everyone forget him? 
In his day, he referred to himself as a lion. Straight face as he said it, commenting on a swift recovery from injury—Lions don’t recover as humans do. The straightness of the face broke soon as he said it, as if he’d finally surprised himself; the absurdity of assertions he’d make, to test and see if he could believe them. 
Even in retirement, a myth refuses to lick its wounds. The wounds heal too quickly—their man smiles in supreme arrogance and challenges anyone with an opinion about his legacy. How can talkers diminish it, if the career’s finished and he’s fulfilled the legacy by not caring? Once, having arrived in Los Angeles, Zlatan received a signed jersey from LeBron James. Kings of a pride will rarely tolerate such gestures from another king. What was Zlatan’s response? Did he thank King James? Did he call him up and ask him out for drinks at a club, or dinner? Of course not. Those would be mortal replies. He signed LeBron’s own jersey—Zlatan Ibrahimovich—and sent it back to him. It’s said to this very day LeBron dislikes the man. But maybe respects him a bit more than he would admit. But that’s all the past now. Now the lion has retired, leaving humans to comment on his absence from the pitch. 
Among many bitchy morsels he’s left us, there are his occasional remarks on the art of the hunt, the quiet to be found deep within the woods surrounding a soccer field. 
Do you know what I love about hunting? he once asked, already knowing the answer. 
That I am no one in the woods, no one at all. I thought the animals might recognize me, but they didn’t. They didn’t even ask me for my autograph.
Of course they wouldn’t—wouldn’t dare. His signature would bring danger. They’d much prefer another day of life than to be made famous by his maiming them. 


*

We knew a man once who observed a curious ritual. Our neighbor, he lived alone in a house built for a family. In the fall months he would travel to the mountains to kill deer. During the winter months their carcasses could be seen hanging from his back porch, frozen plastic gallon jugs of water stuffed into their cavities. We were told by an acquaintance in his house the man kept a tanning bed and that often he was driven to fury by squirrels that trespassed through a second-floor window. The one tree in his back yard was hundreds of years old; its branches extended level to roof. Squirrels would scurry the branches and leap to his house, and from there they burgled the man’s hidden dominion, waking him often at night with their scratching and chatter. 
There was an unease to the man’s greetings, a secretive greed in the searching looks he would send passing over the bare legs of joggers and younger women among us. We kept our distance, didn’t trust him beyond a hello. Not that he was a hunter—we had known many in our time and had judged them respectful of life, such that they upheld certain codes of conduct when taking one. No, not that—that he hung his kills where anyone might see them. Dogs would stalk the boundaries of his fence line, eager for meat-scent. Children would gawk at the skinned limbless husks, ask their mothers later during dinnertime what sort of creatures those slabs of boned muscle had once been. He was a hunter without decency or moderation. He watched women from his windows, as they walked to their cars. None of us would doubt he kept certain of those women hanging as well in his head. 
Out of our window one spring afternoon, we spied a dog gnawing the remains of a squirrel. The following morning we found another squirrel frozen stiff on the bricks of the back porch. Carrying bags of perishable refuse to the large compost pile in the yard, we noticed squirrels mangled and half-buried among banana peels and grass clippings. Dogs, we’d thought—the dozen or so who wandered the neighborhood alleys, stealing into unfenced yards at night. Our upstairs neighbor happened to be watering his plants on the second floor deck, called down to us, “Dale’s been killing squirrels. I told him he could toss them there. Protein for the compost pile—hope you don’t mind.” 
Glossy black of their seed-like eyes; delicate miniature satellite dish ears, furred and spidered with the finest capillaries—yes, we told him, we did mind. 
A city ordinance specified that if squirrels were trapped, they should be driven to a wooded area and released. Three steel traps were set around Dale’s yard. A live thing thrashed around the interiors of one nearest to the fence. When the thrashing ceased, a tiny black eye spied us through a hole in the grating. Our neighbor described Dale’s hunting technique; ten dead and one live squirrel listened as he explained. 
First thing each morning Dale walked the yard with his morning coffee, screwdriver in his back pocket. With a hand he swept clean any traps he found empty. He used cornbread as bait; most mornings they were gummy with dew. The trap-refreshing process was simple enough: tear a cornbread muffin in two, push it to rear of the long steel rectangular cage, reset the trip pins and wait. Should he find a trap occupied, he’d wriggle hands into a pair of leather gloves, gather his prey with a strong grip, stab it in the neck and belly, stab it half a dozen times with the screwdriver. From his deck over morning coffee, our neighbor had seen it. Dale staring at the little death kicking in his grip, savoring the end of a life. After the squirrel went limp, he walked to the fence line, tossed it over. He had done this dozens of mornings—by late afternoon during summertime, the compost pile breathed with flies. 
He was a hunter without honor. Never had we learned to despise someone so quickly. We borrowed a shovel from a neighbor and gathered each of his victims for a communal burial. To spare them an unwelcome resurrection by dogs, wrapped them in plastic. After which we knocked on Dale’s front door. 
He answered with anger, accusations, in a terrycloth bathrobe. His long sweaty hair was blasted with bedhead; his jaw jackhammered—chew chew chew—a mint-green wad of gum. 
“I’ve been watching,” he told us. “I’ve got live feed of cameras out back. I ever catch you sneaking onto my property to mess with my traps, I’ll sue for trespassing.” 
We considered threatening him in kind. Violations of city ordinance, illegal dumping of waste on private property. There were symptoms of an illness sour and electric in his eyes and stridency—we thought twice. No more killings, we requested. And if that was not possible, no more remains tossed to our yard. Our landlord had been alerted, we lied, had disapproved much as we had. Police would be called, he said, if he came by on his monthly rounds to find squirrel-parts littering the yard. Dale told us just what we could do with our landlord, then slammed the door to kill off the sight of us. It was understood we should leave soon if we wanted to survive his porch—shovel over shoulder, we walked. 
Weeks afterward, the man could be seen fuming from one window or another. There was a version of him for every window, a kind of inverse haunting: whatever he gathered into his gaze, he spooked with rages of the mind. 
Years later, while squirrel-spirits scramble intertwining branches above us, we'll pause on our walk, ask: who had been more superior in their craft? The hunter who killed to avenge an irrational grievance, or worse, his annoyance; or the hunter who stalked a murdered prey, to revive it?  

*

We’re lost, so you could say we’re back on the trail. The black notebook is open; phrases written in a familiar hand talk among themselves; sometimes it’s enough to leave a notebook alone, open on a desk, sunlight from a nearby window brightening the pages. Enough exposure will eventually brown the paper, a protracted subtle immolation. In a hundred years the voices will fade and quotes will go blind, the pages brittle, fragile. 
Many friends and acquaintances hide together in the black notebook; each we’ve found along the way, on specific occasions. Most are dead, technically. The rest are unaware they’re lodgers in our notebook. They keep us company. They encourage the belief it’s still possible to sustain “an inner life.” Many of their names are esteemed in their respective fields, not all equally. Important. Once they had been relevant to the ongoing communal enterprise beyond the sovereign meagerness of black notebooks—now they’ve been cut to quotes, modest again, equal in size to the hand that copied them in cramped cursive. 
When we need encouragement, when we need to be found and affirmed one brief moment along this trail that leads into and beyond ourselves, we flip a page back to the past and read. 
Paul Klee, final page of his diaries. It’s been years since he last inhabited us; but here he is, alive again; reciting the epitaph he’d written for a future headstone:

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. 
For I reside just as much with the dead 
as with the unborn. Somewhat closer 
to the heart of creation than usual.

The heart of creation—is it elsewhere? The black notebook’s not sure. But then we remember: before he’d written his last words, we’d been unthinkable, inconceivable. Then he’d died and inhabited them: we were suddenly possible. Forty years later we were born having never heard of him. It would take a lifetime of tracking to discover those first tentative prints that would lead us to him; neither dead nor unborn, in the pages of a diary well past its expiration date; held in hand, opened, warmed by the nearness of our breath. 


*

Easy to romanticize, the heart of creation. We do it too. The flexing engine that pushes us through ever-narrowing channels, arteries, veins, capillaries. Like fire, it’ll perish without oxygen. We regard it, often wrongly, as a solid good working the protean materials of day and night into alien shapes we can re-enter so we might feel the hidden inner arc of lives and admire them. A solid good—but is it? The man who would rape or maim your spouse or daughter is sustained by heartbeats as well; he follows impulses where they lead; often as mementos to his satisfaction or relief, will take trophies. Trophies are proof that, in certain vulgar hands, the sacredness of a hunt can be profaned. Hunters often render everything they touch into kills, and those kills into trophies. Their children, their parents, their lovers. 
These are generalities, we know—they read lovely as flowers in a garden. Let’s water a few weeds, a few dirty specifics, to keep them company. A story. 
Once there was a man born in Czechoslovakia. First he was a child like any other. Very few people noticed him. In his youth he heard a heartbeat outside of his body, a subtle thump-thumping in everything—the heart of creation. He discovered pencils, paper; these early imaginary friends led him to a playground of canvases and easels. He became a painter, enrolled at the Academy of Fine Art. He learned his craft following the path taken years before by his hero Josef Čapek. When the Communists conquered his country and inhabited it with their demands, he and other students were tasked with working in the mode of social-realism. The young man refused, followed his own heartbeat out the doors of the Academy. He rented a dirty studio and resumed painting. No one asked after his fate, no one cared. It was a lonely life. A new life for him—Pariah. Such were the sacrifices he was willing to make to remain free and pure: people would turn their backs when they saw him. Eventually the Communists couldn’t tolerate even this, the little bit of freedom afforded by his exile, so tossed him from his studio into the street and evicted his paintings along with him. The Pariah had been cast out into the wilderness; out of necessity he had to learn to feed and clothe himself. That spring day, thrown to the streets by strong men brusque with moral certainty, he found himself a hunter. Standing to his feet, he set off to create for himself an even more secret life. To accomplish this task, he adopted the habits of pariah-hood fully, adorned himself in pariah-hood’s classic uniform: a ragged, wrinkled suit, hair and beard scraggly and long. He did not trim time from his head but let it grow where it pleased. Scissors and razors were polite deceivers, he would say to himself, to himself since no one dared stand near enough to hear him. They would have a person remain in a present tense of their own design. He would not stand for it. No—he would not sit down, either. He would keep in motion, he would walk. 
A sad case. A pitiful bemusement. Townspeople, spotting the Pariah on a wander, would spare him their close consideration. He was a local figure but only occasionally a curiosity. None remembered when the camera first appeared in his hands. Homemade, cobbled together from junk. For some time many among them mistook it for a symbol of madness: the Pariah and his plaything, a wad of camera-like garbage he lifted to his eye, a mock-photographer taking a garbage picture. The man had been a painter and look where that had brought him. Workingmen would point to the Pariah crouching behind a bush or trundling across a field and warn their sons—“There’s the fate that awaits you, if you don’t set aside childish play and get a job.” 
Accepted nowhere, he could appear most places and not be bothered. The bus station, the main square, the park across from the public swimming pool. He kept his distance because he’d been born at a distance. The camera he carried everywhere helped—it brought the unreachable nearer, afforded a safe view of people in their normalcy. It was harmless, the townspeople believed. It was not a real camera. Some would pose and smile. Some would wave. 
Never underestimate a Pariah’s inventiveness. The truth was otherwise, and known now—the camera was a true thing, their lighthearted dismissiveness naive. The recipe for a garbage camera called for a far-fetched array of ingredients: plywood, thread spools, dressmaker’s plastic. Road asphalt was applied along its edges to prevent light leaks. Bottoms were cut from empty coke bottles and sanded down with sand paper, polished with a mix of cigarette ash and toothpaste. It was true thing with humble beginnings, the camera. Much like its pariah-father, its vision was born from deprivation. 
This was long ago. Now that the story has been told, the past has changed: the Pariah has become known, has won admirers. His fame describes him as an Outsider, a tragic man of principles. For many lonely years he wandered the small town of Kyjov and its surrounding environs taking up to a hundred pictures a day, which he then brought back to a grubby room afforded him for free by a kindly widow, where each negative was printed once and once only. Sheet metal, a light bulb, a tin can, and two fence slats: these came together to serve as an enlarger. The final products he would glue onto cardboard. Here the heart of creation had beat loudly—and few had heard. Pity the Outsider, the originality of his solitude. What would have become of the photographs littering his floor, if Art hadn’t come calling and taken notice? 
He had been a faithful hunter. He had weathered the elements and daily sought his kills. Obsessively he’d tracked a certain species almost exclusively: young women, girls. Girls lounging poolside in bikinis. Girls picnicking in the park. Buxom mothers pinning wet clothes to dry on clotheslines. What did the town think, once it finally saw itself through his eyes? For their Pariah had not merely been a harmless Peeping Tom, but a coveter of what pariah-hood had long denied him—the loveliness of bodies bereft of the women inside them. He had long been town’s mad saint; now he was revealed a Creeper. On a gallery wall in Paris they hung like trophies. Cultured people stood before them, wine glasses in hand, admiring the townspeople's skinned selves taxidermied in black-and-white. They were young at the time and disturbed now at how little they knew of him. 


*

Ancient methods—no matter how contemporary. We’re in a different morning, at a different window, looking at the same yard. First frost outside. We’re of a generation that celebrates the cold, since it augurs eventual relief from allergies. Ragweed, grass, trees—all the green torturers. Our immune system, hypersensitive to minuscule pseudo-pathogens, also part of our inheritance from the mountains, east of where we’re sitting. Brain fog, post-nasal drip, cyclical coughing; eye-rawness, histamine delirium. 
Twice a week we drive to a clinic for immunotherapy. A needle in each arm every visit. Kind ladies distract us with small talk as they deliver the injections. We watch them pierce the lid of tiny red vials, inch back the plunger, draw the allergen concentrate into the needle. We pay good money for these liquids made in a lab. We pay the kindly nurses to pinch a bit of skin and pierce it, push the plunger with their gloved thumbs. Spores and pollens, roughly twenty species, enter the arm and inspire a localized response. Within an hour we can rub the hardened red lump and feel a heat, a kind of pet fever. Before there were needles to solve the puzzle of an immune system in distress, what options did a poor people have? Certain ladies born from the mountains tell me: they had remedies that damn near resembled witchcraft. 
Mama Whittaker was one such mountain mother. She and her people settled around the turn of the century in a holler a stone’s throw from Hazard, called Viper. Some soul long ago had been threatened by a massive rattlesnake, she’d often been told, had maybe even been bit, and as a warning to all future journeymen had returned to civilization having named the place Viper. Mama Whittaker married a secret moonshiner named G.C., Grover Cleveland, his namesake elected president the year of his birth. They sired fifteen children using the mountain method: no protection from anything. Well before the Depression crossed the land of plenty like a famished band of locusts, they were poor. When the stock market crashed, little changed for them. How could they feel the crash, if a stock market had never been built here, Mama Whittaker would say. They lived in a cabin and slept four to a bed. For months at a time G.C. would vanish to play a while with other women. Sated, he would return and lie without much skill or remorse. He had been about, he would tell his wife. He had been out earning a dollar, but having earned it had to spent it to buy a way back home. 
Out of necessity, they were scavengers. They lived so far on the edge of the larger economy money had to go out of its way to reach them. They found they could help a little, meet it halfway: Mr. Combs at Peabody Station would buy ginseng root at a favorable price then up-charge it a fair amount to a wholesaler. Mama Whittaker learned of this from other matriarchs in other hollers and schooled her children in the art of ginseng scavenging. Each morning during the summer months she would divide the children into groups of two, one older with one younger, send them in varied directions through the forest. With sticks they’d dig the damp ground, wriggle the roots free like teeth, drop them among others of their kind in a burlap sack. When the sun was half a finger-length from the top of the sky, they’d call an end to the day’s hunt and wander home. They survived many a starveling year on such earnings. Root-mongering was humble work but they considered themselves lucky—who knew the hills better than they? Mama Whittaker explained that they were helping not just themselves but humankind with their labors. These pale-golden tendrils and tubers were medicinal and had been used by doctors for centuries to heal all manner of ailment. The children believed her. If their father was a devil, their mother was god: her sing-song descriptions of the ways and laws of the universe comforted them, no matter that they often felt otherwise. Hunting for roots was a chore, boring. If it was such a benefit to others, why were they the ones hunting? 
To this day the children, now ancient themselves, speak of their labors as a necessity but a waste. They live alone in nursing homes that few people care to visit. A sovereign quiet surrounds their bitterness: they will speak only if there’s a story to tell. The stories will exclusively repeat events of a shared past, though the past has outlived them. Each will comment in their way on that curious habit observed by their mother. She adored babies. Much the reason she kept having them. And when she was past age to carry a child, began tearing photographs of babies reproduced in advertisements in Sears catalogs. These she pasted to the walls of the cabin’s kitchen. Washing dishes after dinner, a person would be surrounded from all sides by babies. One by one as the children grew smart enough to leave the holler of their birth, their mother continued to sire babies by proxy. Once the kitchen walls were exhausted, babies were papered across every inch of wall through each room of the cabin. When she was a widow and alone, she was mother to hundreds, if not thousands. She was never lonely. Her chosen kin kept her company while her adult children roamed the earth, fleeing their own childhoods and the mountains.

*

We pass through the royal gateway adorned with golden stags. We enter where maps have left us, a paradise centuries old. A seasonably warm Sunday in Djurgården. 
People float along gravel paths two by two. Some reel past on bicycles. Walking bridges lead from island to island, a linseed mill stands waiting for tourists to pose before it, a bit of historical color. We have brought the green notebook along with us, a traveler across four continents. Later in the evening it will open on a glass coffee table in the apartment lent to us by an American couple who emigrated back to Utah. It will repeat back to us many mundane visions of Stockholm, particularly the swimmers leaping from docks or sitting on concrete steps, shiny wet in Speedos, along the strand, westernmost edge of Kungsholmen. 
We walk anonymously among languages, we follow the sunlight wherever it falls. We buy a cup of coffee and listen to leaves gossip and dogs bark. In the intimate future we will meet reindeer as they trot past, in Jämtland. We will wander without purpose in Trondheim. In Ålesund we’ll admire the shiver-shine of light along the coast. Geirangerfjord will carry us atop a cliff to an abandoned farm; from there, we’ll view a long fall to glacial waters. Besseggen will be next, and will be miserable. Chilly drizzle, hiking half-lost in fog for hours. In a sod-covered cabin, we will dry our socks on a radiator and read twenty years’ worth of entries in a registry kept on the kitchen table. After which we will complete our traveler’s circuit and return to Kungsholmen. 
The green notebook will mark these, abridge weeks into scribbles of detail, place names, dates. Months will flow by and one morning we’ll wake in a different bedroom on a different continent, in a country that has never sported a royal hunting grounds, a place such as Djurgården. On the inside cover, written by us just moments ago, a summary remark on what follows, a sentence lifted from the behavioral neuroscience textbook we had brought with us across the ocean. We can discover a great deal about learning and memory by examining how they fail. Why else would we spend our precious time re-reading entries made months ago by some imposter skilled at forging our handwriting? None of it reads believably, though we remember it. The felt element of it evades capture, like a deer chasing its instinct to live. It leaps a fallen tree, slips through briars. It breaks into a clearing and survives the rifle. We were there once, as well. 

*

A sad tale—one unknown by many, so worth telling. Once told it might then be forgotten, but on its own terms: the story of Joy Tudo. 
It began five years ago, in the Philippines. There was a day of rain, darkness on the horizon. A day of rain became a night of rain. Soon days and nights became indistinguishable and there was only rain. There was anger in the wind. There were curses for every tree and house. From the east, across the ocean, a typhoon travelled to punish the earth and its people no matter where they lived, city or village. A ragged, spinning eye—from space, satellites tracked and portrayed it. It was given the name Mangkhut. In its passing many an island was swallowed and digested, defecated as mountains of mud bubbling under downpour. 
In the mining town of Itogon there had been a landslide. A steep hillside had weakened and given way, mauling and burying a mining camp’s bunkhouse under twenty feet of earth and stone. People had been buried alive along with it. The survivors were counted so their number might be subtracted against, to estimate the number of people underground. Among them was a thirty-six-year-old member of the Ifugao tribe, a woman who had travelled from her home village looking for work and had hidden from the rain in the wrong shelter. A rescue team arrived then came the local and freelance foreign reporters. A forensics team from the National Bureau of Investigation appeared a day or so later, all while townspeople and miners stood by watching. 
Word had travelled by mouth and by phone through Benguet Province and beyond—a certain family’s sister and daughter and cousin had disappeared underground and was calling out to them. Two dozen of the woman’s kin drove eight hours through muddy switchbacks and half-ruined roads to reach her, to help in any way they were allowed. There had been government orders to keep clear—but how could a government truly expect a people to do so, if the earth had opened and swallowed one of their own? 
In the woman’s home village her cousins attempted to reach her through ritual forms of communication with the vanished and the dead. A pig was slaughtered. They prayed that their cousin’s spirit would aid the rescue workers in their search to find her. On the seventh day of prayer, Joy Tudo’s spirit spoke to her cousins through the mouth of a mumbukai, a medium employed for that very purpose: a human telephone one can use to talk with the dead. Please find me, she begged, I’m hanging on a post. I’m missing a foot. My cousin doesn’t have a head. I screamed for my mother. I died slowly. I started praying the Our Father. Before I finished, I was taken. 
The day after Joy Tudo’s spirit spoke, her cousin Jasmin was found as described. A few days later rescue workers found Joy and exhumed her from the ground. Prophecy fulfilled, her people asked to take her home. No, they were told, there was a body to account for, more work to be done. There was a clerk typing death certificates. There were forensic workers in Hazmat suits and surgical masks. Permission was requested that bone and tissue samples be taken for DNA identification in a lab, as if the body wasn’t verifiable by sight. They could see her. They had been seeing her in their hearts and minds all their lives. No—they would not sign a waiver. They had at least been given a choice. 
As soon as the body was returned, zipped in a bag, they laid her in the back of a truck and drove through the night to the village were she had been born and raised, where she was wanted. She had left to work at a gold mine and a terrible thing had happened; a curious ore herself, she’d been mined for her story. Connoisseurs of other people’s misfortunes the world over, including our own, we’ve told it. Make of it what you will. Dead, living—we’re a serviceable medium for neither.

*

In the Corps psychotherapists are called wizards. A few discharged Marines have told us so. The hallway outside the office is purring with white noise machines and the office walls are white and clean and decorated with black and white photographs of Mother Nature in a variety of alluring poses. The office park is hardly an Emerald City and the waiting room with its pleasant magazines and coffee maker and water cooler hardly suggest visitors have been granted entry into Oz. It’s quiet though and often that’s enough. People can wait without being bothered. 
The room’s protected by confidentiality but the confidentiality only runs one way—whatever a wizard says can be repeated to lovers and family members and friends, often as explanation for some irritation or problem. 
We were amused when the ex-Marines told us how we were described because the comparison wasn’t far off the mark. Draw back the emerald velvet curtains and of course anyone will find a little man pulling levers and thundering orders into a microphone. Had they expected otherwise? There’s magic in the curtain but a wizard will choose pragmatism every time when it’s called for, draw back the curtains when necessary to reveal their own humble dimensions. If there’s disappointment, there were undue expectations at play, there was mystification. A wizard will rejoice in the loss of such powers, since they never possessed them in the first place. Life in a quiet room has not absolved them of their own dirty human issues and to point that out should be obvious but it isn’t: people will fight a god in order to continue believing in him, we have seen it. By our own hand we have attempted deicide and have seen believers leap from the couch to fight for survival of the illusion. In such instances it’s unwise to fight back. Better to rely on effects of slow erosion. After months of talking, they’ll habituate to the human in the chair across from them; their wizard will die quietly and a fragrance of rot will fill the room. Ideally, certain hard-won improvements will mark his funeral. If only it happened so easily. 
There is a desk and chair, a laptop and lamp and coffee mug filled with pens. There is a bookcase filled with clinical literature and pop-psych page-turners. By design the room is generic and welcomes its visitors’ skeptical reservations and undeserved admirations equally, impartially. Some have been ordered by a court to enter; others come willingly. There is a window view of the street outside, obscurable upon request by curtains and Venetian blinds. As quiet and unchaste as any monastery—many secrets, shames, forbidden muses. Alone at lunchtime consulting with our sandwich, we hear wordless voices through the walls. Other wizards, other Dorothys. Fellow castaways in search of a heart and brain and courage. 


*

The divine creature is a shapeshifter and cannot be touched without risk of electrocution. Bristling with sparks and wattage it zigzags through buildings and power lines, surfaces to brighten with needle-like severity the intricacies of a filament cased within the frosty confines of a lightbulb. Within a wall socket it lays curled, supine and lethal, awaiting a plug or butter knife to explore the forked crevice of its lair. It assumes many forms depending on the time of day and the weather. Those who seek enlightenment and dare handle it directly, to tame it for their own purposes, no matter how profane they may be, tend to perish gruesomely—fitting punishment for their presumption and arrogance. It will eat the life right off their faces and leave them clean and unbroken like freshly licked plates. Rarely do the peasants in its queendom request an audience with it without protection, for they have witnessed on evening news programs the ruinous fate met by similar aspirants and consider themselves warned. 
Five lightbulbs surround us, our own private harem of suns. For miles in every direction there are buildings and streets and within the buildings rooms upon rooms. There are plasma televisions and laptops and ceiling fans chasing their tails and going nowhere. Around us, far beyond the bandwidth of our capacity to conceive all of it in accurate specific detail, a whole city is possessed by the divine creature and hums. 
If we could play cryptozoologist for an evening we would attempt a taxonomy of its many manifestations and origins. It rumbles through the thudding walls of apartments, bass and treble rippling the air as sound waves. It blows dragon-heat from the grilled mouth of a hairdryer. It charges half a million I-Phones any given minute, replenishes the power-load of a quarter million vape pens. Once condemned men were buckled into a chair, donned with a crown through which, at the flip of a switch, it coursed searingly through a shaved human skull. Exposed to its full wrath they fried in the grand style of eggs cracked open into skillets. These rare few appearances were celebrated as justice and much faith was placed in its persuasive power as a deterrent. The man who would take a life for his pleasure would think twice, reminded every evening as he flipped a light switch off before entering an unsuspecting bedroom. Its authority was mythic and subtle but according to neuroscientists familial in origin—for brains sustain themselves electro-chemically much like AAA batteries. The wattage of meager thought was enough to softly power a lightbulb. 
We were thinking this and enacting proof of that very point. Agnostic to the faith, nonetheless we respected its many fetishes of worship. The streetlight. The power station. The digital billboard preaching to passersby on the freeway 10% OFF ALL ELECTRONICS THIS APRIL AT BEST BUY. Awful and holy were its many incarnations, for they were homely, unassuming enough to trick us into complacency and hubris. To liven our mortal coil, to brighten the dark our ignorance casts about us, it was enough to shuffle socked feet on our carpet and with a finger touch our outstretched tongue. The resulting shock stung us. Duly warned and humbled, after a period of brief speechlessness we could speak of it. Sentient current in search of a host, it was here as much as it was everywhere.


*

Ms. Michelle hunts people for a living. If there are people on the run and they’re hard to find, she’ll find them. If you need a bill collector, she’ll be your bill collector. If you need a bounty hunter, she’ll hunt you for a bounty. She takes on cases other investigators can’t solve. Most of her work is done digitally and remote, tracking location blips, status updates, financial records. 
Once a Peruvian crime family had stolen a fleet of Caterpillar wheel loaders and she was tasked with finding them. She was particularly proud of her ingenuity on this one. Since a direct approach would most likely get her nowhere, she emailed the estranged wife of the family’s patriarch, reeled her in with a sob story: she was pregnant with her husband’s child and he was denying patrimony. The wife was suspicious at first, then furious. Eventually she told Ms. Michelle where the stolen equipment had been shipped—to a construction site somewhere in South America. 
Painstaking patience. A love of the hunt and data-mongering. As a girl she’d sit at the kitchen table while other children played, assembling a thousand piece puzzles. There was the thrill of exacting revenge for crimes that hadn’t even been committed against her—people who behaved as if they were beyond the reach of consequence. Many of them, if intelligent and motivated, could hide themselves well enough to evade the FBI. The FBI was her competition; she prided herself on catching perpetrators the U.S. government couldn’t. 
The catch that distinguished her, that placed her talents above all others, was the Mullen case. One day she received a call from ACS requesting help recovering a Hatteras yacht named Morning Star. A year earlier a man by the name of Ryan Eugene Mullen had stolen it and vanished. One by one private investigators had tried finding him and had come back empty-handed. The target in question had been a fugitive for over a dozen years and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. His specs were generic: six foot three, two hundred pounds, blue eyes, deep voice, light brown hair. He wore a size fifteen shoe and in his youth had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. As a teen he’d been incarcerated for beating his girlfriend. Somewhere along the way he’d graduated to more sophisticated involvements and filched the U.S. government of two million dollars through multiple acts of cybercrime. 
Nowadays with the help of the internet a criminal can divide themselves into several alternate identities. They can employ any number of ghosting tactics from remote locations. Ms. Michelle began her hunt at a pay-per-use public records database, searching key SITS variables—shelter, income, transportation, social contact. There were dozens of off-brand versions of the man floating around the cyber-world: Reuben Ryan Mullen, Ryan Paul Mullen, Ryan Ray Mullen. Names mixed and matched until they lost their distinguishing features. 
Ms. Michelle reached out to friends at federal agencies, had them check her findings against government databases. They were able to glean a few trace details on several of the aliases. Many led back to several individuals living in the New Orleans area for the past decade, each linked in some way to a Ryan Patrick Mullen. Two of these were the man’s parents; a third was the owner of a junk yard who’d once made the sorry mistake of hiring the man as manager. It was this last lead that confirmed many of the physical descriptions of the man circulating among databases were far off the mark. In the lead’s humble estimation, they were bullshit. 
The yacht was recovered docked on an inland channel in Louisiana. Mullen had attempted to purchase a large house with phony credit and stirred up local suspicion among realtors. Ms. Michelle had arranged for his arrest remotely and enjoyed sight of Mullen handcuffed through a live feed on a federal officer’s camera phone. The man denied all wrongdoing and claimed his innocence, despite the fact he’d been arrested attempting to board the very boat he’d stolen. He seemed confused by the sudden bustle of agents around him. Clearly it’d been something he hadn't conceived might happen. Maybe a guilty man could profess his innocence long enough he might be absolved of his crimes. Or perhaps he believed he was wrongly accused: some other version of himself had implicated him. 
Ms. Michelle was philosophical on the matter. Maybe he lost track of which self he was, until I came along to remind him. 

*

To be startled, to run; to be chased until one’s legs give out; to drop to the hot ground; to lay panting in the dust. Hounded for days and weeks and years—one generation after another following us at a jog or sprint. No break in the chase to slake our thirst at a water hole. No easy moment available to graze. So we starve and we thirst and as we run we weaken ourselves, all the while our pursuers keeps pace. 
They are a hunting party. They work in shifts. Patience and endurance their only weapons. We did them no harm. Our entire life kept a thoughtful distance from their village. But they grew hungry and with hunger’s hard eyes they saw us, head bowed to sniff the ground or tear with teeth a tough sprig of grass. Before we took notice of their approach, we were shocked into flight, we were running. 
Dust cakes our nostrils, peppers our lashes. Our legs lay like tinder beside us. Footfalls thump the ground, louder from every direction. A man appears, and another. They circle us, leap back when we kick. They move slowly, like leaves on water. They too are exhausted, drained of a will to run. One carries a heavy stone, another grasps at our ears. The ears flick, dodge his grasping hands. But they’re caught eventually. The stone lifts. The stone in both hands slams down. A gash splits our forehead. Blood spurts across the dust, gummy dark rivulets. Our spirit dies within our body and we’re carried by many hands, on many shoulders from the place where we'd fallen. 
We are disemboweled, dismembered, roasted over a very popular fire, eaten. We travel in parts down many gullets. We enter many a child and man and old woman. Enzymes in their stomachs dissolve us. Our essence disperses through their bodies as nutrition. We wake the next morning a dozen people. We open our new eyes and behold each other. Some of us gather mid-morning for an expedition, to search the outlying territories for another meal to chase. We are refreshed, strong. We are not alone, we have each other, and are prepared to race death. Out in the hinterlands it waits, a sacrificial offering. It takes the form of an animal. Wired for fear, swift of hoof. But abandoned by the herd when we come running. 

*

The yellow notebook is a dreamer, makes use of us when it needs us, which is often. Pages flutter like the eyelids of a sleeper in REM: something is happening, some twilight psychodrama is being corroborated. Any cue that an animal uses to synchronize its activity with the environment is called a zeitgeber, we’ve read. German for ‘time giver’. Light acts as a powerful zeitgeber. The yellow notebook is a daytime sleeper but recruits us to do its walking. We carry it nearly everywhere, open it in opportune moments to transcribe second-hand testimonies from other dreamers cast across the alternating dark and light of the earth. The notebook rewards our labors by electing to be our private zeitgeber: by feeding it and sustaining it, by powering the engine of this tiny sun, we acclimate to many rhythms around us. 
The yellow notebook is a time giver and we are its faithful receiver and this would be a symbiosis made in heaven, if there were any truth to mortal cosmologies and the yellow notebook was neverending. But there is a limit to the number of pages available to it. Currently it’s three-fourths through its life cycle. 
We have read that the skulls of certain species are thin enough that light can pass through; that in birds, for instance, the pineal gland is studded with photoreceptors that can detect daylight through cerebral bone. Differently so, for mammals. Since their skulls are too thick to permit the passage of solar radiation, such cells breed in eyeballs instead. This is why we open our eyes before reading the yellow notebook, rather than reading with eyes closed, the more customary requirement for dreaming. The yellow notebook, being a lifelong dreamer, obliges us to meet it with eyes open. Together we enjoy one another’s company lucidly. 
Often our hands play above it and its light casts engorged hand-shadows on the wall. There’s a certain dramaturgy involved: the hands think they’re improvising certain configurations to conjure certain shapes for the wall, but really, who’s to say they aren’t receiving obscure instructions from the notebook? There’s no other explanation for the variety of dramatis personae they’re able to cast in shadow. Few bear any obvious points of reference with the personal lives of their hand-actors. The key is to watch the silent action of shadows, their exploits and conflicts, not the hands; to study every nuance laid bare by their interaction. Since they can’t speak for themselves, we’re left to interpret their needs and aspirations. Maybe they’re unaware of such things as well. The interpretations we provide for them change according to our whim and are the closest we can get to assigning them coherence as a story. 
This afternoon we watch them arrive and leave without due explanation. Ms. Michelle, the skip tracer. Electricity in its many forms coursing through a city, lethal or otherwise. Joy Tudo and her unluckiness. Mama Whittaker and her brood of ginseng scavengers. The lonely voyeur of Kyjov, the squirrel-killer, Zlatan Ibrahimovich in retirement. Mikhail Tal’s finest chess matches replayed for posterity. All these latent in the consolidating dream-time of the yellow notebook; opened on the desk before us, they radiate electromagnetically from their common source. The hands are receivers and do the rest. We’re their sole audience. 
When the play’s over and the actors retire and notebook closes, what will we make of what they've shown us? Repetitions of theme, motifs—were these red herrings to distract from some other subtle exchange we hadn’t noticed? There had been a meeting of dreams and they’d come to an agreement, but as of yet we were still clueless what had been the subject or purpose of their argument. Something about hunters. Something about the lives of the harrowed, the hunted. We would have to reopen the notebook and offer it our hands and eyes again, watch its protagonists play again without awareness of prior exploits. A second performance can never exactly resemble the first, though. The second will deviate from the original and lose itself, all the better to find itself, a game of fates on the wall. 

Fate & Wager

There was a vault. No, not a vault, a locked cabinet. A locked cabinet in the L.A. County Coroner’s office. There was one key to the lock, no more. The key kept on a ring among other keys, the ring of keys kept in a drawer during working hours, taken home with the director each evening. Select the key on its ring, insert it into the lock, insert and turn right. The lock gives way and the cabinet can be opened. 

What’s inside? Letters. Letters sealed in plastic. Letters without envelopes. Letters without envelopes are called notes, so these were mostly gathered as notes though many were written as letters and left to be found on tables or on dresser tops. Nearby where they were found in each case was a body, deceased, within minutes or hours or days or weeks of a last pulse. These were suicide letters left as notes and many hired staffers had read them, coroner included. 

Some were addressed to specific persons, wives or children, siblings or parents. Some were addressed to a general hypothetical audience against which the deceased had long nursed a grievance. Some were composed as final dispatches from a private self-monologue. Many attempted to explain the past, justify the death soon to come from it, citing evidence sampled from a history of failure to describe why the past should come to term so definitively. Many apologized for what had not yet happened, assuming their attempt would be successful, the one successful act  they were perhaps capable of accomplishing. Some were cryptic, incoherent, cast in pinched, hurried penmanship from a mind out of balance. Some said goodbye thoughtfully, assuring siblings and spouses left behind in the ever-occurring present that, while the past was a burden and they were part of it, it was not their fault. 

These letters bereft of envelopes had been collected along with other articles of evidence, during analysis and clearing of the scene. Written by citizens of Los Angeles County, they were determined valuable and even after their respective cases were closed, were retained. Unknown—whether families of the deceased had been offered or would accept their return, should they want them. If so, how many more had been spared such company in a cabinet? One letter folded and creased and shuffled into a stack among other letters, each distinct, each equally unimportant. 

One by one letters arrived as notes, the cabinet unlocked by a hand with a key, new letters stacked on top of old. Return to sender, employees in the coroner’s office would joke. More fan mail. Some days outside it would be raining, others it would be bright and pleasant and warm. Never would there be sleet or snow. Outside their office the Nineteen-Twenties came and went, the Thirties. Busy years for the arrival of letters as notes. Most of the Nineteen-Forties had passed as well, rain and sunshine and sounds of traffic coming and going. The first full year of the Fifties was almost over when the door to the L.A. County coroner’s office opened and a man, recent acquaintance of the director, a professor, entered. He was young and had an hour to spare. He shook a few hands before he and the director involved themselves in conversation. 

They had begun talking about something far from the concern at hand, they had been moving through small talk, when some observation made by the professor reminded the director of the cabinet and key in his drawer. There is a cabinet, the director told the professor, I think you would find it worth a look. The drawer was opened, the ring of keys removed, the cabinet key selected, inserted in its lock, the cabinet shuddering a bit as it opened. Every suicide note collected by Los Angeles County the past two or three decades, the director told him. 

Can I?--the professor asked. The director said he could. A spare room was offered, a desk and chair and lamp to lighten the way, sentence by sentence. There the professor sat through the morning and afternoons a full week. Reading, taking second-order notes of his own, notes that didn’t aspire to letterhood. Notes serving some other purpose entirely. There was an ashtray but the professor kept the tray at arm’s reach from the desk, atop a cabinet. He didn’t dare risk scorching with errant hot ash the letters unstacked before him. 

There were patterns, repetitions of phrasing and sentiment. There were variations of theme in their stated motivations. There were species of handwriting, each suggesting a particular species of mind in extremis. Over the course of five mornings and afternoons, hundreds of letters were read and re-read. Gradually each day's yield gathered into three stacks by the end of the day—the read, the unread, the unreadable. The latter written in Spanish or Chinese or Persian, languages native to the deceased and therefore death itself, but indecipherable to most eyes left behind to read them. 

Forensics of a novel kind, the professor said to himself, the director overhearing him. There were minds still here to be studied. If bodies could be kept in the cool of a morgue, dissected and studied, where could their minds be stored but here, on this desk, in these letters? Hundreds. What was their cumulative effect?  The director and professor agreed the professor had read enough to qualify as a skillful imposter, a forger of letters, should he choose to be. A bet, the director said. Five dollars if you can fool me. Take a week, write a letter, bring it to the office. I’ll steal off to my office and give you access to the key and the cabinet. Choose three letters from the stacks, lay them out side by side on the tabletop with yours mixed in with them. See if I can read them in a sitting and tell the difference. 

There was a pen, a pen resting on the desk near a right hand. Between the right hand resting on desk top and its left doing the same nearby, a pen recently filled with ink and waiting. The professor had selected the pen carefully, after much forethought, after having selected three freshly written notes from a more recently compiled stack of evidence culled from crime scenes. The crimes were suicides, self-homicide, murder of grievances or griefs by proxy. Their pages were crisp, their ink dark and bright, youthful to the world. Newborn letters to the living.

If his attempt was going to be convincing, the professor reasoned, the real letters in his line-up would have to be new. Each were laid out before him, pages of different size. The first half a page, torn across the bottom. The second two pages front and back. The third a full page, intricate with mazy cursive arranged in one neat block. None on hotel stationary, none with personalized letterhead. Unlined and white, all three—these passed the test of comparison to the sheet laid beneath the pen on the desk before him. 

How many letters had he written in his life? Too many to count, but each the same in this one way—written from his perspective. Each surfaced from the same mind at various points in a continuum, across the course of its life. Some of an official capacity, job-related, others obligatory, addressed to mother or father. Many furtive and potentially embarrassing, should they ever be returned to him by the many girlfriends in his past. Many such love letters were shoeboxed somewhere in the house he shared with his wife of three years, he was sure. If he read them, would it seem someone else had composed them? Maybe that might prepare him. To read dispatches from his own scattered history and strain to remember details. 

Never had he written from an invented perspective and never with goodbyes in mind. The left hand on the desk reached for the left-most letter before him. An angry letter and the shortest. Debbie, have it your way…it began. Blame and guilt. Framing the demise of its author as some Debbie’s sole responsibility. The left hand returned it to its spot on the desk then wiped a sweaty palm on a pants leg. 

The second letter, the longest by page count, rambled, lost in a meander of regrets and self-loathing reprisals against its author’s predicament. After the first paragraph the professor noticed he had begun counting the number of first-person assertions—I, me, myself, mine. He doubled back to the beginning and read the letter through for a proper count. Fifty-six appearances of first person pronoun in four pages. This one hadn’t been addressed to anyone but had been signed twice, in cursive and in block letters, after its conclusion. A postscript followed the signatures. P.S.—To whoever finds me: sorry. If I could’ve disappeared, I would’ve.

The third letter, though shorter than the second, took longer to read. Both right and left hands took hold either side of it, to hold closer for reading. It must’ve taken hours to compose, he thought, no mistakes, no scribbling out of words or arrows pointing to corrections. This last letter had the air of a final draft, the last in a lineage of revisions. It was addressed to the Board of Directors of a fruit company and written by a middle-manager denied a promotion. The letter stated the man’s qualifications and speculations for why he’d been passed over, concluding that his removal from the company payroll at this time would be best for all involved. He hoped they would look after his wife and two children, since they had wives and children of their own and would hope, if in a similar situation, the company would do the same. It was an unreasonable request from an unreasonable state of mind, never mind the reasonableness of the man. 

These were the letters, then, and—fresh page before him—he considered what it might mean to write them. Not to have written them, not to have left them where they might be found. Rather to sit in a bedroom or kitchen or at some other office desk among many millions like it throughout the city and county, at the end of a life not his own, having made a decision. The decision then articulated by a pen or pencil in hand, the hand forced into role of morbid stenographer for some mind that no longer wanted any part of its brain. In the present moment, what would it be like—to feel that way? To write a letter convincing enough to fool a coroner; best to tap into that feeling before writing. 

The page was blank, too amiable to play effigy for a void. It was summer outside and windows were open. Electric fans had been stationed atop desks and cabinets; ceiling fans alone weren’t enough to chop through the thick of the air. Beyond the room where the professor sat with his blank page and his pen, secretaries and county employees had arrived and left. Interdepartmental mail had been opened and filed. Lunch breaks had been taken. How to hate a life he hadn’t lived—that was the problem before him. How to throw it away, escape it? 

There was a woman of forty-two, maiden name Mia Barton. Born in San Luis Obispo, her father a grocer. When the father died, her mother brought three girls—she and two sisters—to Los Angeles to live with grandparents. Years bloomed one from the other, in vague succession. Mia Barton became a teenager and lived that way a while until people began to view her as a woman—but what did that feel like, to be a woman? If this was how she felt most days, standing in the small kitchen of her apartment in Lynwood, dressed for a desk job, this must be what it’s like, she would think. Not pretty enough, not smart enough, not charming. The list of deficiencies were well-established by the feeling. There was a way to be something other than a woman, a way out of being Mia Barton on a daily basis. Lay a head on a pillow each evening and wait for sleep to pull her under. The curse of repeated reincarnation, waking each morning as a self again. The other path to take was dark and uncertain but promised more permanent liberation. 

There was the sash of a bathrobe, bathrobe hanging on a hook on the bathroom door. There was a bottle on the nightstand, sleeping pills. There were ledges in every direction from where she stood, ponds and lakes deep enough to swallow her. Objects outside her head were unassuming, innocent of intent. Inside skull and brain there was a narrative and a vision of where that narrative might end—five minutes on the other side of a life, when the head ceases its ruminative tortures and settles quiet for the rest of collective human history. A small fact of the world, Mia Barton, complete and relieved of a future. 

The woman once Mia Barton was talking to herself in the present moment, she was reciting reasons to end her life. Inside a hand holding a pen, she was carried forward sentence by sentence. A professor at a desk was imagining her, imagining himself as her, having nurtured her from birth until adulthood, lonely though married, friendless though social, eaten alive by a depression that avoided doctors. The professor sat at his desk in the room given to him by the director, writing a letter by an imaginary woman. It had taken two full days to imagine her properly. He had lived her life through its full course several times, each turn a little more vividly, picking up along the way more details. By the end of the second day he could picture her from behind closed eyes. Brunette with gray-hazel irises, full cheeks and a chin that met her neck smoothly. A tragic caricature but enough to unsettle him. She was convincing, this golem of dislike, this woman he would never become except in writing. So on the third morning he sat down to write in her voice. The words came without hitch, flowingly. 

The left hand asked for the pen, not the preferred hand, the right. With the left hand of a professor a woman who had never existed composed one last letter, to explain and apologize. She apologized to her two sisters, Philomena (Philly) and Dylanna. She apologized to her husband Marcus. She apologized, oddly, to people who weren't alive anymore, their memories still active and cherished. She apologized for how much of a burden she had become these past years, assuming love wasn’t sufficiently a counterweight. She was tired, she wrote, knowing the sentiment was a cliché. The future wasn’t a friend, even if it included people she loved and who loved her. Even this she found herself doubting most days; something in her disallowed her from feeling it. She was tired of not feeling it, so she was asking now for their forgiveness. If they couldn’t forgive her, though, she would understand. They’d been so understanding of her these past years, it was about time she returned some of that understanding. 

The letter ran three pages, front to back. After he finished writing, the professor lit another cigarette and stood, walked to the other side of the desk. Turning to face the empty chair where only a moment ago he’d been sitting, he admired the tenor of the sunlight angling through the window, the warps and blemishes of the windowpane amplified into blotty shadows on the desktop. He was himself again, back in the room. He was in his own life, spared Mia Barton’s future by something simple as a smoke break. 

There it was, the letter. Upside-down and beneath him, from where he stood. Was it maudlin?—maybe it would have to be, he thought. If it was going to convince, it would have to be. Would its desperations sound rehearsed? But aren’t most genuine desperations rehearsed in someone’s head for weeks and years, anyway? 

The professor reached across the desk, drew the pages toward him. There they lay, upside-down. The left hand, free of cigarette, rotated the pages right-side-up. Hand in tow, the pages lifted off the desk and presented themselves. He was someone else now. He was a professor of psychology standing in an office. Having come across a trove of suicide notes stockpiled in the L.A. County Coroner’s office, he prepared to analyze another sample. This one undated but recently acquired, judging from the freshness of the ink in which it’d been written. 

The professor began reading. On the other side of the pages, a woman was describing reasons why she had decided to take her life. Where was she taking it? She was taking it for a walk, like a dog, she said. She was letting it off the leash, so she could stand at the dark edges of a field and watch it run. 

Four letters, a desk, a chair, in a room lit by a lamp and window. A door leading from the room but the door closed, so the contents of the room hidden. The professor stood outside, hands in pockets, leaned against a filing cabinet. Two secretaries watched him watch the door. 

The director had entered the room ten minutes before. The door had closed behind him and rendered him hypothetical. Behind the door the director was sitting at the desk, the professor imagined. He’d entered to find four neat stacks of pages of various size arranged on the desktop. Rising to the challenge of his task, the director had taken a seat, lit a cigarette, pulled the first of the notes towards him and began reading. 

Finishing he would pause, consider—was it authentic? Was this the preamble to a real human death or skilled prose pretending? 

The professor closed his eyes and saw the room laid bare in the dark of his own head. There he was, the director. Bent over the last of the notes, pointer finger of his right hand tracing beneath sentences as he read them. At the sound of a doorknob turning, he opened his eyes. No more imagination was needed—the director stepped from the room, waved the professor over. Together they entered the room and the door closed behind them. 

So which is it, the professor asked. The director took the chair and raised a finger to his lips. The professor nodded, stopped talking. The finger then left the director’s lips, lowered to the level of the desktop. Four notes lay beneath, one waiting to be chosen. 

This one, the director said. The one full of explanations and apologies. 

The professor worked to retain a neutral face. Which specifically, he asked. 

The director’s finger lowered to the desk, touched paper. Other fingers opened to take hold of the letter, lift it. 

This one. The depressed woman with the purple prose. Eloquent about understanding and forgiveness and the rest. 

The professor’s face lost its neutrality. He pulled a quick frown then nodded. 

Looks like I’ll be keeping my five dollars this time, the director told the professor. Good try, though. Tell you what. For your efforts, why don’t I buy you lunch? 

Three of the notes were gathered, returned to their cabinet, locked by the turn of a key. The fourth was folded, pocketed by the professor. There it was carried out of the office and down the street, to a luncheonette. There it sat beneath a table, warmed by the professor’s leg through pants-cloth. Afterwards it walked with the leg to a parked car, took seat behind the wheel. Driven miles through criss-crossing streets to a house in the western suburbs. There, in a kitchen half a city away from where it’d been composed, the letter was removed from its pocket and laid on a counter. The professor’s wife stood on one side of the counter, the professor on the other. The professor had produced the letter after having described the lost bet between he and the director. He had asked if she might read it and give her honest opinion. Did it read like someone who didn’t feel they were dying? A grim request, he knew. But she was a woman and housewife and he figured she might be more attuned to false notes, inaccuracies of the heart, where he had gone astray in writing it. 

I’d be happy to, she told him. But first, let’s have dinner. 

First year of their marriage she had indulged his thoughts about his day soon as he came through the door. She had been a student of psychology only a few years before but had agreed to delay further studies until they had bought a house and had children. Small talk with her husband, especially after he’d returned from work, fed the student in her, sustained her through another week of chores. They would take a seat on the back patio and talk. Her husband would work through his ideas, what’d he’d gleaned from reading journals and research, and his wife would ask pertinent, searching questions. Many dinners were burned in the oven that way. The student in her trumped the wife in her that first year, and because of it often they went underfed. 

For a while they’d adjusted the routine. They’d have dinner soon as he came home. Her husband would retire afterwards to the back patio to smoke and unwind while she washed the dishes. She would rush through scrubbing and rinsing, impatient to sit for a daily dosage of lecture and discussion. Often a towel would still be in her hands when she stepped onto the patio, hands wrestling with the cloth to dry themselves. They would talk a while then but it wasn’t the same. Her husband, full of belly and sipping scotch, would have lost the energy to talk his way through her questions. When he would yawn, she couldn’t keep herself from spontaneously yawning as well. Soon after they’d step back inside, prepare for bed. Each morning she woke to the same, a routine the student in her found increasingly stifling.

Third year of their marriage, her husband would often skip his after-dinner trips to the back patio, walk to the bedroom instead. Before she would be finished drying the dishes, he would have emerged in his pajamas to kiss her forehead. In bed she’d find him grading papers or leafing through research. Sometimes a well-phrased question about the latter could get him talking, but not often. On the weekends he’d be more receptive. They’d drive to the hills outside of the city and he’d ask about her own reading, her thoughts about the reading, and her days. 

Halfway through their third year of marriage, one late afternoon he’d returned from an hours-long drive after lunch with the director of the L.A. Coroner’s office. He’d driven along the coast, then every direction inland, taking turns randomly. He’d even driven to Lynwood. She’d been standing in the kitchen with dinner almost ready, same as every weekday, six o’clock or thereabouts he would usually come through the door. There was an intensity about him when he stepped into the kitchen. From years of living with him, she knew how read these periods of restlessness. If there was some work problem for which he couldn’t readily find an acceptable solution, his unease would express itself through fidgeting. From his pocket he produced several pages creased and folded. He had mentioned offhandedly days before of a wager he and the director had made—to write a suicide note that could convince a trained professional. He’d worked alone on the letter, hadn’t discussed it with her. The previous evenings he’d sat up in bed, arms folded, books and paper set on the nightstand, thinking through the wording, the tone. When he’d finished and he and the director had resolved their bet, she trusted he’d disclose the outcome to her over dinner. 

Now here was the letter, on the counter. A failed experiment. His disappointment was obvious though muted. 

While they ate he had requested they not discuss it further. He wanted her reading of the letter to be fresh, unhampered by influence. His right hand held a knife, his left a fork. Together they carved a steak into edible pieces on his plate. He ate quickly then excused himself. He wasn’t sullen so much as intent on giving her time to read the letter. She cleared the table, washed the dishes. She grabbed the letter off the countertop, took a seat again at the table. It was still light outside, she could’ve sat on the patio while she read. But given the nature of the letter, it seemed more appropriate to read it at a kitchen table. 

To whoever has found this and is reading this, it began. A hand reached into her apron pocket, emerged with a pencil. 

The hand resting on the table holding the pencil was hers. The letter resting on the table next to her hand wasn’t. 

Hand lifted, bringing the pencil with it, crossed out a sentence in the letter. Above the crossed-out sentence a few words were written. The professor’s wife read through the letter, re-read it. As she did so, hand and pencil worked and reworked what was read.

The professor’s wife was still asleep when he woke the next morning. He carried his shirt and shoes and jacket into the living room after pulling on his pants, didn’t want to disturb her. Twice a year at most he was left to make his own breakfast and this would be one of those mornings. 

He entered the kitchen to find the table set for one, plate with fork, knife, and spoon at his end of the table. Ceramic owl centerpiece with brown and white plumage and orange beak. Salt and pepper shakers placed like sacrificial mice before it. He flicked on the kitchen light. The owl’s glazed head glowed. On the plate was a piece of paper, handwriting on it, the handwriting familiar. A note, maybe, like ones she usually left him rare mornings when she was sick or planning to sleep in. Eggs and ham in the fridge. Bread for toast. Fruit in the bowl. No breakfast from me today, sorry. Enjoy your day, hon. He looked around the countertop for the letter he’d written, peeled a banana while doing so. Where was it? Maybe she’d left it on the nightstand. He’d finished the banana, was still chewing the last of it, was in the process of dumping the peel in the kitchen trash before walking back to the bedroom to hunt for the letter, when he found it down among used napkins and scraps of last night’s dinner, banana peel freshly plunked atop it. 

With forefinger and thumb he fished the letter from the trash. It was splotched with grease and freckled with wet coffee grounds. Unfolding it, he found the letter a blizzard of pencil marks, much edited. He looked to the plate set before his chair, the paper there, walked over for a closer look. Not a morning note—a letter. He set the soiled letter on the table, lifted this fresh one off its plate. The same letter, same tone, much the same words, whittled down to fifth the original length. He read it straight through, unaware he’d held his breath for the duration. Ten sentences at most. He paused, considered, counted them. Nine, actually. He remembered each of them, had written them, but hardly recognized them for the feeling he was experiencing just then. Standing in his own well-lit kitchen feeling a weight descend on his shoulders, as if a much stronger man had taken hold of both and had begun pressing his whole weight down on them. He felt her—this woman, Mia Barton. He’d failed to make her convincing by prose alone but here she was, pinning her sadness on him so he could know her. 

Scared—immediately after he stood in the bedroom doorway, letter in hand. Later driving to work he wouldn’t be able to recall rushing from kitchen to bedroom. An awful certainty had come over him and next thing he could remember there he stood. He must have made a sound because by the time he’d reached the doorway his wife’s eyes had opened. She was smiling sleepily, eyes drowsy and squinting. What do you think, she asked him. He’d been holding his breath until then, let the breath go at the question. The breath made a falling sound, like an armload of hay dropped to the ground. He walked through the breath toward her and stretched out beside her. You’re too good, he told her. You actually made me miss her.

His wife wiped a hand down her face, picked matter from a tear duct. Write me another, she said. I might have a future profession ahead of me.

Sunshine through windows, shadows cutting sharp lines across the floor. Lines that lift and cut across desk tops, stacks of papers. Lines that divide a hand from a wrist as it reaches for a stamp to press against a red ink blotter, before pressing elsewhere on papers the bright block letters CONFIDENTIAL. The hand belonging to Mrs. Mosley, secretary with most seniority in the office. Twenty-two years of service and older than the director by at least ten. 

The professor held a manila envelope and was conversing with the director. The director had been talking with Mrs. Mosley when the professor arrived. Director had excused himself from their conversation to greet him. Now from behind her desk she was watching them. The professor handed the director the envelope, the director and professor turned to look at her. This gave her a fright—maybe they had noticed she’d been watching, concerned she’d overheard whatever they’d been discussing. The director walked over, followed by the professor. 

Mrs. Mosley?—he asked. I was wondering if you might have a moment to help Professor Schneidman and I revive a bet, so we could settle it properly. 

Of course, she said. If the director issued her a request, it was her duty to at least give it her best effort. How could she help? 

The professor stepped away, opened the door to an unoccupied office between the wall-length city map and a fleet of file cabinets. Weeks prior he’d worked out of the office; she and other secretaries had been asked by the director not to enter while the professor was away. The professor was involved in a project and did not want his papers to be disturbed. 

The director explained what he would like her to do. It would take half an hour at most. She listened to his simple, clear-cut instructions, similar to other instructions he’d issued over the past six years. She nodded as he explained but when he finished she continued nodding. One of Mrs. Mosley’s many unconscious quirks—she would often nod as way to aid thinking. 

The professor had returned shortly before the director had finished. Mrs. Mosley was asked to wait until preparations had been completed. It would be best, the professor suggested, if she took five minutes to smoke on the front steps outside or sit on a bench in the hallway. She stood, gathered her purse. The director said it was much appreciated. 

The hallway was brighter than usual. Mid-morning, sun hit the large eastern window at hall’s end and shone across the marble floor. 

To the left of the office was a varnished wooden bench. She took a seat. The watch on her wrist counted seconds until they became minutes. After five minutes had passed, she rose, purse in hand, entered the office. 

Both the professor and director were standing either side of the spare room door, door open between them. Mrs. Mosley followed the instructions given to her and entered the room, professor and director wordlessly stepping aside. Turning, she closed the door behind her. 

A desk, a chair. A lamp and within the light cast by the lamp, four squares of paper of varied size arranged neatly at even distance from one another. She laid her purse at the edge of the desk, took a seat. She looked from one sample to another then selected the leftmost page before her. She pulled it toward her and began reading. 

A five dollar bill torn in half then taped back together. To prove a point the director had produced the bill from his wallet, laid its middle width-wise along the edge of his desk, torn it cleanly across the crease. Keeping half, he pushed the remainder across the desk towards the professor—this gesture marking a fair conclusion to their bet. 

The professor held his half before lamplight, admired the watermark of three number fives ghosting the paper. Half of Lincoln’s face now in his possession, what would it buy him? He had lost the bet then won it on a second try; the door had opened and there stood Mrs. Mosley with actual tears shining down her cheeks, eyelashes dabbed wet with mascara—blinking exaggeratedly as if that would be enough to dry them. The director had never seen the woman cry before and something about the sight shamed him. He offered her a handkerchief from his pocket. It was then both he and the professor noticed the page the woman had been holding in the hand gone limp beside her. 

Is this it?—she asked. She offered the paper but neither took it; the professor recognized the handwriting. 

Who was she? Mrs. Mosley wanted to know. What was her name, how long had it been? 

Out of respect for the dead, Mrs. Mosley refrained from finishing this last question, left the rest of it to be supplied by conventions well-embedded in speech and memory. How long had it been since she’d died? 

There may have been a misunderstanding, the director told her. Maybe he hadn’t explained clearly what she would be looking for. Three of the letters had been found at actual scenes of a suicide, only one had been forged. The one Mrs. Mosley held was the fake, he explained, written by the professor and revised by his wife just last evening. 

The woman pushed the letter toward the director, confused, then after a pause drew it close to her face, exaggeratedly scanning the page for evidence of the mistake. Are you sure, she asked. Have you read it? It seems real. Maybe there had been a mix-up and they’d misattributed authenticity to the wrong letter? 

Not the case, the professor assured her. He’d written it himself and could describe the contents to her, if she liked. He could even describe the sentiments and disclosures edited from the original draft by his wife. He agreed with Mrs. Mosley—he’d felt the same, having read that very version held in her hand earlier that morning. 

Abrupt—the change that came over her face then. Suspicion, revulsion. Emotions that surfaced quicksilver as instinct, before they were caught by good manners and healthy fear of departmental hierarchy, domesticated just as swiftly back into the usual face she wore around the office, gone. 

The director thanked her for her participation, apologized for any distress they may have caused her. She could take the rest of the day off with pay, if she liked. 

Mrs. Mosley declined the offer, returned to her desk and its paperwork.

Three notes were gathered, locked among hundreds like it, in a cabinet. In the director’s office a five dollar bill was subjected to King Solomon’s justice—cut in half to determine who most feared the destruction of a healthy five dollar bill. It bothered neither of them. Each held a half toward the same lamp but from opposite angles. Each admired half a president’s face and watermarks of the number five glowing faintly through paper. 

Doesn’t feel quite right, the professor said. The director agreed it didn’t feel as he thought it might—holding his half of a dare. It felt mean somehow, petty. What’d he done to earn even this much gain or loss? Someone else deserves it more—who? 

On the desk the two halves were edged together. A strip of scotch tape lain along the tear. Flipped on its back, underbelly of the tear repaired as well. 

Five dollars as paper but not quite, the professor said. Wouldn’t be five dollars properly until it’d found its rightful owner. 

The bill was laid next to the letter, as if, given time, the letter would disclose the answer. Written by him but copied by his wife’s hand.

Commoners (Trade & Craft)

He was old, proof enough he’d once been young. Far back in human history, decades or so, some woman had carried him to term and birthed him. Curtis Walford. Some man far back in a different kind of human history, last name Walford, had sent sperm on expedition into the uterus of his mother—a child that would live to outgrow his very father. Might be hard to describe his face—he aspired to facelessness. A name without a face…why would he prefer that? We’re making him up as we go, describing who he was and wasn’t. He’d never existed before we began describing him. But he was a decent person. His name plain and throwaway enough we might take his passage from oblivion into communal history for granted. We were now talking of Curtis Walford, having just now come into his acquaintance. Eighty-two years old but born just this past hour, as we dream him up and talk of him. 

What wisdom could he impart? What advice or warnings or dirty jokes? We’d have to make that up for him as well, empty as his head was, free of his own thoughts and forever absorbent of who we were and weren’t. Old man on a bench near a river. In Trondheim or Cincinnati. Watching teenagers play frisbee golf in a nearby park or seagulls warring over scraps of bread. Did we invent this so we wouldn’t have to live it? Cast the curse of aging and aloneness into some homely golem, escape through the rear exit doors of our fictions? Here he is, right leg crossing over left. Shamelessly a hand lifts to pick its choice of nostril, wipes the mortal refuse on the back of the bench. No one’s watching, so how could shame fall upon him? We’re watching though. Doesn’t he know that? The aversions we’ve packed him with, like cheap furniture in storage, block his view of his many makers standing off across the field, the road, the river, pretending to be mere figures in a distance. If we raised a hand to wave, he’d find his own raising of its own accord. Waving without anything to be gained from the greeting. He’d yawn. Pull at a sock. Strain eyes to see what he’d erased with his hello. Back and forth, back and forth, see? A hand can clean the air without meaning to. 

Imaginary Frenemy

 
She found herself thinking about the celebrity again—it bugged her that she couldn’t will thought of this person from her head. She wasn’t particularly beholden to gossip and didn’t particularly enjoy this person’s paintings. It was their style of play, how they presented themselves in photos and interviews, enigmatic, cocksure, in-on-the-joke and above everyone and everything. They were eccentric, so people said, they dressed at an angle counter to convention and made seemingly dangerous, cryptic career decisions that in the end only fed into the mystique of their aims and overall program. They were well-known for their standoffishness and while this seemed categorical among the famous who intended to retain some semblance of privacy, their behavior was so willful and solicitous it couldn’t be anything but calculated to hook a rube’s curiosity. 
I’m not interested in these people, she’d tell herself, then shake her head. Shake her head as if she were trying to shake the demons out. The goal of the famous person was to play for a living, to live a while in people’s estimations; the price for such luxuries was an occasional intrusiveness. To become a human myth, you need willing mythographers. You need people who think so little of their lives they’ll feed you scraps of them to help you grow larger and larger until the size of you becomes solid as fact, un-ignorable. It’s no way to live but certainly is a subtle way to die. 
She knew some facts and details about this person, their upbringing, their history. Their origins as a young mortal. They had been a childhood actor then they had quit acting; they had tried to attend a college (Ivy League) but quit after a semester. As far as she knew, they had never worked a job a day in their life; both their parents were lawyers so their early years of aimlessness were most likely well-funded. Then they discovered painting. Their paintings were discovered through connections their parents had in New York. There was an opening in a gallery, there were purchases of overpriced canvases…a month after the opening they moved to Brooklyn. They called making paintings “work” and referred to themselves as a workaholic but that soon changed when they gauged the consensus of attitude around them, realizing this was old hat and unpopular. Thereafter they spoke of themselves as lazy, a bad employee of their own canvases and will to create; yet somehow more “work” was made and sold and converted to money, the money in turn converted to time away from the common demands of life. They no longer had to make a living, since they were invested in laziness as a mode of life. It worked for them. 
This was homespun, of course, a story. This was what the celebrity intended you to know and therefore think of them. Their confidence was blithe and so definite it didn’t require your fascination for continued survival. But the truth was more the opposite: without nobodies like herself thinking of them, this person would be deprived of a stage. They’d be acting for their shadow cast at their feet, not even on a wall. It would be a lonely, fruitless thing, their calculation, cutting themselves off from themselves and promoting no one. Pull and push, seduction and rejection. Why was she so interested? Why couldn’t she cut thoughts of this person from her head and be rid of them? The answer was plain but not so obvious: because she wasn’t sufficiently interested in herself. How’d she become so boring? she wondered. The question itself was a perfect sample of the problem ongoing. She wondered about others because she could hardly hold her own attention, thinking of this other person, herself.