lcdm

[lcdm]

Charred

“Mom, I’m gonna set myself on fire,” the girl called out adamantly, taking the canister of gasoline off of its shelf in the garage by the the old, broken down motorcycle her father had never quite gotten around to fixing.

“Alright dear,” she heard drifting from the kitchen window, snaking around the camping equipment blocking the open door. “Just be sure to go in the backyard where the house won’t catch with you.”

The night before, she had meticulously organized her possessions. She had deleted all her contacts and removed her phone battery, placing them next to each other on the table. She took down her posters, rolling them up with a rubber band, and put all her clothes in a suitcase to donate. When her mother called her to dinner, she said she wasn’t hungry and slammed her bedroom door, but only a little bit, the way you do when you want to show that you’re mad but don’t want to get in trouble. She wrote a will and testament on a piece of notebook paper and left all her stuffed animals to her best friend Rose.

In the musty darkness of the garage, she popped the top of the canister off and leaned in to take a whiff. She loved the smell of gasoline, ever since she was a little girl, when her dad would let her pour it into the boat before pushing out onto the lake. In practice, most of it ended up in the lake directly, but she liked to see the pretty rainbow colors swirling in the water as a result. She liked, especially, to watch her dad squirt lighter fluid onto the grill as the flames burst out. “On second thought,” she heard from the kitchen, “Take the bucket out with you and fill it with water so you can douse the ground before you self-immolate.”

“It is, I’m afraid, a case of body lice,” the doctor had said, swinging the execution sword down on what could have been a long and prosperous life. She had felt the room swirl and slip away from her as she sat, lightheaded, teetering on the edge of the cold, metal examination table.

“Lice?” her mother giggled from the chair, looking up from her magazine. “Sarah where on Earth did you pick up lice? I’ll bet it was that Darren boy you’re always hanging around with. I always suspected he never showered.”

“Moooom,” she moaned. “ It’s not funny! Don’t you realize I can never go back to school?”

“Of course dear, that would be absurd. I’ll see about having you transferred over to Westwood once this clears up. Speaking of, doctor, how long will this take to clear up?”

Sarah heard none of his explanation, heard only the rolling chants of ritual, hooded figures clustered around her preparing to sacrifice her to the teenage gods.

Stepping into the backyard with the canister, she glanced over at the house where her mother was fluttering around the kitchen. She had, of course, no intention of setting herself on fire. But she couldn’t ever show her face at school again. Running away was the obvious choice. Sneaking around the treeline at the edge of the yard, she stole into the old decrepit shed standing lonely at the back of the yard. Originally an attempt by her father to build a workshop,-- “Babe why would I hire a contractor when I have the Home Depot!?”--the shed was now an unstable pile of rotted sticks. It needed to go.

And so did she. Putting down the canister, she reached into her backpack where she had packed a few day’s worth of sandwiches and power bars and pulled out one of her less-liked shirts and shorts, tossing them on the floor. The inside of the shed was a mess of sawhorses and planks covered in sawdust, relics not of inspired designs but the construction of the shed itself. She again uncapped the canister. She poured it slowly, carefully, over the piles of wood around her. She couldn’t know it, but the dryness of the week had led to the accumulation of static charge around the shed. As the last drop left the canister, her left leg bumped one of the saw horses, dislodging the plank sitting atop it, sending it sliding down. Creating a spark, which, in contact with the sawdust and gasoline, proceeded to blow the shed to smithereens.

Her mom raced out of the house to find her in the pool, shaken but unhurt, slightly charred, and, surprisingly, free of body lice.

[lcdm]

The Burning Man

Joaquin woke up to the sounds of the Pacific Ocean lapping at his toes, which were numb. He was naked. This is why I don’t do parties, he thought, and then, why do I have a cactus? Because he did indeed, unambiguously, have a cactus. It was sitting in the sand right next to him, with a poorly drawn smiley face on the side of the mud-clay pot in black sharpie. He sniffled, and sat up, the insides of his nostrils burning with salt. His hair was waterlogged. The mystery of the cactus set aside, he primarily concerned himself with locating his piece, both the shooty one and the marijuana one. He was sure, as he lurched to his feet, that those would be integral in tracking down his car, and perhaps also his clothes.

“Say goodbye to eternal life you son of a bitch,” he muttered, kicking the potted plant and being forcefully reminded of his lack of footwear. He collapsed back down into the sand in agony, but noted that his right foot at least had some feeling again.

I’m too sober for this, he thought, before noticing a rather fortuitous bottle of Jack Daniels half buried in the sand to his left. Joaquin extracted it and took a swig, and then he noticed a bonfire farther down the beach, past the Jack Daniels. His private investigator senses tingled at the back of his neck, and he climbed to his feet to go investigate. He left the bottle of Jack in the sand next to the overturned plant.

Some other poor family is going to move in here. Suckers who will have no idea what they’re in for, he thought as he trudged past the line of seafront houses towards the glow of the fire. He didn’t have his glasses, so the fire appeared to him as a warm, inviting blob, like a gummy or a cream-filled donut. He heard the voices of a conversation from the fire, belonging to two fuzzy shapes, draped in a blanket and facing away from him.

“Being dumped sucks. But being dumped and like, seeing pictures of the person who dumped you, with the person they dumped you for, sucks even more,” the boy said, sounding miserable. The girl bumped him with her shoulder.

“No one made you look at them, doof,” she said quietly.

He wondered about them, the two blurry shapes. It was his job to wonder about people. People’s intentions, motivations, why they’d cheat, why they’d hide a body up a tree rather than dig a damn hole… These two shapes were, refreshingly, much less opaque. The boy had driven them to the beach, but it was the girl’s idea to come out here. They were both past their curfews, and she was liable to get in more trouble, but he was the one that was actually going to get in trouble. They had been friends for a long time, by circumstance, maybe neighbors. She was comforting him, but was glad he was broken up, because she clearly thought his ex was a bitch. She would never have told him that.

“I know that,” he responded. “It’s just… I don’t know. It’s only been a week. it makes you feel like you were never important in the first place.”

“Hey,” she said reproachfully. “Who the hell said you weren’t important?”

Joaquin felt a turn, a slight tingle in his lower back that creeped outwards around his waist and up his spine. He thought about what to do, resisting the mental image of himself leaping his naked ass in front of the two teenagers with a boogie yell and sending them screaming down the beach. He swallowed a chuckle, and with a twisting half-smirk wandered towards one of the shiny, boxy houses lining the seafront instead.

It was clearly new, the floor to ceiling westward windows reflecting the quarter moon and rippling ocean crests below it. He scoffed. An ocean view, Joaquin knew, was the great, dirty secret that accompanied a few million dollars to spend and people to impress. He didn’t know why no one ever figured it out before they bought their prize house, that the ocean is, of course the most boring view on God’s Green Earth. It is unequivocally, excruciatingly flat, usually a dull grey reflection of low hanging, salty clouds, with not a single identifying marker besides the occasional boat, if you’re lucky. Primarily it’s obnoxious teenagers playing volleyball in what should be your backyard and leaving their sticky beer bottles stuck against your seawall or tossed vengefully onto your patio to shatter. Even what humbling effect that might be imbued by the ocean’s vastness is lost into mundanity, after around fourteen-and-a-half days, by Joaquin’s best reckoning.

He slipped through the cast iron gate in the seawall of the house and peered around the patio. It was late November, so there was a solid chance the occupant wasn’t even here. One’s beachfront house is only as good as one’s winter chalet in Tahoe, after all.

Because it was 1978, the sliding door was unlocked, and Joaquin found himself on a plush rug in a livingroom with white walls, white cabinets, white countertops, and white stools at a white bar. He looked down, confirming the rug was also white. He frowned. The room was fairly dark, but he was pretty sure it was beige. As he slid the door closed, he realized how cold he’d been outside and squeezed his muscles appreciatively. He scratched his ass, and sand rained down into the recesses of the rug below.

Joaquin walked across the living room and into the kitchen, where he was drawn by intuition to the drawer stuffed with bills. It was the same in every house he’d ever been in. Look around any kitchen, and you’ll find that there are only two drawers that look like they matter. One’s got the cutlery. The other’s got the bills. His grubby fingers ruffled through the credit card statements and invoices from gardeners and assistants. He felt a flash of guilt. Granted, rummaging through people’s private lives was kind of his job description. He just generally had some a priori reason to do it first.

Joaquin didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he knew the moment he’d found it. It was the precise moment, in fact, that the kitchen light flicked on, and he spun around to find a woman staring at him with an offensive degree of disaffectedness.

“Honey,” she said, tapping gentle wrinkles in her cheek and raking her eyes down his torso intrusively and gesturing, “I don’t remember ordering that package, but if I did, I was being a little stingy.”

“Don’t be rude,” he frowned, “I’ve been outside, in the cold.”

The woman shrugged and turned, waving at him to follow as her words trailed over her shoulder like the draping silk white robe she wore. “Where you’ve been is outside in the sand, and you’re about to get in my shower before you track it all through the damn house…”

Joaquin stood frozen for a moment, his eyes darting at the sliding door across the room and the freedom on the other side. An image of himself flayed and piked on the flagpole above the woman’s house flashed through his mind, and after a moment’s hesitation he grabbed the wad of bills and sprinted across the living room, clutching at the sliding door and throwing himself onto the patio without shutting it behind him. He raced across the patio, leaped the gate, and only stopped sprinting when he neared the water, afraid of the icy chill against his feet. He stood panting. He looked at the stack of papers in the moonlight. “Julianne Davidson,” the invoice read. “Psychotic murderer,” he added as a subheading.

He then noticed, the way one notices a lack of any cars in a normally-busy street at midday, that he was being watched. Joaquin turned to see the two teenagers staring rather rudely, from the other side of their fire, evidently roused by his sprint across the beach. He waved jovially and started walking towards them, thoughtfully covering himself with the sheaf of papers. When he was still about twenty feet away, the boy cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted,

“Was the sex that bad?”

The girl broke in immediately after, “Or did she find you screwing someone!”

Joaquin didn’t respond, just waved again and ambled over to them.

“Evening, kids,” he said as he reached a hand forward and felt the happy glow of the fire licking at his fingertips. He saw himself darting his hand into the middle of the flame, skin peeling away in the heat, and shook his head to dissipate the thought.

“She caught you in bed, didn’t she,” the boy said nasally. “Should I be worried about some broad running out onto the beach with a shotgun?” The teenagers laughed.

Joaquin considered it for a moment. He glanced nervously over at the house, which remained dark and dead as before. He shrugged. He didn’t really have anywhere else to go.

“If she does, I’ll run,” he said, allowing them their fantasy. Meanwhile, he was thinking. He tried to reconstruct the stark white interior, but only saw the lair of an evil villain, shark tank embedded in the wall and Julianne Davidson lounging on a sofa with a white, fuzzy cat nestled in the folds of her negligee.

It was Joaquin’s job to wonder about people, and for some reason, Julianne Davidson was as opaque as the fog rolling in from the bay.

His hand wandered a little too close to the flames and he yanked it back.

“You okay there?” asked the boy, or the girl, since he wasn’t paying attention.

“Okay…?” he murmured in response, fixated on a different flame, a candle flickering in his mother’s eye.

It was her routine, every day, at four in the morning when she got home from work. Light the eight candles dotting the apartment; take a bottle of wine from the cabinet; collapse onto the flotsam couch, springs squealing, staring fixedly into the tiny flame until the bottle had emptied itself into her fatal understanding that driving yourself to exhaustion doesn’t require a will to live, not really. Joaquin would wake up to the infusing scent of warmth, of cedar pine or vanilla or lavender; he’d blow the candles out one by one, and he’d leave his mother strewn on the couch where she lay. He knew, of course, that his mother gave up every morning. And that every night she convinced herself, fooled herself, into believing that there was a reason to do it again.

One day, she had reached down to hold his jaw, and tipped his chin up to face her bloodshot eyes, and said “Boy, you go out into the world and find yourself something that matters.” Her face twisted in a way he both understood, and didn’t.  “And if you can’t, then don’t bother.”

He wasn’t really surprised on the bright, dusty morning in October when he woke up for school and smelled only the musty stagnancy of his perpetually unwashed linens.

Joaquin looked up over the flames at the two teenagers facing him, staring at him. Purposeless. Happy, even.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded, feeling a gross bile welling in his stomach. “You think this is some sort of game?” He took a step back. “Do you even know what you’re doing?” He pointed. “You. Do you know what the fuck you’re doing?” He was shouting now, “Do you? Or are you just here to find out if I do?” He turned on the girl. “Why are you here? Huh? What do you want from me? You want me to give you something? A story? Something to tell your friends in the morning? Did you hear about the loser we found last night? Oh, you should’ve seen it, he was so pathetic. Lonely ass detective with no reason to investigate! It was a riot!”

He seethed toward the teenagers over the fire, only to realize blurrily they were gone. He sat down heavily in the sand, hand pressed against the tightness in his chest. He saw himself stepping forward into the flames, saw himself running down the beach like a flaming torch against the darkness of the beach. He saw himself, reflected like a candle flame against his mother’s cornea. He closed his eyes.

* * * *

By the time the sun rose, most of the night had become a blur. He poked at the charred remains of the fire with an exploratory toe. He had been up to something, he reckoned. Probably trying to find his clothes, wherever they went. He saw the now sandy and crumpled stack of papers to his left, had a sudden memory, and instinctively looked to his crotch. Rude, he thought. He stood up.

As far as he could tell, there was no sign of his shirt, though he managed to find his jeans and belt wrapped up in some seaweed and kelp a few hundred yards down the beach. He tried to put them on, but they were too cold, and too wet, so he set them out to dry in the sand and finished off the bottle of Jack Daniels, which he’d re-discovered in his search. He was slightly concerned about the revolver, and hoped that, if it was anywhere, it was at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He hated the damn thing. He hoped he’d never have to actually use it. He didn’t much like cops either, and didn’t fancy his registered piece coming up in some other investigation. As he wandered up and down the beach, he hoped that someone, not Julianne Davidson, was trying to enjoy some scrambled eggs in their million dollar kitchen with its two million dollar view of his sandy ass rummaging through garbage piles and seaweed for any sign of a revolver or pipe.

He didn’t find either, but in a stroke of good luck he found a joint nestled, unlit, between some rocks by the highway bridge going over the inlet. He tucked it behind his ear, disappointed his benefactors hadn’t left behind a lighter or two. Damned kids, he thought. You either pick one, or the other. He huffed.

He wandered along the highway in his semi-dry jeans until he happened upon his Chevy parked haphazardly next to a port-a-potty, seemingly abandoned on the highway’s edge. Makes sense, he thought to himself. He climbed in―the door was never locked―and found his shirt and holster sitting on the passenger seat. No revolver, which in the back of his mind he knew would become a problem at some point. He popped the glove box and fumbled till he grasped a lighter, then lit the joint.

Reaching under the dash, he pulled the key he instinctively knew he’d stashed there, and started the old Chevy’s engine. It sputtered to life and he pulled onto the highway, rolling down the windows as he cruised down the coast feeling, all things considered, remarkably composed.

Along the highway, he passed the occasional groovy van parked on the shoulder, side doors open, hawking fruit or woven baskets or, he blinked, cactuses. He frowned, and, brakes screeching, pulled to the side of the road by the van. A head popped out, and then grinned.

“Duude, welcome back!” the man said happily. He wore circle-rimmed glasses and had braided hair hanging down to his waist. “You here to pick up another friend?” he asked, gesturing to the miniature potted plants around him. Joaquin felt his heart thumping suddenly and violently against his chest. He slammed on the gas, pulling back onto the highway and almost merging into an unseen Ford Pinto, which honked viciously and veered into the oncoming lane to get around him. He drove wildly as his vision blanked in and out of rediscovered memories -- the cactus, the beach, the Jack and the rushing, encroaching water -- jabbed jarringly against his consciousness.

It was another ten or fifteen miles before his heart descended from his throat and he felt he could breathe again. He took a drag on the joint to steady himself. His eyes wandered around the serene morning, the ocean dazzling his eyes in reflected sunlight. He could hear the girl’s voice in his head, to her friend from the night before; Who said you’re not important? He pulled the Chevy into a scenic overlook and left it running as he stepped out, and took in the rocky cliffside and choppy water below. He kicked a pebble over the edge and then didn’t watch it fall. Who said you’re not important? He thought about it.

[lcdm]

Album: 22, A Million

Every month, I try to write about a new (or not new) album I find important. Not an unbiased review (see; dailycal.org/author/ipasha for those), but rather an emphatic recommendation: for one reason or another, you should listen to this album. -Imad Pasha (spy-of-warsaw)

Bon Iver was already a polarizing band, depending on one’s relationship with the indie-folk side of the musical spectrum. You either loved them, or you “didn’t get the hype.” After the critical successes of For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Justin Vernon has taken the band into what seems, initially, like an entirely new direction, and it has his fans either loving or hating it. 

Ultimately, though, he didn’t write it for them. 22, A Million is a deeply personal record, the confluence of “22″, a number with resonance for Vernon, and “A Million” being us, the rest of us. The album was seeded on an ill-fated solo vacation on a Greek Island on a search for inspiration where Vernon, struggling with depressive thoughts and sickening anxiety not in small part generated by the surprising success of his previous works, sang “It might be over soon,” into a portable OP1 synthesizer. 

More than deeply personal, the album is a testament to Vernon’s ability to shape those emotions into art that is so resonant with people, and so aesthetic at the same time. Fans will note this new direction: gone are the pastoral, folk guitar riffs under Vernon’s falsetto trilling, replaced with “715 CRΣΣKS,” 2 minutes of Vernon singing a capella into a vocoder/software developed by him and his sound engineer, a multilayered harmony as if angels were singing through an autotune, or with glitchy electronic bleats and jarring, disjointed, abstracts of songs. 

But it isn’t that. Well, it is. But the more you listen the more you realize that Bon Iver hasn’t really changed at all. The emotional heart of the record is exactly where Vernon has always been, deep within himself. The emotional resonances created in the tracks is the same resonances created before. On repeated listens (I’m on something like the 50th time through), the novelty (or perhaps jarring surprise) of hearing ELECTRONIC NOISES IN A BON IVER ALBUM drops away, and you realize the degree to which the album is a natural, organic extension of the band’s past work. 

I’ll make my point concrete. Put on 8 (circle). Listen to it closely, all the way through. Listen for even the slightest sign of over production, or in fact any electronic, glitchy sounds. I certainly don’t hear them. I hear Vernon’s voice, beautiful in it’s lower register and its harmonies, a three note bass line carrying a saxophone over layered, lush chords. It’s simple, it’s resonant. No sign of the electronic influence the album will be slapped with. The point is that I didn’t notice that the first time. At first the album gives this impression of being so dominated by technology that you don’t notice the moment’s when it isn’t. But 8 (circle), 29# Strattford APTS, 33 “GOD,” even 666 ʇ all to a certain extent lack domineering electronic touches. Are they different than the purely pastoral sound of before? Of course. But they are hardly a stretch. 

But let’s talk for a moment about “715 CRΣΣKS,” because once you get over the shock of it, it’s undeniably beautiful. As the OP1 voices fade out of the intro of 22 (OVER S∞∞N), we find Vernon’s falsetto, sounding fairly pastoral, just with different instrumentation. Vernon has managed what most projects fail to do, which is explore a new sonic space without becoming disjointed, without losing the emotional resonance in all the exploration of new sounds. The raw emotion of the songs comes through just as strong as ever, in some ways even stronger, the exploration wasn’t for no reason: technology has the ability to draw out the alienation we feel to great effect (see; Radiohead’s Kid A). 

Vernon makes up words, phrases, with about as much deference to convention as Shakespeare. The choppy, truly artistic lyric videos he’s posted are sometimes the only way to notice it, it’s so seamless within the songs themselves. But once you know they’re there, they have a mystical power, like the symbols scattered around the album art. “What I’ve got is seen you tryin, or take it down the old lanes around, fuckified.” You wonder at how he could make the word fuckified sound artistically and aesthetically pleasing, but god damn it, he does it. And that’s what’s so important about this album. The intersection of intense interiority with the cold, alienating qualities of technology, the reaching beyond language to new words and painted symbols to create the emotional resonances we can tell Vernon needed to create, all the while maintaining what can unabashedly, unpretentiously be called sonically beauty. 

Listen to this album. Listen carefully to it. Watch the lyric videos as well. Give it some time, if you need. I guarantee you’ll find something in it. And a last note, if you are a Bon Iver fan already, maybe try to forget that going in. Discover him again, in a new way, and then merge the two concepts.  

[lcdm]

Architect

In your travels you come across a city which rises from the crystalline dust of endless sand dunes every two years and dissolves into the sand two years hence. In its wide, open corridors and ornate palaces, the poor live content that they will as soon as not be rich, and the rich live content that they will soon as not be poor, as each envies the relative simplicity in the life of the other.

In the warm summer night a woman lies awake, only pretending to sleep, but listening with a quiet ear to the sounds of her son making love for the first time to his sweetheart in the room below, or perhaps to the sounds of the swallows on the terraces and rooftops above, singing the arrival of morning, for the two are much the same.

You find that in the center of the city square sits a well, the well from which the city’s life flows out in water, and into which the city itself swirls down, dripping into the cavernous depths below as the sand flows through the neck of the hour glass, flowing resolutely to the Other, where all is complete in kind but reflected diametrically in aspect.

Surrounding the city is a wall of roses, intertwined tangles of thorny branches and blooming flowers reaching endlessly skyward that no invader dare lay siege to, for in destroying a single blossom one loses the desire for the whole.

To steal here is to kneel and gather the sand in you hand, and watch it pour through the gaps in your fingers, carried by the breeze onto the porches with wicker chairs and argileh, where perhaps there is a man sitting, his face weathered and hard, endlessly fingering with his left hand the ring found on his right as the scent of kebab drifts from behind him into the square.

To dance here is to dig your toes into the sand lining the bazaar, underneath the scorching layer baked by the sun, to watch the roots spread from your heels and the tips of your toes and take hold to the lampposts and fountains as the city hums itself to sleep and you sway silently in its rhythm.

To die here is to sit cross legged in the square, hand resting lightly on your thigh, eyes closed almost entirely, as the last of the astronomers’ towers and philosophers’ palaces come apart and sink into the ever-shifting dunes, leaving you alone in the ocean of sand from which you construct the universe in a polished sphere of blown glass.

[lcdm]

A Step Down

The sign outside the apartment read "For rent by owner." It was a common sight in the area; many young aspiring folks discovering that New York City was too expensive a locale to live out romanticized apartment life. The sidewalk was clean enough, a good sign, but a faint odor drifted through the street. It must have come from a sewage main, but in any case that in and of itself didn't explain the surprisingly reasonable rate listed in the paper. Upon inspection, the aged windows showed the subtle signs that they wouldn't be the best resistance against the elements, but it was no matter.

   The foyer of the building was paneled in and old wood that left a musty smell in the stagnant air. The paint on the door frames was chipped. Nicole Moore climbed the tight staircase to the third floor, apartment No. 11. She tried the door; it was locked. Casually, she tossed her bag on the floor by the door and trekked back down the stairs to find the manager. His room was directly to the right of the entrance, delineated by a small tacked on gold plate above the door. She rapped the door, and had enough time to roll her eyes and check her watch before the manager opened the door.

   "Oh hi! Yes Hello, yes, you must be the girl interested in No. 11, yes, Norma was it? How are you? Did you find the place okay? Everything really is so nice about now, the weather is just changing, and-"    "Nicole."    "I'm sorry, what was that?" A small bead of sweat was precariously balanced on the bridge of his nose.    "The name was Nicole. Can I get the keys to the apartment to check it out?"     "Oh, oh yes, yes of course..." He reached down and opened a drawer in his desk, sending the bead of sweat flying onto one of the scattered papers on its surface. It was quickly replenished from the sheen on his bare head.    "It really is a wonderful unit, very well lit, great square footage, I'm sure you'll find it perfectly suited to your needs..." He trailed off as she cleanly picked the keys from his hands, wiping them on her skirt as she left the managers office. She made her way back to the third floor, gracefully mounting the stairs as the manager waddled up behind her, undoubtedly enjoying the view. He was trying to say something about the previous tenant but couldn't quite manage to talk and climb at the same time. He had just made the landing when she inserted the key into the door in the farthest door in the back right corner and slid into the room.

   The apartment was empty save a few choice items; an old wooden chair, a dusty couch, a standing lamp with a burned out bulb. Dappled light streamed in through the windows, but the corners of the room remained in dark shadows. There was something about the air in the room... it wasn't still, though there was no fan; it was as if each molecule of air was silently switching places with its neighbor. It was electrifying, and left goosebumps on Nicole's arms.

   After the manager had rather unnecessarily shown her the attached bedroom and bathroom, and left her in peace to contemplate, Nicole sat down on the couch and hummed quietly to herself. She closed her eyes and waved her hand smoothly through the air, conducting a symphony only she could hear. On lazy Sunday afternoons growing up in the countryside she would sit atop the hill nearest her house and let  hours flow by, flow around her still form as she imagined what it would be like to be alive. The nuns in school told her that life was a gift from God; but she had only felt it the day they discovered her in the broom closet with a girl two classes up. Would this be an adequate substitute? A move to the city, alone in an apartment, ready to start life proper?

       When she opened her eyes she found herself facing a woman of about sixty-five. The woman was propped against the doorframe of apartment No. 11, but her foot grazed the raised divider on the floor, unwilling to cross the boundary.    "You have to leave." There was abandonment in her eyes.    "I beg your pardon?" Nicole knew the quizzical look painting her features was more often than not taken for insolence.    "You can't come here. It's not safe."    "Oh, I know this area has a bit of a reputation but I assure you I can handle myself, I mean if a woman advanced as yourself can-"    She was cut off by a noise emanating from the woman that could only be likened to a hiss.    "Fool! The room you sit in is haunted. Leave, while you still can."    Nicole hadn't heard a word past 'haunted.' Instantly, every hair on her neck had stood on end, the goosebumps wrapping their way around her torso, her feet, suddenly not as planted to the floor. Electrifying. By the time she looked up and thought to ask,  "By whom?" the woman was gone.

   Nicole stood slowly, and gazed carefully at the darkened corners of the room. She felt a tingling in the base of her spine that could only be pure terror. She walked briskly out of apartment No. 11, down the stairs, and told the manager she'd take it.

                       * * * *

   Nicole walked into the library with a purpose. Her hands, delicate hands, held a slip with her new address written in neat, small cursive, and a newly received library card. When she was seven, her aunt praised her for her small, delicate hands, so Nicole had snuck into her fathers office and painted claws on her fingers in fountain ink. That night she didn't get any dinner, and had to go to bed early. But it didn't stop her from sneaking in a light to read by, until her auburn hair fell too often in front of her face and her eyes struggled to make out the words.

   She was reading again, but this time her enjoyment was tinged by a sense of savage urgency. Having walked with unusual ease past the mysteries and crime novels, she had selected the largest tomes available: Immigration records, 1894-1938, New York City Register, 1920-1930. Struggling under the weight of the volumes, she found a quiet corner and set to work.

   Of course, the entries were listed by date or by last name, not by address, but judging by the state of the manager's office when she'd seen it, somehow Nicole doubted that he had records of every tenant to live in apartment No. 11. What she did know, thankfully, was that the building had been constructed in 1923. A little snooping had produced the date etched into the cornerstone. As she traced her finger lightly down the columns of addresses, she got the distinct impression that she was being watched. She kept her eyes glued to the old, dusty pages, but somehow she was convinced that if she looked up, she'd see the old woman from across the hall, watching her with malice.

   That first trip to the library yielded no information. After discovering the old reference books could not be borrowed, Nicole left the library, already planning when she would stop by the next day. Her feet carried her along just slightly more quickly than normal, there was a bounce to each step, a purpose. Her long, slender legs took her past vendors and cat-calls without much thought to their presence.

   She felt a real, hard hitting sort of beauty in the city. The pollution, the grime and dust lining the streets and buildings, carried with it a saturation, so many people, so many lives crossing and uncrossing, too much activity for even the earth to keep up with. It never slowed, pushing relentlessly forward into the future despite the uncertainty of what lay there.

  As the weeks marched by and her evenings in the library after work ended night after night in futility, Nicole realized that she would in fact have to approach the woman across the hall if she wanted to know anything more. She hesitated to do so, for reasons unknown to herself. And besides, she'd been in apartment No. 11 for a bit over a month now and there'd been no unnatural door slams, no wind in the night, no sign at all of the supposed haunting. Perhaps it was just the words of a crazy old woman. Nicole frowned as she walked home from work. She certainly wasn't afraid of the woman, but still somehow felt that she abjectly did not want to speak to her. Painted in her mind was the old woman, standing at her door, her face molded into that of her father's year after year, over imperfect grades or imperfect friends, or desires outside that of the family. That look she couldn't stand, that conditioning for perfection so deeply ingrained that one glance of disappointment was tantamount to emotional blackmail. The look that had driven her to cut herself off from the family entirely.

                        * * * *

   For only the second time since she'd moved in, Nicole rapped on the manager's door, careful to avoid the opaque glass window as it was likely to break inwards with any touch. She could hear him inside, his stubby legs pushing his chair back from his desk, his slow waddle towards the door, the squeaking of his shoes on the wood. She giggled to herself as the image of a chubby emperor penguin formed itself in her mind.

   "Oh! Hello Norma, how are-" Ignoring the misnaming this time, Nicole cut in, "Yes, hello. Do you mind telling me the name of the woman across from me? Apartment No. 10? How long has she been here?"

   "Ah you mean old Maxine Bailey? Oh gosh, she's been here probably since the building opened, at the very least it was before this management took over the building. I say, you look quite fine-"    "Thank you very much," she finished quickly, turning and stepping quickly toward the stairs. On the landing, she paused again, musing that the manager's tact for misnaming might extend to her neighbor. She walked forward and knocked on the door, more gently than her usual rapping, and called out, "Ms Bailey? It's your new neighbor," hoping that the length of Ms. Bailey's stay had given the manager enough time to learn her name properly. Nicole was just on the verge of leaving when the door suddenly swung in, silently. Nicole was startled, she hadn't heard anything from within prior to the door opening.    Maxine Bailey looked up at Nicole's smooth features with pity. "Has it started then?" she asked knowingly.    "Actually, no, nothing at all has happened... but I was wondering if you could tell me how you know its haunted?"

   Maxine sighed and shook her head sadly, and gestured for Nicole to come into her apartment.    "Tea?"    "Thank you."    Maxine moved in precisely the way Nicole did not: slow, measured, as if she had the entire sequence of movements mapped out and her actions followed behind on an timed, measured schedule. She handed Nicole a glass of tea from slightly shaking hands, and made her way to a comfortable sitting chair across the room. Nicole sat lightly on a couch at right angles with the chair, and had finished about a quarter of her tea before Maxine had settled into place. The living room was sparse, much more so than would typically be expected of an older woman. The walls were completely blank, save one framed art piece on the far wall. Besides the couch and chair, the rest of the furniture was made up by two small tables and what looked like a writing desk. Silence hung in the air between them, but Nicole tried to stop herself from being fidgety, and sipped at her tea while Maxine slowly measured out two teaspoons of sugar into her own, and stirred it until satisfied. She took a sip, and leaned back and closed her eyes.

   When she started speaking, her words were monotone and emotionless; it was a story she had told before but hated to tell, she remained as removed from it as possible.    "I moved to the city in '25. Keep in mind that was unorthodox in those days, even though I was almost thirty at the time. I'd just come out of the divorce with John. I was so terribly lonely that year... I never went out. But that winter, in January of '26, Irene moved in across the hall. She was so wonderful; an artist, you see. She made such beautiful paintings..." Nicole glanced at the painting on the far wall, and Maxine nodded.

   "You see, I wasn't such a cranky old bitch back then." A flash of a smile, then again stoic. "The day after she moved in I was at her doorstep with a little plate of cookies. When she opened the door, I was shocked. She was wearing nothing but a long smock, tied behind her, and it was completely covered in paints of all different colors, muddy as a riverbed. And her apartment... she had no furniture at all, nothing! Just huge pieces of tarp draped on walls, covering the floor. Open paint cans littering the space, like you'd have to tiptoe and jump to get around them all. And the paintings, spread around on the tarps, each unfinished, as if she were spinning and dancing from piece to piece, a stroke here, a dab there. Her face exuded a feral fierceness, that slowly drained away as she calmed herself and looked to the plate of cookies. She smiled, a full body encompassing smile, and thanked me while taking the plate. Suddenly I felt so foolish, like I was an old woman, a married, stay-home mother bringing cookies next door to find a free spirit of twenty moving like a thunderstorm. But there was no condescending look in her eyes as she smiled and none in her voice as she thanked me, 'I'd have you in but clearly there's nowhere to sit!' I flustered for a moment before inviting her to my apartment for tea later on, when she wasn't so busy. 'Oh, I'm always painting dear,' she laughed, 'but I promise you I'll be over, you make fantastic tea, I can tell already!' I didn't know what to make of that, but as she closed the door left me standing bewildered in the hallway, I really hoped she'd keep her word."

   Nicole finished the last sip of her tea, and thought about mentioning that Maxine's tea-making skill had not degraded over the years, but something told her it wasn't necessary. She placed the cup on the table. "Well I sat in my apartment that night feeling foolish yet again. She was everything I was not. She'd be leaving her apartment at ten in a flapper dress for the speakeasies, to dance away the night. But she didn't. Just as I was getting ready to turn in, there was a gentle knock at the door. When I opened it, there she was, changed into a tight-knit sweater and slacks. I wondered if she'd done that to make me feel more comfortable. She went immediately for an embrace. I hugged her back, awkwardly, as she said 'Thank you so much for the cookies darling, they were absolutely wonderful, I've scarfed down half just this afternoon.'

   I set the kettle to boil, and came back to find her examining every facet of the living room. I just stood there in the entrance to the kitchen watching her. She flitted like a butterfly, her fingers tracing every surface, caressing the edge of the dresser, examining the knots and grain in the wood. It occurred to me that I didn't even know her name.

   'Irene dear, and I never caught yours," she laughed, still looking at the paint chips in the wall, the material on the arm of the couch. I stammered out my name as smoothly as I could manage. As I stood in silence, thinking of what to say, I was saved by the whistle of the kettle behind me. I prepared the cups, steep, sugar, milk. When I re-entered the living room she was sitting on the couch, running her hands through her jet-black hair that extended to her lower back. She had washed her hands before coming by, but I could see specks of paint interspersed in her hair.

   We sipped our tea. 'Marvelous, just as I knew it would be!' She looked so at home on my couch. As I struggled again for words, she laughed again, 'Yes of course, how I got into painting?' I nodded. 'My mother died in childbirth and I never saw my father, always working- a broker you see. I was always with a nanny but she would sleep on the couch all day. So I learned how to entertain myself. I played music, too. But when I left home for the city, I realized that trumpet practicing wouldn't endear any neighbors. So I stuck to art. And I guess it worked out; I've been getting commissions, and I was able to afford No. 11 over there.'

   The more we talked, the more I expected her to get bored and take her leave. But she never did, she always had another story to tell, and I let her talk because soon I was laughing and fetching us wine. We became the best of friends. Almost every night she came by. Sometimes she'd let me watch her paint. That was joyous..."

   Maxine trailed off, glancing first out the now darkened window and then to the clock on the wall. She gathered her breath and skipped forward.

   "You could tell she was married to her work. There was a dark side of her, that would emerge whenever she felt she'd lost her inspiration, or when several months went by without a commission. Some days she'd knock on my door, tears in her eyes, and I'd just sit her down on the couch and hold her. It became clear to me just how fragile she was in her youth. On the days she wouldn't knock at all, I worried for her. And then came the crash. Oh, oh it was horrible dear. At first we were in shock. As the weeks went by we truly realized what had happened. It was over for her. She knew in her heart that there would be no more commissions. I knew it too, though I tried to convince her otherwise. I was lucky, I had substantial savings stored outside of the banks. Family. She had nothing. That winter she was under threat of eviction. I convinced her, against heavy protest, to allow me to commission a piece from her. I forced a price much higher than she'd allow; I knew I had the money for that at least."

   Nicole's eyes shot to the painting across the room. She examined it more closely. She could see the love and pain weaved into the lines. She almost knew what was coming next.

   "One day, just... any other day, I knocked on her door and she didn't answer. I knew she was there, I'd seen her come in. But there was nothing. She always answered the door. She always knew it was me. Even on her worst days she'd open the door and shake her head, and I'd hug her and hand her some hot tea before returning to my room to worry for her. But that day, she didn't answer. I swallowed. I had a key, she had given me one months ago to watch her place while she traveled out of town to visit a potential client. I brought it from my cabinet and slid it in the door. I don't know how, but I didn't at all expect what I found. I... I don't know what I expected. Part of me knew it would be empty; that she had come in, but gone back out without my knowledge. Or that she'd be passed out asleep on the mattress in the corner.

But she, she was just hanging there-"

Nicole jumped up, startling Maxine.

   "Shh, I've heard enough" She murmured, reaching over to touch Maxine's arm. She recoiled, then allowed the contact.

   "The painting was there, next to her on the easel. I don't know if it was finished or not, but it was the only piece in the room. There was no note... or, that was it.

   I've replaced everything in this damn apartment, everything she touched and left her soul on. I couldn't bear it. But I couldn't throw out that painting, no matter how much it pains me. I just couldn't."

   "I understand." Nicole said quietly.

   Maxine was silent. Nicole understood, implicitly, that it was time for to leave. She could get her answers later. She quietly picked up the teacups, carrying them to the sink in the kitchen, and returned to apartment No. 11.

   It looked different somehow. Bigger. Emptier. She could see in her mind's eye the tarps and paintings laid out around the living room, the mattress in the corner. And in a flash, she could see a body hanging in front of her, lifeless. She screamed out sharply, and the image was gone. She stood, shaking, breathing heavily. As she fell to sleep that night, she found herself crying.

                       * * * *

   The next day, Nicole had to resist every muscle urging her to return to Maxine's apartment to learn more. She wanted to give her space. The image of Irene hanging from the rafters had seared itself in her mind, and whether it was just her imagination, or whether she somehow glimpsed the view that greeted Maxine those years ago, what Maxine went through must have been excruciatingly horrifying.

   While she waited, she spent more time exploring the apartment. She knew there must have been occupants between Irene and herself, but upon careful inspection, she could still clearly see the signs of her presence: flecks of paint under the windowsill, a faint circular mark in the wood floors the size of a paint can.

   Then she found the paintbrush. Stuck to the bottom corner of the cabinet under the sink, caked there with dry paint. Lilac. She reached out and as her fingers touched the brush handle, she could clearly see Irene, on her knees, hunched precisely where Nicole was, placing the brush there. Why would she do that? Nicole sat back down in the living room, holding the brush. She was overcome with the perverse desire to paint something with it. To generate a connection with Irene. The room felt cold. Goosebumps appeared on Nicole's arms. Inexplicably, she new she needed to speak to Maxine immediately. There was a hard knot in the pit of her stomach.  

   "So has it started then?" Maxine handed her a cup of tea. "The visions?"

   "I... I think so. Maybe. Or maybe it's just my imagination. How, how do you know she's still there? You went through so much, isn't it possible that you..."

   "Are imagining it? Yes, the thought crossed my mind initially. But you see, I don't think I could imagine two other tenants dying in that godawful place."

   Nicole reeled internally. Her stomach tightened up painfully. "Th.. Three people have died in that apartment?"

Maxine was silent.

   "I still see her you know. From time to time. It's the painting, I know it. I got rid of everything else but the painting. But she's attached to it... sometimes I can feel her here with me. She's so hurt, so angry... but the connection isn't strong enough in this room. In No. 11, though..." she trailed off.

   "What... what happened to them?" She tried to drink her tea but her stomach couldn't handle it. "The apartment was empty for a year after Irene died. But the manager at the time got over it; he needed the rent. A young man moved in, John was his name. Straight fellow, no riffraff. I don't know what he did for work, but he always came home at seven o'clock P.M. looking a bit haggard and tired. I had him over for tea once or twice but honestly he was such a bore, I stopped asking. I had told him about Irene the first day, of what happened to her. He took it gravely, but neither of us believed in ghosts. One day, I was out in the hall and he came out of his apartment looking so chipper that I had to ask him what had happened. A girl. I remember thinking that he'd be gone in a few months, off to the suburbs with a new wife.

   Well, a few weeks later he knocked at my door. The fool was so love struck his eyes could barely focus. I'd never seen a man so enamored. He was holding a plate of cookies. That's how I knew. Nicole, I tell you, they were the same damn cookies I had brought Irene the day I met her. I didn't have to taste them, but doing so only confirmed my suspicions. I sat him down, lord, I wanted to slap some sense into him. I asked him about his new girlfriend. 'Fiance,' he corrected me, 'I asked her yesterday!' I tried to hide my horror. Did he even know she wasn't real? What cruel games was she playing on him? He went on and on about her jet-black hair and her olive skin, and the slight tinge of Italian in her dialect. I told him to wait, I left him there in my apartment and walked across to his; he'd left it unlocked. The room was silent. Empty. Not a whisper. I cried out to her to stop, I told her I loved her, that she didn't need to be cruel. There was no response. Nothing.

   I knew trying to convince him to leave was useless. But I didn't think..." Her voice shook, really shook, for the first time, and Nicole reached out to take her hand.

   "I was out when he shot himself. Revolver. He, he actually left me a note. Told me not to worry, that he'd joined his love, that all was well. Lord, I cried for days. I couldn't bear what Irene had done. I was angry, I wanted to hate her, but I couldn't. I just couldn't."

   "She drove another girl to suicide. Pretended to be her conscience. Convinced her she was a horrible person, that she needed to pay. Overdose. I had warned the girl against renting here, same as I did you. She didn't listen. No one listens." Her voice cracked, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

   "I could leave! What if I left tomorrow?" Nicole knew it was a lie, but she felt terrible seeing the woman so hurt.

   "It's too late dear." She placed a hand on Nicole's cheek gently. "She wouldn't let you go."

   "I, I found something..." Nicole murmured, pulling the brush from her pocket.

   Maxine recoiled, slapping Nicole before she could react. "OUT OF HERE! GET IT OUT OF HERE!" she shrieked, falling back into the armchair cowering. Nicole cried out, "I'm so sorry!" Her cheek smarted, she backed quickly out of the apartment and burst into her own, slamming the door behind her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, she leaned back against the door and slid down until she was sitting on the ground, hugging her knees, gripping the paintbrush in her hand.

   She opened her eyes, and rubbing out the tears, slammed her head back in shock. Sitting calmly across from her was Irene. Legs crossed, on the ground, like they'd been sharing a simple conversation. There was a hint of a smile on her face.

   "So I guess you know my story now." She spoke calmly, and Nicole new the words were somehow directly in her head. Like thoughts, but not her own. She recoiled from the cold, alien contact. Irene's lips continued to move, silently. "You know, that's a necessary ingredient, the story. I can't actually appear to you if you don't already know what happened here. If the old witch stopped telling people, I'd be out of a job." She laughed sharply.

   Nicole felt cold, but there was a fierce joy in this. She glanced down at the hairs on her arms standing on end, and flicked the paintbrush between her fingers. She felt a resolve come over her.

   "So what's it going to be? Make me fall in love with you? Low brow trickery?"

   Irene laughed. "No, none of that is needed with you. You won't go anywhere. You know who I am. What I am. You know what I'm going to do. There's no tricks here, darling." The words swished in Nicole's subconscious. They held power and purpose.

   "You're not a very scary ghost."

   Her dad would be proud. Staring down from his huge office chair. "And what's the first rule of a business meeting?" "Convince your opposition that you are more prepared than them." "That's exactly right."

   Irene simply laughed. "Oh, oh very good! I've been so looking forward to this! I can look and do as I please, darling, but that won't be needed with you."

   A cold breeze swirled around the two women, although the air in the room was still. Irene suddenly felt pain in her hand, she could feel the paintbrush digging into her skin, branding her. She cried out and dropped it, sending it clattering to the floor where it rattled and settled. When she looked up, Irene was gone.

                        * * * *

   Naturally, nothing happened for a week, then two, three. Nicole stewed in her own paranoia, her imagination ripe with scenario after scenario detailing her forthcoming demise. Sitting in her living room, suddenly she was a girl again, the cold, black ocean swirling around her ankles, pulling her in, sucking her relentlessly out to see, her cries drowned in seawater, the darkness blinding until the fierce grip of her fathers forearm around her slender torso pulled her free. And then she forgot.

   It had been a particularly rough day at work. Nicole had trudged tiredly out of the subway and bundled her jacket around her. The leaves had long since fallen and made their swirling rounds through the streets and sidewalks; now a frosty, biting breeze served as the precursor to an avalanche of snow. The stairs in her building seemed intimidating; she paused in the foyer and glanced at her reflection in the smudged brass plating on one of the paneled walls. Gathering what remaining energy she had, Nicole made her way up the stairs, past old Maxine's door, Maxine whom she hadn't seen in months. She fumbled for her key, and numbly missed the keyhole sending the key clattering to the wood below. She stooped to pick it up, blew into her hands to warm them, and tried again.

   Nicole screamed. Piercing, sickeningly. It brought Maxine out of her apartment; she touched Nicole's shoulder, Nicole couldn't feel it, didn't register it. The blood had drained from her face, leaving it cold and clammy. There was a tremor in her hand, soon her entire body was shaking uncontrollably. Maxine forcibly spun her around and took her shaking body into her arms, trying desperately to calm Nicole down, peering questioningly into the obviously empty apartment in front of them. Eventually the tremors faded, the tear streaks on her face leaving mirror copies on Maxine's gown.    "What is it, child?" Maxine whispered, somehow knowing where the answer lay.    Nicole pressed her lips together, held her breath, and turned back to face the apartment.

   Her own body hung naked and lifeless from the rafters. The stench of death battled Nicole's resolve to hold her breath, as she slowly steeled herself and approached the limp body. Her eyes were open, dead, staring lifelessly at Nicole, who stared back morbidly. She hung with her feet dangling almost a foot off the ground; leaving her torso and pale breasts at Nicole's eye level. Nicole reached out, already expecting her hand to slide through the sick joke, the ghostly apparition. But her hand collided with the body with a dull thud, setting her naked form swinging back, the cold of her skin imprinted on Nicole's fingers. She let out her breath in abject shock and then sucked it back in as her dead body swung back towards her. She broke, sprinted for the kitchen, and vomited on the counter and into the sink.

   She re-entered the living room, eyes avoiding the corpse, and saw Maxine standing in the doorway, as ever refusing to cross into the apartment. She wiped at her mouth, "So I guess that's how she thinks she'll get me." Maxine looked back at her, a mixture of confusion and pity in her eyes: "Sweetheart... there's, there's nothing there." Nicole's face contorted into an ugly mix of pain and anger. "Of course it is! Look, LOOK at it! It's right there! Listen! LISTEN!" She reached out and slapped her hanging body in the side, the dull smack reverberating through the apartment, her body again swinging. Maxine was shaking her head, "I... Nicole calm down I don't see anything... I don't hear anything besides you, you need to breathe you need to-" She was cut off as Nicole strode forward, grabbing Maxine's forearm tightly and forcibly yanking her into the apartment, screaming over her protests and dragging her over her struggles to escape. She pushed Maxine's hand onto the body, Maxine's clenched fist pushed against Nicole's thigh in the center of the room, as Maxine looked away, crying feebly. "Feel it!" Nicole snarled over the whimpering. "Stop.. please stop... stop.. you're hurting me please, please, there's nothing there, stop holding me, please.... please..." Nicole threw down Maxine's arm viciously, and Maxine escaped to her own room, slamming the door. Nicole could hear sobs coming from across the hall. And then she started crying. Staggering across the room, she collapsed onto her sofa, curled tightly into a ball, and clenched her eyes.

                       * * * *

   She woke to find her body still hanging lifelessly in the center of the room. Irene was sitting at the other end of the couch, legs crossed demurely. "Such a terrible sight..." she murmured.

   "What the fuck is wrong with you!?" Nicole spat as she leaped impulsively toward the ghost. Surprisingly her hand made contact, the slap rattling her wrist. Irene raised her hand to her face in surprise, and momentarily her mouth twisted into a cruel smirk before returning to tight-lipped concern.

   "I think you should be asking yourself the same question, darling. Battering an old woman like that." Nicole clenched her teeth but said nothing. "You have to understand, you were the easiest of all. That," she referenced the body, "is you. In the future. You don't have any say in the matter. In fact, had you never met me, had I never shown you this, the result would be the same. I'm not bound by a linear time progression like you. I can pluck things from the past, from the future. I know things, darling, things you could never know. I know where your mother went!"

   Nicole started in confusion. "My mother... where is my mother?"

Irene simply laughed gently, "with the fishes my dear."

And then she was gone.

   Nicole circumnavigated the obstacle in the living room to retrieve the sturdiest kitchen knife she could find, and climbing up onto a chair she sawed through the rope tied to the rafters. Her body fell to the floor with a thud. She had no idea what to do with it. She dragged it into the bathroom and into the tub, and left it there. As long as she didn't have to stare at it...

   But when she re-entered the living room, her body was hanging silently. A wave of nausea and dejection swept over her. She turned off the light.

                    * * * *

Slowly drifting, In darkness and emptiness, Despair grown monotonous, Pain turned dull, Eyes open but unseeing, Lifelessly moving from station to station, With infinite patience, With gnawing nausea, roiling in the pit of her stomach, With the same clothes worn the day before, The week before, The smell of death, Always so abstract, The tingling tightening of her throat, Always so distant, The ropes tightening around, Always so inevitable, Like the stress of a knock at the door, Unanswered, Like the weight of responsibilities, Breathing, Eating, Drinking, Stress.

                       * * * *

Death is not fear.

Fear is knowing you don't have a choice.

Depression is the realization that you've already made it.

Life is the illusion that resisting is the noble alternative.

Death... death is the end of the emptiness.

                     * * * *

   Irene had been gone for months. The body had disappeared weeks before. Nicole had since been fired from her job, but had endeavored to find a new one. Her first day had been promising. She was eating again, and there were small, subtle signs that flesh was returning to her fragile frame. She had defeated the demons that had plagued her since childhood. She had rid the apartment, truly rid it, of anything related to Irene. As she closed the door to Maxine's apartment, savoring the taste of tea on her tongue, there was a touch of a smile on her face.

   She opened the door to Apartment No. 3. It was exactly how it had always been. Light, streaming in through the windows, lighting the particles of dust floating lazily through the still air. The sofa, almost but not quite comfortable enough to sleep on. The tiny kitchen, refrigerator stocked with vegetables and fruit. Books, strewn lovingly across the dining table, a spare chair, the floor, the couch, and, as she knew, her bed in the adjoining room. And hanging from the rafters, a single rope, looped around its end.

   Nicole felt nothing, nothing at all. Her book bag slipped slowly off her shoulder, and she let it hit the ground with a soft thud. Her eyes were locked on the empty noose. Synapse after synapse snapped, disconnecting her completely from herself. The last demon is always, always the dead, silence of emptiness. Dull. Her fingers worked slowly, unbuttoning her blouse, sliding her skirt to the floor. Reaching behind her she un-clipped her bra in one well-practiced flick.

   She pulled a chair out from the dining room table, letting books slide off the seat to the wood floor below. Some landed neatly on their covers, some on their spine, splaying the stories open. Looking to her left hand, she realized she was still holding Maxine's teacup. For the first time, she glanced away from the noose and to her front door, left wide open, and across the hall to Maxine's. She placed the cup gently on the dining room table. She then stepped up onto the chair, fixing the rope to her neck. It was comfortable. Safe. Familiar. Familiar as the weightless step that followed.  

                     * * * *

[lcdm]

Cold Mangoes and a Coveted Air-Con

--May, 2016

Twilight in Karachi hits at around 1PM. Load shedding is the city’s only recourse against a power grid overextended, its dying limbs branching in haphazard directions like the delusional workings of a drunk spider. From the shanty towns built into the dirt fields along the roads, homemade power lines thrown over the mains dangle in the dusty breeze, wrapped precariously around the wooden sticks holding up the fragile structures, the stolen electricity powering small radios and lights.

Like clockwork, the city cycles power to one major sector of the city at a time, leaving the rest to swelter. But even within your scheduled hours of electricity, the power drops anyway, the dying hum of the electronics mirroring the helpless sigh of anyone relying on them.

That halfway point, between life and death, lives in those early hours of the afternoon. The concrete houses have few windows or ventilation, leaving the insides gloomy and cave-like in the absence of electric lighting. When the power goes, so does life. The only sound in the house is the single, weak standing fan in the living room, sputtering on the lifeblood of a small battery that charges whenever the power is on. Everyone crowds into the living room, draping themselves awkwardly onto whatever piece of furniture puts them closest to the fan. They wait, eyes half closed, not quite asleep or awake, for the power to return. It’s a place that requires a level of patience I don’t quite have.

Karachi is the fifth most populated city in the world. It is a statistic manifested to me in drives from one part of the city to another that seem to stretch endlessly in time. The drive from home to my Opa’s college: 45 minutes. From home to my new aunt’s house in Defence: 1 hour 25 minutes. To the consulate: 30 minutes, without traffic. All within the sprawling city, without any concept of a suburb and little of what we would call an expressway.

“Abeh Chahl!” My uncle would call from the garage as  I hastened to put on my sandals and snag the coveted shotgun seat before my cousins could. AC vents are a precious commodity in this place. My uncle honks the horn, and finally five, or six, or seven people pile into the small sedan.  

Saleem was my outlet into the city, a precious escape from the boredom of oppressive silence sitting at home. On some days, he would take me to his work at the consulate, flinging the decade-old stick shift Honda Civic around corners honking furiously in the terrifying chaos of Karachi’s streets. Every moment feels a hair’s breadth away from a massive crash, yet I never feel unsafe in his hands.

On the dusty corner between the narrow road of our house and the main street, a man gives haircuts for a few rupees. He has only one or two teeth left, and his hair is matted against his dark forehead. The front of his Shalwar Kamiz is covered in long, dark stains. His store is four long pieces of driftwood, thrust into the sand and draped over with a large cloth; his clients sit on an abandoned chunk of concrete, bent and angled rebar protruding from either side.

“Meri Beta, we’ll stop and get your haircut on the way back,” my uncle would tease from the driver’s seat. Sitting next to him and adjusting the AC vents, I would look away from the man nervously, ignoring his long razor blade that somehow looked rusted though I couldn’t possibly see from so far away. But then I would look back again, unable to ignore the strangeness of it, repulsed and drawn in, fascinated and afraid. The street corner was shared with an old pick-up truck, army green, mounted with a machine gun and men with assault rifles. Keeping the peace.

Along the edges of the road, donkeys (‘Dhunkies’, my Opa would pronounce) pull carts of fresh fruit next to their peddlers. With seemingly reckless abandon my uncle would veer to the side of the road upon spying something of interest, hopping out to negotiate with the seller, searching for the choicest fruit. I would stay in the car, intimidated by the swarms of flies crawling over everything. There is a certain resignation in the people on the streets; they let the flies land on them, crawl across their faces and eyelids without so much as a bat or blink, hands calm at their sides where mine would twitch to shoo them off of me. It was a battle lost long ago for them.

My uncle would climb satisfied back into the car and hand me a bag of mangoes with which to make Lassi later. I would immediately start salivating. I have never eaten a mango like a Pakistani mango. Once, my family tried to smuggle Pakistani mangoes past US customs by shipping them through Canada and then across the border to Seattle by car. They were caught, and likely ended up promptly in the bellies of the customs officers. Who could resist?

After several stops—meat from the butcher, naan from the street vendors, gulab jamen and other desserts from the bakers—we would return home and deposit our treasures to the cook in the kitchen. Rahim was a friendly man, who spoke a dialect of Urdu I couldn’t understand in the faintest, but who still managed to teach me how to properly load a shish kabob for grilling.

And so the laze of the afternoon would set in. In Karachi, extended families tend to live together; in mine, uncles, aunts, grandparents and great aunts all share a roof. Yet in sitting together in the darkened living room, too hot and too tired to talk, the family feels closer than my mother and I ever were, in the cool suburbs of California.

Then comes call of the azaan, the blended layering of voices from all the nearby masjids calling the people to pray.  We-- the men in the house-- would walk to the nearest mosque, sand slipping into our sandals as we weaved through the homes in the neighborhood toward the masjid across the main street. We moved like flies drawn to a light bulb, glancing to the left and right to see other prayer goers slowly closing in on the mosque from all directions.

Leaving our sandals among the hundreds stacked outside the masjid we would step inside to the alcove with showerheads pumping water into sinks to wash our hands and feet, then take our place on the mats. It’s a long half hour of sermon, most of which I don’t understand: a phrase here, a word there. Some people have already begun praying. I glance at my watch, try to predict the time of the prayer, glance at my cousins and wonder if they are more or less bored than I am. And then we pray, low rumbling murmurs from the people around us, light and dark, all sweating through their shalwar kamiz, standing and kneeling shoulder to shoulder.

When we return home, the house is infused with the smells of sizzling meat and copious spices. The sun is starting to set, the city is coming alive, slowly, moment by moment. If it is Ramadan, we are starving, and lock ourselves in our rooms to avoid the smells until the urdu news broadcaster on the TV breaks from his script to call “Sundown!” and the family emerges person by person to quench their thirst on fresh cold mango lassi and dig into spicy kabobs and garlic naan.

After sunset, the city comes alive, degree by degree as the world cools off. We drive to Clifton, where the sand of the desert becomes wet under the lapping waves of the sea, and a salty breeze fills our lungs.  My uncle points to the camels walking the beach offering rides.  “Who wants a go?” he asks, his booming voice projecting across the beach as my cousins and I groan and his two small children giggle in delight. We drive to brand new malls where hip young Pakistanis walk in jeans and designer shirts, and the power stays on through the outages and the smell of the diesel generators is well hidden away. We drive, windows down, weaving through the traffic, the low honks of the buses and trucks blending into the whiny beeps of the cars as all careen through intersections with no regard for the traffic lights so naively hung there and wedding plazas fling bhangra music into the warm summer night air.   

In Karachi the buses have no destination. Or at least, I don’t know where they go. They have no marquee to inform you of their route. Instead, the buses are adorned, saturated with rainbows of colored paint, streamers and tassels and jingling chains, all attached with haphazard abandon to any open corner or jutting protrusion. It is horror vacui with a flair for the flamboyant.

There are no bus stops in Karachi; people jump frantically onboard from the dusty streets, clutching at the doorways as the buses careen around corners without slowing down. When the buses are full, kurta-clad prayer-goers climb the window bars and sit crowded on the roof. If anyone is paying for these rides, I haven’t seen it, face pressed to the window as my uncle overtakes the buses, weaving deftly through the traffic and the dust. As a large truck comes lumbering up the centerline of the wrong side of the road, I wonder how anything actually gets done in this place; but still it breathes and coughs its dusty coughs and the Azaan rings out in the morning and the people go to pray.

[lcdm]

Ditch

Mission Commander Rayleigh opened his eyes and yanked the IV from his arm. Unbuckling the straps across his torso, he turned to his companion, still groggily blinking in the darkness. The computer beeped a confirmation of their survival, streaming the information back through the wormhole as it engaged the autopilot. The two astronauts felt the ship accelerate as it arced gently through predefined coordinates, sending the blinding light of a new sun streaming into the cockpit, throwing crazily dancing shadows onto the panels of dimly lit buttons and indicators and the two men sitting silently beneath them. They had slept only an hour, but the techs had decided that the chance of catastrophic failure during the wormhole transit was high enough that the two should at least be given the courtesy to die in their sleep.

“So we made it, then.”

Commander Rayleigh turned as Mission Specialist August Burnell broke the silence. Sighing quietly, Rayleigh floated upward, crouched against the low ceiling, and pushed off gingerly toward the cockpit. As he strapped into the captain’s chair, Burnell drifted forward and took his seat next to him. The computer whirred happily at this development, and compiled a vital-signs report of the two men to beam back across the space-time divide.

Burnell stared through the windshield at the small blue marble hanging still in the emptiness before them. Rayleigh examined the engine outputs on the console screens.

“Come on,” Burnell reached over and patted his commander on the shoulder. “You’re the first human being to travel through a wormhole, to step onto an extrasolar planet. You didn’t have a speech planned or something?” Rayleigh pursed his lips.

“We haven’t landed yet,” he replied.

Burnell crossed his arms. Rayleigh glanced at him but didn’t say anything. After tapping a few course adjustments into the console, he spun the chair around and unbuckled, floating up off the seat. “Come on, we need to start checking out the life support systems on the lander. We have no idea what it went through while we were unconscious.”

“Are you seeing this?” Burnell turned to Rayleigh expecting the same look of defeat that had accompanied him the past week, but was surprised to see a kindred twinkle in his eye. Stretching before them, the planet dubbed KOI-2325.12 filled nearly the entire field of view. As the ship slid smoothly into orbit, the two astronauts could just make out the curvature of the planet near the periphery of their windshield. The star, dubbed Sol-2, had just risen over the forward horizon, painting the ocean passing beneath them a crystalline blue.

Wisps of cloud cover were sprinkled through the paper-thin atmosphere. As the ship passed onto first landmass, the two men sat up in their seats, peering down the front window over their instruments and feeling the indescribable excitement and neck-tingling fear at seeing a completely unrecognizable coastline. Swaths of green and brown rose off the surface like thick paint on an artist’s canvas, reflecting off the eyes of the two astronauts above.

“It’s beautiful,” Burnell said.

“For now,” Rayleigh muttered quietly, quietly enough he half-hoped Burnell hadn’t heard him. He heard Burnell sigh to his right. Rayleigh let the silence hang and eventually, Burnell broke.

        “What’s been eating you?” he asked.

The commander fumbled, then shrugged.

        “It doesn’t matter,” he replied.

Burnell laughed quietly, a short, curt laugh.

        “Sir, with respect, you are in command of this mission and if something is bothering you, something that would affect the outcome of this mission, I think we’d better talk about it.”

Rayleigh stared ahead for the better part of a minute, tapping his fingers lightly on his thigh.

“We are… single-minded,” he began slowly.  “We fight, and we take what we want. Resources. Each other. Religion and slavery and trade wars. Where did it get us? The oil ran out. And we have miles upon miles of concrete barracks with nothing but nuclear waste. And it’s leaking. Where are the forests, August? Or do you not remember why we’re here?” Burnell swallowed.

“They’re running out of fuel. They’re running out of food.” Tapping into the console, he pulled up the ship’s external camera footage from the beginning of the mission, as the Earth slipped away into the distance. Spinning the screen toward Burnell, he continued, “Look at that. You’re asking why this planet is so beautiful? Here’s your answer.”

Burnell turned away from the footage of earth, grey and cold on the screen, choosing to take in the saturated planet below instead. The image was surreal, imprinting itself on his eyes after he closed them.

“You know what you and I are, August? We’re a big toe.”

“Sorry, a what?”

        “A big toe. We are being dipped in to check the water, and the moment we land on this planet and suck in a breath of air, this computer here,” he hit the console, “will be sending back the signal for mankind to follow. We’ve used up the earth from the inside out, and now we’re spreading across the cosmos like a virus.”

He looked down at the crisscross of rivers below. “This place won’t last a hundred years of us.”

Burnell furrowed his brow.

“Is that so wrong? To survive?”

Rayleigh was silent for a moment, then sighed and closed his eyes.

        “Fine, then drop the drones,” Rayleigh said.

        “I’m sorry?”

“You heard me. Drop the drones. That’s the mission, right? Do it, because I won’t.”

        Burnell impulsively reached out and flipped up the covers for the drone releases, but hesitated over the buttons. He looked out again toward the horizon of the planet, the edge of its seemingly razor thin atmosphere. It seemed at once immensely powerful and infinitely fragile. He could see in his mind’s eye the drones dropping out from the belly of the spacecraft, plummeting through the atmosphere, unfolding their wings after re-entry and propelling themselves over the surface taking readings until they crash-landed into the surface. From his left he heard a quiet murmur from Rayleigh,

        “Once we pull the trigger, we can’t stop any of this. As soon as they know that it’s habitable, there’s nothing that will stop them from following us through.” He slowly wrung his hands together, clenching and unclenching as he talked, “I look down there and to me, that planet is alive. I won’t have the blood on my hands for killing it.” Burnell pulled his hand back from the drone release.

“I can’t believe you have me anthropomorphizing a rock,” he muttered as he flicked the covers back down over the buttons and swiveled his seat around. “I’m going to do a system check,” he said, pushing off and floating back into the bowels of the ship. Rayleigh gave no indication that he heard.

Burnell passed the two bolted down cots where he and Rayleigh slept, and then made a ninety degree turn, pulling himself up into the chamber where the lander was stored. He laughed quietly with a mix of irony and disappointment as he realized the lander, which took ten years to design and produced three PhD’s would never be used. Squeezing behind the lander, he arrived at the one view port on the ship that faced backwards, used originally for docking with the space station in Earth’s orbit. His breath fogged the glass as he looked into the inky blackness of space, trying to pick out the wormhole, though it was an impossible task.

Somewhere though, lurked the wormhole they had come through, and beyond it, Earth. Home. He wondered whether he could call it home anymore. The majority of his time had been spent on jumpships between orbital and lunar stations. At the very least, he had been born on Earth. More and more, people were having children on the stations. He hated that. He may have grown up on an industrial project, but at least there was a patch of grass within biking distance, which, for a five year old, was enough. He heard Rayleigh’s voice over the comms and pushed a button panel next to him to open the line.

“Commander, I have a question,” he said before Rayleigh had a chance to speak further.

“Yeah?” The reply came through the static, slightly bristling. 


“Was this your plan all along then, if we came through and found something habitable? To convince me we should preserve it and lie about what we found?” There was a pause, then

“No.”


Burnell didn’t believe it, but he continued anyway.

“And we don’t have enough fuel to get back. Right?”

“Right.”

“So, if we can’t go down there, and we can’t go back, what do we do?”

There was only silence and static at the end of the line. After about fifteen seconds, he tapped the comms line again and said, “Commander? Are you there?”

“August.”
Burnell spun around to see Rayleigh floating in the entryway to the lander bay behind him. Removed of the pseudo anonymity of the comm­line, he shrunk slightly behind the lander.

“August,” Rayleigh began again. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I'm just telling you how I feel. What I’m willing to do and what I’m not. If you want to continue the mission as planned, I won’t stop you.” He took a deep breath. “ I’m tired, August. More than anything, that.”

Before Burnell could respond Rayleigh pushed off and shot out of the frame of the hatch, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He looked back out the window, this time feeling distant, disturbed that he couldn’t really recall much of Earth, when he thought about it. He eyed the lander. A part of his mind twitched towards it, he imagined himself jumping in and abandoning the ship, taking his chances on the planet below. He knew he wouldn’t do it, and he wondered where his sense of self-preservation had gone.

Slowly, Burnell pulled himself from behind the lander and made his way back to the bridge. He slid into his seat next to Rayleigh and looked at him askance.

“So, what now then?”

The words hung in the air, floating alongside the systems notebooks and other various items the two men had neglected to strap down in the previous days.

“I have a falsified report to send through.” Burnell nodded back uncomfortably as he looked it over.  The techs on earth would undoubtedly think the wormhole was barely traversable.  

“You know they have nowhere else to go, right?” Burnell asked. “Most everyone I know just wants to survive, to protect their families. What about those lives? Are they not worth saving?”  

“No.” replied Rayleigh bluntly. “No, because all those lives wouldn’t be coming here. It’s a first class ticket.” He paused. “Only the powerful will get the privilege of starting over on a brand new planet, and the first thing they’ll do is start bending it to fit their idea of luxury and comfort.” Rayleigh’s mouth had twisted into an ugly sneer.

“Alright, you’ve made your point,” Burnell said resignedly.

Rayleigh turned the screen toward Burnell, where the false report was ready to be sent.

“I’ve made up my mind,” he said. “I’ll let you make yours.”

Burnell stared at the screen for a moment, felt a pressure he didn’t much like, and reached out to press the confirmation button.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said.

Moving to the chamber behind the bridge, he pulled a space suit down from the ceiling where it was strapped.

“What are you doing?” Rayleigh called back.

“I’m not dying in this tin can.”


Rayleigh shrugged and overrode the computers, routing together the fuel systems and oxygen systems before unbuckling himself and floating back to help Burnell with his suit. When they were both suited up, Rayleigh turned to Burnell and asked,

“You ready to ditch?”

“Yeah.”
The two men entered the airlock and sealed the module, pressurized their suits, and then opened the panel to the void outside. Neglecting the harnesses and ropes on the wall, they pushed against the inner door and propelled themselves through the open hatch, away from the ship. Using each other for leverage, they spun themselves around to look back at the ship that had carried them a proper distance of 150 Megaparsecs. They didn’t have to wait long until the mix of oxygen and fuel blew the ship apart. It was a subdued explosion, a thump that shattered the hull and sent its parts flying slowly in all directions. The fire from within was extinguished immediately upon contact with the vacuum.

Burnell took the time to look around him, to take in the utter emptiness in all directions but down, where the planet seemed both infinitely close and immeasurably far away. He tapped his radio, talking through the static.

“Feels like we could just float down there.”

“Yeah.”
 The silence between them hung for several minutes, until Rayleigh radio’d in,  “You ready?”


Burnell took a deep breath. He wasn’t, at all, but he swallowed dryly and responded,

“Yeah, I think.”

“Do you want me to do both?”


Burnell shook his head, and then remembered that Rayleigh couldn’t see it. He dropped his sun visor as he replied,


“No, no I’ll do it.”

“Alright, just tell me when, then.”


Burnell tried to think about whatever it was he was supposed to, his childhood back on earth, his parents and siblings, his first job. He was finding it hard to remember. So he chose instead to look down at the planet spinning rapidly below. He had begun naming features as they came around: ‘horse­head bay’, ‘dagger’s point’, ‘New Alps’. He could get lost in the intricacies of the surface, as his eyes wandered through river valleys and mountain ranges, all flattened and fit together like a mosaic. He wondered what Rayleigh was thinking about. Probably nothing. Glancing over, he said,

“Alright. I’m ready.”

“On three?”
Rayleigh counted down, and the two men pulled the levers on their armbands that raised their suit visors, letting the void flow in and consume them.

*  *  *  *


On Earth, an old, weary scientist looked around the mission control center, now decrepit and falling apart. For the first year after transit, the room had been permanently manned as the world eagerly waited for news to reach them from the wormhole. In the second year, scientists were slotted to other missions and teams, with a small number remaining behind to look for any signs of survival. In the third year, calculations were done that demonstrated time dilation effects due to the wormhole’s instability could delay any transmissions passing through for twenty or even thirty years. The room was left alone, with computers ready to alert the scientists in the case of a transmission.

Sixty years had now passed. The mission had been declared a failure fifteen years prior, but no one had touched the receivers in the mission control room, with the vague, halfhearted hope something might come through. The scientist flipped the switches to turn off the lights, leaving nothing but the line of red dots on the wall, where the computers were still plugged in, still waiting for a signal. The building was being demolished in the morning.

Stepping out into the night, he pulled his breathing mask over his face as the fog rolled in under a brown stained, clouded sky. He walked away from the building, looking up, hoping for a glimpse at the stars. In a small break in the clouds, he saw a patch of black, maybe a single star, and the fast moving dot of light, one of the many small orbiting stations where those who could afford to lived. Climbing on an old bicycle, he rode toward the edge of the compound, where he would descend underground into the inverted concrete towers, safe from all the dangers on the surface.

--May, 2016