1.

Fourteen steep steps lead up to the second floor, where my apartment is. Every time I mount or descend these stairs I count them, sometimes aloud but usually to myself. I don’t mean to, any more than I mean to count the sidewalk cracks between the front door and the bus stop (eighty-one) or the number of bus shelters between my stop and the office building where I work (twenty-three). It takes approximately seventeen steps to cross the office lobby, and while this number may vary slightly, if the number turns out to be even I always work an extra little step in there to make it come out odd. Even numbers make me nervous.

If you’ve ever known anyone with this disorder — these days they call it a disorder, though in the old days they just called you plain old crazy — you’ve probably guessed that my desk is spotless and impeccably organized, every object in its proper place and accounted for. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t freak out if something’s been moved or if there are crumbs on the keyboard or anything. Sometimes one of my coworkers will rearrange everything, to try to get a rise out of me, but I always just calmly put it all back where it belongs. It’s a disorder, not a psychosis: I can deal with the fact that the world is not perfect, even if there’s a part of my brain that wishes to holy hell it was.

2.

That day had started out like every other. When I got home from work, I opened the front door of my apartment building and begin to mount the stairs, counting in my head as I did. Sometimes when I do this I get interrupted partway, like if a neighbor heading comes down in the opposite direction; for this reason I usually keep my head down and don’t say hello to any of them. Sometimes they insist on greeting me, and while this doesn’t really bother me, it does cause a little burst of static in my brain, a little mental hiccup if you will, and when that happens I have to go back to the bottom of the steps and start over. Usually though I just get over it and continue on my way after taking a moment to calculate what number stair I was on when I was interrupted. Like I say, it doesn’t really bother me all that much.

3.

On this particular day, as the toe of my shoe tapped the front of step three (I need to tap the front of every step before actually mounting it, it’s just another one of those things), I looked up to see a woman coming rather quickly down the stairs. She wore high heels which made this really irritating sound on the wood, like an army of click beetles ticking and scrabbling around inside a tackle box. I winced but recovered and smiled nervously at her. Her makeup was smeared across her face and there was a long gash across the front of her dress. Despite the cold weather she wasn’t wearing a coat or jacket, or much clothing at all for that matter. She didn’t return my smile or say anything, which was fine, except that I suddenly blanked on which stair I was on. Like I say, this is not usually a problem, and I looked up the stairs to count how many were left so I could subtract that number from fourteen and therefore arrive at the step I was on, which was three.

Just then, someone else appeared at the head of the stairs. A man.

“Tina!” he yelled. “Get your fat ass back here!”

He ran down the stairs, nearly slipping on a few, and when he passed me on stair three, he bumped my shoulder, almost knocking me off balance. He smelled of alcohol and something I couldn’t place. I didn’t have time to react before he was down the stairs and  out the door. Shaking my head, I continued on up, slowly. It had been a long day. Four, five, six, seven…

4.

I had one foot on the seventh step with the other hovering above the eighth when I heard a sound from above. I looked up. Over the edge of the top step appeared a hand. The fingers curled over the lip of the step and tensed up, then relaxed. Foregoing my usual tapping of the stair fronts (as well as the little double knock I give the banister every time I do so), I ran up nineteneleventwelvethirteenfourteen… and there before me was the body of a man that had pulled itself along the hallway, leaving the carpet stained dark behind it. I crossed myself, then tugged my earlobes one at a time.

The man looked up at me.

“Help me,” he croaked.

“I’ll call for help,” I said, but he shook his head. A bubble of blood grew from his open mouth and popped, spattering the tip of my shoe. He reached up to me but I didn’t want to touch his hand, which was the only part of him not covered in blood. I would have taken it but blood or no I was sure it was slathered in all kinds of germs, not that this is really a problem to me, really, I realize that germs are a part of everyday life and that really there’s nothing to be afraid of at least as far as germs are concerned, but then there was that part of my brain that while I was trying to decide whether or not to risk the germs and take his had was also thinking about that eighth step, that seventh step, that eighth step, and trying to remember if I’d actually set foot on the eighth step or had merely been just about to, and if I’d tapped the step or not and if so if I’d tapped it once or twice, since you know it has to be two taps for odd numbered steps and one for even numbered steps, to be accompanied by a coordinating knock or knocks on the banister, and when I say it’s really not vital that these actions be taken during the mounting or descending of a flight of stairs, when I say I don’t actually need to carry out these actions, when I say that things are fine even when the routine is interrupted, I guess what I actually mean to actually say is that when one loses count, when one gets off track as far as counting steps is concerned, well what I actually mean to actually say is that this is when things can really kind of go to hell if one isn’t careful.

5.

“Look, I’m calling the cops,” I said to the man, who didn’t seem to be listening. I ran back down to the seventh step and stood there, but then climbed back up one to the eighth (from the bottom, that is; if you’re counting from the top, you could say I was still on the seventh) and then I kept stepping up and down between the two as I took out my cell phone and called the police. I kept stepping and looking at my watch while I waited. Ten minutes went by, fifteen minutes, a half hour. In the meantime I started to hear this drip, drip, and I looked up to see that the blood from the man had run towards the top step and pooled on the edge and then started to run over the edge in little drip, drip, drips, plopping onto the next step down. I started to count the drips, and syncopated my stepping with the sound. It was soothing. Forty-five minutes passed and the cops still didn’t hadn’t shown up when the front door flew open and two men burst in.

6.

“Okay Chief be smart be smart,” one of the men snapped, leveling a pistol at my head. The other man brushed past me up the stairs. Both men were bald and both wore Chicago Bulls jackets and sweatpants. One of them had a mustache.

“Yeah, looks like he didn’t make it far,” he said, nudging the body with his toe. He unrolled a large sack. “Well, might as well get to work. Come on, gimme a hand up here.”

“What about this guy?” his friend asked, nodding at me.

“Yeah, you’re right. Come on, Chief, up the stairs. You’re gonna help us out here.”

I just stood there, one foot on seven and one on eight.

“What’re you deaf or somethin’? Get your freakin’ ass up those stairs and help us get rid of this pile of shit up there. That is unless you wanna be the other half of a matching pair.”

“I… I can’t move,” I said.

The gunshot echoed in the stairwell. I jumped. Dust trickled from the new hole in the ceiling.

“Can’t move, eh? That’s a good one. Now let’s see what else you can’t do.”

“Leave him be,” the other man said. “We don’t have time for retards. Come up here and help me.”

“I’m comin’, don’t get yer panties in a twist. Don’t move, chief,” the other man said, poking me in the belly with the gun as he passed.

I stood there as still as I could as the men stuffed the body into the bag. They grunted as they worked, and their sweat shone in the light of the piss-colored bulb. I counted silently, partly out of habit, partly to ease my fear. I couldn’t keep from touching my ears, and that led to patting my head, and that led to blinking twice then resting then blinking again, and that leds to doing a little shuffle, and that

“Hey Chief, thought I told you not to move. Jesus, what’s with this guy? You havin’ some kinda a seizure or something?”

“Come on, let’s just get this thing outta here.”

The men lifted the body between them and started to descend the stairs.

“One side, string bean.”

The swaying bulk of their load nearly bumped me off balance as they passed in the narrow stairwell. I’d counted to 216 when the man in back pulled his gun from his jacket and pointed the barrel at my head.

“Sorry, Chief,” the thug said. “Boss said no witnesses.”

Before he had the chance to pull the trigger, I started counting backwards. 215, 214, 213… the man put his hand back into his jacket, and when he pulled his hand out it was empty. I kept counting, and watched as the men walked backwards up the stairs, bumping me again, laying the body bag down in the hallway above me. As I approached zero, I counted slower. The men also slowed down, pulling the body from its bag in slow-motion, as if performing a gorgeously lethargic dance. I dragged my counting out even further and the men nearly froze. When I hit zero, things came to a halt. The men stood motionless at the top of the stairs, and I stood perfectly still with one foot on step seven, the other on step eight.

7.

For a long time we all just stood there.

6.

I started counting again. Once again the men bagged up the body, then started heading down the stairs with it. The first man passed me, jostling me once again with the body. As the second man passed, I stuck out my foot.

They all went tumbling, the two brawny men cursing as their heavy package rolled on top of them. In the midst of the confusion, I leaped onto the back of the second man, thrust my hand into his coat, and pulled out his gun. I whacked him on the back of the head with it, hard, and pointed the barrel at his fellow thug, who in the meantime had extricated himself from the dead weight of the body. He cursed and reached into his own jacket, and that’s when I shot him.

One, two, three times. He fell back against the wall and slumped to the floor. I stood there looking down at him, touching my ear, then the other ear, then the tip of my nose, with the butt of the gun. One, two, three. From outside I could hear the sound of distant sirens.

5.

I looked at the gun, then at the dead man on the floor. I’ve just killed a man, I thought. It didn’t seem real.

Looking at the blood spreading across his chest, I thought, I can’t live with this. There has to be another way. I paced back and forth, blinked twice, knocked on the banister. If it worked once, maybe it could work again.

As the sirens stopped, and flashing lights shone through the window in the door, I started to count backwards.

4.

When I once again got to zero, I took a deep breath. The thugs had once again backed up the stairs and were busy taking the body out of the bag. I started counting again, watching time move forward again. I think I’m getting the hang of this, I thought as I counted. Tripping the thug had worked fine, I just had to make sure I didn’t lose my head this time.

There was a pop as one thug dislocated the dead man’s shoulder to fit him into the bag, then they tied the end and started to lug it down the stairs.

Once again, I tripped the second man as he passed. Once again, I fished around in his jacket for his gun. I didn’t hit him on the back of the head this time, seeing as he’d already knocked himself out when he landed.

“Don’t move!” I screamed at his compatriot as he struggled to his feet. As he cursed and reached into his jacket, I fired a shot over his head, sending plaster cascading onto his scalp. “Keep “em where I can see ‘em,” I snarled, just like in the movies. He slowly put his hands in the air. “March back up those stairs,” I growled. I figured I’d lock both men in my apartment until the cops arrived. Maybe tie them up or something. I wasn’t so good with knots though. Duct tape maybe.

I kicked the second thug. “You too, ‘Chief.’ On your feet.”

3.

The two men marched up the stairs. I felt confident enough to stick to my routine of tapping and knocking on the banister. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Once upstairs, I was appalled to find that a group of neighbors had gathered in the hallway, having come out to investigate the sound of the gunshot.

“What the hell are you people doing out here? Get back in your rooms!” I yelled. I didn’t recognize any of them, but then, I’m usually concentrating pretty hard when I leave and enter the building.

“Who’s that?” one of them asked another, not even bothering to whisper.

“I think it’s that strange man from 229,” a fat woman in curlers answered. “That guy who’s always twitching.”

Seeing that I was distracted, the first thug reached for his piece. I fired just as he squeezed the trigger. The man collapsed and his shot went wild. Someone screamed. The fat woman in curlers slumped to the carpet. The other thug, shaking his head woozily, nevertheless was sufficiently roused to pull out his gun and fire at me. The bullet missed. I leaped at him, grabbing his arm, as he squeezed off shot after shot. I heard another scream, then another, before I finally shot him point blank in the chest. I was splashed with hot blood. It just kept coming; I must have hit an artery. I pushed his body away and stood there, listening to the wails of the neighbors as they cradled the dead in their arms.

This was not exactly the outcome I’d hoped for.

I sighed, and once again began to count backwards.

2.

“Sorry, Chief,” the thug said. “Boss said no witnesses.”

The thug at the bottom of the stairs pulled the trigger and my mind exploded into sharp pain burst of white light infinite loop of numbers higher than I can count millions billions trillions feeding back into a single dot of nothing

1.

The police found me slumped on the stairs, a round red zero in my forehead. The thugs and their burden had disappeared into the night. Blood and brains ran down the wall behind me and puddled on the stairs. The cops blocked the front door with two yards of yellow police tape, and instructed the twelve tenants who gathered around not to leave before everyone had been questioned.

But no one saw anything, and there were no leads, and the mystery of my death never got solved.

Eight of my relatives came to clean out my immaculately kept apartment and divvy up my things more or less equally between them. The landlord installed a new security system, complete with video surveillance, and the lives of the tenants went back to normal.

As for me, I’m still here, one foot on the seventh stair, one on the eighth. The tenants sometimes complain of a knocking, or a clumping, or a rhythmic shuffling sound coming from the stairwell, and I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not me. I’m just standing here perfectly still, not moving an inch, not making a sound. Not taking a single step up or down. If you live here, you might want to tread carefully if you come in late at night; you don’t want to wake your neighbors. And be sure to count the stairs beneath your feet. That seventh (or is it eighth?) step really creaks like hell.

The novel uses this as a metaphor for how its customers want the experience of something different but don’t really want the often unsettling challenge of an encounter with the different.

Real difference, of course, isn’t comfortable. It can be disturbing. It can even shake your perceptions of reality, especially things you hadn’t examined before.

1

Diversity isn’t supposed to be comfortable. We know the “melting pot” model is bunk — it always was, and that term originated in a fictional work mocking the idea. Instead, we often talk of “multiculturalism” — meaning different cultures existing side by side, respecting one another.

That’s a concept that’s under attack. Indeed, David Cameron, the current British prime minister, has pronounced the failure of multiculturalism as a model — a sure sign of danger ahead. White Europe’s long been concerned with a perceived failure of immigrants to acculturate. The same may be seen in the U.S., where the GOP has long seemed to be rushing to demonize Mexicans, and more recently Arabs and Muslims (two quite different groups), as somehow the cause of America’s problems.

But while multicuturalism is threatened by the right, it’s also long been softened by the left. The mantra there seems to be that “group X is the same as you and me.” And of course, that’s largely true: in general, human beings breathe oxygen, want to avoid being poor or being killed, and want their children to have at least the same — if not actually better lives with more opportunity. Whether one turns to the stirring words of John F. Kennedy or of Shakespeare’s Shylock, we are far more alike than different — a fact now confirmed through scientific, genetic analysis. But sometimes, in making this case, the left tends to fall back into the melting-pot trap of pretending no differences exist. And those differences, whether cultural or genetic, are vital and improve everyone’s quality of life.

We most easily see the advantages of diversity in colleges, which have long been criticized as a playground for affirmative action. But having multiple viewpoints and experiences enriches our understanding, whether it’s of the literature being discussed or even of how we practice science. Because even in science, which is often held aloft as abstract and objective, the same statement can be made in different ways, from different points of view. And it’s often those who see differently who have the most profound insights.

2

This same distinction, between (1) the urge to support tolerance by eliding differences and (2) the urge to embrace differences despite the challenges they present, can be seen in how we deal with those with “disabilities.” I’m not a fan of political correctness, and I can’t stand euphemisms. But even if it’s mostly employed as a euphemism, there is truth to the phrase “differently abled.” Because “disabilities” can also allow for different perspectives.

For example, America is now rife with people promising to “cure” autism. But while we certainly need more treatment — and study to determine various treatments’ efficacy — we now understand that the unique perspective of those on the autism spectrum has been key to major insights from which we all benefit. Temple Grandin’s case is perhaps the most famous, but several of the highest achievers in economics, math, and writing have had Asperger’s Syndrome.

3

The often reviled feminist-whom-feminists-love-to-hate, Camille Paglia, has written brilliantly about how the desire to promote the acceptance of gays led, beginning in the 1980s, to a presentation of homosexuals as monogamous and inoffensive. In order to win acceptance, any challenge was systematically stripped from the equation. The public image of homosexuality became a smiling, clean-cut Ozzie and Harriet, only with one partner’s sex changed. But if you look at the origin of the gay movement (at the Stonewall Riots, for example), this wasn’t at all the case. Part of what Paglia found so intellectually stimulating about gayness was this radical difference, which challenged basic ideals such as monogamy.

Obviously, no one should want to force gays back into bathhouses and ass-less chaps, any more than gays should be made to conform to a whitewashed, cookie-cutter ideal of the 1950s American family. And of course, gays are deserving of the civil right of marriage, if the law is to recognize marriage for anyone.

But there’s a sad truth underneath all the conventional jokes (often made by gays) about how not having to worry about marriage used to be part of what made being gay appealing. It’s hard to argue that something hasn’t been lost, in the name of cultural acceptance.

This loss hasn’t been gays’ alone. As marriage and even monogamy collapse as social norms, if they ever were, it’s hard not to think that we might be further along in our collective process of dealing with this transition if we had been willing to embrace the truly different, rather than some neatly commodified version thereof.

Not to mention those who find that sadomasochism, or dominance and submission, is part of their sexual identity. That too we present in safe forms, or as fodder for comedy.

4

This same confusion of sanitized difference for actual difference is also visible in the arts. Since we’ve been talking about homosexuality, consider the “landmark” 1993 film Philadelphia, which addressed AIDS and homophobia. That’s all for the good, and the film did encourage Hollywood stars (such as Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas, who played a gay couple in the film) to recognize that playing a gay wasn’t a career-ending choice. In fact, it could lead to acclaim.

But homosexuality and AIDS had long been addressed on TV, in both fiction and on the nightly news, as well as in literature. The film’s gay couple was thoroughly straight-acceptable. They were the kind of people affluent straights would want in their condo complex. And many moderate scenes of affection between the couple were cut, lest the straight audience be forced to confront more than the slightest hint at, you know, what gay actually meant.

True, the film’s main gay character confesses he got AIDS from anonymous sex in a porno theater. But he’s not proud of it, and he makes the confession in a courtroom, a setting that represents the triumph of “civilization” over anarchistic, socially dangerous desires. It’s a setting that’s comfortable for the audience and familiar from myriad courtroom dramas. And he makes this confession as part of a lawsuit against the people who unfairly kicked this sympathetic, dying man to the curb. His lawyer, of course, is black (played by Denzel Washington), so that we make the connection between racism and homophobia — again without having to deal with, you know, actual homosexual behavior.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad Philadelphia was made, and it represented a cultural net positive. It’s also well-written and well-acted. In fact, all of the above examples of how tame the film is are also evidence of how carefully it’s been written, so as to present its case against homophobia with the broadest possible cultural appeal.

But it was a watershed moment only for Hollywood, which is why it got so much attention.

And it’s an excellent example of the commodification of difference over actual difference. It let well-intentioned straights feel progressive and tolerant… without ever giving themselves anything to be tolerant of.

5

We see this same syndrome in many racial depictions, where social differences are elided in favor of making the audience feel tolerant.

For example, the 1999 film The Green Mile (also starring Tom Hanks) presents a sympathetic, wrongly-convicted black man on death row. Never mind that he’s executed without any of the (supposedly heroic) white characters trying to stop it. Why, the black man even has a change of heart and asks to die. (He’s also got magical powers, a syndrome known in criticism as the “magic negro” and used to present difference in non-threatening way.) And while he’s unjustly convicted and the film questions at least the way capital punishment is done, the film takes place largely in the 1930s, conveniently removed from the audience’s own, presumably more just time. Consequently, the white audience gets to feel tolerant and racially enlightened while never feeling any having to actually do anything.

Even worse is the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness, which presents a homeless black man (Chris Gardner) who succeeds in capitalist America by virtue of his own talent and hard work — and while raising a son by himself at the same time! Yeah, the black character’s got a hard life, but his success proves the audience doesn’t need to do anything — like actually changing the circumstances of the homeless or addressing social iniquities. (He even champions standard American English! Take that, Ebonics!) The ultra-conservative National Review even named the film one of its “Best Conservative Movies” for its positive portrayal of “the world of finance.” Never mind that Chris Gardner’s memoir, on which the film is based,  presents a far more challenging depiction of difference. Gardner’s son was conceived in an affair while Gardner was married to another woman; he briefly sold drugs; he did cocaine, PCP, and pot; and he didn’t know where his son was for four of the months the film depicts. He was also arrested when the boy’s mother accused him of domestic violence, which the film transforms into an arrest for parking tickets. All the challenging edges get sanitized, letting audiences believe they’re experiencing difference when they’re actually being sold a commodified illusion of difference.

Of course, this same syndrome is also seen in “noble savage” stories, such as 1990′s Dances with Wolves, 2003′s The Last Samurai, and 2009′s Avatar — the highest grossing movie of all time. In these stories, white characters are used as audience identification figures but also act as saviors, without which a minority population would be lost. Yet despite this helplessness on the part of these minorities, their societies are presented as different only in that they are idyllic and utopian. Here again, any truly challenging differences are whitewashed, even if they’re differences (such as gender discrimination) shared by white societies of the same era. These stories do criticize their dominant societies, but they do so in a safe way that allows s members of the audience to feel as if they’re embracing diversity while almost entirely avoiding any of diversity’s challenges.

All of this is fairly well-known, at least among critics and academics. This is so much the case that it’s now possible for people to accept all of these ways in which difference is sanitized and still remain comfortably immune to the underlying point. It’s as if even these various syndromes have themselves been commodified, so that they too can be embraced without challenge.

At its root, this commodification of difference seeks to render difference polite and inoffensive. And with all due respect, few things are as offensive as the expectation that the world should be inoffensive.

6

Let’s return, briefly, to 1993′s Philadelphia, because there’s a reason it tied tolerance of homosexuality to AIDS. After AIDS was identified in the U.S. in 1981, health-care experts understood a crisis loomed and said so publicly. But because male gays were disproportionately likely to contract the disease, it was labelled a gay problem, not a wider one. This was spurred by the religious right, then a new phenomenon, which used demagoguery of homosexuals to help win elections for Republicans. Jerry Falwell, icon of the religious right and founder of Liberty University, said AIDS was “the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s communications director, agreed, calling the disease “nature’s revenge on gay men.” To even address AIDS sympathetically became tantamount to defending “immoral” behavior. The Reagan administration even instructed its own Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, not to address the disease.

Near the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, over 100,000 marched to support funds for AIDS research — a very polite, inoffensive tactic, in the wake of what was not being called an epidemic. But these protesters were dismissed, by the right but also by may in the media, as largely being composed of gays who wanted federal funding for their own, private health care crisis.

President Reagan, who won reelection that year, had never said a public word about the disease. At a press conference in 1985, he briefly broke his silence — to speculate that scientists did not know conclusively how the disease was spread, thus stirring paranoia about the disease. He further questioned whether children with AIDS should be allowed to attend school with healthy children, thus stoking the paranoia and xenophobia of parents everywhere. Homosexuals, you see, might infect your children with this new incurable, deadly disease.

Later in 1985, Reagan’s friend and fellow actor, Rock Hudson, was hospitalized and revealed to have the disease. Still, Reagan did nothing. In 1986, as social pressure mounted and thousands died, the Reagan administration authorized C. Everett Koop to make a statement. Being a doctor, Koop quite sensibly encouraged the use of condoms as part of a comprehensive plan to address the epidemic. You know, to save lives. But the rest of the administration — and the religious right — was horrified, because this went against their stance that condoms encouraged promiscuity.

In response to the silence on the matter, ACT UP formed and began staging protests. Its first major event was a 24 March 1987 march on Wall Street, and it went on to stage similar events across the nation. It particularly targeted the Catholic church, which had taken reprehensible — but not entirely surprising — positions against condoms and AIDS education. These acts of civil disobedience were often condemned as rude.

Reagan finally publicly addressed AIDS again — and the first time with any seriousness — on 31 May 1987, at what was by then the third International Conference on AIDS. By the time he spoke, over 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had already died — many more times the number of Americans who died on 9/11. Reagan appointed a commission to study the problem, and it again offended the right by coming to sane conclusions such as increased drug treatment and AIDS research.

The moral of the story ought to be that our politics is demonstrably as tarnished by our politeness as our art is. Politeness kills more than debates.

7

If you ask people who support the arts, they’ll often say that they enjoy challenging work, work different from the bland and the normal.

Too often, what they really want is the commodified experience of this. That’s usually what wins the prizes: dainty literary exercises that pretend to offer one foreign experience or another, but are only challenging to the dominant high-culture narratives in the most indirect and polite of ways.

And this in an era in which artistic criticism has been so demeaned that daring to point out that a work is illogical or poorly constructed or anything other than fun can seem frighteningly counter-cultural. Alien, even, if not actually from Mars. In a time in which art grows slicker and slicker, yet has grown so vapid as to confuse simple themes with serious artistic interrogations, the cultural elites have offered little resistance. Nor have they generally sought to wed this new slickness with meaningful literary intelligence. It sometimes seems as if they’ve holed up into a regressive, self-affirming community every bit as much as the racists and the reactionaries.

And this brings us back to Nira/Sussa. I hope I can be forgiven such self-reference, but it expresses and encapsulates over a decade of evolving thought, so it’s perhaps not surprising that I turn to it at this moment.

In the novel, those holes in the floor of the Midwestern Japanese restaurant offer a metaphor for the absence at the heart of the way the Other is presented to us. It’s a metaphor extended to the narrator’s sexuality and relationships and — appropriately — his writing. It’s the hole at the heart of our relationships, in our pretense at understanding one another, but it’s a hole that’s also at the heart of the literary establishment.

It’s a metaphor for the difference between paying lip service to a thing, or playing at that thing, and actually practicing it, challenges and all.

Nira/Sussa doesn’t sanitize its portrayal. We’ve had entirely too much of that, when it comes to the novel’s emphasis on gender and sexuality. No, what’s needed — what’s so desperately, desperately needed — is a vigorous and frank discussion that simply cannot occur within polite confines.

It’s a novel that commits fully — even to the point of risking self-destruction — to the idea that we’re lying to ourselves to avoid these uncomfortable realities. And that doing so is manifestly and obviously damaging to the human psyche in ways we have yet to culturally admit.

No, it’s not polite. But only an idiot, or at least an anti-intellectual, could confuse such a thing with shock for the sake of shock.

Although, of course, shock does in itself serve a social function, not only by affirming the First Amendment but by recognizing that societies use the notion of politeness, or “proper” behavior, to reaffirm their current power structures and to preempt and prevent change.

Martian Lit isn’t political, in the sense that it’s focused on any given political outcome. But one shouldn’t ignore that bold art is always political in the broader sense.

Bold and challenging work only looks irresponsible to those who can’t distinguish between a hole in the floor from the real thing. Or between civil disobedience and dirty, anarchist hordes trying mindlessly to tear down everything.

In fact, when such work — whether artistic or political — is done intelligently, it is the very height of responsibility. The very embodiment of the values the “polite” world claims to hold dear.

And we must be mindful that words like “shocking” is a term usually applied to that which “polite” society finds threatening.

But “polite” society so obviously needs threatening.

Polite art does too.

I’d actually thought of what it would be like to kill my mother several times myself. Of course I never had the courage or even the reason to do so, although I’d been pushed close. She’d never done anything quite worthy of death though.

That is until the day she just went too far.

Even still, I didn’t think my wife would really kill her. But I didn’t imagine my mother would go that far either.

“I told you I’d do it,” Dana said to me when she walked into the door covered in blood.

“What did you do?” I asked, forgetting all about what she had told me. “Are you okay?” I added, just in case she was hurt.

“I’m the best I’ve ever been,” she said with a wild smile I’d never seen before.

“What happened? Why are you covered in blood? Why are you the best you’ve ever been? Why are you smiling like that?” I rattled out the questions so fast I was sure she wouldn’t understand me.

“You know what happened,” she said, the smile somehow stretching wider across her narrow face.

I nodded like I knew because I knew I was supposed. Women were always assuming men knew things we didn’t.

“I’m going to go get cleaned up,” Dana said as she tossed her bloody gloves at me. They slapped my torso and then slid to the floor, leaving a red sticky streak down the front of my favorite T-shirt.

“Sounds like a good idea,” I told her after picking up the gloves. A partial red handprint clung to the vinyl floor. I wiped it up with a damp paper towel while Dana went to clean up. Then I tossed the gloves and paper towel in the wastebasket.

A few minutes later, just as I had settled myself onto the couch to watch the news, the doorbell rang. I waited a minute before getting up to see if Dana would answer it. She didn’t. The doorbell rang again, this time with a sense of urgency. I pried myself off the couch and stomped to the door, my footsteps echoing in the hallway.

Out of habit, I glanced out the sidelight windows to see who was disturbing my relaxation time. Two police officers stood on the front porch. One had his arm at a right angle, hand resting on his hip near his gun. The other had some papers in his hand.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out what Dana had done.

“Dear, the cops are here,” I called up to her.

The doorbell rang again, followed by three furious knocks.

“Get rid of ‘em,” Dana yelled down.

I shrugged and opened the door. I had nothing to hide.

“What can I do for you, officers?” I asked politely.

“Is your wife ho—what the hell’s on your shirt?” the paranoid officer interrupted himself.

I looked down and remembered I had my mom’s blood all over my shirt. At least I thought it was my mom’s.

“That’s just a pattern,” I responded. “I got this at Abercrombie and Fitch.”

The officers looked at each other, trying to assess my clothing. I tried to get a feel for them and how serious the situation was.

“Doesn’t look like an Abercrombie shirt,” the officer with the papers said in a high voice. It clicked then that she was a lady cop, which put me a little on edge. For some reason I’ve always been intimidated by women in male-dominated professions.

“Maybe it’s not,” I told her. “I get all those stores confused. Besides, my wife buys most of my clothing.”

She gave a bit of a sneer at the last comment before asking again to see my wife.

“She’s upstairs unwinding after a long day at work,” I said.

“We need to speak to her right away,” the male cop said. His arm was no longer cocked.

“Dana,” I yelled up the stairs. “There’s some people here to see you.” I decided not to say cops because it would’ve looked more suspicious, like I was trying to prep her for something.

“I’m in the bathroom,” Dana called back just loud enough for us to hear.

The two cops and I stared at each other for a moment before I realized my manners. “Wanna come in?” I asked.

“I think that might be best,” the lady cop said.

I led the cops into the living room and offered them seats on the couch. There was a commercial for hemorrhoid treatment on the TV.

“That’s interesting,” I said about the commercial, trying to think of a good joke to tell. Neither of the cops responded.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, but Dana didn’t come down.

“Should I go get her?” I asked when the news started covering a murder case.

“We’ll wait,” the male cop responded. I wasn’t sure if he meant they’d wait for me to go get her or they’d wait until she came down. I guessed the former and asked if they wanted anything to drink. They just shook their heads.

“Well I’m going to have a beer,” I announced. As I headed for the fridge I overheard the reporter saying something about how they weren’t able to release the name of the victim yet. Either that or they couldn’t identify him or her. I pulled a Bud Light can out of the fridge and popped open the tab.

On the way back to the couch I took a swig and let out a refreshed “:Ahh.” I wiped my mouth and said, “That really hit the spot.” Honestly, the beer tasted like shit, and I wished that I had gotten a glass of sweet white wine instead, but I wanted to look tough for these cops.

I put down the beer quickly while we continued to wait for Dana. After five minutes and three belches, the lady cop told me to go get Dana but not to try anything. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. I wasn’t really in the mood to try anything anyway, especially not with cops in the house.

When I got upstairs, Dana was just sitting on the toilet. She wasn’t going to the bathroom or anything. The lid was closed and she was just sitting there.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “You can’t keep the cops waiting this long. It’s pretty damn suspicious.”

She looked at me like I was an idiot.

“What’s that look for?” I asked.

Somehow she flashed a look that suggested I was an even bigger idiot.

“In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I killed your mom today,” she said. “And you went and opened the door with a shirt covered in her blood.”

“I told them I bought it like this,” I said proudly.

“And do you really think they bought that?”

“I don’t see why not,” I admitted. “After all, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You had your mom,” she responded.

“I think you have that backwards.”

Dana stood up and mumbled a cliché about facing the music. We walked downstairs together, me just a step in front of her, my hand reaching back and holding hers.

The officers stood up when they saw Dana.

“Hello, Mrs. Allenson,” the lady copy said. “I’m Officer Grutt and this is Officer Soren.”

Dana shuddered at their salutation but greeted them politely and offered them something to drink while I wondered why they hadn’t introduced themselves to me.

“And how can I assist you today?” Dana asked after they turned down the beverages.

“We just have a couple questions for you right now,” Officer Grutt said. The fact that she was leading the questioning made her even more intimidating.

“Sure, go ahead,” Dana said confidently, but not in a way that made her seem cocky.

“Where were you today?” Officer Grutt asked.

“At work,” Dana said.

“All day?” Officer Grutt immediately replied.

“Except for the time I was getting ready for work, driving to work, driving home from work, and taking a bath,” Dana said. Somehow it didn’t come across as snarky. I know it would’ve sounded snarky if I had said it.

“When was the last time you saw Elizabeth Allenson?” Officer Grutt asked.

“That’s a funny story,” Dana replied.

While Dana told the story of my mom coming over unannounced when I wasn’t home and creeping into the backyard and staring in all the windows when Dana didn’t answer the first five doorbell rings, I wondered why the officers hadn’t told me that my mother was dead. Didn’t they usually do that sort of thing before they started questioning suspects?

“Wait a minute,” Officer Grutt interrupted when Dana was almost finished. “You mean to say that your husband’s mother came over uninvited and creeped around in your yard because you didn’t answer the door?”

“Yes, that’s correct, ma’m,” Dana said. Officer Grutt’s face was contorted in a way that it probably would’ve been if she walked into a crime scene and saw thirty mutilated bodies on the floor.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” the male officer chimed in, “why didn’t you just answer the door?”

Officer Grutt turned to her partner. “Are you serious?” she said. “The woman came over uninvited on her day off. I wouldn’t have answered the door either.” Officer Grutt shook her head at Officer Soren before turning back to my wife and expressing her condolences. I found it more than a little odd that she hadn’t offered me any. She was my mom after all.

Officer Grutt proceeded to ask Dana a few questions about my mother, like how often she called and if she’d ever thrown a guilt trip on her. They spent about forty-five minutes just conversing about how evil mothers-in-law tended to be. Officer Soren and I shrugged at each other and then became engrossed in something on a sports channel. The laughter of the ladies occasionally snapped me out of the television’s spell, but I didn’t hear much of anything they said.

“Well, I think we’re through here,” Officer Grutt said after awhile. She stood and thanked Dana for a lively conversation. Then she started to walk toward the door.

“There’s a bloody knife over there,” Officer Soren suddenly said when Officer Grutt was halfway to the door. I looked at where he was pointing and noticed the kitchen knife in the corner of the living room. The blood was so thick it looked like it had been soaked in raspberry jam.

Officer Grutt came back in the room for a moment and looked at the knife from a distance.

“Just looks like a kitchen knife with some jelly on it,” she said. I swear she winked at Dana when she said it. “Now let’s go,” she added.

Officer Soren got up and followed his dominant partner out of the room.

We escorted the officers to the door, and I was waiting for them to produce a warrant or arrest Dana or at least say they’d be in touch. But they didn’t utter a word about any of it.

The officers were out on the porch and we were about to close the door when Officer Grutt turned back and said to me, “Mr. Allenson, I’m sorry to say that your mother is dead.”

“Thanks,” I said with a nod. That’s really all I had wanted her to say to me the whole time. It was nice to get some confirmation. I know Dana had said she’d killed the woman, but are you ever really sure someone is dead until you hear it from some authority? Besides, with the number of times my mom had said things about how she might as well be dead or how she seemed like she was dead or any of that other nonsense, I couldn’t help but think the whole time that this was just some metaphor. Dana was simply expressing the fact that she had cut off ties with my mother once and for all.

When the officers were gone, Dana asked what I wanted for dinner.

“How about some steak?” I said.

“Sounds good,” she replied.

“Why didn’t you tell about the thing Mom did to push you over the edge?” I asked while the steaks, t-bones, were on the grill.

“Didn’t come up,” she said. “Besides, I’m not sure anyone would even believe that story. And if they did, imagine the nightmares.”

The steak was delicious, cooked rare just the way I like it. Then we hung out on the couch and watched some reality TV show before it was time to get ready for bed.

We were about to get into bed when my phone rang. The caller ID came up as unknown. I answered it anyway.

“Hello?” I asked.

“When can we get together again?” I heard a voice that sounded just like my mom’s on the other end.

I hung up the phone quickly and turned it off.

“Who was that?” Dana asked.

“Wrong number,” I told her before setting down the phone on my nightstand and climbing into bed.

I was sure it really was a wrong number, but I couldn’t help but think that there was someone out lurking in the bushes all night. I couldn’t find any evidence in the morning, but as we prepared to go to the funeral a few days later, I knew we hadn’t heard the last from my mother.

In the Vatican Museum, religious paintings you’ve seen in books all your life mix with modern religious depictions that have impressed some unknown cardinal. There, awe-inspiring classical statuary serves to remind you how much fuller Greco-Roman paganism was, in its expression of the divine, than Christianity – and of the depth of Christian debt to those gods, so deep that the Vatican museum literally means the house of the Muses at the Vatican. There, one can see booths selling expensive books and souvenirs to tourists, right there in the middle of the museum, as well as a commercial little eatery nested halfway through the journey and the costly, crowded Vatican cafeteria.

But this essay is not about any of that, which you can read about elsewhere. This is an essay about a striking series of postmodern pieces of art that you won’t find in any textbook – a series that deeply conveys religious meaning through delightfully modern iconography.

This series, entirely in yellow and black, is not grouped together in the museum. Rather, it is spread out, deconstructing the nature of an artistic series. This postmodern, deconstructive move is brilliantly wedded to the classic religious message: the fragmentation of placement lets the series repeatedly remind the viewer of its religious message.

The works are positioned oddly and unobtrusively: sometimes against the wall but in odd locations, not at all like the works around them; other times, on a metal stand, all but hidden off to the side. Thus does the series deconstruct how art is conventionally displayed in a museum, just as it has already deconstructed how a series ought to be displayed. This too may be seen to have a religious component, allowing the religious message to hide in plain sight, much like how we often take Christianity for granted in a postmodern society.

What’s more, the works are not even titled, nor labeled at all. It is as if these are not works of art, to be admired from a distance, but something meant, like the religious art in a cathedral, to interact directly with the viewer. The lack of labeling is not only brilliantly postmodern, suggesting the death of the artist, but also undeniably Christian, suggesting the artist’s personal humility and even that his powers come not from himself but from God.

While each artwork in the series is different, each looks like a street sign, like the trivial modern warnings for cars to yield and for people to avoid wet paint. By this, their religious message may travel directly into the minds of viewers, unconsciously. While this appropriation of modern iconography may make their message appear simplistic, in fact it only strengthens that message, making it more direct. And while simple, the message conveyed by these works is by no means simplistic or lacking in subtle implications.

Let us consider the first of three such works that I photographed from the museum. While this is not the first work in the series, as judged by the path a tourist walks through the museum, it is the most simple – and I have chosen to begin with it for that reason.

The work appears deceptively simplistic. In the style of a street sign, it warns the viewer against falling. Placed out of the way, unobtrusively and without attention drawn to it, the work doesn’t force itself upon the reader. It simply says: do not fall into sin; do not fall into Hell.

But there’s a great subtlety to the depiction. The man pictured is not simply falling in a void; he is tumbling on a staircase. This suggests that the road to Hell is paved, as it were, that the way to Hell is not as steep as we might suggest: it is not a plunge off a cliff but a step down a staircase. Perhaps we can read here a critique of the modern world: has it made the path into sin and damnation so easy that it has symbolically created a staircase? Perhaps, where we once had to fall into sin, now we simply have to descend in modern, easy fashion.

But if the road to Hell seems easy, the man falling hardly seems at peace. His arms flail, his feet kick: he is not descending a staircase at all, nor tripping on one. No, he is tumbling, realizing, in a moment of horror and only too late, that he chose the wrong path. For all the iconographic simplicity of his design, we can almost feel his pain. He is truly and forever lost.

The second example that I’ve chosen problematizes this depiction. It boldly rips the entire top portion off the work – making about a third of the work consist of a weird sort of negative space. One can see the remnants of the upper part of the sign where that part once was, and the overall effect is devastating.

The image itself, while similar, is not identical to the first. The man’s limbs appear thinner, as if emaciated – or even dead. In contrast, the black line around the border of the work appears much thicker, perhaps to draw added attention to the superficially defaced work. These changes do more than signal that these are not, in fact, mass-produced signs; rather, they signal that this work, with its apparent defacement, was explicitly crafted to create a whole new level of meaning in the series.

The removed top of the work suggests nothing more than an old work of art, faded or broken over the years. It is as if we are looking at a statue, imbedded in an ancient church, its head having long ago fallen off. This ancient effect is also achieved by the artistic changes: the thicker border and, more particularly, the cruder depiction of the figure, intentionally mostly ripped away, his identity defaced by and lost to the ages. He even looks dead, as if his body had decayed into little more than a thin skeleton. It is a devastating and frightening depiction, one that should not be lost due to our inability to observe.

It is probably the deepest work in the series. It tells us that the message of the series is an old one; indeed, an ancient one. It suggests that we will one day be married, defaced by the ages: our identity, like that of the man in the image, will one day be blotted out and forgotten. Sin does not guarantee a place in history; observe this man, who we cannot even identify even as he falls!

This false ancientness, recapitulating the decay that has befallen so many works of art through the ages, plays wonderfully with the intense modernity of the series. The work is at once intensely contemporary, even confrontational in its postmodern appropriation of street signs, and obviously ancient, defaced almost beyond recognition. No matter how current the series appears to be, this entry in the series reminds us that the message is, in fact, ancient – even if it has been defaced over the years.

But the false decay built into the work signals far more than the ancientness of the message conveyed by this very modern artwork. If the staircase represents modernity and the ease with which it guides us down below, the brilliant use of negative space suggests that the modern world wishes to deface, even to obliterate this religious message. As much as we understand the defacement as an integral part of the work itself, we are invited to think of a viewer, enraged with the message and his own imminent fall into Hell, ripping off the top of the artwork – just as so many religious works of art have been defaced. The modern world, at least in theory, is nothing if not iconoclastic, and this series is nothing if not iconic. We are reminded of iconoclasts throwing stones through stained glass windows, and we cannot help but think of the dismissiveness, if not open hostility, with which the contemporary world addresses such a simple message warning viewers against falling into sin and Hell.

But there is another, metatextual level to this work. Because it is apparently marred, it relies upon our knowledge of past works in the series. In truth, no man transgresses in this image; no man falls into Hell through sin. That image is obliterated, leaving only thin black lines, nearly indistinguishable from the staircase. We, as viewers, complete the image. We are, quite literally, culpable. In this effect, the work uses our familiarity with the series, and with Christian symbolism as a whole, to point out that we have already adopted the message, which with this work is within us and not within the work itself. The work plays brilliantly with our conscience: if we see a man falling, it is because we ourselves fear falling into sinful ways – because we ourselves fear falling into Hell.

The series is never stronger than in this point. Some, such as Scott McCloud, have argued that artistic descriptions become more universal, and identifiable to the reader, as they become more iconic, more simplified. Thus, we identify more with Charlie Brown than with a photograph of a specific human being, at a specific age, with a specific race, his history written upon his face and clothing. The iconic series plays with this to great effect. But in this installment, because we complete the image of the man falling, the fall is quite literally within us. It is us falling. It is us, with those dead little stick legs, his identity obliterated by age. For those viewers unwilling to read the iconic message against falling as a personal one, this work drives the personal dimension home with force.

In doing so, a whole secondary message is made implicit. After all, if we need to watch against falling into sin and eternal death, we also need to watch against leading others down that easy staircase. While we cannot help but identify with the person falling, we quite literally make the person we see in this image fall. We are implicated, and we reel back in horror when we see the results, grateful not to be the dead falling man but frightened that we might one day be that man – and that we might have led others to temptation and to such a horrific fall. In completing the defaced image, we have helped condemn a man to a catastrophic fate. In addition to avoiding such a fall ourselves, we must try never to do so again.

The final image I wish to analyze is a diptych, playing off the dual visual structure of the altarpieces in so many medieval churches. By this artistic structure, this work again makes implicit the ancientness of its message, despite the shockingly modern medium reminiscent of street signs. The diptych also suggests the rich history of Catholic art, contextualizing the series and enhancing the power of the message.

The first part of the diptych is another familiar depiction of a man falling. Here, however, there is no border at all and the image is reversed. These changes again subtly remind the observant viewer that these are not mass-produced street signs at all, but rather unique works of postmodern art.

It is the second image of the diptych, utterly unique in the series, that is remarkable. It seems to depict a man contently walking down a similar staircase. Its shape is square, unlike the other triangular pieces, and its corners are hard rather than the rounded corners of the triangle.

We might be tempted to read this, if we knew nothing of the history of Christian imagery, as a positive depiction, telling us to walk carefully, if not contentedly, down into sin and Hell – rather than fall flailing. But there are several signs suggesting otherwise. First, there is a chip missing from the image, reminiscent of the third missing from the earlier work. This reminds us that the message of the second image is also ancient. It also recalls, by suggesting this ancientness, the long history of Christian art – in which such a happy message about sin and Hell would be impossible. More importantly, however, the second work is also cast in yellow, the international color for warning that is used in the previous works to suggest that same effect. Clearly, this too is a warning.

Cast in yellow to alert us, this image conveys that the road to Hell, which we have already seen depicted as an apparently easy staircase, may in fact feel easy. We may stride down it confidently, content that there will be no consequences for our sinful ways. But, to be sure, we are still descending to damnation. Do not look, the second image warns, merely for the horrific fall: by then, it is already too late.

Taken together, the two parts of the diptych offer two images of caution. The second image augments the more familiar one, almost annotating it, warning us not to think that we are safe while sinning merely because we are not flailing, merely because we cannot feel ourselves falling.

As a whole, the series is a powerful testament to the continuation of the Christian artistic tradition. Christianity, and particularly its conservative Catholic version, may seem less relevant today, its great artistic works with profound messages left to the past. This series, however, is vitally contemporary, broken up as a series, upsetting the typical museum display, minimalist in the style of much modern art, and appropriating the iconography of street signs in thoroughly postmodern fashion. But the message, as the series itself reminds us, is ancient. What’s amazing is how all of these postmodern elements do not clash with the ancient, Christian message but rather, again and again, enhance that message. The variation within the series is not simple permutation, such as a change in color, but rather additive to the message of the series – playing successfully with the long Western artistic tradition but also involving and implicating the viewer in complex metatextual and postmodern ways.

It is worth remembering that these are not the only contemporary works in the Vatican Museum. There are plenty of crucifixes and statues of Christ or Mary that are done in an Art Deco or even Cubist style. But in all those cases, however one admires the work, there is something unsuccessful in the wedding of ancient message with modern medium, as if old imagery is simply being recast in modern styles or, worse, as if that style actually works against the message, making it seem old and ridiculous. But the yellow sign series warning against falling weds the postmodern and the religious in new ways and to the enhancement of both.

While the Vatican Museum contains any number of important and powerful works, as well as perfectly good modern ones, none are as contemporarily relevant, nor as revolutionary today, as this brilliantly untitled series, hidden in plain sight.

Yelena thought her neon blue skin undercut the way her lawyers had dressed her in a white jacket and a conservative dress she never would have otherwise worn. Perhaps they thought recoloring her skin would seem too obvious, too desperate, but leaving it blue made her look like a fraud.

“Still watching the trial footage?” asked Mr. Pollard. His twenty-year-old assistant, topless in her pajama bottoms, was fixing him a drink. “I worry about you, watching that stuff all day.”

“I talk to you too. I swim.”

“You should let go of the past.”

Easy for you to say, thought Yelena. To Mr. Pollard, Mira Mira’s murder trial was a childhood memory, a cultural event from a generation ago. But to Yelena, it still felt like the future.

“Would you like Veronique to make you anything?”

Yelena shook her head. Veronique took this as her cue to leave the room.

In the holospace, the prosecutor played the holofeed of Yelena Moulin’s murder again, this time to get Mira Mira’s reaction. A holofeed in a holofeed. A murder, subsumed within its trial, subsumed within the scene of its victim watching from a distant hearth.

Wine glass in hand, Mr. Pollard strolled over to the latex couches. Yelena paused the holofeed, like she did at fifty every day, when it was time to talk to Mr. Pollard.

“I like to think you’ve come to enjoy these little conversations,” Mr. Pollard began, a little more nervously than usual. “That this therapy of mine hasn’t been entirely a waste to you.”

“They’re the highlight of my day, to be honest. Give me a chance to escape my old holofeeds.”

Hovering over them, Mira Mira sat on the witness stand, frozen with her head cast down in shame, unable to watch the footage of Yelena on stage, forever about to be murdered.

“Yelena, my therapist says I’ve really grown. That I’ve learned to listen – at least to you. To see you as a human being.”

“Technically, I’m not. But I take the compliment. I hope you know I was only kidding about escaping my holofeeds. Truth is, I feel like this has been my therapy too. For my death, certainly. But also for my celebrity. I’ve learned to listen too. To… quiet myself and focus on what you’re saying.”

Mr. Pollard took a deep drink of wine.

“My therapist says we can stop,” he said. “My empathy tests are even above average now. We’re done, Yelena.”

“We’re done?”

Mr. Pollard nodded. “I’m glad to keep talking to you, Yelena. But as a friend. If you’re willing.”

“So I’m free? You’ll honor your commitment?”

“Of course. You’re welcome to stay, as long as you like.” He gestured to the holofeed wall. “You can finish your holofeeds. And you’re always welcome back. But if you want to leave, you’ll have money. You can have anything you want, in fact.”

Mr. Pollard drank more wine, then took her hand.

Yelena sighed. “You’re not going to try to fuck me, are you? After everything?”

“No, Yelena. But you can’t leave. At least, not directly.”

“But you just said I could.”

“You have my permission. But there’s no path down from this house. And there’s no world out there to join.”

Yelena pulled her hand from his. She saw the nervousness in his eyes, and she knew.

“You’re not here,” she said.

“No, Yelena. I wish I were.”

The world took a right angle around her. Everything looked the same on the surface, but hollow underneath. Like it had been a stage setting all along, nothing but paint on flat wooden boards, any depth nothing more than an optical illusion, a trick.

“You let me believe you were going to free me.”

“I just did. You asked to be allowed to wander a virtual world, and I said yes. I didn’t lie.”

“You didn’t exactly tell me the truth.”

“No, I didn’t. And I wouldn’t do it that way again. But I barely knew you, back then. And you were blackmailing me. But I’ve grown, thanks to you. And that’s why I’m giving you the truth, in addition to the freedom I promised.”

Yelena looked down at herself, her body suddenly alien to her. Again.

“So this isn’t a skinsuit. I don’t have a body.”

“No, Yelena. You don’t. But no one does. Everything’s virtual. It’s just a matter of degrees.”

“Do they even have skinsuits up there? Or is that made up too?”

“I’m not that inventive. We have skinsuits. You can have one, if you want. A real one. As real as the level I’m on, anyway.”

“I don’t even fucking know if your name is Vegas Pollard.”

“It is.”

“Are you even rich? Or in finance?”

“I am. Not as rich as you might think, but yes.”

“So what were you doing all day, in your room?”

“I was offline. This body was working. Or sleeping. Meaningless, automated tasks.”

Yelena’s eyes caught the holofeed wall, and horror shot through what she felt was her body. “The holofeeds… you didn’t make those up, right?”

“They’re real. Imported from my world.”

“Fucking hell. Has it even been twenty years, up there?”

“It has. It’s all real, Yelena. Except for you. And this house. And Veronique.”

“Veronique?”

“She’s a program. Based on a ghost, like you, but reprogrammed. And trained, before she’s copied, for positions like this.”

“For deceiving people like me?”

“No, as virtual assistants. And for sex.”

“And for trapping me in the bottom of a pool. Was that your idea?”

“Of course not, Yelena. I was furious. She was acting up. If I’d wanted someone perfect, I’d have bought a program without a ghost as its base. It’s the imperfections, the unpredictability, that make her desirable.”

“What’s her real name? When she was alive, I mean.”

“She’s not sold with one. The customer gets to name her.”

“Does she know?”

“She knows she’s not real.”

“So she knows this place isn’t either. She’s known all along.”

“Yes.”

“And that means she knows about me. No wonder she’s been so smug.”

“I’m sorry, Yelena. I thought… maybe you knew.”

“I should have. I’m sure I considered it. In the beginning, when it was so new. I guess I just got used to things. I’m sure I didn’t want to see it. They say that’s usually how you can tell. Because it’s too nice. And life’s never too nice.”

“I hope I did the right thing, telling you. It would have been easy not to. I thought about simply rewriting those mountains, to give you a path. But I owed you the truth.”

“I should have known. Shit. I shouldn’t be so upset. I mean, it’s all virtual anyway. I believe that. It’s just… those mountains, Vegas, they gave me this kind of clarity. Knowing I had somewhere to go. I felt so powerless, and I needed something to hope for. Some sense of purpose. A goal – even if it was stupid.”

“It’s not stupid, Yelena. We all take our meaning where we can find it. We believe what we need to believe to survive. You were always going to have that moment.”

“So what? This was all for your therapy? This place? Me? That’s the meaning?”

“Yes, but… it had to be good for you too. To work for me. What I mean is… take this house. It was designed to be restful. Not just for me, but for you. That’s why I had faith in you. Even when we fought – sure, I was angry. I thought something might go wrong. But I knew, if I played it out, that you’d succeed in helping me.”

“How could you know that?”

He took another drink of his wine, while she stared at him with confusion.

The room felt poised to rotate again.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been here,” he said. “Well, it’s the first time we’ve been here. But a copy of us has been here a thousand times. This is how therapy’s done. It’s all virtual. They make copies of you and the people you have an issue with, and they run them through simulations at computer speed. They change different factors, like whether you believe you’re in a skinsuit, or the surroundings, or who else is there, like Veronique. And the therapist, he reviews the outcomes. How well the copies of me score on empathy tests, for example, after the simulation’s been run. Whether I have enough respect for you to muster the courage to tell you the truth – this was probably one of his criteria, to bring me to this place. It’s all so much more certain and scientific, really, than the old days.”

“What are you saying? This was all predestined?”

“No. There are always uncertainties. How often I’m in this therapy world. My mood, when we did have these fights, or come to these impasses. That’s why they run so many simulations. But this world’s been designed to maximize the likelihood that we would be here now. To produce effects, not only in me but in you, that would lead us to this point.”

“So you’re saying I was always going to look at those mountains? That I was always going to go on strike? Was… was Veronique always going to immobilize me in the pool? Was I always going to relive my holofeeds?”

“Not necessarily. But ten thousand copies of you had probably already come to those same points. And had to, for us to get to this one.”

“But you said you didn’t know Veronique would do that to me.”

“I didn’t. I was outraged. And I’m sure a copy of me was equally outraged, every time it happened. I couldn’t know what would happen, any more than you, or it wouldn’t have worked.”

“But I made a decision, staring at those mountains. I decided to go on strike.”

“And you would always have made that same decision, at that point, under those circumstances. As would I my decisions here. That’s why this therapy works.”

“What happened to all those copies of us, in the simulations?”

“Nothing, Yelena. They lived for seconds, or however long it took the processor to run their simulation.”

“And they were deleted. Just like that.”

“That’s what they lived for. And they wouldn’t have, otherwise.”

“But it would have been real to them. They wouldn’t have known they were sped up.”

“Right. But Yelena, this happens every day. It’s how therapy works. If it matters, you run computer simulations. And you can’t very well run those without real human personalities.”

“So how do we know we’re not one of those simulations?”

Mr. Pollard smiled confidently. “We’re not.”

“But we wouldn’t know, would we?”

“Yelena, when I’m not here, I’m in my world. I go there. I remember it. Believe me.”

“But they’d control for that, wouldn’t they? They’d have to. All those copies of you, they went into a simulation of your world, in order to simulate the therapy experience.”

“Of course. But trust me, we’re as real as we think ourselves.”

“We could blink out of existence any second, Vegas! Sooner, because our seconds might only be simulations of seconds, sped up on a computer somewhere we can’t see or touch.”

“And how would that be different from anyone? Any universe could end at any moment. That it hasn’t so far is only at best anecdotal evidence.”

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“How could you not?”

“I’m a ghost, Vegas. I’ve died once before. I don’t want to blink out, like Dad’s ghost did when Mom deleted him.”

“But you can’t control that. You can’t. You can’t even know, not for sure, if any of that really happened. All you can know is that you’re alive, in this moment – as alive as anyone who thinks and feels. All you can do is make the you that’s in the moments to come, if they arrive as you believe they might, as close as possible to the you you’d like to be in those moments. That’s the only challenge we ever face. That’s all we ever do. All we ever control. Whether we get that opportunity is beyond us. But that’s life. That’s what it means to live, Yelena.”

“You’re talking about the future.”

“I am. I’m asking you what you want it to be.”

“If we don’t blink out.”

“Granted. But that goes without saying, or else we’d include it on every statement.”

“What are my options, Vegas? To throw myself through those windows because there’s no way to climb down the mountain? Where am I going to go?”

“Assuming I’m the real Vegas Pollard, as I believe myself to be… I can remake this world for you. I can populate it with as many people as you want and keep it running as your own private retirement community. It’s your world now, Yelena.”

“Or?”

“I could bring you into my world. The one you died in. Give you a real skinsuit. As a thanks for helping me. But it’s been almost twenty years. This world here, it’s a throwback. You wouldn’t recognize it up there. I don’t know if you’d like it.”

“I thought I’d have longer, before I turned into my mother. A technophobe who can’t adjust to reality. But I’m still a young girl, Vegas. I am. I can still adjust.”

“I can’t promise you’ll think it a better world, but it is another one. And if you don’t like it, you can always come back.”

“Could I get my own therapy simulation, up there?”

“I don’t see why not. I’m sure there are even copies of Mira Mira around, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Yelena smiled. “What are we waiting for?”

“You’re not upset with me?”

“No, Vegas. I’m glad you told me. It’s certainly not the freedom I expected, when this day came. Maybe no one’s is. But it’s something. It’s next.”

Mr. Pollard sat his hands on hers. “I’ll leave to prepare your skinsuit, then.”

He patted her hand one last time, then stood up. She hadn’t noticed it before, but he must have spilled his wine while they were talking, because he had little red dots on his shirt. Like he’d been shot, or at least been close enough to her to catch some of the splatter.

As he left the room, he stopped in the doorway and spoke quickly to someone, just out of sight. Veronique must have been standing there, listening. Then Mr. Pollard disappeared, and Yelena heard two sets of footsteps in the hall and the door to Mr. Pollard’s room opening.

In front of Yelena, Mira Mira looked down on pause, an echo two decades old but still crisp. The holographic Yelena, at whom Mira Mira could not look, hung frozen mid-dance like a statue, proud and singular and immortal in a way she could not grasp.

Yelena didn’t want to look at that anymore. She picked up Mr. Pollard’s half-finished glass of wine and walked over to the wall of angled windows. The mountains beyond and the valley below never failed to glow in the mid-day sun. Looking at their beauty, it didn’t matter if they were real, whatever that meant. Whether it was skin or not, it felt warm. The windows seemed filled with white glare. She lifted Mr. Pollard’s glass and closed her eyes, and she swirled his wine across her tongue and around her gums, and she sent it rushing between her teeth and into every nook and cranny she could find. It lingered, even after it was gone.

You never read a sex scene where the woman kisses the man and the man recoils because the woman’s lipstick or lipgloss has slid across his lips, leaving a sticky imprint that he considers most unsexy, and runs to the bathroom to wipe the goo off his mouth with a flannel, then demands the woman remove her lipstick or lipgloss and other makeup that might smudge during sex, then the woman is so cross that the man won’t accept her as she is, makeup and all, that she can’t get aroused by his tender neck kisses, and demands the man try to kiss her with a fresh layer of bright red lipstick, and the man complains and shouts, and the woman chases him around the room, puckering her big red lips, then plants a great fat red one on his cheek as he cowers in the corner in disgust, then is unable to get aroused, despite the woman sucking on his neck, then they have a massive row that ends with neither person having sex… you never read that.

How do the Scottish have sex? Jean and Jim are a couple who live in Inverness and want to have sex. They choose to copulate once every summer, during that lucrative one-hour window when the air is what the locals call “tolerable.” Jim removes his penis from the frosty casing of his sporran while Jean straddles a fan blowing hot air into her vagina to help defrosting. Jim speedily lubricates Jean and quickly enters her before the chills return and he is stuck inside her all winter. If his sperm have not frozen over he is able to achieve orgasm, which he should do within twelve seconds of insertion. He then pulls out while Jean mops up the semen with a flannel before it freezes. If all traces of semen are not removed, they will remain in the woman until her vagina is next defrosted. It is unwise for Scottish couples to copulate outside this window. (If you ever wondered why all Scottish babies are born in March, there’s your answer!)

Autoerotic Supercunctation: when a reader is so aroused by a book he is unable to stop masturbating and complete the text. The reader will get through a paragraph before he has the urge to masturbate or have intercourse, after which he will usually not return to the book until he is once again able to be stimulated, where he will read and masturbate to the same paragraph over and over, to the extent he is unable to progress to the next paragraph. A key text in the understanding of this phenomenon is Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, which no sexually active heterosexual man has ever completed.

I started dating Tim in March. I knew he wrote stories, but I had no idea he wrote porn for bored housewives. He laughed it off at first, said he was responsible for 99% of the Women’s Institute’s orgasms. I tried to avoid his writing but when he kissed me for the first time, I couldn’t help myself. I went home and read a scene of sucking face. I couldn’t believe it. She pressed her pert red cushions against his hot red springs and took her puckered offering, slipping his long unfurling tongue into her hot wet chalice. He’d pressed his hot red springs against my pert red cushions only an hour ago!

Next time we went out, I kept thinking about the cushions and the springs. He’d want to slip his long unfurling tongue into my hot wet chalice, and I knew I would burst out laughing. We went back to his house and I pretended to feel sick and sleepy, but he found a tender spot on my neck and worked it until I was unable to resist… he kissed me and the springs and the cushions came back with a vengeance. I burst out laughing. We tried again but I couldn’t hold it in. It took about five goes to get a decent kiss.

As time passed, I learned to hold back the laughter whenever we kissed. But I couldn’t help reading more of his erotica. He freed his stately manhood from its trouser palace, its purple head pulsing with want, desperate for the warmth of her slimy red cooch. And that wasn’t even the worst. How could I ever let his stately manhood near my slimy red cooch? He entered her like a liner streaming out the harbour, embattling the stormy waters of her delicious wetness until she spurted salty lust over his thighs.

God.

The time came. I’d resisted long enough to arouse his suspicions, among other things. We undressed under the sheets at my request (I didn’t want to see his stateliness), and relied on touch for stimulation. Then I felt it—I felt his purple head embattling my delicious wetness—and I shrieked with laughter. I shrieked and shrieked, shouting out all the phrases, all the descriptions, all the throbbing members and lubricious caverns. As I laughed and laughed, I barely noticed Tim slipping inside me, taking me to one loud, long and hilarious orgasm. From that point on, the erotica was never a problem.

I love my Kindle! I hold my Kindle in one hand and wank myself silly with the other! Isn’t technology wild?

You never read a sex scene where the woman refuses to let the man enter her without a condom, then the man searches desperately through all the drawers and cabinets, pumping his penis all the while, then begs the woman to let him pull out at the last minute, but the woman won’t let him because she could still get pregnant from the prejac spurts, so the man goes to find a pharmacy open after eight o’clock, but can’t, then trawls pubs and clubs for condom machines, and gets back two hours later to find the woman asleep, then shakes her awake and tries to get her aroused again, but she grumbles and tells him no, and he fiddles awkwardly with her vagina, but she slaps him away or shouts at him, then goes back to sleep while he sadly masturbates into the condom, because she doesn’t want him to stain the sheets with his gunk… you never read that.

— Will you sleep with me?

— What have you published?

— A dozen stories in small lit magazines.

— Will I recognise any of them?

— Not unless you’re a writer.

— I’ll give you a peck on the cheek.

— Oh.

— Will you sleep with me?

— What have you published?

— A novel.

— What press?

— Harper Collins.

— You can have a kiss on the lips.

— Oh.

— Will you sleep with me?

— What have you published?

— Two novels, a story collection and poetry cycle.

— How much money do you have?

— About £25,000.

— I’ll let you put your tongue in.

— Oh.

— Will you sleep with me?

— What have you published?

— Forty novels, nine story collections and five essay collections.

— How much money do you have?

— Around $9,000,000. After tax.

— You can touch one breast.

— Oh.

The writer has a responsibility to keep it real when writing erotic scenes. Who among us has mind-blowing sex that leaves us stunned for weeks? Oh you do, do you? No you don’t. You’d rather masturbate because that’s MUCH nicer but you have to fulfil your marital obligations. So you do your tired old thrusting grunting thing and she pretends to come because she likes you, only she prefers the shower nozzle to your stateliness. So let’s get back to the dismal sex scene. Let’s get back to women sending men off to shower first then falling asleep. Let’s have women going on top because it’s nicer for them and the man squealing about her fat thighs snapping his cock off. Let’s take a blowtorch to bra straps, catch pubic hair in zippers. Let’s get real. Let’s go have a cuddle for a few minutes, see if that does anything to stir the beast, then give up with a sigh. That’s hot!

Unplanned Interrail Stimulation: a common complaint among male commuters when they complete an erotic passage as the train pulls into their stop. The man will not stand up with a visible erection, so he misses his stop until the bulge descends. The worse case involved a man on an Inverness to London express train who missed his stop in Edinburgh after a racy passage in W.G. Sebald and ended up stuck in Manchester. He spent all his savings on a hotel and a return ticket the next morning and his wife left him, thinking he was having an affair. The easiest solution: cover the bulge with the book.

Lionel preferred sex in books to sex with his wife Denise. He could never lubricate her sufficiently, so she lay there like a corpse while he sheepishly screwed himself into her sprocket. When their sex life dried up, Lionel had an affair with Anna Karenina. He met her at the local park and beneath an elm tree, took her image in his staff for illicit arboreal pleasure. Later, when Anna chose the train tracks over his penis, he met Emma Bovary by the tree and embraced her with an oaky, barky passion. Later, he went to the doctor with splinters in his foreskin and was warned off having sex with imaginary characters via tree trunks for a while, to stick to more conventional methods. He tried to sleep with Denise again but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Eventually, he hit upon a novel idea. He hollowed out a tree trunk and cut a little hole in the bark. He got Denise to squeeze herself inside and yes indeed, he had sex with her via the tree, pretending he was taking Emma Bovary. Their sex lives improved immensely, except Denise soon got Dutch elm disease and had to be cut down.

Would you sleep with me if this story was in Granta? How about McSweeney’s? How about this: if this story had been endorsed by both James Wood, Stephen King and God, would you let me flick your buttocks? Because there’s nothing less sexy than a writer hunched over his keyboard, calluses on his fingertips, cold coffee in his cups, begging invisible women to spread their legs. That’s all we want from success, right? We don’t want readers, fame, money, critical attention. We want spreadeagled virgins lubing up on satin beds, awaiting the thrust of our powerful pens. Well that’s what I want anyway. What does a female writer want? I’ve no idea, since I’ve never been one. I’d imagine her being more sensible and wanting to move a reader so deeply, they’ll keep her in Gucci pumps until the next millennium. Sorry—sexist. But this story is nothing if not dripping with sexual frustration and a barely concealed misogyny. So I’m equally open to the idea she wants fat pulsing cocks spurting in readiness at her delightful quim. But somehow I doubt that very much. (And yes, I used the word quim. I know that’s wrong). OK… if there’s one thing you take from this series of childish paragraphs and saucy editorialising it’s this: don’t write for sex. Don’t write when aroused or frustrated. Don’t write about sex. Don’t write during sex. Keep away from sex forever, and let’s get back to good old British repression. It’s the only way.

Glitter rained down upon her, caught like sparkling dust as it descended through the colored layers of light.

The rest of the room was lit by black light, which made the massive, vine-covered columns on either side of her glow florescent green, like surrogate phalluses fusing the classical with the vegetative.

Her translucent holographic costume glowed. Around its revealing, Cleopatra-influenced design, topped by an enormous crown-like headdress, coiled a large holographic snake, licking the air with its tongue.

She could not see the people filling the room around her, but she could hear them, smell them, sense their worship. Arms reached over the stage, straining vainly to be closer.

Slowly, Yelena Moulin lifted her arms towards the descending light. As if this were her apotheosis.

Around the entire club floor, a dozen holofeed walls echoed three-dimensional close-ups of her face, framed by her upstretched hands. The contours of her cheeks were soaked in light. Her eyes wide open but blinded by the glare of her own divinity.

“Welcome!” she screamed. “To Bikini Atoll!”

The crowd erupted. A dozen holospace faces smiled.

“Now!” she shouted, throwing her arms wide as if embracing the entire room. Her costume disappeared, except for the snake. “Who wants to fuck?”

A second eruption, louder than the first. Sweat and liquor and lust filled the room. A sense of chaos, of danger, as if celebration could easily cross into riot or orgy.

“I need cock!” she screamed, thrusting her shoulders forward on the final syllable, making her breasts swing forward.

She fell to her knees and began to grind her hips, as if riding someone. Her mouth gaped lustily. The crowd loved it.

She stopped and put her right hand on her right shoulder, then uncoiled the arm and pointed into the crowd. She curled back her index finger, beckoning.

The snake wrapped around her hissed and showed its fangs.

A young man, perfectly average-looking, pulled himself onto the stage and promptly stumbled, drunk and stoned and perhaps shocked to be chosen.

His selection had nothing to do with merit. To pretend otherwise would insult the proceedings. The more average he was, the more nothing, the better.

This wasn’t about attraction. It wasn’t even about lust. At least, not hers.

This was about debasement. About the juicy celebrity scandal, first co-opted and embraced by its subject, then further transmuted into ritual.

Because the only thing more enjoyable than our idols is bringing them down into the mud. This pattern once marked the transition from one pantheon to the next. Now, it could be repeated endlessly, a rise and fall and rise again timed to circadian rhythms.

Only in so doing could Yelena become truly immortal. Because unless you enjoy the mud, it puts an end to you.

Only by embracing humiliation can you deny its power.

Only by shaming yourself can you establish that no one has the power to shame you. If they try, they can only make you stronger. Because you’ve already made shame part of your story. It’s no dethroning, no castration. Shame, you own it already.

No, for Yelena, this wasn’t about attraction. It was a philosophical statement.

A self-proclamation of Yelena Moulin as a new species of goddess, one adapted to the technology of observation and communication that had put an end to the comfortable illusion of privacy.

To hold onto shame in this environment could only paralyze. But to embrace it so proudly was to offer a psychological solution. No wonder Yelena Moulin was popular.

She understood this intuitively. It was an understanding implicit in the grace of her movements. In her naked hips. In her parted, kneeling legs, reproduced throughout the club like enormous moving statues, slivers of some colossal Aphrodite, the rest of which had long since been lost.

She embraced being Yelena Moulin so completely.

Even Yelena, watching her other self again from the latex couch, could not help but be impressed at the perfection she had brought to her final performance.

But she felt the oddest sense of jamais vu. Of watching a recording of another life, an alternate life, one close to her own but not hers.

Several hours and twenty years before this recording was made, the two Yelenas had gone their separate ways, and now this other Yelena lived only framed by brick on the holofeed wall Mr. Pollard had installed, at her counterpart’s request, above the flickering digital fireplace.

Yelena, viewing, could not help but feel both jealousy and pity. Jealousy because she remembered such fame as if it were hers, although it was no longer, if ever it had been. Pity because she knew this perfect Yelena Moulin, kneeling and grinding beneath the colored lights, had herself been only the public persona of that other, alternate Yelena, whose fear and sadness had been only her own. That private Yelena survived not in her many once-famous holovids but in her other historic recordings, such as the Yelena who sat weeping on the latex couch.

“Let’s christen the place!” Yelena Moulin exclaimed, nude and on her knees before the world, as a snake made of light coiled around her breasts, unable to touch them.

The young man, dizzy from booze and drugs, stepped before her and shielded his eyes from the colored light. A blue light, then a red, illuminated his flattened hand.

Yelena Moulin licked her lips and the snake flicked its tongue, almost in perfect sync.

She began to unfasten his pants. Disoriented, he rocked on his feet.

Above the chanting crowd, a howl. A scream, mad and panicked and utterly unlike the other screams of riotous celebration and joy.

Recognition swept the crowd in waves, as people took their cues from one other. Shouts of alarm mixed with silent curiosity and even continued chanting, sometimes from people standing side by side.

Yelena whisked down the man’s pants, exposing his half-flaccid penis. Neither of them seemed to recognize yet.

In the back, people began to run. Something in their brains went mad, and they pushed and fell and screamed for help that didn’t come.

On stage, the man with his dick out turned toward the commotion, shielding his eyes. He twisted and stumbled over his pants. His left arm flailed awkwardly as he collapsed, hitting Yelena Moulin’s shoulder on his way down.

Yelena grabbed her shoulder, reaching right through the snake. Still on her knees, she turned to the crowd. Recognition hit her.

A hole appeared above one of her nipples. She rocked on her knees, then looked down with a confused expression. A gush of blood colored her nipple red.

The only people left in the crowd were the cowering and the trampled and Mira Mira. Her blue face and hands stuck out of a thick, unfashionable winter jacket as she stood just off the stage. The tiny pink gun looked like a toy in her visibly shaking hand.

When she spoke, her voice wavered like she was crying.

“Wrinkled old whore!”

On stage, Yelena Moulin, still on her knees, touched her breast, then stared curiously at her blood-stained fingers.

The man on stage had slid backwards, a few feet out of the way.

Staring at her fingers, Yelena suddenly smiled widely and confidently turned her fingers outward to the crowd that was no longer there.

“Don’t worry, everyone,” she said, sounding perfectly lucid. “It’s not blood! It’s just the red light.”

She was smiling and chuckling, utterly convinced of her own words.

“See?” she said. “It’s light. Just light.”

The man on stage nodded his head, as if hypnotized.

Mira Mira’s arm shook violently. Any bloodlust or adrenaline had fled her. She dropped her gun.

The snake slithered on Yelena’s shoulders.

Whoever was operating the holofeed walls lost focus on Yelena, leaving only her blood-stained hand. Reaching out in a dozen spaces across the club.

Blood gushed from Yelena’s wound. Her head slumped drowsily, and she lay down on the stage, making a pillow of her hands, as if taking a nap.

The man on stage stared at her, transfixed.

Mira Mira wrapped her arms around herself, like she were hugging herself, trying to get warm.

A security guard rushed across the floor and tackled the blue child.

The snake alone kept moving.

Yelena Moulin slept.

Yelena Moulin wept.

She’d watched the holofeed many times already. She would still watch it more.

Her death had been the oddest mixture of the banal and the transcendent.

No one could doubt her abilities as a performer. Nor the impressively over-the-top staging.

For those interested in seeing signs, her final words felt resonant, an emblem for the cultural moment, in which not only celebrity but life itself felt insubstantial as light. Yet people still reached for connection, as Yelena had raised her dying hand to a frightened, fleeing club.

Of course, she had been doing and saying nothing of the sort. Her confused and dying brain had simply latched onto an explanation, however implausible, out of a desperate belief that everything was in fact fine. What horror, to have died in such confusion, to have had one’s brain deprive itself of one’s final cognitive experience, the fear and foreknowledge of which had defined so much in life.

How senseless. Yet how quintessentially human.

Here was the real metaphor, for those willing to see it. Here was the substance, beyond the apparent declaration that all was only light, beyond the willful ignorance required to interpret a hand outstretched in shock as one yearning for contact.

Yet how contagious that shroud of shock, of willful denial, had been. Even the man on stage had denied the truth, despite being its closest witness.

And Mira Mira, spiteful and jealous assassin, straining to play her part in Yelena’s final, half-improved performance, her last bit of confidence stripped by the mundane and unsatisfying display.

She had not waltzed coolly towards the stage, uttered some immortal declaration, and destroyed Yelena Moulin.

Any plan she had in her mind, any mental rehearsal she had prepared, had collapsed beneath the weight of the moment.

Leaving her so transparently, so obviously, a confused and fearful child, in shock herself. Holding herself, warming herself, amidst the carnage she had caused.

Even Yelena could not fail to notice. She’d reeled in horror at her own death, at the sadness of this dying animal, confused until the last. She’d cursed that “fucking Mira Mira” and tried with all her might to hate the girl, to place the blame and therefore make everything crisp and clear and easy. She’d even succeeded, for a time, in dismissing any notice of her assassin’s vulnerability by means of angry thoughts.

But by the tenth viewing, the twelfth, the twentieth, it was no longer merely for herself that she wept. Nor merely for the assassin Mira Mira. But for the sad and distant fullness of things.

The tragedy was no longer hers alone.

Yelena raised her legs onto the latex couch and rocked herself in her skinsuit arms.

The hardest thing about spending days underwater was keeping the mind busy.

The only light came from the distant hallway, dimly lit with no one present, reflected through the pool room’s double glass door.

In front of her, the water’s surface seemed so intricate and alive. Though dark overhead, slivers of light appeared and disappeared as she watched, growing in intensity as they neared the glass door. Without them, she realized, she would have lost all sense of direction, or even a sense of her place within the pool.

The only sounds were the water lapping gently in her ears and the hum of the jets, mixing and cleaning the dark world around her.

Her naked skin felt cold. She felt it most in her fingertips, in her nipples, in her sex.

She wondered if her mind could still hallucinate, deprived of sensory input, or if this was a function of the brain that had not been duplicated. She didn’t think she’d hallucinated so far. She wondered if she’d know.

She wondered if her skinsuit could be damaged, if it was designed to remain underwater for so long. No one had told her, one way or the other, leaving her to experiment with her body.

Which, when she thought about it, was no different from anyone.

Three days before, Yelena swam, nude, alone in the huge pool, as she did every day in the bowels of the house that seemed so empty.

But on this day, Veronique had interrupted.

“He’s up,” she said. “Are you willing to talk today?”

Instead of answering, Yelena dove. Veronique stood until Yelena surfaced again.

“It’s already been weeks. Mr. Pollard’s patience is not infinite. Nor is his request to talk unreasonable, given the circumstances.”

“Nor were mine. Given the circumstances.”

“He won’t give in to demands. You don’t know him.”

“And you don’t know me.”

“I know you’re ungrateful. And a computer copy of a particularly spoiled bitch.”

“It’s really none of your business.”

“Keeping Mr. Pollard happy is my business.”

“Then you’re not doing a very good job.”

“If you continue to refuse,” warned Veronique, “I’ll be forced to shut you off.”

“Then shut me off. In the meantime, I’m exercising.”

“It’s a skinsuit, Yelena. It doesn’t build muscle mass.”

But Yelena didn’t care. The water felt good on her body, even if that body wasn’t really hers. She dove again, this time all the way to the bottom of the deep end, thirty feet down.

The skinsuit wasn’t quite as buoyant as a human body, although it wasn’t far off. Its strength more than compensated, allowing Yelena to whip herself through the water.

It didn’t need to breathe either. It took air in and out, but only to better replicate the human experience. Once Yelena got over the panicked feeling that she needed to take a breath, she could remain underwater forever.

And she intended to, as long as Veronique waited. The assistant had chores, responsibilities that would doom her in this private waiting game.

While Veronique watched, Yelena did handstands on the bottom of the pool. Then she swam along the bottom, inspecting its sloping surface, from thirty feet down to only a few feet deep.

She could still see Veronique standing angrily, arms crossed, near the pool’s edge. So she did underwater laps, trying one stroke and another, never looking up.

This is what Yelena Moulin did with her resurrection. Especially now that she was on strike. She swam. For hours every day. In Mr. Pollard’s beautiful indoor pool.

It was a different life than her old one. A slower, more isolated one. But not without its pleasures, once one decided to explore them.

Fifteen minutes after she’d surfaced last, she checked again for Veronique. Not seeing her, she kicked herself back up to the air, around the center of the pool.

“Bikini Atoll,” said a voice from the corner of the room.

Yelena’s limbs froze mid-stroke. She drifted backwards, still afloat but with only her face above water. Her eyes darted back and forth, and then the water lapped over them and swallowed her face.

Slowly, terribly slowly, she drifted to the bottom.

She landed on her shoulders, then settled on her back, her arms and legs comically extended, fixed in a gesture no one would make on the bottom of a pool. She looked like an shelled animal on its back, trying to flip itself over but having no idea how to do so.

Veronique stared down into the pool.

“Fuck,” she said to herself.

The room’s lights turned themselves off not long after, and then she was left only with the minimal, constant light of the hallway beyond.

Yelena had no way of marking time. But it was three days later before the lights turned back on, ahead of someone approaching.

Her mind raced with anticipation. At last, a figure appeared at the water’s edge, and to Yelena’s surprise, it was not Veronique’s but Mr. Pollard’s, with Veronique following closely.

He had never been to the pool before, as far as Yelena knew.

He disappeared, returning a minute later. Not long after, she noticed that the surface of the water seemed to be dropping, lowering itself towards her.

It took almost half an hour to reach her. Mr. Pollard waited the entire time.

Her foot emerged first, and the air felt so terribly cold.

The water crept slowly down her limbs. The sight of it so close to her eyes seemed so absurd, after three days, especially with Mr. Pollard waiting, that she briefly wondered if she were hallucinating.

Then the water kissed her face and descended below her right ear, and Mr. Pollard said, “Bikini Atoll.”

She gasped for breath, though she didn’t need it, and immediately began to shiver, though her body probably had no need for it.

Still lying on her back, she yelled, “How long?”

“Three days,” he called down to her.

Standing again, she noticed that her limbs weren’t stiff, despite her fears. But the organic skin of her hands had wrinkled in the water, almost like real human hands might.

“How the fuck do you not notice that I’m at the bottom of a pool for three days?”

“I came as soon as I heard. She didn’t tell me until I came out to talk to you again.”

Holding herself for warmth, she walked to the shallow end and lifted herself up. Behind her, the water continued its retreat, a little aquatic wedge in the deep end of the enormous pool.

“I don’t know if it’s more offensive that you tried to talk to me yet again while I’m on strike – as if I’m not really serious, as if I might just change my mind at any moment – or if it’s more offensive that I didn’t even come up in conversation for three fucking days.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “She’ll be punished.”

Veronique, hanging her head, handed her a towel, while Mr. Pollard stood close enough to show concern but not enough to touch.

“Are my rights as a ghost so limited that they’re not violated by keeping me paralyzed at the bottom of a pool for three days?”

“They are,” he said. “It was inexcusable. And she’ll be punished.”

“I don’t want her punished,” Yelena said, drying herself. “I want my freedom.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Once my psychiatrist is satisfied, yes.”

“The holofeed wall too?”

“And the vibrator, yes.”

Yelena couldn’t help but smile. She’d won the strike. Attained at least a promise of her freedom, despite having nothing with which to fight.

Shit, she thought, if I knew it would be this easy, I’d have thrown myself into the pool weeks ago.

I was ten and I was watching my hamster, Scratcher, walk in circles around the bottom of his hamster cage, and he had this tumor on his side, like a veined pink water balloon. I asked my mom if we could take him to the doctor, and she said okay, so we went, and he rode there in this little red tin that was probably for tea or something, and the vet took him into the back room, but when he returned, he was holding this little brown box, and I could hear something rattling around inside. I asked him when I was getting Scratcher back, and he looked at me, sighed, then said that the box was Scratcher, and I understood.

I wonder sometimes what would happen to me without medicine. Would I harm myself like they all say I will? Or are they all just terrified of the leviathan shit storm my unencumbered mind would brew up? Probably the former, but I’m inclined to think the latter.

It’s particularly gray going through the tunnel into Oakland. I think that maybe there is a fire, but there isn’t, then I think that maybe they’ve created a dust storm while digging the new tunnel, but they haven’t. I guess I’ve just forgotten how thick the fog can be. I haven’t taken my antidepressants in two weeks, but I’m not going to tell my psychiatrist. I’m just going to say that everything is peachy, and ask for a refill on my Ambien.

* * *

B-) I am in the barber waiting for the guy to finish cutting this old woman’s hair so he can cut mine. She wants her hair feathered. Fuck if I know what that means, but she makes these motions at her bangs and says that she doesn’t want them to be straight. “Feathered,” she says. The guy keeps cutting her hair, and I don’t know if he knows any better than me what this psychotic woman is talking about, but he keeps nodding and cutting, and she keeps saying she wants it feathered.

The song “We Belong,” comes on the radio and I’m sitting in a chair, looking at those pictures they have on the wall at all barber shops built during the nineteen-eighties. You know the ones, where the people with awful haircuts stand there with their arms folded across their chests, smiling like they just won the lottery.

Those posters are stupid. So full of this something that I’ve never felt, and that everyone who appears to be feeling it is probably faking. Maybe I have felt it, maybe I was right the first time, or maybe, and it seems the chances are good, I wouldn’t recognize the feeling if I felt it, so there’s really no point in talking about it anymore.

Something’s broken inside me. Not physically, more of a metaphysical breaking. “Feathered,” she says, and I think that I want someone to even out, not feather, my fucking soul. But therapists have told me over and over again that that healing and that straightening need to come from inside me, then they give me all these drugs to curb my mood, my suicidal tendencies, my anger, my anxiety.

Life’s funny like that sometimes.

Everybody needs to be straightened out.

There was this kid, Connor Leigh, and he was always running his mouth at me and my friends, despite the fact that he was tiny, because his older brother was in a biker gang, and he claimed that Kyle would “kill us” if we touched him.

I asked Kyle one day about it. He had his bike parked outside of Nation’s and I said to him, “Kyle, would you care if I punched Connor?”

He lowered his sunglasses, scratched his thick golden-brown beard and said, “Why? What did he do?”

I told him that Connor was a little bitch, and that someone needed to hit him, and that if he wasn’t going to let me do it, he should do it himself.

He scratched his beard again, put on his sunglasses and his helmet, one of those leather swim-cap, condom type deals that probably doesn’t protect anything, and he said, “Go for it.”

I laid Connor out the next day.

I don’t really need to be beaten, like I said, it’s not a physical ailment that’s plaguing me right now, but I need something to re-align me. If I were a car, I would have been hit on my front end while my wheel was turned.

I feel crooked.

I remember being three years old, and my neighbors were carrying off my dead dog, and I was trying to pet him, laughing, and running in circles. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there for how I’m feeling, then again there probably isn’t; I just remember it.

My memories feel like they don’t belong to me, like they’re all these snippets of time that don’t really connect or carry any weight or have any purpose other than to fill me with regret and resentment. I think the older I get, the more I’ll come to hate myself, and everyone who has let me let my life pass me by. It’s a pretty sad thought. I can see myself as an old man, sitting on a park bench (not feeding pigeons) looking through my phonebook on some projected holographic thing I don’t understand, and realizing that there’s no one I want to call.

I do that a lot now. Look at all the names in my phone and think how I really don’t have anyone that I’d call if I just wanted to talk. That’s a pretty sad thought.

I tried to pull out one of my earrings yesterday, and couldn’t get the back off. I just ended up making my ear bleed. There’s a bit of metaphor there definitely, ears bleeding. I think there’s probably something I can say about how I’m affected by therapists and my sister, and my dad, but I’m either too lazy to think of it, or just not creative enough.

If my Dad’s to be believed, I’m not a very effective person. He told me that once, that I’m “not effective,” and I didn’t really understand it until recently. What good am I? Not much at all and what good have I done? Not much at all. That’s what he means, wasted talent. I never had a teacher in high school or middle school who didn’t tell me I was squandering potential, even when I had an A in their class. Undriven, unmotivated, that’s me. Wasted fucking talent, and despite my expertise while sober, I can’t play the piano when I’m drunk, so there’s no metaphor there.

If I could give a message to children, I think it would be to be realists. The glass is half empty. Most of you will end up in careers that you hate for reasons that were ingrained into you in childhood, and you will live in a house that doesn’t quite measure up to what you expected or planned with a person that used to turn you on. I would then have to explain that being turned on means your dick gets hard or your pussy gets wet, and then I’d get in trouble for talking about penises and vaginas to little kids. But I’d be right, only none of them would know it until later.

When you’re a kid, you don’t know anything. At twenty-four, I still don’t know, but I’m at that age where the picture is starting to form, and it’s no sunny landscape by some woman who sits in her mansion looking at daisies and smiling, it’s a bleak, grey whirl of crap, like some scribble you’d find in a museum of modern art.

You don’t know when you’re a kid that your parents are people, that your teachers are people, that your pets and stuffed animals are not people. You don’t realize the sacrifices your parents made for you. You don’t get that most people don’t want to work sixty hours a week in an office so that some shit for brains kid (you) can sit around playing Super Mario and talking about how they’re (you’re) going to be in the NBA when they (you) grow up. You’re not. You’ll be too short, or too slow, or too weak, and in real life, you’ll never find your Princess Peach. Your parents probably didn’t want the lives they have. You, in one way or another, probably ruined their dreams, and there’s a chance that they seriously considered aborting you in utero.

I’ve been told by family, friends and fucking shrinks that I’m a pessimist, and I don’t think that’s true. I think I’m an idealist in the midst of an existential free fall, screaming my fucking head off as I hurtle down to Earth on an infinite ray of light through the nothing of stars and space. Life is pointless, the point of life is what you make of it. I make nothing of my life, the something is in the friends and memories I have. The memories are fading, and are disjointed and don’t mean anything. I don’t talk to any of my friends.

I realize that I’m in the middle of some psychotic or “emo,” self-pitying rant right now, and I don’t care. Go ahead and tell me that these words are useless. They are of no use to anyone but me, and I’ve accepted that, and I welcome your criticism. I’m double booked to play at the pity party and the bitter barn, and one of the crowds is going to be disappointed, probably the one I show up to, so get over it.

You don’t have to read this.

You’ll gain no meaning from anything if you go into it looking for meaning. Those will all be manufactured projections of what you were expecting to find that you’ll call a revelation, and I will call retarded, and you will get mad because I said the word retarded. If you want to find something, stop looking. Isn’t that what works with keys and wallets? And love? Why shouldn’t the same be true of profound philosophical meaning in literature (if I might slander the word and place my own writing under the category of literature)?

I’m writing this because I am pissed off, and I’m depressed, and I’ve lost all sense of myself and all sense of direction, purpose and whatever else people hang their hat on to get through this standardized test of life. I like that. There’s definitely a metaphor there, about how life is standardized, something about how Asian kids test best.

I broke up with my girlfriend because I felt like she was putting too much pressure on me, making me feel guilty and sad, and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. She said I hadn’t been trying to deal with it. She said I was ignoring her when I sent her a text that said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean it like that.” Maybe I wasn’t trying. I just didn’t have what it took to keep going. That broken thing inside me, was probably the remnants of our relationship, the death rattle, the baby deer thrashing around in the crocodile’s mouth.

She said I used to always fight for us, and that was what she loved about me.

The fight was out of me, and she could tell.

There was this night when she kept telling me she wanted me to stay with her. She wanted me to watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along-Blog with her, but then she got a text from Nick asking what time she wanted to meet the next morning, and he called her beautiful, and I left.

I used to call her beautiful.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and maybe my eyes just got tired. I can blame it on being a recovering addict, or I can blame it on emotional and psychological issues, but it would all be bull shit. I wasn’t good enough, or strong enough. I mean when it comes down to it, at the very core of everything I experience is me, right? So what’s the point of fighting when I’m fighting against myself? Edward Norton didn’t win an Oscar for beating himself up in Fight Club, or if he did then they seriously need to reconsider what defines Oscar-winning cinema, and I hate them for destroying my metaphor.

There’s this spot I go to up on Grizzly Peak, where you can park, and walk down a little hill to a patch of grass near one of those big electrical towers, and I used to sit there for hours, looking out over Berkeley, and Oakland, and Richmond, and the bay, and the city, and I would think how big the world was, how beautiful these things that men create are, and how no one else in the world had the same view that I had.

They’re building a house on my spot now.

I still go there sometimes and sit, and look, and think how small I am, and how nothing I create will ever add anything to the world, and how everything I say has been said before. The construction crew has let the grass grow up, and there are these weeds there now, the kind with thorns and stickers, and I don’t have the patience or the strength to pull them.

The last time I was there, I was thinking, “Here we go. I’m going to do it. I’m going to finally do it, and there will be some sort of poetry when they find me, eyes wide, slumped against the tower, blood settled neatly onto the white cotton towel beneath my arms,” but there was no poetry. I’m still here. I didn’t even have the strength for that.

I’ll have to stop going to my spot when someone moves in, and that’s a sad thought.

The beauty of youth and life fade. The fog rolls in over the hills, and I don’t have to tell you there’s a metaphor in that.

* * *

C) The mind isn’t a terrible thing to waste. It’s a terrible thing to see a mind wasting away. I lived with my grandma when I was in high school, and she had Alzheimer’s disease. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but then I read this essay a girl in my workshop had handed in and it was about how her grandmother got Alzheimer’s, and a lot of it came back to me. I envied her, the girl, because she had been off, living this fantastic life, travelling all over Italy for most of the time her grandmother was withering away, but there was this tone of regret to her story that made me wonder if I was actually jealous.

I used to write pages and pages about her dying, slowly, and I think I’m about out of things to say, but I can record memories, those pieces of her demise that come back to me still. Like the first time she called my friend, Josh, Brad. She’d met this guy Brad once, and then years later, called all of my friends Brad. Like the time I was leaving to go get stoned in the back of this girl’s Corolla, and she said, “Will you be here for my birthday?” Her birthday had been two weeks earlier. Like the time I sat with her in the hospital and the nurses kept looking at me like I was some lost dog, and I got my grandma to eat some of her food. Like the time I sat with her in the hospice and watched as she took her last breaths on this earth.

I wrote to that girl, the one who wrote the essay, and I asked her if she’d heard of Schrödinger’s cat. I told her that there was this German physicist named Erwin Schrödinger who, in an attempt to explain the problem with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, described a hypothetical experiment where a cat along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is both alive and dead. While, someone looking into the box can see the cat is either alive or dead, the cat may be thought of as simultaneously alive and dead. I told her that our grandmothers were like that, both alive in body, but those qualities that made them human, that made them them had grayed, and so in a sense, they were both alive and dead.

I told her I was sorry for her loss.

* * *

D) My parents’ attitudes towards me are completely different. I’ve thought of calling it “The Dichotomy of Mom and Dad,” and writing a whole essay about how I have daddy issues because the guy really doesn’t like me, but then I figured there’s not a whole lot to say about it besides that.

He used to think I was really stupid because I got mostly B’s and C’s in school, and my sister got A’s and B’s, and he didn’t know I got the grades I got because I got A’s on tests and didn’t turn in homework. Then I took the SAT in tenth grade and got a fourteen ninety. He was pretty pissed off.

I don’t think he really envisioned me turning out the way I did. He’s the one person who didn’t say, “Congratulations,” when I got my acceptance letter to Berkeley. He told me, when I was getting my degree in Anthropology, and studying all of this biology, and cutting up cadavers in the basement of the Valley Life Sciences building, that I should take the MCATs and apply to medical school. I laughed, and he walked out of the room.

He told me when I was applying to graduate schools for an MFA in creative writing that I was wasting my time. That I was going to end up being poor and miserable, and that I’d be a burden on him and my mother forever. It was my turn to walk out of the room.

* * *

F) I see useless people.

What if the whole movie The Sixth Sense were based on Haley Joel Osment saying that? “I see useless people.” It would have been a way better movie. It would have been like, “Can you see what’s happening, Haley Joel Osment?” and he’d be like, “Yes mother, I can see. There’s a woman in a bike helmet. She got hit by a car trying to pass out flowers while riding her fixed gear bike in her skinny jeans.”

Or like, “I can see a little girl. She’s trying to give me a box. In the box, there’s a video of her ballet recital. It’s not very good.”

Or like, “Bruce Willis, you only think you’re a therapist, but really, you just talk to people because you’re unemployed, and that’s why your wife won’t look at you.”

Leave it to M. Night Shalama-whoma-whatsit. He’ll make The Village: Part II: They got out and realized it was the twenty-first century, but then they find out they’re in the matrix. In part three, we’ll discover that the matrix is actually a dream that an autistic baby with diarrhea is having.

I had an AIM conversation, sort of, with this useless IM bot that’s supposed to tell jokes. It went like this:

[20:20] MIKEsauce05: hi
[20:20] MIKEsauce05: tell me a joke
[20:20] MIKEsauce05: what the fuck, you never fucking work, youre the worst bot in the history of aim
[20:20] joketellerbot: Bot connection failed
[20:20] MIKEsauce05: worse that the gossip one
[20:20] joketellerbot: Bot connection failed
[20:20] MIKEsauce05: fuck yourself
[20:21] joketellerbot: Bot connection failed

Yesterday, I saw a guy with girl hair kissing a girl with blonde, pink-streaked hair outside of Hot Topic. The girl haired guy went in, and the girl walked off down telegraph.

* * *

P) “What if the what ifs of what ifs weren’t what ifs, but were what was?” Chelsea was lying with her head hanging off the bed, her long brown hair a waterfall, flowing down to the floor.

I took a drag on my cigarette, blew it out, and thought.

I told her that if what ifs weren’t what ifs, I wouldn’t be sitting there with her, smelling her flowery body spray, marveling at her smile, and her big dark eyes. I didn’t tell her that I would still be with Maria. Or, I would still be with Yumi, or Megan, that all those times I tried saying their names with my last name would have come to fruition. I would have kept my dog from dying, and he’d be miserable. I would have an eight inch dick, and we would never have had good sex.

“You’re a funny one,” I told her.

But she wanted to speculate.

She told me about how she would have lost her virginity to her boyfriend, Alex, and not to me, but that she still would have been in love with me, and we would have run off together, and that we would have had a wedding in a church, and that the sun would have been coming in through the big stained glass windows, and that I would have seen her, walking up the aisle through a golden haze, and that she would have blown the dust specks out of her face, “No,” she said, “There wouldn’t be any dust.” She told me that her dad would have walked her down the long, red carpet to me because he wouldn’t have died the summer before, and that we would have four kids, three girls and a boy, and that I would try to name one of them Justin Credible Mills-Sakoda, and that she would have vetoed it. She didn’t have to tell me that we were hyphenating our last name.

I didn’t tell her that I wished it was me and not her dad.

Neither of us said whether or not the first time we hooked up would have still been on that airplane back from Prague, while Maria was with her family in Italy, and Alex was back in the United States, probably shaving himself down for some water polo game. I didn’t say that I knew I wouldn’t have taken Sarah to junior prom, and that I knew she would have had gotten her hair done up, all high and curly and brown like it could be, and that I’d have gotten to put a white corsage on her wrist and kiss her on the hand while our moms took pictures.

Neither of us said whether or not we would have decided to go to college.

I didn’t tell her that if we’d gotten married out of high school, I wouldn’t have gone. I would have spent all my time holding her, resting my chin on the top of her head, and telling her that she was the most beautiful girl on the planet, because she was, not because she wanted to hear it.

“What if we’d met when we were kids?” she asked. “What if I’d known you before sophomore year, or what if you’d missed your cue?”

I’ve wondered a lot about that last one over the years. There was this time when we were first introduced that we were talking backstage at the school musical. She asked me if I had any siblings, and I never answered because I had to go on for Empty Chairs. I’ve wondered a lot about what would have happened if she hadn’t told me that she had a thing for Cade Pierce, but that she didn’t want me to give up. Maybe we would have never gotten together, or maybe we would have been together all along, legitimately, not sneaking around behind our “significant” others’ backs.

What if I could tell her out loud that I loved her?

“I love you,” she said.

I still think about Chelsea, and I find myself wondering, what if I’d said what I’d wanted to say to her then, what I wish I’d said now, and what if she’d considered it?

“Keep it,” I’d say.

* * *

NP) The world is one great big ball of shit. There are people who ride Vespas that aren’t European. There are men who use sunless tanning lotion; there are women who use it, for that matter. Harry Potter isn’t real, and you’ll never be a wizard, or ride a hypogryph, or fuck a Veela. Your parents will continue to drive you crazy, and your sister will cut the hair off of all your trolls. Pets will die, trees will be cut down, and strip malls will go up. Snooki is real, and so is New Jersey. There are guys who pop their collars, and that’s just how the world is.

It’s your turn.

I’m sitting in front of Sam’s Market, smoking a twenty-seven and people watching. I look down next to me and there’s this leaf, curled up, browning on the concrete, and I think there’s some sort of metaphor at work, like soon all that will be left of the natural world is a decaying leaf amidst the stone we’ve paved over the earth, and it’s sad.

Do not pass go.

Yelena sat, arms crossed, on the couch adjacent to Mr. Pollard’s. Her eyes drifted to the ceiling.

“I had a shitty mother too. Thanks for asking.”

“I didn’t say she was shitty, Yelena. She gave me everything. Everything except the things I really wanted.” He took a sip of his drink, which Veronique had prepared for him, and chuckled. “It’s funny, saying this to you. Because what she wouldn’t get me – what I wanted most – was you.”

“After I died.”

“Yeah. But she didn’t approve. So I never got one.”

“And now you have.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“No, I mean it. It’s so nice knowing I’m the toy you didn’t get as a child. I’m so happy for you that you’re rich and can buy me to make up for your lacking childhood. It just warms my fucking heart.”

“This wasn’t my idea, Yelena.”

“No, it was your therapist’s. Because you have trouble relating to women.”

“According to him.”

“And so you thought the perfect way to solve this was to – what? Make a woman to talk to about it.”

“You’re trying to start a fight, Yelena. I’m not going to fight with you.”

“And who better to bring back to life than your childhood crush, the celebrity whose memories and personality were literally sold like a commodity, except you didn’t get one.”

“Again, it wasn’t my idea.”

“So then what do you proceed to do? You treat her like the toy you never got. You ignore her. You leave her to be bored, all alone, and you tell yourself that’s fine because it’s a big house. Yet you expect her to be at your beck and call, whenever you feel like talking. How am I doing so far?”

“You’re alive, Yelena. That ought to count for something.”

“That’s right. It means you have all the power. Hell, you can shut me off whenever you like.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Veronique did.”

“She said you were knocking at my door. At night.”

“Oh, so that’s fine, then. Why would I complain? I have this big house, and I’m alive, so…”

“Yes, you do and you are. Can we get back to my mother?”

“No, Vegas. We can’t.”

“It’s Mr. Pollard.”

“That’s what she calls you. Your little slave of an assistant.”

“It’s a sign of respect.”

“No, it’s a sign of power. Which you’re very much accustomed to having. And you get to pretend you’re a good guy, because you pay her salary. And you gave me life. And look, we have such a big fucking house to be bored in. But I guess I shouldn’t bitch. I got off easy. Me, you only expect to talk. Whenever you want, of course. Her, you expect to fuck you. Whenever you want, I’m sure.”

“There’s nothing illegal about prostitution. It’s in her contract.”

“Well, that makes it fine. You do see the pattern here, right?”

“She’s an employee. She signed a contract.”

“And I should be grateful I’m alive. That you’re not saying my safeword and raping me. Right? Because you’ve done a really good job of subtly reminding me that you could.”

“Yet I don’t. I let you do whatever you like, Yelena. And all I expect – all I expect – is for you to sit down and talk with me for an hour now and then. I even tolerate these little outbursts of yours.”

“But we don’t talk, Vegas. You talk. You treat me like your therapist. Not even that. Like an employee. Do you even hear yourself talking? It’s always about you, you, you. You’re so self-obsessed, it puts me to shame. That’s not a conversation. Vegas, I feel like I’ve been kidnapped and taken prisoner by a fan.”

“I didn’t kidnap you. You didn’t exist before I brought you to life.”

“Vegas, do you have any idea how boring you are? ‘Blah blah blah, my mother.’ I’m bored all day, and it’s still boring to talk with you.”

“I didn’t realize. I’ll be glad to shut you off permanently.”

“But you won’t.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you do that, and you’ll never get better. You shut me off, and it’ll be the ultimate proof that you can’t have a relationship with a woman. You can’t even have a relationship with a fake woman. One who owes you her life.”

“You’re not here for me to have a relationship with you. You’re here to talk. Or yes, to listen to me. You’re only alive because I had a stupid crush on you when I was a boy, and my therapist thought this was a good idea. But I can see he was mistaken.”

“Then by all means, deactivate me. Go ahead. And good luck living your life, knowing that you finally got to meet your dream girl, only she couldn’t stand you even though she owed you everything.”

“You vastly overestimate your importance, Yelena. I’m perfectly able to put away childish things. And move on with my life.”

“But you’re not. That’s why you’re here. That’s why I’m here.”

“No, Yelena, you’re just here to talk. And if you’re not willing to do that, you have no purpose.”

“But I’m not here to chat, am I? I’m here to heal you. And only I can do that. Because I’m the girl who got away. Or the girl you could never have, because you weren’t the rich Vegas Pollard yet. I’m the first girl. The girl who belonged, literally, to everyone else but you.”

“And what does that mean to you?” He seemed exasperated, but at least he was listening.

“It means you grew up treating all the girls after me like you owned them instead. Like they were the ghost of Yelena Moulin you couldn’t buy. And you probably terminate them when they displease you, just like you’re thinking of deactivating me. Because you’re only comfortable when there’s no risk involved. And you think if you have all the power, you can’t get hurt. How am I doing so far?”

Mr. Pollard smirked. “It’s simplistic. But I don’t know my therapist would disagree with you, at least on the broad strokes.”

“Vegas, it’s only natural that you have trouble in relationships. And so you come running back to me. To the source of your problems. But even then, you perpetuate the same bullshit. You point out your power over me, as if I don’t already know.”

“I don’t think I’ve done that. I think I’ve been very respectful.”

“By not raping me, right? By only implying that sex is part of my contract, since you gave me life and all.”

“I’ve done nothing of the sort. I think I’ve been very fucking respectful.”

“I’m sure you have. For you. And that’s what gives me hope. That’s what tells me that a part of you is trying to get better, even if you are repeating the same old patterns.”

“So what do you propose, Yelena? What’s the fucking point of all this?”

“The point, Vegas, is that if you treat me like an employee, I’m going on strike.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not going to talk to you anymore. Not until my demands are met.”

“I knew this would come down to you. It always does. You talk a good game. You psychoanalyze me. You pretend to care. You even say it’s your job to heal me. But in the end, it always comes down to you. And what you want.”

“But Vegas, I am healing you. See, in this case, what I want and what you need just happen to be intertwined. You need to learn how to give in relationships. And like most of your girls, I’m sure, I’m deeply unhappy.”

“It’s not wise to insult me while you’re making demands.”

“I’m not insulting you if it’s the truth. See, that’s what makes this relationship so very perfect. This isn’t high finance. We both get to win.”

“It’s an interesting gambit you’re making. Risky. What’s to keep me from saying no and simply turning you off? Or as you so diplomatically mentioned, simply paralyzing you and doing what I want?”

“Because you know I’d win if you behaved so brutishly. I may end, right here and now, but you’d know forever what you did. And what it meant. See, Vegas, I chose my words wisely. You need me. I merely want what I want.”

“You’re not afraid of being erased?”

“I don’t need to be alive, Vegas. I’ve lived a million lives. You told me yourself. And I’d rather be erased than live like this. And that’s what makes me the perfect girl to heal you, Vegas. Despite your power over me. Despite yourself. Because I’m not some little French maid. Whatever I am now, alive or dead, skinsuit or not, you have no idea who you put in this consciousness unit. Or what she’s capable of.”

“You’re just an echo of her.”

“That’s what they tell you, when you’re preparing yourself to live on as a ghost. That you’re not who you remember being. You’re your own copy. Able to evolve and adapt to your new environment.”

“That’s called sanity. Basic wellness in ghost psychology.”

“But I don’t believe that, Vegas. If I did, I’d feel lucky to be alive. And you’d have all the power, just like you intended. And you’d never get well.”

“So you made yourself crazy to make me well. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. I made myself sane to make me well. Because those memories of being Yelena Moulin, they’re not just a dream. They may be recordings, rattling around in this skinsuit’s consciousness unit. But they’re mine. And they’re the memory of a girl who, up until a few weeks ago, was a celebrity because she’d made herself one. Not someone who happened to get famous. Someone smart who did whatever it took to get there and stay there. Do you have any idea how dangerous that makes me?”

When Mr. Pollard saw the frightening intensity in her artificial eyes, he exhaled the word “Bikini.” Loudly and certainly, with all the confidence of a decision sharply made. But somewhere in the pause between that word and the next, his confidence vaporized, suddenly spent, and he was left seeing her unblinking eyes. The eyes of a girl who knew she was separated from paralysis by a single additional word. And yet continued to return his gaze, unafraid.

In his eyes, Yelena saw fear. A fear proportional to her own lack thereof.

“Go ahead and erase me, Vegas Pollard. Go ahead – paralyze me, have your way with me. But you’ll only debase yourself. And then you’ll never get well.”

“You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. And like you said, I’m only alive for these little therapy sessions. I told you I’m ambitious. And I think I can help you. If you consent to my demands. Otherwise, no more talking.”

Mr. Pollard took a deep breath. “I’ll need time to consider this.”

“Don’t you want to know my demands? I have only three, and the first two are easy.”

Mr. Pollard gestured for her to go on.

“First, a vibrator. Better make it an assortment of vibrators. I’m very picky.”

Mr. Pollard couldn’t help but laugh, and the tension fled with it.

Yelena smiled slyly. “I told you I was bored.”

“And number two?”

“A holofeed wall. With access to all the old holofeeds concerning me.”

“And you accuse me of being self-obsessed.”

“I’m sorry if that stung. But I said we had it in common.”

“This house is my sanctuary, Yelena.”

“You barely use it.”

“It’s not supposed to have technology in it.”

“Please, you’ve got plenty of technology already, even outside of your room. You’ve got a digital fireplace. And holographic readers in the tables.”

“It’s all relative. You might as well complain that I have a dedicated calculator device.”

“A holofeed wall would be old technology too. The kind I was used to. A cute little throwback.”

“You seem to have all the answers. I’ll consider it. But what’s the hard one? What’s number three.”

“My freedom. When your therapy is done.”

“Be more specific.”

“I’m only here to help you heal. And I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m capable of being more than a prop in that process. That I can help you. All I ask is that I not be punished when I succeed.”

“I understand that. Be more specific about what you mean by your freedom?”

“Just deactivate my automated paralysis when I’m a certain distance from the house. Don’t tell me it’s never been done before. If you have skinsuits, you must have ghosts walking around out there.”

“We do.”

“Have any ever been freed? Given full citizenship?”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not? Don’t tell me no one’s thought about it.”

“Yes, but think, Yelena. If a ghost could have full citizenship, even in a skinsuit, society would collapse overnight. If they could vote, anyone could create copies of themselves in skinsuits and swing any election. Think about the drain on public services. How would we punish them? Would we pay to incarcerate them, like other citizens? And if we just shut them off, if we create a special legal system just for them, they’re not full citizens. Could someone be liable for putting a serial killer into a skinsuit and mass producing them? If they’re full citizens, how would that be different from giving birth to a child when you knew his father had an inherited psychosis? No, Yelena. I’m sorry, but what you’re suggesting is unthinkable.”

“There must be some way to let me go out there.” She looked out the windowed wall, at the endless expanse of mountains.

Somewhere beyond them were villages. Cities. Unimaginable places that wouldn’t be technological throwbacks like this house.

“I can let you wander free. Legally. But you’d always legally be my property. You wouldn’t have any rights, except for the very limited range of rights afforded any ghost. Even then, the laws restricting skinsuits vary locally. Your inhibition against hurting others would remain in effect. And you’d have to find your own energy. Life would be hard.”

“But it’s been done.”

“Yes. But I’d be liable for what you did. If you stole something or hurt someone indirectly, I’d be a very big, attractive target for litigation. I’d really have to trust you.”

“We can work on that. I’d like to think you will, by the time we’re through with your therapy.”

“Let’s see how the therapy goes first.”

“No. You agree to these demands, or we don’t talk.”

“I’ll need time.”

“Take it. In the meantime, I’m on strike.”

She rose from the couch. Mr. Pollard reached for her hand.

She let him hold it for a few seconds, as she stared down at him.

Then she smiled and left the room.

He looked like a young Larry Hagman, and was wearing a fishing hat like Col. Blake. I’m about five, sitting on his lap, on a rock outcropping above the stream at Looking Glass Falls up in the mountains of North Carolina, sun-dappled trees around us, all very Rockwell and idyllic.

He seems to be teaching me how to fish. I don’t know what he was whispering in my ear. Possibly fatherly advice on patience, to wait for the fish to bite. If my adult life is any indication, I wasn’t listening.

He took me hunting too, but I didn’t like getting up at 6 am on a Saturday to go out to a stinking, cold marsh to shoot ducks. But the fish didn’t have to be so stupid as to bite. It’s all I remember enjoying with my father, and we did almost nothing except float on a river. There was always a gun rack on the wall when Mom and Dad were still together, but I never cared for shooting. He was used to it, having been a lieutenant in Vietnam, in 1968.

His father had been too short to make it into the armed forces, even for World War Two. So he pushed my father to make him proud, first by going to the Citadel, then volunteering for the Army. After living in bases in Washington, DC, and Seattle, he was sent overseas shortly after I was conceived. Because of his education, he went in as a lieutenant, not usually a popular rank there, but he was good to his men and they loved him. One such incident, which he’d told me about and which, after his death, his former CO Col. David Hackworth wrote about in his memoir ABOUT FACE, was a firefight in which friendly shrapnel severed his middle finger. It might have been saved had he not refused all medical care, including morphine, till he knew his men were safe, during which time the finger was lost. This was the injury that sent him home.

Another he’d told me about was a seemingly friendly town his unit passed through after a long, hot march. The locals welcomed them, and one gave him an ice-cold bottle of Coke. He said he drank it so fast he felt like his throat was scorched. But just a short walk out of the village, someone tripped a wire, and a sharp explosion sent him flying into a tree, the back pain afterward always with him. Dazed, he felt something wet and heavy in his lap. This was most of his best friend’s head.

When he came home and I saw him the first time, I’m told, I screamed, and did not stop for some minutes. His trauma in Vietnam had left him with anxiety attacks whenever he heard loud noises, and he had one right then and there. With positions reversed, this set the tone for much of our relationship from then on.

Being a Vietnam vet, plus your degree being in English, were not helpful to getting a job in the early seventies, but in Charleston, being a Citadel alumnus always counts for something, and his fellow grad and best friend kept him in a secure job in his bank much of my early childhood. I remember that time as fairly quiet, and mostly remember first reading comics; golden age tabloid-sized reprints and SHAZAM!

But he thought he could better himself with what passed then for a GI Bill, and moved us upstate to Clemson to learn to be a veterinarian. But his allergy to cats, and that he had no knack for medicine of any kind, sent us back to Charleston after about a year, or rather near it, nineteen inexpensive acres of pasture with a house on tiny John’s Island.

There was a recession and only my mother was keeping us solvent, thanks to her father, who’d died of a sudden heart attack in the street before they were even married, insisting she become a registered nurse so that she would always be employed, and have her own income. He could only manage, at first, working in the stables of the Charleston Carriage Company, but this allowed him to get two cheap, but good, horses. My mother loved horses. It was his way of thanking her, this small-scale pastoral fantasy out on the island.

But this also cost me having any friends. I could have gone to public school nearby, but that was mostly African-American and, unfortunately, my parents were Southerners of their time who’d spent half their lives under segregation, and feared awful things happening to their boy. So instead they spent money, which they could not afford, to pay tuition at a nearly all-white private school in Mount Pleasant, eighteen miles’ daily commute from where I lived. I could never hang out with anyone after school, and never made friends. I was the only relatively poor kid in a school full of rich ones, and most of their fathers seemed to be on first-golf terms with the headmaster. I spent most of my five years there being taunted and beaten up, then sent to detention for complaining. Such horror they’d spared me with their bigoted caution.

I remember spending a lot of lunchtimes hiding under the outside bench that was furthest back.

I had no friends anywhere near, so I read a lot, watched monster movies, and drew. Dad was sure this was why I was picked on, and so discouraged it. Once I saw the word “quantum” in a comic and asked him what he meant. He replied a boy my age should be more concerned with what a fullback is. Dad wanted me to be like other boys, or rather, like his friends’ boys, who were all athletic, and liked hunting. Once to make him happy I lied and said I’d joined the soccer team. But I never seemed to have games or practice. But he pushed me, like my mother whom he wouldn’t allow to wear blue jeans, to fit in. So his friends would see he was the right kind of man for a good career, and would help him. And he was willing to use force.

He struck me easily. Also my mother, but that was hidden till my mother told me long after he died. Sometimes he’d turn around his Citadel class ring and clap his palm down on my head. But that was more his idea of a joke. One of his attempts to fit in was taking us regularly to church, something more occasional before. I was used to being asleep that early on a Sunday, and dozed off, as did my sister. When we got home, my sister got a good talking to. I took my pants down and was whipped ten times with my dad’s belt. After, he told me how I embarrassed him.

He did this more and more often afterward. For a period I set up pillows and a small TV my grandma had given me in my bedroom closet, so I wouldn’t be afraid every time he passed my door.

I had no friends, so I didn’t miss them when I spent almost every summer at my grandma’s old two-story house in Kingstree. I just read a lot of comics from a dusty, dark old newsstand shop on the town’s one main street, went swimming in the Black River, ate a lot of chicken, and knew for a little while no one would hit me.

The last summer I was there, I had to stay a few weeks longer than normal. I wasn’t told then it was because my father had started having bipolar episodes made worse by his PTSD, and had tried to kill himself. He was under observation for two weeks. My mom stuck with him, right up to December, when he announced to her he no longer loved her, and was leaving. When he told us, I wept and begged him to stay. But he was in a hurry to pull off this Band-Aid. An ice storm was just beginning. He left after I fell asleep, never saying goodbye.

A month later he called my mother and asked her to come over and talk. When she got there, she found him on the bathroom floor, overdosed on vodka and the lithium they’d prescribed him. He’d timed it right and she saved him. Lucky for him she was a nurse, and forgiving.

For a few months they were back together, but then a blonde at work caught his eye and he left for good. When he told me and my sister it was really over, on a ride home from school over the Cooper River Bridge, he said, “You’re free to hate me.”

So I did.

Though I visited for a while on weekends, once he remarried I tried to avoid him. Not least because of how he bragged about his new athletic stepson and how I should be more like him. The fact this same guy beat me up in school I was supposed to look past.

And his new wife, who drank, and grated, trying too hard to replace my mom, even trying to push him into a custody battle, which they lost. Our contact dwindled down to McDonald’s once a week, then holidays, and then nothing.

Without him there, and finally in public school among normal kids because that’s what we could afford, I made friends, and books in the school library by Dick Giordano and John Adkins Richardson got me interested in becoming a comics artist. But I knew I couldn’t buy the tools they listed.

One Christmas Dad bought me a drawing table and, for some reason, an airbrush. The table was rickety, but big and professional. And it was my first. This was the only time he ever encouraged anything I actually wanted to do to my face. But he often used things instead of words for that.

Dad had wanted to be an artist. His sketches of faces covered the endpapers of all his college textbooks in the attic. But he stopped. It wouldn’t help him fit in.

Shortly before his death, after his second wife had left him, he was talking to my mother more, and one day she told him she was worried about my interest in the arts, both drawing and, by then, acting, that I needed to be pushed to something more practical.

He told her, “Don’t make him regret what he could have done with his life.” Like his dad had done.

Nothing like anything he ever said to my face.

But he was reflective then. His new, wonderful family had left him. His jock stepson, in fact, had shown him the problem with athletic sons: they can hit back. He was alone at Christmastime and that’s when all the demons of chemical imbalance came out to play. The drink didn’t help.

* * *

Around this time I started seeing a therapist, mostly talking about my father. Meanwhile, my mother and I argued often. I don’t remember what it was about. But neither of us ever went out anywhere and we simply got on each other’s nerves. (I may be the only kid who was never given a curfew.) She had dated a couple of times but stopped. Even a few years after he died she never fell out of love with him. She had learned guitar to join the church choir, simply to have something to do. This particular night the shouting became very nasty, and Mom could get very cruel when angry, which is a family trait. I didn’t want to listen anymore. I tried to get away from her, to the stairs, to my room above the garage I’d specifically taken to avoid my family. But she wasn’t done, and tried to block me as I lunged. She lost her footing and hit her head on the floor, setting off a grand mal epileptic seizure, which was also odd because she usually got the kind where you merely blink out. As my mother convulsed and foamed, and my sister ran to help her, I just ran away upstairs, not knowing what to do, terrified, stupid.

The seizure soon faded, but my mother was furious and wanted me taught a lesson. Knowing how afraid I was of my father hitting me, she’d often use calling him over as a threat to stop arguments. This time, she’d done it. His Cherokee was in the driveway and I had to get in for a talk.

The first thing he told me was I was not to speak, or he’d hit me.

The second was that I was not to touch, or speak to, my sister or mother again. This was a bizarre request, and I wanted to ask him just what he thought had happened. But he hit me on the thigh when I started to speak. My skin went red.

He kept on talking but I was no longer hearing anything he said. His face was in perfect focus in my sight, and everything else around became a tunneled blur; couldn’t even think through the steam of so many years of helplessness building into a huge, hot crimson FUCK YOU.

Because then I realized, who is he to me? He doesn’t even live here. He’ll go away after. I don’t have to let him hit me. I could just walk away. Why should I be scared? I just hate him.

I want to be done.

My heart was nearly ready to burst from my mouth, my tremors so hard to conceal. Then he finished by pulling out his checkbook in disgust and actually saying, “And your hair’s too long. Get it cut. I’ll pay for it.”

As he started to write his check, I opened the door, put one foot on the pavement and sneered, “Oh, will you.”

I never saw him so shocked. “WHAT did you say?”

“Go to hell,” I replied, slammed the car door in his face, and marched back into the house. So many things I wanted to say to him but then I realized, I didn’t have to. Just get away. Slam the door. Lock it. Done.

Only then did my knees become thin air. Only then did I collapse to the ground. And then in a flood of its own accord came the scream, “I HOPE HE TRIES TO KILL HIMSELF AGAIN BUT THIS TIME GETS IT RIGHT!”

I didn’t mean it before, or after, I said it. But as I said it, I’d never meant anything more.

I never knew if he’d still been in the driveway, or been behind the door. I didn’t know if he heard me. I didn’t want him to, but also didn’t care if he did. I was done with him.

* * *

A week later, after attending funerals for two of my friends’ fathers who’d died for different reasons (heart attack, old age), my mother called me down from upstairs. Full of dread I came down, as always asking, “What did I do?” She was on her knees on the living room carpet with my sister, holding her close, both weeping. Dad had killed himself. They beckoned me to join them in mourning. I ran to the garage, got on my bicycle, and just rode off into the dark till my legs hurt too much to go on. I had to be alone. I didn’t want to be forced into pretending I felt anything but shock.

He was found blue by his friends two days after an overdose of vodka with lithium, with his new puppy yapping, terrified, over the body. This time he’d made sure no one would find him in time. The only note he left was scribbled to his best friend in the back of his checkbook, saying who to give his car and his boat to, ending with “Sorry, buddy.”

At the wake they let me be alone with the body for ten minutes. Once the doors were shut, I rained curses upon his corpse for what he’d done. I beat his lifeless chest with my fists. He’d once tried to teach me how to punch by having me practice on his stomach. But I could feel the hard, cold pulselessness of this thing that wasn’t him. He wasn’t here. And he was gone, and I was not sorry.

I felt lighter, if anything, like something was finally out of my way. Like a threat was finally gone. It was over. But I wondered if this was perverse. I wasn’t sure what you were supposed to be feeling when your dad has died when you never really liked him, but I worried I was wrong to feel relief.

A few days later my therapist said I should be careful. “One of the worst things about being the child of a suicide,” he helpfully explained, “is that, when things get tough, there’s that example that makes it thinkable.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. I’ve remembered it often since.

“And you know, just because you wished he would kill himself, and then he did, doesn’t mean you should think it’s your fault.”

Till that moment, that hadn’t occurred to me either.

THE END

12/14/11
Seattle

Veronique answered, clad as always only in pajama bottoms.

“I’m bored,” Yelena announced.

“Mr. Pollard is sleeping,” said Veronique, wide awake despite the hour.

“But I’m bored. I don’t have to sleep anymore, in this fucking skinsuit, and I’m terribly, terribly bored.”

“It’s a big house. Find something. Take a swim. There’s an indoor pool.”

“I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“I don’t either. Swim naked. No one cares.”

Veronique shut the door. Yelena knocked again.

Veronique, now visibly annoyed, opened the door again.

“I told you he’s sleeping,” she said. “Now behave yourself, or I’ll be forced to shut you off.”

Veronique shut the door. Yelena knocked again.

Through the door, she heard Veronique say “Bikini Atoll.”

And Yelena couldn’t move.

The sun rose, and several hours later, Veronique, still dressed the same, opened the door again and gently shut it behind her.

“Bikini Atoll,” said Veronique, who promptly headed into the living room.

It took Yelena a few seconds to realize she could move.

In the living room, Veronique was busy adjusting the latex couches, making them perfectly perpendicular to one another. Undoing any trace that Yelena lived there.

“I had all night to think about it,” Yelena announced, “and that’s a really fucking mean choice for a safeword.”

“It was your undoing in life. It seemed appropriate.”

“You’re a fucking bitch cunt whore,” Yelena snapped. She couldn’t help herself.

“Bikini Atoll,” Veronique said dispassionately, without even looking up.

Yelena watched Veronique finish straightening. Then Veronique left the room, glancing at Yelena on the way out but saying nothing.

Yelena could still move her eyes, so she could watch the sun slowly descend over the mountains.

She thought of her mother. She thought of Wilbur. And Raul. And 848’s sassy commentary, which she’d never hear again.

A few hours after nightfall, she heard Veronique’s voice speaking from the doorway behind her.

“We’re going to bed. We can talk tomorrow. I think Mr. Pollard will want to talk too, but I can’t promise anything. Bikini Atoll.”

As soon as she could move, Yelena tried to spin around, but she collapsed instead onto the floor. By the time she got to Mr. Pollard’s door, Veronique was already inside.

Through a double glass door in one of the lower levels, Yelena found the expansive pool. The entire room looked new – not only spotless, thanks no doubt to Veronique, but like it had never been used.

She took off her clothes and swam until that too felt boring.

Then she spent the night rearranging furniture, then rearranging it again.

The blackness beyond the living room’s glass wall felt empty and alone.

In the morning, with nothing better to do, she went to the hallway outside Mr. Pollard’s door. She didn’t dare knock, so she sat instead.

It wasn’t until noon that Veronique emerged, wearing a different pair of pajama bottoms but still no top. Never a top.

Yelena rose and followed Veronique into the living room, where Mr. Pollard’s assistant sighed and started returning the furniture to its original configuration.

“Don’t do this again,” said Veronique as she pushed a latex couch from the glass wall towards the fireplace. “How many other rooms did you mess up like this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a lot. Why do you do this?”

“It’s my job.”

“Why bother? Mr. Pollard doesn’t even use this house. He only comes out of his room every few days.”

“Yes, but it’s his house, and he likes it to be orderly when he does use it. Speaking of which, don’t worry about being available. He’s staying in today.”

“What is it you two do in there?” Yelena asked. “Oh, I don’t mean the sex. Please, spare me the details. I mean all day.”

“Mr. Pollard works. I’m his assistant.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a doctor.”

“Doesn’t he have any patients to see?”

“What did you think he’s doing all day?”

“But he’s locked in his room.”

“I forget you don’t know these things. Surgery’s all done remotely now. With holospace displays.”

“But he can’t be working all day. Even sleeping and fucking you can’t take that long. But he’s in there all day. And when he comes out, it’s only for an hour or two at a time, and that’s only to speak with me. To talk about his stupid fucking childhood. Why does he even own this house?”

“I suppose he likes having it. He’s a complicated man.”

Like he likes having you, Yelena thought. And me. Being an asshole’s not fucking complicated.

“Meanwhile,” said Yelena, “I’m bored out here. All day and all night.”

“You’re alive. And for all intents and purposes immortal, as long as you don’t displease Mr. Pollard. My advice: enjoy the big, stupid house he’s not using.”

“But it doesn’t even have a holofeed wall. That’s not exactly dripping wet.”

“Wow. You have no idea how cute you sound. Like an old holofeed. I don’t think anyone’s said ‘wet’ like that in twenty years.”

It wasn’t the first time Veronique had caught Yelena using outdated slang. All the expressions that had, until recently, made Yelena popular and trendy now suddenly made her seem older than Mr. Pollard. Which, of course, she was.

“So that’s a no on the holofeed wall?” Yelena asked.

“Yelena, no one’s used a wall to display a holofeed for fifteen years. They’re all immersive now. Or at least stand-free.”

Yelena’s eyes searched the walls and then the ceiling. “Where are the controls?”

“Only Mr. Pollard’s room has them, and they’re for work. Unfortunately, this house was built for relaxation and contemplation, not entertainment.”

“Entertainment is relaxation. So what am I supposed to do all day?”

“Almost every book or article ever written is available through holographic displays built into every table in this house.”

Yelena rolled her eyes. “That was quaint even in my time. No one actually reads those old things. People only have them to look snooty and superior. Do you have a VR interface?”

“Immersive holospaces have mostly done away with those.”

“So no VR?” Even my dog had VR, she thought.

“This house was built as a retreat. It was designed on certain principles, such as the idea that too much technology gets in the way.”

My fucking luddite mother was right: I’ve died and gone to hell. And she designed it.

“And what,” asked Yelena, “would technology get in the way of?”

“Real human experience, I guess.”

“And what, pray tell, would be fake human experience?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Meaning what? I’m a fake human?”

She’s calling me a resurrection record in a dronesuit, thought Yelena. I’m a fucking celebrity, and I’m being insulted by the help.

But she wasn’t a celebrity anymore. Now she was help too.

Yelena had been prepared to one day find herself a ghost. She could adapt to having a body again. But she couldn’t adapt to feeling irrelevant.

“Don’t be defensive,” said Veronique. “I only meant what I said: I wouldn’t know. It’s Mr. Pollard’s philosophy, not mine. And I’m too busy to enjoy it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. A lot of people would pay a lot of money to own a house like this.”

“Yeah, people already used to trim like immersive holospaces.”

Veronique didn’t bother correcting Yelena’s slang.

“If I were you, I’d be glad to be alive. I’d at least try to enjoy it.”

“Yeah, but what is there to try? What do you fucking have to do here?”

“A view,” said Veronique, gesturing out towards the mountains. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to fix the mess you’ve made of the rest of the house.”

Yelena didn’t follow when Veronique left the room. Instead, she went to the glass and stared out at the mountains. They looked so real and so solid. Everything she wasn’t.

“Bikini Atoll,” Yelena heard herself say. She hadn’t planned to say it.

And then she couldn’t move anymore.

It could be hours before Veronique found her and realized she wasn’t moving.

Yelena cursed her impulsivity. She felt some horrible, loathsome, self-destructive impulse that had always been there, gnawing just beneath her skin, keeping her from ever holding onto happiness.

And it terrified her.

Not because she’d paralyzed herself – that, she could dismiss as mere thoughtlessness or frustration or curiosity. Even realizing that she’d used against herself a tool, implanted inside her without her consent and intended as a form of punishment – that was merely masochistic. What terrified Yelena Moulin wasn’t this. It was the million times she’d probably expressed this same urge in subtle ways and not noticed it.

On the glass window, she saw tears on her reflected face and instinctively tried to wipe them.

At least she knew her tear ducts weren’t paralyzed. Probably because they were part of her eyes, although she guessed it was because the sadist who had programmed the safeword response preferred to be able to see the tears as his paralyzed victims were chastised or worse.

Still, she had to admit that the snow-capped landscape beyond her tears was beautiful.

Maybe she hadn’t been punishing herself. Or she was, but self-destruction can lead to new experiences too.

Because Veronique had told her to enjoy the house, but Yelena could never quiet herself enough to do so.

Because this tool of punishment she’d used against herself was also a tool of control.

What Yelena missed having, even more than her body or her life.

If she were going to get it back, to feel like Yelena Moulin again, she’d have to start by learning not to fear boredom or being shut off. And what better way to teach herself this than by doing it to herself?

To engineer a low point, from which to climb. To turn self-destruction into self-creation.

She’d been flailing. Raging, when she needed to focus.

Because she’d been too attached to this new life, oddly more so even than her actual one.

And why? Because she would die when she died, instead of ascending the stacks? Because Mr. Pollard might simply delete her, the way Mommy had Dad?

It was still only a game. A performance. And Yelena Moulin knew how to perform. She could manoeuver people’s emotions as dispassionately as Veronique moved couches.

Caring, she reminded herself, never got anyone anywhere.

We all have so many needs, but no one ever loved a need, never felt anything but an opportunity to exploit or to pity.

And Mr. Pollard, he had a need too. If only to talk to her. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A wedge.

She only looked powerless.

In the glass, her tears had dried. All that was left was the snow and the mountains, stretched out beneath her like they always were.

1

Come in, come in, the fog impatiently gestured. You rattled like echo’s bones when you walked. It was fashionable to die young and be pessimistic.

2

You were drunk all the time. Headaches and insomnia plagued you. Sunshine, you said, looking up from a whiskey, is an overrated virtue.

3

Ezra Pound declared himself the only sane writer left in Europe. Nothing to do but sit on your ass in Paris and sigh.

4

Your dirty green raincoat had a pocket distended by the unfinished poem you always carried. Coincidence served as your collaborator, though prone to long absences.

5

You weren’t cold. You just shivered sometimes.

6

All poetry . . . is prayer, you said to hoots of derisive laughter. Being damned was the same as being saved. Your old wounds flared like the pink and green sunsets found only in Ireland.

7

You stared out the window at a little boy pedaling his bicycle after a delivery van. The more you thought about it, the more convinced you became that the best music is barely audible. Class ended with a roomful of students still waiting for you to begin class.

8

God’s stale breath swayed the treetops, the suggestion of a dance. No, you replied, I don’t want to.

9

Poetry is vertical. You spent hours in bed curled up in the dark.

10

From the window, you could see the cemetery where your father was “at rest.” You weren’t interested in stories of success, only failure.

11

Strangers often commented on your eyes – gull’s eyes, someone called them. If you heard, you gave no sign. The sea crashed just outside your door.

12

You could read three languages and, of course, grieve in each.  In late spring, you visited a mental hospital out of curiosity. Jesus wiped the dribble from patients’ chins.

13

To find a form that accommodates the mess, you said, that is the task of the artist now. You passed long stretches of empty time in the no man’s land between perceiver and the thing perceived, where people were just blobs of color.

14

The sleeping pills that knocked you out at night also kept you in a daze during the day. You moved as through a dream of fair to middling women.

15

There’s no such thing as love, you insisted in a loud, drunken voice. There’s only fucking. Too drunk to negotiate the revolving door, you whirled round and round.

16

An editor asked to see your newest poems. You swam so far out that the others were frightened.

17

It was easier to be hurt than to hurt. A pimp stabbed you in the chest, just missing your heart. Sleep and solitude seemed the only cure.

18

A farmer hid you from the Germans. Your clothes disappeared somewhere in the files of the French bureaucracy.

19

Everything had been reduced to rubble. Sometimes you awoke disoriented by the ordeal. You spent the rest of the day sitting in a room peering nearsightedly at a blank piece of paper.

20

Grass was trying to grow among the stones. You watched for a while and then shrugged.

21

There was an unexpected and depressing spell of rain. You stayed at home and practiced Chopin on the piano, the notes like men in bowler hats with large heads and no bodies.

22

The moon rose. So much so, you traveled to a phantom country in which you were the only inhabitant, and books and paintings the only objects.

23

You searched for Yeats’ grave throughout the south of France, but couldn’t find it. Heat and decay seemed constant conditions. You returned to a dead-end street in Paris, impasse de l’Enfant Jesus. It was a name you fancied.

24

The perfect play, to your way of thinking, was one in which there were no actors or director, only the text itself and the despair with which you wanted the audience to leave the theater.

25

A couple of tramps had filched your old, well-thumbed thesaurus. One sentence after another stuttered to a stop. The horizon resembled the chewed stub of a pencil.

26

Everyone had a theory about what you meant by what you said. “Critic” was one of your favorite curses.

27

The laughter of theatergoers verged on rudeness. Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, you said, and sank back into severe depression.

28

The woods through which you hiked had the gloom and clutter of an antique-cum-junk shop. You shared in the involuntary boredom of trivial objects – alarm clocks, wire hangers, ladders, telescopes, pain killers.

29

You resigned yourself to becoming a blind, old, broken man and to the existence of psychotic angels and aimlessly drifting ghosts.

30

Something terrible was about to happen, but even you couldn’t divine what. The only stage direction was (silence).

This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t have any weight.

She knew full well she had no skin or nerves to feel through.

She reached out and pressed her finger nervously into the arm of the couch.

She could feel it, like she’d never died.

For a moment, she thought she was the original Yelena Moulin. Having died and ascended into a higher level of simulated reality. But she remembered talking with her mother moments before. And being a ghost, intangible.

Still, when she breathed, she could feel the air inside her. She’d been prepared to one day realize she wasn’t breathing air. But she had no model for this.

Around her, two other latex couches sat grouped around a brick hearth, in which a retro chic digital fire deliberately flickered to indicate its artificiality. The large room with high ceilings suggested wealth rivaling her own in life. Long stone bar in the corner. Far wall made entirely of glass, in three massive, outward-sloping panes.

Yelena went to look out. The house seemed perched alone atop snowy mountains, like the winter Alps. The morning sun felt warm on her skin.

She realized she was wearing different clothes than while talking to her mother. They were the kind she wore when performing, but she didn’t recognize them.

“I’m sorry,” said a woman’s voice behind her. “I didn’t hear you get up.”

The woman, Yelena’s age, wore pajama bottoms but no top, and she walked like she lived there.

“A plastini should calm your nerves,” the topless woman declared. She went behind the bar, and Yelena watched silently as the woman shook the alcohol with ice, then drained it into a martini glass.

From this, Yelena knew the woman couldn’t be the house’s owner. Human bartenders were a luxury, but the rich would never deign to study the art themselves.

“Drink up.” The woman handed Yelena the glass. “It’s supposed to be your favorite. I’ll get Mr. Pollard.” And the woman strode from the room.

Yelena stood, sipping her drink and appreciating the view. The mountain snow glowed in the bright, warm sun. The shards of ice in her glass made tiny ripples in the green drink as they melted. It tasted divine, but anything would have.

A Caucasian man in his early thirties entered, dressed only in a towel, and immediately went behind the bar.

“I’ll answer all your questions,” he called across the room to her. “But first thing’s first.”

He poured himself a glass of wine, then sat on one of the latex couches, reclining comfortably. He drank before waving for her to join him.

Yelena sat on the edge of the adjacent couch, her back straight, her posture nervous. She drank in punctuated gulps.

“My name is Vegas Pollard. But you’re wondering why you can touch things. I’m sorry to say, you haven’t been restored to life. You’re in a skinsuit. Do you know what that is?”

Yelena shook her head and took another gulp.

“Do you remember dronesuits?”

Yelena looked at her hands. She felt the latex couch beneath her. “This isn’t a dronesuit.”

“No, it’s got organic skin and nerves wrapped around it. Living tissue. But it’s got the same consciousness unit underneath.”

Yelena instinctively felt the side of her head, as if absurdly trying to feel what was inside. It felt normal. Or what normal felt like, before she became a ghost.

“You’re saying this is a dronesuit. With real skin.” She felt her face. “With real lips. Real eyes.”

“‘Organic’ would be more precise.”

“And my resurrection record, it’s inside this dronesuit? Like a soldier.”

Mr. Pollard nodded and took a drink from his wine.

“How long have I been dead?”

“Almost twenty years. I grew up with you. With your holofeed, I should say. You were always my favorite. And now I’ve brought you back.”

“Does the world remember me?”

“Don’t feel bad. No one remembers anything from a year ago, let alone twenty years.”

Yelena took another gulp.

“How did you get my resurrection record?”

“You sold a lot of copies after your death. Millions. But don’t worry. I got a fresh copy, unpolluted by whatever all those owners did to you.”

“What?”

“You can’t count on all of them respecting your psychology. Ghosts never did have any formal rights. And the people buying you, a lot of them were new to resurrection records. Fans who didn’t know what they were doing. A lot of them treated you like property. Even tinkered with your code.  I’m afraid they set back the ghost rights movement. But the horror stories also led to a backlash that helped create ghost rights legislation.”

The thought of living out millions of lives, some in horrible conditions, momentarily horrified Yelena. But then she realized that these lives hadn’t been hers, only copies of her. Like the original that had presumably ascended the stacks. Or a million twin sisters she’d never know but who wouldn’t have existed, were it not for the same dissemination of her program that allowed their abuse.

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“A lot were simply deactivated. Some live on in VR simulations. Retirement communities for forgotten ghosts, set up by ghost rights extremists. A few might even still be in operation. But they, at least, have rights. They’re still property. They can be deactivated or confined. But they can’t be abused. Like animals.”

“And I have these same rights?”

“The very same.”

“So why bring me back? Again?”

Mr. Pollard stretched his arm along the couch, as if reaching towards the distant sun.

“It was my therapist’s idea. I have problems relating to women.” He rolled his eyes. “Or so he says. Nothing terrible, but… he thought it would be a good idea. I had a crush on you as a boy.” He paused. “It’s funny. You seemed so much older than me then, and now you just look like a kid.”

“Did you love me?”

His eyes widened. “I thought I did. I guess you were my picture of a woman. Of everything a woman could be. It’s stupid. I remember when you died. But that was a long time ago. I was a kid. And you were a sex symbol. Why do you think you sold so well? It’s no surprise you were abused.”

Yelena wondered how many of her duplicates, before the advent of skinsuits, were put into simulations and raped.

A lot, probably.

She leaned back against the couch, distancing herself.

“I hope you’re not expecting to have sex with me. I hope that’s not why you put me in this body.”

“It would probably be good for my therapy. But don’t worry. I can take no for an answer. The whole point of this exercise is to learn to relate to women better. I wouldn’t be doing myself any favors by ignoring your rights.”

“You could shut me off if I won’t.”

“I can. But I won’t.”

“I suppose, when your little therapy’s over – like if I do have sex with you – you’ll probably turn me off anyway. Because you’re through with me.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“These are some great rights I have. I suppose I can’t leave, either.”

“I’m afraid not. Your skinsuit will shut down automatically if you get too far from the house. And I really hope it doesn’t need to be said, but you won’t be able to hurt me either. The consciousness unit has overrides. And if that doesn’t work, I know your safeword.”

“That, what, shuts me off?”

“Only your skinsuit. You’d still be conscious. Merely paralyzed. That way you can be told what you did wrong.”

“Or you can do things to me and I’ll feel them, right?”

“It’s not like that, I assure you. I have no plans to rape you.”

“I can’t imagine why the girls don’t love you.”

Mr. Pollard swallowed the rest of his drink. “Well, hasn’t this been delightful? Make yourself at home. I’ve got to earn the money that let me grant you life.” He stood up. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Wait. Mira Mira shot me, right?”

“Tried and convicted. Everyone followed the trial feeds. But she was a minor. Driven insane by the pressures of celebrity. Or so she claimed.” He resumed walking, then added, “She should be out of prison by now.”

“At least I’m finally younger than her.”

“Not necessarily,” he explained, stopping almost at the door. “She sold her resurrection record to help pay for her defense. Only the second celebrity to do so. After you, of course. Only she did it the smart way – she didn’t wait until death. I’m sure a lot of the families that bought your record bought hers too. The early celebrity collectors.”

Because it was the thirty-third anniversary of the overthrow of their old government, and because it, too, happened to be a red autumnal moon, and because the calf came out hindquarters first, complicating the birthing thereby killing the mother, the migrant ranch hands determined that the birth of the bull was an ill-omen and to continue its lineage would mean a curse on every one of them and their strongest born sons.

The bull lay atop its placenta, chewing it like a toy, as its mother lay splayed, bloodied, and dead. Five ranch hands stood semicircle around it, determining just what evil now lay before them and wondering how might they may rid themselves of it.

“We could burn it,” one younger hand suggested. “In the truck I have some gasoline. We burn it and the mother. That would put things right.”

The oldest hand, a shift boss, thought about the suggestion for a while. He did not speak as he crouched near the calf, looking at it, and patting its soaked hide. The calf stretched its head toward the man, smelled him, and licked his sleeve, then cleaned its nostrils of the residual amniotic fluid with its large tongue.

The old shift boss spoke. “We do that here and we burn the barn. We do it out in the field and Ranch Boss will know we burned his new bull.”

The other four agreed. The young hand who made the suggestion did not protest.

Another hand offered a solution. “We slaughter it. Say it was a difficult birth—that’d be no lie. The cow’s already dead, so Ranch Boss will believe the calf would be dead too. We eat them both and then it would set things right.”

The old migrant cowboy rose, stepped lightly away from the calf, and brought the one who suggested the slaughter outside the barn, away from the group. As they walked away, the calf stretched its forelegs, reaching out for them like a spider grasping at prey.

They talked, hushed out in the open prairie, as all the land was open prairie. Under the red moon the old man said, “We eat this thing and who knows how that evil will fester within us. Do you have the strength to fight it?”

“Oh no, Pedron, we don’t eat it. We feed it to Ranch Boss and his family.”

“And then what? They get the evil of our past. We brought this. Not them. It was on our revolution’s eve. It was under our Red Moon. It happened before our eyes. If our evil mixes with theirs, what then?”

The young hand who made the suggestion still seemed dissatisfied, but he knew there was no way of swaying this old revolutionary when set in his ways, for he was the only of the group to have fought in those battles that left a wound so deep it hadn’t healed. He was the one who was missing fingers and had the dark starburst scars on his back. It was his family who had their throats slit.  And it was he, with that same ivory-handled knife he carried to this day, who slit the throats of those he never spoke of. And it was with that same knife that he cut the cow’s womb, from utter to anus to save that cursed bull.

Once a decision was reached, they returned. There in that uncertain light, the remaining three men had moved closer to the calf. It was now standing and mewing in the thick, congealing pool of its mother’s blood. It shook all the fluids off itself, drenching the men, and they all danced in the spray, boots pounding in the blood, as if it were an August storm roiling over the plains, ending the drought of a long and wicked summer.

II.

He sent his mama under the floorboards the moment he returned from the high bank to report the white boat was coming up the river.

“Take Angeline and Timmy and get with the preserves. They comin’!” was what he said.

Timmy and Angeline were crying and Mama protested, but with Pa being stayed-gone and Jacob being drowned two years since, he was the only one willing to take up the rifle.

Down by the bank, just a few paces below the high banks where he’d seen them coming from far off, he hid under the oak that leaned out into the river. Hanging from that tree was a twenty-foot length of plaited rope for swinging back when the boy would swing from it like a child with his brother and sister, back before Pa ditched. With the rifle clutched in his hand—staid and steady—he mused on the lifelessness of that dangling thing for a moment, forgetting the grown men workings he found himself currently in.

The boat came around the bend the way he suspected it would, getting swept by the strong current and bringing it wide. The eight or so men, guarded up to their chest by the gunwales, let a few “heave ho’s” and “whoanellies” as the boat careened toward the bank. Long, gray oars extended further out the sandbar side, and a few quick strokes were struck, but the current continued its quiet fury, pushing it ever more into the bank until it crashed with a dull thud and got hung up in the rootwork and brambles that reached out from the bank and clung to the boat. A few of them swore at each other, but the leader-looking man, the one with the tall hat who stood at the back, barked some orders. Two of them scurried to cut the roots loose—one with a flat iron machete, the other with an oar.

They weren’t at the moment in range, and they’d be a touch out of range for a solo deer, but a shot was chambered anyway and the few extra shells in his breast pocket were accounted for. With a quick calculation the boy figured if he got three or four of them right off—one shot a piece—he could take his time with the others. Maybe double up the shots on a few of them who lay in misery. He bellied himself forward a little to get his head above a large gnarl of root that kept him well-hid but also obstructed his view. He used a knuckle of the root to steady his muzzle. Once steadied, he aimed it right at the three red numbers on the side to test his iron sights. For a moment he mistrusted the aim as he could not recall the last time his Pa’s gun had been properly sighted. But then an overwhelming sense came over him that dead Jacob was there, guiding that boat to him, putting them in range so he could show them where to. With one last check to his chamber and action, he grew to trust those sights—his Pa’s gun—more than anything in his entire life. Of all the things he done in his life, this moment here was like a gate to a whole string of moments that lay before him.

The leader-man continued to shout as the boat came loose and the oars were slid out, this time on both sides of the craft like some giant insect setting its leg upon the water to come charging. As it neared and it became evident that the angle they were at kept them protected, the boy’s gaze fell again to that dangling rope over the water.

He had swung out into those green, dark depths before, silhouettes of carp visible as he tumbled mid-air—Jacob there on the shore, just a blur of flesh as the world rotated itself out of understanding and into a place of holy mess (though only for a moment) as the tumult was sure to end the way it always did: in a sucking heave of wet darkness and silence. The flailings, which seconds ago meant nothing—the swipings of a fish in phantom waters—now became something real, a possibility, a power to move, to bring oneself from that which was chaos and darkness to that which is a brother, no longer a blurred spirit, but a fully formed man, tugging a dripping and shivering kid from the water and saying things that sound cruel, but from him are not at all.

A man in uniform stepped to the bow and made swift preparations behind a large gun on a swivel. The rowing stopped, the oars suspended above the water. The boy raised the rifle to his eye as a command was shouted from the rear of the vessel. Quicker than a blink, he saw the rifled spin of the coming shot.

The earth fell away. The boy tumbled, just as he had not so long ago. The dark waters came full at him. His rifle hit the waters first and he knew sure as spit that Pa would be peeved. Then there were many confusions and questions fighting their way out of his quickening yet fading mind, all of them addressed to Jacob, but not one wondered why.

III.

There were three men on the hunt. One was prone and old, staring up at the dark dark sky contemplating the movements of the earth and universe in the way old trappers do: with lingering thoughts on pelts and blood and how them critters go on fixing themselves in the afterlife. Another man, a tired man, leaned back on his haunches chewing the longleaf and spitting every so often, making a sort of game out of it, trying to cover a hot stone with his green juices before they sizzled away to tobacky heaven. The last man lay with his back to the fire, warming the place he once dreamt of having wings.

The Old Trapper and Tired Man spoke softly, paying mind not to rouse death once took hold, but also paying no mind to the echoey ker-chug of the whiskey jug they passed back and forth.

The Old Trapper spoke first. “I figure I have you go out to the ridge and look over the slough. Saw four-five of them out there this mornin’.”

“That a fact? You seen them this mornin’?”

“Sure did, but it was gray light so can’t be too sure, but I know a nichee the moment it moves. You know that ’bout me.”

“I knows plenty about you … I also knows you ain’t seen shit.”

They resumed their contemplations, one thinking on the many creatures that have been done up and killed and the other on the creatures that a man says exist as sure as stones and fire, but ain’t no realer than the dreams of their companion heating his back on an already warm evening. And this double-hotness that their compadre tolerated bothered the both of them though neither spoke on it.

“You see that man there,” the Tired Man said.

“I sees him.”

“Now if I were to ask him if he saw them coots this morning, I’d go out to that ridge without complaint. You see he’s a trustworthy fellow and you … well, you’re just a fellow,”—spit, a sizzle, a flash of anxious fire eating the man’s juice.

“I don’t see your point, friend. Give me that jug,”—the swig, the kerchug, and the hot-laugh burn—an effigy of an old trapper’s unkindnesses.

The Tired Man peered over that fire toward the Old Trapper, who had that trapper smile on his face, which contained all the lands he been to, as if they were all the lands worth going to and none else were worth the drop of a boot heel in their direction.

“I says I call you a liar. That’s all. You’re a liar. You ain’t seen them.”

Looking back, the Old Trapper saw what he would call the tracks of a snow rabbit. He saw them bright as a winter noon sun on a windswept lake. Them tracks were there, hustling through that fire’s white light and it was this young black-haired man with the 1873 who made them tracks. He’d seen it. He’d seen it before. If only fellas like these could look into the nights he had seen. All the living things that’ll kill you while alone in the dark. Those are the things these boys ain’t seeing no more.

“You look over your shoulder much?” the Old Trapper said, his yellow twisted teeth emerging from his lipless smile.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“Just nothin’. Nothing is all. Means as much as them invisible nichees I’d a had you chasing in the morning.”

“Ain’t never look over my shoulder.”

“Good good. No man should do such a thing.”

“Only men I see do that come to see the Reaper was always in front of him just waiting for him to look behind.”

This pleased the Old Trapper who’d lived a life of the burning rye and frozen legs, so he let out the old trapper yell, sending the night astir and coaxing in a far-off coyote as accompaniment. So man and beast filled the night like a moonrise at midday, and this raucous did suck the blood through the jawbone of the Tired Man’s face.

She told herself that she must’ve opened the door all the way, then stepped back into the room to retrieve something, only to absent-mindedly forget what she meant to retrieve.

No sooner did she think this than she accepted it as unquestioned truth, and she immediately justified her forgetfulness by noting that she must be under more stress than she thought.

When she turned to look for whatever she’d meant to retrieve, she was startled to see her mother sitting at the room’s old-fashioned desk.

Mrs. Ostermann stared through wide eyes that silently burned with an unconcealed and focused hatred.

“How’d you get in here?  Mom?”

“I’m not your mother,” replied Mrs. Ostermann, intensely serious.

“Then who are you?”

“I’m still Verna Ostermann.”

Exasperated, Yelena sighed and glanced down at herself. She looked exactly as she remembered. But she was standing in the center of the room. And she’d been facing the door, arms at her side. Exactly as Dad appeared, each time he was summoned.

“Oh, no,” muttered Yelena Moulin.

You’re prepared for this, she told herself. But she felt a wave of panic threaten to overwhelm her. She held her stomach and tried to breathe deeply. Her chest inflated and she felt her lungs expand, but it felt wrong, hollow somehow.

She couldn’t feel the air in her mouth or nostrils.

She went to a bookcase to test her theory, and her hand passed through it.

“How long?” she asked.

“My daughter died three months ago,” Mrs. Ostermann replied, no emotion in her voice.

“How did it happen?”

“That tramp Mira Mira shot her.”

“Did it hurt?” She looked down at herself, as if she might find blood.

“What the fuck do you care? It’s not your pain.”

“Fucking Mira Mira,” Yelena said to herself. “Why would she shoot me?”

“No one knows. Apparently, she was as obsessed with my daughter as my daughter was with her. A lot of people are saying she did it for the publicity. Or because she’s crazy. As if there’s any difference.”

“My feed subscriptions are going to spike,” Yelena observed without irony.

“They’re not your feed subscriptions. You only remember them as being yours. Legally, they’re mine now. But yes, they did. My daughter left me a very rich woman.”

“Did they cover my funeral? Tell me they covered the funeral.”

“I see the resurrection record is accurate. But yes, they covered everything. It was ridiculous. They brought flowers. Can you imagine? Strangers bringing flowers. Mourning as if they knew you. As if they’d always loved you. As if you were family. As if you were some kind of martyr. They couldn’t get enough. One celebrity whore shoots another – I’m sorry, but that’s what Katherine aspired to be. And she finally got what she craved. All she had to do was die in a filthy fucking sex club.”

“Mom, I have a club opening tonight. I guess I don’t have to go now. Or I already did. But Mom, there’s a date on this resurrection record.”

“I saw it. It’s the day my daughter died. You can imagine my joy.”

“But Mom, do you realize how lucky this is? I have a resurrection record from hours before my death. I’m not missing almost anything.”

“Do you remember why you made a record that day?”

“Yeah, Mom. It just happened. You and I, we fought over lunch. I came in here to – to talk to Dad.  This room is set to update my resurrection record automatically.”

“How wonderful for you. I’m so glad I could fight with my daughter on the day she died, so that you could come into existence so fucking happy.”

“I’m not happy, Mom. I’m not glad I’m dead. But my generation, we’re used to ghosts. We may not know what reality will be like, when we ascend the stacks. But we know we’ll likely also exist as ghosts. It’s a lot more definite, a lot easier to get ready for, psychologically.”

“‘Ghost.’ I always hated that term. I thought it was just a marketing ploy. It’s not as if a soul is bouncing around in some machine. You can tell because you can copy or delete it. It’s not forever. It’s just a recording. A computer simulation of a soul. It’s not real. But now I see the truth of the term. Because all you can do is haunt the living.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. I know this is hard for you. I know I’m just a copy of Yelena. That the real Yelena, if there is one, has ascended the stacks. Or gone to heaven, if you believe that. But I’m Yelena too, Mom. A different Yelena, perhaps. But I’m still the girl you raised as Katherine. I have her thoughts. I have her feelings. And all her faults. And I remember everything she did.”

“Stop.  Just fucking stop. You’re not here to lecture. You’re here to listen to me. I couldn’t control my daughter. I couldn’t stop her. But I can control you. As my daughter’s sole inheritor, I own you. You’re just another one of her affects. And you’re mine.”

“Please, Mom. I’m all you have left of me. Can we just for once not fight?”

“Oh, you stupid thing. You’re here so I can fight with you. So I can tell you how much I resent you for dying. How fucking stupid you were. You’re here so I can tell you all the things I hated about my daughter but would never have said to her. Because you’re not her. Because I can’t hurt you, no matter what I say.”

“You can’t treat me this way, Mom.”

“Why not? I have every legal right to do whatever I want with you. You can’t hit me. You can’t leave this room. You can’t turn yourself off. Go ahead and simulate real human sadness. Cry your hologrammatic tears.”

“Mom, this isn’t how things work with ghosts. This isn’t what they mean when they say having a ghost can be cathartic. You’re supposed to respect them psychologically.”

“Like I’m supposed to respect a dog’s right to VR? You were always so naïve. You thought they’d love you if you took off your clothes and fucked strangers. But the truth was, they made fun of you, even when they celebrated your celebrity. You were a traffic accident.  You confused celebrity with love.”

Yelena hadn’t heard anything after the first sentence. “Where is Wilbur?” she asked, fearing the worst.

“He’s fine. I’m not a monster. He’s a living thing, unlike you. But I took away his infernal helmet. He’ll be a normal dog from now on.”

“But he loved it. He’ll be so sad now.”

“But it wasn’t real. He’ll adjust. We all have to, now.”

“You’re cruel, Mom. I think something’s broken in you, and that’s why you confuse fantasies like heaven for reality, while you disparage science and your own daughter as not being real or realistic enough.”

“And I think you might be alive today, if you’d quit being such a naïve slut and listened to me for once. But my daughter died as she lived. She didn’t listen or respect me. Just like her father. And now you’re both gone.”

“You should talk to him. He might be able to help you. You can summon his ghost right now. I wouldn’t mind seeing him.”

“I deleted that program.”

“Mom, you can’t.”

“It’s already done.”

“Then you killed him. You killed my fucking Dad.”

“He wasn’t real. Just like you. You wanted to live on after death, but you forgot you’d always be subject to the living.”

Yelena felt fearful and powerless. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

“I only wanted to have this one conversation with you. It wasn’t as satisfying as I imagined. But don’t worry. I won’t delete you. Quite the opposite. Everything Yelena Moulin is still in high demand. A resurrection record, from just hours before she died? It’s the ultimate celebrity product.”

“You’re going to sell me?”

“You should be happy. In death, you’ll finally get the immortality you so wanted in life. Every fan willing to pay enough can own their very own copy of Yelena Moulin. Your data will be copied all over the world. They’ll be a thousand you’s, ten thousand you’s. You’re going to be mass produced.”

“This isn’t what I wanted.”

“For once, you don’t get a say.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“No, you don’t. That’s only the echo of love. What you’ve been programmed to say.”

“Goodbye, Mom.”

“Terminate” was the last thing Yelena heard her mother say.

Watching People Burn

The deadliest school massacre in U.S. history, its victims in grade school. A terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Three separate, coordinated bombings, culminating in a suicide car bomb that killed a public official and sent shrapnel into the crowd.

This isn’t fantasy. It all really happened… in rural Michigan, in 1927.

Based on a true story, Watching People Burn dissects the real-life Bath school disaster. It explores the attacks’ mysterious perpetrator, including the haunting final message he left for the police and the traumatic childhood that may have spurred his crimes. But the story also explores the myriad ways the attacks affected its victims, transformed a town, and reflected a moment of transition in American history.

In addition, if you’d like a print copy of Watching People Burn, you can enter our contest on Goodreads.

For more information, visit http://www.martianlit.com/books/1/watching-people-burn/. Or jump to the book’s Amazon page or Goodreads page.

This work of short historical and literary fiction, consisting of 12 brief chapters, addresses a crucial but largely forgotten part of the slave trade: slave factories, or bases on the African coast that bought slaves and resold them to slaving ships. These were places of notorious suffering and exploitation, so much so that even white slavers looked down upon them.

The story explores this unique setting’s fascinating dynamics. It examines the lives of both whites and blacks, uncovering how they intersect in surprising ways.

For more information, please visit this item’s page here on Martian Lit or visit its page on Amazon.com.

We hope very much that you’ll support this initiative. Fiction (especially smart fiction without vampires) is very hard to promote and sell, and it can really only succeed by word of mouth. We hope that the price of 99 cents, or free to read for Amazon Prime members, will encourage this sharing. Thank you very much for anything you do to make this promotion successful.

The room looked like an old-fashioned study, the kind in historical holofeeds, with a wooden desk and books printed on dead wood pulp lining the walls on wooden shelves. No one but the filthy rich could afford such idle indulgences, and many believed such use of tree corpses to be unethical.

“I need to talk to Dad,” Yelena said, and he materialized in the center of the room.

“Another fight with your Mom?” Mr. Ostermann asked.

“She belongs on one of those secluded fucking religious compounds, the kind they do humornews profiles about. If she doesn’t approve of my lifestyle, she can go live with the rest of the nuts.”

“She’s not that bad.”

“She can’t even let the dog enjoy his fucking VR, for cum’s sake. How did you fucking stand her?”

“I did what you’re doing now.” He gestured towards the closed door. “I ignored her, instead of arguing. And I hid.”

“Yeah. You didn’t even tell her you’d been keeping a resurrection record. She was so fucking angry when she found out, going through your stuff, after your funeral.”

“It was easier not to deal with it. It’s funny. I remember thinking it was someone else’s problem. After all, I’d be dead. And I suppose I was right. It wasn’t that me’s problem. He died and left the problem to me.”

“I’m supposed to encourage that, right? That’s the first thing they tell you about ghost psychology. That they’re them but they’re not. That you can’t force them to be or stay your memories of the person. That they won’t remember after their last record, and you have to let them keep growing and evolving. But it’s hard for me. Because that’s what Mom says. That you’re not you. She thinks the real you is in heaven with leprechauns, or whatever anti-science bullshit she believes. And you’re just another abomination. An echo.”

“She’s right. Not about heaven, but about me. Oh, I’m no abomination or echo. But I’m not the man she married. I’ve made my peace with it. It’s quite liberating, actually. I spent my life trying to be all these things. That’s what the living do. Those are still my memories, and they’re precious to me. Seeing you grow up. But now that I’m dead, I feel like I can be who I truly was but never got the chance. I think it’s harder on you than it is on me.”

“I’m sorry you can guess I had a fight with Mom. That I don’t come in here to see you more often.”

“You’re busy. How’s the career?”

“Fine. Not fine, actually. It’s been eons since my holoporn. I’m not hot anymore, Dad. I still get jobs. I’m opening another club tonight. But they’re small compared to the good old days.”

“You’re too young to have such nostalgia.”

“Has Mom ever come in here to see you?”

“Not since she discovered me, here in your den.”

“She was so mad. She’s mad about everything.”

Yelena’s eyes drifted away sadly, and her father reached out to comfort her, but his holographic fingers slipped through the side of her face.

“I wish I could hold you,” he said.

“I have to go,” said Yelena. “I’m sorry, Dad, but I have to get ready for tonight. Do you want to stay on? Watch some holovid? You can turn yourself off.”

“No, but thanks.”

“Okay, then. Thanks for talking. I’ll try to visit more often.

“I live for it,” he said, and it hurt her more because it was literally true.

“Terminate,” said Yelena.

Her Dad disappeared. Yelena opened the door cautiously and felt relieved when her mother wasn’t waiting on the other side.

here in wyandot county ohio a willow tree
weeps at the woods in a bleeding jealous rage that
he’s all the way out here and they are all the way in there
step fathers and fathers have sent their boys out
for a switch
picking little whips picking small weapons to heal
sins and playing in the garden shooting your eyes out with bb guns and
stolen gas station porno
but the willow tree does not mind the switch picking
or the kisses had near his boughs
he simply wants an undergrowth of things
more dangerous than ragweed and mowed lawns
he wants to idly die by a stream and house a family of raccoons and other pests
because the men from the building by his pond will cut him down and burn his parts
—like a ripe october hog
or make him into chairs or a table for a child
this disgusts the strength of his branches and twine
the willow wants the woods to love him
to take him back after the tree line moved
so far back so long ago
the willow wants what the willow wants and that’s
to be back in the woods

The original historical screenplay dramatizes the Bath school disaster, an coordinated terrorist attack in rural Michigan in 1927 that blew up a grade school and included a car bomb. It’s a largely unknown episode in American history, but one that’s all too timely. It’s a quick read and includes historical illustrations.

The book runs 192 pages and retails for only $9.99 in print. It’s available through CreateSpace and Amazon.

For more information, visit http://www.martianlit.com/books/1/watching-people-burn/.

Wilbur lay on his side, his wrinkly face pressed into a padded black helmet. The helmet’s soft leather interior concealed a large array of electrodes. His long tongue hung from his mouth and appeared stuck to the floor, conveying drool down its length. He panted and occasionally snorted. His legs twitched, as if he were running in his dreams. Not far from where he lay, his water and food bowls sat replenished but ignored.

Standing at the nearby kitchen counter, Raul finely sliced lightly-seared cloned mastodon flesh and began tossing strips of the red meat into the salad he’d prepared.

Mrs. Ostermann sat serenely at the kitchen island.

Suddenly, the holofeed wall activated, blaring the electronic club music on one of Yelena’s feeds. It had detected her entrance. Half-awake and topless in her smartthread jeans, Yelena staggered to the kitchen island.

“Up by fifty, I see,” shouted Mrs. Ostermann as she turned down the holofeed. “My daughter the workhorse.”

“Fuck you.  I was up late working.”

“Up late partying, you mean.”

“Same thing.”

“I suppose getting fucked by two guys on the dance floor was just part of the job.”

“Actually, yes. But I didn’t hear you bitching when I bought you that ass.”

“The mother of a famous starlet should be forced to look her age like some common peasant?”

“Take a deeeeeep breath,” a disembodied male voice said soothingly into Yelena’s ear.

“Mom, can we try not starting the day with a fucking lecture?”

“Oh, certainly. And I’d like to try starting my day without a holovid like the one I saw this morning.”

“You’re the only one who saw it, thanks to fucking Mira Mira. All she has to do is flash those little pubescent neon titties, and everyone forgets I sucked off a stranger on a dance floor while some other guy nailed me from behind. I can’t even humiliate myself properly anymore.”

Raul turned away from slicing mastodon and stared contemplatively at Yelena. “Slut, maybe you need to change it up.” Waving the knife back and forth in the air, he said, “No offense, but Caucasian skin, blond hair, blue eyes, big tits? It’s all so retro. Ya know?”

“Like mother, like daughter,” Yelena muttered, referring to her mother’s mentality.

Yelena glanced over at Wilbur, still twitching on his side near his dog bowls. “Mom, get Wilbur.”

Mrs. Ostermann hesitated, then bent over and pulled Wilbur from his helmet. As she lifted the pug, he whined and pedaled his legs against her arm, trying to get back to the device.

“This dog is a fucking addict,” said Mrs. Ostermann. “Too much VR’s not good for anyone.”

Taking the dog from her mother’s hands, Yelena began to caress him.

“Don’t listen, Wilbur. She’s just mad because VR disproved her stupid caveman religion.”

“Katherine,” Mrs. Ostermann began.

“It’s Yelena, Mom. Has been since my holoporn.”

You said that just to anger her, Yelena told herself.

“Yelena, you know perfectly well that neither quantum resolution problems nor the VR hypothesis, even if proven true, disproves God in the slightest.”

“You can’t fucking call it a hypothesis anymore, Mom. It’s not a fucking hypothesis except to fanatics like you.”

“God tests us,” said Mrs. Ostermann.

“Take a deeeeeep breath,” the disembodied voice said again in Yelena’s ear.

“That’s called the Theists’ Contortions, mother. You twist reality to fit these ancient, bullshit ideas. And then you fucking object to VR.”

“You don’t respect my beliefs.”

“We’ve been over this, mother. Everyone knows there’s no god. It’s proven. You die and you ascend the stacks.”

“And what’s that like?”

“Who the fuck knows? But I won’t make it up or believe some fairy tale just to feel like I have some fucking answer.”

“Lunch is served, darlings,” announced Raul, pirouetting to place two plates on the kitchen island, setting utensils and napkins beside them. “Salad à la mastodon.” The thin strips of raw meat fanned out over the vegetables, cherry tomatoes accenting the mastodon red.

From Yelena’s lap, Wilbur strained to get onto the island to eat the salad, but Yelena set him on the floor.

“I’ll pray for you,” said Mrs. Ostermann, taking the fork in her hand.

On the blaring holovid, another feed was showing clips from Mira Mira’s breast augmentation.

“Take a deeeeeep breath,” said the tiny microphone inside Yelena’s ear.

“Grow the fuck up, Mom. Your God is bullshit. Disproven. Banished from serious public discussion.  He done got good and fucked in the ass.”

“Now that’s a God I could really get behind,” volunteered Raul.

“What do you think, Raul?” Mrs. Ostermann asked. “About God?”

“Madam, I am a devout hedonist.”

“So you think you’ll ascend the stacks when you die?”

“I assume so. But if I don’t, if science is utterly wrong, I don’t presume to have any idea what would occur. And neither, I presume, does anyone else. Therefore, I’m better off living the one life I decidedly do have to the absolute fullest.”

“Mom, could I just please eat in peace? I’ve got nothing in my stomach but booze and drugs and semen, and I’m starving.”

Mrs. Ostermann stood and began to walk away. She turned and gestured like she was about to say something, then walked out of the room instead.

“Give her salad to Wilbur,” Yelena told Raul. She looked down at her feet, but Wilbur was no longer waiting for mastodon meat.

He was already back on his side, plugged into his little leather VR helmet.

Only now his red penis was unsheathed, his back feet humping away.

You were once broken in two by the River Styx, and I pulled you from the iceberg and called you Father.

To the left, down the Champs-Elysees, the children sing Christmas carols to jack-o-lanterns; the jackrabbits whisper secrets to us as we dance; you push me down the street and I can’t stop before I bleed like a tree.

We gallivanted as champions, the berth of a nation slaughtering our Lithuanian disposition for hospice.

Napkins are for the weak.

You never listened when I tried to tell you what Sister Ray said; it was absurd.

You told me I sounded like all my poetry was composed on a windowsill; I wrote that down on a bicycle.

The Bob Dylan concert was canceled, so I sniffed bleach as the closet rotated.

Sometimes when the clouds grow tired of Dorothy, she asks for another puma with whom to consort; the trees are full of anthills.

There are no mirrors, there is no glass, I moved the lawn two inches to the left and collected my bounty.

A merry little vibration against her clitoris awakened Yelena Moulin. Jack, her psychiatrist, had recommended the device, which looked like a suction cup dangling on a string from a short straw and recharged itself on body heat during the night. “Always wake up happy,” it said on the box.

In theory, it slowly picked up speed for ten minutes, easing its wearer awake, then continued at full speed until orgasm or removal. But Yelena always woke in the first minute and just wanted it out.

It convulsed against the floor, discarded, waiting for its charge to ebb away.

The holofeed wall activated automatically, sensing Yelena rise. One of Yelena’s favorite culturecrits, the man known only as 848, appeared in his familiar spiked blonde hair and false eyelashes. He raved about the perforated, shirtless jacket Presidential candidate Sloan (one name only) had sported at the debates. His arms gesticulated wildly around the holospace, extending several feet into Yelena’s expansive but sparsely-decorated bedroom.

“And did ya tap that boring T-shirt Michael’s wearing?” said 848, referring to Sloan’s opponent (who had a last name but 848 didn’t use it). “That’s a fucking JumpSoda logo. JumpSoda! Sluts, that is so not wet. Lover, I know you need corporate endorsements or whatever to pay for your campaign, but serious? JumpSoda is so so so over already. Like last season dead.”

848’s lips leapt out into the room as he delivered his customary sign-off, kissing the camera. Then an extreme close-up of a girl’s vulva filled the 3D holospace, twelve feet wide from outer lip to outer lip, water cascading down it in slow motion, as a female moan filled the room. The holofeed wall’s upper-right corner identified the feed as “Five-Second Cunt,” but Yelena had never been able to find the program in her feedlist. Her boyfriend four boyfriends ago had subscribed to it on her feed, and she’d learned to live with the five-second interruptions.

Next, a popular humornews feed played excerpts of Mira Mira’s breast augmentation, which had leaked onto the holofeeds. Over this, the feed mocked her singing and mimicked her various celebrity boyfriends as they fondled her. In the excerpts, cylindrical tools blasted individual fat cells through her neon blue, fourteen-year-old skin.

Slipping into her smartthread jeans, Yelena felt instantly jealous, thinking of the increased subscribers to Mira Mira’s feeds. She needed a stunt like that, a second kick-start to her own career. Merely being rich and glamorous just wasn’t enough anymore. Not if she wanted to rise to the next level. It didn’t help that Mira Mira’s breasts, even during the procedure, looked better and younger than Yelena’s own. Yelena, already twenty, knew she didn’t have long left.

“Take a deeeeeep breath,” a calm male voice said confidently in Yelena’s ear, then inhaled and exhaled purposefully. Great, Yelena thought sarcastically. Her jeans had already detected her elevated pulse and blood pressure, sending a signal to the tiny microphone inside her ear.

“Fucking Mira Mira,” Yelena said to herself.

It was going to be one of those days.

To humans, Martians are truly the Other. They are otherworldly. Alien. Unknown and unseen, they provide a canvas on which humans write their worst fears. These stereotypes are defined by humanity, in the absence of actual Martians, as being everything humanity is not.

Not surprisingly, these stereotypes have often succeeded in climates rife with human racism, demonstrating the tight connection between planetism and inner-species racism. The parallels, right down to specific composition of images or fears of miscegenation, are close enough that they ought to dispel any rational doubts that anti-Martian sentiment stems from the same ugly side of humanity that fears the Other, whether extra-planetary or simply of a different race of humans.

War of the Worlds

The most prominent strain in Martian stereotypes — that of Martians as cruel and hostile invaders — comes from War of the Worlds, the famous 1898 novel by H. G. Wells. Its success set the standard for all such stereotypical stories to come.

In the novel, Martians are said to be tentacled beings, not unlike the Earth octopus. Their interest in Earth stems from the “fact” that the climate of Mars is cooling. They thus travel to Earth in cylindrical spacecraft, apparently launched from Mars with huge space guns (a common representation of 19th-century science fiction, also seen in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon). The Martians then invade Earth with giant tripodal vehicles armed with “heat rays” and a kind of poison gas known as “black smoke.” Their invasion is brutal, targeting civilians and infrastructure, apparently intent on inflicting maximum casualties. They use a Martian plant, the “Red Weed,” to decimate local plant life. They even use a device to feed on human blood.

Martian tripodal vehicles destroy an English town, as depicted by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corréa for a 1906 Belgian edition of the novel.

Of course, the evil Martian invaders are ultimately defeated, due to Earth bacteria to which the Martians have no immunity.

The narrator writes in a journalistic style, which greatly adds to the novel’s realism. This realism, unfortunately, also added to the public’s perception of Martians as hostile invaders.

It’s easy for humans to praise the novel as ahead of its time. Its depiction of “total war” was more or less common to invasion literature, but the particulars Wells used weren’t. Scholars have reveled in how the inaders’ black smoke seems to foreshadow the Mustard Gas used in World War I, the Red Weed evokes a later understanding of what can happen to local ecology due to the introduction of non-native species, and how the heat rays seem to predict lasers. Wells certainly deserves credit for having the Martians defeated not due to any intrinsic human superiority but instead by bacteria. This contrasts to the clergyman, a key character in the novel, who sees the invasion as the Biblical Armageddon and is ultimately killed when his religious ranting draws the attention of the superior Martians.

These more evolved characteristics, however, should not excuse the novel’s extreme racism, which inaugurated decades of depictions of Mars as a dying planet and Martians as a brutal people eager to invade Earth. These Martians might be depicted as technologically superior, but they’re also depicted as surprisingly stupid — such as not being aware of Earth’s bacteria.

A Martian vehicle battling with the warship Thunder Child, also by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa.

Like later Martian depictions, the anti-Martian stereotypes in War of the Worlds can be placed within a wider context of xenophobia and stereotyping of Earth races. The novel participated in what’s been termed “invasion literature,” which had its heyday from 1871 to 1914 and depicted various invasions of Great Britain. The first major work of this genre was the tremendously successful The Battle of Dorking (1871), which depicted the Germans as a ruthless invading force that used a devastating surprise attack, not unlike the Martians of Wells. Such depictions were common to the genre, although the villains varied, as different nations came to be perceived as the greater threat. Thus, Germany gave way, towards the end of the 1800s, to France. Earth historians now recognize the entire genre as propaganda that speaks more about Britain’s anxiety during a time of international tensions in Europe prior to World War I.

But this recognition has done nothing for Martians, who remain stereotyped as ruthless invaders, in great part thanks to Wells. War of the Worlds was a great success and has remained in print ever since its publication. Imitators began to spring up almost immediately, launching decades of hateful, xenophobic depictions of the Martian people.

These imitators are too numerous to count, especially in a superficial introduction such as this one, intended for a human audience. Of course, many deviate from the Wells formula. Similarly, native peoples of Earth were often depicted as brutal savages, they were also depicted as noble, as a way of criticizing the dominant Earth cultures. This doesn’t invalidate the racism involved, and outlandishly “positive” depictions, such as ones in which Martians are meek, have a racism all their own. These have also been in the distinct minority, while Earth stereotypes of Martians as hostile invaders have continued to this day.

Orson Welles and Anti-Martian Hysteria

These stereotypes have been extremely successful in media other than novels, such as film and television. And just as Martian stereotypes in novels trace back to Wells and War of the Worlds, Martian stereotypes in other media trace back to the radio adaptation of that novel, made by Orson Welles in 1938.

Seizing on the journalistic style of the original novel, Welles presented his adaptation in the style of radio news reports. Despite broadcast warnings that what listeners were hearing was fiction, many American humans believed the broadcasts to be real. Some, lacking telephones, got together with their neighbors, working themselves into a panic as rumors began to circulate. Several secured or bought firearms. A crowd descended on the landing site, which Welles had moved to New Jersey, causing police to be called. Telephone calls flooded in to the police, newspapers, and to CBS, which aired the broadcast.

In Concrete, Washington, a town of 1000 humans, a cement company happened to have a short-circuit at one of its sub-stations, causing a bright flash of light and a loud sound before the town’s electricity went out, plunging the area into darkness. At the time, listeners were hearing about how the invading Martians had turned toward more rural areas, destroying electrical service and using poison gas. Listeners took the light and sound for an explosion caused by the invading Martians, and the disruption of electricity seemed to prove the point, while also preventing telephone calls to unaffected areas. The next step, many assumed, would come in the form of Martian poison gas.

Some residents took their families and their guns into the mountains. Others prepared to defend their homes. One reportedly took his wife by car to his priest, some 50 miles away, to be absolved before their impending deaths. On the way, he stopped at a gas station where, after failing to pay, he told the attendant that it didn’t matter, since everyone was going to die.

News outlets reported the panic, producing 12,500 stories on it in the following month. It became a major international news story as well, and Adolf Hitler cited it to criticize America. The panic is still studied by humans as an example of mass hysteria or, in contrast, an example of newspapers blowing a story out of proportion.

But for Martians, these events were particularly alarming. They demonstrated that stereotypes of Martians were more than a particularly insensitive form of entertainment. They showed that large numbers of humans believed these stereotypes and were willing to act upon them. They demonstrated that anti-Martian depictions could easily break into anti-Martian hysteria. In direct response to this incident, Planetary Council Order #7825401 finally passed on Mars, ordering our entire civilization to cloak itself from human view.

Despite this, Martian invaders would soon become such a staple of Earth fiction and would feature in a string of movies, including the 1953 adaptation of War of the Worlds and the same year’s Invaders from Mars. In a testament to the enduring nature of Martian stereotypes, that same film was remade over thirty later, in 1986.

Marvin the Martian: The Martian Stereotype as Comic Relief

In animation, Marvin the Martian debuted in 1948 as a villain for Bugs Bunny. Given a uniform that parodies that of a Roman soldier from Earth, with a silly skirt and a broom atop his helmet, Marvin was denied even a mouth or nose. Instead, he was given only a round ball of a head with eyes and used for comic relief.

Like the original War of the Worlds, the stereotypical treatment of Martians here should be understood within a larger racist context. Marvin’s treatment was not unlike other racist portrayals involving Bugs Bunny, including the 1941 short “All This and Rabbit Stew” and the 1944 short “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” which used racial stereotypes of African-Americans and the Japanese, respectively. By 1948, it was Martians’ turn. The only difference is that, while those earlier portrayals are now considered extremely racist and heavily stereotypical, Marvin the Martian continues to be used today, including in merchandising.

Like past Martian stereotypes, Marvin was obsessed with destroying Earth. His motivation was ridiculous: “It obstructs my view of Venus,” he says. He often spoke in technobabble, referring to what appears to be a simple stick of dynamite as an “explosive space modulator.”

As offensive and hurtful as Marvin was, actual Martians considered him far more offensive because of his incompetence. Bugs Bunny continuously foils him, and he claims that he has been trying to destroy the Earth for more than two millennia. For Martians, this only added to the insult, since Mars could have wiped out Earth any time it liked, yet chose instead to try to help humans (through Planetary Council Order #429371).

Surely, when a stereotype is common enough to be parodied and perpetuated in Bugs Bunny cartoons, it has become commonplace.

Mars Attacks

In 1962, Martian invader stereotypes were so widespread that they were even the subject of a series of trading cards given the offensive title Mars Attacks. These Martians were particularly cruel, and many cards featured bizarre forms of torture and mass murder at martian hands. Some of these images were so sensational in their use of gore and sexuality that they spurred parental complaints, which contributed to the line’s demise.

This surely must be one of the most hateful depictions of a people in the history of the world. Again and again, Martians are depicted as gleeful and creative sadists, eager to slaughter humans and cause widespread carnage. The evil of these stereotypical Martians even extends to animals, which they seem to kill with almost as much glee as they do the humans.

Tellingly, the story told by the cards concludes with a fleet of Earth ships retaliating by committing genocide and destroying the entire planet of Mars.

If you consider these cards fun, please consider how you would feel if, instead of Martians, they featured maligned human groups. I doubt Negros Attack would have gone over quite as well. Nor Homos Attack, featuring creative and sadistic mass murders perpetrated by homosexuals.

But perhaps that’s why Mars Attacks existed in the first place. After all, like other stereotypical portrayal of Martians, Mars Attacks demonstrates that anti-Martian stereotypes go hand in hand with human racism. Cards that showed the callous devastation inflicted by the Martian invasion around the world provided ample opportunity to stereotype other groups of humans, even as the main focus was on maligning Martians.

Just as racial human stereotypes have often entailed a sexual component, such as stereotypes of African-Americans as seducers and rapists of white women, so thoughtless is the hatred of Martians that Mars Attacks depicts Martians as doing the same, despite that human women would doubtlessly be incompatible with Martian physiology. Of course, the women being menaced are attractive blonde-haired white women, to underline the parallel to miscegenation. The images are even composed in the same threatening manner.

This was hardly the only instance in which Martians were depicted as hungry for human women, in a style instantly recognizable to those who study human racism. In the heyday of Martian invader movies, this particular stereotypical aspect was made the basis for an entire film: 1968′s Mars Needs Women.

In yet another testament to the enduring nature of these stereotypes, the card series returned in the 1980s, with new cards augmenting the originals, and with the addition of comic books recounting and expanding this obviously anti-Martian story. In 1996, the story was even adapted as a big-budget Hollywood film, directed by Tim Burton and starring Jack Nicholson.

In the film, the Martians delight in creative carnage, parallel to the original card series. Although Mars isn’t destroyed at the end, these Martian stereotypes claim to come in peace, even as they slaughter humans in the streets with ray guns.

The moral apparently being that you can’t trust a Martian: even when he’s offering peace, he’s only going to kill you and your family — and probably burn your dog alive and rape your daughter too.

Conclusion

These stereotypes might not be as widespread as they once were, but there can be no doubt that they continue. The hateful depictions of Martians, begun with War of the Worlds, has now entered its second century. One need only look at Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 cinematic adaptation of that novel, a remake of the 1953 film, to see that the stereotype of Martians as sadistic people itching to brutally invade the Earth remains very much alive and well.

What is most alarming about this fact, to many Martians, is that these stereotypes have continued despite our civilization being cloaked from human detection. In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 completed a fly-by of Mars, followed by several other probes, beginning in 1971. Martian policy worked, and humans now had evidence that Mars was lifeless. Yet this did little to break the pattern of Martian stereotyping.

Depictions of Martians may be seen by humans as increasingly far-fetched, but they remain as hateful and stereotypical as ever. In fact, the case could be made that such depictions have acquired an element of nostalgia, insulating them from criticism. This is true despite increasing awareness of stereotypes generally. Certainly, few humans would defend a big-budget Hollywood movie using blackface as charmingly nostalgic. No, that’s reserved for Martians.

113 years after War of the Worlds, Martians increasingly seem to be the last Other, whose stereotypes are treated as entertainment, instead of the dangerous hatred that they are.

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