NFTeachable Moment
“I... I’m impressed you made it. Really. But you’re freakin dreaming if you think some dude is gonna buy it.”
“Bro, you don’t get it. This is just the first one. There’s, like, ten thousand Melt Kid Kings, each one a unique NFT. Two-fifty each. Do the math.”
“Fuck math. I’ll stick to skating.”
by John Dutton
The setting sun flashed a brief fireball on the cracked phone screen as Melt held it up.
Liam frowned. “Why would I buy it?”
“You wouldn’t. You know me.”
“What’s it for?”
“It’s not for anything.”
“So someone who doesn’t know you – who has no freakin clue who you are – would pay good money for this?”
“Not good money, good crypto.”
Liam sighed and hiked up a sweat leg to rub his calf. The bleacher below had dug into his leg while he was focused on Melt’s phone.
“Bro. This is shit.”
“Right?”
“No, shit shit, not the shit.”
“Nah, bro, you don’t understand – this is what everyone is into.”
Melt pinched the image closer. A thick-lined cartoon of a giant boy’s head with a triumphant frown. A comic-book rendition of Melt’s own face and lank brown hair, topped by a red-gold crown angled back in a frankly non-royal way. And the crown fronted by an incongruous red baseball cap bill.
“I... I’m impressed you made it. Really. But you’re freakin dreaming if you think some dude is gonna buy it.”
“Bro, you don’t get it. This is just the first one. There’s, like, ten thousand Melt Kid Kings, each one a unique NFT. Two-fifty each. Do the math.”
“Fuck math. I’ll stick to skating.”
“I’ll get you the best board when these launch.”
Liam shot an involuntary glance at the beat-up wheels and scratched wood of the skateboard next to him.
“But why?” he said. “Like... why would they buy them?”
Melt eye-rolled and shook his head. He shoved the phone back in his hoodie pouch and sprang up, facing his friend.
“Have you listened to anything I said, bro? They’re limited edition. Each one is unique. Like, the crown can be bigger, more bling, different colors, the bill can have patterns and shit. You get to pick the eye color. Like a Fortnite skin, but just the head.”
“Yeah, I listened. But why would I buy one?”
“Urghcch... shit, bro – so you can own one!”
“Okay, follow-up question: why would I own one?”
“It’s exclusive merch.”
“You can’t have merch.”
“Why? Why the fuck not?”
“You have to be an influencer, a celeb, have a YouTube channel or whatev.”
“I will be.”
Liam looked incredulous. “How?”
“Cos I’ll be the Melt Kid King millionaire.”
Liam stood up and spun a wheel on his board. “When I skate on a half-pipe I got two options. I can get momentum by climbing higher each run, or... I can just climb to the top and let gravity do the work.”
“So?”
“You’re, like, trying to start at the top without the climb.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You wanna start at the top.”
Melt threw his head back with a smirk. “Ohhh... yeah, okay bro, I get it. But you’re missing a key factor.” Now he threw his arms out wide and pointed back at himself. “The Melt factor!”
Liam looked around them, searching for an audience. But they were alone on the bleachers. A scruffy dog was peeing on the fence behind home plate. A couple of moms in puffy jackets were pushing swings and chatting in the kiddie park. That was it. Leaves had fallen, ground was cold.
“Bruh. There’s no – “
Melt interrupted him. “I’m the fucking hype goat. The Discord channel – the guys on there – I’m hyping them up and they’re gonna go fucking crazy for the Kid Kings in fucking minutes once they drop.”
Liam eyed Melt. He sure was hyped up. Eyes gleaming, mouth tight, arms taught, still pointing at himself.
“How?” asked Liam.
“How what?”
“How you hyping them up?”
Melt relaxed, put a reassuring hand on his friend’s shoulder and shook his lowered head. “Bro, it’s okay. You got your shit, I got mine.”
“Yeah. We’re good. But I still wanna know.”
“I’m a thousand percent sure.”
Now it was Liam’s turn to smirk, and Melt did not take it well.
“Fuck you! Skate your fucking life away while I cash in,” he said, jumping straight down from the top bleacher. As he landed his phone bounced out of his pocket. He tried to catch it and in bending down, hit his forehead hard on one of the diagonal metal supports. His cry of pain wasn’t as loud as it should have been. He crumpled to the ground.
Liam saw what happened and jumped down too. Dropping his board he crouched beside Melt, who was on his knees in the fetal position, moaning quietly and rocking back and forth.
“Bro...” said Liam softly, laying a hand on Melt’s back. “Lemme see.”
One of the moms was walking briskly toward them, frowning.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” whimpered Melt, still rocking.
“Is he okay?” shouted the mom.
Liam looked over at her and shrugged. She marched a little faster.
“Hey, honey,” she said as she bent down and put her hand on Melt’s back next to Liam’s. With her head angled on one side, her brown hair formed a curtain. Liam stared at her. The low sun filled her face. The concern and care in her eyes were a magical blanket. Liam felt the knot in his stomach untie. He hadn’t even known it was there.
She tried to pull Melt up by his shoulders. “Let me see, honey.”
He had one hand pressed to his head, just above his right eyebrow. She pried it off carefully. Melt was turned away from Liam but he could tell from the change in the mom’s expression that the injury was bad. Melt lifted up his hand to look at it, and both he and Liam saw the dripping bright blood. “Shit... my eye!” he moaned.
The mom focused on the injury area and fished a small packet of baby wipes from her pocket. “Let’s take a look at it,” she said as she opened the packet and pulled out a wipe. “This might sting but I need to see.”
Liam watched, his mouth hanging open slightly, as she dabbed at the wound, squinting and balling up the wipe before dabbing again. Her eyes flicked over to the metal support and Liam instinctively followed her gaze. There was blood on the end of a thick rusty bolt poking out an inch from the surface.
“Sit up, honey,” she said.
Melt raised his torso but kept his back to Liam. He wiped the other eye with his sleeve and Liam could see that he was crying. The mom pulled out another wipe, smoothed away the tears and then applied it to the wound.
“Hold it here. Press tight. Your eye’s fine but you’re gonna need stitches. Maybe a tetanus shot.”
Melt shook his head. “No, lady, no shot.”
She looked at Liam quizzically, then back at Melt. “You need one.” Then back to Liam. “Can you phone his parents?”
Liam nodded. Melt shook his head. “Nah-uh. They... they don’t believe in hospitals.”
She sighed. “Even for stitches?”
“I... I don’t know... Maybe. But no blood transfusions.”
The mom laughed, sat back on her heels and flicked her hair away from her face. Again, Liam was mesmerized by a warmth that flowed into him somehow.
“I don’t think you’ll need a blood transfusion, honey, but you need to get this cleaned up with alcohol at minimum, and you’ll probably have a big scar unless a doctor stitches you up real fast. Keep it pressed on tight!” She looked at Liam. He wanted her care. But she was all business with him. “Can you take him home?”
Liam nodded.
“Promise? You’ll do it now?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
She got up and brushed off her knees. She held out a hand to Melt, who took it and stood too.
He faced Liam for the first time. “Bro – you hear that? I’m gonna have a scar!”
The mom turned on her heels and waved at a toddler standing beside the swing, holding the hand of the other mom. As she walked away she said over her shoulder, “Clean it up, kid!”
Melt picked up his phone. “This is legendary, bro!”
“Huh?”
“The Melt Kings – Scarface edition!”
He walked past Liam and took the wipe off his forehead. After a quick glance at it, he threw it down in the fading grass.
Liam watched the mom reach the swings and hoist up her little boy with both hands. She held him up above her head like a champion and he giggled in the waning sunlight.
Connections
I suppose 31 is a fairly young age to lose one’s mother. And 54 is a fairly young age to lose one’s life. But run-of-the-mill statistics don’t interest me. If I’d wanted to be an actuary I would have become one, like Fanny, my sister. I only spent twenty-one of those years with mom. My life drew me away from Burlington; her death is bringing me back. Did I visit last July 4th? Don’t remember. I really don’t. I’m just too busy and my mind too frenetic to pay attention to such details. No, I’m just not in the same sphere of reference as the rest of my family any more.
by John Dutton
July 4th, 2003. The connection from Chicago took off at 8.55. As the light diminished, the first fireworks appeared: 227 years of disconnection from a network called the British Empire. The plane climbed, and in ten minutes I saw forty, maybe fifty more firework displays. Sterile spores bursting out of the darkness.
To my fixated mind the displays looked like nodes in a network; each linked to the other via invisible bonds. The resonance made me smile. Traveling home to witness this elegant manifestation of the subject that had kept me at Berkeley during six weeks of empty lecture halls and yawning computer screens.
Was my return to Vermont really delayed by my research? Maybe it was the blood vessel in my mother’s brain which had ruptured last February.
Post-doctoral research topic: Ghost hubs – how social network connections are sustained in the absence of a linking node.
I suppose 31 is a fairly young age to lose one’s mother. And 54 is a fairly young age to lose one’s life. But run-of-the-mill statistics don’t interest me. If I’d wanted to be an actuary I would have become one, like Fanny, my sister.
I only spent twenty-one of those years with mom. My life drew me away from Burlington; her death is bringing me back. Did I visit last July 4th? Don’t remember. I really don’t. I’m just too busy and my mind too frenetic to pay attention to such details. No, I’m just not in the same sphere of reference as the rest of my family any more.
This flight felt so different from the one last February. Back then I was heading from Bay Area misty rain to green mountain snow and tears. From academic corridors of jeans and collaboration to an unfamiliar country of suits and sympathy.
Looking at the stars out the airplane window, I thought about home. I pictured the letters h-o-m-e in purely graphical, topological form, determining each one’s nodes and connections. A trivial process, a habit which kicks in whenever I’m idling. The mathematician in me, ticking, clicking away. The rest of the sociology department looks at me askance. An interloper from abstract science, trying in vain to purify the muddy waters of humanity’s web. But that’s why network theory sets my wheels racing. Suddenly biologists are talking to computer scientists, electrical engineers are exchanging notes with immunologists. And human computers like me turn their coats and enter the world of people.
Network: A group of nodes, every one of which is connected to at least one other node. A special kind of network, called scale-free, consists of many nodes with a small number of connections and a few nodes with an enormous number of connections. Social networks tend to be scale-free, which accounts for the phenomenon popularized as Six Degrees of Separation.
I analyzed what those lines and curves in the word ‘home’ represent. Every letter seemed significant. An ‘h’ looks like an entrance, an ‘o’ like a protective wall or a castle moat. An ‘m’ looks like supporting columns, maybe a reference to the classical architecture. But an ‘e’ is a funny shape. There’s something devious about the way it turns back around at the top without completing the loop. It looks squinty somehow. An ‘e’ has something to hide. My mind drifted back to mom. The ‘o’ in ‘home’ now a space. A zero.
They didn’t understand why I hadn’t come sooner. Fanny wanted to get together for supper on the 4th. I bullshitted about needing to catch up the research I’d missed back in February. A long weekend was the last thing I wanted. A missing person effects the perception of time for those who were close to them, a black hole stretching the continuum around it. The weekend was going to be long enough with the regular two days.
My itinerary was ideal: take the last flight before the overnighter. Arrive in Montreal at midnight, rent a car and drive the forty-five minutes to the border. No customs wait, then arrive in the wee hours when everyone’s in bed. Skip breakfast, dad will be gone to the restaurant by the time I emerge. Perfect plan.
On the I-89 to Burlington I realized my morning lie-in might not pan out. The girls would be there. Fan’s girls; my nieces. Emma, the six year-old future star of stage, screen or webcam, Sally, her three year-old doppelganger, and Beth, Sally’s diametrically-opposed twin. An interesting mini-network in themselves – its hyperactive dynamics had set off a gray brushfire that spread at a frightening pace from their father’s temples to the rest of his hair – they would have one purpose in mind: to show me some neicely love. Love you are powerless to resist, escape from, or even swat at hopefully. Fan would show up with them at, what, 8.30 am if I’m lucky? A sitting duck. Uncle Jim – drained by 10. They put the ‘eek!’ in ‘weekend’.
Hubs: The nodes in a scale-free network which have an exponentially large number of connections. An obvious example is the American airport system. A less obvious one is the World Wide Web, where the millions of average websites only have at the most ten links, while the hubs, such as Yahoo, are few in number, but have millions of links.
Montreal is a hub. Not only in the airport sense, but in the viral sense. It ‘s now well established that patient zero in the AIDS epidemic was a French-Canadian flight attendant by the name of Gaetan Dugas. Nobody knows where he caught the virus, but in 1982 he became the initial hub in the network representing its transmission. Two circumstances combined to make him special: the distances he traveled for work and the high number of sexual partners he had due to his behavior. Remove either of those circumstances and he wouldn’t have been a hub. But someone else almost certainly would have. Or maybe not. Maybe the disease would have been identified in time and contained, like SARS. The critical thing is that the hubs are key in such a network. A colleague of mine (a physicist, not a sociologist) suggested to me that the only chance of success in combating AIDS in the Third World would be to target the hubs, i.e. concentrate all available resources on distributing medication to prostitutes and needle-sharers. It’s ethically distasteful, of course. The people who spread the virus most get rewarded with medication. But the alternative is just pissing in the wind.
“What is the purpose of your visit?”
How much time does he have till the end of his shift?
My eyes were still closed when they barreled through the bedroom door. Fan must have made them creep up the stairs. Squeals wrenched me from a dream about mom, and eight tiny limbs pummeled me through the sheets. Uncle Jim the Jungle Gym.
When I finally peered out from under the twins I was surprised that Emma was holding back, almost hiding, behind her mother in the doorway. This was new behavior. She had turned the corner. This was what school had done to her – now she was a woman, and women didn’t go jumping up and down on their uncles. Later in the weekend she smirked when I mentioned last year’s idols, Britney and Christina. Now it was Avril Lavigne. She had a fake tattoo. Not on her arm, but in the small of her back, like some other singer. I felt sorry for Fan in anticipation of Emma entering teenland, if she even lasted that long before demanding the piercings and low-cut jeans…
At the same time, what was I into when I was her age? Kiss. Dad was sure I’d grow up a devil-worshipping freak in makeup. I makes me laugh, how ridiculous it all was. They weren’t devils, they were clowns, performing at a six year-old’s party.
“Hi, bro.”
“Hi. Unnnggh.” The hair-pulling had started. Emma edged her way shyly into the room.
“Hi, uncle Jim. I made butterfly wings yesterday.”
“I thought God made butterfly wings.”
She laughed. “Silly. It’s a craft project.” Then she came over to the bed and thumped me, just for old time’s sake.
Mom used that word. People were ‘silly’, not ‘dumb’, or ‘stupid’. I guess it was her English upbringing. She was in Emma’s smile. Not her eyes, where people always see deceased loved-ones, but in her smile. Shame that the eyes have this privileged reputation as the window of the soul, because the smile is so much more revealing. Everyone can read a smile.
“Come on, girls,” said Fan. “Give uncle Jim a chance to get up.” They climbed off. “I got you muffins. From the Scrumptious Café.”
“Thanks.”
What did I expect? That she would make me mom’s bacon and eggs, sunny-side up, while juggling three kids? That exact smell would never greet me again as I staggered down those stairs past her souvenir plate collection.
We sat in the living room. It was a good thing the nieces were there, or I might have felt sad, seeing photos of mom, her books and her trinkets. As it was, the circus continued: clowns, tumblers, and dancers all embodied by the twins and their ringmistress Emma. I became the juggler of toys: Mr. Potato Head, Barbie, sticker-albums, nurse’s kit, plush animals, all thrust under my nose one after another, sometimes almost up it. Only when I was about to be completely submerged under three furless, giggling monkeys did Fan intervene.
A brief entr’acte ensued during which Emma showed me a book her parents had bought her on their trip to Montreal the year before: La Terre vue du ciel. I asked Emma if she knew what the title meant in English and she did: Earth Seen from the Sky. French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand had traveled the world taking pictures from a plane at the perfect altitude to clearly see whatever feature (some man-made, some natural) was of interest below, yet high enough to capture its graphic form rather than a National Geographic-style documentary record.
The photos were fascinating because every single one was beautiful, without revealing the source of the beauty. You couldn’t be sure what it was a picture of; all you could see were shapes and colors. A description accompanied each photo. Emma told me proudly that she was learning French.
One of the images looked like a bacterial culture. A central colony with a multitude of outgrowths, many of them interconnected. I had seen this type of image many times. It’s a typical network structure, featuring a central hub, connected to many smaller nodes by links of varying sizes. In fact, though, it was a photo of a tree in Tsavo East National Park in Kenya, called the Tree of Life, because it was the only shelter from the searing sun for miles around. The ‘outgrowths’ were brown animal tracks inscribed and reinforced over the years in the green scrub. Some tracks had been more used than others, and were therefore more present. A network of pathways without any planning, formed solely by the attractor – the Tree of Life – in the center of the photo.
Would the network remain for long if the hub were removed? Would animals blindly follow the same tracks that had been laid down in the past? Or would they realize the tree had vanished, and simply walk in another direction?
Theory: In certain special kinds of networks the links to a node can remain even when the node is removed.
Eventually the girls got bored with uncle Jim. Left in the kitchen with Fan, I looked around at mom’s influence, her architecture. No wonder people see ghosts. I kept doing it the whole weekend. Not just in the familiar, family places (popping her head around my bedroom door; leaving the bathroom wearing her robe; bending over the garbage to scrape off the scraps) but even on Church Street with another family, turning her head toward me, then evaporating, a stranger with her hair, staring blankly. On that sultry Saturday I had to get out of the house and wandered downtown with a sharper perspective than ever before. Burlington was a mini-Berkeley. Had I really left home or just shifted the geography to suit me? Which aspect of the distance was real and which was artificial?
But she wasn’t a ghost. A demon, a benevolent demon, briefly possessing the bodies of others as I passed near them. Her demon was everywhere. A woman emerging from the candle shop was usurped for an instant, my mother smiled at me, then left her alone. On a boat thirty yards from the lakeshore she turned to me in the body of a woman wearing a pink, patterned sarong. Then a wavelet twinkle and she disappeared once more.
I’m no believer in any kind of spiritual stuff, but it was easy to see why other people are. Your mind recreates the connections that linked you to the absent person. Connections with no node to join to. So the node is projected by the mind, like a phantom limb.
Current research: The English Civil War – the removal of the monarchy and execution of the king in 1649; the establishment of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, followed eleven years later by the restoration of the monarchy. The monarchy is the hub which was removed, then restored (albeit with a different king) with virtually all of the network connections to it still intact. Does this violate the rules of network formation? Did other links to similar hubs, such as Parliament, keep the connections active, or did the connections themselves allow the Restoration to take place?
“Bob’s on Prozac.”
“You’re kidding.”
She took a sip. The coffee was exactly how mom used to make it.
“He worries about his job. Last year was hard on him. The aerospace industry is in the toilet.”
“But Prozac? He never seemed like… well, I knew he got stressed, but…”
“The panic attacks started last fall. He’s under so much pressure, and I can’t work because of the twins.”
“Jesus.”
Her eyes had seen the hand she’d been dealt. Not a bad hand, not a good hand. But this was it. She wasn’t young any more.
“So are you seeing anyone?”
“Not right now.”
Fan expected to be entertained whenever she asked that question. She’s had two relationships her whole life; I’m a pinball. She has a house and three kids. I’m two years older than her and am still a student in the stereotypical fashion.
“So you were seeing someone.”
“Yes.” I let the pause do its job.
“And?”
“Well…here’s the thing: she couldn’t handle the truth. All I need are A Few Good Women…”
“Ha ha. What kind of truth?”
“We dated for a few weeks. Great sex. She really liked me, I could tell.”
“With your male intuition an’ all.”
“Uh-huh. But I didn’t feel anything. Except, you know, down there.”
Fan shook her head almost imperceptibly. “So you dumped her?”
“No! That was the point: I didn’t want to dump her at all. I was having a great time.”
“Until she found you in bed with someone else?”
“Not even. I decided to be a man. She’s a really nice girl. So I was honest for a change. Told her I knew I wasn’t going to fall in love with her.”
“You what?!”
“I didn’t want her to be under any illusions.”
“Where were you when you told her this?”
“Lying naked on the living room floor.”
“After having sex with her?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s terrible! How could you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Say that after having sex with her.”
“It seemed like a good time to bring it up. While she was in a good mood.”
“Why do guys think it’s best to wait till a girl’s finally feeling good about things before dropping a bomb?”
“It’s logical. Like an equation.”
“What?”
“If you’re going to subtract an amount you need to start off with a larger amount than the amount you subtract or you end up with a negative result. So being in a good mood is equivalent to having a large original amount before the subtraction.”
“You’re an asshole.”
She had lost her humor. “No. For once I wasn’t an asshole. I told her the truth so she wouldn’t be more hurt down the road.”
“You have no idea how the female mind works.”
She had a good point there. “But I was being honest. Can’t you at least give me that?”
“No. It wasn’t a nice thing to do.”
“But why? I really want to know.”
“It wasn’t nice.”
“Yes, you just said that.”
Things were going downhill fast. The usual scenario when we discussed my love-life. “You just said I wasn’t nice, but I don’t understand why.”
“Can we change the subject please?”
“What?”
“I don’t want to talk about this any more.”
“But you called me an asshole. At least help me understand what I did to make you say that.”
“Just drop it. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
She got up and rinsed her cup in the sink. “I’m going upstairs to check on the girls.”
I shrugged to my imaginary audience of sympathetic guys, all wearing ‘She thinks I’m an asshole’ T-shirts.
Emergence: The idea that the whole of a system, or network, can be more than the sum of its parts. Typical examples are avalanches, where a quantity of snow behaves as a unit, rather than a collection of individual flakes, and ant colonies, which display the properties of a unified organism though each ant behaves according to very simple, pre-programmed rules. Maybe consciousness can be explained by the theory of emergence; the neurons and synapses of the brain operate according to relatively simple chemical and electrical rules, but the brain as a whole displays intelligence and consciousness.
My Grand Tour of Burlington ended at the cemetery. This is where mom has been ‘laid to rest’. After being incinerated, of course, as per her wishes. At the memorial service I looked at the coffin on the conveyor belt to the flames and thought, “That’s not mom in there. It’s just decomposing organic matter. She’s already gone. It’s just a wooden box. The wood used to be part of a viable organic network, containing a collection of organic molecules which also used to be a viable network.” I know Fan would have cried if I’d shared those thoughts with her. I’m an asshole. But that’s what I was thinking.
At the plaque marking the spot where her ashes are buried, I had the same feeling. “It’s not her.” Why even bother standing here? Why bother bringing flowers? She’s gone, and if all that remains are the quilt on my bed, the lintel decoration – things she made – and the memories of her in the minds of the people who knew her, then we should exercise those remains. Don’t allow them to atrophy; use them, renew them. Because they are her true remains, not a collection of carbon molecules. I remembered reading last year about a German company which turns the ashes of a loved-one into a diamond. What a joke. An expensive joke, too. You might as well believe that your loved-one exists in the exhaust fumes of the car you drive. All our molecules are recycled eventually, whether as a diamond or a pile of shit. What counts for genuine remembrance is the network which sustained that person as an individual. Let them resonate in your memories and activities. Gather together with people who knew them. They are a hub.
I’m the person I am thanks to her genes and her love. The network continues beyond the individual. Or rather, there are networks within networks within networks, each one a node in a higher-scale configuration.
I arrived home at 6. Dad was already there. He hugged me. He didn’t used to do that. Oh well – some good is coming from mom’s death.
“How are you, son?”
“Fine, you?”
The typical pleasantries, though now he seemed unsure of himself. Mom usually took the lead.
The girls ran into the kitchen to smother him. In the living room, Bob was watching TV. It was difficult not to analyze his every word and gesture for signs of stress or behavior-altering drugs.
“Hey. What’s up?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
Like weather. No storms, no heatwaves. Drugs had made Bob a perpetual sunny September day. Bob is coasting in his weather-bubble.
We chatted about the minutiae of the local news, including the always-entertaining Vermont’s Most Wanted segment. “Janet Boucher, 42, for bail evasion; Mark Foote, for narcotics possession.” Probably an ounce of weed. These are the best criminals Vermont can come up with!
Dad came in just as the sports report began. A narrow defeat for the Expos. “It’s always the same. I don’t know why I bother.” Like most of the ‘fans’, he never bothers going to the stadium to watch them in person and then complains because the team doesn’t have the budget to compete with the big boys. “Did you get out to any games yet this year?”
He asks me the same question every time he sees me. Baseball is the territory on which we meet.
“No, I was busy trying to finish my research before the summer.”
“And is it finished?”
“Yes and no.”
“Uh-huh. Oh! Did you see that catch!”
He was watching the screen during his last question and my answer. He carries a locker-room with him all the time. Running a sports theme restaurant is his heaven on Earth.
Attractors. The points towards which certain dynamic systems tend to converge. A common example is the period of a pendulum, which will converge on a specific frequency no matter how fast we start it swinging. Attractors are often illustrated graphically as basins in a lumpy surface into which a marble will eventually roll. As networks develop they often clump together around attractors, which, for the internet, are called hubs. In the network of the human brain the attractors may turn out to be memories or what we know as ‘states of mind’. Babies and schizophrenics lack deep attractor basins in their neural networks, the result of which is that they flit suddenly between widely divergent mental states.
Fan very kindly made dinner. One of the contradictions in dad’s life is that he runs a restaurant and can’t cook for shit. In fact, if you asked him to cook shit, he would probably screw it up and produce something which tasted nice.
The kids sat at the “big girls’ table” in the kitchen, where they could do less damage to the walls, floor and furniture. We automatically took our regular places in the dining room. The others had eaten there many times since mom’s death, but this was a first for me, except for during the smothering haze following her stroke, when we all became zombies, possessed by death, but still lamely repeating our pre-stroke habits. The space at the table where mom always sat dominated my field of vision. I remember wondering whether she was located in my blind spot, and all I had to do was shift my gaze to one side to be able to see her out the corner of my eye.
“So the girls are still sleeping well?” asked dad, as he always did. My sleep patterns as a baby must have traumatized him. He was obsessed with that question, although I suspect mom had dealt with me most of the time.
“Yeah – no problem,” answered Bob.
“Because when Jim was a baby…”
(Fan and I looked at each other and smiled our ‘here we go again’ smile.)
“…his mother and I had to walk him up and down the corridor, singing to get him to fall asleep.”
“Yeah – I remember you saying.”
“And you know what the worst thing was?” Bob was either being polite or else Prozac had erased his memory for useless anecdotes. He shook his head. “That for some reason we chose the Do-re-mi song from The Sound of Music.” Bob smiled and took a swig of beer. “And it repeats, you know. It ends with, ‘that will bring us back to Do’, then starts again with ‘Doe, a deer…’ My God, we must have sung that a hundred times over, some nights!”
At this point I was mimicking dad saying the “hundred times over” part and Fan started to snicker. Dad looked at her. “It’s true, you know.”
“Yes, dad, we know.”
I guess at this point I felt that I should make some kind of enquiry into dad’s disposition. It seemed like the right thing to do. “So, how have you been? Keeping busy with the restaurant, I guess.”
“Well, I’m glad you asked me that, son, because I have to tell you and your sister something. And you, Bob.” We all stopped chewing and looked at each other. “You remember Pattie, Pattie Tiernan, who we used to go and stay with in Connecticut when you were little?”
“Auntie Pattie and uncle Derek in Glastonbury?” I said, nervously. There were many such ‘uncles and aunties’ when we were young.
“Yes. Well they got divorced a long time ago and she runs a bed-and-breakfast in Maine with her children. You remember Marty and Kyle?” I nodded. Fan was looking at dad like he was turning leprous before her eyes. “Anyway, she got back in touch with me after your mother died. Sent me a letter saying she had heard through Nate Stevens. We got together a couple of months ago.”
“What do you mean, got together?” asked Fan, her voice trembling slightly.
“Had a drink, reminisced about old times.” Silence. Dad was about to open one of the lockers in his locker-room, and we all knew it. “The thing is…what you should know is…back then, in the seventies…Pattie and I fell in love.” A pause. Half a second? Half an hour? “We couldn’t do anything about it because of you two and Marty and Kyle.”
My mind rapidly oscillated between three thoughts: ‘Did mom know?’, ‘Is he lying?’, and ‘What does this mean?’. Nothing else coherent, the neural equivalent of heart fibrillation – a quivering, superfast spasm locked in a self-reinforcing loop. Dad snapped me out of it with a sledgehammer blow.
“Pattie is going to move in here with me.”
I couldn’t even bear to look at Fan’s face. Bob stared down at his plate.
He continued, matter-of-factly: “We’ll see how it goes. She’s looking forward to seeing you again after all this time. She’s not going to replace your mom, though.”
Fan got up from the table and ran upstairs. Bob slowly pushed back his plate, excused himself and followed her. I don’t know what happened up there.
I looked through the doorway into the kitchen. The girls had stopped what they were doing and were staring back at me. Their animal senses had perceived the earthquake before the rest of us. When I turned back to dad I felt a surge of empathy. What was he supposed to do? Even if this story about falling in love twenty-five years ago was a fabrication, how could I blame him? He’d never lived alone in his life and was incapable of doing it. Not just physically (cooking, cleaning, laundry, daily household maintenance), but emotionally. He’s a social creature; he hates being alone. Mom’s death was as wrenching for him as if he’d been plucked from his life and set down on a desert island.
“She’s not going to replace your mom,” he repeated, his eyes distressed.
“I know, dad. It’s okay.”
Beth ran into the dining room. “Where did mommy and daddy go?”
“They’re upstairs,” said dad, softly. “Come and give granddad a hug.” She climbed up onto his lap. He was good with all three of them. He’s friendly. That’s why people like him.
Suddenly an argument broke out between Emma and Sally. Squealing, a crash of cutlery on plates, a flailing of arms and Emma’s glass falling to the floor, shattering. The argument ceased. There followed a gap in which mom would have done something. I don’t know what – telling them to watch out for the broken glass, soothing words, gentle admonishment – all I know is that there was a space and a period of time which she would have filled. I heard a door open upstairs and Fan call out, “Is everything okay?” Beth jumped down from dad’s lap and ran to the stairs. I got up and walked swiftly into the kitchen to make sure that the other two didn’t step on the shards. After I had scooped them up, I looked at dad, motionless at the table with his back to the kitchen. He would always wait patiently, talking to me and Fan while mom finished cooking, then his face would light up as she entered, carrying his steaming plate. I’m sure he did the exact same thing after we had moved out. I realized that he would soon be doing the exact same thing with Pattie. The phrase ‘ingrained behavior’ is a good one. Habits build up in crevices like the marbles in my mathematical attractor basins.
Tipping point: The point at which a network changes, sometimes irrevocably, into a new configuration. Examples are my mother’s stroke and the phase transition of water into ice. Water doesn’t gradually become filled with ice crystals as the temperature drops towards zero Celsius (25% ice at 6°C, 50% ice at 4°C, for example) but instead suddenly has a complete transition at a very narrow temperature range (around 0°C). Many organic and social networks display this property of a tipping point.
Fan left soon after dinner on the Saturday, not another word to dad except a curt goodbye when she was already half-way out the door. I spent the rest of the evening watching the ball game on TV with him, just like the old days. The oppressive absence of mom continued to exert its weight on me, and, I guess, on him. There were no random noises as she busied herself somewhere else in the house. No polite enquiries as to when the game would be over. No offers of tea and biscuits.
But, to my surprise, at the seventh inning stretch, dad sprang from his chair and asked if I wanted tea and biscuits. I’d never heard him say ‘biscuit’ before, save for when he would tease mom about her using it and other British-isms like ‘aubergine’, ‘aluminium’ and ‘trousers’. “They’re double-chocolate chip,” he said, with a boyish grin. I smiled at him and said sure. The simple things really did make him happy. We munched and sipped until the end of the game. He chattered away to me, reminiscing about this player and that, the memorable games we watched together when I was a kid, the time Gary Carter and his wife sat at the next table to us in a Montreal steakhouse.
By Sunday lunchtime he had run out of ways to avoid the subject of Pattie, so he left to clean the beer pipes in the restaurant. He was good at keeping busy. Or at evading emotional discomfort, whichever way you look at it. I let him go. He was fine. Fan was the one who needed help.
I called her and asked if they wanted to spend the afternoon down at the boardwalk with me.
The girls were excited by the opportunity to take advantage of uncle Jim once more. Ice cream was their weapon of choice, and my wallet surrendered without a whimper. Bob considerately led them away to ‘look at the ducks’, leaving Fan and I the chance to talk. We sat on a bench, the breeze from the lake fooling us into ignoring the sun’s heat on our delicate half-English skin.
“He doesn’t know how to live on his own,” I said. She just stared at the ground between her feet. “And you have too much on your plate to help him. Lucky he’s got the restaurant, or he would have gone into a depression already.”
“He had an affair. Mom left her homeland then spent her whole life picking up after him and raising us. She never had a life of her own.”
“Who are we to judge?”
“What are you saying? She’s our mom! At Christmas she told me how she was looking forward to her retirement so she could travel. I mean really travel – see the world. She never went anywhere – just Montreal, Boston, New York, and back to England every few years. She wanted so much to visit France and Italy. She gave so much to dad and what’s he doing now she’s gone a couple of months? He’s going to sleep in the same bed – her bed – with ‘auntie Pattie’. I wonder why she got divorced? Maybe her husband wasn’t as understanding as mom. ‘We fell in love.’ Fuck that!”
She needed to get all that out of her system. She was right – it was a personal tragedy that mom didn’t get to do everything she had hoped. “Life is unfair,” I said. That was my deep insight.
“Yeah, well, it may be unfair, but I don’t have to put up with Pattie living with dad. If he thinks life is gonna carry on as usual…if he thinks the girls are gonna call her grandma….” Her eyes were full of tears. She tipped her head back, squeezed the lids tight, and rubbed away the moisture.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “We don’t know what went on. No one knows what goes on between a man and a woman.” I thought about telling her what I had seen in the storage room when I was fifteen, but I couldn’t. What was the point? “She’s still our mom. She’s still their grandma. Those links will never fade away.”
“I know.”
“And, who knows? You might get along fine with Pattie. And you know that dad is completely incapable of being alone, right?”
“Yeah.”
“The bottom line is, he has his life to deal with. You have yours. You have a great family. That’s your priority.”
“Yeah. You’re right.”
Bob was wandering back towards us. Beth broke free and ran into her mommy’s arms. Sticky little hands clamped themselves around Fan’s neck. She smiled and kissed her. I made a face, tongue lolling out of one side of my mouth. Beth giggled. “Did you see any ducks?”
“Yeah. Three ducks.”
Emma climbed onto the bench behind me and put her hands on my eyes. “Guess who!”
“Britney Spears.”
She laughed and stuck her head over my shoulder so I could see her face. “Silly!” she shouted. Fan smiled at me.
I convinced Fan and Bob to eat at the restaurant with me. The girls were ecstatic; granddad would be there and he always spoiled them rotten. I was glad Fan said yes. It was the best thing we could do to keep things on an even keel with dad, at least until Pattie showed up.
When the meal was over and the twins were beginning their bedtime meltdown I said goodbye to them and told them I’d be back for Thanksgiving. That was going to be interesting. Fan and Bob left with their wailing entourage. I helped dad close up, like I used to in the year before I left for Berkeley. Not a word was spoken about mom or Pattie.
The next morning I got up late and exchanged brief pleasantries with him over toast and coffee. Then he hugged me, told me to have a good trip, and asked if I needed anything. I smiled at the irony. No, I told him, I was fine. I stood at the kitchen window and watched him pull out of the driveway. The old station wagon, his beast of burden, misfired but valiantly accompanied him on another trip to his refuge: the restaurant.
Back in the eighties I would sometimes go over there on late summer afternoons, before the evening shift began. I would waste my time practicing darts or using the key to get free games on the pinball machine. Mom and dad were usually there, preparing for re-opening, but I didn’t really pay attention to their comings and goings and they didn’t pay much attention to me.
One day when I was fifteen I stopped playing pinball and went into the storage room to get myself a bag of chips. If I took one from the bar, dad would notice. I opened the door and froze. Mom and one of the regular customers (Andy Something, good-looking, younger than her) were standing, arms around each others’ waists, foreheads touching. No kissing, no fondling, but they broke apart, guilty as hell. “I was just getting a bag of chips,” was all I could think of to say. I felt for some reason like I was the one who should provide an explanation.
I turned and shut the door behind me. I don’t know exactly what went through my mind, but I wandered aimlessly up and down Church Street until suppertime. I have no memory of how mom behaved when I saw her the next morning, but I never mentioned the incident to her, and she never brought it up with me. That was the only time I saw evidence of infidelity from either of my parents. Who knows what goes on between a man and a woman?
The song playing on The Buzz when I crossed the border into Canada was that pointless remake of Drift Away. Hah! If only.
I felt sorry for Fan. I was flying to out-west, she was stuck in Vermont with her family, dad, and the space where mom used to be. Her absence was a concrete presence, defying all the laws of physics and mathematics. Maybe, counter-intuitively, distance will make my connection with mom more solid; I won’t be constantly reminded that she isn’t there any more. But Fan will feel the amputation, the raw pain from the phantom limb. The prosthetic, the interloper who will soon arrive, might only increase Fan’s focus on the pain. She might tip our family into a phase-transition and irrevocably reconfigure our connections. Or will the network stay intact, kept in place by our memories and love? I’d like to think that science has got it wrong.
Bianca
Sixteen rainy seasons. Sixteen dry seasons. The Lord’s bitterness has made him a stooped curse, a gnarled, chopped root. A new Lady, Dolorosa, stalks the hacienda’s hallways like a queen. Bianca mucks with the servants. No tears. Things must be done. No cries. Things give the days their rhythm. The deeper the dirt and the stronger the stench, the more Bianca whistles. And the more this new Lady clenches fists and teeth.
Translated from the Bolivian by John Dutton
A hacienda on a hill near the City of Silver. The Lady leans on the veranda. Steam rises from the rainforest. She wants a child.
The Lord, the Don, is always away, and the years are flying. Time is crushing her dream, evaporating her joy before it can blossom.
The Lady is in her dream. Her eyes see nothing. A crow alights on the wooden railing. In her mind the baby is in her arms. She hears its cries. The bird takes flight, wheels, swoops toward her. Its beak pierces her breast like a needle. Drops of blood fall onto her white lace, filling its spaces. The vision fades, her vision returns. The crimson pattern grows bigger. She sees the lips of her child against pure white skin. And hair like black feathers.
When the Lord returns she’s ready for him. Sweat mingles, she welcomes his love. Fruitful, she cradles his life as it grows inside her.
But before she ripens fully the girl is born. Skin as white as her mother’s lace, hair as black as the crow’s feathers and lips as red as the blood that gushes from the Lady. The midwife seeks wisdom in her almanac. Water is helpless, everyone is helpless. The Lady suckles the infant with her seeping strength. Her smile breaks and she dies.
The midwife names the baby in her own language. The heartbroken Lord averts his eyes from Bianca’s snow white skin. He departs the cruel bed, the laughing hacienda. His sorrow falls without mercy upon his miners, who shirk batons and bullets from the men on horses.
Sixteen rainy seasons. Sixteen dry seasons. The Lord’s bitterness has made him a stooped curse, a gnarled, chopped root. A new Lady, Dolorosa, stalks the hacienda’s hallways like a queen. Bianca mucks with the servants. No tears. Things must be done. No cries. Things give the days their rhythm. The deeper the dirt and the stronger the stench, the more Bianca whistles. And the more this new Lady clenches fists and teeth.
Dolorosa moons at the mirror. She sees the accelerating stars through the reflected window. Her rage framed by the gilded oval. She stares at her face and she knows. She knows she’s fading. She knows Bianca’s blood-red lips will soon receive their first passion. Her own lips purse. Her powdered cheeks fleck and crack. Hair shrouds her sour-milk eyes. Bianca is the one the sky loves the most. Bianca’s beauty blinds the new Lady. Bianca must be eclipsed forever.
The woodsman is summoned. A man with a scarred neck and earthen eyes. He thinks in trajectories and targets. The beating of wings and the beating of hearts are his to still forever. Dolorosa places a hand on his shoulder, whispers in his ear. She needs him. She has a task for him in the forest. She hisses Bianca’s name and the woodsman lowers his eyes.
The new Lady accosts young Bianca with news of an errand: the blue-gilled mushrooms that grow in the shade of the cinchona tree must be gathered for the Lord’s welcome feast. The woodsman will accompany her, watch for jaguars and anacondas, stay by her side.
The heat is yet to rise. Bianca wraps a shawl and lines a basket with linen. A knock on the door of the woodsman’s lodge and it opens before her knuckles can rap a second time. He avoids her eyes, strides forth without hesitation, and they enter the forest.
The cinchona trees grow where the soil is rocky, at the mountain’s feet where the mines begin. Dolorosa knows this. She knows that Bianca will be far from rescue when the assassination occurs. Gleeful in anticipation, the Queen-Lady parades before her mirror in dresses and tiaras, humming a spiteful melody.
Bianca stumbles over root and vine as the trees close in. Her protector draws his machete and clears the way. The morning slips by, the canopy thins, and as sweat dampens Bianca’s blouse she spies the trees where the blue-gilled mushrooms grow.
She leaves his side. The woodsman loads and cocks his musket in practiced silence. Bianca stoops at the base of a trunk. The barrel lowered, the assassin takes a step, squeezes the trigger. Powder ignites, a frog leaps and Bianca’s sharp breath makes her head jerk backward as the lead pierces the bark. The woodsman begins to reload and prime his weapon. Bianca knows she can run away or toward him. The adrenaline that speeds her heart focuses her thought. By the time he raises the musket her breath is upon the hand that steadies the barrel. Her eyes captures his own long enough to fracture their steel. A muscle twitches on his temple. She holds his gaze, places her hand on the muzzle. He remembers to breathe. Bianca’s years have taught her nothing about men. But her flesh knows what to do.
He has been long without a woman and has no defense. Her lips are warm, warmer than his throat, warmer than his gut. Her fingertips on his scarred neck loosen sinews but tighten spine. He is not accustomed to closing his eyes in the heart of the jungle but Bianca tears him away, uproots him, cleaves him from the earth beneath his feet. He does close his eyes. Nothing else matters.
A screech overhead brings the world back to life. He staggers back, eyes darting, ears perked, nostrils flared. Bianca puts her hand to her chest. He turns and never looks back. As the woodsman’s stooped form recedes into the rainforest Bianca knows she cannot hope to return.
The woodsman must bring proof or the new Lady will look upon him with a skeptical sneer. He trudges back, fixated on the rhythm of his llama-skin boots. The sun is high. His mind drifts. Then it snaps back into focus and he knows. He knows what he must do. No one will notice a llama missing from the herd. A slaughter that would have been performed for food will be a sacrifice to preserve Bianca’s life.
Satisfied at the sight of the llama’s bloody heart, Dolorosa smirks and feels victory rise in her chest. But still it isn’t enough. Only the taste of Bianca’s flesh will seal her tomb forever. The cook does her bidding, prepares the organ that was rent from the warm carcass and roasts it slowly until the moon reigns once again.
The platter makes the new Lady’s saliva flow, but the taste is too familiar. Not the bitterness she craves or the pleasure she expects when her molars crush the muscle. Something is awry. The meal consumed, Dolorosa addresses the mirror anew. The answer she receives kindles her ire until its flames engulf the hacienda. She breathes in the heat from the air that burns with her rage, opens her husband’s cabinet of antiques and relics. From a serpentine scabbard protrudes an onyx-ornamented handle. Dolorosa pulls out the dagger that three centuries before slew the chieftain while armored soldiers secured his limbs. She summons the woodsman. Eyes lowered, he enters the hall, knowing that she knows. She demands penitence. He kneels at her feet. She plunges the dagger between his shoulder blades. His last breath escapes, his body curled in the womb of death.
Bianca follows the base of the mountain, imagining not where she might find succor or shelter. The sun moves to the mount’s opposite slope. The shade begins to needle at the pit of her stomach. Beyond an outcrop she spies the mine entrance and makes her way toward it. Yawning blackness and stale air. Curiosity beckons her, but instinct wards her off. She walks closer. As trepidation slows her step, she notices something. A path leads away from the mine, into an unknown section of forest. A route somewhere. The chill of the mountain’s mouth makes her shudder. She turns onto the path.
Deep in the bowels of the mountain a cramped cave filled with seven small men wearing battered helmets. Coughing, chewing the coca leaf, spitting silica-veined phlegm on muddy mine floor. A grunt with every hack of the pickax. A wheeze with every heave of the shovel. Gas lamp flames flicker next to close walls, illuminating sacks of ore, rotten timbers, coiled ropes and winches. Knotted, worn umbilical cords disappear up the dark shaft.
They chew the leaf, their skin fading to blue. The miners’ sickness punches them over and over in the solar plexus. One sneezes, then returns his attention to a crevice. Another slouches through a puddle, legs heavy, eyes tired. A rake-thin boy, barely thirteen, pushes an empty trolley in silence, watched by an older, fatter miner wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Another miner removes his helmet and wipes his forehead with a dusty sleeve. He reaches into a satchel and pulls out a clear, flat bottle. Grimy cork twisted out by stubby fingers, a swig, then the bottle neck superficially cleansed with the same dusty sleeve. The miner swallows, squeezes his eyes shut and laughs. Another snatches the bottle angrily with a hand and a scarred stump. He drinks too, then offers the alcohol to a willowy youth with a red bandana. The youth shyly refuses.
Rodrigo, the older miner, checks a pocket watch and signals the end of the shift. Tools are downed, empty lunch tins scooped up by chafed hands. Shuffling feet carve a last trail through the rock dust, past rice bags filled with explosive powder, a box of blasting caps and a battered guitar leaning drunkenly against the jagged rock. The welcoming tomb disgorges them for another day.
A squat house on the edge of the jungle. Bianca approaches its mud walls warily. The glassless windows gawp at her from under the rough thatch. A heavy door of raw wood draws her in, its iron knocker a stiff index finger beckoning her. Fashioned in the form of a horned man with a briar-patch beard and muscular chest, the knocker was once painted red. Now only a few flecks remain, like spattered blood from a recent kill. The horns are a ring through its head, a hinge fixed to the wood. Bianca grasps the figure’s torso and swings it upward, letting it fall with a hollow tock. She waits, lifts the heavy latch. There is no lock. The door creaks open, she creeps inside.
Bare, almost barren, the room’s skewed table crouches in the center, surrounded by low stools. Bianca surveys the counter and basin, splintered fruit crates housing potatoes, rutabaga and onions at one end of the room, a shabby little bed at the other. An inner arch leads Bianca through to a second space with three wider beds shrouded in threadbare grey blankets of coarse alpaca wool. She sits on one. Fatigue embraces her, pulling her head down to the thin, yellowed pillow. Her leaden eyelids close.
When they open again, she starts, gasps, and scuttles backward, pressed against the wall. The seven miners are surrounding the bed. Pedro and Luis cough in unison. Emilio, the man with the stump, is angry, threatened. He wants her gone. Iago sees a devil’s emissary. Camilio watches her like a hawk. Rodrigo calms them, makes an introduction to Bianca, and requests her name in return. Her voice seems to soften the mood of the dusty crew. She recounts her life in the hacienda, her flight from her father’s wife. They listen, entranced. The boy, Xavier, sniffs back a tear. Rodrigo nods sagely and requests a moment alone with his men. Bianca nods. They bow and let her pass.
The miners agree to give her refuge. She has no plan. She knows not how long she will need a haven. But they ask for nothing. Unable to seduce them like the woodsman, she has charmed them, brought sunlight to their stunted darkness. And the days pass. And the meager food is shared. And the bed in the first room is hers.
Yet Bianca is not safe. The mirror has focused the Dolorosa’s hatred, expanded her vision to beyond the forest. Spies are sent out. News of the house on the edge of the forest is gobbled up greedily. The tiny miners are shielding the one she despises. She schemes, she dreams. She calls her maids and a disguise is tailored. A fan-seller. They make fans of red silk, blue silk, yellow silk, all trimmed with black lace and dusted with a powdered poison. One waft of a fan near the face would be fatal. When the sky is heavy with humidity and the earth seared by the midsummer sun, the new Lady will visit Bianca. Maniacal, impatient, she Lady retraces the path through the forest with her spy and awaits the day.
That day comes. July burns, Dolorosa delights. She dons her costume, gathers the basket of fans, deadly dust in every fold. As she leaves the cool hacienda she curses the heat. Sweat trickles down her neck. The lush forest turns air into haze. She stumbles on roots, catches on thorns. But she penetrates the verdant overgrowth through to the mountain. Heartened, she quickens her pace. The sun is lower than she’d hoped when the house comes into view.
The new Lady pulls down her veil. She raps a tarantella on the door. Bianca opens timidly but relaxes when she sees the stooped fan seller. Dolorosa remains silent, raises a gloved palm and proffers the basket. Bianca smiles sweetly, blows her hair off her beaded forehead, peruses the contents of the basket. She presses three tin coins into the fan seller’s hand. It spasms like a claw, triumph coursing through its veins. Bianca takes a red fan from the basket, nods a thank you. The fire in the new Lady’s eyes almost scorches the veil. Bianca unties the ribbon holding the fan closed. Dolorosa backs away. A cough. Another cough. Bianca looks up. The miners are returning. One of them starts to whistle a melody, its notes weaving a thread of unity among laborers. The fan-seller melts into the forest.
Bianca releases the ribbon. The miners arrive at the door. The shift went well, their mood is bright. They laugh at Bianca’s new fan and snatch it from her grasp before she opens it. The boy takes a linen kerchief and wafts it in her face. Another kneels and blows her feet to cool them. Another takes the fan and dances a furious flamenco to a new tune. Bianca laughs. He fans himself. Specks of poison dust are drawn in with each whirling breath. He sneezes and coughs, bent double, until his face is purple. But his lungs are protected by the silica layer that is killing him with glacial suffocation. The fan is dropped to the dirt. His comrades help him into the house and fetch water. Bianca forgets the fan.
The Hacienda welcomes the new Lady, borne home to her nest of thorns on wings of victory. Her maids bathe the sweat from her flesh. In a nightdress of violet cotton she consults the mirror. The answer it gives is unfavorable. Her mouth thins and hardens. The crease on her forehead spreads. Her fists clench with rage. She knows Bianca has not succumbed to the trick of the fan.
While Bianca sleeps soundly, Dolorosa rocks in a chair, staring at a maroon spider as it swathes a captured fly in a shroud of gossamer. A new ruse grows like a spore, blots her fury. Three days later she returns to the house at an earlier hour. She wears a brown wig, a new costume, has a satchel of satin-hemmed veils slung over a shoulder.
She finds Bianca in the miners’ garden, tending to the seedlings. Warning Bianca to veil her face from the sun and preserve her porcelain skin, Dolorosa glides toward her. Bianca stands, wiping her brow with a soil-stained forearm. The new Lady produces a veil from the bag, tends it for approval, then offers to secure it on Bianca’s head. Trusting, she turns her back on the veil-seller. The veil has a satin tie. With the speed of a viper darting toward prey, Dolorosa slips the veil below Bianca’s chin, grips the tie around her neck and pulls the lace noose tight. Bianca splutters, grapples, but cannot release the tie from her sinewy clutch. Bianca’s breath halts. Dolorosa’s muscles burn. She throws back her head in dominant ecstasy. Eyes closed by the blazing sun, mouth gaping, she is blind to the thrush flying above. It loses its grip on the worm plucked as food for its fledglings. The worm falls wriggling into her throat. She chokes and releases the veil. Bianca stumbles forward, scrambles away across the field. Dolorosa thrashes, her wig skews. Bianca breathlessly reaches the house. She sees the flailing figure, recognizes her father’s wife and bolts the door.
The miners return exhausted. Bianca decides to spare them the worry, keeps the encounter with the new Lady to herself. They are generous, they have a grace beyond received refinement. They are good. They do not deserve more fear than the pit of dust and darkness already infects them with.
Fury overwhelms the new Lady. She prays to a somber angel, but her faith is splintered. Her boot taps the tiles. Another trick is needed. She addresses the mirror. It reflects a polished apple in a carved jacaranda wood bowl. The She turns, her eyes narrow to single thought: make it pregnant with poison. Make it give birth to death. But the new disguise must be impenetrable, hypnotic. It must assuage suspicion, engender trust. It must cradle Bianca tight, weave her helplessly in the strands of its lethal loom.
The new Lady takes a gilded carriage to the city of silver. The finest auburn wig. A cloak of satin. And, from a sidestreet sorceress, a mask that molds to her skin, smoothes her rancid wrinkles, conjures a sugared smile where lips were cracked. The shift is complete. Tenderness where the tenebrous lurked. Charm where chastisement spat. Generous gentility where jealousy slithered.
She waits not one day. She knows she will return to the hacienda like a jaguar bearing the carcass of a newly weaned vicuña to nourish its cub. But her cub is the rage, its nourishment Bianca’s last breath.
Dolorosa carries her apples in a linen sling embroidered with red roses. The day is fresh. The path is clear. Her journey is like an arrow seeking the heart. As she approaches the house she skips like a maiden. The knock on the door is light. The sun bathes her in a halo. This time the world has turned and Bianca shall perish.
A cautious opening. A wary welcome. But the disguise shimmers away the distrust. The new Lady’s head tilts: an apple for a penny? A simple siren song. Bianca’s hand searches for the coin, her fingers walking the bank of the river of death. The apple-seller holds out the fruit, shining like a ruby. Bianca’s mouth waters. One hand, one coin passed into another hand. One hand, one apple passed from another hand. Dolorosa invites her to taste. Bianca holds the fulsome fruit to her lips, breaths in its purity. A simple last smile, one bite, then an ocean of venom.
Bianca drops to her knees. The Lady’s head tilts more to an evil angle. Bianca stops breathing. And still the heart beats. And still the blood flows. But the lungs, the lungs. Bianca grasps the door frame. Her nails break in the wood. Her eyes flash upward, meet the new Lady’s limpid gaze. A feline with jaw fastened on throat, listening for a stilled pulse. Bianca falls to the threshold. Dolorosa puts her moist lips to Bianca’s nostrils. Detecting no breath, she withdraws, stretching her arms like a condor, regal in her supremacy.
A far whistle reaches her ears. No matter. Let the fool miners come. Let them rail, let them wail. Dolorosa closes Bianca’s eyes with the toe of her boot then seeps back into the forest.
As the miners draw near there’s a shout. They drop tools and bags. They run. They stumble. They stand aghast, coughing and sobbing. The elder crouches, placing a calloused finger on Bianca’s milk-white neck. An eternity of hope. His brow uncreases. She lives! Slow like the sap of the palo santo, her pulse still murmurs.
They carry her to the bed, administer cinchona. Pedro coughs his tears to the floor as his trembling arms lift her to his sobbing chest. Iago looks to the heavens. Camilio bites his lip and feels nothing when his teeth pierce the skin. Xavier stares in silence, then Rodrigo clasps him to his chest before the wail can begin. Emilio turns away, the anger flushing his face. Luis fiddles with the buttons on his jacket.
Rodrigo looks down at the ground, sees a crust of bread spilling out from a bag dropped in haste. He remembers. The loaf that was left in the deepest part of the mine. That they found months later, dry, yes, but it had grown no mold. They had brought it back to their cottage, added seven drops of water, pouched it in leather. When the sun rose, it had softened, was miraculously edible. This was the miracle Bianca needed. Stall death, wait for a cure.
He speaks gravely: this is the only way. Iago finds blasphemy in his words: the Lord has spoken, they shall not dispute his wish. Xavier sobs and sniffles. Emilio cannot bear to leave her alone. Silence, but for the jungle insects, snickering at the miners. Pedro coughs, bent double. He mutters, splutters. He gets the words out. He will stay with her. His lungs are finished. He has not long to live. He will be her guardian, tend the light in the dark cavern until his own spirit fails. There is agreement. In silent sorrow, they lift the board from Pedro’s bed. They secure Bianca to this living pall using strips cut from his toolbag.
A moonlit march to the gaping mouth of the mine. As they descend, the hollow air is disturbed only by coughing, scuffling and curses of bitter anger. The blackest pit reached, they lower her to the cold rock floor. One by one, they kiss her forehead, utter a whispered prayer. Pedro sits, draws his knees to his hollow chest, quietly accepting their reverence. His comrades place lamps beside Bianca’s motionless head. Forced and formal, Rodrigo announces their departure, leads them away from the flickering vigil.
Days pass. The lamps burn the thin pit air. Pedro’s coughing stops. Barely conscious, he rests his head on the cave floor beside Bianca’s. They each breathe the other’s last breath.
Her heart waits, then beats, then stops. Bianca’s final swoon makes time stand still, her mind now free to dance with joy, to tell a tale of deliverance. She sees herself, clothed in white satin, lying still in a crystal casket before a house in a clearing. Prism rainbows color her dress. At sunset, seven miners approach through a path in the jungle. A taller figure follows. The miners surround the casket, their faces desperate with hope. The figure leans over the casket, stricken speechless by her beauty. It is the foreman, now a prince, the commander of a conquistador ship. He removes his plumed hat, opens the casket and kisses Bianca’s blood red lips. Her eyes flutter open. She coughs. She smiles. Her savior smiles back and lifts her to his chest. The miners rejoice.
The hacienda. The mirror. Dolorosa knows Bianca is dead. Convulsed with triumph, she smashes the glass with a golden goblet. A spinning shard severs her jugular. She collapses, choking, to the white tile floor. Crimson blood oozes. Black lace twitches. A crow perched at the open window eyes her life ebb away. It spreads its wings, prepares to feast.
The pit. Bianca drifts down the dark river of death in a dream ever after.
Chatterbox
It’s a cliché to say that a handsome man has chiseled features. Allardyce’s face was assembled using a melon scoop. And there was nothing he could do about it.
For many men this would have been a problem with dating, but not for Allardyce. Because he had a bigger problem. He wouldn’t shut up.
by John Dutton
It’s a cliché to say that a handsome man has chiseled features. Allardyce’s face was assembled using a melon scoop. And there was nothing he could do about it.
For many men this would have been a problem with dating, but not for Allardyce. Because he had a bigger problem. He wouldn’t shut up.
Now, sitting at a furtive corner table in the Clover Leaf with Clarice, the problem was bigger than ever.
“It’s not that his movies are unrealistic, which is the first criticism Westerners have about them, they just have a different cultural mythology on which their esthetic is based, and I expect that if someone from Shanghai saw Monster, which I guess they can these days, they might find it unrealistic even though for us it’s an extremely realistic movie. Maybe that’s a bad example, but you know what I mean – sometimes we can’t apply our rules, and in fact, they aren’t really rules but sets of…”
“Just…
“…preconceived cultural…”
“…hold on.”
“Sorry.”
“I have to pee.”
“Sorry. Okay. Jeez, we’ve already been here for…”
“I gotta go.”
“Sorry.”
Allardyce watched Clarice as she shimmied past the waiter. He loved her, was madly in love with her, and was so nervous about being alone with her for the first time that his motormouth had been in overdrive for the last hour.
He didn’t know what she saw in him. All he could imagine was that he was somehow the exact opposite of her husband. James probably had a normal face. Staring in the direction of the washroom, Allardyce wondered whether his lumpy features had scared her away, and that she’d never return from her ‘pee’.
Drinking in a roadside bar on a sultry August night with a married woman was by far the coolest thing he’d ever done. When Clarice had first served him at the Bamboo back in May, he’d joked that they were both oddities: a black waitress in a Chinese restaurant and the only black computer geek at the computer geek company he worked for. She’d smiled and answered that ‘uncommon’ and ‘special’ were the same thing.
Lunchtimes at the Bamboo were perfect occasions for Allardyce to flirt with Clarice, because she was always too busy to let him talk for long. But yesterday she’d told him, in response to a concerned query, that she was having a bad day and that her marriage sucked. He impulsively asked if she’d like to go out and tell him about it, and now here she was, returning from the Clover Leaf bathroom, fanning herself with her hand against the oppressive humidity.
She retook her seat. He opened his mouth.
“So anyway, it’s really a shame that James is putting in those hours. I mean it’s good, I guess, for his business, and you must benefit in some way, though of course I’m not asking you to reveal anything about your financial agreement as a couple or…”
A huge clap of thunder. Clarice jumped. Allardyce held his breath, then let it out with a laugh. She laughed too. He carried on talking:
“It’s a good thing really, because we really need a storm. Oh, it’s raining. I don’t have a coat but, oh, it doesn’t matter, I mean, it’s hot anyway, and it’s…”
The lights went out. En masse, the Clover Leaf’s customers made the noise a group of people always make when there’s a power cut. An emergency light came on in the entrance behind him, too far from their table to illuminate his face.
Allardyce was speechless. He felt his stomach muscles relax. She couldn’t see his face. He could see hers, vaguely, and she was more beautiful than ever. Bedroom beautiful. But she couldn’t see his.
“That’s a sign,” she laughed.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone wants this to be hidden.”
“What to be hidden?”
She leaned over the table and kissed him on the lips. His brain disconnected in shock and his hormones took the lead. A thirty-second eternity passed. She moved away.
“Thank you. I needed that,” she said.
“You’re, um, welcome.” He stared at her in silence and she stared at him. This was his greatest moment. He was The Man.
The lights came back on. Steve Earl picked up again in mid-chorus. En masse, the Clover Leaf’s customers made the noise a group of people always make when the power returns.
Clarice was still staring at him. Allardyce started to feel his stomach muscles tense up. She looked away. Small beads of sweat started to form on his forehead like pearls of betrayal.
He opened his mouth.
The Doll Box
Now the feet. She lit the blow-torch and adjusted the flame. Her grandmother had long ago stopped complaining about the smell drifting upstairs through the floorboards, and Nickie paid no attention to the carcinogenic air entering her lungs. The flame brushed the plastic and the tiny toes melted away from the doll’s left foot. A drip fell to the concrete below, joining the stalagmitic accumulation. She sculpted the softened plastic with a knife, lengthening the foot. Then the other foot.
by John Dutton
She opened the door to her grandfather’s workshop. As always, with her eyes closed. She never got used to – never wanted to get used to – the memory-filled sawdust air. She breathed him in. His sweat, long fallen; the dust of his skin, long flaked off.
She flicked the light switch. Waited an extra second before opening her eyes. The magic never happened. Time edged ruthlessly forward.
She was fifteen when he died. Eight years after his death she still entered his workshop every day. For the first year or so she had sat on the bench, a toddler once again, watching snowflakes collect on the tiny window pane or the sun illuminate an abandoned web. She didn’t remove his tools. Didn’t touch the half-finished bird box that rested, roofless, at the far end of the long bench. She just sat. Eventually her grandmother would appear at the door:
– Come back upstairs now, Nickie love.
She started modifying dolls just after her seventeenth birthday. At first she used the ones in her collection. As a child she loved playing with dolls, and every year her grandfather had given her a new one for her birthday. They were her friends, her playmates, her muses. In art class at school she drew her dolls over and over, capturing them the way she saw them in her mind. Childishly beatific faces atop womanly curves, with clothing too sensual, too mature. But always surrounded by a suffocating dark rectangle. The art teacher would admire the execution, then frown.
– Did you think about adding something, Nickie? A background, a context? Another canvas?
Nickie hadn’t. Eventually the teacher gave up, not wanting to press the issue or deprive Nickie the orphan of her outlet. When she was ready, Nickie took these dolls to her grandfather’s workshop where she undressed them and transformed them.
Descending the last two bare wooden steps, she unconsciously rubbed the thin, scratchy fabric of the doll’s dress between her thumb and forefinger. This one would be Katya. As she set it down on the bench next to her knives and brushes, she still had no idea how she was going to turn this plastic female homunculus into a traveler, an explorer, a space probe.
Somehow every doll’s personality emerged naturally. Like random gene combinations, Nickie’s memories, hopes and fantasies cascaded into the stream of her creativity. Each doll came into being as familiar and surprising as a newborn looks to its parents.
She got to work, cutting through the original dress with a Stanley knife and dropping the rag into the decapitated industrial chemical container that held the rest of the off-cuts. This was her raw material. An eBay doll, this one, originally from Latin America, with dark, rounded features and impossibly long eyelashes. She’d gone through the dolls in Gaspé’s one toy shop and the Canadian Tire years ago. Then she’d mail-ordered from ToysRUs until she’d exhausted the Canadian market.
Holding the doll in both hands, she stared at its face. A fleeting shard of memory and she was twelve years old again: her parents laid out in the funeral home after the crash, Nickie wishing she could scrape away the waxy, inhuman sheen on their cheeks and see their faces shine with life again.
– I’m sorry for your loss.
What had she lost? The dimly-understood magic of life insurance had provided financial security. Her loss was temporal; the future no longer a slow-flowing river, but a precipice. Clinging to it, feet dangling over the abyss, she was unable to let go. If Nickie’s childhood had ended that evening in the funeral home, surrounded at a respectful, fearful distance by whispered regret and downcast gazes, it wasn’t erased and replaced by adulthood. It was frozen in time – a frame paused forever on the screen of her life. Each doll somehow gave her the chance to recast the possibilities that were stolen from her by the truck that rammed her parents’ car.
She gripped the doll’s head and pressed in both cheeks with her thumbs. The rubbery plastic rebounded. She unwound the vice, the steel lever falling back through the eyelet with each turn. The doll’s head fitted perfectly, and she tightened a quarter-turn, clamping the forehead. The drill was already plugged in, the one-sixteenth bit attached. She aligned the tip to the doll’s left cheek and squeezed the trigger. A buzz, a blur. She moved forward steadily. A whiff of friction-heated plastic hit her nostrils. With practiced precision the bit emerged at the equivalent point on the doll’s opposite cheek.
Withdrawing the drill, she righted herself, replaced it on its hook, and reached for a bird-bone-thin bolt from the container. She inserted it in the cheek-hole with a surgeon’s steady hand. Pushing in the other cheek until the bolt end poked through, she carefully screwed on the matching nut. Tightening, tightening, the cheeks sucked inward. She peered at the deformed face, satisfied with the new features; the high cheekbones, the haughty demeanor. The extraneous threaded metal beyond the bolt was briskly snapped off by wire cutters gripped tightly in her pale hands.
This doll was a baby, but she wanted to age it. She encircled the waist with a tie-wrap, pulled it tight and snipped off the end.
Now the feet. She lit the blow-torch and adjusted the flame. Her grandmother had long ago stopped complaining about the smell drifting upstairs through the floorboards, and Nickie paid no attention to the carcinogenic air entering her lungs.
The flame brushed the plastic and the tiny toes melted away from the doll’s left foot. A drip fell to the concrete below, joining the stalagmitic accumulation. She sculpted the softened plastic with a knife, lengthening the foot. Then the other foot.
She liked the doll’s thick, brown hair, but trimmed and styled it anyway. The asymmetrical swept bangs of a Latina pop star she’d seen in music videos. Katya was almost complete. Nickie unscrewed the pot of modeling clay and scooped some out with her middle finger. She applied it to each cheek, covering over the bolt heads, smoothing and blending the edges of the clay flush with the plastic.
Now the makeup. Partly to cover the clay, partly to uncover the sprite inside the plastic. She took out three tiny pots of enamel paint from among the two dozen that lined the drawer under the bench. Gold, indigo and hazelnut. Her face only two inches from the doll’s, she carefully applied radiating flecks to each iris with a fine-tipped squirreltail brush, wiping it on a rag between colors. She moved back and squinted at the doll’s eyes, then bent over it again and added some more indigo to each eye.
Katya’s outfit was already sewn. Nickie still had a closet-full of her old teen clothes to cut and re-stitch. Her grandmother’s sewing machine ran as smoothly as it had five decades ago, and her seamstress DNA was alive in Nickie’s own hands.
She removed the doll from the vice and dressed it in the black skirt and deep purple fur-lined jacket, fastened by a single hook-and-eye. Two black pumps were slipped over the congealed toes and pressed against the heels so that the glue would set. The shoes were the only part of the dolls that left her dissatisfied. They didn’t measure up to the rest of the outfit. She’d developed the black pump as a reasonable fall-back, but she always had to glue them on.
Next, the box. She worked swiftly, wrenching off the sides and pulling the protruding nails out of old lobster crates with pliers. One crate made three twenty-inch-long doll boxes. She trimmed the planks with the circular plytooth saw, pushing each one steadily through the blade. The bottom and the sides were trimmed and nailed together in less than ten minutes. The lid needed more effort and more care. The eye slit had to be at exactly the right level. She measured and marked the area to be cut, changed the one-sixteenth bit for a quarter-inch and drilled four pilot holes. Inserting a jigsaw in the first hole, she started to cut out a rectangle, beveling its edge slightly. The box was ready to be assembled. She nailed the sides onto the back, then placed the lid on top to make sure of the fit.
Her box-painting area was a tea chest missing one side. Her grandfather had never said where it had come from, but it had traversed the ocean, that she knew. He had used it for lacquering his bird boxes, and the interior was patterned with a maze of hypnotic, lustrous shadows from the sweeping clouds of his lacquer and her paint. She dragged it into the middle of the workshop, then placed the box and lid inside. She shook the paint can rhythmically, the aerosol ball rattling like a heartbeat. She pried off the cap, checked the arrow alignment and started to spray. The chestnut-colored vapor clung to the box in a thin coat. In places the wood grain remained visible, like lines of tensed muscle under skin. She turned the box and lid around to cover the remaining surfaces. The paint dried in minutes.
Back at the bench, she wiped her hands on a rag and lined the bevelled edge of the eye slit with glue. Working quickly, but carefully, she extracted a school-grade microscope slide from its container and checked it for scratches. She bent over the transformed lobster crate and placed the slide into the eye slit aperture, gently pressing the sides until the glue set. She screwed two tiny brass hinges and a matching brass clasp onto the lid, positioned it exactly, then attached them to the box.
Now the name. Metallic gold paint. Calligraphic letters formed with practiced ease. No guideline. Her hand remained steady as she brushed each letter of Katya’s name under the eye slit. She’d been told by the owner of the store in Greenwich Village that it was the hand-painted names which drew customers to the doll boxes on the shelves. Nickie had seen photos of the store, the track lighting aligned precisely with the names, the boxes in a row on the long shelf in the narrow store, a pair of customers staring into one of the eye slits.
She opened the clasp, lifted the lid and lined the box with burgundy velveteen. She placed Katya inside. This was the picture she’d drawn a hundred times in art class.
This is what she hadn’t been able to express in drawings, what she couldn’t make her art teacher understand. The teacher conceived of her job as opening doors, loosening the bonds of imagination. She didn’t understand the power of peeking through a crack.
One last breath of air for Katya. Nickie shut the lid and closed the clasp. She leaned over to look through the glass at Katya’s hazelnut, gold and indigo eyes. Soon, they’d be reflecting the light from a different world. Was the slit for looking out or looking in? In the morning, she would pack Katya up and ship her off. Every silent goodbye was a bon voyage to a child crossing an ocean, a prairie, a desert.
Nickie closed her eyes, smelled the scent of her grandfather’s hands, felt his rough fisherman’s fingertips on her chin. Clanging pots overhead signaled suppertime. She turned off the light and carried Katya upstairs.