The Hot Mess

The Hot Mess by Frances Madeson

His kisses made promises he had no intention of fulfilling. I knew that early on. But the overlapping oval of our Venn diagram—the space containing our shared spheres of interest and sensibility—though not large, glowed red chile hot.

His linguistic defenses (or were they offenses?)—anyhoo, jeepers, excuuuuse me—were curious to me. What to make of them?A kind of camp, certainly. And what is camp but a defensive aesthetic strategy? Pre-emptive self-mockage.

He said he didn't take himself that seriously, but that was either a self-deception from lack of self-knowledge or an outright lie. He's even a bit precious in that regard. He told me his middle name with a good bit of pride, I had asked him lying beside him under clean flannel sheets. “Waldo,” he said, “my uncle's name. He was a good man.” His voice grew deeper, fell quieter, remembering that connection with that good man from long ago.

His breath was sour the first time we made love, post-nasal drip, and I'm not proud of this, but every time he tried to kiss me I turned my head away, until he stopped trying. But the next time, at his place, he laid a kiss on me that made the world stop turning. His tongue, slow and thick, took possession (no other way to say it) of my open (no other way to say this, either) yearning mouth. He termed them “perfect” kisses.For me they were suggestive of a depth worth probing, though I never found it—buried too deeply under all his many rituals.

Set in his ways. His ways kept him safe. Safe from what? From the likes of me.

I kept him at a healthy distance. “You don't text! Wow,” he said. Our first date he made a stark comment. “You think very highly of yourself.” I couldn't deny it. Having exceeded my own limitations so many times, having conquered so many fears, I can practically grow on demand, in real time. Another morning, he said, “You're a central figure.” Which is a little different from putting me on a pedestal.

He made me feel very beautiful in bed, served me there like a queen. He held me close, tight as we shuddered together. He laced his fingers in mine and twisted and turned my hands making me feel his considerable strength. Pushing into me, away from me, pulling, then resisting. His signature gesture, this push-pull, and how I loved it. I rubbed his chest, feeling his heartbeat. “You've found my nipples,” he said. Grateful. He placed his fingers over mine on them and applied pressure, my professor, instructing me. “You don't have to be so gentle.”

He invited me to balloon fiesta and then canceled at the last minute, ruining everything just as he intended.

There was another man, hovering in the wings. Bearded, long still-dark hair tied back in a coated rubber band, Samurai style. Too young, but I sampled him, more than that. I couldn't help it, he had thrown himself in my arms. Another heat seeker. He did things with his tongue on my ear to make me forget Romulus's perfect kisses. Almost.

Romulus introduced me to his former student, now a professor like him, but in a college back east. A lovely girl, a lesbian as it happens. “She's the daughter I would have wanted,” he confided, really meaning it. I peeked at a picture of them together on his Facebook, her graduation day, his arm was around her shoulder, paternally. I was happy for them both. I wondered who had taken the picture.

The last time we were at his house, he turned on the television. Football, so much more brutal then I ever remembered it. Gladitorial, we agreed on this. Then hockey. “They're so speedy,” I said about the players. “Yep,” he said, “those guys can stop on a dime.”

Romulus of myth was raised by a she-wolf. Mine too, though a different kind (speaking plainly, his mother was a drunk). He's careful with alcohol, my Romulus, but reckless with aspertame. His poor, poor brain I thought, caressing his shaved head, my fingers floating over the little skin tags here and there.

His house in Nob Hill—a long-term rental, empty walls, TVs in every room, a meditation on beige. It's a trap I thought when I saw no art on the walls, a tar baby to a commonplace domesticity. He wants a woman to want to envision herself complementing his environment, but only in the abstract. He speaks of correlates, however, the correlation calculation only works well for relationships that follow a straight line, and he'll never allow that; his herky-jerky scheduling will insure non-linearity. One of his cats (I couldn't tell you which one) chased a starling inside the house. I slammed the door to his office, the cat on one side of the door, the wounded bird trapped inside the relentless beigeness.

When he came home from teaching his graduate seminar, I told him about it. Matter of factly, he unlatched the window screen from the outside and released the wounded bird, watching it fly off. He swept the pile of feathers, some of them bloodied, into his backyard where the breeze took them. You can see the Sandias from his patio. Sunset turns them to coral, beautiful even with the sagging power lines in view.

So many ruffled feathers undone from such a small bird.

Still sweeping, he said: “It comes with the territory.”

Rosie's Garden

I'd had the Yorkie a full week before a single “Puppy Lost” sign was posted on the community bulletin board at the Country Mart. I'd been checking daily because I really couldn't afford to care for a dog not yet housebroken—the tags, the shots, the chow, the gnawed slippers and ruined slobbered-upon sandals.

I pulled both staples out of the corkboard, accidentally removing a chunk of cork with my fingernails, and took the photocopied sign down to hold it under a brighter light; the better to scrutinize the color photograph above the description, telephone number with our 573 area code, and the caption: “Haf you scene my dog?” Not a day tripper from St. Louis touring the local wineries as I'd imagined in my primary scenario, too tanked up on slushy wine-a-ritas to realize her doggie hadn't hopped into the hatchback; I'd thought all sorts of things. Now I wondered—non-English speaker?

In the picture there were welts on Miranda's head between her ears, bright red ones that had healed under my care, squeezing the gel out of the aloe frond and applying it with a Q-tip, feeling her coat for ticks, chiggers, fleas (there were plenty of those), and I knew it was the very same dog. She was posed on a bale of hay, sleeping in the sun, a weathered red barn behind her. Could be anywhere: Highway D, Highway H, Highway Double O, or maybe out 32 a ways. Over yonder, as some of the locals might say.

I had named her Miranda from The Tempest because I'd found her cowering from a lightning storm in my garage; the dinged metal door's a hassle to raise and lower, so I leave it open unless we have a severe storm warning in the area; and there she was between the mulcher and my John Deere riding mower when I got home from work. At the first crash of thunder she had leapt into my arms and buried her little face in my neck, her wet nose poking under my collar, trying not to whimper. Innocence presuming protection. Lala it said her name was. Why not name her Missing A Good Long While or Gone A Whole Fucking Week, since that had been her destiny? I called the number, got a recording and left a message.

I had listened attentively to the outgoing message to discern what I could from the tone and timbre of the speaker's voice. Would I hear kindliness, a smiling voice, or a space cadet? (To lose a puppy! And one as loving, playful and sweet-tempered as Miranda.) But a penchant for passive neglect is undetectable to the ear, at least in such a perfunctory collection of words, at the tone, please leave a message. Maybe ever.

I tried as best I could to filter out the annoyance I was feeling toward this lackadaisical stranger, when I left my own number adding that I might have found her dog. My voice slanted italics on that might. Hours went by before she called back, evening into night; it was going on ten o'clock and, was I ever pissed off that she didn't have her phone on her hip, alert for a call on the first day the signs were posted, a full 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 days after her dog had gone missing? What is the matter with these people? What did I mean by that—these people—masters of dog? losers of dogs? narcissist lunatics?

I took down her address and directions, a few miles out of town, something about a creek and concrete culvert (my moat she had laughingly said) and told her she'd have her dog back in the morning; I could drop her off, unless she wanted to come get her now. No, the morning would be fine. Really? I would have exerted myself for you, I told this other woman's puppy; I would've hit the road in my pj's to get you back. Maybe she's crippled, suffers from night blindness; maybe there's a good reason, I softened, not wanting to perturb Miranda with my disgust.

We made the best of it, Miranda and I, our last night together. We tugged and tussled with a tassled throw pillow, I watched her ecstatically chew an old washcloth, we had extra treats; her, homemade dog biscuits I'd picked up at the Wednesday afternoon Farmer's Market at the VFW, and me a mookie bought there too. A mookie's basically an oversized oatmeal cookie, more scone than muffin, and once you have one, well...

I walked with her one last time down my gravel lane in the fizzling moonlight, both of us swiping at but not catching June bugs by the scores. Catch them for what? Though I'd been strict the whole week, this night I left my bedroom door ajar–private quarters, I had called out every time before she had yelped and scratched at the door, even in the middle of the night when she heard the toilet flush. But tonight we would snuggle, if you call her lying in the crook of my ankles, snuggling. Me, enjoying the scant weight of her, her warmth, breath, beating heart, giggling when she took to licking my toes while I wiggled and squirmed with abandon. It's not love yet, I thought (mistakenly), but another night of this toe-licking routine and it soon would be.

It was her first time in the car and I let her sit on my lap; it wouldn't be a long ride and the roads here are smooth, well-surfaced, straight, easy to travel. Not a crazy risk, to keep her so close. I saw the barn back from the road, the one in the picture, turned in the long driveway and thought, Miranda's home now, and I'm glad for her; but where am I? Where? Morning, the mistress of the house said as she approached the car, it was subtle but it sounded like mourning. Hi, I answered, wishing I were. This was going to be harder than I suspected.

Aiyee, LaLa, lalalalalalalala, puppy, baby, where did you go? To this nice lady's house for a visit? Now you come back to me; that's a good puppy dog. Come, do you have time for a Nescafé ? I'll show you my garden. You'll take whatever you want; I won't insult you with cash, unless you want cash. Do you? Rich bitch. No. Let's just get it over with. Miranda, poor thing, wasn't sure who to follow, whose feet to trod along under. Just go with her, I thought. Make the break. Go with the old lady, the craven one who cannot spell, the one who names you after a note, a syllable on the diatonic scale, third from last.

Flowers! I love flowers as you can see! We were in the midst of what they were calling on the news a Missouri flash drought, but soaker hoses were  irrigating her flower beds, row after row. Take what you want, my garden is your garden. It sounded like guard on in her pronunciation. En garde, I thought, my hand twitching, missing my rapier in its grip. 

The sprinkler was rotating, the cool droplets falling on the beds like a soft shower. These are my day lilies she said, improbably pointing to leafy red-stemmed vines. There are my nasturtium, another row exactly the same. I have tons of sunflowers, the birds eat the seeds—the chickadees, the whippoorwills. Is she blind, I wondered, putting on an act of sight? Unaware that all the beds contained but the same oily plant, more a weed to be precise, dangerous, unwanted?

If it's three, let it be, I called back to her, sprinting for my car, starting the engine and revving it for effect. Miranda, let's blow, I incanted under my breath because in America it would be wrong to say it out loud, the dog being her personal property. Let the puppy follow me home again anyway, I sang to the tune of a sea  shanty, haul away from the crazy lady who makes nosegays for her family, and tiaras for her pets, from her low bed of ivy, her very poison ivy. Mi-randa!

Episode 210 (from Kissing Booth, a novel in episodes)

 “Is this Darcy? Darcy Preston from Budweiser Falls, Missouree?” the vaguely familiar voice bellowed into my ear.

"Yes. Yes it is. Who’s this?” I asked switching on my bedside lamp and seeing that it was almost midnight.

“It’s Merveene, Darcy. Merveene from Sunny’s calling long distance so I got to make this quick. Your dad’s real sick. You’d better come on home. That’s all I called to tell ya. Come on home and don’t dilly-daddle. You understand what I’m getting at?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“What? I can’t hear ya so good.”

I speak up. “Merveene, tell my dad I’m coming to see him. Tell him to wait for me. Please.”

“I’ll drive over in the morning. I’ll be there at first light to get the message to him. But you hurry.”

It was only after I hung up that I thought to ask why my mother hadn’t placed the call, but I already knew the answer. She didn’t want me there.

I called the airlines to make the flight arrangements and explained the urgency.

“Miss,” the reservationist said, “just so you’re aware, we have a bereavement fare. It cuts the cost in more than half.”

“I won’t be needing that,” I snapped.

I’d be on a 6:30 a.m. out of LaGuardia to Kansas City. I’d have a rent-a-car waiting for me and I’d drive like hell the two plus hours to get to the farm. Packing a bag, I stood in front of my closet for the longest time trying to decide if I should bring funeral clothes. Irrationally, I decided if I didn’t bring a dark suit, he wouldn’t die, so I didn’t, but he did anyway. It was just as well. My structured garments and New York tailoring would’ve stood out like a gangrenous thumb at his humble service.

“He’s weak,” my mother said opening the screen door for me. I’d been honking my arrival from a half a mile away. I rushed past her to his bedside. I held his hand and looked him all up and down to make sure he was really still here. When he opened his mouth to greet me, I saw he was missing a front tooth and his gums were bloodless and white. His toenails were so sharp and long they were poking holes through his socks, but his bedding and clothes were clean and his body didn’t smell, as I’d dreaded.

“Hi dad, Merveene tell you I’d be coming?”

 “Yes,” a voice not his own replied. He had a tray with some lemonade on it at bedside and I held his drink up with a straw so he could take a sip. “Your mom wouldn’t let her in, but she shouted it through the window screen.”  We both laughed a little. “I’ve been waiting. Say bye to my best girl. Now that you’re here, you look so pretty I think I’ll stay awhile.”

“Oh, dad. Thank you.” I kissed his hand and held it there to my lips. Being there in the room for two minutes I saw he was done rallying. “All the sweet memories I have of my life here are of you.”

He shook his head. “Wish I’d been able to give you more, do more for you.”

“Like what?”

“Better mother,” he hollered, or tried to anyway.

That one really made me laugh. “That’d been a neat trick.”

“I fixed it with a lawyer so she can’t sell the farm to anyone but you, and then only for a dollar. She’s provided for. When she dies the place is yours.”

“I’ve always loved this place.”

 “Liar. Might feel differently one day. It’ll be here for you. I want that.”

“Okay.”

“You want anything?” he asked me. I felt it was a limitless question. I could’ve asked him for anything, anything I felt needed clearing up. But we were already clear. He’d held my hand crossing a busy, dangerous street, and let it go when we got to the other side. Deeply, we'd wished each other well, but the connective threads hung looser after that. That’s how we’d both needed it to be.

My eyes darted around the whitewashed room and then settled on the hand I was already holding. “Your watch.”

He nodded. And I took it off his wrist and put it on mine, the leather band still warm from his fevered arm.

“Darcy, I’m tired.”

“I understand. Mind if I sit here while you rest?”

He shook his head. I plumped his pillows and smoothed down his soft coverlet, letting my hand rest on his chest a moment to feel the miracle of his heart still beating. He closed his eyes. The sun, which had been streaming in both exposures went behind a cloud, and a shadow fell over his face, turning him from three-dimensional matter made of flesh, into a fading projection, the color of ash.

“Sleep, daddy. Get your rest. You worked hard.”

“That I did.”

FORECLOSURE/DISPOSSESSION

Garden party, Ladue, Incan sculpture, pottery from the Amazon, elephant ears, queso blanco, fig jam, baguette, Nescafé, Chopin études, flamenco, castanets echoing from the past, orange marmalade, holding the jar up to the light with both hands, my father's jam, he made this he said missing him, pointing to the void, to orange to sweet to golden to sticky, long ago gone. Later, pictures on the fridge, dashing in his fedora, Papa had style, mi casa es tu casa, milady of the highway. Tu pussy, this jam, is delicious. Which one? Both. Together? Tu pussy es mi pussy, say it. Mi pussy es tu pussy. Ricissimmo. Look at me!

Tell me how you saved him, my cousin, you dove in? No; I screamed. La petit mort. Almost. He was 4, I was 6. Birthday party dress, little girl pretty, wanted to show my daddy, down at the pool. Crinoline, taffeta, petticoats: they pumped his chest, a plume of water squirted from blue lips. He was floating? No, he had sunk, sunken treasure, reaching for a toy he fell in, all the way in. Let me tip you, just tip you. It caught my eye, forlorn plastic toy, bobbing, ripples, ripples from what? On the very bottom, he was splayed face down, arms and legs akimbo, not troubling the water. I can't imagine, if you hadn't come along. If you hadn't come along.

No one saw him fall, no one heard the splash, the adults preoccupied, pool-time, flirting, mahjhong. The lifeguard, Ian was his name, magic tricks, quarters out of nostrils, nickels from ears. Your penis, that scar. How does a man get a scar like that? Fucking in the ocean, mi amor. Saltwater, friction. It must have hurt you to keep going like that. Excruciation, worth every thrust. Don't stare; it's so ugly, ragged. No, valiant. Both of us, water heroes. Your curves, all woman, your kisses so generous. Let me shave, I'm too scruffy. Better? Better. Oh, those panties. How pretty, silky, see-through, thank you, my head is exploding. We'll come together this time, I'm certain, in gushes.

Don't bite me. I'm sorry, carried away, marking you. My breast! Get ice. Are you going to do it? Do what? What you said you'd do. What did I say? I don't remember. That you'd suck my cock in every room in your house. Haven't I already? Not your studio. No, not there. I'm going to let the dog go, let him run. There's no fence, if he's lost or hurt, it'll ruin everything, all our time together. Doesn't matter. I want him to taste freedom, even bloodied. Like me.

 Put some cream on my face? Of course, your skin's so dry. Just my forehead, under my eyes, the bridge of my nose. Does all my hair bother you? Bother me? You called me lupine. No. But sometimes I wish. What do you wish? That I could rest my cheek on your bare chest, feel your beating heart on my face. Shall we shave it? Yes, we'll cut it first, a weird harvest, chest hair in grayscale: the whole spectrum. In a moment; I'll get newspaper. First let me lick your labia, they're mine, I'm swallowing your clit; come in my mouth, darling. Come. Come. Come.

Your lips curling around my cock, your pussy a perfect fit, like a hundred wet tongues licking my cock. Is it too small? No. What you said before, a perfect fit. How can this be happening, that you came back to Missouri, surely not for me? My hyphenated south-north life doesn't point here, rolling in this honeyed clover redolent of cinnamon. Absurd, me without my pain, my chauffeur. We don't belong; the gods won't suffer it; it will be revoked. Don't stop talking. You know what this is? No, what is this? Rock star sex, backstage. How can you go so long? Are you taking something? No, not even herbs; you bring it. You! Excuse me lady, I believe I'm coming.

Coffee's made. I'll be down. I'll bring it up, to you, my queen of the highway, goddess of Route 67. I have a gig tonight. Stay in town, come see me play. I heard you on the phone, what you said, what you called me. Gringa? Yes. So what? So I'm your Other. And you're mine. How do you call me to your friends—your Latin lover? No! Just. Just what? Just, my lover. Not your man? No. I can be late, I can call in to my boss. Call. From behind, no, the side. Roll over.

A present. From South America. I'll wear it now. In bed, a scarf? I love it, that you bought it for me, that you thought of me there. Did you find mine in your suitcase? Of course. I wore it to death. After, let's make another fire. Did you bring your drum? No. I asked you to. You're my drum. Oh, two drums. Ow! New Years, at the Sheraton, will you be my guest? No. Why not? I don't want to see you like that, formal in a tux, an emcee. Banter, charming everyone. A raffle; I couldn't bear it. There'll be dancing. I don't know how to do your dances, I'll be ridiculous. You have another date? Yes.

A Nobelist, there'll be a party, a fundraiser for their library. How much? One fifty. Krona or dollars? No. Too much. I don't speak Spanish; I've never read him. Have you? Yes, of course. In school, a long time ago. Liar. Wait, I'll lube you. Let me lube you. Are you sore? Never. I...I don't want the world. I did, but I don't anymore. I just want this, my legs in the air, muscled meat of my calves on your chest, ankles framing your ears. Liar.

When you took me to the airport...to New York. Six months ago. You helped get my suitcase. I handed over my keys, you opened the trunk. Giving them back, your thumb grazed my hand. Grazed? You ran the side of your thumb down the length of mine. And? One stroke, that stroke, so confident, so sure. Everything melted away, all difference. Inside, I...I twitched, wanting you. Me too, remember I kissed you? I remember it well. Leaning on the car. Sun in our eyes. What I said, too? Yes? What is? Give me...Qué? Give me a New York kiss. And did I? Yes, you did. Want another one now? No.

But you said. What? I was your power. So I said. And now? You are.

Edmond Caldwell's Commitment to a Certain Kind of Sentence

Photos by Steve Hull

 First of all thank you very much for publishing Apple Seized in Dark Sky magazine because it—both its content and form (or unified conformtent, to coin a portmanteau (which is fun to do regarding a literary work about luggage!))—entered my long-term memory where the story's been looping on its own baggage carousel since I read it two winters ago. I've had the advantage of time to consider its revelations. I was lucky to get eased in.

You’re welcome, and let me thank you in turn for the opportunity to talk about my novel in the context of interview questions that aren’t drawn from the shallow well of literary journalism.  I hope my responses will do them justice.

And it’s interesting for me to focus on “Apple Seized” because I wrote it originally as a stand-alone story, with no notion of its being the first chapter of a novel.  Yet I do find, as your words suggest, that the succeeding chapters of the book are all there, stowed away in the luggage and waiting to be unpacked.

Let me just say at the outset that your work explodes any lingering false dichotomy between morality and aesthetics, as if they were separate categories; they are one and the same, you make that explicitly clear, a topic I can't wait to hear you explore more fully vis a vis your rejection of the paragraph as a way of ordering text. 

I’m glad you see it that way since the book turned out to be very concerned with exploring/exploding dichotomies, and about seeing how things are defined by their margins.  I don’t often think in terms of morality, however, so you’ll forgive me if I substitute for it a word I feel more uncomfortably comfortable with – politics.  There is most definitely a wall erected between aesthetics and politics in conventional approaches to fiction, and it brings out the arsonist in me.

So my first questions, or series of statements and questions I'd like you to respond to as freely as you like, center on Apple Seized. Later I hope maybe we can talk parts to wholes, because that's where I think Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant  really distinguishes itself, in creating a satisfyingly complex and thrilling vibrational composition—three parts comprised of three chapters each, a verbal triptych of triptychs. Or as you term it in Return to the Chateau, “a triskelion pattern” (but I don't see the curves or bentness. Or I do, but I see them scrawled on blocks of text resembling more the panels of a triptych (especially because of the concern about placement and displacement)), but maybe you'll change my mind about that.

I’m glad you bring in the term “triptych” because I was thinking a lot about visual art while I was writing the book, especially about the idea of surfaces and about the page as a surface.  I wanted to get away from depth-models of narrative, especially psychological depth but also temporal depth (“backstory”) and spatial depth (foreground/background).  I hope I was able to suggest, without explicitly stating it, that the looping of the baggage-claim carousel and the looping of my protagonist’s thoughts are in fact “the same” loop, without any priority assigned to one or the other – they’re a continuum on a single plane (and the same with the other “non-places” in the other chapters of the book and my hero’s experiences of them – the hotel zone, the highway rest-stop, the shopping mall, etc.).  Likewise, the character isn’t supposed to preexist whatever happens on the page; he has no backstory beyond what the sentences propose (or take away, or omit) at any given moment.  He “exists” only in the nine boxes of the book’s nine chapters, and even then he’s not necessarily the same character from one box to the next.  And in the same spirit I’ll suggest that there’s not necessarily any contradiction between the “curves and bentness” of the sentences and imagery on the one hand and the “blocks” of text (or boxes, panels) on the other, once we see that the former constitute the latter rather than being engraved on them or placed inside them.

Published by Say It With Stones; also available on Amazon, B&N and wherever books are sold.

And now that I've said that please feel free to talk about its placement now. The finger-fucking you refer to later in the book, author diddling reader, does it begin in Apple Seized, do you think? Was it your intention to hook your authorial finger in our fresh holes right from the beginning (before we got a chance to think about where else that finger has been!!!)? 

During most of the composition of the book I can’t say I was thinking of the reader at all, or rather I was thinking primarily of myself as reader.  One of the early principles of the book was self-pleasure (the alpha and omega of finger-fucking, after all).  In fiction workshops (of which I attended a number in an earlier incarnation), writers are constantly enjoined to keep “the reader” foremost in mind, not to lose their attention, maybe to tease them a little but always to please them, etc.  So this reader really turns out to be some kind of cop, or a john, in relation to whom the writer occupies the place of a prostitute.  I don’t read anything like this so-called reader, so why should I write that way?  In revolt against this early training I wanted to compose something solely for my own delight, in the name of masturbatory and polymorphous desire as opposed to the reproductive-genital sexuality of the conventional novel (the conventional novel is in fact connected to a regime of reproductive-genital sexuality, meant to contribute to the reproduction of society at the level of ideology).  My whole book is a finger-fucking book; one either joins in the fun or feels diddled in the pejorative sense, conned.  But the shadow of this critical authority is always there in the novel as well (in various guises as airport security, museum guard, literary critic, etc.), because the book simultaneously represents the struggle to free itself from this regime.

With its setting of the baggage claim area of an international airport within the U.S. and its emphasis on his and her luggage items, Apple Seized appears to be your very real exploration of the unpacking of your own gendered displacement in the terror/police state that is now America. You depict the dangers as different for men and women, even as you acknowledge the privilege in feeling that displacement only recently. It's implicit anyway that pre-9/11 there would not have been so much concern with looking like someone from the Middle East. And I took your evocation of shittiness (talk of bowels returning to normal and dumps on the carousel) to be an acknowledgment of the unfairness of that special red, white and blue American privilege even more than its revocation.

At the time of composition, and at the level of conscious intention, I was mostly trying to get the sentences right, so that they might convey the conveyance of the carousel in the way it constructs, moment by moment, my hero’s so-called “consciousness.”  I wanted to capture, or be captured by, the essence of the baggage-claim terminal, in the same way that my hero wants, in a later chapter, to capture the essence of the highway rest-stop.  I trusted that if I got the sentences right, the other matters (of content, theme, etc.) would take care of themselves, would emerge on the carousel from the bowels, and no doubt trailing clouds of shitty glory from whence they came.  So I don’t disavow any of the items you’re noting on the carousel, it’s just that my relationship to them is different from the intentionality implicit in the way you frame the questions.  Obviously one of the things that’s going to come out on a luggage carousel in a contemporary U.S. baggage-claim terminal is Terror, not from so-called Islamists or other officially-suspicious persons but courtesy of the U.S. itself.  About gender I will note that my protagonist becomes increasingly “feminized” (by hetero-normative standards) as the novel goes on, until he is identified with his mother rather than with all of the white male literary fathers, from Joyce to Beckett, that populate the text.  The more Terror-fied my protagonist becomes, the more feminized, the queerer, the darker his skin.

A jingoistic shittiness, but also unadulterated shame in the literal notes in red words on the custom form, marking your hero as a rule breaker (why not just tell him to trash the apple?). It's the overkill in establishing a written record for such a trifling event, that disorients him (“it was very difficult to concentrate”) suggesting a primal, almost sexual disgrace in getting caught. This is sealed by the allusion to Scarlet Letter, but it had been evoked earlier in his wife's casual immodesty in exposing her bra cups when taking off her sweater. Are you intending us to be thinking about honor crimes, specifically?

Not consciously, but once again I’m not responsible for everything that comes out on the carousel.  I think the hero both admires and is intimidated by the absence of self-consciousness that the figure of his wife always suggests.  She represents a whole host of things that are Other for him, that he might feel ambivalent about but that he relies on all the same – she is science, rationality, technology; professional success and financial security; she has immunity from illness and interrogation.  Her laptop is a phallus, and she is devoted to it and the power it gives her; she has sublimated her own eros through it so that she lives pleasurably but makes her way in the world.  She has, or at least appears to have, firm boundaries and a stable ego, no doubt at a cost.  The hero has weak boundaries and an unstable ego, at a very great cost indeed, but perhaps with an additional benefit as well.

Can you say more about rule breaking and heroism and the assertion of sexual desire (searching out the attractive passenger whose butt had clearly caught his eye; his checking out of the sexy stews or pilots; and his fantasy about using his wife as a foil so that others could hear his joke about the loud noise and perhaps admire him) so present in your writing and in your attitude toward writing. Or if heroism's too hyperbolic, leadership?

The form of this question is interesting to me because, at first glance at least, the items in the parentheses tend to undermine rather than bolster conventional notions of heroism and leadership, suggesting a “hero” who is voyeuristic, vain, too furtive to act.  And indeed that’s my hero, in all his anti-heroism.  Airport baggage-claim terminals are kind of crazy places when you think about it – there’s so much sexual desire on the loose, so much “looking,” so much proprietary-territorial aggression, so much terror and relief. The energies are so much in excess of their various occasions or manifestations in the form of this or that person, this or that object – is that my suitcase or your suitcase? is that my desire or your desire? – everyone’s struggling to get a grip. The weaknesses and flaws of my hero – his anti-heroism – are precisely those things that allow him to “tune into” all these discordant frequencies, become their victim, subject, receptacle, and, at another level, their oracle.  That’s the level of the sentence, which doesn’t belong to him as a character, but of which he is the occasion, the focalizing point.  He is made up of these sentences of desire and terror; he is sentenced to desire and terror.

With the apple, the seized one,“...yellowish green with orange flecks and not too large,” you've circled back for Hawthorne again, but Hawthorne of The House of Seven Gables, no? Its existence seems both an admonishment of its own neglect, forgotten in the hero's luggage item, and also a dire warning—“the weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.”

That apple does come bearing a lot of symbolic baggage, doesn’t it?  As well as being “just an apple,” innocence interdicted.  At some point it might even be rendered into watery applesauce in the Taunton State Hospital for the criminally insane. And what about that rusted tin pastille case with a rubber band around it that the dog and the customs agent overlook?

But the chief figure I’d like for my book is a little less organic than Hawthorne’s oak and one less premised on continuity (whether “good or evil” in the fruit it produces).  That’s the figure of the mise en abyme, the infinite repetition of the same image (like the cereal box with a picture of a kid holding a cereal box with a picture of a kid holding a cereal box etc. etc. etc.).  In the case of my book it’s loops, bigger and smaller loops, loops inside loops inside loops, maybe even fruit loops.

In trying to think about the distinction implicit in the book's title, are you trying to get at a way of thinking about non-human wishes for agency? Are you also sounding an alarm about the displacement of privilege of the human vis a vis the fruit or the dog, for instance? Is the apple seeking revenge against humans for its millennia of being maligned as forbidden? Is the beagle answering its own monstrous enforced domestication and enslavement as a sniffer-outer for Power?

I like the idea of having a book with two titles.  At first they were just two candidate titles that I couldn’t decide between, and then an early reader of the manuscript helped me to realize that that very undecidability was the matter’s riven heart.  Of the non-human wishes for agency, are you thinking ahead to the way my hero “misreads” Animal Farm in a later chapter?  Once again, I can’t say it was a conscious choice, but I wouldn’t discount your reading by any means.  I think “the human” as an ideological category is overrated at best, and pernicious at worst, and I hope the book finally reflects that.

Regarding the liberation from the hierarchy of the paragraph, why this strong statement about how writing is structured? Is it part of the unpacking of privilege, some essential preparatory act we have to perform before we can proceed? That we have to allow for the willingness to change in a fundamental way, to expose the arbitrariness of the rule makers by doing away with the fruits of their rules?

The rejection of paragraphs was initially mostly a challenge of form.  I happened to be reading a number of writers who wrote either whole books or at least whole chapters or sections without breaks – Claude Simon and Thomas Bernhard most prominently – and I simply wanted to see if I could “do it.”  The challenge is that you can’t just write an ordinary story and then delete the indentations; the units have to link up and lead into each other without visible seams, so to speak.  This puts the stress on the sentence – you have to discover a certain kind of sentence that establishes a new or at least different relationship between content and form.

This goes back to your observation about exploding dichotomies.  One dichotomy I was interested in exploding is the one between content and form, because like most dichotomies it’s also a hierarchy:  in fiction, content is typically conceived of as primary, and writers are supposed to find the adequate form for their content.  Paragraph breaks are indeed, as you say above, “a way of ordering the text,” with all the connotations of the word “ordering.”  Maybe they’re even one of the premiere ways that content comes to dominate over form – I need a separate paragraph for establishing the setting, another paragraph for character description or a bit of action, and then come my paragraphs of dialogue, all of which must in turn be subordinated to “advancing the story,” etc.  Fredric Jameson somewhere makes a provocative assertion, using Hemingway as his example, that reverses the poles:  What if his famous style were simply the result, first and foremost, of wanting to write a certain kind of sentence? And therefore all that we think of us as typical Hemingway content – the drinking and bullfighting and al fresco masculinity and so forth – were merely the most adequate available significations to allow such sentences their unfolding?

I think this is also an answer, in a way, to some of your questions – was I thinking about honor killings, Hawthorne, non-human wishes for agency? Well, in the first instance I was simply thinking about writing a certain kind of sentence, and if I could keep writing it, not fall off the tightrope, then the politics and the literary allusions and the themes (because there are all of those things) would take care of themselves, would be the constituents of these sentences as they proceeded.  No doubt there were “other things” besides a style of sentence that I wanted to deal with as I continued to write, but in the moment of composition they were secondary, or I didn’t want to think too consciously about them but rather wanted them to come forth as functions of the kind of sentence I was writing.  The commitment was to a certain kind of sentence, and I see that as a political commitment.  The initial wager of doing without paragraphs compelled me to think about and write sentences in a different way, and from there on it was a matter of fidelity to that kind of sentence, of which the book is the result.

And what exactly are you modeling here? That we can do it not piecemeal but wholesale and survive to turn another paragraphless page, implicating author and reader alike and together, turning those pages with daring and wit? Isn't the essence of the anxiety in the story about just that, how scary it is to think it, much less to do it (and continue to do it for 272 pages!)?

It’s interesting to think of the anxiety in the story as having been “folded in” from the constraints of the form.  How do we trans-form what appears to be a prison into the terms of our freedom?  Or if that is asking too much, then yes, our survival. If there’s a heroism in the book – to return again to one of your earlier questions – it is that of surviving and speaking, like my Little Wayfarer I continues to do from her non-place in the margins until they tie her limbs to the bed and bind her tongue, and like the Little Wayfarer II that they ripped from her womb might have a chance to continue in her placeless place.  But that’s looking ahead.

Hands big enough to touch all the puzzle pieces.

Put It In Your Mouth

Photo by Steve Hull

 The Dairy Queen was just a huge big deal when it opened in Budweiser Falls. Somewhere out there at some shining corporate headquarters—a suit-and-tie-clad executive—had looked on a map and seen our town, seen us, and deemed us worthy of a franchise. Even as we dealt with the guilt of abandoning our local drugstore’s soda fountain counter, we marveled at the wonder of soft custard cones double-dipped in gold brick chocolate.

I was seventeen, shapely, and licking a dripping cone on the late spring afternoon when he pulled his little European roadster into the gravel parking lot with a roar. It squeezed between two pickups, the only other vehicles in the lot. His fleshy pink lips protruded from behind a full black beard and formed the words car trouble. Tangly-haired, he wore John Lennon spectacles which screamed to me: Imagine! Imagine you were rich enough to have your own  late model import in which to zip around the countryside. His license plates said New York.

Pride rather than attraction made me prop up Dreiser’s Sister Carrie where he’d be sure to see it. Stirring a long pour of sugar in his enormous coffee, he perched on the corner of the formica table closest to me.

“You seem like an intelligent girl.” He spoke slowly in case I wasn’t.

“Why’s that? Because I can read? Go back to New York.”

“Oh, you can read.” He laughed. “Can you tell me where the garage is? Not to park, my car’s overheating.”

“Mister, in Missouri, in the country anyways, we don’t need parking garages. We have plenty of parking without paying for it. As for the auto repair, it’s kind of hard to explain. I’ll have to draw you a map. You can read a map, can’t you?”

“Couldn’t you just...uh... show me? C’mon, take a ride.”

I said it to everyone. “I’m going to show this guy where Foley’s is. If I’m not at Glee Club tomorrow, he did it.” And everyone laughed except the stranger.  I closed my book, tossed my almost finished ice cream, and got in the car with him. He’d graduated college, he said, and was traveling cross country before starting law school in the fall. He was going to get a look at the Good Ole USA from the driver's seat of a fast car, and then head back East for his real life. I was local scenery, my virginity a souvenir like the shot glasses from Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky rolling around in his glove compartment.

After we dropped off his car—smoking manifold, Foley said as soon as we drove up—he asked me if I wanted to get something to eat. “Sure,” I said. “There’s a place we can walk to, and the chicken fried steak’s pretty good.”

“What the hell’s a chicken fried steak?”

“Don’t curse,” I told him.

We settled in the booth at Sunny’s, the one nearest the jukebox and looked over the glossy  menus. We made our choices and Merveene the waitress who was a regular fixture there, probably still is if the Tareytons haven’t asphyxiated her, gave me the fish-eye. 

“Darcy, your folks know you’re on up here with a stranger?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I lied. “But he’s no stranger. He was over at the High for Career Day. I’m interviewing him for The Igloo.”

“Uh-huh,” she said not believing a word, shifting her weight onto her back leg, jutting her hip. 

“Whatchu having?” she asked Warren. “I’m guessing you like fresh grown country meat?”

“I’ll take whatever’s easy,” he answered, not backing down. “The Blue Plate Special sounds good.”

“Darcy?”

“The same.”

“Now, how’d I know you were going to say that? Two Hot to Trots, to stay,” she yodeled into the kitchen pass-through window for all to hear. Everyone got a good chuckle out of that: two Hot to Trots.

Warren feigned interest in the title on the thick paperback. “It’s for school,” I lied. In English we were reading Thornton Wilder—the one where all the people fall off the bridge. They never would've taught anything with even a hint of the sex act in it. I was reading it on my own, hoping to pick up some solid vocabulary words for my upcoming SATs, or so I'd told Mr. Bradley our school librarian who'd warned me: no happy ending in this one, Darcy. I’d also read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Colette, Henry Miller, and even some of Anaiis Nin from his stacks. He had slipped these in among the tamer classics, the dirty parts being the reward for an advanced literacy. Though to my utter disappointment, there were no dirty parts in the Dreiser; it was all euphemism, suggestion, and innuendo. Now, whenever it comes up I always say that Dreiser left out the most important passages: What happened to Carrie in those rooms with Drouet and Hurstwood?

Warren Wineburg didn’t deserve my cherry, but he got it anyway.

I walked him the back way through the woods to the town’s one and only motel. He laughed when I told him for the longest time I'd thought it was called Vacancy because that’s what the neon sign always blinked. I waited outside, cowering behind the ice machine while he got the key from the office. He opened the metal door, long ago painted battleship grey, whistled for me like a hunter calling his hound, and I slipped in. Would that I’d slipped right back out!

I flipped through the Bible in the bedside table drawer while he was in the shower, on the lookout for the hottest parts in the Song of Songs—The roundings of thy thighs are like the links of a chain… Thy two breasts are like two fawns. Curious, I went into the bathroom and knelt on the closed toilet seat to watch him. His legs were not as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold. His body was on the scrawny side with just a couple of bumps on his arms where the rest of the muscles were supposed to be. He was hairy, almost furry, all over, even his ass. He turned to show me his penis. It was the first man’s penis I had ever seen, though I’d seen plenty on livestock.

“I’m circumcised. Haven’t you ever seen a circumcised penis before?”

“No,” I admitted, neglecting to mention that I hadn’t seen an uncircumcised one, either.

“Put it in your mouth,” he told me. And before I’d even been kissed, I had a mouth full of what the boys called a boner. “You look pretty with my dick in your mouth. Now suck it.”

Like circumsized, the vocabulary words I picked up for the rest of our time together would never appear on my SAT test. Nothing he did really hurt me, but it didn’t feel good, either. He laughed loud and hard when he realized he was popping my cherry, the blood from my torn hymen wetting his thrusts.

“I always want to remember this night,” he said without a trace of romance. Kodak had just introduced the pocket-sized Instamatic and when he showed me his, it was another first. Flash! Me holding his hard cock between my tits. Flash! Me blowing him. Flash! Me with cum on my face. Flash! Me splayed and trussed like a Thanksgiving Day turkey. Flash! Me pretending to diddle myself with a broom he found in the closet. Flash! Flash! Flash! He used all twenty shots on the film and a pack and a half of flashcubes. But the one that hurt the most is the one where he mocked me the most. He posed me spread eagle on the bed, my hands tied behind my head with his woven canvas belt, my hair covering my face and the Budweiser Falls library’s Penguin Paperback Classic of Dreiser’s masterwork propped up on my swollen breasts. Flash!

When it was time for me to be getting home, he wouldn’t let me take a shower. Not enough towels, he said. “Let me call you a taxi, baby. I’d be a gentleman and drive you home, but…” There was no way I could have the cab pick me up at the motel, it’d be all over the county in no time. “No, I like to walk.” He urged some cash on me anyway. At the door, he cleared his throat and orated a little speech. “I had a great time. You’ve got a silken, wet pussy and a tight round ass, but your big tits are your hands down best feature. Take the money and buy a good bra, with support. Keep ‘em that way. You’ll go far in life.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Our place was just shy of three miles from the motel down a dark country road. Chafed as I was, it felt good to be loping along under the protection of the stars, both dippers directly overhead. I let the black night envelop me, the peepers trilling me home, but about half way there I realized I’d forgotten the damn book. I could never explain it being found at the motel. Oh, the shame, shame, shame of it, having to retrace my way, knock on the door and awaken him, see him leering at me cockeyed through his easy sleep, and duck under his arm on the doorpost to retrieve the book. Inside again I was momentarily frozen by the debauched setting, especially the dark stain of my very own blood bruising the sheets, the rank smell of it mixed with his semen, our sweat, the 7 and 7 he drank after I left. 

Near tears I found what I was looking for on the floor at the foot of the bed face down on the nylon carpet, some pages turned in on themselves. I grabbed it and smoothed them down the best I could as I fled, stroking the bentness away. I dashed around the parking lot and down the gravel path to the road, running until my breath was spent, until I had to stop and double over, a crimp in my side, pebbles in both loafers. In the still, silent night, his voice traveled the hundred or so yards of my sprint, and when it caught up with me I heard it as clearly as if he were standing next to me, his pink wet lips inches from my ear.

“Nighty night, Sister Carrie.”