In seminar, grad students on plastic folding chairs: seven women, two men. Naive enough to believe in poetry’s transformative force, but cynical enough in their darker moments to consider poetry a pseudo-spiritual calling, something akin to the affliction of televangelists.
Outside, the last blue day in October. Snow in the forecast.
They discuss “Andromeda and Perseus,” a poem submitted by Beth, who has reversed the title of the Titian painting in order to center Andromeda’s suffering rather than the heroics of Perseus—rapist, killer, destroyer of women.
“The taking is as brutal as the captivity,” says this squat girl from Montana.
The poem spans fifteen single-spaced pages, and contains, among other things, a graphic description of period sex in which menstrual blood congeals on a gray comforter. This is designated “the Gorgon’s mark,” in relation to “the iron stain” left on Medusa’s robes following her decapitation by Perseus.
Around they go, taking in the poem’s allusive system of images and its narrative density, the emotional heat of its subject matter, its increasing cultural salience re: women, re: trauma, re: bodies, re: life at the end of the world.
“I love the gestural improvisation of it all—so very Joan Mitchell,” says Helen, who had once been some kind of Mormon child bride out in a suburb of Denver, and who now lives above a bar in downtown Iowa City, writing poems about dying children and pubic lice.
“I mean, like, so sharp, diamond sharp. Could cut a bitch, you know? God.” Noli, nineteen, child prodigy. Disappointing her parents. Poetry instead of, what, medical school, curing cancer?
“Totally. So raw, though. So visceral.”
“And heightened—” Mika, twenty-eight, Stevie Nicks impersonator in her bangles and boots and gauzy drapery.
“—charged-up, high-voltage shit—” Noli again, so talkative today. So chatty.
“Voice, voice, voice.” Here, Linda, black from Tulsa. Braids. Glossy, perfect skin. She went to UT Austin, did a PhD in physics at MIT. Finished. Or dropped out. Either way, here in Iowa with the rest of them. In some kind of tension with Noli, also black, also brilliant. Not sisters. High-intensity mutual exclusion.
“Finally, something real,” Noli says. Linda’s gaze sharpens. “But totally rigorous. Like, not fake slam-poet shit. Just voice.”
“I want this in my veins. Hard,” Helen says.
The effluvia of praise washes over Beth, who receives their compliments with a placid glow. The instructor, never quite in contention for the Pulitzer but never quite out of it either, nods slowly as he presides over them like a fucking youth minister.
Or so Seamus imagined as he drowsed in half focus. Then, coming back to himself, to the room, becoming present, he really looked. Beth’s lips were in a thin line, her eyebrows in deep grooves. Miserable despite the praise, when praise seemed so much the point of the poems they wrote. To be clapped on the back. Celebrated. Turned into modern saints and martyrs.
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Seamus, that a person, presented with what they wanted most, could seem so miserable about it.
Along the upper wall of the seminar room, trapezoidal panes of glass. The room was all sleek, dark-wood beams and soaring windows, barnlike in its effect. Early afternoon sunshine pooling on the scuffed floors. Locked cases of books by writing program alumni who had gone on to midlist glory.
The patina of prestige, so much like the corroded wax on the floorboards, had seen better days. That was the thing about prestige, though—the older and more moth eaten, the more valuable. There was a certain kind of poet for whom prestige was the point. The poetry was the prestige, and if no one saw you writing a poem, being a poet, then you were not a poet. For these poets, seminar was the zenith of their lives as artists. Never again would they have, on a weekly basis, such attention channeled upon their performance of poetry.
“This poem really troubles notions of reliability. Because, like, who is more an authority on an experience than the person doing the experiencing, right? But, like, the inconsistencies in the telling really make you wonder if the truth is really a palimpsest of falsehoods, and—” Helen again, though now interrupted by Garza, half Tunisian, half Quebecois, but raised in Toronto and Oakland.
“Totally. In this very Vicuña way, like in Spit Temple—”
“I prefer Moraga’s take on personal history, and how we bridge gaps in the archive with—” Noreen, West Virginian with a faint lilt that might have been faked—it was curiously absent when she was drunk—cutting across Garza’s response.
“Hartman tells us that archives are constructed in the manner of—” Noli, cutting in, too.
These sundry interruptions and redactions, all the skirmishes and misdirection. Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle. Seamus looked to his right at Oliver, who was listening intently with a pleased, receptive expression. How, Seamus wondered, could he take this all so seriously, as they wore on talking about the violence of the archive and Cherríe Moraga and Cecilia Vicuña, whose work was not even remotely on point for the poem at hand. This wasn’t poetry. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation. This was another kind of poetry theatric: If you just said enough names, people assumed you knew what you were talking about and tended to attribute the vagueness of the reference to their own ignorance. But Seamus had read both Moraga and Vicuña. He had read the critical essays of Saidiya Hartman—avant the MacArthur, bien sûr—and the critical essays in response to Hartman’s work. He knew America to be a war of contradicting archives. Different histories with their own particular turbulences.
It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.
“And the part about the blood on the sheet! I mean!” Noli said. “Stunning. Irrefutable.”
Seamus flipped back through the poem until he got to the line about the Gorgon’s mark, which had surprised him in its venereal vividness. It had the vibe of a detail you might find in a good poem. As if out of O’Hara by way of Kooser.
But reading back over the line, Seamus felt tickled. What kind of person, what kind of poetic organizing intelligence, upon seeing menstrual blood on a bedsheet after not-great sex, thought of Medusa’s decapitation? Too funny. Not the blood itself, but the pretentious linkage. There was the duress. The transubstantiation of the real thing into something so freighted with meaning that it collapsed in on itself. The whole poem became a joke. This variety of poem often surfaced in seminar: personal history transmuted into a system of vague gestures toward greater works that failed to register genuine understanding of or real feeling for those works. Self-deceptions disguised as confession.
Seamus giggled to himself.
The instructor, low troll of a man with a head of high white hair, looked at him. Paused.
“Something to add, Seamus?” Everyone looked at him then. This was, he knew, a way of marshaling attention to himself. It was the only charismatic trait he possessed, but he had no control over it. True, he could have tried harder. This too was a performance, but he considered it morally acceptable because he knew it was a performance. He didn’t pretend it was poetry.
He shuffled the papers a moment, but then, breaking out into a little giggle, he said, “So, like, her pussy is a Gorgon head? Is that like a Trump thing?”
A little magic trick: silence, the rolling blackout of their anger. Then, gradually, the lights going back on. Annoyance. Irritation.
Ingrid Lundstrom said, “I think it’s more saying that we live in a world that has turned women’s bodies into objects of revulsion and pain—and, how our pleasure is not our own? I think we need to honor that.”
Ingrid had been in his class at Brown. In their sophomore year, she got published in The New Yorker with a nakedly autobiographical poem about her father’s conversion to evangelical Christianity and his subsequent self-immolation. She was the kind of poet whose work was chiefly about herself, as if all that had transpired in the existence of humankind was no more consequential than the slightly nervy account of her first use of a tampon. He thought her poems craven and beautiful and utterly dishonest.
“Yes, but, like, her cooter is full of Medusa blood. Am I being obtuse? Am I missing the allusion?”
Oliver tried to intercede, laughing. “Negative capability, right?” he said.
The instructor said, “We are here to witness the poem.”
Seamus snorted. Ingrid replied dryly, “I just think it’s important to remember that the speaker of the poem is clearly carrying a legacy of violence, and this ambivalence toward desire/body/love/want is valid.”
Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.
“Are you a poet or a caseworker?” Seamus asked.
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Such withering piety, such righteous fury. He delighted in Ingrid’s façade cracking.
“It’s not a gendered term—unless you think it is. Now that would be sexist.”
Ingrid stood and gave Seamus a bored, dismissive glance. Then she went to the sink in the back of the room to fill an electric kettle.
“You’re being a child,” Helen said, sotto voce.
Seamus made a show of screwing up his face and rubbing his eyes. He pouted.
“We are getting far afield here,” the instructor said. He was looking straight up into the exposed beams, as though waiting for a signal from the divine.
“They’re the ones calling names. My comments were textual,” Seamus said. Through all of this, Beth stared into her notebook and scribbled furiously until she had soaked the corner of a page black with ink. Seamus leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching her wrist wrench back and forth.
“Inappropriate.”
“Asshole.”
Such a chorus of opprobrium. Like the witches in Macbeth, but less fun. Less ridiculous glee.
“I’m triggered by your insults,” Seamus said. “They remind me of my torturous childhood. Please stop.”
Ingrid set the kettle on its stand and flicked the switch. It screeched as it came to life.
“The poem,” the instructor said. “The poem is everything.”
“Maybe you should take a breather, champ,” Oliver said. He brought his hand to the back of Seamus’s neck.
“You betcha, pal,” Seamus said. He showed his teeth. Oliver just shook his head. But Seamus couldn’t stop. He tasted the glut of their attention. The sweet iron tang of it. He was thirsty for more. The looks on their faces, the anger, the annoyance. So sure of themselves. Of their positions.
“I think we could all do with some fresh air,” the instructor said. “Maybe we table for this week. You are free to go.”
Oh, no fun. No fun at all. How unfair. Seamus grunted as he stood. Oliver followed. The rest of them remained in place, composed in various tableaux of waiting. Whispering to one another, exchanging notebooks and pointed looks. Seamus wondered if he and Oliver alone were being dismissed like disruptive children, while the others were all waiting for a second, secret seminar—the real class—to begin. He stood there a few seconds more, but then felt Oliver’s hand at the crook of his arm, pulling at him.
Well, fine, he thought. All right.
“Enjoy your yoga,” Seamus called over his shoulder, and Noli replied, “Enjoy your bowel impaction.”
Them on the bridge, Seamus and Oliver.
Seamus hated, but couldn’t resist, the compulsion to relive the harrowing of seminar. Same story, every week, really: so and so said this, so and so said that, can you believe? A silly question. Belief had died with the rise of the contemporary, the instant. Belief being one of those hangovers from some other era, a mere shading of history. But then again, they were fags for belief. They were poets, after all.
“I hate when people title their poems after paintings. Ekphrasis is so dead, man. Bleak and needy shit.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right. Fatuous intellectual cachet and all.”
“It’s what you do when you know your art is bad. Is explicitness supposed to be a substitute for depth? I don’t know.”
“Kidding themselves.”
“Totally.”
“Abstract nonsense.”
“Yep.”
Underfoot the swaying bridge, sluggish green water. The bramble and dark mud of the riverbanks, the golden grass. Oliver’s ruddy cheeks and the scent of his loose-leaf tobacco. Almost unbearably tender, the look in his eyes.
Not for the first time, Seamus imagined Oliver’s face going grotesque with pain. Imagined the slant of his mouth in suffering, beautiful in the way of those early, crude carvings of Christ, the suffering and the beauty one and the same. Seamus turned away from Oliver, took in the industrial park and its long tusks of steam. The cars on the bridge near the library ambling along.
“It’s nice we got out early, though,” Oliver said.
Seamus nodded, though for him the timing was kind of annoying. Seminar could go until six or end at four. The variability prevented him from working on seminar days. It would have been too embarrassing trying to explain to the shift lead why he needed the flexibility on his start time, so he just kept the day free. Yet now, with class lasting barely an hour, he had almost the whole afternoon free.
“Nice is a word for it. If you don’t work for a living.”
Oliver laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Just the way you say that. Work for a living. It’s almost pretentious. Weren’t you just skewering fake piety?”
“It’s fake piety to support yourself?” Seamus asked, somewhere between irony and earnestness. Oliver just laughed again. “What’s so fucking funny about it? Not all of us have money. Or parents. Some of us really do have to support ourselves.”
“The unshackled rage of the working-class white male, how terrifying,” Oliver said. He was really cracking up now, and Seamus felt a hard knot at the base of his throat. He wanted to shove Oliver into the river.
“You’re first against the wall,” Seamus said.
“I’ve made my peace with it.”
“I know you’re joking, but it still sounds terrible. Sure, I can be a jerk, whatever, but I do give a fuck about this shit. Like, poetry. It matters to me. And it makes me sick, sitting in that room every week while they fucking braid each other’s pussy hair about their trauma or whatever. When I could be doing a shift. Paying my rent. Working. Like normal people. So that I can write poems. That they just shit on. Because they’re not about being molested. It’s such a sham.” He grunted.
“Hey, I’m on your side. You know I love your work,” Oliver said. Seamus shrugged.
“Group therapy.” Seamus bit down at the corner of his thumb, chewed away at a translucent sliver of dead skin. Then, like a penny at the bottom of a well, down and down below the surface of his anger, an idea glinted.
“You know what I should do?”
“Get drunk? That’s my plan,” Oliver said.
“I should write a poem called ‘Gorgon’s Head’ and watch those uptight assholes lose it.”
“Do it,” Oliver said, leaning against the rail. The wind, raspy with cold, moved through his hair.
Again, the leading edge of an image as forceful as a premonition: Oliver’s face gone lean and taut with agony.
“I should, right?”
“You’d get tossed out. Are you nuts or what?”
“But it’s funny, right? Come on!” Seamus slapped Oliver’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “It’s funny!”
Oliver gazed across the river. Three modernist buildings crouched low on the banks, like a herd of grazing mammals. The bridge was studded with flags from each of the countries represented in the student body. They snapped in the wind. Oliver pushed off the rail. Seamus followed. The bridge pulsed low under them, alive almost.
“You hate the idea? You think it’s stupid?”
“I don’t,” Oliver said. “But is it worth it? Like, why?”
“Because it’s funny!” Seamus gripped Oliver’s shoulders and shook him hard.
Oliver jerked back and Seamus felt sad, then annoyed.
“You think I’m going to hurt you?”
“Not at all. But people have feelings, Seamus. I think you forget that sometimes. Or you think it’s something to make fun of. But people do have feelings, and it’s okay that they do.”
“So I hurt your feelings? I didn’t shake you that hard.”
“Not me.”
On the river trail, they passed the modernist galleries, which housed various exhibits and shows. The previous fall, Seamus and Oliver had gone to a talk on race and the poetry of John Berryman in one of the galleries. Some of their classmates had been there too—Garza, Linda, Ingrid. During the talk, the speaker, who was white, had used the word nigger while quoting a source. It seemed to come out without her knowing it, but the room noticed and grew cold then quite hot. Seamus felt a frisson of glee. The talk up to that point had been tedious, mainly because he agreed with it all—racism bad, Berryman good, but also bad re: race. White people talking about racism had the effect of a news report. But here was theater. For days after, the incident got retold and reconfigured. Linda ended up on the local news recounting the violence that had befallen her at this talk, and the speaker was put on leave in the lit department, and then asked not to return to her post in the spring. She made the mistake of writing a long article about it for The Guardian, which Linda shared on Twitter and mocked. It turned into an ugly mess on culture blogs and Instagram, and now Linda was verified on social media, and the speaker was an occasional guest columnist for The New York Times on matters of cancel culture, which was not real except that sometimes it kind of was.
There was a hostility to public life now. Or maybe that hostility had always existed, and what was new was simply the directing of it toward people who had long been exempt. Seamus thought that the whole thing had the absurd drama of a great play. All the Shakespearean misunderstanding and misspeaking, everything doubling in its extremity and consequences until it ruptured into something truly cathartic. Except that there was no catharsis. Just people hardening into the caricatures of their roles.
But Linda was right. The speaker had broken the social contract when she said that word aloud, and, as had been the rule since the very beginning of society itself, there was a price for breaking the contract, for saying what you shouldn’t say, for going off script.
They walked on in silence, though Seamus could still hear the flapping of the flags on the bridge. The sky was a deep, tranquil blue. The sun warmed his face.
“I just don’t want you to get into anything. Distracts from the work,” Oliver said.
“But it’s funny, though, right? Like, be real, you have to laugh. It’s insane not to laugh.” Seamus hated the plaintiveness in his own voice, how much he needed Oliver to side with him. But more than that, he hated that Oliver didn’t see how objectively hilarious it would be to write a poem that exposed the falseness that dominated their program and their discourse and the whole sham of American art.
Oliver sighed. “Yes, it’s funny to title your poem ‘Gorgon Head’ and then make everyone read it. And yeah, I’d laugh. But her poem was really personal. It was about her life. And that’s not funny, right? People’s lives?”
“Why don’t you just go to nursing school?” Seamus barked.
“Jesus,” Oliver said. “Maybe you do hate women.”
Seamus’s neck got hot at the insinuation. This was not about women. This was not about feminism. This was about a hollow and false ethic in art. Bad art knew no gender.
“Because I hate lazy generalities?”
“Do whatever you want, man. You’re determined, I know. But don’t be surprised when it blows up in your face,” Oliver said. No heat. No malice. But that only made Seamus feel worse. The resignation of it.
The water frothed near the shore under the struts of the bridge. Some plastic bottles had been caught there and filled slowly with river silt. Seamus crouched to scoop up some rocks. He lobbed them into the center of the river, each descent dark and irrevocable.
“I’m not a monster,” Seamus said. “Despite your implication.”
“I don’t think you’re a monster. Like I said, you’re determined. I just don’t get why.”
“Some pal.” Seamus wiped the grit from the rocks against Oliver’s jacket. “Thank you for the support.”
“Well, I am your friend. That’s why I’m trying to talk you out of being an asshole. For your own sake.”
“Sure, I’m the asshole.”
“I wish you hadn’t gotten that on me.”
“And I wish you had a sense of humor!” Seamus gave Oliver a quick, hard punch to the side and took off up the path. He had an easy, smooth stride, but Oliver was taller and his legs ate up the distance between them. Seamus soon had to slow down and jog backward. He tried to tamp down the urge to cough and clear his lungs, but he ended up bent over, hands on his knees, hacking up a yellowish glob onto the concrete. It hitched and burned as it came up and out.
He had to stop smoking.
Oliver struck him hard between the shoulders three times, and each slap made the dark of Seamus’s eyelids swim red and blue. At the last one, the hardest, he felt himself breathe free and opened his eyes.
Penance.
Seamus worked evening and morning shifts in the hospice kitchen—broths and stocks, chop and peel, shit like that. He’d gotten the job when he first came to Iowa City because, unlike Oliver and some of his classmates, he didn’t get the good fellowship, and the nonfiction goons across the river had taken all the comp/rhet sections for themselves. The director had looked at him with somnolent pity. “Sometimes, our students have had great luck finding jobs in the area,” she said in what she must have imagined was a helpful tone. “Little things to supplement.”
He knew a lot about that word, supplement.
At Brown, among the lesser talented of the very rich, his scholarship had accounted for tuition but just barely that. His other needs multiplied in the dark like some invasive predatory species: textbooks, meal plans, shower gel, shampoo, toothpaste, laundry detergent, his part of the dorm fridge rental, the dorm itself, notebooks and pencils, tech fees, rec fees. How amazing that, at college, even basic amenities were considered luxuries and therefore to be covered at your own expense. It had cost him quite a lot to get up the money for the SAT and ACT, for the AP exams, money he’d gotten by gigging in bakeries and mowing lawns. But that wouldn’t do for college. There was simply too much need.
So in undergrad, he supplemented his scholarship not with paper writing or academic scut work in department offices (the faculty did not like him), but with shifts at a bleak hospital kitchen in Providence. The women took a liking to him, taught him the rhythms of cooking for dozens, for hundreds. He learned the intricacies of scale and mass consumption, and what waste there was—for there was always waste—he took home and stored. When he needed a quick job, he went to hospital kitchens. They were always hiring. People were always quitting, because they had no choice but to hire the desperate, the tired, the needy, people who were already on a carousel of shit jobs that chewed them up. Hospital kitchens were home to junkies, ex-cons, and old women—people who could never afford the hospitals where they worked.
Seamus was suited to that kind of work. He liked the cooking, and he had, in a way that was not dissimilar from writing poetry, an affinity for the long, repetitive hours it took to make anything good and for the tedious preparatory work. He felt best when he was alone in the kitchen at the end of a long day, peeling and chopping vegetables or making stock for the week’s soups. The simmering constancy of it. Alone in a kitchen, he was at peace. Not free to wander in his thoughts, exactly, so much as existing in a state of thoughtlessness. Nothing could bother him.
Since there was still so much blue sky left in the day, he thought he’d ride over and see if he could get in a few hours at the hospice kitchen to help take the sting off the month’s bills. He wondered how people with families could get by on a grad student’s stipend. He thought of one guy he knew in the lit department, Gerard, who had two small children and a wife.
Gerard was studying something useless, something like medieval poetry and form, and his wife was looking after their children. Sometimes, he saw them down at the corner of St. Mary’s for the weekly food bank. It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one else knew. Art was worth many things, but was it worth putting your whole family on the brink of extinction? Seamus didn’t understand Gerard’s calculus. He loved poetry, but he couldn’t always square it with the essentials of life.
Like, if he had a family and responsibilities, he wasn’t sure that he would pick poetry over them. And in that case, if he could think of a set of circumstances that could justify turning away from poetry, then why bother at all? This kept him up at night, wondering if he lacked the resolve to be the kind of poet he wanted to be. But then he remembered that he was just another white man in the world pondering the extinction of poetry, which had survived the ending of the world innumerable times. It would survive whatever contemporary apocalypse he could dream up. Poetry didn’t need him. It certainly didn’t need his elegies for its demise. It was a delusion, he knew, the delusion of everyone whose life had been touched by poetry, that somehow poetry needed them to go on existing. But it did not.
Poets. God, fucking poets.
The hospice was a ten-bedroom house on a grassy tract of land out on the edge of town. This had once been the good part of town but was now populated by a strip mall, five pharmacy chains, a dialysis center, a plasma bank, a check-cashing place, and three fast-food restaurants. There was an apartment complex, a row of tan stone buildings set front to back with their edges abutting a road. On the other side, the trees on the soggy, sloping hillsides were dotted with white houses and trailers with gravel driveways. The hospice had once been the home of an old family in Iowa City who had died out sometime after World War II. The heirs, distant cousins in New Hampshire, didn’t want the house, which was far away and old and ate up taxes. They got rid of it by selling to a company that was bought by another company that was bought by yet another company. The house pinged around a series of shell corporations, absorbed and spun off until it was purchased by a national organization that turned old homes into nursing facilities and hospice care for the old and infirm. The thought was that people shouldn’t have to sit alone in warehouses like bad furniture that no one wanted, that people deserved to die with some semblance of human comfort.
In the hospice, Seamus noticed, the residents liked to talk about animals that had gone extinct. Tortoises and obscure mammals, birds and amphibians, fish. It kept their minds occupied, enumerating all the creatures that had ceased to exist. Some of the nurses tried to fight it, thinking it was too morbid, but the residents would not be moved. Every day at mealtime, when they gathered at the long table in the kitchen or out back in the gardens, the residents ate their soft food or swirled their plastic cups of water and talked about the decline of speciation. It cheered them, like finding a rare piece of hard candy in their pockets or a getting phone call from their children or nieces and nephews. Little bursts of pleasure.
Seamus often skimmed their conversations for odd facts to tell Oliver about later. Did he know, for example, that warm winters meant that tick-borne diseases were on the rise? And that the migration of deer from the East Coast out into the west was causing a migration of Lyme disease, and also the death of ash trees and cedars? It was all connected in a prickly web. Ticks and deer and trees and the warmth of the short days of winter.
In the spring, they planted flowers and vegetables in the back. In the fall, the residents took turns raking leaves. Checking the soil for compost potential. Looking after the small family of deer who lived in the woods. The residents were active here, spent their days in motion. They had a reason to get up in the morning. Even though it was all just a highly orchestrated and carefully managed illusion.
Upstairs, they suffered. In their dark rooms, they lay in their hospital beds while nurses sponged off their sweat and wiped up their vomit and shit. They shivered and groaned as their bones broke down or their muscles atrophied. Everyone was always so optimistic at first, when they arrived at the hospice. See, look at how beautiful it is. See, you will have a view of these trees. It’s hardly even like being on the East Side. Oh, look, there are ducks in the pond. There is a knitting circle every day. Once a month, a group of young children comes to read and do crafts. The busy politeness you offered the god of dying in order to pretend for a little while that you were simply on a brief respite from your life, that before long you would get to return. But that wore off. Some came out of it, joined the ongoing projects of hospice life: the garden, the compost, the deer, the bird-watching, the knitting, the crafts. And some did not. They sat by their windows and waited. And then they died.
At the hospice, Seamus propped his bike against the side wall in the garden and hopped up the steps into the mudroom. Eunice’s radio was playing Chet Baker while she brushed and inspected a shipment of mushrooms from the local foragers. Seamus knocked his boots against the door jamb.
“You ain’t on today,” she said.
“Got sprung early.”
“You better not be cutting out on that lesson.”
Seamus put his hands up in innocence. “Pat me down, sarge. I’m good for it.” Eunice waved him on.
“You can help with the bisque.”
“How elegant,” he said.
“Do it up nice the way you do.”
Seamus leaned over Eunice at the table and pretended to be checking her work with the mushrooms. She had gout in her left knee and complained of swollen ankles. She sat at a stool to do this minor but careful work. Passing the brush around the button caps and across the tender gills of the oyster mushrooms. The morels like something out of a fairy tale.
“It’ll do,” he said.
Eunice swatted at him. “Get.”
He found Lena at the counter, cutting aromatics. She was on the other side of forty, but she had skinny arms and the kind of stubby ponytail Seamus associated with girls from his middle school. Her hair was box-dye copper with black roots. She looked up at him, watery green eyes, and gave him a smile, showing the craggy craters of her gums, missing teeth on the right side of her mouth.
“Bisque,” he said.
“You know I hate this shit.”
Seamus gave his hands a wash and draped a dry cloth over his shoulder. Lena leaned to the side and watched him survey the shit job she’d done dicing the aromatics.
“You got the garlic too early,” he said. “It’s going to give up the goods before it even has a chance to get hot.”
“I just do what that thing tells me to do,” she said, waving her phone at him. It was the PDF he had downloaded to both of their phones last year when he had come on, a file of recipes and ideas about how to cook for the dying and the almost dead. Eunice said it hurt her eyes, so he’d printed her a copy with extra-big type. Lena was good with a phone, though she had no sense of a recipe’s intrinsic sense of order. She tended to want to get it all done up front, then knock it off one step after another. She could follow, but she could not—or at least did not—understand what any of it meant.
“Don’t worry.”
With the back of his hand, Seamus moved the slimy, poorly diced garlic along the cutting board and into a metal bowl for compost. There he added the onions and their skins that Lena had butchered. He peeled a fresh pile of onions, and pulled the knife through their bulk with one certain motion. He loved that first bite of the knife through the material wet of the ingredients. He could read, in that very first moment, the final taste of the dish. It was just an onion, but in bisecting it, he felt a little closer to himself.
The partial cuts, first vertically and then horizontally, getting a dice the cheap way. Hot oil in the pot, waiting for it to shimmer. The sizzle of the onions and celery. Tossing them around, letting them settle, sweat. Eunice’s radio down in the mudroom, Chet Baker’s perfect, clear horn, the sweet sadness of his music rising up to them out of the under dark.
The frustration from seminar fell away from him. In this place, he was free of all that horseshit. It was just him and the sweating onions. The garlic he shucked swiftly of its paper, and then—one hard whack with the back of his knife—turned it to pulp. He ran his knife through it to break it up, keep it from getting too gummy. That instant allium odor, sweet and pungent. Into the pot with the onions and celery.
He opened a can of whole San Marzano tomatoes and wet his fingertips in the pulpy juice. He liked that metallic aftertaste. He strained and mashed the tomatoes with his wooden spoon. The hiss of the veg in the pot went sharp, so he reached over and poured in mushroom broth that he had made himself last week. It squelched the hiss and got the veg out of contact with the pot bottom. This he simmered. In went the tomatoes then, all mashed like tartare. And, finally, the rice. He ladled in some of the can water. Salt. Just a little sugar.
Lena had been watching him the whole time. “I would have just put all that shit in there and left it to go,” she said.
“Yeah, well. You kind of do that. But the order. It’s important.”
“Your mama teach you that?”
“No.”
“She didn’t cook for you?”
Seamus set the lid on the pot.
“I’m going to do the dishes.”
“I bet she must have liked having you around then. Doing all the cooking.”
Seamus stacked the lunch dishes in the sink and scooped up what he’d dirtied with his prep. He ran the water hot into the deep sink and lathered the bowls, the cups. The plates. The pans and pots. Up to his elbows in the biting water.
No, his mother had not cooked for him. His mother, when he thought about her now with the benefit and generosity of adulthood, had suffered from debilitating headaches. She spent her days lying in bed. His father worked in construction, splitting bricks and working the roads in summer, pouring asphalt so that in the winter he could be a bad actor who toured the Midwest in small company productions of Hamlet and Othello. Most often he played Iago, but sometimes he was also Desdemona’s father.
One night, his father came down wrong during a tech rehearsal and broke his foot. It didn’t heal right or something, and an infection set up. His father lost the left foot. And some of his fingers. He almost died from sepsis. For some reason, his mother had blamed herself for the injury and the subsequent trouble. She said that they had abandoned him—hadn’t been vigilant enough, hadn’t checked the wound the way they should have. She blamed herself because she couldn’t get out of bed, and blamed Seamus because, well, with her not getting out of bed, it was on him to help his father. And apparently he hadn’t done enough.
His mother loved his father more than she loved him. They spent most of their time in the hospital at his father’s bedside. He missed two or three weeks of school, had to be held back a year. His father went on disability, and he grew fat and tough.
Seamus thought with a silly kind of meanness that if he were another kind of writer, a tacky writer, he could write about that. About the smell of his father’s rotting foot. About the simultaneous brightness and dullness of the beige room where his father did rehabilitation at the hospital, watching him fasten himself into plastic limbs that pinched and bit. Or watching him stretch the partial nubs of his fingers as wide as they would go, and the anger in his eyes when he found that he could no longer do this simple task. Outside the window of the rehab room, there had been a small garden with a cedar tree in it. Seamus spent a great deal of time looking at that tree while his father cursed as he was Velcroed into and out of temporary prosthetics. Or he could write about the smell of pills sweating in their plastic cylinder, like sea salt and shit.
Once, his father asked Seamus to put ointment on his leg. Seamus squeezed the oily white cream onto his fingers. He streaked it across the tan, knitted surface of his father’s leg. He recoiled, surprised. He’d thought the flesh there would be dead and cold, but instead his father was warm and lightly furred. The thinness of the skin, the loose, fibrous quality of the muscle underneath, and the tingling static of something alive. Vividly, painfully alive. His father hissed.
“You can’t do anything,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Seamus said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Get away from me. Go away.”
He might write about that, being sent away to stay with his grandparents for the summer in Pennsylvania. Their dark house in the middle of a field of yellow grass, as if the land were unwilling to believe that spring and then summer had come. Everything about the Pennsylvania house was cold and half eclipsed.
His grandparents were so polite to him that it felt like estrangement. He ate their bitter breakfast and their cold lunch. For dinner, they had strange pies made of offal and other things. The house smelled like vinegar and embalming fluid. They did not speak to him often, and he spent a lot of time reading to himself. When he returned to his parents, he was taller and paler. His parents looked like their anger and their pain and their sadness had burned them through, leaving only the struts of their foundations.
But no one had a happy childhood. No one had a good life. Human pain existed in a vast supply, and people took from it like grain from a barn. There was pain for you and pain for you and pain for you—agony enough for everyone. The pain of his childhood was of such a common source that it embarrassed him. Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs—it was that they all had the same pain, the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things—hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.
These were not worth poetry, surely. But he knew, in a way that was more feeling than knowledge, that if he wrote a poem about it, about his life, they would call it brilliant. They would say it was his best work, as if everything he had ever done before had been mere illusion, smokescreen. He knew they would call it good, call it vulnerable, and what was worse than that?
Seamus hosed down the dishes and hung them on the rack to dry. He took his time arranging them, setting the plates into the slots above the sink. Arranging the forks and spoons at diagonals so the water ran along the grooves of the rack, collected, and fell in a stream down into the drain. He liked a clean kitchen, a regimented kitchen. It was the way he’d been trained in that first hospital. Everything in its place. No slick surfaces. No knives pointing out the wrong way.
Under his T-shirt, his back had gotten sweaty from the kitchen’s heat. He squirmed and pulled his shirt free of his shoulders.
“Swamp back,” he said to Lena, passing her. “I gotta change.”
Down he went into the mudroom. Eunice was still playing Chet Baker. She had gotten somewhere, he saw. In the small bathroom, he shucked his shirt and blotted himself dry, then pulled on a fresh shirt and a sweater. His gums tingled. He patted down his pockets, but his cigarettes must have been in his coat up on the hook in the kitchen.
He peeked through the mudroom door at the top of the stairs.
“Chile, he swear he know everything.”
“I just let him go. Hey, better him than me.”
“Well, according to him, he is better.”
Seamus could hear his own blood pounding in his ears. How fucking embarrassing. But he couldn’t go down without risking the steps creaking, and he couldn’t go in without them knowing he had heard them. He kind of wanted them to know that he had heard them, but he liked Eunice and Lena. That made it worse. He just held his breath and waited for what he thought was five minutes, but which could have been years or just seconds. Into the kitchen he went, smiling at them, wondering if they saw him trying to play off how he felt. He couldn’t do or say anything different. That would have made it all worse. That would have been acting. But he was acting. He had already been conscripted into acting. They all had their little parts to play in this moment.
“Forgot my coat,” he said. He took the chore jacket off the hook and put it on. “Watch the pot for me.”
Lena laughed at his bad joke. Eunice smiled at him.
“You bet, boss man.”
Seamus flinched. Then descended into the dark of the mudroom.
The inside of his nose burned, and he brought his hand up to check for a nosebleed. The skin was so hot with shame it shocked him.
Seamus smoked out on the garden steps. The cold had deepened as it descended. Out over the tree line, the glinting refractory of the town’s edge. The high-output glow of the CVS across the highway blunted into gauzy white by the moisture in the air.
Smoking near the building was technically against regulations, but out in the garden there were allowances. A certain softness to the rule. They were in the business of mercy, after all, and seeing your beloved father or mother or whoever die was enough to drive you to smoking. But it was the evening, and the garden was empty except for Seamus. Turning over his bad feelings about the moment when he’d snapped at those girl poets. Though he did laugh remembering how he’d used the word cooter, which he hadn’t used in years. It had come on him so suddenly: cooter.
That was the closest he’d come to a poem in what felt like a lifetime.
In his first year, Seamus had written three villanelles about a young Jesuit at the end of World War I who receives the news of the armistice just as he has woken from a wet dream. Seamus wanted to write about the profane and the sacred, flesh and spirit, the death of God and the life of man, and the giving way of old things. He wanted to write of the comic circumstances of life and the universe, and the whole dark mystery. He wanted a great many things, and he had boiled it down to those three poems, but when the time came for discussion, no one said a word about his pieces.
It was only after the professor said, “Well, certainly someone has to have felt something,” that Oliver raised his hand and said, “The second piece does something interesting with form.” A shiver went through the room, and someone else said, “Yeah, totally, yeah.” The conversation whirred to life, and the discussion broadened to take in the scope of history and what it meant to be writing about World War I in today’s world of forced migrations and drone strikes and the famine in Yemen. What it meant to be writing about World War I and Old World suffering at a time when there was so much New World suffering, and Linda said, “I think it’s frankly Western European masturbation about the one time in their lives they felt like the prey instead of the predator—like, boohoo.” Helen mentioned that another interesting point was the lack of critique of the Jesuits, “and, like, colonialism, what about that?” Garza responded, “What about colonialism, exactly?” And then Helen replied, “Totally!” Garza said, “No, I meant, like, what do you mean by colonialism in this context?” Which prompted an embarrassed shuffle and then a defense, “The Catholics? Latin America? Hello?”
“To me,” someone interjected, “the biggest issue here is that the author has substituted formal stricture for emotional rigor, and seems unwilling to engage with the political dimension such a choice entails?”
Seamus had looked up from his scribbled notes to squint at the person who had spoken. It was Ingrid. She’d looked at him with her pale green eyes and bright blond eyebrows fixed in a perfect expression of lucid hatred.
After class, he went home and tore up all his poems and all drafts. Then he flung the bits from his window, and down they had rained like so many white leaves, landing on the top of the porch roof.
That was the first and the last time he had put something up for discussion in seminar.
He started begging off from including his pieces in course packets, telling himself they didn’t deserve his work. Then, later, he convinced himself that this was actually humility, an act of humble regard for the process. That his lack of submission was really about submitting totally to the nature of writing. That he would turn something in when it was ready, and it wasn’t about having his ego assuaged with praise or whatever, he said, chiefly to Oliver.
After that seminar, he and the professor had met for coffee to discuss his work. Seamus brought up obliquely the idea that he wasn’t writing for now or to now, for that matter, that he wanted to write for the eternal, for the everlasting, for the hereafter and for yesterday, forever and ever, amen, and the professor, north of sixty-five and weary with gratitude for life and liberty and the American way, who wore Wranglers and smoked American Spirits every morning as the sun came up, looked at him with passive approval.
“It can be difficult,” he started to say, and Seamus drew a sharp breath because he felt as though he was on the cusp of being understood for the first time in his whole life, but then the professor shook his head and sipped his black coffee. Seamus felt something roll up and store itself away from him.
“What can?” Seamus asked, but the professor was already fiddling with the edge of his newspaper. He looked startled that Seamus had asked him to continue his thought.
“Oh, I was just thinking that it can be difficult in your first year, but it gets better.”
Seamus felt stupid for having expected something more to follow from the phrase It can be difficult, as if he’d somehow been tricked into thinking that this person, this professor, cared about him.
It was a problem in the world, he thought, people going around pretending to care about others when they really didn’t. Or else, people feeling that they had to go around pretending that they cared about others when in fact they did not, or could not, or were without room in their lives to do so. He could understand that, at least—that sometimes your life was so filled with other things that there was no room for other people and their stuff. But perhaps he was overthinking this whole thing, and perhaps the professor did care about him and his work, and that this was not just a thing people said to make themselves feel better, It gets better. Perhaps this was an attempt, a genuine attempt, at an intervention in his life. Perhaps this was the moment he’d look back on and think, Yes, that’s when it all changed. But in the cynical part of his mind and his heart, Seamus could not help himself in discounting and discarding the professor’s sentiment even as he smiled and nodded and said, “You’re right, you’re right.”
That day in the café, they talked about the three villanelles and the difficulty of writing in old forms, of trying to bend them around to make them say something new, and Seamus hated the professor a little more with every word. He despised the suggestion that he should make his poems say something new, since that posited a progressive view of literature, located the importance of a piece in its being contemporary. The professor’s eyes were bright with the effort to connect or reach, and this too was something that Seamus resented. Why couldn’t his professor look at him like a peer, like an equal, rather than a riddle of pedagogy? He quietly sipped his coffee, and when he reached the bottom of his mug, he pretended there was more to drink. The professor gestured in loose orbits to poets dead and alive, of this moment and of the last, and Seamus thought, God, this is vulgar. This is so fucking vulgar. Just gross.
When his professor asked at the end of that first term why Seamus had stopped including his work in the packet, Seamus had just said, “Oh, you know. It can be difficult.”
Seamus put out his cigarette and breathed smoke. The gate at the edge of the garden opened and he heard someone walk toward him. The grass hissed underfoot. He squinted along the wall, blue-white in the dark.
“You got another one?” came a raspy voice.
The man passed into the light of the kitchen window. He was tall, bullish in a trucker cap and old-fashioned glasses, with a double bar running between the lenses.
“Sure.” Seamus flipped open the pack. The man took one of the cigarettes, but instead of lighting up, he looked at it.
“These one of them funny boys?”
“What do you mean?”
The man examined the pack in Seamus’s hand and then frowned.
“I don’t know them kind.”
“American Spirits,” Seamus said, then feeling embarrassed, “They’re just smokes, man. Take it easy.”
The man’s look of judgment did not soften, but Seamus took it on the chin.
“Thanks,” he said, then, lighting up with a red plastic lighter, he inhaled. “This is like smoking potpourri.”
Seamus did laugh at that. He had gone almost noseblind to the scent of American Spirits, but early on, the smell had been the thing he liked most about them. His high school English teacher had smoked them. He’d bought Seamus his first pack. Mr. Fulton, a balding man with a wide mouth and watery eyes. Mr. Fulton, whose semen had tasted like damp hay.
In college, American Spirits became shorthand for a certain kind of young person they all wanted to be. Stylishly unkempt in the way of the 1960s Greenwich Village crowd, but in far-flung college towns where all they had was affectation. But that kind of putting-on had gone out with stomp-clap-yeah in the mid-2000s, and marooned them all in a sea of cold, sterile irony. It was now outré to smoke American Spirits, but Seamus couldn’t break the habit. His parents smoked Menthol 100s.
“Tobacco’s a sweet plant,” Seamus said.
“Don’t I know it.”
The man leaned against the wall by the window, and Seamus watched him. “You work here?”
“Kitchen,” Seamus said.
“Must pay decent, you smoking these things.”
“It’s all right.”
“Mmm,” the man laughed a little, one eye pinched closed in the smoke.
“What do you do?”
“Oh,” the man said. “What do you do. You must be in school.”
“That obvious?”
The man dumped his ashes against the wall, drew the cigarette back to his lips and shrugged.
“I guess so. Fair enough.”
Seamus didn’t always know how to talk to townies. If he was supposed to be obeisant or obsequious or haughty, if he was supposed to pretend that grad students weren’t parasites. Sometimes, the townies didn’t want to do the two-step of pretending to care about higher education, but sometimes they did. Seamus followed. He didn’t know how to lead. How to have a real conversation with someone who didn’t care about what he cared about.
The man went on smoking. He let his eyes drift closed. The cold cement steps made Seamus’s ass numb.
“It’s gonna get bitter tonight,” the man said.
“Yeah, probably.”
“I didn’t put up my hens. I better get going. Hey, thanks for the smoke.”
“You bet,” Seamus said.
The man went back along the wall, bracing himself with his right hand, smoking with the left, but before he was gone he turned back.
“Hey, man. You want to see something?”
Seamus lifted his eyebrows.
“See what?”
The man nodded to the long driveway. Seamus looked back through the kitchen window, where Lena was wiping down surfaces. He stood up slowly, shaking out the numbness in the backs of his thighs, and followed the man into the dark.
They walked a little way down the crunching gravel, along the wooden fence posts that lined the driveway. The man was smoking as they went along, not talking, which made Seamus’s throat dry. The anticipatory silence of it. He had a thought about what all this meant. About where it was going and why. They climbed over the fence and stepped onto a shaded path. Seamus kept his eyes on the back of the man’s head. The white of his nape. He made his way carefully, but the man moved with such an easy, loping stride that Seamus was a little in awe of it. They reached the top of the hill and then hitched awkwardly down the opposite slope.
They were in what looked to be a dirt roundabout.
The man stood with his hands on his hips, at the center of what had once been a trailer park, and surveyed the long white trailers. The RVs. The campers. A utility pole shone yellow like a sick bruise high up over them. An array of dirt paths led to the ruins of these homes, these lives. It felt like a lonely, sad place.
“My old man owns this shithole,” the man said.
“Owns what exactly?”
“This land. He used to lease it out, let people park their trailers here. The bubble—before it went pop, you know.”
“The bubble?” Seamus asked.
“You know, with Obama and them. All the people, suddenly, needing a place. We opened up this little lot to them, and they stayed, and paid rent, but then it got a little worse, and with no jobs, because ol’ Raghead sent them overseas, people was in a bad way. And we had to close down because nobody was paying the rents on these things.”
“Oh,” Seamus said. He didn’t mention that the recession had started before Obama came into office. Both because there was no point to the argument and because the truth did not change the material reality of what had happened to this place and to these people. The names, really—the names of history—did not matter. The who did what to whom and when. Petty facts and details. But when you were in it. Before the present became the past and before the past became history, when it was your family going hungry or your town losing their jobs, getting wrung out, it didn’t matter if you got the blame pinned on the right son of a bitch. It didn’t matter if you could recite the tenets, or the lines of descent, of the class traitors. That was just stuff. Republicans. Democrats. Conservatives. Liberals. Libertarians. Communists. Socialists: Whatever made you feel good at night. They were all just kidding themselves. Seamus kept his mouth closed. Looked into the busted windows and the gaps where the metal siding had been taken off.
“Few years ago, some dopeheads came around,” the man said. “They took everything. Copper. Siding. Anything they could get their hands on. Like a pack of coyotes. Before that, the old man thought we’d do that cash-for-clunkers shit. You probably don’t remember it, but was some good prices for a while. We thought we’d do it. Or have this shit hauled. But we never got around to it. Then the old man got sick. You can see how all that turned out.”
Seamus felt some of that old Marxist guilt. The reflexive pity and shame of being a little better off than a person to whom he was speaking. But then it occurred to him that this man probably had more money than he did, and it eased some of the guilt. They occupied simultaneously two systems then. How strange. These networks of human relation.
“This what you wanted me to see?”
“No,” the man said. He turned then, and unzipped his pants unceremoniously and took out his dick. “This is.”
The nakedness, the blunt end of it, was distantly shocking to Seamus. But then, low, skidding across the surface of his tongue, something like want. Confirmation. He approached the man and reached down. Took the human warmth of his dick into hand and gave it an experimental tug.
“I see,” Seamus said.
“Well? You gonna do more than see or what?”
Up close, Seamus could see his scraggly sideburns, the wisp of hair peeking out from under the trucker cap. He smelled like American Spirits, sure enough. The man sucked down the last of the cigarette and flicked it away into the dry, cold grass. It sank into the dark and vanished. Seamus knelt and closed his eyes and pressed his face to the musky surface of the man’s pelvis. He smelled powerfully of sweat and all-day living, but there was something powdery and clean under that smell. He opened his mouth and the man’s cockhead slid over his lips, the tip damp, tasting a little like urine. He hadn’t shaken off good.
The man grunted in pleasure, and Seamus took this to be a sign that he was to continue, and continue he did. Until the man had worked himself into a real rhythm pumping into and out of Seamus’s mouth. Seamus liked to be used this way. Sometimes he thought the only things he really needed in life were poetry and to be occasionally held down and fucked like dogmeat. He closed his eyes and braced his hands against the man’s hips, but the man swatted his hands away.
“Don’t touch me,” he said. “You don’t get to touch me. Now open that mouth up, I want you to gag on it.”
Seamus sank deeper then, let the man’s dick stretch the delicate webbing at the back of his throat. The guy wasn’t hung. Not impressively. There was nothing impressive about it except that he had malice to the way he fucked Seamus’s mouth, and that wasn’t nothing. Seamus enjoyed that. His mouth grew gooey with phlegm. And there was a persistent burn down in his throat, but he accepted this, too, as one accepts the outer dark of estrangement from grace.
The man squeezed the back of Seamus’s head in a way that was almost tender, and Seamus opened his eyes, looked up. For a moment, in the amber light of the utility pole, he saw Mr. Fulton and then his teacher from the poetry seminar. But it was neither above him. It was the man in the trailer park lot, fucking his mouth and mumbling under his breath that Seamus was a good boy, had a good mouth, knew what to do.
The man shoved home. Down, down, down in Seamus’s throat, and Seamus did almost choke. But he didn’t. He held it down. And the man groaned and finished, and when he pulled out, he rubbed what was left across Seamus’s face. Like some kind of anointing, warm and sticky, smelling like spit and the sea.
Seamus stood up. Wiped at his mouth with his arm, and tried to compose himself. His mouth was full. He didn’t want to swallow, but the man’s eyes were on him. And he felt that if he spat it out, something terrible would happen. The man was up on him, just watching him with hard, close eyes.
Seamus swallowed. The man pulled Seamus close and kissed him. There was no love in it. There never was. But in the kissing, Seamus felt if not close to the man, then at least some acknowledgment that they were together in something, whatever that was. It had been a long time since Seamus had been together with someone in something. Even fleetingly. The kiss wasn’t even particularly pleasant. They were just pushing spit around in a gross play-acting of desire and pleasure. Seamus wasn’t hard. The man kept groping between his legs, trying to get something going, but down there Seamus felt cold and flaccid. More than anything, it hurt to be gripped that hard and pawed at. The man licked his face clean and Seamus closed his eyes and imagined a smaller, more private darkness in which he was totally alone.
“Give it a rest,” Seamus said.
On the way back, the man, smoking another one of Seamus’s cigarettes, said, “I needed that.”
“Dying people make you hard or what?”
“No,” he said, stopping. Then he stuck his fingers hard in Seamus’s chest. “Don’t make jokes about the dying. Show some fucking respect.”
“You’re the one who said you needed it.”
The slap, when it came, was a surprise. They were standing on the path in the woods. The hospice lights were visible through the trees at a distance. Seamus felt their aloneness acutely. The man caught him around the throat and put the cigarette out on the side of his face. It burned, slowly, down through the skin.
“My dad is in that fucking place dying. He was a giant. And now he’s fucking wasting away like some faggot with AIDS. You don’t make jokes about what dying does to a person.”
Seamus tried to get free, and the man just clenched his throat tighter until he again sank to his knees. The man crouched with him, and they were face-to-face on the cold ground, the man squeezing off his windpipe, looking at him like he was a child.
“You ever have something in this life make you feel small? I didn’t think so. What this world does to people. You don’t know the first thing about cruelty. I should show you. If it was any fairness in the world, I’d show you. You think just because you like sucking dick, the world showed you the back of its hand. But it ain’t. It ain’t nothing to what real suffering is.”
As he talked, Seamus could see channels of spit foaming around his canines. Pronounced. Yellow. He had the mouth of a predator. Seamus could smell the cigarettes and the come and the drying of the man’s spit on his face. They were so close then. As possible as two people could be. Their faces so near. It was like they had joined in communal prayer. The man was gazing into his eyes.
“I ought to split your head open,” the man said. “I could. I could take you back down to them trailers and show you something funny. Then see how you laugh. What do you have to say about that, funny man?”
How inadequate he was to this moment. What did he really have in the face of his own extinction? It was funny, almost. He felt so dumb. So dumb and helpless.
“Good night Joe, good night Joe, good night,” Seamus rasped.
The man blinked slowly, as if struck.
“I hate faggots like you.” But he did let Seamus go. He shoved him away and stood. He spat at Seamus, then relit the cigarette and walked on ahead.
Seamus sat alone on the ground. He gingerly touched the burn on the side of his face. It was small. So small. Already, he could feel how much worse it would hurt later. But he was safe. He was alone and he was safe and he looked up to the tops of the trees and tried to catch his breath. Then he laughed and coughed—how did the rest of that fucking Tate poem go?
In the hospice bathroom, Seamus blotted at his face. The circular burn from the cigarette. The puckered angry ridge. The oozing yellow of the fat and flesh below. In the light of the bathroom, everything a little lurid. A little bit like horror. The water stung. And the antiseptic from the medicine cabinet. Stinging, but the pain also distant from him.
Why had he not done something in retaliation for what was done to him out in the woods? Why had he let it happen? The man was stronger than him, he knew. But he could have done something. Anything. He might have tried to get loose and free himself.
The image of himself on his knees. The man’s hands around his throat. Briefly, the cold of the air, the damp musk of the woods. The smell of his own cigarettes breathed back on him. He was okay now. Safe now. But the man lingered. Seamus washed his face and stuck a Band-Aid across his jaw, pulling it so taut that he thought it might snap.
In the kitchen, the air humid. The bisque humming along. Eunice cutting up a crusty baguette. Lena churning salad. They were talking about the weather. Ice on the roads. It had been a long fucking day. Too long.
“You look like hell, boy,” Eunice said.
“Feel like it.”
“What happened to you?”
“Just a cut. You know. Happens sometimes.”
Eunice hummed like she didn’t believe a fucking word he said. Stupid shit.
“Was that you and Bert I saw out in the garden?”
Seamus looked down into the shiny, battered work surface. His shadow. The burst of ceiling light radiating out from his head like a bruised halo.
“Is that his name?”
“He must have bummed a cigarette. He’s always bumming something.”
“That he did.”
“His daddy up on three. He a mean one.”
“Him or his daddy,” Seamus asked, smiling despite himself. What was this goading thing in him.
“You a mess,” Eunice said.
“He’s the meanest dying man I ever seen,” Lena said. “One time, his food beat me out the door when I was up there. Nurse come around talking about some, ‘He prefers it left outside.’ Like, no shit. He almost painted the wall with it.”
“Some of them don’t know no better,” Eunice said. “Some of them just. You know. They making they transition and don’t know what else to do. So, they just. Take it out on everybody. I understand. It’s a hard thing, giving up this world.”
“Is it?” Seamus asked. “I mean. Sometimes. I’d like to just. Give it all up.”
“And do what, boy? You ain’t seen the world yet. How you know you wanna give it up and you ain’t seen nothing?”
Seamus put his chin on his hand and gazed at Eunice.
“They should let you teach the poetry workshop,” he said.
Eunice stopped and turned her head to look at him. Her expression closed and her eyes got dark, distant. All you could hear was the sputter of the pot and the rustle of the leaves as Lena turned them over in the bowl.
“I don’t know nothing about that particular life,” Eunice said. “Wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”
Seamus had trespassed somehow, he realized. He had said something stupid and naive.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
“That’s exactly the problem.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, and she cut the last of the bread and put it on the sheet pan. She opened the oven and set it under the broiler. “Check on that soup. Do some work.”
Seamus slid off the stool and checked the pot. The bisque was getting there. He took up a carton of cream and poured it in. Stirred. Watched the soup grow matte and thick. He tasted it for salt and found it a little too sweet, so added the salt. But not much. There were health concerns.
When he was satisfied, Eunice put him on fruit salad duty. Chopping mangoes, pineapple, peaches. Peeling grapes and slicing them. Drizzling on the lemon juice in a big glass bowl.
He thought about what he had said to Eunice about teaching poetry. He had meant to say something about how inadequate his education was. He had wanted to say that her lessons had a material substance to them, that they meant something to him. That she was a part of the real world that he longed to belong to. But now, squeezing lemons and drizzling their juice over the fruit, he could understand how stupid that must have sounded to her. Platitudes. Eunice didn’t go around living her life awaiting a moment to dispense wisdom. She was in the business of living, getting by. Eunice was at the center of a whole universe that he couldn’t begin to pierce and understand. It was a civic inattentiveness of the soul that had made him say something so stupid.
Eunice didn’t need his benediction. His compliment was an insult.
It stung his pride.
Before service, they had a little break, and Seamus made espresso for them all. He poured them into the little cups and served Eunice and Lena with a cloth draped over his arm. Something he’d seen in a movie. And put on a bad French accent and said, “Mesdames.”
They sipped at the kitchen island and moaned in pleasure. Eunice nodded in approval.
“You do have a way,” she said.
Seamus nodded stiffly, then, because he couldn’t help himself, he grinned.
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
Dinner service was in the dining room at the long table. They set out the plates, the cutlery, the glasses. Many of the residents were in wheelchairs and some bedridden. Others needed their attendants and nurses to help. Sometimes family. That night, there wasn’t anything special planned. A small dinner of the bisque, the bread, the salad. An apple cider to celebrate the season. Just a little. The residents came in, dressed in soft clothes. Shawls, wraps, gowns, cashmere sweatpants, chinos, heads wrapped in turbans or bandannas.
This gray procession of the dying and their equally ashen family. The old, unmarried daughters and sisters, the stricken brothers and sons. Grandchildren. Nieces. They were only seven or eight for dinner tonight. Bert sat at the head of the table near his father, who was quite thin and severe. But he was dressed, fully dressed, in a sport coat and dress pants. Bert in jeans and his flannel looked so curiously mismatched. But they shared a heavy, dark intensity.
Dinner service under way. The clinking of spoons on porcelain. Seamus at the kitchen doorway, peering out over this assemblage. Their heads bowed over their bowls. Grateful, perhaps, for having something to do with their hands at long last. Eunice down in the mudroom, Lena washing the dishes.
Bert looked up then. Eye contact, curiously intense. Seamus thought about what he’d said out in the woods. Hating faggots like Seamus. Jokes about the dying. Oh, Seamus thought now. Oh. His dad didn’t know. Bert was in the closet. That explained the misplaced rage.
Seamus felt powerful. That was the word for it. Powerful.
He smiled at Bert, gave a faggy little wave of his fingers just as the father looked up to see. And he raised his brows suggestively and turned back into the kitchen.
Lena was watching him.
“We got enough trouble,” she said.
“Won’t be any trouble.”
“Yeah, not for you.”
Seamus shrugged.
But he felt good.
Like he’d gotten something back for himself in the end.
Seamus rode up North First Avenue on the icy sidewalk. He hit a left and rolled down a slope, passing under trees. He was on the side roads, cutting through yards on his way into downtown. Occasionally, he set a dog off barking and pulling at their chain in a yard, or passed a family sitting down to dinner or watching the evening news. These illuminated windows of other lives, families, made him dizzy.
Then a set of high beams shot out overhead and dropped low. He pulled up on the sidewalk to let it pass, but instead the lights dipped out and he could hear the car on the road behind him, rolling along with a slow crackle. He glanced over his shoulder. A black truck was easing along behind him. The street was otherwise empty. Quiet. Houses and apartment buildings. He cut across the street and rode upward, pointing east. The car followed. The road grew narrower, darker. Inclined. Seamus pumped harder to gather some speed, and then looped back, cut down and turned north. There was a squeal and a rubber thud, like trash cans going over.
He gathered another burst of speed and pushed hard, his thighs burning. His back ached. The sweat stung the burn under the bandage. But he kept going. Was it Bert? Was he coming to collect his due? Seamus reached the top of the hill near College Green. He exhaled, easy. He knew where he was now. He glided down by the Co-Op, turned and hit Iowa Ave., which he took up into the heart of downtown. The undergrads hanging out under the lights near Joe’s. Loud music coming from the bar on the corner. He saw Prairie Lights and Mickey’s. Thought of dipping in there until he was clear. Then he rode up to Market and parked his bike outside of George’s.
But then he remembered. It was a seminar night. His classmates would be in there. He peeked through one of the dim front windows, peering in with his hands over his eyes. He saw Oliver. He saw Ingrid and Linda. Helen. Some of the boys from the other group of poets. Laughing at the bar, in the booths. The music was loud. It shook the glass. He couldn’t go in there now, showing up at the end of the night, knowing he hadn’t been invited and why. He was tired. He had no patience for it. He needed to keep a lookout. He wasn’t totally sure he’d ditched the black truck, whoever it was. If the driver was even after him, which they very well might not have been. He needed to stop being so paranoid. So sure of his own victimhood. It made him out to be like Beth and her Gorgon head.
He jogged up the street to the Fox Head. Fiction bar, but an off night for them, and so empty of writers, and at that particular moment also empty of locals. The bartender was about forty-five, balding, and skeletal in the face. He wore old band T-shirts and made a show of cleaning glasses. The bar was dim and loud, the pool table vacant for the moment. Seamus felt the emptiness of the bar acutely. There was no heat. He ordered a PBR, but the bartender kept looking down at the glass he was cleaning as though he didn’t hear Seamus. After a few moments, he nodded and filled the glass and pushed it slowly across the bar. Seamus dropped the two dollars on the bar top. The bartender just looked at it, then, shrugging again, he picked up another glass and started wiping.
Seamus dumped himself into a booth near the side wall. The greasy window gave a view of the street and sidewalk, John’s across the street. As he drank the PBR, he tried to keep his hands from shaking. Whenever a car was in the street, he slid low and peered through the window, trying to see the make and model. Never any trucks. Just small, compact cars belonging to undergrad parents or sensible people with real jobs. University ladies in stretch-waist pants. People going into John’s. He checked his watch.
The beer did not help. But the second one did. Two men entered, ball caps low over their heads. Seamus sat at the bar after his third beer, saw no point in going back and stooping in the booth. He sat next to a tall guy in coveralls. The guy was drinking slow out of a bottle. He had a thick beard.
It was just the two of them at the bar, drinking slowly. The guy’s friend came from the back of the bar where the bathrooms were situated. He tried to goad his friend into a conversation.
“I think you two can work it out,” he said. “Don’t give up on something good.”
“It’s not giving up if he’s being an asshole.”
Overhead, John Cougar, “Hurts So Good” playing slightly too loud. Distortion in the speakers. He could feel the music in his teeth fillings. The guy next to him mumbling. His friend being persistent. Then Seamus felt something strike the back of his arm and he looked. It was the guy’s friend.
“Hey, buddy. Tell him that he shouldn’t dump his boyfriend.”
“You shouldn’t dump your boyfriend,” Seamus said. The bartender slid change across the counter. The friend slid it back and added two dollar bills. The guy with the boyfriend about to be dumped looked mortified.
“I’m sorry. He’s very drunk.”
“So am I,” Seamus said. Pointing the bottle end at the two of them. “Impossibly bombed, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t I know you?” the friend asked. He, like his buddy, was tall. Carhartt jacket, baseball cap pulled low. He was lanky and had a gap.
“No, but you could very easily. I’m Seamus.”
“Hartjes,” he said.
“Mouthful,” Seamus said dryly.
“Fyodor,” the other guy said.
“Bigger mouthful.”
“Parents,” Hartjes said.
“You guys Russian?”
“Black,” Fyodor said. “Just black.”
“Well,” Hartjes started to say.
“Mostly black.”
Seamus’s neck flushed. “Oh. I didn’t mean that about your names. I’m sorry.”
“White man on the run,” Hartjes said.
Fyodor shrugged.
“Don’t listen to me, by the way. If you want to dump your boyfriend. You should. Don’t let me stop you.”
“He’s a good guy. It’s just hard. I guess that’s always true. For everybody.”
“Yeah,” Seamus said. “Boy. That’s the truth.”
“That sounds suspiciously like the beginning of a story.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about it. I’m a poet.”
“A poet! Man, no kidding. We had to bail on the last place because it was full of your people.”
“Yeah. They’re a bit like pack animals that way.”
“You mean we.”
“I mean we, yes,” Seamus said, laughing. The song changed. Dylan. “Tambourine Man.”
Fyodor put his bottle down and closed his eyes. He was blushing a little. Seamus knew it was time for him to get home and mind his own business for a change. But it was nice, sitting here with two people. After the night he’d had.
“Man, you ever just feel like. I don’t know. Like you could just knock your brains out, you’re so grateful the day is over?”
Hartjes eyed him and Fyodor laughed.
“White boys are crazy,” Hartjes said.
“I think you’re right.”
Hartjes and Fyodor walked Seamus to his bike out by George’s. Fyodor was driving home to the boyfriend, the one he was maybe planning to dump, who knew. Hartjes lingered while Seamus undid his bike. Hartjes said he’d walk Seamus as far as the parking garage down by the union. That’s where he’d left his truck. Seamus said it was on the way.
They went up Market and passed the business school. It was dark but not late, just after eleven. The wind was getting sharp, though, coming off the river. Down by the parking garage, that tower of orange lights. Hartjes stepped in close to Seamus. Breathed on his lips. Sour beer. Seamus kissed him, then—remembering Bert, remembering the espresso—he pulled back. He felt bad about his breath. He’d rinsed his mouth, but he could still taste Bert. Hartjes smiled cryptically. Put his hand on the small of Seamus’s back.
“You could come up to my place,” he said. “Or . . .”
“I think I better just. Go home. Before I get into trouble.”
“Fair enough,” Hartjes said. “Give me your number, though.”
Seamus typed his number into the phone and handed it back. Hartjes texted him and said he’d see him around if he wanted. Or not. Seamus said yeah, it’d be great. Then they split and Seamus was alone.
Taking his bike across the bridge. The wind was stronger then, slicing up his face. He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.
It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck.
He mattered so little.
Seamus lived in a studio apartment in the wooded hills that overlooked the rest of campus. The floor was creaky under his pacing, and every so often it gave a sharp yelp, like a frightened cat. His apartment was in an old house built back in the fifties or sixties. There was something quite dense about the house, except in his apartment, which had been cleaved from a larger room. You could feel the difference in the strength of the wood, how it warped and threatened to give way.
They were all living in such squares, carved from the greater mass of history, from old lives.
In his apartment, he reheated some of the bisque he’d carried home from the hospice and sat at his desk. A stack of discarded poems gazed back at him with inert judgment—his compost heap, he called it. Among the dashed, hurried fragments, quatrains and couplets torn from the ends of other failed things, there was a crown of sonnets about Alsatian nuns during the Thirty Years’ War.
He had once read a historical account of a group of children who had been stuffed into barrels and floated down a river in order to avoid the Catholic authorities. Except that someone had made a horrible mistake, the children’s barrels had been battered by rocks, and the children had all died horrible deaths. A group of nuns had gathered by the riverside at night and waded deep into the water in order to extract the children, or what there was of them that could still be found. It was fable-like, the idea of a group of holy sisters shedding their habits and wading in their white vestments into cold water to seek drowned children. For days after reading the story he had walked around feeling heavy with it, like he was the one who’d gone swimming with all his clothes on.
The poems had come out decently at first, or so he had thought. The lines glinted like cold stars, harsh and distant and perfect. But after he had completed them, each sonnet the story of a sister and a child, seeker and the lost, a call and a response or, rather, a silence, he found that he hated them. He had rushed through in the excitement of creation, in the blurry exhilaration of putting words down. Worse still, he had come up to the very edge of his technical ability, and had resorted in his more desperate moments to puns, to cheap tricks, to dodges of sentiment. There was a falseness to the poems, further illuminated by the stricture of the form itself. There was nowhere to hide in a sonnet, which was something that before had been the very point.
It used to seem to him that you could write about the past as a way of understanding the present. But now, his classmates wrote only about the present and its urgency. The very act of comprehension or contextualization was centered on the self, but the self as abstracted via badly understood Marxist ideology. The self in contemporary poetry was really some debased, abject manifestation of a system of wrongs and historical atrocities, shorn of their historical contexts or any real rigorous understanding. Their poems were complaints of hurts done and occluded. No one wanted to read his poems about Catholicism or Alsatian nuns or the apocalypse of the Thirty Years’ War. They wanted to know how he fit in. Poetry was just a matching game, the poems simply cards.
He stared at a notebook that he had pinned open with paper clips and weighed down with a ceramic bear. Then he took out a pen and set down the first lines of a poem that had come to him on the ride home:
How vast your works, O Gorgon Head—
the night, the century, the quiet, the cry.