C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag
Issue 1: Winter 2011
Editors
Nico Vreeland
Marcos Velasquez
Eric Markowsky
Sean Clark
Published by Chamber Four LLC
Cambridge, MA
2011
Smashwords Edition
Published by Chamber Four LLC, 2011
Smashwords Edition
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C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag, Issue 1, Winter 2011. “Detroying Herman Yoder,” Copyright © 2011 by Gregory Blake Smith. “The Black Wig,” Copyright © 2011 by Kim Henderson. “Comforts of Home,” Copyright © 2011 by Anne Leigh Parrish. “Creation,” Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Finnegan. “Ramadan, Jihad, and Azad,” Copyright © 2011 by Bilal Ibne Rasheed. “Heat,” Copyright © 2011 by Michael Henson. “Waiting for Home,” Copyright © 2011 by Ron Koppelberger. “After Reaching the Home of Juan Pablo Lorenz,” Copyright © 2011 by Marc Levy. “Water Song,” Copyright © 2011 by Terra Brigando. “Shriveled,” Copyright © 2011 by M.J. Fievre. “the presence of others,” Copyright © 2011 by D.H. Sutherland. “Grace,” Copyright © 2011 by Gale Acuff. “To an Old Poet Dying Young,” and “A Sargent Portrait, Maybe,” Copyright © 2011 by William Doreski. “The Transamerica Pyramid,” Copyright © 2011 by Yaul Perez-Stable Husni. “How to See Yourself,” Copyright © 2011 by Shannon C. Walsh. “Town and Country,” “Frog Pond,” and “An Outdated Globe,” Copyright © 2011 by Luca Penne. “Dementia (I),” Copyright © 2011 by Julian Smith-Newman. “A state of mind, like most things—,” Copyright © 2011 by Katelyn Kiley. “Unknown Destination,” and “Falling Asleep in the Afternoon,” Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Lawless. “Picture This,” Copyright © 2011 by Jenn Monroe. “Illumination,” Copyright © 2011 by Greg Hewett.
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Table of Contents
Fiction
by Gregory Blake Smith
by Kim Henderson
by Anne Leigh Parrish
by Margaret Finnegan
by Bilal Ibne Rasheed
by Michael Henson
by Ron Koppelberger
Nonfiction
After Reaching the Home of Juan Pablo Lorenz
by Marc Levy
by Terra Brigando
by M.J. Fievre
Poetry
by D.H. Sutherland
by Gale Acuff
by William Doreski
by Yaul Perez-Stable Husni
by Shannon C. Walsh
by Luca Penne
by Julian Smith-Newman
A state of mind, like most things—
by Katelyn Kiley
by Daniel Lawless
by Jenn Monroe
by Greg Hewett
Destroying Herman Yoder
by Gregory Blake Smith
In the gun store I couldn’t make up my mind. There was all that smug menace to choose from. I hefted revolvers and breech loaders, practiced executing the world with Mausers and Glocks. The store owner—his name was Ronnie—was very patient, answering my questions, overlooking my ignorance. In the end it was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 Special I settled on, swayed I suppose by the associations—fedoras, rain-slick alleys, platinum blondes and gut-shot punks. I have always been a classicist at heart, as even the Academy of American Poets recognized.
According to The Review of Wound Ballistics, the Glaser Safety Slug (one of which I have just discharged into a pumpkin to the right of Herman Yoder’s head) has a pre-fragmented core of compressed number twelve shot. It uses an eighty grain bullet rated at +P velocity, a design that causes the slug to expend its energy into the target, without excessive penetration and the danger of collateral injury.
I say all this to Herman Yoder, standing there in his living room, even that part about the +P velocity, smiling calmly the way madmen do in the movies.
It was not easy finding him. Yoder is a common surname in Iowa. Drive through the environs of the Amana colonies and you will see it painted sloppily on every other mailbox. I had to thumb though a dozen phone books, call this or that Yoder and impersonate lost high-school buddies, confused UPS drivers, until finally I located his house in a cornfield outside Wellman, just down the road from a wooden church on the National Historic Register, a mere eighteen miles from the high school he’d attended, twenty-two from the farm Grace Albrecht had grown up on.
“What kind of name is that anyway?” I say now, coming back from the pumpkin and plopping myself down in this sad Castro convertible. I keep the gun leveled at him.
“Yoder,” he says, as if that explained something.
“Not Yoder,” I say; and then like a punch line: “Herman. What kind of dick-ass name is that?”
The Review of Wound Ballistics. Don’t you love it?
The Castro convertible isn’t the only sad thing here. The whole house is sad in my considered opinion. A suburban rambler, circa 1970, an out-of-place eyesore with its pseudo-modernist horizontals, low-pitched roof, the nonsense of a lawn abutting cornfield on three sides. There’s a little windmill in the front yard. Maybe five feet tall. And in the backyard a split-rail yard swing. Very rustic.
Somewhere, acres away, a harvester is running. Rolled up in my back pocket I’ve got my well-thumbed copy of Action Comics #187.
He asks for the second time who I am, and for the second time I tell him. I am Ichabod Sick, I say, which is more or less true.
“What kind of name is that?” he has the nerve to say and I smile, make a checkmark in the air to show I appreciate the bravado.
“Sick,” I say and cock the Special. “That’s what kind of name.”
Twenty years ago it had been a choice between Ichabod and Orlando, dactyl or amphibrach. I took a poll of friends and enemies. Orlando, it was felt, had a certain flair which, in my warmer moments toward myself, appealed—thick, Harlequin Romance hair, a chemise open at the throat, maybe a casement window dusted with Tuscan moonlight. Or so I described it years later to an interviewer from The American Poetry Review. But Ichabod had a doggy tenacity that I thought would stick by me when the going got tough. When I handed the official papers in, the Cambridge District Court secretary had grimaced.
“Sid Vicious,” she’d said. This was 1981. “Johnny Rotten. Is that the idea?”
Herman Yoder, on the other hand, looks like a Nashville reject. A blonde-streaked mullet that’s already getting on my nerves, a ripped “Achy Breaky” t-shirt, blue jeans. I caught him barefooted and about to shave, which gives him a particularly vulnerable air. It’s a pleasure to find him so easy to hate.
I tell him to sit on his hands. To put his hands under his thighs and keep them there. This was something my high school chess coach taught the chess team to do. “Think,” he used to say. “Then think some more. Don’t take your hands out until you understand the position on the board.”
“Think,” I tell Herman Yoder now. “Then think some more. Don’t take your hands out until you understand the position on the board.”
He wants to know what he’s supposed to think about.
“Crime and punishment,” I tell him.
In addition to Herman Yoder, and Ichabod Sick, and the pumpkin with a bullet in its brain, the other sad entities in Herman Yoder’s living room are a television, a couch, photos of what one surmises is Herman Yoder’s family. Tucked in between two chairs there’s a bookcase filled with diet books. Taped on the picture window, facing out, made of construction paper, are two black cats, a witch on a broomstick, and an impossibly orange moon.
On the end table beside me is the 1990 Clear Creek Amana High School Yearbook (faux-leather binding, faux-gilt lettering). I open it at the back and start paging through it. There’s a Zelinsky, and a Zeiner. And then there’s a Yoder. Three Yoders actually—Anna, Eva, and Herman. We ask the Herman in the photo if he knows that he will grow up to wear an Achy Breaky t-shirt like a capital-L loser, and then flip to the front of the book.
Aaron, Abbott, Adamczyk—you should quit now, we tell ourselves, but the pages keep turning—Adamson, Ahling, Aiken....
And then there she is, her eighteen-year-old self looking at me from off the page without reproach or shadow, in one of her cape dresses, and with a prayer veil covering her hair, and with that smile of hers, and for a moment the world shimmers again, coheres, and the urge to kill living things that has been hovering just above the Castro convertible drifts toward the open window.
* * * *
The first time I saw her I was twenty-five and she was twelve. I was a hotshot in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the lithium/valproate cocktail that had gotten me through college was still working, and I was living with a girl who liked to expose her breasts to me as if they were a force of nature. Her name was Judith, and she was ironic and Jewish and thought Iowa was a hoot.
It was at the Steam Days Celebration in Kalona, where Judith and I had gone because that’s what we did on weekends, attended rural Iowa as if it were a local talent show. There were restored tractors and harvesters on display, steam-powered antiquities with belts flapping and pop valves hissing. A Bingo game was being called over a PA system. We walked around and made fun of everything, ate bratwurst and roasted corn, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s bare limbs. Judith had on these big sunglasses that made her look like Jackie O. And I had on a tank top because in those days I was lean and had nice arms. We turned into the main tent where pies and fresh-baked bread and handicrafts were being sold. It was Judith who spotted her.
I captured the moment beautifully in “The Atmosphere Cleaves.” That sense of another world intruding on this one. A higher world depositing here as a joke or a parable—or just to rub our noses in our lame, drooling, mud-caked, manic-depressive inadequacy—a splash of clarity. She was with her mother, standing behind a card-table with a checked tablecloth flung over it, selling jars of homemade preserves and jellies, the two of them in Mennonite dress, their hair parted in the middle and swept back under a little cap, their bodies in unflattering, homemade dresses that covered their arms and dropped to their ankles, identical Reeboks on their feet. This was nothing to me. I had gotten used to seeing Mennonite families on shopping excursions in the malls around Iowa City. But there was about this girl a lucid beauty that was blinding. Not Hollywood or Vogue beauty, understand. There were no flaring cheekbones. She had only as much mouth as was necessary. But her face was perfect. A beauty as bare of ornament as an equation.
“We must have intercourse,” Judith said, parting the red slash of her lips and poking me in the ribs. “We must sample her wares.”
What I remember most, and what made it into “The Atmosphere Cleaves,” was the sudden sense of my own carnality, the nakedness of my limbs, my shoulders, the bare crankshafts of Judith’s collarbones. I saw myself, saw Judith and me, as this girl must have seen us—in our vanity, our sex unredeemed by any glimmer of love. Judith did all the talking, sampling the various jellies and preserves—plum, peach, apple butter—commenting on each and asking questions. Each time it was the mother who responded, even when Judith directed her questions at the girl, who stood there shy and overwhelmed. The only word she uttered was “Grace” when Judith—from point-blank range—asked her her name.
“Grace,” Judith repeated, and the word slithered in the grass and disappeared under the side of the tent. “And how old are you, Grace?”
“She’s twelve,” the mother said, handing me the change. She noticed my hand tremors. The lithium.
“And do you say your prayers every night?”
A glaze overspread mother and daughter. They were used to this. The sly harassment, the indirect ridicule.
“Come on,” I said, taking Judith by the arm. She smiled her Scarsdale-Vassar, we-have-to-be-going smile, and let me lead her away.
“Well, that was fun,” she said when we were back outside the tent. We watched a threshing machine clank along.
“Your tits were taking up all the oxygen.”
“My tits—” she said, appraising herself—“belong on Mt. Rushmore.”
And that would have been that. The girl would have been slimly decanted into my first book of poems, made her way into various anthologies, and that would have been an end to it. Except that six years later I saw her again. Saw her in a reprise of that first time as if reality had cribbed from my poem—the checked tablecloth, the antiquarian sunshine, the chuffing machinery in the background....
I was back at the Workshop, this time as teacher, Judith long gone, lithium/valproate succeeded by Tegretol, which was succeeded by Cibalith-S. I had been through some tough stuff, including a couple of hospitalizations, during one of which I fell in love with this anorexic girl. This was at Mass General, on a ward called Bullfinch 7 where they put the schizos and the self-harming bipolars and the teenage girls with one foot in the grave. We were quite a crew, sitting around the dayroom, half of us talking to the ficus plants and the other half looking like they’d just flown in from Dachau. I was in a manic phase, taking twenty showers a day, and this girl—her name was Lydia—she was trying to get rid of her body. We were a pair. We’d go into her room, close the door against the rules, and she’d say my name over and over—Ichabod Sick, she’d say, like she was tasting the words, Ichabod Sick—and she’d describe herself, name each body part like an inventory of disgust, as though what I was doing to her was a punishment, one more way of mortifying her body. Her pelvic bones stuck out like faucets. Frangible, I whispered to her like a sex word. She died two months after I was released.
So I was out there at Iowa just trying to hold myself together, keeping my distance from the grad students who wanted to drink beer with the Semi-Famous Young Poet, watching Love Connection in my room, or driving for hours through the dirt roads that cut the Iowa countryside. Sometimes I got out and walked through the cornfields, locked myself into a row and just walked, the stalks of corn like blinders on either side of me, and forward the only direction. It was during one of these excursions that I happened upon Steam Days again.
What had been so striking about her as a twelve-year-old—the simple beauty, the asexuality that was so pure that it tipped over into sexuality—was somehow still there in the eighteen-year-old, but now under the yoke of her dress, under the long dropping fabric, there was also the soft insistence of her breasts, of her hips moving like a pledge or a promise. To the poet Ichabod Sick—standing off to the side in lithium-soaked wonder—it was the Marriage of Existence and Essence, the pure Mennonite spirit poured into the physical vessel of a lovely young woman.
“N-32,” a voice called over the PA system. I went up to their table and smiled like a pilgrim.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” the daughter answered.
“Do you remember me?”
She threw a look at her mother, smiled to try to cover what she must have considered the rudeness of not remembering me.
“Your name is Grace,” I said.
“Yes...”
“I wrote a poem about you.”
At which mother and daughter again exchanged looks. “B-8” the PA announced.
And then I did one of my idiot-savant things. I reached out and touched her. With my fingertips I touched the girl just where her hair swept under her cap. In another second I think the mother would have screamed bloody murder, but I started reciting “The Atmosphere Cleaves,” and the sound of a poem suddenly in the air—with its music and illogic, like the English language had suffered a mental breakdown—stopped her. They waited until I was done—until the poem with its liquid eroticism and spangled angels, its Bingo game running in the background, had appeared and vanished—and then the mother inserted her forearm in the space between her daughter and me.
“You should go along now.”
“Did you like it?” I asked.
“Yes, but you should go.”
“I didn’t understand it,” the girl said. Her mother shot her a look as if to say who cares whether we understood it, you little fool, but the girl kept her eyes fixed on me.
“Who are you?” she said.
I just stood there and smiled—dumb, discovered, outed.
“Martin,” I said. The old word felt funny in my mouth. “My name is Martin Browne. Marty.”
* * * *
There is about Herman Yoder the stink of life. His thighs get hairy disappearing into his boxers. His toenails are bent and yellow. There is a brown haze of testosterone and semen hanging about him.
Under his yearbook photo it says Nickname: “Yo!” Quote: “See ya, suckers!” Somewhere in the fields, closing in on us, there’s the sound of that harvester still.
“Yo,” I say. He takes one of his hands out from under his thighs, gives me the finger, and then shoves his hand back under his leg. “You don’t seem to understand the position on the board,” I say and wave the gun in front of my face like there’s maybe a fly bothering me. “No one knows I’m here. There’s no apparent motive.”
He does a good job of hiding his fear behind the big man’s bravado. “You gonna tell her how I cried and begged for mercy? Is that it?”
“What?”
“That pot-smoking bitch!”
I close my eyes. I do not want Herman Yoder’s wives and/or girlfriends to clutter the equation. “Please,” I say. Through my clothes I can feel Action Comics #187 in my back pocket. On page twelve is Superman’s dream of a clarified world: a Fortress of Solitude in the artic waste, without germ, pulse, or decay.
“Tell her to go fuck herself!”
So I shoot his cat. I point the gun first at Herman Yoder’s face and then slide it to where Herman Yoder’s ugly yellow cat is walking with its slinky haunches and I shoot it. It’s a necessary demonstration. A visual aid. The cat flies apart from the impact, then reassembles, rolls over, hisses at the air, tries to get away from its own insides, and then lies down panting. There’s surprisingly little blood.
Herman Yoder is screaming. “Skunk!” he cries. “Skunk!”
What kind of human being names his cat Skunk?
“Skunk!”
“You’re a very ugly man, Herman Yoder.”
He starts to curse me again, but his voice is gone. Over the sofa there’s a sign, a molded plastic bas-relief of a handgun with the legend: WE DON’T CALL 911. That’s as good as a poem.
“Now,” I say in a tone of voice that says we understand the position on the board now, don’t we? “I’m going to ask you some questions.”
He turns on me a face the poets might describe as distraught, distrait, or disconsolate.
“First question.” I pause to get my thoughts in order. “If,” I say, “someone were to inform you that you were to be executed for a crime you had committed, what crime would come to mind?”
He doesn’t answer.
“What secret offense from your past proportionate to the punishment?”
It seems to be sinking in. The situation he’s in. He seems to be getting it.
“We posit a moral universe in this question,” I say. “Things add up. Crime and punishment.” And I draw an equals sign in the air with the barrel of the Special.
* * * *
It is to the defendant’s credit, your Honor, that he did not attempt to seduce the girl, to touch her, to force himself on her in any way. He simply wanted to live within the circumference of her spirit. To hear her voice and see her face. That is not stalking; it’s breathing.
It began quietly. I kept a discreet distance behind the school bus, following it out into the country along the two-lane roads, the snowy landscape broken into forty acre grids, the stubble of corn stalks under the melting white and the moraine of dirt on either side of the road. I followed her to and from school, sometimes to the library, to the mall with her girlfriends, twice into Iowa City where she went with her mother into the University of Iowa Medical Center. After a week the boys in the back of the bus began to catch on, waving and giving me the finger out the back window. How long it took for her to figure it out I don’t know, but by the time I started attending the Lower Deer Creek Mennonite Church—sitting well away from her, mind, but catching glimpses between the lumpen heads and shoulders—I could tell by the way her family sat stiff and self-conscious that they knew.
And then there was a period of a couple of weeks when she didn’t go to school, didn’t attend church. The pastor during Sharing and Announcements asked for prayers for her, for Grace Albrecht to recover from her affliction, and I was still sane enough to worry that she had fallen ill, mad enough to exult that it was Ichabod Sick they sought to save her from.
In Action Comics #187 there’s a panel of Superman standing under a shower, only it’s not a regular shower, it’s a super-blowtorch shower and he’s burning off the dirt and stains of the world from his invulnerable suit. This is in his Fortress of Solitude. It’s made out of ice. He stands with his legs wide apart and powerful.
When one of the church elders approached me, asked me who I was, that’s what I told him. I told him about the super-blowtorch shower. And the cleanliness. And the dirt.
* * * *
On the floor between us, Skunk has finished expiring. I have just asked Herman Yoder if he has some electric clippers, and failing that, a pair of good scissors.
“Your hair,” I tell him, wagging the Special like an index finger at his mullet, his body, his whole being. “It’s giving off a sour odor.”
He gives his head a shake.
“Your body, too.”
He just gives me the stink eye.
“Undress,” I say. “We need to clean you up.”
* * * *
The prayers of the congregation worked. After ten days away she was back home, then back in school, back attending church. The poet Ichabod Sick increased his attentions.
Her house was one of those isolated farmhouses you see in the Midwest, with the long dirt drive that right angles through a cornfield up to a simple yard and a plain white frame house. Each afternoon she would step off the bus, empty the mailbox, pointedly not look at the black Pontiac idling at the side of the road, and then ascend the drive, the hem of her long skirt eddying about her ankles, her coat plain—everything about her gray, brown, dull blue—and her clunky shoes and hair swept under her hat, and the poet Ichabod Sick’s heart stinging under the super-blowtorch of the sight of her.
When I was away from her, there was the mire of the world all around me, the infection that reached me even out on the frozen plains.
I followed her into Wal-Mart, into Susan’s Fabrics. Always at a discreet distance. In the town library with her girlfriends she read People magazine under the buzzing lights at the back of the periodical room. When she saw me peering at her through the stacks, she dropped the magazine, hurried and found her friends. They whispered and pointed with their eyes.
At church her father came up and told me to stop it, just stop this, he said. She’s just a girl, he said. We’ll call the police, he said.
In the hospital it was a gastroenterologist she was seeing. The digestive organs. Colitis, ulcers, colon cancer—the bacteria raging, coliforms, fecal streptococci.
And all the time I was writing furious brilliant poems about Beatrice and Lana Lane, about the Sons of Levi and the fire that cleanses, poems that later in the hospital, mired in swales of depression, I would find to be breathless and incoherent, ugly on the page with their ill-formed limbs and microcephalic heads.
* * * *
“Grace Albrecht?” Herman Yoder says now. He fixes me with a look from behind the soap and the rivulets of blood oozing down his forehead from where he’s cut himself. “What about her?”
There is something inexpressibly ugly about Herman Yoder’s body. With its massive penis hanging between his legs like an elephant trunk. And the tufts of hair illegibly distributed. The lumpiness about the shoulders, the hirsute back, the thick waist with its red crenulations from the elastic in his boxers.
We have not stopped with cutting off his mullet, but have determined to cleanse his entire body of hair. Accordingly, we have ordered him into his bathtub, and given him his razor and told him to start shaving. First his head, and then his arms, and then his legs, and finally his crotch. The bathwater is turning pink from where he has nicked himself. He has started blubbering once or twice, just like they do in the movies. Once or twice started cursing and calling me names. We have had to discharge a third round into the mirror above the sink by way of persuasion.
Also, the bathroom floor has flooded from where I tried to flush the Achy Breaky t-shirt down the toilet.
“Did you know her?” I ask.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
He scrapes the soap from his face. “Of course I knew her. We all knew her.”
“We?” I prod. He names his wife or maybe girlfriend, some other names I’m supposed to recognize. He is still convinced that I am here to avenge a domestic squabble. I’m the guy his pot-smoking wife is seeing or something.
“Listen,” I say to Herman Yoder. I close my eyes because the shattered mirror is reflecting things I know are not there. “Forget your wife. Your wife doesn’t enter into the question. Try to concentrate and answer me: When in the presence of the Innocents, does Herman Yoder do what he can to save them, or does he partake of the massacre?”
He stops shaving his thigh, blinks at me.
“Finds another way home, or not?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Grace Albrecht,” I say. “I’m talking about Grace Albrecht.”
“I haven’t seen Grace Albrecht since high school,” Herman Yoder says; then, like enough is enough: “C’mon, man!”
* * * *
In the State of Iowa “Stalking in the Fourth Degree” is unwanted behavior constituted of, but not limited to, following, telephoning or initiating communication or contact with a person so as to cause material harm to the mental or emotional health of said person, and is a Class B Misdemeanor.
I was arrested, arraigned, released.
A week later I was arrested again. Two sheriffs showed up at the tent I had pitched on the frozen front yard, rousted me out of my Blue Kazoo sleeping bag, cuffed me in full view of the Albrecht family picture window, and drove me to the University of Iowa Hospital where after a lot of this and that I was held in a locked ward awaiting a competency hearing. The records from my previous hospitalizations were entered as evidence. My sister had to come and testify. And the Director of the Writers’ Workshop. And then it was back to the locked ward where the manic break happened and I went plunging downward. The walls moved in, the grotto reappeared, I lay flat and two-dimensional on my hospital bed. The Spring semester began without me.
In the crescendos of these episodes my memory gets unreliable, but what I think I remember from those last days in the tent is not sleeping and not eating so as not to have to evacuate waste, and rewriting the Paradiso by the light of a can of Sterno, and the cleansing cold, and telling Grace as she came up the drive of the plans I was making, me in my smiling madness clutching Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in one mitten and telling her as she hurried away about the artic desolation, about the ice and the stainless steel cold—how we would live with no food, no waste, no tinge of color.
After a month they moved me out of the locked ward and I began the slow crawl upward, like one of those grade-school graphics on the creation of life: the piscine creature humping itself out of the primordial slime, the nubby fins growing into lizard legs, the starter-kit mammal, the monkey puzzled by its tail, and finally the hunched but erect-walking Ichabod Sick.
* * * *
I have asked Herman Yoder for his last words. He is standing in the bathtub with the hairy bathwater lapping at his ankles, a ring of hairy scum about his middle, and his flaccid penis looking like a hanged man.
“The sum of what you’ve learned in your thirty years. That sort of thing.”
I parade him back into the living room, tell him to say goodbye to the pictures on the wall, his mother and father, his kids, the wife I’m sleeping with. And it’s here he loses it. Starts to blubber and cry over his kids, Janie and Buddy for god’s sakes. And he starts to apologize to his wife, says he’s sorry, turns to me, his face all blotchy from the tears and the shaving job, and starts to apologize to me, too, says he’s sorry for whatever it is, whatever he’s done, until I tell him to shut up—just shut the fuck up, Herman Yoder and say goodbye to your kids. He makes a stumbling lunge at me, all blubbery and uncoordinated so that it’s an easy thing to dodge him as he sails past. He ends up on the floor, on his hands and knees, crying into the carpet.
“Skunk,” he says at the sight of his dead cat, and then like a cri de coeur, “Skunk!”
Somewhere there’s a tornado siren going off but it’s a balmy October day so maybe there isn’t a tornado siren going off. I kick Herman Yoder and tell him to stand up, march him through the kitchen and out into the backyard. There’s a stupid Jack’n’Jill well and the corn seven feet tall on three sides and growling unseen in it somewhere the harvester guaranteed to appeal to a poet’s fancy. I tell him to enter the corn. “What?” he says and I stick the barrel of the Special right in his naked back and push him toward the cornfield.
“We’re going to find the Grim Reaper,” I say and someone starts laughing.
* * * *
When the weather warmed and I had made it back to being half human, some of the Workshop students began coming to the hospital for tutorials. We met in the sun room. They brought me flowers, cards, Jujubes because of that poem I wrote about movie-theater candy. I was only thirty-two but I shuffled about the corridors in my pajamas like I was seventy-two. My hair stuck out like Einstein’s. I affected a grandfatherly German accent, sucking on my Jujubes and offering suggestions to their poems, a bland word changed here, a stale image there, and let’s calm down the overactive lineation, ja?
“Like zees,” I would say, drawing a line through a word while a young poetess sat next to me with her breasts like frankincense and myrrh, “and zees, ja?”
I lay around my room reading Boethius, took part in group, set off on shuffling hikes through the hospital. I went from ward to ward, through clinics, up to the closed doors that led to the ICU, checked out this sun room, that sun room, stared out the front doors at the brightly-colored world outside. In the pediatric oncology ward I’d sit in the waiting area like a strung-out parent while wispy-headed gnomes tried to play like normal kids. I got down on the floor and played with them—trucks, Legos, Candyland—shared my Jujubes, and whenever the door that led to the examining rooms swung open made loud steam-shovel noises to cover the sound of crying children.
Sometimes I just sat there like a lobotomized Lepke, missing all the connections.
But my medication was adjusted, adjusted again, and the world began to fit itself back together. My roommate thought it was hilarious that I was a poet. His name was Foster and I called him John Foster Dulles for no reason at all and we watched ESPN together and played Go Fish! and I Doubt It! He was a big guy, farted a lot, which made the delicate red scars on his wrists seem all wrong. When I got tired of cards I’d take to the hallways, bringing the hundreds of pages of my winter mania with me. I’d sit in one of the sun rooms and read through them like they were tablets of cuneiform, looking for a comprehensible image, a salvageable line. I would jot these down in a fresh notebook, maybe start playing with the seed of a poem. During one of these sessions my lawyer called with the news that the Albrecht family had asked that the charges be dropped. The air began to lighten. A poem about the three Magi looking for another way home so as not to have to tell Herod about the Christ child began to stumble toward its themes. Advent. Childhood. Destruction. I was working on it—hospital bed cranked up into a reclining position, reading glasses on—trying to rewrite the first line of the second stanza, something about where I had misplaced myself, when Fat Nettie the Nurse came to tell me I had visitors.
“Shoo, fly,” I said.
She turned and headed back down the hall, her enormous rear-end square and flat like the back of a snow shovel. In the bed next over, behind the privacy curtain, John Foster Dulles farted.
“I lost him out behind second base,” I tried out, “my sane self, I mean.”
I let the line hang in the air a moment, then unplugged “him,” and stuck in “Marty.” Tried that out. Then unplugged “Marty” and stuck “him” back in. I listened for the zones of radiation, for the breeze from right field. It took me a good minute to realize someone was in the doorway again. And that it wasn’t Fat Nettie come back to plump my pillows, or some student, or one of the neighboring nutcases about to claim he was John Wilkes Booth—
She was in a wheelchair and so changed that even with my reading glasses fumbled off I don’t think I would have recognized her if her mother hadn’t been standing behind her. Her mother with her mouth pursed, hair up under her cap, body in rigid disapprobation as if she’d lost some argument just minutes before and was here under protest. It was the girl’s face that was so different. The clarity was gone—the perfect bone structure I had caressed in the ether of madness—and in its place some illness or medication had painted her features on a ball of dough. Everything was swollen, out-sized, and there was a wash of acne across her cheeks and gray crescents under her eyes. But she was smiling, friendly, maybe a little shy at being so bold.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” I answered like I was fifteen again and couldn’t talk to girls. She wheeled her chair a little further into the room. She was in a green bathrobe with fuzzy slippers on her feet. On her lap there was a stack of what looked like music, those old, yellow Schirmer piano editions.
“We heard you were feeling better.”
“Yes,” I managed, “thank you.”
“We saw you the other day,” she added by way of explanation, “in the sunroom. The one with the piano. I hope you don’t mind.”
I shook my head “no.” I could think of nothing else to say except to ask what was wrong with her, what had happened to her lovely face. But of course I couldn’t ask that. One of my legs began to quiver under the covers. “I’m sorry,” I said in a shaky voice.
“Please...”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and then it was out of me. I sat up in bed, and with my voice all wrong told her I was sorry over and over again. “Steady as she goes, Mr. Sick,” I heard John Foster Dulles say from the other side of the curtain, but I couldn’t help myself. I kept saying how sorry I was for everything, for frightening her, for hurting her and her family—
“It’s all right,” the girl was trying to say. “You were ill. You weren’t yourself.”
“Yes,” I said, then in a whisper: “no.”
“We don’t mean to upset you,” the mother said. She seemed to want to say something else but stopped herself. And then, almost like an accusation: “They told us you were better.”
“Yes,” I answered. I tried to smile. I tried to look grateful. I tried to look better. “I am better,” I said. I held my hands out, helpless. “I am better.”
“We just wanted to say,” the girl said with a tight, purposeful smile. “That it’s all right now. We understand.”
I closed my eyes. “Thank you,” I said and this deep, deep sigh came out of me. I looked down into my lap, shoulders slumping, face slack like maybe I had had a lobotomy. There on my knees was my poem about the three magi.
“Well...” the mother murmured.
“I have a no-contact order on me,” I blurted out after a moment. I looked at the girl’s ruined face, then up at her mother. Did they not know that? “But stay a minute,” I said. And then I asked would they mind if I read them the poem I was working on? It was a mess, I said, but it was—and then I said this fancy-pants poet-thing: it was the only myrrh I had to offer. They smiled politely.
“Okay,” the girl said. I slipped my reading glasses on.
And so there in a hospital room in Iowa City, with a suicidal fat farter and a manic-depressive with a salvation complex, and a young woman and her mother just trying to be decent, Herod massacred the innocents again, and the living skeletons on Bullfinch 7 made their bodies disappear, and Marty Browne lost himself out behind second base. Smell of leather, glint of gold, something something something, and a game of Sorry! in the kids’ oncology ward.
I don’t think they made heads or tails of it, but when I was done, the girl said it was lovely anyway. I thanked her, made the usual excuses about it just being a first draft, then laid the notebook aside and took my reading glasses off. Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. I nodded at the piano music on her lap. Did she play?
“Oh, I used to.”
“We should be going,” the mother said.
“I used to but I quit,” the girl went on. “I’m just trying to get a little of it back.” She let her fingers dance across a keyboard. “A little each day if I feel strong enough.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”
She seemed to understand that I just wanted to have a normal conversation. That it was important to have a normal conversation.
“I quit because of a traumatic experience,” she said. She turned to her mother. “You remember that?”
“Yes,” the mother answered. Non-committal, like okay we’ve done our good deed....
“I was in this talent show,” the girl went bravely on, turning back to me. “In middle school?” And she started in on a story about how she’d messed up in front of the whole school, how she’d had to stop and start over again—this too-hard Bach invention she’d foolishly chosen—how she couldn’t see the music because her eyes were swimming, and the outside of me was listening to her, smiling and listening, but the inside was thinking how close to the truth Ichabod Sick had been. Without even knowing it, in his madness, how close to the truth: she was something special. It wasn’t just empty beauty. She had—hadn’t she? in spite of everything?—sought out Ichabod Sick. She had come into his sickroom, into his sick life, and without ever saying it, she had forgiven him.
“I was practically in tears,” she was saying. “When I finally finished there’s this kid from my class in the wings, and he’s holding these tennis balls because he’s on next, and he says: You stink.” And she laughed a rueful laugh. “You stink,” she said. “This kid. Herman Yoder. I’ll never forget it.” And she looked down into her lap, at the piano music, at the memory.
“Tennis balls?” I found myself saying.
“He juggled.”
“Oh, I see.”
And that was it. We said a few more things—I mentioned something about Robert Frost not being able to read his poem at Kennedy’s inauguration because the wind made his eyes water—and then she was saying again how glad she was I was feeling better, and I was thanking her, and then with all three of us smiling her mother wheeled her out of the room. A week later I was discharged, and a couple of months after that I left Iowa City. I never saw her again.
But some years later at a posh reception I cornered this mini-skirted gastroenterologist and under the ruse of researching a poem asked her about the swollen face, the acne—what GI disease was that a symptom of? Side effects, she said, running a finger along her spaghetti straps—medication. Prednisone. Probably Crohn’s Disease, she said—a very nasty condition where the body tries to reject its own intestines, current research indicating that an overactive immunological system was attacking waste in the intestines, usually leading to ulcers, fistulas, a probable colostomy and bowel cancer down the road, did I want to come up and see her medical books sometime?
* * * *
Against the wall of corn Herman Yoder looks like an erect, hairless, man-sized possum, all pink and ugly and rodent-like.
“What pleasure in the world?” I’m saying to him. “What small beauties?” We have been cataloging his many murders while the sun shines and the world ripens. I have in my head that October day ten years ago when to keep myself from going mad I hiked through a cornfield not so far from this one and stumbled on Steam Days the second time—the cuts and scratches, the dirt, the smell, and then the beautiful young woman. And now Herman Yoder’s skin all red and blotchy from the cornstalks. He keeps asking what the fuck we’re doing and I keep telling him that I am annihilating him. I am annihilating you, Herman Yoder, I say and I march him this way and that, sometimes with the corn rows, sometimes against. On occasion the roar of the harvester descends upon us like we’re in a fifties sci-fi dinosaur thriller.
“What are we doing?” Herman Yoder screams back at me.
“We’re looking for sanctuary,” I tell him. “The atmosphere cleaving and revealing the untouched breast. N-42.”
And I start to call out Bingo numbers as we go. Herman Yoder keeps saying that he didn’t do anything—I didn’t do anything, man, he says over and over.
“G-51!” I cry.
“I don’t even know you!”
“B-8!”
He tries to run—angry, impotent. He crashes through the rows of corn, but he’s naked and his feet are bare and hurting and it’s no problem for me to keep up. I pelt his glabrous back with Bingo numbers. After a couple of minutes we break out into a waste of stubble and dirt. And there’s the harvester a few acres away, green and yellow and toy-like, a sail on the horizon for poor Herman Yoder who begins running toward it, waving and crying out. It’s then that I have to tell him to stop. I fire off a round over his head for punctuation.
“Now, now,” I scold when I draw up to him. He is breathing heavily and there are smudges of blood on his shaved legs. He’s bent over and he’s got his hands on his knees like an exhausted sprinter.
“It’s a beautiful autumn day, Herman Yoder,” I tell him. And it is. The sky is blue and the sun is shining and there are lovely threads of high cirrus overhead. There are golden and scarlet treetops in the distance and the white steeple of the Historic Register church a couple hundred yards away. These are the sights that surrounded her all her life. This is her home. “This is her home,” I say out loud with deep satisfaction. “What?” I hear, but I am closing my eyes, imagining her in the world again—the soft scent of her in the breeze, the deep delicious reds of her jellies, the launderer’s soap, the refiner’s fire.
“In my travels, Herman Yoder,” I say, inhaling everything there is to inhale, “I have often thought of Grace Albrecht back here, the fixed point of the compass—” and here I lift my nose to a faint scent of the past—“and whatever happened to me it was all right because I knew that she was here and that it was right that Ichabod Sick should be an attractor of the ugly and the dirty, the sex and the vanity and the petty crimes. It was a way of sacrificing myself.”
I open my eyes. He has straightened up, but it isn’t easy to stand naked out of doors. Some intuitive shame takes hold of us, doesn’t it?—has taken hold of Herman Yoder so he’s got one of his arms folded in front of him, his fist tucked up under his chin like a shivering child just out of his bath, and the other hand across his private parts. I put the muzzle of the Special to my lips and kiss it. I’m feeling pretty good right now. The harvester is coming toward us, mowing the circles of hell around us—the dirt, the waste, the remnant stubble—and that feels pretty good too.
“What I didn’t reckon on was you back here, near her, you with your tennis balls and the pus oozing out.”
The guy inside the harvester has been watching us for some time now. A naked man and a man with a gun standing in the middle of his cornfield! I raise the gun, stiff-arm it at Herman Yoder’s head so it looks like I’m about to execute him. Like that famous Saigon photo. The guy in the harvester slides the window back and shouts something at us but we can’t hear him over the distance and the roar of the dinosaurs. I calmly swivel the gun, move my arm ninety degrees until the gun is pointing straight at the harvester, straight into the window where the guy starts having a fit. Then I bend my arm at the elbow, bring the muzzle slowly up to my own head and rest it on my temple. I trust all three of us appreciate the tripartite structure, the classical composition.
“I will now recite a poem, Herman Yoder,” I say. “It will explain, perhaps, the necessity of our execution.”
A pheasant flushes in front of the harvester. The farmer guy is still watching us, twisted around in his seat. He has what looks like a cell phone clapped to his ear. But Herman Yoder isn’t watching. He’s begun backing up, edging toward the rows of corn, eye on the gun still pointed at the madman’s head. He has the look of the desperado who’s about to make a break for it. For some reason there’s a bell ringing in the cornfield. The average age for onset of bipolar disorder is nineteen.
“Where then is the other way?” I start. And there he goes, spinning around like a running back and crashing into the wall of corn. “Where the world with no Herod and his scimitars?” I shout after him. I reload my gun, let him think he’s maybe getting away, and then tumble into the corn after him. I shout the next line of the poem at his back, and the next, the stuff about the leukemia kid and Lydia with her pelvic bones like faucets. I get out of breath pretty fast, so that by the time the poem peels off into the smell of my Spaulding glove, I’m only pelting him with bits and pieces of it—the sane world of my childhood, a smiling kid, leadoff hitter for his Little League team, and all that goldengrove unleaving stuff. I fire a shot in the air just for the heck of it. And then its on to the fourth stanza with its gift rescinded and the pain and the mania and the crumbling. Babies thrown down wells, skewered on swords. The Magi circle back on themselves, return to the manger because there is no other road, there is no other way home. Ahead of me Herman Yoder staggers out of the corn onto a lawn. For a moment I think we’ve circled back to his house—symmetry!—but then there’s a scream. I’ve got just enough time to see the steeple looming over us—big and white and square—before I’m out of the corn too. There’s the little white church I’d passed two hours earlier, and the old graveyard beside it, and out along the road shiny cars and pickup trucks. It’s a wedding, for Christ’s sakes. There’s a couple dozen people down along the road and lining the sidewalk running up to the church. The men are all in black. The woman are bright yellow and ruby and lavender. There are some Mennonites sprinkled among them. Some of them are wearing hats like it’s 1958.
“And what use?” I shout at them. Herman Yoder has stumbled, collapsed onto the old turf of the graveyard. “This frankincense, this myrrh!”
They turn their eyes from the naked man to the man shouting at them. Who knows, maybe it’s a funeral. I lift my arm in the air and the sight of a gun sets everyone running. I fire a round in the air. Ronnie told me it was a weapon, not a gun.
Herman Yoder is saying something. I take a step toward him, bend over his naked body. “What?” I ask him.
“Go away,” he manages in between heaves of breathing. “Just go the fuck away.”
“Poem’s not done,” I tell him. I take a step back and catch my breath. There are people hiding behind tree trunks. Behind cars. Other cars are peeling out down the road. There’s a little girl in a pretty aquamarine dress calling for her mother. I start in on the last stanza, the stuff about the maculate world and Grace Albrecht’s laugh like a necklace of silvery syllables. And with each line I shoot something. I shoot a gravestone. I shoot a tree. I shoot a window in the church so that the glass shatters and tinkles down onto the pews inside. There’s screaming and cowering and sudden silences. Some guy who was heading for the shotgun in the back of his pickup truck has changed his mind and hit the dirt. I reload. I’ve run out of poem but there’s still plenty to shoot. The cornfield. The steeple. A sparrow on a power line. Overhead there’s the blue sky all peaceful and untroubled as if there’s nothing going on down here. I raise the gun up over my head and take a shot at it. Somewhere there’s a child crying. I aim at the sky and take a second shot, a third, but it’s still there, still blue and lovely and serene. It stretches from horizon to horizon. And there’s only so much ammunition.
The Black Wig
by Kim Henderson
It is time to leave the party. My wife is giving every guy there fuck-me eyes, which is what she does every Halloween when she puts on a black wig that makes her blue eyes look like a movie star’s. She finds various excuses for black wigs—Cleopatra, Amelie, Mia Wallace. But it’s always for the same reason: so that once a year guys will do a double-take when they see a woman who is in no way blended and blurred, a woman of great contrast—which equals daring, which equals a good fuck.
I’m a robot this year. Completely homemade—cardboard and duct tape and wacky sport sunglasses, which are great because no one can see my facial expression when my wife mildly betrays me with other men. And she had to pick this party, full of engineer dorks, men who are supposed to be my friends. I figure I can tolerate it once a year, so I nurse a beer in the kitchen and try not to watch her parade around in her big black 1970’s wig, pretending to be best friends with every guy there, giving out hugs and saying in that high-pitched drunk squeal, “Remember when?”
Of course, she’s not really daring, nor is she a slut. The costume of great contrast is what it is: a costume. Worn once a year. If she were truly daring, she’d dye the damn rat’s nest and go for contrast all year, but of course then eventually the hair would lose its sheen and hang like handfuls of moss, and she would just be one of those pasty Goth chicks that are a dime a dozen in any city mall, the really skinny ones in big black boots made of fake leather that squeak like a wet raincoat with every step. But then no one would really want to screw her.
I swirl my warm Budweiser and talk to some guy dressed as a quark—red shirt and a U for “Up”—and somewhere is his nerdy girlfriend, the anti-quark, in pale blue with a bar over her U. They have it right with the matching couples’ costumes. A quark can’t fool around with a slutty witch or a French maid, not with Miss Anti-Quark around the corner. Maybe next year Holly and I can wear the two-person cow costume we spotted at Mega-Halloween. Of course she’ll get to be the head with its four-inch-long eyelashes, and I’ll be stuck blind in the back, heavy with udders. The ass.
This quark and I are talking about the theoretical side of quantum physics, which is apt considering he and I took physics and thermodynamics in college together, along with most of the men here. But I don’t care much for the topic at this moment, because I don’t want to think about if there is another version of Holly who’s guiding one of these guys to a bedroom, or several of these guys. However, talking helps me not notice various characters’ hands lingering on her waist as she makes her hugging rounds—Fred Flintstone, George Jetson, The Riddler—so I go on and on about Copenhagen versus Many-Worlds while other guys’ pinkies snake below her panty line.
Right on the other side of the countertop, she flings her arms around some guy with a smeared-on black eye, which requires I physically shield my gaze with my hand, pretending there’s something in my contact. This quark is now blabbing about Many-Worlds theory in a movie he saw—is he actually trying to keep my attention averted? He’s talking ninety miles a minute, and Black-Eye Dude has just wrapped his arms around Holly and sniffed her hair. She’s hugging him, her legs spread a little too far, her little black mini-skirt stretched taut—who is she even supposed to be with this outfit? Tina Turner? Jackie Brown?—and he’s got both hands on her back, and his thumbs are massaging, and he’s smelling her with his eyes closed. She probably reeks of pheromones.
A hyper Chewbacca leaps past them, over the countertop, swiping beer bottles onto the floor with his giant feet, and yanks the refrigerator open. He grabs two bottles of beer and dangles his pink human tongue, which looks unusually small and disgusting with all that fur around it. The eyes are a boring gray, and a touch of pale skin surrounding them glows under the fluorescent light, where there is no fur. I glance at Holly and she has snuggled deeper into the black-eyed-P’s arms—not pea, the letter P, there’s a P in electrical tape on his shirt, the clever bastard. She glares at Chewbacca. She doesn’t like frat boy types. I wonder myself how this Chewbacca got here, but maybe he’s just a normal guy—like the quark or me—who’s not himself tonight.
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