1.

Heron is a bird. Two wings, two legs, a bedraggled feather skirt and a long curve to his supple neck. Heron’s voice lives in the very bottom of his throat, a grumpy troll that communicates with sounds like the clash of stones when the tide sucks on them. He is the slave of seasons and all his days are the pretty much the same. His only memories are the instincts that tell him what to do and when to do it. All the young herons he has fathered and fed have flown away.

She is a human female, warm blood, dense bones and all. Her eggs live deep inside her. If one happens to meet up with a sperm it stays in her body and grows for nine months, give or take, and then comes naked and squalling into the world. This has happened twice. She raises her children alone. When this story happens, she is empty except for the longing that fills empty spaces, quiet except for the buzz that lives in synapses unfired for too long.

Her name is Kate.

2.

Heron ate a skate.

Hunger and boredom, they made him do it.

The skate was a flat, fat triangle, so big that just one of them would keep him full the time it took to stalk and grab days’ worth of the usual fishes, fat in the middle and pointy at the ends and stupid, most of them, stupid enough to take his legs for reeds, his feet for leaves or shells and swim around them, a slippery tickle, until he decided to strike. Though he’s lived on their plenty, counted on them being dumb, knows the taste of their slime as they slithered down his long throat still twitching, Heron has no hunger for them anymore. Not for them. Not for many things he knows in every feather, every cell. Has always known.

The giant triangle fish did not expect the thrust of Heron’s bill, never saw it coming or if it did, could not escape the strike. It hung from Heron’s bill, flexed and twisted, flapped its fleshy wings and lashed its tail and Heron did not see coming how much it would hurt when the skate’s tail whipped against his belly and his legs. Before he could eat the skate, Heron saw he would have to figure out how.

Lucky for him, his wings knew.

They wrapped around the skate and folded it into a package, narrow and thick. Pressed the package tight against his belly for the seconds it took to pull free and stuff the wriggling mass into his open bill. It was hard to swallow, a harder swallow than he ever swallowed before and the package caught halfway down and his throat stretched until it hurt and for some unmeasureable stretch of time, Heron thought the fat mass of skate might choke him so that he would never breathe or eat again.

But his legs knew what to do.

They knew they had to dance, dance harder than they ever had to win a mate and Heron danced and danced and the dance saved him, even though he was not certain it would until it did. Heron danced and danced and slowly the huge mass of firm flesh and soft bone made its way past the narrowing of his throat and found its slow way down into his stomach.

His stomach was shocked when the package got there, bigger than anything that ever came before it, a huge weight that made his stomach hurt from stretching, so big it squeezed his lungs while it sat there, huge and immovable and while he floated in that feeling that was almost death, Heron told the feathered gods of his family that if he survived this experiment, he would stick to the usual fishes for the rest of his life. In the many hours it took his enzymes to digest the skate, though, Heron slowly came to appreciate the novelty of the experience. While he didn’t measure his time on earth in numbers, he knew he had been Heron for many changes of seasons, many mating dances, many nests. He had eaten numberless years’ worth of the usual fish.

No mating had ever survived its season.

For most of the time between breedings, Heron returns to his solitary ways. He hunts alone, eats and dozes alone, the tides and the air enough company to content him. Only when early spring ruffles his wings does Heron think about courtship, about congress, about those weeks of heightened purpose, when he hunts to feed the hatched babies that doze inside the nest. Six months away from spring, the remembering itself seems like a dream. The longing inside him feels like lice in his wings.

3.

Kate watches Piers’ morning exercise — bar bells, jump rope and crunches — for the pure joy of seeing his big sleek body move. After a while, his skin turns shiny with sweat. She likes his body better than his art, which is a re-jiggered Renaissance style applied to modern themes and a bit of a one-trick pony, more idea than soul. She blows on her coffee and admires his abs through the pale steam rising from her cup. To be fair, Piers’ brush technique and his mastery of perspective is impressive. It’s what he does with it she doesn’t care for.

Angela joins her on the stoop, a waft of peppermint rising from her tea. Watching Piers exercise is both a shared joke and their obsession. Neither of them has yet seduced him. Each has confessed to the other the thought has crossed her mind. They haven’t seduced each other yet, either. Angela calls her work neo-impressionism, even though it has nothing to do with qualities of light but explores the effects of commerce on image. Her images are all but flattened into posters, but the posters are so slick and beautiful she qualifies for this master class in realistic painting.

Kate’s trying to make hyperrealism and surrealism get married and have babies, not because it’s cutting edge so much as because it combines the two things she does best — faithful rendering, weird visions. Every member of their group is post-post-modern, trying to invent something new against ridiculous odds.

Piers is breathing heavy now, sweat raining from his forehead to splash against the concrete, making nickel-size splotches against the gray. In nearby treetops, a tiny warbler burbles with morning verve. Once Kate hears this one bird singing, she hears them all, a cloth woven from many bright threads of birdsong, draped like a scarf across the shoulders of the day.

Kate stops here along enough to note the family relationship between verbal metaphors and visual images. To feel the day’s hopes and disappointments floating in the morning air. The teacher, a semi-famous artist, might say something nice about her work today. Maybe she can fix the place she fucked up yesterday’s sketch without having to start all over again. Maybe later she’ll go for a long walk on the beach. Maybe she’ll will hear the phone ring if her children call.

The little warbler is insistent, as if somebody’s paying him to sing.

4.

Part of the day he wades in the shallows. Part of the day he drowses in a tree. When Heron naps, he hides, as close to the trunk as he can fit with his wings clasped tight to his sides. Heron feels safest sleeping when he feels invisible, when he becomes the biggest, stillest cone on the thickest branch, when his tree is outside the flow of animal traffic, beyond reach of the two-legged creatures who like to stare. Because he stares when he fishes, Heron mistrusts their attention. When they stare, Heron imagines they are imagining how he will taste.

Heron likes best to feed when the sun slides down the sky and plops into the water. He likes the sound the sea makes then. Tonight the sea sound seems to rhyme with the song his nerves make remembering the skate, with the ache of his stretched innards and his surprise at becoming Heron who ate a skate and lived.

5.

Kate is on the beach near dusk. Because she comes from the west coast, sunset here starts from the wrong side. The sound of small waves lapping sand is familiar, though, and makes her feel safe enough to light the half joint in her pocket and take a few rough tokes before her throat rebels. A few heartbeats later, the strange settles in, releasing the tension in her shoulders, rejiggering her pulse and the colors of the coming night. What was one sound layers into many parts. What was three women fuses into one.

The mother revels in the rich of it, senses full and all her body hairs alert. The painter frames it in order to invent then render a deliberately eccentric composition meant to challenge what the viewer, that mysterious other, thinks is real. Kate the human sees the scum of refuse at the tideline and feels rage. A rocket launched from Cape Kennedy just past dawn this morning, and she imagines the evening luminescence fouled by burnt rocket fuel, by the unholy racket of her species trying to fly away.

But mid-evening along this shore touches her like a lover might if a lover could touch her everywhere at once. She sees, she hears, she smells, she draws the evening into her lungs, caresses and expels it. A little wind off the water kisses her neck.

6.

The sun sinks for a long time before it disappears.

Heron stands still to watch it go. The usual fishes poke at his legs, begging to be eaten. Because Heron isn’t hungry, he lets them play. Out of that tickle, a wanting comes. Normally what Heron wants at dusk is food.

If touch is hunger, what is food?

7.

The sea is to her left, which means she’s walking south.

8.

The eye on Heron’s night-side scans the shore. This means he’s facing south.

9.

When Kate sees the heron wading, she realizes it’s the first shore bird she’s seen all day.

Curse the men who need to rape space to prove to how big their dicks are, who treat the planet like it’s a bar past closing time.

10.

The creature is alive. It has long straight legs that taper like his do. It walks in the shallow water, too noisy for a bird. Heron knows it sees him because its gaze feels like a touch.

11.

The heron just offshore is watching her. If it was human, its stare would be rude. Kate turns toward the horizon, the ocean and the bird.

12.

There’s seeing and watching. Heron knows both. He knows the creature in the shallows is watching him. When he stops walking, it stops. It turns toward him.

13.

Because the heron’s eyes are on the sides of its head, it doesn’t have to turn its head to see her but Kate knows it sees her. She can feel the soft buzz of its consciousness directed at her.

14.

Even though nothing happens, everything does. Something moves inside his chest. Heron takes a slow, proud step, one foot leading, the other catching up.

15.

The heron takes a step, then stops. It feels like a pickup line.

Kate steps precisely, foot rising high then swinging out.

16.

Heron takes another step, stretching his neck forward, as if he was fishing.

17.

Kate turns toward the bird.

18.

He feels her look.

19.

Once with a boyfriend’s dog, she felt something like this.

Without a common language, speaking.

20.

But can she fly?

21.

So much attention. The bird eyes swallow her.

22.

Heron looses his wings and takes a long step forward, as if he means to take off.

23.

The bird starts to fly away but then doesn’t. She takes a long step forward, then stops.

24..

Heron remembers. When the nestlings are big enough, he shows them how to fly. Heron takes long steps, showing her how to move her wings.

25.

She feels the fierce attention of his sideways eye. The bird takes three long strides, wings lifting. She mirrors him, letting her stretched arms rise and fall.

26.

Heron lifts off, not high, not far.

27.

Kate copies every motion. She does not fly.

28.

Every nest has one slow hatchling. Heron repeats the lesson.

29.

Okay, I’ll try again.

30.

It waves its long skinny wings. They are beautiful but useless.

31.

If something is impossible, is not being able to do it failure?

32.

Heron feels how much it wants to fly.

33.

I’m sorry.

34.

This time he leans, flaps and lifts until he sails through air. Heron wants her to feel what flying feels like.

37.

The bird rises in a sweeping arc, travels the length of a city block, then comes back and lands in the water just across from where she stands.

38.

With all the will that is in him, Heron wills her to take flight.

Instead, she sits down on the sand and lets the water lap her legs.

39.

I love you. I love you but I cannot fly.

40.

If you were a heron, I would do the mating dance with you.

Instead, he stretches his wings and rises, rises and flies away into the night.

41.

Kate works all night to capture it. By morning light it lives, a creature half bird, half woman, both halves carefully rendered, hyper-real.

42.

For a long time, her fellow students look instead of talking. Kate watches their faces. The words come like thrown stones, splash and sink. From the surface of the painting, with a look of longing it stares back at her, the two-faced creature she has become.

43.

Heron stands in the shallows, alone, watching the sun come back while the usual fishes bump against his legs.

Welcome to climate Armageddon. I’ve moved downstairs to write because we just had a 3.46 earthquake, the 12th this week and the first one big enough to feel. I really don’t want to be on a different floor than my husband if the house collapses which, being 102 years old, it just might. Which means, I guess, I have no wish to die alone and crawling down those steep and narrow stairs would be a challenge and a pain.

The novel progressed and then did not. The not arose from my will to create melting away, melting from heat, from bad air and an opportunistic virus afoot in my zip code, for want of hope, from anomie. A French word for the meltdown of standards, usually of a group, in this case, my singular commitment to survival through storytelling — or, alternatively, an offering to my ancestors in return for their protection in a harrowing time, the deal my dead father proposed and the survival he promised if I took him up on it.

I took him up on it.

My previous ventures into historical fiction have been histories of the future, of nightmarish realities just possible should we continue on a particular path of folly. This history is different, harder for being verifiable, haunted by the real people who lived it and my suspicion that they will punish me if I play too fast and loose with the reality they lived. Hence my constant negotiation with facts and dates, guesses at motivation, my willingness for my ancestors to have satisfying lives in their re-imagined bodies, pleasurable sensual encounters with the tastes and textures of the world and sexual encounters with one another’s bodies, the license I end up giving myself to make shit up.

An historical novel is still a novel, after all. And every effort by a living person to recreate another person’s lived past is making shit up, creating a plausible emotional reality that is no mirror of the traceable, actual, factual reality those long-dead people lived.

Hence it is, in both best and worst senses, a pack of lies based on conjecture and the nature of conjecture is a refraction of the psyche of the author. Which means, I suppose, that writing about them is really a way of writing about me before I was born, a quest that both makes sense and is quite egoistic. The father who gave me the assignment is him-through-me, a guesswork patriarch who seconds the impulse to survive physically and emotionally in a particularly challenging time that may or may not be the end time — for this planet and many of its life forms, animal, vegetable, sub-cellular — and gives me an assignment to bind me to the world.

Even if he is I and I am giving myself the assignment.

This is the only world I know.

Here in the flats
No sound sounds apocalyptic.
The sky’s bone white.
Air color’s the gift of the smoke of many fires,
a reactionary force mustered
too late by a planet that’s had enough.
After a spring of trilling,
the birds are dumb again.

The silence?

We’re stunned into it, despair’s muzzle
stuck to sweaty faces, sweaty bodies
sheltered in unsafe places.
Some folks have faded tents. Other people fold
their dirty sweatshirts into pillows and call
the sidewalk bed. We’re haunted
by the things we chose not to see,
those deals culture’s made with capital
for the last couple hundred years
or so without even a broom and dustpan
following behind to sweep
the sorrow off our streets.

People on the hills have money.
People in the flats have endless cubic yards of
crappy stuff and no money to pay the dump fees.

Left under freeways,
on random corners, in empty lots, the
former possessions of unseen humans
turn into white trash, bleached
to the ugly pale of bones.

I’m thinking it’s a pass-through,
the people from the hills
gifting bushels of their used-up stuff
to the people on the street,
more stuff than is manageable or
even possible to want.
Here in the flats its ugliness, its
lack of purpose is revealed.

Hill people claim the tax deductions.
Flats people wallow in the waste.
The air smells like ash.
Walls are a privilege.
I bless mine. I pray for
some for you.

In memoir as in fiction, dialog is more eau de speech than it is transcript, a distilled approximation of the real thing.

“Why isn’t Daddy coming?” my daughter said.

In real or re-created “real” life, few of us speak either as concisely or as aptly as characters get rendered on the printed page. In real life, people speak to fill the empty spaces. We blither and dither. Some people lie a lot. Some people swallow their feelings and spit them out as verbal bullets, meant to injure or assassinate. Some of us are chronic interrupters, eager to speak and unwilling to listen. A blessed few get born witty, able to seize a bon mot in the moment, instead of thinking of what we should have said later. Utterances have their own rhythms. So do conversations. Often, what we say with our bodies is at odds with what our words express.

“Of course I care,” he said.

Then he hung up.

All of which makes dialog a powerful tool, useful for much more than delivering necessary details or reporting what got said.

Two or three canny exchanges between characters can reveal as much or more about their relationship, their individual affect and the relative power differential between them than paragraphs of narration.

Does the exchange build, transform and deliver them to a new place or do the speakers cling to their positions? Is the language easy and natural or stilted? Have they achieved a less-is-more understanding — a kind verbal and emotional shorthand — or do they have to spell out every detail? Do they — as parents and their offspring often do — talk at cross purposes, never quite copping to personal truths?

Are their agendas obvious?

Have they said this before?

“Believe what you need to,” my mother said. “I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked her.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

Well-made dialog can reveal age, class, region of origin, level of education and native intelligence. Each character, like every real person, should have a unique bag of metaphors — idiosyncratic images and experiences that act as yardsticks they use to understand the past and domesticate the unfamiliar. Each of us inhabits a unique linguistic universe. For example. Because I went to a girls’ school where wearing makeup was not allowed, I perceive putting on makeup as both privilege and personal freedom. When I choose to omit applying mascara, I think of my bare lashes as “St. Nick eyes.” When I think those words or say them out loud, a universe of past unfurls inside me. If one of your characters says them, or something like them, I am co-opted. I am bewitched.

“I had to hold Piri most of the time,” Rosario said. “During penetencia. During the ceremony. I had to keep my hand over his eyes.”

I could see it in my mind and the sight was painful. Rosario said, “Iku came.”

“How? How did you know?” Iku is death.

“I passed him,” Rosario said. “During matanzas, Madrina passed Aganju. He ate a goat heart and went to war with death.” She looked at her small hands. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t know where I went.”

How much talk is too much?

It depends on what work you want the dialog to do. Two lines — one each per character — can seal an agreement, consummate an attraction or start a lifelong quarrel. Three in just the right place becomes both an engine of revelation and the force that sends the story to a new place. When the voices of the characters hold the space and drive the car, the author disappears. When the author disappears, the reader steps into the story, present and at risk. Once a reader is psychically all in, just for a moment, her body surrenders, too. She holds a breath, feels a strident heartbeat inside her ribcage, her stomach lurches or lust touches her between the legs.

“Do me a little favor?” she says.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Well, I told a little lie,” she says. “I told some of the girls at the bingo game you were my daughter.”

Description circles body and mind.

The right dialog in the right moment gets inside.

“Shall we go to my place, then? We can swing back and pick up your car in the morning.”

“Are you crazy?” I asked him. It was a real question but it made Ben laugh.

“Maybe just a little bit,” he said.

Sometimes it’s best to simply let your characters talk to each other for awhile. Even for quite awhile. We know this space from seeing movies and watching plays. If you start late, that is, join the duet a few bars in, you can grab the reader and drag them along. This is high speed storytelling, with the white space between speaker changes sometimes leaping huge spaces. The reader learns on the fly, deducing emotional intensity and factual detail from the size and depth of those chasms of omission. Even when the intention is to get a laugh, leaving spaces inside speech is tactically smart. Filling in the spaces makes the reader feel smart.

“We snuck into the kitchen,” Howard says. “We watched the grownups.”

“They’re getting drunk,” Davy says.

“Your father’s drunkest,” Howard says. “He fell into the Christmas tree.”

“It would have gone clear over,” Davy says, “except Jerry’s mother caught it.”

“Jerry’s dad caught him,” Howard says.

“You should have been there, Melissa,” Davy says. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re lying,” she says.

Finally, dialog can be to story as image is to poem, voices and vision linked to make a moment.

My friend’s hair was plastered to her head and her face was shiny with the rain. The day was graying fast toward dusk, and against that monochrome backdrop her dark eyes were almost crazily intense.

“Let’s tell the ocean what we want,” she said.

“I used to throw rocks in the ocean and make wishes,“ I said. “If the rock I’m throwing reaches the water’s edge before the next wave breaks, I will live happily ever after.”

“No you won’t,” my friend said. “But let’s do it anyway.”

“I’m not sure what to ask for.”

“Ask for your soulmate,” my friend suggested.

Gingerly, I turned toward the water and muttered, “I want my soulmate.”

The wind blew my words back into my mouth so promptly and forcefully I wondered if they counted as said.

Finally, always read your dialog out loud. Your ear is the best arbiter of speech. If your tongue bumbles, saying what you’ve written, erase it and try again, if necessary, again and again, until you’ve written words your tongue can say, words that like magic beans dropped in water, grow bigger in the mind.

While you’re locked down by a virus with no respect for national borders, under the thumb of a president with little respect for human life, it’s a good time to read (or re-read) David Talbot’s deep history of our American deep state. This a perverse love story, corporations and governments cross-breeding to produce our current toxic and tragicomic political reality. Without historical exegesis, it’s hard to see how we got here, locked in our homes, masked on our streets, bewildered pawns of a rigged game.

This is my 2016 review.

Growing up mid-century American was a confounding experience, especially if you grew up in a family with liberal roots. My father moved right of his Wobbly father to become a New Deal Democrat. My mother’s family were immigrants, financially successful but never candidates for the Establishment. Growing up in the Northwest, the Establishment itself was an invisibility, only dimly revealed in national magazines and the hazy gray ghosts of early television. My own first political memory hooks up with David Talbot’s alternate history of the world with the Army-McCarthy hearings, my father pointing to a dark-jowled Dick Nixon on the 12-inch screen and saying, That is an evil man.

The point is, between the populist idealism of my own family, the “democratic ideals” expounded in the national social studies curriculum and the raw images of events that appeared on the flickering black and white screen, nothing ever quite made sense. My generation grew up with a troubling cognitive dissonance between the bombastic gospel propounded by the News Announcer (a white baritone) and the often troubling images He explained away. Perceiving the shards of doubt created by the grinding of those tectonic “truths”, we were invited to interpret them not as the space where lies lived but as personal failures of patriotism.

All of which makes reading The Devil’s Chessboard an extended, almost orgasmic Aha! moment. David Talbot’s deeply researched and well recounted narrative of America’s hidden government makes all the pieces fit together convincingly for the first time. Between the first sentence and the final acknowledgment, one is magically immune to charges of paranoia or the truth-twisting dissuasions of the Establishment media but is able, at last, to surrender to a coherent, self-consistent history of the United States, from roughly 1940 on.

No, corporate America never stopped doing lucrative business with the Nazis. Yes, there is and always has been an American oligarchy, privileged, entitled and entirely above and outside the laws that constrain the rest of us. Uh huh, they went to the same prep schools, the same few Ivy league colleges. Belonged to the same clubs. Yes, those “democratic ideals” are so much crack to keep the masses calm. True story — the elected occupant of the White House, that “leader of the free world” is a dispensable puppet in the hands of a deeply embedded ruling class that makes its own rules and plays its own global power games. The media, even those publications perceived as liberal or progressive today, stand ready to discredit the thoughts, actions and reputations of any credible dissenters.

The Cold War was a necessary excuse for Corporate expansionism. Dirty tricks were old news by the time the Watergate burglars bungled their mission. Consummated or merely attempted, the assassination of foreign heads of state was a perfectly legitimate form of statecraft in defense of “American interests abroad.”

Yes, there is a reason Harry Truman regretted authorizing the creation of the soulless shadow government that is the CIA.

In The Devil’s Chessboard, political and personal histories entwine, as Talbot examines the lives and times of the Brothers Dulles — John Foster the statesman, Allen the spymaster — arguably for decades the two most powerful and frightening humans on planet earth. Talbot’s examination is exhaustive, ingenious, and most of all, integrative, cross-synching every source available — official and recently declassified documents; court, commission and congressional testimony; personal correspondence and diaries of the players, their co-workers, families and sexual partners; and a deep web of interviews with anyone Talbot and associates found willing to talk and able to shed light on the historical actions and the characters of those who secretly ruled our world for much of the 20th century. Given the seriousness of the allegations, one can only be grateful for the depth and ingenuity of the research.

I invite anyone not yet politically conscious in November of 1963 to dig out and watch the live news coverage from Dallas, 11/22–11/24. Even if you’ve grown up on Mission Impossible and Marvel Comics, I guarantee you’ll be dumbfounded, as my generation was, by what happened and how it was explained to us. Hollywood would never have bought that script or made that movie. Too much of it confounds logic and defies imagination. Imagine your parents, your grandparents in their shock and grief, watching this tawdry and improbable drama unfold and staring at the screen in disbelief. Imagine being numbed by your government’s assurances, via the Warren Commission, that this really is what happened.

Lone gunman. Soviet spy. Mafia thug. Get over it.

Except, of course, we never have gotten over it, and neither has the world.

The Devil’s Chessboard touches our present and recent political past without explicitly citing them or pointing to the deep historical causes of today’s domestic crises and global dysfunctions. Talbot set the boundaries of this work and stayed within them — he must have been god awful tired and disheartened by the time it was done, even more so when he found that the media establishment is choosing to ignore The Devil’s Chessboard, despite its author’s impeccable if left-leaning credentials and accomplishments.

This then, is a reader’s testament. The Devil’s Chessboard shines light into the heart of darkness. Reading it is like a long hot shower for the soul. My thanks to David Talbot for making new sense of my life and times.

2

Morning birds singing as they have not for 20 years. The virus came and said, Thou motherfuckers shalt stop trashing the planet. We all need to breathe. Your petty travels, your little businesses, your greed and pleasure are not worth dying for. Fuck you, economy. Fuck you, polity. We will not be made extinct. We the living, the diverse species you have so long disparaged, exploited or ignored flourish as soon as you hunker down, close your curtains and lock your doors.

O fog on hills. O morning birds, unfurling song. This year you’ll mate, your eggs will hatch, your wings will spread. Will the humanoids cohabit, or will the tiny shards of DNA that are the virus strike the fuckers dead?

It appears greed is the fulcrum.

I have looked out this window for 17 years, never upon such tattered peace. Never on a morning so ornamented by the joyful song of birds or Gaia so hopeful in spite of everything. It would be just for Trump to die of the pandemic he denies, denied the treatments he denies his fellow humans. We all would profit from his passing.

Better if he’s simply driven from office, but with all the money in his corner, all the power, how will that happen? Do we the people have any power any more, or only an illusion of a whisper of its ghost? We rose up once, to kick the British out. Rose up again to stop the human trafficking that cultivated and sustained the South. Our cruel sinful history is our common history. The South was Trump. The South was rich men wanting to get richer. They probably liked it best when their fortunes were built on human suffering, savored the pheromones of the pain of fellow humans. Because the motherfuckers wanted to displace any other gods — those weak-kneed, compassionate ones, those dumb big-hearted ones, blind to the economic differences between Us the Rich and everybody else.

And we the motherfuckers seized the continent and all its riches, its holy places, its rightful servants, its mothers and shamans, cultivators and celebrants.

News flash. Economic differences are necessarily borne of ethical differences. If you believe every human, every organism has a right to live unmolested and unexploited, then you must curb your appetite for accumulation and exploitation. If you can’t breathe, well, that’s it. Same for me, same for you, same for everybody dying on this battered overheated globe.

This little bit of matter that is our home.

My prayer today is that we all will rise again.

A dove just landed on the power line outside this window and showed me the patterns of her tail. Amen to that.

Sure, I can see the advantages of staying neutral in the face of human suffering, I just can’t do it. Every time I try to build up a good set of calluses on my soul, I end up with a very sore soul. Whether I’m a nurturer by nature or it’s a scar left by my childhood with the nuns, who can tell? The point is, I’ve stopped blaming myself. You break, I fix. You hurt, I kiss it make it better. I’ve learned to see it as an attribute, not a disability. Once I stopped going to mass every Sunday and bumped up against some other ideas about how things work, I kind of got the notion that this is how it was meant to be this time around. Probably I did Attila the Hun or Lucrezia the Borgia already. This lifetime, I am kind.

Like every other good Catholic girl, I used to think that it order to help other people, I had to suffer myself. That’s why I became a nurse. It probably accounts for a couple of my marriages, too. Professionally and socially, I was spending all my time with people at or around rock bottom. The place where dying seems like a pretty good idea. I worked in Pediatric ICU. I was depressed all the time. The husbands strayed. That makes us all sound pretty generic, doesn’t it?

Seen from a big enough distance, the past is generic. We’re all characters in the same sad story. The ending is always the same. What we can choose is the intersection where we cross paths with other people.

Once I understood that, I quit nursing and went to beauty school.

What she loves. Sun on the store front, so the plate glass becomes a slick of gold. The hum of appliances and conversations braided, so that even in this very public space, there is a sense of confidentiality. The smells. Fruity, floral, sulphurous, the sweet and acrid commingling, which is how beauty comes about. The little family of stylists, people she’s chosen to make part of her world. The conditioner feels like liquid silk. Her fingers are spiders, spinning it through Nettie’s coarse silver hair, massaging her scalp. Nettie loves to be touched, so much it makes Petula wonder if she ever gets touched at home. Nettie is so short Petula has to sit her up on three twice-folded towels so her head reaches the edge of the basin. Her tiny feet hang a foot short of the floor. Two sinks down, rinsing out perm solution, Donna is telling about the Rufus Wainwright concert she went to on Saturday night. This is the fourth or fifth time Petula’s heard the story. She tries to get the girls to talk less and listen more.

“Harry must have shot twenty rolls of film.” Nettie’s eyes are closed and she speaks to the ceiling, reflectively. “Seeing the David Hockney exhibit, ten years later, really got to him.”

Petula makes the noise she ought to patent, a melodious murmur that assures the speaker of her attention without disrupting the flow of the confession. At the basin, in the chair, folks do confess.

“He probably wouldn’t want me telling anyone this,” Nettie says, “but when he walked into the room with the Grand Canyon practically life size on one wall, he started crying.” She’s quiet for a moment, while Petula dabs drips from her forehead. “Harry never cries,” Nettie says. “Not for birth, not for death.”

“How about you?” Petula asks.

“Me? I didn’t cry,” Nettie says. “But it was really something. It…I think it…did something to Harry. Just seeing it.”

Harry Tanaka is a sort of famous artist himself. He wins prizes and grants for his series of scenes from the concentration camp in Arkansas where he spent four years of his childhood. This is his only subject.

“He always sounds slurry, like he’s on something,” Donna’s saying about Rufus Wainwright. “At first, I didn’t like it. But now I think it’s kind of sexy.”

Harry Tanaka is Japanese. Nettie Tanaka is Jewish. As a couple, they are more bonded than happy. Nettie says, “I know he’s been afraid for a long time he’s getting stale. He never said so, not in so many words, and I kept my mouth shut, too. But I knew.”

Petula buzzes again, low level compassion, wordless.

Nettie sighs. “I think, I hope, that something changed.”

Petula slides one hand under Nettie’s neck, with the other threads a warm, damp towel through the gap and wraps it securely around Nettie’s head, watching her face relax as the warmth engulfs her skull. Petula loves to see it, the way tension sublimes off at the first touch, lines easing, years steamed away.

“We’re just going to leave this on for a little while,” Petula says. “Your hair will like it.” Nettie closes her eyes. A smile no more arch than Mona Lisa’s changes her face from wary to serene.

Down the way, vigorously, Donna shampoos her client’s hair. She catches Petula in the act of catching Nettie in the act of pleasure. Busted. Petula shrugs. She pats Nettie’s shoulder. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“I just love the smell of lemon,” Donna says.

Next morning.

Seven fifty five, says the big round clock face on the wall and the angle of the morning sun concurs. At this hour, three of the salon’s five stations are still empty. The coffee smell is new upon the air, seductive, and there is something almost sculptural about the silence. Does noise flatten dimension? Confuses the senses, more likely, obscures the edges of things and feelings. In the quiet, Petula has time and space to hate her morning task. Printing out the labels, sticking them to the little glassine envelopes, she has the luxury of outrage. A few salons have refused to comply, she knows. She also knows what happens to them. Informal denunciations, at first, the kind scrawled on the walls in letters that won’t scrub off. Whispering campaigns. It gets worse. Online denunciations. First the rent and then the taxes, up up up. Fail the patriotism test and everything falls apart. Petula seals yesterday’s DNA samples in the official envelope and puts it in the box for the government courier. What the government does with them is not her concern. She is a businesswoman first of all.

What would Donna say if she knew? What would her boss lady say? What would Mama say? And what about Sissy. What about Tom.

Tom. I thought this was the one place, the one time, I didn’t have to think about Tom. It’s like he’s followed me into the hair salon. After we get married, he’ll follow me everywhere. After we get married, it’ll be a sin to touch Donna’s breast when she bends over me like this. Under that smock thing she’s got on, I can’t tell if she’s wearing a bra or not. And what color are her nipples. Are they big. How can I get married when I’ve never seen any breasts except Sissy’s and my mama’s and my own.

All’s Tom’s got are two little pimples on a flat white chest.

Donna excuse me girl but do you think I’m pretty, Not just pretty. Do you think I’m sexy. Have you ever had sex with another girl.

Every time I get a haircut or a perm I dream about you for a couple of nights, hot nights, hot dreams, and then everything goes back to normal for a while.

“Hey, Pet, you mind if I put on Rufus? Sandy wants to hear.” Donna doesn’t wait for an answer but cues the album. If Petula had her way the only thing they’d ever listen to would be old shit like Rod Stewart and Nirvana and Aretha Franklin Queen of Soul. Pretty soon Rufus is crooning and Sandy has that dumb goofy look people get when they hear him for the first time. Donna works a wide tooth comb through Sandy’s mat of new curls. “Whadaya think?” In the station mirror, Donna sees her own face grinning back at her.

“He sounds….”

Donna keeps combing while Sandy looks for a word. The thing is, Sandy’s dictionary is small and ten years out of date, like the ones they give you in middle school.

“Dangerous,” Sandy says.

This surprises Donna. Instead of saying something back, she’s silent for a minute, just in time to hear Pet’s client Nettie say, “I know he sleeps with other women. Even at his age. He always has.”

The words persist, side by side, small naked bits of truth. Some days it’s like that in the shop. You couldn’t keep a secret to save your soul. Since it’s ensemble time, Donna just goes ahead and says it out loud, to no one in particular. “Marriage is dangerous”

“You’re always in danger of being bored to death,” Pet says.

Little Nettie looks herself square in the mirrored eye. “Nobody ever dies of a broken heart,” she says.

Donna feels the shake of Sandy’s head in her hands. “That’s not true,” Sandy says. “My aunt Eva did.”

Eva started college in boom time, when jobs fell like ripe fruit into the laps of the young and the clever. Almost no matter what you chose to study, you could count on a first year salary of at least fifty thousand dollars at somebody’s pre-IPO start up, plus stock options, gym membership and catered lunches, free. Eva’s parents wanted her to study computer science or get a business degree, but Eva loved Anthropology. She figured she could make her mark doing field work in the customs and folkways of the high tech culture. For three and a half of her four undergraduate years, it seemed like a good plan.

Then History trumped Anthropology. The boom busted. America embraced the distractions of war. It embraced war so enthusiastically almost nobody seemed to notice when the Bill of Rights died. The liberal senator who spoke at Eva’s graduation ceremony told the them that the idea of security had just been redefined for all time. It was no longer a social program but a strategic military imperative. This was a man who’d staked his political career on his stewardship of Medicare. The parents of the graduating class applauded, even though it was their social security contributions that were being plundered. The graduates themselves looked bewildered.

Eva moved home for a while to hold expenses down while she kept looking for a job, but last year’s abundant future was this year’s paradise lost. Like many people her age, Eva got depressed. Then she got mad. For a while there were enough mad Evas out there, staging sit ins at airport security checkpoints, that the president and congress took decisive action. We got the national identity card. We got the homeland curfew. We got the renaissance of the poll tax, sold with the pithy slogan, Because freedom doesn’t come free.

The fifty year old Peace Corps had a midlife crisis and came out the other side as the USGSC. What the initials stood for was United States Global Security Corps, an organization whose mission was not to advance peace by assisting less fortunate nations, but to make up for American ignorance of the languages and folkways of its potential enemies by sending American youth to live among them, an initiative embraced by neutral and skeptical nations alike because of the patent-protected drug disbursement program that rewarded compliance. As an inducement to enlist, young people were offered immediate government sanctioned bankruptcy — the forgiveness of all personal credit card debt. Those who stayed the full three year course were relieved of the responsibility for any outstanding student loans. With one stroke of the pen, in signing the enabling legislation, the President addressed a slew of interlocking social problems — youth unemployment, domestic unrest, and the chronic global intelligence shortfall. Paying off youth credit cards at ten cents on the dollar, the government also help keep the national debt offensive afloat.

Her degree in Anthropology, her demonstrated aptitude for learning languages, and her maxed out plastic made Eva the ideal USGSC recruit. With her parent. blessing, Eva set off for Urdu boot camp. Upon graduation, she was posted to a semi-permanent refugee encampment on the Pakistani-Afghani border, a filthy polyglot hive of exuberant human suffering and resilience with about the same population as metropolitan Newark, New Jersey. To say that nothing in her previous real or imagined life experience had prepared Eva for Shoomastoopa is to understate the case dramatically. At USGSC language training school, she’d been a star. In the narrow alleys of her new posting, Eva found it almost impossible to take hold of any meaning from the swirl of dialects that surrounded her. The inside of her head began to feel like a constantly shifting mosaic of Indo-European language bits, almost but not quite recognizable as words and ideas. After a week, she responded by encysting herself into a mute fetal ball in the partial shade of one scrawny palm on the verge of the central, makeshift marketplace. By the time the ten year old niece of one of Shoomastoopa’s maleks alerted her uncle to the plight of the strange American visitor, Eva was severely dehydrated and delusional. No more than she deserved, some said, but in the end, compassion prevailed, and Eva was delivered to the field hospital near the eastern border of the city.

She was 23 years old, no stranger to affairs of heart and groin. In her college days, Eva pursued her pleasures, though she did so responsibly, avoiding the risks of infection and reproduction. Eva seldom let her social life impinge upon her studies. Though she shared her body when it suited her, she had never given anyone her heart until the moment Dr. Nusrat Ullah took her two trembling hands between his own, looked into her exotic blue eyes, and prayed to Allah to give her courage and to restore her sanity.

It was as if Eva was a just-born animal, focusing all its need and hunger, all its affection and attention on the first friendly face that passed before its eyes. Dr. Nusrat was swarthy and melancholy, with large dark eyes, a fierce nose, and a touch of gray in the boyish shock of hair that splayed across his forehead. Ever since a Russian bomb killed his entire family two years before, he’d been trying to work himself to death in service of his fellow refugees, with discouragingly little success. We can only assume that he felt a surge of current snake up his arms, carrying love’s message from their joined hands straight to their hearts, bypassing the more rational provinces of the brain, at least until the infatuation was firmly rooted. In that instant, each perceived the other’s pain and resolved to make it go away. Or so they told each other later, if only to explain the indecent haste with which consummation fell upon desire.

Love lifted the confusion that fogged the language centers of Eva’s brain, so that she could communicate easily with her doctor and his patients. Her superiors at USGSC were impressed at her initiative in volunteering at the field hospital, by how quickly she integrated herself into the life of the camp. They came to rely upon the cultural and political assessments that filled her biweekly reports. Later, in a retroactive defense of its actions, the US Military and Anti-Terrorist Tribunal claimed that Eva’s growing radicalization was the result of brainwashing by her Muslim paramour, but this was not really the case. It was the testimony of Eva’s senses that that caused her loyalties to shift away from the security of her homeland to the physical and spiritual needs of the orphans of war. Ultimately, chance more than politics was responsible for what happened, no matter how much propagandists on either side resist that explanation.

Eva got pregnant. After much soul searching, she and Nusrat decided to marry and , no matter how harsh and uncertain the world, to go ahead and bring their baby into it. Because she wanted her parents to be present for the birth of their first grandchild, because she wanted them to meet her new husband, Eva begged Nusrat to come with her on a protracted visit home. Because he adored her, Nusrat agreed. Because it took a long time to get his visa, Eva was deep in her pregnancy, and seriously anemic before the couple landed at Stapleton Airport, nearly a full day later than they were originally expected. As they waited and waited to clear security, Eva grew weaker and dizzier, until Doctor Nusrat reached into his boot and pulled out a syringe loaded with folic acid to give his wife a little pick-me-up-and-tide-me-over shot.

The sight of a brown man sticking a needle into the arm of a blue-eyed blonde roused such primal suspicions that the national guardsman on duty raised his M-16 and fired so many shots into Nusrat he didn’t even have time to look surprised. Eva refused to enter the country that assassinated her husband and boarded the next plane bound for Karachi. She made her way back to Shoomastoopa before she went into a premature labor that cost both her life and the baby’s.

“Wow,” Donna says. “That’s so sad.”

Their agreement is silence, a moment that stretches to contain the sadness.

“But do you really think that’s dying for love? Like, technically speaking. I mean — “

Sandy looks stricken. “It’s like a family legend. Aunt Eva died for love.”

“Of course she did, sweetie,” Petula says.

Nettie says, “Your aunt Eva was lucky, if you ask me.”

I used to love love stories but now I hate them. I used to think there was no nobler life for a woman than to be a muse to her man. Now that I’m the crone at the corner of his hearth, now that I am the quasi-female dwarf presiding over his unhappiness, now that I am de-gendered by the passage of time and the weight of habit, the diminishment of hormones, now that my hair is white and the backs of my hands are spotted and gnarled, I hate love stories.

If I had daughters I would tell them not to marry. Never to let passion override conventional wisdom. You are too different. He is too angry. You are throwing yourself away. Fifty years, and conventional wisdom wins. He is still too angry. Dumb and disposable as Kleenex, I threw myself away. The wives of my sons are dying for want of oxygen. They are crumpling like old tissues. I don’t know whether to pity them or to feel vindicated, that they too throw themselves away.

The problem with touching people is that you feel their thoughts. What emanates from Nettie’s knobby cranium under its silver cap is cold and dark, rage having an identity crisis, masquerading as despair. Pet looks to the window with its skin of light. A little steamy nebula hangs in the golden sky. Jimmy’s breath. Jimmy. When he sees her looking at him, Jimmy licks the window with his long pink tongue. He grins at Pet, a greeting she perceives obliquely through the backside of the window struck by sun.

“Hey, it’s Jimmy,” Donna says. “Are you going to let him in today?”

“Shall we take a vote?” Pet says. “All for letting Jimmy in, say aye.”

Sandy says, “Does Jimmy have an appointment?”

“Jimmy has a standing appointment,” Pet says.

Sandy looks doubtful.

Donna says, “Whatever.”

Nettie says, “What does he smell like?”

“Jimmy smells like jerk chicken,” Pet says.

“Jimmy smells like old dog,” Donna says.

Sandy says, “Let him in.”

Petula takes the keys from the drawer, unlocks the street door. Jimmy smells like old sweat, careless piss, new sunshine. His dreads look a lot better cared for than his clothes.

“How is it out there?” Pet says.

“Wild. Wild morning.” Jimmy’s grin says he likes wild. He has front teeth but these give way on the right to the tease of a black hole. “They’re hungry,” he says. “Listen.”

Donna mutes Rufus. Their united attention is rewarded with the high thin sound of howling, a sound more frightening than police sirens because it comes from living throats.

“Truck hasn’t come around for two, three days,” Jimmy says.

“They ought to shoot them,” Nettie says. It’s one of the things people say, one of the things that changes nothing.

“Old drunk down on 9th, he got his leg chewed off last night,” Jimmy reports.

“There’s always a meat shortage this time of year,” Pet says.

Sandy startles. She stares toward the street and they follow her gaze. The dog that regards them through the glass is at least four feet tall. Could be a Mastiff-Great Dane cross. It looks like a Shetland pony with fangs. With a high IQ. Drawn by their thoughts?

“Boris wants a snack.’ Jimmy raps the window glass, right where the great dog nose presses against it. The animal opens its maw. From the red depths of its throat comes a sound like sentient thunder. Jimmy laughs. Beyond Boris, smaller members of his pack loiter in the street, charging the occasional passing car.

“Get the Volvo,” Jimmy urges. “That’s a good boy.”

“Coffee, Jimmy?” Pet says.

Dogs rush the cab that pulls up to the curb. Boris rises up on his hind legs, rakes front claws across the hood. The driver lays on the horn, which does nothing to dissuade the dog pack from its surveillance.

“It’s Tony,” Pet says. “Give him a hand?”

“I want donuts for breakfast, then,” Jimmy says.

“You got it,” Pet says.

Jimmy slips out the salon door. He hits the street singing, a song that sounds, pressed through glass, something like reggae, something like the music a snake charmer plays to induce a cobra trance. Jimmy’s movements are fluid and slow. At the same unhurried pace, the dogs turn away from the taxi and surround the man. Jimmy addresses them in a soothing, melodic singsong. Inside the salon, a common gasp as Boris rises up on his hind legs. His forepaws come to rest on Jimmy’s shoulders. Inside, breath held against the sight of blood. It doesn’t come. Gently the man and dog sway together, side to side. The other dogs watch intently. While they dance, Tony climbs out of the cab and moves swiftly, silently for the door of the salon. Once Tony’s in, Jimmy reaches in his pants pocket and draws out a handful of linty kibble. Boris licks it from his open palm. Jimmy edges away from the dogs, toward the door. Once he’s safe inside, the spell passes and the dogs throw themselves against the window, baying their frustration at being had.

Tony shrugs out of his faux leopard fleece and slips a peachy colored smock over the tee shirt that hugs his pecs. The encounter with the canines has left him pale, pale, pale. His hands, long fingered and well kept, swoop through the air. The jewels on his white acrylic nails glint in the morning sun. He drapes himself around Jimmy in a swoon of gratitude. “My god. You saved my life.” Then, nostrils twitching, he pulls away. “When was the last time you took a bath?”

“I cultivate the scent,” Jimmy says. “Be glad I smell good to those dogs.”

“I worship your musk,” Tony says. “Truly. But I like my men better wearing Calvin Klein.”

“I never knew you had a thing for old guys,” Donna says. “Calvin Klein is so, not now.”

Tony pivots on the ball of one foot, draws himself up into diva declamation mode. Says, “Honey — “ but Pet’s look stops the snit before it has a chance to build up steam. Tony mimes the zipping of his lips.

“Thank you,” Pet says.

“You’rejustjealousbecausemenactuallycallmeupandaskmeout.” It comes out in one triumphant exhalation. Tony smiles sweetly. He unlocks his drawer and takes out his tools — scissors, brushes, combs and curling iron, diffuser, dryer. With great precision, arrays them on the tray.

Jimmy says, “Donuts.”

Pet says, “Uh huh.”

What he hates. Pet having it both ways, approving him and not. Alone, or with the right crowd in the salon, he is her fair-haired boy. She eggs him on. Her laughter is his best reward. Bring in some stringy old grandma, some trailer trash post teen whose hips are broader than her mind and it’s, Ooooh, freaky Tony you be good now. And to those women, Can you believe this queen.

Believe me, Petula, believe in me. I cut hair like a god. When it comes to color, I am Matisse. I make you laugh. I share my tips. Nobody gives you better back rubs. Don’t you remember, from your Sunday school days, how Peter denied Jesus? Don’t do that to me, Pet. I need you to own me. It’s what my mother never understood. We need to own each other.

Or is it Jimmy? Is that what it’s about?

Petula loads ten bucks credit on a transaction chip and hands it to Jimmy. “I like plain,” she says.

Donna wants a cruller. Glazed for Sandy. Nettie says she doesn’t care. Nettie almost never admits to caring.

“Chocolate on the outside. Full of vanilla jizz,” Tony says. He winks at Jimmy.

“That’s how I like em too, man,” Jimmy says. “I’ll be right back.” The donut shop is in the underground arcade. No dogs in the tunnels, not yet, even though some people like them better than the rats. Let ’em at each other and see who wins. It’s a popular joke.

“Be careful out there,” Tony says. “Maybe the rats are hungry today.”

Donna says, “The rats are always hungry. That’s why I carry M & M’s.”

“The only animals I’m afraid of walk on two legs,” Jimmy says.

His smell and his testosterone aura leave with him when he goes. Without them, the salon feels more cozy and a little bit bereft. Donna tackles Sandy’s stiff new curls with clippers, the way she might trim a hedge. Tony’s first appointment, Janis, arrives arcade-side. It must follow her everywhere, this stunned silence-at-first-sight. Janis is six feet tall, fleshed and muscled on that fine borderline between buff and slim, with breasts that are an asset and an investment. Her morning face, unmade up, is clean and strong. The pale gold hair brushing the tops of her shoulders is Tony’s work. It sways enticingly, not quite in synch with the roll of her hips as she crosses the salon from door to Tony, who stands on tiptoe to fling his arms around her neck. Janis hugs him back a hundred dollar hug, sincerely and for free. She changes into her own peach smock, sits, arranging her perfect limbs in Tony’s chair. Every session in Pet’s salon starts with a neck massage — it is a kind of trademark. As Tony kneads the tops of her shoulders, Janis closes her eyes, lifts her chin and sighs.

“Hey Janis,” Pet calls over. “How’s tricks.”

Janis answers without opening her eyes. “The other night some guy hired me to have a tea party with Raggedy Andy and Raggedy Ann.”

Tony, massaging. “What did you wear?”

“Braids and an apron.”

Over the clippers’ drone, Sandy says, “I don’t get it.”

“Very chic,” Tony says. “Chef’s apron, or maid’s?”

“A very small apron,” Janis says.”

“She’s like, a whore.” Donna’s voice takes a solo, four syllables long.

“That,” Nettie mutters, “is the universal female condition.”

“That,” Janis says, “is a big fat lie.”

Tony, nervous, says, “Girls….”

“Artists always get misunderstood,” Pet says, soothing. “Tell us what you call it. What you do.”

“I am a fantasy artist,” Janis says. “From strands of dream and desire, I weave a real if momentary world.”

“Fancy words for dirty deeds,” Donna says.

Sandy looks back and forth, entranced. “Who’s telling the truth?”

“They both are,” Tony says.

“Dirty minds,” says Janis, “see dirt everywhere.”

For along time, no one understood how much things had changed. In school, they tell you evolution is gradual, so slow that no one ever sees it happen. They tell us we’re the same as people have always been, since we wielded clubs and ate raw meat. Nobody wants to hear that escalating environmental pressures accelerate organic change, not when politicians still argue about whether god made the world in seven days or the world made itself in its own sweet, unfathomable time.

If what we do can really change things, change the playing field and change the players, well, that has implications for how we behave, who’s responsible for what. Go far enough down that road and you find a high court adjudicating evolutionary crimes. Crow Chemical has as much environmental impact as the Ice Age. Is just as ruthless. Should they be punished for their arrogance?

At twelve, at fifteen, I was a geek. Puberty overtook me at my game console. I thought I knew what was supposed to happen when it did. I was supposed to crave contact with fellow human flesh. The smell. The feel. The warmth. But those things were rarely part of my experience. When they were, they scared me. Instead, it was pictures that made me feel excited. As my appetites grew more pronounced, and more refined, what I wanted was better, more exciting pictures. I thought I was the only person in the world who felt this way. Of course, I was deeply ashamed.

College, I hoped, would free me from my adolescent isolation. There, I imagined, I would be able to live in all my senses, to get on course erotically. Just my luck to come along in exactly the same year that UC sold all its campuses to the Saudis and became exclusively an online university. To ease the transition, all of us virtual students were assigned rooms in virtual dormitories and expected to spend at least part of every day in residence there. I even had a virtual roommate. In time, perhaps because we never actually occupied the same material space, we became very close.

In time, our closeness became not physically but imaginatively intimate. I learned that Jorge, too, was a visual stimulator. In time, I changed my major to Art and Design, while Jorge devoted himself to Computer Science. Between us, we acquired the skills and sensibilities to break new ground in erotic art. We developed strategies to manifest subjective sexual fantasies. Our collaborative senior thesis was called Beyond the Body: Explorations in Pictorial Libido. Both Jorge and I graduated with highest honors.

Neither of us had given much thought to what we’d do when we finished our degrees. As it turned out, we didn’t need to. Our professors couldn’t wait to become our clients. Most of their fantasies were mundane, about doing things to students the Ethics Committee would frown on if those acts were real. But it was a start. In no time, we’d both paid off our student loans. We invested in faster connections, more storage, state of the art video and sound equipment. I became more and more inspired in sensing clients’ desires, in gratifying the most fleeting and exotic of their visual longings. At first I used my own body out of economy, but in time, I came to love transforming and displaying it. Let’s say I can understand how certain artists become fixated on self portraits.

All of humanity, all human needs and appetites were inherent in me. I could become any sentient being. I could assume any pose. As time went by and I could afford to, I began to improve on the gifts nature had bestowed on me, both through my own efforts and with the help of various professionals.

Then, six years after we became virtual roommates, Jorge and I decided it was time we met in the flesh. We agreed to rendezvous one autumn afternoon at a certain viewpoint on Mt. Tamalpais. The day was perfect. Sunlight turned the ocean to restless blue metal. There was no wind. I couldn’t decide if I was more excited or more terrified. I couldn’t decide what to wear. How to look. Who to be. Once the date was made, I saw what I had not understood before. As much as I was capable of caring for another being, I loved Jorge.

I loved his voice. I loved his spirit. I loved his technical acumen. I loved his ingenuity. I loved his code. It was the first time I had ever loved.

I was the first one to arrive at our meeting place. From the viewpoint, it was possible to see the road as it wound around the mountainside. Jorge’s old silver Porsche was sleek and shark-like as it climbed toward me. I felt the hum of its engine deep inside my body. As the Porsche drew nearer and nearer, as the shadowy figure behind the smoked glass became more perceptible, it was, I confess, orgasmic.

At last, the silver Porsche turned into the lookout, The engine stilled. For what seemed like a long time, nothing happened. Then, finally, the silver door swung open.

What is the fastest, finest thing you can imagine? Can you imagine pure light instead of liquid in your veins? Can you imagine breathing sacramental air? Can you imagine occupying a state of utter vulnerability, your senses stripped naked by love? When the being who emerged from the silver Porsche was seen to be small and shapeless, was seen to be twisted and scarred, was seen to be unsightly, the horror I experienced was in exact proportion to the intensity of my anticipation. Instantly, ecstasy was transformed into an anguish of the optic nerve more painful than anything else I have ever felt.

My love for Jorge still existed in all its force but in that moment it became separated from any point of reference in the material world. My love was liberated and exiled. I the artist and I the canvas fused into one being, sterile and hybrid. Pain drove me to the next evolutionary level. Jorge climbed back into his silver Porsche and drove down the mountainside, away.

Since then, I have devoted myself to providing solace to the visual aesthetes of this world. I create tableaux of stunning beauty and perversity. It is the power of my work to divorce Eros and reproduction. Hence, I do my small part to hasten the extinction of my species. For this I am well paid, yes. But even if my art brought no money at all, I would still make it. How else to fill the time between now and death?

“So what are we doing with the hair today?” Tony says.

“I’m tired of hair,” Janis says. “Take it off.”

“Sure?”

“Do it,” Janis says. A smile dances on her lips as she watches the salon’s other occupants watch her. The golden hair falls to her lap, to the floor. So much dead protein. When there’s an inch left all around, Tony takes his clippers to it and the clean, sculptural shape of Janis’s skull emerges. Her face is beautiful and without gender. Sandy stares. Nettie looks away.

“Do you still think I’m a whore?” Janis says. She’s caught Donna’s gaze and won’t let go. Donna seems unable to speak.

Pet, being Pet, rescues.

“If taking money for giving people pleasure makes you a whore, sign me up.” Pet flicks her whisk broom sensuously down Nettie’s neck, across her shoulders, dispersing stiff fallen hairs.

“Amen to that, Sister Petula,” Tony says.

“Some people,” Janis says, “prefer pain.”

Jimmy slips through the arcade side door carrying a brown paper sack. Grease has soaked through the paper in shiny dark spots. “Wild outside. Wild inside. No chocolate today.” He deals out donuts, maple for Tony.

When Jimmy comes back, so do the dogs. Boris butts his big square head against the salon window. In a semicircle behind him the rest of his pack shifts and yips like a doo wop chorus line.

When all the humans are fed, Jimmy opens the door, opens the bag and tosses half a dozen day-old donuts into the street. The dogs dive for them. With a growl, Boris re-imposes pack order. His strong jaws close on a stale maple bar. For an instant, he looks surprised at the sensations it evokes — so soft, so sweet, so strange. Chew. Gulp. Gone. He seizes another donut, then leaves his subordinates to fight among themselves.

The genres we humans practice are less silos than strands, at least in the hands of skilled weavers. Case in point is veteran novelist Ann Harleman’s latest tale, Tell Me, Signora, a magic carpet expertly woven of equal parts vibrant travelogue, political thriller, memento mori, a woman’s quest for healing, the global intelligentsia seen inside out, all leavened with the ever-present yeast of female desire owned and satisfied. Harleman’s latest is sensuous, smart and illuminated by the interventions of the dead. It is unfailingly both feminine and feminist, the story of a strong, smart woman seeking to reconstruct a self after decades of selfless caretaking.

Harleman’s narrative landscape is built from these beautifully evoked, contiguous realities. The coin of the realm comes straight from fairy tale and hero’s journey — a powerful act required to bust the curses of the past and set the future free. Tell Me, Signora satisfies both as a richly detailed contemporary novel and a classic quest narrative. It’s a book skillfully made enough to obscure its lofty pedigree and welcome readers into its encompassing narrative now. I dare you to wash the dishes before the story’s done.

In a conversation with my son this week, the term “neurological diversity” arose. It entered the room courtesy of Greta Thunberg in conversation with Naomi Klein. Greta described her prodigious ability to research, absorb and synthesize complex information as a sort of compensation for lacking the more common gift of social intelligence. My son, who’s teaching an undergrad lit class in Berkeley’s African American Studies department about invoking and communing with ancestors surmised that the ability to see and communicate with the dead might be a real if not common human gift — another way of being differently able.

Click.

I recently read my 1984 novel Conscience Place for the first time in 35 years. It was about to be republished. My task was to proof the scanned text, and I secretly gave myself permission to make small tweaks if I thought they were needed. Thirty five years is a long time, after all, and I feared being embarrassed by a writer I no longer am telling a story in ways I no longer would to an audience of readers who might no longer give a shit.

Click.

While I no longer remembered the text, I have never forgotten the experience of writing Conscience Place, never forgotten being thrown headfirst into a strange new world. I was supposed to bring all my skills as a writer with me, but none of my assumptions or prejudices. Until then, all of my work — 3 novels and a book of stories — had begun with a voice speaking inside my head.

Click.

Here’s what I wrote in the introduction to the new edition:

Conscience Place arrived as an image. It wasn’t a picture of anything recognizable, but a luminous silvery shape suspended against deep black. I was working hard on something else at the time but the silver image sucked all the air out of that story and left it dead by the side of the road.

I more or less got it that the image was a feeling tone, that last con­summating chord played on the keyboard of nerves and hormones, skin and memory that is the human instrument. It’s how a story makes you feel, if only for a moment. The image of the silver shape on black was how the incoming story was supposed to make people feel. And I was supposed to translate that image into words so they could.

When I opened my notebook and took up my pen, the story was ready. It started with a set of premises, pitched in the other-worldly voice of an origin story. I decided I’d take down the ideas and get rid of the voice later. In the end, it persisted. What the voice set up was a sort of mythic long shot. When I zoomed in I was at The Place, among The People.

Click.

Last May, I was afraid my former self would shame me. Instead, I got sucked into the story once again. I remembered writing every word, in a kind of heightened state that was both composition and transcription. I remembered the sense of not making things up but letting them show up and pass through me. I remembered choosing words and writing scenes as if they were poems, with as much attention to rhythm and image and the silence of white spaces as to event. I found that the voice of the prose still lived in my central nervous system and it still had the power to carry me into a place of elastic compassion and surpassing strangeness. Now and then, I recognized a fleeting image or a moment or an attribute that reflected my then-real-life, but mostly, the Place felt like a whole-cloth creation. In today’s living room, I wept. A thirty-five year old story still had the power to break my heart.

Click.

When my son and I talked about neurological diversity this week, I realized I’d been noodling on the knowledge that the best of my six published and even-more-written novels are stories that passed through me, not ones that arose as ideas in my brain. They arrived with the sense that the story itself already existed in some alternate space and it was my job to bring it into this one. I’ve surmised in the past that this is simply a means of banishing self-consciousness, getting out of my own way, but I don’t really believe that’s true. Almost all of my short stories — and I’m quite good at the form — arise directly from my real life. Writing them is trying to make truth out of past. My stories happen through deep memory and conscious craft. My best novels — and these are all genre novels — happen through a sort of extended trance possession.

Click.

One last data point. I’ve taught lots of writing workshops over the years — a couple weeks at Clarion among them — and it’s sometimes though not always my experience that a student’s work-in-progress has an intention that’s at odds with what the writer is trying to make it mean or do. In most cases, I respect my role as medium and deliver the message to the writer. Once the vision is clear, I can help with craft.

I am willing to believe that there’s a channel through which story flows into the world. I am willing to believe there can exist a neural channel that lets us hold that water in our hands. I am profoundly grateful to have experienced this story mind a time or two.

Fiction-Writing as Trance Possession: Conscience Place and Story Mind was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First, let’s talk about the inherent value of a one-term presidency. Twenty-two of our presidents served a single term or less. Fourteen served two full terms. Seven served one full term, were elected to a second but either died, resigned, were assassinated or impeached. The best of them were willing to jeopardize re-election in order to do the better thing. The US was never meant to be a dynasty. And that’s a good thing. Looking at the field of Democratic elders standing in the primary, the pertinent question is not if they have two terms in them, but if they are capable of turning the ship of state in a positive direction within four years.

Trump’s time in office has been a hard but useful lesson in how quickly a self-serving conservative cadre can dismantle decades of progressive legislative action and humane policy, mostly by unilateral executive action. Perhaps the hardest lesson of the last few years is that the legislative branch doesn’t really count for much — not unless an unwavering party majority is in place in both houses — an outcome we’re not likely to see soon again. Trump and his cronies have given us a Supreme Court whose supreme mandate is to protect wealth and whose second preoccupation is a social agenda that’s anti-woman, anti-diversity and socially cruel. They’re there for life. The checks and balances they told us about in school have been unchecked and become decidedly out of whack.

The reason the lesson is useful is simply that it proves how much can be accomplished in how short a time when the agenda is clearly defined and systematically advanced from day one. The question for Democrats hoping to save democracy is who’s got the chops to turn the boat around.

Enter Miz — make that Senator — Warren.

It’s not hard to argue that Joe Biden, friend of big banks and big business, is on the fast track to non compos mentis. Just play the videos. Even if he could keep his words in order and his facts straight, his willingness to take reflected credit for the progressive accomplishments of the Obama administration is really so much noise. Joe was the token business-backing white man that made the ticket palatable enough to win the middle and give us our first President of color.

For oh so many reasons, Joe is not the man for 2020.

And Bernie? You have to love him. For his truth telling. For being loud and outrageous and socialist enough to bring a new generation of voters at least part way into the system. For giving us the ten commandments of a socialist new deal. Bernie is Democrats’ John the Baptist, preaching not that the time is here now so much as that it must come soon.

Joe Biden was born in 1942. He will be turning 83 when a new administration is sworn in in 2025.

Bernie was born in 1941. He’ll be 84.

Elizabeth Warren was born in 1949. That means that if elected, she’ll be 75 at the end of her first term as President of the United States. Her social and fiscal policies will put the US on par with the best of western democracies. As a veteran senator, she’ll work to restore the relevance and efficacy of our legislatures. As both lawyer and law professor, she’ll respect and work to restore the rule of law. The US will once again be committed to the preservation of the environment — maybe even soon enough and dramatically enough to lift the cloud of greed and doom that cloaks our species and its home planet.

Not only will she have moved enough Plan Pieces on the Chessboard of State to undo much of the Koch Coup Trump and his cronies have so tirelessly advanced, she’ll have trained a carefully chosen Vice President to take over leadership of the Democratic Party and pursue a humane progressive agenda for the following 4–8 years.

I’m Elizabeth Warren’s age. I spent ten years as a single mother. I’ve spent time teaching. I’ve been successful in two careers. Like Warren, I’m fit and not especially vain. I know how to focus and I’m tireless. I listen to other people. When consensus is hard to achieve, I can imagine a third way. Having raised kids, I know how to identify and encourage talent. Most of the things that suck women’s energy or curb our flat-out pursuit of worthy goals and dreams lie in our past. I understand the one-two punch of high energy and high intelligence that puts us ahead of most packs.

I also know it takes most everything you have, especially if every day you give your all.

In four years as President, Warren will have saved our asses and lifted up our hearts. In four years, she will have earned an important smaller job — or well deserved retirement. And she’ll have trained her replacement to carry on.

Our job now is to look hard and choose that replacement wisely. We need to pick a brilliant ticket, not just a winning candidate. It’s the Democrat’s turn and their duty to plan for history’s long, long term.