Freeman's Home E-Book

John Freeman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 462

Beschreibung

The third literary anthology in the series that has been called 'ambitious' (O Magazine) and 'strikingly international' (Boston Globe), Freeman's: Home, continues to push boundaries in diversity and scope, with stunning new pieces from emerging writers and literary luminaries alike. As the refugee crisis continues to convulse whole swathes of the world and there are daily updates about the rise of homelessness in different parts of America, the idea and meaning of home is at the forefront of many people's minds. Viet Thanh Nguyen harks to an earlier age of displacement with a haunting piece of fiction about the middle passage made by those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine brings us back to the present, as he leaves his mother's Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are building a semblance of normalcy, and even beauty, in the face of so much loss. Home can be a complicated place to claim, because of race - the everyday reality of which Danez Smith explores in a poem about a chance encounter at a bus stop - or because of other types of fraught history. In 'Vacationland,' Kerri Arsenault returns to her birthplace of Mexico, Maine, a paper mill boomtown turned ghost town, while Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village with grandparents who married across a cultural divide. Many readers and writers turn to literature to find a home: Leila Aboulela tells a story of obsession with a favourite author. Also including Thom Jones, Emily Raboteau, Rawi Hage, Barry Lopez, Herta Müller, Amira Hass, and more - writers from around the world lend their voices to the theme and what it means to build, leave, return to, lose, and love a home.

Leseprobe

Freeman’s

Home

Previous Issues

Freeman’s: Arrival

Freeman’s: Family

Freeman’s

Home

Est. 2015

Edited by

John Freeman

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © John Freeman, 2017

Assistant Editor: Allison Malecha

“Alipašino” first appeared in Bosnian in Adisa Bašić’s Promotivni spot za moju domovinu. Sarajevo: Dobra knjiga, 2010; “Germany and Its Exiles” first appeared in German in Herta Müller’s Der Spiegel as “Herzwort und Kopfwort” in January 2013; “The Committed” is excerpted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s forthcoming novel, which will be published by Grove Atlantic; “A Land Without Borders” is excerpted from A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank, to be published by Text Publishing in April 2017; “A Natural” copyright © 2017 by Ross Raisin. Extracted from A Natural by Ross Raisin, published by Jonathan Cape; “Being Here” is excerpted from Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here, to be published in English by Text Publishing in 2017. Translation © 2017 Penny Hueston. Original French publication: Être ici est une splendeur © P.O.L. Editeur, 2016; “E. A hymn bracing for the end” is excerpted from Concerto for Jerusalem by Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa, to be published by Yale University Press in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series in fall 2017. Reproduced by permission.

The moral right of the authors contained herein to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 517 3

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 946 1

Printed in Great Britain

Published in collaboration with the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School

Cover and interior design by Michael Salu

Contents

Introduction

John Freeman

Six Shorts

Thom Jones

Kay Ryan

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Rawi Hage

Stuart Dybek

Benjamin Markovits

Vacationland

Kerri Arsenault

Alipašino

Adisa Bašić

Fishermen Always Eat Fish Eyes First

Xiaolu Guo

The Committed

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Hope and Home

Rabih Alameddine

what was said on the bus stop

Danez Smith

Germany and Its Exiles

Herta Müller

All the Home You’ve Got

Edwidge Danticat

A Land Without Borders

Nir Baram

Pages of Fruit

Leila Aboulela

Home, The Real Thing of an Image

Velibor Božović

The San Joaquin

Barry Lopez

What More Is There to Say?

Lawrence Joseph

Stone Houses

Amira Hass

The Sound of Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon

A Natural

Ross Raisin

Marine Boy

Gregory Pardlo

The Curse

Emily Raboteau

Being Here

Marie Darrieussecq

#21

Katie Ford

The Red House

Kjell Askildsen

E. A hymn bracing for the end

Adonis

On Winning the Melbourne Prize, 11 November 2009

Gerald Murnane

Contributor Notes

Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

For much of my life home has been elsewhere. Both of my parents grew up in cities they felt compelled to leave, so for a decade my family lived elsewhere: in Cleveland, where my parents met, then on Long Island, where my father found work, and later—for the longest stretch of time—in a small Pennsylvania town called Emmaus, where my mother and father made a home. There I walked to school on cracked sidewalks beneath maple trees so large my fearless brothers thought twice about climbing them. The Lehigh Valley rose above and around us like a smoke ring. Night felt like a well.

We lived in Emmaus for just six years but until recently it was the only home I’d known. It had the moody, memorable rhythms of a home. On clear afternoons our high school pep band marched the streets belting out songs, tossing batons. On snowy winter mornings my brothers and I curled around the radio, listening for school district closings. Upon hearing East Penn Schools, we bolted into the yard to build castles from chest-high drifts carved by snowplows. Summers, the soft June air would be pierced by the whine of far-off drag races.

I never knew there could be a difference between where you are from and what you call home until my family left Pennsylvania in 1984. My father had a new job in Sacramento. We were going home—to his home, and like almost every trip my family took, we drove. The United States unpeeled before our station wagon packed with coloring books and our springer spaniel Tracy, who curled up into a ball the size of a danish and slept most of the way. Everything else we owned was stuffed into a moving van driven ahead of us by a guy named Kool. As Ohio opened up into Iowa and then to the broad terrifying expanse of Kansas, I thought, this is where I’m from.

I didn’t know it then but California would become where I was from. My family adapted to long, even seasons and shallow nights and hot lungfuls of valley air. It would be a decade before I felt again the lonesome hollow in my chest a fall day can give you. I lost my nickname and my brothers reinvented themselves too in minor ways. It wasn’t odd to see palm trees or to think about everything east of us as “back there,” to not even think about the past at all. To just get in a car and drive somewhere alone to see how fast the machine could go.

Movement is a particularly American metaphor because agency is one of the nation’s obsessions. It is part of America’s mythology that you make your fate. You can decide, and then become, whatever or whoever it is you wish to be. In a country which takes such poor care of its weak—which has been and continues to be so hostile to visitors—it feels especially cruel to play this dream song. And yet everywhere the tune hums: in presidential speeches, advertisements, church services, in pop music and books and films. It is the melody of American life.

I have come to believe that home is the antidote to myths such as this one, myths that hover outside the reach of so much human life, creating a low pressure system of unhappiness in between the ground and sky. Perhaps we truly need to become in order to be, but however speedily or sluggishly that evolution proceeds, we need a narrative space in which we tell and live the story of our lives—and that space is called a home. In this sense, a home is not a fixed place, or even necessarily a stable one. The last decade of migration ought to tell us that. Rather, home is a space we have exerted ourselves against to make a corner of it ours. Home is a place we claim or allow ourselves to be claimed by.

Part of making and preserving this space is telling it. The writers collected in this issue of Freeman’s are caught in the middle of that act. As readers, I invite you to eavesdrop on their narrative hammering, to watch them raise the roof beams. These are intimate, difficult, sometimes amusing, and beautifully textured stories—true and otherwise—poems, and photographs. For a child, a home is the original sensory map, and so several stories begin right there, with that first surveying of the territory.

Xiaolu Guo describes her childhood in a small fishing village in China, where she was raised by her frail grandmother and hard-­drinking, cruel grandfather. For Thom Jones, home was the aisles of a general store which his grandmother ran during the Depression in Illinois. Passersby were so hungry she’d pack scoops of peanut butter to have at the ready for desperate visitors. Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and grew up in Brooklyn, and in her bittersweet essay she writes of something that happened in the interregnum between homes that instigated a crisis of faith in her life.

The building materials of home do not exist in a world of plain geometry; they are constantly changing shape and weight. Many stories here sketch out the quantum mechanics for living in a shifting field, when the need for safe space remains. Nowhere has this urge for safety and home been more powerfully under threat than in Syria and Libya. The novelist Rabih Alameddine travels in Lebanon and Greece where he witnesses the small and large ways Syrian refugees make a temporary space a home, and when conditions are too abject for this urge to take root.

A society is often defined by how it treats those seeking shelter, wanting to make a home. In her brilliant, furious essay, Herta Müller tells of her own migration into Germany in the worst days of Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania and the awful ways she was treated upon arrival. She warns of the amendments made to Germany’s sense of itself, of who counts as German after the war when exiles returned home. Then she compares this house of holes to the one Germany struggles with in the wake of mass migration into Europe from the Middle East.

Time and again the pieces here form a calculus of belonging, and wrestle with the ethics of addition. The poet Kay Ryan has a theory on home. It has to do with interior proximity, and a balance between our need for what is around us and for our ability to affect it. Emily Raboteau marries into a family and notes that when you become daughter-in-law to an immoveable object, such as a stubborn Ugandan mother, you take over the burden of channeling that tension into the creation of a new, larger home. In his elegiac short story, Barry Lopez writes of a lucky woman for whom the effort of maintaining a home has largely receded, and who funnels her remaining energy into preserving the health and vitality of a wider home, the natural world, which is home—she hopes—to all.

Would that there were more in the world who saw this way: sharing a home in many cases is a fractious, often dangerous matter. In his essay about life on the edge of Israel and Palestine, the novelist Nir Baram describes how a history joined by exclusionary definitions of home corrodes daily life along that border. In a chapter from his forthcoming novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen imagines the stories of people on boats coming from Vietnam to America in the 1970s, the terrifying Middle Passage of a huge wave of migration into the U.S.—and upon their arrival things will hardly get easier for them.

Whether it’s war or pressures too great to bear, home is so often the place one needs to leave. In an excerpt of his upcoming novel, A Natural, Ross Raisin conjures a gay footballer traveling the low-level club circuits across England on his first trip away from home. Marie Darrieussecq writes of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and how she had to leave her husband and children behind in Germany to get space to work in Paris. Juan Gabriel Vásquez made a similar trip to the city of light some eighty years later, following in the footsteps of Latin America’s great novelists, only to discover home had followed him there. Gregory Pardlo signs up for the marines as a young man but spends most of his time not really wanting to leave where he is from.

Home can let you down more than any other place and still retain its hold over you. Kerri Arsenault comes from a paper mill town in Maine, a place created by its industry and then killed by the carcinogens that industry pumped into its air and water. Yet the town’s residents remain loyal. In his poem, Danez Smith writes of the way new connective spaces between unlike people are created by the cruelly exclusionary logic of a home that won’t let you in.

Since force is acting on it at all times, home must be claimed and arranged, catalogued and maintained. Adisa Bašić’s poem speaks in the voice of a neighborhood which lures no tourists but means everything to those it raised. Amira Hass lives in the West Bank and notes how signs of what was once Palestine litter Jerusalem, most notably in the stone houses which were built before the creation of Israel. Lawrence Joseph has lived in lower Manhattan for several decades and his poem chronicles the turns of light like a painter who knows his palette. Writing of his childhood Austin, Benjamin Markovits recalls how if it was your home, you reserved the right to rename its streets, to mispronounce its landmarks, to make it yours.

There’s a liturgy of home in these pages—a praise that goes beyond compliment and edges toward devotion. Aleksandar Hemon humorously describes the marathon singing sessions his family hosts at gatherings to keep their Ukrainian heritage alive. Rawi Hage describes how he began taking photographs during the civil war in Lebanon, hoping he might see a bomb dropping, an activity that may have preserved the trauma of that war for years to come. In a steamy prose poem, Stuart Dybek recalls driving home from a day at the beach, the tension of stopped traffic eclipsed by the erotic possibilities of a stopped car. In her exquisite, beautiful poem, Katie Ford shows how home is what you encode to a text: the poem becomes home itself.

To find a home sometimes we have to expand our notion of what that means. It can be one place, or it can be many, it can be one’s own words, or it can be the words of another writer, as it is for the narrator of Leila Aboulela’s story, who has lived the life of a conservative Muslim in Scotland but who finds air to breathe in the work of her favorite novelist, a woman who has lived a different life than hers. For the hero of Kjell Askildsen’s brief story, a place becomes a home when he can finally add a person to it.

Ultimately, home is in the body and the voice for so many writers. In a stirring verse, the great poet Adonis sings the praises of the vessel which has carried him across nine decades, and the form which has made the world his home. And finally, in a speech accepting a prize that once came with a monetary award to be allocated for overseas travel, the Melbourne writer Gerald Murnane beats out a hymn to the places that have made and sustained him across six decades in the city he calls home.

Even though New York is now my home, these writers have convinced me home is ultimately not a singular place. That even if you make a new home, others can exist in minor keys. I have felt at home in London and in York, Maine for long stretches, and pretty much in every pool and on every cinder track I have stepped foot on, and strangely in the most remote parts of the American West which remind me of what was there before it was stolen.

I type this now from Chicago, not my city, but the home of Aleksandar Hemon and Teri Boyd, parents to my god-children, and therefore a home of sorts. It is probably my sixtieth visit to this strange, miraculous city of ziggurat skyscrapers and endless alleys, poetic talkers and well-curated mythologies. I last saw the Hemons in Sarajevo, their father’s other home, and where four of the pieces in this issue were spoken aloud before the writers themselves knew they had a piece for this issue.

The kids are asleep upstairs now—ages four and nine—the exact ages I was when I lived in that small town in Pennsylvania thirty years ago. The ages at which you can watch children change before your very eyes, the thin membrane between now and then so slim it feels transparent. I wonder what they are thinking in their sleep, how large and permanent the city must feel crouched in the dark around them each night. Each day the world around them opens wider. Perhaps there will be a time when this city will become where they were from, but I hope they take a page from this book and realize they can call it home, too.

Six Shorts

She was scarcely five feet tall. Her hands and elbows were rough with callouses. Her hair was thin and gray and she always smelled vaguely of Bengay. She walked with a cane. They called her “Mag” and said that in her day she was a “looker” and that she loved to dance. She didn’t seem the dancing type to me. To me she was “Gram.” Every day she dragged herself from bed at dawn and set her aching body to work. The “Store” opened at six a.m.

The bread man came early with his redolent supplies. The milkman was next, followed by the meat man, and then customers began filing in, in a steady procession. I remember Stanley Kunchas, a cheerful Hungarian who came through the back door on his way to his shift at the Durabilt. He left his bulldog, Pete, on the back porch while he departed through the front door, strolling up Jericho Road, lunch pail in hand, in love with life and the whole world. Pete guarded Mag’s back door for years.

The people came to buy and they came to visit. Mag was a skillful hostess/psychologist/entertainer—there was little TV in those days. There was no hurry. Still, the shelves got stocked, the stove got stoked with coal, laundry got done, meals were made, four daughters were raised, as were innumerable grandchildren.

Mag couldn’t stand the sight of hunger or suffering. She saw the Depression come and go and saw to it that her customers were fed. Located as the store was near the Burlington Railroad, hoboes were frequent visitors. They would do odd jobs for hot food and coffee and talk of their travels.

Mag started the store with fifty dollars she earned working in a glove factory. In my childlike way I helped in the store. I sacked red and white potatoes in ten-pound bags tied with cotton string. I blended yellow beads of dye in tubs of margarine. I would dab peanut butter from a tub onto a piece of wax paper. Mag gave it away as a kind of emergency food. I swept the floors. Hauled pop bottles down into the dark basement. There was a cistern down there. A cousin once told me that it was seven hundred feet deep with a powerful undercurrent.

There were other grocery store hazards. I killed the occasional jumping spider that arrived in the banana crates from Central America. The same cousin told me they could move at blinding speed. The excitement of such possibilities kept me on my toes. And then there were butcher knives. My grandmother taught me how to slice meat while keeping the knife blade moving away from my hands and body. It was my grandmother who taught me how to knot my shoes.

The years took their toll on Mag. Times changed. Customers moved and defected. The A&P was quicker and cheaper. There were two armed robberies and Mag’s bladder ruptured from the stress of waiting for another. She had become an old woman, defenseless and alone. Her doctors told her she was too worn out to run a store and that she had to quit. The family agreed. “Enough,” they said.

The store is torn down now. Mag is dead. Most of the people who traded with her are dead too. The store wasn’t much to look at anyhow. There’s a greenhouse on the property now. But the store lives on in my heart. It wasn’t simply business. The store was about knowing and loving people. It was a time and era worth remembering.

—Thom Jones

Crispin was ticking like a little Geiger counter as she settled in on a pillow near my head this morning. I was her uranium. But of course with a real Geiger counter, the object isn’t just to register the find; somebody has greedy designs on the uranium; somebody wants to get it and sell it. Somebody is getting excited, and the ticking is getting faster and faster.

The marvelous thing about Crispin is that she is not getting excited. She settles down, turns off the tick and shuts her eyes.

Not everything has to escalate.

I’ve tried to think about her purr. Why does it always happen at about the same nearness to my head? And why does she purr and then stop purring? What I think is that it’s a perfect-proximity indicator; it turns on just as she crosses a certain border into perfect proximity, and its only function is to say, You’re there. That’s why it can quit.

What the cat wants isn’t contact but something close to it. Or I could go a little further and blur the border between proximity and contact and say that being almost there (proximity) is the best sort of being there (contact).

Close but no cigar, people say, as though anybody wanted a cigar. Close is much better than a cigar, says Crispin.

This feeling about proximity is related to the exquisite force fields in a house. In the same way that the cat is made perfectly easy (perfectly easy!) by a certain magical relationship between herself and the head of her person, a person is made easy by the magical relationship of various intersecting vectors generated by her chair and table in concert with her lamp, say.

That’s how we feel at home, ideally: we feel released to not pay any attention to where we are because we are suspended and weightless in a beautiful web made out of the sweet intersections of the familiar and thoroughly prevetted.

A house is a big skull, or at least mine is for me—the container of my brain. Really, I move around in my house disembodied, I’m sure.

Or I move around in parts of my house, that is. I wonder if other people are like this and only really use an embarrassingly small amount of their space? If there was an infrared tracker of my movements it would be so irradiated in my bed area that it would burn through the back of Fairfax. There would be serious hatchings in the kitchen and bathroom, lighter arcs out to the mailbox and the driveway for the papers, but the other rooms would be ghostly.

I could apparently sublet much of this lavish thousand-square-foot house.

No: that was a joke. I need all the space I’m not using, just as Crispin needs everything all the way out to the distant perimeter of the fence. She knows if some bad cat has snuck in, and it is very polluting to her rest. We need it empty.

I actually mean empty both physically and mentally.

I have always felt kind of embarrassed that I have to have so much brain I don’t use, and even seem to have to aggressively defend the emptiness of. I’ve never quite come to terms with it because it’s so un-American, so inattentive-to-my-bootstraps sounding. It sounds like a character flaw. Dare I say, I am in many, many ways not curious? That I do not care to add to my mental stores?

Or perhaps I could say, slightly less self-damningly, that though I am curious my curiosity is unserious, as if I am just pretending to be curious about, say, how tall hops plants can grow, because I know that hard little fact is going to drop through my mind just like pretty much everything else? In other words, it is a mind that cannot hold onto a lot but still it is a good mind in its way with long lines of sight unobscured by the heaps of stuff that build up in minds that can build them up.

What my kind of mind likes makes it tick like Crispin’s ­perfect-proximity indicator.

My bedroom is full of books and as I pass my eye over them on a given morning, one or another of them is somehow just at the right distance from me, just perfect to open and allow that strange unmaking and remaking of the self, that weird interweaving of brains when things go permeable.

You have to have a lot of extra house around yourself to get this to happen and perhaps it is somehow happening in the extra-house part of the other mind that has become so attractive to me right then. Maybe we share some kind of room for entertaining.

—Kay Ryan

I have told this story many times since the events took place. As with many a trivial anecdote, I have come over the years to realize that this one is, in fact, not trivial at all; each new retelling brings me, I think, closer to its meaning. Perhaps one day I will understand it.

In 1999, after three years of trying to build a home in Paris, I decided to leave. The choice to settle in this city had been dictated by my vocation: In the sixties, Paris was the place where my literary forebears, particularly Mario Vargas Llosa, had written the masterpieces that informed my tradition, my language, and my tastes. But my Parisian experience was a discreet catastrophe. I spent the first months seriously ill and I failed at the basic task of writing books I could be proud of. After a few months of hiding away in someone else’s home in the Belgian Ardennes, I arrived in Barcelona. There were material considerations behind this decision—here I could earn a living writing in my own language, or teaching literature, or translating it—but also a kind of unashamed superstition. The name of Vargas Llosa, perhaps my predominant influence at the time, was once again very much present in the mechanics of my decision. In the early seventies, he had written wonderful novels while living here; his publisher was here, and so was his agent. He had built a home away from home, I thought, and I would try to do the same.

By the fall of 2000, I had joined a literary magazine, Lateral, as part of its editorial board. At the end of my second or third meeting, Juan Trejo, a fellow apprentice in the novelistic trade, approached me to tell me the following story: The day before, having left home to throw his garbage in the nearest trash bins, he spent some time going through the leftovers—the cast-off books, furniture, or appliances people leave by the containers for the benefit of others. Among the rejected stuff he found a VHS videocassette; on its label, typewritten, were the words Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa. He picked up the tape and the next day, gave it to me. It was, he said, a welcome present.

That evening, while I dined at home with my wife and my sister-in-law, I told them about the tape, and the three of us agreed that there was something unusual about Trejo’s story. As he left home to throw out the garbage, he knew that the next day he would have a meeting with the rest of the editorial board; the new guy, a Colombian who also thought of himself as a writer, had expressed his admiration for Vargas Llosa; and the tape Trejo had found next to the garbage cans, among discarded things, was not merely about literature, which in itself would have been a major coincidence, but an interview with that same novelist who he knew was so important to the new guy. Trejo could have left the tape where he found it; or he could have picked it up but forgotten about his conversations with the Colombian newcomer; or he could have preferred, out of timidity or plain indifference, to keep it for himself. My wife and my sister-in-law marvelled at Trejo’s thoughtfulness. I suggested we watch the interview, as a way of closing a nice evening, and they said it was a good idea.

Here the plot becomes intricate. Besides the name of the novelist, the label didn’t reveal any particular information; it therefore felt like an eerie coincidence to realize, as we began the video, that the program in which Vargas Llosa would be interviewed was a well-known Colombian show called Face to Face. A lost tape found next to the garbage on a street in Barcelona contained a Colombian TV show about a Peruvian writer I happened to admire. What were the odds? In the interview, Vargas Llosa discussed his recent experience as a presidential candidate and his defeat by Alberto Fujimori. The interviewer announced he would also be discussing his most recent novel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, which he was publicizing in Colombia at the time of the show. This is how I learned that the interview had taken place in 1998. Vargas Llosa had visited the Bogotá International Book Fair as part of his publicity tour that year; I was there, coincidentally, and had bought the book and thought of getting it autographed; but I’m not good at harassing the writers I like, and my copy of the book remained unsigned. My mother-in-law, more resourceful or less shy, had managed to get an autographed copy, and before I left for Belgium, where I was living in those days, offered to exchange it for my unsigned copy. It had taken me longer than usual to start reading the novel, and there it was at that very moment, on the floor next to my nightstand in Barcelona, along with the other five or six books that interested me. And so it came to pass that on my TV screen a writer was speaking, in 1998, about his book; in the year 2000, across the ocean from the continent where both of us were born, I was reading that book and had a signed copy within arms’ reach. My wife, my sister-in-law, and I began speculating about the chain of events that would have made such a moment possible. But nothing could have prepared us for what happened next.

Vargas Llosa had started talking about The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto; the producers of the show, diligently, had found footage from the Bogotá Book Fair in which Vargas Llosa appears surrounded by multitudes of readers, or browsing books in neon-lighted stands, or walking along corridors, escorted by fellow writers such as R.H. Moreno-Durán. After a close-up of the surrounding faces, the camera dived down to document their walking shoes. Suddenly, in the left part of the frame, a pair of new shoes arrived that didn’t belong to the writers or to the accompanying journalists: they were ladies’ shoes. The camera panned up again, perhaps out of sheer curiosity, and the frame was filled with the new actor, or rather actress: A woman approached Vargas Llosa with a copy of the new novel, smiling, and asked him for an autograph.

The woman was my mother-in-law.

And so it came to pass that the book Vargas Llosa was signing at that instant on my TV screen was the exact same book that my mother-in-law had given me. I had only to turn my head slightly to see it, but of course I did much more: I grabbed it, opened it, and read the inscription in Barcelona (in the year 2000) at the same time that Vargas Llosa (in the year 1998) wrote it out in Bogotá.

“Best wishes,” it read. And then: “MVLL.”

Every question became pertinent now. What circumstances had allowed that interview, recorded in my hometown of Bogotá while I was living in Belgium, to reach me at my new home in Barcelona? What made the editors of the show use the footage where my mother-in-law appeared suddenly to have her book signed, instead of another take of another moment? What chain of banal coincidences made me start reading the signed book two years after getting it and just a few days before Juan Trejo found the tape among the discarded objects of Barcelona life?

What happened that evening in my Barcelona apartment remains beyond my full grasp. I’ve told the story a thousand times, I’ve told it in writing and in interviews and to friends in casual conversations, and I’m fully aware that I still expect my listener or my reader to come up with a rational explanation. I know Juan Trejo gave me the tape as a welcoming present in the same way I know my mother-in-law gave me the book as a farewell gift: Both moments speak to the fact that I was living somewhere I wasn’t intended to live. But maybe that’s neither here nor there.

—Juan Gabriel Vásquez

At the age of sixteen, I convinced my cousin to chase the falling bombs in the streets of Beirut with me. The objective was to get a photograph of a bomb before it reached the ground or landed on a building, on a car, on a street, before it caused death and mayhem. The camera was his, but we shared it. The car that we drove in pursuit of the bombs was my father’s. The images of falling bombs never revealed anything. After we sent them off to get developed, all we had were photographs of blue skies, a few clouds, roads, and the tops of buildings.

The “decisive moment,” to use the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous expression, was not determined by a visual anticipation of what would appear within the poised frame of the camera, but by the sound of the bomb’s whistle. We stood on highways, in alleys between buildings, aiming our lens toward the trajectory of whistles.

I left Beirut, and twenty years later, upon my return to the Mediterranean city, I reminded my cousin of our madness and the time we rushed after the falling bombs. He nodded and said, It’s a miracle that we are still alive. Miracles, I said, do not exist. They do, he said, the proof is that we are here and alive in spite of people’s stupidity and the terror we endured. You believed in miracles back then, he reminded me.

In Montreal, I had no job to fall back on and had spent all my savings on that last trip to Lebanon. I stayed in bed for weeks not able to move and I began to contemplate suicide.

Then one day I decided to get up. I walked from my Côte-des-Neiges apartment to a government clinic. The social worker who interviewed me there happened to be an acquaintance from my university days. We both completed a degree in Fine Arts, and like the majority of people who studied liberal arts, discovered that it was hard to get a job in the field afterward. Marc, the social worker, went back to college and finished a degree in social work, and I drifted for a while, holding many small, inconsequential jobs. In class Marc had always seemed arrogant, with an air of superiority. He was well read, eloquent, but had no talent as an artist. He seduced men and women equally. His critiques of people’s artwork were very perceptive and analytical, but he was always dismissive.

At the clinic, Marc asked me about the method of suicide that I was considering.

A bullet, I said.

You have a gun? he asked.

Yes, I replied.

You would be the person pulling the trigger.

Yes.

Can you imagine where you would be standing?

On the balcony.

And you would be looking in which direction? he asked.

The sky, I guess.

And what part of the body would you aim at?

His interrogation lasted for a while, and continued with the purpose of assessing the seriousness of my intention.

He asked me what I was doing before I had thought of ending my life.

I told him that I had just come back from Beirut.

It could well be post-traumatic stress, he said, but that has to be determined by a psychologist. I am here to gauge what channels and options are open to you, and what your obligations are. Is there anything in particular that happened in Beirut that you would like to discuss?

Nothing in particular, I said. I just met with family.

Anything in particular you remember? he said.

A few dinners with family members and old friends. I visited a cousin who was a childhood friend.

What did you talk about?

We were reminiscing about the time I carried a camera with the intention of capturing the image of a falling bomb.

And did you capture it? Marc asked.

No, we never did.

And why do you think you wanted to capture the image of a bomb in a photograph?

Death, I said, and laughed at the vagueness of my answer.

No laughing matter, he said. Photography is about death, he added.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, I said, and we both smiled, having read the same books in university.

You were not afraid? he asked me.

No, I said.

Did you think of it as a suicidal mission?

No, I said, I wouldn’t have brought my cousin with me, I guess, if that was my intention.

So suicide is a private matter to you.

Yes, I said. It should be, or else it’s murder or an intention to harm somebody.

And what would you have done with the photograph if you happened to have captured a bomb falling from the sky?

A trophy, I said. Undeniably a rare image.

Your interest in image-making seems to have started in your youth, he said.

Yes.

But the camera was your cousin’s, you mentioned.

Yes, but we shared it. The car we drove on our mission was my father’s.

Marc paused and said to me, Listen, these are the options: I have to assign you to a specialist to further assess your situation.

And then? I asked.

The psychologist will determine what to do next.

And what would that entail? I said.

Anything from medical treatment to hospitalization.

But I have never actually owned a gun, or a bullet for that matter. It’s all hypothetical, I said.

It is out of our hands now, he said, and stretched back in his revolving chair. What did you expect from your visit here?

To talk it over, I said, not to be potentially incarcerated.

I am curious, he continued. What is your cousin’s situation now?

He stayed, he never left home.

And what has he been doing for the rest of his life, since chasing the bombs with you?

Nothing. He continuously whistles, it’s irritating, he has stayed home ever since then. Never got a job, borrowed money, and he lives at his parents’ house with his sister who provides for him with her secretarial job.

Was he the one driving the car when you chased bombs?

No, I did the driving.

Was he the one who took the photographs?

No, I did.

There was a pause, and we both looked into each other’s eyes.

He didn’t come of his own free will, did he? Marc asked. You dragged him along, you forced him, and he must have been terrified, he didn’t want to die. Did he come of his own volition? Marc repeated.

No, I said, defiant now.

What did you do to him?

I called him a coward, I said, and I stood up to walk to the door.

What else did you tell him?

I told him if he has faith nothing will ever happen to him.

And nothing has happened to him ever since, Marc sneered. We’ll be in touch, he said. Your file will be assessed soon.

—Rawi Hage

Where they should be wading, skeletal birds step, marionettes operated by an unseen hand. In the glare you can almost catch the glisten of their strings. Stooped as if shawled in blue-gray wings, herons cross a brackish marsh that once threw reflections of their grace, but now stares up blind, the cracked face of a mummy unwrapped, scarred by bleached fish bones.

We drink more beer, shower less, and save the dishwater to spill on flowers. Love, they still bloom only below the kitchen sill. Last night, thirsting bees chased us home, dive-bombing madly as we ran, flashlights bobbing in one hand, foaming sweaty bottles of Heineken in the other.

Traffic stops on Signal Hill for a tarantula to cross the road. One more mirage crawling across shimmered concrete. “Do you think a mirage is aware of what it is? If it ever wonders if we’re real?” She’s only asking to kill time. We’re crawling in an overheated Dodge, backed up behind a bloated convoy of water trucks. Their hoses dangle like deflated trunks, a circus line of elephants sloshing as they rumba around scorched, suicidal curves. They drizzle as they grind through gears and trail a slick that hisses beneath our tires like a rainy night.

At twilight, the herons’ folded wings make it appear as if they’re outfitted like Fred Astaire, in tails. Their beaks look as if they’ve strapped on masks and are on their way to a Venetian masquerade. Or perhaps they’re wearing nose flutes or some archaic instrument, about to sardonically toot a troubadour canso about the plague. Those once lethal, fish-spearing beaks droop as if they might be used to prod like canes. “What’s a metaphor but a mirage?” she asks, although it’s not a question.

In a dream we’re crossing the Mackinac Bridge in a misty drizzle again, on our way to camp in the Porcupine Mountains, and stop as we once did at Crisp Point Lighthouse to fish the whitefish run. We saw old agate hunters in the fog, remember, retirees from shuttered Rust Belt auto plants, arriving in Winnebagos to prod with canes for gems and Petoskey stones along the pebbled beach where a branch of the rusty Two Hearted pours into Lake Superior. Is it merely another symptom of drought when even in dreams that stormy North Atlantic up in Michigan appears more real than this shimmering mangrove coast where waterbirds scavenge a cracked mudflat and a parching heat somehow ascends with enough vapor to warp the shapes of light?

Mount Sage, Tortola’s highest hump, has trapped a cloud. It’s green there the way mountains are capped with snow.

—Stuart Dybek

fdkeep a pair of basketball shoes in the closet of the entrance hall in my parents’ house in Austin, Texas. These are the only high-tops I still own. Most of the time I live in London and don’t play, but whenever I go home, I dust off the shoes and head out to the half-court in the backyard that my father put in when I was a kid, and shoot around. Every day for pretty much every year of my childhood I spent a couple of hours there after school, sometimes hanging out with friends, but often just working on my jump shot. I guess I could add up the time. About a year of my life.

A sycamore spreads its leaves over the court, so even on hot afternoons you can play in the shade, but these days the branches hang heavy enough that there are only certain spots where you can shoot your shot without worrying about being blocked by nature. There’s a telephone wire, too, which sags across at the level of the free-throw line. The concrete paint is peeling, leaf matter has collected in the cracks, twigs crackle underfoot. On warm days, which means most of the year, you get bitten by mosquitoes. A converted apartment looks over the court on one side, where the latest renter can sit out on the balcony drinking a beer in the evening and watch me play if he wants to. On the other side, the bamboo hedge has grown too tall to look over. Depending where the wind is blowing from, you can smell the smoker from Ruby’s BBQ a couple of blocks away, which is where we got the chopped beef my dad brought over for my wedding thirteen years ago—in London.

At the ticker-tape parade in Boston, when Larry Bird celebrated his first NBA championship, he leaned into the microphone and got the crowd going by saying, “There’s only one place I’d rather be. French Lick.” But I wonder if he really meant it at the time, or if it was just one of those things you say about yourself, to make a point. Jews at Passover traditionally say “Next year in Jerusalem,” but there’s a certain amount of rabbinical commentary around the question of whether you’re still supposed to say it if you have no intention of going back. For my mother Jerusalem means the steep-roofed brick cottage her father built on the shores of the Flensburg Fjord after the Second World War. It’s not really the house she grew up in, that was farther down the road, but it serves the same purpose. You can see Denmark from the kitchen window—the garden slopes down to the beach. And every summer if she can, she spends a couple of weeks there, entering again the old routines, buying rolls from the baker, digging potatoes if there are any, but my dad is mostly relieved when they go home.

For us, I mean my parents’ kids, Jerusalem is Austin, though one of my sisters still lives there and has a much livelier and more honest and up-to-date sense of what the place is actually like. Natives now complain about the traffic, and there’s some ridiculous statistic like one in seven Austinites moved to town in the last year, the implications of which dawn on you after a minute. My eighth-grade French teacher, who appeared out of the blue a few weeks ago and invited me to tea at the British Library, told me that being a real Austinite used to mean that you knew the little shortcuts and byroads to get you around the hassles of living there, and now it means that you don’t.

KUT, the local Austin affiliate of NPR, recently ran a program about the generational shift in the way people pronounce the city’s street names—which involves a funny kind of reverse political correctness, since many of those names are Hispanic and German and the tradition was always to mispronounce them. I grew up off Guadalupe—“Gwada-loop.” People called Mueller Airport “Miller,” then “Myoo-ler” (which is probably how I grew up saying it), and now I don’t know what—it’s not an airport anymore, it’s a fancy new development. At the really very nice hippie (or rather hipster) food cooperative (the hippies have either evolved or been priced out) behind our house, the bearded guy at the cash register asked me how my day was. I took the kids to the Thinkery at Miller, I told him. That’s right, he said, that’s how you’re supposed to say it, isn’t it? We had listened to the same show.

Our local park, which is just a creek running through an overgrown field, is called Hemphill. We called it “Hem-fill” when we were kids, instead of “Hemp-hill.” I don’t think anyone else ever did, but I guess kids get to make up the rules of their own childhoods. It’s where we learned to ride our bikes, and there was an old guy in a run-down house (since torn down and attractively rebuilt) named Mr. Boyd, who used to give us popsicles on hot days. I don’t know that if he were around now I’d let my kids knock on his door. My daughter has an English accent—she hates being called posh, but that’s how she sounds—and holds on to the idea of Austin, of Flensburg, as an ace-up-your-sleeve alternative identity. I’ve promised her that before she graduates high school we’ll spend a year in Austin, though whether she’ll still want to by the time we get around to it is open to question. But I want to, I think. It’s the only place I still play basketball.

—Benjamin Markovits

Vacationland

KERRI ARSENAULT

Mexico, Maine sits in a valley or “River Valley” as we call the area, because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. The hills are low and worn and carved by the waters surrounding them, and trees line the rivers, which confine the town. It’s a paper mill town where smokestacks poke holes in the smog they create.That’s money coming out of those smokestacks, my father used to say about the rotten-smelling upriver drafts that surfaced when the weather shifted. That smell loitered amid the high school softball games I played beneath those stacks and lingered on my father’s shirtsleeves when he came home from work, allowing me to forgive the rank odor for what it provided.

From the porch steps of the house where I grew up, to the right, you’ll see a street of clapboarded homes, the quiet interrupted every now and then by a braking logging truck. A mile or two out of town, the road narrows and small creeks knit through pastures shadowed by hills, a working farm or two, a long straight road, and smells of cut hay, muddy cow paths, rotting leaves, or black ice, depending on the time of year. The seasons, they calendared our lives.

To the left of the porch, you’ll see the end of the road. There, the pavement dips down to reveal the town’s only traffic light, a gas station, and the roof of the Family Dollar Store. Behind the store lies the wide, slow-moving Androscoggin River. Just beyond the Androscoggin, on an island in the neighboring town of Rumford, the paper mill’s largest smokestack emerges like a giant concrete finger. From anywhere in town you can orient yourself to this stack or the ever-present ca-chink ca-chink ca-chink of the mill’s conveyor belts and find your way home, even from a pitch-black walk in the woods. When mill shutdowns occur for holidays or layoffs, the smokeless stacks resemble the diseased birch trees dying throughout New England.

Where stack meets sky, the river pivots and heads southeast, under bridges and over rapids, pushing through falls and dams, around islands and along inlets, through Jay, Lewiston, Topsham, Brunswick, and other small towns, until it meets and mingles with five other rivers at Merrymeeting Bay, whereupon it finally and quietly slips into the Atlantic Ocean.

April 2008 and I am home for my grandfather’s funeral.

My parents’ house sighs with winter’s leftover lethargy. Spring has arrived in Maine with driveways full of mud and sculled up snowplow debris; salt stains, shredded earth, and derelict mittens lie in the wake of its embracing path. A few dirty buttresses of snow linger like pocked monoliths, meting out the new season’s arrival. The swollen Androscoggin pushes flotsam downriver in the commotion of spring’s thaw, and insect hatches will soon begin bursting along its surface until summer opens like an oven. My mother comes out on the porch where I’m standing. Want to go for a walk? she asks, her face pinched with the sharpness of her father’s death.

We head up Highland Terrace and stop to peek in the windows of an abandoned house, one I always liked, with its wraparound porch, turreted roof, and buttercup-yellow paint. The owner is sick but refuses to sell the house, my mother says as we walk across the battered porch. So it sits there, this once elegant home, shedding its brightness, yellow flecking the half-frozen ground. Spray-painted in the road near the driveway: “Fuck you, bitch.” The fug of the mill swallows us.

Ahead, we reach the top of the hill, and there, my old high school. To the east, snowmobile trails and abutting them, the mill’s decommissioned landfill. To the west, the football field slices the horizon and beyond that, lazy fingers of smoke lick the sky.

We walk inside the school, and my mother stops in the office to chat with the principal. The lobby smells of Band-Aids, warm mashed potatoes, and damp socks. Being there reminds me of Greg, my high school on-again, off-again lumberjackish boyfriend who lived near the town incinerator. I loved him like I would a sorry stuffed animal, one who had lost an eye or whose fur was rubbed raw. Kelly, a girl who wore her black, perfectly feathered hair like a weapon, was in love with him too. When he and I fought—usually because of her—I’d listen to sad songs on my cassette player over and over until he’d call and I’d forgive him in a pattern of everlasting redemption. I only saw Greg once since I graduated. He came to my parents’ one Christmas break when I was home from college. He and my mother caught up while I leaned against the kitchen countertop across the room. Peckerhead, my father said when he entered the room. He called all boys I dated “Peckerhead” but only if he liked them. If he didn’t, my father would sit at our kitchen table like a boulder while the boy fidgeted by the kitchen door in blank-faced silence. Greg eventually married Kelly and got a job at the mill, alongside his sister Janet, who pitched for my high school state championship softball team.

After my mother and I leave, we follow the dirt path behind the football field, past Meroby Elementary where I got into a fistfight with Lisa Blodgett. Lisa and I took turns swinging horizontally at each other’s head until a teacher intruded on the brawl. Lisa’s strength was tremendous for a sixth grader, her grit shaped by being one of the youngest girls in a family of fifteen kids, most of them boys. When I looked in the mirror that night at home, I was sure I looked different, the way you think you do when you lose your virginity. It was my first and last bare-knuckled fight, except for a few unconvincing swipes at good old Kelly one night at a dance. My best friend, Maureen, who towered over both of us, protected me from Kelly’s sharp, red fingernails.

Down Granite Street, an untied dog begins following us, growling. Just ignore him