About Me
- Jonathan Tuttle
- FOLIO is a magazine of strange, comic, and strangely comic words and pictures published from 2006 to 2009. For back issues please contact the_folio@hotmail.com.
FOLIO Has Been Institutionalized
This past week, a lone cataloger deep in Wilson Library has been hard at work preserving issues 1-13 of FOLIO for the North Carolina Collection.
Issue No. 13, Secrecy - Who
FOLIO is produced by a group of young literati in the eighth floor janitor's closet of the university library.
Issue No. 13, Secrecy - The Arsonists
Strange pieces of information began to trickle in. We discovered the arsonists formed at a Whole Foods Café as a Meet-Up group. We found this after one of the guys googled “the arsonists.” But just before we could jot down their names the page disappeared. If you google them now all you’ll find are local news videos, coverage of the eleven apartment fires this year. They torch whole units within the complexes. Twenty-two freestanding chimneys stick out from the apartment section of town now, looming over the charred toilets and air conditioners like Greek ruins. Displaced students are washing their hair in library bathrooms, young investment bankers are crashing on friends’ sofas, and divorced fathers are spending the weekends with their children at a Four Seasons pool—then heading back to their Day’s Inn for the week.
As a small promotion, the Force assigned me to live undercover at the one apartment complex not yet touched by the arsonists. When I told my wife, she ran into the bedroom and slammed the door; her usual strategy: protesting her neglect by becoming unreachable. “Fine!” she screamed. “Go!” I told her I’d miss her and packed up my plainclothes.
The woman at the apartment office, Judy, also had a hard time understanding. “A lease?” she said. “For three weeks?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I don’t have any pets.”
After whispered calls to my boss and hers, I signed a lease and she bit her nails. “Do you really think there’s a chance?” she said. “I mean of us too?”
The prospect put a damper on our tour of the premises. “The pool is fairly large. Second rated in the county. That could put out a fire, couldn’t it? If we got a line of people and some buckets?”
The complex was complicated, a labyrinth of earth-toned pods set back in the trees. It was Fall and the dogwoods weren’t close to blooming, so I assumed the white dust on most of the cars was ash, the remains of nearby apartments. The observation pleased me. I had to keep my eyes open for work like this, and I had to see things differently. I had to keep a record. The job as I saw it, a large one, was to protect everyone in the apartment complex without drawing the attention of anyone but my superiors. It was daunting.
“And this is Mr. Clyde,” said Judy, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting on a second-story porch. “He’ll be your upstairs neighbor.”
“I see. Where is the elevator?”
“No elevator.”
“And he lives upstairs?”
“Yes, the one-bedroom below him is yours. It would have been Mr. Clyde’s of course, but since this is an emergency…”
“No, no, I can take the upstairs apartment, that’s not a problem.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
“But how does Mr. Clyde even get out?”
“He doesn’t. Well, he has his porch.”
I waved, with guilt, to Mr. Clyde. He did not wave back.
For some reason I thought the apartment would come with furniture, or at least the Force would have pitched in for an air mattress. As it was, all I had was a folder of take-out menus from Judy and an icemaker in the freezer that sounded like two barges slowly colliding. My one-bedroom had a half-bath, a cute kitchenette, and a parking lot view. There was an obvious carpet cleaning done recently; the floors could not have been more perfectly off-white, nor the walls or ceiling for that matter. I’m sure I was to be fined if I left the apartment any more or any less off-white than I had found it. I wondered what they’d charge me if the place were burnt down.
Unsure of the rules on how often I could leave my post, I snuck out for furniture as fast as I could. I found a small couch in town and, since it looked lonely without, a TV too. I drew up a supply list once I got back. I thought about walkie-talkies; binoculars, maybe passing them off as a bird enthusiasm. I wondered if the apartment had a fire extinguisher. And did the fire alarms work? I made a note to check them once I got a chair, or at least the strength to move the couch. I also needed a place to hide my gun, because if I wanted to look out, I had to allow for people, arsonists, looking in. The only potential place was under my new cushions. I pushed the gun under and fluffed, which gave me an excuse to sit down, turn on the TV, lie down.
A twilight descended that was utterly unlike the ones we had in my neighborhood. There were things to see and so I strained to see them, but the effort made everything seem impossible. If it were night and black, I think I could have seen better. I could have the moon or a light bulb. But this was just mud. A fluorescent streetlight outside the living room window buzzed on. The dull noise was terrible.
I didn’t know the apartment came with cable, but there it was. I clicked up past the static and the game shows and the sitcoms and soon enough I was in the mid-twenties. I settled on a favorite, the Discovery Channel, and they happened to be discussing my favorite Discovery Channel subject, the universe. I like to think about infinity from my couch, like where it starts and what’s at the end of it. Seeing those Hubble Telescope pictures in my new apartment made me feel at home. And it wasn’t just me. Soon I noticed that, with a two-second delay, the same show was playing upstairs. Mr. Clyde and I were learning about strangelets.
But I could tell the cushions were taking me under. I had bought a comfortable couch. However, I vowed to stay vigilant. There were no striking matches, but I noted the sensory street lights coming on, the sliding glass doors being shut. I heard a dried leaf scrape against the pavement like a cracked and upturned dinner plate.
The next morning I set out for some research under the cover of a leisurely stroll through beautiful autumn weather. Although I had the look of an aged man enjoying his daily allotment of fresh air—a shaggy crew cut kept in nostalgia for the Marines, a sweatshirt over a shameful stomach—in truth, I was secretly scanning the islands of landscaping for signs of potential arson. Perhaps the arsonists had scouts, and perhaps these scouts left clues.
There were sirens rising up from the north. Hopefully not a fire, I thought, half out of genuine concern and half out of envy I couldn’t be there catching the bastards myself. I was on the other side of the complex when my wife buzzed in my pocket. I realized just before I answered that in my fatigue the night before I had forgotten to call and check in, tell her how my first day on the job went. I had never been away from my family like that, and admittedly, the etiquette escaped me.
But from the tone of her voice after I apologized, I gathered my wife did not mind the missed phone call. Without pleasantry, she told me that my daughter, Maddy, was deep in a science project and making too big a mess in the house. Since I had the space, she said, there was no reason Maddy couldn’t come over and make a mess of my place. “Saturday can be your day,” she said.
I was happy to see my daughter but worried about the amount of work left to do. My undercover jaunt had turned up nothing and there were only so many excuses I could give for picking through mulch in flowerbeds. But it was a nice walk. Surprisingly, the apartment complex was even quieter than our subdevelopment. There were no lawns to be mowed. No ice cream truck jingles. No teenagers roaring through on the Jeeps they got for Christmas. They would have been forced to a crawl like everyone else, portaging over the yellow, half-acre speed bumps that the Brits call, hideously, “sleeping policemen.”
I was shaking my head at the name, trying to get the image out, when, coming up on my apartment, I saw my daughter standing at the door. She had a camcorder and tripod in one arm, a three-part folding poster board in the other. At the exit back to the road, I saw my wife’s car pulling away.
“Hey, Roland!” Maddy called. “Nice crib!”
Since she was two and I decided to tell her the truth, my daughter has always called me by my first name. “Thanks for getting all the furniture out of here, Roland,” she said once inside. “We’re gonna need all the space we can get.” Maddy pushed my couch into the closet and unfolded her tripod.
“Do you want anything?” I said. “If you hold your nose the tap water’s all right.”
She was busy drawing little squares into her notebook—the one with the dolphins flying through space on the cover—then filling the squares with arrows and stick figures. It made me think I should have been doing the same, noting the measurements of apartment units, locations of the best escape routes, etc. My daughter has always had a way of making me feel less professional.
As she scouted locations, an idea began to take shape in my mind, perhaps inspired by Maddy, of an extensive fire-drill plan for everyone in the complex. I would have to pass out fliers to set up a time. Maybe the promise of a barbecue afterwards would get the job done.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” said Maddy.
I had never heard anyone use a knocker before and I guess it went unnoticed. Looking through the peephole, I found four or five mops of unkempt hair around the bottom. I opened the door.
“Maddy’s father?” said the child in front.
I recognized him, and a few behind him, from Maddy’s school plays.
Maddy pushed me out of the doorway and ushered them in. “Joseph, did you bring the chair?” she said to the short one.
He held up a collapsible wheelchair.
“Alex, did you bring your iPod?” she asked another.
His headphones fell out of his pocket.
“Benjamin, what about the sticks?”
Benjamin pulled a movie clapboard and a pack of chalk from his jacket. It seemed I wasn’t alone in wanting to work as hard as Maddy.
The knocker knocked again, and in the peephole I found another swarm of classmates.
“Get in here! You’re late!” said Maddy.
The place was quickly packed. I was in permanent danger of being toppled by Maddy’s gophers and yes-men. My only choice was to pull up a chair in the back and watch, maybe jot a few notes for my fire drill.
Maddy yelled and a kid slammed a clapboard in front of Joseph’s face. His legs were dangling over the wheelchair’s footrests and his head sat slumped into his collarbone. His hands hung over his lap, holding the iPod.
“Dr. Hawking,” said a boy sitting next to him. “Tell us: what’s at the end of the universe?”
Joseph made a few clicks on his iPod and a few tics with his lip while another boy standing over by Maddy spoke into a toy megaphone. “Space and imaginary time together,” he said, his voice now deep and electronic, “are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. That would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundaries or edges. I have been round the world, and I didn’t fall off.”
Another question was asked and again Joseph pulled up his lip and clicked his iPod, keeping his eyes fixed ahead of him with hints of curiosity and delight. The less he moved, the more his eyes seemed interested, ambitious, wild. Maddy cast well.
“Take five!” she yelled.
Joseph jumped up and ran around the building, just to stretch.
I was impressed. It all sounded like something I could have heard on TV. “You’ll get an A plus,” I said to a student. “I’m sure of it.”
“We’ll see,” said the child. “The other group is shooting in the planetarium.”
The afternoon turned out to be as productive as the morning. Stephen Hawking himself was floating through my apartment, speaking simply and powerfully about the collapse of hydrogen giants. “That was stunning!” I said to Maddy after a take. “You have a real talent.” And she did. But I realized that the time I spent sitting in amazement of her hard work was just that: time spent sitting. The little notebook I had vowed to fill slipped from my lap, and just when I noticed, Maddy yelled, “That’s a wrap!”
A knock came at the door and the pizzas I ordered were welcomed inside. Someone hooked up the camera to my little TV and soon we were all putting back our third slice and reviewing the day’s work. The students were entranced, laughing and boasting, glued to the screen while I stole another slice.
But Maddy was doubtful of her success. “Something’s missing, something’s missing,” she would mumble, and her minions passed it on. Soon I noticed some students laying down their pizza and picking up equipment.
“What’s wrong? Do you guys want ice cream?” I said to a few.
“We’ve been dismissed,” they said.
Cell phones were brought out and parents dialed. Students were leaving in twos and threes, faster than I could say goodbye. A long line of headlights stretched outside, and I waved blindly, proving myself a responsible chaperone.
A few of the headlights suddenly switched off. I braced myself for confrontation—“Do you know how late it is?” “My Ethan should not be working this hard on a science project!”—but saw instead only college kids, slamming their doors and walking up to the apartment across the way.
The lights inside that apartment got brighter, music came on, and I could feel the bass. I began to wonder if the arsonists weren’t already embedded in an apartment just as I was. Did they have the resources for something like that? I wanted desperately to know if that beer had Whole Foods labels on it; perhaps that was the alcohol they used to spread the flames.
I rushed back to my notebook to mark every flip-flop and lower-back tattoo I saw. It felt good to finally have an idea. “Sorry, sir, my daughter was making a fascinating video” would be some excuse for the Chief.
“Whatcha doing?” Maddy said. The camera and tripod were again slung over her shoulder and the three-part poster board, now covered in banners and photos, was in her arm.
“Drawing a thong,” I said.
“Thanks for letting us use your place.” She walked over to the door. One more pair of headlights had come to rest behind her. They switched on to high beams and Maddy leaned in for a hug. “I don’t want her to think you’re keeping me.”
The lights were still bright in the apartment opposite. Their sliding porch door opened and voices—singing, laughing, shouting curses—filled the parking lot. I told myself I had no proof that they were arsonists, which helped assuage the cowardice, and retreated quickly behind my door.
Pizza crusts and plastic plates awaited my return on the living room floor, but I didn’t mind. It was a nice reminder of a nice day, what I had and the alleged maniacs across the street did not. I speed-dialed a friend. “You wouldn’t mind sending a couple of rookies out on a noise complaint, would you?” Brushing a few breadsticks into the crack between the cushions, I sat down and kept my fingers between the blinds until the uniforms came. I had a good laugh. The revelers would have to shut up and the recruits would have to suffer their abuse. But when I saw one of the college kids open the door and invite the cops in, I grew gloomy and turned up the volume on the Discovery Channel.
Again, the subject was the universe. Meteors were falling over a desert. It was a moving sight, especially coupled with the soothing rain sound effect. The light changed shape and soon the stars were water being poured into a fishbowl. A fish appeared rounding the bowl over and over and I felt a little bad for it. A deep voice came on telling me that although the fish could never leave the bowl, I shouldn’t pity it, because the line it swam was endless.
“How’s that supposed to make me feel any better?” I thought, and I might have said it out loud. “It would get so bored! And it could leave if it wanted to. Don’t some fish jump?”
“If it jumped it would die,” said the narrator.
“Well,” I reasoned, “that’s a form of leaving, isn’t it?”
The voice grew impatient. “Nevermind! You are stealing this from Mr. Clyde!”
The meteors came back. I heard the rain again, and an odd sound effect of dried leaves scuttering across pavement. A car ran over a speed bump, and, before I fell asleep, I said a short prayer for the policemen who had to sleep outside.
After I woke up I called Maddy’s cell phone but couldn’t get her. I tried her mother. “I’ve got a great idea for Maddy’s project,” I said. “Is she coming over today?”
“Just text her your idea.”
“You don’t understand, she has to be—”
My wife hung up. How’d she get so busy all of a sudden? I was the one with the job. There I was in my plainclothes underwear on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in a student’s apartment complex working my ass off. I reached for my notebook to prove it, but the spare scribbles I saw there reflected poorly on my discipline. I put on my pants. I would not waste the day.
With the notebook at my side I locked the apartment and set off into the field for inspiration. I managed to squeeze out a few half-hearted thoughts about removing the spare keys from under everyone’s mats, and a really laughable one about covering the grounds in dog crap. My idea: one squishy step and the arsonists would flee. But each thought was an embarrassment, an insult, and they quickly subsided to thoughts of Maddy’s project. Passing a dumpster, I had a strong urge to jump in and find some styrofoam I could sculpt into planets and moons, but I resisted.
The air was floral, pleasant. The revelers were passed out inside and the streets were mine. I felt flushed, warm, and as I walked further, hot. Up above the leasing office, a plume of smoke was drifting. I thought, Already? I had only begun to take notes, my phone was inside; I wasn’t prepared! But how was I to put that in the report? I jogged towards the plume, hoping the arsonists were not far behind, or at least the fire not too far gone.
At the office I saw nothing. The doors were locked, the lights out, and the smoke continued. The mini-gym was empty too, though the TV was blaring. I pounded on the doors of the the mini-laundromat, heard the pennies and buttons tossed around in the driers. I ran around the back, not having the presence of mind enough to look for footprints or lighters. The back of the laundromat was as pretty as the front, painted and landscaped. The grass grew flush with the first line of mortar in the bricks, where a pipe extended letting out hot air from the dryers, which met the cold air outside and—of course—turned thick white.
I sat down on the grass, up against the bricks, and tried to focus on that amazing floral air. At least there was no one to see me running around, I thought. In that sense a catastrophe was truly averted.
“Hey. Why don’t you keep a key under your mat?”
Maddy was standing over me. The light on the front of her camera was red.
I offered Maddy the leftover pizza back at the apartment. “It was a real treat to watch you work yesterday. How do you feel it went?”
“So, so,” she said, spooning the cream out of a Twinkie. “We haven’t hit it yet.”
“Hit it?”
“Hmm. Haven’t hit the core yet, the juicy bits.”
“I don’t know a lot about juicy bits, but I’m glad you brought your camera. I’ve been thinking about your film, and I wanted to introduce you to my neighbor, Mr. Clyde. I think he could add a really authentic touch. Not that Joseph isn’t any good, but why not make this a documentary?”
Maddy seemed intrigued. She consumed three more deboned Twinkies before her camera was done charging and I escorted her upstairs.
“Is it on?” I said outside Mr. Clyde’s door. “Are you ready?”
Maddy snapped her fingers in front of the camera. “Testing. One, two.” She gave me a thumbs up, looking even more professional than she did yesterday.
I looked into the little screen she switched around to face me and brushed the sleep out of my eyes. Then I knocked on the door. And I knocked again.
“Not home?” said Maddy.
“He can’t leave!” I craned my neck to peek through the windows but his blinds were closed. I turned to Maddy and sighed.
“Just push it open,” said a voice behind the door.
Maddy nodded me on.
Wheeling back slowly into the hallway was Mr. Clyde, a toy periscope in his tiny hands. “It’s how I look through the peephole,” he said.
Mr. Clyde was probably a small man even standing up. His banana peel body fell to one side of his chair. His slacks looked pressed; his shoes were tied. A piece of string wrapped around his globular head connected the ends of his glasses.
“Excuse me, Mr. Clyde,” said Maddy, the viewfinder still cupping her eye. “I’m leading a science project about Stephen Hawking.” Leave it to Maddy to ditch the small talk. “My father suggested I interview you about your similarities with Dr. Hawking.”
Mr. Clyde smiled. “I don’t know if I’ll be much help,” he said. “But come in, come in.”
Mr. Clyde gestured toward his living room arrangement and we sat down on his sofa, a shade more faded and an inch less poofy than mine. I wondered who, if anyone, had ever sat on it before. I never heard any footsteps when I was downstairs, so I don’t think he had any visitors. The sofa served a more general purpose. He could not use his legs, and yet he had them. The same was true for his sofa.
“I apologize for the spare set-up,” said Maddy. “I usually have a crew with me, lights, microphones. I’m afraid I’m as unprepared for this as you are”—she glared at me—“Could I ask you to say something for me?”
“Say something?” said Mr. Clyde.
“A little more.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Got it.” She looked up from the rising and falling lines on her little screen. “How long have you been using a wheelchair, Mr. Clyde?”
“Since I was a teenager.”
“What were you like as a teenager?”
“Normal.”
“Were you passionate about science then too?”
“I was never any good at science.”
“Does your limited physical space give you free reign over a vast, uncharted mental space?”
“I like things quiet.”
It occurred to me I should have been more specific in describing what I knew about Mr. Clyde. But this was an awkward time to clear things up. I urged Maddy on.
“Mr. Clyde,” she continued, “do you find people discount your intellect on account of your condition? How do you cope with that?”
“People are generally very nice.”
“When did you notice you were losing your mobility?”
“After the car crash.”
“Is your family supportive of your research?”
“I have a stamp collection. Do you mean are they supportive of my stamp collection?”
Maddy turned to me, put her palm over the mic, and sighed.
I felt she was asking for my help. The camera was rolling and, subject or no subject, she needed a film. If I couldn’t find any arsonists, I could at least make a good eighth-grade science project. “All right,” I said. “Now we won’t take up too much more of your time, but I think we’re ready to delve into some juicy bits. Sound ok?”
“Ok,” said Mr. Clyde.
“In your opinion, does the universe have a boundary?”
“A boundary?”
“An edge.”
“Does it?”
“Let’s say you think it does. Now, can the universe still be infinite?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
Maddy was turning red, and not her embarrassed shade, the angry one. I needed to prove to her that I retained at least some small part of yesterday’s work. “Well, Mr. Clyde, I know a certain Stephen Hawking who would be very disappointed in you.”
“I don’t follow classical music.”
“Stephen Hawking! He’s all over TV!”
“I don’t watch much TV.”
“Well, I wouldn’t either, but there’s nothing else to do here! And it’s free!”
“Yours is free? I pay every month.”
“Well, thank you Mr. Clyde. I think we got everything we need.” I was getting a little angry too. Mr. Clyde’s paraplegia did not affect his brain, so it wasn’t a total tragedy. The tragedy was that his brain wasn’t that great to begin with. Unlike Hawking, Mr. Clyde’s dead-fish expression had less to do with his condition than with his dead-fish thoughts.
“I hope your video comes out well,” he said, wheeling behind us to the door.
“We do too,” I said. “We’ll try and get you a copy when it comes out.”
“No we won’t,” Maddy whispered.
I followed her out, but stopped, remembering my own work. “You wouldn’t happen to hear anything strange outside your apartment at night, would you Mr. Clyde? Anything suspicious? Footsteps? Sort of like leaves blowing?”
“I hear leaves blowing,” he said.
“Hmm, I hear that too.”
Maddy wouldn’t talk to me once we got downstairs. She called her mother for a ride and waited on the sofa. I would have gladly offered to take her back home myself if I didn’t think she’d bite my head off. I wanted to apologize to Maddy in the car for ruining her project when I couldn’t save my own. And if she didn’t want to go back home, if she wanted to go to the mall, or the movies, I would have done that too.
But my wife pulled up outside and honked. Maddy walked out without a goodbye and I was alone again. I should have closed all the blinds and turned on all the lights. I should have microwaved some hot chocolate and stoked the fake fire. The twilight was still very depressing. But I did nothing. On went the television, one more window for that cheerless blue-grey light. Grainy images from the surfaces of other worlds were floating across the Discovery Channel.
Pretty soon Maddy would be home, my wife preparing dinner. My work kept me away, quite far away really. I could see the arsonists through the craters on TV. They sat at a table in the middle of a Whole Foods café just outside the universe. Though they were surrounded by people, trays of food flying over their heads, children running between their legs, they never seemed to mind. They were involved in a lively discussion, almost athletic, full of old embarrassing stories shouted across the table, whispered secrets, and snatches of song. They were white, black, Asian, Indian; but all young professionals, people who knew that the world was before them and they were invited inside.
If I stared a little harder, and concentrated, I could see a young man in black-framed glasses, something of a ringleader, conferring with a young woman beside him. He was listing numbers, addresses.
The young woman said, “Ski masks this time?”
He shook his head. “Too hot. Why bother?”
I saw an Asian girl bragging to a friend. “I’ve been pretending to read meters for three weeks and no one notices! With a few more readings, I can find a way to take out three units in a row next time!”
A shorter girl, the Tiny Tim of the group by the sympathetic smiles she garnered, sat on a bag of charcoal, permanently perfuming her adorable red pea coat. “Do you know the body is two-thirds water and it can light on fire?” she said. “The world is two-thirds water too.”
I blinked and realized I hadn’t blinked in ages. I couldn’t afford to. All this strange information was coming so fast. I wanted names, phone numbers.
But the fluorescent streetlight switched on outside and drowned the arsonists out. I listened for a moment past the buzzing, hoping they were still there. But I heard nothing. The leaves took up again outside my door, a slight wind pushing them across the porch. If I were an arsonist hiding from a policeman who was disguised as a renter, a loner, a divorcee, I would disguise myself as a leaf and tiptoe as if I were scraping along his porch.
Soothing thoughts of infinity crept in to claim me: sun spots, my daughter’s discipline, the length of my evenings, the fact that the Discovery Channel goes on discovering even while I sleep.
The fire started at twelve that night. When my eyelids fluttered open for a brief moment, I thought: someone’s doing laundry. It wasn’t until the fire came in through the fake fireplace and lit across the carpet that I fully woke up.
I cannot remember the order of my thoughts. I remember the TV was burning but still on. I remember appreciating the little there was to save. And I remember noticing the lack of any emergency procedure. There was no line of neighbors outside passing buckets of water up to the fire. No one stormed in and threw me over their shoulders. The notebook that detailed all of those plans was a flying fleck of ash in the kitchen.
I slid into my shoes, placed by the door for such an occasion, and ran out through the flames with my hands over my face, tired, disappointed, hot. I should have left my wallet inside; that way I would have something to complain about too. But, as it stood, I lost nothing.
From the parking lot, the building looked like a fancy wrapped gift. One long sheet of flame wrapped up from the bottom porch to the tallest chimney, coming together in a smart bow. The flames, like a candle’s flame, were not violent. There was barely any sound. The bugs had flown off the streetlight. I suppose they had something bigger in sight. I noticed also there was no late-night kegger behind me. It was a good night to be drunk somewhere else.
I took out my phone and decided to call the wife before I called the Chief. I told my answering machine I’d be coming home that night, that the job was over, and she wouldn’t have to worry anymore.
The arsonists were surely on the other side of town by then. All they had to do to admire their work was turn on the news. The TV vans were probably already on their way, the fire trucks following shortly behind.
Uninterested in seeing the roof cave in or the windows shatter, I got into my car. The flames left my rearview mirror minutes out of the complex, the smell of smoke minutes later. Soon I was back to the homes that aren’t connected to other homes. I knocked on my front door and followed the retreating nightgown into the bedroom. Without undressing, I curled behind my wife. I did not miss my couch.
When I went in to surprise Maddy the next morning, I found her already hard at work—of course. Several monitors were set up on her desk and bed. “Did the school let you have all that?” I asked, tapping on her headphones.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you get off work today?” She seemed to have an eye on every screen, and didn’t turn around for an answer.
I ignored her question too. “How’s it coming together, champ?”
“Just working with this guy.” She brought up the blank face of Mr. Clyde. “He’s a little tricky. A lot of the stuff he says doesn’t make any sense put together. I’d ask if we can go back for some follow-ups, but I’m not sure how much more—Are you ok?”
My face went ashen. “We have to go,” I said. “Get your things.”
“Roland, I appreciate it, but more of the same isn’t gonna give me—wait up!”
I wasn’t sure if I expected Mr. Clyde to be alive, that in an act of belated heroism I could drive over and save him, or if I was going out of morbid respect, that I had to hold some peremptory funeral. I think I went in order to deliver an apology.
We drove in silence to the complex, and found my building a blackened skeleton like all the others before it. The caution tape was up but the cops were gone; there was no one to yell at me. I told Maddy to step carefully, the embers could still be very hot and the rubble could give way.
We walked into my apartment, much as I left it only without walls, and, tragically, without ceiling. Beside the heap of my sofa sat Mr. Clyde’s wheelchair. It faced the television, Mr. Clyde a small pile on its seat. Maddy, realizing that she had made absolutely sure to return her own prop wheelchair and had not left it behind, began to cry.
“I’m sorry, Maddy,” I said. “I failed.”
On the way back home she insisted we stop at the mall. I was happy to oblige. Her friends could cheer her up better than I could. But when we pulled up to the door, she asked me to get out with her. She took my hand and made a beeline to the pet store. “I’ve been saving up,” she said. “I want to buy a fish.”
We picked out a gold one with deep red fins. Removing the wad of allowance from her back pocket, she got a bowl, some flakes, and the fish. She held it up to the window on our way home, explaining to it everything it saw. Careful the fish didn’t fly out of its bowl, I drove very slowly over the sleeping policemen.
As a small promotion, the Force assigned me to live undercover at the one apartment complex not yet touched by the arsonists. When I told my wife, she ran into the bedroom and slammed the door; her usual strategy: protesting her neglect by becoming unreachable. “Fine!” she screamed. “Go!” I told her I’d miss her and packed up my plainclothes.
The woman at the apartment office, Judy, also had a hard time understanding. “A lease?” she said. “For three weeks?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I don’t have any pets.”
After whispered calls to my boss and hers, I signed a lease and she bit her nails. “Do you really think there’s a chance?” she said. “I mean of us too?”
The prospect put a damper on our tour of the premises. “The pool is fairly large. Second rated in the county. That could put out a fire, couldn’t it? If we got a line of people and some buckets?”
The complex was complicated, a labyrinth of earth-toned pods set back in the trees. It was Fall and the dogwoods weren’t close to blooming, so I assumed the white dust on most of the cars was ash, the remains of nearby apartments. The observation pleased me. I had to keep my eyes open for work like this, and I had to see things differently. I had to keep a record. The job as I saw it, a large one, was to protect everyone in the apartment complex without drawing the attention of anyone but my superiors. It was daunting.
“And this is Mr. Clyde,” said Judy, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting on a second-story porch. “He’ll be your upstairs neighbor.”
“I see. Where is the elevator?”
“No elevator.”
“And he lives upstairs?”
“Yes, the one-bedroom below him is yours. It would have been Mr. Clyde’s of course, but since this is an emergency…”
“No, no, I can take the upstairs apartment, that’s not a problem.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
“But how does Mr. Clyde even get out?”
“He doesn’t. Well, he has his porch.”
I waved, with guilt, to Mr. Clyde. He did not wave back.
*
For some reason I thought the apartment would come with furniture, or at least the Force would have pitched in for an air mattress. As it was, all I had was a folder of take-out menus from Judy and an icemaker in the freezer that sounded like two barges slowly colliding. My one-bedroom had a half-bath, a cute kitchenette, and a parking lot view. There was an obvious carpet cleaning done recently; the floors could not have been more perfectly off-white, nor the walls or ceiling for that matter. I’m sure I was to be fined if I left the apartment any more or any less off-white than I had found it. I wondered what they’d charge me if the place were burnt down.
Unsure of the rules on how often I could leave my post, I snuck out for furniture as fast as I could. I found a small couch in town and, since it looked lonely without, a TV too. I drew up a supply list once I got back. I thought about walkie-talkies; binoculars, maybe passing them off as a bird enthusiasm. I wondered if the apartment had a fire extinguisher. And did the fire alarms work? I made a note to check them once I got a chair, or at least the strength to move the couch. I also needed a place to hide my gun, because if I wanted to look out, I had to allow for people, arsonists, looking in. The only potential place was under my new cushions. I pushed the gun under and fluffed, which gave me an excuse to sit down, turn on the TV, lie down.
A twilight descended that was utterly unlike the ones we had in my neighborhood. There were things to see and so I strained to see them, but the effort made everything seem impossible. If it were night and black, I think I could have seen better. I could have the moon or a light bulb. But this was just mud. A fluorescent streetlight outside the living room window buzzed on. The dull noise was terrible.
I didn’t know the apartment came with cable, but there it was. I clicked up past the static and the game shows and the sitcoms and soon enough I was in the mid-twenties. I settled on a favorite, the Discovery Channel, and they happened to be discussing my favorite Discovery Channel subject, the universe. I like to think about infinity from my couch, like where it starts and what’s at the end of it. Seeing those Hubble Telescope pictures in my new apartment made me feel at home. And it wasn’t just me. Soon I noticed that, with a two-second delay, the same show was playing upstairs. Mr. Clyde and I were learning about strangelets.
But I could tell the cushions were taking me under. I had bought a comfortable couch. However, I vowed to stay vigilant. There were no striking matches, but I noted the sensory street lights coming on, the sliding glass doors being shut. I heard a dried leaf scrape against the pavement like a cracked and upturned dinner plate.
*
The next morning I set out for some research under the cover of a leisurely stroll through beautiful autumn weather. Although I had the look of an aged man enjoying his daily allotment of fresh air—a shaggy crew cut kept in nostalgia for the Marines, a sweatshirt over a shameful stomach—in truth, I was secretly scanning the islands of landscaping for signs of potential arson. Perhaps the arsonists had scouts, and perhaps these scouts left clues.
There were sirens rising up from the north. Hopefully not a fire, I thought, half out of genuine concern and half out of envy I couldn’t be there catching the bastards myself. I was on the other side of the complex when my wife buzzed in my pocket. I realized just before I answered that in my fatigue the night before I had forgotten to call and check in, tell her how my first day on the job went. I had never been away from my family like that, and admittedly, the etiquette escaped me.
But from the tone of her voice after I apologized, I gathered my wife did not mind the missed phone call. Without pleasantry, she told me that my daughter, Maddy, was deep in a science project and making too big a mess in the house. Since I had the space, she said, there was no reason Maddy couldn’t come over and make a mess of my place. “Saturday can be your day,” she said.
I was happy to see my daughter but worried about the amount of work left to do. My undercover jaunt had turned up nothing and there were only so many excuses I could give for picking through mulch in flowerbeds. But it was a nice walk. Surprisingly, the apartment complex was even quieter than our subdevelopment. There were no lawns to be mowed. No ice cream truck jingles. No teenagers roaring through on the Jeeps they got for Christmas. They would have been forced to a crawl like everyone else, portaging over the yellow, half-acre speed bumps that the Brits call, hideously, “sleeping policemen.”
I was shaking my head at the name, trying to get the image out, when, coming up on my apartment, I saw my daughter standing at the door. She had a camcorder and tripod in one arm, a three-part folding poster board in the other. At the exit back to the road, I saw my wife’s car pulling away.
“Hey, Roland!” Maddy called. “Nice crib!”
*
Since she was two and I decided to tell her the truth, my daughter has always called me by my first name. “Thanks for getting all the furniture out of here, Roland,” she said once inside. “We’re gonna need all the space we can get.” Maddy pushed my couch into the closet and unfolded her tripod.
“Do you want anything?” I said. “If you hold your nose the tap water’s all right.”
She was busy drawing little squares into her notebook—the one with the dolphins flying through space on the cover—then filling the squares with arrows and stick figures. It made me think I should have been doing the same, noting the measurements of apartment units, locations of the best escape routes, etc. My daughter has always had a way of making me feel less professional.
As she scouted locations, an idea began to take shape in my mind, perhaps inspired by Maddy, of an extensive fire-drill plan for everyone in the complex. I would have to pass out fliers to set up a time. Maybe the promise of a barbecue afterwards would get the job done.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” said Maddy.
I had never heard anyone use a knocker before and I guess it went unnoticed. Looking through the peephole, I found four or five mops of unkempt hair around the bottom. I opened the door.
“Maddy’s father?” said the child in front.
I recognized him, and a few behind him, from Maddy’s school plays.
Maddy pushed me out of the doorway and ushered them in. “Joseph, did you bring the chair?” she said to the short one.
He held up a collapsible wheelchair.
“Alex, did you bring your iPod?” she asked another.
His headphones fell out of his pocket.
“Benjamin, what about the sticks?”
Benjamin pulled a movie clapboard and a pack of chalk from his jacket. It seemed I wasn’t alone in wanting to work as hard as Maddy.
The knocker knocked again, and in the peephole I found another swarm of classmates.
“Get in here! You’re late!” said Maddy.
The place was quickly packed. I was in permanent danger of being toppled by Maddy’s gophers and yes-men. My only choice was to pull up a chair in the back and watch, maybe jot a few notes for my fire drill.
Maddy yelled and a kid slammed a clapboard in front of Joseph’s face. His legs were dangling over the wheelchair’s footrests and his head sat slumped into his collarbone. His hands hung over his lap, holding the iPod.
“Dr. Hawking,” said a boy sitting next to him. “Tell us: what’s at the end of the universe?”
Joseph made a few clicks on his iPod and a few tics with his lip while another boy standing over by Maddy spoke into a toy megaphone. “Space and imaginary time together,” he said, his voice now deep and electronic, “are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. That would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundaries or edges. I have been round the world, and I didn’t fall off.”
Another question was asked and again Joseph pulled up his lip and clicked his iPod, keeping his eyes fixed ahead of him with hints of curiosity and delight. The less he moved, the more his eyes seemed interested, ambitious, wild. Maddy cast well.
“Take five!” she yelled.
Joseph jumped up and ran around the building, just to stretch.
I was impressed. It all sounded like something I could have heard on TV. “You’ll get an A plus,” I said to a student. “I’m sure of it.”
“We’ll see,” said the child. “The other group is shooting in the planetarium.”
The afternoon turned out to be as productive as the morning. Stephen Hawking himself was floating through my apartment, speaking simply and powerfully about the collapse of hydrogen giants. “That was stunning!” I said to Maddy after a take. “You have a real talent.” And she did. But I realized that the time I spent sitting in amazement of her hard work was just that: time spent sitting. The little notebook I had vowed to fill slipped from my lap, and just when I noticed, Maddy yelled, “That’s a wrap!”
A knock came at the door and the pizzas I ordered were welcomed inside. Someone hooked up the camera to my little TV and soon we were all putting back our third slice and reviewing the day’s work. The students were entranced, laughing and boasting, glued to the screen while I stole another slice.
But Maddy was doubtful of her success. “Something’s missing, something’s missing,” she would mumble, and her minions passed it on. Soon I noticed some students laying down their pizza and picking up equipment.
“What’s wrong? Do you guys want ice cream?” I said to a few.
“We’ve been dismissed,” they said.
Cell phones were brought out and parents dialed. Students were leaving in twos and threes, faster than I could say goodbye. A long line of headlights stretched outside, and I waved blindly, proving myself a responsible chaperone.
A few of the headlights suddenly switched off. I braced myself for confrontation—“Do you know how late it is?” “My Ethan should not be working this hard on a science project!”—but saw instead only college kids, slamming their doors and walking up to the apartment across the way.
The lights inside that apartment got brighter, music came on, and I could feel the bass. I began to wonder if the arsonists weren’t already embedded in an apartment just as I was. Did they have the resources for something like that? I wanted desperately to know if that beer had Whole Foods labels on it; perhaps that was the alcohol they used to spread the flames.
I rushed back to my notebook to mark every flip-flop and lower-back tattoo I saw. It felt good to finally have an idea. “Sorry, sir, my daughter was making a fascinating video” would be some excuse for the Chief.
“Whatcha doing?” Maddy said. The camera and tripod were again slung over her shoulder and the three-part poster board, now covered in banners and photos, was in her arm.
“Drawing a thong,” I said.
“Thanks for letting us use your place.” She walked over to the door. One more pair of headlights had come to rest behind her. They switched on to high beams and Maddy leaned in for a hug. “I don’t want her to think you’re keeping me.”
*
The lights were still bright in the apartment opposite. Their sliding porch door opened and voices—singing, laughing, shouting curses—filled the parking lot. I told myself I had no proof that they were arsonists, which helped assuage the cowardice, and retreated quickly behind my door.
Pizza crusts and plastic plates awaited my return on the living room floor, but I didn’t mind. It was a nice reminder of a nice day, what I had and the alleged maniacs across the street did not. I speed-dialed a friend. “You wouldn’t mind sending a couple of rookies out on a noise complaint, would you?” Brushing a few breadsticks into the crack between the cushions, I sat down and kept my fingers between the blinds until the uniforms came. I had a good laugh. The revelers would have to shut up and the recruits would have to suffer their abuse. But when I saw one of the college kids open the door and invite the cops in, I grew gloomy and turned up the volume on the Discovery Channel.
Again, the subject was the universe. Meteors were falling over a desert. It was a moving sight, especially coupled with the soothing rain sound effect. The light changed shape and soon the stars were water being poured into a fishbowl. A fish appeared rounding the bowl over and over and I felt a little bad for it. A deep voice came on telling me that although the fish could never leave the bowl, I shouldn’t pity it, because the line it swam was endless.
“How’s that supposed to make me feel any better?” I thought, and I might have said it out loud. “It would get so bored! And it could leave if it wanted to. Don’t some fish jump?”
“If it jumped it would die,” said the narrator.
“Well,” I reasoned, “that’s a form of leaving, isn’t it?”
The voice grew impatient. “Nevermind! You are stealing this from Mr. Clyde!”
The meteors came back. I heard the rain again, and an odd sound effect of dried leaves scuttering across pavement. A car ran over a speed bump, and, before I fell asleep, I said a short prayer for the policemen who had to sleep outside.
After I woke up I called Maddy’s cell phone but couldn’t get her. I tried her mother. “I’ve got a great idea for Maddy’s project,” I said. “Is she coming over today?”
“Just text her your idea.”
“You don’t understand, she has to be—”
My wife hung up. How’d she get so busy all of a sudden? I was the one with the job. There I was in my plainclothes underwear on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in a student’s apartment complex working my ass off. I reached for my notebook to prove it, but the spare scribbles I saw there reflected poorly on my discipline. I put on my pants. I would not waste the day.
With the notebook at my side I locked the apartment and set off into the field for inspiration. I managed to squeeze out a few half-hearted thoughts about removing the spare keys from under everyone’s mats, and a really laughable one about covering the grounds in dog crap. My idea: one squishy step and the arsonists would flee. But each thought was an embarrassment, an insult, and they quickly subsided to thoughts of Maddy’s project. Passing a dumpster, I had a strong urge to jump in and find some styrofoam I could sculpt into planets and moons, but I resisted.
The air was floral, pleasant. The revelers were passed out inside and the streets were mine. I felt flushed, warm, and as I walked further, hot. Up above the leasing office, a plume of smoke was drifting. I thought, Already? I had only begun to take notes, my phone was inside; I wasn’t prepared! But how was I to put that in the report? I jogged towards the plume, hoping the arsonists were not far behind, or at least the fire not too far gone.
At the office I saw nothing. The doors were locked, the lights out, and the smoke continued. The mini-gym was empty too, though the TV was blaring. I pounded on the doors of the the mini-laundromat, heard the pennies and buttons tossed around in the driers. I ran around the back, not having the presence of mind enough to look for footprints or lighters. The back of the laundromat was as pretty as the front, painted and landscaped. The grass grew flush with the first line of mortar in the bricks, where a pipe extended letting out hot air from the dryers, which met the cold air outside and—of course—turned thick white.
I sat down on the grass, up against the bricks, and tried to focus on that amazing floral air. At least there was no one to see me running around, I thought. In that sense a catastrophe was truly averted.
“Hey. Why don’t you keep a key under your mat?”
Maddy was standing over me. The light on the front of her camera was red.
*
I offered Maddy the leftover pizza back at the apartment. “It was a real treat to watch you work yesterday. How do you feel it went?”
“So, so,” she said, spooning the cream out of a Twinkie. “We haven’t hit it yet.”
“Hit it?”
“Hmm. Haven’t hit the core yet, the juicy bits.”
“I don’t know a lot about juicy bits, but I’m glad you brought your camera. I’ve been thinking about your film, and I wanted to introduce you to my neighbor, Mr. Clyde. I think he could add a really authentic touch. Not that Joseph isn’t any good, but why not make this a documentary?”
Maddy seemed intrigued. She consumed three more deboned Twinkies before her camera was done charging and I escorted her upstairs.
“Is it on?” I said outside Mr. Clyde’s door. “Are you ready?”
Maddy snapped her fingers in front of the camera. “Testing. One, two.” She gave me a thumbs up, looking even more professional than she did yesterday.
I looked into the little screen she switched around to face me and brushed the sleep out of my eyes. Then I knocked on the door. And I knocked again.
“Not home?” said Maddy.
“He can’t leave!” I craned my neck to peek through the windows but his blinds were closed. I turned to Maddy and sighed.
“Just push it open,” said a voice behind the door.
Maddy nodded me on.
Wheeling back slowly into the hallway was Mr. Clyde, a toy periscope in his tiny hands. “It’s how I look through the peephole,” he said.
Mr. Clyde was probably a small man even standing up. His banana peel body fell to one side of his chair. His slacks looked pressed; his shoes were tied. A piece of string wrapped around his globular head connected the ends of his glasses.
“Excuse me, Mr. Clyde,” said Maddy, the viewfinder still cupping her eye. “I’m leading a science project about Stephen Hawking.” Leave it to Maddy to ditch the small talk. “My father suggested I interview you about your similarities with Dr. Hawking.”
Mr. Clyde smiled. “I don’t know if I’ll be much help,” he said. “But come in, come in.”
Mr. Clyde gestured toward his living room arrangement and we sat down on his sofa, a shade more faded and an inch less poofy than mine. I wondered who, if anyone, had ever sat on it before. I never heard any footsteps when I was downstairs, so I don’t think he had any visitors. The sofa served a more general purpose. He could not use his legs, and yet he had them. The same was true for his sofa.
“I apologize for the spare set-up,” said Maddy. “I usually have a crew with me, lights, microphones. I’m afraid I’m as unprepared for this as you are”—she glared at me—“Could I ask you to say something for me?”
“Say something?” said Mr. Clyde.
“A little more.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Got it.” She looked up from the rising and falling lines on her little screen. “How long have you been using a wheelchair, Mr. Clyde?”
“Since I was a teenager.”
“What were you like as a teenager?”
“Normal.”
“Were you passionate about science then too?”
“I was never any good at science.”
“Does your limited physical space give you free reign over a vast, uncharted mental space?”
“I like things quiet.”
It occurred to me I should have been more specific in describing what I knew about Mr. Clyde. But this was an awkward time to clear things up. I urged Maddy on.
“Mr. Clyde,” she continued, “do you find people discount your intellect on account of your condition? How do you cope with that?”
“People are generally very nice.”
“When did you notice you were losing your mobility?”
“After the car crash.”
“Is your family supportive of your research?”
“I have a stamp collection. Do you mean are they supportive of my stamp collection?”
Maddy turned to me, put her palm over the mic, and sighed.
I felt she was asking for my help. The camera was rolling and, subject or no subject, she needed a film. If I couldn’t find any arsonists, I could at least make a good eighth-grade science project. “All right,” I said. “Now we won’t take up too much more of your time, but I think we’re ready to delve into some juicy bits. Sound ok?”
“Ok,” said Mr. Clyde.
“In your opinion, does the universe have a boundary?”
“A boundary?”
“An edge.”
“Does it?”
“Let’s say you think it does. Now, can the universe still be infinite?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
Maddy was turning red, and not her embarrassed shade, the angry one. I needed to prove to her that I retained at least some small part of yesterday’s work. “Well, Mr. Clyde, I know a certain Stephen Hawking who would be very disappointed in you.”
“I don’t follow classical music.”
“Stephen Hawking! He’s all over TV!”
“I don’t watch much TV.”
“Well, I wouldn’t either, but there’s nothing else to do here! And it’s free!”
“Yours is free? I pay every month.”
“Well, thank you Mr. Clyde. I think we got everything we need.” I was getting a little angry too. Mr. Clyde’s paraplegia did not affect his brain, so it wasn’t a total tragedy. The tragedy was that his brain wasn’t that great to begin with. Unlike Hawking, Mr. Clyde’s dead-fish expression had less to do with his condition than with his dead-fish thoughts.
“I hope your video comes out well,” he said, wheeling behind us to the door.
“We do too,” I said. “We’ll try and get you a copy when it comes out.”
“No we won’t,” Maddy whispered.
I followed her out, but stopped, remembering my own work. “You wouldn’t happen to hear anything strange outside your apartment at night, would you Mr. Clyde? Anything suspicious? Footsteps? Sort of like leaves blowing?”
“I hear leaves blowing,” he said.
“Hmm, I hear that too.”
*
Maddy wouldn’t talk to me once we got downstairs. She called her mother for a ride and waited on the sofa. I would have gladly offered to take her back home myself if I didn’t think she’d bite my head off. I wanted to apologize to Maddy in the car for ruining her project when I couldn’t save my own. And if she didn’t want to go back home, if she wanted to go to the mall, or the movies, I would have done that too.
But my wife pulled up outside and honked. Maddy walked out without a goodbye and I was alone again. I should have closed all the blinds and turned on all the lights. I should have microwaved some hot chocolate and stoked the fake fire. The twilight was still very depressing. But I did nothing. On went the television, one more window for that cheerless blue-grey light. Grainy images from the surfaces of other worlds were floating across the Discovery Channel.
Pretty soon Maddy would be home, my wife preparing dinner. My work kept me away, quite far away really. I could see the arsonists through the craters on TV. They sat at a table in the middle of a Whole Foods café just outside the universe. Though they were surrounded by people, trays of food flying over their heads, children running between their legs, they never seemed to mind. They were involved in a lively discussion, almost athletic, full of old embarrassing stories shouted across the table, whispered secrets, and snatches of song. They were white, black, Asian, Indian; but all young professionals, people who knew that the world was before them and they were invited inside.
If I stared a little harder, and concentrated, I could see a young man in black-framed glasses, something of a ringleader, conferring with a young woman beside him. He was listing numbers, addresses.
The young woman said, “Ski masks this time?”
He shook his head. “Too hot. Why bother?”
I saw an Asian girl bragging to a friend. “I’ve been pretending to read meters for three weeks and no one notices! With a few more readings, I can find a way to take out three units in a row next time!”
A shorter girl, the Tiny Tim of the group by the sympathetic smiles she garnered, sat on a bag of charcoal, permanently perfuming her adorable red pea coat. “Do you know the body is two-thirds water and it can light on fire?” she said. “The world is two-thirds water too.”
I blinked and realized I hadn’t blinked in ages. I couldn’t afford to. All this strange information was coming so fast. I wanted names, phone numbers.
But the fluorescent streetlight switched on outside and drowned the arsonists out. I listened for a moment past the buzzing, hoping they were still there. But I heard nothing. The leaves took up again outside my door, a slight wind pushing them across the porch. If I were an arsonist hiding from a policeman who was disguised as a renter, a loner, a divorcee, I would disguise myself as a leaf and tiptoe as if I were scraping along his porch.
Soothing thoughts of infinity crept in to claim me: sun spots, my daughter’s discipline, the length of my evenings, the fact that the Discovery Channel goes on discovering even while I sleep.
*
The fire started at twelve that night. When my eyelids fluttered open for a brief moment, I thought: someone’s doing laundry. It wasn’t until the fire came in through the fake fireplace and lit across the carpet that I fully woke up.
I cannot remember the order of my thoughts. I remember the TV was burning but still on. I remember appreciating the little there was to save. And I remember noticing the lack of any emergency procedure. There was no line of neighbors outside passing buckets of water up to the fire. No one stormed in and threw me over their shoulders. The notebook that detailed all of those plans was a flying fleck of ash in the kitchen.
I slid into my shoes, placed by the door for such an occasion, and ran out through the flames with my hands over my face, tired, disappointed, hot. I should have left my wallet inside; that way I would have something to complain about too. But, as it stood, I lost nothing.
From the parking lot, the building looked like a fancy wrapped gift. One long sheet of flame wrapped up from the bottom porch to the tallest chimney, coming together in a smart bow. The flames, like a candle’s flame, were not violent. There was barely any sound. The bugs had flown off the streetlight. I suppose they had something bigger in sight. I noticed also there was no late-night kegger behind me. It was a good night to be drunk somewhere else.
I took out my phone and decided to call the wife before I called the Chief. I told my answering machine I’d be coming home that night, that the job was over, and she wouldn’t have to worry anymore.
The arsonists were surely on the other side of town by then. All they had to do to admire their work was turn on the news. The TV vans were probably already on their way, the fire trucks following shortly behind.
Uninterested in seeing the roof cave in or the windows shatter, I got into my car. The flames left my rearview mirror minutes out of the complex, the smell of smoke minutes later. Soon I was back to the homes that aren’t connected to other homes. I knocked on my front door and followed the retreating nightgown into the bedroom. Without undressing, I curled behind my wife. I did not miss my couch.
*
When I went in to surprise Maddy the next morning, I found her already hard at work—of course. Several monitors were set up on her desk and bed. “Did the school let you have all that?” I asked, tapping on her headphones.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you get off work today?” She seemed to have an eye on every screen, and didn’t turn around for an answer.
I ignored her question too. “How’s it coming together, champ?”
“Just working with this guy.” She brought up the blank face of Mr. Clyde. “He’s a little tricky. A lot of the stuff he says doesn’t make any sense put together. I’d ask if we can go back for some follow-ups, but I’m not sure how much more—Are you ok?”
My face went ashen. “We have to go,” I said. “Get your things.”
“Roland, I appreciate it, but more of the same isn’t gonna give me—wait up!”
I wasn’t sure if I expected Mr. Clyde to be alive, that in an act of belated heroism I could drive over and save him, or if I was going out of morbid respect, that I had to hold some peremptory funeral. I think I went in order to deliver an apology.
We drove in silence to the complex, and found my building a blackened skeleton like all the others before it. The caution tape was up but the cops were gone; there was no one to yell at me. I told Maddy to step carefully, the embers could still be very hot and the rubble could give way.
We walked into my apartment, much as I left it only without walls, and, tragically, without ceiling. Beside the heap of my sofa sat Mr. Clyde’s wheelchair. It faced the television, Mr. Clyde a small pile on its seat. Maddy, realizing that she had made absolutely sure to return her own prop wheelchair and had not left it behind, began to cry.
“I’m sorry, Maddy,” I said. “I failed.”
On the way back home she insisted we stop at the mall. I was happy to oblige. Her friends could cheer her up better than I could. But when we pulled up to the door, she asked me to get out with her. She took my hand and made a beeline to the pet store. “I’ve been saving up,” she said. “I want to buy a fish.”
We picked out a gold one with deep red fins. Removing the wad of allowance from her back pocket, she got a bowl, some flakes, and the fish. She held it up to the window on our way home, explaining to it everything it saw. Careful the fish didn’t fly out of its bowl, I drove very slowly over the sleeping policemen.
Issue No. 13, Secrecy - Credits
art ALEXA GARVOILLEfiction JONATHAN TUTTLE
this issue of FOLIO made possible by MUSSY CLEARFIELD
Issue No. 12, Escape - A Thief's Best Friend is His Tote Bag
The Farmer’s Market reaches its peak time at ten o’clock – for me. The best goods are dwindling but the crowd is rising, and the buzz around their heads is thick enough to disappear beneath. It’s not exactly a Middle Eastern bazaar—there are no newsprinted fish flying overhead, no shouts from rotund fruit men to escaping boys with bulging coat pockets—but these farmers have a pomp all their own. They sit back in their homemade chairs, hands in their homemade pockets, stroking their homemade moral superiority, without even considering the amoral superiority beneath them. They are no match for me.
I walked the entire length of the market before I began, weaving down the aisles from the front of the tent to the back. I made sure the vendors were where they were the week before. I checked up on their inventory, noted the items furthest from reach, the big, the small, the wrapped, the unwrapped, and came to rest at meat. The meat tables occupy the end of the line for most shoppers. Men who think that blood will trim the femininity off their aprons stand arms crossed and snug behind coolers of plastic-wrapped flesh. The coolers present a challenge unlike that of a stray head of broccoli, but it’s better to get the hardest part over with first.
A mustached man still nursing the toothpick from a sample of cheese approached the butcher. His wife was held up somewhere, probably baskets, and he was determined to get the most out of his morning. “Do you know I’ve always wondered,” said the man, “at what age a veal is no longer a veal.”
The butcher cocked his head. “A veal?”
“You know, is the year a calf’s a cow the year a veal’s not a veal? Or is a calf never a veal until it’s dead? Or does it matter? Ha! A veal’s a veal’s a meal!”
While the butcher busied himself with his affronted stare, I swept four links of his best blood sausage into my empty tote bag and walked away.
My bag says “PBS” on its side. I stole it during a fundraiser. There are many just like it all across the market, though the sausages inside them are probably wrapped in receipts. It’s important to blend in. You blend in so you can blend out. I wear cargo shorts and a beige rain hat. I wear an over-large t-shirt because I am very small.
People dress their Saturday worst for the Market. Their least-favorite shoes wade in the mud between stalls. Any other day and they’d be whining, but today they gladly stride, sucking in the mess of global thoughts and local acts, even taking their dogs along with them to churn and contribute to the slush. I pet one.
There were a few leaves of chard left on the center vegetable table and the crowd politely danced around them, waiting to strike while pretending they were interested in kale. The vendor was chewing a honeycomb lent from the seller behind him. He moved slowly with his chores, opening rolls of pennies in his battered tin cash box, licking his finger to open a paper bag; all giving the impression he was a humble man who enjoyed life’s sweet simplicities, that we were guests on his front porch. But after he got his finger into the bag, he would smile and flick it downward so fast the air popped in like a gunshot, waking everyone up from their courtesy and moving them closer to the chard.
I buzzed in and out of the circle, trying to find the best position, stretching my hand out over the leaves only when the vendor smacked a bag open. With each smack I got a little closer, the crowd got a little more confused, and on a smack so hard it blew the bottom of the bag out, I touched the chard.
“Mon-ey chan-gers!”
The cry from the middle of the tent was loud and drawn-out, the anger in it mounting syllable by syllable. Just as everyone turned to see who had screamed, I wrapped my hand around the chard like it was a Golden Ticket and went giggling, really giggling, out of the circle.
I looked for my benefactor but saw that only Jesus had arrived, that is, the homeless man who calls himself “Jesus.” It was a bit late for him, and he looked more frazzled than usual. He cut right into the middle of the market and paced barefoot up and down the aisles. His typical blue bathrobe was dragging in the mud. His Speedo was lost in the hair of his thighs and stomach. The beard, as one would suspect, was grown to effect––less so the fingernails.
I am always happy to see him. As someone who is paid very little attention at the Farmer’s Market, and always hopes to be paid a little less, it helped that Jesus was around. I would have tried to be crucified next to the real one too.
“Out! Out! Money changers!” It plainly came from Jesus. Usually, his mumbles were low and undirected. This was strangely coherent.
A few disapproving glances were sent in his direction. He was finally making a commotion too loud not to glance at. Was this a performance piece? the shoppers were sure to think. Do farmers perform “pieces”? Was this a shouting schizophrenic they had heard on the street before? If so, which one?
“My house shall be called a house of prayer and you scum are making this a robber’s den!”
Jesus took his raving down the aisle, so that’s where I took my tote. I stayed behind and three shoppers to his right. Appropriately enough, a pair of Philistines was selling hummus at his next stop. Jesus dragged the tip of his finger through their sample cup, as if he were writing in the sand, and smeared a line of the Roasted Red Pepper over his mustache. Jesus was an intimidating figure even without the menacing gestures: six foot something with a football player’s build. Understandably, perhaps expecting a slingshot to come out of his bathrobe, the Palestinians pulled back in fear, and just enough for them not to notice my collection of their pastries.
Beside them, the community’s favorite married couple was operating a children’s puppet stand. Their show concerned climate change, I think. There was a sun and an ailing dragon. Jesus was transfixed. Landing on the lap of a less-than-transfixed girl in the front row, he kept his eyes on the bare wrists below the sock puppets.
Before long, it was apparent Jesus’ attention was out of disgust, not admiration. “Where is your farm?” he said to the wrists. “What land do you till?”
The puppet couple was unused to audience participation. The show went on until the screams of children brought their heads above the curtain.
Jesus had taken his swimsuit off. He pulled the dragon sock from the husband’s hand and slid it over the offending organ. “What seeds do you plant?” he shouted at the puppeteers. “What fruit do you pluck?”
While parents and children were covering their eyes, I took the tote of an outraged mother and pushed it into my own.
I was thrilled. My tote was fuller than it had been in weeks. Jesus and I were truly working as a team. I’m at the mercy of the nearest diversion in my job, and with Jesus, there could not have been a greater mercy. I wanted to pull his sleeve along with me so we could skip together to the next farmer. But I couldn’t risk anyone thinking this marvelous accident was somehow planned. I ran to baskets and only prayed he ran along with me.
The baskets were typically impossible to fit into my tote, but with Jesus still screaming, I felt the impossible was ready to be tried. I looked for the small ones, the widely woven ones that could be easily collapsed. The seller, a shy tee-totaller with a beer belly, was watching all the commotion at the puppet stand, and when I saw her eyes widen and her lips separate, I knew backup was on the way.
“Silly ass!” Jesus shouted at the basket weaver. “Liar! Hypocrite! Money changer! From what tree did you pick these twigs? Are you a farmer or a demon in a silly ass’s clothing?”
He took her credit card slider, pressed it against her head—“Out demon! Leave this ass behind!”—and ran the slide over her white curls. “Out!”
He was angrier than I thought. I was concerned, but had no time to ask the woman if she was all right. My tote was heavy and begging for more. I stopped searching for the easiest basket, just grabbed the nearest handful of reeds.
More and more people from the corners of the market were coming inwards to spectate. Looks of concern dotted the crowd. As everyone had left their cell phone at home to more fully experience the authenticity of the market, no one could call the police. The bored son of a butter churner, his Tonkas having run the gamut of possibility, came back in from his trucks and wriggled his way to the front. His face was glowing. He was entertained. Saturday had finally lived up to its name.
Ducking under arms and purchases, I found the soy table next door and, just as I wished, Jesus found it too. He picked the teenager who was manning the table up by the collar and shook him furiously. I hid behind a barrel of soybeans.
“Do you know who I am?” Jesus spat in his face. “Do you know who I am?”
“Who are you?” said the teenager.
I was reaching my hand up into the barrel when Jesus suddenly pulled it away from me. He raised it over the teenager’s head, beans pouring over their shoulders, and let it drop. The barrel had a false bottom two inches down. The poor boy’s head cracked straight through and he teetered around, seeing stars where there were supposed to be soybeans.
This must have been some kind of last straw. A group of thirty-something male musicians, all shaggy beards and plaid shirts, closed in on Jesus with chivalrous frowns. Some tackled his legs, others his arms, flying up in squid-like fury.
“Sell everything you own!” Jesus shrieked, the musicians having forgetten to cover his mouth. Perhaps it was his awful smell, but once they had throttled his chest, they backed off a little and Jesus wriggled free.
“Sell everything you own, not everything you make!” He toppled the next five stands, pulling out tablecloths like a bad magician and flipping over tables. I had to run ahead of him so he wouldn’t wreck the items I had my eyes on (I once had to take a head of lettuce from the ground and was very disappointed). I ran backwards, holding my tote out under the tables as Jesus filled them up.
Unfortunately the plaids conquered their senses and mustered the strength to bring the schizo down. I could do nothing to help him, just stepped back and watched. It was a horrible sight, like the tent of a three-ring circus falling in on an elephant. They dragged him back to meat, his ankles bobbing through the mud, his beard stuffed into his mouth.
“—everything you own” was the last I heard him say, and I was almost certain the first word was “steal.”
The vendors quickly relit their pipes and blew the sweet smoke over the crowd, anxious to get their audience back. They opened a few more jars of dijon or chutney or dijon-chutney, the tops shooting like champagne corks into the silence.
My shoulder was aching from the weight of the tote, and I thought, sans companion, maybe I should just go home. My spoils were plenty. My shoulder needed icing. However, the pretzel sticks left out for the taking sent a strong reminder of the task at hand. Duty first, I breathed deep, pulled my hat back over my eyes, and wrapped my arms around the pyramid of mustard jars. With or without the perfect diversion, I had to finish what was already the best day at the Farmer’s Market I ever had.
I wondered, scooping roasted walnuts from their buckets, whether Jesus ever noticed my darting around beneath him and if he realized how much he was helping. I would have loved to thank him. Alas, we could have never met, since I can never be noticed.
“Hello there,” said the florist. “You’re carrying quite the load.”
Flowers were my last stop, the farthest point possible from meat. The florist set up her stand outside the tent, where there was grass instead of mud, and where she could greet the families walking in. They were all carrying heavy loads, so I ignored the florist and kept on for her daffodils.
“Did you see Jane Eyre last night?” she said. “Excuse me, Jane Eyre?”
The petals in the front were a little peaked, so I rifled through to the back. I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Was it all you hoped it would be?”
“What?” This may have been my first spoken word at the Farmer’s Market. It hurt my throat.
“Jane Eyre. Masterpiece Theatre.” She pointed to my tote.
“Yes, PBS, it’s—”
“All you really need, isn’t it?”
So she wouldn’t be able to inspect anything past its insignia, I shifted the tote around to my back.
“Do you have something specific in mind?”
“Specific?”
“A flower.”
“Yes, a flower. I have a flower in mind.”
“Is it for someone special?”
“No...”
“I think this one sets your hair off nicely.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes.”
I reached into my back pocket, again a first, and pulled out the change I had taken from the Leave A Penny, Take A Penny.
“Please, please, it’s on the house,” she said.
Obviously, she wasn’t like my other Farmer’s Market companion. But although she smiled and Jesus frowned, both expressions carried vast generosity. I nearly melted under hers.
I took the flower. “For me?”
“Put it in your tote, Tote-man.”
I put it in my hair.
Issue No. 12, Escape - Evil the Hand that Frees the Hermit
Evil is the free hand that raps the hermit’s door,
while hidden, the other within the coat secretes a store
of court orders, judgments, liens, levies galore…
So exquisite the bouquet of legal array
is presented the hermit that he faints away,
the scent of reed and rice and lisle sending him to floor…
Un-nerved, the process server stoops to feel for pulse—
ineptly finding one, she tents his face with her papers,
as if the finest of linen shrouds, and slinks away!
Stealing to the Bonneville parked just outside,
she slams it into Reverse, mindful to rehearse
the mantras of her training:
“It’s not personal! It’s just business!”
“It’s not personal! It’s just business!”
“It’s not personal! It’s just business!”
Issue No. 12, Escape - Credits
This issue of FOLIO made possible by Melinda Van Slyke.
Cover: Ben Tuttle
Lino & Photo: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Drawings: Jill Ostrowski
Poetry: J Willie Garvoille
Issue No. 11, Actors - I Own This Town: An Interview with Mary Holland
Mary Holland is the greatest actress you haven’t heard of. Part Bette Davis, part Andy Kaufman, Holland is a recently graduated drama student from Galax, Virginia, home of The Old Fiddler’s Convention for 73 years. Documentary filmmaker Andrew Ferris discovers the life of an intimidating actress in a struggling city.
FERRIS: Does watching movies in Hollywood feel different than watching movies in Galax?
HOLLAND: Galax! I’m so glad you asked me about Galax... Well, the feeling is the same, if that makes sense. I go to the movies by myself, and I do it because of a specific feeling I get by going alone. I had that feeling at the Twin County Cinema in my beloved Galax and I have it here in Hollywood at the Arclight Cinema on Sunset Boulevard (my favorite movie theatre in LA). I’m sort of obsessed with going alone. I’ll rearrange plans and work it out so that I can go by myself.
In Galax, I was almost always the only one by myself in the theatre. Nobody went by themselves. It was a place in which social interaction took place; that was its purpose. In Hollywood, there are many addicts like myself, and I see people going alone all the time. People take movie-going seriously. They are there to watch the film and pass judgment and hopefully go home enriched in some way. I’m kind of watering at the mouth right now... I want to go to the movies.
FERRIS: Does acting feel as personally important to you in Hollywood as it did in school?
HOLLAND: It’s a different kind of importance. In school, I worked extremely hard and thought about the craft and the skills involved every day. I entertained concepts and tried new things and learned more about myself and the behavior of people than I ever thought I could. I tried to soak in everything and apply it to work for classes and for rehearsals. The struggle of a novice attempting to learn a complicated and elusive art. It was delightful. Painful, and delightful.
In Hollywood, I have to trust that I have the craft. That it’s in me. Because nobody wants to see you working on your “art”. They want you to do your job, and get out. I can’t spend hours musing over universal truths. I have to focus on making a living by showing what I can do. Acting will always be personal with me. It is me, it’s in my blood, you know? But I can’t be the tormented artist I had the luxury of being in school. I think that luxury will be mine again once I land a role, but for now I have to focus on landing the role, which is the hardest part.
FERRIS: Do you schmooze, network?
HOLLAND: God no. I don’t know how. You have to network out here, because it’s all about who you know and whatever, but I feel like a prostitute when I start talking to someone with the purpose of helping my “career.” It’s disgusting to me, and I can feel it when other people are trying to schmooze me. It’s the worst feeling I’ve felt out here to date.
I did this performance for a workshop a few weeks ago, a pantomime to one of Mozart’s symphonies. It went over very well, and everybody in the workshop liked it I think, and then the teacher said I should try to get it filmed and send it somewhere. The next day I heard from a guy in the class and we had lunch. After talking and having fun, he told me he wanted to get involved in one of my pantomime thingys. He wanted to get on Leno!
I had to take a shower after that lunch.
FERRIS: How do you prepare for an audition?
HOLLAND: When I first got here, I had no idea what to expect at a film/tv audition, so I overworked the script and went over every detail with a fine-toothed comb. I wanted it to be perfect. And it fell apart on me in the room with the casting director. I’ve since learned that once you get the feel of the character and the circumstance, you just have to play. That kind of freedom in acting is what I had in school, that sense of play, and it’s intoxicating to me as an actor and as a spectator. So I try to play in an audition. I don’t spend hours poring over the script now.
FERRIS: Before you walk into the audition room, is there something you always do for good luck?
HOLLAND: Um... I go to the bathroom. And I look around at things. And I try to take in everything. I try not to let my nerves get the best of me and get to my head. I tend to get overly excited and happy and shaky, and look like a crazy person. I just want to stay aware of the world around me, so I look around at everything and it calms me down.
FERRIS: During the audition, can you feel yourself switching from trying to make a good impression as Mary to trying to do a good reading as the character?
HOLLAND: When I audition, I think the most important part of it is the first couple of seconds right when I walk in the door. That’s when I feel the pressure in my brain: be me, be me, be me, be me, be me. Once, I was thinking that so hard, I tripped and fell into the room and then afterwards I got home and vomited. That last part is not true.
I’m used to these auditions now, so I’m not so nervous about presenting myself. I’ve become a bit jaded. I’m so tired of rejection, sometimes I just want to walk in and show them a boob or something. I’ve stopped caring so much what they think about me as a person. I just try to relax and be me and then show what I can do, and then get out.
FERRIS: What was your last audition like? Were you happy with the results?
HOLLAND: I was incredibly happy with the results. During the strike, it was completely dead. Nothing was auditioning except for a few films, none of which I auditioned for. I had been out of practice with auditions for almost 4 months when I got a call from my agent about an audition. It’s a high school girl, and they want a character actress (which is me). So I prepare and I’m pumped and I go in and I impress the casting director. She works with me for about 15 minutes and gives me wonderful compliments and then my agent calls me later and tells me that she sent the tapes in to the director. I got so freaking excited. And then a week or so later I heard that they had found someone else for the role. They said I looked too old. It must be the wisdom in my eyes.
FERRIS: Have you ever seen another actor in a role that you auditioned for? How did it leave you?
HOLLAND: It was flattering. One role that I got a callback for is now being played by Selma Blair (the role is Molly Shannon’s daughter on a TV pilot). So I don’t know. Right now I know that I have to be in a place where if I get the role, great, and if I don’t get it, great. Once the audition’s over, it’s over. And I have to get over it right away or my life will be miserable, you know?
FERRIS: Do you have a job outside of acting?
HOLLAND: I work as a hostess at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Most of the time it makes me want to shoot myself in the face. I stand and stare for hours on end.
We’re in an area surrounded by doctors’ offices, and once a girl came in and started asking me questions about the food we serve. Something seemed off about her, and I couldn’t quite place it until I noticed the incision in the crease of her left nostril. Her nose never moved when she talked. The incision still had fresh blood that appeared to have only recently been stemmed. She saw me looking, laughed, and said, “Sorry, I just came from getting my nose done. Do you guys have soup?” We do, but I didn’t answer her. She texted her way out of the restaurant and it took me a while
to recover.
Also, I just got hired as a model. For an art class. A nudie model. I’ve done it once and it was quite scary. But thankfully the class was small, and the people in it were mostly old, so it was like getting naked in front of my grandparents. I didn’t do that much after I was 6 or so, but still...fun!
FERRIS: What does a typical day look like for you?
HOLLAND: I wake up to my kitten licking my mouth. I wish I was kidding about this, but I’m not, she’s the only lover I have. If I have an audition, I usually find out the day before, so I get up and I go over the script. I have a tendency to get a little freaked out and nervous about these auditions, so until it’s time for me to get in the shower, I do something to take my mind off it. Like make out with my cat. Not really.
Because the traffic in LA is the worst in the world, even if the audition is a mere six miles away, I time it so that I leave an hour before the audition time. I get to the studio and enjoy a few wonderful minutes wandering around the soundstages and imagining myself working there. Then I get to the audition and I try not to get intimidated by the bombshells that are in the waiting room with me, and then I do the audition.
I go home, obsess about how it went, and get ready for work. I leave an hour early for work too. I go in and change into my uniform and prepare myself mentally for a few hours of mind-numbing boredom. I check my phone obsessively throughout the night to see if my agent called me to tell me I booked the part, and then around ten or eleven, I go home.
I listen to NPR and think about things. I go down the hall to see Michael and his boyfriend and we watch Jeopardy and they make me laugh. I go to bed and try not to wonder about the scary things about being out here – is this really going to happen? Am I freaking kidding myself? I’m terrified. Please someone give me a job.
FERRIS: Is there still a certain magic in the dream factory?
HOLLAND: Yes.
Issue No. 11, Actors - Slap An Actor
4 Guilty in Blithe Spirit
by SHERIDAN WHITESIDE
Chief Theatrical Critic
Any of the following actors – Elizabeth Sommers, Jeremy Ostler, Maxwell Cann, Helena Whisk – may be slapped.
Each played lead to middling roles in last night’s otherwise acceptable Blithe Spirit. The actors singled out for this column represent, as usual, the wooden, the over-enthusiastic, the perpetually adolescently awkward, and the irritating to look at.
Ms. Sommers, thin hair, clam face, keeps an apartment on Third and Sycamore and can be seen walking her dog every weekday morning at eleven-fifteen. Readers should not be afraid of the dog, however. It can be easily stepped over as you move to deliver her well-deserved slap.
Messrs. Ostler, bow-legged, and Cann, indented sternum, share a condo in the Glennford development, number 18. The pair leave for the theatre together at five o’clock, so one hand stuck between their faces should create a perfect double whammy.
This critic has it thrice confirmed that Dame Whisk, fatty elbows, pimpled calves, does not lock her door before retiring and often sleeps in late. Perhaps not a task for the casual admirer of this column, but devoted followers should pull no stops in waltzing into her bedroom on 6 Regal Court, peeling back the sheets, and proffering a good, sound thwap across the cheeks. Whisk was particularly offensive on and off the stage, as her oft-diagonal spine could never truly be removed from concentration. Readers note: Whisk’s ruby apples present this season’s Golden Fleece! The lucky slapper will receive an autographed copy of this column. God’s speed!
Tickets for Blithe Spirit, should one need insult before their injury, are ten dollars and standing water only through the end of this month. Please remember, actors are to be slapped only, no nails, no fists, no wind up exceeding six inches.
In reply to last week’s column, “Slap Happiness,” the following was received: “Dear Mr. Whiteside, Thank you for the spot light in your piece last week. I was slapped yesterday and greatly enjoyed it. In the future, I will hold my arms more gracefully while onstage. Yours, Fifth Sentinel To The Left.”
Go forth! -WHITESIDE
by SHERIDAN WHITESIDE
Chief Theatrical Critic
Any of the following actors – Elizabeth Sommers, Jeremy Ostler, Maxwell Cann, Helena Whisk – may be slapped.
Each played lead to middling roles in last night’s otherwise acceptable Blithe Spirit. The actors singled out for this column represent, as usual, the wooden, the over-enthusiastic, the perpetually adolescently awkward, and the irritating to look at.
Ms. Sommers, thin hair, clam face, keeps an apartment on Third and Sycamore and can be seen walking her dog every weekday morning at eleven-fifteen. Readers should not be afraid of the dog, however. It can be easily stepped over as you move to deliver her well-deserved slap.
Messrs. Ostler, bow-legged, and Cann, indented sternum, share a condo in the Glennford development, number 18. The pair leave for the theatre together at five o’clock, so one hand stuck between their faces should create a perfect double whammy.
This critic has it thrice confirmed that Dame Whisk, fatty elbows, pimpled calves, does not lock her door before retiring and often sleeps in late. Perhaps not a task for the casual admirer of this column, but devoted followers should pull no stops in waltzing into her bedroom on 6 Regal Court, peeling back the sheets, and proffering a good, sound thwap across the cheeks. Whisk was particularly offensive on and off the stage, as her oft-diagonal spine could never truly be removed from concentration. Readers note: Whisk’s ruby apples present this season’s Golden Fleece! The lucky slapper will receive an autographed copy of this column. God’s speed!
Tickets for Blithe Spirit, should one need insult before their injury, are ten dollars and standing water only through the end of this month. Please remember, actors are to be slapped only, no nails, no fists, no wind up exceeding six inches.
In reply to last week’s column, “Slap Happiness,” the following was received: “Dear Mr. Whiteside, Thank you for the spot light in your piece last week. I was slapped yesterday and greatly enjoyed it. In the future, I will hold my arms more gracefully while onstage. Yours, Fifth Sentinel To The Left.”
Go forth! -WHITESIDE
Issue No. 11, Actors - Credits
Portraits: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Interview: Andrew Ferris
Photos: Kihra Sorensen
this issue of FOLIO made possible in part by The Third Earl of Southampton
Issue No. 10, Chess - Diorama
Our house was little more than a shoebox for a third grade diorama, the rooms little more than scraps of cardboard glued up to represent rooms: a kitchen upon entry, its adjoining nook a living room, a set of stairs no wider than the narrowest closet climbing steeply to a bathroom, where any sudden movement would have shaken the whole box.
Reading in my room beneath the bathroom, I could hear the entire process of a shower. The swish of slippers would take me from my book and a new story would develop over of the one in my hands.
“This is a little late for Grandma,” I thought one night. The faucet ran and as cold turned to hot a towel was pulled from a rusty rack and the toilet flushed to speed things up. A heavy rush against my ceiling fanned out into a rain. A few rings shuffled down the pole.
Always miraculously, the ancient, stand-alone bathtub withheld the first step, and again I was amazed it did not crash through the ceiling and land beside my bed. There was a water stain on the ceiling, widening every day. I expected the second foot to peak through at any minute, but the porcelain took that one too, and I listened to my grandmother, Vivien, inch herself into the hot water.
I could hear the squeaks from her feet but I mainly gauged travel from the changes in the sound of falling water, massaging one part of my ceiling then slowly moving to another. Once the water kept a steady pattern, I figured my grandmother was struggling with a shampoo cap. Really, I did more reading of the upstairs sounds than of my book. Somehow that story, with all its lack of event, was more compelling than my novel. And then there was the fall, and the box shook.
Like ice cracking and sliding down the roof, the unique sound demanded full attention, and any thought I had of my grandmother slipping had to enter the brain as slowly as the sound faded. I dropped my book and swung open the bedroom door. I turned to dash up the stairs, calling “Grandma!” as I went, but I saw in the glow of our living room lamp, my grandmother, knitting.
“Grandma?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Did you hear that crash?”
She put down her needles and looked to the ceiling. “I thought I felt something.”
The shower continued above us, though water wasn’t hitting the tub. I could hear it come out of the faucet and then absorbed in some dull silence. I left Grandma to her scarves and vibrations and ran up to our only bathroom.
The slippers I heard swish were by the sink. The towel that rolled the rack was balled up on the toilet seat. I could see the cause of my ceiling’s water stain. A trickle of water dripped over the edge of the tub, where my little brother lay bleeding from the head. His legs were taking the water and his arms were dangling over the side, like he had just enough time to try and break his fall. His lids were open, and despite the hot water, his skin looked as white as his eyes. His hair was wet and still covered in soap. His gold necklace was resting on his sternum.
Grandma postponed cleanup till the morning after my brother’s fall, telling the mortician on the telephone he should rest up and get to bed, that there would be plenty of time for all he did later. Poking around for ourselves, Grandma and I were able to gather that the cause of death was almost certainly soap. Though I never taught him to do so, apparently my brother washed his feet in the shower, maybe that was his first time.
Orphaned early, my brother and I were put into the care of our paternal grandmother, though the court did have some concern about the location of my grandmother’s house. By far the smallest my brother and I had ever seen, let alone lived in, the house Vivien still occupied was meant for turn-of-the-century steel workers and their families. When we moved in, the neighborhood was a mostly abandoned, decaying pile of bricks heaped against the river.
If we did have neighbors, we never met them. A family could have been living next door, but I doubt it, and we never questioned for a second if there was or wasn’t. The court must have wondered if my brother and I would ever go out to play. We didn’t, but not because it was unsafe. Vivien made for us the happiest, warmest community to which I have ever belonged. Our home was infinite in its comfort and love and I wonder how much we would have gone out to play even if Grandma did live in the palatial north suburbs.
It was all a matter of the right lampshade. Our diorama rooms were effaced with beautiful light, a blood orange glow on Grandma’s chamomile bedspread, a twilit incandescent on turmeric-stained wallpaper. Scarves with tiny plastic beads were draped casually over lamps and dangled at our heads as we finished homework, or board games, or the last of the tapioca.
I thought about sleeping that night on the living room sofa so I wouldn’t have to lie directly under my little brother in his bathtub coffin, but Grandma, not heeding her own advice, stayed on in the living room knitting. Being born two years ahead, I was born outliving my brother and, that night, I continued to outlive him. I fell asleep staring up at the usual water stain, now darker and thicker in the middle.
Grandma spared no candor at my brother’s funeral.
“How did this happen?”
“He slipped in the shower.”
She stood her ground in the receiving line, giving the end of her translucent hand to whomever asked, never quite looking in their eyes. She wore the shawl she finished knitting the night my brother died and a dress I supposed to be older than she was.
The funeral was held in a community center north of our dilapidated neighborhood. It was strictly non-denominational. A man from the center was hired to say a few words, a few candles were lit, and soon we were back in the procession headed home.
Our meager house had a hard time fitting three people and a lifetime of fabrics and nearly disintegrated under the weight and conversation of all those strangers at the reception. They were younger people, younger than my grandmother at least. I took them to be children or grandchildren of people she used to know, neighbors perhaps. The respect they gave her was the respect given to someone who had only ever been seen in a portrait.
Grandma cleared off the buffet and set out strawberries and cheeses, and yet it was the guests who took pains to provide for her, asking her if they could spread a cracker for her, dip a strawberry into sugar for her. Eventually the attention they gave her even trickled down to me. The only thing I could wear that day––because it was the only suit in the house––was my grandfather’s uniform from the war. The bright gold buttons must have caught our visitor’s eyes and after they had plied my grandmother with snacks and well wishes they directed all tea and sympathy to me. “Sorry, son. Ten really is too young.” Then they’d go up and use the very bathroom in which my brother died.
After an evening of picking up strawberry tops from the buffet and wiping down rings of champagne, Grandma, who was knitting again under the living room lamp, called me over. She patted the cushion beside hers and plopped her yarns down on her aproned lap. She smiled at me, her eyes half magnified by her glasses. “I got you a little something.”
She reached beneath the sofa, digging around amongst sandwich crusts and successful mousetraps, and finally came out with a shoebox. A shoebox, however, that was unlike any I had seen in our house before.
She flipped open the top, pulled back the tissue, and picked up the first pair of brand new athletic shoes I had ever seen up close. Grandma cooed and ran her finger along the rubber soles. “Good traction,” she said. “For the shower!”
They worked. Perhaps not what they were intended for, soaking up my antique shower instead of basketball sweat, but six of one, half a dozen of the other.
“Good morning!” I’d call into the kitchen, where Grandma would be up and dressed and squeezing oranges.
“Morning dear!” and she’d keep on humming.
My pump-up, rubber, extravaganza shoes squeaked louder than the stairs themselves as I climbed up to the bathroom, laminated book in hand. Grandma, knowing how much I loved to read, bought me a bench that fit across the tub and a laminate envelope for my books.
I’d toss my robe over the sink and – pump, pump – step into the shower. Awkward at first, yes, but I was thankful for the safety and soon got used to the extra weight. It felt a bit like what I imagine drowning in a pair of cement boots would feel like, except here, my life was being extended.
I wondered what it sounded like from below, what I would have thought, reading downstairs, of the scrapes and bruises coming down on the tub. Grandma was downstairs, and I showered with a thought in mind of performance, lending a few odd stories she could piece out from the sounds above.
Later, whilst reading, I discovered Grandma did not have her own pair of shower shoes. I could hear none of the plops I was sure they made, only the familiar patter of bare skin on bare tiles. She’d switch the radio on to the old time Big Band station, and once she was in the tub, I could only interpret her quick and heavy footfalls as dance steps.
Afterwards she’d pounce down the stairs like a slinky, a tower of towel wrapped around her brilliant, white hair. Judging from an old picture of her I found in the attic, her hair had indeed lost all life and color, but came to possess the enviable luxury of invisibility, never dirtying a carpet or clinging to a sheet, never stopping up a shower drain.
My brother’s death had me noticing my grandmother more clearly, but one night I pulled out of my bedroom and read beside her on the couch, and it was there I came the closest to never knowing her at all. The light was worse to read by in the living room, though more relaxing. I’d start just sleepily running my eyes over the tops of words till my head would fly off the page completely and rest on the afghan. I pushed my cold toes under her legs and brought my eyelids down another notch. She could knit for hours, do dishes or flip channels for hours and the slightest hint of fatigue would never show, as if in solemnly accomplishing the smallest of tasks she was already sleeping.
The cloth over the lampshade cast a bell of light just wide enough to cup my grandmother’s body. The shadows bowed around her hips, never getting to the ten fingers and ten toes that after eighty-some years were still in tact. Her mother, I’m sure, counted those fingers and toes after she was born and delighted in the addition, but how much more delighted would she be that they were all still there? The shadows followed the bell of light around my grandmother, till the bulb above her head quelled them completely. The lamp lit up her hair, both brilliant and invisible, into a source that was greater than itself.
Reading in my room beneath the bathroom, I could hear the entire process of a shower. The swish of slippers would take me from my book and a new story would develop over of the one in my hands.
“This is a little late for Grandma,” I thought one night. The faucet ran and as cold turned to hot a towel was pulled from a rusty rack and the toilet flushed to speed things up. A heavy rush against my ceiling fanned out into a rain. A few rings shuffled down the pole.
Always miraculously, the ancient, stand-alone bathtub withheld the first step, and again I was amazed it did not crash through the ceiling and land beside my bed. There was a water stain on the ceiling, widening every day. I expected the second foot to peak through at any minute, but the porcelain took that one too, and I listened to my grandmother, Vivien, inch herself into the hot water.
I could hear the squeaks from her feet but I mainly gauged travel from the changes in the sound of falling water, massaging one part of my ceiling then slowly moving to another. Once the water kept a steady pattern, I figured my grandmother was struggling with a shampoo cap. Really, I did more reading of the upstairs sounds than of my book. Somehow that story, with all its lack of event, was more compelling than my novel. And then there was the fall, and the box shook.
Like ice cracking and sliding down the roof, the unique sound demanded full attention, and any thought I had of my grandmother slipping had to enter the brain as slowly as the sound faded. I dropped my book and swung open the bedroom door. I turned to dash up the stairs, calling “Grandma!” as I went, but I saw in the glow of our living room lamp, my grandmother, knitting.
“Grandma?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Did you hear that crash?”
She put down her needles and looked to the ceiling. “I thought I felt something.”
The shower continued above us, though water wasn’t hitting the tub. I could hear it come out of the faucet and then absorbed in some dull silence. I left Grandma to her scarves and vibrations and ran up to our only bathroom.
The slippers I heard swish were by the sink. The towel that rolled the rack was balled up on the toilet seat. I could see the cause of my ceiling’s water stain. A trickle of water dripped over the edge of the tub, where my little brother lay bleeding from the head. His legs were taking the water and his arms were dangling over the side, like he had just enough time to try and break his fall. His lids were open, and despite the hot water, his skin looked as white as his eyes. His hair was wet and still covered in soap. His gold necklace was resting on his sternum.
Grandma postponed cleanup till the morning after my brother’s fall, telling the mortician on the telephone he should rest up and get to bed, that there would be plenty of time for all he did later. Poking around for ourselves, Grandma and I were able to gather that the cause of death was almost certainly soap. Though I never taught him to do so, apparently my brother washed his feet in the shower, maybe that was his first time.
Orphaned early, my brother and I were put into the care of our paternal grandmother, though the court did have some concern about the location of my grandmother’s house. By far the smallest my brother and I had ever seen, let alone lived in, the house Vivien still occupied was meant for turn-of-the-century steel workers and their families. When we moved in, the neighborhood was a mostly abandoned, decaying pile of bricks heaped against the river.
If we did have neighbors, we never met them. A family could have been living next door, but I doubt it, and we never questioned for a second if there was or wasn’t. The court must have wondered if my brother and I would ever go out to play. We didn’t, but not because it was unsafe. Vivien made for us the happiest, warmest community to which I have ever belonged. Our home was infinite in its comfort and love and I wonder how much we would have gone out to play even if Grandma did live in the palatial north suburbs.
It was all a matter of the right lampshade. Our diorama rooms were effaced with beautiful light, a blood orange glow on Grandma’s chamomile bedspread, a twilit incandescent on turmeric-stained wallpaper. Scarves with tiny plastic beads were draped casually over lamps and dangled at our heads as we finished homework, or board games, or the last of the tapioca.
I thought about sleeping that night on the living room sofa so I wouldn’t have to lie directly under my little brother in his bathtub coffin, but Grandma, not heeding her own advice, stayed on in the living room knitting. Being born two years ahead, I was born outliving my brother and, that night, I continued to outlive him. I fell asleep staring up at the usual water stain, now darker and thicker in the middle.
Grandma spared no candor at my brother’s funeral.
“How did this happen?”
“He slipped in the shower.”
She stood her ground in the receiving line, giving the end of her translucent hand to whomever asked, never quite looking in their eyes. She wore the shawl she finished knitting the night my brother died and a dress I supposed to be older than she was.
The funeral was held in a community center north of our dilapidated neighborhood. It was strictly non-denominational. A man from the center was hired to say a few words, a few candles were lit, and soon we were back in the procession headed home.
Our meager house had a hard time fitting three people and a lifetime of fabrics and nearly disintegrated under the weight and conversation of all those strangers at the reception. They were younger people, younger than my grandmother at least. I took them to be children or grandchildren of people she used to know, neighbors perhaps. The respect they gave her was the respect given to someone who had only ever been seen in a portrait.
Grandma cleared off the buffet and set out strawberries and cheeses, and yet it was the guests who took pains to provide for her, asking her if they could spread a cracker for her, dip a strawberry into sugar for her. Eventually the attention they gave her even trickled down to me. The only thing I could wear that day––because it was the only suit in the house––was my grandfather’s uniform from the war. The bright gold buttons must have caught our visitor’s eyes and after they had plied my grandmother with snacks and well wishes they directed all tea and sympathy to me. “Sorry, son. Ten really is too young.” Then they’d go up and use the very bathroom in which my brother died.
After an evening of picking up strawberry tops from the buffet and wiping down rings of champagne, Grandma, who was knitting again under the living room lamp, called me over. She patted the cushion beside hers and plopped her yarns down on her aproned lap. She smiled at me, her eyes half magnified by her glasses. “I got you a little something.”
She reached beneath the sofa, digging around amongst sandwich crusts and successful mousetraps, and finally came out with a shoebox. A shoebox, however, that was unlike any I had seen in our house before.
She flipped open the top, pulled back the tissue, and picked up the first pair of brand new athletic shoes I had ever seen up close. Grandma cooed and ran her finger along the rubber soles. “Good traction,” she said. “For the shower!”
They worked. Perhaps not what they were intended for, soaking up my antique shower instead of basketball sweat, but six of one, half a dozen of the other.
“Good morning!” I’d call into the kitchen, where Grandma would be up and dressed and squeezing oranges.
“Morning dear!” and she’d keep on humming.
My pump-up, rubber, extravaganza shoes squeaked louder than the stairs themselves as I climbed up to the bathroom, laminated book in hand. Grandma, knowing how much I loved to read, bought me a bench that fit across the tub and a laminate envelope for my books.
I’d toss my robe over the sink and – pump, pump – step into the shower. Awkward at first, yes, but I was thankful for the safety and soon got used to the extra weight. It felt a bit like what I imagine drowning in a pair of cement boots would feel like, except here, my life was being extended.
I wondered what it sounded like from below, what I would have thought, reading downstairs, of the scrapes and bruises coming down on the tub. Grandma was downstairs, and I showered with a thought in mind of performance, lending a few odd stories she could piece out from the sounds above.
Later, whilst reading, I discovered Grandma did not have her own pair of shower shoes. I could hear none of the plops I was sure they made, only the familiar patter of bare skin on bare tiles. She’d switch the radio on to the old time Big Band station, and once she was in the tub, I could only interpret her quick and heavy footfalls as dance steps.
Afterwards she’d pounce down the stairs like a slinky, a tower of towel wrapped around her brilliant, white hair. Judging from an old picture of her I found in the attic, her hair had indeed lost all life and color, but came to possess the enviable luxury of invisibility, never dirtying a carpet or clinging to a sheet, never stopping up a shower drain.
My brother’s death had me noticing my grandmother more clearly, but one night I pulled out of my bedroom and read beside her on the couch, and it was there I came the closest to never knowing her at all. The light was worse to read by in the living room, though more relaxing. I’d start just sleepily running my eyes over the tops of words till my head would fly off the page completely and rest on the afghan. I pushed my cold toes under her legs and brought my eyelids down another notch. She could knit for hours, do dishes or flip channels for hours and the slightest hint of fatigue would never show, as if in solemnly accomplishing the smallest of tasks she was already sleeping.
The cloth over the lampshade cast a bell of light just wide enough to cup my grandmother’s body. The shadows bowed around her hips, never getting to the ten fingers and ten toes that after eighty-some years were still in tact. Her mother, I’m sure, counted those fingers and toes after she was born and delighted in the addition, but how much more delighted would she be that they were all still there? The shadows followed the bell of light around my grandmother, till the bulb above her head quelled them completely. The lamp lit up her hair, both brilliant and invisible, into a source that was greater than itself.
Issue No. 10, Chess - The Creation
after He, the great crafter,
had made many His worlds
and spattered palettes of color
across the un-canvassed voids,
He stepped back, to better his view...
and suddenly knew thereafter
how to make laughter.
Issue No. 10, Chess - Chess Night at Your Local Barnes and Noble
"You know, there is such a thing as humorous chess."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka
Issue No. 10, Chess - Romantic and Square is Hip and Aware, More Fiction than Non Dept.
Bobby Fischer, the Corduroy Killer, died last month. He was exceedingly stylish. After the heights of his chess genius have cancelled out the depths of his anti-semitism, what remains in history will be only the well-groomed mysterioso. The Britannica entry for ‘Fischer, Bobby’ will feature multiple pages cataloguing the uniform corduroy jacket, the skinny tie, and the wave of sandy bangs.
Fischer is not the most photogenic of men––that mantle is still held by Truman Capote––but like Capote, Fischer’s visual allure comes in part from the very unalluring context in which he is placed. The Chess Club that meets every Wednesday night at your local Barnes and Noble will not keep your eyes up off your magazines. The prodigy eight-year-olds that stun the old men might give you a chuckle as you settle in, but none of them will keep you as entertained as your hot chocolate. For a bookstore café, they dress eccentrically: black flood pants and white socks, ropes for belts and bulging guts. But eccentricity is an expectation they conform to well, which makes them, in the end, anything but eccentric.
Bobby Fischer was eccentric, the early Bobby Fischer. A wildly bearded bigot does little to stand out, since a man with a computer’s mind is expected to hold a few unhuman beliefs. But the Fischer of yesteryear, the young man who made even a set of black and white squares look debonair, was as eccentric as a vintage photograph of J.D. Salinger (for a photograph of the recluse now only speaks to the pains at which it was taken, whereas an image of the young Salinger speaks to a time when he didn’t mind being photographed, a concept that, compared to his current view, seems unbelievably eccentric). And eccentric is attractive.
Legend has it that Fischer’s standout looks were noticed the second he walked into his Brooklyn Barnes and Noble café. Soon every man, woman, and child came out of their books and circled round his first game. They stared at the young man’s clear skin, not his board, and after a victory they applauded his fashion sense, not his win. What did they know about chess strategy? Everyone, deep down, can recognize good taste, even if they have none themselves. Perhaps at the time they imagined they were admiring his chess and not his chest, congratulating themselves for showing interest in something they were never interested in before. But on the drive home, the husband remembered the striking lad at the checkers board, and the wife reminisced over the strapping young man and his Candy Land talent.
The same neglect applies to history. The context in which Fischer was placed, the one that by juxtaposition made him look so good, will fade away, leaving only the good looks. Should a celebrity obituary expound on why a man was famous or why a man will be famous? We should speed history up and jump a few chapters ahead.
Encyclopedia Britannica supplemental volume The Freshly Shorn and the Cleaned-Up Nice, page 185, ‘Fischer, Bobby’: “He entered every room in slow motion. Haunting choral music was piped in from unseen vents as Mr. Fischer carelessly cut through a crowd. Carey Grant quaked in his shoes and James Bond ran to the bathroom. Utterly effortless, his collar starched itself and his cufflinks clinked themselves against the bar like the ice in his scotch. He will be forever carved into celluloid as those four unknown men are carved into the South Dakota mountains.”
Fischer is not the most photogenic of men––that mantle is still held by Truman Capote––but like Capote, Fischer’s visual allure comes in part from the very unalluring context in which he is placed. The Chess Club that meets every Wednesday night at your local Barnes and Noble will not keep your eyes up off your magazines. The prodigy eight-year-olds that stun the old men might give you a chuckle as you settle in, but none of them will keep you as entertained as your hot chocolate. For a bookstore café, they dress eccentrically: black flood pants and white socks, ropes for belts and bulging guts. But eccentricity is an expectation they conform to well, which makes them, in the end, anything but eccentric.
Bobby Fischer was eccentric, the early Bobby Fischer. A wildly bearded bigot does little to stand out, since a man with a computer’s mind is expected to hold a few unhuman beliefs. But the Fischer of yesteryear, the young man who made even a set of black and white squares look debonair, was as eccentric as a vintage photograph of J.D. Salinger (for a photograph of the recluse now only speaks to the pains at which it was taken, whereas an image of the young Salinger speaks to a time when he didn’t mind being photographed, a concept that, compared to his current view, seems unbelievably eccentric). And eccentric is attractive.
Legend has it that Fischer’s standout looks were noticed the second he walked into his Brooklyn Barnes and Noble café. Soon every man, woman, and child came out of their books and circled round his first game. They stared at the young man’s clear skin, not his board, and after a victory they applauded his fashion sense, not his win. What did they know about chess strategy? Everyone, deep down, can recognize good taste, even if they have none themselves. Perhaps at the time they imagined they were admiring his chess and not his chest, congratulating themselves for showing interest in something they were never interested in before. But on the drive home, the husband remembered the striking lad at the checkers board, and the wife reminisced over the strapping young man and his Candy Land talent.
The same neglect applies to history. The context in which Fischer was placed, the one that by juxtaposition made him look so good, will fade away, leaving only the good looks. Should a celebrity obituary expound on why a man was famous or why a man will be famous? We should speed history up and jump a few chapters ahead.
Encyclopedia Britannica supplemental volume The Freshly Shorn and the Cleaned-Up Nice, page 185, ‘Fischer, Bobby’: “He entered every room in slow motion. Haunting choral music was piped in from unseen vents as Mr. Fischer carelessly cut through a crowd. Carey Grant quaked in his shoes and James Bond ran to the bathroom. Utterly effortless, his collar starched itself and his cufflinks clinked themselves against the bar like the ice in his scotch. He will be forever carved into celluloid as those four unknown men are carved into the South Dakota mountains.”
Issue No. 10, Chess - Credits
Photo and Drawing: Alexa Garvoille
Fiction: Jonathan Tuttle
Poetry: J Willie Garvoille
Backpage Photo: Kihra Sorensen
This issue of FOLIO made possible in part by KNOCK MAGAZINE, http://knockmag.wordpress.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)