a comparative study in greenness of grasses

(The Great Lawn, Central Park, NYC)

el pato solitario

(Jamaica Pond, Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA)

One of Those Whole "You Can't Go Home Again" Deals

The main flight attendant for his section of the plane, Vincent discovered, had a buoyant sense of humor.

That’s all I need now, he thought. All he really wanted was an uneventful flying experience. Get settled and buckled, ignore the safety announcements, keep his eyes on his book, get his complimentary snack and beverage, and rest his eyes if he was that lucky.

Now he had an amateur comedian announcing the rundown of basic safety concerns. She wanted everyone to rivet their attention to her litany of bland rules and instructions, and she wasn’t afraid to misuse both her brassy voice and the very concepts of comedy to achieve this. Vincent was now certain that he was being punished for a string of unknown sins.

“In the event of a loss of cabin pressure,” the woman said, “oxygen masks will automatically descend from the panel above your seat. Simply place the mask over your face…” She mimicked the action, putting the yellow section of a sample mask she held close to her mouth and nose. “…adjust the straps…” She pulled at the pale rubber band that hooked onto either side of the mask. “…and pull on the tube to start the flow of oxygen.” She demonstrated, straightening the clear plastic tube in front of her. “Not much of a fashion accessory, but it gets the job done,” she concluded. Many of the passengers chuckled good-naturedly. Vincent made an effort not to mold his expression into more of a scowl than it already appeared.

“Now if you’re assisting someone with a mask, make sure you put on your own mask before putting on theirs,” she continued, smiling broadly at her captive audience. “You’re not going to do them a lot of good if you conk out, now are you?” More polite laughs. Vincent focused on the book he held in his lap and offered a silent plea to heaven to deliver him from this soon. Even if that deliverance necessitated the activation of the emergency oxygen system. At least then the flight attendant would be forced to shut up.

After making jests about seat cushions serving not only as emergency floatation devices but also as excellent stadium pillows, warning that smoking in the restrooms would be caught on hidden webcams, and promising that the beverage service would be delivered that evening by cart, not flung from the ends of the aisles, the routine ground to a conclusion. Vincent realized he had been reading the same sentence for the past two minutes, and closed the book for a few moments to rest.

He felt members of the cabin crew passing by his shoulder as they hurried about their duties. Vincent had recently concluded that they in fact had no real duties, apart from the little speeches and the bartending. All the hurrying, he believed, was just filler. Busywork. Justification for their salaries. Oh, wait. They also closed the overhead bins and fetched the occasional pillow. Still, Vincent thought he might prefer it if they’d just sit down and relax.

In the bag tucked under the seat in front of him, Vincent had a variety of reading materials, but the one that most obsessed him even though he hadn’t read through it in over a week was a tight stack of letters written in a familiar loopy scrawl. These were the dispatches he’d received from Pancakes over the past year or so, scattershot details that she dashed off every so often. They were always impressionistic. Pancakes didn’t much enjoy composing formal letters, but she frequently felt a desire to jot down ideas and stray thoughts for an hour or so, and then she scrawled out a quick salutation and signature and proclaimed these as letters. Most of these went to Pastina, but when they didn’t go to her, they went to Vincent or to Pancakes’s father, Emiliano.

Despite the fact that her letters rarely had much more than a general mood or theme, the trend of those he’d received over the previous dozen months was unmistakable. As rare and as unlikely as it seemed to those who knew her best, Pancakes was in love. Vincent could almost feel himself sneer as the phrase floated through his head.

Pancakes was in love. Vincent felt cheated by it, even though he thought he’d put the idea of her ever being in love with him out of his mind years ago. But then this new guy had come along, this guy Claude, and it was as if all the years he’d spent dutifully being Pancakes’s platonic friend faded in a few moments. He was jealous and he was obsessed. And he still had to go and be just her friend. He considered ordering a cocktail when the time came, but he knew it would probably just make him sick at this point. His stomach hurt already.

Vincent remembered one particular line from Pancakes’s letter back in September. It wasn’t that details about Claude flooded out at him. They didn’t, actually. Claude was mentioned only twice. But the whole personality of that letter stood in sharp contrast to the usual Pancakes Dunst missive. The tone was, Vincent realized a few weeks after reading it (after reading it, in fact, fourteen times) completely unexasperated. That, he concluded, was shockingly new for Pancakes.

Not that she sounded content. If she had, Vincent would have called immediately to ask Pastina exactly when their friend had been kidnapped and replaced with an alien drone. Instead she mentioned feeling “idiotically optimistic, and totally ashamed of it.” She called Pastina “painfully hell-bent on having good intentions even while considering what it might feel like to strangle me.” She even suggested that her mother “almost sounded like she was thinking of talking sense for a change.”

Something had most decidedly come over Pancakes. And right now, Vincent imagined, that something was looking forward to ringing in the new year with her. Unless something happened in the next few hours to make the flight attendant’s emergency warnings suddenly pertinent, Vincent would soon arrive at his destination so he could pretend to be happy for them.

un paraguas rojo

(Beacon near Oxford St., Somerville, MA)

this way to beauty island

(Chicago, IL)

the voyeur's nightmare

(Harrison Street, South End, Boston, MA)

all tomorrow's parties

(Somerville Ave.)

the tattoo factory

(overcast in Chicago, IL)

particulate

Until suddenly one day, that’s all she could see. Dust was everywhere. In the end, life was a desperate bid to keep the dust cleared. Move it around, wipe it down, shake it off. But the dust kept coming, unrelenting. It was patient and slow and indomitable. And eventually one day it would overwhelm her, it would overwhelm everyone. And dust would cover the entire landscape. It would grow into a thick, heavy, swirling sea of grayish matter. In the end, the dust would win. It had only to abide.

After the Four-Color Action Has Ended

They brought the medication at 10:30 and 4:30. He knew that. They were very punctual about it. Plus, there was little else besides the less consistent meals that he could look forward to each day. He watched the light spill in his window, watched the shadows lengthen across his spare hospital room, and watched the darkness retake the room. In between, medication and meals. Very little else to do before those things but lie back and wait. Very little else to do after those things but lie back and wait.

There was a lot of lying back and waiting. Hours and days and weeks of lying back and waiting.

But it’s not like he wanted to do much else. It’s not like he could do much else. He filled his time mostly with books. There were the books his mother and his cousin had sent, and often he found himself staring at their pages.

He couldn’t concentrate long enough to read a full page of text, much less a chapter or a full book, but some of the paragraphs he quite liked. He lay there, a book open on his chest, his eyes picking their way through the orderly regiments of letters. Letters formed words, a fact he liked, and words in turn formed sentences. It all made sense to him.

Plus, when enough of those sentences joined together in as a team, they asserted themselves as a paragraph. A tight unit of unified thought. Sometimes it described action. Sometimes it meandered through a pattern of thoughts. Some mixed it up a bit with both, but in any event the paragraph was self-contained. Why read more?

He enjoyed the paragraphs on thinking more than the ones about action. The action sentences used language that was quick. It was jagged to him. It was sharp. Those passages used shorter phrases, more dynamic verbs. Maybe they were more engaging, but they were stupid, he thought, pointless. Why would someone run across a field? What would make them drive a car? To what end would they fly a kite, swim a river, or argue with their spouse? Just a lot of energy dissipating into the air, as far as he could tell. No matter how much was done, there was always more to do later. It was exhausting, and it never seemed to end. Even completing a paragraph, he realized with sadness, only implied that another one was to come.

When he thought about it too much, he felt fatigued. He tried not to think about it, to let his mind be blank. He was no less fatigued then, but at least he didn’t notice as much.

The paragraphs on thinking were different. They weren’t so concerned with achieving a concrete end. They still had things to say. She feels lonely. He wonders about the existence of God. The people hope for a good harvest, a new goat, some way to keep the Cossacks from overrunning the village. All of it happens in the head, and this he particularly liked. It was about brains, not brawn. The action paragraphs were the other way around.

Another thing he liked: The paragraphs on thinking had a different philosophical outlook. True, they also implied that things would go on and on, paragraph after paragraph. But they did so with a difference. Yes, they seemed to say, every obstacle overcome only reveals another one on the horizon. So why rush and make a lot of noise about it? Better to drift toward deeper understanding, a more varied worldview. Consider all sides. Enjoy the linkages between proposition and supposition. Ponder the relationships between statements.

All of this was a neverending puzzle box that kept his hours between meds far fuller than anyone suspected. They say him lying there, nearly motionless, day after day. They saw how he scarcely turned the pages of his books, how he ignored direct questions, how he seemed not even to notice the massive manacles that restricted his arms’ range of motion to a scant few inches.

He heard some of the staff whispering, discussing his medical chart where they stood outside his bright little hospital room. There seemed to be some disagreement between them, but he wasn’t sure why. It kept drawing his attention away from the paragraph he'd been working on all morning. Why couldn’t he be left alone to recuperate? That’s what they said he should do. Rest. Relax. Take some time off to gather his strength. They told him that he had been through quite an ordeal. That was exactly how the doctor had put it when he had woken up in this room four weeks ago: “You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

Quite an ordeal? They had no idea. Not a single one of them would have survived it. Not even a little of it.

As he listened to the conversation on the other side of the heavy door, his thoughts were drawn away from the paragraph he had been enjoying that morning. It irritated him to be interrupted in this way. How could he not hear them? There were three speakers, he noted. Two of them he knew. The other he did not, though something about it seemed familiar. Familiar in an uncomfortable way, like a half-remembered bad dream.

“His healing is much more accelerated than expected,” Voice One said. It sounded like the day nurse who sometimes opened the blinds wider than he would have liked.

“No, this isn’t unexpected,” Voice Two corrected her. “His case isn’t typical.” This sounded like the doctor who frowned a lot but rarely said anything to him directly. “What we have to consider aren’t the physical injuries. Those are easy to mend. It’s what’s happening in his head that concerns me.”

“But as badly as he was injured—” began Voice One.

“You see how much better he is, don’t you?” Voice Two admonished. “I would remind you that this isn’t your area of expertise, it’s mine. So listen to me when I tell you that the psychological aftereffects of his injuries are the concern.”

“Of his injuries,” repeated a third voice in a tone clearly designed to show weariness.

Voice Two sounded flustered. “Well, at the … ordeal. How he received them.”

“Let me sum it up for you,” Voice Three said. This was a voice of authority, no mistake. It was no faster than the others, maybe slower, but it had a way of hurrying things. “Yes, he’s healing nicely for the most part. But the fact is he’s uncommunicative, he’s lethargic, and he seems to have lost all interest in the outside world. We have to do something about that.” Still he couldn’t place this third voice. It was low and had a nasal tone. And clearly it invited no argument.

Voice Two outlined an intensive course of drug therapy, trauma counseling, and the slow introduction into his routine of small group encounters. “He needs to see that people need him,” the voice concluded. “To show him that he’s connected to others. If that gets through, things should take care of themselves.”

“How soon will all that take?” Voice Three wanted to know.

“A few months, perhaps. Depends. Several weeks if he has a breakthrough.”

“Make it two weeks,” Voice Three insisted. “That’s all we can spare. At the outside.”

Both the doctor and nurse tried to protest, but the Voice Three cut them short. Two weeks, it was decided, was the extent of his additional recuperation. After that, he would have to be back on the job, without fail. The rest would have to come to an end.

As he listened to the conclusion, he felt anger pressing on him like a great weight. He glanced at his book, but found that he had absentmindedly crushed the heavy, leatherbound volume in his balled fist. The thick novel had been reduced to a dense kernel of wood pulp, as small and hard as a marble. Disgusted, he held it up in front of his face with two fingers. He stared intently at it and the tight sphere shimmered with heat and burst into white-hot flame. A second later, only a curl of smoke and a scattering of powdered ash remained.

More paragraphs awaited him, one after the other. None of them about thinking.

Twenty-seven Reasons It Will Simply Never Come About

1. It might set a bad precedent.

2. I am base and obvious in my desires and ambitions.

3. The world is a cruel place—all the more so when one is aware of that fact.

4. I cannot get the information I need without further upsetting the situation that I need the information in order to resolve.

5. Professional seers claim I am badly aspected and cannot escape my fate.

6. We do not learn lessons through wish fulfillment, and I am evidently being kept after class.

7. I leave little room for compromise, though compromise is the most obvious, efficient path.

8. Those involved do not know what they want to do, and they are seeking the guidance of one another as to how to proceed.

9. Karma.

10. What I am attempting to do is, in fact, impossible given our present understanding of the physical world.

11. Money, supplies, and enthusiasm are low.

12. It’s a bad plan, poorly conceived but brilliantly packaged.

13. Communications are down.

14. Despite all our talk about infrastructure, no one’s done a damn thing about it.

15. My definition of success is way more ambitious than I will ever realize.

16. The gods are angry.

17. We’re not on the same page.

18. Somebody planned the whole stupid thing for a holiday weekend, and they should have realized that everyone would be away.

19. She never got my letter.

20. A series of small, seemingly meaningless occurrences will steer things another way, perhaps revealing indirectly the intentions of an inscrutable higher intelligence.

21. They’re working with the wrong figures.

22. We’re still working out what the meaning of “is” is.

23. There’s a blood curse on the whole group owing to a foul deception perpetrated by our ancestors.

24. Sunspots.

25. Everyone will begin speaking different languages all of a sudden and will abandon the unfinished tower.

26. We forgot to account for the possibility of there being a centerless universe—random, arbitrary, and without mercy or pity.

27. Some people are born unlucky.

What They're Not Telling You

These average classes are for those of you with lesser abilities.

If we took any notice of you whatsoever, you’d be fired before the end of the day.

No matter how many times you revise the first sentence of your book, there’s no way you’ll live long enough to significantly improve the ten thousand that follow it.

In fact, yes, my new boyfriend is better than you. In so many ways.

You have no novel in you.

Even the most generous and undisciplined schools of art would burn that canvas.

The size of your salary is directly proportional to how much of your soul we own.

We love your sister more than we do you. Always have.

There is no farm in the country where we sent Buster to live. Your hamster did not escape while you were away at camp. Plus, there’s no such thing as doggie heaven.

Using you? I guess you’re right. I was just using you. Thanks.

Your incompetence sometimes takes my breath away.

You deserve a much bigger raise, but we’re betting you’ll stick it out for the pittance we actually gave you.

Your music is offensive enough to anger patrons at a cockfight.

You’re just lucky all the good employees keep resigning.

Your sense of fashion would embarrass the average lobotomy patient.

Based on this resume, I wouldn’t even hire you to pack fish.

We’re really looking to sell the house to a nice white family.

The grass actually is greener on the other side, but you’ll never have the courage to do anything about it.

As soon as you’re out of earshot, we immediately compare notes on your most recent acts of outrageous idiocy.

Yes, that dress does make you look fat.

Threatened by your intellect? Oh, that’s pretty far-fetched.

If your father and I had had better contraceptives, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Your humor does little to mask your rage.