November 2022

On the telephone from the hospital, my father tells me he wants a cigarette. He has fallen again. His once hearty frame is now so frail, I can hardly bear to look at him. The cancer is in his bones. The cancer is everywhere. A wise friend once said that gazing upon death is like staring at the sun. But it’s worse than that. The last time I saw my father before this call, I was shocked by how thin he had become in the course of months, and he said to me, you look at me like I’m some strange man. I didn’t say, it’s far worse than that.

“But these people in the hospital,” my father goes on, “won’t let me smoke.”

My father doesn’t mention that his doctor has pronounced the end is no longer years away. That if we’re lucky, we might have this season and the next. My mother tells me all of this instead. “Your father is dying,” she says, in the same tone she uses when she wants to guilt me into doing something. Then she begins to wail.

As I talk to my father on the telephone—he in Arizona, me in the Berkshires—I watch the dusk fall languorously on a green sea of grass, brilliant with falling stars or just fireflies. My two-year-old daughter plays with the children of my friends and they chase after each other through the field.

“What if we went somewhere?” I ask my father, engaging in make-believe as I do so often now with him. “Let’s go to Italy,” I say. But it is the town of his birth that crosses my mind. I don’t say its name though. It feels too late to talk about Palestine.

My daughter trips, and my stomach clenches even as she squeals with delight. “I fall down,” she cries happily.

“I can’t go to Italy,” my father says after a while, but I am no longer paying attention.

The last time we were in Italy together was the summer after I turned sixteen. I still remember the twilight road descending to Bergamo the evening I drove us all back to the hotel in Fakri’s Benz. In another life, Fakri and my father were two Palestinians studying engineering in Italy, though most of that time was spent sleeping with Italian women and drinking haram Italian wine. The consequence of so much nostalgia for that bygone era (the sixties!) was them getting very, very drunk at dinner.

My father was shouting, “Quant’è bella giovinezza che si fugge tuttavia,” a beloved Italian saying, as I recklessly drove Fakri’s beautiful Mercedes at speed downhill. I cringed at my dad’s maudlin ravings, cringed at that man he once was, the one who always had a belly, whose cheeks were sometimes red from vodka, who smelled always a little of tobacco, cologne, the faint trace of pot, who was sometimes rageful, often hilarious, so alive. How much now do I want him back.

Meanwhile Fakri was hollering at me insistently: “Do you feel Palestinian habibti? Do you? Can’t you feel it?” As if the night, or the drive itself, that drunken drive down the falling road, was a sort of baptism unto Palestinian-ness itself. Fakri told me to drive faster, chanting Falestine, Falestine, Falestine with duende, and then my father forgot his dulce youth and joined in, like the homeland might emerge from the Italian landscape a fata morgana.

I didn’t feel Palestinian. (A sensation that is not particular to that night: I don’t speak Arabic, my mother is Jewish, and I am American born and bred, so I have always felt disingenuous asserting belonging within such a tormented narrative.) But I did feel something as our descent hastened, as the view below dizzied and dazzled and tempted and sickened me. What I felt was that awful inclination that has always plagued me—not to Falestine—but to falling, a desire to fall, to no country but death’s country. L’appel du vide, the French call it. The call of the void.

I have been told, in no uncertain terms, I will inherit nothing from my father in the material sense. In the immaterial sense, I wonder what it is I have inherited from him more profoundly: his Palestinian-ness or his propensity to fall?

My father has been falling all of his life. When he was a small child before the Nakba, playing on his roof in Safed, he dropped a story off the ledge. And there was that crash from bicycling down a steep desert hill in Arizona when he was middle-aged, and one of my earliest memories of him is in its aftermath with a big bloody bandage wrapped around his head. Still, nothing compares to the numerous times he’s fallen since he’s been ill. Observing him, it almost seems like he is giving himself up to the ground, with graceful surrender, with desire even. (He says it feels like he is being pushed.)

Years ago, when my father saw my face turn ashen as I drove down Highway 87—which descends thousands of feet from the Tonto National Forest to the Sonoran Desert in a seemingly end- less (gorgeous) spiral—he spoke to me of the seventeenth-floor apartment in New York City where he once lived.

“What scared me about it,” he said, “was that it made me want to fall.”

And then he assured me it goes away, the falling thing, like a bad flu, or recurring nightmare.

There are two recurring dreams I have had most often in my life. One is a variation on the same theme: I am in an elevator as it rises out of its compartment. It just keeps going up. What terrifies me in the dream is not the uncontrolled ascent, but the inevitable, imminent fall from it.

The other recurring dream began at my old, beloved apartment on Macon Street in Bed-Stuy. In this dream, I was always waking up in a different apartment than the one on Macon, one with different walls (too white, too bare, in fact not unlike a hospital). I now lived in this lesser place and so I wept, head in my hands. I can still remember the deep relief of waking up and finding that Macon remained as it revealed itself before my opening eyes.

Why suffer these two particular dreams over and over again? What does falling have to do with home? Probably nothing, and maybe everything. We are born, we die, with a dream in between. We live in an apartment, a country, on a planet, in a galaxy of a rapidly expanding, darkening universe, in a body. Until we don’t. Where do we fall to? My second daughter lives inside of me now, and I shelter her until she falls away from me. We lose Eden—Palestine, Macon, ourselves. Home is only a metaphor for life. Who are we but wandering spirits, refugees from the void?

Or perhaps, the answer is prophecy. In the end, the second dream is a dream that came true: I’ll never wake up in that apartment on Macon Street again.

My daughter finds me in the green, dusky field. “I fall down!” she reports blissfully, pointing to the criminal grass.

“Are you okay?” I ask her, and my father, who is still on the phone, responds instead. He is okay, he says. But then he moans. I hear him vomit. My mother begins to shriek. It’s not pretty, no it’s fucking awful, and I’m a girl whose only religion is beauty and there is so much of it just beyond me so I say goodbye daddy, take care of yourself, and hang up.

But I’m still with him, staring across the distance at a field of cows, idyllically grazing and tagged for death, and I forget all about Italy as my daughter tugs on me, and I ignore her, and type in a question for Google and it informs me that my father’s hometown of Safed and the Berkshire vista before me share the same elevation. And it strikes me that my father’s five-year-old vision of leaving Safed—of the house where he says they left gold beneath the floorboards, from which my grandmother, a few days postpartum, walked with her children on the road to Damascus, away from her family’s home since the sixteenth century for which there was no deed, no paperwork because theirs was a deed more imperishable than words, and so, they believed they would return, of course they would return, and then days, months, years, lifetimes (and now my father’s) have passed—this childhood vision is also his last.

“No cry, Mommy!” my daughter screams at me. And I realize it is true. I am weeping at long last over this inherited, quintessentially Palestinian fact.

We leave the Berkshires and return to the city. The weekend away, alas, was just a weekend and we are always returning to the city despite our best efforts at leaving it. This time it is to yet another temporary sublet. (To put it discreetly, we are not in a position to sign a lease.) This place feels almost like home, more so than the others that followed Macon—that is until we come back to a leak that has, quite literally, caused the ceiling to fall through. Standing there, thirty-five weeks pregnant, tiptoeing around the crumpled plaster, observing the building’s skeleton, its web of beams and pipes and ghosts, for the second time in a few days, I think of ’48, of my tata pregnant as I am now, and begin to weep.

Days later, we are interrogated by the landlord. Don’t we know that our sublet agreement with his primary tenant is illegal? What paperwork do we have? What are the terms of our contract? Let me stop there. This isn’t truly tragic, this isn’t war. We didn’t lose the rite of centuries. Weeks later, I will observe a New York City sanitation truck destroy in broad daylight all that remains (a suitcase, a green chair, a vacuum cleaner) to a homeless woman as she cries, scratches her face with that unmistakable, desperate painkilling need. I know, this isn’t that. Nevertheless, I feel a terrible lightness. And I have, on so many days, in the years since we left Macon. The same lightness that accompanies driving too fast down a steep road in Bergamo, the lightness of riding in an elevator as it shoots up through the stories (or in my dreams through the roof), the lightness of gazing at the sea sparkle over the rails of the Verrazzano Bridge, the lightness that presages a fall.

We move again. We’ve done it so often, we’re almost good at it. Almost. Maybe it’s in my blood. This time to the music of our daughter wailing, flinging herself at the doors, at the chairs she believes belong only to her, the screech of tape, sweep of broom, the ache of my back, the roaring vacuum, our kicking fetus, Clorox stench, we need more paper towels, the sound of keys on the countertop, and then our suitcases, our daughter’s toys, our boxes full of so much what? are stacked around us in the morning parlor of my best (and most charitable) friend’s beautiful brownstone. My partner touches my belly, says: “I feel like we’ve fallen so low. Like anyone can just get rid of us at will.”

Is this what you meant, Fakri? Is this a pale semblance of what being Palestinian feels like?

Sometime between this move and our next, my father falls again, and I call to ask how he is feeling, and he lies, and when he asks how I am feeling, I also lie. My mother tells me what I already know—that he can no longer hear upsetting things. No talk of Palestine, no talk of my endless, temporary displacements, no talk of money woes. Khalas. Enough is enough. He just wants to meet his new granddaughter. So, we talk a little bit about the gabapentin, the oxycodone, the radium treatment. Then he says, “There are no miracles.”

“You tried everything,” I say. “You really fought.” And a memory of him belting out “Fight” alongside The Cure returns and I think of the long fight of his life, as he moved from home to home to home so many more times than me, for so long without papers, or citizenship, facing arrest, and once even the threat of being thrown off a ship. But how can I even pretend to summarize all of that here? An entire life is no anecdote after all. Not his, not yours.

“I fell again,” my father says. “It happened so fast, this falling. I just fall all the time.”

And I say something useless in response.

“What day is it today?” my father asks. I tell him it is Tuesday and he expresses disbelief. I ask my father if he’s watching the game in the hospital. The Warriors are on and Steph Curry is his favorite player. He says he doesn’t care anymore who wins or loses the stupid game.

“But you love them,” I say.

“I just want to go home,” he says. His voice is so diminished now that everything he says sounds as if he is about to cry. But he isn’t.

I don’t ask what home he means. Then a sudden surge of joy in his voice surprises me. “You know what I have always loved?” he asks me.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Italy,” he says. “Quant’è bella giovinezza che si fugge tuttavia . . .”

“Tell me what that means again,” I say.

“How beautiful youth is,” he says. “But how to translate che si fugge . . . ?”

I haven’t had that dream of Macon Street in a long time. Instead, I now have a recurring dream in which we live in the penthouse of a tall building. Just like my father’s storied New York City apartment, it is usually on the seventeenth floor. And then, for no stated reason, we are removed from the apartment itself and forced to live on the windy roof. I can’t look down, both because I fear I will fall and because I might want to.

In the last dream like this, I realize that the entire world is ending. Our bright, fiery sun plummets without ado and then it is night in the middle of the day. I can hear the ocean swelling, the birds crying. The wind is too loud. My daughter is in the dream, too, and she clings to me and her chest is humming, warm, or it is me, and I am warm and humming with my mad love for her.

When we wake up again in another dream place, I wonder, is this it? Have we come home? Or, in other words, have we fallen to the bottom yet? But I know there is no such thing as either place. This is why we all dream of falling, and falling forever.

*

“No more falling,” I say to my father on the phone before we hang up. This is the sort of make-believe we engage in, both in the beginning and in the end. And, I almost do believe it.

After all, how could I know that some weeks later, I would drive the 2,500-mile distance to him in his desert, with a newborn and a toddler, because the end was nigh, and bear witness to his trembling body, illogically thin, as he daily fret over the few steps between his bed and his wheelchair? How could I know that I would ask him in his final days to find a phone number up there for me to call him on? How could I know that I would be the one who would press my ear down onto his chest, and hearing no song, announce to my mother, he’s gone. That in the aftermath of his passing, we would find ourselves moving yet again, my mother and ourselves, and once our furniture was all gone, sleep between the echoey walls of his last homeland, on two couches pushed together, and how I would wish there were such things as ghosts, a visage, a wail, clear articulate proof he remained rather than just wineglasses inexplicably breaking, coyotes howling, and dreams, oh the dreams, the dusk, its magical western palette. Yes, we would again find ourselves where we have been all of these years, not homeless, but not yet home, staring up at the stupid stucco ceiling, singing our daughters to sleep.

How could I know any of this would come to pass as I hang up the phone? The end comes so fast, and so soon. And there are no revisions. How could I know how deeply I would yearn for an unassuming phone call such as this—the one I am hurrying off of, the one which began as it always does with my father saying hi Hannah, it’s your daddy disregarding a smartphone’s inherent caller ID—this phone call which is now over.

“That’s okay, habibti, I know you’re busy. Have a good night.”

No, I couldn’t know. Back here, in this essay, it is still July and not December, and my father remains, and the warm sun has risen again so I take my daughter to a nearby playground, the swings so comfortingly familiar no matter their point in space, and she beelines right for them, and points to the empty one beside her. “Sit down,” she commands.

I do as I’m told. It’s been so long. I know I delighted in this once. This lightness, this fleeting sensation of flight, this casual forgetting of how easy it is to fall. “Whee,” she cries. “Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.”

And up we go, into the sky.

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From Freeman’s. “Che si fugge” by Hannah Lillith Assadi. Copyright (c) 2023 Hannah Lillith Assadi. The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

I’m reading a book about New York in the late 1970s and it begins with a perennial observation that you can live many lifetimes in the city due to the unsentimental way it demolishes the past. I have a spooky feeling, peering over the shoulder of the writer, Paul Goldberger, forty-five years later. Most of the thrilling new items he describes – buses, which are all painted white, phone booths one cannot molest—are now in 2023 things in the past. Some of it reads like a prophecy: about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mercedes Benz showroom at 430 Park Ave. Goldberger asks: “why Wright did this is a mystery… the idea of having sleek European cars appear to the purchaser to be gliding toward him off a curving ramp is an appealing one, but it doesn’t stand a chance of working in such a low cramped space.” And now that that show room is gone.

Working as an editor, especially within literary journals, can sometimes feel like a similar experience in hyperactive obsolescence. Not that writers’ manuscripts are gliding toward us in a low cramped space—but rather every week brings a new foreclosure. This month it’s The White Review and The Gettysburg Review. Next month it will be others. This is the way of literary magazine publishing. For every Virginia Quarterly Review or Paris Review, there are dozens if not hundreds of other small journals that open with fanfare, continue for a few issues and then close quietly in the night before the chill has gone off the wine for their launch parties. I’ve lived in New York City almost thirty years and my memory is cluttered with issue parties for little magazines like Open City or Astra, or Black Clock, beautiful journals which are no longer in circulation.

It can make you feel a bit gloomy, unless you accept that like New York City itself, literary magazines are by nature—most of them, not all—meant to be ephemeral. If they were part of a biosphere, little magazines wouldn’t be the tortoises swimming along well into their hundredth year, they would be the Great Danes of our planet—lovely, clumsy, a little slobbery and gone too soon. And of course, even though we know, otherwise, their days are numbered, we grow attached to them.

All of this is on my mind because Freeman’s, the literary annual I started in 2014, is also coming to a close this fall with its tenth issue, which is themed to conclusions. Yes, there was a time when I believed it would last for 70 years, and I fathomed going over proofs at age 114 with a looking glass and a pipe and stories of being at Ocean Vuong’s first public reading. I imagined having an office. I dreamed up the ways that it could become permanent. None of them were feasible. (Incidentally, these are reasonable things, by the way—and magazines which are striving toward semi-permanence, which employ people, like Gettysburg Review, absolutely deserve them, especially when people’s livelihood depend upon it)

That last parenthetical might sound like a bum-covering caveat, but these issues are important. I edited a literary magazine in the past, Granta, a magazine you might have thought had a license to burn money, since it was owned by one of the wealthiest women in Europe. It didn’t. And the unbuilding of the team I worked with was one of the most painful experiences of my professional life. What is one person’s choice is another person’s livelihood, and this is one of the challenges of working in a form that requires money, since virtually all literary magazines lose it, some of them quite a lot of it. Benefactors, institutional or individual, tend to have a different idea about money from the people who work for them.

John Freemand with with Garnette Cadogan at City Lights.

When I started Freeman’s one of the things I wanted to set in place was a support structure free of these hang-ups. It was a pipe dream, but I felt like it was possible in a world in which so many great things happen through mutual aid, not patronage. I wanted to pay writers first, everyone else who worked on it, and then see if it could make money. This meant, in essence, finding a book publisher who was willing to see if their existing system could take on some of the production tasks of the magazine: luckily, Morgan Entrekin at Grove, which has remained independent minded for almost eighty years, was willing to do this.

As a result, for the last ten years Freeman’s has benefited from some of the best young minds in publishing who were, essentially, moonlighting on their day jobs. Before his authors won Pulitzers (Viet Thanh Nguyen) and Booker Prizes (Douglas Stuart, Bernadine Evaristo), Peter Blackstock was its editorial assistant; followed by Alison Malecha and Dhyana Taylor and Emily Burns. For almost the whole run I had a managing editor, Julia Berner-Tobin, who made time out of her time to shepherd it along. If you’ve ever met a managing editor, the most minute-pinched people in all of publishing, you will appreciate what a lucky break I’d received. Freeman’s also had great copyeditors, production designers, and publicists. For a few year it’s had a home on this website thanks to Emily Firetog and Jonny Diamond, which brings it a distribution far greater than any post office can provide.

I knew this set-up had a time-limit. It was not, make money or else, it was rather: go for it, and let’s make sure not to overtax everyone involved. So I knew I’d have to treat every issue of Freeman’s like it might be the last. This was fine given my goals, which seem a little utopian when I set them down. I wanted to create a literary magazine that was a beautiful object, and whose pieces felt as warm and funny and sad, and intense as life itself. I wanted it to feel spoken to you. I wanted it to feel like the best dinner party you’ve ever been to, not because people are performing or dominating the table, but because one story built off another off another, and that in the exchange, something greater than the singular, came together, like a kind of music.

Storytelling and enchantment have come under criticism recently, perhaps because of the ways they are sold to us in a world in which our attention is a commodity. I never feel like this when I’m listening to a very good storyteller, or when a writer has plunged me into a world that they have created. It is astounding that the interior sonics of voice can change our minds. It can add new neural networks, alter blood-flow, it can literally change what we are made of, or what we care about.

Aminatta Forna and Binyawanga Wainana telling stories.

Little magazines have a history of utopian thinking and short life spans: I knew that if Freeman’s were to get beyond it’s third issue, it was going to need help. Freeman’s didn’t really have a promotional budget: so the only way to get it out there was to make it a place. Not just a paper bound book, or the corner of a website, nice as both are. I’ve always felt like events can do that, by creating a culture around a publication, and by occurring in spaces that already have acoustical mojo of their own: like independent bookstores. So for each issue Freeman’s had a series of events: more than 500 of them in all over the last decade, from Talking Leaves in Buffalo to City Lights in San Francisco, to Shakespeare & Co in Paris. I would say ninety percent of them at indy bookstores. There’s one this Friday at the Vancouver Writers Festival with Omar El Akkad and Tania James, this annual fall literary gathering has hosted no fewer than six launches.

This volume of events is glorious and wildly unsustainable, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything. To listen to and watch writers exchange ideas and think, even in the sometimes cynically tilted era of the book tour, the tidied model of the festival, is thrilling, especially when it’s people who aren’t often put together on stages. Literature is too easily slotted when we talk about it publicly. Sometimes it doesn’t have to involve physical travel either. I will never forget hearing Mieko Kawakami, Daniel Mendelsohn and Valzhyna Mort discuss the ways we talk about love in an event hosted online by the Vancouver Writers’ Festival.  Or to hear David Searcy talk about drag racing in Corsicana, Texas.

I love events because I went to many of them in my twenties and thirties. When I moved to New York City in the mid-1990s I didn’t know anybody, I was often lonely. A little bit less so in libraries and bookstores or sitting in an audience with the lights turned low. The first year I arrived I went to three or four a week. I can’t believe some of the people I got to see read and speak aloud: Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Adrienne Rich, David Foster Wallace, Gloria Naylor, Wanda Coleman. W.G. Sebald. Kay Ryan. Dagoberto Gilb. Svetlana Alexievich. The list is my library.

Of course, as Jane Jacobs has argued, urban planning and greed and accidents make a city; but it’s people, too, which means their stories. The space those tales open up. The New York City I moved to was made possible by the social space of defunct magazines. I lived in the village in areas kept sane and informed by Christopher Street, which ceased publication in 1995, but whose writers, those who had survived, remembered and paid testimony in ways that lasted. Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero, his essays from Christopher Street about living and dying in New York during the days when there were successful treatments for HIV and AIDS, returned to relevance during the terrifying opening days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a model for a little magazine, it was hard to find a better one. A publication which made itself feel needed during a time when stories were important. (And if you want to revisit that time, check out co-editor Michael Dennehy’s book, On Christopher Street, published in March this year). So many crises—and explosions—have had their versions: journals, small newspapers, chapbooks. Fire!—the magazine which ran for just one issue during the Harlem Renaissance, fueled by the work of Gwendolyn Bennett and Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston’s. Robert Bly’s great window to the world, The Fifties, connected anti-war activists in America to those around the world, from Tomas Transtömer to himself.

One of the great powers of a little journal is that, even when it is geographically pinned to a place, it opens up an alternate imaginary community to the ones of a nation, or at least of the nation as it is defining itself currently. In her great book, Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernandez describes the ever evolving role of Regeneración, the newspapers which began calling out of Porfirio Diaz in the build-up to the Mexican Revolution. Doing so landed its editors, Ricardo Flores Magón and his brothers, in jail, so in the early 1900s they crossed the border into the U.S. and continued publishing it from there, borrowing the presses of Spanish language publications across the borderlands, printing it there, and then smuggling it back into Mexico.

Aleksandar Hemon after a Freeman’s event in Sarajevo.

It’s an astonishing story, a harrowing one too, since the U.S. and Mexico collaborated to track down the Magonistas, the men and women who worked on these publications, and in so doing created many of the apparatuses of our current carceral and borderland states. Against histories like it, tales of little journals blinking out in the dark can sometimes seem like mandarin complaints in hard times. This both is and isn’t right—there ought to be room in publishing for all kinds of journals, from the silly and obscene, to the fabulist or realist, Apollonian or Dionysian. A healthy literary landscape includes all types: and this is why even though we accept their lives are brief, the ending of literary journals causes concern.

It would be a shame if, in the future, all we had were the well-funded magazines we all know. I have nothing against them, including this one—they are essential. Were it not for a set of Paris Review Book of Interviews, I’m not sure I would have become a journalist. Yet having edited a little journal myself, I can say that all of us at the bigger reviews depended on the work of littler magazines. Would Barry Lopez have gone on to publish Arctic Dreams if Skywriting hadn’t existed on the West Coast in the late 1970s? Probably, but they were there when he was writing his first book and few others were—and that first brush with oxygen of an audience is hard to measure.

A decade later, Corazon de Aztlan was covering life in East Los Angeles in a way few newspapers cared to, including the crisis in Chicano schooling. Out of this engagement a great many writers of that movement found faith. Now there’s still a bookstore in the San Fernando Valley, run by former East LA resident Luis Rodriguez and his wife Trina, a bookstore/cafe named after Rodriguez’s aunt. Now Tia Chucha Press are also publishing strong books, too, including the latest poems of Claudia Castro Luna. It’s impossible not to feel these tributaries are all connected. At one point, PEN had a syndicated fiction project—and thus the early stories of Lydia Davis ran in newspapers around America in the 1980s, if you can believe that.

Can we change some of these trends? Actually, yes, we can—not to the point journals or newspapers or the bookstores that sustain them will live forever, but they might survive another issue, another month. What if that PEN syndicated project were resurrected today? Would it give a lifeline to all the tiny alt weekly newspapers in America struggling to earn readers, if they had stories in them by Lydia Davis, or say Jon Fosse, who recently won the Nobel and excels at vignettes? What if more people who wrote short stories or poems subscribed to just one journal which published them? Denver Quarterly, Zyzzyva, The Caribbean Writer, by some accounts, there are nearly 1,000 of them. What if the hundreds of MFA programs around the country which earn money from the aspirations of writers subscribed to just a few more of the journals their students are submitting to. So many of them could afford it.

Valeria Luiselli reading at a Freeman’s pop up event in Portland, 2016.

If you’re reading this and care about literary journals, and don’t subscribe to one—and can afford it—please consider subscribing to one. What a novel thing it still is, I find, to receive in your mailbox something other than a bill. I recently began subscribing to my current favorite literary journal—in Icelandic. It’s called The Moon’s Poemletter and it’s a verse equivalent of One Story, which mails out one poem a month from Iceland. Every thirty days a poem chosen by the Icelandic poet Ragnor Helgi Ólaffson arrives in my mailbox in New York. It’s not printed on anything all that special, but the day it arrives time slows down a little bit. Click here to subscribe, or encourage Rangar to do one in English: it’s not much to ask for, but in a life where our minutes are finite, not to mention quite a few of our enterprises, it’s quite a lot to provide..

—John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, which completes its run this month with an issue on conclusions

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The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

This piece was written in 2014 and published in English in the 2016 issue of Freeman’s. Translated from the Arabic by Wiam el-Tamami.

To be clear, I don’t like mobile phones at all. But when my family and I arrived in Ramallah, a friend gave me one in case of emergencies. Even so, when it starts to ring, suddenly, at 8:29 on this morning in mid-July, I let it go until my partner picks it up. He goes quiet and holds the phone out to me, pressing it to my left ear. It’s a recorded message, delivered in a booming voice speaking in formal Arabic. I catch only a few words: “. . . You have been duly warned. The Israeli Defense Forces . . .” Then the message ends and the line goes dead. I freeze.

This is the kind of call made by the Israeli Army when it is about to bombard a residential building. The moment someone answers the call, they relinquish their right to accuse the army of war crimes, as they have been “duly warned.” The strike can take place within a half hour of the call.

Just yesterday I heard about a young man receiving a warning call like this, informing him that the building where he lived in the north of Gaza would be bombed. The young man was at work in the south at the time. He tried to call his family but could not reach them. He left work and rushed home, but found the building destroyed. Some of his family members were wounded; others had been killed.

I don’t know whether this incident really took place. One hears a lot of stories these days, some too awful to believe. But here it is, at 8:29 a.m., pouncing on me like my destiny.

I’m not sure who this phone belongs to exactly, or who the Israeli Army thinks it belongs to. I wonder if my friend might be part of some political group. I doubt it. I make a quick mental survey of the neighbors, trying to guess which of them might be “wanted.” The only people I’ve encountered since we arrived two weeks ago in Ramallah are annoying children aged four to eleven; two middle-aged women and an elderly one; and a man in his late fifties. None of this puts my fears to rest. Their profiles do not differ much from those of the victims of recent air strikes. And then I realize, with dread, that I’ve become a replica of an Israeli Army officer, pondering which of these Palestinians might represent a “security threat.”

My partner is still standing in front of me, and behind him our eight-year-old daughter has now appeared. Our son, three months old, is sleeping in the next room. My partner, who has limited Arabic, asks me what the call was about. I look at him, then at our curious daughter. I try to find something to say, but I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness.

I look at the number again. I could press a button and call the “Israeli Defence Forces” back. Or I could send a text message. I could at least voice my objection to this planned attack. But when I try to think of what I could say or write, I feel numb, knowing that the words that will pour out of me will be useless. This realization, that words cannot hold and that they are wholly feeble when I need them the most, is crushing. The Israeli Army can now call my mobile phone to inform me of its intention to bomb my house, but my tongue is struck dumb.

After telling our daughter to get ready I go to the room where our three-month-old is sleeping. We have less than a half hour to leave the house. I walk into the darkness of the room and stare at the wall. I begin to notice a strange, intensely black cube high up on the wall. I don’t understand what that cube is doing there. I am sure that the wall is white; it’s not possible that a part of it has suddenly turned black. I scan the room for other dark cubes that might have crept into it while I was outside. Finally my eyes fall on a dot of green light at the end of the computer adapter, in front of which a pile of books stands. The light emanating from that tiny dot has cast the shadow of the books on the opposite wall, creating that black cube.

That tiny green dot of light, as faint as it seems, barely visible, was able to throw me into another abyss of fear. Perhaps my terror following that phone call is also exaggerated. Before my daughter and I leave the house as we do every day—she to her summer camp, and I to the university to my students—I look at my partner and our three-month-old child. Will this be the last time I see them?

We go down the stairs, without meeting any of the neighbors or their children, so I stall in the hope of picking up some noises from behind their closed doors. I hesitate for a moment, wondering whether I should ring one of their doorbells to ask if they received a similar call. But I keep walking behind my daughter until we leave the building. Then I look at the fifth floor and at the sky, trying to detect any sound or movement of drones or fighter jets. So far, nothing. We continue down the road to catch a cab from the main street.

As we reach it, the morning bustle of the main street embraces me. I calm down slightly, thinking it might have been a mistaken call, or one intended as a general warning to everyone, and not specifically to me and my family. But once we get inside the cab, fear overtakes me again. I ask the driver to turn the radio on.

For the next half hour, there will only be news about bombings of buildings in Gaza, with none in Ramallah.

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The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

Since the early nineties and the war in Bosnia, my parents have lived in Canada, while I’ve lived in the United States. When I visit them with my family, we stay only for a few days. The night before our departure, my father might sit down on the sofa in the living room (a Western showing on TV), and say: “Conclusions!”

I know, of course, what that means: he wants to draw conclusions from our stay because he has a need to know what actually happened, what we have understood or achieved in our time together. Conclusions are closure to him, allowing him to process the imminent loss related to yet another parting from the people he loves.

At first, his demand for conclusions was annoying to me, as such parental quirks often are to intolerant children. But then, as per the usual process, it became an amusing story I would tell, which then naturally led to my doing the same thing, except ironically. It didn’t take long before I started feeling an unironic need to demand conclusions in similar situations and also to escape the compulsion to do so, lest I become like my father.

As all adult children know, there is no way to win that struggle— eventually we do things our parents did even if we swore never to do any of them. During the pandemic, I started producing music under the alter ego Cielo Hemon and released nine singles in 2021 and 2022, the last of which was entitled “Conclusions,” and it was not ironic.

The track concluded the first cycle of Cielo’s music, but it was also related to the reconfiguration of my (and, perhaps, our) relationship with time, wrought by the pandemic and the catastrophe of Trumpism. As every Bosnian knows, trauma splits time into the before and the after, whereby the before becomes inaccessible and available only as a reflective narrative, or even as blatant, delusional nostalgia (Make My Life Great Again!).

The need to draw conclusions is really a desire to convert what has just happened into memories as soon as possible—before the next, unquestionably oncoming trauma—and get as much from the experience as possible before moving deeper into the after, where things will not only feel less real but will also become a mark of loss. A demand for conclusions is an expression of a desperate hope to hoard love for the future, which will be marked by loss.

For the last couple of years I have increasingly felt that we are in the midst of a cataclysmic global rupture. Climate change and the related pandemic, the apocalyptic intensity of fascism, the pathetic weakness of Western democracies rooted in delusions of grandeur and the fact that they cannot, because they don’t want to, become systems of full inclusion so they’re reverting to the default: exclusion complete with misogyny and racism. I have an intense feeling that everything I love is ending: literature, writing, music, soccer, skiing, my body, Bosnia, you name it.

This is in fact the end of time, and you have to be a tech bro or a fascist, or both, to think that we are not at a precipice of cataclysmic loss. The question then becomes why write and publish, or do anything, since it won’t make a damn difference one way or another.

And the answer is love: for language, for imagination, for all those who precede us and all the less lucky ones who will come after us, for humanity. For conclusions still bespeak a faith in the future, even if a limited one. One day, we will unfold these conclusions as stories or music and we will know that we have lived and loved, and we might recall and experience again the joy of being together.

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From Freeman’s. The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

With the Winter Solstice behind us, each day will get longer, and with those minutes and eventually hors, as light falls later, there are—happily—more time to spend reading. Outside, inside, at cafes, in libraries. Sneakily at your desk. On train rides home or to visit friends and family. I talked to a number of contributors to Freeman’s about what 2023 books they were excited to read—or just finally have in their hands—and here are their responses, from a big biography to novels, a short story collection and a work of poetry.

–John Freeman, editor, Freeman’s

*

The Chinese Groove by Kathryn Ma

It’s been nine years since Kathryn Ma published her first novel, the marvelous The Year She Left Us, and I’ve been waiting ever since for her next.  At last, it’s almost here: The Chinese Groove will be published later this month, and I’ll be first in line to get my paws on a copy.”  –Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Candy House

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg

The book I’m most looking forward to in 2023 is one I’ve already read. I was lucky enough to be sent an advance copy a few months ago of Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, and was knocked sideways by it. This is a story I thought I knew, but Steinberg showed me that I don’t.

The Mandelas have achieved mythical status far beyond South Africa—but it’s a terrible burden to be a god. Many of us are familiar with the history; how many of us have a real sense of the human beings behind it? This remarkable book changes that. In heartbreaking detail, Jonny Steinberg adds up the catastrophic toll on these two lives and the lives of people around them. Yet he never takes his eye off the larger picture, and the damage done to the Mandelas comes to stand for the damage done to millions; their history is the history of modern South Africa. Even more impressively, he manages to illuminate two different political traditions through the personalities of Winnie and Nelson, and to give a fresh understanding of the crossroads at which my country now stands.

Gripping and profoundly moving, this is Jonny Steinberg’s finest book. I can’t wait to read it again.  –Damon Galgut, Booker Prize winning author of The Promise

Edo’s Souls by Stella Gaitano, translated by Sawad Hussain

I can’t wait for South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano’s Edo’s Souls, translated by the wonderful Sawad Hussain. Hovering between folklore and historical fiction, Edo’s Souls grapples with love, motherhood, and relocation, all in the context of an unfolding civil war.  –Sara Elkamel is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice 

Witness by Jamel Brinkley

I’m excited for Jamel Brinkley’s second story collection Witness. His first collection A Lucky Man won my heart with its stunning prose and psychological nuance, its seamless movement across time and memory. According to the publisher’s page, the ten stories of Witness will focus on New York City and feature a range of characters “from children to grandmothers to ghosts.” A Brinkley ghost story? I’m in.  –Tania James, author of Loot, forthcoming from Knopf

The Applicant by Nazli Koca

The book I can’t wait for is Nazli Koca’s The Applicant, a fantastic debut novel coming from Grove in February: the story of a Turkish student in Berlin struggling to get by without a visa, forever caught between the demands of everyday survival and the fervent energy of youthful yearning and artistic dreaming.  –Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences: Stories

The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith

I can’t wait for The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith, a novel that repurposes the old-school botanical survey as a way of sorting through curiosity and desire in their rawest forms, set against the high-romantic backdrop of the Roman Colosseum in plant-strewn, crumbling ruin.  –Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation of Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga is forthcoming from Soho Crime in Summer 2024.

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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future.

“I was away from Korea for a long time,” he said.

We were having tea at a downtown café. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen him, but couldn’t. When I made some offhand comment about the tea timer on top of our table and how pretty it was, he reached for it at once and stuck it deep inside my purse. Shaped like an hourglass, the timer contained blue ink that flowed in reverse from bottom to top.

“This is stealing,” I whispered, glancing around the café.

“I’m good at it. On my travels in the past few years, I’ve stolen many things.”

He kept the things he’d taken in a glass cabinet in his living room. A silver fork from a Paris café, a teacup saucer from a London restaurant, a bamboo basket that had held orchids from a New Delhi bed-and-breakfast, and a pen belonging to a worker at a museum information desk in Berlin. There had also been an ashtray from an Osaka hotel (though he was caught red-handed and had no choice but to return it), as well as a cat from New York.

“Wait, you stole a cat?”

“Actually, that was the first thing I ever stole.”

*

He began to talk about the New York apartment he’d lived in after his divorce.

“It was a run-down building, but clean. Across the hall from me lived a man in his early sixties named Emerson. He lived alone. Well, not exactly alone. He lived with his cat Debbie. He was an old, overweight man living alone with his cat.”

Because of his weight, Emerson tottered comically when he walked. Surprisingly, he had an extremely soft voice. They talked in the hallway now and then, and each time he had to strain his ears in order to understand what Emerson was saying. Emerson had never been married. They even joked about their marital status, calling themselves “the divorcé and the bachelor.” Perhaps because of all the joking, they became quite comfortable with one another.

One weekend, Emerson invited him over to his place for a few beers. “And there she was—Debbie. She was all black, except for her white belly and paws. Until then, I hadn’t known he owned a cat. When we’d been smoking and chatting for a while, I noticed she was watching us from under the couch, with just her head poking out. I’d never seen a cat so close up before. I tried to pet her, but as soon as I raised my hand, she dashed under the couch. It was only then that I realized all the framed photos on the walls were of her. In other words, Debbie was Emerson’s only family.”

After that, he and Emerson got together every so often. They joked, drank, and smoked together, and Debbie would stare at them for a while and disappear under the couch. He found his life satisfactory in its own way. Objectively speaking, though, it would have been a stretch to call his life satisfying.

He had followed his American girlfriend to the States, despite not knowing a single soul in the country, but after being married for less than three years, she had left him. Then due to various overlapping circumstances, he was forced to quit his job.

“Because of her, I had my life stolen from me. Don’t you think?”

Still, he didn’t think his situation was all bad. Happiness and boredom, abundance and loneliness filled his life with order, as if these emotions had been woven together in a plaid pattern, and as a result, his life felt strangely balanced. To top everything off, he’d made a friend named Emerson. However, while he was intoxicated by this sense of equilibrium, his bank balance lost its equilibrium, which then unraveled the woven balance of his life.

“Luckily my old company called me. They said if I wanted to keep working for them, they could transfer me to their Philadelphia branch. I no longer had any reason to stay in New York, so I decided to leave. But first, I wanted to say goodbye to Emerson. The night before I left, we got sloshed at his place. I may have cried. He may have patted me on the back, who knows. Then I passed out on his couch.”

In the middle of the night, he felt a stare and snapped awake. Something in the dark was watching him. It was Debbie. She was sitting elegantly before him and Emerson, who had also fallen asleep on the couch. He got up, carefully moving Emerson’s arm that was splayed across his feet. The entire time, Debbie kept her eyes on him. When he stepped into the hallway and was about to close the front door, he realized Debbie was still watching. She walked slowly toward him. She then sat on her haunches and gazed up, stretching her front paws up toward him.

“It was as if she was saying, ‘I want to leave, I want to leave this place. Please take me with you.’ All of a sudden, it seemed wrong to leave her behind. I don’t know why I thought that.”

Debbie’s eyes glittered in the dark. He picked her up. He walked out of the building and left New York.

*

“That was a very bad thing you did,” I said.

“About two weeks later, I went back to New York with Debbie. I had to. Since I didn’t have the courage to explain my actions to Emerson, I planned to secretly drop her off at his apartment. But his place was completely empty. When I asked the property manager what had happened, he said that Emerson had committed suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“They found him a week after I’d left. He’d hanged himself.”

“Where’s Debbie now?”

“She’s home, back at my place. Why? Do you want to meet her?”

I hesitated for a moment. “No,” I said at last.

He nodded.

We talked about other things after that and had many good laughs. Yet, the whole time, I was thinking, Murderer! When a little more time passed, that thought faded from my mind, and instead I was picturing myself back in my own home, peering at the tea timer and the blue ink making its way to the top.

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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future.

The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
skeletal against the light blue sky
three varieties of purple in the distance
as the sun sets, and the birds exchange notes.
My dog Johnny falls asleep at my feet
on the terrace. I sip my drink and think:
just as having an even tiny portion of your portfolio
in bonds can help your long-term performance,
so even a few drops of dry vermouth
will improve your martini.

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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of change, featuring work by Joshua Bennett, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, Sayaka Murata and Ocean Vuong among others, is available now.

Previously I only used the word avalanche as a verb. It basically meant, “I am crying and I cannot stop.”

Still, owning a home in an avalanche zone, I have recently been compelled to try to make sense of my city’s urban avalanche advisories. They use the word avalanche in a way that means “a massive amount of snow, ice, and rocks falling down a mountainside.”

Please forgive my errors or oversimplification, but here’s my attempt at translating. It appears that it matters what kind of day a mountain is having. Depending on the weather, snow settles into different kinds of layers, and these layers stack up over time. What I understand to be our biggest current problem is what’s called a “deep persistent slab.”

A deep persistent slab is a big piece of snow with a very weak layer inside it. The weak layer is so deep you almost don’t know it’s there unless you’re looking for it. Another layer inside it might be a crust, which in a way amplifies the weak layer because you could poke the crust a long ways away and the poke would reverberate across the crust, and this is how one light touch could trigger an avalanche of giant proportions. No matter how soft or how strong the snow is, if you touch it when or where it is tender, it will drop to the depth and the width of its weakest part. And so an avalanche is not just snow, and it is not just the trigger, it is the result of holding too much when you were not properly grounded. On the same day, one year apart, I packed a bag. That’s a lie; one year ago my friend Melissa packed my bag, because I was avalanching on the living room floor. My sister had called. My father was fighting for his life in the ICU. At that time they said they didn’t think he would make it through the night, and I could not fly out until morning.

Sometimes you don’t get a warning.

I can’t separate the experience of saying goodbye to the home my dad built me from the experience of saying goodbye to my dad at this precise time last year. There are all kinds of natural disasters. They say our bodies remember grief anniversaries, which baffles me since my own grief is very bad at time management. Perhaps grief is just a weak layer and it doesn’t matter how deep it’s buried. A smell or a bird or the sunrise on a particular day can always touch it.

Grief, I mean the director of emergency management, knocked on my door Saturday morning to explain the danger of wishing for the best.

But it’s a blessing, isn’t it, to have a chance. To have a minute.

To take the irreplaceable with you.

If the avalanche were to hit our homes, they predicted it could be fourteen feet deep going fifty-seven mph across a quarter mile. I really can’t see how a human house could survive that, and yet I am familiar with praying against the odds. My father survived his first night, and on the second night, he briefly woke up. It was today, one year ago: my mother’s birthday. A miracle, they said, and the nurses had chills. It filled me with catastrophic hope.

When we dug our way out, we told my dad that we loved him, and that he didn’t have to worry about us. This was the third day. We said goodbye, because we were warned; and it’s better to say goodbye and walk away than to be destroyed inside it. That was 364 days ago. Some mornings I can walk on that layer and some mornings I’m still buried under the snow.

What type of weather do we want? my friends asked, and I don’t know enough avalanche science beyond “we want spring” to answer this. In grief counseling, no weather is bad; I think the goal is that you heal your deep persistent layers so no slab could kill you. The director of emergency management lowered the danger level from “extreme” to “high,” so I know that with the right conditions even an avalanche can change. The weak layer can strengthen, the facets can face the wind. The load can lighten and aspects can melt. It can be touched without breaking.

Often it just takes time.

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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of change, featuring work by Joshua Bennett, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, Sayaka Murata and Ocean Vuong among others, is available now.

Changed. Done

Changed. Did. Did been.

Do. The woo

     They

Do opon the shores,

The mercy that isn’t taken against

Thy cliff

       Be

How, the ways

In which, such privilege, and thusly

Y’all all

Changed

In respect,

Apparently, to gender

Entering me.

Days

Some start with little or

Less gender; other days overwhelm.

Why, yes, today

Is

Very gendered! The air

Bethicked right salt

Of it, and free

And

Everywhere

I look! Some days go

Restlessly, I remember,

And

I begin again the woes’

Whoing me up, a sun

Across a fog,

Desire,

Dolores and Truth,

The blue way

An ocean revises the shore,

Hinges,

Hinges that are the birds flying,

My very skin, black, growing

Softer

On

Each spill of a pill, breasts, lips,

The conjugation of

My waist, my

Hips,

And so daybreak

Breaks over me,

Apparent, a new woman,

Venus

Out of the grammared

Pearl and waves

To you, waves,

Waves—

It’s no longer then

You see me. No,

You sea me.

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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of change, features work by Joshua Bennett, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, Sayaka Murata and Ocean Vuong among others, is available now.

Some nights, that deep cold lake brings my child self back to me again. This is often without my consent. I want no part of the person I was then, or to be back in the town of those years that made and held me. Cooperstown, where I was born, is a speck in-the-middle-of-nowhere New York, so small it is officially a hamlet, so pretty with its flower boxes and groomed hedges and American flags that it has been transformed into an object, its citizens offering the place up every summer for the pleasure of thousands of boys and men who come for baseball and nostalgia and a glimpse of their own child-ghosts. Can a town be objectified like a woman? If she is Cooperstown, she can.

In my dreams, the lake first sets me down at the Presbyterian church atop Pioneer Street, thin, tall, ancient, a building made of whittled bones, where I was long ago given the gift of awe but also of torment, the three-hour services with an indifferently talented choir and the crotch of my itchy woolen tights slowly sliding down my thighs. Through the rest of the week, I would bear the oppressive weight of a male god who was always furious at the tiny rebellions of my mind. I was defective because I feared far more than I loved. A mouse, this child me, blonde, pale, blinking, bewildered, scared. In the dreams, even as I repudiate her, this child self goes away from the church as fast as she can, flying down the hill toward Main Street. It is empty of cars and people, the single stoplight westward along the street shining against the wet asphalt, glazing the windows of the bakery in alternate red and gold and green, the cord of the great flagpole in the center of the street where I stand chiming in the small wind. From there, the street scoops downhill to Lakefront Park, where the statue of Natty Bumppo hunts with his dog, until at last it empties out into the dark glower of the lake.

It is this strange long lake, a block away, that peered from over the lawn into the windows of my childhood bedroom. Before I rose from bed every morning I would look out to gauge the lake’s mood that day, which could change with terrifying swiftness. There would be temper tantrums when the dust-devils grabbed loose snow up from the ice and spun it to frantic dancing; placid happy days of sunlight on the warm, navy blue August water; pen- sive sheets of fog lifting gently off its surface in an orange autumn dawn; thunderstorms descending from Cherry Valley nine miles north in luxurious woolen sheets of gray. We had a party every Fourth of July, where from our lawn we’d watch the fireworks double themselves on the water below, the hills grabbing the thunder of the explosions and tossing it back and forth between them until a new blast came and the old thunder was lost. The lake has always been pure intensity, beauty, terror to me.

And in my dreams the child me stands hapless at the flagpole, trying to resist its pull, but inevitably the lake draws my ghost down, toward this wild and uncontrollable and inescapable depth of feeling.

This is what I dislike, the way that as a child I felt absolutely everything, and it was all unbearable. I had a good childhood, I was fed and loved, but I was born unskinned, a girl bleeding out her hot red emotion everywhere. There were days I felt I would die of the sound of the crows eating the corn in my father’s garden or the taste of the honey I stole from the back of the pantry—sugar forbidden in my house, pleasure suspect—and spread surreptitiously on the hot biscuits I baked before swim practice. The membrane between my interior self and the world was easily rent. I could contain nothing within me. I am not quite sure how I survived. And everywhere I went in town, even in places where you couldn’t see the lake, you knew it was there, gleaming; it was my overlarge mirror, unskinned like me, shining the sky back to itself, too emotional, too much, too dangerous, you could drown in it.

A dreamer at last awakens into life. The lake’s nighttime draw fades until I wake in the mornings as an adult who has grown the calluses necessary to keep herself alive. Still, even as an adult, I am reluctant to come home. It has been almost a decade since I’ve been back to Cooperstown; my parents have moved away, there is no obvious reason to return. And so I have kept the place safe, stuck in aspic, somewhere deep inside. There is a beauty in this resistance, because the layers of time and space in me can be preserved unmixed. In this way, the bend where Lake Street descends to Council Rock exists as many things all at once: the spot where one Halloween in middle school, I lay down in the dark road to scare myself and was nearly run over by some quiet car, where I stepped on a flotsam board and drove a nail through my foot, where my first friend and I crouched, seven years old, scraping wet stones on stones to paint our faces and make ourselves warriors. To see the ways the town has changed, the trees loved decades ago dead and vanished, the buildings altered, the old friends startlingly old and stout and gray, looking like their parents as they bend their heads into the wind, crossing the street, no, no thank you, I cannot, it would be too much. The fragile defenses I have constructed against the overwhelm of the world would break. Anyone could see straight into my depths. And so I sacrifice, night after night, my child self to the lake, both self and lake through dream rendered subject, not object. Perhaps a ghost is a person and a place dreaming at the same time. I let my subconscious draw this trembling, world-sick child down to Lakefront Park, which in my sleep is simultaneously draped in night and too brightly daylit, the sun blazing the water hurts my eyes. In this place I once saw a flock of mallards peck a sickly drake to death, and my golden retriever would hie herself there to lap up the grease the motel’s restaurant set outside to cool, and my lovelorn best friend and I would eat whole pints of ice cream to find a foothold for self-hatred, and I once waded in after a frisbee and sank up to my hips in duck shit and had to be pulled out with a rope. All of it, all, remains as it has ever been, living, tender, wild.

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