Lord Byron's Love Letter

The Foundling Boy and The Foundling’s War. ,Michel Déon

During the waning days of World War II, a young soldier holds captive a general of the German army on the island of Crete. As the sun rises over Mount Ida, the two men find themselves finishing one another’s quotations of Horace. Like stories of French and German forces in the First World War spending Christmas together on the front — and going back to shoot at each other the very next day — these unguarded moments speak to our common bonds, and the mutual tendency to forget all too soon how very much we are related.

The very nature of wartime relations and associations — beneficial and misaligned — form the core of The Foundling, an inestimably entertaining two-volume series by Michel Déon comprised of The Foundling Boy and The Foundling’s War. Now 95, living in Ireland with his wife and many horses, Déon is one of France’s most celebrated writers. The Foundling series, first published in France in the 1970s, is now making an underreported entrance into the forum of American letters.

Déon’s novels take their name, and much of their ribald plot, from Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel,The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. No less an authority than Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared Fielding’s novel one of the three most perfect plots in all of literature. But it was due to the French translation by Pierre-Antoine de La Place that Fielding owes his popularity. La Place, who also first translated Shakespeare into French, held little regard for textual fidelity and did much to improve Fielding’s language for the French reader.

A menagerie of correspondences and accordances abound in Fielding’s novel and Déon’s work reflects an abiding study of Fielding’s style. Not unlike the recent novels of Elena Ferrante, Déon’s characters — taking their cue from Fielding’s mastery — assume integral recurring roles in the narrative, a risk ensuring the reader a serial interest in the story’s development.

Julian Evans’s translation of Déon’s frequently funny picaresque tale is a charming, adventurous read, a “must read”, really, because of Déon’s rational take on all our squabbling. The Foundlingis the history of Jean Arnaud as he squirrels away some elbow room for himself in a world mired by the aftershocks of war. Jean is born in 1919, the year of the Treaty of Versailles. Jean’s adopted father, a poor gardener, is un mutiles de guerre, one of the 1 million Frenchmen left badly maimed by the First World War. The myriad mutilated, undead veterans were daily reminders of a conflict many Frenchmen wished to forget. Jean’s family is no different. As an infant, his father sings to him, as if a lullaby, “And all you poor girls/ who love your young men/ if they reward you with children/ break their arms, break their legs/ so they can never be infantrymen/ so they can never be infantrymen.” Despite the warnings of his father, and the promises Jean makes, he will one day serve his floundering nation.

But in the French pastoral countryside in the intervals between wars, Jean grows up hale and strong, with just the right amount of sexual impropriety (and fumbling) to convince us of his believability. He is a precocious child who will grow into a man’s body but will never seem to lose his boyishness. Girls will fall into his arms like manna upon the poor and needy. For the impatient reader wondering when the author will narrate Jean’s development from infant to infantryman, Déon interrupts the narrative:

I sense that the reader is eager, as I am, to reach the point where Jean Arnaud becomes a man. But patience! None of us turns into an adult overnight, and nothing would be properly clear (or properly fictional) if I failed to illustrate the stages of our hero’s childhood in some carefully chosen anecdotes. This is, after all, the period when Jean is to learn what life is, or, more specifically, when he is to experience a range of feelings, aversions and passions which will imprint themselves readily on him and to which he will only discover the key very much later, around the age of thirty, when he begins to see things more clearly.

Life to Jean seems very much like a Alexandre Dumas novel, or, more contemporaneously, a Patrick Leigh Fermor travelogue. But as Jean travels — to England, to Paris, to Portugal — France is rotting from within.

Between 1918 and 1940, the years, roughly, during which Jean comes into himself, France had no fewer than thirty-four governments. Meanwhile, dictators in Italy and Germany and the Soviet Union thrived. Frenchmen were much too busy proclaiming their pacifism to notice the uniformed barbarians knocking at the gate.

“You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex,” Céline writes in Journey to the End of the Night, a novel Jean much admires. But war provides Jean and his comrades a glut of opportunities for fleeting love and rollicking adventure. Recalling his own experiences in World War II, Déon writes: “I was among those French who otherwise would never have met peasants, workers or waiters. That helped a lot in my life of writing.”

Jean spends the vast majority of the war in Nazi occupied Paris. But, of course, the city is a playground for German officers. Though there’s significant hardship present, Déon’s Paris looks less like Guernica and much more like a scene straight from a gay Lautrec poster. The show must go on, as an old saying goes, but in this case it was Nazi-ordained that Paris keep up appearances. In a 1940 letter Goebells writes, “The result of our victorious fight should be to break French domination of cultural propaganda, in Europe and the world. Having taken control of Paris, the center of French cultural propaganda, it should be possible to strike a decisive blow against this propaganda.” But the Nazi soldiers were to temporarily enjoy the show, when they weren’t goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysées.

Jean thrives in this new environment of intrigue, befriending resistants and collaborateurs alike. Though possessing a strong sense of right and wrong, Jean’s allegiance is to himself and his comrades, some of whom, like the dashing con-man Constantine Palfy, are unforgettable.

“Who still believes in the French? But who does things better than they do?” Palfy asks Jean during the interwar period. But our world isn’t quite so different from Jean’s time, a time of intrigue and deception. When Europe seems ever to be on the mend and global superpowers threaten one another with their mincing steps, Déon sheds riotous humor and immense delight on the misgivings of men.

There’s Something I Want You to Do.

Back in the ’90s Charles Baxter, primarily known as a short story writer, published a novel called Shadow Play. Baxter is a master of the difficult, emotionally fraught moment, and this novel is filled with them. In one scene, two cousins are rowing out into the middle of a lake in early spring. One of them, Cyril, is dying. He plans to hurl himself overboard with a bunch of weights. The conversation between Cyril and Wyatt touches on many universal themes, and Baxter orchestrates it with seamless dialogue, description, humor, and pacing. I have brought this scene to creative writing classes where I have dissected it and put it back together as an exemplar of of fine fiction writing.

I was reminded of this great scene in Shadow Play while reading “Lust,” a story from Baxter’s latest collection, There’s Something I Want You to Do. A man, jilted by his girlfriend, goes to see his best friend, who is hospitalized in the end stages of cancer.

“There are other fish in the sea,” Benny tells his [dying] friend. “That’s the cliché with which I comfort myself. Other fish, other seas. I’ll be feeling one hundred percent soon.”

“You’re funny.”

“But I need coaching. From you.”

“You’re funny.” Then he says, “You’re going to be on your own in no time flat. Where’s your hand?” Benny takes his friend’s hand again.

“How come this?” Benny asks.

“I’m scared.”

“Well, you have a right to be,” Benny says before he realizes how undiplomatic this is. I only meant that….”

“I know what you meant.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t worry. Did I tell you… they found a hospice for me?”

“No, you didn’t tell me.”

“It’s out in Hopkins. It’s cheap. At last, a hospice I can afford. Where are the girls now?” Dennis asks. “Where have the girls all gone? I haven’t had a lot of them visit me. Maybe they’ll drop roses on my casket.”

“They’ll be here.”

“Describe them. Do me a favor. Tell me a story. Let’s fill the time.”

Charles Baxter

Baxter certainly tells a story; the fictions in this new collection are strongly narrative. Characters appear and reappear and repeatedly say to one another, “There’s something I want you to do,” requests that make them accountable to one another. Baxter lives in Minneapolis, and I’m thankful that he writes of his own terrain, describing its social and emotional swales and feeling little need to venture farther afield. He demonstrates how it’s so much easier to strike a universal chord closer to home than to do a lot of research about an exotic place. And yet when Baxter chooses to venture out, he does so with great confidence and good reason. In “Bravery,” a young woman vacationing in Prague with her husband gets bumped by a streetcar, which sets her in motion toward an epiphany that could not have happened if she hadn’t been far away from home.

And yet this feeling of foreignness, this being an outsider (even in one’s own hometown) is one of Baxter’s principle preoccupations. In “Charity,” Matty, a down-on-his-luck gay man who suffers from chronic pain and desperately needs money to buy illegal prescription drugs for that pain, mugs Benny, a character who appeared in an earlier story and who has gone running in a park. Steeped in subsequent remorse about the attack, Matty thinks “’I am no longer myself.’ He did not know who this new person was, the man whom he had become… someone who belonged on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign that read HELP ME.”

Matty is not the only character who desperately needs help. In “Loyalty,” a man whose first wife left him finds her, twenty years later, in a sorry state on his doorstep and takes her in, much to the dismay of his current wife and children. Corinne’s cynical biological son resents her at first, because he doesn’t remember her, but slowly he accepts her. Then she finds an unexpected purpose as the indispensible caregiver to her former mother-in-law, a born-again Christian who is dying and who comes to believe that Corinne is part of the divine plan of her end of life.

Baxter wrestles with the ideas of divinity, Christian spirituality, and even theocracy. In a way, this volume is a testing ground for the reductive Primo Levi epigraph that provides a grace note to the collection: that one’s moral vision is the blend of one’s experience with other people’s experiences that have been assimilated as part of one’s one. Levi’s is a non-religious, non-Christian construct that does not take divine inspiration into account. The author also cites Ivan Karamazov and, in particular, his argument that there cannot be a God because innocent children are often made to suffer. I don’t necessarily get the sense that Baxter hews to this agnosticism; he merely allows it to play out.

In “Gluttony,” the daughter of a born-again Christian couple becomes involved with the son of a neo-natal doctor. Without consulting her parents, she decides to abort an unexpected pregnancy. Invited to her home, Elijah, the neo-natal doctor, undergoes a sort of inquisition of his religious beliefs and moral concerns, made all the more ironic because he brings children into the world—of anyone he should understand the atrocity of terminating a pregnancy. Baxter invites the reader to seriously consider the pro-life philosophy of the woman’s parents. His touch is so gentle, so neutral that we never wonder about his own feelings.

Baxter’s writing is characterized by this unselfconsciousness, this artless clarity. His characters take on their own lives. They subsist so independently of their creator that we almost forget that there is a creator.

GALILEO’S MIDDLE FINGER BY ALICE DREGER

The facts are often not what we want to hear. This rings true for most of us when we’re thinking of stodgy old white guys living in sixteenth-century privilege, believing the sky was punctured by pinpricks of starlight from heaven. But examples from a modern context are surprising and sometimes nauseating: the data that show not all children are always traumatized by molestation; evidence that rape may have a biological, sexual origin, and that transgender identification may have more to do with desire than identity (or at least that desire is wrapped up with identity).

Alice Dreger examines these uncomfortable, controversial, and sometimes painful conclusions as she confronts heretical science. In this thoroughly engaging and often terrifying book, Dreger focuses not on the mothballed apostates of Galileo’s era, as the book’s title suggests, but on contemporary, blazing controversies. Scientists, who we expect to be supportive of revolutionary ideals in the service of knowledge, can also have, at their core, a ruthlessly unscientific bias.

Galileo’s Middle Finger deals very little with astronomy. Nor does it say much about the Copernican Revolution or the witch hunts against the men who dissected the heavens. The book’s title comes from an encounter at the Uffizi Museum in Florence. There, along with Galileo’s telescope, Dreger saw the great iconoclast’s middle finger, preserved, displayed upon an ornate base of marble, where it was written, “This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand that ran through the skies.” Dreger found this an absurd gesture: Galileo, the destroyer of authority, the activist of facts, the man who burned people with his eyes until they gazed through his telescopes, is eternally flipping off the skies.

The book, which is really a memoir covering twenty years of Dreger’s historical research and social activism (mostly in the field of gender identity), is organized around the idea that “The pursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time.” At first Dreger recounts her early experiences in intersex activism. When her historical dissertation on Victorian hermaphrodites turned out to appeal to a group of activists in the mid-90s, Dreger gave up a tenure-track job to join their ranks, stuff ballots, harangue politicians, and form committees. As things progressed, she began to notice an unsettling fact: some activists were ignoring data, much the same way that doctors did when they mutilated an infant with mystifying sexual organs.

People, Dreger observes, often want an enemy, an ogre to slay. But in order for time and change to have their geologic effect on the monolith of cultural norms, Dreger believes that activists must arm themselves with data and be willing to change their trajectories. “Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts,” she writes. Her point is that essentialist identity tropes will help no one. “We were not Good fighting Evil,” she writes. “We were dealing with well-intentioned, myopic people who weren’t seeing what we couldn’t help but see when we took the long view in weighing the evidence.”

Alice Dreger

Which is why Dreger later found herself, unpredictably, coming to the defense of straight, white men researching maligned people: first Michael Bailey, who studied transgendered women, and then Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist profiling the disappearing Yanomamo people in Brazil. In his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, Bailey’s thesis was that transgender identity has a lot to do with sexual desire. Bailey, a tenured professor at Northwestern, found himself under fire in reviews, conference panels, hearings, and phone calls to his family. Prominent transgendered academics publicly accused Bailey of sodomizing his children, having sex with his research subjects, and of suffering alcohol abuse (charges which lacked any evidence, according to Dreger). Dreger was weary to support Bailey because of the gaffes he was known for (like insinuating that highly sexed people would make good prostitutes). She came to his aid not because of personal affiliation, but, as she frames it, out of a necessary commitment to justice through verifiability.

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon was widely seen as problematic for his summation of the Yanomamo as a “fierce” people. But his controversy mushroomed when he was accused of experimenting on the Yanomamo or to see how many would respond to a wave of infection. He let many people die, among other alleged misdeeds. The charges against him were so influential that the American Anthropological Association created a task force to investigate him, and Brazil banned Chagnon from doing research in-country. Dreger’s conclusion, though, was that charges against Chagnon were bunk, and stuck for a long time partly because many people didn’t like his egotistical personality.

Dreger takes pains to point out how odd and uncertain it felt for her, as a prominent feminist historian, to come to the aid of empowered, old, straight white guys in academia. But looking at the research and the charges, Dreger found herself harking to the academic cornerstone, the bedrock of science: the collection of data as the arrow of knowledge.

Dreger’s writing, at times, comes close to a morality play, with her side clearly in the right, opposed by nebulous characters with sometimes unclear motivations. Dreger is right that “Even Nazis didn’t think of themselves as Nazis.” But she doesn’t always seem to extend this compassionate, explanatory thinking to her enemies, at least on the page.

Dreger sets herself up—along with Bailey and Chagnon and a few others—as “Galilean” types, pugnacious pursuers of truth, no mater the public cost. It comes off as a bit self-important, and on a few pages, preachy. But in the last section of the book, when she details the complicated, difficult-to-summarize controversy of a doctor experimenting with an untested drug on pregnant mothers, Dreger proves that she is no stranger to plowing waist-deep into thickets of controversy. Here she recounts how her years of passive research turned into offense, and how she was stymied by political in-dealings and the incompetence of the FDA. She presents copious paragraphs of damning evidence.

Galileo’s Middle Finger makes an important point about researchers obsessed with publication, tenure, and external funding, who keep their heads down in a gun battle. Dreger writes, “Our fellow human beings can’t afford to have us act like cattle in an industrial farming system.” On the whole, the book is engaging, and, coming from a historian, surprisingly edgy. Dreger, ironically, is not writing from the catacombs of social evolution but from the front lines. Her long view adds a layer to the controversies she outlines, making them about more than individual issues, but about how knowledge goes forward, or goes anywhere at all.

WHERE THINGS COME BACK BY JOHN COREY WHALEY

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley is a refreshing and unpredictable spin on YA. It pulls you into a small town that you know too well, a suffocating place full of halfhearted ambition. But it leaves you hollow and gasping, a testimony to its thought-provoking, harrowing message.

The story alternates timelines. Most of it is told in first person by Cullen Witter, while another part, in third person, follows a young missionary, Benton Sage. It’s set in Lily, Arkansas, where Cullen lives, but it is also located inside every town and every person; a place with old, flickery diners; where nostalgia can feel like despair. Everyone in Lily wants to leave for something greater and more meaningful, but it’s a futile dream, as Cullen watches them return over the years and settle into old routines. During the summer before his senior year, an extinct woodpecker reappears and his brother disappears, leaving the town and his family in a frenzy. Cullen has to learn to balance the inexplicable loss while retaining enough strength to keep believing in the return of his brother, the fragility of the people around him, and above all, himself.

The woodpecker is an obvious metaphor for Gabriel, Cullen’s brother. It’s even named Lazarus, an allusion to the restoration of Saint Lazarus in the Gospel of John. But the book is not about sighting a bird; it’s about coping and enduring. Cullen is teetering, trying to hold the fragments of his family together. His mother panics—she is willing to do anything to find and explain the loss of her son. At one point she even hires a psychic to give her the false assurance that she needs.

There is something about the book and these characters that is always on the edge, looking into an abyss, perpetually wondering and speculating. And at any moment it might collapse into itself. Whaley allows for tiny, understated moments of tension and anxiety. Cullen spends much of the book condemning other people, bluntly pointing out their hypocrisies. But when a girl he barely knows visits him he becomes overwhelmed, even afraid of her sincerity, as he realizes for the first time that his brother might really be gone forever. In a startling moment of empathy, he embraces someone who is unhinged in her loneliness, a bit deranged from medication.

I had never before felt compelled to turn around and hug my aunt, but something made me do it, the same thing that makes people hold doors open for old ladies at grocery stores or stop and let people cross the road; things that felt regular and impersonal, but meant the world to those on the receiving end. I wrapped my arms around her and held her to my chest. It was very quiet in the room, I remember because I could hear Aunt Julia’s breathing. As I walked out the door, she stood watching me from the living room her arms limp at her sides, her shoulders slumped over, her face only half alive.

John Corey Whaley

There are also drifting sections where Cullen talks outside of his body, as if he cannot stand to talk anymore from his conscience.

When one’s parents storm out of the house followed by a psychic who is still holding his missing brother’s T-shirt, he stands up, looks into his mother’s eyes, and wonders where they are headed. He looks over at his friend, who has tried his best not to cry, and sees that even he seems to be buying into these terrible theatrics. He follows his mother. She turns around, says, “We’re going to find your brother,” and gets into the backseat of his father’s truck.

It is a very human book, with a vulnerable presence that lingers long after it has been put down. Most of all, Where Things Come Back grapples with religion and faith—themes that can easily feel overwrought or condescending. It’s a brave topic for a YA book. Whaley neither condemns nor upholds religion; instead he uses it as a vessel to talk about abandonment and love and anger and life. I felt, while reading it, that the dark and desperate questions that Whaley’s characters deal with were not targeted at God or the fear of God, but rather at the fear of the unknown. There is a constant need throughout the book for definite answers, one that drives people to become resentful and distressed. How is it that disappointment and pride can be so much stronger and crueler than understanding? Why do people care more about returning woodpeckers than lost brothers? What stops us from becoming better people than we are today?

At the end, Where Things Come Back reminds you that when you find yourself searching for answers, you are often just looking for forgiveness. Sometimes there is just emptiness and no one to blame. But there are second chances. In a lovely paragraph, Whaley writes directly to the reader:

When I asked him the meaning of life, Dr. Webb got very quiet and then told me life has no one meaning, it only has whatever meaning each of us puts on our own life. I’ll tell you now that I still don’t know the meaning of mine. But I’ll tell you the meaning of all this. The meaning of some bird showing up and some boy disappearing and you knowing all about it. The meaning of this was not to save you, but to warn you instead. To warn you of confusion and delusion and assumption. To warn you of psychics and zombies and ghosts of your lost brother. To warn you of Ada Taylor and her sympathy and mothers who wake you up with vacuums. To warn you of two-foot-tall birds that say they can help, but never do.

This book tackles fear in an offbeat way. It’s tinged with absurdity and humor, filled with long-winded sentences and a quiet madness pushing beneath the surface. Woven through all of this, Whaley tells a story that is voraciously sad and resiliently hopeful.

The Idiosyncratic Fictions of Jean Echenoz

BY MARY HAWTHORNE
In, 1941, during the German occupation of Paris, the French illustrator Jean Bruller found himself in search of a publisher for his recently completed novella “Le Silence de la Mer” (later adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville as his first feature film). Encouraged by his friend the writer Pierre de Lescure, Bruller had joined the Resistance, and together the two men hit upon the idea, in the absence of an alternative, of setting up an underground press, which they called Éditions de Minuit. The next year, the book, which centers on a cultured, idealistic Nazi soldier quartered in the home of an elderly Frenchman and his niece, who choose silence as a form of passive resistance in the face of the soldier’s queries and soliloquies, appeared under a pseudonym: Vercors, after the Vercors Massif, in central France, a Resistance stronghold.

With the help of the writer and editor Jean Paulhan, the press went on to publish some twenty-five volumes clandestinely, among them works by Paul Éluard, François Mauriac, and Louis Aragon, which were passed from hand to hand, often in the middle of the night on a Paris bridge. After the Liberation, the editors decided to continue along their chosen path of resistance, publishing only the work of unconventional writers, whom they would not solicit but, rather, trusted would come to them. And so they did: Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Pinget, Marguerite Duras, and, many years and authors later, Jean Echenoz. As with Beckett, everyone else had refused the young writer, so, as a last resort, he dared to approach Jérôme Lindon, Minuit’s legendary editor, who snatched up his novel at once.



I learned the general outlines of this history in the basement Fnac store at the Italie Deux mall, in Paris, by reading the bande desinée that prefaces the Bac Pro study guide for Echenoz’s best-selling novel “14,” published by the New Press as “1914.” (The book has entered the French canon: now teen-agers are forced to read it.) Meticulously researched and grounded closely in fact, the book is a retelling of the Great War, the first “industrial,” and obscenely “experimental,” war, from a singular perspective. It’s too idiosyncratic to be shelved under historical fiction. Rather, it’s an implicitly philosophical novel, though it may not seem so at first, because Echenoz simply states facts, at a certain remove, as if by way of a recording device. But, of course, which facts? And how to arrange them? In this regard, Echenoz’s unemotional prose and rigorous assembly concerning a ghastly subject bring to mind the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff’s brilliant “Testimony,” just republished by Black Sparrow, which borrows from harrowing criminal-court transcripts to create a bleak history of the United States between 1885 and 1915.

“1914” centers on five young men, all but one of them friends, who within a matter of weeks find themselves confronting the horrors of trench warfare. By the end of the book, all but two have been killed. The book is a cadenced, inexorable funeral march, whose music comprises the hideous sounds that war produces, including the sad, absurd sounds made by military bands marching alongside the soldiers, urging them on, as a column of gendarmerie take up the rear, poised to shoot anyone who might be tempted to desert—and who are “hated almost as much if not more than the fellows across the way.” The soldiers are prisoners of war, the gendarmerie their keepers. Sorry, pal: no exit.

The role of the gendarmerie during the war was news to me, as it was to Echenoz when he began his research, and it’s one kind of fact that he elaborates. He also brings to the fore more esoteric details that similarly hit their mark, such as the weight of an amputated arm (in this case, eight pounds), or the contents of a soldier’s pack (soldier’s prayer book: check; pressed-iron mug: check) and what that pack weighed (seventy-seven-plus pounds)—when dry. It was a completely different matter when it rained, which it did, a lot. Another kind of fact, almost equally sordid, in its way, emerges toward the end of the novel. “We all know the rest,” the disembodied voice of a disturbing narrator who comes and goes—a hallmark of Echenoz’s fiction—says. He goes on:

The first two months of the spring offensives in the fourth year of the war consumed vast numbers of soldiers. The army’s reliance on mass tactics required the permanent replenishment of large battalions, an ever-higher level of recruitment, and ever-younger recruits, which supposed a considerable renewal of uniforms and matériel—including shoes. . . . The pace and urgency of such orders, combined with the unscrupulousness of manufacturers, led to the production of questionable service shoes. A certain stinginess crept in regarding leather of so-so quality; insufficiently tanned sheepskin was often selected, less expensive but mediocre in terms of thickness and durability, and in other words, pretty close to cardboard. Laces were now square cut, easier to manufacture but more fragile than round ones, and they lacked finished ends. Thread was skimped on in the same way and eyelets were no longer made of copper but of iron—which rusts—of the cheapest kind available. It was the same with the rivets, pegs, nails. Bluntly put, they were slashing the cost of materials without any care for the solidity and water resistance of the product.



So: shoe manufacturers—profiteers of the Great War. (A pair of soldier’s boots features on the Bac Pro cover.)

Echenoz has published fifteen novels since his first, “Le Méridien du Greenwich,” in 1979, his earlier ones hewing toward experimentalpolars, or detective novels, and other stock genres; his most recent, including “Ravel,” “Running,” “1914,” as well as his first collection of short pieces, “The Queen’s Caprice” (which has just been published by the New Press), hew toward the historical and biographical. (Endnotes provided by the collection’s gifted translator, Linda Coverdale, offer informative points of reference, and the pieces themselves, all of which were written on request, offer a window into Echenoz’s unique way of looking at the world.) Still, Echenoz is scarcely known in the U.S., and not all that widely read in France, for that matter, despite having won many prizes, including the Prix Goncourt in 1999 for his droll picaresque novel “I’m Off.”

One almost embarrassingly beautiful late afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I visited Echenoz, in his apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement, in Paris. Tallish and blondish and pink, he greeted me at the door by smiling shyly and looking down, gesturing me through a narrow foyer toward a carpetless, loft-like room with a kitchen at one end and a marble fireplace at the other. I sat down in an elegant upholstered chair opposite a similarly elegant sofa. He sat down on the sofa, across the wide river of a bare glass coffee table. A giant arching chrome floor lamp with a big, black shade hovered overhead. Echenoz was dressed in suède slip-ons, jeans, and a gray-blue cotton T-shirt with long sleeves, pushed up to reveal an old wristwatch. He crossed his arms and legs, and waited for me to say something.

I asked about his story “Three Sandwiches at Le Bourget,” one of the most oddly affecting stories in the newly translated collection, about a man who goes looking for a sandwich in Le Bourget. He told me that he was asked to write about the Bourget stop on the R.E.R., the railway network serving Paris and its suburbs, for a collection that served as a kind of tribute to the late editor François Maspero, who years before had written a book about the stations of the R.E.R. “Late one morning one day, I just decided to go there, and when I arrived I was very hungry and wanted a sandwich. So it turned out all right, as a kind of reportage absurd. . . . But I had no idea what a sad town Bourget was. I walked all around, but once was not enough, so I went three times.

“It was very cold,” he added with a laugh. “But I do this often, not in the suburbs but in Paris. I walk around and take notes, to conserve a kind of décor. Décor is the motor of fiction.”

I mentioned his piece “Twenty Women in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Clockwise,” which describes the postures, the clothing, the jewelry, and the coiffures of the statues of French queens over the ages, and offers a spontaneous interpretation of the expressions on their faces, and he told me that years ago he wanted “to write about all the statuary in the garden. And then, well, it’s complicated . . .” He laughed again.

“You were born in Orange—did you spend your childhood there?” I asked, speculating that the ancient city was somehow associated with his curiosity about the past. (One of the pieces in the book recounts Herodotus’ visit to Babylon.)

“No. I think I lived there for about fifteen days,” he said. “My family wasn’t particularly concentrated in one place. My father was born in Paris, my mother in Marseilles. My parents ended up in Orange because it was a zone that the occupying forces had left. My grandfather was a doctor in Paris before moving to Orange.”

“And you lived in Rodez?”

“Yes, because my father was a hospital psychiatrist. He was assigned to Rodez, then to Digne-les-Bains, then to Aix-en-Provence. Always in the South of France. So I passed the greatest part of my childhood in psychiatric hospitals, because I was the son of the doctor. But I have very good memories of that time, not at all traumatic memories. It was normal life, except with people who were suffering, more or less, who were ill. But it was not at all like being in the trenches. It was just a hospital, for the mad.”


“Did you always want to be a writer?”

“It’s very banal, but yes. I think because I read a lot as a child, because my parents read a lot. I was surrounded by books. But, between writing and becoming a writer, that took a while. I was already thirty when my first book was published.”

“Did you have a mentor?”

“Comment?”

“A mentor: someone who—”



“Ah, non, non. Personne. Oh là. Mon Dieu. Quelle horreur.”

She Would Buy the Flowers Herself

Today marks the anniversary of the 1925 publication of Mrs. Dalloway. The stream-of-consciousness novel has long been considered a modernist classic, perhaps the most accomplished work in Woolf's oeuvre—and though its elliptical prose and complex themes render Mrs. Dalloway a particular challenge for adaptation, this has naturally not stopped people from attempting to do so, with varying degrees of success. 

The above is either the worst or the best such adaptation, depending upon how highly you value things like coherence, tone, and style. It has none of Marleen Gorris’s respectful fidelity, none of Philip Glass’s aggressive atmosphere. Indeed, Natalia Povalyaeva’s animated short, Mrs. Dalloway and the Flowers, has almost nothing to do with the novel at all. Unless, that is, we are talking about the line, “It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Pari

All Dogs go to Heaven with a Vengeance

by John Thorson

Normally Darren isn’t allowed in the house, but my parents are gone for the weekend. I make sure he takes off his shoes. Where’s the bathroom, he asks. I show him where it is and he hands me the battleaxe. Wipe it down, he says. I nod and take the weapon back to the kitchen. Using a dishrag I remove all the moisture from the metal, careful to get the melted snow pooling in the recessed Celtic etchings. Darren shows up as I’m finishing and inspects my work, nodding his approval. I give him my seat and he dabs at the wet places I missed while I grab two Mountain Dews from the fridge.

It would be hard to be a sniper during a snowstorm, I say.

Not really, Darren says, and then proceeds to give me this whole spiel about next-gen scopes and how, if anything, whiteout conditions give the sniper an advantage because it makes his position harder to pinpoint.

Yeah I know all that, I say. I was joking, I say.

Yeah I know you were joking, Darren says.

The phone rings and I answer it in the other room. It’s Zulkoski, my cool friend. It’s time, he says. I hope you know what I’m talking about, he says. I don’t, but it sounds big. He asks if I can bring an extra sled and I tell him of course. When the call ends I’m so excited I dance a little. I swing an imaginary broadsword at a nearby ficus plant. I go straight to the utility room and consider my loadout; scarf or facemask, mittens or gloves. Or none of it. Don’t bundle up. Cold doesn’t affect me.

The roads in Darren’s housing development are worse than anticipated. Most have not been plowed. Some have been plowed, but not well. A few have been half-plowed to unexpected dead ends. I check the clock on the dashboard and do silent math to adjust my schedule. Darren notices and asks about my plans for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing, I say. Homework all afternoon, I say. My parents are forcing me, I say. Darren makes a jerk-off motion. He brags that his grandmother never forces him to do his homework. He tells me he’d like to see her try, then he pantomimes violent sex.

At last we arrive at our destination, a lone split-level in a cul-de-sac of two-story homes that never fails to remind me how poor Darren is compared to everyone else. The garage door is still missing from when it was stolen last month. A tarp billows in its place. There is no car in the driveway, which means Darren’s grandmother isn’t home from work yet. Darren points this out and then asks if I want to come inside and watch porn. Nope, I say. I keep the engine running. I drum my hands on the steering wheel.

Darren double-checks the zippers on his duffle bag. He fumbles with his seatbelt. He buttons his jacket. He finds his keys. He reaches into the backseat to retrieve the battleaxe and almost decapitates me lifting it forward over my headrest. Sorry, he says. Thanks for the ride, he says. I’ll have grandma drop me off at your house after dinner, he says. Then he steps out of the car.

Whoa hold on, I say. Maybe not tonight, I say. Tonight is maybe not so good, I say.

Darren freezes. He sets his duffle bag on the curb and his axe on the duffle bag. He pivots to face me. A defiant scoff hangs on his mouth. Why not, he asks. Where are you going, he asks. What are those sleds for, he asks, pointing to the sleds, thrusting his head forward to emphasize his indignation.

None of your business, I say. I need to leave right now, I say. Going sledding, I say.

Darren’s face unclenches. Shotgun, he shouts, moving as if to come with me.

I yank the car into drive and peel out.

I don’t like ditching Darren, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Darren is ugly. He’s a pervert. He has little eyes and his lips are scarred from a repaired cleft and his body has a weird shape like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

I stop at the end of the cul-de-sac, lean over, and pull the passenger door all the way shut. The side mirror realigns and I see Darren sprinting down the street trying to catch up. He slips on a patch of ice and eats shit in a snowbank.

Zulkoski lives in the woods and it’s hard to see his house from the road and I almost miss the turn. This is my first time here. I idle just past the mailbox and unbuckle my seatbelt and jockey my posture to get a better view. Most of the architecture is obscured by trees, but the parts that aren’t hint at a mansion beyond huge. I coax my mother’s station wagon forward up the winding driveway and park along the shoulder. I hike the rest of the way to Zulkoski’s pulling my two sleds. I pass at least twenty cars. I’m late.

I reach what I think is the front door and as I’m searching for a doorbell it opens. It’s Zulkoski’s older brother, Adam Zulkoski. He’s facing the other way saying something to a girl I can’t see but can hear laughing. Adam Zulkoski is laughing too. So I start laughing, which I hope communicates a sort of general I’m fun attitude and also hey there is someone at the front door in case you opened it by mistake or something.

Around back, Adam Zulkoski says. I do a quick lean in to see who he’s talking to, but don’t lean far enough and when I lean back Adam Zulkoski is looking at me like I’m some kind of smiling dumbfuck. Backyard, he says. Backyard, he says again.

In the backyard no one is sledding. Zulkoski is driving his father’s snowmobile in fast circles. Erin Kirchner is sitting behind him, sharing the saddle, seatbelting his stomach with her arms. Everyone else is standing around drinking Natural Ice beneath a pair of heat lamps. Zulkoski’s parents are nowhere.

I score a few acknowledging glances as I approach the crowd and dislodge a beer from the snow. Scott Schaefer shoots me an upward nod of solidarity even though I am positive Scott Schaefer doesn’t know who I am. I nod back and take a sip. The beer tastes triumphant. This is the best party I’ve ever been to.

I start walking towards Scott Schaefer’s conversation, but Zulkoski’s best friend Trent yells my name and waves me to his group instead. Trent is making a bizarre production of my arrival, checking either side of me, back and forth, with an exaggerated look of confusion on his face like maybe he thinks I’m hiding someone or something behind me. So where’s the other one, he asks.

I point back in the direction of the beer, where I left the second sled I was told to bring. Don’t worry, I say. I brought an extra, I say. That one with the stickers is mine, I say. This makes Trent lose his shit laughing. The others too. I smile and give them a lovable shrug. That’s my sled, I say.

Trent catches his breath and holds up a hand like he’s about to speak, but before he’s able to verbalize anything someone else calls my name and I turn.

It’s Zulkoski. He’s spotted me from his snowmobile and is flipping me off. Bend over, he shouts. Fuck you, I shout back, reenacting our inside joke from Earth Science last semester. Zulkoski smiles and makes a gesture like he’s eating someone out and then says something I can’t hear that makes Erin laugh. He cranes his neck and twists his head and winks at her. I brought an extra sled, I shout. Zulkoski shifts his attention back toward me. Sure, he shouts. Then he drives into a dog that he doesn’t see.

The yelp gets everyone’s attention.

Zulkoski kills the snowmobile’s engine and swivels to survey the vehicle, frantic. He doesn’t know what he hit. The animal’s hind legs are smeared along the tread, but most of the dog is caught in the undercarriage. Erin notices a piece of tail on her shoulder and screams. You hit a dog, someone shouts.

Zulkoski’s face flushes. What dog, he asks. Whose dog, he asks. What did I hit, he asks. Erin starts sobbing. Zulkoski looks like he’s about to cry too. He is taking big breaths.

The sliding door on the deck opens and we all turn toward the noise. It’s Adam Zulkoski. He walks out to the railing nearest us hefting an acoustic guitar to his shoulder like a yakuza brandishing a samurai sword. His eyes move from the chunks of dog to the snowmobile to Zulkoski. His open mouth poses a silent What The Fuck. Your brother hit a dog, someone shouts.

Adam Zulkoski tenses his grip on the neck of the guitar. Okay, he says. I’ll go get a shovel, he says. Come on Oscar, he says. A yellow lab joins him on the deck and follows him off along the side of the house. The sight of a living dog inspires me to chug the rest of my beer and open another.

Across the yard, a shaken Zulkoski dismounts the snowmobile, followed immediately by Erin, who then dashes, raw-faced, to her now also sobbing girlfriends. The rest of us move closer and form a cautious ring around the vehicle, just outside the spray of blood.

The dog’s head is half-buried upside down in the snow. Its lower jaw extends at an angle like an open stapler. Part of an ear is missing. There are bald patches in its fur. It is ugly, dirty, malnourished, an outdoor dog that has been lost or abandoned. There is no collar, but who knows; a cheap one could be shredded somewhere in the machinery. The goriest places remind me of last year’s Black Friday: Darren and I buying turkeys for cheap, lining them up in my backyard and taking the battleaxe to them.

Phil from World History moves closer, squatting near the sections of dog that are most intact. He prods the largest with his beer can. This isn’t a dog, Phil says. it’s a coyote, he says. My aunts keep coyotes on their farm, he says. You only hit a coyote, he says.

Zulkoski’s yellow lab brushes past my left leg and pads over to where Phil is crouched. It sniffs the dead animal. Phil goes to pull the dog away, but before he can it dances out of his reach and sinks its teeth into the coyote’s shoulder. It whips the carcass back and forth a few times then clenches into a tug of war with the vehicle’s undercarriage. Hey Oscar save some for the rest of us, someone shouts.

A tendon snaps and Oscar tumbles backward with most of a foreleg still in his mouth. He shakes his head and delivers the mangled limb to Phil, then he rolls over and exposes his belly.

Zulkoski laughs.

Phil laughs.

Everyone laughs, even Erin and the girls. And I’m laughing with them, but I’m also staring at the dead coyote and I’m thinking how much it looks like a dog.

Over the course of the next hour the party vibe rekindles. A few of us even suggest sledding, but nobody else seems interested. It’s getting too dark is the excuse. Trent has a brilliant idea that involves the roadside flares he keeps in his trunk. The other guests aren’t into it. Neither is Zulkoski, who has just spent the last hour cleaning coyote gore off the snowmobile with his brother. His mittens are caked with scabs of fur. Jesus Christ I am ready to get drunk, he says.

We all move to the basement and switch to liquor and decide to play charades because Zulkoski’s family has a version called Movie Charades that uses an interactive DVD. Zulkoski goes first since he’s played before. The rest of us face the other way while the television gives him his word. When the DVD announces Lights Camera Action, we all turn back.

Zulkoski is shuffling in place, hugging himself, puffing out his cheeks. Behind him, the television shows a black Cadillac rolling to a stop in front of a wheat field. A supertitle tells us it’s a scene from The Godfather. A Mediterranean variant of the Jeopardy theme plays instead of the scene’s original audio. A flashing timer counts down in the lower-right corner.

A car, someone shouts. Marlon Brando, someone shouts. The Godfather, someone shouts. Marlon Brando, someone shouts again.

Zulkoski tightens his expression and flares his eyes and shakes his head No. The Jeopardy music speeds up. The timer turns red. Clemenza leaves the car. Rocco raises his gun to shoot Paulie. The screen shakes with earthquake sound effects as the final seconds strobe away.

Cannoli, I shout.

Zulkoski exhales a burst of air and points at me. Yes, he shouts. The DVD’s narrator yells Cut and the word cannoli appears in the livery of an Italian flag.

The game awards Zulkoski 10 points for successfully acting out cannoli and awards me 15 points for guessing it. It’s my turn now. Scott Schaefer takes my Tom Collins and then he and everyone else turn their backs. The DVD gives me three different charade options: Claymore, Freedom, and Primae Noctis. The movie is Braveheart. I choose Primae Noctis because it’s worth the most points. The DVD starts a black and white countdown like an old projector. At two, the narrator calls Lights Camera Action.

I purse my lips. I frown. I point to an invisible Scottish bride. I try to look as much like nobility as possible. I scowl.

Braveheart, someone shouts.

I scowl harder. I point again to the invisible bride, this time directing her to stand in front of me. I hold out my hand and tell her to kiss it. I draw my sword to keep the groom at bay and with my free hand I bend the bride over. I start making love to her from behind, doggy-style. Every man dies but not every man truly lives, says a Scottish voice from the DVD. I continue pumping in rhythm with the bagpiped Jeopardy music until my time runs out and Primae Noctis appears in bold white letters over a flaming Union Jack. Jus primae noctis, I say, bracing to catch my breath. The right of English nobility to sleep with brides on their wedding nights, I say.

The room is silent. I feel a rush like I’ve just dropped something fragile. Zulkoski stares past me while Trent whispers something in his ear and every part of Trent’s body communicates such an intense I Told You So that I can’t help but look away. So I guess I’ll go next, says Scott Schaefer.

Some of the girls stifle laughter into their hands—not the sort of restraint meant to spare someone’s feelings; it’s the mean kind, the kind that demonstrates a shared desire to keep whatever joke hidden from me for as long as possible.

I reclaim my drink and stumble across the room to the nearest place furthest from the television, which is a papasan chair facing the sliding glass doors along the basement’s back wall.

Looking outside at my own stupid reflection, imminent thoughts of Darren put a tremble in my lower lip; I think about the childhood speech impediment that made Darren say his R’s like W’s and how all through seventh grade Bradley Neukirch would invite Darren to sit with him at lunch and trick Darren into talking, get him to embarrass himself in front of the rest of the table, get him to go on and on about elves and mutant powers and that kind of thing. I think about the four square game when Darren refused to go to the back of the line after being unfairly called Out so Bradley Neukirch started chanting Dawwen’s out, and he got everyone waiting in line to chant it, and the chant spread to the basketball courts, and it spread to the soccer field, and everyone was chanting Dawwen’s out; the teachers didn’t know what was going on, and neither did most of the students, but we all knew Darren—he said R’s like W’s and he always cried when he got mad.

A motion lamp activates somewhere along the side of the house, jerking my attention. I lean forward under the glare of the interior lights and press my face against the patio glass, straining to get an angle on whoever made the lamp turn on. My breath fogs my line of sight. I’m not seeing anybody. I settle back into the papasan and raise my Tom Collins for another sip, but then realize my drink is just ice and Movie Charades is too loud and also people have begun guessing my name in response to whatever is being acted out behind me.

Upstairs, Phil from World History is busy arranging open beers in concentric circles on the dining room table. He looks excited when he notices me standing there. He tells me he’s rescued the fallen soldiers from this afternoon, gesturing to the thing he’s been working on. It’s all for Liquid Courage, he explains, a drinking game that he invented. We’re gonna play it later, he says. It’s kinda like strip poker, he says. It involves stripping, he says.

Your aunts have pet coyotes, I say.

Phil laughs and has me follow him into the kitchen. He opens the freezer and takes out a gallon of milk. He puts the milk in the sink to thaw. Yeah, he says. They’re lesbians, he says. My aunts are lesbians, he says. He turns toward me and holds out his hands making fists like he’s gripping the handlebars of an invisible bike. He knocks his fists together, which makes a sort-of clapping noise. Lesbians, he says again. He laughs.

The motion lights turned on but I couldn’t see who was out there, I say.

Uh oh, Phil says. He passes me the handle of whiskey.

Outside feels less cold than expected. I edge along the house’s exterior wall, hunching over, careful not to destroy footprints. The moon is worthless for tracking. It’s impossible to see any gradation in the snow. I bring my eyes within a few inches of the ground and squint to calibrate some measure of dynamic contrast range, but everything is still too flat and lights from the house are distracting my night vision—one basement window in particular, going from dark to light to dark to light.

I stoop closer to investigate.

It’s Adam Zulkoski’s bedroom. He and a topless girl are fighting over a light switch. She turns the lights off. He turns them back on. She turns them off. He turns them back on and then tries to squeeze her chest.

The topless girl shrugs out of his reach. She abandons the switch and retreats further into the room, closer to the bed, closer to the window I’m watching from. She shimmies out of her jeans, bending to help her legs free, and her tits are just hanging there, quivering, like water balloons ready to be tied.

Adam Zulkoski sidles up to assist with the remaining underwear, but the topless girl meets his advance and guides him to the mattress instead. She works his pants to his ankles all slow and smiling as if prelude to a blowjob or handjob, but then instead of removing the pants she re-fastens the belt to bind his legs. She whispers something that scandalizes Adam Zulkoski, then she punches his inner thigh and ballet twirls back to the light switch. The room goes dark. Then almost immediately the lights come back on, except now the topless girl is squinting in my direction and covering herself.

My spider-sense kicks in and gets me away from the window before she screams.

She’s reacting to the sudden movement, I tell myself. If she could see it was me, she would have screamed sooner. She’s just reacting to movement; she hasn’t seen my face, it’s too dark recognize what I’m wearing. I could be anyone out here.

A motion detector clicks somewhere close by and floodlights ignite the back patio. I adjust course and sprint for the woods. I’m deep in the trees when I hear the rattling bounce back of a door being rage opened to the limit of its hinges. How much time has passed, I try to guesstimate—enough time for pants, but maybe not gloves and a coat. Best-case scenario he’s still barefoot. I move further into the woods.

The new plan is make a wide circle back to the car, but when I reach the driveway there is no driveway. Zulkoski’s house is on my right instead of my left. The crest of the sledding hill is on my left instead of a hundred or so yards the opposite direction of where I should be. I’m all turned around. It’s dark and I’m freezing. There’s a full moon and a dog is howling. I’m halfway up a hill overlooking Zulkoski’s house. And it’s not a dog howling; it is a person howling—a person pretending to be a wolf. Darren, I say. I keep my voice quiet in case I’m wrong. Darren, I say again. I clean the tears off my cheeks. I lick the snot mustache forming on my upper lip. A swirly wind stirs up some loose powder. And then I see him.

Darren is there, twenty feet ahead in the margin of the sled path, standing just in front of the tree line. He has his battleaxe. He’s holding it high above his head like a barbarian or something, trying to look cool. He adjusts his stance and howls.

I point at Darren. I see you, I say.

Darren howls again, but this time his voice cracks and he sounds worse than a fucking retard. I see you, retard, I say, still pointing.

Darren points back at me. He gives me a thumbs down. He lowers his axe and starts spinning in circles while loosening his grip along the length of its handle like an Olympic hammer thrower but with zero athletic ability. After a dozen or so turns he lets go. The weapon silhouettes as it sails through the moonlight away from him, away from me, and up the hill to where it lands a good fifteen feet from either of us. Balls, Darren shouts, racing after the axe, trying to beat me to it, but Darren is dizzy and I’m faster. I’m faster and now Darren is lying on his back beneath me and I’m standing over him with his axe in my hands. I’m faster, I say. My heart is pumping, pounding blood, pounding in my eardrums.

I’m faster, I say again.

Darren looks up at me, smiles at me with his ugly cleft lip. He’s having trouble breathing. Not really, he says. I let you win, he says. If anything we’re equal, he says. Or I’m more like the agility specialist and you’re maybe more strength focused, he says. Plus you saw me coming, he says. You’re lucky the house was locked, he says. Next time I’ll ambush you, he says. You’ll see, he says. Next time, he says. Then he winks at me, which, when Darren does it, is more like both eyes close but one closes tighter.

Darren repositions his hands palm-down in the snow to push himself upright, but I put a foot on his chest and press him back to the ground. I tighten my hold on the haft of the axe and guide its head downward toward Darren’s left shoulder—closer and closer until the edge of its blade almost touches where his arm joins his body. I let it hover there like I’m lining up my shot.

Darren un-crosses his eyes and shifts focus to the distance exposed by the gap in my stance, as if he sees something behind me, as if oh shit there’s someone sneaking up behind me. Adam Zulkoski. I try to turn. Darren shoves my foot out from under me and I face plant instead. By the time I realize I’m down, I’m already up again, scrambling, desperate to explain myself to whoever it is Darren saw. There’s nobody.

See, Darren says. Agility, he says. Let’s mosey, he says. I’m late as fuck to this thing, he says.

Blood is smeared on my hands and I can see more blood in the snow where I fell. But I don’t feel it, whatever part of me is bleeding. I’m numb, light-headed. I make eye contact with Darren and rake my bloody fingers across my face like I’m applying war paint.

Darren gives me a look that is equal parts satisfied tormentor and excited toddler. He shows me he has the battleaxe, holds it out to me like, you want it, come get it, then he takes off running as if this was some sort of game. I stop chasing when I reach the trees and lose sight of him. I’m not giving you a ride home, I shout. This is your fault, I shout. I’m not giving you a ride home, I shout again.

Darren responds with a distant, sustained howl.

I respond to Darren’s howl with my own louder, more sustained howl.

Darren howls back, less confident than before. When he finishes, I howl again, take howling to the next level with a much louder, way more sustained howl. Darren howls back a goading, gay-sounding caricature of me howling. I interrupt him with a deafening, nearly perpetual howl, and, as soon as it’s over, I inhale and howl again, and again, chaining together howls, one after another. When I hear Darren’s howls trying to compete with mine, I howl harder, burn all remaining fuel, consume my strength, siphon my soul, howl to the point of vomiting.

A sudden, third voice rises above both of us.

I stop howling. So does Darren. It’s Adam Zulkoski, shouting like he’s trying to get someone’s attention, but I can’t see him; he must be near Darren. More shouting, and now he’s saying something. The words are too distant to hear, a pattern of incomplete sounds that resemble a single, angry question being repeated. Darren howls, but is cut off. More shouting. Screaming. Frantic apologies. More screaming. And I’m gone, running down the hill in great leaping strides.

The air in Zulkoski’s basement has that coating of morning wetness. I unravel myself from the papasan chair and try to stand without losing my balance. I’m the only person down here, unless everyone is hiding. All the couches are empty. The lights are on.

Upstairs there is still no sign of other life and too many cabinets in the kitchen so I use a dirty cup for water. There’s the residue taste of licorice, but it fades with each refill until it’s gone. I trace a dick into some spilled macaroni-and-cheese cheese powder, but otherwise just stand there drinking water until the morning sun crests the hill and enters the room. The bottles for Liquid Courage are still set up in patterns on the dining room table. The sunlight moves across them like a song in Fantasia.

At some point clouds shift. The room goes cold. I acknowledge that I’m wearing someone else’s shirt, and I’ve been cleaned. Whatever lingering desire I have to see the others awake leaves me. It’s time to go home. I finish my water and gather my coat and exit through the basement, which turns out to be a good thing because my sleds are out back and I might have forgotten them otherwise.

As I leave I pass the gore stain where the snowmobile accident occurred. I don’t have to remind myself it was just a coyote. I’m feeling zero emotional attachment to this stain right now. I squat next to it, study the grittiest splotches, locate the mixed-in animal remains and imagine undead versions of their owner.

A separate area of my brain skips back to the other day, back to before Zulkoski calls and invites me to the sledding party, back to when it’s just me and Darren taking turns chopping at saplings on my family’s acreage and I’m telling Darren how I wish the Earth was Middle-earth and how I would probably be an elf.

Darren chops a sapling and then looks at me like I’m seriously stupid. He rattles off a list of my traits. He explains how my traits are not elven traits. According to Darren, I’d be lucky to be Engwar— i.e. Man. An elf, he says. I don’t think so, he says. I’m cold let’s go inside, he says.

This is happening right as it’s my turn to chop of course, which is typical Darren autism. The gall of it, actually. I’m feeling a ton of hate in this moment, violent hate. I can’t tell if it’s real or if I’m revising the realness in hindsight or what, but the combined insult of being lectured by Darren and then losing my turn with the axe makes me so mad, so incredibly mad.

I hawk up some hangover bile and spit it on the coyote stain.

Darren is a forever-alone virgin. He doesn’t have elven traits, or life goals, or empathy. He’s a pathetic subhuman, a changeling who has sort-of learned how to mimic human form but won’t ever fully learn because of a learning disability. I gaze deep into the rust-colored snow, unblinking until the rust color distorts to a shiny purple at which point I let my eyes relax. I exhale. I tell myself pity is probably the most elven emotion, and pity is what I feel for Darren.

A gust of snow freckles the coyote stain and lifts my attention to the vast, unspoiled whiteness of the landscape beyond, where I’m about to ponder impermanence and my own mortality in the larger scheme of things, but then I see the true location of the coyote’s dismemberment is actually a dozen or so yards farther out. I’m not sure what I’ve been staring at for the past few minutes. It doesn’t matter. It’s snowing now and I don’t have the energy to walk out to the real stain of discolored snow where the snowmobile accident occurred, which from this distance looks smaller than I remember it being. I grab my leash of sleds and pull them the opposite direction, towards the front of Zulkoski’s house where all the cars from yesterday are still parked in the driveway.

End