OLD AMOS I. Old Amos Old Amos stood in the southeast corner of the garden, the corner closest to Jerusalem, the city of gold. The sour cherry tree behind him was in full bloom. When the breeze stirred, white petals floated down. It was the middle of June, spring going into summer. It had rained for almost three solid days, then turned fair as a high pressure system swept down across the Great Lakes from the northern reaches of Canada, wild country. Three lazy clouds drifted like lost pieces of cotton in a blue sky. Momentarily, they lined up in a row… Jerusalem was still seven thousand miles away. In all his eighty-one years, Amos had never been there. Yet he had not forgotten her. He had obeyed faithfully the Biblical injunction, “Jerusalem, if I forget thee, may my right hand lose its cunning.” He longed to let her clasp him to her bosom. A scruple kept him from taking his longing quite literally. Each life was both lucky and unlucky beyond measure. When it came to souls, scales failed. You knew for sure that you didn’t know what was coming next, wouldn’t quite know what it had been once it was gone. Whatever you planned changed in the making. If you thought of yourself as its author, you sinned. You might as well lust after the making of graven images. Also you were a fool. Oblivion was the privilege of fools, an enviable one at that. A little bit of vision, no great amount, took a man a... read more
I. It started with the generator. Kenneth walked into the office just after lunch one day at the very beginning of the long rains. It was too hot. The air wasn’t stirring at all. Moko, the vice-principal, was yelling at Henry. “Henry, you can not always be making these silly and frivolous requests. You must plan and anticipate needs. One order every six months or even every year should be quite sufficient, indeed. I must impress upon you that, without foresight, nothing of lasting value can be accomplished.” Moko turned away from Henry, who sat immobile at his desk, his face totally quiet. Dressed in short-sleeved white shirt frayed at the collar and grayish green slacks, Henry was a slight man in his middle thirties. While Moko was working under his white shirt on a mild rise that would, with a little encouragement, boll out into a full fledged pot belly, Henry’s frame lacked even a hint of fat. The articulation of every muscle was visible.† The skin was a wrapping that revealed their workings more than it cloaked them.† Underneath the desk, Henry’s ankles were crossed. In the drab office with its old wooden furniture, the bright yellow of Henry’s rubber clogs made an accent, like hot mustard sauce. “Henry, you can not always be getting the idea that you’re indispensable. You know what the President has been saying about all this feather boating held over from colonial times. He say, ‘Pay for performance and only for performance.’ That’s official now, not just one man’s whim, although some of us, we have been thinking the same thing for... read more
This little story came easy. Perhaps it was all there even before I wrote it. It knew what it was and how it wanted to go about telling itself. It had pace and tone down pat. It knew what it cared about and what it didn’t care about. I felt like a midwife at an easy and natural birth. There was nothing harrowing about it. I didn’t know anything about the story before I started to write it. All I had was an itch that produced the need to scratch it, that is, to write, an itch I have had many times before, but never with a result like this one. It took no more than part of an afternoon to write it. Then it was done. I changed a very few words, even spending just a little time feeling guilty that I didn’t feel the necessity of changing any more than these very few words. This little story was smooth and pure and powerful. I have been writing a long time and I have struggled with recalcitrant pieces for days, weeks, months, years, even decades, always feeling that something in the writing, something in myself was tenaciously resisting the process. I have been frightened and infuriated and depressed. I don’t know what has held me to it but something as implacable in me as the resistance I addressed. I don’t know if I ever wanted to be a writer. I was not one of those. Rather becoming a writer was something that happened to me, like a highway accident I was lucky to survive, but that changed my... read more
“It was terrifying last night, Aunt Becca. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I got up because I heard her. I wondered what she was doing at two o’clock in the morning. I know she hasn’t been sleeping well. She went down the stairs . She looked like she was floating in that pale green nightgown. I followed her. I don’t think she knew herself what she was doing. “Maybe she was walking in her sleep. She stopped just in front of the big living room window and looked out over the rhododendron bushes onto the front lawn. I stood behind her watching. The moonlight was shining down on the snow. It was so bright you could see the shadows of the branches of the trees. “Then she turned to go back upstairs. She saw me. Maybe she recognized me. I’m not sure. It wasn’t as if it made any difference that I was her own mother. No, I might have been a stranger on the street, a statue. She would have said what she said to the wall or to a chair if I hadn’t been there. Her voice was so soft it could have been a ghost’s. “‘Look at me,’ she said, not a trace of an expression on her face, ‘I’m already not here.’ “When I told Eddie about it, he looked at me like I was nuts. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?’ he asked me.“ “‘No, you idiot,’ I was tempted to answer him. ‘I’m not sure it wasn’t a dream. That’s why my blood ran... read more
Didier Baa is the world’s leading authority on the no-brow movement. “The first thing to remember about me is that I am never sheepish,” said Didier,whom we met on the Left Bank in a small café on a gray winter’s day of 2011. “But you did not come here to listen to me talk about myself. I don’t know how they have done it, but the no-brows have accomplished the feat of being able to go under the low-brows while remaining over the high-brows. They have used the power of nothing, the power of emptiness, to catch both the low-brows and the high-brows in a delicate yet powerful pincer movement. Neither knows quite what has hit them or where it has come from. This is because it has come from nowhere. The no-brows have entirely given up the brow. This has bestowed on them great freedom and great power because they have nothing to lose.” Didier Baa gestured in a way at once anxious and emphatic. “You know, what is most remarkable is that you can Google the no-brows and what the search engine finds is absolutely nothing. The no-brows simply do not participate. That is their perfection, that they have no need to participate because they are looking for no reward, no power. They elude the high-brows, the middle-brows, the low-brows, even the search engines. This makes them very powerful.” “Can I meet one ? I’m very intrigued?” “Ah, I’m so sorry. It is, how do you say it, a sorrow? But I am the closest that you can get, “ responded Didier, tenting his fingers together. “Why... read more
