Fifteen years ago my sister married an Italian boy, equal parts smug and charming, unreasonably handsome.  To see this young man was to see beauty clogged in someone who didn’t deserve it.  This boy worked a pear orchard in Northernmost Africa.  His and my sister’s paths had crossed while swaging across Europe.  My sister assured our mother that her newfound home was a short boat ride to Spain.  We all thought she was sacrificing too much for this boy.  Father said she would come to her senses eventually; the hard days would work their way into her with a curative effect.

       But my sister was happy living in the ‘old world’, climbing ladders all day with her nose up in the blossoms, dropping fruits into pails.  Mornings they ate sweet biscuits with sliced pears.  At sunset they stewed pears in honey like the Romans had; this was once, her husband explained, the only way for a Roman to eat a pear.  One assumed sex was had like a meal, neither rushed nor leisurely, two or three times a day, he being the kind of man who used orgasms to recalibrate his ambitions.

       After the harvest my sister would wrap whole volumes of dazzling pears in tissue paper, snuggle them into fancy gift boxes and slingshot the pears all across the globe.  Those flawed—with nicks, dents or soft spots—they sold in town at a discount and kept some for themselves.  Those grossly imperfect—doomed from the start, twisted messes or sauce under the skin—she bestowed to clans of barefooted children who danced at the gates; in one of her letters she described these children: dark and scuffed as unwashed plums.  Flighty and wild like the birds.

       Eventually, I too met a man.  We married quickly and had three sons, one right after the other.  Though I had always hoped to avoid those trite suburban benchmarks—we came to measure our life in thread counts, inches around the waist, square-footage, horsepower.  These measurements fell around us as nets fall from the trees over forest creatures, and we lived (even happily) within their confines, keeping us from the wild, the wild from us.  But every day I thought of my sister who had made a lusty and savage adventure of her life.

       When our third son was born my sister surprised us with a visit.  Five years she had been away from America.  She arrived in a simple muslin dress, her only glamour in the leanness of her body, her deeply bronzed skin.  Though she came without her husband, she talked lovingly of him, of how he had found his way into a circle of people who were both bohemian and strangely powerful.  The Dragonflies, she called these people.  We did not ask.  She smiled at the children but did not care to hold them.  A quietness resided in my sister that was not there before.  My father guessed serenity.  I guessed anxiety.  My mother said, she’s not a girl anymore, that’s all.  On the last evening of her visit she vehemently scolded us for eating imitation butter, for drinking skim milk; then she laughed—a quavering maudlin laughter—and she said, what the hell difference does it make, what do I know?

       In her letters, for the longest time, she claimed to be happier than ever, at the core of a simple formula.  A white woman in Africa basking in a web of pears that stretched out forever.  She wrote again and again to say that she didn’t miss her former life, she didn’t miss America at all, and she wasn’t ever returning for more than a visit.

       Several years ago my sister fell out of touch for a terrifying length of time.  Incommunicado is the only word she uses now to explain that year when her signal had faded.  And a mischievous smile, not of the mouth but of the eyes.  From a town in Northern Italy my parents received one cryptic postcard (typed, nothing hand-written).  TRAVELING.  MUCH LOVE. One evening a crazed woman knocked at my parent’s door, gibberish spewing from her mouth, and my mother swore to have heard my sister’s name thinly laced in this woman’s rant.  My father said, no darling, you’re imagining things.  We were a few days shy of purchasing plane tickets when there came a lengthy hand-written letter telling the story of a gluttonous bug that had picked the locks on the trees, plague had found the orchard, the pears were done.  My sister and her husband were living farther south, away from the sea, raising crops for a church.

       She returned to us with one large suitcase, fine lines etched into her forehead, around her eyes.  The life she had lived with her very pretty husband, she said, was rotted as the trees that once dropped whole tides of pears; never again would she hear of him, nor he of her.

       My sister lives in her girlhood bedroom, rides a bike to a coffeehouse where she works with a tribe of lazy children half her age.  We have her over for dinner.  She doesn’t mention the butter or milk.  I am certain from the look in her eyes that she sees the richness in my life, the deep value in the children, in the real estate, in the labyrinth we’ve built for ourselves.  See the swimming pool, like a turquoise jewel pressed into the grass.  See the car in the car in the garage, like a diamond in its box.  Jealousy takes its swift clean bites from the heart.  I know.

       But my sister isn’t altogether unhappy, she has her secrets; she herself is an object of intrigue.  What life did she live in Africa?  Was it the one in her letters?  You look at someone and you see that they have flooded their former lungs, a tidal wave of secrets receding to the edges of the soul.  There is something precise—a love? a crime? a reckless evening?—a morsel vaulted deep inside her, she clings to it like a divine meal she enjoyed many years ago, all of it passed through her body, but oh, the memory!  The pears!  The man!  The children who danced at the gates!  And the rest of it that she kept for herself.  Don’t I want whole years that were mine, braided with the salt smell of the sea and a lust that yielded to nothing?   It is unclear as to which one of us has missed her chance.

for T.G.

In this version of the story the boy does not
learn to fly: a rapid cut of arms
through air—sarcoline stained
glass wings, the breath in his rib cage
caged as any wild animal. It is not my place to say
whether his eyes were closed or open, whether
what he thought of in those moments licked
by gravity was his father asleep
in an upholstered chair—Tony Soprano,
his drive past any number of suspension bridges
into the city, on the television—his mother
herding herself with worry
for this batch of begonias unsettled
in their lack of light. How many times—
lying down on the cool tar of the roof—
I felt the wavering bur-reed
of a boy’s finger going to unhook my bra,
before I stopped it. Amo le mie proprie
cellule. How many times my feet
bound in strap-upper sandals, the metal banister
freckled with this morning’s rain, the shingles
each a slanted prism-lake, I cupped my hand
to a friend’s shoulder in order to stand upright.
Before the mid-fourteenth century,
to slip meant to escape. As if in the loss
of our footing, the earth would open up
into elsewhere—grass, rather than a hard plane:
a sea the color of milk or vernix.
The pattern in which your body lands: tessellated
as houndstooth. This and unforgiving, forever.

Though a native Italian, Alberto Arcangeli (top) creates music that bears a palpable Britpop influence, heavy on acoustic guitar, sprightly piano, gauzy vocals, and a sprinkling of Syd Barrett psychedelia. It’s also catchy as hell. For “Wheels and Love,” Arcangeli teams with Urbino artist Massimo Ottoni (below), whose delicate paint-on-glass technique perfectly captures the numinous longing of “Wheels.” Here, we cross the Atlantic for an e-mail exchange with Arcan- geli and Ottoni to talk about “Wheels”‘s pastoral inspiration, yet very 21st-century DIY genesis.

Interrobang?! Magazine: How did you two find each other for “Wheels and Love?”

Alberto: I was looking for someone to do the video of this song, but I didn’t want a standard pop video, I wanted it to be a “piece of art.” Something that could have a life of his own. I knew Massimo because he studied art in Urbino, where I was born and raised. I loved what he did there, but didn’t see him for 15 years, so I looked on the internet and I realized that he was still doing beautiful things. I sent him an email with the song and a few words about the project, and he liked it. Then he came out with the idea of a paint-on-glass animated video. That was just what the song needed.

!?: What was the inspiration/genesis of the piece?

Alberto: I wrote “Wheels and Love” in my garden, on a sunny September morning, with birds singing in the trees. Kind of a dreamy picture. I recorded the first half of the song singing and playing di- rectly in my mobile phone, in the garden, and then added the rest of the arrangement in my home studio. Actually, I don’t know why I wrote a melancholy song in such a beautiful morning.

!?: Musical influences?

Alberto: I usually listen to a wide range of musical styles and genres. What I care for is, by and large, “good music” vs “bad music.” I have an idea of what “good music” is, and I feel like good music must come out from spontaneity. You can improve your ideas, work hard on your songs, but you can’t fake spontaneity. That said, to me good music is: the Beatles, Thelonious Monk, The Beach Boys, Manuel de Falla, The Rolling Stones and many others … But I can’t deny that most of my inspiration comes from pop and rock music.

!?: How long did the piece take to develop, from start to finish?

Alberto: Not so long. I usually start with an acoustic guitar part, structure and arrangement in mind, and then I add all the other instruments: bass, voice, drums… Sometimes everything fits well from the beginning, other times I have to rethink all of the structure, because I feel that something’s missing… This time everything sounded right from the beginning and in a couple of days the song was completed. I can’t say that for the animation, though, it took Massimo a bit longer to do it!

!?: Massimo, you use a lot of heavy blues, whites, and greys (with even a direct nod to Picasso’s Blue period in your rendition of The Guitarist). What was your approach to animating “Wheels and Love”?

Massimo: I think that what characterizes my approach to animation is not the choice of shapes or colors, but the movement. After listening for the first time to “Wheels and Love” I immediately saw that the “movements” could be split in two parts: the first part of the song, more static, with minimal movements, and the instrumental part, where the music “melts” in a fluid flow. The timing of the movement of the objects is always my first concern, and is what defines the connotation of a clip within my animations. Secondly comes the color. I started to flip through books of art and felt that the first part should be dominated by whites, blues and greys, while the second part should have heavy warm colors, like reds and yellows. Picasso’s Blue period fit particularly well, that’s the reason why there’s a rendition of The Guitarist. Then comes the storyboard, which was pretty easy, because I just followed the lyrics of the song.

Concerning the paint-on-glass technique, I must say that I’ve always been looking for a faster and less expensive way of doing animations. The paint-on-glass technique has great advantages in terms of speed, and just a few drawbacks (i.e. the fact that once you’ve done a clip, you can’t go back or modify it. If the clip’s right, you keep it, otherwise you have to start from the beginning).

To listen to Alberto Arcangeli’s “Wheels and Love” and view Massimo Ottoni’s accompanying animation, visit http://interrobangzine.com/music-video

For more from Alberto Arcangeli, check out his second full-length album, Pop Down the Rabbit Hole, available on his website: http://albertoarcangeli.com

                    After the Da Milano Purse Ad

          I.

An archipelago
               of women, grey-scaled
          their faces:
          black blush, teeth
     a niveous white.

Around the couch, their knees
          gather as twigs bent ready

to kindle
          a pearlish stalk of fire.

     They remember little
     of their childhoods:
          piano lessons,
     cleaning a mother’s
          pastry brush.
     Dormer windows sufficient only
          for a dollhouse.

          II.

     Instead of the fellow’s head:
a purse, turquoise as a rose
          that can’t exist,

                    the range of a leather
                         strip in place
                         of thread,
                    tied and two
                         tassels weighty enough
                    with buds of this.

The handle makes a pair
     of haloes. They could be instead:
          his ears, nostrils,
          twin sclera or choroid⎯
               the little pieces
                of his eyes.

          III.

          But the suit of him
          beneath: it’s what’s
     the psychiatrist
          for whispering
          girls.

Tell me your name, the topcoat asks.
Tell me about your childhood.

     As if charm were a matter of matching
          cufflinks, a matter of how big
          the long dark
     space is in the cavern
          of your head.

1. Always Follow Directions
       It’s the second time this week that a client has been attacked because they strayed out of bounds to get a better picture—seems like there’s one on every trip who thinks they’re too good for the rules and I say they get what they deserve. Sweat stings my eyes as I stumble along the jungle trail with the power blower strapped to my back.
       Mr. Brant is somewhere under the twelve-foot tall bird-mass and it’s my job to get to him before he suffocates. Leith yanks the starter cord on the five-horsepower engine behind me and the trusty Tanaka two-stroke roars to life on the first pull. I grip the output wand with both hands, playing the five-thousand cubic foot per second blast in practiced arcs back and forth over the surface of the mass, peeling away layer upon layer of birds.
       The sky darkens as the Venezuelan cliff swallows disperse by the thousands, possibly more than ten thousand in this mass, and take to the air. After five minutes I’m down to the innermost layer of swallows, the specialized Guard Birds which undoubtedly were the first to give the alarm and attack, all males and three times the size of a normal swallow. I ramp up the throttle to dislodge these larger creatures, and finally they, too, take wing. Off to the sides are dozens of bodies of ordinary Venezuelan cliff swallows who themselves suffocated, sacrificing their lives to protect their communal nesting grounds in an impressive display of cooperative defense.
       With Mr. Brant free of birds, I shut down the engine and before I can doff my pack, Leith and Sara are by the man’s side checking for pulse and respiration. His color’s good and I relax a little; he’s going to be fine and we don’t need an Incident Report and another mark against our insurance.
       “I think he’ll be OK in a few minutes if we just back off and give him some air,” I suggest.
       Sara shakes her head gravely and reaches for her radio; she’s going to call in the Medivac helicopter.
       “You know the motto of Avian Adventure Outfitters,” she says. “‘If swallowed, seek medical attention immediately.’”

2. Good Old-Fashioned Calamine Lotion
       The Right Reverend Cotton Mather Wool, named for a silver-tongued Puritan minister whose exuberant campaign of genocide against the peaceful Narragansetts opened up a significant chunk of New England for settlement by God’s chosen, was proud of his namesake. He knew that as long as he stayed in North America, chances were he wouldn’t encounter anyone who knew of Cotton Mather’s dark passion, and with a moniker like ‘Puritan,’ how could you go wrong?
       Rev. Wool wore a smug smile as he polished the brass nameplate on the wall outside his office, a nameplate announcing to the world, or to the portion thereof that somehow found its way to, or past, his office, that he was the Solemn Premier Benedictor in the Fourth Order Prefectory of the Calvinist Church of the Reformed Christ, North American Branch. He had worked his Right Reverend ass off to get that post.
       Down on the ground floor, a wan young man leaned against a heavy oak door until it yielded, stepped in from the bright sunshine and let the door thud shut behind him. Inside was cool and musty and he blinked in the semi-darkness. After some minutes he could make out the form of a white-haired Curate dozing behind the reception desk.
       “Excuse me?” said the young man in a timid voice.
       The Curate startled, then blushed deeply, though the college student couldn’t see this in the dim light.
       The old man coughed. “Yes, yes, how may I help you, my son?”
       “I’m here about the Part-Time Assistant to the Secretary to the Administrative Assistant to the Solemn Premier Benedictor in the Fourth Order Prefectory of the Calvinist Church of the Reformed Christ, North American Branch.”
       “Yes, yes, of course,” wheezed the Curate. “Take the stairs behind me to the second floor, turn left, room two-ninety, apply with Cotton Wool.”

3. Television Remotes and Other Toxic Substances
       “As you know, the world summit on the Mars Rover Parasite epidemic has been moved here to the arctic where our isolation has spared us, at least so far, from infection. I’m told even the UN headquarters has been breached by grade-schoolers, word has it they’ve eaten every adult who was left in the building, so sad. Welcome, then, distinguished guests, all of you before me as well as those watching around the world via satellite link, welcome to Iqualuit, Nunavut.” And with that, the old Inuit chief sat down.
       The floor of the Iqualuit Community Center vibrated to the thrum of the diesel generator just outside which powered the broadcast equipment and the Center, and as a result the podium migrated toward the audience whenever it was vacated. As Ban Ki-Moon approached the podium, it approached him and he caught it, pushed it to the front and held tight.
       “I see a lot of somber faces,” he began. “There isn’t a person here who hasn’t been touched by this tragedy, and I am truly sorry for your losses.” He cast his eyes downward for a moment and paused. “Recent breakthroughs, though, offer some hope. What we’ve long suspected is now confirmed: hormone production at the onset of puberty is what protects us from the Martian scourge. For Martians it’s the equivalent of head lice, but for us—” He shuddered. “It ravages our children’s nervous system and turns them into ferocious cannibals.”
       “This morning we’ll be hearing about new in utero hormone treatments. If they work, humans will have parasite immunity from birth.” The room erupted into applause, and Mr. Ban smiled briefly. “There may be some unwanted effects but it’s our best hope for survival as a species.”
       “Later today we’ll convene a panel on new lightweight leg armor which can be pressed from natural fibers such as hemp or bamboo. This should make it accessible to just about everyone, greatly reducing injuries from small children. Finally, this evening we’ll get an update on the race for a cure. It could be just around the corner. But until that day, ladies and gentlemen,” He paused and looked around for emphasis. “Keep out of reach of children.”

4. Various and Sundry Liquids
       Emmy Bly found there’s nothing like a mud-rotary drill rig working right outside one’s home to bring on headaches. Diesel exhaust permeated the house and vibrations from the drill shook dust out from between ancient floorboards; she’d had a migraine five days running.
       On day six the foreman announced they’d hit a high-yield formation and would finish the next day. Emmy clutched a fistful of shawl to her breast. “Praise the Lord!”
       “Got that right, sister.” Jim-Bob spat tobacco juice into her marigolds. “We’ll set casing in the morning, drop the pump, take care of a few details an’ we’re outta here.” He spat again.
       The following day she watched expectantly as Jim-Bob and a young apprentice pounded casing, bang, clang, bang, but it was music to Emmy’s ears since it heralded the end of the ordeal. She watched the fuel truck leave, followed by the cube van with all their tools and spare parts. Finally the derrick came down and the outriggers went up. The apprentice left in his car and Emmy waited for Jim-Bob to drive off in the drill rig.
       But he sat in the cab chewing tobacco. Emmy twisted the corner of her shawl and pursed her lips. When the apprentice returned with a take-out bag, Emmy frowned.
       As the wide-eyed apprentice looked on, Jim-Bob unbolted the cap from the top of the well casing and poured a large milkshake down the well. Emmy Bly’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
        She stomped out red-faced, her silent mouth working, but Jim-Bob held up a hand.
       “Hang on, sister, b’fore you have a cow, I gotta show you this.” He squatted next to the casing and pointed to a bright yellow sticker with bold black lettering. “Jes’ read that, Ma’am, if you please.”
       Emmy leaned over and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “My goodness, I’ve misjudged you, Jim-Bob. It clearly says ‘Shake well before using.’”

        1. The House
        As a comedian, I’m well aware of the sacrifice I make. Even the most genius of jokes is doomed to not hold up. Watch:
        There’s this glass house, and yes, it’s Christian, but it’s done, supposedly, in a loving way. Who cares, right? I mean, I’ve never been much for roadside attractions. But I guess people love it. There’s something on the Internet about it every day, and it’s made me start to wonder what’s inside.
        My own house, the one I live in, an apartment, is devoid of windows. The silverfish scurry, screaming, in my wake. My boyfriend says he likes it this way, the world growing steadily uglier and uglier since antiquity, the discarded, tarnished energy collecting like grime.
I’m trying to develop an act based on discomfort. I want to elicit the type of laughter—terrified, cramped—the type that comes from sorrow.
        That’s what they mean when they say I brought the house down.
        I watched a documentary about lights over Phoenix. One woman said the lights, which were amber and had floated silently above her, were aliens’ tentative attempts at saying hello, their way of letting us know they’re here without freaking us out. I know it seems obvious, but I was struck. It’s like the fish noticing the humans. The babysitter’s face when she hears the words I’m in the house.
        My act has been getting a lot of laughs. It’s been described as feminine, organized, composed of longer stories. My boyfriend’s routine is more frenetic and influenced by weed. Really, though, I think people prefer to see some effort.
        We’re both performing this Friday at the Moment. It could get a little competitive.
        I think I’m going to tell the one about his ex-boyfriend, how he goes to the same therapist as me. Okay, how does this sound:
         I just turned 30. I know, I know, I’m floundering. I mean you turn 30, you reach the very furthest corners of the room that is your brain, and then what do you do? You greet those corners, right? You scrape them squeaky-grimy with a little dab of spittle on your finger. You keep them laughing for the hour or the decade they need to be kept that way, and then once they don’t know why they’re laughing anymore, you throw yourself before your dour enemy, tragedy, the victorious ally of time.

        2. The Moment
        My boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend’s name is Jack, and he’s staring at me like his pupils weigh fifty pounds. I didn’t invite him, and neither did my boyfriend, I believe him when he says this. When it comes to ethics, he’s fathoms beyond my therapist.
        I look at Jack and understand: all the neon colors that thrash beneath metallics, pinched along the same bright latitude of the eye. I’m warming to him, believe me.
        They just, unthinkingly, announced my name.
        Welcome to the Moment, I tell them. Thank you for coming out tonight. Even through the barrier glare, I see my boyfriend hunched over his notes. His stonerism, pure poseury.
        Jack, I say into the mic, because he’s huddled up next to my boyfriend and laughing. Jack, I say again, then Jackmeoff. The cheapest sort of humor, no? The kind that survives.
        I’m hit with a feeling of comfort amid the encroaching unease, a warmth beyond the sound of a distant honking horn. The Moment is a really nice place, I say, deciding to embrace that comfort. Maybe I should leave the house more often.
        I don’t know why I bother living with my boyfriend. I once dreamt something insane draped over him as he straddled me. He hunched and bucked and it billowed like a heat mirage.
        How could I have forgotten my fishdom, my goal of wriggling Henry David Through? Life is tricky like that, the various things that mesmerize. You stand transfixed, watching nodules of rice that sink in cold water, when really each is as unique as a fly being tied.
        I told this to my therapist, who wrote it down. Then looked at me like she already knew.
        When will you start keeping track of the things that pass you by, she said.
        Can you believe it? I came to her asking for direction.
        Nobody’s entirely in their element, she continued. Some creatures live their whole lives as fish out of water. Let yourself have some imagination. Pretend you’re a child, for once. Either that or retired.
        I bet you tell the same thing to Jack.
        Damn straight, she said. You’re the one who recommended me to him.
        As usual, my therapist has handed me a punchline on a platter. And whether that platter is glass or Carnival glass or flaking silver plate remains to be seen.
        As of now, here at the Moment, unnatural laughter all around—and don’t get me wrong, Chaucer, it’s refreshing—, I’m already planning a road trip, a solitary pilgrimage inside that house of glass.

In a grainy photo: a blot, a figure hovering
above clumsy shtetl roofs. The only evidence
of the flying man’s existence: this photo

& a collection of stories. In the camp, a young
doctor, fascinated by the flying man, unwittingly
removes his iron shackles. The story ends—

the flying man of Treblinka drifts away, over
the camp’s sallow walls, lost in the sun. But,
regarding the moment before, the story is muddled.

In one version, he speaks a droshe first.
In another, a great stone is carried into the air,
the young doctor’s skull crushed & the Treblinka

rebellion spurred. Variations speak of the flying
man’s family, his wife & son. Before he is caught
by the wind guttering above the camp,

the flying man is forced to choose: his son or his wife,
only strong enough to carry one. Sometimes he is able
to save both. Sometimes he comes away only

with bloody palms. Among the variations
there is considerable disagreement over the nature
of the flying man: good or evil, gadol or makhashef.

In the box with the picture of the flying man
there are several other photos: A man & woman
with crooked smiles standing before a sagging

hovel of brick; a German beside a ditch
filled with tin soldiers—the shot taken in such
sharp focus, such exacting detail it hurts the eyes

when studied too long; a child’s puzzle, missing
several pieces; a young doctor beside a table
of dying starlings, wings all severed.

     — for Kevin Boyle

Tell us some Irish phrases, one French girl says
to the bartender hitting on her French friend,
and being the womanizer and bartender he is,
he replies, I don’t know if it’s Irish, but we use it
none the less…—now a wink at the friend,
as he pours them another round—Keep up
like this and you’ll be after ‘The Hair of the Dog’
tomorrow.  The one who asked, pencils this
into her notebook, trying to grasp
what was meant, the bartender asking them
both back to his flat for morning drinks,
apologizing and winking more, explaining
the Galway Hooker was named for boats
native to the bay, rather than loose women—
Wink, wink—but the French girls leave quietly
after the traditional music ends, the bartender
busy closing tabs, setting up for the lock-in.

In an alley off Mainguard and Shop street,
there are ruins—like every other corner
or county, ruins upon ruins—of the Hall
of the Red Earl and the roots of Galway
interred under the Irish Revenue house,
Anglo-Normans having pinned this port’s
tongue to Old French and hosted banquets,
dispensed justice, collected taxes—
Appropriate, don’t you think?—years ago.
In fact, because this has always been
a tourist town, many falsely believe Galway
was named for Anglo-Norman invaders,
foreigners, the Old French and new,
Americans, Brits, womanizers from every
morally-ruined country in the world
storming upon this seaside town—FALSE—
it’s actually named after Gaillimh inion
Breasail, the daughter of an Irish chieftain
who drowned in the quick river current.

So the girl’s name is pinned to the tip
of everyone’s tongue when they say Galway,
though she sank into the Corrib’s flow
like the pint glasses and road cones
drunk Americans toss into the Middle
river’s canal—Galway, the town flourishing
at the edge of the water, the bay
with its hookers cutting the quick current,
with its modern day hookers hooking up
with womanizers in the chilly night.
Two Irishmen look over the Salmon
Weir bridge across the river, watching
two crew boats darting for each other.
A quick turn, smart rowing to get them out
of trouble, and one Irishman—between
penciling numbers in the paper’s crossword—
comments to the other how the space
between those boats was As tight
as a fish’s ass…, at the exact same moment
as the French girls walk on the other side
of the bridge, commenting that the man
at the pub last night was Beautiful
like a Lorrie, you know?  Wink, wink.

Even today, the maiden’s drowning
is a tragic one—tragedy, the easiest thing
to translate into any language, compared to
the Natalie Wood joke I could make
or the comment about how the chieftain
must have drank like a fish after that loss
and got the whole island started, because
What American knows who Natalie Wood is
today? And What American doesn’t know
that Irishmen drink like a fish? I know,
I am a tourist in a tourist’s city.
These comments would have fallen
on the clueless ears of the French girls,
if I had made them.  The only colloquialisms
or ideas they could have thought of
or gathered from my joking and inappropriate
winking would have been that, in French,
you say My mouth is like wood to mean
you have a hangover, or I drink like
a hole for a common-day drunk.  It is fairly
selfish, but I don’t think there is anything
wrong with learning the language
of a new city, a good place to find some
friction, to looking into your own soul
and—if lucky—breaking the skin on the pool
of the self wallowing in a turn of phrase.

Blades of sawgrass bend beneath the golden
weight of the setting sun, thick as honey,

until their pointed edges meet with the river
and cut V’s into the black, rolling surface.

Salty, ancient mud weighs at the edges,
pulling down, deep into the wealth of

ongoing life and progress, so small as
to seem unimportant- but in the falling

daylight, a beauty so subtle and so complete
renders all things equal, great, and whole.

A heron arises suddenly from the tide,
from another sky beneath the marsh

nearly as endless as the one above.

          One morning when the light was still yellow-tinted and not yet white, I hauled a load of laundry down a flight of stairs to our apartment complex’s shared washer and dryer. There are only eight units here, four on the lower level, four above. I started the wash slowly, relishing each dirty piece of underwear, happy about building a life with my lover, dirty sheets and all. As I loaded panties, shirts, socks into the machine, Elizabeth, our neighbor in G, watched The Sound of Music. I could hear it humming through the walls, the only thing any of us shared aside from the laundry room and part of an address. I smiled as I heard the words Soon her Mama with a gleaming gloat heard, and I smiled as I thought of the scene, all the kids and Fräulein Maria and their frantic puppet show. Once I told my sister that I wanted six children. It was the perfect number, I told her. The Von Trapps had seven, and that was one too many. My sister, who was obsessively acting out motions in fives or numbers divisible by five, disagreed. She said five was the best number, and I thought of her then tapping her fingers on the bedroom wall, opening and shutting doors (one-two-three-four-five!), counting her steps down the hallway, leaping so that her feet would only touch the carpet five times. My sister said that five was the best number, and she thought if she failed to shut the door a fifth time that one of us would immediately die.

          Roberto Bolaño tells stories like my mother, not in a linear fashion, but around an entire universe. You think he starts moving in a straight line, but his line is not only curving, forming wide ellipses and sweeping arcs, it is also traveling around multiple geometric planes. My mother, when asked what’s for dinner, will start with what happened at work that day, what song was playing on the radio, who called her while she was in the grocery store, and sometimes she’ll forget to tell you what’s for dinner. The plot, simply, is that our neighbor is dead, and the only time I thought of her fondly was the day I loaded laundry, singing along with the Von Trapp children and thinking of my sister. I, like Bolaño and my mother, want to tell you more, what car was driving by, what she did right before she died, what flowers were blooming and which ones were shriveling into themselves, like Elizabeth. She died yesterday. Any day a reader newly finds this, Elizabeth will have always died yesterday, and therefore here, I am always alive.

          The neighbors below us have two small children, and one day the toddler put his fleshy hand to the wall and exclaimed, “Hot, hot!” His parents rolled their eyes, because although they were excited about Barkley starting to use words, he was in no way using them correctly, which made communication just as difficult as when he merely cooed and giggled. But this day Barkley was right, the wall was hot. Every time we showered or washed dishes above them, the hot water gushed from the old, rotting pipes, filling the walls below ours with hot water. After several minutes of trying to communicate with his parents, Barkley gave up and went back to his train set. Later that night the mother cradled her newborn in her left arm, and as she reached for a towel in the bathroom, her right hand sensed a heat radiating from the wall. “Barkley!” she cried, “you were right! The wall is hot!” Then the mother scrunched her face up, because walls aren’t supposed to be hot, especially not hot enough to make your fingers throb, and she called in her husband, who called the landlord, who called the plumber to fix the pipes.

          The plumbers were in our apartment banging and clanking into the wall to expose its innards. My fiancé had just gotten two new microphones, and he connected them by a short bar, mimicking with the microphones the placement of each of our ears and the jumbled space between them. As a sound enthusiast, one who hears a noise and is suddenly lost in its meaning, the physics of the sound wave, the bouncing of invisible reflections from their origin to his perked ears, my fiancé wanted to record the plumbers busting through our wall with a sledgehammer. He told Carlos, the English-speaking plumber, that he would be recording, and Carlos said, Cool, buddy. Through headphones he listened to each sound as he captured it, each bass heavy thud and each melodic syllable that the plumbers spoke in Spanish to each other, and he smiled imagining them at work just two walls away. His ears had grown to him like a second set of eyes, but better, like x-ray vision.

          When the work was finished for the day, the plumber asked if we knew the woman in G. He said that he knocked on her door to tell her the water would be turned off for a few hours. He could see her through the open blinds sitting in a chair, he said, her neck craned backwards and mouth hung open. He noticed she had headphones on, so he banged more loudly on the door, thinking she was sleeping deeply to some of her favorite songs, probably Beethoven or some shit, he said. I thought she could have been listening to The Sound of Music, maybe: There’s a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall and the bells in the steeple, too. Maybe she’s dead, the plumber told us. Maybe she is, I said, I’ve never seen a dead body except for at funerals. The plumber told us that he had seen two dead bodies, and that one was a man named Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson was pretty old, he said, and the job at Mr. Wilson’s was taking place mostly outdoors. On the last day of the job, the plumber went to tell Mr. Wilson he had finished, and when he found Mr. Wilson’s door locked he easily picked it and let himself inside. He knew something was wrong right away, he told us, and he went from room to room with an eerie feeling, while saying Mr. Wilson!, but not expecting anything good to come of it. Then he saw Mr. Wilson lying on his bed, hands folded gently on his stomach. In Mr. Wilson’s kitchen, Carlos called the police and the list of numbers Mr. Wilson had posted on his fridge, he said, not wanting to be blamed for killing the old white man.

          His partner, probably tired of all the talking and ready to head home, walked to Elizabeth’s door and banged again. It was so loud that my fiancé winced, covering his ears with two smooth hands. Nada! he shouted to Carlos, shaking his head. Someone needs to call the cops, Carlos said as he packed up his tools. See you tomorrow, he said, and we waved.

          What if she knew she was dying, my fiancé said, and she put on her favorite music, stayed up all night to watch the sunrise, and then just drifted up or away, or wherever you drift. I nodded, considering that, and then I said: what if she got up and drank a cup of coffee, went down to the laundry room and started a load of laundry, and then, as she waited, she put her headphones on and just died, right there, with you recording it and her laundry just spinning away. Don’t be morbid, my fiancé told me, because dying is one thing, but dying and leaving your clothes damp in our shared washing machine is quite another. I thought the laundry would have added a poetic touch, but I didn’t say so because I was thinking of ghosts. The policemen came to our apartment complex, and we waited to be interviewed but that never happened. We imagined the cop sitting in Elizabeth’s apartment, waiting for something — the coroner? the homicide detective? her family? Do you think he’s drinking her tequila?, I asked my fiancé. The detectives in 2666 do that, they show up at a dead person’s house and sit and drink tequila while the body gets colder and colder, I told him. No, he’s not drinking tequila, he said. That’s crazy. Then we got high and my fiancé played guitar while I made up a song about Elizabeth in the style of Bob Dylan: Eeeeeee-lizabeth, started coffee, loaded laundry, put on her favorite song. My fiancé told me to stop, that I was scaring him, and I was scaring myself, too, so I stopped. We popped open cans of Miller Lite, tapped them together — to Elizabeth! — and we drank like only the living can.

          That night in bed I thought the room was darker than normal. We never saw policemen or firemen take Elizabeth away, and I wondered whether her body was still there in the chair as Carlos had described it, mouth open and drool pooled on her shirt. I was too afraid to ask my fiancé what he thought. With my chest pressed to my fiancé’s back, I tried to think about happy things: girls in white dresses with blue satin — no, that wouldn’t work. One word tickled the tip of my tongue, a shameful, ridiculous word: zombie.

          I woke up without a nightmarish zombie or ghost encounter, and for that I thanked the dream-gods. Carlos and his partner returned while we were eating lunch, and in an odd way we were excited to see them, to invite more life into our apartment. We told Carlos that Elizabeth had definitely died, although in reality we weren’t sure; we hadn’t seen her remains, we hadn’t confirmed with anyone. As we slurped down our spicy ramen noodles, Carlos told us that he had dreamt about Elizabeth, and that in the dream he told her he was shutting the water off and she said okay and she was walking around her apartment. Carlos told his wife that she had visited him, that she was thanking him for finding her, because who knows how long she would have sat in that chair had he not been there to fix our pipes. Our eyes watered from the spice. That was the first dead body I’ve ever seen, said Carlos, and my fiancé and I exchanged glances, remembering the story of Mr. Wilson. Carlos walked out to find his partner. He’s an Elliot, I said to my fiancé, recalling someone we once knew. Elliot, the type that enjoys telling stories, that gets intoxicated on details that aren’t totally true or false. Sometimes Elliots will forget what the truth is, since they’ve spun their yarn in so many different ways. They don’t mean any harm, but fact and fiction, to them, are one mangled, hairy, two-headed beast. My fiancé nodded and drank down the spicy remains of the ramen.

          The plumbing was complete and we were alone again, and although the pipes were fixed, there were still holes in our wall covered with sheer plastic, where I imagined blurry little ghosts hiding. I wanted to see a policeman or detective. I wanted to be asked questions: Did Elizabeth seem depressed? Did she contemplate suicide? Was there anyone who might want to cause her harm? But no one asked these questions, or maybe they just weren’t asked to me.

          Here is what I would have told them: A blue Chevrolet was driving by. A black bird settled in the branches outside my window. Elizabeth died. Our pipes were fixed.