In Simyon Reznik’s 1996 book The Nazification of Russia, he tells a story that took place in Moscow. It was the 50th anniversary celebration of the Russian defeat of the Nazis in the 2nd World War — what they call “The Great Patriotic War.”

The surviving soldiers were quietly assembled to receive an apology — due to the Soviet collapse, they were told, there was no money to provide them the treatment they’d gotten accustomed to during the past 49 years of anniversary parades: no new uniforms, no haircuts and shoeshines, no hot meal, no marching proudly and being cheered on in the streets. Oh, there would still be a celebration: the government spent millions on a new “Victory” statue as the centerpiece for the parade. Bill Clinton was even persuaded to come watch. But, you, old men, old soldiers who actually defeated the Nazis in a war that killed 27 million (!!!) Soviet citizens, we have decided not to include you.

According to Reznik’s story, one of the attendees asked if the government could at least afford to provide them a bucket of paint and a brush, to cover over the SWASTIKAS that had been appearing all over the neighborhood.

How could a country so proud of defeating the Nazis become “Nazified”?

When I was a kid, I was taught by the general Cold War culture in which I lived (vibes?) that communism was the opposite of democracy, and that the Nazis and the Communists were BOTH the bad guys. A kid imagined Hitler, Stalin, and The Devil Himself plotting in back alleys together. I was in 4th grade when I learned that the USSR had been allied with the US AGAINST the Nazis in the 2nd World War. That might’ve been my first experience with cognitive dissonance? My 9-year-old brain made up a story about how they maybe must’ve-used-to-be good guys? But then after the Nazis were defeated they became bad guys? First impressions are lasting. I’m 51 and I’m still reading books and trying to figure out not just what was going on back then, but what’s going on now, what strange system of connections has led us from there to here, and what of culture or nature underlies it all.

Why did my family and I eat at an American diner, just yesterday morning, sitting three feet from a fellow American man with a swastika tattoo so big it had to wrap around the considerable girth of his arm? And if I had leaned over and said to him, “my grandfather lost both of his brothers in that war, fighting against that flag,” would it have meant a single thing to him? Would it have stirred some cognitive dissonance? I don’t know. But re-write the imagined scenario: I’m fairly sure that had I said they’d been killed “by Nazi war crimes,” it would have been a cognitive smoothing, and in his eyes my nose would have grown hooked, and my hands would have curled in avarice, because, more than likely, it’s the war crimes his tattoo is celebrating. An American man sporting a swastika in the US in 2026 probably isn’t proclaiming his opposition to our war-veteran grandfathers — that part is an accident. What he’s really proclaiming — offense to anyone else a cost gladly paid — is that he hates Jews.

Probably not JUST Jews.

Reznik’s book was originally published in Russian with a different title, for Russian readers, and its project, as it seems to me, was to resolve some cognitive dissonance that people in the former Soviet states might’ve been feeling back in 1996. They’d been told their whole lives that the capitalist West was in opposition to the utopian ideals of communism — that capitalism was opposed to equality, fairness, order, reason, and decency. Nazis were the bad guys, representatives of the capitalist West, opposed to all that is good and decent too. Maybe Soviet kids were picturing Hitler, Ronald Reagan, and the The Devil Himself plotting together. But the USSR never lived the utopian ideals it proclaimed, and while the Nazis hated the Communists and the Communists hated the Nazis, they DID have something in common: they both hated the Jews!

This can be confusing depending on where you’re from and what you’ve heard, because according to many anti-Communists, the Communists ARE a bunch of Jews!

But of course, to the ACTUAL Communists, it’s the evil Capitalists who are a bunch of Jews — including the actual historical Nazi leadership, by the way, who were secret Jews.

And the Jews are the reason things went wrong: the communist revolution didn’t go better because Jews. Lenin didn’t do better, because Jews. And the reason Stalin messed up so hard? Turns out, he was a Jew.

But of course the “problem,” simultaneously, alongside Jews being to blame for all those failures, is that the Jews are — this just in — super-crafty and super-connected and running these vast global conspiracies that they execute flawlessly and never get caught at. But also, they’re terrible gutter scum who breed like rats, call the exterminator. It’s confusing until you really step outside of it and look at the big picture.

It’s NOT “let’s look at the Jews and decide they’re bad.”

It IS “let’s decide who’s bad and call them Jews.”

And if a bunch of people walk around happily proclaiming themselves Jews? Well, obviously they were asking for it.

Reznik takes the reader through a multi-generational labyrinth of Soviet Jew-blaming. Truly, every time a group or leader is celebrated, they are True Russians, and every time that same group or leader becomes despised, they are unmasked for the Jews that they were all along.

When Hitler was the symbol of all that’s wicked in the world, he was a Jew. When Stalin fell out of favor, he was a Jew. When the wisdom of the revolutionaries who rose up against the Czar was questioned, the fact that some of them were Jewish made the whole thing a Jewish plot. The Czar, for the record, was wildly anti-Jew. When the Soviet state fell, Hitler was rehabilitated: no longer a Jew.

Before I read Reznik’s book, I would have thought this diagram (spotted on my Notes feed) was a mere provocation —

But while it is oversimplified, suggests Islamists aren’t totalitarians, and leaves out several other -isms that could’ve been included — it also chooses “pro-Palestinian” where “anti-Jew” would have sufficed — it is speaking of a truth here.

Nazis, Communists, and Islamists1 : these are three very different groups, but all three want to radically alter political and population maps with guns, bombs, and propaganda. And all three have a preoccupying concern with killing all the pro-West Democratic multicultural Israelites, first within the lands they control, and then, once the State of Israel is established, through attempts to destroy the Jewish state.

Official policy in the Soviet Union severely limited the opportunities available to Jews, whose ethnicity was marked down permanently on their official state ID papers. So people did whatever they could to not be a Jew, and to make sure that their child wouldn’t be a Jew — or, they would try to leave — escape, really. If their exit was refused, they became a “refusenik,” further branded and persecuted, but if their exit was approved, they usually ended up in the US or Israel. By the time Mikhail Gorbechev could be asked a question about Russian anti-Semitism by a Western reporter in the era of opening-up in the 1980s, his response was that the Soviet population was only .69% Jewish (less than 1%) — and then he outrageously claimed that 10-20% of the people who ran institutions in Russia were Jewish. So obviously, he concluded, the Jews are doing well in Russia! The Russian Nazi groups made great hay of those numbers for some years. The first one was true, the second wasn’t.

In the Soviet system, everything was hierarchical and controlled: if you wanted to be a poet, you had to join the poet’s union. If you wanted to be a mathematician, the mathematician’s union. Whether or not you could study what you wanted and become what you wanted depended on these organizations and hierarchies. Reznik tells the story of several high-ranking members of the Union of mathematicians, one of whom proclaimed at the end of his career that his crowning achievement was keeping Jews out of Math in the USSR. He claimed that no Jew published a paper in Mathematics under his watch. No Jew defended a thesis while he was around. No Jew got a job, not in Math! He was very proud of this. As a result, the US and Israel both have a disproportionate number of former-Soviet Jewish Mathematicians.

Disproportion is on my mind. In the past and also today, people’s attitudes towards Jews are disproportionate. If we hold Jewish people, and Israel, the Jewish state, to the same standards as everyone else, they do not rank as evildoers on the world stage. No society is perfect, but they really just don’t rank. The US has killed far more innocents — and yes, with US taxpayer money! Where are the marchers chanting that “from sea to shining sea, Native America will be free!” ?

Israel’s current right-wing government aside, Israel has mostly been a defense-focused but otherwise peace-seeking multi-ethic democracy with (imperfect) legal medical marijuana, gay marriage, and women’s rights, and the primary country of refuge for an ethnicity (Jew) that’s been reduced by violence to one-fifth-of-one-percent of the world’s population2. Despite this humble stature, Jews are treated, in the propaganda, as super-powerful evildoers on the world stage. It would be laughable if not for so many people believing it, and if that belief didn’t create extreme mortal peril for the few Jews who are left.

Many people railing against the “Epstein Class” are referring to wealthy people who act above the law; but many people who hear the phrase just hear “Jews.” Terrible things have happened in Gaza, but they were not the most terrible things to have happened in the world, nor were they the least excusable — for starters, a real, actual racist genocide is now, currently, happening in Sudan, where Arab Muslims are raiding the villages of Black African Muslims and killing men and even male children for the crime of being Black — the mass rape of women and girls that’s happening there would also qualify as a genocide on its own.

So why such a different standard? It’s not just “availability of media” that makes the difference: the horrors of the past couple decades in Syria have been the best-documented wartime atrocities in human history. When Arabs kill Arabs or Arabs kill Africans, few care. But when Arabs kill Jews, the world lights up with people screeching for more blood! And if the Jews defend themselves, that’s just a psychic burden beyond the ability to carry for many people! It seems there is something triggering in many people’s minds when the soldier carrying the deadly weapon intended to draw blood is a Jew — the image could have been solemn or inspiring or tragic or terrible had the soldier been American, Ukrainian, Russian or Syrian — but a Jewish soldier becomes, instead, offensive?

It seems that a lot of people are thrilled with seeing Jews mass-murdered, but appalled by the idea that the Jews might fight back. The planet Earth is rich with towns where Once There Were Jews, cities with “Jewish Quarters” with no Jews. There may even be a historical synagogue that has one guy looking out for it, or a small community of a few dozen, or none at all. One thing is certain: there are not enough living Jews to fill the empty synagogues that rot in Jew-free cities around the world.

This is part of the exterior of the synagogue of the Italian city of Trieste — I find its geometry entrancingly beautiful.

This synagogue is still functioning! Trieste has a population of over 600 Jews! Before the Second World War, the Jewish population of Trieste was over 6000. The city where I will be living for the coming year, Iași, in Romania, once had a population of over 40,000 Jews. You may have read about the Iași pogrom? A third of them were murdered, over just two days. Imagine surviving that and carrying those memory, those nightmares, with you, wherever you flee to, for the rest of your life. It’s been more than 80 years. In Iași, today, there are a few hundred Jews.

In total numbers, there are still, today, all these years after the Holocaust, fewer Jews alive than there were prior to the Second World War. Do those who believe in defending minorities really think that if you collect one of the world’s tiniest most murdered minorities into a single location they transform into a privileged majority unworthy of defense?

Do those who see Israel as a “settler colonial” state really not understand the difference between an empire’s overseas installations and the decimated remnants of a nearly-destroyed race gathered as refugees in the land of their ancestors?

Well of course they understand, that’s clear, because they claim they want to apply that exact logic to the Palestinians, which is fair enough, but why not for the Jews? Is there something about being Jewish that makes that same logic not apply? If “Palestine” is supposed to be “for Palestinians” why isn’t “Judea” supposed to be “for Jews”? The answer seems to be “because they’re Jews.”

I’m going to take a page from Anthony Kwame Appiah and refer here to the history of the Cagots. The Cagots were a persecuted minority in parts of Spain and France. For hundreds of years, outsiders observed that they could not tell the Cagots apart from their non-Cagot neighbors. They spoke the same language, in the same way, worshipped at the same churches, albeit in a separate area, and they had to enter through a separate door, be baptized in a separate fount, and receive communion from the end of a long spoon.

During some periods, they were forced to wear clothing that identified them as Cagots — an insignia shaped like a webbed waterfowl foot on their chests, or coats trimmed in a particular color. But most of the time these outward markings were not necessary, because the people of the region knew who was a Cagot and who was not. The Cagots all had to live in a segregated suburb outside of the city. If you were born a Cagot, a Cagot you were. They were limited in the trades they were allowed to pursue — limited to the lowest physical labor. All of this should sound familiar, because this is what human discrimination looks like everywhere.

But the point of the story of the Cagots is that whatever is at the root of this distinction and all the oppression it caused is a mystery, if it exists at all. Hundreds of years ago people were making wild guesses at why this group was despised, and they still are today.

If we are to learn anything from the story of the Cagots, I don’t think it will be because we’ve figured out what original distinction lay at the root of the discrimination. If we learn from the story of the Cagots, it will be because we realize that humans don’t need a real difference to hold themselves above another group, or to create a group just to lower its status and thereby raise their own. They just need, psychologically, to “other” someone and feel superior to them — I think they just need it to feel okay in the world.

To this day, there are people in France and Spain who know they come from Cagot families and they do not talk about it. It’s not fun for them, and they are not available for interviews. They just want everyone to forget about it so they can blend in with the rest of France or Spain and live their lives. In this respect, many Jews are like the Cagots of the world, disappearing in Soviet society by marrying out and getting new ethnicities for their children’s state ID papers until they are less than 1% of the population, disappearing in American society by changing their last names and celebrating Christmas. If you trace back my lineage you’ll find Jews who sent their kids to Catholic school, then became Jehovah’s Witnesses, and then became nothing. I’m not Jewish because my ancestors made sure I wouldn’t be.

But how strange and sad is that, in a world that supposedly celebrates diversity? Clearly all diversity is not equal in the eyes of the celebrants. Some, in fact, is not worthy of celebration at all. I would argue that no human is more indigenous than another, and no human is less a refugee than another. As I have said before, we are all the survivors’ children, and just as our existence is evidence of an unbroken chain of life reaching back to the beginning of time, our existence is also a testament to endurance in the face of hardship. Everyone has a king for an ancestor; one king and one hundred paupers. Everyone had a murderer, a rapist, and a sadist for an ancestor, and for each of these one hundred generous, patient, gentle spirits. But we couldn’t exist without all of them. Each of us comes from some bad, but we persist because there is enough good. We owe it to the future not to expect, or accept, simple answers to complex questions. We owe it to ourselves to ask hard questions of our own hearts.

2

If you are interested in comparison: there are four times as many Persians, at .08% of the global population, while 5% of the world’s population is Arab (25 times as many Arabs as Jews), and 25% of the world population is Muslim (that’s 125 times more Muslims than Jews).

To entertain arguments about “genocide,” you would have to track the actual population numbers and see whose populations have grown and whose have shrunk.

I knew before I left that everything there would be new to me, so I wanted to take it slow. My ideal concept of a first visit in a new country is to find a neighborhood where people work for a living and to try to “blend in” for a while. Get the rhythms of how people live. I was aware that, in Japan, European-looking people can’t exactly “blend in,” but that lots of non-Japanese live in Tokyo, and so you could try.

All this is theoretical.

On the morning of our departure I needed to heft six 50-pound bags of chicken feed out of the back of my van so we could put our suitcases in, and I did not do so wisely. I wore the wrong shoes, and instead of taking the time to turn the van around so it backed up to the gate, I opted to just walk each bag a little farther. Since the ground near the gate is packed solid and the gravel farther down the drive is loose, this was a doubly stupid decision, and I should just cut to the point here and say that I rolled my foot in the gravel with 50 pounds of weight on my shoulder.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, a typhoon was hitting Tokyo! This resulted in our flight being delayed, and then, because of the legal obscura regulating the hours that pilots are allowed to fly (and Delta’s inexcusable lack-of-backup), our flight was canceled — but not until my mom, my kids, and I were already in Detroit. So then my hurt foot participated in a mad scramble for alternate flights while still hefting too-heavy bags — now full of clothes and books and sketchpads instead of chicken feed, but still, none of this was “good.” Did a child briefly cry? I dare say yes. Did I? Of course not, no. The kids kept busy and I found us another way to get there.

The best we could do was a flight to Seattle, an overnight in a hotel, and then a morning flight to Tokyo. We followed the plan. But when I woke up in Seattle I couldn’t move my feet. I looked at them and could only say “oh no” because the tops of both of my feet looked like bruised swollen grapefruits. Just: OH NO. The right one was injured from rolling it on the gravel drive under a bag of feed, the left one was injured from having to make up for the right one. I was convinced that several hours in a plane seat would set me right, tho, so I hobbled along and we got on our way. We bought some fresh clothes at the airport, and got a halfway decent meal there, too, and we did both things within sight of our departure gate, because I could hardly walk. Delta paid for all of it, and we were almost happy with Delta until we found out the checked bags they’d SWORN would get to Tokyo ahead of us were actually a day behind. But honestly, I could barely concern myself with that.

Pain, some anthropologists say, helps sear experiences into memory, and this is why many rites of passage require scarification, genital cutting, beatings, even terror of death. A baby might get a bris, and a fraternity pledge might get a hazing, the idea being that an experience cannot be shrugged off in the presence of pain. If there’s truth to this then I will possess vivid memories of Tokyo for the rest of my days, for I arrived there like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid — every step was nearly-unbearable anguish, like walking on knives — and I also, like the mermaid, arrived animated by the desire to learn and explore! And with a VERY brief timeline!

Unlike HCA’s little mermaid, I was not, however, mute: I’d learned a few phrases in Japanese, and I also found that many people we encountered (like the Chinese taxi driver who picked us up at the airport) were eager to try their English with us. But we possessed enough Japanese to be polite to those we encountered, and to buy some sandwiches from a local bakery and, dare I say, even be found somewhat charming — or at least amusing? — by the ladies who worked there.

Delta was reimbursing us for more clothes because of our missing bags, and in hindsight we should have gone fancy-shopping and gotten something nice. We all had a change of clothes in our carry ons, but we’d already used those when we stopped in Seattle. My husband was working in Kyoto when we landed, and was originally scheduled to meet up with me, our kids, and my mom after we’d been in Tokyo for two days, but even HE ended up getting to us before our bags did — which was good, because he could help move them into the rental house! :)

At this point I can only say if you were hoping for tales of zen gardens and exquisite sushi — well, actually, we did experience a zen garden and eat a lot of delicious sushi rice! But also Tokyo was not a dream, it was a place, and I was real there, and I had a body, and that body failed in a rather shattering way, and I can’t quite separate the agony from the delight, nor would I want to. At the same time I explored a new-to-me country that I was curious about, I also had to figure out how to walk. And roll!

I was a woman in a wheelchair.

For the three weeks before we left for Tokyo, I was something close to a single parent. I was responsible for everything: the household, the kids, our feeding, everyone’s well-being. This was most intense on the day that we hit another car in traffic and I ended up fleeing the scene because the guy in the other car looked terrifying and I was responsible for the safety of my two children and my mother.

When we got to Tokyo, I was not helpless, but it was clear I could no longer do it all. Not that I ever could REALLY do it all — but until I was hurt, I could pretend. Once I was hurt, pretending was over. My first time sitting in a wheelchair was at DisneySea. We went to Tokyo with children, but DisneySea was for me. I’m from Florida and I’ve been to Disney World more times than I can count. I know where everything is, and nothing is new until they open a new ride. But DisneySea was COMPLETELY new. And curiously I found myself half everyone else’s height, and rolling along, dazzled by the newness of it all. It was like I had been transformed into a child: slightly helpless, smaller, naive, amazed. People were both a little extra kind and also a little extra wary of me.

For me, the highlight of DisneySea was the Tower of Terror. Only Tesla and I went: Tesla is my thrill-ride buddy. The others aren’t into it.

We’ve been on the Tower of Terror in Florida, and in my opinion, it is not that terrifying. It’s based on The Twilight Zone and it’s kinda kitschy. The Tower at DisneySea is completely different — and there’s something about the whole ride being in a language you do not really understand that makes it FAR MORE terrifying. We were so scared Tesla was repeating “it’s just a ride, it’s just a ride” to get herself through the doors. It looks different, it feels different, and yes, it RUNS different. Less “woo” and more “oh no.” THREE PEOPLE who were in our group noped out before we could get strapped into the lift! And here’s a fun fact: if three people nope out of your elevator, you end up with three empty seats labeled 666.

DisneySea charged us the equivalent of about $3 to rent a wheelchair for the day, by the way. The next day we went to the “Harry Potter Studio Tour,” which is a vast, interactive museum of the props, sets, and technologies they used to make all the Harry Potter movies. I’m actually not a fan — I’ve never even seen all the movies. But this was one of the most astonishing places I’ve ever visited. Because they made these movies over such a long period of time, these sets were really built, and built to last. Hagrid’s house is actually outside in the elements, sturdy and weatherproof. The great dining hall with the floating candles really is a great hall full of floating candles! And if you’re in a wheelchair, which this place actually provides completely free of cost, by the way, it’s like you can steady-cam your way through some of the sets!

This Harry Potter Studio Tour was not something any of us had heard of, before we went to Tokyo. It just happened to be near the apartment we were renting. So we figured, why not? Let’s check it out! We had NO IDEA it would be so vast, so impressive, and so amazing.

But yes, yes, these are the touristy things you do if you have kids. (Um, we were tourists, and we have kids, so, like, hey! There you go!)

But we also did some off the path things… we paid a visit the US Army base outside of Tokyo, where they have a sports bar like you’d find in the USA, but with REALLY nice bathrooms like you find in Japan (best of both worlds?)

We went there to visit a friend of my mom, who is an art teacher at the base’s high school. She’s been there for eight years and my mom sees her every summer when she comes home to the US for her summer vacation — this is the first time my mom got to visit her, see where she lives, where she teaches, what life on a US Army base in Japan is like, and all that!

And we did some mandane Japan stuff, like… we went shopping at a HobbyOff!

We went to HappyDaruma and each painted our own darumas in a gorgeous tatami room overlooking a sacred zen garden.

We toured the Buddhist gardens and shinto shrines.

And we just kind of puttered around the neighborhood we stayed in, Nogata, enjoying the people and the energy of the town.

Buying things from vending machines, petting dogs!

We ate a couple breakfasts at a basic little place a block or so away, where they served traditional Japanese breakfast: rice, fish, soup, seaweed and beans. I learned that I REALLY like a Japanese breakfast! (My mom liked it too but the others ate pancakes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I like it even more when it’s served by a super-kawaii cat-faced serving robot!

And of course everywhere we went I snapped pictures of gorgeous flowers that were blooming everywhere when we were there!

We did a lot more — a lot more than you’d think for people who are only in Tokyo a week and are committed to taking ‘em easy AND have a member of their party with injured feet! For example we went to Tokyo Pride…

(Okay, I’ll admit I had to tap out of this one early because there was nowhere to sit and my ankles were on FIRE — but we stayed long enough to have some fun! :)

But probably my favorite picture from Tokyo was this one. It’s just a picture of a bus stop. And next to the bus stop there’s a bunch of umbrellas. People leave the umbrellas so the next person waiting for the bus doesn’t have to stand in the rain. This was my feeling about Tokyo in a nutshell: people were very low-key and as a matter-of-course “being thoughtful.”

We went to DAWN robot avatar cafe whose human employees are all home-bound for some reason or another. You get a drink and/or snack and you chat with someone via tablet who can control an adorable little robot in an extremely cute outfit. It’s kind of just a very expensive 30-minute conversation with someone via zoom, but the robots gesture and emote, and there are also larger robots that bring your order, and it’s an interesting experience that also helps home-bound people be fuller participants in society.

On our last day, we visited the Tokyo-Edo museum, an astonishing journey through the history of this city, with reproductions of whole buildings, artwork, weapons, sculptures, vehicles, books, just everything you can imagine. I can’t do it justice with pictures so I won’t try to. I’ll just give you two photos I really like for my own reasons:

After the museum, our group split up: my mom and Brian, who are avid crocheters, went to find some Japanese yarn, while the kids and I visited an aquatic art exhibit, essentially the world’s fanciest aquarium, full of nothing but goldfish.

I know what you’re thinking: is that inhumane? Well, I didn’t see a single goldfish that looked ill, or a single one that was dead — and I can’t say that about ANY pet store I’ve ever been in, so I’d say these fish were being treated relatively well.

And the experience WAS kind of magical. Very meditative and atmospheric and…soothing? It was neat.

And on that note, we concluded our final day in Tokyo, packed our belongings, and got one last good night’s sleep before our long journey home. I learned that Tokyo is a vast and busy city full of kind and thoughtful people. I learned that whether your visit is 1 week, like my mom and my kids and me, or 1 MONTH, like my husband, you aren’t going to see it all — there’s too much. So just go. I learned that onigiri is life and robots can turn a restaurant into a party. And I learned that there’s more than one way to separate garbage, and one of those ways depends on whether or not it can be set on FIRE.

It was a wonderful first visit to Tokyo. I’m very much looking forward to visiting again!

But by the time I got to the side door my kids were running up behind me, “SHE’S ALIVE!” and one my kids was cuddling a barely-alive baby squirrel.

I’d never held a squirrel before, I’d never even SEEN someone hold a squirrel before, so this was all kind of wild, but I looked up “what do you do if you find a baby squirrel” on the internet and we basically followed the instructions: we put her near the tree she’d apparently fallen out of (a 40-foot oak that’s the tallest tree on Sherman Hill) but close enough to the front window that we could keep an eye on her. Hours passed, and no mama squirrel showed up to save her. Then my kiddo noticed that she was dragging a leg. “Oh no,” I said, “if she’s injured that changes everything — the mama squirrel won’t come back for her”

So I ended up reading a long list of phone numbers of certified wildlife rescuers off a PDF on the website for Iowa’s department of natural resources, starting in Des Moines and working my way out, but it was a Friday night and no one was answering the phone. I left a LOT of messages before someone finally answered, but she was ready! She sounded almost as breathless as I was — and ready to spring into action! She was an hour from Des Moines, so she offered to meet me halfway. She would try to save the baby squirrel!

My kiddo and I rushed to the meetup point, a gas station outside Ames. The squirrel — my kid named her “Indiana” — was NOT doing well. We were scared she could drop dead at any second. But our savior was this woman right here:

We got VERY lucky with that phone call! And so did this little squirrel!

Our hero told us that Indie Anna (she changed the spelling and we LOVE it) was very close to death when we arrived with her. She was starved and dehydrated and the reason she’d been dragging a leg was not that she was injured, it was that her body was starting to shut down anything that wasn’t a vital organ. Her climbing around in those videos was desperation to find food — her mother’s teat, preferably.

Instead, Indie Anna was put on squirrel-pedialyte and then that was mixed with a little squirrel-formula. Here’s her finally at peace, no longer ravaged by thirst and hunger:

Because of the starvation, Indie Anna was a little developmentally behind — her eyes still closed. When she finally opened them, she discovered a world very different from a ball of sticks in a tall tree!

The squirrels that Squirrel Garden rehabs get re-released into nature. So Indie Anna will someday be back among the oaks. My kiddo actually asked if she could be re-released into our yard. Personally, I’d like to see her somewhere safer. People run over squirrels in this neighborhood. Somewhere with fewer cars would be nice. But all of that is a worry for tomorrow: for today, Indie Anna is alive and well and thriving.

Mammals looking out for mammals, that’s what I like to see! =)

She’s even been immortalized in a coloring page: Indie Anna! Who upon being abandoned, braved a 40 foot drop and risked death at the smack of hard pavement on the off chance that some random animal might find her and, instead of eating her, save her!

Here’s the most recent video of Indie Anna, in her newest, big-girl cage!

You can follow the adventures of Squirrel Garden on their blog!

It was a Dodge RAM, and it was very nice, and there was lots of room for the kids in the back seat. I remember orienting myself to the rental at the airport lot, and thinking, I’m not sure about this, only because I was so HIGH — and yes it was clear where the edges of the vehicle were, but the whole thing was BIG. I was just suddenly a very big presence in the room, the room being the parking garage for rental cars at the Fort Lauderdale airport, a place I’d been dozens of times before, but suddenly it looked different, like it was a little mouse maze and I was a mouse driving an elephant

It was surprisingly easy to drive once I started moving, but when I pulled up to the exit gates, instead of looking up at a rental car employee as usual, I was looking DOWN. Strange! Still, as disorienting as all this was, by the time I was on I-595, I was like, hey, I could get used to this! The visibility was outstanding. I could see what all the other cars were doing. I did actually feel “safer”! And the vehicle had a LOT of power — I mean a LOT! If I wanted to accelerate us into a new situation, it felt almost effortless.

And yet by the time I returned that rental a week later to head home, I was confident that I’d never rent one again. Not because I’d discovered anything wrong with the vehicle — I didn’t — but because I’d discovered something wrong with ME. Driving that car made me think different and feel different on the road. Succinctly put: I didn’t like who I’d become when I was driving it.

Ordinarily I drive a minivan. Yep, I’m a minivan mom. Minivans are of average height, and the visibility is good-enough and not by any means god-like. You have a lot of wall-and-door-blocked distance between you and the back of the vehicle in particular, and there’s usually kids and groceries and things back there. When I’m changing lanes I have to depend on the little orange light on the side-view mirror to know when it’s safe to move, because the blind spot is significant. When a car’s in the blind spot, the orange light is on. When it’s clear to go, the light goes off. Generally speaking, if I’m trying to squeeze into a tight merge, I signal, and then watch that light for when it goes off. When it goes off, I accelerate into the opening with a close eye on the car in front of me. This usually works just great, not just in Iowa but in Florida too.

But last week, when I did this, the van shook like we were in an earthquake. We’d been hit! I looked in my rearview mirror and saw nothing but DODGE, the giant logo of the giant truck, and a bit above and behind that, an angry face with a long bushy beard and dark sunglasses

It’s important, since I just wrote “we’d been hit,” that I cut forward about an hour to a conversation with a very nice police officer on the front porch of my house:

“YOU hit HIM,” the policeman says.

“I…? What?”

“YOU hit HIM. He had a dash cam. I saw the video. YOU hit HIM.”

“I — okay, I’m just a little stunned, I guess. Because from my perspective…”

“You pulled into HIS lane, and YOU hit HIM.”

The very same police officer, tho he was obliged to cite me for both my lane-change and for leaving the scene of an accident, expressed some sympathy for why I did leave — he described the guy as a “big biker” type who was “very angry, tho he’d calmed a bit by the time I left him.” The policeman told me next time I need to call 911 while circling the block if I don’t feel safe pulling over. So if this happens again, and I hope it doesn’t, that is what I will do.

The other driver, the policeman said, did originally insist that I hadn’t signaled, BUT the dash cam (as an aside - who owns/uses a dash cam and why? Am I just out of touch or is it really weird to even have this?), yes, the dash cam proved that I had signaled. (Yay?) The policeman told me he asked the other driver, “couldn’t you have let her in?” And he said the guy replied, “yeah, I guess I could have,” but the bottom line is that in a merging situation, the current possessor of the lane owns it, and the person merging into it has no rights to move into it.

“This is Iowa,” the kind policeman said. “We’re nice here. I’D have let you in. But the law doesn’t let me enforce being nice.”

I admit now I kinda want to see that dash cam video, because I suspect that in it you might be able to see my side-mirror light, and that it would show that the little orange light went off, and then I accelerated into the merge, but that the POV perspective of the camera had also accelerated forward — to block me. I suspect that when the light went off and I shifted my attention to the car in front to make sure I fit on that end, the other guy behind me was making SURE I wouldn’t fit on the back end.

I mean, like I said, I’ve driven a Dodge RAM. The visibility is outstanding. And the *acceleration* power is truly remarkable. It’s a hell of a truck.

But this brings me back to why, when I returned it, I knew I’d never rent one again. Because driving it changed how I thought. Being ABOVE everyone else and MORE POWERFUL than everyone else changes you, on the inside. Even in South Florida, where the roads are crowded and there are plenty of other people driving big trucks, I nonetheless usually felt sort of “alone” up there. If I pulled up at a red light and another giant truck happened to pull right beside me, it was almost startling — like, oh! A fellow human! You can see me! Um. This is awkward…

I learned long ago in life that the best way to handle a situation like this is to just accept responsibility for the things you did wrong. And that means accept the consequences. So I have tickets to pay. I didn’t feel safe pulling over near that scary looking person (who it SEEMED to me had just hit my car for no reason), so I drove to a police station. He followed me for a while, but when he stopped following me, I was soaked in fear-sweats and adrenaline and just wanted to go home. I drove home and called the police from there. They scolded me for leaving — the very nice but no-nonsense dispatcher said, “you are not obligated to engage with the other driver in any way, but you must stop and engage with the police.”

This is good info, and I’m glad I know it now, and it will affect how I act if I’m unfortunate enough to end up in a situation like this again. But the reality is that if the angry fellow driver is “trying to engage with you” that can be a really terrifying and potentially dangerous situation. Especially if you have your mom and your kids in the car and you were just coming home from a nice lunch at Panera Bread where you chatted about your upcoming trip to Japan, and you had absolutely no thoughts of rage or road-warrior-ing in your head whatsoever when it happened, and then you look in your rear view mirror to see what is sometimes affectionately called a “murder truck” with a angry-man face hovering above it, you might just want to run for your life.

When you learn afterwards that it was your fault, it’s quite a surprise. Because you WERE in the wrong, even if you were being orderly and “nice” about the merge, whereas the other person was NOT wrong, even if they were being, in the merge-situation, to quote the Dude, “an asshole.”

But it’s not illegal to be an asshole.

And I think this is the problem with being “elite” — whether you’re on a high horse, a high truck, a private jet, an expensive club, so on and so forth. You’re in rarified air, and the other humans around you aren’t visible as people, they just seem like objects that move around you, obstacles or irritants maybe, or maybe “problems to be solved.” And once you think like that, you’re an asshole. No matter how diligently you critique others’ actions, no matter how much dash-cam evidence you have, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not about being wrong or right, it’s about being an asshole or being nice.

Don’t be an asshole.

Love,

PS: I’m in Japan, and just moving through Tokyo and interacting with people here has been a transformative experience. I will write more about this soon.

I’m about to get spicy.

Because they learned this phrase from popular culture, where it apparently just meant “grade inflation,” I would have to explain to them that, as A-grubbers, the LAST thing they would want is a teacher who grades on a curve, which should mean numerical grades are adjusted to fit a bell curve in which roughly 50% of the students are assigned a “C” and around 15% must receive a D or B, leaving something like 10% to receive an A and 10% shafted with F’s.

There are theoretical ways of looking at this where you might decide this is a good thing to do, but to an A-grubber, the idea that A’s would become a “limited resource” — that there are just a few A’s to be had — and that they will have to COMPETE for one, against others like themselves? That is a nightmare indeed!

When I was an undergrad I majored in the sciences before switching to Writing, and I had a magnificent Organic Chemistry professor named Dr. Cyril Parkanyi, who DID actually grade on a True Curve and it DID actually benefit most students, but only because he was giving tests in which the median number of actual correct answers given would hover around 50%. I will take a moment to brag that I never got below 92% correct on a test in organic chemistry. I frickin LOVED that subject, and I loved that professor. He would show up in black socks and Birkenstocks and casually teach us, with a musical accent that had waltzed straight in from Prague, his lectures frequently punctuated by the phrase “as you know,” which, bless him, most of us did not!, how to make hard drugs in the lab (maybe just to see if everyone was paying attention?) and then erase the chalkboard before any laggards could copy it down. Ah, the days before smart phones! Don’t believe the hype: things really were better back then. More interesting things were prone to happen!

So A-grubbers. They’re a thing. Sometimes they have good reasons, like if their GPA falls below a certain number they no longer receive a scholarship without which they cannot afford college at all. That’s a good reason! Often they just weep and say, “but I’ve never gotten a B in my life!” In any case, grade-grubbing warps the mind — I recently had a normally very excellent student who’d become overwhelmed and fallen behind on things look me square in the eyes and ask me what was “the bare minimum” she could do to earn an A for the course. While I tried to swerve the conversation back into better territory, it bothered me for a WEEK. “The bare minimum to get an A” is a statement I would call “paradoxical” at best.

At the same time, I am aware that grades do not REALLY mean anything. Grades are not your worth. Grades are not moral. A person could have a higher GPA because they are a good-looking star athlete and certain girls in the class are willing to do all their work just to be seen TALKING to them. Another person could have a lower GPA because in addition to college they work full time at a hospice center and also volunteer to counsel homeless people at their church. Neither of those examples are made up, by the way. At the same time you could have two students, both doing all their work faithfully and honestly, and one gets A’s and the other gets C’s, the A-getter is an idiot who stumbles through life making enemies and the C-getter becomes a cornerstone of human society, and this result would surprise no one.

I learned to teach college classes as part of graduate school. They admitted a bunch of graduate students in English and, in exchange for tuition, most of us taught two “freshman composition” courses. I literally taught my way to an MFA! One of the activities when they’re teaching you to teach is called “grade norming” — a large group of people all read the same example student essay (usually a real specimen), and everyone decides what grade they would give it. Then there’s a conversation where people explain why they gave it the grades that they did. There is always a spread of grades. The goal is to get everyone closer to the same page, to get the easy graders and the harsh graders to realize that they are outliers, so they might moderate their judgments towards the middle. But the effect is to make everyone realize that, dude, this is REALLY subjective.

One of the students in the class a year before me had a breakdown when given their first stack of student essays to grade. Like so bad, they had to leave and get treatment. Other grad students had to grade their class’s first assignment at the end of the semester, and when this person returned to grad school, they were not allowed to teach anymore, but I did get to know this person and thought they were really nice and smart and interesting. It was also very clear why this person had broken down in the face of doing something so arbitrary as assigning grades: because this person had been a philosophy major trained to look at things very logically and with precision. AND they had been trained by upbringing to believe that grades actually MEANT something. It’s like believing in Santa one day and the next being handed the hat and beard and a sack of candy canes and coal — these are the children you must judge, naughty or nice?

I did once have a cousin tell me that when I gave students an F I was “ruining their lives” — no one’s life is ruined by an F, I told him, but he was not convinced. I explained that at the university I taught at, an F was just an opportunity to redo the class, because if you earned a better grade the next time around, they would REPLACE the F with the new grade. A mulligan!! But it seemed to him I was still ruining lives. I think to him the emotional impact of failure would be so devastating that the idea that you’d go back and do it over didn’t sound like an opportunity, it sounded like a nightmare.

Grades are one of those things like MONEY or RACE or GENDER — they are social inventions of human interaction — tied to things we find meaningful, but fundamentally abstractions invented by and agreed upon BY an abstraction (“society”).

So one is tempted to dismiss all of them as “a game” and say they are “not real” or are “performative” — but nonetheless they have a real effect on your life. Money IS a game, but it’s a game that can starve you or leave you without needed medical care. Race IS largely invented, but others’ perception of yours could affect whether people will be nice to you, or even talk to you. Gender IS a performance, but how you perform it in the eyes of others WILL determine whether you’re seen as a leader or a loser, a queen or a crone. None of these things are fair, moral, just, right, or logical, they simply ARE. And that’s how it is with grades. Grades are fiction — fiction that affects your life.

I think it’s really interesting that Harvard has decided to limit the number of A’s. If you’re going to perform a cruel experiment on a bunch of young people, by all means make it the most privileged and entitled young people you can find!!

The stated goal is to make HIGH grades more meaningful by making them more scarce — but this also means making students compete for them among themselves. Imagine if a country imposed a maximum number of super-rich. Like there can only be 10 people in the country in the top 1%. Anyone who fails to outcompete the top ten gets a tax penalty that shunts them well down the scale. Imagine if a municipality limited the number of marriage licenses: we can handle 18 weddings a month around here, no more. If you don’t make the cut, you’ll have to apply next month. I’m just saying, imagine what it does to people’s brains when the things they need to feel successful are arbitrarily limited.

We know what happens when the limits aren’t arbitrary: there’s only so much gold on the planet earth, but the demand for gold will vary by the number of humans alive and their industrial and decorative needs. You can’t make more gold, and so the tragedy of gold is that if you increase demand enough, it will rapidly become “smart business” to incinerate six million people for their wedding bands and the gold fillings in their teeth.

So we can’t increase the amount of gold, but we can unhinge our monetary systems from the amount of it available, and we can recycle it, find alternate mechanical processes so it is required less by industry (and dentistry), and make tungsten wedding bands a hip new thing. Enough people get murdered, you do what you gotta do.

The Harvard experiment is like deciding to tie a currency back to gold just because you want that currency to MEAN something — Harvard is making it so that A’s are now a limited resource. Suddenly there’s a kind of logic in getting the smartest guy in your seminar plastered the night before the test. You need to take that MFer OUT — incinerate him so you can get the A he’s got buried in his guts.

“Getting a guy plastered” is the least horrifying example I can think of. But there are lots of ways of undermining a fellow student. You could just socially shun them for being too smart — NERD! Ostracism and low self esteem lowers academic performance. You could sexually assault them — that tends to fuck up people’s GPA! Often they drop out of college completely! You could drug them — did you read about the guy in France who was sneaking diuretics into women’s drinks while he interviewed them for jobs? Some of his victims were so humiliated they gave up on their careers! There are other options: you could just turn off their alarms so they wake up late. You could bully them online, try to make them feel unloved and worthless. You could spread rumors to create havoc in their personal lives. Or you could wipe your ass with their toothbrush to get them sick… I’m not trying to give anyone ideas here, I’m just pointing out that if you have a WHOLE CAMPUS of highly ambitious young people who have never gotten a B in their lives and you tell them that only 20% +4 students in the course can possibly earn an “A,” they will quickly look around them, do the math, and figure out who “the problem” is.

So is grade inflation really a problem?

Or is the problem that grades are so arbitrary?

Or is the problem that grades are a fiction but nonetheless affect people’s real lives?

Or is the problem that there are limited “elite opportunities” — eg spots at Harvard — and people have to compete to get them?

Or is the problem that humans can be greedy and cruel and will hurt others to get what they want — and we amp up that sad fact of biology when we have conditions of scarcity?

“The problem” can be shifted from place to place, and I’m sure as soon as the 2nd student dies because they were seen as a threat to another student’s A, Harvard will repeal the policy, but in the meantime it’s worth thinking about how dumb the whole system is.

There are two sides of teaching, as we know it: the mentoring side, and the gatekeeping side. We expect the same person to perform both roles. The professor attempts to cultivate learning in students, then the professor assesses the students to see if the garden has produced. Into this difficult balance, Harvard has introduced a new wrinkle: only the top 20% +4 cuts get to go to market with “choice” and “prime” slapped on their package. The rest fear they will be dog food.

Those of us on the outside looking in know that no one who goes to Harvard will be dog food — they’ll be fine. But THEY do not know that. They live in fear of slipping a notch lower than their nearest peer, and the fact that they’re still in the elite compared to us outsiders doesn’t assuage them one bit.

I do not and have never believed that Harvard students get a better education than students at other, less renowned colleges and universities. What they get is the name-brand endorsement and the benefits of connections with so many others who have the same gold seal. The longer I’ve taught, and it’s been 25 years now, holy moly, the more I’ve learned that the hardest most challenging education, with the biggest effects on a person’s understanding and ability, happens in the cracks and corners, among students who’ve transferred three times, students whose educations were interrupted by giving birth, students who went to war, students with full time jobs who care for elderly relatives — students who have learned and grown despite their guide being an overworked, underpaid, little-respected and little-connected community college professor — these are the people who have the most transformative experiences.

People whose parents went to Harvard, and who’ve always been expected to go to Harvard, who then GET to go to Harvard — well, for them, going to Harvard doesn’t mean much, does it? It’s like, the bare minimum, and it’s also like getting an A. A’s are baseline. It’s paradoxical when those two ideas are crushed together, but for many people that is their reality. And when people who have always gotten what they wanted don’t get what they wanted, sometimes they explode.

I think there’s every reason in the world for people who actually care about learning, growth, thinking, wisdom, virtue — all the things a college education can cultivate that don’t have to do with status and careerism — to avoid elite universities, and not just Harvard, like the plague. Whether for yourself or your child or grandchild, if you’re in a college-deciding place in your life, find that haven between the cracks and around the corner, the school people choose because it’s a place of learning, not “advancement.” And don’t give a crap about grades. Give all your craps about learning, and the grades will take care of themselves. My heart breaks with pity for anyone who wastes their youth worrying the difference between 92 and 93 percent. Life is so much bigger and better than that.

CocoRosie’s song “Japan” repeats in the chorus that “everybody wants to go to Japan” — and in the decade I’ve had this song on my playlists, when it’s come on, I’ve been like, “yep, that tracks.” But the song, which you may or may not find offensive, is about (if I may get all lit-crit interpretive on you) how wanting is a fool’s paradise, but the only paradise there is is for fools!

WELL MY THOUGHTS ON JAPAN GOT MORE SPECIFIC and more… real? when my husband’s employer asked him to work in Japan for 3 weeks. Not only was I thrilled for him and his new adventure, I was inspired to hop on, like a baby alligator on a turtle’s back! Hey, hubs, if YOU’RE going to Japan for three weeks, surely the kids and I should go visit you for at least ONE of them? :D We decided in the end that it would be better to tack our one week visit on the END of his work obligation — so he’ll actually be in Japan 4 weeks, and the last week will be a family visit.

All of a sudden I realized I would be a guest in a country that I knew nothing about!! I needed to learn phrases! Customs! Cultural quirks! Stat!

Culture, however, is more than just a list of etiquette rules. Sumimasen and Arigatō gozaimasu are important, the DOs and DON’Ts are important, but I wanted to have a sense of Japanese culture, the mindset, the worldview, the base reality — and not just of ancient Japanese culture, but of the world of today. So I started googling for recent bestselling novels in Japan that have been translated into English.

That is how I found STRANGE PICTURES.

The author of this novel is UKETSU, a mysterious (and surrealist?) YouTuber who wears a creepy mask and uses voice distortion to make himself sound like a little girl.

I suppose that should be enough to warn you that the book will be weird. But I doubt that it prepares you enough.

OH and let me make clear that — probably more so than any other book I’ve reviewed here — I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR EVERYONE. Young and old, edgy and conventional, big time readers and hardly-ever readers — I have already given or recommended this book to all of them and ALL of them have enjoyed it. The young and the “hardly ever readers” in particular have gushed about how once they started the first page they COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN.

In part, the book walks you thru a series of puzzles — pictures, strange ones — that were ostensibly left online, like little bits of informational residue abandoned on old blog. The story then takes you into terror and darkness.

It’s psychologically thrilling, but there is only ONE scene I would characterize as “horror” — a scene in which a person investigating a murder is murdered in the exact mysterious way that they had, up to that moment, been unable to figure out — and so revelation comes only with the nightmare of it being repeated on yourself.

But I get ahead of myself — it’s the puzzles that draw you in. It’s the questions that those puzzles raise. It’s the characters who are encountering the evidence and trying to make sense of it. Sometimes they’re very wrong, sometimes they make wild guesses that seem plausible and then a few chapters later come back to explain to you why you should have seen right thru their version of events!

It’s a book about making sense of strange stuff that doesn’t seem to add up — and about how the most ordinary surfaces, the most “conventional appearances,” can disguise primal acts of vicious rage and cruelty — and shows how the origins of that rage and cruelty are… the most ordinary surfaces, conventional affect.

The human mind is drawn to pattern-seeking and puzzle-solving, especially when it comes to patterns about how people behave and what their behavior means. And so this book is irresistible.

But then there’s more: STRANGE PICTURES is followed by a sequel, STRANGE HOUSES. And it too is followed by a sequel, STRANGE BUILDINGS.

STRANGE PICTURES stands alone and is irresistibly strange and marvelous — I recommend it, as I said, to literally EVERYONE.

But book #2, STRANGE HOUSES, is (dare I say it), TOO STRANGE? It wanders into theories so improbable-seeming that I could hardly accept it. But then I remembered what had prompted me to look for these books in the first place: I wanted to learn about Japanese culture. And so I started to think about the second book in terms of, what would my cultural assumptions have to be for this story to believable?

That made me think about how Japanese people regard the past, and family, and the respect granted elders, and the duty expected of children, and the Shinto-Buddhist realm of magic and superstition and how it weaves its way into a people’s whole way of life. While reading the 2nd book, I remembered what I’d read in other sources, about how there really is a class of people in Japan called Yakuza, and while in Western media Yakuza are portrayed as supercool sexy-badass gangsters, in reality they are a historic underclass, considered unmentionable. An ignorant child who makes eye contact with a Yakuza in a bathhouse and speaks aloud to his father about the strange man’s tattoos brings his family not just embarrassment but FEAR.

The story in STRANGE HOUSES is not about Yakuza, but it is about family status, going back many generations, and how the new generations carry the baggage of curses and ritual deeds designed to countermand curses — and how that is reflected in the construction of a house.

Just as STRANGE PICTURES depends on figuring out puzzles in drawings, STRANGE HOUSES asks you to look for puzzles in floorpans. Something I learned while reading this book is that Japanese people are very quick to demolish buildings. Tear it down and build from new seems to be the default attitude. That allows for purpose-built structures with customized quirks holding hidden meaning.

I do not recommend STRANGE HOUSES to “everyone” — but if you read STRANGE PICTURES (and you should!) I think you will know in the end if you want to try out STRANGE HOUSES or not… it’s weirder, shorter, more particular, and the violence, and the way it’s executed, and the reasons for it, for a Western mind at least, are harder to believe, and require stretching your imagination a bit further.

But then came STRANGE BUILDINGS — this book, to my good fortune, was released in English translation just weeks after I’d finished STRANGE HOUSES. I was surprised (and at first distressed) to discover that it’s basically a continuation of STRANGE HOUSES — but as I kept reading, my distress evaporated. Halfway through the third book, I came to see the second book as a kind of “bridge” — a necessary transition to take one from the first to the third. The third book, STRANGE BUILDINGS, is much, much, much, much, much, much DARKER. I cannot emphasize this enough. And the darkest turn doesn’t come until near the end of the book.

It’s the kind of thing where you’ll remember where you were when you read it. You’ll wonder how you hadn’t known all along. The clues were there, but probably the truth of the matter was just so horrible that your mind refused to go there. You’ll check your heart’s still beating and exhale and wonder if you should still give it to your kid when you finish, like you’d promised. (I did. I had to warn her about it, but I did.)

UKETSU has a 4th book out, and I am awaiting the English translation, which will be titled STRANGE MAPS. I don’t expect it to re-create the magic of STRANGE PICTURES, which remains a stand-alone masterpiece. But I do expect it to continue the weirdness, to shock and disturb, to challenge my puzzle-loving brain, and to take me into the darkest depths of at least one Japanese psyche.

Thanks for reading! Now go buy STRANGE PICTURES!!!

These books are not “strange” in that performative way some books exercise strangeness, that purposeful, elegant weirdness that manifests in white space and can be measured by rules — literary strangeness that is also erudite and methodical, that seems, if I may say it, aware of, and defensive of, any future accusations of “cringe”…

I have enjoyed those books in the past. But lately I’ve been enjoying books that Ride The Cringe, that are so bizarrely unbelievably submerged into themselves, you marvel that the writing is un-embarassed. Reading these strange books is an antidote to something I’ve been feeling, which is best described as “hemmed in by expectation” — I’ve been writing long enough that even if my audience has never read a past-word-o-mine, I still feel the weight of all my past words and I wonder if the next thing I write is (by them) circumscribed.

I don’t want it to be circumscribed. I want my fiction to go off the rails. The rails I am on, I am on them because once they were the rails that interested me, but they have carried me within view of another country, and I need to hop skip and roll if I’m going to get there. My landscape of destination doesn’t have rails or roads… only poorly kept paths. Trails walked by gusts of wind, borders kept by rivulets of rainwater.

The most important practice of writing is READING, of course, everyone knows that. The best writing advice is “when in doubt, read.” Reading stirs the writing-pot. Reading lifts all the fascinating bits to the surface. Especially if you’re reading something that excites you.

These books have excited me because they are daring and naked and extreme. They are weird, they are strange. They are shameless. Here is one:

Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams is a “science-y magic” fantasy novel, where the “magic” is a metered natural resource managed by a public utility, and people have to go to college to learn how to use it — but once you’re in class, they don’t just GIVE you the magic stuff to learn with, it’s expensive! You have to bring your own — so only rich students can afford to “study” it.

Magic in this story is tied up with celebrity and mass marketing, in a really gross way — the magic stuff makes people stay young and attractive and healthy — almost as a flex, all the richest people chain-smoke because they can never get cancer. It also gives them endless energy — the party never has to stop. Poor, ordinary people need sleep and get sick. The rich make themselves well-known and glamorous and then use that fame and glamour to fleece small sums (which add up!) from the millions of poors, who are always running to catch up. I have often wondered how much poverty could be cured for the price of a single Super Bowl, and while this book doesn’t quite ask that question, it shows a world in which magic is used to create otherwise meaningless profit-churning spectacles despite the corruption of an unequal society, which is riven by class conflict and divided by race and ethnicity.

The main character is a member of a minority that is believed, by the majority, to be thieving and crafty, and they are mostly poorer and more likely to be tear-gassed by cops or attacked by drunken gangs on the street. Yet the main character IS also thieving and crafty, not that any of her relatives are — it’s really just her — but she grapples with the idea of fulfilling a stereotype about her people, even as her actions both morally repel and excite (and enrich!) her. At first she’s just a striver, a climber, but then she stumbles onto a SOURCE… an unmetered, unknown, off-the-map SOURCE of this impossible power. Before she’s done, she’ll cause mass death and end up not just rich but empowered and high-status, as one of “the good guys” — and she’ll experience sex enhanced by magic, a many-thousands-of-dollars orgasm, like a cherry on top.

The whole story takes place on what seems to be a future Earth that has been sealed in by something like a reverse-Dyson-sphere if that makes any sense — this world has a literal ceiling, Earth is trapped in a ball, and that gives the story two very interesting effects: first, it makes it seem completely cut off from reality as the reader knows it; and second, it makes the world full of peoples and societies and classes seem very small and trapped together — and therefore foolish, because they’re attacking each other when clearly there’s a bigger problem going on all around. There are ancient legends that once there were light sources called “sun” and “moon” up in the sky, and they have cartoonish childish ideas about what that might have looked like, because they all live under a non-stop fluorescing surface that they cannot pass or escape, not even with their amazing magic.

This world is also peopled by individuals and groups who have been formed by the magic into something non-human. Maybe they’ve been made into something glorious and godlike, or maybe they’ve been made into something slimy and hideous, or maybe they’ve been made into ghosts that exist in the flow of this powerful magic-stuff and seek only to possess a body, which they will burn up quickly, in a desperate and murderous bid for a fleeting taste of corporeal form. Meanwhile the flesh-and-blood humans want to plug themselves into the power stream so they can project their “animas” and fly through the air, observing the real world secretly, invisibly, until they WANT to be seen, at which point they can manifest themselves as mere visuals or they can alter matter and beat someone up, maybe knock down some walls.

And that brings us to the this magical substance’s ultimate purpose: WAR. The novel’s main character doesn’t seem to realize it at first, but the highest purpose of this POWER is not to make yourself rich, or energetic and beautiful, it’s not to make yourself famous, not to have amazing sex, not to eat delicious foods that are out of reach for ordinary people, not even to transform or fly, but to CONQUER. And not even just to conquer a physical landmass — to conquer the truth. To be able to manipulate how the public receives the events you’ve orchestrated so that you control the “story.” The ultimate flex in this novel is to be able to say to a planet full of attentive, admiring eyes and ears that the people who died lost their lives for a good reason, and now in order to honor their memory the whole country must now do A, B, and C.

This story is nutball crazy when it comes to the physical sciences, and even compared to more traditional stories of magical beings, this story makes an unexpected (but clever and true) swerve into socio-economics. But when it comes to our understanding of POWER and how humans use power to gratify themselves and hurt others and convince themselves that they are justified and great — well, this book might as well be proposing a solid set of physical laws that pertain to human behavior. And I’m not sure there was a way to write a story about that that wouldn’t have been gut-wrenchingly depressing, except by making it so very, wholly entirely strange. The fantasy elements and the bottled-in Earth are part of what make the truth of this story comprehensible, I think.

Its strangeness leads to its solidness.

Thanks to for making me aware of this book’s existence.

Next time, Uketsu

But if from that experience you think you’ve learned that humans are fragile, frail, easily overwhelmed, easy to render helpless and destroy, you have deceived yourself. Because humans are both individuals and collectives, just as light is both particle and wave, and while you might contain a single particle, you’ll never control the wave.

Or is it the other way around? ;-)

In recent days four human beings climbed in a tin can atop a tube full of expertly-modulated explosives and with math and support from teams full of teams of people, exploited the natural laws of the universe to travel to BEHIND THE MOON and back. They sent pictures to show us what our world is, pictures that imply what more we can be.

Meanwhile, a single man with a social media account convinced a fair portion of that vital blue life-crest, our only home in the deadly vacuum of space, the thin habitat of every one of us who ever was, that he’d drop a nuke on Iran in an attempt to end a civilization.

It’s a threat that gives pause. Civilizations have ended before. Or they have changed so radically, they may as well have ended.

Yet people persist.

Less than two weeks ago I learned that I’m being awarded a Fulbright to Romania. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years. For years I’ve been reading books by Romanian authors and histories of Romania, or the world wars, or the inter-war period, or the Habsburg Empire, or the Ottoman Empire — Romania is a unique and amazing crossroads of cultures, but that also means conquerors, catastrophes, genocides, executions, unwise excavations, deportations, drowning of entire towns, the wanton butchery of draft animals, environmental disasters, and other horrors — it is best for now we not mention Romanian Jews. Romania intrigues and inspires me in part because of how humans persist there in strange, marvelous, and beautiful ways — not disentangled from the byzantine tapestry of the past, but weaving new strange layers into it. All while speaking a language not far removed from the words of Ovid or Augustus Caesar — a living language that continues to evolve, yet holds fast to its roots.

My Fulbright adventure will begin in September in Buchareşt and take me to Iaşi on the Moldovan border. I will spend the year in conversation with Romanian students, and also I will travel the country exploring not just different living cultures, but also the artifacts of uncountable different “pasts” that have all made their mark here in the deep, perhaps truly unknowable, heart of Europe — a place where innumerable “futures” also grow.

While I’m there I’ll hopefully complete a novel that’s half-formed in this part of my life, with this set of experiences, but which, I think, needs this next part, and these new experiences to make itself complete. My theory is that Americans only think we’re rootless, because we’ve been so radically transplanted, scrambled, and encouraged to forget, because we’ve been fed so many absurd tales and outright lies, not just from schools and media but even by our families.

Still, all of us are the survivors’ children.

We have this in common with almost all the peoples of the world. WE are the survivors’ children, for good or bad. The trauma? The survivor’s guilt? The unpayable debts to the dead? Yes. But what wisdom and skills and luck it takes to survive, well, we have inherited nothing if not a fighting chance.

The journey ahead is full of question marks, and my goal at the moment is simply to avoid preconceptions and be open to discovering that everything I thought I knew was wrong. I want to re-see and re-consider. I want to know the world as tho for the first time. I believe that if I explore in this way, I will find something good there, something that is meaningful and true.

I hope you’ll come with me on this journey :)

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8

Storms of the land are not like storms of the sea.

If you’ve been out too far perhaps you have seen how the ocean waters reach up into air and the sky pours its waters down, and the wind whips the world into froth, from above, from below, from beside – and you, unlucky to be in the middle, you are scrubbed from every direction like a radish about to be sliced.

Where the land is very low and very flat, where the land is merely a saucer holding a spill of ocean, little more than a sandbar with groves — in Florida — a storm can feel like drowning in air.

Another wave of rain pressed thru the Fruit Forest, a dark gray arm waving across the sky, dismissing sunlight and casting water in sheets down onto the saturated sand. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, Vivienne’s grandmother from Florida used to say. That and, call Mickey Mouse and ask Him for a sunny day! Vivienne learned early not to talk of grandmother’s cultish tendencies. Yet always she had been drawn…

Now, here, in grandmother’s holy land, her students dead, her lover lost, she ran into the wall of the storm, her soaked boots splashing through rising waters over sandy dirt the color of wet ash and packed down around the hard-eroded roots of trees. Despite the treacherous ground she kept her balance and pushed forward. When she came to a fast-running drainage ditch, she jumped into the water and waded downstream, remembering the Jailbreak livplay: how walking through water in that game helped you shake the hounds.

The Jailbreak livplay focused mostly on eluding and disguising, and on finding food to eat, but it allowed for improvisation. Vivienne had two affairs while playing that game, and once set out on a heinous crime spree, which meant she lost, but it was still the most fun way to play. Winning isn’t everything, was another thing grandmother would say. You win and your prize is you suffer the most. Vivienne always suspected grandmother meant Canada. Their country was a winner by default – the rest of the world went to war and they managed to stay out of it.

The world to the south knew death, pain, loss, and ruin, but Canada remained the odd paradise of silent people retreated into digital worlds, their mortal forms protected by cyber-soldiers whose meat came mostly from the desperate survivors of a handful of formerly united “States,” but whose tech came from the geniuses at the Ontario Zoo.

It was better not to think about it. It was better to stay in your games. But grandmother was right, winning was a kind of losing. Every year more and more people volunteer to be permanently installed at the O.Z., where their gray matter could serve as dynamic processors, while their bodies hung like meatpups. Full immersion and possible immortality – now that’s winning.

Yet it seemed to Vivienne like the worst fate of all. And she had a creeping suspicion that her game lives were not much better. A slippery slope? An on-ramp to the Zoo?

The WWII game had violent moments, but it was mostly about networking and long-term, elaborate, cooperative planning. You couldn’t do that in the real world. How would you keep anyone’s attention long enough when everyone’s minds are split by gameworlds? How could you even try when your own mind is split by gameworlds?

Her quest for The Real brought her here. Is this what she wanted? To be hunted like game? To be prey? To want to pray? To the Mouse or some other deity?

She remembered getting her first chip as a child. As the doctor finished the work, a bright red circular rug seemed to appear on the floor. A white, wooden hobby horse and a box of toys seemed to be sitting on it, and above these, a cartoonish blue-glowing window whose light pulsed to attract the eye. As she came nearer, its panes opened, an illusion of curtain seemed to wave in a digital wind, and she saw a brightly colored village under blue skies. Each house or person or dog or bird reacted to her attention and offered a new amusement. “Everything works,” the doctor said, and young Vivienne saw she hadn’t moved, realized she hadn’t felt her feet on the floor. She looked at the chair she hadn’t stood up from. The doctor patted her head. “Enjoy!”

That was decades ago. Vivienne’s now middle-aged face brushed a long branch of a citrus tree, coursing water down to the ground, its leaves broad and waxy. A soft, heavy weight lumped against her right eye, an old grapefruit, half-rotten on the branch. Ants clung to it for life against coursing rainwater. She brushed them away.

She held up the lumpen fruit up like a mirror, reminded of her pockmarked skin, unevenly colored, her wrinkles. Some people change their avatars twice a year, or every few years, or every few days. Vivienne had kept the same face since she was twelve years old. She aged it, a little. She gave it glasses and a more serious expression when she went to college. But she hadn’t really aged it since then. How strange it has been, to be here, so obviously old, so everyone can see, it feels un-real, like a character I am playing.

She thought of her first boyfriend, Justin. She was sixteen when they met. She fell for his avatar’s Asian eyes, its cream-in-coffee complexion, its heavy sheaf of black hair that shimmered blue in sunlight. Justin fell for her avatar’s round purple eyes and yellow-gold waves of hair, its porcelain-white skin. The affair lasted less than two weeks. It ended when he admitted he was not Asian, and she admitted she was. It took her years to understand why this was the end of them – her own orientalism and self-loathing were unimaginable to her when she was young. But you have enough affairs, even digital ones, and patterns will etch too deep and clear to deny.

Vivienne stopped and tried to get her bearings. The sky was booming and water was air. Her hair was plastered down over her face and ears and she could barely open her eyes against the weight of rain. One end of the sky was darker gray: East. The City of Towers lay beyond that darkness. When first she ran, she expected Pete to be directly behind her. When he wasn’t, she expected he would catch up. When he didn’t, she accepted that she would return to the City of Towers alone, if she were to survive at all, and that, once there, she would have to tell a story no one would believe.

The psych eval before the trip: Vivienne gave the doctor a grinning wave, “of course you’re real, you know what I mean,” intending a compliment, intending a connection. The doctor asked sternly, “what makes you think I’m real?” Her friendliness was taken too literally. Confidence in “reality” is often a sign that you’re slipping. Accepting all that cannot be known is “mental health.” Her next words were careful: “I just mean I like you. But I know you could be anyone, including an AI. But it’s none of my business who and what you are, any more than it’s your business what my physical body looks like, or where that body lives.” She watched the psychologist avatar smile and nod.

Vivienne stared down the darkest part of the sky as though to memorize its position, and started stomping through the water again. She wondered if she would be lost in this forest for hours, days, or longer. She wondered if that creature would follow her. She wondered if she would hear it, if there would be any advanced warning at all, if she would know. Or if all would just stop, a blackout from which one never wakes up.

The government required the psych evals because so many people break down when they disconnect. Aspects of what they considered their personality disappear: memory, intelligence, empathy, intuition. When they return, they are often preoccupied with figuring out what is “real.” Some join Luddite colonies and Anarchist cells. Many come back and go to the Zoo, choosing to submerge their consciousness in complete fantasy rather than contend with the ambiguous “real.”

Vivienne told the psychologist avatar, “I’ve been off the ConneX before, and I am fine. I was one of the people hit by the Anarchist attack in Toronto last year, the day before my 40^th birthday. The ConneX was out for almost an hour. I was in my lab. I couldn’t get into my games, and that was annoying. Mostly I remember how quiet it was. The news was silenced. The pop station silenced. The celeb chatter silenced. The friend feed silenced. I could hear my gorillas breathing. I could hear my own heart beat. I saw how plain my desk and chair were, without their skins. I found small cracks in my office wall. Near the window, ants crawled back and forth through a small hole. Some carried crumbs. One carried a dead friend. The world was not stimulating. It was just the world. Time seemed to slow down. It was dirty and smells were stronger.”

All of this was true. But she did not tell the psychologist that she’d seen all that in just the first few minutes, and then left her office. That she’d walked several blocks to find an area still connected, wanting to re-connect, not upset or disturbed, just annoyed, disappointed, frustrated, but she couldn’t: even in an area that still had service, her link had been disrupted.

And wandering around there, off-ConneX but surrounded by people who were on it, she saw something otherwordly and strange: humans shuffling down filthy streets wearing blank stares and tattered clothing. On the ConneX, she would have seen expressive avatars with gaits that bounce and dance, outfits flashing slogans, glittering sidewalks, shining towers, bodies emanating emoji signals, music, and memes. If she’d switched on her custom settings, she might see a Medieval village with dragons soaring overhead, or an undersea “Atlantis” whose citizens swim from place to place with their glittering fish-tails, or a wild west, or a tropical beach, or a ship full of pirates, their slogans and memes re-written in pirate-speak.

Instead she just saw these people-shaped things, silent and walking, their faces emotionless or jerking in strange unexplainable grimaces, all off in their own worlds.

She was old enough to remember when public skins were the only option. People and places posted an image or avatar, and your chip would read it and you’d see it. Some shops would change their look every day or hour. Some shops started running their skins on a continuous loop, a new look every few seconds. But then TruVision added a monthly fee option where you could override the chaos of everyone’s skins for one single theme. You’d still see their ads and products, but it would be embedded in a consistent world-view: an ancient black-and-white TV sitcom, or cartoon comedy cave-men, or ancient Rome, or in a lot of cases, just the view that the user considered “normal.”

The old way was such a headache, and the fees for universal skin overrides weren’t too bad, so most people bought in right away. All the other VSPs followed suit, and soon, Vivienne felt a vague but pervasive disturbance, a sense that life on Earth had fundamentally changed: people in the same place no longer saw the same thing. If Vivienne talked to another person about her mermaid tail, they heard her talking about her six-shooter. When they replied with a six-shooter-relevant comment, she heard a comment about tails. It made everything make more sense, in a way, but people weren’t really talking to each other anymore. They weren’t even talking to the interface. The interface was just helping them talk to themselves.

That was when Vivienne started getting into livplay. In livplay, the people she interacted with might be on the other side of the planet, they might be older or younger than they appeared, but they would hear and see the same things she did. The gameworld, once chosen, was shared and identical from player to player. In this way livplay often seemed more real than reality. More similar to that hour she spent off the ConneX, but not so dull, so creepy, so lonely.

The rain stopped almost at once. It was dark now. Gusts of cooler air came, first as a balm on her over-heated body, but then she began to shiver. Vivienne ducked under the boughs of a large orange tree and stood quietly listening. She smelled something familiar. She stopped and searched towards the trunk of the tree until she saw it in the last gray glow of the day: gorilla shit. Several heaps, mostly older, at least one fairly new. Assuming these apes weren’t slaughtered like the others, a whole troop probably lived nearby.

A stillness came over her – in part this was her training. Encounters with unfamiliar gorillas required calm. Rushing towards a family of gorillas in a panic might terrify them, and terrified apes could hurt or kill a person easily.

But it wasn’t just her training, it was something else – the heart-stopping attention of anticipation. There were no more wild gorillas in Africa, just a few re-introduced settlements in daily contact with researchers and eco-tourists. The animals she’d worked with in her lab and in other parts of Canada were born in captivity. Her knowledge of the behavior of wild gorillas came mostly from the photos, videos, and field notes of researchers who’d worked 100 years before. Here were animals who had been wild and without human contact since before the war.

Vivienne was a graduate student, just like Pierre and Sofi, when she first heard of the refugee situation in Florida. Of course she’d always been conscious of the distressed region because of her grandmother. In her grandmother’s day, it was a vacation paradise, subtropical and sunny, clean salt air, the viciousness of nature held at bay by human innovation. But the land was flat and supported underneath by a layer of permeable limestone that kept water from rising up through the ground about as well as a sponge.

Her grandmother’s reminiscences aside, for all of Vivienne’s lifetime, Florida was a conflict zone of over-want and over-worth, where the land and sea and air and all its creatures grew more hostile with every passing year: the sun too hot, the waters too high, viral and bacterial dangers multiplied in the flesh of fish and mangoes, while medical care grew impossible to find. Between heat stroke, meningitis, drowning, and rampant crimes of desperation and despair, South Florida developed the shortest life expectancy in North America, the hardest living conditions, and the most difficult trek imaginable – a long slog through waist-deep water and steaming heat, not to mention hostile humans and hungry reptiles – for the people desperate to escape and build a new future in the north, or in another state, or, if they were lucky, in one of the new provinces of ever-expanding Canada. It was hard, then. But it was not war.

By 2067, people with the means to flee the area, like Vivienne’s own grandmother, were long since gone. Those who remained were poor and disconnected, but they had persevered, establishing and protecting communities on the islands that were once higher spots of dry land, and on the raised corridors of the old highways.

In August of that year, a storm came: the hurricane was named “Donald” in the quaint tradition of naming storms like they are people, but despite the common name and the cute tradition, there had been nothing like Donald before. He was a superstorm, filling most of the central Atlantic at his peak, slow-moving and hard-blowing, churning with the ample heat of the heating world. Scientists wondered whether Donald would ever dissipate, or whether he would become a permanent or semi-permanent feature of the Planet Earth, changing the environment irrevocably, affecting human chances for survival everywhere outside the poles.

For the weeks he raged, hovering especially over Florida and the Yucatan, Vivienne’s grandmother watched in a perpetual frenzy of care. Once she told her, “please grandma, you’re 92, maybe you shouldn’t keep up with everything that happens down there, maybe it’s not good for you,” and her grandmother told her, “what really breaks my heart is that no one else seems to care. Disasters are inevitable, but the way we respond to them is not.” Superstorm Donald did dissipate, and sooner than expected, but not before killing tens of thousands and destroying everything in South Florida that remained above the waterline.

Then the refugee crisis began. Wading in filthy waters filled with deadly toxins and venomous creatures, or teetering on broken and makeshift boats, the survivors moved through the unbearable heat, clutching their children and the last fibers of their sanity, and moved north towards the high land north of Okeechobee Bay. The City of Towers officially opened their arms to them, but the forest dwellers called them an “invasion.”

It didn’t help that the storm had been named for the Mouse-worshippers’ god of anger, a uniformed white duck perpetually spitting in frustration and refusal. The refugees were mostly dark-skinned, as were the city leaders; the Mouse-worshippers were mostly light-skinned people who had already self-segregated into tribes. The coming confict only required a spark.

A short, aggressive call. She heard it even through the rain. One gorilla warning off another, perhaps a mature female warning off an annoying child, or perhaps a sign they were aware of her. Had she kept running, she would never have heard it over the sound of her own footfalls and breath. Slowly, quietly, she peeled off most of her clothing and wrung them out. It was a way to be relatively still, but still active enough that she might stop shivering.

She fitted her boots upside down on branches, and draped the wet clothes beside them. She rubbed her near-naked body. Even with this cooler, drier air whipping in, her clothes would not dry easily. So she left them, parting the boughs of the overgrown orange tree to explore.

Vivienne was at a virtual primatology conference when she heard that they were calling it a war now. Her grandmother had been waging a one-woman political campaign to convince the Canadian government to intervene. “This is going to escalate, and people will get hurt!” and of course she was right. The Mouseketeers formed militias and established a second system of “justice” outside of the city. Come the heat of June, they started taking the lives of refugees, in the name of the Mouse. First they appeared to be murders, lynchings at worst or extreme police brutality at best (Vivienne’s grandmother insisted these two were the same thing).

But the Mouseketeers claimed these were legal executions, and then they killed even more people. The refugees and citizens of the city marched against them, at first aiming to take custody of the killers, but then they razed the suburban villages and left human bodies in their wake. It was murder after murder. It was war.

Vivienne kept up with what was going on down there, more or less, but she’d also been busy, helping her professor develop V-chips for chimps, and spending a lot of time performing studies on them. She signed all her grandmother’s petitions and spoke to her AI-MP, and on the one year anniversary of Donald becoming a “superstorm,” Canadian troops arrived in Florida.

Within days, her grandmother’s health declined. It seemed to Vivienne that her concern for the land of her birth and childhood had been all that kept her alive, and now that the conflict was over, she’d collapsed. Whether or not that was true, the conflict was over for Vivienne, because her grandmother died, and the war ended, and aside from a brief report a year later that no one was certain what happened to the local population of wild gorillas during the war, she barely thought of Florida again, not for years.

Another grunt. This time Vivienne sensed its direction and moved slightly towards it, but also slightly to the right. She turned her back to the sound, walking half-backwards. Above her the storm clouds were rapidly moving on, exposing a deep sky full of stars and a bright almost-full moon. When the shape of an adolescent gorilla became barely visible in the corner of her eye, she lowered herself to the ground and sat there, arms draped on knees, her head tilted to one side. She felt the smooth pad of the gorilla’s fingers on her shoulder. It picked up her hair, put it to its mouth, then backed away. When it returned, there was another pair of hands, these much larger. Vivienne stayed still and let them examine her. She was exhilarated and wished that her students were here to experience this, and then she remembered that her students were dead, and that it was her fault, because she brought them to this place, because…

When Sofi first came to work at the lab, Pierre had already been there a year. Sofi came into the gorilla enclosure to introduce herself, and Pierre fell off a log. Literally. Vivienne knew they would be terrible for each other.

And Zuzu. Zuzu was their sharpest young gorilla, and Pierre was her favorite human. He’d been sitting on that log to talk to her. After he fell backwards and stumbled babbling towards Sofi, Zuzu stopped signing, stopped eating. Vivienne transferred her to another primatologist’s lab, where she eventually recovered. Pierre barely noticed. These young females touching her now, sisters or half-sisters certainly, were right around Zuzu’s age when that happened.

These apes were descended from apes like Zuzu, cage-dwellers whose emotions were tied to the alien actions of their human gatekeepers. Gorillas who played video games, knew how to open and close a refrigerator to retrieve chilled fruit, who slept on a bed with springs and bedsheets in air-conditioned rooms, free of pests. When they were abandoned to the natural world, how strange it must have seemed to them: how dull, how difficult, how disappointing, this world full of rotting-fruit trees covered with biting insects, too hot, too wet, and full of dangers.

Or perhaps they embraced it, more interested in freedom than convenience, like the Luddites and Anarchists today, the proud survivors, conquerors of nature’s adversity. And someday, just as the caged apes’ grandchildren are now falling victim to bloody-minded humanity, will the grandchildren of the Luddites and Anarchists be slaughtered by a digital humanity, their heads and hands removed for trophies?

The clouds passed and the stars emerged. Vivienne was grateful that the receding storm and blast of cold northerly air had chased off a good portion of the insects, because she was sitting near-naked and exposed on the wet ground, vulnerable and unable to swat anything away without disturbing the gorillas. After several minutes of touching and sniffing at her, the two of them ran off into the trees, and Vivienne was alone.

She looked at this corner of the Fruit Forest in the bright moonlight. She felt drunk: she needed water, and rest. For water she stood slowly and put her tongue under the tips of leaves, tiny sips. She repeated the gesture over and over, imagining herself a butterfly flitting from flower to flower: laying her tongue, absorbing the droplets of rain collected there, moving on.

And then she heard someone singing La Vie En Rose.

In her daze she thought perhaps if she stayed quiet the creature would never find her. She did not think that its closeness revealed its ability to track her. She thought perhaps it would pass and she would be able to continue her slow trek towards the City of Towers, maybe even having more encounters with wild gorillas along the way.

She did not think of following the adolescents to see if their troop had some suitable shelter. She did not think of searching for more buildings, perhaps tall buildings visible from tree-tops, which even in ruins could provide some shelter or supplies. She did not think of seeking out Pete’s water taxi, which was moored in a tributary of the Sea of Houses not far from their camp. She did not think of returning to the camp to look for weapons or even supplies like food, water, or a tent, which might have helped her survive in the forest longer.

In so many ways, she played this all wrong.

The voice singing La Vie En Rose was getting closer, and with her fear submerged in the haze of exhaustion, Vivienne joined in, singing past the first verse to the second recitative: “des ennuis, des chagrins, s’effacent – heureux, heureux à en mourir,” she said this alone, as the creature listened, having never heard this part before. Usually Vivienne skipped it: “Happy, happy to die,” the song paused to say. She usually thought it was too embarrassingly over-dramatic to include.

The creature was here now. Vivienne beheld the stranger, her eyes focusing as best they could. Bradidiah had called her a witch: perhaps, Vivienne thought, if a witch is a woman sewn up with armor until she might be mistaken for a great pink ape, une gorille rose, but no, with her wobbling consciousness Vivienne saw this was simply a soldier in scar tissue, a sort of cyborg she had glimpsed before, once, decades ago, before everything in the world was covered up in avatars, before augmented humans blended in by means of augmented reality.

Vivienne closed her eyes and fell into the arms of the soldier, an embrace of defeat. She welcomed death, she hummed sweetly to her, because she knew that no matter how many people the cyborg killed, the creature did not kill Sofi, that was her, that was Vivienne, and she could not live with that knowledge, she could not go on remembering the feel of the trigger under her finger, warmed by her skin and slimy with sweat when she pulled it, or the ocean of blood that emerged from Sofi’s neck, or the wet, choking sounds she made so very briefly before she died.

Vivienne saw several young gorillas’ curious faces peeking at them from not far away. They were unafraid of the cyborg and came close – it was clear to Vivienne that they knew her, that the soldier was a friend of the tribe. The broad pink arms drew tighter around her, and with each beat of her heart Vivienne saw the pink insides of her eyes pulse, blood vessels straining, eyes making light, like fireworks bursting. The chorus of curious grunting grew louder, and the nighttime sounds of frogs croaking and gators thumping and birds cooing filled all the space left in her ears. The wind blew and she felt its coolness upon her bare legs, and perhaps merely out of habit, from having died so many times before in games, she would have sworn she saw within the flashing pink light of her eyes the words:

Game Over

Apologies and condolences.
The character linked to your gamerID is no longer
viable within the selected gameworld.
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Author’s Note: So ends The Singing Ape, as published on Substack!! I also titled this novella “Humans Aren’t the Only Ape that Sings” for a while, and jeez I wrote it a long time ago now. Years and years. It’s been sitting in the “to do” piles of various publishers for ages, getting returned to me with praise but no contract. Tor alone held onto it for two years, seriously. But I’ve got other stories in the works that are set in the same universe and I just couldn’t keep waiting, so I’ve published this novella here. I’ve enjoyed publishing it this way: it’s given me time to re-read, do a little editing, and of course add some illustrations, which has been fun :) Chapters 6 and 7 don’t have illustrations in part because those sections are so propelled by action that it felt weird to interrupt that flow with a picture. There’s a lot of “discourse” out there about the hobbled/broken/degraded/etc. state of fiction-publishing in this the year of our lord 2026, and I don’t feel the need to add to it except to say that I have read self-published novels and I have enjoyed them. So here’s one more. We’re not trying to move mountains, here, just tell stories, and in telling and reading hopefully uncover something True. It’s a very human endeavor and like all very human endeavors it’s under threat by the systems that have dominated our world and demanded that everything be A Shocking Blast of Scalable Insta-Content! But there’s nothing tweetable or tiktokable about what I do. Either you join me for the journey across the terrain of typed words, or you don’t. Either way, it’s been a pleasure, and now I feel more free to move on to other projects. Thank you for reading! :)

Foremost among our troubles, we are cooking our one and only home in this hostile vacuum of space, rubbing out our pale blue dot, making unlivable what is literally the only harbor of life that can sustain us.

I remember when it was un-imaginable that humankind would sit by and do nothing while our daily conveniences contributed gasses to the destabilization of everything; unimaginable that global superpowers would allow border conflicts to spiral into chaos and destruction. I remember.

But now I know, and have experienced, a world so post-human that we don’t just “sit by and do nothing” — we actively accelerate these tragedies! At the moment the US economy is floating on a sea of digital speculation and fuels feeding the fires of warfare. We’re pouring more power and water into these projects every day, like idiot prisoners giving the last of our gruel to the guards in hopes they will free us. They won’t.

And our daily lives?

Every school could be a Uvalde, every Wal-Mart could be an El Paso, every grocery store could be a Tops (Buffalo) or a King Sooper (Boulder); we think twice before we go to the garlic festival or the 4th of July parade; your town could be the next ICE-invaded town, and no, legal citizenship won’t save you.

And when we try to gather strength from a community of spiritual fellow-humans? It might be a Tree of Life or Sutherland Springs First Baptist.

And things would be so much worse if we lived in Ukraine, or Iran, or Lebanon, or Israel, or the UAE — at least we don’t have drones and missiles exploding upon us. At least we’re not in Yemen or Sudan or Afghanistan. At least we’re not in China?

But it’s not so different, is it? China is demonized because there, workers so despair some throw themselves from factory windows, and people’s every thought and act are tracked online.

Here in the US, workers are less likely to self-defenestrate than to die “deaths of despair”: maybe suicide, or maybe they drink themselves to death, or gamble with pills off the street until the micro dose of the fentanyl-times-20 novel basement lab drug hits with the power to sedate an elephant, and there’s no narcan around to save them.

And tracked online? Baby, don’t even start. China’s got nothing on Google. And Google’s the tip of the surveillance capitalist iceberg.

Forgive me for drawing out the desperation of the situation. I tried to keep it taut. I tried to generalize. I didn’t even mention the violence or tragedies that have personally affected me. My goal is a big-picture sense of the stakes.

Because what I really want to talk about is your superpowers.

If you are reading this, you have the superpower of sustained attention. You have maintained this power despite decades of media exposure designed make you dim and scattered.

If you are feeling something from reading this — grief, anger, duty — you have maintained your humanity despite a vast commercial apparatus attempting to dull you into a competitive consumer who jumps for rewards.

You may have other superpowers you’ve retained from the age when such things were not “super”: perhaps you can do simple math in your head — maybe it delights you, it gives you a little spark, when you say the answer while everyone else is pulling out their phones and searching for the “calculator” app?

Perhaps you, like me, always know where you are? I use digital maps, yes, but have avoided the use of turn-by-turn directions, which means, if I go somewhere, I know where I am. I always know which way is North. I have an internal map that finds my way. I rarely get lost, and I’m never afraid if I DO get lost, because I know I can figure out where I am.

Many of us have retained the knowledge of how to turn ingredients into food. Many know how to turn yarn into clothing. You might know how to turn tiny seeds into baskets of food using only water, sunlight, and time.

I know how to drive a stick shift and how to jump a car. I know how to treat minor wounds. Every time I exercise these skills I feel… The Opposite of Helpless.

And when I think about my daily, common, everyday superpowers, I can’t help but feel that my ability to simply BE has become a superpower too. You can leave me sitting in a room with nothing to read or watch or listen to for quite a long time, and I will be fine.

Of course these are all versions of “in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” — you’re powerful only because others are impaired worse than you’re impaired. I wonder if this is, in its maximal form, the scheme of the Titan Tech Bros — not so much that they become super rich and powerful on their merits, but that they want to make poor helpless stim-hungry debtors of the rest of us, so that they, as RICH helpless stim-hungry debtors, can be kings? Well, it’s probably more complex than that. They apparently get more sex-parties too?

As the world gets further demented and dehumanized, it’s essential we lean into the superpowers of our humanity. Our daily, ordinary, gestures of generosity and decency towards our fellow human beings add up and push back against the tide of selfish grasping and distrust. Our daily, ordinary, exercises of intelligence and creativity push back against the tide of helplessness, and keep us from being instrumentalized as mere cogs in this great brute machine that does not work for us. Use your small common knowledge, save mankind.

Your power is not hard to exercise, because your power is the thing you delight in. Maybe you’ve forgotten to do it for a while, but you still WANT to. And it will bring you small necessities and pleasures. I love chasing my chickens around, and so I always have eggs. My husband relaxes by crocheting, and so he always has sweaters. I have a friend who writes and sings beautiful songs, and so she always has music. <3

All of us are able, by exercising our powers, to shut out the noise and marvel at this amazing world — and so we will always have love. Love, in fact, might be the thing that you delight in — the more you give, the more you get, that ability to give it, that is a superpower too. So what is it?

What’s your superpower?

Make sure you exercise it, today.

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7

“No no no no! Sofi!” Vivienne yelled. “I shot the monster! I swear I hit it, not her!”

“The witch changes the path of your bullets with her dark magic,” Bradidiah said.

“It ricocheted,” Pete said. “Off the creature, into your student.”

But as Pete said this, the creature, realizing what had happened, dropped Sofi to the floor. The bullet had entered through Sofi’s collar, destroying her neck and lung on its way to her heart. Her body stiffened and gushed blood.

Vivienne fired twice more, with less conviction. The bullets flew off the creature’s body, the first one striking the couch which released a puff of yellow cushion stuffing, the second one disappearing into a wall.

“Stop shooting, Vivienne, it does no good. Bullets do not harm it.”

“As I warned you,” Bradidiah said.

“Oh Sofi, Oh Sofi, no!” Vivienne said, dropping the gun to her side.

“How do we kill it?” Pete asked Bradidiah.

“When it attacks one of you, then I will take it from behind.”

Pete nodded and took Vivienne’s hand. “Run,” he said.

The two of them flew up the steps. They heard Bradidiah call them traitors and cowards and curse them in the name of Donald. Then both Bradidiah and the creature yelled and grunted from below. But Pete did not wish to stick around and listen. He pushed open the door and pulled Vivienne out into the waning daylight. “We will go to my taxi moored by the Sea of Houses and sail away from this place, as soon as I know the murderer of my brother is dead.”

“I don’t think he can kill her, Pete. I don’t think anything can.”

“She is not my brother’s killer. The forest dweller Bradidiah is. If she kills him, she has executed my revenge, and we will go in peace. But if he somehow defeats the monster, then still he must die for what he did to my brother.”

“How do you know…?”

“He admitted he shot at the creature, and my brother lay dead from bullets. We have seen how the creature kills, and what she does with her kills. And also… I just look at him, and I know. I see guilt in his eyes. Now I want you to go — go back to the taxi. You will be safe there. And if I do not follow in an hour…”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“Skip was the gentlest of men. To kill him, to shoot him… I must make sure this damned mouse-worshipper’s story ends here.”

“Listen.”

Pete listened a moment, then opened the door labeled “CAST MEMBERS ONLY” enough to hear a repeated clang-clang-clang-clang growing louder as it rose up the steps.

“It’s her,” said Professor Vivienne Froget. And with the education and intelligence of a woman of her station, she turned without a further word and ran blindly away.

Pete did not follow. No fool, nonetheless, he had to be sure.

The sky curled gray above, banded green and orange in the West, and soaked a deep inky purple in the East where Venus now rose to meet the moon. Pete could no longer hear Vivienne’s panicked breathing moving away through the citrus trees, but he could hear the frogs croaking and the gators knocking and the owls hooting and somewhere the distant call of a peacock over the wind. And up the metal stairs: clang-clang-clang-clang.

He held his pistol and waited.

A man must be strong to live in the City of Towers, for all the other men are strong, most of them survivors of the war. You never know what a man will do. Murders are too common. Men who have killed once do so again too easily when they are angry. You must always seem the sort of man no one wishes to make angry — and yet you cannot seem so frightening that people will kill you for fear of what you may do. There are other men like Skip, in the city, whose every word and action is designed to diffuse violence, whose every thought and action is made in pursuit of peace. Some think men who live like Skip did are weak, but Pete knew better. Skip had witnessed the deepest depravity, had lost every shadow of a happy life, and had nothing left to lose. He could have been among the worst of them, and yet he chose to seek calm and peace. He could have lashed out, but he chose to think. And Pete knew that in his final moments Skip understood the fight that he’d lived and its worth, and that it is nothing to have the misfortune of crossing a murderous man. Yes, Skip had seen with his eyes the horrors of their mother’s death, and he would have died grateful, knowing a death could always be worse.

But Pete was not a good man like his brother. During the war, Pete had killed. At first unwillingly, and then with sick pleasure. And after the war, Pete had killed. Twice. He killed because it suited him for those men to die. He planned it, and did it calmly, without witnesses or evidence, in the night. A secret he kept from his brother. Perhaps knowing who he had been and what he had done during the war, people might have suspected him. But Pete could pass too easily for a respectable, peaceable man, because of his brother. And he knew that, without Skip in his life, the number would have been much higher than two. Skip. So decent. So good. And now this lying, shit-stained forest-dweller Bradidiah had snuffed the life of the only man who could have stopped Pete from killing him. Innocence and revenge, as ever and instant as rain and tides, combined in this murder as the cause and the assurance of Bradidiah’s demise.

Clang-clang-clang-clang, the noise grew close now. Pete stepped through the doorway and onto the landing and looked down. It was the beast, the pink, hairless ape, dragging Bradidiah up the stairs, Bradidiah’s head clang-clang-clanging against each metal stair step as she rose. Was he dead? Surely he must be. Pete stepped back and let the door swing closed, but the beast had already seen him. He could have turned and run, but he didn’t feel like it. And death did not seem so unwelcome. His brother gone, what would his life be now? Bitterness. Degradation. Violence.

Canada.

Broken men dressed in the clean pressed spoils of murder, complicit in the crimes that provided the wealth, human only in shape, in appetite, in smell, these empty bags of men.

The pink ape threw open the door, heaving and teeth bared. She flung Bradidiah’s body and a blue bag to the ground, and Pete imagined himself the professor’s consort in the northern reaches of temperate Canada, an inmate and outsider, empty but still moving, still making love to this woman as though it were work, warming her bed and decorating her arm, and allowing her to implant in his head the chip ubiquitous among her people, the chip that would allow her to see inside his skull and know him — and what would she find? A coward, a murderer, a vessel for memories and grief? Would she find a dumb killing machine, like a shark or a gator? Or would she find livestock?

The pink ape stood and watched him, unmoving. He saw now that the creature wept, that tears poured out of its tiny brown eyes and coated the angled planes of its face.

He saw now that the monster was not just a monster. He saw the creature had loves and memories also. He relaxed.

Still weeping the creature pulled a knife from the bag and sawed off Bradidiah’s head. Blood oozed from the meat and soaked the earth. Then she cut off the hands. He had seen such brutal things before, but never accomplished so easily. This creature was so strong, she seemed to snip the head and hands of a man with the ease of clipping feathers from a chicken.

Then she turned to Pete and with eyes that seemed to ask “why?” and, tears still in her eyes, she stepped forward and clutched his windpipe. “Why did you not run?” her eyes seemed to say. And he thought at last that yes he should have run. He could have played this differently, he thought. He could have trailed his lovely weathered professor to her peaceful, comfortable country. He could have retired this part of himself and discovered another. He could have lived a second life as another person, a better person, an interesting person — fascinating to others because he is now so gentle but reveals with his kind smile the tales of his unimaginably terrible past. He could have been a person who leaves something small and precious to the world, like a song he might sing, or a picture he might sit for, or the story he might tell for a livplay adventure.

Then he thought: this ape is sad because she murders me.

Then he was gone.

001 It is 1 December 2115

002 My mother is dead

003 There is no longer a reason

004 To resist becoming

005 The monster

006 I always knew myself to be

007 I meet my sister Tara

008 At the mortuary

009 We view the body

010 There is no funeral only us

011 Mom is wrapped

012 In a burial shroud

013 Black and seeded

014 With rows of bright spores

015 They are dormant dry and cold right now

016 But when she is placed outdoors

017 In the warmth and moisture

018 They will devour her

019 Tara says I’m volunteering

020 I say don’t rush into anything

021 She says it’s decided

022 We settle her affairs and mom’s at the same time

023 Mom returns to the earth

024 Tara wears sunglasses to the airport

025 She is flying to Ontario

026 To volunteer her brain

027 To the great hive mind

028 And her body will hang

029 In a black rubber suit

030 Threaded with bright wires

031 And sparkling tubes

032 That will keep her body

033 Healthy and alive

034 Possibly forever

035 In rows and rows of fellow volunteers

036 It is the same technology that provides

037 Cruelty-free meat

038 Rows and rows of pig bodies

039 Hang wrapped in black rubber

040 Brainless, clean, healthy, tasty

041 Every few minutes they dance

042 To build and maintain muscle

043 Until the day they are removed

044 And unwrapped

045 The black rubber harness

046 And its tubes and wires

047 Peeled away to be re-used

048 And the pig body dies

049 Without a squeal

050 And you eat flesh

051 For which no human or animal has suffered

052 People call them “meat pups”

053 The rows of hanging pig bodies

054 And cow bodies

055 And lamb bodies

056 And horse bodies

057 And dog bodies

058 And I have heard people call volunteers like Tara “meat pups” too

059 But they are not just bodies

060 They do have brains

061 That is the point of keeping them

062 At the Ontario Zoo

063 An AI Zoo full of AI creatures

064 Like puffins and polar bears

065 And the central cortex

066 Of the global brain

067 That runs the planet Earth

068 Which they call TERRA

069 Pronounced like my sister’s name

070 Whose brain now stores and processes data

071 And whose consciousness

072 We are promised

073 Lives happily in a cyberworld

074 A never-ending Livplay

075 She could leave at any time

076 If she wanted to

077 We are promised

078 But no one ever does leave

079 It is a system of which she has long been part

080 And which has long been part of her

081 From a distance

082 Through the ConneX

083 But I am no less angry

084 I am disappointed you just gave up I tell her

085 I know this will not change her mind

086 And will leave things bad between us

087 On 10 December 2115

088 Her sunglasses have black lenses and orange frames

089 I cannot see her eyes

090 She nods and leaves me

091 I am alone

092 Thousands of travelers press past me

093 I have always been alone

094 Mom and Tara and I were once alone together

095 Now I am alone alone

096 I always knew

097 Without them

098 I was that special sort of person

099 That gets sent to perform assassinations

100 Or put on one-way missions to Mars

101 I tried the Mars Project first

102 They didn’t want me

103 They want top students from the best schools

104 I was worst student at the School of Mom

105 So I put a resume out

106 With the corporate militias

107 Still operating south of the Canadian border

108 The border crept down as far as Arkansas

109 And stopped

110 I grew up in Arkansas

111 I would have liked becoming Canadian

112 But the fools who vote on these things are even more stupid than me

113 They kept us a free state

114 Which is what they call

115 The hellhole places that used to be United

116 I’d never tried Livplay

117 I barely used the ConneX

118 I didn’t even have a chip

119 But then the job required it

120 It is 6 May 2116

121 A JonesTech doctor has removed part of my skull

122 She is installing my new cranial plate

123 My head is braced forward

124 But I can see it

125 Reflected in the glass of a jar of swabs

126 Black metal glittering with tubes and wires

127 In a flash of insight I know

128 The kind of monster I will be

129 And the irony of my fate

130 My contract is sold twice

131 I kill 7 men and 4 women

132 I kill no children

133 I am grateful for that

134 Four times a year I am upgraded

135 Skin, tendons, muscles, processor

136 It is 2 June 2118

137 We arrive by helicopter

138 Me and two others

139 Our new contract holder greets us and leads us down

140 Into a bunker

141 To join the other soldiers

142 He leaves again and after a while

143 He returns with a few more

144 He says loudly I am a property owner

145 And war is coming

146 I bought the best enhanced soldiers on the market

147 That’s you

148 And I will further enhance you

149 I am a scientist

150 I do my work here

151 Your mission is simple

152 Kill any human who comes onto my land

153 Show no mercy

154 I am not taking sides in this war

155 You will kill all sides

156 There are some who think my land is their holy land

157 They’re idiots and you will kill them

158 Let those maniacs respect this line on the map if they respect nothing else

159 He showed us a petri dish

160 Half blue and half orange

161 Blue is antibiotic he said

162 The orange is disease

163 You are the blue and they are the disease

164 We had a tactical advantage

165 An EM disruptor scattered signals

166 For miles

167 All but ours

168 Ours rode on the disruptor’s waves

169 A clever technology

170 Rodney was a scientist and inventor

171 The sole proprietor

172 Of land that was valuable

173 Before the world changed

174 He is dead now

175 I killed him

176 He was lonely

177 A monster like me

178 But I am glad I killed him

179 He named me Hotel

180 He named us Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliett Kilo Lima Mike

181 It was not the first time they’d changed my name

182 I did not like it

183 But I couldn’t remember

184 The name mom gave me

185 The name Tara knew

186 So I called myself Hobo

187 This defiance would save my life

188 But I didn’t know that then

189 I only knew I was a monster

190 And that monsters choose their own names

191 4 July 2118 is a sorely remembered holiday

192 Among the combatants

193 The war is hot

194 My kill number is 28

195 The highest among us

196 I locate trespassers this day

197 And I must kill them

198 I have no choice you understand

199 I am programmed to kill them

200 But I make myself move slowly

201 Gathering intelligence

202 I am not programmed to gather intelligence

203 This is the first crack in my program

204 The first sign that Hobo can do things

205 That Hotel cannot

206 I follow them silently

207 One says

208 The mouse-forsaken mud people have no understanding they do not know what it means to love the land to feel its spirit they come here like parasites and consume and destroy until there is nothing left but here I’m going to show you the heart of this country the soul of our people is here and deep in this forest there is a glittering tower that reaches into the sky proclaiming the genius of our white european english-speaking ancestors and there was a time when on this day each year the sky would light with bursts of fire and the wind would swell with music and

209 The child he spoke to only listened

210 The man died before he knew danger was near

211 The child knew what was happening before he died

212 And as I killed him

213 I must kill the more threatening target first

214 Hotel executed her programming

215 Hobo held the small head that was only just beginning to be filled with hate and love

216 Stupid hate and stupid love

217 And let it drop to the ground

218 Hotel proceeded along the likely path of the man and boy

219 They were headed towards the castle-structure

220 This structure attracted the tribal cults

221 They called themselves Florida crackers, full-time tailgaters, rednecks, KOA Kampers, old time gator-baiters, salt-water slugs, and mouse-loving sons-of-bitches

222 Among other things

223 Once they lived in the Sea of Houses

224 When it was dry

225 Now they camped in scattered villages throughout the Fruit Forest

226 Hunting and gathering

227 Violent in mania for the past

228 Desperate to purify and exclude

229 They warred against the City of Towers

230 As flooding from the south sent refugees there

231 And swelled the city’s numbers

232 To them the city was a chaos

233 Of diversity

234 And they wanted order

235 They wanted order more than they wanted peace life goodness safety or love

236 On 4 July they drifted toward the castle like seaweed collecting on the shore

237 As I neared the castle I found more

238 A total of 60 more

239 Children numbered 26

240 Families

241 Silently and quickly

242 Group by group

243 I killed them all

244 My kill number was now so high

245 No other soldier on the team would come close

246 This also saved my life

247 But I did not know that at the time

248 9 August 2118 a push update overrides my current program

249 The soldier with the most kills is sent to kill the others

250 Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf India Juliett Kilo Lima Mike

251 They tried to escape me

252 But they did not hate me

253 What glimmer of humanity remained in them

254 Understood

255 When all of them were dead the program ordered me to kill Hotel

256 That same glimmer within me rose to a flame

257 And I did

258 Then Hobo sought out Hotel’s killer

259 Rodney

260 And I crushed him

261 I left his body to rot on the shiny floor of his shiny apartment

262 They would say he was lost in the war

263 And the war ended

264 And I began the long process

265 Of making this place my home

266 In fifteen years my only friends

267 Have been gorillas

268 They forgive my strange appearance

269 They greet me unafraid

270 And I had become as peaceful and as unlikely to murder as they are

271 Until the humans started cutting them up

The final chapter will be posted in one week: Thursday March 26!

I’ve never seen the point of watching the sun set. I lived in San Fransisco for two years and never once tried. In Key West I guess I gave it a shot a couple times, but it didn’t do much for me. Meanwhile I will move heaven and earth and wake small children in the predawn hours so that we can all go watch the sun rise.

I am a creature of beginnings, I suppose. Maybe if I lived somewhere where all the stars are visible at night, so that nightfall was something to look forward to, the sunset would seem like a drumroll introducing the cymbal crash of a dazzling Milky Way.

This is a peace sign someone traced into the sand. I wasn’t the one who traced it. I wasn’t the one who walked over it, either. Whoever’s finger pulled through these grains of sand, they did it the day after the US started bombing people far away.

If you could leave this strip of beach and go due East, across the Atlantic, you’d get to Morocco, and if you kept going, you’d be in the Mideast cradle of civilization itself. The peace sign was traced a bit up on a sand dune, so propped up almost like a sign facing across the ocean, futile, invisible, but heartfelt. Peace.

This is a young airline pilot who invited one of my children into the cockpit to look around. He encouraged her to sit and try all the controls, push buttons, flip switches. He didn’t have to do that. But we were his last flight of the day and he wasn’t in a rush to go anywhere else, and he saw a curious child’s eyes peering into the world he inhabits and he invited her in. I wonder sometimes if she’ll grow up to be a pilot. I had a dream once that I was old in a wheelchair and she was taking me on a tour of the plane she’d designed. We were flying through the air able to see through the bottom and watch the world spin by below. I had this dream when she was a baby.

This is a painting my aunt Sylvie-Anne made when I was a little kid. She died way too young of pancreatic cancer, and I will always be upset that she was taken away from us like this. She could make clothing to match any fine fashion atelier, and she could paint too. And she had a wicked sense of humor. And a depth of kindness and generosity. And a mildly hedonistic streak. She will always be one of my heroes.

These are rhododendron:

These are also rhododendron:

This is someone’s family business:

And this is a blackened mahi caesar salad:

This is what happens to a metal fan in salt air:

This is what happens when you name a street after doing a pitcher of margaritas:

This is me:

And all that is why I haven’t posted anything in a while.

Yes, I woke up on day 1 of our family vacation and read that the US had gone to war with Iran. I threw my phone across the room and resolved to enjoy my corner of this Earth anyway. My family members are terrific and fun and remarkable people, and I’m lucky to get to spend time with them, and I’m lucky I just happen to come from a place that’s warm enough for March 1 jacuzzis and front row to the best sunrises in the world. I’m not showing anyone’s face but my own, but on this trip I got to visit with 20 relatives +loved ones. On my next trip I get to meet with at least 10 more. Who knows where this world is heading? Who knows if we’ll be able to afford air travel in the coming months and years? Who knows if we’ll all even be here to want it? Love the people in your life, in person, and right away. Sometimes tomorrow doesn’t come.

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6

They moved faster now, the Fruit Forest quaking around them a wet, gray-green blur, scented by earth and decaying citrus. High in the trees where the storm blew hard the ravens collected on the long, high branches of orange trees which waved and danced in the wild air. The birds held the branches tightly and screamed out louder than the wind.

“They call for their friends to come and watch: caw, caw, come see Bradidiah the cursed one fall.”

“Let them come. They will only see you kill their demon-witch and break the curse.”

Bradidiah stopped and crouched and spoke to the rhythm of the voice he heard: “Stop! Listen to the air, the witch is everywhere, she sees our every movement. Take this knife and stand aside. Only defend your life. Don’t try to help or save me.”

Chet squinted in disgust. Though he always felt small beside his friend he nonetheless smacked the bill of Bradidiah’s hat. “You are speaking to the tune of her song.”

“I will learn her mind. I will anticipate her attack.”

“She enchants you. You will fall under her spell and be destroyed.”

The voice grew louder and the two men crouched, each grabbing the other’s arm in the pouring rain. “She comes — leave now, my best friend, Chet. One of us should return home. To tell our story.”

The storm seemed to press down upon them, purple-gray and wicked. Lightning flashed whose thunder tumbled slow, a seeming-endless roll. When the sound passed, the ravens yelled louder than before. On the path ahead of them they saw a monstrous bright thing emerge from the forest: a pink, hairless ape. It hulked itself slowly onto the path. From one hand hung a colorful “backpack” emblazoned with the smiling mouse, the most powerful god of their ancient religion. “It all started with a mouse” they both mumbled, a reflex. The bottom of the backpack was red-brown, soaked through with blood. The pink ape opened its terrible mouth and the rain and wind was pierced by the sweet sound of music, a high woman’s voice that rose and plunged and seemed to promise despair in the throes of hope. It was the witch, they knew. Neither spoke. To speak was to die.

Chet stood first: his posture was strong and he held his knife before him in a fist.

Bradidiah raised himself tall and aimed his gun.

The beast laid its bloody smiling mouse bag upon the ground and took two steps forward through the mud, still singing high and sweet through the rain.

Bradidiah fired his weapon.

They entered another chamber of the ride. The walls were painted black and covered with eyes. In the low quivering light of Pete’s torch the eyes seemed to move with life.

“…The game would exist already if anyone knew the details this place. But it takes a lot of data, and we know more about ancient Egypt than about this disconnected part of the world.”

“If I knew how to make these games, I would be a rich Canadian!” Pete laughed. “Perhaps you will make it, now that you have been here?”

“Game design is the most sophisticated human activity in all of history. It’s more complex than space travel. I’m not saying I’m not smart enough, but… I would have needed to start studying as a child!”

“Then you can tell them — and they can design the game based on what you saw.”

“Games run on volume. You need thousands of observations taken in aggregate for the system to work. Otherwise it’s just an immersive novel. Chance and choice require probability. The more data, the better the game.”

“So the game you played — the World War game — there were, what, thousands of stories of that war?”

“Millions. That’s why the game was so good, so real. There were so many trillions of documents from that period, so many stories and facts and points of view, that the game was able to support millions of players each in a different role. There are simpler games, of course, but they are less real. The same few scenarios play out over and over, without character development or a narrative arc — or there is only one narrative, and everyone who plays must be one of a handful of people. The WWII had incredible detail. It was transporting!”

“So if only a few people experience an event, everyone in the world can play it, but they must all be the same few people. But if millions of people experience an event, millions can play…”

“And each be themselves.”

“Then let them build the game and tell the story of Vivienne and Pete, and Skip, and the students…”

“…Sofi and Pierre. And the gorilla poachers of Florida.”

“We should return. I should not have left Skip for this long.”

“Yes, we should tell them what we’ve found. The ruins of the Magic Kingdom! We must document it the best we can with the tools we have, with drawings, and measurements.”

Sofi sat in the small control room so long it began to feel like home. She thought she might like to stay here, to die here. She thought this would be better than whatever awaited her among the dancing dolls, along the murky underground river, or within the exterior corridor shifting and sliding with cockroaches. But after she ate her muesli bars and drank her water and rested a while, she could imagine trying to escape again. The problem, of course, was the right side of her body. If she stayed still, that side was stiff and ached, but if she attempted to move the pain blinded her and she could only collapse and let it pass.

She rocked in the control room chair and watched the endless dances of the robot children, little soulless bodies, spinning under the lights. The chair in the control room had wheels, and as it crept inches back and inched forward, she thought she might use it to escape. Of course it would only work if the hallway stayed flat, and she knew the only escape was up: sooner or later she would have to climb if she was to survive.

She nudged with her foot until the chair was by the door and she rested her head against it, listening to the soft steady patter of millions of little cockroach feet, the flutter of millions of cockroach wings.

“Cockroaches have no sting. They have no poison. They cannot kill.” Her own voice rung in her ears, trying to convince her. But then she imagined the feel of them crawling up her neck and face and getting into the sleeves of her shirt and her pant legs, their little feelers probing inside her ears. She looked out the window again: the ride was also covered with cockroaches but there was no way to roll a chair across its rail-covered floor. She listened to the door again, the soft sound of them was almost like a sheet of paper being brushed gently against it, back and forth. She sat with her backpack on, her left foot braced against the floor, her left hand on the door release. She breathed heavier, heavier. She clenched her good fist. She flexed her good leg. She screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed — loud and long and filling the room, the only sound in the universe, scream, scream, scream, until it hurt too much to scream, and she pushed the lever and sealed her mouth shut and pushed herself on the wheeled chair out into the hall where she inhaled through her nostrils the overwhelming stench of them.

They crept, they crawled — from the ceiling they fell. She rolled over some of them in her wheeled chair, she stomped on some of them with her booted feet, but they kept coming, crawling up the moving wheels of the chair, crawling up her dragging leg, and even up her good leg as she pushed. Some of them flew as they fell off the wall, spinning to the floor slowly with the flip-book sound of beating wings. A few of the fliers landed on her head and back. She tried to brush some away but it was useless. She leaned forward in the chair breathed with her nose and with her good leg pushed.

Behind her the hall was collapsed and dark, but forward the low lights continued into a shifting sea of shimmering brown-black. She saw another door on the left, and she moved towards it, wanting to scream but not daring to open her mouth. She grabbed the door handle and pulled, but it was sealed tight. Her eyes went white and she thought she would die, but she didn’t, she kept pushing forward with her foot to the end of the hall where a ladder made of black painted pipes was bolted to the wall. It rose up into a gap in the ceiling where there was no light, but Sofi did not think about what lay ahead, she only thought of getting out of this hell.

Cockroaches were in her hair, on her back, creeping under her clothes. She jumped up with energy she didn’t know she had and grabbed the ladder, pulling herself up on the left side only with quick grabbing and hopping movements. On the second level she saw light and moved towards it — she was on a balcony looking down on the river scene below. The room immediately beneath her was not lighted, but light entered from an adjacent room, and she could see that the river widened out and deepened and that the pink boats were being pulled underwater here. It became clear that the entire building must be slanted, and that she’d been moving downward all this time — downward, deeper into the earth, farther away from her goal. But she didn’t curse her luck because she believed that as long as the cockroaches didn’t get in her mouth she would be all right. She brushed them away from her ears and arms and face and got back on the ladder — it kept going up until it ended at flat ceiling. She thought of the ceiling panel she’d fallen through and grabbed her useless right arm with her left and looped it around the top rung of the ladder. It held. She reached up, and felt a small recess with a handle. She turned it. She pulled it. The door swung down, wet dirt fell. She could hear rain and thunder, louder now. She was just a few feet underground. With her left hand she reached, she dug, she pulled — she was a madwoman driven insane by the crawling insects, and she dug her fingers into the roots of grasses and pulled until the ground poured over her and past her and she saw daylight and clear rain fell on her arm.

Mud flowed down the sides of the hole she’d made, eroding it away, revealing that the ladder continued through the opening, and she used it to pull herself up and force her head and shoulders through. She felt the cockroaches falling off her — the earth pushing them off her. There were still a few in her hair, but she didn’t care, because she could feel the open sky, a warm subtropical rain and gusts of wind hard enough to knock her down. She dug her feet in the soil to push herself the rest of the way, and wriggled onto the ground, rolling face up to see the low, dark clouds. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled and rain filled her hair. Still she kept her mouth closed, her nostrils flaring with effort. She dug her fingers into the root networks of thick, aggressive grasses, and pulled. She soil beneath her feet gave way and flowed down the hole and she rolled away from it, onto firm ground. She ran her hand over her head and neck and arms and pulled more cockroaches off her body, crushing them in her fingers, flinging them far. “Oh god,” she finally said, when nothing crawled near her mouth. And then she laughed with the elation of the damned, “Oh god oh god oh god!”

And when she opened her eyes, there stood above her a pink and hairless ape, reaching one arm down to her, with what appeared to be a smile.

“This will be a city of researchers!” said Professor Vivienne Froget, breathless from rushing through citrus trees and abating rain, and from delight. “The next expedition will bring everyone — and the more who come, the more will be willing to come! Instead of the ConneX we’ll have the connection of people, a network of flesh! Words instead of signals, singular and undivided, stretching through the trees — the beacon in this nothingness will be us, humankind! It will be like the underground, in France! The resistance!”

Pete followed close as he could. “I wish they were here now. City dwellers need a city of people to feel at…”

She’d stopped. And he saw the reason before he could ask why: there on the path lay the body of a man — headless, handless.

Pete glanced around carefully, took a closer look. “He is a Forest dweller. A White, like your students, but with sun-reddened skin. Look, he wore the laughing mouse. It is their god.”

“I expected to find gorillas butchered like this, not a man.”

“My brother,” Pete said.

“My students,” Vivienne said.

They ran: the waxy wet leaves of orange trees whipped them in the face but they ran. The pooling mud and water grew deep but they let it splash up their bodies and they ran. Above them ravens gathered and cawed like a portent of doom but still they ran into the heart of their cawing darkness, around the bend, onto the path that they knew led to their campsite. At the campsite the sun reemerged from behind the clouds and fell through the wings of birds, dappling the ground with spinning light, and they saw that they had come too late.

Vivienne shouted “no!” but Pete said nothing. Under the flapping and cawing of a mob of ravens, he slowly approached the body of his brother, outstretched upon the earth, blanketed red with blood, dotted with holes where bullets had torn through his skin and fat and muscles and organs and bone until nothing worked right anymore, until the fleshy mechanism that was Skip came to a halt, broken and unfixable. He crouched down and held his brother’s shoulder.

Vivienne ran to Pierre’s body. When she saw his head was missing she turned away and squeezed closed her eyes. “My god what have I done?”

“What language is that? Speak English!”

Vivienne fell backwards to the ground in surprise. The man who spoke seemed to appear from air, but she realized now he’d stood at the edge of the campsite all along. Watching their return. Waiting for their return. The ravens screamed.

“You did this?” Vivienne shouted, in English.

“It was the witch,” he said, slowly. “Do you understand my words? You speak strangely.”

“She is from far away,” Pete said, also in the Forest-dweller’s tongue, “but she understands your words. She is in shock.”

The stranger nodded and touched the laughing mouse over his heart. “The witch has also killed my friend. His name was Chet and he was a good man.”

“We found him.” Vivienne covered her face with both hands. “We found his body. Without hands. Without a head.” She wished to be anywhere but here. Without the ConneX she could not retreat. Anywhere but here, she begged her brain, take me anywhere. The lack of response had become more than she could bear.

“And him?” Pete said, gesturing down to his brother Skip on the ground.

The stranger shrugged and looked away. “He has been shot. The witch I think must have caused this too.”

“I understand.” Pete stood. “And who are you?”

“I am Bradidiah of the village Sandrella, where the sun rises over the Eye-for blacktop. Good Chet and I came to defeat the witch who cursed me.” He pointed over his head.

Vivienne and Pete looked up again and saw there were hundreds of ravens. Some of them swooped over them and others turned high in the sky. They filled the upper branches of the trees with inky blots of noise.

“Your friend was killed. How did you get away?” Pete asked.

“I ran,” Bradidiah said, stepping back towards the tree line and opening his arms to the ravens above. Guano streaked his biceps like fingerlines of warpaint. “I saw that Chet was dead in her arms, and when she turned towards me, I ran.”

“Sofi, where is Sofi?” Vivienne said, leaning her head to look around. She knew that Sofi’s body must lie nearby.

“She’s not here,” Pete said.

“There is no one else here,” Bradidiah said. “Perhaps like me she ran. Perhaps like me this other friend is still alive.”

Despite her desire for extreme and disturbing events, Sofi never once wished to see a head removed from a body, not even in a gameworld. When the great pink ape showed her Pierre’s head, she of the iron stomach vomited half-digested muelsi onto her chest and cried. A second later she tried to understand what she’d seen, but could not picture it. She only knew the fact of it: it was Pierre’s head. How did she know what she’d seen, if she had no memory of seeing it? What microsecond did it take for some part of her mind to recognize Pierre’s disembodied head and go blind, and erase all memory of the sight? She would never know, that moment forever a blur of sick horror and abstraction, hovering over the absence where image of memory should be.

She looked at the other head, a stranger to her, unreal seeming because it was too real. The ape set it back in the bag, a blue and bloodstained canvas sack decorated with a smiling cartoon mouse, and Sofi the primatologist pushed aside all consciousness of these two human heads in a bag, and instead observed this strange and impressive ape: hairless, pink, with long limbs and broad shoulders. Without the protection of fur, its skin had suffered: welts, scars, abrasions, infections, callouses everywhere. Yet the ape was not ugly — she was in fact a lovely hulk to behold. Her protruding belly was proud, her flat breasts cheerful, the bulk of her arms and legs inspiring, and the intelligent brown eyes deeply set into her head made Sofi aware of her own humanity, its fragility, its power. This feeling gratified the same part of her that thrilled for violent gameworlds, this place where her mortality, her desires, and her deepest self met. This ape would kill her; this end would be fitting. Or she would become like this ape, and that would be fitting too.

Sofi observed the creature, expressionless in her fear and wonder, and as she studied the beast’s eyes, it bared its teeth or smiled at her, she wasn’t sure which. At once she felt the strangeness of her own face, its stiff, alien posture. She moved her face muscles but she couldn’t guess what it looked like. But the ape seemed to relax. It leaned a bit to the side, and sang: “Quand il me prend dans ses bras, il me parle tout bas, je vois la vie en rose. Il me dit des mots d’a…”

“The professor’s song!”

The ape did not understand her, but sensed her joy of recognition. She pounded her chest and hooted something unintelligible, something that sounded like a language, but none Sofi knew. The creature bared its teeth at the sky, then rolled to its feet, grabbed the bag in one hand and took Sofi by the other, and pulled her small, badly limping companion through thick trees to a steel door set into the earth with a sign bolted on that read, “CAST MEMBERS ONLY.”

“Let this be clear: the war is over. You two were on opposite sides. And now you both hurt with fresh loss: Pete, for Skip. Bradidiah, for your friend. But your enemy is not the man before you, it’s out there. I hurt too, for my student Pierre. And there is a girl who may be still alive, a girl we may still save.”

“I don’t know this girl. I only want my revenge.”

“Then Bradidiah, I will shoot you where you stand.” She pulled her gun and aimed it at him.

“Vivienne!” Pete’s body did not match his voice’s pretend outrage. He did not want to see Vivienne become a killer, but he would be happy to see Bradidiah shot dead.

Her aim was steady. The self she knew from gamewords seemed to have taken over her body. With absolute certainty she said, “We are together or we are nothing.”

Bradidiah looked up to the raven-spotted sky. “I relent. We are together. I will protect this girl — if she is alive — as though she were a girl of my village. Whatever is necessary to take my revenge.”

“We should not let him hold a gun,” Pete said.

“Together or nothing, Pete. We must trust him if we are to save Sofi together.”

“I trust him to betray us.”

“I am Bradidiah, only son of Jasmine, sole survivor of the battle for Cinderella Castle. Among my people I am held to be the most honorable of men.”

“And yet you walk everywhere with a cloud of ravens overhead, in a rainstorm of bird shit? You are a liar. You are cursed. You are a coward who abandoned your friend.”

“He was already dead.”

“You say he was. And you say you want revenge. Why did you not want the same revenge at the moment you saw this ‘witch’ take his life?”

“I am not used to being questioned in this way.”

“I think you are.”

“Pete, enough. Do we go together?”

“Yes, let us bring him. But do not let him carry a gun.”

“I don’t want your gun. I have my own weapon. Bullets don’t work on her anyway.”

At this revelation Pete stopped and watched Bradidiah follow Vivienne down the path. He took a moment to contain his simmering rage. He had suspected since the stranger looked away when they asked what happened to Pierre. This, then, was as good as an admission: the beast kills by crushing and dismembering, but Bradidiah has tried killing with bullets. Bradidiah was the murderer of his brother, Skip, the gentlest soul alive, and therefore, Pete decided, Bradidiah must die.

The door marked “CAST MEMBERS ONLY” opened onto a small landing built of concrete and steel. Concrete-covered metal stairs painted with lines of bright orange descended into dim light below — more emergency lights of the type that Sofi saw surrounding the river of singing puppets. She balked for a second at the thought of more cockroaches, but the ape did not pause, and as it dragged her downward by the hand it didn’t react to the tug of Sofi’s hesitation.

There were no cockroaches, and Sofi soon realized that she was not in a sunken building this time, but an actual bunker — this structure was designed to resist the earth, and possibly worse. Near the bottom the air became cool and dry, and Sofi was for a moment mystified, having forgotten what it’s like to stand in a climate controlled room, but when the ape pulled her through the final set of double doors at the bottom of the stairs, she found herself in a clean, dry, civilized room full of working machines and bright lights, comfortable-looking chairs and couches arranged around a coffee table, the decor blandly familiar despite being very old. A kitchenette lined one wall and a several halls and doors led out of this space in different directions. The ape led Sofi to a table with chairs, inviting her to sit.

With difficulty she lowered her mangled body into the chair. The ape watched, then retreated to a cabinet from which she pulled a large medical kit.

“Oh you want to help me. Oh I hope you can. I hope it’s not so bad. But I think it is. I think it is bad enough that I will never go home. I will die in this place. What is this place? Do you know? Is this where you came from, or did you just find it? It is so clean. The apes in our monkey house would destroy this place in minutes.”

The ape lumbered over to the sink and wetted a towl. Its hands were coarse instruments, and to Sofi it looked like a person trying to tie shoelaces with oven mitts on. But this, she thought, cannot be a human being. Its proportions are all wrong. A human has a longer, more flexible torso, a human has shorter arms, narrower shoulders, wider hips, a larger skull. As the ape came close and began to clean Sofi’s arms and face, she looked closely at its arms and chest, at the scarring visible all over its body. The lines were not straight, they had been cut by an unsteady hand, but looking at them closely, it was unmistakeable: “These are not injuries,” she said, “these are surgeries!” The ape howled something in its strange language. “You are a human being. These scars are from surgeries.”

Sofi looked at the whole body again, tracing a scar with her finger: “they cut along the bones in your arms, did they replace them? They inserted plating here on your torso – and your face, plating on your face! Yes, I see you – I can see your human face. You are a person! Can you understand me?” But the woman only finished cleaning Sofi’s wounds and opened the medical kit with her meat-paw hands. “This is military plating, isn’t it? You are an augmented human, a soldier, but not the kind we have today in Canada, who blend in with the population. Their implants are so subtle they’re invisible. This is something more… primitive. You just have these triangles of bulletproof fiber, like sewing darts, implanted throughout your body.” Then a thought shot through Sofi so hard that it hurt: “Oh you know, in Canada we all wear avatars. We broadcast avatars, all the time. Maybe our soldiers would look like you if they came here. Maybe they don’t even know what they look like?”

Sofi’s head was spinning from pain and exhaustion, but her mind also glowed with fascination for this new reality. And with it came a transcendent joy. The room was a blur of yellow, and Sofi leaned forward, mouth gaping, eyes agog. The ape-woman, the soldier, was beautiful. Beautiful. The most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Yes, her body was swollen, re-proportioned, the skin scarred, but the precision and symmetry of the implants and the grace of the underlying human form made the end result beautiful, strange and frightening. The deep-set eyes seemed intelligent because they were — the body seemed strong as a gorilla’s because it was — probably stronger. But the center of the ape’s beauty in Sofi’s mind was its truth. No avatar, not even clothing.

“Your body, you wear what you are – what we all are, all of us.”

The woman responded with a brief string of sounds Sofi did not understand.

Woozy, she sighed, a high lilting note.

The ape-soldier-woman imitated her.

“The professor’s song,” Sofi said.

The woman waited.

Sofi was not a singer, but she sang: “Quand il me prend dans ses bras…” and the sewn together soldier grasped Sofi’s hand as her face rearranged in joy. Now that Sofi knew what to look for, the darts of synthetic material were easy to see along the jaw, over the cheek, along the brow, and so they were also easy to ignore. Of course this is the face of a human woman — she could not miss it now.

Hand-in-hand they sang the rest of the song in French, French that Sofi knew this creature did not speak; she had merely memorized the sounds from hearing Professor Froget sing the song again and again. Yet the augmented soldier’s eyes were full of tears when they reached the end, and so Sofi went back to the beginning and they sang it again. This time as they finished, the great hulking, weeping woman grabbed her and hugged her. She said something into Sofi’s shoulder that Sofi could not understand, but it didn’t matter: she understood what she meant.

“It’s okay,” she said to the woman. “I won’t leave you.”

One of Sofi’s ears was covered by the woman’s chest and the other by the bicep of the woman’s arm, and so it took her a moment to realize the bang she’d heard was a gunshot, and that the pain she felt was a bullet tearing through her heart.

Read Part 7

It’s easy to understand why someone would prefer being regarded differently from how people regard them because of the place assigned to them by fate. Rather than your character or choices or cultivated abilities, “how you’re treated” is entirely in other peoples’ heads.

I’ve spent the last 12 years raising two beautiful, crazy, amazing human beings, who are full of flaws and foibles but also love and curiosity, who are capable of being astonished and capable of creating astonishing things.

Their experience of the world, since they began school, is having that truth of them ripped away in the eyes of others.

Right after they started at their first part-time four-day-a-week preschool, one of my born-girl children started insisting she was a boy. She insisted that for about two years before violently swinging in the other direction and not only insisting she was a girl, but swearing that pink has ALWAYS been her favorite color (it wasn’t) and that Hello Kitty has ALWAYS been her favorite character (nope — red. And Spiderman, I was there). The changes themselves don’t mean much to me, my personal relationship with “gender” is ambivalent at best, but what IS interesting is what seems to have prompted the changes.

In the preschool she went to at 3 years old, there were kids who insisted that certain toys were “for boys” and certain toys were “for girls” — at the time she was obsessed with firetrucks. Being told that firetrucks were “for boys,” she simply decided she was a boy so that she could play with firetrucks.

Before they started preschool there was a day when we went to Walmart and they were selling cheap, giant rubber balls. Each chose one. Tesla chose one with a picture of a pizza on it, and Sagan chose one that looked like a soccer ball. Very quickly after arriving home, they both wanted the pizza ball, and it turned into a fight. I told them gently, Tesla chose the pizza ball, so it belongs to Tesla. Sagan chose the soccer ball, so it belongs to Sagan. About four seconds passed, which is longer than their attention span at that age, so we move on, and Sagan turns to Tesla and says, “hey Tesla, want to play a game where I’m Tesla and you’re Sagan?” And Tesla said “okay.” And Sagan ran off with the pizza ball.

What I’m saying is, the kid had already figured out that if certain things are for certain people, you change who you are to get what you want. If Tesla gets the pizza ball, be Tesla. If you have to be a boy to play with firetrucks, be a boy. Until, presumably, the interest in firetrucks wanes. (It took a while: at her preschool “graduation” at 5 years old, they asked all the kids to say what they wanted to be when they grew up, and she was still saying “firefighter!”)

When she switched teams later on, back from boy to girl, it was clear the reason why: in her new cohort of kids, there was one very assertive girl named Armani, and this child was The Boss and Ruler of the Littles. And to be friends with Armani, you needed to be a girl — cue the color pink and Hello Kitty.

Once, when I was still trying to get pregnant, my husband helped me apply the estrogen patch. About ten minutes later I found him curled up on the sofa holding his head. I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong, I can’t stop crying!” I asked him, “did you touch the sticky part of the patch?” “Yes.” “Did you wash your hands after?” “No.” And I rushed him to the sink to wash that stuff off. I’m not sure he ever fully recovered! Telling this story to a group of friends later, I saw the eyes of one very wise friend, Stephanie, grow wide: “see?!” She said to our male friends, “I told you!! It’s HARD to be a girl!! You have to be TOUGH!! You guys couldn’t hack it!!”

My kids are growing up among a gender-flexible cohort, and very few, it seems, really WANT to be a “girl” at the moment. The “why” is not mysterious. Here’s an example from just a couple weeks ago: they went swimming at an indoor waterpark for their 12th birthday, and random strange boys made comments about their armpit hair — they had to get aggressive and bark those boys away, which interrupted their vibe, of course. Now what are their options if they just don’t want to be reproached by strangers for how their bodies ARE? 1) shave your armpits FOR THEM? 2) don’t swim at waterparks TO AVOID THEM? Both of these options mean changing your behavior, which means some rando has power over you for no good reason. That leaves number 3) don’t be a girl?

They’ve already compromised on so many things. One of them really wants to wear swim trunks instead of a top-hiding swimsuit, but she also understands that her chest is basically “illegal” now that it has grown boobs — she would get in trouble, be “arrested” if not by police than by other responsible adults who wouldn’t allow her topless presence. And of course neither of them enjoys getting cramps and wearing pads or period underwear (or tampons if they go swimming) once a month.

In middle school, the division between boys and girls has never seemed so stark: one of them comes home with the words “boys suck” written on her hand (the same one who spent two years being a boy, btw), because the boys get together in groups to tease, taunt, and get a rise out of her (among others). Needless to say, I’ve been there. You can’t let them see they’ve affected you, so they’ll go away — but that just means they move on to the next target. When they run out of girls to pick on they’ll turn on one of their own. And the boy who knows he’d be the one the others would turn against? That guy is highly motivated to make sure they keep picking on girls — so he’ll push VERY hard to get a rise out of you. This is to say: it’s not that the boys don’t have troubles too, but it’s fucking hard to be a “girl.”

Socially, they will probably continue to have the same option that a lot of young women have today, which is to opt out. They will declare themselves a “they,” and they will wear the non-binary colors, and they will put conspicuous effort into “presenting” in a way that is neither very male nor very female, because to be lumped into either group is to suffer the disadvantages of that group. Of course there are disadvantages to being non-binary too, but at least you chose those — they were not foisted upon you.

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But even with the disadvantages, there’s power in exempting oneself from the gender game. There’s a kind of self-possession in refusing to play, even if it costs you. If people can’t quickly categorize you into one of these two groups, that means they have to linger a minute, contemplate that pronoun, look closer at how you “present” and who you really are. Pulling yourself out of the gender game is a way of asking people to look at the real you.

I recently made a comment on note by Andrew Sullivan in which he questions the spike in the number of born-girls who now identify as nonbinary or trans-males:

I’m afraid I didn’t reply to the questioner1 because the comment was as far as I was willing to go in that context. But I was not saying that androgyny is “in” — I’m saying there are distinct disadvantages to being a feminine straight girl who hangs around with masculine straight men. And to do things differently is — “safer and less demeaning.”

To be very direct: these are ways to repel or avoid the unwanted sexual interest of others. I hope that everyone understands how essential “avoiding/repelling unwanted sexual interest” is to a girl’s sheer survival. I hope I don’t have to explain that.

Life is hard for everyone, and it’s not a competition. But right now I’m watching my born-girl children struggle. And I wish the world didn’t do this to them. I told them that if we lived in France their hairy armpits would be unremarkable, and they said “let’s move to France!” But France is also where 100 men raped Gisele Pelicot after her husband drugged her unconscious for the purpose. And she’s not even a young girl! There is hope, in the heart of every woman, that growing old and wrinkled will make us more free. I think instead unfreedom of one type is replaced by another. And I think nowhere in the world is safe to be a woman, let alone a girl.

You feel you are born into a war, on the losing side, and every day is navigating the heartless bombs that fall around you. You want to infiltrate, you want to hide, you want to spy, you want to sabotage, you want to blend into the crowd, and then you want to spray the enemy army with machine gun fire — but all of that is just a way of saying you want to survive. Not just keep breathing but keep being who you are. You want to not change for them, you want to not be changed by them.

What you want is impossible.

So I’m publishing my book here, one chapter a week on Thursdays, but last Thursday, there was no post.

Why? Well…

I am reminded this week of Achille’s Lack of Productivity, the frailty that humans have that make us less suitable “employees” if “employees” means cogs in the money-making machine.

Because this week my child’s pet snake Ari disappeared, and I have spent days now searching my house, quite stressed out, while my child alternatingly tries to think about anything else or just whimpers into the couch cushions “Ari, where are youuuuu?”

I mean, from the point of view of Human Utility, I am not very valuable right now. I’ve ceased all other projects, household, artistic, and otherwise (have I bathed? Um, a little?), so I could double down on the insane act of moving every piece of furniture in my home, using a camera scope to search inside HVAC tubing, voyaging bodily into the terrifying crawl space… and coming back empty-handed.

This is me whimpering into the substack cushions: “Ari, where ARE youuuuuu?”

We discovered Ari was missing on Wednesday; the Sunday before, my rooster Frookie died. He was six years old, which is a ripe old age for a chicken. He was the last of my original flock, and by far the most affectionate and intelligent chicken I’ve had. As a baby chick he used to sit on my shoulder and sing in my ear — back then his song sounded like a songbird, trilling and cooing and little musical tweets.

At some point with that first flock we realized we had 7 roosters and only 6 hens, and I had to choose which rooster we’d keep and figure out what to do with the others. So there were 7 males competing for this coveted spot in my back yard. Frookie won because he didn’t play for the spot in the yard, he played for a spot in my HEART. He kissed up to me like I was a goddess. He melted me. And then reigned supreme.

But years passed, and so did Frookie: from ripe old age into the ever-beyond. We gave him a dignified burial, under the birdbath, and we mourned.

Ari, tho, is young (less than a year old!) and there is hope she’s still alive. It’s -2 degrees outside and completely white with snow, so I’m confident that she’s still in the house, somewhere. Probably alive?

I think alive, because I have four cats and two dogs, and when they find a mouse, for example, they do not, shall we say, dispose of the evidence. More accurate to say “they toilet paper the dining room with the evidence.” I have a collection of photos on my phone which I call “crime scene photos.” Sometimes I wake up in the morning and there has been a Murder Most Foul — once I found literal drops of blood across the kitchen floor which led me right to the body.1

WARNING: CRIME SCENE PHOTO FOLLOWS

Humans are animals that love animals, and there is a hierarchy. I’m more emotionally attached to my mammals than I am to my reptiles or birds. I really like mice and I hate seeing them killed, but I like my cats more. Previously I wrote here about my dog Guillermo, and how he got pancreatitis while we were out of town, and nearly died, and was saved, and how we then got a monster of a medical bill, and I asked for help, and bless you my beautiful readers you helped, and I was able to pay that bill. Now I just have to keep paying $65 a bag for Guillermo’s prescription low-fat dog food (which he actually loves and acts like it’s the most delicious food he’s ever encountered, thank you small favors!). Guillermo and his buddy Carson are definitely at the top of the animal-hierarchy. Well below the humans, but above all the other animals.

The trauma with Guillermo wasn’t limited to him and me, tho. My child who is the snake-mama nearly had a breakdown. Her teachers called me and told me that since she returned from winter break (when we were out of town / when Guillermo almost died) she’s spent “95% of her time picking at her face and hair” getting into fights over weird little things, and writing upsetting things on her desk. Earlier the same day they called me, she had texted me from her Apple Watch telling me she was in danger. I literally dropped everything and drove to the school because she told me “trumps ice agents are here we’re gonna die” — it was a massive misunderstanding. Some of the kids had organized a protest/walkout against ICE and she heard about it and misunderstood in the most terrifying possible way.

So I decided to make an extra appointment with her doctor. The doctor’s office is attached to the hospital where the twins were born, part of a huge medical complex, and they have an attached parking garage where we always park. So we parked there and we come down the stairs and I see flashing police lights, and I’m thinking it’s probably a parking infraction in progress, but but then we see two hospital-branded cops -- with the name of the hospital labeled on their car and uniforms. They appear to be real cops, with a gun on one hip and a stun gun on the other and handcuffs and everything. They have a dog wearing a vest that says “do not pet.” My kids are basically narrating all this as it’s happening, by the way, because they have no filter, and they’re already asking to pet the dog and I tell the kids, “no no, read the vest, carry on, leave the doggie alone, just keep walking,” but then the cops STOP us and tell us they’re looking for “weapons and drugs” and ask me if I have anything like that in my purse and I say no, and so they take my purse and put it on a bench and tell me and the kids to “line up against that wall right there” and we are completely stunned by what’s happening so we do, and the doggie takes a walk by my purse and they say “you’re good to go, want a sticker?” and they gave us stickers with a picture of their badge with a dog on it. Are you pissed off yet?

So I pick up my purse and my anxiety-prone snake-mama kid exclaims “that was TERRIFYING!” and her twin yells “what WAS that?!” and I was just speechless, so I walked them to the doctor’s office, but by the time I checked them in I had found my voice. The receptionist asked how I was and I said, “not great, actually,” and told her what happened. She was shocked and started asking the others if they knew what was going on. Then when the nurse came and we got into the exam room, the same exchange: “how are we doing today?” “well, actually…” AND I added for the nurse, by the way, we’re not just here for ANXIETY but ANXIETY that took the shape of a “Trump’s ICE is coming and going to kill us all” text and those MFers basically just terrorized my kids for no reason, and I gave her the sticker and she walked out of the room with a “what the actual fuck” look on her face.

By the time the Doctor got in the exam room she was LIVID -- she’d just gotten off the phone with the hospital police and had told them that what they were doing was completely unacceptable and that patients need to feel safe when they come to their doctors.

It turns out, it was a training exercise -- I mean, dude, do you realize, if they had said to me, “Hi Ma’am! This dog is in training, can she practice on you?” WE WOULD HAVE SAID YES! But they didn’t do that, they just said, “we’re looking for guns and drugs” took my purse and said “line up against the wall” — which is what you say to people you’re about to execute for fuck’s sake!!! Is it asking too much for the iota of empathy that recognizes “I, as a uniformed man wielding weapons, could be scary to others”?

It’s been a helluva week.

When I have been thinking not-about-my-rooster and not-about-the-snake and not-about-the-mental-health-of-my-children, I’ve distracted myself with Wonderman, the short Marvel Universe romp, which is an amusing little eight-episode detour that’s probably more about acting and Hollywood than superheroes. The camera-work is inventive and the musical choices are INSPIRED. The story is also fun, funny, and meaningful while not taking itself TOO seriously, even if it is sorta self consciously modeling itself on Midnight Cowboy (which is a great movie but an even better book, James Leo Herlihy is the greatest American author). So there’s THREE things I recommend!

I’ve also enjoyed the cover stories of both Wired and The Atlantic and noted that they seem to be competing for “most eye-catching cover” which is nice — the Atlantic wins on irony but Wired takes the prize for outrageousness. (Also recommend)

So that’s the news from Amytown, USA. Wish me luck, I’m headed to the basement to search for a snake.

Some you read because it feels like everyone has read them. Some you read because they might contain vital insights. Some you read to experience more of life than a lifetime affords…

And some books are just FUN.

The Body Scout is FUN. This is one of those books where you feel like the author had a blast writing it and now is taking you along for the ride.

It’s set in a world where people upgrade themselves with biotech in a very keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way, but the effects of that are imaginative and surprising and… did I mention fun? The biggest consequence of this “what if…” that the book takes on is in Professional Sports, especially Baseball, America’s Game (TM), which in this world is as popular as baseball was at its height in the mid 20th Century — it’s always on everyone’s minds.

The main character is a “scout” for one of these teams, and he’s looking for “bodies” but probably not in the way you think. Also he’s connected to the team in deeper ways than you’d predict, and the animating trauma that begins the murder mystery at the start of the story makes for quite a startling and memorable scene! All of these things make the story a wild and exciting ride and a great deal of fun. The story also has a deeper resonance tho.

Baseball has a special place in American literature, of course. I’m sure you have your favorite. My favorite is my recently-deceased (rest ‘im) MFA teacher Skip Hays’ book The Dixie Association which was the book that convinced me to uproot from Florida and go to Arkansas to study fiction. If you want to read the book that’s the uncredited literary inspiration for 1989’s Major League, you should read it right now! Or, if you just want to read a Great American Novel about baseball — read it now! Either way it’s out of print, so you’ll have to rummage a bit… take your time with that “now.” ;-)

Baseball stories always say something about America — not always “the US” to the exclusion of the rest of the Americas, but yeah, usually the states are at the center. Baseball stories are about idealism and inequality first and foremost, which are the two ideas most distinctly in conflict in the “American Experiment.” And in baseball there’s a reflection of those two ideas in 1) the rules and gameplay and the hearts of the fans (idealism), but 2) professional baseball is made and marketed by capitalism, and the more popular baseball is, the more corrupt it becomes (inequality).

In The Body Scout, baseball is both maximally popular and maximally corrupt. Teams are owned by biotech companies, for whom the games are a way to showcase and advertise new biotech products with the bodies of the players. And for you watching at home: this is the cool new thing! But also, having biotech implanted might be necessary for you to have a job and survive! Which means you’re always in hock to a medical debt system, and before you can pay off the last upgrade, you need more credit for the next. It’s not like you live without it, so what choice do you have?

It’s freedom’s lie: you’re “free” to lie down in a ditch and die, if you can’t or won’t do what capitalism demands.

The Body Scout would make excellent reading for an overseas American Studies program, for its insight into contemporary American culture. But to American readers it’s the strange familiarity of this awful future that strikes you, it rings true and you feel immediately at home. From that place of familiarity, the bizarre ripped-from-the-internet details become a way to better-see the bizarre details of the world we live in. It’s sort of like how Breaking Bad couldn’t exist without the nightmare US medical “system” and its total failure to protect and support sick people. Americans watch that series and see an entirely logical story. People from countries with universal healthcare watch it and exclaim “what is this improbable dystopia!” Give our painful reality a sci-fi futuristic turn and you’ve got the foundation for The Body Scout.

This is a fun book with some real (if synthetic!) meat on its bones. For a good time: I highly recommend.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that is on Substack

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5

When the rain came, Vivienne and Pete had already found a miraculous kind of shelter. The statue they’d discovered stood on a path of colorful bricks that was mostly buried, but once they discovered its outline, marked by where the trees grew and did not grow, they followed it to a row of foliage-covered buildings. Peeking inside the first one, Vivienne saw a scene she recognized from historical livplay: an amusement ride waiting for people to climb aboard.

“These are entrances to ‘rides,’” Vivienne told Pete. “A kind of entertainment from before livplay and gameworlds, from before the ConneX.”

“Yes, I know rides,” Pete said. “We still have them in the City of Towers.”

“You do? I would love to see that!”

“We do not show outsiders. We feel shame, that we still have such ancient toys and games, that we are so far behind the rest of the world. But I will take you,” said Pete, “when we escape this madness.”

Vivienne took his hand. “They built these rides on this brick path, across from what used to be a lake it looks like,” Vivienne said. She pointed across the roadway which opened onto a low muddy plain.

Pete shook his head, “This land is frequently taken by sinkholes,” he said. “I believe that is what we’re looking at. There, in the water you can see the tops of other buildings, perhaps other rides which have been swallowed into the pit.”

Lightning flashed and a great boom filled the air all around them. “Come,” she said, taking Pete’s hand. “Let’s go back here, where it’s dry,”

They encountered several lines of tattered ropes and Pete took the lead: “these are to organize the people into a single line, so they can get on the ride one at a time. Come, we’ll walk to the front.”

He seemed to know exactly which way the path would turn and they passed through the folds and convolutions quickly. At the front they found a line of cartoonish cars, constructed with bench seating so people could get on and off quickly, and so people of every size and shape could pile on together. “This looks like fun!” Vivienne said, and immediately requested this scenario from the livplay server, forgetting that she had no connection, that her request could not be received let alone satisfied.

“We have something similar in the city,” Pete said, stroking one of the cars. “We call it The Wild Ride of Monsieur Toad.”

“Monsieur Toad!”

“It is a very old ride. No one knows what the name means.”

“I’m sure that the name evolved from a sensible root whose meaning was lost, like how there is a city called in English, Toad Suck.”

“Perhaps. So if electricity worked here as it does in the city, this would be the controls — the operator would push these buttons and…” Pete pressed the green button labeled “ride main,” which snapped into place with a firm click. Nothing happened. He pushed a few more buttons. The sound of rain falling echoed all around them.

“It’s too bad. It looks like a fun ride,” Pete said, looking down the tracks.

“Let’s walk it,” Vivienne said suddenly. “We’ll come back if it gets too dangerous. But let’s follow these tracks and see where it goes, what this ride is like.”

Pete looked out towards the gray muddled daylight. There was a series of flashes and booms, rolling thunder. He thought of his brother, Skip, such a gentle, timid man, how he even feared the daily rain.

“We should go back. We left them to look for poachers. They do not know we have found the Magic Kingdom. They will think we are in danger.”

“You worry for your brother.”

“Of course.”

“He is with Sofi and Pierre. They have guns and Sofi is fearless. They will protect him. Let us explore just a little, and then we will return to camp.”

“He is safe and dry in a tent with your students,” Pete said. “They will distract him with their endless speculations about the gorillas, stories of how the beasts came to Florida.”

She laughed. “I hope you are not already bored with the talk of primatologists.”

He turned towards Vivienne, whom he wished to love, and took her hand. “Yes, this will be fun. Let’s follow the tracks and find our wild ride.”

Pete kept a watertight box of matches with him always, and now as they prepared to explore this strange, ancient Mr. Toad, he pulled them out and set them on a counter. He took off his shirt, revealing his lightly muscled torso, dark as the ocean at night and shining where the gray daylight fell upon its contours. Then he rolled the shirt and climbed beneath the ride cars and began mopping.

“Are you cleaning, Pete?” Vivienne asked him, amused but certain there would be an explanation.

“There are petroleum products — lubricants — on the wheels and tracks. I’m going to get as much of it onto my shirt as I can, so we can use it as a torch.”

“You men of the City of Towers have such useful skills.”

“When things don’t always work easy, you learn to make them work hard,” he said. After a few minutes he rose up, grease-streaked and wielding a twisted, blackened shirt. Searching around the control panel he found a long pole with a hook at the end of it, and wrapped the shirt tightly around it. Then he pulled out a match and lit his torch. It gave off a steady, smokey light.

“Now let us find Monsieur Toad,” he said, smiling.

“I’m surprised these rides and buildings survived the war,” Vivienne said as they crept through the first dark archway.

“The fighting was in the city, and the villages. We are far out, here, where few ever come.”

The torchlight illuminated a playful stage set of flat cartoon animals, larger than life and wearing alarmed expressions.

“I think in this ride the creatures are afraid of you,” Pete said. “Yes, look at the tracks — the cars will move erratically. These animals are fearful, and jump out of your way — or perhaps don’t, perhaps you hit them.”

“You were there, you fought in the war, didn’t you Pete?”

“I didn’t fight. I survived. I was taken, along with my father. My mother and Skip were left defenseless. War takes a man from the things he loves and forces him to fight and die for the hatreds of another.”

“A corruption of the natural order.”

“You understand, Vivienne.”

She hesitated, but could not resist. “I shouldn’t compare your real war to my livplay experiences. But they are real-feeling, and authentic. The game designers research it down to the smallest element. The most moral use of livplay really is that it allows us all to experience the lives of others — expanding empathy.”

“How long did you play this game?”

“Almost a year.”

“Our war lasted only five months, but felt much longer.”

“As I said, it is not the same.”

“Tell me the horrors of your dreamwar, Vivienne whose heart overflows with empathy.”

Vivienne heard in his voice something between impatient contempt and indulgent love. But it was important to her that Pete know all the corners of her life. She wished to bring him home to Quebec and share everything with him, get him connected, let him in her mind, and be in his.

“I’ll tell you this. Many people died during that year. They were not really dead, but they were dead to the game, and there is no way of getting them back, and you have to go on without them. And you love them, even though you know it is not real, you still love them. I felt that pain so many times as the war raged on. But the hardest thing for me was when I died. It was knowing that my loved ones felt this pain now because of me. It was knowing that they had to keep going, they had to carry on, without me. And I couldn’t help. I had only one life to sacrifice for the cause, and when I had given it, it was over.”

“War makes people disappear,” Pete told Vivienne. “That can be good or bad. It depends on the person. The war took our mother and our father. For my family, that is what the war got wrong, and right.”

“You don’t mourn your father?”

“I would, if I knew he was dead. But it seems just as likely he would leave. When you burn the earth, you make it possible for new things to grow there. He hated living in the city. I imagine him with a new, younger wife and every year a new young son. Raising goats. He liked goats.”

“That’s nice to think,” said Vivienne.

“Or I imagine his skeleton in the mud of a roadside ditch,” Pete said, and shrugged under his torchlight. “I imagine both just as much. Perhaps this is the biggest difference with your livplay. When your friend disappears, you know what happened.”

“It’s true. Game data is always accessible to active players. I could always find out if someone died, and how.”

“And if they were dead, you knew they were alive, somewhere in the world.”

“Yes, alive and unhappy, because they’d been removed from this game we all loved.”

“Here is another difference: war is not a game anyone loves. When I imagine my father’s skeleton in the mud, it is not entirely sad. For I can hope that he died before he was forced to do terrible things, that he died before he could learn what happened to his wife and children. I imagine he died innocent. Which is terrible but not as terrible as surviving by doing inhuman things, and living on fit for nothing but killing, like the poachers who murder gorillas because they miss the days of murdering men.”

They approached a doorway blocked by a ride car, and Pete and Vivienne pushed it. As the car advanced, a wooden panel popped out from beside them. They both yelled out.

“It’s a dog!” Pete said, holding his torch closer to the panel. “A frightened dog. It’s part of the ride.”

“How did it work, without electricity?”

“We have mechanisms like this, in the City of Towers. Non-electric. The car must push a lever when it passes through the door, and that makes the dog appear. Watch, I’ll bet…” Pete got behind the car and pushed it the rest of the way through, which made the dog panel retract into the wall. “Yes, it turns a wheel as it passes and that pulls the panel back, reloading the spring. It’s a non-electric machine.”

Vivienne marveled at the mechanism. “Huh!” she said. “A non-electric machine! Who dreamed such things were possible?!”

Pete laughed. “Your livplay game designers should build a game of the Fruit Forest, the Sea of Houses, even the City of Towers — a game made of our humble Eye-for Corridor. You Canadians will all play it, and be amazed!”

“They should, Pete! You’re absolutely right, they should!”

The right side of Sofi’s body would go numb then rage again with pain. Still she focused on her goal: she stepped through the spinning masses of robotic puppet children dragged round and round on their mechanical tracks. Her left leg burned now too, because it had borne all her weight since she fell through the ceiling of this ancient entertainment chamber and began hopping around, looking for way out. The last option seemed to be the door on the other side of the fake river, which promisingly had “EXIT” in bold red English-language letters written over it. Still, she had to get there.

She reached the edge of the river and looked down at a sunken boat. It was only an inch or two beneath the surface of the brownish water. She ruled out hopping onto it using her one good leg: if her foot slid she would have no way to catch herself, and if her foot landed firmly, she might plant it straight through the corroded old thing and become trapped. No, she needed to get low to the water and creep onto the bow gently, then roll to the other side and climb off. She sat at the water’s edge, the recording still looping: “there is just one moon. And one golden sun. And a smile means . . . There is just one moon. And one golden sun. And a smile means . . .” She stretched her left foot forward to test how strong the boat was when something large and menacing moved smoothly just under her. Heart in neck she rolled backwards right into one of the lines of dancing dolls. They knocked her forward again and she landed with her face inches from the water, where she was able to see several tadpoles and gnats and a school of small fish and the eyes of one very large alligator rising to the surface. She pushed herself backwards again as it broke the surface and opened its jaws, but the beast couldn’t crest the angled lip of the fake river and it slipped back. This time she grabbed hold of the dancing child dolls and let the machine drag her. When it spun her farther from the river she let go and sat between the sets of little singing puppets and driven half-mad by pain and irony, she realized she’d never felt so alive. She laughed, “Oh yes!” she yelled, “Fucking alligators!” she announced, “This is the good shit!” She knew she sounded like a maniac, but it was so darkly funny she couldn’t help but glee. All her life she’d livplayed scenarios like this, sought them out, always pushing to find something more intense, more extreme, and now she was trapped in a pit with these singing spinning grotesqueries, with no way to call for help, alligators between her and a door that might lead nowhere, with no gun and half her body shattered and in pain. “Brang it ooon!” she growled in the voice of her favorite perpworld character, an enormous sweaty Californian bursting with muscles. Then she rolled on her side and laughed.

She must have passed out like that. Because when she looked up again, a great deal of time seemed to have gone by. It was raining even harder now, and she lay in water flooding a quarter inch, soaking her back and the base of her hair, and flowing across the platform of spinning dolls towards the river. The hole she’d fallen through was now a sort of square waterfall, pouring water and dirt and leaves and frogs down on the spot where she landed what seemed like ages ago. The river entered and left the room through vast openings that were pitch black and obviously full of water, and she wondered just what kind of volume this fake river could hold, how long it must rain before the water level would rise enough to allow an alligator to climb out.

“It’s clear I need another plan.”

She got to her feet and hopped back to the control room so dizzy from pain and injury she felt almost drunk. “So I turned you on,” she said, “but you do more than just turn on. Let’s see.” She pushed a button that killed most of the lights, just leaving a few theatric spotlights. She pushed another that knocked the soundtrack out of its loop, “friendship to everyone, though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide, it’s a small world after all…” She tried pushing that one again, and then its neighbors, to see if she could turn the sound off completely, but the song still played. She saw a big toggle switch labeled in English “ride main forward stop” and went ahead and switched it. The noise was horrible — she had to go out into the rain-flooding room to see what was going on, and it took her a minute to figure out what she was seeing, but the boats that were underwater were also attached to tracks, and they were now moving forward on those tracks, slowly shoving aside mud, branches, and the half-rotted trunk of a palm and headed into the dark unknown at the end of the room. One of the two broke apart as it moved, but the first one held together, an eerie underwater ghost boat disappearing into darkness. As it vanished from view another boat entered from the other side of the room. This one was entirely above the waterline, bobbing merrily as a chain dragged it from beneath. It also looked fresher than the others, probably because it had seen less sun, but its cheerful pink bow was decorated with the desiccated remains of a muscovy duck.

“Fifi, move,” she said. “Fifi, move!” she yelled. And she moved: she jog-staggered out the door, then ran-hobbled to the edge of the river about four feet ahead of the boat. She looked down and saw nothing lurking. The movement of the track should scare any reasoning beast into hiding, she thought, but she was unsure how reasonable these great reptiles might be. When the boat came to its nearest point, she leaned forward and grabbed its handrails and swung into the plastic bench seat. She scooted to the other side of the boat and lifted herself up with her left arm, then used her left leg to push herself forward. She only reached the edge of the platform, her legs splashing into the water, and she panicked and kicked and pushed and pulled herself up, and when she looked back down at the water, there was nothing there. She was now on the opposite stage set, and the boat with its muscovy corpse passed out of the room and into the adjacent blackness, grinding against broken pieces of fiberglass.

The door that said “EXIT” was just a few feet away, and the adrenaline was still flowing through her muscles and veins. She staggered towards it, elated, hopeful, feeling like she was about to “win” — a strange feeling she half-scolded herself for: this is not livplay, Fifi! But it was the truest feeling in her: from her probably-concussed head to her probably-broken toe, she felt the thrill of succeeding in gameplay. She pushed the door’s release lever and it swung forward into a hall made of white-painted concrete block. Low emergency lights were on, and Sofi stopped to marvel again at this: electricity! In the Fruit Forest! She leaned on the wall as she moved forward — the hall was shaped like a plus sign, three legs leading to doors, the leg to her left a column of stairs. The corners were all creeping with cockroaches, but she ignored them and kept moving forward. At the center of the plus she gripped the handrail and pulled herself up the stairs, one at a time. At the top was another short hall, this one without lights, but she could see well enough to make out another door labeled “EXIT”: she pushed the door’s release lever, and it did not move. She pushed again, but she might as well be pushing a lever bolted to a wall: the door didn’t move at all. There was a narrow window, but she could see nothing through it but a hazy reflection of her own eye.

She collapsed at the door and listened to the muffled happy singing and wondered if anyone else would ever become trapped in this place. Would someone slip into that hole and become trapped just like her, and if they did, would they find her skeleton here? Would they even make it this far? Of course if anyone found her skeleton here they would know this is not the way out. They would try the next thing. What is the next thing? “The other doors,” Sofi said to the cockroaches scurrying down the hall. “Is that all that’s left? Doors that lead nowhere. This entire building is buried. Only the ceiling is close to the ground, but I can’t reach the ceiling.”

She thought some more and rolled onto her hand and knee. “If you’re in a building, and want to get to the roof…” she began hopping back down the hall. She lowered herself carefully down the steps and proceeded straight across towards one of the two other doors, unlabeled, unknown. She opened it and heard the singing grow loud again: “it’s a world of laughter a word of tears…” The only light came from upstream: she could see the room she’d left to her right, another bright pink boat entering from that side. She could see, just barely, that in this room more dolls danced, and with a different rhythm: they jerked more and bowed halfway through each spin. It was harder to see without lights or even a patch of sunlight, but now she knew what to look for: there would be a control room, probably on the other side of the river, probably with a door leading into that same collapsed passage. She squinted in the dim light and saw what she sought.

This didn’t feel like winning anymore. Livplay didn’t wear you down like this. The pain wasn’t getting worse — if anything she was going numb — but she was losing the ability to move that side of her body, which was swelling and stiffening. She decided to sit a minute, have a drink of water. Maybe eat one of the muesli bars she brought. She rested her hand against the wall to ease her way down to the floor, but the wall was alive with cool, crisp tickly things. Cockroaches. Some of them crawled up her arm to her elbow, something crawled to her shoulder, her neck, others she felt cling to her fingers as her hand brushed them from the wall. She opened her mouth to scream but felt one tickling at the edge of her lips, and so she struck at it and closed her mouth and screamed with it shut and her hand clasped over, a sound like a horrified hum. Panicking, she ran-hobbled for the next boat that entered the room and dove onto its first bench seat. She rolled against the plastic to crush anything that might still be crawling on her, then got her left foot onto the boat’s edge and pushed off, belly-flopping onto the platform. She felt something move near her ear and jerked to her feet, her mouth still shut, breathing heavily through her nose as she scraped that side of her head with her arm. The control room door opened when she pushed it, the big button labeled “scene 5 main” was right where she expected it to be. She pressed it and this time none of the lights burst, and most of them still worked. She looked out the window: the cockroaches crept up and down the walls in shimmering brown-black sheets, like the walls were made of hallucinogenic mica. A few were on the floor near her feet and she stomped them to crisp puddles of guts. The door seemed otherwise roach-tight.

She turned to the other door — in the stretch of fantasy river she’d first fallen into, the control room’s back door led to a collapsed passage. Here there was a similar door, and the passage was not collapsed. She was able to push it open. It was lighted by low emergency lights. And it was crawling with thousands of cockroaches.

Look for Part 6 on 2/19 !

The year I happened to leave High School (I hate the term “drop out of” but someone might’ve called it that), there was a law on the books (short-lived, thankfully) that declared you had to wait at least six months after leaving High School before you were allowed to take the GED and therefore go on to college (which was my goal).

The law was short-lived because all it did was increase the number of people who NEVER got their GED, not reduce the number of people who left those overcrowded nightmarish institutional learning facilities that they called “schools” — but I digress. Point is, when I was a young teen I spent about six months with nothing to do but get in trouble. The trouble may have bled over the edges a little actually.

I knew a lot of street kids, kids in and out of homeless shelters, kids “staying with” someone or “crashing” somewhere. I knew a lot of girls who were exploited (and hey, I may have been mildly exploited myself!), but the hardest case I ever saw was a boy who was maybe 12 or 13.

This boy’s mother was barely older than him and had shacked up with an old man in Coral Springs whose family hated her, because from their point of view, the story was that after grandma died grandpa went and found a street whore and was letting her live in the house! But you know what grandpa didn’t do? He didn’t let the street whore’s son live there with them! So my friend was homeless.

I visited his mother once, with him (I drove him), while the old man was off golfing or whatever, and he wanted her to ask the boyfriend, please can he let her son stay. But she just said she was sorry, so sorry, that she couldn’t help him, but he’d have to go back to the shelter for runaway teens, which is where she grew up too, so she knew just how bad it was. He’d been beaten up and raped more than once, already, they’d knocked out his teeth. But that’s how it was. She couldn’t just walk away when she was living in this big house with this man who doesn’t hit her and who lets her eat whatever she wants. “Now you all gotta go, now, before he gets home, he’ll go right through the roof if he sees you kids here.”

What I remember most is that she seemed so young. Like when she gave birth she must’ve been 12 or something. That boy was a sad boy, and he had a lot of bad luck. He couldn’t walk down a street without a cop stopping him — it was like he just reeked of “something wrong.” And years later, when I was maybe 30ish, I started seeing him standing at an intersection in Fort Lauderdale near where I lived, begging for money. He was wearing shorts and a duster and was still missing the same teeth he’d had punched out before I met him, which I could see because he was smiling at the cars, like maybe high? The first time I saw him there he looked kind of okay, but after a week or so he looked completely drugged and out of it, staggering back and forth to the intersection to hold his sign. I never stopped and said anything to him because what would I say? 15 years ago I knew you for a short time? Remember? I don’t think he would. His story was an exceptional one in my life; to him I wouldn’t have been background noise. Anyway, after a few weeks he disappeared from that intersection. God only knows if he’s still alive.

Around the same time I met him, I knew a girl who was younger than me, who was a twin but I never met the twin, who was the “hot” one. All the boys always talked about how “hot” she was, non stop. I thought her face was kind of funny, and she always had a “terrified rabbit” expression. But she had a “hot body” in the same way my currently 12 year kids have a “hot body”: small and taut and lean, with fresh tiny little buddings of puberty. In hindsight it’s INSANE how everyone talked about how “hot” she was. She was a kid. But at the time, it seemed normal.

Anyway, it came up a lot that she was a twin, but her sister was “with Jeffrey” I swear to god I am not making this up. It could have been a different Jeffrey. But she said he lived in Palm Beach and was “a lonely old rich guy who just wants company.” The picture I had in my head was NOT what we all know as Jeffrey Epstein today. Being a person of modest upbringing, I pictured someone living in a beachside condo tower, like a retiree or something. (I had no idea what “Palm Beach” meant, wealth-wise; I’d have pictured something more like WEST Palm Beach, where the plebs lived.) And maybe that’s who her twin was with, some nobody. But maybe her twin was in a mansion on Palm Beach being “passed around like a platter of fruit” — I don’t know.

What I know is that this sister who was left behind floated around the shittiest apartment complex in my city, a real dirt hole where there were a lot of drugs and prostitution, and a lot of bad things happened. People bled. Animals were abused. I once got chased down the street by a man who absolutely wanted to rape me, and when I dodged him and made it back to my friends, a couple of the guys talked to him, and they came back saying, “eh, he’s from another culture, where he’s from, girls walking alone, it’s open season.” Huh. How different is that “other culture,” really? When I met her, the twin, she was staying with a guy who was mostly known for always hovering over a courtyard on the balcony of his 2nd floor 1-room apartment, watching whatever was going on below and laughing and making comments like the old guys from the Muppet Show. He was also the guy who’d give you cash for your food stamps, 50 cents on the dollar. He was so slimy he looked to me like he was made of oil. He creeped me the fuck out.

Not all creeps are creepy tho. One of the many part-time jobs I had when I’d started community college was as an “inventory counter.” They’d put together groups of us and send us to department or grocery stores just to count what was there. As work goes, it was fine. But a lot of the people who worked there, especially the full-timers, were grossly overqualified. They had degrees in computer science and stuff like that, but for whatever reason they’d fallen down. Anyway, my best friend at that job was a guy in his 40s who’d had a family and a career in Michigan and had fucked it all up and now lived with his elderly mom in Pompano. He was fond of me and another girl about my age who also worked there, and we’d go to bars and play darts and drink beers, even tho me and the other girl weren’t 21 yet. But we looked close enough to 21, especially when we showed up with this guy, I guess. Anyway, I genuinely liked the guy. He was smart, interesting, funny, and so on, and I never had to worry about him putting a hand on me because, as he made very clear to anyone who might suggest otherwise, I was too old for him. Yes, he was very open about this. Whatever had happened to his former life, it had something to do with the fact that “he liked young girls.” And he was very proud of himself because “now I’m good and I stay away from young girls.” “You,” he would say, to me, or the other girl, “you’re WAY too old for me. Couldn’t get it up if I tried.” I believe this was all true. To me, at the age of 17 or 18, he was harmless. If I’d met him when I was 10, it might’ve been another story. I left the job after a while and I never saw him again.

I’d gotten a different job working the front desk at a hotel in Deerfield Beach. It was a hotel that got a wide variety of people. Truck drivers would stop for the night, but also vacationers would stay there. We’d also get down-on-their-luck locals, like once there was an apartment fire nearby and news cameras showed up to film me checking in the people who’d lost their homes. One day I was checking in a mother and daughter who seemed very well-heeled, like too rich to be there, honestly, and the mother was deep in conversation with the manager about their need for discretion and security. They were from St. Thomas, and they were laying low for a bit she said, because her daughter is attracting the wrong kind of attention. I could see why! The daughter looked like a model: she was tall and just gorgeous like someone you’d see in a magazine, long flowing brown hair and the cutest smile in the world. When she walked on those too-long legs it was languid, like a slow dance. She put her sticker book up on the counter and asked if I’d like to see her stickers. That’s when it clicked. I asked how old she was. TEN she said, smiling. TEN?!! The mother responded to my shocked face by saying, “it is a REAL problem! A man tried to leave with her when she was swimming in a pool!” So they were basically in hiding. Was she hiding from the person who in 2026 is definitely the world’s most famous pedophile who happened to own an island really close to St. Thomas? I don’t know. Could’ve been a different guy. But anyone who listened to a single word come out of her mouth would have immediately known she was a CHILD.

Yesterday I saw a story in the Guardian about someone’s name coming up in the Epstein files who had SLEPT IN MY HOUSE. As an honored guest! So honored Brian and I gave him our bedroom and we slept on the futon! He was an author doing a couch-surfing tour for his new book, and we hosted him. We invited friends and told them to bring their friends, put out a big drink spread, it was an event! One of our friends brought her friend who happens to be a professional dominatrix. At some point in the after-reading party, our “honored guest” stood up, grabbed this woman by the wrist, and dragged her into MY bedroom. Everyone stopped: stunned silence.

Someone asked, “what just happened”?

Someone asked, “did she WANT to go with him?”

It’s awkward, right? Because if something mutual is happening, you don’t want to be Prude Mother Mary Margaret Killjoy — I mean, it WAS a party, and we’re all adults.

But on the other hand, it was not clear if that was mutual or what — ?

Long minutes passed, less than five, but still, we were all not sure what to do, so it kinda felt longer — and then she came out of the room, truly discombobulated, and she and my friend left. Afterwards I learned that it was NOT mutual, and honestly if she hadn’t been a professional dominatrix, I’m not sure she’d have gotten out of that room so quickly. Anyway, years later, same dude is having “#MeToo troubles,” and according to the Guardian, an intermediary asks Epstein if he’ll help the guy out and Epstein is tepid about it but says “ill help anyway i can. if you like.” The Guardian makes the connection that this author, our once “honored guest,” SUED the woman who’d accused him only a few weeks later — implying that it was Epstein’s money/backing that gave him the gumption to file the suit. Maybe it was, maybe he’d have sued anyway. I don’t know. But Jesus.

There are so many unknowns and unknowables that it can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean it’s not enraging. These are episodes from my life, and my life isn’t all that special, and I don’t know what to do with this information except write it, because I’m a writer.

My work-friend the inventory-counting pedophile had lost his job and marriage and basically his whole life because of what he’d done, whatever it was, and I guess he owned it, in his weird way. My friend whose mother abandoned him apparently never got off the streets. Maybe he never had a chance. His mother was a child when she had him. Who even was his father? Where were HER parents? Are either of them still alive? Did that 10 year old who looked like a sex goddess manage to grow up without being assaulted? If she did, I hope she’s doing great now — hey, tall gorgeous rich girl! I hope you got a fancy law degree and you’re using it to convict skeezy pervs who hurt children! But who knows. Maybe she’s in a trophy case.

I’m sorry for opening up all these guts and not being able to tell you whether the patient died or got better.

This world we live in is a fucked up place, my friends.

We can do better.

So accept this observation with a spoonful of salt, but there was a time when Napster was The Best Thing Ever and everyone with a certain (not that high) degree of tech-savvy-ness used it.

Napster was not completely legally on the up-and-up, I dare say! Lol, why no: it was, in many people’s conception, actually theft! And it was terrible for the music industry and all the artists who created music. But the benefits to the users were so free-n-easy that Napster was ubiquitous, and we just let part of society that we actually liked be destroyed out of simple short-term selfishness. We ate the music-industry seed-corn.

Now, it’s gone. I mean Napster is gone. You can still share mp3s online in 2026, of course, but just as a simple, cultural reality, most people are listening to Spotify or Apple Music or looking up songs on YouTube. People are not hoarding CD-ROMs full of mp3s. Most people don’t even have a way to play a CD or DVD or CD-ROM. And very few people own drives big enough to store such things anywhere else — we use “the cloud” (someone else’s computer), which means we don’t own anything anymore and if we CARE about that, we are hostage to the server fortresses.

So people stopped caring. Both the habits and the technologies have changed. The music flows, but not the same music. People don’t have as much choice. You’re much more likely to listen to what they WANT you to listen to than what YOU want to listen to. People have become disconnected from artists, often not even knowing where the songs came from. And people are much more likely to pay, one way or another, whether that means forking over money, or submitting to ads.

All of this is the downstream result of Napster, but entirely contrary to why people liked Napster. On Napster you used to look for what you wanted, and if it was there, you could take it. If you took it, you owned it, and you could share it with everyone else.

People keep saying “AI* is here to stay” but we also know “AI” requires a lot of energy and a lot of water and a lot of real estate… a lot of MONEY.

*shorthand for LLMs, image generators etc

It’s hiking up bills and costing jobs. It’s expensive. So why would you say that you can’t get the genie back in the bottle or the toothpaste back in the tube if KEEPING the genie or toothpaste OUT operating in the air is an expensive and energy-intensive task that causes widespread problems?

It seems to me that if there isn’t a concerted effort to make AI services continue, they will cease. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean, sometimes, technologies cease. Even good ones. Even popular ones. We think back on them fondly — we say “those were the days!”

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I’m not going to try to predict the future, but I do think anyone who resolves that “AI is here to stay” is considering only one possibility of several.

If we take the Napster scenario as a kind of allegory of what could happen with AI, there’s a possible future in which intellectual property issues and social backlash make all these tools just too darn expensive and not worth the trouble. They get swallowed into larger services and ecosystems that you have access to, but cannot download anything from. Anything you make will belong to them, “them” being whomever is also pinging your bank account for regular fees.

People will think back and say “ah, remember when you could vibe-code for practically free! That was nice back when the AI companies were so desperate to establish themselves that they subsidized us all having access to something so extravagant!” And no one will know if it’s “Claude” or “GPTn^7” or “Gemini” or “Mecha Hitler” any more than they know who is the actual composer of that song you keep hearing in the background of YouTube videos.

Or maybe things will turn out some other way.

Maybe instead of Napster, it will be like the Concorde, the SST: the airplane that could take you from New York to London or Paris in three hours. Remember when crazy-rich people would ride the Concorde? They’d sip champagne and eat caviar and btw Break The Sound Barrier? I remember. And then it stopped. One nasty accident, and no one wanted to deal with it anymore. Who cares if it was super cool and high-tech and made life easier for rich people? Who cares if we’ve already invested unimaginable sums in the development of this vehicle and all the system-wide supports for it? Who’s going to INSURE that shit? And so it’s gone. POOF.

It’s not necessarily so, but it is possibly so. Just as it is not necessarily so that AI will define our future (near or far). It’s just a possibility.

And since a warehouse the size of Manhattan is even more disruptive than an explosion on a Paris runway (let alone a file-sharing app), it’s a possibility we should seriously consider.

I was just looking for a “comic book” to read, something light — I actually was thinking something fantasyish? — maybe some other-planet creatures or superpowered goddesses or deeply-feeling robots? We were at the local Nerd Depot, the whole fam, and Everyone Gets One. I saw this book about working in the Canadian oil sands, and read a couple pages, and I knew it was coming home with me.

I had no idea what it would do to me.

If I had, I might’ve left it on the shelf.

But I’m still recommending it, even tho it hurt.

Because it’s that good.

So why did it hurt me? Well, if you make it aaaaaaaaaall the way to the end of the book there’s a two page author’s note that starts like this:

I am wary of the sensationalization of my narrative because it contains sexual violence. The sad fact is, however, that sexual assault of every kind is far too common everywhere to be sensational. That does not mean I am not deeply and negatively affected by it. I will always be affected by it. But I guarantee you that neither of the men who raped me consider what they did to be rape, if they consider it at all. I know the name of one of them: he is a father now with a woman who was his girlfriend when he raped me. I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.

The author’s note continues, and after you read DUCKS you will certainly want to read it all. But I’m presenting the first paragraph here because this is why reading this book gutted me. Rape in this story strikes the reader in exactly the same way actual rape strikes a person in real life, which is to say, THE STORY WAS ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE, and then this shitty thing happened for no discernible reason, and actually now NO ONE wants what the story is about to change, NO ONE, not the protagonist, not the minor characters, not the reader, not the author, NO ONE, and yet THERE IT IS and then holy shit it happened AGAIN?!?!

Think of your favorite book, your favorite story. Now imagine that halfway thru the story, your protagonist, whether man, woman, elf, hobbit, bull, bunny, or robot, is suddenly abducted and forced to satisfy the base physical desire of a background character. And then everyone surrounding that protagonist starts teasing them (“gaslighting” we’d say nowadays) about how much they loved it. And no matter how much Harry Potter or Bilbo Baggins wants to recapture their story and pursue their own goals, all the background characters persist in treating them like “an available way to satisfy physical desire.” A glass of water to be gulped, a toilet to be shat in.

The truth is that this is not a book “about” sexual assault. But likewise, every book that doesn’t mention sexual assault is eliding part of life. If I’m reading a murder mystery, I expect that if the detective is assaulted in some way, it’s probably relevant to the “case.” But in real life, you’re living your life, and then someone invades your life and makes your life to some degree or another “about” THEM. It’s horrible.

So I reached this point in the book….

This moment is about halfway through the book.

And I felt like it was over.

I closed the book and I cried.

Because I’ve been there.

And then I hid the book under some clothes because I didn’t want my daughters to find it and read it and ask me about it.

I just needed time.

It took about a week, maybe it was four or five days. I don't really remember. I tried to pick up other books, I did other things, of course I did, I mean, it’s life, every day brings new challenges and tasks and so on, and you just do what you have to do, and you laugh and you joke and you eat and you watch a dumb TV show and you enjoy it.

But finally I came back to DUCKS and I turned that page.

And I read on. Man, it’s just a really good story. It’s NOT about sexual assault, folks. It’s about life in the camps in the Oil Sands in Western Canada, and about people from other parts of Canada where the economy is crap, and there’s no jobs, and how they go there to work in the oil sands where’s it’s dangerous and inhumane, some of them for life, but a lot of them as a short timers, just to make a lot of money over a few years to pay off student loans or buy a house. It’s mostly men. Men outnumber women something like 50 to 1. If you didn’t talk about sexual assault you’d be lying.

Kate Beaton does not lie.

And so that makes this book a painful experience, at the halfway mark, because life is painful, and this book does not lie.

And if my daughters pick up this book they’re going to be affected by it. It’s going to be painful for them to read, and they’re going to ask me about it, and we’ll talk, because they need to know, this is how the world is, unfortunately.

I recommend this book to one and all, unreservedly.

It’s homey, poignant, REAL, meaningful — it’s about being human but stuck to the bottom of capitalism’s shoe. It’s about loving life and knowledge and nature and art, and yet feeling like you have no choice but to participate in ripping up and poisoning the Earth, because otherwise how can you pursue those things? It’s about people being decent to one another for no good reason, and it’s about people being shit to other people for no good reason. It’s about self destruction and collateral damage. It’s about living on and continuing to tell your own story, be your own hero, for another 215 pages, even after some fuckface, or a steady stream of fuckfaces, try to piss all over it — NO: it’s your story. You stay the story’s center. And those bad actors become something else. To someone else, maybe even love and light, but in your story they’ll always be shit, because they were shit to you.

You should read DUCKS.