AWP starts tomorrow. And I am dreading it.

Back up—I am getting excited to see so many of my writing buddies and spend time in Seattle, my old Nineties stomping grounds. I haven't been there in 25 years, not since my now-husband and I traveled back there to buy our wedding rings, have beers at the crooked corner of Pike and Melrose, and watch fish get thrown at the Public Market. The Mountain even came out for us, a nod to the short time we’d lived there, me 2 1/2 years, my husband only one. But it was a pivotal time. He finished writing his dissertation there. I dropped out of grad school. He got his first tech job. I worked as a secretary to make ends meet. He got offered a gig in Silicon Valley, the big leagues. I printed out everything I had written since leaving school--a pile of fictive leaves, the roots and limbs still a problem for me. I printed all this out to try to prove, somehow, that I was doing this. I did it in secret. I felt silly.

My husband's new company paid for our move. A team of efficiency experts came and packed all our stuff—right down to the toilet brush—in brown paper; a semi came and took all our possessions, including the two Hondas, down the highway toward California. The driver told us he would stick to the coast route in Oregon and Nor Cal; there was snow over the passes. A short film played on loop in my mind: the truck down-shifting on a steep grade on Highway One, not making the curve, and slowly, silently sliding into the Pacific. Everything, including my sheaf of stories and the brick-like MacBook I used to write them, gone in a moment.

(In this film, the driver somehow managed to jump clear just in time, in case you're wondering.)

The truck made it, and so did the laptop and the proto-stories. Life is like that. You dream of release, of letting go and being let go of, but your expectations and their attendant fear and shame won't let you go. In the last 25 years I've worked as a tech writer and a school librarian and been on the board of two arts organizations. I was a costume designer and, always, a school volunteer. My husband and I raised two kids. My wedding rings got tighter and now sometimes even soap doesn't help to get them on or off. Life happened and the writing happened, too. The expectation of some kind of culmination, fulfillment, justification never left.

And so, since last September, when I finished posting all the episodes of What I Saw in California here, I stopped pushing new work at you to focus on polishing the manuscript of Nobody's Property and pushing it at agents.

But I won't be meeting with any agents at AWP. So far, no one sees a book in it. Maybe no one ever will. But Hope won't let me go. The chief gift that writing has given me is to know the difference between hope and expectation: hope is simply a curiosity about the future, a faith that the future will arrive, like a truck that's plied the fierce fractal of the West Coast. Expectation is a narrow, straight road to a place you feel you deserve to get to. It has zero curiosity about what else could happen. And so, with an open heart and expectations as close to zero as I can get them, I hope to see you in Seattle. And I hope the beer is still good.

xo, ekc

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Overpass: 2003

Summer: Coming home from downtown, I walk from the Balboa Park BART station, here in the south-central outskirts of San Francisco. This place is not on the maps of the city that you see in the Travel pages or in guidebooks; usually it gets cut off just below the Mission. This is the last stop before Daly City. It is a place eviscerated by freeways, BART tracks, MUNI lines—bypassed, razor-wired, forgotten. But people live here, and on the side streets you can see sherbet-colored stucco bungalows built before World War II. The place is like a jigsaw puzzle made up of mismatched pieces from different boxes. You can’t put it together.

I walk along the desolate eastern side of the station, a Brutalist cliff of pock-marked concrete. At the corner of Ocean and San Jose Avenues hunkers an abstract sculpture of rusting steel. I laugh at the optimism of public art in a place like this: its hopefulness just underlines the sadness of the scene. The piece, which I may be the first person to actually look at in some years, is signed and dated: 1977.

I walk through Balboa Park itself, a large, overgrown city green space slated, as are most spaces in this part of the city, for “revitalization” at some time in the not-too-near future. I pass the creosoted wood playground and head back toward an ivy-shrouded concrete ramp that will take me to the freeway pedestrian overpass. My anxiety increases with each step. A city worker wearing camouflage uses huge shears to hack away at the bushes obscuring a soccer field. He could follow me with those shears, I think. There’s no one else around and the roar of freeway traffic drowns out any distinct sounds as I start up the ramp. He could follow me, or there could be someone up at the top, waiting.

I’m only taking a walk.

Once I get onto the overpass above the rushing traffic I feel calmer, although I’m not sure why; I’m visible, but who in those cars barreling toward downtown at seventy, eighty miles an hour has any power to help me even if they chose? I am almost off the overpass when a large, burly man with dark shoulder-length hair steps into the chain-link tunnel ahead of me. We are walking toward each other and I think something along the lines of “This could be it.” He carries a jacket in his left hand, trailing beside him, and he takes up a lot of space in the center of the tunnel. The traffic is roaring. He doesn’t move into my path, but he doesn’t move to the right as walking etiquette demands, either.

If something happens, it will be my fault for walking here. That is clear.

They say to make eye contact with strangers in vulnerable situations: would-be assailants don’t like to know that you know what they look like. But that is too much, here. I stare at the ground ahead of me, where I’m going.

We pass each other.

The whole time I had my cell phone in my hand, but what was I going to do with it, dial 9-1-1 while the guy cooled his heels on the overpass, shout into it at the emergency operator over the roar of the traffic, tell her where I was—and where was I, on an overpass over 280 off of what street? If I couldn’t remember now, I surely would not have remembered under pressure. It was ridiculous! Ridiculous to think that anything but the odds could keep me safe.

Once I get off the overpass and round a corner I am in my own neighborhood. It’s foggy and cold today, in the fifties, but the walk has warmed me. I pass old houses in various stages of decay and restoration, half-million-dollar houses crouched above the highway. The concrete buildings of City College sit like bunkers on top of the hill. I speed up as I pass a van parked by the curb. A dented Ford pickup, rusted in its bed and at every margin of its body, looms out of the blowing fog—a ghost of the Seventies. In the fog, the place seems to have one essential quality: indistinctness. It is without light or dark.

One more time, I have survived to see this scene. “I won’t walk that way again,” I think. But which way will I walk?

Hillside: 2010

The hill behind Heather School is redolent of eucalyptus oil, mineral earth, and dog shit on this first morning after the first rain of November. All the summertime eliminations have dried in the heat, preserved for this moment of sudden wet. If the rains keep up, you'll hardly notice any shit at all till the end of May, maybe June. The springtime showers have extended the past couple of seasons until the summer solstice, creating a steaminess so strange for these dry, oak-and-Toyon hills. On the other hand, in the last weeks of October we experienced temps in the nineties on more than one day, and now a Valley Oak below the upper trail here is showing new-spring-green foliage. All of California's predictable tragedies—drought, fire, flood—seem to be giving way to quieter, more insidious failures: rot, premature growth, failure to thrive.

But the Toyon is fruiting right on schedule. At first, when I pass one thinking of other things, I don't recognize it as Toyon. I just see its ripe, deep orange-red berries and sharply toothed leaves, some of them already turned orange and ready to fall into duff, others curled in on themselves, curled around some already departed thrips or perhaps some fireblight that left a blackened spot, tinged with red. I see the plant, something beautiful, singular, and subject only to my seeing, not a part of anything else.

I walk on, throw the dog a stick down the hillside, call her back so that she can go down and fetch another. Then we head toward the lovely glass house below the lower trail, where the people have not fenced their yard, preferring to savor the illusion that their property extends beyond their back patio and past the centenarian oaks, on up the hill. This is one of the best spots for squirrel hunting, and I hear Meg crash down through the oak leaf mould and whimper out her squirrel alert. Then she races back across the space, patrolling the hillside. This is where, on separate occasions, both the man and the woman who live here have come out of their beautiful house to chastise me from the safe cover of the trees, telling me that my dog is supposed to be “under control” here in the off-leash dog area.

As I make my way up the path Meg follows me, runs past panting, doing this thing that is the only way to calm her body and mind for the rest of the day. The last time it happened, when I heard Meg barking down by the glass house, I called her off and she came immediately (which, to be honest, pleased and amazed me), and the man observed with an irony that his German accent turned nasty “Oh, he's really under control, I see!” Several replies went through my head, the best (as always) being the Buddhist rejoinder, “I'm sorry you're suffering.” But I said nothing.

And the main thing is he is right: my dog is not perfectly under control. She loves people (especially kids), other dogs, even the cat, but she will bark if you glare at her or if you shrink away in fear. It is true that dogs smell fear, and they don't like it, not one bit. And the training that she must sit and observe when she senses fear or hostility, rather than bark and escalate the scene, continues. It will always continue. Each time I walk her off leash here I bring treats and work on reinforcing the command to “Come,” and this time it did work: when I told her to, she came. She left the Teutonic grouch to his own unhappiness. But no, she is not “under control,” I think; she’s alive.

And then it comes to me: the plant I had been looking at. Toyon. Heteromeles arbutifolia. California Holly, where Hollywood got its name. The berries, like clusters of tiny apples, gave the plant its Latin generic name, which means “different apples.” Here is a plant that Carl Linnaeus never saw, but that owes its botanical name to his insight that all of life might be classified in a hierarchical system based on physical form, and more specifically on sexual characters. The number of pistils and stamens, the sexual parts of plants, provide the first point of departure for classification. This was risky business in the eighteenth century: Some theologians and even scientists of the day considered it an obscene and heretical system, but Linnaeus declared, “The flowers' leaves...serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity...” He more than once claimed, in Latin, that “God created, Linnaeus arranged” (Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit).

His wife Sara gave birth to their first son, Carl the Younger, seven months after their marriage  (sin being the first principle of organization, the infraction often so much finer than the rule that governs it.)  Linnaeus's coat of arms featured at its center an egg, which he recognized as the seat of all life. His inclusion of homo sapiens among other “anthropomorphs”--or 'man-like creatures,' apes and monkeys-- and his classification of mammals as mammals, that is, based on the way their mothers feed them, were both revolutionary. Apparently he could tell a good story, was often full of his own exploits and accomplishments, at other times spoke of offing himself if only he had possessed “a rope and English courage.” He was a man so alive that the intellectual conception and classification of all life were not beyond him.

The Toyon. Linnaeus took away the Toyon, the singular shrub with red berries, and left in its place Heteromeles arbutifolia, each individual of which could reproduce sexually with any other individual and make another, many others, and not only on this hillside but anywhere in the world. He took away the local gods in favor of creation; took away singularity in favor of organization; and based his entire system on the chaotic imperfection of sex.

I'm still thinking of what I could say to the man with the glass house. I even see myself picking my way down past the oaks to his patio, shaking hands, introducing myself and trying to explain what we're doing here, Meg and I, maybe making some progress in this world. But the response that feels most natural, maybe most authentic, is this: “No, my dog's not under perfect control, Man, but then, neither are you.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus

(Carolus Linnaeus, from De Systema Naturae, quoted in http://curieuxunivers.umontreal.ca/en/classification/hmv/page4.php)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/tribute_linnaeus.html

Music from ccMixter: "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch; and "In the Garden," by snowflake.

and read along ↓

atascadero      mire, bog; (fig) stumbling block.

atasco              obstruction, blockage; traffic jam.

—The Collins Concise Spanish Dictionary

My instinct, mid-stream in the molasses flow of late-afternoon San Francisco traffic, was to just keep moving. This was getting us nowhere. Mom sat beside me listlessly looking out the car window while I steered us around and around, trying to make out the logic of this neighborhood: a tangle of pockmarked city streets, overpasses, skyways, and gracelessly aging industrial buildings that housed sweatshops and auto mechanics. Here and there an artist had carved out a space in all the late-industrial jumble, but SoMa, that amalgam of material desire and millennial longing, hadn’t been invented yet. It was still just South of Market.

“Pull over,” Mom said. “Pull over in the bus stop there and let’s ask in that store for directions.”

“All right.” I pulled to the curb and switched on the hazards. I ran into the corner liquor store to get directions to the freeway.

“You’re almost there; take a right, a right, and another right, that’ll put you on Division,” the pale kid behind the counter told me. The painful brightness of the stud piercing his tongue darted in and out of view as he spoke. In my memory, he nervously tapped a pack of Marlboros on the counter, evidently ready for his next smoke break. I noticed his long, white fingers and the skin pulled tautly across the ligaments on the backs of his hands. “Then take your first left, at the light, and then right up the ramp.”

I thanked him, then ran back to the car and switched on the radio. Before we even took the first right, the disembodied voice from Metro Traffic Control informed us that scores of our fellow citizens were running onto both levels of the Bay Bridge from the East Bay side, shutting it down just before the evening commute was to start—putting their bodies on the line for peace. The drive back to Berkeley did not look good.

“I can see what they’re doing, but it just seems like it’s not the best way to convince people.” Mom said. “They’ll be trying to pick their kids up from daycare, or trying to get home to dinner. They’ll be worrying about their families and be getting angry at the protesters, not at the war.” She sat squinting out the window at the stream of pedestrians making their way across the intersection I was attempting to cross, the car’s right-hand turn signal clicking uselessly. She continued, “What if we were on there and I’d already taken my shot and we couldn’t get any food?”

I thought of this: the insulin flooding her blood stream, Mom getting more and more irritable, then dangerously agitated, maybe clutching at the door handle as if to get out and walk among the other cars idling on the bridge. That, and the sweat starting, the nervous heat of a body getting too much of one thing it needed and not enough of another. An insulin reaction was much scarier than the possibility of a diabetic coma, what most people had heard about. Mom always carried around candies or dried fruit in her purse just in case she “got low”; her fear of getting stuck on the bridge without food was just a useful hypothetical. But it made me nervous anyway.

“I know, it’s like attacking other people, holding us captive.” I flexed my fingers and then squeezed the wheel, hard. “Damn it, would somebody let me through?”

The light turned yellow and a couple of stragglers jogged to the curb. I stepped on it and just beat a late-model Mercedes that was turning left against the fresh red. Mom braced herself on the dash with her left hand, a gesture that might have been involuntary or might have been calculated to make me feel that I was taking an unnecessary risk. It was left over from the days when we didn’t wear seatbelts, when no one wore seatbelts, when stories circulated of people being “thrown clear” of an accident and mercifully saved, rather than incinerated with the wreck. In those days Mom drove a Pinto whose treacherous fuel tank had been mysteriously “converted” to make the car somehow not a death trap. When she had to brake the Pinto suddenly, Mom would throw her arm across my chest, as if this would save me from flying through the windshield in the event of impact. Even at the time, this gesture seemed ineffectual, yet I found it reassuring, a sign of my mother’s constant caretaking.

Mom looked much the same now as then, with shoulder-length ash blond hair, skeptical green eyes, and a kind, full mouth. Her skin, she would say, was a farmwife’s skin, large-pored and not fine at all, but the kind of skin that doesn’t easily wrinkle. “Your mother is so young!” people were always telling me. And she was young; and I was young also, but with fine skin that was sure to wrinkle as I got older, as my grandmother’s had (Mom always pointed this out as she talked about her own tougher skin).

What we were doing here, trying to leave San Francisco after a day of sightseeing, should have been simple. And I had an easier time with the second right; the third, onto Division, was free of pedestrian complications. I peered up at the concrete tendrils of the highway interchange. “Well, we could take 101 South from here, I think. We could take one of the other bridges. Or we could go down to Gilroy.”

“To the outlets?” Mom asked.

“Yeah. It’s a long way to go. But we could go shopping, then go back north.”

“We could do it. We’ll see how the traffic is.”

A road sign announced I-80 East - BAY BRIDGE - 101 Fwy South. I pulled into the left turn lane, the car’s blinker again supplicating meekly against the oncoming traffic, then pulled through on the yellow. I steered right onto the sweeping arc of the I-80 onramp, stayed right to curve south onto the 101. This time Mom did not brace herself but let the car carry her up and onward. Once we were on the freeway we were in another country, one of unlimited possibility, or anyway of possibility limited only by the prevailing speed.

On the 101, going south out of San Francisco on this clear blushing February evening, sailing past Potrero and Bernal Heights and Visitacion Valley, the speed was somewhere between seventy and seventy-five, my hands resting lightly on the wheel and Mom’s folded, for now, in her lap.

We had planned to stop at the outlet mall in Gilroy on our way up to Berkeley from L.A. earlier that week. I'd been down for a vacation in Claremont; now Mom was coming back north with me for a birthday visit, planning to fly back home at the end of the week. It was the kind of plan that begged for something to go wrong. We took the scenic route up the 101, stopping for lunch at a Taco Bell in San Luis Obispo before heading inland on that asphalt incarnation of El Camino Real. Just outside Atascadero, my ’82 Mazda, at nine years old already in late middle age, broke down. I was cruising in the left lane when suddenly the relationship between the weight of my foot on the gas pedal and the forward motion of the car was lost. For a minute I couldn’t catch my breath. “What’s happening?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know, it’s just not getting any power. It’s like it’s just not getting any gas.” The panic clutched my throat.

“O.K., now, just try to get over to the right.” Mom’s voice stayed calm and soothing, a touch of brightness at its edges. “We’ll just get over to the right and see how far we can keep going.”

Empty grazing land spread off to the east, and we could see a few scattered trees ahead and the first run-down buildings of Atascadero. “We’re close enough here, we can walk it if we have to. There now,” Mom continued, her head craned to the right and her hands gripping the curved handle of the door beside her, “just after this blue car, then it’s clear. Go now.”

We edged over to the gravelly right shoulder in slow motion and went on, the car suddenly roaring now and then with an infusion of gas, then just as suddenly shuddering and slowing. Even though we could see the town from here, it would be a long walk along the highway to get there.

But we made it; we went on like that, lurching along, until we reached the exit ramp and turned east into town. We found a garage right away, a refuge for limping pilgrims on that old road.

“Sounds like the fuel filter.” The mechanic, a handsome, muscular but not burly man with long, trim sideburns, stood considering the nearly expired car in the driveway, stereotypically wiping his hands on a rag already far from clean. Randy was neatly embroidered over the pocket of his short-sleeved, steel-blue shirt. On the taut skin just below his right shirtsleeve was tattooed the simple, indelible motto: semper fi.

“It’s funny it made it this far,” Mom said.

“Probably the grade’s what did it. Got a little plugged up before that, you’re pumping all that fuel through to make it over, jog a little gunk loose, that’s it.”

My throat tightened up again, thinking of it. If the car had stalled on the Cuesta Grade, that long, curving climb up from the coast, we’d have had to get out. There was nowhere to walk there except the narrow shoulder, with semis chugging up the grade and cars and panel trucks gunning it around them. Two people had been killed there the year before, run over and over by cars that didn’t even stop to see what they’d hit.

“I had it tuned before I left,” I said. “Shouldn’t they have changed the filters then?”

“Should have, yeah,” Randy said, still thoughtfully rubbing the rag between his hands. “So you all are probably headed somewhere and want it back this afternoon.”

“Berkeley,” Mom agreed.

“Berkeley,” he nodded. “I’ve got to finish this job I’m right in the middle of, got the car up on the lift, then I’ll get to it. Should just be a couple hours. That O.K.?”

“Sure, we’d appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome to wait here. Got some magazines out in the office there.” Randy gestured toward a small glassed-in room next to the garage. “Coffee.”

We both thanked him and walked toward the little room.

Two brown vinyl-seated chairs with extruded metal frames and legs that had a peeling, rust-flecked chrome finish had been set up here beside a formica coffee table. The table held two limp and wrinkled copies of Car & Driver and a few back issues of Guideposts, less well used. On the counter, next to an assortment of work estimates, pens, a stapler, a phone, all coated with a thin patina of grease, a drip coffee maker sat burbling and spitting. The coffee must have been made some hours earlier, and although sitting on the burner hadn’t improved its flavor, it had at least concentrated it to a reasonable strength.

“I might need to eat something,” Mom said, looking up from her book after we’d been sitting in the little office for about half an hour. “The coffee’s not sitting well on my stomach.”

I looked over the top of my book. “Yeah, I could use a little snack. There was that grocery on the corner when we came in.”

“Let’s go see.”

We picked up our purses and shoved our books in, setting out for the corner store a block away. There were no sidewalks here. The shoulder of the road was steeply curved toward a gravel ditch to catch the runoff from the rains that were always expected in November and December. Now it was dry but clean, with none of the dust that would coat the road and the gravel and the few spindly weeds later in the spring and summer. The air was clear, dry, and cool, and the gravel made a sharp crunching sound as we walked toward the Kwik and Convenient we’d spotted as we coaxed—or maybe willed—the Mazda around the corner. The sky was a soft blue overhead. The sun’s low angle, even at two in the afternoon, made the horizon out over the highway, toward the coastal mountains, a pale rose color.

We bought two bags of peanuts and a Diet Pepsi at the market. There was a bench in front of the store. It looked out on a parking lot strewn with fluttering food wrappers and smeared with used motor oil. We sat to eat. Beyond the parking lot, a narrow road climbed a low hill, heading east. It was lined with upright eucalyptus and what looked like bay laurel, rangy and arched over the road. The trees’ slender leaves moved a little in the breeze and reflected the late winter light grayly. After a block the road dipped out of view, so I had the impression that the avenue of trees continued, perhaps up into the hills, perhaps right out of town and into the country. While we sat there no cars went up this road, which I began to think of as a lane, and none came down it.

“Oh, damn, I forgot to shoot up!” Mom said suddenly. “I don’t think what I took at lunch will cover this.” She opened her purse on her lap and began to rummage through its contents. Finally she pulled out a small syringe and a glass vial, brushed some lint from the rubber top of the vial, took off the orange cap that covered the needle, pulled in a bit of air, and plunged the needle into the vial. She upended it and drew out a small amount of fast-acting insulin, withdrew the syringe and tapped it with a fingernail to move any air bubbles to the tip, then pushed in the plunger until a little drop appeared on the end of the needle. Mom poked it into her thigh, right through her jeans, and depressed the plunger all the way. She pulled the needle out. “That should do it,” she said, recapping the syringe and putting it back into the tangle of her purse. “Maybe we should walk a little now.”

“That won’t make you low?” Exercise was good for Mom’s diabetes but could sometimes send her blood sugar plummeting.

“Just a little ways.”

When we got back to the garage, Randy showed us the invoice and Mom paid the thirty dollars (he only charged us for recycled parts) and he handed us the key in his matter-of-fact way, as if he hadn't just saved us, like it was this way every day. We threw our bags into the back seat of the Mazda and backed out of the driveway, over the gravel ditch, onto the road and back to the highway, with Mom behind the wheel now, giving me a break.

We drove north. By the time we passed the outlet mall in Gilroy, it was too late to stop, and anyway, we weren’t really in the mood for shopping.

The war protests had started the next day, on my birthday, my twenty-second. As Mom and I sat celebrating this personal occasion in Caffe Venezia in Berkeley, young men and women marched down University Ave toward the highway. Serious and exalted faces streamed past the windows while mother and daughter sat sipping red wine and relishing our mixed green salads dressed lightly with oil and vinegar and topped with delicately shaved Parmigiano Reggiano. We were not unaware of the irony of this scene.

“We’re dining for peace,” Mom said, laughing and holding up her glass.

I clinked Mom’s glass with my own just as a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair walked past outside, yelling something unintelligible and holding up a sign that read “NO BLOOD FOR OIL.”

“Hey, now I’m half your age, I just thought of it. I’m as old as you were when you had me.”

“That’s right,” Mom said.

“It’ll only happen once.”

“Right, it won’t happen again.”

“I can’t imagine having a baby right now!”

“It was fun.” Mom laughed. “You slept all the time. Took two naps a day, two or three hours at a time. I remember every morning I would go to the store—there was a shopping center near our apartment in North Hollywood and I would walk over there with you in the stroller—and I would buy a mystery and an eclaire. And every day I would spend your nap time reading the mystery and I’d eat the eclaire.”

“You must be forgetting the hard parts.”

“Maybe—I don’t know—maybe I just didn’t know it was supposed to be hard.”

The last straggling protesters had moved past the windows, and now only normal evening traffic streamed by on University. A declaration learned in one of my U.S. history classes (I couldn’t remember which one) entered my mind: Events are in the saddle and ride mankind. Emerson. I found a strange solace in the idea.

I learned the next day that when the protesters reached the highway, they had suddenly run into a clearing in the traffic of I-80 East near the Berkeley Marina, somehow leaving enough time for the oncoming cars to see them and to stop. I could see the connection between the slogan “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” and the protesters’ risky action: cars stopped on the freeway: gas is taking you nowhere tonight; stop and think. But I doubted that they were changing many minds this way (most minds, headed east from Oakland or San Francisco or Berkeley, on an evening whose air and light felt like early spring, being anyway not too differently disposed than those of the protesters). I said as much to Tony, the guy sitting next to me in a bright and shabby Berkeley seminar room while we waited for our medieval history discussion to start.

“I was out there,” Tony told me. “I don’t want to go again, but I will if I have to.”

The force of this statement—the profession of reluctance and also of decision—struck me. Where something compelled Tony to act, something equally compelled me to stay on the sidelines and to feel that judging events was an adequate response to them. Tony did not go out there for fun (getting in his requisite Berkeley protest before graduation), but feared we were entering another of those conflicts that people could picturesquely call a ‘quagmire’ and that the Selective Service registration form he was required to fill out to receive Federal financial aid would put him right in the middle of it. When I signed that same Selective Service form, I checked the box that claimed my exemption—I am female. But it was not just the accident of sex that separated us. Tony felt that his actions mattered.

“I can’t just sit around and watch it on CNN,” he told me. His light brown eyes looked straight into mine and his dark brows knit together. He had a mess of curly brown hair that covered his ears and a short, serious face. The word “pugnacious” entered my mind as he stared me down. Was that the right word?

Then it occurred to me that perhaps he was a better person than I was. I felt that I could live with that.

The clock ticked over to 10:00 AM and an electronic buzz signaled class’s beginning. We had notebooks and pens and most of us had our paperback translations of The Book of Margery Kempe arranged in front of us on the seminar table. Here and there the brazenly false wood grain of the table’s formica top had been carved with someone’s initials or with the random, tired shocker: FUCK. I fiddled with an earring and waited for the day’s discussion prompt from our graduate student instructor, a friendly and serious woman writing her dissertation on the medieval iconography of time.

“Margery Kempe,” she said, standing at one end of the table. She raised one eyebrow to give her face a skeptical and interrogatory look. Well, that was about as noncommittal a beginning as you could come up with. It was now up to one of us to jump in with some kind of statement, back it up with evidence, and submit to further probing. The clock’s second hand beat loudly as we stared at our books on the table.

I riffled the pages of my book, looking for something. Margery was always getting into trouble for crying too much in public and making a spectacle of her empathy for Jesus’ Passion. I, too, had become a little weary of Margery’s carrying on by the end of the book. Margery was the pilgrim as publicist; she actively sought an audience, even a hostile audience, for her expressions of deep and gaudy faith. And she often held in contempt those around her who believed in a quieter orthodoxy. Still, I admired Margery’s boldness in the face of arrogant authority. I found the passage I wanted:

When her crying was passed, she came before the Archbishop and fell down on her knees, the Archbishop saying very roughly to her, ‘Why do you weep so, woman?’

She answering said, ‘Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.’

I took a breath and began to make my argument.

Tony chewed on his fingernails. He always did this, all through the discussion. No matter how hard I willed him to stop, he kept biting them, until the quicks were exposed and red and jagged. I wanted to grab his hands and stop him. Don’t, please don’t.

That afternoon, after class, I had taken Mom sightseeing in the City. And then the second evening of protest had begun.

We didn’t have to go all the way to Gilroy, of course, when the protesters closed down the bridge. We could have parked the car and taken BART home through the tunnel under the Bay. Or we could have driven north to the Richmond Bridge. We passed the San Mateo Bridge (which was packed) and the Dumbarton (which was more or less clear) on our way south. Finally, we could just have gone north from San Jose, up the eastern edge of the Bay. Instead we continued down through the outskirts of San Jose, where the 101 narrowed to two lanes in each direction; down through the green remnants of the Santa Clara orchard country, where the office parks and technology “campuses” had not yet reached; where the highway, eight or ten years later, even after widening, would often be almost impassable, packed with commuters willing to drive for an hour—or two hours—between jobs with stock options and houses with upwards of 2,000 square feet for less than $600k.

But now, for Mom and me, it was not only possible to go on, but exciting. We were happy to be going shopping. We were happy, truth be known, that the bridge was shut down, that people were home trying to get a glimpse of the bombing on TV (the tantalizing suggestion of the destruction brought to them by heat-sensitive camera equipment and satellite communications and Wolf Blitzer). We said as much to each other. “We’re shopping for peace,” I said and laughed, and Mom laughed with me. It was ludicrous to drive all that way, and we knew it; but it was war, and we were having fun.

I don’t want to go, but I will if I have to. As I drove, I thought of the protesters closing the bridge; of bodies in the way of cars. I could see Tony, one of the first out, running and shouting and hoping that the car coming toward him would stop. Or was there even time to hope that? Would he see the car coming at all?

It took a certain credulity—or faith—to participate in a war, I thought, and also to protest one. It was easy to tell myself, cruising south on the Royal Road, that I didn’t believe in it, not any of it.

When we got to Gilroy it was dark. The lights of the outlets shone over the highway. I pulled the Mazda up the exit ramp and then left, onto the overpass that led to the stores. I parked in front of Liz Claiborne and killed the engine. Mom didn’t make a move to open her door; when I looked, her face looked pale and shiny under the artificial light from the store’s windows.

“I think I’m low,” Mom said. “I think there’s a Snickers in my purse. Can you find it, in my purse, in the back?”

I unhooked my seatbelt and reached around to the back seat, feeling for the purse. “Where is it? It’s not back here.”

“Oh, here it is.” Mom reached to the floor under her legs and pulled it out. “Here, look. Oh, I can look.” She was disoriented and shaky. Finally she pulled out a small sandwich bag filled with hard candies and a couple of bite-size candy bars. She ripped the wrapper off a Snickers bar and took a bite. “I’ll be O.K. after this. Then we can go in. We’ll get something else to eat in a little bit. I’m O.K.”

“All right.” I sat in the driver’s seat and waited for her to finish the candy bar, for the sugar to metabolize, the glucose to find the insulin key to my mother’s fragile, resistant cells.

We didn’t end up buying anything that night; we looked around a little bit, but we really didn’t find any bargains. We ate a sandwich at a small, fluorescent-lit café in the outlet center, then we got in the car and drove back north. Traffic was clear through San Jose and past the cutoff toward Oakland and Berkeley. All the way, I felt like turning the car around, felt that if we’d just kept going, just stayed on the highway heading south toward Atascadero, we might have found what we were looking for.

Music from ccMixter: "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch; and "What It Takes To Be Me," by Alex Beroza, featuring FORENSIC and Nicolas Kern.

and read along ↓

Come so far when you think - you think back
You can’t buy what we made, you and I

—Peter Frampton

I measure the imported rice, squeeze the plum tomatoes and chop them, chop the flat-leaf parsley and rosemary from the garden, the garlic, the onion. I grate the cheese and dice the celery, drizzle olive oil into a heavy casserole, eyeballing the measure. In go the garlic and celery. Dinner will be tomato parmesan risotto and rabbit with white wine sauce. The rabbit pieces are soaking in cold water in a clear glass bowl in the deep stainless sink. I lift each piece out and let it drip, then put it on paper towels I have spread on the granite counter. When all of the bits of the small body are arranged on the towels, like words in a poem, it makes me feel faintly ill to look at them. But I pat them dry as the recipe directs, then add them to the olive oil, garlic, and celery waiting in the casserole dish. I put the lid on (it makes a muffled ringing sound as it slides into place) and turn on the gas. It lights in a blue-and-orange burst and settles into two concentric blue rings. I turn it as low as it will go.

Outside the kitchen windows the fog is blowing by on its way to the Great Central Valley. The shining green leaves of the myoporum trees in the neighbors’ yard hiss with the force of the air and the tiny sand particles carried on the air. In the morning the back patio will be covered with a fine grit and with fallen, yellow leaves. Summer, here in San Francisco. I take a gulp of white wine and note the time: 4:30. The rabbit will stew for two hours before I will be needed again. My husband and daughter are downstairs, watching a video. There is this time in front of me that demands to be used but refuses to suggest its proper use. I think of someone I have not thought of in some time, of summer in L.A. I try to conjure the light and the heat and the dusty dryness of that place but I’m not sure, in this half-light, that I can get it right.

* * *

I saw him last when I was seventeen, at a Thunderbird party, where we celebrated chunks and spurned worms. Drinking Mescal and eating the worm were for popular kids, kids we called soches; Thunderbird chunks were for poets.

Lauren and I were standing in the kitchen. She was arranging clear plastic cups on the breakfast bar counter, pulling each one from the stack and lining it up with the rest; a phalanx stood ready to serve the multitude. A fully stocked bar ran the length of the wall behind us on glass shelves backed by mirrors. The bottles were carefully arranged with the labels facing squarely forward, legible to anyone sitting at the small round formica table or lounging on the green velveteen couch in the attached family room. But no one was sitting there now. It was looking to be a grim party.

“When is Will getting here?” Lauren looked at the wall clock in the kitchen. “He said 6:30.” Lauren’s parents had been out of the house since 5:00, but no one had shown yet, and it was already 7:00. Then we heard the front door whine open on dry hinges, felt the movement of warm air as a cross-draft was briefly created and then cut off. It was Will. As if on cue, he came in with his hands tucked in the pockets of his black trench coat.

“You’re looking rather wan, Emily,” he told me in his studied California Ivy accent, every syllable pronounced like it was a gift to the listener. He produced three cylindrical bottles from his inside pockets. He untwisted the cap from one, then filled three cups halfway, concentrating. His thin white face glowed against the deep black of his trench coat, his polyester button-down, his stiff processed hair. Before there were goths, Will’s esthetic was one of decay and perversion, and his beauty lay in the effective deployment of that esthetic on his own person. His lips were pale and thin and his light eyes deep and close-set behind short brown lashes. A seductively sculptural nose—a nose with no straight lines, only long architectural curves, held my eyes as he handed me a cup. “This’ll put color in your cheeks.”

I laughed too hard at his words. He looked at me five beats too long.

“Did you get any luscious chunks in yours?” Lauren held her cup up to the low-angle sunlight coming in through the open sliding glass door and admired the dregs floating in the liquid red.

I looked down into my plastic cup. “Can’t tell.”

“Well, if you get any make sure to chew them, there’s genuine nutritional value in there, although they haven’t yet established a US RDA for chunks.”

“Yeah, OK.” My hair was still wet from the pool out back, and the smell of chlorine mixed with the candyapple stench of the booze as I took a sip.

“I’ll just step into the living room to attend to our musical needs.” Will pulled a tape, still encased in cello-wrap, from his pocket: Your Funeral, My Trial. He looked at me again, his face blank, and left the bottles of fortified wine on the bar.

Now, left for dead by the look he had given me before he exited the room, I said, “Will despises me.”

“No, he doesn’t.” That was as much contradiction as Lauren could manage. “He’s just in a mood because Shana wouldn’t let him use The Sheik on her last night. She was all ready to go and they went into Steve’s room and were going to do it, then he pulls out the thing and she’s like, ‘You’re not using that thing on me!’ and that was it.” Lauren paused and pulled her close-knit eyebrows closer together. “I’m going to call Dave. He’s got to bring some more people or we won’t have any fun at all.” Dave was Lauren’s fallen Mormon boyfriend, who would soon be legally kidnapped by goons hired by his judge father and spirited to Provo for some expensive reprogramming. She went to the phone, an avocado model mounted on the wall by the sungold refrigerator, and dialed. “I wonder if he’ll come over. He’s got to come over.”

Music started up on the living room speakers.

I walked out to where Will was listening to Nick Cave. He sat looking through Lauren’s older brother Steve’s record collection. The room was like a shrine to Seventies kitsch, already a marvel even by the mid-Eighties: smoked-glass tile mirrors with gilt veining covering the wall behind a brown ultrasuede couch whose cushions were worn shiny; carved shag carpeting in variegated brown and beige undulated over the floor. Steve’s basketball trophies, lined up on a wood-veneer cantilevered shelf, were reflected in the obscure mirrors over the couch.

Will and I were the only people in the room, but he didn’t look up as I walked in. I crossed the room and sat down on the floor under an open window, a light warm breeze touching my skin. I hugged my legs to my chest and rested my chin on my knees, still holding the cup of Thunderbird in front of me in my left hand, a token of membership in this strange brotherhood.

I could see the amber-red starting to show in the ends of my hair as the pool water evaporated from it. I was in the habit of wearing stark white powder on my face and neck, something my mother loathed, but I hadn’t reapplied it after my swim. I studied the freckles on my arms just below the rolled sleeves of my ink-black button-down shirt. I leaned back against the wall and concentrated on feeling the breeze move the soft blonde hairs on my legs.

Will let out a manic high-pitched laugh.

“What is it?” I said from my haven by the window.

Will came and knelt beside me, holding up the album cover for me to see. “I’m in You—Peter Frampton!” he exulted, and let out another crazy laugh.

“Excellent!”

“I’m going to put it on.”

“Yes, definitely!”

The antique groove of Frampton came on, and Will came back and sat beside me. He lit a cigarette, exhaled, and looked at me. I smiled and he looked away. After he had smoked it pretty well down, which didn’t take long, he held it out to me. “Here—it’s never too early or too late to start.”

“Oh,” I laughed a little—“Oh, no thanks.” I felt like a dweeb.

He sat next to me and looked at me. I looked at him and I waited.

Will said, “God you’re beautiful Emily.”

“Thank you,” I said.

And with that little speech he made me know that he was not going to kiss me. Will you believe me if I tell you it was one of the more disappointing moments in my life up to that point and for some time to come? He made me feel that there was some defect, something in me so inadequate, that beauty alone could not compensate. On the other hand, it seemed to me at the time that he also saw something there that he wanted to leave unsullied. With that speech he made it known there was something he valued about me, and so there was no way he was going to come any closer.

The record required turning over and so Will stood up and walked to the turntable.

No one else came to the party.

* * *

The rabbit has stewed in its own juices. I take the lid off the casserole and turn up the burner to cook off the liquid. I measure a half cup of wine from the bottle I’ve been pouring for myself, add it to the casserole. I start broth simmering in a saucepan on a back burner. I melt butter in an enameled pot and throw in onion and garlic. I add the rice to the butter mixture. I splash in wine from my glass, estimating the amount this time, and begin slowly ladling in broth and stirring. I’ll be stirring from now until dinner is done.

I’m doing something I know how to do.

Music from ccMixter: "More Water," by airtone, featuring Adisa McKenzie; and "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch.

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Up at Pulgas Ridge, Megadog and I walk the Cordilleras Trail past the multiple-addiction rehab center tucked at the edge of San Francisco Water Department land. This open space, reserved for hikers and their dogs, is flanked by the rehab on one side and the county mental health services on the other. Sometimes we see guys playing basketball out in back of the rehab building, its tile roof and pale stucco walls aging with Katherine Hepburn style under California live oaks. Sometimes we see them tending their garden, where tomatoes still ripen on the vine on into the fall. Occasionally, they are out playing cards in the morning heat, or washing cars to raise funds for the center. Today, no one.

Decomposed granite crunches under our feet as we pass outbuildings maintained by the water department, surrounded by dry bunch grasses and cracked clay in a wheat-colored meadow. Water is the only reason this land is not covered with houses, condos, a mall: water and its exigencies have kept much of the peninsula south of San Francisco an open woodland. Looking at its green hills now, it’s hard to imagine that over a century ago, this area was clearcut to build the city not once, but twice.

Mega wears her red saddle bags and halter. Her short hair is the same color as the grass, and her 50-pound body appears to be all muscle and sinew as she powers down the path. She has a black nose with a white blaze under her chin, and as she pants, her mouth curls up into a muscular smile. She carries her own water. Past the wooden bridge over a blackberry choked creekbed, the granite path ends and the trail becomes dusty clay the color of rust. We walk in the shade of oaks. The buckeyes have lost their leaves by now. The trail angles up over a canyon lined with leather leaf ferns. Massive California bays reach up to us from the dry creekbed below, their roots exposed by the winter rains that have been so stingy the last few years. No water is running, but the creekbed looks dark, and I imagine putting a hand down there to feel the coolness of the secret water below. 

Mega presses on. 

The only thing slowing her down is the saddlebags. Without them, she would chomp at the restraint of her halter and try to take off after every lizard on the trail. Wearing the saddlebags in pack mode, she would stay on the trail and close to me even without the leash, but it's required here, where woodrats make their homes under piles of lichen-coated brush. They don't need a one-year-old Mutt crashing through their shelter in search of fun. 

The trail opens up and becomes sandy, lined with sunbaked chaparral. Flaky lichen clings to the bases of the chamise and manzanita here, a reminder of the rains that have let us down lately. I've read laundry lists of the native understory plants that bloom here in the spring, but can't remember their names now. Only the desiccated stalks of sticky monkeyflower here and there suggest that something more lush and colorful has happened recently. 

At the top of the Ridge we stop for water just inside the split rail fence that surrounds the off-leash area. From her saddlebags I pull Mega’s bowl and water bottle. She laps at the stream of water as I fill the bowl on the ground. I drink too, then unbuckle the saddle bags and leash to let her run. 

She sniffs, pees, and is off. 

We clamber down eroded paths past monumental blue gum eucalyptus planted while this place was still a tuberculosis sanitarium, a refuge from the city fogs and a place apart. The hospital buildings have been pulled down, but here and there concrete stairs with galvanized hand rails lead down through the crackling chaparral and live oaks. 

Stone retaining walls from early in the last century remain to dam up fallen leaves and support cascades of poison oak. Dedicated people, people with fixed ideas, have here and there planted pre-Columbian species to ward off the oleander and eucs and pepper trees, the remnants of a California that was a cultural colony. Plants as facts on the ground. 

Under one of the oaks I see a couple of old concrete footings that look like a good place to stop and rest in the shade. 

I leave the water out for the dog and sit and look around. About 10 feet away, someone has constructed a small shelter close to the ground, out of a fallen oak branch and smaller brush. It looks just big enough to crawl into, maybe huddle with my dog for warmth on a cold night in fall. The thought fills me with comfort. Near my feet, a small concrete pipe pokes out of the ground. Its cover reads: Domestic Water. 

As Mega scrounges around, I decide to explore near some stairs and take a side path that dead-ends near an old pepper getting crowded out by one of the intentional live oaks. Pepper trees are a particular favorite of mine. Despite being known as California pepper trees, they came originally from Brazil. The Franciscans planted them in dry packed mission courtyards and they became a signature of the Old Spanish California scene romanticized—or fantasized—by the yankees. When I was growing up near LA, in a landscape swiftly turning from agricultural-utopian to suburban-bland, every vacant lot was home to an old pepper, whose branches invariably swept the ground and made a perfect playground for my girlfriends and me. The old fruit trees would go to ground if untended, but the pepper trees survived on their own until the bulldozers pulled in. So maybe it is no accident that I stop and walk around the tree and look at the ground around it, climb in under. 

And in this out of the way place I see it—a stone. A flat, oval stone, clearly a marker. I call Mega over and, as I get closer, I imagine it must be a memorial to someone’s longtime companion here. A strong, happy dog like mine who would stay close and come when called, mostly. 

I crouch down and see the words I love you written in script at the bottom of the stone. At the top is a picture obscured by dust. I start to wipe it with my hand and stop, suddenly still and cold. The first thing I see in the picture is what must be human front teeth, the large, protruding, recently emerged front teeth of a child. 

And suddenly I do not want to be here, but I can't leave. 

In front of me is a gold painted concrete oval with red, white, and blue striped edges inscribed in pink, blue and white script. Some of the words have faded and are not legible, but I think I can fill them in, in my mind. 

Megan Marie Kuhn 
7/4/1989 to 10/24/07 
Courage is ___ what you’re ___ to do 
…
There can be no courage unless ___ scared 
Always in my heart I love you 

Courage is not what you're supposed to do. 
There can be no courage unless you're scared. 

Courage is doing what you're not supposed to do. 
There can be no courage unless you're scared. 

Always in my heart I love you. 

I think of the different variations. How disrespectful, I think, to read this as a sign; how childish to read it as a warning. How self-important to feel it's somehow my special duty to witness its message. 

Which weakness do I choose? 

I go with the third, thinking on my way down the hill about this particular dead girl—and I was meant to think of her as a girl, her picture there being obviously one of someone much younger than 18. And then generalizing to the many girls, dead and disappeared, to whom I have been called over the years to bear witness. All the lives of all the dead girls. 

Like cool water running under dry land. 

As we leave, guys are out in back of the rehab, playing chess, reading. From here it looks easy to be in recovery, but hard, immeasurably hard, to be recovered, and to leave. 

I think of this essay as a kind of epilogue to my memoir Nobody’s Property, about my aunt's disappearance in Germany in the 1970s. Her story, for me, is a presence, an obsession, and yes, an addiction.

Music from ccMixter by copperhead: "I Need Something;" and by Alex Beroza: "Too Young," featuring snowflake.

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It doesn’t help that I have PMS on the day my chicken dies. I find her in the backyard coop, one wing drooping out of the nest, her head lolling. I have always told myself that if illness struck my tiny flock of two I would face it with the pragmatic detachment of a farmer, letting nature take its course or, in the interest of humane treatment, helping nature along by whatever means I had at my disposal. (But not owning an axe, I’m not sure what I expected I would do: twist the necks of birds I had named “Visions of Johanna” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie”?)

I come from farmers, after all: my grandpa, an Oklahoma migrant, had a great affinity for animals, a gentleness and an empathy that made him, according to one farm boss he worked for, the best horse team driver around. But when an animal’s time came, it was unsentimentally dispatched, by shotgun or, in the case of my mother’s childhood pet terrier, Corky, by the dog pound’s gas chamber. That was what was sensible. This attitude was such a matter of faith with my grandpa—a token of personal integrity, of fitness to exist in this world—that once when my mother spent $500, almost her month’s salary, to save our cat Bugsy from an entrenched case of feline urinary syndrome she swore me to secrecy. “If Grandpa found out about this he would think it was the most foolish thing he’d ever heard,” she told me. And he went to his grave not knowing.

But here is Marie, Absolutely Sweet Marie, unable to move, her legs useless underneath her. “Oh, baby, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to get you help,” I croon to her. The waterer in the coop is low and a little grungy; could her condition be my fault? Have I been a bad farmer? I have to do something. I call the SPCA; they refer me to a vet called All Pets. I call; they can see her in half an hour. I don’t ask for directions; I’m sure I’ve seen their storefront in the Inner Sunset many times before.

I find the cardboard pet carrier that I use to take my cat to the vet, put a towel in the bottom, and gingerly move Marie out of the nest. I see she has egg stuck to her underside—either her egg has broken or malformed inside her. The whole time I’m talking to her, telling her it will be okay, but she doesn’t look good. I strap the box into the car behind the passenger seatbelt.

God forgive me, in the car on the way I’m remembering Marie’s habit of running inside the house any time the back door is open, and I’m thinking it would be nice not to have to worry about that anymore. And she’s the one who flew over my neighbor’s fence and ate the flowers. While I’m thinking of this, though, I’m racing to the place I’ve seen on Ninth Avenue near the park.

I find a spot on Kirkham and pull Marie’s box out of the car. I practically run down the hill only to find the place locked; this is All Animals Hospital, not All Pets. Shit. But I have my cell phone; I call, and they give me directions to their South-of-Market hospital. Now I’m really frantic. I strap Marie back in the car and take off.

I call my husband at work and I start crying. “It’s going to be okay,” he tells me, in much the same voice that I’ve been using on Marie. I fly down Oak Street to Gough to Division, find the place on South Van Ness, park out front. I rush through the front doors and the staff there bursts into motion. “You got here fast,” one of the women behind the front desk says as the other speaks urgently into the P.A. system: “All available personnel to the back. Emergency. All available personnel to the back for emergency treatment.”

They whisk Marie, still in her box, behind swinging doors. I have dried my face but I know I still look harried and tearful. “Everything’s going to be okay,” a squat woman with closely clipped hair and an eyebrow ring says to me as she hands me a clipboard and asks me to sign. “We need your signature before we can proceed. We’re performing emergency resuscitation on Marie right now.”

That is what the form says:

Our staff is performing emergency resuscitation on your pet. These life-saving measures are necessary before any evaluation can be made of your pet’s condition. These procedures will cost between $200 and $400 dollars, exclusive of any further treatment necessary for the wellbeing of your pet. Your signature indicates your consent for us to proceed and your agreement to pay for these services.

I look at the woman. “Can you just tell me if she’s a goner?”

“We can’t determine anything about Marie’s condition until she’s stable. We’ve got five people back there right now working on her.”

An image of five gloved and gowned figures, laboring over the almost lifeless body of my Rhode Island Red, flashes in my brain. “I just thought it might be Newcastle’s…,” I say feebly. If it were this extremely contagious, deadly, and costly poultry disease, I thought they would want to know about it. I thought I was doing my civic duty bringing her in. But the squat woman just looks at me, and the woman next to her, with caramel skin and wavy black hair, just looks at me too. I sign.

“The doctor will be out to speak with you as soon as they stabilize her. They’re going to do X-rays as well.” The squat woman takes the clipboard back from me and the dark-haired woman turns to her keyboard and begins to ask me for my personal information. I give it, but I am beginning to weep again. I sit down, try to read some pet information pamphlets from the side table, but I can’t stop weeping. And I know they think I am the crazy chicken lady, weeping over my failing poultry, but what I am thinking is “My husband is going to kill me. He’s going to kill me!” And does my grandpa see from the other side how ill-equipped I am to live in this world, where people are available to resuscitate your chicken and give her X-rays? No, I don’t really believe it; but I have his voice inside me, growling “Emily—don’t be a silly girl!” Silly was about the worst thing you could be in his book.

The doctor calls me in to one of the examination rooms. She is a young woman with two dark braids, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, precise red lipstick, and the white sleeves of her clinician’s coat rolled to reveal tattoos scrolling up her forearms. She has a warm smile. She projects concern. She tells me they are now X-raying Marie; she has been given oxygen and an I.V. drip. But it doesn’t look good at first glance.

“Chickens are a funny combination of tough and delicate. We may be able to give her drip antibiotics and force feed her overnight. Sometimes it works. But I wouldn’t hold out too much hope—we’ll see when the X-rays come back.”

I wait again. Now I have the privacy of the examination room to weep in. “Get it together!” I think. “Two hundred to four hundred dollars,” I think. And antibiotics and overnight force-feeding—how much could that cost? I think of the almost-empty waterer in the coop. I think of times I yelled at Marie for running inside the house. Chickens, I’ve found, don’t seem to mind when you yell at them, but they’re hard to read. Unlike dogs, they don’t mime human expressions, and they don’t cower and they don’t beg. They do scurry away from you when you move fast, and they’ll peck food out of a child’s hand and eat it without compunction. They’ll close their eyes when you pet them. They’ll eat their own eggs, or they’ll sit on the eggs but eat the chicks when they hatch, but not out of anything other than confusion about what’s appropriate, what they’re supposed to do.

The doctor comes back in, mounts the X-rays, flips on the light. What comes up looks exactly like a chicken carcass after Sunday dinner, spread-eagled, or I guess you could say spread-chickened, the soft tissues on the bones an albuminous apparition: so temporary.

“It’s not good,” the doctor says, and I feel sudden relief. “You can see this cloudiness in her reproductive tract; that’s an infection. It’s so extensive it looks like she’s been working on it for quite a while, and it finally got the better of her. This happens a lot; an egg bursts inside or is imperfectly formed, and then the yolk is the perfect medium for bacterial growth. It’s not your fault.” I read after it was all over that it’s called an egg embolism.

“I would recommend putting her down, at this point, so she’s not suffering anymore. She’s almost gone as it is.” No all-night force-feeding. No more unaccountable costs.

“Okay,” I say. I sniff.

“Would you like to see her before I do it?”

“Yes, thank you.”

A tech comes in minutes later, wheeling Marie on a tiny gurney, a burgundy towel covering her, a small oxygen mask over her beak. A chicken with an oxygen mask! It is ridiculous, and yet its effect on me is almost religious in its intensity. Her eyes are closed, and her mahogany head, still perfectly formed, rests halfway inside the clear mask. The image makes me wish I were a painter: it is surreal and beautiful. And I love Marie for being so perfectly what she is, and I love the world for giving me the chance to see her this way.

The tech goes out again, and I cry again, and I tell Marie she was a good chicken, the best, and she laid great eggs, and I am sorry. The doctor comes in and gives Marie a purple syringe of barbiturates, and the vein in the soft mahogany-red neck stops pulsing.

They wrap her in the burgundy towel and say they are sorry, and I bury her in the backyard and after a suitable period of mourning get myself another chicken. I name her “Carolina in my Mind.”

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

This had become her life: in the morning feeding the chickens scraps from dinner the night before, walking down the path toward the water, putting on her smock and scarf and sweeping the patios before cleaning the inside of the villa, if the guests were out or departed. In the early days, Iris was snug across her belly in a sling, gently rocking with the work and able to eat when she needed to. Later, she went to the village school, protected for a while by her mother’s strangeness and her presumed father’s special status as a fallen hero. But children are children and villages are villages and eventually, some words of judgment came between Iris and her mother. Rose knew she would leave someday, and sure enough, she did, just as soon as she could.

Rose had grown used to her life alone, then. But all the repetitive, rhythmic motions gave her time and the cadence to think. Had there been a day that went by that she did not think of Bencomo, in those years he was away? The man who loved to walk, the happiest man on the island, in prison on the Peninsula. In those days, she wondered if he would ever come back; would he be ashamed to come back? Forbidden, somehow? These are things she should have known, but her own shame kept her from knowing.

And shame kept her from thinking of Michael for more than the minute it took her to realize she was thinking of him.

Funny how knowing about shame doesn’t help much.

This had been her life, but today was different: Iris was coming, Emily was coming.

That afternoon, Rose and Emily sat on the beach as Bencomo and Iris tried to teach the little one to skip stones. The tide was out, holding itself back for later.

Emily turned a smooth stone over and over in her hand and a few remnant grains of dark sand clung to her fingers. She stared out at the water and said: “My whole life I tried to stay safe for you.”

“Is that it? Trying to stay safe? or trying to be dead already?”

The two women looked at each other, really looked, then.

“So Edith’s gone,” Rose said, as much to break the tension as to find anything out.

“Oh yeah, has been for a while. Charles too, now. I’m sorry.”

Rose had thought it would be a declaration of independence, leaving everything behind in the forest and starting a new life, an authentic life–the real life, she thought of it then. They had never let her decide for herself, even going to Germany had been held up as the best thing, a lucky thing, “a brilliant opportunity” Edith said, but not a choice. She knew she could reject it if she tried hard enough, but then it would just be on to the next thing they picked out, in consultation with all their friends. If you had friends who were presidents of universities, of course you had choices! The best choice could be made for your daughter, and if she didn’t like it she was ungrateful.

Even now, she could get upset about it, she noticed. As soon as she noticed, the feeling faded. It really did not matter now. For once in her life, back in that freezing November wind, she had decided for herself. She thought. Of course, Michael was there, the mastermind, weaving sticks and twigs into a little tent above the backpack. Pinpointing a spot deep in the brush nearby that would be the perfect place to hide a body. He told her that part much later and it repelled her, thinking about how he could plan that, hiding the body of someone he didn’t yet know. It felt like a murder in the same way that her decision, now, has come to feel like a suicide.

Michael: whispering in the dark about Tenerife, the sun and the black sand and the drizzle that crept in and nourished the pines clinging to Teide’s skirts. The mulberries growing over secret water, the water from the base of the mountain whose movement was the special art of el llavero. “You will love it,” he said.

And only now does it occur to her that he sounded exactly like her mother.

Rose looked into her niece’s face and knew she was looking into a mirror—a cubist painting of regret, anguish, satisfaction, and the slightest bit of nostalgia—which is really self-pity, of course.

“You know, you could have been living for me, instead of dying,” she said.

And Emily answered: “I guess I didn’t need to.”

Later, the four of them sat around the table on the patio of the cottage. Emily wanted to see the place. Bencomo had carried the little girl most of the way up the steep path; she was exhausted from the beach and swimming all afternoon in the pool, and her foot was bandaged where a small shard of glass had lodged and made her bleed briefly and cry for a long time. Emily had tucked her into the bed in the cottage and Iris had told her a story about growing up there. Now, they all had iced drinks in front of them and Iris and Bencomo were smoking Iris’s cigarettes.

“Of course I gave them the explosive,” Bencomo was saying. “Your mother told me about Michael and about you and said she didn’t know who the father was. Before that, I cared if I lived or died or went to prison; after, no.”

Iris flicked her ash over the gray patio stone. “So because she wouldn’t choose, you were going to blow up the whole world.”

“But they were to put the bomb at the airport on Gran Canaria someplace strategic, away from people,” Bencomo defended himself. “In the end, they put it by the flower stall. It did go off. But it was not my fault those planes hit each other head on.”

Iris made a tsking sound, the unmistakable sound a child makes at the defensiveness of a parent. And so that, in its way, was a comfort.

Emily changed the subject: “But what happened to Michael?”

Rose gave her a look. “Michael left. His mother returned from time to time to take a peek at Iris. She let me keep working at the villa. I stayed in the cottage, waiting for Bencomo to come back.” She turned to Iris. “Can I bum one of those?”

Iris held the pack out to her and Bencomo grabbed the matchbook from the table. And they all sat on the back patio, the ice cubes tinkling, the cat chasing a moth, in the air the sulfur from a struck match.

Rose’s Journal

You had been in labor, painful, extended back labor, as they brought the survivors in. As the nurses coaxed you to walk and pant and get down on all fours and pray for the next wave to break, Michael attended the burn victims and the passengers with multiple fractures from leaping into the fog and smoke from the wing of the plane. You didn’t know how he found any moments to slip away, but he came back repeatedly to check on you, breathe with you.

Bencomo stayed with his brother for ten days, long enough for the authorities to have a chance to bicker each other into inaction after the crash. The bickering and inaction would continue, as would the radio broadcasts from North Africa demanding autonomy for the Canaries.

When Bencomo came back, you were there with Iris; and so was Michael; for a few days he’d come to the cottage for a quick meal of stew, bread, and wine and then gone back to the hospital to care for the injured. Then the Americans were all flown out on military planes, once the U.S. government had determined which branch of the military should have the honor. And suddenly, faced with a deep cliff of inactivity, Michael had fallen into a stupor. It was as if a lifetime’s emotion had been compressed into that one week, for him. Now he was used up and wrung out, a rag used to clean an entire house, a whole village.

So when Bencomo shows up at the cottage that evening, Michael is asleep in your bed. You speak softly, sitting at the small table outside on the stone patio, bundled against the fog: “I can’t turn him away.”

Bencomo is still just in his shirtsleeves, arms crossed. You’ve offered him wine but he won’t take it. “We gave ourselves away, this time.”

“But they haven’t arrested anyone.”

“It doesn’t matter, they will.”

He could stay with his brother; he could leave the island, go find work on the Peninsula–surely they needed people there who understood the flow of water? Your urging–you don’t know how prescient it is.

“You want me to leave?” He looks inside the doors to where Michael sleeps.

You look where he’s looking, hesitate. “I…no….”

Bencomo nods, twice, and stands. “I have been hiding with the goats for too long now.”

You stand up heavily and your chair scrapes the paving stones. Michael stirs and turns over. And just like that, Bencomo has gone. You can’t follow him with the baby.

The noise and movement have roused Iris, who starts to root around, hungry. You unbutton and position her under your breast, full of milk. As she opens her jaw wide to take the nipple her unfocused eyes, still newborn blue, search upward and find your eyes.

“I choose you,” you tell her. “I choose you.”

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Thanks to Ronald Mackay and his delightful book, Fortunate Isle: a Memoir of Tenerife (2017: PlashMill Press, Friockheim, Scotland). From him I learned of the supreme happiness of El Llavero, The Key Man, as well as details of life on the north of Tenerife before the demise of Franco.

then read ↓

/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

Forty years. Her niece had outlived her by forty years now. To Emily, she was still that girl who perished in the bitter wind among the birches. It felt strange, and Rose didn’t like her niece dragging her back to the forest, striking the match to end her life.

On the other hand, thinking of that girl she’d been made her remember Michael first, then Bencomo, the key man. Michael, with his plan for her, his organization projected all over the ground of that birch forest, had taken the pieces of her disordered brain and slotted them into the story he was constructing; Bencomo, on the contrary, with his happy-go-lucky disposition and easygoing manner, had just let her be, not required of her any action, even any intention. But this outward acceptance belied a highly structured interior. Was it the map of the island he held in his head that gave him the ability to be restful? Or rather, the three-dimensional model he had in his head, the topo of all the ways that water could move? His brain even encompassed the fourth dimension, time, as he could walk to any valve and know without thinking about it how long to leave it open, how and where and when the water would flow to its destination and where it would come to its rest and how long the residual would take to percolate through the basalt and back to the sea. Michael’s organization projected outward; Bencomo’s circulated inward.

Michael organizing the forgery of her German identity documents; Bencomo filling a clay jug and directing the stream of water into her mouth. Michael going to the office of the Civil Guard to register her as a domestic in his employ; Bencomo stretching next to her, not touching but barely, under the shade of a palm for a ten-minute nap. And she felt there, for just those ten minutes, that whatever would come would come, and let it. Like water moving downhill. Water had nothing to do with plans, with papers, with fake registrations or licenses…or autopsies. Well, that is what she thought back then.

Which man, she wondered now, was harder to know? If they’d both stayed, she might have found out.

Bencomo had been sitting in front of the computer as Rose transferred the sheets and towels from washer to dryer, ruminating. She walked back into the lounge and he turned in the chair to face her.

“I wrote to her,” he said. “She’s coming.”

“Iris? I know she’s coming, she sent me her itinerary last week.”

“No, Emily. And the little girl.”

Rose’s Journal

“Close your eyes,” Michael tells you, and you do what he says and hear the dark rocks shift under his feet as he takes your hand and seems to fall onto the sand-polished shingle. So you open them again. And there he is, holding up a ring with no box and looking up at you, his brow creased seriously. You take a step back and the unaccustomed weight at your belly makes you wobble a little on the rock. He tightens his grip on your hand. The volcanic rock under your feet should be rough, should grip your foot the way his hand grips yours, but it has been worn down for centuries. Millennia? Or perhaps some of it only for the past 65 years, since the last eruption? Although you doubt this rock came from that. More likely it has eroded out of the cliff since the time of Odysseus, and before.

Slow erosion, slow accumulation: a lifetime.

You couldn’t tell him yes, there on that shingle beach. The summer hadn’t brought the sand in yet, and you knew it hurt his knees to crouch there, in front of you; you could see him shifting a little, unsteady, as he held the ring he’d hurriedly bought in town up to you. Which, even this was formulaic, programmatic. Michael was following protocol. Amazing that someone who had put so much disruption in motion in your life could be so wedded to protocol. Ha! Wedded. Seeing him balancing on the rocks, you knew for the first time that that was one thing you would never be, wedded.

He would take the first plane out. You could have left him with some hope, an equivocal answer, but that just seemed cruel, to him and to you. So he would take the first plane out from the airport at Rodeo, that was his plan. He got on the bus to the airport and you thought about going to see Bencomo, having a glass of wine on the patio and watching the surf break, but that seemed unfair to Michael and also like a decision, or like part of the protocol, one man slinking away hunch-shouldered while another man raises a glass in triumph. That was not what you wanted. No milestones; no promises; no past and no future. No pivot points, no fulcrums. No before and no after. And certainly–no happily ever after. After having been a non-person for these five years, it was becoming easy for you to see how actual people messed things up.

Bencomo would be there tomorrow, a day much like today. And Michael, too, back on his base. Was that why you’d really said no? It wasn’t clear yet, but Michael had formed the beginnings of a plan to make you a person again. You were already apparently a German national living in Spain; the disorder after Franco’s death was the perfect stage set for a return, a redemption. A rebirth! You could see the wheels of his mind turning. You could see his desire, his perfect need to have you be his bride with lace curtains in a little pastel stucco house on the edge of the forest.

No, tomorrow you would share a bottle of wine with Bencomo and watch the tide begin to bring the sand in, as it did every year. That’s as far ahead as you were ever going to think.

That’s when the contractions started. And so that is why you were at the maternity hospital, with its pretty flowers flanking the front entry, when they started to bring the survivors in.

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

She wasn’t on drugs. Well, she was—she was on those fucking high-dose birth control pills that made her natural talent for melancholy a full-time vocation. And right before she bled? When she took the placebo and all hell broke loose, hormonally speaking? She became sick with rage, with longing, with despair, and, when it was at its worst, with just wanting to not exist anymore. It happened on the boat over; it happened up those twisty stairs at Schiller College; it happened on November 5, 1971.

It kept happening after Michael visited that spring, a neat packet from his parents’ pharmacy tucked into his luggage.

Bencomo saw it happen so many times; he was the one who put two and two together. He had her talk to his brother’s wife, who tried to convince her to use some herbal paste that looked like dung (though she knew it wasn’t—it smelled all right). In the end it was simple: more and more tourists were coming to the island and the importation of condoms increased accordingly. Bencomo asked an English friend of his to buy them at the chemist’s.

And Michael brought them, at her request, from Germany. In this way, she still did not have to choose.

She had told Iris never to go on the pill, but they had all kinds now, specialized for clear skin, for period regulation…for depression. They had shots, they had implants, rings, safer IUDs. What a glorious world of yes! had come into being. And yet, Rose suspected, women still lived in a world with only an illusion of choice, where men might do anything to own you.

Iris lived alone. She must also have had her suspicions.

Iris was coming to see her, soon, when the university where she taught had its spring recess. Just as Michael had, every year, and also winter and summer breaks, until that one in the summer of 1976.

Rose’s Journal

You’d been living above this cove for almost five years, not choosing.

Michael came to see you on a day in June so blue and dry that time seemed to stand still. You remembered such days from childhood, when the June Gloom had ended, the burnt-metal smog of summer not yet accumulated against the high dam of the San Gabriels.

Maybe that’s why it happened; you remembering the last days of your youth.

You walked along the beach full of hot summer sand, then sat on a blanket under the shade of the rough rocks. Michael’s father had just died, and his mother was not sorry.

The tide was out, the water calm. You wanted to skip stones but Michael’s father had died and he wanted to talk. Understandably. You listened, thinking how much clearer his English had become working as a doctor on the American base. You always spoke English with each other; you spoke Spanish with people in town, of necessity and to be polite, and you spoke German to Michael’s mother when she visited, but with Michael, and with Bencomo, you spoke English. At first, both men had wanted to learn it. What better way to learn than in the arms of a lover? (That word! but sometimes it could not be avoided.) And ultimately, you still felt most yourself in English, and that is what you spoke with the people closest to you.

“We were going through my father’s study, cleaning and sorting, after the funeral,” he said. “It’s strange how we do that after someone dies—sift through their things. You could rationalize that it is clearing the decks, and it does feel like that, a bit. But I think it is more that we need artifacts to tell the stories we already think we know about the person. Then we can get on with our relationship with them.”

It struck you that you had never done this, tidying up after the dead. That you would not be home when your parents, grandparents, or anyone else you’d known before died.

Michael went on: “We found some drawings—Mother was familiar with them but I was not—in pen and ink. Studies, anatomical studies. My mother said ‘yes’ and nodded her head when I held one up to her; she scowled. The drawings were kept in wide flat-file drawers, numbered and protected by sheets of vellum. Detailed studies of a hip—the iliotibial band, the femoral muscles, the ball joint and the bursae. Very beautifully rendered, and in the corner of each sheet my father’s signature, along with a stylized swastika.

“Mother explained that Father had made these before the war, during his medical training in Austria. They were made for a manual of human anatomy still used today—it is considered the best, most detailed, most consciously arranged and cataloged. And—my mother told me all this looking straight into my eyes in a kind of challenge—they were made while dissecting the bodies of executed prisoners—including Jews rounded up on Kristallnacht.”

Michael stared out at the water. “This was my father’s secret pride and my mother’s secret shame. She only found out about it after they married, and then she lived in fear—but also, perhaps, the secret hope—that all would be revealed. The anatomy is still in use, but anyone who contributed to it would be considered deplorable, of course.

“The original drawings contained my father’s signature; the reproductions in the book do not.”

You had intended to tell Michael, that day on the beach, about Bencomo, about living your own life (you thought), about letting him live his. Instead you let him kiss you after telling you his horrible truth. It was a rough, seeking kiss, a kiss that sealed your lips.

You let him make love to you on that green blanket on the beach. He pays attention, as always. But again, it is as if he is sealing you off from yourself, putting you, like a specimen, in a jar. He wills you to stay with him on the beach forever. Just like the two of you planned, that day long ago, in the forest.

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then read ↓

/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

The hands were missing, the feet were missing. The thoracic cavity was intact. Who was this niece of hers to read all of this aloud, with the taunting, repetitive guitar refrain making you just want it to be over, while Emily sipped her tea or whatever, sighing, pausing, clearing her throat as if it really mattered to her? But then it did bring home to Rose that this was all a performance, and it wasn’t about her—Rose—really much at all. Emily was performing anguish, reluctance, the storyteller’s remorse. Or maybe revealing why it was impossible for her to tell this story at all.

She didn’t know that the body was not her Aunt Jenny’s body. She still thought it was!

Bencomo sat on the sofa with his hands in his lap for a few moments after the episode ended, then stood without saying anything and let himself out the front door, headed toward the cove. There were no visitors leaving or arriving today, no household tasks to get in the way of what needed to be said. She followed him, as she had so many times, down the gritty path.

This little, rocky beach had made her; it had undone her. The tide was out and many smooth stones were exposed. Bencomo picked one up and skipped it through the water, placid, now, as it paused before renewing its assault on the beach. The stone skipped six times, then sank. Her brother, Jim, had liked skipping stones. There was an art to it: your body had to be loose, but your toss sharp and precisely angled. When the stone sliced across the surface, there was no better feeling. Why was that? It just was. A skipping artist; Jim had said it would be possible to be a skipping artist, if one could eat off that. But to eat, in this world, others had to want something from you.

She tried a toss herself, but she was nervous and the stone plunked and sank when it hit the water. Too much of an arc. Still, she tried. “He told me when he came that spring—Michael—he gave me the poster and told me that they’d taken care of it. No one would be looking for me any more.”

Bencomo, silent, got nine skips this time.

She gripped another stone, rubbed it between her fingers. “He thought I would be happy about that. They’d found a body—there were always bodies, especially near the American bases, well not all the time but often enough.”

There was a body that no one was looking for. Exhumed, examined, exiled to a pauper’s grave. There was Michael’s father, on the forensic team, an expert in anatomy, with access to dental records and the ability to detach a jaw and conveniently lose it. There was Michael’s mother, who wanted a daughter, who wanted to do everything for her son. And there was Rose, mess that she was, out in the cold, wanting an adventure, wanting to say yes! to someone who would take care of her.

But until now, she’d never seen—or heard—the autopsy report.

“After that, he thought he owned me.” She tossed the stone and it skipped ten times, through a wave. No better feeling! “He asked me to marry him, over and over. He had needed this one thing settled, he said. But of course I said no.”

“I thought it would be me,” Bencomo said, turning to look at her.

“So did I,” she said.

Rose’s Journal

Most people here seemed to accept you as something beyond the pale, nobody’s property and so not requiring supervision or consent. They treated you decently because they were decent people—Bencomo being perhaps the best example of this—and not because anyone had any claim on you.

But this created a problem for you. Increasingly it felt that Bencomo’s intense stare was the only attempt he would ever make on you; without the ability to seek any formal arrangement by asking for a man’s blessing, there was nothing else for him to do.

How you longed for that place that Michael had shown you, that place where yes, yes, yes could happen, where wishes were expressed but not always granted, where any act could be accepted or refused but the person always embraced.

Where there was no contract, enumerating claims, defining terms, limiting, as contracts do, the past and the future, leaving the present, the only actual place where people live, desolate and lonely.

Michael had shown you that place, and now you wanted to go back there—with Bencomo.

When Michael was away, the walks with Bencomo got longer and you started to understand why he was always smiling. As you walked the paths that laced the tilting plane, fog cooled you; you could see fog droplets condense on the grass seedheads along your way. When a droplet got heavy enough it would slide down to the gritty earth and dampen a spot at the plant’s base. You imagined the web of thirsty roots under the surface waiting, like nerve endings, for every drop.

When the rains came Bencomo didn’t walk; there was no need. You would putter around the villa cleaning things that had already been cleaned, reading books you’d already read. Perhaps stringing together a necklace or two. You wondered what Bencomo did at his cottage all day. Of course he took care of his animals—the chickens and cats he’d told you about in tentative English (better than your Spanish), the little yellow dog who accompanied you on your walks. You imagined him puttering around the cottage, mending things or having a little bread and cheese for lunch, listening to the sound of rain and seeing, in his mind, the aquifers filling.

You didn’t imagine him meeting with his friends, talking independence for Tenerife, talking about collectively owning the waters he controlled with his little key.

The day after one of these rain days, you walked with him again. The rain had not been heavy and there was a banana plantation that needed more water. This required several stops uphill with the key, redirecting the water to its destination.

The walled banana grove filled and became a big bowl of pudding. You followed Bencomo, carefully you thought, as he walked down the central berm between rows of banana trees to check that the distribution of water was even, that each plant would get its fill before the water could percolate down through the blasted basalt beneath the topsoil.

Your sandals didn’t have good purchase here and you slipped and slid into the pudding beneath one of the plants. The cry you let out made you feel foolish. You were sinking in above your knees and your skirt fanned out over the mud. You felt your feet being sucked down further. How deep did the pudding go?

He’d been ahead of you, but he turned at your cry and sat down quickly. He braced his legs against the stalk of the plant that seemed like it would consume you along with its drink. He held you under the armpits and pulled you toward him until he could clasp his hands behind your back and hug you to him and continue to pull. Finally there was a sucking sound and the mud released you. He fell backward onto the firm berm and you came with him, landing on top of him with his arms still clasped around you. You were laughing. He smiled but he still looked into you—into your soul, you thought, and laughed some more at the cliché—and as you lay along the length of him you felt him getting hard against your thigh.

You had been asking him this question on all your walks on all these days and waiting for his answer. Now here it was—and were you really going to do this, here, between the banana plants with the sharp smell of fresh mud in your nostrils? Yes, you were.

“Is it okay?” you asked as you worked his belt buckle, pulling it just that bit tighter so you could slip the tongue of the buckle free. He nodded as he lifted his head up to kiss you. You bit his lower lip, lightly. It was full and soft. You crouched above him and your muddy skirt fanned over his chest. You pulled the crotch of your underwear aside and guided him and he moaned as he pushed inside you. It didn’t take long. It didn’t need to.

Your last pill pack had ended and you were going to have to find a way to avert disaster in that way, as in so many others.

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then read ↓

/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

The door of the cottage stood open. Rose and Bencomo had walked up the hill in silence but he had held the gate, then the door, for her. Still he did not close the door behind them; he was not planning to stay. As she pulled the desk drawer open and rummaged through the detritus it held, he looked at all the familiar pictures on the wall above the little desk, the ones that Rose had taken but hardly thought to look at anymore: the artful shots of step pyramids and cactus and scrub, the candids of Iris, and years later of him. The one picture that remained of Michael, smiling standing on a beach of polished basalt. That one dated from before all the others.

She found what she wanted under some fragile scraps of airmail paper and handed him the crisp sheet, folded in quarters. He opened it.

“Michael brought it from Germany, that spring when he visited. It was a kind of justification, at least to him, for what they’d done. He thought—or he hoped—I would appreciate it.”

Bencomo stared down at the page. You didn’t have to read German to know what it was. It trembled a little in his brown hands. How was it still so crisp, so white, after all this time? How was there still a slight sheen of quality to the paper? It struck her suddenly: this paper, this evidence that she was missing, would outlive her after all. She had convinced herself it was an artifact of a forgotten time but now it was here, everpresent, outlasting all the people who’d searched for her, all the people who’d ended the search, and, soon, all the people who remembered.

Emily: she had a copy. And that copy, even though she was fifteen years younger, would outlast her too. Squirreled away in a trunk in her garage or attic or living room, for all Rose knew. She hoped it wasn’t the living room, but feared it might be. Emily had made this story central to her life and had no way of moving it to the periphery.

Bencomo spoke: “It’s too bad. It’s really too bad. I think, what if this was a picture of Iris? I would give my life to make it not true.”

“I am sorry I didn’t tell you, and I’m sorry I let you believe a lie.” She stared at the paper in his hands, hoping he would tear it up and throw it into the compost pile, willing him to take this story off her hands.

“Sorry is worthless,” he said instead, as he carefully folded the poster and handed it back to her.

Rose’s Journal

You felt you could live with this feeling for a long time—maybe forever. This feeling of not choosing. Of letting life choose for you.

Michael had promised to come back to you over the break at spring term, this time without his mother. This gave you a light feeling of conspiring with someone, although Michael’s mother must have endorsed the plan. He did nothing without his mother.

And Bencomo—you caught him staring not at you, but into you, with his wide amber eyes. Those eyes staring from under his strong brow and long lashes—those eyes made you feel owned. Still he was a perfect gentleman on the long walks you took with him, opening and closing the irrigation flumes with his trusty key. He had a flawless mental map of all the flumes and aqueducts on this side of the island and he pointed them all out to you as you walked. You wondered how long it would take him to reward you for these walks, this attentiveness.

Michael had never looked at you in the same way. His blue-green eyes always had a smile in them, and when he looked at you, you didn’t feel ownership but the sense of a shared secret, some adventure he’d thought up for just the two of you. Something he knew (and he was right) you’d have to say yes to. And so yes, you wanted him there, without his mother, and you wanted to say yes to whatever he proposed. And you wanted your walks with Bencomo, who’d never asked you for anything, but who you knew would get what you both wanted when the time was right.

Almost every day the two of you walked by his cottage, but he hadn’t yet invited you in. Maybe by the time the yucca bloomed….

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

Rose stared out at the cove. Bencomo stood next to her at the windows that gave onto the patio. Rain spattered against the windows now and then, and the waves beat as hard as ever against the rocks; in a few weeks they would calm and start to deposit sand again on the pebbled beaches.

“What is she so afraid of?” she said, as much to herself as to Bencomo.

“She is afraid of dying,” he answered. “And she is afraid of finding out.”

“Afraid of me stumbling around a forest, drunk with a bum knee, wearing two pairs of jeans and a blanket like the dumbshit California girl I was. Which, yeah, is pretty much how Michael found me.”

“How could you let him do this?” Bencomo asked.

“Michael? I thought he loved me.”

“He was doing his mother’s bidding.”

“I think she loved me too, in her way.”

“Trying to keep you a prisoner?”

“That’s not so different from a lot of other mothers.”

“You told me you were the American cousin—what else have you lied about?”

She turned to him, but he stayed looking out at the sea. “You want me to tell you Iris is all yours,” she said.

“Once I thought she was all mine. But she’s neither of ours. Not anymore.” He turned and looked at her. She had been afraid to see disappointment when he looked at her, not tears. He spoke again: “After she was born, you took her home to our cottage. Our place, no one else’s. You raised her there while I was a real prisoner, on the Peninsula. You wrote to me. You sent photographs. I came to believe she was mine because you wanted her to be mine, despite what you said. I came to love her—who could not?—and my brother and his wife came to accept her as our own. And anyway it couldn’t matter—Michael could have no claim on her anymore. Why do you maintain this fiction?”

“Look at Iris,” Rose told him. “She doesn’t need anyone to send a check or wire her money or tell her to practice piano. She doesn’t belong to anyone.”

“She lives alone,” he said. “She doesn’t come to see you, and she doesn’t call.”

Rose’s Journal

What were you going to do with this fucking goat?

Michael had returned to Germany with his mother. Nothing was decided between you, but everything seemed to be understood between them. It was a relief to have them gone, but now you were here on this island, stuck in your new life which didn’t feel that different from the old life, ensconced in the princess bed, alone.

Except for the goat.

He was happy tending the fenced hillside above the orange trees, but once that was cropped down, he would need somewhere else. And you guessed that soon he would need what all the males of all the species needed. With goats, surely, the calculations would not be so complex as they were with humans. He would need to be with other goats someday soon.

You supposed that if you could get even a little bit of money for him, you could move on.

You asked about it at the fonda, where Michael’s mother had made arrangements for you to get meals and what wine they would dole out to a young single female: just enough for you to practice your Spanish without too much embarrassment. The aging lady who ran the fonda laughed when you told her you wanted to sell a male goat on Tenerife. “Do you want to sell a rock, too?” But she had an affectionate edge to her teasing and a calculating look in her eye that you hoped meant she would help you.

She gestured to a young man seated in the corner eating the octopus stew you’d also been given. “Bencomo,” she said, “come here.”

Bencomo took you to his brother’s place miles out of town, stubble and rock and salt—and goats—on a narrow shelf hung above another changeable cove. It was a journey that would have been unthinkable for any of the girls of the town, to be there unaccompanied with a young, unrelated man, but for you, the extranjera, it was acceptable, even expected. You had no family reputation and no future to uphold. You knew the Señora from the fonda would not have entrusted you to anyone the least dangerous, and this Bencomo proved to be polite and cheerful as he guided you and the goat west, away from what passed for civilization in this rocky place.

Still, you got no money. You got salt, and a kidskin purse, and a little preserved lemon, and the brother’s wife smiled at you. You felt you were among friends for the first time in a while. That was something.

On the way back to town, Bencomo pointed out to you the little stone cottage above the sea where he lived, alone.

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

Rose was making up the bed in the room that faced the volcano. A small window with raw wood shutters, darkened with age, framed the view up the mountain to the sleeping peak. The walls were whitewashed and bare. There was a small writing desk under the window. Guests never seemed to sit there; the chair was always pulled aside, belted pants thrown over the back of it, or sometimes a sheer nightgown. Or both! And she did not begrudge the tourists their little moments together. Downstairs, possibly, their children were mercifully sleeping as they stole some fragment of their life back. No, she didn’t mind seeing evidence of that.

This chapter had been hard. Bencomo had gone out the front door to the golf course, shaking his head, right after this one. He had stood up from his chair and paced as the results from the University at Heidelberg had been described. Had Iris listened yet? Rose was still waiting on the call from Iris, asking for an explanation.

And after this chapter, things got so much more complicated.

She took an athletic approach to making beds, lifting the mattress and tucking the sheets with teutonic precision, as Michael’s mother had shown her. Not fluffing, but pounding and slapping the pillows. Forcing the corners of the soft linen coverlets into strict envelope folds. Her own mother, Edith, had not been one to exert herself physically and preferred thick fitted coverlets, with flat pleats and box corners, that could be draped to hide whatever disorder lay underneath.

This room: she could be here dispassionately cleaning and tidying and arranging now for the northern guests who would expect a place that had been maintained habitually, not hurriedly tidied on occasion. A room that contained no secrets, where the corners had been swept clean. And Rose could give that to them, not because it was her job; not because anybody was paying her; not because her life or her livelihood depended on it; they did not. She could give that to them because in this room time did not pass; it was the one place she allowed herself to remember her own talent for belief, for trust, for acceptance and for love. She had all the time in the world for cleaning this room.

It was not a large room but it contained her whole life.

Rose’s Journal

When you’d returned from Las Palmas, it became clear that Michael was never going to make it to the princess bed without an invitation. Of course he had kissed you, and you had kissed him; on the truck around the mountain, on the boat, on the beach. You felt it was almost a show: the young university student and his lost girl, in brown sandals. You felt yourself slotting into some fantasy he had about himself, just having missed the student protests of ‘68, wanting to prove something, to someone.

You lay in bed one morning, very early, listening to waves. The sun had not yet come up. The sky was half lit by a weak moon and you could see one very bright star through your window; was it the Polestar? You didn’t know. You kept the gauzy curtains open at all times to glean whatever light, whatever view, you could.

You lay there and argued with yourself. Would it be now? Michael’s mother was asleep downstairs, in a small room off the patio. You felt a bit guilty about it then, and it didn’t occur to you that of course this was all according to plan: she had a plan for him, and you, and your second-floor rooms were no accident. Your own mother had always seemed to be so much the antithesis of anything about sex that this was inconceivable to you. And so it felt unseemly, somehow disrespectful, to go to him now. Well, of course it did, and part of you found this appealing. Going down to breakfast with this secret between you, you felt, would be thrilling. Your period had just ended and you’d started a new wheel of pills and you didn’t know how you would get another, here, and it seemed as good a time as any. You heard Pearl speaking to you from beyond the grave: get it while you can.

You walked down the hall in the sensible flannel pajamas Michael’s mother had brought you, because the nights could be chilly. For one ridiculous moment you wondered if he would mind your waking him. You slipped into bed beside him and whispered “I’m cold.” The flannel chafed the dry linen sheets and sent small sparks into the air.

First he spooned you, one hand held politely over your rib cage. After a few minutes of fastidiously motionless spooning, his hand moved to your breast, almost as if it were a separate entity with a will. “It is okay?” he asked you. And how beautiful that was, how thrilling! No boy had ever asked you if anything was okay. They had only ever tried to see what would fly. “Yes,” you said, turning toward him and kissing him. For the first time, you understood the cliché about feeling someone’s heart beating as if it would burst out of his chest.

“We can’t have sex,” he said then, which was the strangest thing for a person to say in the circumstances. Get it while you can, you thought.

“I’m on the pill,” you said.

“It’s not that.”

And you thought you knew, so you did not ask, that it was the presence of his mother downstairs that made him hold back. You thought the decision was all yours. You thought you were offering him a shared something that would make you both happy, a completion of something begun in the forest. He had asked if it was okay, and you had said yes.

And now he asked again, lying next to you and touching you, if it was okay. And you asked him the same question, as he lay on his back.

It was messy, as such things always were in your brief but fairly complete experience, and over too soon. Out Michael’s window the volcano slept on, backlit now by the sun coming up stealthily to the east.

You thought it was some scrupulousness on his part, some sense of responsibility, or simply fear of his mother, as all men have, that held him.

It had been so exciting to be asked and to say back yes…yes…yes: you thought consent was all yours. But as he lay there breathing next to you after you’d done all you could do for him, after he’d done all he was willing to do for you, you felt his anguish radiating through the half light. You were still in your camisole and pajama bottoms. You didn’t know how you could feel it, but this was the first time you felt the weight of all you hadn’t consented to enter the room.

When you went down to breakfast the next morning, Michael’s mother smiled at you. “This is so lovely, having you here. I have always wanted a daughter.”

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

My god. Of course Rose had read about the case in the newspapers that Michael brought, but this awkward investigator’s report was new to her. And Charles; Emily had gotten it from Charles. Surely he was dead by now? It sounded like her mother was dead. But Maria—still alive. Of course, she was barely older than Rose.

Michael’s parents didn’t run the pharmacy—they owned it and a cousin ran it. Michael’s father was a surgeon, of course, but this “investigator” might not have even talked to Michael’s father. He didn’t even get Rose’s own birthdate right—the birthdate of the victim!—and he seemed more interested in analyzing the alcohol content in beer than in really discovering anything about the case. In that whole analysis, Rose could detect the silent hand of her mother—and perhaps her father’s not so silent one—guiding the “investigator,” directing the man to clear up any justification for reproach of their daughter. That was what was important—that she, and by extension they, not be blamed.

Because of course, people were going to blame her. It’s the only way they had of feeling safe themselves. This brought it home again, what had become clear reading all those articles in Quick over the months people maintained interest in her case: she’d thought they would want to find her and took care, with Michael’s help, to cover her tracks. And to be fair, her parents did seem to want to find her—I mean, how cruel would it be to suggest otherwise? But it had become clear to her over those months, and upon reflection in the years that followed, that the real search—and what compelled interest in the case beyond a prurient glance at pictures of her clothing and backpack in the forest—the real search was for blame. How else was anyone going to feel safe unless they found someone to blame? And so it was the careful process of managing blame that had played out all those years ago.

And was Emily doing anything different, as she decided whose names to say in her podcast—and whose not to say?

Rose’s Journal

It didn’t take long for you to feel like you had to move. Michael’s mother was planning to come to the Villa to overwinter. You would be sharing a roof with her again. And what would be wrong with that? Someone to make cake, someone to comment on your hair and inquire whether you were practicing your piano on the instrument with a view of the cove.

The air was mild here in November. You ate on the Plaza with Michael, fresh octopus and rough Spanish wine in small glasses. They still called it sack. The light reminded you of home; it woke your soul up and told you to go…see…find out for yourself.

It wasn’t anything Michael had ever thought of for himself, just taking off without a word to anyone. But you convinced him: pretty soon he’d have to cut his hair, become a professor of something or other. Why not cut out for a while, see some things, test the waters….

It would be nice to have a little spending money. You both could work the Germans coming off the cruise ships on Las Palmas. You had the necklaces you’d started stringing together from beach flotsam; he threw his leather tooling kit into his backpack, you brought the purse you’d made from a linen pillowcase and fisherman’s rope. You would make your way back around the volcano on the bus or a banana truck, to save the bus fare. You would catch a ride on a freighter to Las Palmas, for a song.

The morning you took off, a boy from outside the village was selling a kid goat at the side of the road. The little goat was bleating for its mother. You knew it would become stew, its skin a supple purse, if anyone else bought it, and you begged Michael to buy it for you.

It kept bleating on your journey around the volcano, and Michael related the local lore: Before the Spanish conquest, when Bencomo was still leading the Guanches fighting in the canyons to save their island, they would separate the kids from their mothers, praying that the gods would hear the piteous bleating and decide to save them.

So you made it to Las Palmas, and sold a few necklaces, and talked to some nice English ladies, but then it was time to go back again to the villa above the cove, to receive Michael’s mother.

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

Jesus, how many Toms were in this thing? Although it did seem like every other guy was named Tom back then. Maybe that’s another reason, besides the obvious one, she’d named the cat Tommy.

The goat was another story….

Bencomo was lying in the lounge on the sofa that crouched in a little “conversation pit” with two matching chairs—soft, red velvet, overstuffed but now somewhat deflated and quite comfortable after the breaking in of hundreds of tourist backsides. From her place seated pretzel style on the Bedouin carpet by the coffee table, Rose watched him. His arm was thrown over his eyes in a manner that made him look like some sort of Victorian invalid. When the music died, he didn’t stir, but she knew he wasn’t sleeping by the pacing of his breath. And she knew it was time to call Iris. If only because, who else was there?

Who else did she have left?

The Christmas vacationers weren’t due for another hour. She took her flip phone out to the patio. A winter clarity had entered the water, as if it were lit from underneath, the inky water turned blue, and calm for once. She pressed the number labeled, simply, “Iris.” Rose wasn’t much of one for nicknames.

She started to count the rings, knew on six it would go to voicemail. On the fourth, Iris answered. Long enough to think about it. Rose asked about her life on the Peninsula, how the book was coming, and they exchanged petty bits of news—they were not on bad terms, not since Iris had left the island—and then Iris asked about Bencomo.

“He’s fine—he’s well.”

“Good old Bencomo.”

“Well. That’s sort of why I called you.”

“Yeah?”

Rose’s daughter spoke perfect idiomatic English, and also Spanish with a Canarian flavor, of course, and German and French and a little Arabic. She was a professor of history, specializing in the Canarian origins of the Spanish Civil War, phrases Rose often repeated in her mind to reassure herself that some things in life went alright.

They were not on bad terms, not really.

“I need to tell you about something that happened to me—something I did,” Rose said now. “But I need you to listen to something first. Can you write this down?”

Rose’s Journal

Michael’s father was an expert in anatomy, a surgeon in Heidelberg who shuttled between university and hospital, and so it was not difficult for him to ask the registrar for a birth certificate for you, not difficult to procure a university ID. Perhaps the German authorities would have asked you for more, but in Spain a palm was easily greased. Michael’s father seemed to take pleasure in saying this. Was that why he did this for you? As a sort of game? You were too young to wonder long why he would do such a thing. It did not occur to you that he might be doing it for anyone else besides you, and perhaps Michael.

There were train rides and transfers, a stay at a pension in Cadiz. Michael handled the papers; some friends had told him about a place where they would not demand your passport. And anyway the sight of two foreign students traveling barely made them shrug. The room had two twin beds, and Michael politely (studiously? protectively?) turned down the covers on the one closest to the window before going to change in the small hall bathroom. You fell into your own bed, into a sleep punctuated by the late-night carousing of sailors.

The next day, the ferry ticket was a simple matter, and your schoolgirl Spanish stood you both in good stead, as your high school teacher had insisted it would, as you blushed and told the young ticket agent you’d forgotten your passport back in the hotel safe. You would retrieve it before sailing.

“Bueno,” he said, and stamped your passage.

Almost two days on the water. The seasickness was so much worse than it had been on the transatlantic crossing, even. You arrived in Santa Cruz de Tenerife not having really slept in days. After a lorry ride with some Spanish Civil War veterans around the mountain (they spoke only to each other, in hushed voices, about their days spent scrambling over snowy passes on the mainland, clearly assuming the two of you would not understand, or anyway that some young students speaking a mixture of German and English did not have a direct line to Franco and his cronies), you were let off at the roadside and walked across a shingled beach to the villa.

You knew which way this had to be going; saw the way Michael looked at you. And why else, really, would you be here? But Michael put his own things in a volcano-facing bedroom, then showed you to a room overlooking the cove at the end of a tiled hallway. A room, you shuddered to see, with a princess canopy bed.

Yet you had never slept the way you slept in the villa. The sound of the freights pulling through Bönigheim had comforted you with the familiarity of the warning horn; but here the waves assured you, with their rhythmic push and pull, that really none of that mattered anymore: a freight train heading somewhere along parallel tracks, a drawn-out horn warning most to keep back, luring some with its promise of sweet oblivion. Here on the shoulder of this dozing volcano, nothing was heading anywhere, and you could rest.

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

“Did your mother really talk like that?” Bencomo asked as they walked, holding hands, on the steep path toward the cottage.

“Yes,” Rose answered. It was kind of uncanny how Emily had captured it. Then she realized: Emily had actually known Edith longer than Rose had. Really, it had been no time at all.

“She always talked like that, in that apologetic sing-song. Even…even when…” Rose shook her head, but Bencomo didn’t say anything, just waited.

“On that cross-country trip, before I left New York on the ship, we visited Shawnee so I could say good-bye to my grandparents and some of my friends who were left. My father had a new apartment there, and of course we stayed there, as if we were a family. My mother even bought little rose-shaped soaps for the bathrooms and made like it was her place.

“But in the entryway, when you first walked in, there was this giant oil painting that my father had had made of his nineteen-year-old secretary. I don’t even remember her name now. Blonde, blue eyes, smiling, looking right at whoever came in the front door, staring them down. When we first walked in and my mother saw it, she said Oh how lovely in that voice of hers. Oh how lovely! And then walked past it over and over for a whole week and said nothing else. Oh how lovely. That was how she condemned the world.”

“This was your father’s lover,” Bencomo summed up.

“Of course!” Then Rose felt bad for her testy tone with patient Bencomo. “Yes, of course she was. Not even two years older than me.”

Home at the cottage, Rose opened the drawer in her little white-washed writing desk, under the window with a view of the chicken coop, and there it was: the last letter she was carrying that November, really no more than a terse note, from her mother. The thin slip of airmail paper had been folded in the side pocket of her backpack; she’d grabbed it, along with her turquoise bracelet from Dougie, before hiding the backpack in the little quickly-constructed nest in the woods. “For the dogs to find,” Michael had said that afternoon. The wind wasn’t blowing; it was barreling through like a freight train, the mildness of the south turned to northern discipline in the matter of a day. This is why Michael insisted she come home to stay with him and his mother, that first day. He’d laughed at Rose’s plan of nesting in the forest near the tourist lodge. “The forest is free,” she told him. He saw she was a little hurt at his laughter and apologized.

She returned five days later to the forest having exchanged her California-girl denim for sensible woolens and knits borrowed from Michael’s mother (the trousers were only a bit long so she rolled the cuffs). She wondered now: why would she have agreed to such a thing, really? But at the time, filled with the arrogance of youth, Rose assumed that her logic was unassailable.

Still, as she dropped her denim jacket carelessly on the ground near the backpack, and the jeans not far from that in a place where a weekend walker could spot them, she wavered. It felt like a little suicide, or maybe a little murder; she was leaving Jenny there with the discarded Levi’s, for all intents and purposes killing her, the little girl who’d played a tastefully antiqued piano in a quiet room above the smog. It felt cruel, and if Michael hadn’t been there she would have shouldered her pack again, with its letter as heavy as stone, shed the new clothes, and headed back south to the life she’d known.

“Judy came again yesterday with Emily,” the letter from her mother read. “Such a quiet child, so unlike her active cousin! I opened the piano for her and let her try the keys, after she washed her hands in the hall bathroom. After a tentative minute she began to bang on the instrument and I told her it was time to close it up. She did not protest!

“Which leads me to inquire again, if you have access to a piano? You do have such a lovely touch with it, dear. It will stand you in good stead in your latter years.

“Dougie came round the house asking after you and I told her I had absolutely no news! So I am dropping this quick line and hoping to get it in the mail before the post-office closes for the weekend.

“Lovingly,

“Mom

“p.s. I do hope Dad has deposited the money in your account by now.”

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

I feel like I’m using her, Jenny. But is it a terrible thing to say that maybe she’s using me?

Or maybe is it a good thing?

What had she done?All those years ago in the forest, it had felt like she could make a clean break from the past. A clean break! But all she’d done was haunt this poor girl who—it did run in the family—had somehow managed to make the haunting about herself, her own fault. Rose felt the scar tissue through the thin cotton of her blouse, low there on her right side. She saw now that she could never escape what she’d been, never leave the people who, in their flawed way, loved her.

And—Emily had a little girl! Rose had a little girl, too.

Bencomo turned to her. “Does Iris know?” His hand was nervously working something in his pocket, the irrigation key he still always carried.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It always seems so important to get away from your mother. You’ll use all kinds of excuses. So many things start as a wish to get away from your mother.”

“Iris is not on the island now.”

“No.”

“So what difference will it make?”

“The truth always makes a difference.”

“This is my point.” He fidgeted the key some more. “One phone call, that is all.”

Outside the waves swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed. Rose sometimes thought the sound of the waves would drive her crazy—crazier. The rolling sound of the swell was like an earthquake that never came. The surf brought the sand in summer, took it away again in winter as the waves threw themselves at the rocks. Of course every wave was not the same, but they all seemed to be begging the rocks for some sort of forgiveness. Begging the rocks into submission. Like her mother, she realized now, always coming back, back, back, breaking her down with that voice that wheedled and probed. Relentless in its false humility.

She looked out the window, beyond the pretty bougainvillea-lined patio and the pool. She could see the waves pounding, searching, looking for any little point of vulnerability, of entry.

I am your grandmother.

Emily didn’t know the half of it.

She turned from the view, back to Bencomo. “Iris is fine. Iris will be fine.”

“Water flows downhill.”

Bencomo was the Key Man, she thought. He ought to know.

She put the laundry into the washer, poured the detergent into the little dispenser. She remembered getting the first automatic washer at the villa, workmen coming and puzzling for days over where to run the water lines, how to drain the wash water out to the citrus and avocados. She’d watched them, the two of them, as they calculated how the water would feel its way downhill, toward the sea. All the people of Tenerife had this intuition about what water wanted.

Not just Bencomo.

The men had to work their way around a stray outcrop of Basalt in the lower garden, explosives not allowed anymore on this part of the island. Rose remembered hearing the distant thunder of TNT, like breaking waves, as new banana plantations were excavated, each explosion distinct but muffled. Bencomo had shown her, once, how to cut the fuses to slightly different lengths to offset the detonations so one would know that all the sticks of dynamite had gone off. Didn't want to lose an arm out there! Didn't want to die.

He had shown her and she hadn't thought twice about it. It was thrilling to see the way he worked so surely, but there were many men on Tenerife practiced in this careful art. Many of Bencomo's friends, and his brother who lived out with his salt farm and his goats, away where it seemed the Civil Guard didn't want to go.

Until they did.

This washing machine was an old model. It would start its cycle even with the lid open. Rose found it strangely soothing to stand and see the agitator start to move, to churn the water and drag one piece of fabric after another under the surface. Washing the past away.

Rose’s Journal

So many things start as a wish to get away from your mother. The best kind of love would set you free, you thought.

You thought Michael had done this, in the forest, creating a new path for you out of there, out of your life. His mother helping should have tipped you off, though.

He took you to the village square here to drink wine out of small glasses, like something out of Hemingway, and watch the local teenagers parade around in their opposite streams, concentric circles in the square. You learned later that one wrong look was a promise made that could ruin a girl’s reputation forever. But then, you thought, how bad was it to have your reputation ruined forever? Having such a thought was a luxury of the extranjera, someone already with no reputation. Like being an infidel, or a ghost. Was that why Bencomo was drawn to you, because he knew you could make no enforceable claim on him inside the stone walls of public trust? By definition, strange women are ruined; having no family, no reputation, spoke to men that use without maintenance was possible. It whispered to them, over and over, until they couldn’t sleep at night. And so, you thought, men longed for escape too. Escape from a promise that lasted one short, hard-working lifetime.

But not Bencomo! Well, he already existed so much of the time outside the village, walking, always walking and releasing the water that the women could carry on their heads from the fountain in the square back to their homes, releasing the water with his trusty key.

And when he looked at you it was sometimes a thirsty look, but not a look that played tit for tat, and no promises. A look that simply knew it would get a drink today, and a drink tomorrow, ojalá. The best kind of love is the love of water.

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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

I have moved away from her with hardly a thought.

I don’t understand that this kind of familiarity is a gift.

I don’t remember us locking the door, and I don’t remember us driving away, but I know we did.

There was only time for one episode today; Rose was just here for a quick tidy up while the tourists were out, at the beach probably, or maybe playing golf. Although these folks had kids they were taking to the beach, judging by the crumbs and sand on the floor. And every bed in the house was rumpled.

Rose loved the little rivulets of thought that became tributaries in the narrative—at least to her, someone who’d lived it. Welcome to Planet California! When it rained, the reservoirs filled up with rocks and leaves and silt, runoff from the hills that became not earth but part of the flood, a liquid force of will. The gentleman-ranchers were long gone and the only ones who used the untended reservoirs were kids who would swing out wide over the water, some in their underwear, some still in shorts and T-shirts in the brazen assumption that they would make it back to the side without falling off the rope. If they didn’t make it, if the rope didn’t swing back all the way to the reservoir’s lip, they would let out a whoop and let go. Rose could still feel the way her arms would swing up, her pale body slip into the dark spring runoff, her feet flash for a moment in the soft muck of the bottom. So cold! She would swim to the side as fast as she could and let Dougie grab her under the pits as she pushed off the old, pocked concrete, exposing fresh skin on the bottom of her feet. The best was when she came out into the hot day, a hundred degrees even under the shade of old oaks. That was the best.

She was glad that in-between life had lasted a few more years, long enough for Emily to write about it.

She headed back to the cottage for her lunch rather than eating it at the villa. She sat in her courtyard, alone except for her cat, Tommy, who petted himself on her calves while she ate salty bread and cheese and sweet sections of orange grown in volcanic soil. Finished with her small meal, she dabbed the last drops of orange juice from her fingers onto her jeans and threw a crust of bread to the chickens. The highest in the pecking order chased off the rest, who went in for little forays and plucked what they could. Finally one of the low-order birds grabbed what was left and took it under a rosemary bush and gobbled it; in all her defensive action, the high-order bird lost out. If only life was like that! Rose thought as she threw the orange rind in with the chickens, who peered at the rind with contempt. They wouldn’t eat it, but it would break down better here than in the compost pile.

The gate squeaked. Bencomo was coming into the courtyard. A good walker, after years of walking this entire tilting plane from sea to volcano, he’d gotten here fast after his daily pool check at the villa. He was worried: his eyes were only on her eyes.

“I saw you left the computer on your story,” he said. “I was going to turn it off before the new people came back.”

“You listened,” she said.

“Yes, to the first one. And I saw the picture.”

They knew each other so well, but they hadn’t tried to live together in years. Bencomo was worried that, if he woke in the night, he might try to throttle her before he knew what he was doing, a reaction he’d earned doing his time on the Peninsula. That was what they did to you there. And so the one thing he was careful to do was never to fall asleep next to her. This robbed her of an essential peace.

Still, she had Tommy, who would fall asleep purring on her chest, a little catch happening deep in his throat when he lost consciousness and the purring ticked off. Whatever she might want to do in that moment—turn the page on the book she held over her belly, rise and make a cup of strong tea—she postponed. The peace of having a sleeping creature on her was both profoundly in-the-moment and reminiscent of all the other moments of peace she’d experienced in her life. There with the sleeping cat on her she could be thankful for those moments.

And now, this beat with Bencomo’s eyes not gazing, not staring, but entering into hers with incomplete understanding but a willingness to understand gave her one more moment. This was it—the instant you let go and slipped into the water and your toes stirred what had piled up, year after year, at the bottom.

From now on, they would be listening together.

Rose’s Journal—continued

Pink always looks soft. You suppose that’s why they try to make it the constant color of little girls, a blind for all the hardnesses girls have to grow. You remember looking out through gauze curtains at the pink glow softening a scrim of clouds over the cold, hard landscape, ice forming at the leaf edges of an aging cypress, and thinking you wanted to be that sun rising again over your heart that had turned cold.

You’d learned about Homer in high school, so at least you had that under your belt. The other kids had moaned and groaned about having to read it; they’d thought you were being some kind of ridiculous kiss-ass when you read every line, a translation from the nineteen thirties, right on time as the teacher assigned it. Rosy-fingered dawn, wine-dark sea, something something Achilles—you couldn’t remember them all now, it had been forty years! But you loved it, the repetition of the language that had let Homer, or whatever accretion of voices Homer actually was, remember the story and recite it, or sing it, over and over. Little inflection points, little road markers for the storyteller. You remember how the boys in class snickered at the part about Circe, the keeper of sex slaves whose insistence excused Odysseus’s infidelity to Penelope. And Penelope, who sat and spun: all the girls rolled their eyes at her, but something touched you about the way she was single minded about waiting. This was required of her, of course, as a wife; but you admired her ingenuity at rebuffing all the clawing advances of the suitors.

But the part that really got to you, the part that haunted you all these years later: when they took all the young maids outside and strung them up. As you remember it, it was Laertes, Odysseus’s son, and the loyal lute-player who did it. They strung the girls up so their toes stirred the dust as they died. Because they had slept with the suitors. And you thought, what choice did they have?

/*If you enjoy Nobody’s Property, please…

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then read ↓

/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

The Clock of Doom

Rose remembered that clock. She remembered Edith’s silent rage underpinning everything. Rage, or was it simple fear? Fear the form that waiting took, until Charles returned to Oklahoma again, left his office empty with that throbbing clock marking time.

She wanted to listen more, but Bencomo would be here soon, after his shift at the golf course, and she wasn’t ready for him to hear this, not yet. She took off her apron and hung it in the kitchen closet, along with the babushka scarf in a pattern of faded California poppies that she always tied over her long hair. She grabbed her leather satchel and stashed the little writing book inside, slipped her sandals on over her stained feet, and left by the front door, locking it behind her. Then she started uphill.

The walk to her cottage wound through scrub and cactus and reminded her of the hard, dry landscape she’d grown up in. Every place on Tenerife was between a rock and a hard place, basalt and packed earth. Well, maybe not every place…the tourists mostly came for the soft air and the soft sheets and the soft sand of the south side of the island. The sand that had been barged here from North Africa–four million bags of it–the white sand to make the petticoats of the volcano look like California. Tourists could fly there from Bristol, Manchester, Bradford in just a short hop. Rose couldn’t blame them for needing a break from dark stone.

Here, on her side of the island, everything was made of volcanic rock or of adobe made with volcanic soil and donkey dung. Grey-black, sometimes ochre, never white unless it was whitewashed. Like the villa, whitewashed every year since 1782. From the path above the villa she could look out to the murderous cove or up the slope of dry-laid rock terraces to the banana and orange plantations clinging to the dusty skirts of Mt. Teide. Up that way was Rose’s cottage, stone laid upon stone and tucked and plastered on the inside, but on the outside naked rock. From up there, the sea looked peaceful and infinite; and the locals (even after forty years, she hadn’t become a local) assured her that the volcano hadn’t erupted in over a century. Sometimes, she wished it would.

Breathing hard, she opened the little wire gate between black stone posts that led to her patio. The sun was still high and she was sweating. She peeled her jeans off and pulled her soft blouse over her head and draped them over one of the wooden chairs, then stripped off her underwear. The spigot on the small pipe that curved up from the wall near the chicken coop creaked as she turned it. Her shower water had been warmed in the cistern by the noonday sun and ran off through a runnel toward a small truck garden behind the cottage. If she opened her mouth to the water she could taste the volcano.

So Jim and Judy were divorced. She didn’t know why she should be surprised about that. The Clock of Doom ticked on, shit changed. And the words in this episode sometimes sounded stilted in Emily’s mouth. What was that about? It seemed like she was trying to justify some underlying rage, some fear the same as Edith’s, perhaps, fear about the passage of time and what to do with it. Fear of living your life as an apology.

As the water ran through her hair and over her shoulders a new feeling arose in her: disgust at all this apology. Apologizing: that was just making whatever happened about you, about what you had done. About how people felt about what you had done. And it insisted on forgiveness. Okay, so there were cases when it was necessary to apologize, but you had to do it in a way that let the person you were apologizing to make a choice. With these people, the people that now, for Rose, inhabited this liminal world of the podcast but whom she’d once loved and hated and fought and embraced, the apologies never stopped. They’d turned apologizing into an art form. They stuffed it down your throat until you had to pretend to forgive them. But even then, were they going to get on with it and live their lives? No, they were going to keep checking, checking, checking to make sure they were forgiven.

Except Charles. Charles never apologized.

He was sixty bucks ahead.

Rose had done her best to live for all this time. But now she saw that maybe it had all just been one big, messy, tearful apology, and she hated that.

She dried herself, patting the surgical scar over her abdomen gingerly, like a memory she didn’t want to get down into. She pulled on the linen shift she wore most afternoons and grabbed her little book again. She could open it right here, at the wood table on her patio. She could write in it anywhere!

In the recurring dream–which you never tell anyone about because who wants to hear about other people’s dreams?–you fall asleep in the forest. All around the wind still howls but in your nest you are warm. Your legs are drawn up and you sleep on your side, your hands folded under your head like a child in a fairy tale. In the dream you actually see the wind blowing around in wisps and curlicues, and you see yourself from a distance, then you are back in your body, safe and sound in the place you have made for yourself. This is how you saw it that day you met Michael.

But of course, you never did make the nest for yourself; you only told Michael about it, about your plan.

“It’s not safe.”

“But no one will find me there!”

“There are wolves, actual wolves. Not like in California.”

“We have wolves in California. I think. I know we have bears. And coyotes. My friend’s cat was killed last year. All they found were his two back legs, under the orange tree. They tell you to keep your cats in now, but it just seems cruel. They like to go out.”

Michael laughed a friendly laugh. “You’ve thought this all out.”

You were used to hearing the coyotes yelping at night, in the Spring. Put that and the train whistle together, which you wouldn’t think you would hear all that way up in the hills but it must bounce off the rocks or something, put that with the coyotes and it’s some lonely fucking music. And you’d heard that whistle and you knew you had to move. You couldn’t stay in that room at the top of those curvy stairs one minute longer.

You rubbed your ankle bone, where the flesh was still a bit yellowed from your fall the week before. Michael noticed.

“You’ve twisted your ankle.”

“I was drinking.”

He scowled at the ankle. “May I?” he asked and when you nodded, he felt around the bone tenderly with his long, pale fingers. You saw the tendons flex on the back of his hands. “Does it still hurt?”

“No,” you lied.

“You’re coming home with me.”

/*If you enjoy Nobody’s Property, please…

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then read ↓

/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/

Rose hit pause. Shit, man. This was heavy. Jim, Charles, Edith—this whole cast of characters, still out there in the world, still up to their old tricks. Emily—she was a toddler the last time Rose had seen her—out there looking for Jenny. The first episode had filled her with rage and a sense of dread, but now that all turned to pity for this kid—a woman now, obviously—who’d spent her life wondering just what the hell had gone wrong. And feeling like she’d missed it.

Sometimes it was hard to listen. But she had no choice. She pressed play again. Sure, it got a little wordy in places, but that didn’t really bother her; it reminded her of home, of all those professors’ kids who learned SAT words on their mother’s knee. The story felt so intimate, strangely as if it were none of her—Rose’s—business. The narrator’s voice cracked on certain syllables, grew raspy sometimes just like the singer’s on the backing track, as if it cost her too much to tell it. Rose wanted to make her a cup of tea.

She stared at the picture of Jenny on the screen, part of a collage of postcards and other flotsam. She remembered that kind of center-parted, silky hair. Whenever it got wet, or got blown around at the beach, or during the two weeks a year when it rained in Southern California, it became impossible to maintain hair like that, frizzing up like an old wool sweater, refusing to flow in the silken sheets that all the fashion mags showed.

This must have been some studio shot, the hair blow-dried, held back in a headband until right before the shutter clicked. Rose remembered school picture days when, at her mother’s insistence, she’d done that, sometimes successfully, sometimes not; until finally she’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror one day and chopped it off into abrupt layers, an act of defiance that made her mother stop and stare in the pristine vacuum track she’d just made in the hall.

Vacuuming—it was time to make some noise. Rose had mopped up the wine from the floor after coming in from the patio but wine still stained her bare feet. She got up from the chair, pulled the vac out, plugged it in, and hurriedly sucked up all the sand the tourists had left. If she missed a little, so what? She was usually so careful but she knew the place would be full of grit again the moment new people arrived. Which was not scheduled to happen for hours; their plane was landing at Reina Sofia at 3:15. Then they would have to pick up their car and skirt the volcano to get here. She had time.

She wound the power cord around her right elbow and hand, hung it over the handle, and stowed the vacuum in the closet off the kitchen. Then she sat down at the little wooden desk, opened the desk drawer with a tiny key she wore on a chain around her neck, and took out her pen and the small blank book she occasionally wrote in. She didn’t think of it as her diary. She didn’t think of it as hers. It was where she put the voice that welled up in her from time to time, a place to keep that voice secreted away. She wrote.

November 4, 2011, Las Aguas, Tenerife

For so long you were afraid of being found. You would wander the black-sand beaches wearing your sandals made by the village idiot because the sand was too hot for bare feet, offering your little shell necklaces, sometimes softened with a sprig of seaweed from the scruff of foam that lined the surf. The nice English ladies really liked what you made! Sometimes they bought something. But then you would visit the temple at the top of your hill, the step pyramid half buried in black soil. You would visit and figure why not? and leave one of your necklaces there as an offering: Please don’t let them find me.

Was that the arrogance of youth? To think that people were looking for you? Even if they did say it in the papers that Michael brought on his short trips from Germany. It seemed like they were okay with the familiar story that, you have to admit, you’d encouraged by letting Michael plant what he did in the forest. Michael and his mother. They knew what would play to an audience.

Now it’s been forty years. You didn’t have to do much at all, it turned out. You came here, to this island that looked like freedom, and began stringing shells and years together. And now you’ve been at it for so long it doesn’t feel like freedom anymore, and the people you were fearing would find you–they’ve passed on or passed away. The little pyramid on the hill is gone, too, stone harvested to build the wall around the golf course. But you wonder: what spirits still reside there? Who were those people who looked for freedom here, too, on this furious island, piling stone upon stone?

And is it time to be found?

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