133: The Vanishing

The mind is a black box.

A black box, in common parlance, is a system with opaque inner workings; one can observe the input and corresponding output, but the mechanism, the algorithm that transforms one into another remains obscure.

Black box theaters are minimal performances spaces rooted in the American avant-garde, intended to emphasize human elements of plays without distraction from ornate staging. Oftentimes, these spaces eliminate the proscenium, reducing the distance, narratively and mentally, between actor and audience. The box entraps with the promise of intimacy.

The group Black Box was at the forefront of late 80s Italodance with hits “I Don’t Know Anybody Else,” “Strike It Up,” and “Everybody Everybody.” Their music videos replaced original vocalist Martha Wash with lip-synching model Katrin Quinol. One commenter noted, “There’s no way that voice comes out of that skinny-ass body.” Wash later sued for ‘commercial appropriation,’ winning a settlement that required proper credit for her vocals, but for a year, as the songs glinted towards #1, Martha Wash had become a ghost, a voice missing its own body.

Airplanes are equipped with black box recorders to document voice calls to, from and within the cockpit, pilot actions and responses, details of speed, distance, altitude. Designed to withstand thousand-foot drops, jet fuel infernos, obliterating depths and darkness of the ocean floors, they are the sole survivors of catastrophe.

Rex, at the end of The Vanishing, finds himself in a black box of his own making. In his quest to comprehend his wife’s disappearance, he submits to the one person who can answer the mystery. And, upon its resolution, he cannot find a way out: the fading flame of his lighter swallows the oxygen out of his lungs. The black box is a trap.

A coffin is a black box.

As my father lay in his hospital bed, the Buddhist temple brought over a black box the size of a deck of cards. It played sutras on a loop, like congregants gathering around him to chant. I heard it in the background as my brother held the phone, so I could watch him on Facetime, mouth open, soundless, die. Afterwards, he was to rest there, undisturbed, with the black box as a soundtrack to guide his spirit to peace. I tried to get the next flight back to Colorado, but got stuck overnight in Tampa.

Hotels, despite their brass lamps, overhead lights, and cheerful, bland wall art, are black boxes.

People who organize memorials play music out of black box speakers. Favorite songs of the deceased, classical elegies, Sinatra’s “My Way.” We attempt to appease the dead; otherwise, one day, we will be served papers: the dead are filing a lawsuit to claim their proper credit upon us. My father had no memorial. Back at the temple, my mother could not enter because she was crying, and sadness, the nuns said, traps the souls of the dead on the physical plane. So I, the youngest, without tears, returned the black box in a Ziploc bag.

The heart is a black box.

#132: The Ruling Class

An ex-boyfriend once told me (paraphrasing Churchill, he said), “If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.” At the time (I was in college),he was mocking my leftist leanings, many of which I was sure he shared. But when I wanted to, for example, boycott Nestlé products because the company fostered a culture of dependency on their baby formulas in underdeveloped countries, he said, “I’m sure that huge multinational corporation is devastated that you won’t eat their Crunch bar.” Then we broke up, and then he became a stockbroker, so maybe he did follow the path he had predicted. (As it turns out, that isn’t a Churchill quote, but comes instead from 19th century French jurist Anselme Polycarpe Batbie.)

Or maybe I took umbrage more at the fact that I suspected that he was correct; that in my middle-class and middle-aged lifestyle, I’ve lost much of the radical fervor that marked my younger days. In college, I once volunteered to work defense at an abortion clinic, serving as a shield to the incoming patients, blocking the view of protestors holding gruesome signs and chanting in mock baby voices. Now, I call it a victory if I talk myself out of taking a nap.

Nonetheless, in The Ruling Class, this is also the path the 14th Earl of Gurney, played by Peter O’Toole, takes. From peace-and-love-spouting hippie Jesus to a starched and collared House of Lords representative. From “the God of Love” to Jack the Ripper. And the genesis of this change wasn’t age, but rather some ersatz electroshock therapy from another person who believed himself “the Electric Messiah… the AC/DC God.”

That was a quote I knew long before I ever saw the film. It was used as a sample in My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult’s song “Kooler Than Jesus.” I still have a t-shirt with the song title emblazoned on the back. Once, while I was wearing it, an older African-American lady stopped me and asked me what those words meant. She was challenging me, perhaps as much as my ex- had, but in a gentle, non-confrontational way. I explained that it wasn’t as much an attack on Christianity as much as it was an attack on the cult of personality build around Jesus. I’m not sure I made myself intelligible, because, in truth, I didn’t wear the shirt because of my strong atheist ideals—I wore it because the song had a good beat and I liked dancing to it.

Maybe my convictions were never that strong.

I still refuse to eat a Crunch bar, however. Not because I’m trying to stick it to Nestlé—but only because it’s waxy chocolate.

#131: Closely Watched Trains

Because Miloš’ father can not rouse himself to war; or because he comes from a family of lost causes, a grandfather who tried to stop an invading tank with hypnotism; or because he shoots his wad early when he’s with a woman; or because his attempts at lovemaking are interrupted by bombs; or because his lothario co-worker goes through the ladies with a rubber stamp; or because there’s nothing worse than being a virgin; or because he fails to commit suicide in a brothel; or because youth is winsome and impulsive in the same breath, Miloš volunteers to drop a bomb on the passing Nazi train of ammunition and gets shot, falling onto the train shortly before it explodes.

Because it was the 80s and Nancy Reagan had declared a war on drugs; or because, even after 10 years, American culture still seemed to baffle my father; or because our house had been burgled twice, a broken basement window: stolen jewelry, VCRs, my precious Nintendo console, our sense of security; or because we needed protection from… something, a nebulous entity haunting us like poverty; or because we felt ill at-ease in the suburban enclave of Aurora, Colorado; or because his Vietnamese friends had convinced him that there was nothing more bonafide American than firearms, my father bought a rifle, which he stored in a camouflage-print bag, despite the fact that he’d never gone hunting once in his life.

Because I knew where my father stored his gun in the basement, in the small cubby between his waterbed and the wall; or because I had been to the gun range with him once when I was young, the shooting earmuffs clownishly large on my head; or because I had found, on the top shelf of his closet, his box of ammunition, which rattled like a metallic snake, because one shell was missing, the single shot he had taken at the shooting range; or because the spirit of döstädning had possessed me; or simply because I had been convenient, the child present in Colorado, visiting in my childhood home, when my mother wondered aloud what to do with the gun, I became the legal owner of my father’s rifle.

Because the man in the shop could sense my discomfort; or because the police officer to whom I tried to surrender my father’s gun told me, “You could probably sell this”; or because the employees saw how I looked around nervously at the guns on the wall, the guns in glass cabinets, more guns than I had ever seen in one place; or because I felt queasiness, not from the fact that these guns were ‘real,’ unlike the plentiful metal fabrications in television and movies, but more that I was giving up a piece of my father, a piece that had gathered dust for decades, but a piece that I’d known was there, and thought would always be there too, the gun shop owner offered me a token $100 for the gun, adding, “Come back if you have any others.”

#130: The Shop on Main Street

On Main Street, Newark, Delaware, is a tailoring and alterations shop called Italo’s. It sits above a coffee shop that has gone through at least three iterations; Italo’s remains unchanged, its interior carpeted in the drab corporate beige engineered to suck away stains and personality alike. It swallows pins and staples. The shop fits one customer at a time, a counter cutting off access to the workspace and the windows that look onto the drunken students parading down Main Street. Its sign seems unchanged from the 80s: the shop name, a clip art needle, a clip art sewing machine. Italo’s is run by Dan, who, as I understand it, was once employed by Italo himself and simply kept the name when Italo retired. In The Shop on Main Street, Tono acquires his shop by fiat—the Aryan ‘comptroller’ of a Jewish business; this seems to be the direct inverse: a minority business owner taking over a previously Anglo business.

Dan reminds me of my father—they are both Vietnamese immigrants. A generation of men who kept their heads down and worked, trying their best to pass on that lesson to their children, who absorbed them to varying degrees. Dan has taken up sleeves for me, hemmed pant cuffs, taken in jackets and, more recently, let out waists and seats. He’s done well for himself; his racks are always filled with fluffy prom dresses, suits sharp and pressed, shirts dangling like lost skin. He chalks the cloth with deft, definitive strokes; his hands will one day be my father’s hands, I think: puffy, weakened by brain swelling, a tumor pushing away the able-bodied man I remember. My father’s unable to hold a pair of chopsticks and uses silverware awkwardly with his left hand, as his right can no longer grasp even a pen. Dan has shifted to being open only part-time, in preparation for his own retirement. My father retired decades ago. Rozalie, the owner of the button store in The Shop on Main Street, never retires, but instead keeps her store open with no inventory, buoyed only by the Jewish community, under threat by the authorities.

There’s a handful of other Vietnamese businesses on Main Street: a bánh mi shop, and a phở restaurant owned by Koreans. The community in Delaware isn’t big; you’d have to go to Philadelphia to find significant numbers. But I hear snippets of the language while wandering through Costco; I get a moment of wide-eyed surprise when I order at the Vietnamese restaurant owned by actual Vietnamese a few miles away. I rarely see other Vietnamese people in there. I took my father there once when he was visiting me in Delaware; he declared the food ‘acceptable.’ He rarely eats anything except Vietnamese food, which, in his old age, I suppose he sees as his right. He’s too weak to leave his house in Colorado, and so I bring home take-out when I visit.

No one is coming for us, so we show up for ourselves.

#129: Le Trou

In a long sequence in Jacques Becker’s Le Trou, we watch prisoners—men who neither protest their innocence nor speak about their crimes—struggle to dig a hole in their shared cell, using the makeshift tools they have at their disposal: a periscope fashioned out of a toothbrush and a mirror shard to track the movements of the guards; a weighted rope to transfer items from one cell window to another; a metal bar from the bedframe to serve as a crude hammer to break through the floor in what feels like an unbroken scene, though in truth, there are a number of cuts, most notably to shots of the men’s faces, staring anxiously, impatiently, worried that they will be discovered, at times mumbling wordlessly, even though the sound of the metal bar pinging against the concrete is ostensibly covered by the sound of construction elsewhere in the prison, but the noise is so incessant that one of the prisoners clasps his hands over his ears, but that metal bar that becomes the focal point: striking the concrete with what seems like futility—a few white specks, like dots of chalk on a chalkboard, until—amazingly—a chip flies away, and then a crack appears, and in aching slowness, the crack widens, the result of the pure, continual effort that the men have exerted; it seems like real concrete that they are trying to break through, a piece of cloth around the metal to protect tender flesh from friction, and I wonder if all work is like this, furious pounding against a concrete floor, progress measured in crumbs, in shards, in exertion, and how this notion is forced upon us, how we imagine freedom to lie on the other side of that work, how even in prison these men are expected to work assembling cardboard boxes, and how this work facilitates their real work of escape, how they dig into the floor, breaking rocks into smaller rocks, and smaller rocks into dust, scooping it away in small tin pots and transferring it into cloth bags until they have broken through the floor and into the space below, a darkness illuminated by burning cardboard, and even so, the men show no excitement at their progress, at what they’ve accomplished, they take no time to admire their efforts, a hole large enough to disappear into, like a momentary release from routine, and in truth, the men know that, soon enough, the process will repeat, there will be another wall to break through, there will be more debris to clear, there will be more aching muscles and more stiff knuckles, and all this will be undone by one feckless co-worker seeking the easy way out, and I think, Yes, that’s exactly what work is like.

#128: Carl Th. Dreyer—My Metier

As a general rule, I eschew selfies. At best, I regard them as unnecessary—will I really remember this vista better if I insert my face into it? At worst, they feel narcissistic, a reminder that the world isn’t the world unless I’ve marked my place on it, as if the moment I want to capture is worth preserving only if I can prove it happened. Do people look through their old selfies for that glimmer of remembrance—yes, this happened—or are selfies all in the service of now? Look where I am now. Look at me now.

I can’t look back on my old selfies without registering how old I’ve gotten. In Torben Jensen’s Carl Th. Dreyer—My Métier, he conducts new interviews with Dreyer’s leading men and ladies, juxtaposing their aged faces and bodies with their younger, cinematic selves. I searched the screen, trying to bridge features—eyes, hands, mannering—from younger to older, but even so, those connections felt tenuous, as if these were completely different people. I wonder if they recognized themselves, or if, as we grow older, we inevitably become strangers to ourselves.  

In “Everyday,” photographer Noah Kalina compiles, into a single video, the selfies he’s taken of himself since January 2000, an extended riff on Ahree Lee’s “Me.” In “Everyday,” we can see the tiny permutations of age, of exhaustion, of lifestyle changes, as backgrounds shift, as hair elongates and shortens, as wrinkles deepen. Perhaps this is the ‘frog boil’ effect: when presented with ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos, we jump out of the boiling water immediately, scalded; when presented with incremental changes, we don’t recognize the increasing ache in the bones as we stew, the compulsion to yell at strange children crossing out lawn.

The last selfie I remember taking was along the Guayas River in Guayaquil, Ecuador,. Matthew and I were on the Ferris wheel, despite his fear of heights and despite my minor case of conjunctivitis. From our capsule, we could see the whole of the city: the dense crowds and shiny attractions of the river walk; the cargo ships crawling along the muddy water, the colorful scrum of houses climbing up the hill, skewered throughout by skeletal telecommunication towers.

Then, in our pod, Matthew and I crammed together, trying to frame our faces against the landscape outside the cloudy glass. We tried again and again: in one, the setting sun washed us out; in another, we only got sky; in a third, our heads tilted oddly. In all of them, my left eye is almost shut. And I realize: I don’t want to see my face. I can almost recognize the stranger in the picture, the facial features, the salt-and-pepper hair, the glasses—even the squinted, crusty eye. Even though he smiles, I suspect the stranger wants me to tell me something, to remember something, but I’m now too far away to hear him.

#127: Gertrud

Carl Th. Dreyer released his final film, Gertrud, during a cinematic revolution. Against the backdrop of the French New Wave, Gertrud seems overly mannered, a relic of a lost time even when it was released. Based on Hjalmar Soderberg’s 1907 play, the film itself is meticulously staged, with the actors speaking, in arch dialogue, about the impossibility of love. Dreyer opts for static camera placement, rarely using reverse shots; in fact, he rarely has the actors speak face-to-face, instead having them look obliquely towards the viewer, replicating the theatrical experience. Bendt Rothe, who plays the husband, reported that “there was not a movement that Dreyer did not supervise and direct. None of the acting was ours, it was all his, expressing his ideas.” Amid jump cuts, non-linear stories, and handheld camerawork from other directors, Dreyer remains uncompromising in his artistic vision.

When I described my work-in-progress to my agent, I used the phrase “obnoxiously literary.” She didn’t bat an eye. I explained: this novel would take its style from classics of German modernism. We were seated at the bar of a French restaurant in Portland. Robert Musil, I said. Thomas Bernhard. Bertold Brecht. As she nibbled off a plate of toothpick-skewered olives, I wondered if she was calculating her earnings on fifteen percent of zero.

When Gertrud premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, audience-goers jeered. In the film, Gertrud, a former singer, has a firmly-rooted idea of what she wants from a lover and never relents, even as she is disappointed, again and again, by the men in her life. One is consumed by his career; another too self-centered; a third blinded by his own vision of love to understand hers. As Jytte Jensen describes it: “She is concerned only with arranging to live out her life according to her strict adherence to her unique—and in Dreyer’s world feminine—ideal. Love is all.” Her refusal of anything less leads her to abandon her men, eventually refuse to entertain even the possibility of love.

Or, as Whitney Houston puts it, she “would rather be alone than unhappy.”

My agent neither encourages me to continue my path, nor does she dissuade me. Instead, she takes a hands-off approach; when I finish my manuscript, we’ll discuss it then. Besides, at our meeting, she had more important things on her mind: she announced that she was pregnant and would be stepping back for a while.

Meanwhile, I continue working.

In his version of Gertrud, Dreyer adds an epilogue, revisiting the heroine decades later, at home. Gertrud’s unwillingness to compromise comes at a cost. Elsa Wright describes the final scene, in which “Gertrud’s room is virtually changed into a tomb under your very eyes—by the closing of a door, a shifting light, and the distant sound of bells.” But before the door closes: she reads a poem, which she had written at age 16. She still, she says, stands by those words.

#126: Ordet

I.

Jesus told his Roman executioners, “After three days I am to rise again,” and, as if dared, they set, over his tomb, a wax seal with rope. The price of breaking that seal was death. Three days later, his disciples found the stone covering the tomb rolled away, and nothing inside except the linens that had wrapped his body, bearing the shape of a body, but with no body. They concluded that he had, indeed, resurrected.

II.

At the end of Ordet, Dreyer frames the deceased Inger in beatific light. Throughout the film, she has been the heart of the Borgensgaard farm: tending to piglets, rolling out dough, rearing two daughters. But now, her hands are clasped upon her torso, dead after a harrowing medical procedure. Her resurrection starts at her extremities. Her fingers twitch. Her eyelids flutter. As she revives, she kisses her husband’s cheek with gentle nibbles, though I somewhat expected her to rip, zombie-style, a bloody chunk out of his face. Thomas Beltzer points out that the scene is purposefully uncomfortable: Inger has been granted not a spiritual resurrection, but a physical one. “The bodily resurrection,” he writes, “means that God loves our bodies as well as our souls and that he wants to be fully involved in our material lives as well as our spiritual lives.”

III.

When I watched Ordet, a month ago, around Easter, I was in a dark place. I had, like others, sealed myself into a tomb of my own making. I had trouble sleeping. I tried to relax by crossing my hands upon my chest, but beset by uncertainty and fear, was left imagining what it would be like to be dead—a holdover from my teenage years, when I thought about death with the romantic curiosity of someone far from it. But, with its possibility close, I thought it might be nice—like an endless night of sleep. When it came time to wake up, to rejoin the living, I resisted. I felt, not like Inger, but like Johannes, who, driven mad by Kierkregaard, believes he is Jesus: “You must rot, because the times are rotten.”

IV.

Leonid Andreyev, in his story “Lazarus,” questions what happens after resurrection. Before his death, the character of Lazarus takes sybaritic joy in living, but after his resurrection, these former pleasures fall by the wayside. Only emptiness remains. As the rich and curious seek him out to uncover what it means to die, they come away without answers, and haunted. I read that story in middle-school, trying to discover what it meant to die but came away without answers, and haunted. 

V.

A nearby church bears a banner reading “WE ARE EASTER PEOPLE”; it’s been flying for almost two months. What does resurrection look like? Buds on trees have brought forth blossoms; ferns curled into themselves have unfurled fronds; shoots scraping their way out of the ground have grown dark foliage. Elsewhere: streets await the spill of traffic; strip malls await the switch of dusty OPEN signs; skies await screaming airplane engines. We await the moment we can roll the rock from the cave entrance of self-isolation to see how world has changed. I urge myself, wake up. Wake up.

#125: Day of Wrath

When the townspeople burn Herlof’s Marte—not tied to a stake, the way we imagine, but instead to a ladder before being tipped into the fire to die of actual burning, as opposed to the relative mercy of smoke inhalation—Matthew gasps, because of course he does.

He tells me: in Scandinavia, during the witch craze of Early Modern Europe, there were approximately 5000 accusations of witchcraft and 1500-1800 executions. Denmark, following the reformation of 1536, had an intense period of witch hunts and persecutions, particularly under Christian IV’s reign, during which Carl Th. Dreyer sets Day of Wrath. But while that number sounds severe, the Holy Roman Empire saw nearly 100,000 accusations and 60,000 deaths. Countries that didn’t experience a steep rise in witch hunts—Spain, for instance, and the Italian city-states—had strong central governments that weren’t being challenged by reform movements.

Dreyer insisted that Day of Wrath wasn’t a political allegory, even though it was made during the Nazi occupation. But many interpreted the persecution of witches as analogous to the persecution of Jews—and that even in the depths of autocratic rule, love and life could flourish, if even fleetingly. After the film’s release, Dreyer spent the remainder of the war in Sweden.

In college, I was asked to perform wedding ceremony for two witches. They were actually pagans, but the wedding itself was symbolic, anyhow: the ceremony was part of the protests against Pope John Paul II’s Baltimore visit in 1995. D___ and R___ had decided to mutually change their last names to ‘Flatbush,’ appropriate enough, I supposed, for a lesbian couple. D___ wore peasant dresses and kept her straight brown hair in a ponytail, whereas R___ was shorter, squatter, and chubbier, with curly black hair that framed her round face.

I gleaned a few tips off the nascent internet and threw together a hodgepodge of gestures that could be interpreted as meaningful. At the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, amongst the protestors advocating for gay and lesbian equality and reproductive rights, I gave a blessing to the four elements (a tealight for fire; a pigeon feather for air; a plastic cup of water; a pile of dirt) and bowed to the cardinal directions, and as I quoted Tom Robbin’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (“I believe in nothing; everything is sacred/I believe in everything; nothing is sacred”), D___ and R___, leapt, hand-in-hand, over each of the elements.

I’ve wondered why they asked me, an atheist, to officiate; I knew them only glancingly, though we’d always been friendly. But maybe this was the point: this is how we protest oppression; this is how we live under regimes; this is how we save each other from the flames.

After the ceremony wrapped, the Flatbush wedding party continued down the hill, whooping and hollering, the moment joyously carnivalesque, a glorious inversion, the freaks and weirdoes of Baltimore holding their ground against the throngs of people lined up to catch a glimpse of His Holiness in his bullet-proof buggy.

#124: Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set

(originally published Nov. 4, 2015)

Nineteen Facts and One Lie about Denmark

1. This past electoral year featured a remarkable first: the first candidate for Prime Minister ever to pose on his campaign poster wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, a holster and a six-shooter.

2. The Danish media color codes political parties opposite to the now-conventional American coding. In Denmark, red represents the leftist parties, while blue represents the conservatives.

3. Danish political parties are identified with a letter of the alphabet.

4. The right wing Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) is represented by O.

5. The socialist party, Enhedslisten, is represented by Ø.

6. Ø, a nonphthongal close-mid front rounded vowel, may be the most difficult letter for non-Scandinavian speakers to wrap their lips around.

7. When I try to pronounce an ø, I sound like a Frenchman expressing disgust while mimicking an English accent.

8. A Dane once described a Swede speaking Swedish as singing. He described a Dane speaking Danish as a Swede getting gut-punched.

9. Written Danish is verbose. For instance, Christopher Paolini’s Eldest, which clocks in at 704 pages in English, in Danish run 935 pages in Danish and is split into two volumes.

10. Correctly pronouncing the dessert rødgrød med fløde, a red berry compote atop a groat custard, marks one as an official Dane.

11. The unofficial Danish national dish is smørrebrød, an open-faced sandwich on dense rye bread.

12. Most smørrebrød shops in Denmark open at 7 in the morning and close just after lunch at 2.

13. In Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, one can have smørrebrød in several restaurants, including Kähler I Tivoli and Grøften.

14. Tivoli Gardens, the second-oldest amusement park in the world, served as an inspiration for Disneyland.

15. Adult admission to Tivoli Gardens is 99 DKK ($14.50); to Disneyland, it’s $99.

16. Tivoli Gardens isn’t the oldest amusement part in Denmark. That honor goes to Dryehavsbakken in Klampenborg, just north of Copenhagen.

17. In 1669, King Frederick III closed Dryehavsbakken and turned it into his private hunting ground.

18. The Danish film The Hunt was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.

19. The Hunt lost to the Italian The Great Beauty.

20. That Oscar snub put the 1956 cultural agreement between Denmark and Italy in jeopardy.

#123: Grey Gardens

(originally published May 26, 2015)

When I called my parents earlier this month, there was a sense of jubilation and relief when they answered: “You’re the only one who calls us regularly without having to be reminded.” (Which wasn’t exactly true, since I called in response to an email my mother had sent, asking us, the children, what we wanted to do for my father’s 80th birthday. Shall we meet in Houston or Denver? I wanted to vote, emphatically, for Denver; Houston, in July, was a non-starter.) “We haven’t heard back from your brother, but he might be working in Malaysia.” my mother said. “And, as for your sister, well, we never know where she is.”

My sister splits her time between Saigon and San Francisco, with the majority of the split in Saigon. She goes incommunicado for long periods of time, and the family’s only knowledge of her whereabouts are what we glean from Facebook posts. Of the siblings, she’s moved the farthest away, both physically and psychically.

It wasn’t always this way. My brother moved away first, after college, to work in Midland, Texas, never to return; I left next, fleeing to the East Coast for college, though I moved back to Colorado periodically, in between jobs. But my sister followed the path that had been set out for her: living at home, teaching for Denver Public Schools, being the obedient daughter. Maybe, in that way, she was like Little Edie. The one who stayed behind. The one who put her life on hold. The one who deferred her dreams until they had congealed into an amalgam of love, guilt and resentment.

At times, I can sometimes understand that resentment. My mother gets stuck on an endless loop of worry—When will the University offer you a full time job? Do you have health insurance? When was the last time you went to the dentist? Despite her best intentions, she can be smothering, oppressive, a presence that demands attention.

Little Edie only left Grey Gardens once her mother had died. She went to New York, had a cabaret act, and, at 60, became the star she had always wanted to be. She burst forth onto the stage of Reno Sweeney for eight shows, enrobed in a crimson gown with a swath of red-painted plastic leaves on draping her shoulder like fire.

My sister, too, escaped. First into her own apartment, then into her soon-to-be husband’s condo. She decided: she’d get her MBA and leave the teaching profession all together. But on the way, she found a second husband, all the way on the East Coast, and, finally, Vietnam, and a possible third husband in San Francisco. And I see her, living the life she thinks she was denied all those years ago: the endless parties, the clothes that exude glamour and youth, the carefully constructed of her make-up and hair. And I see her still: parading in circles for the camera, picking the best costume to wear for the day, trying to keep the line between the past and the present.

#122: Salesman

(originally published Nov. 27, 2014)

Viet Dinh

Street Address · City, State, Zip · (XXX) XXX-XXXX · email@email.com

CHARISMATIC, GOALS-FOCUSED PROFESSIONAL

Top producer with a distinguished track records in sales, customer service and client management

Best-of-Breed Go-Getter — Outside-Of-Box Strategic Thinker — Value-Added Self-Motivatior — Hard-Working Thought-Leader — Results-Driven Team Player — Detail-Oriented Go-To Person

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Leveraged acumen to drive consistent increase in sales profits. Extensive experience in client satisfaction, appreciation and retention. Outstanding communication, networking, selling, customer service and negotiation skills. Adept at determining customer requirements and engaging in client-focused problem solving. Proven track record with bottom-line results.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Regional Sales Manager
Aurora Sentinel, Aurora, CO (1988)

Hands-on experience with all aspects of sales process, from initial processing of newspapers (tri-folding, rubber-banding, and wrapping in poly-plastic bags, depending on weather). Used varied and dynamic methods to achieve efficient distribution channels, including pedestrian-focused doorstep dropping, tossing from the handlebars of a wobbly bicycle, or flinging from the back of a Toyota 4-Runner driven by delivery associate. Took initiative when gathering monthly ‘donation,’ since newspaper was considered ‘free.’ Stoic in the face of slammed doors and irate customers insisting they had canceled their ‘subscription’ and no longer wanted product. Saved resources by noting addresses and not delivering product, subsequently recycling stacks of unused product at King Soopers for pennies on the dollar. Penetrated key prospective accounts while receiving payment, taking note of extensive wood-paneling, dun carpeting, wafts of cigarette smoke. Adopted innovative approach to increasing revenue, relying on innocent, doe-eyed look to extract tips more effectively.

Account Executive
World’s Finest Chocolate, Aurora, CO (1984)

Proactively recruited and retained secondary sales force. Spearheaded workplace entrepreneurship, delegating tasks as necessary to maternal and paternal contractors. Mentored members of sales team, insisting that catalog rewards were not the end goal. Instead encouraged civic pride in Parklane Elementary School, in spite of established sales quotas necessary to earn year-end bonus. Generated adequate volume with new accounts despite heavy competition from other independent sales associates accessing the same markets. Expedited sales by eating product, five-inch chocolate bars with the color and texture of a paper bag, a single almond in each segment. Compared product to others on the market to gauge marketing strategy, decided on innovative approach of not mentioning flavor whatsoever. Achieved and exceeded sales goal when contractors pooled resources and announced, ‘Look, it’s just easier for us to buy you whatever you want from the catalog.’ Donated all proceeds to local charitable organization, left on good terms after the 5th grade.

Area Sales Associate
Innisbrook Wrapping Paper, Aurora, CO (1982)

Accountable for all aspects of sales, business development and client management. Effectively prospected clients door-to-door using a hard-copy, glossy catalog. Pursued leads to generate revenue growth. Emphasized the need for foil-embossed wrapping paper and the indispensability of having several rolls on-hand at all times. Generated leads in a four-house radius, cultivated person-to-person contact. Wrote order forms, negotiated delivery dates. Prepared closing documents, eyed prizes in the rewards catalog: Atari 2600, Huffy Bike, Personal Gumball Machine (gumballs not included). Earned erasers in the shape of monsters.

#121: Billy Lair

(originally published July 28, 2014)

Alternative Viet #1: This Viet knows what he wants and gets it, always. In high school, this Viet isn’t the shy and sheltered teenager who is constantly surprised to discover that his classmates are, indeed, having sex. Instead, this Viet is sexually active and sophisticated, having both male and female lovers. This Viet doesn’t stare at people longingly, wondering what it would be like to love and feel love, but is already jaded about the whole deal, with the insouciance of a European playboy. This Viet doesn’t stay home on the weekends, listening to Saint Etienne’s So Tough album on endless repeat, translating British ennui into a more pedestrian, suburban heartbreak. No. This Viet is not at all like the other one.

Alternative Viet #2: This Viet has adopted Viet #1 as his own. It’s college, after all: who here knows who the ‘real’ Viet is, except for the daughter of the Asian supermarket owner? And how often will their paths cross? Very rarely, this Viet realizes. The time has come for a reinvention, for a radical makeover, and this Viet can be whoever he wants. This Viet creates his own myths and disseminates them as far as they will travel, because if enough people believe a story, doesn’t it, in fact, become true, like a dream made flesh? If he insists on the primacy of this Viet, the other Viets will fade away, become distant, apocryphal memories, almost as if they never existed, and no one would be the wiser.

Alternative Viet #3: This Viet is in trouble. He has been called to the carpet to reconcile the differences between the various Viets.  Bill waits for him to explain. Bill is this Viet’s first boyfriend, and this Viet wants to get this right. But the history he has given Bill does not comport with the histories of Viets #1 and #2, which Viet’s friends have shared. How can there be so many Viets running around? Who is the ‘real’ Viet? Bill says that he understands the urge to become someone new. Who doesn’t want to be cooler than he really is? Bill says, even though Bill, himself, has gone the opposite direction, converting to Catholicism from Protestantism because Protestants aren’t ‘by the Book’ enough. This Viet wonders: what difference would it make if the history he’s told Bill is the ‘real’ history—the virginal history, the history of sexually inexperience and ineptitude? What if all the Viets have begun to bleed together, the confidence of the other Viets giving this one more of a sense of self-worth? Why would anyone ever want to be a normal Viet, confused and stumbling about, when there are other Viets out there in the world, Viets who know what they’re doing, Viets who make no apologies, Viets who might be able to tell him the right thing to say to Bill so that the surgical excision of the other Viets from this one won’t hurt as much.

#120: How to Get Ahead in Advertising

(originally published Jan. 5, 2014)

My mother is in the hospital for an infected wisdom tooth. She thought at first that the soreness was her sensitive teeth, and, to compensate, she chewed on the side of her mouth that didn’t hurt. As the pain progressed, she self-medicated with Tylenol, with its effects diminishing after an hour or two. Before long, her jaw had swollen, and she could only open her mouth a crack—not enough to eat or drink. A friend urged her go to the emergency room. If that infection gets into your blood, my mother’s friend said, it could be fatal. And so, my father took her to the hospital. He called to deliver the news, deadpan:  Happy New Year. Oh, I’m fine, but your mother is in urgent care.

*

In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag enumerates the ways in which people conceive as cancer as the Other: a mutant, an invader, a colonizer, “a cosmic disease, the emblem of all the destructive, alien powers to which the organism is host.” But sometimes I think the body itself is the Other, unknown and unknowable. Despite the holistic promise of mind-body unity, who knows what’s really going in there? The medulla oblongata throws up its hands and takes a nap.

*

In the hospital, my mother wasn’t allowed to lie down and had to sleep reclining. She was forbidden to eat or drink and received nourishment through an IV. But despite the fluids, she complained of an aching thirst, a mouth-dryness that could not be quenched via the median cubital vein. My mother is eighty, and this is the first time she’s been hospitalized. She hadn’t fully read the admittance forms, so she didn’t know that she had to request painkillers. She suffered the discomfort until it became overwhelming. The nurse went straight to the hard stuff: morphine. But what if I get addicted to it? my mother asked, as if contemplating the ways in which her body could continue to work against her, as if it were separate from her conscious mind, now frightened, unsettled, disoriented.

*

Our bodies betray us constantly. They sabotage us at inopportune times: a sudden erection at a dinner party; a sphincter unwilling to hold its gas in a crowded elevator; a boil that speaks its mind and refuses to be placated. The corpus gives the middle finger to the consciousness: You think you’re in control? Just you wait. Our bodies, our subversives.

*

My mother is back at home now. She can only eat purees through a straw but seems in good spirits. The offending wisdom tooth will be extracted two days from now. If she wanted to, I imagine, she could confront her tooth: How could you do this to me? Did I not care for you? Did I not brush you with Sensodyne? It doesn’t matter, I suppose: soon enough, her tooth, a hard nugget of pulp and enamel, will be dead, extracted from its host. But maybe its dying wish will be to bite back, one last time.

#119: Withnail and I

(originally published Dec. 31, 2013)

Yaldā: the longest night of the year. On this night the Sun-God Mithra was born, he of the wide pastures, of the thousand ears, and of the myriad eyes. He emerged from the light from deep within the Alborz mountains and was equal to Ahura Mazda and Anahita. Our friend, Hamid, prepare a pot of fesenjan, serving it with crackling, saffroned tahdiq. We snack on green olives to protect against scorpions. A stainless-steel samovar puffs on the kitchen counter, offering water for bitter black tea. Hamid gives me an amber rock of sugar. Hold this in your cheek while you drink, he explains. It will sweeten the tea.  Our friend Jenn marvels at fresh quince. A pomegranate waits to be cracked open, the seeds as red as dawn. The last fruits of winter.

This year, Hamid’s boyfriend, Warren, invites friends with whom he used to live on a pagan commune on the outskirts of Philadelphia. They reminisce about midsummer bonfires and fertility rituals. Warren is now earning his Ph.D. in nursing; Scott and John are now a well-to-do gay power couple, an architect and schoolteacher, respectively. Everyone’s radical days seem far behind them; even the drugged and drunk Marwood, at the end of Withnail & I, cuts his hair and prepares to embark—seriously—on his career.

J___ proclaims himself the fire-tender for the evening. He has the build of a construction worker and keeps his hair pulled back into a ponytail, a spurt of plumage at the back of his head. Fueled by red wine, his voice grows larger as the evening wears on. What we need, J___ says, is a vertical fire. His big-hearted benevolence explodes. He stacks the logs into a pyramid teepee, and they’re soon blazing. The night is unseasonably warm—almost 50 degrees—and with the fire and the steam from the samovar and food, the room is a tub of embrocation. How did the ancient Persians, gathering in the mountains to watch the miracle of dawn, vent their caves? J___ says, This reminds me of a sweat lodge, but I hope it isn’t the one in Arizona where three people died from heat stroke. The guru, James Arthur Ray, claimed that the dead “were having so much fun” in their out-of-body experiences that they didn’t want to return.

At the end of the evening, we gather in the living room. It’s a family tradition, Hamid explains, to make a wish for the new year and then to turn to a random poem by Hafez. The translations by Gertrude Bell—the woman who helped shape the borders of modern Iraq at the 1921 Cairo Conference—are prolix and convoluted, an remnant of Victorian imperialism; the translations by Daniel Ladinsky are cleaner and more sonorous. I throw pistachio shells onto the fire, where they spark and pop.

The subject tonight is love
And for tomorrow night too
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all
Die!

#118: Sullivan's Travels

(originally published Dec. 10, 2013)

When Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea enter the flophouse, they look around, dismayed. Sleeping vagrants litter the floor in a knot of rags, and when Lake and McCrea find a free spot, they curl into a protective cocoon, batting away strange, errant limbs. On the wall is a curious sign: Have You Written Your Mother?  Those thick block letters have an oddly chiding tone, a schoolmarm’s fat finger waving at those unfortunates who have just endured a fiery sermon to sleep here.

No, I have not written to my mother. I call, though not as frequently as she would like. My father answers and pretends I’m a stranger: Who’s this? he asks, as if caller ID weren’t a built-in feature of their life. My mother replaces Hello with Why haven’t you called? As she runs through her litany of concern (Have you gone to the dentist? Found a permanent job yet? Get your flu shot?), I feel like I’m eight, and I wait, irritably, until I finally become an adult, and she tells me what’s been going on at temple, with her friends, in the family.

She sends out emails too, though her use of diacritical marks depends on which computer she’s using. Behind the desk in the computer room (my old bedroom), my father has taped a sampler of the Vietnamese fonts he’s downloaded. With these, the accents are accessible via keystrokes. I imagine her sitting there, tapping out appropriate vowel tones. But if she’s in her own room, sitting up in her waterbed, tablet on her lap, I imagine that she most likely can’t be bothered. It doesn’t matter, really, if the marks are there or not, since I’m barely literate in Vietnamese. I scan the email for words I immediately recognize—root canal, endodonist, dental insurance, osteoporosis—and infer the rest. The diacritical marks dot the screen like dust.

But my mother also writes letters, short communiqués on the free notepads charities send out when they try to guilt you into sending donations: Red Cross, World Wildlife Foundation, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Her handwriting is crisp and spiky, insisting that it be absolutely understood. Just a few words on each note: I’m sending you this check, it says, because of ____, and I’m forced to sound out each word, to remember which tone goes with which mark. The hỏi asks a question, and the ngã breaks. Sắc is like the French accent aigu, while huyền is the French grave, and nặng is the heavy thud, a cannonball of a vowel. The diacritics sometimes double up on the same vowel. Depending on its marking, the word ‘ma’ can mean: mother, or ghost, or however, or horse, or grave, or rice seedling.

My mother asks if I can read her notes, and I always answer yes, even if I can’t. I put her notes, folded in half, in the back of my desk, where they remind me: communicate.

#117: Diary of a Chambermaid

(originally published Nov. 12, 2013)

Autumn will always be associated with death. It’s the way the leaves turn red, then brown, then fall. It’s the colder winds, the longer nights. It’s the onset of winter. Look at the holidays: Samhain, All Saint’s Day, El Dia de Muertos, P’chum Ben, Famadihana, my birthday. I dreamt last night that I had an L-shaped gash on my thumb, from the tip down the knuckle, and that I could peel back my fingerprint to reveal what was underneath. And instead of flesh and muscle, there was instead what looked like the inside of a rotting, hollow branch. Thick cords of dark organic sludge, white spots of what I assumed to be mold. Something out of a Quay Brothers film. This is the inside of my body, I thought, I dreamt.

Nowadays, roadkill is more abundant. Sometimes there’s nothing left but a rusty streak that stretches from the blacktop and up onto the sidewalk, but more often, smaller carcasses line the gutters and the medians: raccoons, possums, the occasional fox. Whenever we pass one, Matthew coos, Poor thing. I no longer point out dead cats.

On the highways, deer obstruct the shoulders with their thick, dun bodies. Apparently, deer collision cause about 200 human fatalities a year. It’s unlikely that the deer walk away from these incidents unscathed. The carcasses of whitetail deer can be collected, if the gatherer files a claim with the regional game commission for a permit number. Without a permit, the gatherer is required to butcher the deer himself, rather than taking it to an official deer processing center. Delawareans donate more than 20,000 pounds of venison to charitable organizations statewide.

Hunting season has come again.

The landowner in Diary of a Chambermaid asks his son, who has been hunting, Aren’t animals more beautiful alive than dead? His son replies, Hunting… is hunting. The son then teaches his father how to hunt butterflies. As the father shoots one off of its flower, the son asks, I thought you liked butterflies? and the father replies, I do. I rather I’d have missed.

A few years before she died, Matthew’s cat, Gwinny, hunted butterflies in his backyard garden. He watched her, of course; she was 13 years old—elderly for a cat—so she never caught one, but her eyes grew wide and wild at their fluttering. She couldn’t meow, but instead squeaked, at times imploring them to come within reach of her paws, of her fangs. When Matthew moved from there, he gave the house a thorough cleaning. In the living room, as he was vacuuming, he pulled back a curtain to discover a pile of butterfly corpses, a mass grave years in the making. There were a few intact specimens, dried and discolored, but most of them were in pieces: a wing flake; a torso; some dry, crisp antennae. Monarchs waylaid on their migratory path. Dismembered swallowtails.

Perhaps Matthew yelled at Gwinny. Perhaps he was secretly proud. Either way, I imagine her response would have been a single squeak: What did you expect? It was their season.

#116: The Hidden Fortress

(originally published Sept. 20, 2013)

A few years ago, as I was driving south down I-95 late one night, near the Pennsylvania-Delaware border, I saw a house on fire. The highway was mostly empty, and I slowed to look. Emergency responders were already on the scene, but they seemed on stand-by—the house looked like a total loss, and they were on-hand to keep the fire from spreading. It was eerily beautiful, the way the flames ate away the night. In my car, I could only imagine the intense heat, the smell of the cinders, the smoke of a person’s life in the air. When I drive by that area now, if I remember, I look to see if I can find where the fire had taken place, but I can never find it. Another house has already grown over that spot, I imagine, like scar tissue.

In The Hidden Fortress, revelers at a fire festival intone an existential prayer as they slouch their way around a bonfire.

The life of a man
Burn it with the fire
The life of an insect
Throw it in the fire
Ponder and you will see the world is dark
And this floating world is a dream
Burn with abandon

And at that last line, they dance in a frenzy. And as a fortune in gold is added to the fire, a princess and her bodyguard, who have been trying to evade capture with the gold, abandon their worries and dance. The two peasants who have been helping them, however, look at the fire with sadness and dismay—the gold they’ve tried to protect is now melting, and as the bonfire blazes, it burns away their hopes, their dreams, their futures.

I tell myself that if I ever suffer a catastrophic house fire, I won’t rebuild. The things that can be replaced, I won’t replace. The books, music, and movies that I’ve spent a lifetime collecting and curating, I will no longer need. If I’m ever reduced to zero, I’ll somehow make peace with zero. As 17th century poet Mizuta Masahide writes:

Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.

Tonight, I returned home from a long day at work to find the house lit up with paper lanterns—the Harvest Moon Festival.  I walked in to see, in our dusky living room, warm, glowing colors, floating in space. Each lantern a constellation, a nebuIa, a galaxy. I hesitated: Is this my house? Yes, it was. Matthew had used up the last of the tealights, including the red ones that smell faintly of bayberry. Dinner was warm on the stove. Afterwards, as we prepared to retire upstairs, Matthew said, Oh, the lanterns! and even though there was no risk of them catching on fire and burning the house down, we went back to blow them out. And from the second floor of the house, in the room we call the library, where I keep my autographed books and my Criterion Collection DVDs, we got a better view of the rising moon.

#115: Rififi

(originally published Aug. 18, 2013)

This is the lesson of Rififi: rings are nothing but trouble. A carefully planned and executed heist comes to naught because of a diamond ring given to a showgirl by a vainglorious safecracker (played by the director himself). That one symbolic gesture brings about the gang’s downfall.

When civil unions became law in Delaware, the wife of one of Matthew’s colleagues offered her planning services for our ceremony. I’m sure you’ll want to do this soon, she said. Matthew and I glanced at each other, taken aback that she was more excited about our theoretical unionization than we were. 

Matthew’s father once explained that, in marriage, there are three rings:  the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and then the suffer-ring.

When Matthew and I drive to visit his father in upstate New York, along Route 31 in Pennington, New Jersey, we pass a warehouse that sells ‘USA Tolerance Rings.’ Was this the new thing amongst the kids? I wondered. The middle ground between chastity rings for the Christians and the rainbow freedom rings for gays and lesbians? Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that tolerance rings are a manufacturing component used to join mating cylindrical parts.

I once gave Matthew a ring, which he flung away. I had bought it at the Colorado People’s Fair, from a tented vendors with stacked, felt-lined trays of jewelry. It was a simple silver band, though given the other stock—rings with dragons and pentagrams, intricate claddaghs, rings that looked like that had been blackened in a fire—I can’t be sure that it was actually silver. Or even metal. The ring turned out to be loose, since I could only estimate his ring size based on my own fingers. While he was pulling a plant out of his car, his hand flew back, and the ring went flying, with only a single tink! to indicate where it may have gone. Or so he claims.

Now that same-sex marriage has become the law in Delaware, Matthew and I play a variant of the gay/not gay game, in which we try to guess whether two people are together or not. An obvious giveaway, of course, is the presence of matching rings. If they, in turn, play the same game with us, I’d like to think that the answer is still obvious, despite the absence of any symbolic jewelry.

But, in the end, no one really cares about the ring in Rififi. The centerpiece of the film is, undoubtedly, the soundtrack- and dialogue-free sequence as the thieves perform their heist. They communicate with gesture and glance, having practiced and prepared. This silent partnership is the raison d’être of the film. It’s what people remember.

What I remember: Matthew and I, stretched out across our respective couches, reading. I glance over at him and know what he’s saying: Get this damn cat off of me or I need a refill of tea. Why have a ring ruin all that?

#114: My Man Godfrey

(originally published Aug. 7, 2013)

When my sister was in high school, she went on an Urban Experience. As a lesson about homelessness, she and her classmates were challenged to spend the night in downtown Denver with only five dollars in their pockets. They would have to sleep on heat vents or in homeless shelters; they’d have to know what it’s like to be hungry; they’d emerge from it chastened and humbled and wiser for the experience.

It was fun, my sister told me.

I suppose this was the drawback: there was nothing at stake. They only had to make it for a few hours, and by morning, they’d be back in bed, well-fed and warm. In other words, it was an early opportunity for my sister to spend an entire night out. As it was, by the time I got to high school, I had already planned how I would have spent my night, but the program didn’t exist anymore.

Years of city living has inured me to the homeless. I mistrust the men—and it’s almost always men, Caucasian—who linger on the devil’s strip near busy stoplights, where the traffic can back up a block’s length. Their clothes are dirty and sufficiently worn, though still serviceable, and they bear stubble on their face as proof of hardship. They hold cardboard squares with their lives’ misery condensed in black Magic Marker: got laid-off, Vietnam vet, foreclosed home, hungry family, God bless. They rarely speak. But they strike me the way William Powell strikes me in My Man Godfrey: There’s no way he could be homeless.

I wasn’t always so cynical. One evening when I was still in college, I was with my friend Cris and his boyfriend Jamie, hanging out in the gay neighborhood of Baltimore, Mount Vernon. We were all too young to go to the bars and clubs, but we were there to steep in the general atmosphere, reveling, as we were, in the then-new excitement of our community. We were at the base of the hill the rises towards the George Washington Monument, outside of The Buttery, a diner that would have been more aptly named “The Greasery.”

An African-American woman came up to us. She spun out her story—she needed milk for her baby at home, stuck in the city without bus fare. Cris and I, both still new to Baltimore, looked at each other, unsure of what to do. We could deal with homelessness when it was huddled in a corner, but never had it come up to confront us. As college students, we hardly had any money ourselves, though we must have had a few bucks between the two of us. We sputtered out our excuses, but she pressed on. My baby’s hungry, she insisted.

Jamie, from nearby Ellicott City, was getting more upset at us for engaging with her than with her for coming to us.

Finally, fed up, he gave her a few dollars. “Here,” he said. “Take it.”

When she left, she seemed to skip, with what might have been glee. “She seems happy,” I said.

“Why wouldn’t she be?” Jamie replied. “She got her money.”