The Elephant

     I was exhausted. Learning the halls of the psych ward, which water fountain had the coldest water with the best pressure, where the laundry room and the bathroom were located – these things took a toll. Panos pointed and told me things as we walked down the corridors: those bathrooms are the cleanest; the phone line is longest on Sunday; that is Dr. Avramopoulos, who is very nice, but not likely to remember your name. I made a fool of myself with a gurney, trying to lower the rails and engage the breaks while the head nurse looked on. Mrs. Konstantinidou did not smile as I wrestled with the bed frame, but coolly assessed my performance. Heat rose in my cheeks as the misbehaving bed slid across the floor. I pressed it up against a wall, and at last the bed relented; the rail fell into place with a clatter. Mrs. K. nodded and frowned and did not say a word.

     My tour of the hospital ended at the service entrance, where a raised platform allowed for the loading and unloading of trucks, and the trash produced by the hospital gave off a fetid vegetable stink. Panos waved his hand and said, “This is where we put the trash.”

Beyond the shadow of the overhang, beyond the blue metal canisters seeping garbage, a tiny park brought light to the place. “What is that?” I asked.

“That’s an elephant,” Panos said.

The park was small and triangular, formed by the intersection of three streets. Five sickly pine trees grew there, and the tiny patch of green was fenced all around by iron rails. Beneath the trees a small Asian elephant swayed back and forth. It wore a bedraggled headdress, a sort of carpet on its forehead, decorated with frayed tassels and glass sequins that glistened when the creature shook its head.

“I know it’s an elephant,” I said. “What is it doing here?”

Panos shrugged. He had nothing to say about that. Reluctantly I followed him back into the building.

The next day was so busy with unanticipated tasks that I had no opportunity to visit the elephant living behind the hospital. I peppered Mrs. K, Panos, the orderlies and patients, nurses and doctors with questions, but everyone behaved as if an elephant living on a traffic island was unremarkable. In my bed that evening I made a list of all the questions I had asked, only one of which was answered:

Q:   Why is there an elephant behind the hospital?

Q:   How did it get there?

Q:   Where did it come from?

Q:   Who takes care of the elephant?

Q:   What is its name?

A:   Celina

I lay in bed sleepless, staring at the moon as it moved through the panes of the window. Its cool light cast blue shadows, and I turned over and over in my mind the dear fact that Celina means moon. Somehow, at that very moment, because of the light coming through my window, I was deeply connected to the elephant living behind Sotiria Hospital. The thought gave me peace, and soon I was asleep.

The next morning I woke at dawn, ready to meet Celina. It was our first date and I wanted to make a good impression, so I took from the cafeteria a handful of sesame coated kritsinia. No one was about the service entrance when I jumped down from the platform and crossed the alley. Celina ambled towards me, stretching out her trunk to see what I had brought.

I offered Celina the kritsinia one at a time and we were soon friends. She took the treats from my hand with great agility and tenderness. When the bag was empty, she dipped her trunk in the paper sack, inhaling crumbs and tickling my hand.

The spell was broken when a man approached with a wheelbarrow full of hay. Celina abandoned me completely. I admit, I was jealous of the easy camaraderie between this stranger and my elephant, but I did learn the answer to one of my questions. The person who looks after Celina is called Mo.

“When did the elephant arrive?” I asked.

Mo grinned and spread his arms wide. “Very big elephant!”

I realized I would gain nothing from conversation with Mo, who did not speak more than a dozen words of Greek. Still, he was Celina’s caregiver, her most intimate relation. I watched him closely over the next several days, determined to learn all I could about him.

Some Facts About Mo:

·  He is a janitor at the hospital

·  He wears pajamas to work

·  He keeps a backgammon board hidden under the cleaning rags of his cart.

·  He plays backgammon with the Gypsy who delivers hay for Celina

·  Mo hoses the hay down before giving it to the elephant. He hoses Celina down too, which she enjoys.

·  He sings when he works, his voice high-pitched and reedy, not at all commensurate with his big boned frame.

N-Dimensional Manifold: an Interior Essay

I have come to the conclusion that the central question of reality is topological. It is likely that I don’t know enough about topology to make such a claim, but if one were to consider mathematical concepts metaphorically, I feel confident in stating that reality is as convoluted as a Klein bottle.

A Klein bottle is a two-dimensional manifold, a spatial construct with a single continuous surface, like a Möbius strip. The difference between inside and outside ceases to exist when considering a Klein bottle. As individuals, each of us has both an inside and an outside. Inside, we are known only to ourselves. Outside, we are what the rest of the world perceives. Each side is something of a mystery to the other, but that is all right, since at the end of the day we are one. But consider the elephant: on the outside she is a dung-covered pachyderm living on a traffic island in Athens. On the inside she is fed by dreams of rivers, the mud-bright hollows of her youth. Celina is trapped in a reality in which her inside and her outside cannot know one another.

In truth, we are all Celina. We are all elephants trapped in cages too small. We are all dreamers, metaphors, and broken Klein bottles.

Weeks passed, yet despite my attention, everything I learned about Celina came from Googling elephants on the Internet. Did you know that their large ears help to regulate body temperature? That they can communicate seismically over long distances by stomping their feet? Did you know that musth, a state of elevated testosterone in bull elephants, is evidenced by secretions from the temporal gland on the side of the face?

My searches also turned up the parable of the blind men and the elephant. As I stripped the beds and stuffed dirty linens down the laundry chute, I wondered how others perceived me. When they watched me at work, did they see only a beast of burden? If I were blind and touched Celina’s ear I might think I’d laid hands on a fine leather jacket. What did my ear tell the world about me?

At long last I did make an ally among the hospital’s employees. Valia was a voluble young woman who came to the hospital six months ago. She came in June, and she knew all there was to know about Celina. I met Valia behind a mountain of clean sheets; she had been tasked with folding the laundry. In a generous mood I offered to help her, and I was rewarded with the following information.

For much of the preceding year, and on and off before that, Sotiria Hospital had been the home of Greece’s most famous rebetika star, Sotiria Bellou (the synonymy of the singer and the hospital is inconsequential, but the word means salvation; this too is information I found on the Internet). Bellou was destitute, Valia said. She was a gambler, and heavy smoking had wrecked her voice. The director of the hospital was her brother and he used his position to get her a bed. By mid summer it was clear that Bellou’s health was deteriorating. She kept an oxygen tank beside her bed and spoke in a voice so broken even her brother could not understand her. She was scheduled for surgery, the removal of her pharynx. She lay in bed and smoked, withdrew into herself further and further, until one day a visitor arrived.

No one knew what to make of him. He was wealthy and cultured, an American of Turkish decent. He gave his name, Ahmet Ertegun, and assumed he was known. No one in the hospital had ever heard of him, but he was able to draw Bellou out. She began to eat again, sat up in bed and talked with her visitor for hours on end. Bellou and Ertegun played backgammon together, and she placed bets on who would win.

“Ertegun stayed for a month,” Valia told me. “He stayed until Sotiria had the operation. That is when he brought the elephant, trying to cheer her up. It didn’t work. Once her voice was gone for good, Bellou gave up. Even Ertegun couldn’t change her mind. She died within a week, and Ertegun vanished. The elephant stayed. No one knew what to do with it.”

As long as I was willing to help fold laundry, Valia was willing to talk. She had a keen eye for detail and enjoyed sharing her observations. In the evening I jotted notes so that I would not forget what she had said. I added details gleaned from the Internet – there was a lot Valia did not know about Ertegun and Bellou.

·  Ahmet Ertegun was a music producer from the United States. He owned Atlantic records.

·  Rebetika, Bellou’s musical repertoire, was outlawed by military dictators for being treasonous and for promoting sex and drugs.

·  Bellou was born in 1921, Ertegun in 1923. Her father was an orthodox priest. His father was the Turkish ambassador to the United States.

·  Ertegun was a fantastic dresser. He favored gray silk shirts with a slight metallic tint and narrow ties.

·  Bellou dressed like a man.

·  Bellou had a battered backgammon board, loose in its hinges. The pieces were heavy and scratched, the dice large and slightly yellowed. Each black dot was a tiny concave dip, blurred at the rim where black met white.

·  She rolled her own cigarettes, and kept her tobacco pouch inside the backgammon board. She smoked constantly, and for months after her death the scent of her tobacco lingered in the halls of the hospital.

·  Ertegun brought a portable record player with him and seemed to produce vinyl records out of nowhere, the bulky cardboard sleeves sliding out of his suit jacket as if from another world.

·  Ertegun used his wealth in typical ways: he collected art, and he headed up a philanthropic society. His taste in art ran toward modernist, with a preference for movement, color, and geometry. “Poetry is painting that talks,” he said, and Bellou laughed at him.

Night after night I lay in bed, and thought about these two. My focus had shifted from Celina to Bellou and Ertegun, and I felt guilty, as if I had betrayed a lover. In truth, I had not betrayed my elephant, but only followed a more circuitous path in trying to reach her. An elephant is such a private being, so discreet, despite all the ways in which it is obvious. Ertegun and Bellou were both famous, and their public lives enticed my imagination.

Bellou was an addict and needed to gamble. Each day when Ertegun showed up they spent a few fierce hours rolling dice. The sound of the ivory cubes clicking against the sides of the box touched Bellou with the bliss of a needle. They played until Sotiria was satisfied and then they talked. They disagreed about everything.

“We come from different worlds, you and I. You have always been on the inside: ambassador’s son, educated scion, never went to war. Your business – right time, right place; lucky, lucky, lucky.”

“What do you mean, on the inside? Inside, outside – that dichotomy is useless.”

“Only people on the inside have the privilege to think that way. When I came to this city I was a nineteen-year-old girl, running from my parents and my husband. Imagine: a village girl with a guitar, a butch voice, and an eye for women setting foot in Athens the same day the German occupation began. We starved for years, people grazed in the fields like goats. I was better off than some, I could sing for my supper, and in the bars of Thesion where the German soldiers drank their beer I sang the pop hits I’d learned from the movies. The soldiers would pitch drachmas into my guitar case, they made a game of it. How I hate the dingy sight of coins. Don’t ever show me your money, Ahmet Ertegun, I don’t want to see it.”

Bellou pointed to her mouth. “You see this tooth? No, of course you don’t; it’s gone. This is the tooth a German soldier knocked from my mouth because I refused to salute the Fuhrer.”

I became obsessed with the tavli set in Mo’s possession. I was certain that Bellou’s backgammon game and Mo’s were one and the same. To think I had seen it! Those precious dice! I checked the sheltered bay where the hay was stored. Only three bales remained. The Gypsy would return soon, and he and Mo would sit down for a game. All I had to do was wait.

At last my patience was rewarded. It was a warm day in December and I was paying a visit to my favorite water fountain when I heard the rattle of distant dice. I followed the sound and it led me outside, where I found Mo seated cross-legged on a flattened cardboard box, rolling dice with the Gypsy. Parked beside the dumpster was a battered Toyota truck, lopsided beneath a tower of apples. Celina reached for them, they were just beyond her grasp, and the elephant looked as happy as I had ever seen her.

Mo pointed toward Celina. “Apple!” He said. “Elephant!”

I pointed at the tavli board, the dice in his hands. “Where did you get that?”

Mo misunderstood me. He scooted over on the worn cardboard and patted the spot next to him. As soon as I held the dice, sent them clapping against the box, I couldn’t stop. Hours passed, and I grew accustomed to the sweet smell of garbage. I was thirsty and penniless when Mrs. K. found me. They had been searching for ages, she said, looking all over. I was dizzy when I stood, the sun suddenly too bright. Mo tucked the tavli board under his arm.

Word spread. Playing dice behind the dumpster with the janitor and a Gypsy caused a stir. Notoriety is not too strong a word. I tried to explain my interest in the tavli set. I told everyone who would listen that I was not a gambler, more of a scholar really, but the evidence was against me. People looked askance when I entered a room and I was forbidden access to the service dock.

In my bed at night was the only time the watchful eyes of the hospital staff were not upon me. Not that anyone could read my thoughts during the light of day, broken Klein bottle that I was, but in solitude I felt a freedom I did not know when surrounded by my colleagues. I wondered if my fantasies of Sotiria Bellou and Ahmet Ertegun brought me closer to knowing them, if by creating my outer stories I was gaining insight into their inner ones. I felt sure this was true, and that somehow, if I followed my thoughts long enough and far enough, they would lead me back to Celina, in the way a finger traced along the surface of a non-orientable manifold will eventually return to its starting position, albeit upside down.

Once when Ertegun came he brought a little record player. He played jazz records, one after another, flipping the disk when the needle reached the end. He was proud of the artists whose careers he’d launched: Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, and the rest.

“Yes, but what did you do?” Bellou asked him. “Supporting the arts isn’t the same as being an artist. You want me to believe, but I’ve met too many of your kind to have faith.”

“My kind? What do you mean, my kind? You insult me, Sotiria. And I disagree with you. Facilitation is a type of creation. The world is different because of what I made, even if my making is mostly of the second degree. And for your information, I did write some songs. Quite a few, really, performed by a number of artists.”

“I never heard your name attached to any song.”

Here Ertegun blushed. “I didn’t use my name. Too many questions. I wrote under the name Nugetre.”

“What a mouthful. Why did you stop?”

“Who says I stopped?”

Ertegun had a way of changing the conversation whenever he wished. From his suit he pulled out the frame of a painting, too large to have been where it was; the canvas was taller than his torso. Still, it slid from his coat with the ease of a slick black wallet, and Ertegun held it up for Bellou to admire. “What do you think?”

Bellou wrinkled her nose. “Your poetry isn’t talking to me. It looks like a silly face made of metal bits left over from some construction.”

“You know nothing about art.”

“If you have to know things in order to appreciate it, then it’s bad art.”

“You need to look at things differently. Stop expecting the world to make sense.”

“Oh, I’ve never expected any sense from the world. But if you want me to appreciate that, it’s like asking me to say the emperor’s robe is made of gold when we both know his hairy ass is covered in pimples.”

“No wonder you have no friends,” Ertegun said, sliding Morris’s Outer Connection back into his suit. “If there is anything that will save us as we move into the new millennium it is ambiguity. Anyone who clings to the forms of the past will be destroyed and forgotten.”

“You are heartless,” Bellou croaked, her voice devolving to a whispered crackle.

“Not heartless, not heartless at all. Sotiria, the twentieth century has been the most blood-soaked, evil epoch in human history. Do you deny it? Look at what it has done to you. What I am after, my friend, is liberation.”

She smiled at him, her throat raw and dry and throbbing. She had so much to say. For example: liberation from what; liberation for whom? Nothing bothered her so much as the bantering about of freedom. And how dare he assume that the world had done anything to her that she had not wanted it to do. Yes, she had been betrayed, but those were private concerns, about which Ertegun knew nothing. Damn him and his modern art. Fuck his rock and roll.

But it hurt too much to talk. She pointed to the record player and blew out her cheeks, a sign that he should put on Louis Armstrong’s Muggles.

As the winter days grew bleak, so did Celina. Through a second floor window I observed her compound, watched the listless swish of her tail. Her mood seemed to mirror mine, as though we were more closely linked than ever. Though I had been forbidden the service docks, the quickest path to the elephant, I could not leave her in her misery. I began visiting her in the hour before dawn when everyone else at Sotiria Hospital was asleep. I tried to entice her with apples, carrots, bags of kritsinia. She rejected all my offers. Eventually my visits to the elephant were observed, but my colleagues let it go. They had noticed my depressed state and thought the elephant might lift my spirits. But I dared not ask a single question about Celina’s history, or so much as mention Mo; I did not want to raise suspicions. Yet in bed at night I fantasized about the tavli set. I could feel in my hand the heavy weight of the dice, and I could smell the tobacco-rich scent of the wood. I yearned for it the way Sotiria Bellou had yearned to place a bet.

Never had I felt so alone. The rich world of my inner life was invisible to everyone around me, and all anyone saw of my exterior was a person of questionable sanity in love with an elephant. I kept a block notebook under my bed in which I sketched, hoping the art of drawing would yield some insight, some breakthrough in my psyche.

I began with my feet. Intellectually I was compelled to reproduce an aspect of my external being, as if to ensure the reality of my physical self. Also, I had a good view of my feet, propped up in bed as I was, and my feet were far more interesting and easy to draw than my knees. The drawings reminded me of the old joke about an elephant hiding among flowers by painting her toenails pink, and this of course reminded me of Celina.

So I drew elephants:

     Weeks passed and my isolation began to seem normal, even welcome. Celina’s mood improved somewhat, and she began to eat again. Everyone around me acted as if the person they saw in me was the person I was, the person they had always known. I went about my duties and visited Celina openly, whenever I wished. It was not so much that the others had forgiven the incident with the backgammon game, but had forgotten it entirely.

     I, of course, had not forgotten. My interest in Bellou’s old game, an artifact I had come to believe was magical, grew and grew. I knew where the item was, and if Mo were not so assiduous in avoiding me, I would have taken it from under his rags. That was my ultimate plan – to steal Sotiria Bellou’s tavli set from the janitor. I didn’t know what I would do with it, or why I thought it would bring me closer to Celina. Bellou, after all, had paid no attention to the elephant whatsoever. But I could not deny my compulsion, and so I studied the bales of hay behind the hospital as they slowly diminished. When the Gypsy came to replenish the supply, he and Mo would be occupied stacking the bales for a few minutes. During that time, Mo’s cart would be unattended. I would have to act fast.

It was a chilly afternoon in early February when I heard the rattling cough of a truck engine. From the second story window that overlooked Celina’s little garden I saw the Gypsy’s Toyota pull up beside the dumpster. Mo appeared and the two men shook hands. I walked as quickly as I could and took the steps two at a time when no one was looking. Mo had left his cart in a basement hallway, not far from where he unloaded the hay. I could hear the dull beats of the bales as they were dropped against the wall.

The box was where I expected, beneath a pile of rags that had inadvertently polished the wooden lid until it glowed like a living thing. I clutched the box to my belly, doubled over to hide it beneath my coat. It was awkward, but because the others had grown accustomed to not seeing me, or seeing only what they wanted to see, no one noticed my agitation.

In my room I slid the box from my coat. The last time I saw the game it was open, and so this was my first opportunity to inspect the lid. It was carved in delicate arabesques, to which clung bits of paint. It seemed impossibly old and imbued with power. The reality of Bellou’s tavli set confirmed all my conjectures about its magical nature. Though I was eager to open it, to know its inside as well as its outside, I waited. The light from the setting sun held the box, and all the color in the room soaked into the wood. It startled me, this leaching of color. Everything but the box, which glowed like honey, grew gray as night settled. I wondered if I, too, had become gray, if all my color had slipped away.

The night lasted long and I sat motionless, staring at the box, the way its jeweled light shifted in the night. It was not until the last hours of darkness when a frail moon rose and cast a net of sparkling diamonds across the lid that I was ready to open it. I knew the light would change soon, that the impossible richness of the moment would fade as morning drew on.

The pieces of the game and the dice lay loose in the box. They were both velvet and ivory at once, and I stroked them as you would a lover. But the item that held my attention, the thing I had not thought of, had not expected, was the ratty black leather case that once held Bellou’s cigarettes. I opened it with trembling hands. I did not smoke, but if any tobacco remained, I would have made an exception.

All that the pouch held was a flurry of rolling papers, delicate as feathers and glowing white in the light of the moon. They smelled of wood and chocolate and whiskey. I plucked one from the pouch, inhaled its rich scent and then popped it into my mouth, where it dissolved on my tongue like the body of Christ.

The lights were on in the hallways. They shone forth like beacons into the blue hour that lay quietly upon the city. The rooms were dark, and the only sound was the distant hum of traffic on Kiffisias Avenue. I pushed open the double doors to the outside and a warm breeze enveloped me, a late wind of the halcyon days. The weather had changed, suddenly and irrevocably. I could feel the buds of the almond trees beginning to open all around. Celina was awake, eying me with curiosity. Her gaze was different than it had ever been – not the eager stare of an animal searching for treats, but the look of one who knows.

Perhaps the strange warmth blowing through the streets woke her; she was agitated in her pen, pacing its lengths, and while earlier I was worried she would not come, that she would prefer her familiar prison to the unknown I offered, now I was hopeful. I lifted the complicated arrangement of pegs that hinged the fence and pulled both sides of the creaking gate wide. Celina and I stared at one another for a moment before we turned our backs on Sotiria Hospital. I led the way, hoping she would follow.

I dared not turn to look, as if I was Orpheus and she was my beloved, come up from Hades. Were those her footsteps I heard, elephant-soft on the cracked asphalt? I turned right, then left, the road subtly heading downhill. In the distance, beyond the tops of buildings, the port of Piraeus awaited. The elephant and I entered Singrou Avenue, its broad expanse empty in the white light of dawn. The blaze of unseasonable warmth swelled in the air around us. Celina was right beside me now; the gentle weight of her proboscis embraced my shoulder. My hand was on her jowl, and I breathed her sweet, fermented breath. Slowly, to the rhythm of our steps, the sun peeled its eye over the hills of Hymettos. From Piraeus a ship would carry us to our destination. Celina and I were one; our history had begun.

American Brewery

My father owned a small grocery store in Greek Town, specializing in olive oil and feta cheese. He supplied local restaurants as well as families, and he worked long hours. He drove a fat Cadillac, a honey-colored monster of which he was foolishly proud. On Saturday evenings he rubbed it down with a rag so that on Sundays when we drove to church it would look its best. Sometimes, when all the lights were green on Eastern Avenue, he would gun the engine and let the car accelerate, its heavy weight pouring down the road like an ocean liner. I loved the way my body felt pinned to the seat, the luxurious cream interior. When it idled, the Cadillac purred like a kitten, and you could barely hear it. 

It’s hotter than Hades at seven in the morning and I’m covered from head to foot in work clothes. Pigeons carry all kinds of contagion. It isn’t the heat that makes me dizzy, but the prospect of entering the Brewery. Lewis expects me to assess the scope of the project, but I’ve avoided Baltimore for twenty-five years. There’s more on my mind than I let him know. I could have wriggled out of it, I suppose, but places draw you back in their own time. Anyway, it isn’t the Brewery that marks me.

They call this neighborhood, the most blighted area of Baltimore, East Broadway. The American Brewery dominates the streets with its massive cupola and boarded windows. The houses in East Broadway are destitute, the concrete stoops crumbling, trapping scraps of trash in their crevices. The wooden eaves are rotting, black and wet beneath flaking paint. Plywood nails up doorways in a random quilt design, like crazy squares stitched into an otherwise sensible plan. My old house is one of those, but I haven’t sought it out.  

When I was young the American Brewery was the center of our lives. In games we called it the witch’s mansion, and our mothers told us never to ride our bikes beyond it. Church bells rang in the evening, and fathers came ambling home from out its doors, slow and companionable in the fading light. The Brewery shut down in 1973, and everything changed.

In 1973 I was nine years old and as happy as I’ve ever been. We had been in the house on Linwood for three years, and even Mama, who wanted to live in Greek town where she knew people, had grown used to things. Costa was old enough to ride his bike to the Greek neighborhood, and he spent his free time with friends. I was younger and a girl and therefore not allowed off the block. At first I was lonely, watching the kids play in the alley and not knowing how to join them. My black hair seemed a horrible blight against their blondness, and I was sure it was this difference – my Greekness, their Germaness – that kept me apart. But it was summer and Mama made a batch of popsicles with vysina, sour cherries soaked in syrup. These were so popular that kids started coming up our back steps, shyly asking if Mrs. Dimitsanis had any more cherry pops, and asking me if I wanted to play. 

    Two small boys in particular became my friends. Frank and Joe Whener lived half way down the block, and soon I was in their house as much as my own. Frank was nine months younger than me and Joe was a year younger than him. We were a close threesome and spent as much time as possible outdoors. The rooms in our homes were small, and we were always under foot and made to know it. We didn’t mind the cold. On winter days when the sun caught the light off the ice hanging in long fingers from every ledge, Frank and Joe and I would drag a Red Rider up and down our street, breaking the icicles and loading them into a pile in the wagon. We sucked the longest ones until they slithered from our mittened hands to shatter on the street. 

    On rainy afternoons we were allowed to watch television at the Whener’s house. We sat on the floor, riveted to the rabbit-eared black and white. Mrs. Whener served us Ritz crackers with peanut butter, and we watched Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heros, MASH. I would return home in the evening, full of crackers and peanut butter and a vision of the real America and try to eat my dinner to my mother’s satisfaction.

Huge windows that once overlooked the beer vats span the second and third floors of the Brewery. They are paned with small, thick squares of opaque glass and only a few have been broken since the building was abandoned. Light filters down from them to the first floor. I feel safe in the wide yellow light, held in a space where nothing has happened for decades. The scars of time barely penetrate the heavy walls.

I breathe deeply, both to invite and dispel this awareness of time. What if I could go back through the years and change one thing? What if just one thing in the past was different? This mind game is an old habit of mine, a bad one. I turn on my flashlight and enter a narrow hall.

    There is loose rubble at the base of stairs, and in one small, dark room – a manager’s office, perhaps – a worn armchair. The electric panels are corroded, and on metal pipes flakes of rust have the organic beauty of lichen or stalactites. Thick paint peals from iron rails like frost on a window.  

In the sixties and early seventies, East Broadway was a solid, working class neighborhood, a mixed community of European immigrants and blacks entering the world of home ownership for the first time. Maybe East Broadway could have survived the closing of the Brewery if more of the homes had been owner occupied, but in 1973 when the Brewery closed, half the houses were owned by landlords, people with no incentive beyond profit to improve the properties they owned. Jodie Rockland and slum lords like him had bought up the properties a couple at a time, more every year. Now there are over two hundred abandoned houses within a twenty block radius.

When I drove in this morning the streets were empty except for a few congregants on steps, smoking wearily and squinting into the rising sun. I looked along the alleys, half expecting I would see some raucous childhood game in progress: kickball or tag or jumping rope. There was nothing, only the dense hull of the Brewery marooned on the top of the hill. 

Growing up, kids were everywhere. We owned the alleys and every evening after supper, as long as the light lasted and often until after dark, we held fantastic games of hide and seek. The number of hiding places in a city alley is remarkable: crawl beneath the Buick up on blocks, crouch behind a neighbor’s row of hollyhocks, lie flat on the topmost, narrow shelf of a tool shed. We played the version that involved running to base; you had to be caught as well as found. My mother dressed me in skirts and stockings and scolded me terribly about the filth until she finally caught on to the idea of play clothes. After that I wore Costa’s worn out trousers and tee shirts to play, and while both my parents frowned at the sight of me, my happiness pleased them. Only when friends or relatives came to visit was I forced in from the game, washed, and properly presented in a dress.

I had become my family’s ambassador in the neighborhood. Baba and Costa passed their days in Greek town, and people hardly knew them. Mama was shy, her Greek accent heavy as a rug, and she busied herself with cooking and cleaning, taking very little advantage of her success with the vysina popsicles. I, on the other hand, was welcome in every house, and broad German women, the mothers of my friends, would smile at me with indulgence, pinch my cheek and say, “What beautiful eyes you have, Nina.”

It must have been early in the summer of ‘73, around the time that the Brewery closed, that boys from McElderry wandered into our alley. We had been playing hide and seek, John Bartal’s back door serving as base. John was my next door neighbor, the oldest kid in the alley. He was a rough boy, the kind who would pick up a burning cigarette butt thrown from a car and smoke it down to the filter.

The boys that came weren’t looking for trouble. They were brothers, I think, the younger one about Frank’s age, and the older about the same as John Bartal. They leaned against the fence of John’s yard and watched us play. If they had been white boys perhaps they would have been invited to join the game, but as it was, John walked up to the older boy, shoved his shoulder and said, “Get off my fence.” The boy pushed back and soon John and the stranger were rolling on the ground, furiously kicking and punching at each other. We stood around and cheered for John, ignoring the other boy, the younger brother, who clung mutely to the chain link fence. 

It ended when my mother came out of the house with her broom and began beating the boys with it, shouting in Greek for them to stop. I can’t imagine those straw rushes hurt, my mother was never much for hitting, but the surprise of being beat with a broom quickly parted the boys. The black boy grabbed his brother’s arm and ran. John made as if to chase them, but one final wallop from my mother’s broom changed his mind.

Those black boys ran from us just as whites ran from East Broadway a few years later. My family ran too, though not because of the blacks moving in. But reasons don’t matter. The damage is done. 

The basement of the Brewery is cool as a cave, with vaulted brick ceilings and catacomb rooms, one leading into another. I was afraid to come down the stairs, into darkness so complete, afraid of rats and skeletons and the other terrors of childhood. But searching roots stretch and cling to surfaces like streamers at a party. It is peaceful here, with rows of metal tanks staring at one another like sentinels. Yet the beam of my flashlight is like the headlights of a car, casting wild shadows, and despite the beauty of these forgotten rooms I want to leave.

When Humanim bid on the project, offered to buy the building from the city for less than three thousand dollars and in exchange renovate the space as our Baltimore office, Lewis pulled me aside and said he wanted me to oversee the project.

“It’s a beautiful space, Nina, the way the light moves across the floors. And the exterior is to die for.”

“I know the place,” I told him. “I grew up close by.” 

His eyes widened in surprise. “You grew up there?”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “I haven’t been back.”

In the spring Lewis and I drove together to the site, to check out the Brewery. We circled the blocks of the neighborhood: Chester, Washington, Lanvale, Patterson. Boards were nailed tight to every other door. 

“Do you know what a Quick Take Law is?” Lewis asked. I shook my head. “A Quick Take Law is where the city has the right to seize possession of an entire community if seventy percent of the properties are vacant. Right now, East Broadway is at fifty percent.” 

The city doesn’t want to invoke a Quick Take. That would require a lot of attention and money that the city doesn’t have. The city wants Humanim to make a difference. I don’t know if that will happen. 

The morning Lewis and I drove around the neighborhood, cruising the blocks in his new model Toyota, we passed a make-shift shrine of teddy bears and Dixie cups filled with liquor. People stood a short distance away as a police officer emptied the cups into the gutter. Curious, Lewis drove slowly. I stared at my hands, ashamed, but still managed to glimpse the irregular brown stain of blood on the pavement. Liquor swirled in the blood, carrying bits of it away.

When I was a child, East Broadway hadn’t been so damaged. I wanted to tell Lewis that, but I knew what this would lead to. Lewis would ask, “What was it like, Nina?” Instead I said nothing.

Fathers worked when I was a child, and mothers stayed at home. Nobody shared domestic responsibilities, and the fathers I knew struck me as shadowy, quiet men who overlooked children. I knew them in a peripheral way. John Bartal’s father I avoided. He was narrow and hard-faced, his hands curled in red fists. Both John and his mother were like him, and aside from our games in the alley, I had little to do with them. Mr. Whener, I thought, was a kind man. He was thick, with large, sausage-like fingers that seemed surprisingly soft and gentle. He ruffled his boys’ hair, picked them up and shook them upside down. He never touched me, though I wished to have my hair ruffled too, and I would have liked being shaken upside down. Mr. Whener worked at the American Brewery, as did several other men on our street. He drank coffee at his kitchen table, his face a worried frown when the closing was announced, but he was the sort of man others helped, and he was soon employed at the National Brewery in Canton.

My own father could not have been more different. He was Greek, he was loud, and everything under our roof was his business. I was never overlooked, but rather held up regularly for inspection. Was I properly groomed, was I getting good grades, did I help my mother in the kitchen? When he was pleased with me he would wrap me in his arms, squeezing the breath out of me, and pinch my cheek with his long fingers, soft dark hairs between the knuckles. He was a critical man but not hard to please and he loved me very much. I felt guilty for wishing he were more like Mr. Whener, and loved him more fiercely for my guilt. He changed as I grew older. Quieter, less critical, he’d wait for me to touch him, as if he’d lost the right to a father’s embrace.

Three dark flights of stairs and a narrow metal ladder crusted with pigeon dung lead to the space beneath the eaves of the green-roofed cupola. Boards curve in a smooth arc above my head. Pigeons roost outside an open window. The rustle of their wings and their flute-like cooing vibrate the air. The air smells clean and bright, high above the humid streets. I look out the window hoping for something familiar: the Dominos Sugar sign, the spires of St. Wenceslaus, Johns Hopkins Hospital. But the view is uncompromising. All I see are brick row homes, worn asphalt, and the cracked concrete of old alley ways, twisted in a web of forgotten stories.

It was early October, an Indian summer, and though we were back in school and the light was fading fast, we kept our games of hide and seek going late into the evening. There was a lot of unease in East Broadway then, with the Brewery closed and families starting to move. You could hear shouting in the houses from time to time. We kids preferred to be outdoors.

It was early October and the sun had set and we played in the dark, a delicious silence descending on the game as I, the seeker, crept around cars in the hope of surprising the hiders, who were equally silent. Only when they broke cover and ran for base was there any noise, the grinding crunch of gravel as the worn treads of sneakers tore across the pavement. Two of my friends were safe at base, their knees drawn up to their chests as they sat and watched the rest of the game. Two of the smallest I had already caught, and they sat too, waiting to start the next round. I was approaching a tiny shed, suspecting a hider wedged behind the back wall and the fence. I was at an advantage because I was between base and the shed, and every step I took reduced the chance of getting safely past. 

There was a flurry of movement, and Joe erupted from behind the shed. He knew where I was, creeping toward him along the alley, and he had timed his escape perfectly. He was a small boy and fast and his plan was to dart to the opposite side of the alley and run past me before I could reach out my hand to tag him. He was sudden and I didn’t expect him and his plan would have worked if my father hadn’t come home just then. The prow of the Cadillac caught Joe as he leapt into its path. Joe’s small body was thrown forward, and he landed on a neighbor’s parking pad, his limbs sprawled on the concrete. His head, crushed above the left eye, came to rest beside the tire of the parked car.

I heard my father’s screams, mingled with those of children who had come out of hiding, and finally Joe’s father arrived. He moaned softly as he cradled his boy, rocking him back and forth until the ambulance arrived with its red lights flashing. 

I wonder if there is anyone left in the neighborhood who remembers Joe Whener. I suspect not. Joe’s story and mine have been written over by the broken world of East Broadway. Anyone who knew us – the Dimitsanis and the Wheners – is long gone.

The Wheners moved to Canton in December of 1973. My family moved to Greek town two months later. I don’t remember the year that followed. I don’t remember leaving Linwood Avenue or settling into the new house on Grundy. Such gaps are what happens, I suppose, when memories are sealed and boards nailed across the past.

Goose Shoot

     Honey pulled the spent spool from the machine and scraped a bit of residue from the build plate. She knew the equipment inside and out, but she never had the vision of Papa Joe. Something froze up inside her whenever she thought of making a mask of her own. She studied Jimmy Lee, marveling that he didn’t have any of her inhibitions. The boy was her neighbor from two floors up, he was barely old enough to be out on his own, and here he was standing in front of Honey and her dad ready to pitch his line.

“They’ll be the best you ever seen,” the boy said. “I got me four printers. I can do the whole lot.”

Papa Joe crossed his arms over his belly, that acre and a half of gray sweater littered with crumbs and spilled whiskey. Joe lived the way he wanted, which was mostly making masks and eating snacks in front of the TV. He eyed the boy. “I don’t got time to waste on a fool biting off more than he can chew.”

Jimmy Lee scowled. “I ain’t no fool.”

No, Honey thought, he wasn’t a fool, not yet, anyway. He wasn’t old enough to be a fool. The boy had a runny nose, runny eyes, and a crust of egg at the corner of his mouth. “Let him make the guns, Papa,” she said. “You never liked that part anyway.” She threaded a hot pink spool onto the stylus. It wasn’t Honey’s favorite, she preferred Kelly green, but Papa Joe claimed pink was a top seller at the Shoot. December was such a gray time, and people needed a splash of color.

Honey loved the masks, had since she was a child and her papa told her what they were. Joe modeled them on protozoa, the elaborate fossils of rhizopoda, sarcodina, radiolaria. His creations amplified all the tiny holes, the galactic swirls, the convolutions of miniscule carapaces. His masks promised there was sense to the world; if such intricacies could be spent on fossils blanketing the ocean floor, fossils no one ever saw, then surely there was meaning to a person’s life. Honey loved wearing the masks. Beneath the sunburst strangeness of one of Joe’s creations she became something new. The round-faced woman she was vanished, all the softness of her twenty years disappeared. Under a mask Honey might be anything, even a sun god or a demon. 

She did not feel the same about the guns. She didn’t know why people had to shoot, why they had to kill, why those actions were necessary. She picked up a mask, a smooth, pocked, sun-gold starburst of a headdress, and said, “Why do we need the guns? Why aren’t the masks enough?”

     “I didn’t make the world,” Papa Joe said with the patience of a man who had addressed this question many times, “I just live in it, okay? The mask is an extension of the gun, and the gun is an extension of who we are. If I had my way, tomorrow there’d be ten thousand people running naked through Central Park, throwing rocks and sticks at the Canada Geese. By the end of the day there’d be one dead goose, maybe two, and the rest would have flown off to the Bronx. No one likes the way they taste, oily and tough, all the bitterness of flesh manifest, but still we do it every year. It’s a tradition.”

“You got it exactly wrong,” Jimmy Lee said. “If I had my way, there’d be nothing but guns. The masks are dumb. No one can see who’s shooting when everybody’s got a mask on.”

“That’s the point,” Joe said. “It’s why you aren’t allowed to shoot if you don’t have a mask.”  

Joe lifted a three-foot radiolarian from the build plate and set it on Honey’s head. The central pod, where her head fit, was pocked with holes like an old bone. A prayer scarf of flagellates in stiff pink hung over her collarbones, and the intricate beanie on top hovered like the escape pod of an alien starship. It rested well on her shoulders. She could turn left and right, look up and down. The helmet barely wobbled. Joe nodded his head, satisfied.

“That one’s not bad,” Jimmy Lee said, “I guess I’d wear one like that.”

“You can’t afford one like that,” Joe said. “But make me my guns and you’ll be able to buy something off the street.”  

     Honey took the helmet from her head. “Make me one like this,” she said, “but green.”

     It was the fourth of December, a still, gray day. The ground was cold but not frozen, a little squishy from all the rain. Honey’s breath came out in puffs like steam from a grate. Nine o’clock in the morning and the Park was starting to fill up. Marching bands made up of boys and girls too young to shoot, too young to wear masks, stomped along the paths in their spangled costumes, trying to keep warm. Papa Joe walked past, pulling the cart full of masks. Honey walked behind him and kept a hand on the stack to make sure nothing fell off the wagon.

     “We’re late,” she said, “We should have been here at seven. Everyone’s already got their masks.”

     “Not everyone. People are still coming in. Besides, my masks aren’t for early birds.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “Early birds take the first thing that comes along, or the cheapest. My masks are meant for connoisseurs, people who know what they want and are willing to sacrifice something to get it. There are plenty of them around, just waiting for old Joe to show up. You’ll see.”

     “Where’s Jimmy Lee? We can’t sell masks without guns.”

     “He said he’d meet us at the pipe. Look – there he is. Little bugger got us a good spot.”

     The boy’s coltish legs hung down from the oil pipe, his feet swinging above the ground. Running east to west across Central Park, the pipe carried fuel to the five burrows. Jimmy Lee must have come early, Honey thought, to claim a place on the pipe. The boy’s nose was still running, and his sleeve was stiff with the shine of snot.

     Below his feet, in the shadow of the pipe, lay a loose pile of dove-gray long guns. Most had the flared muzzle of a blunderbuss, and their hammers were curled like cowlicks. Frivolous, Honey thought. Her papa hated that in guns.

     “Took you long enough to get here,” Jimmy Lee said. “People have been coming by all morning, but I can’t sell guns when I got no masks.”

     Papa Joe grunted. “They’ll be back. How many you got?”

     “Fifty-seven. How many masks you got?”

     “Not that many. Low fifties.”

     “Shit,” the kid hissed. “These are good guns. It’s a shame not to fire them. I thought you said you was making sixty.”

     “I said I was trying for sixty. Masks are a lot more complicated than guns. Anyway, what do you care? I paid for the guns whether they get shot or not.”

     The kid shrugged. “My guns are meant to be fired, is all I’m saying. They got good aim. More geese is going down with a bullet from Jimmy Lee’s sticks than any other make. See if it don’t happen like that. It’s a shame when a gun don’t get fired; it’s like a man dying when he’s still a virgin.”

     Papa Joe rolled his eyes. “What do you know about being a man? Maybe a few folks will come by with a mask and no gun and we’ll sell off the extras.”

     “That ain’t how it works,” the boy said. “Nobody’s ever got a mask and no gun. Everybody wants both or none – that’s the way.”

     “Not me,” Honey said, stepping up to the guns with her Kelly green mask under one arm. She picked the simplest one she could find, wrinkling her nose at the weapon’s embellishments.

     “Best gun you’ll ever shoot,” the boy said.

     “I don’t care about that. What’s the load?”

     “Six. It’s standard.”

     Honey hefted the gun. It was light. The boy had probably printed it porous to save on plastic. Piece of crap. The kid didn’t know a thing about ballistics. Jimmy Lee was nothing but a sack of boogers on stilts.

     A man came and picked out a pink heliozoa, ciliates spiking out all around. He chose a gun at random, paid, and headed out onto the Lawn to stake his place. After that it was hotcakes for half an hour, and Papa Joe’s pockets hung heavy with cash. The boy watched the transactions, hungry, but he’d already been paid for his part. One person did come along with a mask and no gun. She was old and thin and dry and her mask, a fan of corn husks broken and stained so that it resembled a geriatric cat more than the sun god it was meant to be, looked like it had been brought out every Goose Shoot for the past fifty years. A lot of people kept their masks, but it was another thing to keep wearing the same one, as if you insisted on being the same person over and over again. It just wasn’t done.

     After she had gone, Papa Joe was restless. “Crazy old coot,” he muttered. “It’s people like that get culled in a Shoot.”

     “She seemed harmless,” Honey soothed.

     “You only say that because you’ve never seen a culling. It’s the harmless ones that tend to lose their minds.”

     The Goose Shoot culled both birds and people. The invasive flocks of Canada Geese were kept in check, and those who couldn’t manage the violence and despair at the heart of being human were drained through the sieve of temptation and found out. A mask and a gun changed a person; some couldn’t change back.

     At eleven o’clock the marching bands fell quiet, a sign to get ready for the Call. There were two guns left and no masks, and it was then the boy realized the position he was in. He hadn’t thought to buy a mask off the street, not until now when they were all sold out. Joe picked up one of the guns, his head a giant radiolarian sun. “I guess that one is for you,” he said, toeing the last gun, the longest blunderbuss of them all.

     “I don’t got a mask!” the boy cried. “You didn’t save me one!”

     “You didn’t pay for one!” Joe said, mimicking the kid. Papa Joe was a caustic man when he wore a mask.

     The boy’s face was a rage of disappointment. Honey knew this was his first Shoot, and that like any youth he’d fantasized for years about aiming into the air and firing, dead sure he would kill. She felt sorry for him. “Come on,” she said, “pick up your gun. You’ll see more without a mask anyways.”

     “But I won’t be able to shoot.”

     “That part’s overrated. Just a lot of loud noise followed by a lot of dead geese.”

     The day had begun to brighten. As a blue patch broke open in the sky a wall of trumpets blasted out a high, carrying note – the Call of the Goose Shoot. The boy forgot his complaint and dropped down from the pipe. He picked up the last gun, a eunuch weapon in his unmasked hands, and followed Honey and the old man out onto the Lawn.

     All around them people turned to the sky and held their guns high. Murmured conversations fell to silence and only the clear clarion call of five hundred trumpets carried on. One by one the trumpeters lowered their horns, and the Call grew faint as a zephyr until at last could be heard the soft beat of wings. For a heart’s beat only this almost silence, and then the air was filled with honking. The geese rose in a mass from behind the trees and flew low and loud over the crowd, their bellies a dirigible of gray flesh. A thousand guns fired and the sky exploded in a rain of feathers and blood.

     Honey’s mind filled with the dull thud of birds falling from the sky. She shot without aiming and gave herself up to the simple pleasure of carnage. On her left Papa Joe brought down a bird with each bullet until six Canada geese had fallen. It was his way. “Never be unintentional,” he’d told Honey when she was small. “If you’re going to do a thing, mean to do it.” Despite her wishes, her father’s words seeped in; it took all Honey’s effort not to aim her gun. On her right the boy aimed at bird after bird. He sighted with his naked eye and whispered, “Pow,” as he pretended to pull the trigger.

     The flock was past in five minutes, on its way to Yankee Stadium, minus the thousands sacrificed to the Shoot. Children too young to hold a gun or wear a mask began the joyous task of gathering the carcasses, flinging them onto a pile that would stay all day so that everyone who wanted could take a selfie. Honey had dozens of such photos, a lifetime of Goose Shoots, and she didn’t need another. But the boy beside her looked so sad, so lost, his feet sinking into the mud and shit and blood, that she said, “Come on, I’ll take your picture. The pile is as tall as you already.”

     “What’s the point?” the boy said. “I didn’t shoot any.”

     “Who cares? Shooting is overrated, so are the geese. It’s being here that counts.”

     Papa Joe had gone to fetch his cart and Honey and the boy were alone. She plucked his elbow to pull him toward the dead birds and felt the hard knob of bone in her hand. All the growing parts of him were mismatched against his skinny meat. She pulled him forward until he stood in front of the heap of birds, his chin and shoulders sagging, the gun listless at his side.

     “Smile,” Honey said, but the boy, maskless, frowned. She took a few pictures of him anyway, but they were hollow, haunted photos, so she said, “Here, wear this,” and put the green shell of her mask on his head.

     The boy stood up straight under the weight of the helmet, his shoulders back, feet apart, gun clutched to his chest. Almost like a man, Honey thought.

     The boy was happier after that, and Honey let him wear the mask as they milled around, watching the children gather the last of the geese. Most people had removed their masks and begun to move toward the melting booths and the rest of their lives. Lines had formed at eight points around the Great Lawn, but the boy showed no willingness to line up, to let the day end. Honey stayed with him out of kindness. He’s just a boy, she thought, if a foolish one. He was too young to be holding a gun, too young to be wearing a mask, but it was too late to change that now.

     At last she pointed him toward the yellow canopy of a melting booth. A line snaked across the trampled Lawn as people waited to discard their guns and maybe their masks as well. Honey’s feet were heavy with mud and blood. “It’s time to go home,” she said, pulling him towards the line by his boney elbow.

     “I don’t want to.”

     “It doesn’t matter what you want. You can’t stay here, and you can’t keep the gun.” She nodded her head toward the green peak of her mask atop the boy’s head. “You can keep that, if you want.”

     The boy pulled the helmet from his head and threw it on the ground. “I don’t want your dumb mask,” he spat.

     The boy looked different. A half an hour under the mask, gun in hand, inhaling the scent of a thousand dead birds, had changed him. Violence seared through him, and his lips pulled back in a feral grin, as if the fury was too much for his face to contain. Dry snot crusted his nostrils like mineral deposits.

     Honey’s heart beat hard in her chest as she realized what was happening. He hadn’t shot the gun, but that didn’t matter. He had held it. He had aimed it. He had wanted to kill.

     “Give me the gun,” she whispered.

     “No. It’s mine. I made it. I’m keeping it.”

     The boy stepped out of the line and walked toward the bridle path.

     All around, chatter stopped. It happened like this sometimes, the Goose Shoot raising up bloodlust instead of releasing it. Jimmy Lee would be culled if he didn’t turn around now. Four masked guards pointed guns at the boy. “Stop,” one said, “Put down your gun.”

     Jimmy Lee kept walking. Seconds passed, and he walked some more. Then the air split with four guns fired at once, and the boy fell in a loose pile of bones and blood. The guard who’d spoken lifted the visor of her mask. “We told him,” she said, “he knew we would shoot.” She pried the gun from the boy’s fingers and flung it into the cauldron of melting plastic.

     The line shuffled forward and the mutter of conversation covered over the gap where the boy had been. One by one people dropped their guns and masks into the swirling plastic and left the Shoot behind until next year. Honey clutched her gun and mask to her chest and waited her turn. She felt guilty for having let him wear her mask. She had only done it to be kind, but he was too young to understand what he would find within. For the rest of her life she would smell the boy’s blood, feel the weight of his weapon, never fired, in her hands. Her first culling, and it was all her fault. She wondered if she would become like the dry woman with the cornhusk mask, never able to move on from this moment. When it was her turn, Honey dropped her gun into the soup. It disappeared instantly. She hesitated for a moment but then dropped the mask in too. It took longer to go down. Green swaths of melt circled the gyre until at last the mask, too, was subsumed.