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  “No? What do you mean, no?” And she called someone else to help her even though I was too stunned and shocked to struggle. Even though the bracelet was delicate and held no weight at all. Even though my wrist was caught in her grip and there was nowhere I could go.

  How do you say to two agents holding your forearm and your wrist that there are oaths you will not break, even if your arm does? How do you explain that a promise made in childhood can solidify to become as sturdy as the strongest bone? That it will snap before it bends? That certain vows require more from us than others? That they form us and to undo their bind means to unravel completely?

  I cannot remember why the agents stopped their attempt to take off my bracelet. Maybe it was because they recognized my deep, muted terror. Maybe they understood something about precious objects that would mean nothing to someone else. Maybe they realized that there was nothing about me to fear. Maybe they saw what they had become in my eyes. As I kept saying no, they stopped. They dropped my arm and as I held my wrist, they told me to get my luggage and go on. I turned around and looked at the first security agent. I could not speak, but I would like to think that I didn’t need to.

  Since then, I have been asked to step aside for other inspections. I have volunteered to do so before I’ve been asked. I’ve said that the bracelet will not come off. I’ve said that it simply does not come off. I’ve said that I cannot take it off, and I have seen how those declarations have sometimes prompted recognition in TSA agents who then wave me on. I have tried to prepare myself, though, for the inevitable because one day it will happen.

  I made a promise as a child believing that the world would bend to my oath. I did not foresee the many ways that this world would try to inflict so much damage on those words—my words. Back then, I did not know enough to accommodate for the wreckage that time can exact on everything around me. I imagined that I would stay the same as the moment in which I made that vow: I promise you, I swear to you. And yet: what “I” remains untouched by life?

  Several years after my grandmother’s death, I found myself standing on my grandfather’s veranda. He was dying and had begged to see me once more. I could not travel back to Ethiopia in time to see my grandmother before she died, and he wanted to make sure this would not happen with us. When he opened the door and saw me, he began to weep and call out my name. And as he repeated it, bowed by the weight of the word, I knew that he cried for my grandmother. I knew that when he looked at me, he wept for the other Maaza who was dead. The one who was alive and standing at the doorstep was less real than the one who had left him behind. I cannot imagine what it was like for him to stand in front of me, on his way to dying, on his way to our last shattering farewell, and understand that his utterance of my name would also call forth a ghost. As I watched him struggle to regain his composure, all I could do was grip my bracelet and cry. To promise, to send forth, to migrate. To hope.

  —Maaza Mengiste

  SLEEPLESS LOVE

  Jonas is sleeping: deeply, obliviously. Not I. With him as with all the others, I am the watcher, the wakeful one. This is our fourth date, and as I watch him sleeping, his back to me, the arc of his right shoulder with its oddly hollow, birdlike blade inches away, the deep furrow that runs down the center of his back, sloping away and disappearing behind the cotton blanket, that landscape that I love so much, I know there will not be a fifth date.

  Once again, I have made the same mistake.

  For with him as with the others there is not only this landscape, the salty terrain of flesh, the furrows and hills that invite exploration and discovery, there is that other landscape, the one where he cannot join me. As the hours slide through late night to early morning, I feel myself entering this private terrain. First there is the upward slog from the plush dark valley of eleven o’clock, with its dense comfortable underbrush: the magazines piled on the duvet, the whiskey glass gleaming amber on the bedside table, the detritus of the day before, among which I can happily prowl, convincing myself that I am still of the day. But as the little wooden mid-century modern electric alarm clock on the nightstand whirs and clicks and eleven spirals away into twelve I feel myself as if hiking, struggling toward the darkly silhouetted peak of midnight; then, on the other side of that crest, the cautious, icy descent down into the valley of one o’clock—still close enough to midnight to feel connected to the day before and, therefore, to some kind of safety. But as one o’clock creeps toward two and then three and finally three-thirty, it is as if I am skittering across a vast floe of ice: the continent of true insomnia, the white place where the sky is indistinguishable from the horizon and the horizon from the ground, where there are no landmarks, no railings or stanchions, no tracks, not even the scratchy tracks of birds. I know that I am completely alone in this place, and when I finally summon the courage to look down at Jonas (or Bill, or Glen, or Greg, or Jake, or Travis, or Rafaël, whoever it may have been over the decades), it is, I imagine, how someone who finds himself aboard a sinking ship might look down from the juddering deck, as the stern rises toward the moon, at some other passenger who, out of cunning or (more likely) sheer dumb luck, has found safety in a lifeboat and is already curled there at the bottom of the shallow boat in a blanket.

  It is like being a ghost and looking at the living.

  This is my landscape, the place where I live for seven hours every night of my life. Even when I was a child, I wasn’t able to sleep well. In the crib I would turn over constantly, anxiously; in the narrow wooden bed that my father built for me when I was old enough to have a bed of my own, I would read long after we were supposed to turn off the lights, dreading the moment when I would have to put away my book for good and face the blank night. In the college dormitory room I shared with two other students the deep rising and falling of my roommates’ breathing was like the sound of surf, but even that wouldn’t lull me to sleep; I would count their breaths into the hundreds until, around five-thirty, I would collapse into an hour’s shiftless sleep.

  It was at university that I slept with (well) another man for the first time, and I realize now that what I was hoping for more than anything—more than the fulfillment of some adolescent fantasy of perfect like-mindedness, more than the sheer pleasure of sex—that what I was hoping to get more than anything from these lovers was someone to share my sleeplessness with: someone who would, at last, accompany me through the white trackless exile of my insomnia.

  And yet, as if by some perfect, cruel asymmetry of the psyche, every youth, every man I was to fall in love with thereafter would be a profound sleeper. One would collapse so totally into an almost coma-like sleep after sex that, the first time we went to bed together, I was afraid he might have had some kind of cerebral embolism, might even have died; another was so hard to wake up that on our first morning together, so as not to miss an important editorial meeting, I had to leave him sleeping there, and wondered as I took the subway downtown just who he was, actually, and whether my apartment would be intact when I returned home. One would softly cry, like a toddler, when I jostled him awake from a nap, so thoroughly did he inhabit his sleep. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful garden and you’re pulling me away from it back onto asphalt,” he once said to me, unforgiving. But whatever their individual habits, they all shared the ability to fall swiftly into sleep, leaving me beside them to watch the wooden clock and begin my awful journey while they remained unconscious through the night. Which is to say, all of them managed to make me feel alone even when I was with them. Unconsciously, instinctively, like water buffalo in a drought that can smell a standing pool twenty miles away and move sluggishly toward the place where they think it is, only to find dried mud where the water was only minutes before, I have managed over the years to find these perfect sleepers, these companions who are not companions, these partners who cannot accompany me where I go each night.

  The fact that I continue to make my nightly journey alone suggests to me, at least, th
at there are never really “lessons” in love; the place in the psyche that is the source of how we love is so deep that our attempts to reach it, to tunnel down to it and bring light and air there, must always fail. I go to a party, a meeting, a bar; I go online. I see a man whom the conscious part of me beholds and begins to desire; whom my conscious self approaches at the party or meeting or bar or the site or the app and talks to and decides is suitable because this man shares my love of swimming or Mahler or gardening; the conscious part of me will do what we all do, will type his number on my iPhone and wait sickeningly for a text or a call and then, when it comes, will grow giddy and anxious until the moment when we go for a drink or dinner and then, when the drink or the dinner leads back to my place or his place, things will unfold as they do. And it is only then, when we go to the bed and get in and he falls soundly asleep, curled in his lifeboat while I scan the familiar horizon, the shrubbery of 23:00 and the silhouetted peak of midnight, the valley of 01:00 and the dread frostbitten plains of 03:30, do I realize that the conscious mind is the fool, the rebellious and ultimately powerless servant of the unconscious mind which wants, in the end, and for whatever mysterious reasons, to be alone.

  —Daniel Mendelsohn

  LIVES OF THE VISITING LECTURER

  Pool

  The hotel has a pool. The hotel has no pool. The hotel has a pool but it is three strokes long. The hotel has no pool but there is a university pool. The university pool is closed for a swim meet. The university pool is not closed but requires a keycard. There is no university or university pool but there is an ocean, loch, lake, fjord, river, local spa. These are wildly pounding, freezing cold, rocky, muddy, reedy or crazy-expensive nonetheless all will be well, the visiting lecturer knows as she slides into the water. You too are made of stars, someone is saying later as she passes the breakfast room.

  Plato’s Roaring Darkness

  Noticing a poster for a talk (by last year’s visiting lecturer) about Plato, she is cast back to the winter as a graduate student she’d fancied herself a demimondaine because her mentor liked to give her suppers at posh restaurants in return for light fondling in his office. He was a large, monumentally ugly man who had written important books on Plato. She was unused to attention. He smelled like dust. She was twenty-two and thought him too old to worry about, anyway that’s how things worked in those days. Together they attended Emeritus Professor George Grube’s “On First Looking into Plato’s Republic.” She remembers now nothing of the lecture except that Professor Grube talked into the microphone and consulted his notes alternately, as he was so nearly blind he had to bring his face right down to the podium to read, thus becoming inaudible. It was later that night or the next day in his office that she and her mentor had a discussion about flesh and to his asking whether or not she “could see her way to being kind to him” she had answered no. Some years later, making notes for a memoir, she will shave the anecdote down. “After dinner I went to hear an old man, nearly blind, who spoke of the frustration and despair he found in the central books of Plato’s Republic.” And she will add, taking things in a different direction, “Men are allowed to decay in public as a woman is not.”

  Special Collection

  On her free day the visiting lecturer signs up for a tour of the national museum and finds herself in a frigid storage room, not open to the public. The curator situates her at a distance from the paintings stacked around the room, faces to the wall, “each one an insurrection in itself.” The curator gestures. “These, these are insane objects.” The curator has small silver paws atop her notes, very like the paws of the ermine in the painting Lady with an Ermine, now on display in the nation’s other museum, which the visiting lecturer had been told was not worth visiting. After the tour they exit the storage room. An older man walks by the curator’s side whispering, “Stop blushing, just be here.”

  Still Green

  Migraine may accompany a visit. She has brought with her Beckett’s book on Proust. Sometimes Beckett appears to be just horsing around. But then a sentence is so intelligent she lays the book down, unable to breathe. Flakes fall from her frontal lobes. After the lectures there is Q & A. She hears herself tell the students all storytelling is a cliché, just go down into the lit barking heart of the thing and see how a pineapple is made, to quote Wallace Stevens, and they say, Who’s Wallace Stevens? Much remorse follows such a visit. The bunch of green bananas on her kitchen windowsill at home is still green. This makes her think of T.S. Eliot, his infant vows of chastity while writing “big black knotty penis” in letters to friends.

  —Anne Carson

  SONG OF THE HIGHEST TOWER

  He was sitting on the filthy mattress that served as a sofa on the building’s patio. I was leaving that same night, and I wanted to see him before I left Paris. I remember with great clarity how I thought: I am not in love. I’ve only known him a week. I don’t even know his last name.

  Guillaume opened a pack of cigarettes and reached out his hand. I remember how he wriggled his long fingers asking for something, and I intuited what it was: a pen. He didn’t look at me. He wrote his email address on the silver cigarette paper: guillaumejolie1980@hotmail.com. It was the European summer of 2003, and he was wearing a black suit as he sat on that mattress, with his elusive blue eyes, his hair so greasy it looked wet. I put his address in my wallet, and I didn’t tell him ‘I’ll write you,’ and he didn’t reach out again for one last caress. He let me go. The night before had been too excruciating. I went up the five flights of wooden stairs to my friend’s apartment where my suitcases were already packed, and around the second floor I started to cry and I thought, why is it all so dramatic, why do I want to go down and bury my nose in his white shirt that smells like the sweat of weeks and go with him? We’ll explore together, we’ll hunt in the deserts, we’ll sleep on sidewalks of unknown cities, without worries, without sorrow. I took a painkiller, turned on the shower, and told myself again that I was thirty years old, that any love only a week long, overwhelming as it may be, is forgettable, and a boy like that, so young—Guillaume was twenty-three—was a fling, a triviality, a game, something to brag about, the beautiful, gloomy Parisian, Rimbaud on Barbès, my dying boy with his veins dotted with needle tracks and scars from self-inflicted wounds, pale and precise marks, horizontal, recent.

  When I got out of the shower and peered out the window, Guillaume was gone from the patio—the cour—and nor was his bag on the mattress. I was glad. When I left for the airport my friend went with me as far as the Metro stop: I looked for Guillaume on every block, his blond hair, his black suit. He wasn’t waiting for me at the station, either, though the previous night he’d promised he’d be there, before he got angry when I said no, that he should let me go alone, that our time together had been nice. Nice, he repeated. Très jolie.

  I didn’t mention him to my friend. I didn’t talk about Guillaume for the rest of my trip, not with anyone, not even to lessen the story’s tragic air. I woke up nauseated every morning I spent in Barcelona, my last stop on that trip. From the other side of the bathroom door, the friend I was staying with asked if I was okay, and I said yes, just something I ate, too many planes, leftover anxiety. It wasn’t leftovers: it was an anxious bit of iron caught in my throat, and the memory of Guillame’s legs, oddly hairy for someone so blond—the legs of a faun, of a demon. I looked at myself in the mirror after vomiting phlegm every morning and I downed tranquilizers on an empty stomach.

  Still, I didn’t write him. I looked at the metallic paper in my wallet and I let it go. I went to the cyber café and sent messages to everyone who didn’t matter, boss, friends, ex-husband. I’d call my parents with a card—remember that? You scratched off a soft, lead-grey coating over the code: you had to enter it before dialing the number. Guillame happened in that world, before Gmail, before smartphones, when the phone still rang and there were no social networks and life didn’t happen online, when you didn’t travel with your
computer unless you really needed it, and search engines wouldn’t pull up résumés or photos or criminal records. I only have three pictures of him, taken with an analog camera. Two were taken at a party. Today, I just can’t understand that world where it was still possible to get lost and where it could also be impossible to find someone again.

  I wrote Guillaume the very day I got back to Buenos Aires, exhausted, my suitcase untouched in the middle of the living room. I sat waiting for the reply, picturing him in some all-night cyber café on Rue des Poissonniers, smiling at my message. Refresh. My mouth filled with blood when I saw, in effect, the reply. Too soon. That druggie’s inbox is full, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t understand my message, my triple language—we spoke a little French, a little English, a little Spanish.

  The message said the address didn’t exist, that the error was permanent and I shouldn’t try again.

  It took me a minute to understand. Had Guillaume written his address down wrong? Was it an error with Hotmail? Maybe I had typed it in wrong? I copied and resent the message. Same result. Sometimes that happens when an inbox is full, I lied to myself. I slept fourteen hours on pills, woke up in a pool of sweat, vomited in the bathroom, and wrote him again with my coffee growing cold beside the keyboard. Same result. Permanent error, a message that you sent could not be delivered.

  I remember the vertiginous desperation I felt, so much like panic. I think back to that moment and I’m astonished by the discussions I hear about romantic love, and how if it hurts it’s not love. How do you avoid adrenaline when you’re in an earthquake? How do you control panic in a house fire? How do you check a pounding heart when test results announce cancer or pregnancy? Who wants to live with all that anesthesia?

  I called my friend in Paris. I told her what was happening. ‘My emails all bounce back.’ I faked a certain amount of calm although I think she sensed my devastation. She said: ‘When I see him, I’ll ask him for his address again. That kid’s always fucked up.’ Then she told me about her new job in a gallery in the Marais. I kept sending messages to the guillaumejolie address every day. Jolie. Bonito, nice. Très jolie, he’d laughed bitterly on our last night in that endless discussion full of sobbing and sex. He’d tricked me, the Jolie was his revenge. Why? I didn’t ask for his address, I didn’t demand contact. Did his ever-fevered body hold malice? I’d caressed his scars with my fingertips. He was always shaking. A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, I thought. ‘Let’s go to Charleville,’ I said one day. ‘I hate France,’ he replied. He wanted to go to Mali, where the musicians he played with had migrated from.