Nicole Carpenter used to go through my city like a walking middle finger. She fought, smoked, dipped, drank and skipped school, and by the time she finally reached her junior year of high school, she altogether dropped out. I met her some years ago in my hometown of Battle Creek, the Cereal Capitol of the world (think: Kellogg’s Cornflakes).

Nicole wore sandy blond cornrows that dropped to her waist and wrapped around her like seaweed. She’d sway her head side to side and fling those braids behind her shoulders, rake back the strays with two acrylic nails, then light up a Newport 100. Nicole was exceptionally petite, about four-feet-nine inches, and could’ve passed for an eleven –year old.

When Nicole found out she was pregnant (at age seventeen), she moved out of her parents’, picked up a job at Arby’s, and moved in to the guy she thought (“I mean, shoot, he prolly is, that muthafucker…he the only one who didn’t wear a jimmy cap.”) might be the father of her baby.

Dad was Nicole’s doctor and had been since she was a little baby. He was in maybe his eighteenth year practicing as family physician, performing everything from wart removal to severing umbilical cords, when Nicole resurfaced, dangling her legs over a paper-wrapped table when he walked into the exam room. That was the same year Dad stopped delivering babies for good, and Nicole was one of the last patients he worked with in the delivery room.

Dad claims he was forced to stop delivering babies because the cost of malpractice insurance had got so high. Mom says she fast-forwarded the decision after Dad got paged in the middle of Midnight Mass for the tenth Christmas Eve in a row, but I think that Nicole, specifically Nicole’s pregnancy, had an affect on the verdict, too. The whole thing just seemed to deflate him.

Being a doctor in such a small town, my dad was a bit of a celebrity. Folks had named their dogs after him (different variations of Phil, Philip and Ptacin) and there wasn’t a time he could zip in and out of Felpaush Grocery without getting impeded by folks for minor medical attention, which can be particularly embarrassing when you’re with him and your hands are balancing items like Pepto-Bismol, toilet paper, Tampons, or anything that revealed to the world that you, too, go to the bathroom. But my dad would take his time with people, put his hand on the shoulder of the ailing individual, lean in as if to whisper a secret and say, “How can I help?” I guess that’s how I learned about patience—by watching him exhibit this untamed (or untainted) compassion. Dad had a Paul Bunyon-sized heart, and my friends claimed he was the Jesus reincarnate.

Mom said he was just a big baby. You be the judge: late one night back when he was a medical student at Georgetown, Dad got mugged while jogging through campus. My father had no cash or money on him, to his name really, but invited the thief back to his “minimalist” apartment anyway, for some fruit and to write him a check. Dad said that if the guy was going to don a black mask and attempt a mugging, he needed the hundred bucks more than he did.

Growing up, my family’s dinner conversations revolved around Dad’s work stories. With our chins resting on our hands and our elbows framing our dinner plates, we’d listen to him talk about our town, about our time and our people. I remember chewing on a square piece of pork tenderloin when he told us the tale about the obese man with maggots that laid eggs in his belly button, or the one about the surgeon who stitched up a guy after a vasectomy and forgot to remove the gauze.

One night (I was about eighteen or nineteen years old) when we were shooting the shit around the dinner table, Nicole’s name came up. My Polish mother said, “Phil, tell de girls about Nicole, you patient with dying baby.” She shook her head. “Dis is such tragedy!”

“Who’s Nicole?” I asked.

Dad put down his silverware and blew out a long trail of breath. “Oh, Nicole,” he said without looking up. “She’s one of my patients.”

“And is driving you Daddy down de wall,” Mom added.

“It’s ‘up the wall’,” my sister Sabina chimed.

“Nicole’s been coming to my office since she was a little baby,” he said, “but I hadn’t seen her in years until she came in for a prenatal exam.”

Mom interjected, “She thinks she Mary, Mother of God.”

Dad sighed again. “Nicole’s a bit dramatic.”

He told us that Nicole’s pregnancy was a rare and complicated. She was born with something called Russell-Silver Syndrome, a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused someone to be very small and look much younger than they were. When she came into my dad’s office for her first prenatal checkup, all fresh-faced and pregnant, Dad sent her to a specialist for extra testing to see if Russell-Silver Syndrome would affect her fetus at all. Results proved that it would not, but something else blipped up in the tests. Nicole’s baby had Anencephaly, a totally unrelated birth defect.

Dad took the paper napkin off his lap, unfolded it and laid it out over the kitchen table. “Anencephaly refers to the incomplete development of a fetus’s brain and spinal cord, and their protective coverings.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket, one with a built-in laser pointer and the word Celebrex written up the side, and began sketching onto the cleaner side of the napkin: a line, a loop, a crescent. “It occurs when the neural tube—a narrow sheath that is supposed to fold and close during the third or fourth week of pregnancy…”—the pen doubled back; a tulip, a pea pod, a tunnel—“fails to close, resulting in failure of major portions of the brain, and failure of the skull and scalp to form.”

I leaned in for a closer look at Dad’s drawing. It looked like a roller coaster. “No brain? No shit?” I asked and Sabina kicked me from under the table.

“Infants born with Anencephaly are usually blind, deaf, and unconscious.”

“And what is ze fate to the babies?” Mom asked.

“When Nicole’s baby would be born it would have already suffered serious brain damage…wouldn’t be able to eat, not even breathe for long.”

“Holy wow,” I said. “Do they suffer, Dad?”

My father put down the pen and handed me the napkin. I folded it up four times and slid it under my plate. “It’s not a painful condition,” he said, “but it is inevitably fatal.”

“Poor baby. Poor her soul. It is very sad,” Mom said, then joined Sabina, who was clearing the table. Dad pushed out his chair, and as he began to stand up I stopped him.

“Wait, what happened next? To the girl?” I asked.

“The specialist explained all this to Nicole and recommended that she terminate the pregnancy.”

“Then what?”

“Dad works at a Catholic hospital, Mira. They don’t do abortions,” Sabina said. She had recently denounced her Catholicism, claimed it was homophobic, sexist and past its prime. I envied that she got to sleep in during church.

“Nicole basically freaked out and drove straight back to my office.”

“Screaming and crying like child,” Mom called from the sink.

“Yes, screaming and crying and causing this huge commotion in the waiting room, demanding to see me.” He carried his plate to the sink. I followed him.

“So then I pulled her into an exam room and tried to calmed her down. Go get your dishes, please, Mira,” Dad said.

I went to the table and returned with my plate. “Then what? Then what did you say to her?”

“Well, we talked. I explained that it wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t cause this and couldn’t have prevented it. I just looked at her and said, ‘Nicole, there is just nothing you or me or anyone can do about this. There’s no surgery to do in the womb, no medicine you can take.’ I just told her, ‘Nicole, your baby just ain’t going to survive.’”

Dad dropped a big spoon into the coffee beans, leveled off a scoop of decaf and tipped it into the coffee maker. He walked over to Mom, who was loading bowls into the dishwasher, put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her forehead and gently pushed her out of the kitchen. He handed Sabina a towel, rolled up his sleeves and plunged a big pot into the kitchen sink.

“I told Nicole that she could transfer medical facilities if she’d prefer to abort the fetus.”

“So did she get, you know, what Beanie said?”

Sabina threw a towel at me and told me to make myself useful.

“She panicked and became frightened by the thought of an abortion,” Dad said. He folded his arms and leaned back onto the ivory refrigerator door, which was checkered with magnets of our old school photos and Mom’s kitchen wisdom quotes. One magnet framed an old family photo: our family wearing matching St. Philip Elementary School sweatshirts, rosy cheeks, huddled in a tripod. One magnet had a cartoon of two makizushi rolls on it. Wake up, little sushi, it read.

“I remember Nicole sitting on the exam table, weeping. She said to me ‘This was a spark that had no chance at life without my help, so if my child was meant to live for five minutes, it is going to live for five minutes.’”

There was a moment of silence, which was quickly interrupted by the buzzing and scraping sound of Mom sliding the electric broom across the tile floor.

“I agreed to ride it out with her,” Dad said in what sounded like a whisper, even over the vacuum.

“Tell the girls about the board, Phil,” Mom said, plowing the vacuum past us.

“What board? What happened?”

“So we continued giving Nicole care—a lot of care—during her pregnancy. She came into the office several times unannounced, saying she felt movement and thought she was having a miscarriage. We were there for her around the clock. But at the same time, the hospital was struggling with the technicalities of the delivery,” he said. “It was like this: the baby would die outside the womb, and in a purely medical sense whether Nicole delivered at twelve weeks or forty weeks, the question was moot. But because of the Silver Syndrome, because Nicole was such a tiny person, she wouldn’t be able to deliver a normal sized baby because it wouldn’t fit through the bones of her pelvis.”

“So what could she do? What were her choices?”

“She would have to have a Caesarian delivery, and for a woman of her size, this was dangerous procedure.” The vacuuming stopped.

“Daddy and Catholic bishop met during de week, during time we had dance class,” Mom said.

“We formed an Ethics Committee. The director of hospital, a lawyer, Al Skipper, the hospital chaplain, and other doctors to determine how early Nicole could be induced without it being considered a termination of—or an unnatural—pregnancy. We finally decided on a time, up to the very minute, of what was considered ‘natural.’”

“Yeah…God’s way,” Sabina sighed.

“So what happened?” I asked again.

“The baby inside Nicole grew. She felt it kicking.”

“What did she do?”

“She dug in her heels and carried the baby through the pregnancy. She learned the sex of the baby. She bought maternity clothes and pink baby clothes. She named the baby. Even the nurses at the hospital knitted booties and made a baby quilt. She hired Reverend Skipper from the Ethics Committee to facilitate the funeral of the baby.”

“And then?”

“And then we induced her when it was the right time.”

“And then?”

“And then Nicole delivered her baby, vaginally.”

“And then?”

“And then after five hours, the baby girl died in Nicole’s arms.”

“Poor her soul, indeed,” I agreed.

A few weeks later I met Nicole. I’m not sure why I did it, but I wanted to meet this person, this girl, this woman. I just had to get her story. It was as if she carried some kind of answer my younger self had been looking for. I found her in a booth at Home Spun Family Restaurant, and as I sat down across from her, a shudder of recognition passed between us. I ordered a coffee while she smoked feverishly.

“Do you wanna see a picture of my little girl?” she asked.

She slid the photo across the table, a 4 x 6 glossy with edges that were beginning to coil and curl towards the center, like a dried leaf. I continued to look at Nicole, afraid at what I might see.

“That’s my lil’ girl Elizabeth,” Nicole said, and I looked at the photo in front of me, which was upside down. Nicole leaned over and rotated it counter-clockwise with her left hand, the hand holding a cigarette, to face me.

The baby in the photo was dead. She was tiny, had a pink cap over her head and looked like an old man. Not much different than any newborn—closed eyes and a pink complexion—but this baby was dead, and I could tell.

Nicole pulled a frilly scrapbook out of her purse and narrated a few more photos: baby Elizabeth in a long white lace dress, Nicole’s parents embracing Nicole on the hospital bed, a cluster of smiling nurses, and a print of a tiny white casket.

“You should be proud of yourself,” I told her.

She said she was. She said, “I’m talkin’ to my parents again, and I may be movin’ back home. This was a blessin’ in disguise I guess.” And while she was talking and smoking, I was thinking to myself Yeah but how does someone move on? Moving on…isn’t that what your baby was doing? Isn’t it your job to try to remember?

A year after that, Nicole came back to my dad’s office to announce she had gotten pregnant again, and that she had given birth to a healthy baby. Mom thought it’d be nice to round up a roomful of baby goods—diapers, a stroller, a crib and a bunch of barely-used onesies from the Salvation Army—and throw Nicole a belated baby shower. She invited nurses, Al Skipper, Dad’s office manager, and some of her own friends (a couple of doctors’ wives who happened to be immigrants, too) to celebrate Nicole’s new life. See look, I thought, there is a reason for everything. God knows what he’s doing. He will always make you happy again. But when the day came and they were all in the waiting room, ready to shower Nicole with their streamers and white frosting baby cake, ten minutes passed, then twenty, then Nicole never showed up. Dad tried to call her and got a droning signal at the other end of the line, a recorded robot voice saying the phone number was no longer in service and had been disconnected. He checked the hospital records, which revealed she had had a baby boy, and that’s it.

With wet eyes, Mom re-donated all the baby goods back to the Salvation Army, took the stroller to Kids R Us and brought me along for the ride. In the car I tried to be the optimist and come up with excuses for Nicole’s absence, but it didn’t fly with her; she’s impenetrable to all types of sugarcoating. Maybe her baby got sick, I said. Mom ignored me. I’m sure Nicole is being a good mommy, Mom, really, she probably just had to work.

Give me break, Mom said. That girl was hussy and we both know it. She probably dump her baby wit de parents and is out tail chasing dis minute.

Mom, maybe she had amnesia, I said, and that’s when I started doubting my sense of the truth. I looked out the windshield of our family’s Chrysler minivan. I felt myself begin to warp into something I had been afraid of—a nihilist, a cynic, a misanthrope, the kind of person who deliberately tore small limbs off trees minding their own business, the kind of person who cursed under her breath rather than smile at someone passing by on the sidewalk, a person who added gray layers to their skin to make it thicker. Impenetrable. I looked up at the stupid face of Jeffrey the Giraffe towering over the doors to Toys R Us and I thought: What if that girl wasn’t the Buddha reincarnate after all? What if I was just not seeing the world for what it really was? Maybe she really wasn’t carrying that nugget of truth I needed so badly. Maybe she was just a girl from Cereal City, U.S.A., who worked at the Arby’s drive-thru on Capitol Avenue, and maybe I really was just a misanthrope after all. A misanthrope living with her parents.

BY ANNABEL SMITH

We arrive in the nameless village early, when the morning light is still thick and golden, marred only by the dark smudge of hills on the horizon. Doctors, nurses, dentists, support staff: a team of ten, we’ve flown into the Dominican Republic for a week of one-day stands. Day four, this is our fourth and final village. Like most foreigners, we’ve brought a sense of adventure and spare memory cards. Unlike them, we won’t be staying at luxury resorts or visiting golf courses. We have come to do good, to make a difference.

Our local partners are waiting for us in blue T-shirts like ours, clipboards ready. They’re clearly excited when our convoy arrives, and greet us with great enthusiasm. We climb off the bus and shake hands warmly. They show us the empty hall they’ve arranged for the doctors and a separate space for the dentists. The neat green community building is ideal, with several private rooms and a large main area filled with benches like pews. We unload the eight black suitcases and mysterious machines from the truck that follows us everywhere. The set-up team gets to work, while the rest of us wander off, knowing the drill, clutching our cameras.

The light is perfect, and I start taking pictures. At first glance everything seems so lush and vibrant that I want to roll around in the colour and soak it in. A wide river crosses the road further ahead and water channels run down the side of the streets. Most houses are wooden, a couple concrete, one or two a patchwork of metal. They’re painted seaside colours, pale pinks and turquoise, and the space beside each has been compressed and smoothed into a compound, some holding small flower gardens.

I walk on in search of new views. Despite so much water, the biscuit-coloured earth is completely parched: each truck and motorbike that roars past throws up a cloud of fine particles that settles back over everything. I pass a few struggling French marigolds and snapdragons and a long-abandoned hand pump. Further from the centre some of the houses are made of dirt. I put my camera away.

I find out later that this isn’t a village but a former banana batey, or company plantation. The big businesses have all gone now, taking the work with them, but leaving the workers behind. There are few jobs except growing enough food to eat. Some fields have been turned over to rice and sugar beet and there are still plenty of banana trees, but in many places all order has been lost and there is only a wild tangle of greens, broken by a few umbrella acacias and glossy mango trees. Villainous bougainvillaea conspires to make a subsistence existence look joyful.

Today is laundry day, and already sheets and shorts are flapping on strings stretched along the roadside. I pass women sitting on their heels in front of large plastic basins surrounded by small piles of clothes. Some smile and wave, many sit back resting as the clothes soak. Small children play in the dirt and sweet little piglets trot about.

The water has been brought from the river in yellow plastic cooking oil bottles; there doesn’t seem to be any soap. By the river I meet a man with a huge spotted sow on a string and I watch admiringly as she wades into the water and happily roots about. The pig is magnificent. The man grins with pride.

Everything is set up when I get back to the makeshift clinic. The doctors have taken over the three private rooms and are already with their first patients. The waiting room contains a scattering of women and children, and no men, which is what we have come to expect. The room will get busier and busier as word spreads through the community, but most men will stay away. A few may come for skin conditions like scabies and impetigo, or even reading glasses, but they will never mention the symptoms of the sexually transmitted infections that we know are widespread here. What good can we do if we only treat the women?

A secure space at the back of the hall has been set aside for the pharmacy, and it’s already buzzing with activity. The contents of the eight black suitcases are laid out on trestle tables: jauntily coloured cardboard boxes and packets; foil pouches; plastic bottles; blister strips. Every item has been donated, and although it looks higgledy-piggledy, each is in its place. Some bear the specialist labels of hospital supplies intended for professionals, others the eye-catching logos created for the supermarket. Some are familiar—Tylenol, Aleve, Advil—others unusual and difficult to identify.

I have no medical training and had expected simply to observe, but nobody just watches here, so I become part of the pharmacy team. When patients have seen one of the doctors they bring their prescriptions to us. We take them, find the right drugs, have them checked, then pass them to Juan, who sits outside the door, guarding the divide between waiting room and pharmacy.

It takes less than half an hour for me to learn how to fill a script on my own and I spend most of that time trying to decipher the doctors’ handwriting, which is universally atrocious. The patterns are very simple because there aren’t many choices. We try to keep the doctors up to date when we run out of drugs, but sometimes we fall behind. Then one of us has to go and face their frustration, which gets angrier as the day goes on. To compensate, we gossip about them, which is easy because they’re all young and good looking. I feel guilty about our laughter when I glance through the door.

Nobody speaks of cancer, TB or HIV. We have no surgical facilities and no specialists. We acknowledge only what we can treat that day.

Globally, nearly 5 million people with moderate to severe cancer pain get no appropriate pain medication. Nor do some one-and-a-half million with stage-four AIDS. Those in the global south are likely to have been diagnosed late and to have no hope. Severe pain means agony. Men, women and children suffer burns, accidents, gunshots, sickle-cell disease and the severe nerve damage that comes with diabetes with no pain relief at all. They may have been lucky enough to receive vaccines, antibiotics or anti-retrovirals, but without pain relief many prefer suicide.

Juan’s job is to explain the medication to the patients: how many tablets to take and when, and that these are not “caramellos.” A Venezuelan with two years of pre-med, Spanish is his first language. He is calm, colloquial and clear. The Dominican patients nod, smile and quietly ask questions. They are a little shy and deferential, but they seem to understand.

But many of the patients are Haitian, not Dominican, and Juan doesn’t speak Kreyol. None of us does. We can manage French between us, in an approximate sort of way, but for those with only Kreyol we carry out a pitiful show of mime and drawings. We have pictures of suns and moons and the empty faces of clocks onto which we draw the times at which the drugs are to be taken. When blank, confused faces look back at us, we know we have failed; at times it’s almost farcical. Juan tries, explaining everything once, then making each person repeat the instructions back to him, as best they can. It’s painstakingly slow, and by the end many of the Haitians simply look frightened.

During quiet moments in the pharmacy I stand watching Juan, looking over his shoulder to the waiting area beyond. Still almost every seat is taken by a woman or a child, their name stuck to them on white labels. Most women are pregnant and many are very young. They wear jeans or shorts and a T-shirt, their hair neatly braided, flip flops on their feet.

I find myself staring at a woman wearing a long white cotton summer dress with a deep handkerchief collar; her hair is short, unbraided and pulled back with a wide Alice-band. She reminds me of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre, for she, too, is clearly mad. She stares at the floor or looks at us childlike and uncomprehending. She is alone, and we can do nothing for her, yet I have an overwhelming desire to walk up to her and take her hand.

The children sit still and solemn on the benches: four little girls at the front, their braids fastened with pale blue bobbles. We work calmly and steadily, but they wait nearly three hours, their heads turning to follow a noise or sudden movement but otherwise their lives suspended. In awe of everything, they are wide-eyed and patient.

Doctors and nurses are constantly walking through the waiting area, sharing equipment, checking on drug availability, joking, laughing or stopping for a drink of water. Many pause to take photographs on their way. Nobody complains; it’s as if they know that part of the deal is that we have our trophies. Every single doctor and nurse finds a reason to walk past the tiny girl in the pale pink froth and the flowery headband, their cameras ready.

I take a break and wander out onto the dirt road towards the intersection that is downtown. The one small open-fronted shop has shelves stacked meticulously with drums of milk powder, bags of rice, cans of condensed milk and bottles and packets of all sorts of things. A huge scale hangs over the counter, where a few sad vegetables are wilting in the heat. The small pyramid of eggs nestled in the shade makes me think of the children I teach in the U.S. They are all well fed, and many are athletes. Most discard the yolks of their breakfast eggs, believing them to be unhealthy.

I walk back past the dentists, who have drawn a huge crowd. Dressed in blue scrubs and white masks they’re deeply absorbed in their work, bent low over their patients, surrounded by the large, strange machines. When I first walked past people were wary and standing well back. Now there’s a party atmosphere as they watch three dental students brandish a huge set of cardboard teeth and an enormous paper toothbrush. They’re showing everyone how to brush correctly: up into the corners and right to the back, then letting the children have a go. There’s much laughter and toothbrushes and toothpaste are handed out to everyone. Some people still look suspicious: a tall woman at the back has clearly been unnerved by the large photos of gum disease being wielded by another student, black teeth thrusting menacingly out of scarlet gums.

I’d forgotten about toothache. How extraordinary it must be to arrive in agony, unable to sleep or eat, and to leave with no pain. To have a rotten tooth extracted under anaesthetic; an abscess drained, a cavity filled, an infection treated with antibiotics. To feel pain switched off.

By midday the clinic is full. It’s hot and sticky in the pharmacy and we all make mistakes, muddling scripts, forgetting to double-check the age and weight of a child, mixing two drugs with similar names. Even when we get it right it feels hit and miss, or worse, hit and run. And what about me—I’m a schoolteacher. What on earth am I doing here?

The children in the clinic are all too small. It’s not only about malnutrition and lack of healthy food, although I wonder whether any child here has eaten five portions of fruit or vegetables in the last month, let alone in one day. It’s also about parasites. Most of these children get little benefit from the little food they eat because it feeds the worms that live inside them. Every child who comes through the clinic today gets two small tablets which they have to swallow in front of us with a glass of bright pink juice. Once their stomachs are their own again, then they will need protein, vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates to build their bodies enough that we can guess their ages. I think of the abandoned hand pump and the happily wading pig. There’s very little time before the next round of uninvited dinner guests arrives.

Everyone needs multivitamins, but our packets specially formulated for pregnant women run out almost at once. We substitute the brightly coloured animal-shaped children’s vitamins, but they are soon finished too. Americans spend $7 billion annually on vitamins and minerals, most of which they could do without. In a land of plenty, it shouldn’t be hard to let food be one’s medicine, as Hippocrates advised, and to send the vitamins to those who truly need them.

The island of Hispaniola is bisected by one of the world’s most dramatic borders, dividing relatively rich, hopeful Dominica from desperately poor, hopeless Haiti. But we are on the good side, where tourism has boomed and opportunities abound. Why, then, do these people have no healthcare or welfare?

During a quiet moment I ask our project director Bob why things are so bad here. He tells me that Haitian men have been crossing the island to work on the Dominican bateys for the last seventy years. During that time many started to stay between seasons and married immigrant Haitian women. The bateys became a unique mix of Haitian and Dominican people and cultures, but with one overriding characteristic: poverty. Because Haitians are non-citizens they are not seen as the government’s responsibility and so do not receive public services. In theory the private companies owning the bateys should provide for them; in practice, few do. Once the companies pull out, the communities are abandoned.

Almost all Haitians come originally from Togo. They have darker skin than most Dominicans, and those who live in the bateys are frequently discriminated against. They are seen as a drain on limited resources, and frequently blamed for the high rates of HIV and TB. They’re often treated with contempt and disgust.

By late afternoon it’s airless and stuffy in the pharmacy and we’re all yawning. The window slats are wide open and three little girls in blue and beige school uniforms have appeared, standing on tip-toes, waving through the blinds. We snack on Oreo cookies and chips to try to keep our energy up, and remind one another to drink plenty of bottled water.

Our drugs are running low. We’ve used nearly all the antibiotics and all the prescription-strength pain meds. We are becoming more generous with the Tylenol, though, giving several boxes to those who suffer from chronic pain. Why not? We’re going home tomorrow, and we need to get rid of them. They have no mystical value for us, we’re long
immune to the miracle of near instant pain relief.

American demands and expectations drove the market to provide tablets, caplets, chewy tabs and gelcaps, day strength, night strength and round-the-clock relief. We need never be in pain for more than ten minutes. In the community where I live and work in New England, pain medication is used largely to enhance athletic performance, so people can play sports longer and harder.

Is it possible to be too well?

At the end of the day, on the bus ride back to our hostel, I wonder what we achieved. We saw over 200 patients, almost all of whom will have benefited from our visit. We eased pain, cleared up infections, cured skin complaints and checked on pregnant women and babies. We taught basic health education and dental hygiene and helped women to look after themselves and their children. Above all, we showed up: we let people know we cared.

Yet I don’t feel like a hero, and I’m pretty sure none of my colleagues do either. Most are asleep, slumped uncomfortably, or gazing silently out of the windows. We all know that although we’ve helped many people, there are far more who have never seen a doctor. At best, we provided quick-fix philanthropy: a cocktail of Advil and good will. At worst we’ve been a distraction that allows boxes to be checked, consciences to be salved and the status quo to continue. What is really needed here is infrastructure: employment, education, covered drains, clean water, sewage disposal and a permanent clinic. We’d like to believe that this island and its people will one day have what they need, rather than just more jolly bougainvillea. We’d like to believe in one day.

When I was a child, we lived inside the war.  Our parents went away sometime during the last year, leaving me and my sister, Olly, to fend for ourselves amidst the rubble.  Our house was old and solid, made of stone, and the shelling had mostly been to the other side of town, so all the walls of the house were still intact and there were only a few holes in the roof.  Most of the windows had shattered, but we covered our bedroom’s windows with trash bags taped to the frames, and that mostly kept the wind and rain out, except for the windiest, rainiest nights, but those were few and far between.  It was awfully dry that year, in fact, which created its own problems — after the well ran out, we got our water from the river, but the river water was full of bacteria and we didn’t always have enough fire to boil it.  We were often sick.

The day J.C. died, we were healthy, though, because there had been some rain recently, but not enough to bring out lots of mold and mildew, and that day itself was one of the sunniest of the spring.  Because of the good weather, Olly and I decided to go into town and see if the war had ended.  It hadn’t, but we discovered Mrs. Carter had died in the night and we were able to take some of the onions and carrots she had stored up.  We felt guilty about stealing food, and so we were always grateful to find people who had recently died.  We took our snacks out to the town common and sat down for a picnic.  Before the war, the common had had a bandstand and a grove of trees, but people had taken the bandstand apart for firewood and the trees had been shattered during a bombing raid, so there wasn’t much to separate the common from the street except for occasional tufts of grass, but we remembered the bandstand and we remembered the trees and so it was still the common to us.

It’s impossible to know if J.C. recognized it as the common, too, but it was the place where he came to die.  He had arrived in town soon after our parents went away, and he lived in a little cottage less than a mile down the road from our house.  The old man who had lived there (and whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it) left right after the war began.  J.C. occasionally talked to us, but mostly he kept to himself.  He was tall and skinny, with a head that was too big for his body.  He wore clothes he seemed to have made himself, and he didn’t have any skill as a tailor.  He said his name was Jesu Cristo, but we could call him J.C.  He said he was God incarnate.  He said he was the savior.  He said he would bring peace on Earth.  He asked us if we believed in him, and Olly said he was standing right there in front of us so we didn’t need to believe in him.  This seemed to make him sad, and he went back to his cottage, and we didn’t talk to him again for a little while, though now and then we would see him out staring at the sky and we would wave to him, but he didn’t wave back.  “Maybe,” Olly said, “he doesn’t believe in us.”  I told her not to be silly, but I didn’t really think she was silly, it was just something to say.

Later, we saw J.C. carrying things into the cottage in big blue bags from the post office.

“Is the mail working again?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.  “I’m building a temple.”

“What for?”

“Contemplation,” he said.  “Prayer.  Don’t you know what a temple is?”

“Sure,” I said.  “But I thought they had to be old.”

“No,” J.C. said.  “Anybody can make a temple.  It takes a lot of work, though.”

He went into his cottage and I heard the door lock.  I went back to our house and found Olly working on the mud castle she was building on the dining room table.  She spent a lot of time on this castle, bringing dirt in from a hole she had dug in the front yard.  She spent a lot of time trying to get the crenellations at the top of the walls to be perfectly even.

“That’s not a castle,” I said.

“Yes it is,” Olly said.

“No,” I said.  “It’s a temple.”

“No, it’s a castle.  I don’t want to build a temple.  I’m building a castle.”

“No you’re not,” I said.

Olly, her face streaming tears, threw a handful of mud at me, screamed, and ran out of the room.

We tended to fight when we got hungry, since we were most irritable when we were most hungry, but we didn’t fight very often, because we always had plenty of space to wander around in alone when we wanted it, so we rarely felt like the other person got in our way.  We had our own little worlds, really.  Olly, for instance, never went up to the third floor of the house, but I spent a lot of time up there, in the places our mother had called “the servant’s quarters”, though we never had any servants.  I brought our stuffed animals up there, because after our parents left, Olly had grown scared of all the teddy bears.  (The only things she seemed attached to were a few little rocks she had given names to and carried around in her pockets.)  I arranged the animals to sit in rows and pretended I was their teacher, telling them all the truths of the world.  I told them about the giant man who held the Earth up in space so that we wouldn’t all die, and I told them about the dinosaurs that ate the cavemen, and I told them that all the stars in the sky were lights from rocketships that were flying through the ten bazillion miles of space to come get us and bring us to Heaven, and I told them that humans are the only animals that can speak English and this is why we are the rulers of everything.

Olly and I spent much of our time together, though, because Olly liked to hear the stories I told her.  At first, I told her stories about the things our parents were doing out in the world — fighting evil witches and dastardly kings, working as spies for the government, flying in warplanes and bombing remote regions of the Earth.  Olly didn’t seem to understand these stories, but she liked them.  As she got older, though, she asked for stories about other people.  I told her about Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman.  She especially liked the story of how Wonder Woman discovered that Superman was insane and used her powers to tie him up and then smash his head in with a boulder.  “She had to hit him again and again, didn’t she?” Olly asked.  “Yes,” I said.  “He was very strong, and she had to smash his head in over and over and over again to kill him.”  We laughed a lot at that, and then Olly began to sing, and soon I joined her:

She smashed his head in

over and over and over again

and over and over and over again

and over and over and over again!

Eventually, I began to tell Olly stories about J.C.  In my stories, he was a wandering wizard who had lost his powers, but he didn’t know why, and so he was making his way through the world to find out what had turned him into a mortal man.  I couldn’t seem to bring the story to a conclusion, I couldn’t figure out why J.C. had lost his powers or how he could get them back, and Olly asked me to stop telling her stories about him because they made her sad, so we went back to Wonder Woman and Batman.  I even brought Superman back from the dead so Wonder Woman could smash his head in again.

As we had our picnic on the common, I heard movement behind me and turned around and at first I didn’t recognize J.C.  He was naked and purple.  He had found some paint of some sort and covered every inch of his body with it.  He stood on a big rock at the other end of the common from us and held his arms out to his side.  He couldn’t close his eyes because he had covered them with paint.  The paint had sunk deep into his pores and clogged them.  His skin couldn’t breathe.  He stood there for a long time — it felt like hours, but I doubt it was much more than a minute or two — and then he fell over, flat onto his face.  I didn’t do anything, just stared, but Olly ran to him.

“Get up, J.C.,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“I like purple,” she said.  And then, more quietly: “Why won’t you get up?”

I went to him and stuck my ear down next to his mouth to see if I could hear him breathing.  I couldn’t.  I moved my head down to his chest to listen for his heart, but I didn’t hear that either.  I took Olly’s hand.  “Come on,” I said.  “Maybe he has some food and stuff in his cottage.”

“Why did he die?” Olly asked me as we walked down the road.

“I don’t know,” I said.   “Or, I mean, I know the paint, the purple stuff on his skin, that could have done it.  Probably.  But I don’t know why he painted himself purple or if he knew what would happen.  I guess he did know what would happen, though.  At the end.  It seemed that way.  Don’t you think?”

“Sure,” Olly said.

The cottage was built from cinderblocks and stones and mud.  It had a rusty tin roof.  From outside it didn’t look like much, but inside it was cozy.  It wasn’t as small as it seemed from outside — there was one main room, but it was at least as big as our dining room, the largest room I’ve ever been in, and there was a little bedroom at the back, beside the kitchen nook.  I immediately began to think about moving in.  The single fireplace would probably be enough to keep the cottage warm through the winter, unlike our house, where even if we had been able to light a fire in every fireplace, the house never would have gotten very warm, given the tall ceilings and all the broken windows.  Some of the windows in the cottage were still whole, and the ones that were broken had been carefully covered with thick boards.

We didn’t find any food, though, or any evidence of food having been eaten there.  What had J.C. lived on?  I imagined him foraging in the woods, chewing on berries and grass, gobbling dirt.

Then Olly found a trap door in the bedroom that led down into an apparently deep and very dark cellar.

“I don’t want to go down there,” Olly said.

“Me neither,” I said.  “But there could be food.  It looks like a good place for storage.”  I started to look for a candle in the kitchen when Olly called me back to the bedroom — she’d found a flashlight under the bed.

“It’ll never work,” I said, but I was wrong.  “Those’ve got to be the most powerful batteries in the history of batteries.”

Olly handed me the flashlight and I pointed it down into the cellar.  A wooden ladder led down at least ten feet to a stone floor.  I began the descent.

There was food — shelves of it, in cans and jars and bottles.  The metal shelves ran from the floor to the ceiling on three sides of the ladder.  The cellar was larger than the cottage, at least twice its size.  I shined the light ahead — the shelves continued on and on, filled not only with food but with artifacts from the old world: books and newspapers, computers, dolls, tools, pens and pencils, cups, bowls, framed photographs, portable music players, sheets, towels, clothing of every imaginable sort…

I finally reached the end of the shelves and discovered there a little bed and desk.  The chair at the desk was small, like Olly’s chair in the bedroom at our house.  The floor was sticky with something, and I shined the light down.  At first I thought it was a pool of blood, but then I realized it was the purple paint.  Cans of spray paint lay scattered in a corner, covered with purple fingerprints.

On the desk, I found a battery-powered lamp and turned it on.  The desk was covered with bits of paper with strange drawings on them — stick figures, mostly, in abstract landscapes, or what I took to be landscapes.  Only one of the pieces of paper had any writing on it, but I’ve kept it with me ever since.  It took me days to decipher it all, the handwriting was so tiny, the letters so indistinct from each other.  As far as I can tell, this is what was written on the paper:

THE REVALASHUNS OF JESU CRISTO

I have been alive 100000 years now LORD my GOD and you have in those 100000 years tormented me always with your ABSENSE! and I want to no only what I am sposed to no but you will not even let me have that.  You are DEATH!  That is all I no.  I AM LIFE – I LORD AM LIFE!  This is my revalashun.  This is the only truth you have reveeled to me.  This is the only thing I bleve and becuz I bleve it I no it is the TRUTH.  This is the war this is the true war this.  You are death.  I am life.  I am life.  I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM!!!!!!

Looking at this now, typed, free of its yellowed paper and red ink and strange, minuscule handwriting, the words seem ridiculous.  I am tempted to laugh.  But when I first read them down in the darkness of the cellar, the shadows kept barely at bay by the low-powered lamp, the effect was a mix of absolute terror and profound sadness.  I stared at the paper, puzzling out the words — LORD GOD ABSENSE DEATH I AM LIFE I LORD AM LIFE TRUTH I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM — and my hands shook and my legs felt like their bones had softened and my heart sped up so that I could feel every drop of blood shooting through my veins.

I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM!!!!!!

I grabbed the paper and ran past the shelves and back to the ladder and burst up into the afternoon sunlight.

Olly lay asleep on the blue and white quilt that covered the bed, but she woke when I looked at her.

“What did you find?”

“A lot,” I said.

“A lot good or a lot bad?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Food.  Things.  All sorts of things.  I think J.C. was collecting them.  Hoarding, collecting, I don’t know.  Something.  The temple.  I think he brought all this here from somewhere else.  If this was all here when the old man was here, why would he have left?”

“That all sounds good.”

“Yes,” I said.  I put the paper down on the quilt.  Olly looked at it.

“I can’t read it,” she said.  “Or not most of it.  What is it?”

“Something J.C. wrote.  I don’t know what it is.”

“That’s okay,” Olly said.  “It’s nice to have something from him.  We can remember him this way and tell stories about him and tell people what he was like.  Later.  Don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said.

The war lasted another two years.  We moved into the cottage and lived there until the end.  Our parents never came back, but we didn’t expect them to.  Nobody really came back, but new people arrived.  Serious people, people with empty eyes.  Some of them wanted our cottage, but we had found guns in the cellar and ammunition and we had used them to hunt squirrels and rabbits and deer, so we knew how to use them to protect ourselves.  But we didn’t have to protect ourselves for too long.  People mostly left us alone once things got more settled.  I began to be able to sleep through the nights again.  Olly got her stories from the books she found in the cellar, and I read them too, though not as many and not as often.

And then Olly went away to get married, and I was alone in the cottage, and have been alone for some time now.  I tried to tell people about J.C., but nobody wanted to hear stories about anything from before the war.

A few days ago, the food finally ran out.  The last things I ate were some pickled beets.  I’d never much liked beets.  I should have saved something I liked for the end.

It didn’t have to be the end, I suppose.  I could have planted a garden, I could have even gone shopping at the new grocery store in town, but it felt somehow like a betrayal, and so I never did.  I just ate what was in the cellar, until now there is nothing left to eat.

I wrote Olly a letter, telling her all about the changes, about how the common has been paved over so there will be, they say, fewer traffic jams.  I told her the food was mostly gone.  I told her she should come visit, and that I’d save some food for her.  (But I didn’t.  I’ve lied about so many things, why not lie about that?  She wouldn’t expect anything else.)  She’ll laugh when she reads the letter, if she reads the letter.  She’s only written to me once, quite some time ago.  “I used to love your stories,” she said.  ”We lived on stories, didn’t we?  Stories aren’t truth, though, and after everything that’s happened, I just want some truth.”

I should have written her another letter.  I should have apologized for not coming up with a good ending for the stories about J.C.  I wish I had thought of some way for the wizard to regain his powers.  I hadn’t meant to upset her, I just wanted to pass some time.

I know when she saw him all covered in purple, Olly thought J.C. had become a wizard again — and then, when he fell, that whatever forces had taken his powers had done something even worse.

I’m sorry, Olly.  He was just a crazy man.  There were a lot of them in those days, don’t you remember?  (There still are, I suppose, but they are more hidden now.)  I shouldn’t have given him meaning for you.  That’s the only thing I regret.

Her handwriting was remarkably neat and clear.  That is what I remember thinking as I let the letter fall into the fire.

I wake up in the darkness every night.  I reach for the flashlight, but the batteries have long since died.

I am hungry.  If you were here now, Olly, that is what I would tell you.  I am hungry.

A little German boy in town told me that in his language they do not say, “I am hungry,” but rather, “I have hunger.”  It is not who you are.  It is a possession that can be shed.

(She smashed his head in over and over and over again, and over and over and over again, and over and over and over again.)

The beets were a deep, rich shade of purple.  Almost the deepest purple I have ever seen.  They stained my hands and mouth, and when I saw my palms covered with the purple juice, I cried for the first time since we were children one hundred thousand years ago.

We dedicate this issue to risk takers, caretakers, and survivors.

-The Editors, Nita Noveno & Caroline Berger
-Assistant Editor, Barbara Sueko McGuire

HELP TEAM CAFÉ AND THE PEOPLE OF BENGUET

Special thanks to writers Padmapani L. Perez and Luisa A. Igloria for connecting our communities.

In early October, devastating typhoons hit regions of Luzon, the Philippines’ largest island. In Benguet Province, families of farmers lost land in the mountains that has been passed on through generations. Entire mountains collapsed. Landslides buried homes and people, rivers flooded and carried away livelihoods. Sunday Salon would like to support Team Café’s on-going efforts in the recovery process.

During the 1991 killer earthquake Café by the Ruins in Baguio City, set up a soup kitchen to feed families that lost their homes in Baguio. With Typhoon Pepeng, Team Café did the same, delivering hot meals to evacuation centers in the municipalities of Tublay and Itogon for ten days. Then, the Team distributed kitchen starters to each displaced family so that they could take these with them to their new homes when they relocate.

Now Team Café is raising funds to help them rebuild their future.

Their objective is to respect the dignity of the families they’ve been helping in the past weeks. On behalf of Sunday Salon, Team Café, friends and the people of Benguet, thank you for being our supportive partners in this endeavor. Please check out Café by the Ruins Facebook page where you’ll find photos, videos, and information on what they have been doing since October 10.

For donations please deposit to:
Account Name: Ruins Inc.
Account Number: 940139510
BDO (Banco de Oro) Legarda Branch, Baguio
Yandoc St.

For international deposits:
SWIFT code BNORPHMM
ROUTING# 0210-0001-8.

A message from Baguio City resident Padmapani L. Perez of Team Café:

More recently, we have delivered kitchen starter kits to these families. Each starter kit was composed of 8 kg of rice, some dried fish, beans, cooking oil, a pot, pan, kitchen knife and other basic necessities. As of October 21, we have delivered 153 of these kits to the communities that we had been serving over the past week and we have about 100 more to deliver. The kits were received with great enthusiasm and thanks by the families affected in the slides caused by “Pepeng.”

Our work is not yet done and we are looking toward continued communication and projects with the families that we have already been working with. We are still looking at the feasibility of several ideas. Three of the ideas that were floated, which we think the Café can facilitate with the funds that we have (and are still receiving), are:

a) Pay-per-seedling tree-planting activities in the heavily eroded areas (once the ground has stabilized). Those affected by Pepeng will be asked to participate and will be paid for every seedling they plant-a temporary green job, so to speak! This way, we all participate in the healing of the land.

b) Distribution of solar chargers to approximately 200 families in distant Tublay barangays, which may be without electricity for over a year due to the extent of damage from landslides. These will keep cell phones charged so communication won’t be cut off and their kids will have light to do school work. A solar panel kit costs P2500 (about $50 US) only. Our mountaineering volunteers can carry these across the landslides on their backs.

c) Distribute a pig for every family to raise (or to sell if they prefer). Here in the mountains, pigs are precious property.

Why Believe? by Salon Staff

FICTION

Death Becomes Us by Tim Kreider

Revelations by Matt Cheney

NON-FICTION

One Day by Annabel Lucy Smith

Poor Her Soul by Mira Ptacin

Pinheads No More by Chris Grillo

POETRY

Composure by Louisa A. Igloria

Birthmark by Prabhakar Vasan

Noise by Cheryl Burke

Consider by Diane Schenker

Yes No Yes by Diane Schenker

INTERVIEWS

Nancy Agabian by Nita Noveno

It is, again, unsafe.
At least, it is unclear.

animals, their dark forms when they crouch at the margins of the freeway

The city is charred, as
from a blast. Or the eyes are.
The mind is crumbling into
its own foundations. Or
the homes are. Waiting, even,
is a taut state, the drone
of current through a wire.

silent, tense, they search for a space in which to cross

And negotiations unravel.
Language, a dried gauze, fails
to keep this clean.
Exposes to the air the burnt
stump still raw. Flesh painful
just to look at. The burn wound.
Which refuses to scab over.
Endures like a birthmark.

how we must blur and roar past them

Any impulse must originate in
and move outwards from
this margin of ruin. Quickly.
With little or no allowance

made for the margin of error.
A feint, say, or a blind lunge.

they know we will annihilate them if their calculations contain the slightest imprecision

At this time, in this state,
to stand off and witness
may be better

they know we will not slow down, will not stop until we are well past them

or may not
be viable.

within one of them, under the steaming fur, the main nerve signals NOW and it lunges into

Now is the winter of our inevitable results, unavoidably determined by prior conditions.

Essential? Absolutely. Logically. Required.

Convention, on the other hand, dictates plenty of things that are none of its business. Poke convention in the eye with a sharp stick.

Effects are not always what they seem. Beware faulty reverse engineering. It only seems logical.

S seh seh seh incessant abscess accede exceed concede proceed recede secede ancestor. S.

So what, that’s my motto. So fucking what.

Absolutely essential, needed,

Required—what small, scratchy volume contains the overlap of necessity and love? Will you tell me?

Yes I said yes I will Yes.

Consider housekeeping, consider the rain. Consider
the fly dancing on the window. It herky-jerks its
relentless heartbreak of trying to get out.

A fall warbler appears on the seedy maple stuffing
itself for its long flight, feathers weathery dull in

post-connubial anonymity, hard to identify.
Consider the dirty window. You lift it to see more
clearly. The fly stumbles up with it, then out.

The warbler is gone but you can see the rain, its
needled finery gently wetting the patient, nodding
trees. They gossip in whispers among themselves.

Consider the lifetimes spinning out before you, each
small choice weights in one direction or another:

1) You stare out the window with notebook and
pen, channeling the array of tiny beauties before you.

2) You rummage for bucket, sponge and squeegee,
vinegar? ammonia? the window needs cleaning. You
clean it and the rest of them, too, for you are responsible
and efficient. You take a nap.

3) You stare out the window, on the limb of your
thought of how dirty the window is, it really should
be washed. This grey tatter grows between you
and the real rain. The notebook dies on the table.

Consider. Choose a door. Open it. Think
of what is the most important house to keep.

The Community Choir of the Community

BY TIM KREIDER

The news spread quickly that he was gone. And while nobody could deny that a vast emptiness now laid claim to some part of the world, some later would suggest that he had been disappearing for a long time.

Now this needs to be qualified. Nobody really noticed this gradual and subtle disappearance until after he had died. Only then did a contingent led by Hank Mortibund, Old Man Mortibund’s youngest, put forth the claim that he had been gradually disappearing over a length of time, as if to prepare the rest us for the time when he would no longer be with us. Little Ginny Peepholtz, bless her heart, wondered if we don’t start dying the day we are born.

If Hank meant that Jimmy had been such a part of the Community that he had become almost invisible to us most of the time, then maybe they were onto something. Nowadays, it is pretty much consensus throughout the Community that he was the bedrock. That’s much easier to say in hindsight. The fact of the matter is, he was just one of those things that was always there but without special notice, which I guess you could argue is what a bedrock really is.

The Task Force assigned to uncover and report what it was about Jimmy that had such an effect on the Community produced only insignificant data and eventually succumbed to internal squabbling and disbanded. Perhaps Gwen Wolfington, a former colleague of Jimmy’s, put it best in her interview for the Documentary. “When we were around Jimmy, he somehow just made us more than we otherwise could’ve been. But it’s only now that he’s gone that we realize it.” Nobody could really explain exactly what Gwen was talking about, especially in light of her severe stutter, but we all had an idea of what she meant.

A few members of the Community- Mr. and Mrs. Pianissimo, Reverend Hodges’ mother, Old Man Mortibund, remembered the time before he was there. But most of us didn’t know life without Jimmy until now. This is what caused Junior the most trouble.

You see, one of the lobes of Junior’s brain had been measured as abnormally large. It was put forth by some that this oversized lobe housed Junior’s extraordinary imaginative capacity. Junior used his imagination to prepare himself for any and all possibilities that could beset us. Junior had imagined numerous scenarios prior to Jimmy’s passing. He had pictured every possible scene of life with Jimmy in it. Junior could just as easily envision Jimmy’s smile as he gazed upon his future grandchild, Junior’s little niece or nephew, now just a newly fertilized egg in Junior’s sister’s womb, as he could remember the glint in Jimmy’s eyes when Junior ran off the field after catching his very first Little League fly ball. He could just as easily smell the new seats of Jimmy’s next car as he could recollect the fresh mint of Jimmy’s breath as he tucked him into bed each night. He could just as easily hear Jimmy’s voice going over retirement figures as he could recall the advice he had been given concerning any of a number of miscellany- how to tie a Windsor knot, whether to sacrifice the knight or the rook, what type of weather a “flock of sheep” cloud formation preceded. All of these scenarios Junior had foreseen. But what Junior had failed to imagine was a life without Jimmy.

This caused major problems for Junior. Like most people, Junior only thought of the future he imagined for himself, and that future always contained Jimmy right where he always was. There was no other way to think about it. Junior could’ve prepared himself, could’ve envisioned a future without Jimmy just once during his daily musings, just once. But why would he? A future without Jimmy certainly wouldn’t make for pleasant daily musing. Junior was accustomed to only experiencing what he had first imagined. This allowed Junior to react to anything in what Dr. Jenkins referred to as a “staid” manner. But when Junior was informed that Jimmy was gone, his lack of imaginative preparation for the situation caused this staid manner to be thrown out the window, along with the telephone, the Brahms record, the spider plant, and anything else he could get his hands on before being restrained by his companion. Much later, in a journal article that was largely ignored by most in his field due to its redundancy, Dr. Jenkins wrote that Junior was dead until this moment, in which he became alive for the first time. And nothing would prepare Junior for what was to follow.

Junior left the Community (voluntarily) long before Jimmy passed. He needed to find his own community, or have a community find him, or find that he didn’t need any community, or have all communities find they didn’t need him. He wasn’t quite sure.

Of course Junior remembered his lessons at the Center about Emily Dickinson, and how she lived her whole adult life without leaving the grounds of her childhood home. And of course he didn’t get the lesson at the time, but sometime later he realized the merits of this- the heightened attentiveness to one’s immediate surroundings, the intimate knowledge of detail, and how this could benefit the imagery of his own poetry. But Junior didn’t write poetry.

He returned to our Community periodically, feeling at home in the way he felt at home as a child but also feeling alienated in the way an adult visiting a community not his own might feel. His visits were brief, stopping by on his way to or from some other place. But a community needs time to really penetrate an individual. Junior showed up from time to time but never really stayed long enough to remember the muted sound of the pine forest covered in fresh snow, or how Mrs. Danticoat would wave to the children at the bus stop from the end of her lane every morning as she picked up the paper, or how the bark of the trees turned a magical red in the fading sun, the brownness momentarily transformed into some brand new color amidst the orange glow of everything else, or where the twists in a conversation with Mr. Sauers might end up by the time Mrs. Sauers called him back to the house. The Community is an embroidered quilt. The complexity and substance are in the details, and Junior had ceased to look very closely since he had moved on.

So Junior wouldn’t necessarily know what was going on with Cher Atlas. He wouldn’t necessarily know that Cher was feeling the loss of Jimmy more strongly than some. Cher felt an actual physical emptiness inside of her. She felt incomplete, like a part of her was now missing as well. She went to the Clinic, underwent a battery of tests- MRI, CAT scan, and the like, but the experts couldn’t find anything missing. It all seemed to be there, right where it should.

With the medical assurance, Cher began not to notice the emptiness as much. But as this sensation dissipated, it was replaced by an unbelievable burden. Cher soon felt a tremendous responsibility, for whom or for what she could not quite identify (nor could the specialists at the Clinic quantify), which only added to the discomfort of this new feeling. Whenever Cher closed her eyes to try to go to sleep, this burden would creep from her shoulders into her gut. But sometimes, when her eyes were open, she saw things, things that were always there. But in ways she had never before seen them.

Although also unbeknownst to Junior, this too was especially true for Juanny Waxman. Some days the rays of sun shot magically down through the clouds like spears and it was like he was seeing the whole world through polarized sunglasses. But it all started when the sun began to go down that first day after Jimmy had gone. The sun that evening looked as if it had been hurled by God at the canvas of the sky, splatting against it in a form of divine abstract expressionism and spraying colors everywhere. Now of course Juanny had seen sunsets before, and even a Willem de Kooning exhibit once on a class trip to the Museum, but in the days after Jimmy’s passing he somehow didn’t seem so far away from them. He was no longer looking at these sunsets as much as they were happening to him. It was like he stepped outside of time, even though the spectacle he was witnessing was one of constant change, of time itself.

The days following the disappearance of Jimmy had a similar effect on Peng. Since the age of eleven, Peng’s tiny forearm hairs, on rare occasions, would rise during certain moments of certain songs. Other times, Peng could listen to these same songs without any reaction. Sometimes she would even have to force herself just to keep listening, forbidding her mind to drift from the music, in order to try to recapture the arm hair-raising experience she found so desirable. But Peng quickly found she couldn’t seek out these moments. She would play the pieces that triggered these moments over and over again, even turning the volume up at times, and although it was the same music, she could never seem to replicate the experience she sought, leaving her forearm hairs lying limply on her skin. What Peng didn’t realize was that it wasn’t the music in itself, but that the music struck a chord with something in her. So while she still played her records, she became resigned to the notion that most of the time, short of these sporadic transcendental experiences, she wasn’t really listening. And she couldn’t help but wonder, if she wasn’t really listening most of the time, what else was she missing?

So she was taken by surprise when, in the days immediately after Jimmy’s passing, while feeling that loss, she again heard the music the way she had in those fleeting moments. It first happened during a Lauridsen Chorale, a chorale she had heard hundreds of times. But for the first time, she was hearing what she could only imagine the Chorale had aspired to be. If Peng were not so self-conscious to speak in such terms, she might have said the music transported her. And this happened again and again and again in those days after Jimmy’s passing. Not only with the Lauridsen Chorale, but with the Roches and Abbey Road and Bach and Rosemary Clooney. The forearm hairs had risen.

In the void of this place in Junior’s brain, the place unaccounted for in Junior’s imagination- life without Jimmy; Junior’s mind literally went blank. He forgot how to get back home, back to the Community, to where he was now called. When he reached for his map, it was not there. How does one go about finding a lost map? A desperate perplexity replaced the initial rage Junior had experienced. Dr. Jenkins did not comment on this particular stage.

Jimmy had gained some renown amongst the amateur cartographers in the region with his savvy topographical skills, his extremely accurate relief renderings in particular. And although Junior didn’t know it until this very moment, Jimmy himself had served as a kind of relief map for Junior, guiding him through life’s peaks and valleys. But now as Junior futilely searched for the map in the shadowed corners of his apartment, it became apparent that he would need to be guided in some other way.

With Junior unable to reliably recall this journey, perhaps no one will ever know exactly how Junior found his way back to the Community on this fateful night. We do know from the series of firsthand interviews with Junior conducted by Strom Jackman and his team in the months following Jimmy’s passing that at some time between leaving his apartment and reaching the limits of the Community, Junior decided he no longer wished to find the Community. It has been widely speculated that it was this change of mind that actually put Junior on the right path to the Community.

And so Junior paused for the first time just outside the Community. He paused because he was scared to enter, because of what he might find, or more aptly, because of what he knew he wouldn’t find. The Community could not be the same without Jimmy. He paused because he needed to pause. He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t ready for Jimmy to leave and he wasn’t ready to continue without Jimmy. So he paused.

He thought again of the photo that had shown up in the mail just days before from an aunt or a cousin once removed, somebody he did not remember from the family Christmas parties of his youth. The envelope contained no note, only a photo of Junior as a toddler crawling out Jimmy’s outstretched legs as they rested on the ottoman. Junior didn’t need any of those psychology classes his sister used to take at the Center in order to draw his own conclusions. He recognized himself as an extension of Jimmy, something he could crawl from the heart of but never actually stand on his own and run from. He saw that all of his strivings were dependent on Jimmy’s support. Junior could venture out, but would always be guided by Jimmy.

Where were those legs now? Were they taken out from under him? Was he in the midst of falling? “And how far below was the floor?” Junior wondered aloud. But nobody was listening.

Junior could never really know if what took place in the Community over the next several days had started before he entered or if it had all been triggered by his arrival, like a symphony waiting for the conductor’s baton to rise. And whether or not Junior’s realization that a pause was, by definition, temporary, set something else, something much bigger in motion, or whether that something else was a force of its own, something so powerful that it set itself in motion, the only thing Junior could know for certain was that when he finally was carried into the Community, it was like a Venn diagram, where Heaven touched down close to earth, and those on earth reached up to their highest, and the two, ever so briefly, met as one.

Since there still exists a sizable faction that would argue that it was all because of Smiley Keyes, the mute boy who had grown up and done well for himself with bit parts as a film and television actor (mostly commercials), the story of Smiley Keyes should probably be recounted.Smiley did cry as an infant, as infants are wont to do. But Mrs. Keyes remembers Smiley’s sobs being different from the crying of her other six children. Smiley’s was a long, drawn-out wailing, more of a lament than a sudden outburst of discomfort, like a tremendous sadness from being in this world was rising up from deep within and seeping out of his mouth.

So Mrs. Keyes was almost relieved when it finally and abruptly ceased at the age of 19 months, until it became apparent that nothing more, no sounds whatsoever, would come from that little mouth. Oh, how Mrs. Keyes would yearn for something, anything, even the long, slow wail of woefulness she had almost grown accustomed to in those first 19 months.

She can remember clearly the day it stopped. She had gone over it, minute-by-minute, a million and one times, searching for what Dr. Jenkins referred to as the “critical transitional episode.” But try as she might, nothing. Truth be told, that day was just as ordinary as all the rest in the Community, except of course for the fact of it being the last day anybody heard so much as a peep from the lips of little Smiley Keyes.

But for as much as he was teased by the other schoolchildren during his Mainstreaming and developmentally stunted by the misguided methodology of the then fashionable Mackenzie System, which was embraced by the Center (and everywhere else) for a few academic years during the heyday of Exclusionism, Smiley possessed an inordinate amount of resiliency. Anyone who looked at Smiley for even an instant would see this. You couldn’t help but be captivated by Smiley’s eyes, the literal windows to his soul. Because soon after his “critical transitional episode” at 19 months, whatever that was, Smiley began to speak through his eyes.

Smiley’s instructor at the Deaf Jam Summer Drama Workshops, Earlene Mundle, is credited with being the first to recognize Smiley’s unique gift, the power he held in his gaze. Later, when he was sent to the Clinic for a battery of tests, his optic nerve was measured at twice that of normal size. But Science couldn’t fully explain the phenomenon. Smiley’s eyes not only spoke, but spoke with inflection. His eyes gave meaning to that for which we do not yet have definitions. And eventually Smiley cashed in on this, garnering as large a role as commercials would cast for a non-speaking part.

As people lined up that day to pay their respects, Smiley could not bear to look up. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he opened his eyes as himself anymore, rather than through another character he had taken on, so different and separate from himself. He wasn’t sure what might come out. And that is why he cast those eyes downward, away from all others. He was afraid of what he might see when he looked with his own eyes into the eyes of not another character but another person, especially Junior, whose eyes awaited his at the head of the line.

Smiley didn’t really know Junior and hadn’t really known Jimmy either. Smiley and Junior were some years apart, their paths rarely crossed, and Smiley didn’t speak anyway. Smiley was, however, acutely aware of the fact that everyone in the line of which he now found himself a part had just the right things to say to Junior. He could even feel the breath of Admiral Samples on the back of his neck, reciting the words he had written on a note card and would speak when his turn came.
As the line inched ahead, Smiley overheard the non-words of Mrs. Shepherd, “I don’t even know what to say in a time like this, Junior. There are no words.”

17 more words than I have, Smiley counted to himself, staring at a small run near the ankle of Mrs. Shepherd’s stocking and willing it to somehow stay that small forever, even though he knew that with each movement it would inevitably grow.

As Mrs. Shepherd moved on, Smiley stepped up and extended his hand to Junior. Smiley felt Junior’s hand clasp his own. Junior’s shoes were shined. In them, Smiley could almost recognize himself amidst all of the reflected light from above. And then he felt Junior pulling him closer. Except he wasn’t actually moving. He remembered his late grandmother, always nagging him about his slouched posture, telling him to imagine helium balloons tied to each ear, pulling him up straight, all the while with her index finger delving sharply into his lumbar to help prod his imagination. And this is exactly what he felt at that very moment, both the balloons tied to his ears and the finger in his lower back. And he did what he didn’t think he could do, what he swore he wouldn’t do. He slowly lifted his head, following the buttons of Junior’s shirt, until he found himself looking right into Junior’s eyes. Again he felt himself being pulled even closer. But still he remained in the same spot.

And so he stood and faced Junior. And as he looked into the eyes of Junior, he saw both the look in Junior’s eyes and the look of his own eyes. He saw the deep lament of the last sounds from his mouth. But he also saw this lament transformed. And he knew as he looked into Junior’s eyes that he was both giving something to Junior and taking something for himself.
Then Smiley opened his mouth. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t decide to open his mouth at that moment. And he didn’t know what was going to happen next.

He heard a faint whisper. “I know.”

Smiley knew as well. He didn’t know exactly what they both knew, but he just knew they knew. And that was good enough.

And because there are others that will tell you it was simply the song by the Barbershop Quartet, it would be unfair not to expand on that story as well.

The Barbershop Quartet had fallen on hard times, most wouldn’t know there even existed a Barbershop Quartet in the Community. Three of the members had long since passed their prime, the fourth had died several years ago. They had made a name for themselves in their younger days, crisscrossing the land with their four-part harmonies and unusual arrangements of traditional favorites. But as the banality of wives, houses, children, and careers came to replace the idylls of youth as they almost always do, the Quartet’s diminishing dedication to rehearsals became evident in their final product. The Quartet was stung by the chillier receptions they were now apt to receive as a result, and the ensuing disgruntlement among the members led to the expected in-fighting, which led to disharmony and rumors of a breakup. One member thought the Quartet to be nothing more than an idyll of youth. One disappeared into deep bouts with depression and alcoholism. One wanted to move in a different direction artistically, composing songs for the church choir. One was lost at sea when his Piper Cub mysteriously malfunctioned.

The three surviving members of the Quartet did stay in contact, and talks of reunions surfaced every few years. However, they faced some challenges with the four-part harmonies with which they had made a name for themselves (“The Barbershop Quartet”). So most of the reunions consisted of the three surviving members meeting in someone’s rec room or basement, reminiscing about the old days over glasses of sparkling cider or grape, swapping stories about Fantasy Spring Training Camp in Arizona or the new Candy Striper down at the Clinic, and voting on names for the Quartet in its new form (“The Three Surviving Members”, “3/4″).

So this is where things stood with the Quartet at the time of Jimmy’s passing. They sat in one of the surviving member’s converted basement that was now a rec room and talked about what the Quartet would do in response to Jimmy’s passing, what it meant to be the Quartet in a time such as this, and if a new name was needed. Unbeknownst to the three surviving members, similar conversations about the need to respond to Jimmy’s passing, albeit tailored to their own individual hobbies and talents, were taking place in rec rooms and converted basements throughout the Community. But what could the Quartet do in a time like this, especially without a bass?

Very early on the morning following Jimmy’s passing, before the first light of day, it suddenly came to the tenor as he rhythmically paced on the treadmill in his converted basement to the pulsing light of the muted television. At the same time, in his rec room on the other side of the Community, it came to the baritone as he kneeled in early morning prayer at a window in the first light of day. The lead, just a few houses down from the baritone, was stirred from his slumber and rose from the sofa pull-out bed in the rec room to go to the bathroom. As he stood urinating over the toilet, leaning wearily against the wall to his right in the flickering light of the bulb above, it came to him. As if the years of uniting in perfect harmony had eventually come to overtake even their own moments of inspiration, it came to the three remaining members simultaneously and in perfect accord- they just needed to sing.

As if carried there, they each individually dusted off their red and white-striped vests, donned their straw boater’s hats, and headed to the Barbershop. The wondrous, if not somewhat creepy, feeling that arose when they encountered each other entering the Barbershop simultaneously and identically dressed was quickly replaced with the safer aplomb of a raised eyebrow, a chuckle, and some Oh my’s. After each had his mustache trimmed, they stepped out onto the street. The streets were filled with the early morning rush hour crowds of people, but a subdued din due to the circumstances replaced the usual hubbub of the hour. The Quartet warmed up with some exercises they had picked up at the Improv Symposium and Buffet several years before, quickly tuned themselves to pitch, and as if they were 18 again, broke right into the rumbling first verse of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

The three surviving members, each crooning heavenward with eyes closed, became so lost in the harmony they didn’t even realize that for the first time since that tragic Arbor Day when the Piper Cub went down, their sound was complete. They had drowned in four-part harmony. Just behind them, in the doorway of the Barbershop, gripping a broom firmly in one hand and, like the others, with head raised to the sky above and eyes closed, Jacques the Barber, in a slightly wavering at first but beautifully rich bass, joined the three surviving members in encouraging that chariot to swing low. And the sweet chariot, in turn, dipped even lower.

No official invitation was extended to Jacques the Barber. It wasn’t as if contract papers were drawn up on the walk outside the Barbershop. Actually, not a word was spoken. When the three surviving members made their way through the small crowd that had gathered by the song’s conclusion, Jacques naturally followed.

In front of the firehouse, the new Quartet was joined by baritone Fire Chief Mandlebrow in a rousing “Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie.” By the time the group reached the steps of the Courthouse, they had become a chorus of twelve, with another 50 or so following just to listen. Judge Milichamp recessed for “Bill Grogan’s Goat.”

We can’t be certain how aware the three surviving members were of the additional members they had accumulated. They continued to appear absorbed by the harmony, as if their four other senses had each lent all of their capacity to the auditory sense. They hadn’t sung like this in years, not since the Piper Cub went down, really not since several years before that, if ever. And they had never sung “Bill Grogan’s Goat.” They didn’t know where that came from. But on that day, as the morning grew towards noon and the sun rose higher in the sky, and as song filled all of that space, they only knew one thing- they were to keep singing.

And so the three surviving members led their growing group of now 20 singers, along with a good part of the Community in tow, through the streets that morning. Dr. Feldspar, in her Report several months later, was unable to find a coherent pattern to the route that morning after running several of the programs her then unheralded Assistant, Bob Dodd, had written. And so perhaps it will never be known exactly how the Quartet, by that time actually a choir of 32, ended up in the yard in front of the house in which Jimmy had lived.

Junior, in the magical realm somewhere between deep sleep and waking, heard distant voices, beautiful angelic voices, and was that…? Could it be? Yes, it was the words of the old favorite, “I Wouldn’t Trade the Silver in my Mother’s Hair,” that he heard. As the voices grew louder, Junior woke from his dreaming, sat up in his childhood bed, his feet hanging over the end by several inches, and looked around.

The voices were increasing in volume, like they were growing nearer, and as they reached the first chorus of “In Your Own Backyard,” Junior was drawn to them. He approached the window and pulled back the curtain. The light was blinding at first, instantly replacing the darkness the room had been shrouded in. After several moments, as Junior was again able to start to open his eyes, squinting at first, he could begin to make out a crowd in the front yard. As he opened his eyes completely and stood there in the light, what he saw gathered in the front yard was unlike anything he had ever seen. People filled the whole yard, 32 of them singing in the most perfect harmony he had ever heard, and at least, he would estimate, another hundred just standing and listening, with looks on their faces much the same as the look he imagined must have been on his own face, one of pure rapture. And in the front of all of this stood three men in red and white-striped vests, straw boater’s hats, and neatly trimmed mustaches, each with his head raised heavenward and eyes closed. Junior wasn’t even sure if they were aware of the hundred plus people behind them.

With the last note of “In Your Own Backyard” still ringing across the front yard, the three surviving members, but at first only the three surviving members, suddenly burst into the first verse of a new song. Up to this point, almost magically, as if all 32 of them had been rehearsing together for months, each song had begun without introduction, without someone yelling out, “Bill Grogan’s Goat,” or, “I Wouldn’t Trade the Silver in my Mother’s Hair,” without anyone counting off a beat, but with all the singers somehow starting in perfect unison. But now the three surviving members began to sing a number not immediately recognizable to Junior. At first, he thought it might be “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” or perhaps a slightly untraditional arrangement of “Marian the Librarian.” Scholars have argued that the song by the Quartet on this morning on the front lawn of the house in which Jimmy had lived had strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the melody and hints of “Betelehemu” in its structure, but there has never been a consensus regarding the origin of this song. And yet somehow, the other voices soon joined in. And from his window, it sounded to Junior as if the hundred who had gathered heretofore just as listeners now sang along as well.

As the notes of this strange yet somehow familiar new song rose up to the window at which he stood, Junior felt them enter. He knew he was singing but could not be sure if any sounds were coming out of him. And it was just like that that he remained, transfixed at the window. The song from outside, from the Community, was the Community. And now it was also part of him. Some of the emptiness temporarily began to fill.

As the song ended, the last note seemed to ring on, and Junior wondered where exactly it would go when it disappeared. As he thought about it and really listened, he thought he could still hear the last note, albeit evermore faint, in the silence. And as the Quartet and their hangers-on dispersed, Junior thought he might still be able to hear that last note somewhere in the silence. And he wasn’t sure anymore when the music ended and when the silence began. Or even if there was a difference.

But it wasn’t just Smiley Keyes or the song by the Barbershop Quartet. It wasn’t just the sunsets or the tiny hairs on Peng’s forearms. It was all of these and it was everything. It was each raindrop, by themselves inconsequential, landing together to form the puddle in Jimmy’s Spot, into which Junior peered to see in return a fluid form of himself. The puddle would eventually dry up and become part of the earth. It was the cacophonous individual sounds of the crickets blending as one to create the droning hum that whispered, “It’s okay to rest now,” to Junior as he lied in his childhood bed. It was Jimmy’s colleague, Tyco McBrewster, whom Junior had never before met but whom Junior knew to have counted Jimmy as much a friend as a colleague, and whom Junior would eventually turn to for professional advice that was simultaneously knowledgeable, empowering, reassuring, and endearing. It was in Tyco’s voice that Junior heard the voice he had heard in his imaginings of the future with Jimmy, only it was being spoken through a different instrument. It was the fulfillment of a void. But it was a void that didn’t so much happen to Junior as Junior let happen to himself. And what filled the void was always there, ready to fill the space when the time came, like a bud so small it is all but invisible. What Junior felt happening in the Community was always happening. It had just been diluted over time. But now the intent behind all of the things that took place day after day as long as the days kept going- the muted sound of the pine forest covered in fresh snow, Mrs. Danticoat waving to the children from the end of her lane, the red bark of the trees in the fading sun, the twists in a conversation with Mr. Sauers, was reflected in a moment. And the same force that made the Community a community day-in and day-out now thrust itself on Junior in a highly concentrated dose and with a power and glory unlike anything he had heretofore experienced. Junior was enveloped in an embroidered quilt.

And now as Junior stood on the bank with the sun setting behind him and watched the ashes float through the air and drift gently down the stream, he no longer wondered where Jimmy was. He was scattered everywhere. He isn’t the bird, but the space under the bird’s wings as it soars across the sky. Not necessarily sun or flower, but the photosynthesis. He isn’t the note, so much as the chord. Just like he isn’t the person, so much as the community. Jimmy hadn’t gone anywhere. He had gone everywhere.

Everything returns to a source:
gladness to the tree, fruit
to the cradle, flesh from the bone.

Water lashes the roofs in the town,
but also the pink and yellow roses
that appear as if out of nowhere

in a corner of the garden,
where once there was only
a hard rectangle of dirt. But

ask yourself how you truly feel,
what the bones in your ribcage
might be singing

in the silence of night
to each other, as they hold
the stricken heart in place.