Entirely Human

I am one of the walking wounded who lights his way through this absurd void with a perpetually burning heart.

There’s a point when you run, a point when your body finds its rhythm--your meat is contacting, your tendons are pulling and your bones are obeying. Your breath comes deep and even. All your hot blood is pumping and the whole machine is working marvellously. You feel strong, you feel righteous, you feel animal and unstoppable and utterly alive.
And if you’re anything like me, this is about the time all the bullshit drops away. All the crap we built up over the centuries. All the people who’ve convinced us that they’re our betters and the towers we’ve erected for them to rule us from come crumbling down. The clock stops, the bills fade away, order and religion and anything inorganic or unnatural just don’t exist anymore.
The whole fucking edifice of modern life just topples.
And if you know me, then you can understand how appealing this is.

And so it’s as I reach this point--this sublime, primitive moment--that some things begin to occur to me.
Like to simultaneously curse and praise all the walls that came down when the wires went up. And where that lead me. How good and bad things happen when you can connect with a person you’ve never met.
To love and disdain the human element of the edifice I only moments ago watched fall away. Because for all the time I spend lamenting an urban sky obscured by telephone wires; they brought me to someone that, no matter how it plays out, reached through this blighted webscape, pushed through the digital abyss, and made me feel something totally and completely human.
At precisely the point when I wanted to stop feeling anything.

My sneakers scrape gravel and my lungs fight for every breath. Blood rushes through me, my heart is audible to everyone in a one mile radius--I’m sure of it. The sweat lashes off of me, my calves turn to rubber. My eyes stare straight ahead, watching the road cut a swath between frozen, snowy fields.
I grunt, I groan, I let out a short sharp bellow and force myself forward. My body, my mind, will not get the better of me. There’s no quit in me. I’ve never felt this before. My heart burns for a dozen reasons and still I go. I suck cold air through gritted teeth, I taste wood smoke on the air.
And still I go.

Last night was the end of something for me. A shift, a transition, to something else. There’ll be those of you who know what I mean, there’ll be those of you who don’t care.
There are a million and one reasons for it. And the best one I can come up with is that it was time. Time for two people who still care very deeply about each other to separate themselves while they still care. Time for two people who’ve been through everything to face what’s ahead on their own.
Time for two people to be two people.

My feet throb, sweat pools in the soles of my cheap sneakers. My chest feels like a tire with a slow leak. I grind my teeth and watch the sweat fall from my brow, soaking my sweater. I’m running on emotion now. There’s nothing in the tank. I left it all out on a country road.
I spent it all.
In the snow and mud of my backyard I collapse. I fall to my knees, pressing them into the cold earth. I raise my torso, point my chest at the sky.
Across the backyard my neighbour sees this all. He sees this--this sweat-drenched, gasping man kneeling in the mud in shorts and what he says is, “Looks like someone had a spiritual experience.”
And I say, “No. Nope. Entirely human.”
And I get up and go inside.

And you--yeah, you; you know who you are--you’ve come into my life at a very strange time. I guess we’ve come into each others lives at a very strange time--and if I believed in things like fate and destiny I’d probably be very afraid.
But I do believe in coincidence, and happy accidents. And now, in very happy accidents.
You’ve helped me realise some things about myself. And I hope you’ll stick around while I sort through these things I’m feeling and experiencing.
I hope I can make it worth your while. I imagine I can. I hope I’ve already demonstrated this to some extent.
It doesn’t feel wrong anymore.

CURSED III: Architects of Troubled Sleep... a review

“Kill the bosses, kill the priests, kill the shepherds--save the sheep.”

I don’t usually write about music in my blog. There’s a few dozen reasons for it but the best I can come up with right now is that a good deal of the people reading it don’t give a fuck how I feel about some basement-dwelling powerviolence band from Iowa who put out one EP and then fell into the void while attempting to fill it with their own jizzum. And really, in that context, I can appreciate and understand the lack of interest most people would have that sort of entry.
But, because I spared you all my insights on the last WORLD BURNS TO DEATH record and my lengthy comparative analysis of the discographies of RECENSION and OXBAKER, I figure I’m within my right to review the third album by Toronto’s metallic hardcore heavyweights. If this isn’t your cup of pee, I suggest you mosey, cowpoke. Because this is as likely to bore you as the actual album is to tear a strip out of you.

I could start where most reviewers, interviewers and other writerly sorts start when discussing CURSED. I could perform a run-through of the scene credentials and list the bands these guys have played in before. But if you’ve decided to keep reading then you either already know, or will listen to the album and take great pains to find out how far back the great hardcore goes. (It goes way, way, waayyyyyy the fuck back.)
But where I’d like to start is here:
I’m playing an Epiphone SG that hasn’t been restrung since I moved to BC. Those three year old strings are down-tuned a full step. I play with a Rat distortion pedal through a Crate amp about fifteen years past its prime. This amp has a speaker cone that rattles like Bea Arthur with a lung infection receiving earth-moving oral sex. And my guitar doesn’t sound half as evil, dirty or heavy as Christian McMaster’s.
Not. Even. Fucking. Close.
From the first notes on the eponymous introductory track, through the blast beats of the opening of the album proper right until the final strains of “Gutters” have seared themselves into your battered brain, the guitar never lets up, never sounds weak. In fact, it never sounds like anything but a raging conflagration bent on consuming every available source of fuel.
The guitar overload of the second album isn’t here (suggesting to me that CURSED should always operate as a four-piece) and I figure when you have Dan Dunham of--y’know, that heavy band from Hamilton with the really cool name--playing bass you want his noise as high in the mix as you can get it. Which might have something to do with (what turned out to be) the band’s brilliant move of getting their sound guy, Donny Cooper, to produce. Who knows better what the band is supposed to sound like than the guy that’s been making them sound like them night-in and night-out on tour?
Another boon of the departed guitar overload is the fact that the drums never once get lost in the mix (which, truth be told, is my only real complaint about Two--why have a drummer like Mike Maxymuik if you‘re going to hide his talents behind a wall of feedback? Good drummers are damn hard to come by!). In fact, at times, like at the end of “Friends in the Music Business”, the drums shine in a way they never have on a CURSED record.
And of course, through all of this you have what I’ve come to regard as the razor edge of CURSED’s musical attack--the lyrical and vocal ability of Chris Colohan. I warn you: this might come off as hero-worship with just a touch of homosexual longing--but the dude is a solid word-monger. I remember way-back-when, listening to a 10” by a band that contained three-quarters of CURSED (man, it’s hard to write this without mentioning the bands they were in before) that ended with a spoken-word track by Colohan that thoroughly blew my mind and was responsible, in large part, for my return to writing.
Things are no different on this album. Take, for example, the opening quote of this review, taken from the album’s third track, “Magic Fingers.” Is there any simpler expression of just what punk is about? Probably, but does it rhyme? Probably not. And it probably doesn’t have Colohan’s gravel-throated delivery to back it up.
Or how about on the song "Into the Hive," where Chris, in a rage against Toronto’s condominium-culture, expectorates this little gem: “Show me a man with that much faith in concrete and I'll show you every self-starter that ever put torch to building.”
What amazes me most is that Chris seems to get more and more disgusted and disillusioned with every release. Some three bands ago I figured Chris had peaked as far as total rage went. But here, on CURSED’s third record, he manages to plumb new depths of anger and frustration. If he didn’t come off as such an affable, funny guy in interviews I’d implore his friends to put him on suicide watch (though a homicide watch is not entirely out of the question).
All this ass-kickery comes with a neat little bow on it: this is easily CURSED’s most cohesive record. There were moments on the first two records where I found myself taken out of the flow--for example, listening to Two and asking myself, “Wait, are they covering War Pigs?” and then checking the track listing and realising that it was indeed and original called “Model Home Invasion.”
That’s not to say that there are no surprises on Architects…. In fact, just wait until you get a load of “Unnecessary Person.” Not only is it a huge departure for CURSED, it might just be the finest vocal performance Colohan has turned in since “Nineteen Seventy-Four” (the song, not the year).
But I suppose the big thing people are going to want to know is how III: The Architects of Troubled Sleep stacks up against One and Two.
See, the great thing about One is that these dudes didn’t care if it came off as too metal or too heavy or (G*d forbid--too SABBATH). If you thought that the breaks were too “tough-guy” sounding or the music not tuneless or atonal enough (this, of course, at a time when everyone was doing their damnedest to sound like LÄ RM) then fuck ya. CURSED was doing CURSED.
Two, I’ll admit, I didn’t get right away. I thought the production was muddy and everything seemed muffled to me. I had to listen to it while running to figure out what made it great. The sound of Two is the sound of your heart pounding in your ears; of blood pumping at insane volume through your head. It’s the sound of your body on the brink of total exhaustion.
If One was the dark cloud, and Two was the rolling thunder, then Three is the storm. Three is the total devastation that leaves nothing in its wake but wrecked landscapes, decimated cities, mourning families and utter waste.
I worry, sometimes, that there won’t be a Four. With the turnover rate in underground hardcore being as insanely high as it is, it’s rare to find a band that has staying power. It was easy in the early days, I suppose, when what was “punk” was less rigidly defined. If BLACK FLAG had been forced to release Damaged over and over again instead of being permitted to evolve, well, we might not have gotten a third album from them. Luckily, they were permitted, for the most part, to explore new territory. And while In My Head might have been taking the experiment a little far, at least they had the opportunity to make that record.
I realise that CURSED will likely be vilified in some quarters for the few departures on this album. Hell, look what happened to their fellow Torontonians in FUCKED UP--a band that could do no wrong while they were releasing two-song seven inches. When they released Hidden World a major split occurred amongst fans that the band, thankfully, survived and which helped to rejuvenate their fan base.
Let’s hope the reviews are kind to CURSED. And let’s hope Four comes quickly.

Being a Good Person is a Thankless Job

I have this history with so many people’s fingers getting tangled up in my dreams and “real men” throwing punches at my glass-jawed aspirations. There are so many nights in my memory that reek of stale air, heavy with nicotine and sweat and beer, nights where I didn’t believe I’d wake up the next day and didn’t care if I did. I’ve sought refuge from the disappointments I’ve had to face--that I’ve retreated from--in so many wasteful ways. Laying my tears to rest with so many rotten, wrecked people.

My way is now and always has been to remain the cynic. To be angry and frustrated and let that drive me to success or, more often than I care to admit, retreat. Because for some reason I’ve always found it preferable to failure.
But I’ve learned. And I’ve grown.
I’m not a perfect person. And there are times when I doubt I’m even a good person. My weaknesses have always been so much more apparent to me than my strengths. I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself through eyes unaffected by my own flawed understanding of the world.
But like I said: I’ve learned, and grown.
It’s so easy to take the people who matter for granted, the people who make us better human beings and who push us to, and beyond, our limits. It’s easy to take them for granted because they’re always there. It’s in their nature--they don’t run away.
It’s such a thankless fucking job.
Over time I’ve learned to be confident. And I’m still scared shitless of what lies ahead, and I still doubt my ability to make it through from time to time, and I’m still unsure and cynical and angry.
But I want to fight. I want to try. I want to make decisions and see them through. I want to face failure and know that I’ll live to fail again and not fucking care. And slowly--so painfully slowly--I’m getting there.

I want you to know (and I say it publicly in the hopes that others will see someone in their own lives that needs acknowledging) that I appreciate you for everything you are. That--whatever else happens, or has happened, whatever disappointments we‘ve shared or faced separately--I’ll always be here for you. Because you deserve no less.
You know who you are.
Thank you.
I love you.

Leave Mine to Me

Yeah, I’m back. Let’s not make a big deal out of it, okay?

A couple of weeks ago I got a piece of mail from Dave Van Kesteren, the Conservative MP of Chatham-Kent Essex. It was a mail-out that, for some reason, sought approval of the Conservative Government’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to curtail climate change. Luckily I know about the Harper government’s plan for Climate Change, because there was precious little to go on in that mail-out. It was light on information, asking only if I believed that curbing climate change was important and if I thought a plan that set fair targets across the board was favourable.
On the backside was a sort of ballot you could cut out and mail back, there were two little boxes you could check: Yes, I support the government’s plan for Climate Change or No, I don’t. Then there was a little space for comments, your name, address and so forth--presumably so that the Harper government could take note of the names and locations of its dissidents.
Dutifully I filled out the ballot and mailed it back. I checked the “no” box and included these comments:

Too little too late. The Conservative’s plan for action on Climate Change is an un-funny joke. Also, this mail-out campaign is a fantastic example of unsustainable, wasteful use of resources.

There are no points for being snippy with the government, but it is a lot of fun. I don’t expect them to listen, of course.

Two days ago I got a second mail-out from Mr. Van Kesteren’s office (maybe they do value my opinion after all). This time I’m being asked if I support the Conservative Government’s fight against illegal drugs in Canada. The idea here is that they’re introducing new legislation to impose mandatory minimum jail sentences on “serious drug crimes.”
Now, I suspect that the Harper government and I have differing views on what constitutes a “serious drug crime.” I certainly don’t like the idea of someone getting caught with an ounce of pot being jailed for any length of time--after all, the money spent on such an endeavour hardly makes it worthwhile.
My stance on drug use has always been pretty libertarian. If you’re using and not hurting anyone but yourself, well then, shine on you crazy star. This is natural selection hard at work.
And so, it should come as no surprise that my views on marijuana, specifically, have always been in the “legalize it” camp. I don’t smoke pot and haven’t for almost ten years. I found one day that it didn’t do anything for me but make my eyes burn and my cookies disappear. But I have countless friends who indulge from time to time, and even more who indulge far more frequently than that. I’d hate to see any of them go to jail for it--or for passing on bits of their supply to other friends for fair monetary compensation. That’s just good capitalism, and I was told in high school that anything else is utterly Evil.
So when I got on the treadmill yesterday afternoon I started to compose my response to Harper and his cronies. I was in the middle of trying to pare down an extremely lengthy argument regarding the amount of money spent on federal prisons and how in a truly sane society where smoking and alcohol consumption are legal, marijuana use ought to be legal as well. That was about kilometre number three, halfway through my planned work out when my brain went to a strange, new place.
Now, I’m not going to say that my relatively new, healthier lifestyle didn’t come into play in where my mind went next, but I will say that I doubt it was as big a part of my thought process as some of you will assume. Where my brain went was here:
“Hey, Dave, in a truly sane society, wouldn’t cigarettes and alcohol be illegal?”
To which I could only reply, “Well, brain, actually… yeah.”
I played with this argument for the remainder of my run, trying to find a hole. For three more kilometres I attacked it from all angles and got nowhere. In a sane society, no, marijuana would not be legal. And trans fats, cigarettes, alcohol, fossil fuels and American Idol would go with it.
So I put it out of my mind, resolving to work on the problem later.
After dinner I sat down in front of my computer with a beer (hey, I might have come up against a wall but I’m not ready to adopt straight edge just yet) and started to work out the argument in the written word; which is where I usually work things out.
Five pages into an argument with myself I wrote this line:

In a truly sane society we wouldn’t need to make laws to keep people from doing harmful things to themselves.

So, I won’t be taking a Sharpie to the backs of my hands just yet, and when I do my democratic duty (expecting, again, to be ignored) and fill out this mail-out for Mr. Van Kesteren, I will still check the box that indicates that I do not support his government’s plan. My hope for the future will just be a shade different.
In a truly sane society, it’s true, people would willingly abstain from the things that cause harm to themselves and each other. But we don’t live in a sane society. And sometimes one needs to numb oneself, sometimes one needs to escape.
Maybe one day--if we ever find ourselves in a world where fairytales aren’t justification to fly planes into buildings, where justice and vengeance aren’t directly equated, where George Bush isn’t elected to two terms, where people take sports and religion less seriously than international relations--people won’t need to medicate themselves with drugs or escape into the escapades of America’s Nest Top Model. But until then I beg the Canadian government to stop its bullshit, tough-on-crime, what-about-the-children posturing and let us get on with this dismal existence as best we can.
I’m holding out hope for a brighter day. Not much hope, and I’m not holding it out too strenuously. But that’s my escapism--that’s my meth-hit. And since I won’t take yours away, I’d ask you leave mine to me.

My Gift to Prince George

Is one of the symptoms a loss of faith? Or faith in loss?
- Amy Hempel

So I’m leaving Prince George in a little more than a week. I can’t imagine I’ll be back as a resident (though I do intend to visit). This is my going away present to Prince George and the fantastic people I’ve met here.
But you have to promise me you’ll do what I say.
Promise?
Promise?
You sure, you promise?
Okay, that’s three times you promised. No fucking backsies.
Go to the library—the Bob Harkins branch downtown. Do it soon, do it at night. Do it on a night when the air is unsettled and bitter and the snow comes at you sideways like a wind of needles. Go when you’ve been drinking. Go when you’ve had a fight with that boy or girl you once deemed worthy of sharing your bed but about whom you now have your doubts.
Go when things couldn’t possibly get worse. Go when the world has made you sick.
Don’t go if there aren’t tears in your eyes—if there’s no tears, wait.
It’s worth it.

Are you listening? This is important.
Maybe you should take notes.

Go when you’re broken, used up. Make your way upstairs into the general collection, into fiction. Find H—there’s a break in the shelves with tables between. Find Hemingway. When you’ve found Ernest, who killed himself with a shotgun, you’re close. You only need to go a little further.
Get your cheek up close to those spines, get close so you can smell that dusty, moldy smell of old paper. Put your finger on the spine of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast—this is as good a place to start as any.
Drag your finger along the spines.
What do you mean you don’t want to?
What are you talking about? Germs?
Fuck you, you promised three times. Now do it.
You’re close, you’re very close. Drag your finger along the spines slowly, enjoy the way the spines in the plastic dust covers feel against your skin. Your love affair with books, if it has not yet begun, will soon.
Read those spines carefully. And when you see the name Amy Hempel, stop. This book, The Dog of the Marriage—this is my gift to you. You can’t have the book, but I’m letting you know it exists.
This is the best book in the city.

No matter what you’ve been told there are only two kinds of writers. There is the kind of writers that readers read and there are the kind of writers that writers read. Amy Hempel is the latter.
These writer’s writers, they are the secrets most of us try to keep from you. It’s selfish, we do it because when we read the first short story in Amy Hempel’s first collection we knew: I’ll never be this good.
We keep these secrets—Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, Bukowski’s later poetry and yes, Amy Hempel—from readers because we know that we’ll never sell a book if the rest of the world figures out what we already know: that we can never say anything that Amy Hempel hasn’t said and we’ll never be able to say it as well as Amy did. Writers like Amy Hempel will doom all of those plot-driven, third-person narratives of description and epic proportions. Fuck Moby Dick. Fuck War and Peace. Amy Hempel can say everything that Tolstoy ever did in a five page story about a pet-owner whose dog has run away from home.

Amy Hempel is a minimalist in the truest sense of the word. Any insight I may have had in my life and attempted to bring to light in my stories Amy has already had and managed to boil it down to one tiny little sentence with a truth so complete—so terminal—that I may as well not waste my time. And what kills me is; she’s already moved on.
She’s used up that insight.
She’s figuring something else out while I’m still trying to find the perfect modifier to fit between my subject and my verb.

I hear this a lot:
“I love _________’s novels because (he/she) writes the way regular people talk.”
Which seems like a really good thing. A beautiful thing, even. Before you’ve read Amy Hempel. Because Amy forgoes speech—she writes the way we think, she finds words to do justice to the way we think when we’re not using words.
I wrote in a story recently that writers do surgery. I said that some work on the brain to change your ideas, some work on the lungs to make you stop breathing, some work on your bladder to make you pee your pants. I said that the best go right for the heart.
And all of that is true.
What I didn’t tell you is that above the best, in some ethereal, preternatural place, lives a race of writers who do it all at once. And of them, Amy is the best. She’ll arrest your heart, leave you breathless and in need of a change of underwear, thinking.

Thus far Amy Hempel’s entire career is four books long, forty-eight short stories, about fifteen thousand sentences. That’s it, that’s all. Seems tiny, like a miniature version of a career in literature.
But here’s the catch: that’s all she needed to say what she had to say. She didn’t waste a single word. She weighed every word, she crafted every sentence with a care that goes beyond simple love of language and directly to the heart of communication.
When they collected her forty-eight stories into a single volume I wrote a review of it. I want to share a few paragraphs from the end of that review with you. Please, bear with me:

A good writer goes into a story like it’s a darkened room. Some writers light candles, giving us the soft glowing sphere of light, hinting at the unknown and frightening periphery. Others use a flashlight, pointing us at what they think we need to see. Some can’t refuse the urge to narratize the shit out of what they show us. Others just flick on a switch, leave the room and let us try to figure it out for ourselves.
What Amy does is take us by the hand and lead us into the room. She lights a roman candle and fills the room with a brief flash of white-hot light. And she holds our hand the whole time, she tells us it’s okay to be afraid. And she doesn’t let go until the explosion is over and only the fire remains to burn away the room she let us see so well for only a moment.
And then…
Long after the room—the entire building, in fact—has been exhausted to ash. Long after the last faintly glowing ember has been raked under black earth. Long after the ground has cooled, while you sit and wait for the grass to start growing again—Amy leaves you there with the inescapable feeling that the world is somehow different than you imagined.

Unfortunately the Prince George Public Library only carries the most recent of Amy’s four books—The Dog of the Marriage. The other three (Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom and Tumble Home) are something you’re going to have to request they bring in.
Either that or The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.
Failing that you might want to ask your writer friend (if you have one) if they’ll let you borrow her books. They may claim they don’t have her books, they may claim they never heard of her, but if the writer is really good I’d say that there’s at least a 50/50 chance that they’re lying and deathly afraid of what happens to your estimation of their work once you’ve read a story like Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolston is Buried.
It’s no secret that I am an atheist; I have no belief in God. I don’t think about it—about him. I choose to put my faith in my family, my friends and myself—in things I can verify the existence of.
But these days I do occasionally bow my head and offer up something like a prayer. I don’t make entreaties to a useless modern god, though. My prayers—if you can call them that—start with the word Amy and end with the word Hempel.
That book in your hand? Read it. You can thank me later.

[FIK-shuhn] III: A Story for Sarah

I lose more friends this way.
A little known fact about me is that if someone asks me to write something for them I’ll usually do it. (Hear that? That’s the sound of countless girls weeping gently, their tears spattering poetry rendered by my young, lust-driven hand. And rightly so. Unless the poetry came unbidden, chances are I was merely proving that I know nothing about the way to a girl’s heart but that the fastest way into her bed is through sweet, sweet words and a peerless command of language.)
When someone asks me to write a story for them I only ask for a starting point: a title, an opening sentence, a question that could be answered by forcing it through the fine mesh screen of the narrative process, etc.
Sarah has given me just such a sentence. I thought to myself that I would write a nice story for a nice girl who asked nicely. The trouble is that I’ve never written a nice thing in my miserable life. The trouble was compounded when she gave me a sentence that I couldn’t help but read as semi-autobiographical on her part. I don’t know Sarah well enough to crack her psyche like and egg in a socially acceptable, albeit post-modern, show of anthropomancy. Besides, divination is somewhat passé and I’m nothing if not totally here and now, dude.
So I thought it better to play sortilege in my own dementia. Explore the themes and topos already working in my brain and not stray too far from the memes that constantly come up in my writing. What I’ve wound up with is bleak—even for me. And I apologise, Sarah, if this isn’t what you had in mind but this is how I roll—at midnight, dark glasses, dressed in black. I’m like Poe but with a sense of humour and a love of the absurd—laughing hysterically at blood pooling wherever I find it.
It’s longer than I had hoped it would be but I had so much fun writing it that I wanted it to go on and on. And Sarah’s sentence forced me into the third-person as well as the past-tense which are two narrative conventions I’ve often shunned. Though I couldn’t resist having my character tell parts of her story in the first-person at the end—as unreliable a narrator as she may be, she gets down to the subject matter and tells her story close to the skin and, as you are about to learn, that’s a storyteller’s job: to pull back the pericardium and not appear shocked that you’ve let him (or her) get so far.
So here is Sarah’s sentence:

She sat there staring into space wearing a striped scarf thinking of a sentance and worried that the walls are closing in on her in the library because she screamed for no apparent reason but if only they knew the whole story…

And here’s how I managed to pervert that perfectly serviceable thought:

The Dissolution of Priapus
J. D. Buston

She sat there, staring into space, wearing a striped scarf and thinking of a sentence. She worried that the walls were closing in on her in the library—shelves of books creeping ever closer, the smell of old, jaundiced paper and dirty cloth binding stronger, nearer, minute by minute—and she screamed for no apparent reason. At least, she thought she had, but when she looked around no one was looking back at her. If only they knew the whole story. About how cold it had been reaching into the freezer, about how long it had taken, about how it came apart. If they knew these things they’d more than look at her—they’d stare. And she wouldn’t have to worry about coming up with a sentence. They’d be more than happy to do it for her. They’d come for her with pitchforks and torches.
She got up from her chair and started toward the shelves. If the walls insist on closing in, she thought, I’ll meet them halfway.
The wet soles of her boots whispered against the low-pile carpet. Her breath sounded as a backbeat to her footfalls. As certain as she was that every eye in the room was on her, when she looked around she found just one old man—grey and wiry haired, with a week’s worth of ashy stubble on his sallow, corpse-like face and a lazy eye—looking her way. He smiled at her and she darted into a row of books to avoid having to reciprocate.
There, between the rows of books, she sensed that the shelves towering over her leaned in slightly. She thought of the racks tipping inward, falling over one another. She thought of the tomes raining down, her body being bludgeoned by heavy volumes. She knew what blood spatter looked like. She knew roughly how much damage her flesh and bones could sustain and she was pretty sure she could survive the books.
But the books weren’t what really concerned her.
The body was.
She scanned the spines that lined the shelves. She pulled out a thick volume, separating it from the rest: Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. She leafed through the pages until she found what she was looking for. Priapism, she read, was the persistent erection of the penis, accompanied by pain and tenderness—at this word, “tenderness,” she scoffed. A writer she knew once told her that word choices were important. “Nothing hinders communication,” he said, “like a word with two disparate meanings.”
She knew the story of Priapus—how he attempted to rape Lotis and the gods punished him by giving him enormous wooden genitals. This, she reasoned, was a poor punishment for a rapist. To give him a tool, by which he could continue his offences endlessly and, probably, more painfully? What sort of screwy penal code were the gods of ancient Greece working from? “He got off light,” she whispered to herself—or maybe to the books.
She put the book back on the shelf. She looked down at her hands. She was sure she could see black-red still crusted and dust-like in the wrinkles and the folds of her flesh. She felt filthy but there was nothing she could do—the red lines mapping her crime were indelible and stood in sharp contrast to her pale skin. They were there for everyone to see.
Worse yet, her hands were still cold from digging in the freezer to bury the packages.
She stuffed her hands into her pockets and rested her forehead against the bookshelf. Through eyes open and staring at the ground, she watched her tears fall to the floor making little wet marks on the carpet. She was crying—or rather, her eyes were. At the centre of herself she felt cold and disconnected. There, surrounded in a bitter coating of grief and guilt, was a chewy, separate centre of pure, black, sweet vacuity.
“My dear,” came the voice—cracked, worn and affectionate. “Why are you crying?”
She snapped up straight, startled by the intrusion. She looked to her right—where the voice had come from. The old man—pallid complexion, crooked teeth, lazy eye and all—stood a few feet away. His stooped shadow cast a question mark on the shelves beside him.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” she said, turning her back to him, cutting off the conversation, and starting away.
She made her way back to her table. She started stuffing her books into the shabby, green knapsack she’d brought with her. When she reached for her copy of Cooper’s The Practice of Surgery a liver-spotted hand lashed out and grabbed it away from her.
The old man sat across the table, looking as though he’d been there always. “This is a very old text,” he said. “This was a How-To manual for field surgeons during the Civil War.”
She reached out to grab the book back but the old man was deceptively quick and pulled it just out of her reach as he leafed through. “I can’t imagine that anything you could learn from this book would be good medicine by today’s standards,” he said.
She thought about explaining to him that, in the end, her patient’s comfort hadn’t topped her list of concerns. That she’d just needed to know the basics. Instead she grabbed for the book again, catching the old man off guard. Her fingers closed around it and she yanked it away.
The old man looked hurt. “Such a rude thing for such a pretty young lady to do,” he said, frowning.
“Tough shit,” she said, stuffing the book into her bag and closing the zipper.
“I wonder,” the old man said, “why you had the section on amputation book marked?”
She stiffened at this. Something cold and tight found her spine and closed around it, threatening to dislocate a vertebra or two. She shivered; her breath quickened. To be found out in such a simple way, by such a strange old man—it would be absurd.
“Morbid curiosity,” she said.
“I take it you’re a medical student.” he said.
She caught the old man’s gaze and held it steady. She told herself that if she couldn’t look this man in the eye here and now, she’d never manage to look another human being in the eyes as long as she lived. Besides, she reasoned, the man wasn’t accusing her of anything.
“Nursing, actually,” she said, severing eye contact.
“I suppose I could have guessed that,” the old man said, frowning. “But that book is outdated. Are you writing a paper on the advancements made in the field since the eighteen hundreds?”
She shook her head. Tiny hairs bristled on her neck. “No, just what I said. I’m morbidly curious about the process of removing large limbs.”
She pulled her knapsack over one shoulder, tightened her scarf, slipped on her gloves and walked away from the table. Without looking back she lied, “It was nice meeting you.”

The night was cold and the sky was overcast. The streetlamp nearest the library’s exit was burnt out. The strong wind whipped past her, threatening to deprive her of sufficient air to breathe. The blacktop was wet and slick. She walked with her chin buried in her chest, her hands stuffed into her pockets, her eyes tracing the path only a few feet ahead of her. Every step made her joints feel weak—as though they could come apart with little effort.
In the dark, with nothing to look at and nothing to think about but the few measly feet of concrete spread out before her, her mind was forced to conjure its own imagery to play with. Hot red meat wrapped tightly in plastic; a poured cement floor and a wobbly wooden workbench spattered in red and stinking of rust and cold steel; the crack of bones and the snap of tendons; the metallic chatter of a reciprocating saw. A freezer, buried packets, fresh blood pooling in plastic bags, all buried under a few tubs of ice cream and trays of TV dinners.
She turned a corner onto a busy street. People pushed past without noticing her. Her, and her striped scarf. Her, trying to come up with a sentence; her, trying to imagine a suitable punishment for her crimes. These people, she thought, as they shouldered past her, have no idea who I am. What I am.
She went into an empty coffee shop and ordered hot chocolate. She sat alone at a table near the window and stared into the dark brown liquid in her mug. As she contemplated the scent and the warmth of her drink she gradually became aware of a presence nearby. A cold maelstrom formed at the bottom of her gut but she willed herself to look up.
At the next table, with his chair turned so she could see him in profile, was the old man. His nose was hooked; she had a clear view of his lazy eye. His chin was pointed and peppered with stubble. For a few brief moments she realised that he’d probably been handsome once. But whatever he had been, he certainly wasn’t much to look at now.
He turned to her and smiled. His legs were splayed before him, his arms were long and thin—he appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be glued together from spare parts. His cheeks had a little bit of colour—plenty more than he’d had in the library. He looked so relaxed. Try as she might she couldn’t remember the sound of anyone entering the shop since she’d sat down. And the shop was, aside from the old man, as empty as it had been when she arrived.
He picked up the steaming mug on his table, stood, and walked the few feet to her table. He gestured with his mug at the chair across from her and said, “You mind?”
Before she could respond he planted his ass and sipped at his drink. He looked out the window, swishing whatever he was drinking around his mouth. After a time he swallowed.
“Green tea,” he said. “At my age tea’s about the only thing I can drink after dinnertime.”
“Fascinating,” she said, curling her fingers tight around the ceramic handle of her mug. He was beginning to frighten her. Appearing as if from nowhere, first at her table in the library and now here. She thought she could, if necessary, scald him with the cocoa, or even hit him with the mug. This, at least, she knew she was capable of.
This and more.
He sat and didn’t speak. He watched cars pass on the road outside. He fingered a napkin on the table. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, producing a scratchy music that irritated her. Finally he said, “I was a doctor.”
“Was?” she asked.
“I was. I’m retired. I was a field surgeon in Vietnam; I was captured by the V.C. They kept me in a prison camp for eight months to treat what had seemed to be an epidemic of gangrene. I did a lot of amputations under less-than-ideal conditions.”
He took another long, slow sip of his tea. He didn’t look at her. He watched the cars on the street outside the window. He gazed through his own reflection and took long, deep breaths. The only sound he made for a long, long while was a gasp and a chuckle as a large dog pulled its owner through a deep puddle.
“You know what I always hated about doing amputations?” he said, still not looking at her. Without waiting for a response he went on, “The carefulness of it. You couldn’t just go in there with, say, a jigsaw and hack away willy-nilly at the joints. Nope, you gotta get in there, ligate the artery, control the bleeding—and you know you better have a top-notch anaesthesiologist! In that POW camp in ‘Nam, I had to use heroin to--”
“Stop,” she said, cutting him off.
He stopped.
“What are you driving at?” she said, just above a whisper. “What is it you think you know about me?”
The old man, the doctor, cast his eyes at the floor. “My dear,” he said, “I don’t presume to know anything about you except your taste in reading material.”
“Then why all this?” she said. “Why sneaking up on me in the library? Following me here? Why are you creeping me out?”
The old man adopted a wounded look. His eyes grew impossibly wide as a layer of salty tears enveloped them. The corners of his mouth turned down, his bottom lip edged out a millimetre or two. “It wasn’t my intention to frighten you,” he said. “I merely saw a girl who seemed—I don’t know—troubled somehow. I thought I might help. That’s been the hardest thing since retiring—feeling like I’m not helping anyone.”
She felt sorry for the old man, the old doctor. But she knew he couldn’t help her. No one could. There’s a point beyond redemption—and we all make it there sooner or later. She had reached that point because someone else had reached that point and she had tried to help him.
Her writer friend had told her once that telling a story was something that had to be done close to the skin. “It’s surgery with words,” he said. “Some writers go for the bladder and try to make you pee your pants. Others work on the lungs to get you to stop breathing. Some are brain surgeons, trying to change the way you think. But a real storyteller knows there’s nothing more demanding than open-heart surgery. A real storyteller—his job is to peel back your pericardium and go to work on your heart, never letting you know how surprised he is that you’ve let him get so far.”
“Rohypnol,” she said to the old doctor.
“Pardon?” he said. “Did you say Rohypnol?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a serviceable anaesthetic—better than heroin, I bet.”
The old doctor leaned in, swallowed hard, said nothing.
The first operation seemed simple enough. He’d come to her—her writer friend had come to her—ridden with guilt and almost dripping with remorse. He told her the story—close to the skin—about how he’d found the girl in the park. How he’d forced her down behind some bushes. The things he’d done to her. He told her about the solution—a simple procedure to remove the offending flesh, to purify him and prevent any further transgressions.
She told the old man all of this in the writer’s words.
“It wasn’t until I started to realise what I’d have to do—reroute the urethra and all its—uh, mechanisms—through the perineum,” she said, staring into her mug. “That’s when I realised it would be rough.”
The old doctor was looking at the floor. His lips were taught, his eyes focused, his jaw set. He looked as composed as anyone could—but for his pallor, which had returned and deepened. Whatever flush the tea had given him was gone and his face was bloodless.
Funny, she thought, one can prepare for the worst. They can control their reaction, their face, their breathing; but the blood always gives you away. The blood does what it wants.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, sipping at her cocoa. “I did it.”
“Did he survive? Was the operation a success?”
She set her mug down and cast a glance about the coffee shop to ensure that it was still empty. She returned her eyes to the steam that rose from her mug and said, “In one sense it was as successful as you’d want it to be. In another sense it was a disaster.”
She’d drugged the writer with Rohypnol—they’d both figured it would be poetic justice to use the date-rape drug—and strapped him down to a work bench in his basement. The bench was a crooked wooden affair wanting more nails for stability. It had been built by the previous owner. Some of his older, rustier tools had been left behind and still hung over the bench.
The one renovation she did make was to replace the bare overhead bulb with a proper surgical lamp. She stole a scalpel from the lab at school and set up in his basement with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some cotton swabs and a few T-shirts cut into rags should the bleeding become too severe. She removed his member as well as his testicles. (There’d been some concern; the writer hadn’t wanted to grow tits but felt it would look weird, his having balls and no dick. Eventually he secured a reliable supply of testosterone supplements and the debate was over.)
Afterward, when he said he’d wanted to keep it, she packed the whole thing—penis and testicles—in plastic and kept it in his freezer in hopes that they could jar it in some formaldehyde eventually.
The old man pulled back from the table. “How did you ligate the supplying artery?” he asked.
“I didn’t, per se,” she said. “I worked quick and cauterized the veins with a soldering iron left behind by the home’s previous owner.”
“And the patient, he—he survived?”
“He did. He kept himself medicated with heroin while the wound healed.”
The doctor, his face gone a paler shade of ash, picked his mug up, brought it to his lips, but didn’t drink. He made a face at the smell and put the mug back down. “And the patient—I mean, did it work? Obviously he didn’t, um, offend again.”
“You would think,” she said. “But as I said earlier, the operation was both a success and a disaster.” She looked at the floor and felt perspiration form on her upper lip.
A few months later the writer returned to her. He asked her what the quickest way to a man’s heart was. She was making dinner and she’d just talked on the phone with her mother so she’d told him it was through his stomach. She turned the question back to him; she asked what the quickest way to a woman’s heart was. “I don’t know about the quickest,” he’d said, “but the funnest is an orbital sander applied with pressure to the sternum. It takes a while, but it’s pretty.”
The answer had unnerved her and she let him know it. Dejected he told her it had happened again. This time with a girl at the bar. He’d brought her out into the alley and raped her.
“That’s impossible,” the old doctor said, cutting her story off.
“Rape isn’t about sex—it’s about power and control,” she answered. “He used his fingers.”
The doctor’s mouth hung open. A small, weak sound came out of him.
The writer told her she’d have to remove the criminal fingers: the middle two on his right hand. She refused at first. She told him he’d have to turn himself into the police; that the first operation hadn’t helped and so neither would the second.
“Oh, okay. Would you like me to explain to them,” the writer said, “how you, a nursing student, performed an elective penectomy on me?”
She set up her operating theatre once more. She searched the abandoned tools for something powerful enough to cut bone. The only thing she found that might be capable was a heavy, clumsy reciprocating saw with but one blade which was broken. “Not that I had much choice,” she told the doctor. “And the blade was still long enough to cut through the thin bones of the fingers.”
Again she drugged him with Rohypnol, again she used the scalpel to work through the skin and tendons (leaving enough flesh to close the wound), again she used the soldering iron to cauterize the blood vessels. When the bone was exposed on both fingers she cut through them with the saw, injected her still-unconscious patient with heroin, wrapped his fingers in plastic and put them in the freezer.
The old doctor writhed about in his chair. She wondered whether the story or her own cool retelling of it was what unnerved him more. She reasoned that it must be a mixture. The doctor was likely comfortable with surgery and with stories told in a calm fashion. What made him uncomfortable were mutilations and bloodless stories about them.
“Of course,” she said, “my writer friend hadn’t known what he was getting into in having those fingers removed. He found afterward that he could not write.”
Because of their placement on a keyboard, the letters I, O, K, L and M disappeared from his alphabet. Commas were strangely absent. When he attempted a more primitive method of writing he found he could not hold a pen properly with his right hand and that what he wrote with his left was illegible.
“And listen;” she said to the doctor, “between the heroin and his missing fingers, for the first month after the operation, he kept dropping lit cigarettes into his lap. He ruined all his pants.”
She wanted to laugh at that. More than that she wanted the doctor to laugh at it. She wondered if it was too late to add levity to the story. She tried to remember what the writer had told her about humour in narratives. He’d said something like, “Either a story is full of jokes, or it is a joke.”
The old man ran a shaky hand through his thin, wiry hair. He looked more corpse-like than ever. Dark rings were around his eyes, no muscles moved under the pasty skin of his face. His jaw hung open just a little and his lips were cracked and dry. Were it not for the flicker in his eyes she’d have buried him in the dumpster out back.
“You writer friend,” he said. “What’s happened to him? Where is he?”
She lowered her head and glared at the last bit of hot chocolate in her mug. It was cold now. Outside sleet had begun to fall and what little traffic there had been when her story began was gone. In the big window she could see herself sitting at the table with the old doctor. Her own eyes were ringed with red, her hands sat motionless on the table. Her striped scarf hung over the back of the chair with her coat. Her knapsack sat at her feet. The window was double-paned and there appeared to be two of her, overlapping—or more likely, coming apart. Two eyes slowly becoming four, one mouth becoming two, one body falling to pieces. Too many pieces.
“He’s dead,” she said.
The doctor shocked her by making no indication that he was surprised. He seemed as composed as he ever had. He nodded his head, bringing it up and down in small, slow arcs. He kept his eyes focused on her. The look on his face said that he’d known this would be the outcome.
“Couldn’t stop, could you?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I suppose neither of us could. He kept coming back. I don’t even know if he was really doing the things he said he was—but he wanted me to keep taking more and more of him.”
“And you had to, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
The next time he came it was his tongue—he’d tied up a girl and abused her with his tongue (she’d never found out exactly what he meant by that; whether the abuse had been verbal or physical). Then he wanted her to take more fingers, then toes. Then it was his hands and thumbs.
“He wouldn’t stop. And I…” she trailed off.
“You started to enjoy it as you got better at it, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
The doctor pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in toward her. In a rumbling voice like concrete scraping concrete he said, “I know. It’s impossible to stop. When they’re asking for it and you want to give it—it just seems right. I know.”
“He came once—and I don’t even remember what it was that he wanted taken off that time—all I remember is his tongue was already gone and so were his hands so he put a pencil between his lips and wrote it out for me. And while he was under, after I’d finished taking off his left big toe or whatever the fuck it was he wanted removed… I... I took an ear. He didn’t ask me to, I just did.”
The doctor nodded. The look in his eyes was not one of surprise, or sickness or even resignation. It was compassion, perhaps understanding. He reached out and took her right hand in his own. He squeezed her fingers hard and attempted a desperate little smile—which faltered and faded before it ever really came to be.
“I never let him wake up again,” she said. “I kept him drugged for days, taking a little bit at a time, wrapping it in plastic, putting it in his freezer. I practically moved into his house. I didn’t go to school, I didn’t eat—I did nothing but surgery.” She was crying now, there was a note of acquiescence in her voice and the doctor knew what it was she was resigned to: punishment.
She thought that the doctor would turn her in.
“My dear,” he said. “My dear, dear, young nurse, you only gave your writer friend what he was looking for: dissolution. He was coming apart on the inside—he had you take apart his outside because that’s what made sense to him.”
“But it’s a crime,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “I know it is.”
“I have to be punished,” she said.
“You do—and you will be,” he said.
She looked at him, dried her eyes and waited for it; waited for her sentence.
The doctor said, “After a time, when you realise how absurd it is, you have to embrace it or you die. You have to laugh at it—I laugh like hell about it at least once a week.” At this the doctor held up his left hand. She was floored. She didn’t know how she’d not noticed it before—she figured the old man had kept his left hand in his pocket the whole time, or at least distracted her with the cunning and confident way he used his right. His left hand had only one partial digit left on it: the bottom half of the thumb. “Most of my toes are gone as well,” he said. “I’ve only been punishing myself for a short while. But once a week I take a little piece off for what I did to those Viet Cong. There was one case of gangrene in that camp—I took that limb and convinced the V.C. that it was contagious and that an epidemic had begun. I freed myself by disposing of my captors one digit; one limb at a time. I’d spend half my days diagnosing Viet Cong with gangrene and the other half talking off bits of them. I did what I did because I had to—but that don’t mean I should get away without being punished.”
She nodded. No one should ever get away without being punished.
The world was sick—not just her. She was just one infected cell. And while she couldn’t put together the pathology of it, the cure made sense to her. She trusted the old doctor. She trusted the cure.
She had her sentence.

A N T I C I P A T I O N

My pen knows what to do. I close my eyes and I see this girl who glows. A girl who radiates. When she smiles, she beams. She warms my heart. I open my eyes with a feeling of floating past all the garbage around me. I will emerge unscathed because I will not endeavor to hide myself from whatever is coming. Bring on the worst. I welcome it with open arms. – Henry Rollins

When it snows, everything gets quiet. Like opium for noise—the sounds stay but they seem removed from my position. Even the sound of my breath—coming as it does in short, sharp bursts of troubled air—sounds like something someone else is hearing and trying to describe to me.
Poorly.
I know I told you not to use adverbs, but listen: This is the calm before the storm.
I know I told you not to use clichés, but I’m sort of a dick that way.
When it snows everything gets white and looks pure. A filter of pearlescence obscures all the dark harshness. Even blood looks pink. And of course you, the thought I can’t help thinking every time my pants come off, don’t belong here. You’re a big black mark in all this white glory.
I guess the problem is that I could never entirely erase the memory of you. I breathed you in once—the scent brought to mind thoughts of blood, sex and revolution; remember? So even now I’m bloody, sticky and revolting.
Cleanliness is for the birds.
I burn through the snow. I sweat. I exhaust it all to ash, refuel and go again. I cut through the ice—incendiary—abuzz like a nice hot length of neon tubing through the cool murky air.
You so black, me so bright—I hope you’re afraid.
What we’re about to find out, my dear, is what really happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object.
You realise, of course, that someone is going to get hurt. Civilizations may collapse.
I’m ready.
Bring it on.