For millennia, Jerusalem’s Old City has inspired violent, possessive passions by partisans of three religions, and many factions of each, all vying for shards of the same sacred real estate. To walk up the Via Dolorosa is to reconceive the world’s endless religious struggles as metaphor of a neighborhood turf war without end. The neighborhood boasts three religious travel destinations so alluring, they aroused the Crusades.

The Wailing Wall is a remnant of Solomon’s Temple, built around 1000 BCE and destroyed four hundred years later by Babylonians—then reconstructed and destroyed again a millennium later by the Romans. A block away sits the boulder from which Mohammed leapt upward on a visit to heaven and where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac—now within the Dome of the Rock Mosque. All this lies a few earthbound steps from the Via Dolorosa, along which Jesus carried the cross up Calvary Hill.

If the Old City inflames the faithful with possessiveness, it at least astonished this faithless tourist. I came to Jerusalem in 1987, shortly before the Intifada, to visit a friend. “Take care,” he said when I mentioned the prospect of walking the Via Dolorosa. He shrugged one of those communicative “Life is like that…” and threw in one of those hand curlicues that Israelis specialize in. “Ancient feuds still play out there,” he said. “Mostly interfactional violence.”

Tourism goes on forever, as do the mundane lives of residents here—and their half-hummed prayer at the Wailing Wall, at the nearly adjacent Holy Sepulchre Church, at the Dome of the Rock Mosque. Eons of residents and tourists have bumped into one another along its carless lanes, perhaps most often while wandering through the souk—the street market that sprawls across Jesus’s path. Centuries of interreligious bargains struck there have yielded up such booty as souvenir ashtrays bearing images of the faith of choice; velvet paintings of the Last Supper, and of holy Arabic script; mother-of-pearl rosaries, and mother-of-pearl-inlaid olive-wood and cedar camels, omni-priestly sandals, inter-festive wedding dresses, woven rugs for prayer and general use and various Aladdin-ish brass oil lamps.

All along the way, the pilgrims stand out, blocking crowded corners in lost batches, far from (one guesses, overhearing) Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, France and, as a cheery old guy exclaimed, “Idaho!” They’re forever arriving, as so many have before, and tracing for themselves the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. The Stations have long been marked along the Via Dolorosa with those Roman numerals, I through XIV, that encircle the sidewalls of every Catholic and Orthodox church. Crusaders, having struggled to reach the Holy City, sometimes surveyed the path exactingly, pace by pace and angle by angle, then struggled home to their castles in Europe and replicated it in their backyards, a prayer repeated, sometimes scaled down, as though the geometric particulars of the route were themselves essentially sacred.

***

I began the route, map in hand and edgy because that was the mood of the city. Some of the stations are a bit off the street, in surprising niches. Guides wandered up to strollers. One Abdul Jaussi said he was a high school teacher and offered to show me “everything.”

“Are you Catholic?” he asked.

“Jewish by birth,” I answered, “but not religious.”

“But you are nice!” he exclaimed.

That out of the way, we agreed on a fee and he commenced to guide: “You came into the Old City through the Lion’s Gate.” He pointed back down the street toward an arched opening in the high stone wall that ringed the city. “Crusaders came in there. General Allenby came in there when the British took over in 1917. In 1967, General Moshe Dyan came through the Lion’s Gate too. All the conquerors came through that gate.”

He led me down the street, into the yard of a Moslem elementary school, and, with his foot, pointed out the First Station of the Cross, where Jesus had been condemned by the crowd that chose to release Barabbas. A certain tan, concave cobblestone in the center of a rough basketball court marked the sacred spot. There was a half-cup of rainwater in it from a morning shower. A netless hoop dangled askew from backboard, and a tetherball pole stood a few yards from the stone, not quite on the sidelines.

A schoolboy tapped the cobblestone with his foot. “You may wash your hands here too,” he said in English. The stone had worn smooth. An artist had recently painted murals on the courtyard walls: an ostrich, a jack-in-the-pulpit and several deer on what could have been a New England mountainside. At the exit hung a big red poster of a dejected, stooping child clutching a teddy bear. Abdul translated the legend: “Be aware of troubled children.”

Electric saws snarled through the yard. On Fridays at three in the afternoon, said Abdul, Franciscans walked the route, some bearing crosses. And by prearrangement, which Abdul could handle should I so wish, groups, led by priests, could rent crosses of their own to carry along. Indeed, Abdul later took me to a woodshop in a back alley nearby, where a couple of carpenters repaired organ pipes next to a stack of rental crosses they’d constructed. Passing the schoolyard, an old man hugged bags of groceries. A guided pair of tourists stood, heads turning by degrees, taking in a sequence of distant sights across the valley as their guide named them. Two Greek Orthodox priests hurried by, heads close in talk, followed by a pair of similarly robed, similarly conversing Hassidic Jews, two Arab workers with shovels, two little girls giggling their way home from school and two teen boys gossiping in Brooklyn English.

Amidst this everydayness, the deep traditions of three major religions had formed. There must also have been shoppers and visitors and priests on other business the day of the Crucifixion and the day of Mohammed’s heavenward journey and even the day of the destruction of the Temple, just as we see shoppers and kids on bikes at the edges of newspaper photos of war scenes.

Abdul led me up the street to the Second Station, in the courtyard of a Franciscan convent built where Jesus had received the cross. Pillars and ornamental stone scrollwork from earlier buildings had been arranged about the yard, “said to have come from Pilate’s headquarters,” said Abdul. A gray all-weather model of Crusade-era Jerusalem stood in a corner.

Many visitors here had dual identities: they were tourists and worshipers. A party of ten, whispering in Italian, many with fold-down ballplayer sunglasses, shuffled through the yard, stoop-necked with fatigue. Pilate had washed his hands of Jesus here. Lurid dioramas with sad-faced figures replicated the anguished scene. A few tourists knelt and touched a tiny grid gouged in the fieldstone, “Made by bored Roman soldiers who played dice upon it,” said Abdul.

A tractor towing a wagon of rolled-up rugs roared past. Someone had stacked egg crates and garbage sacks in the street, right below the Third Station plaque, where Jesus had fallen for the first time. A man carrying perhaps a dozen loaves of bread in a clear plastic sack walked by, shoes clicking briskly. A street vendor whispered, “Please, sir-r-r,” insistently, repeatedly shoving forward a religious booklet. The proprietor of a souvenir-and-food stall shouted across to me, “New Testament! Three dollar!”

Before the Armenian Church, twenty yards farther on, we came to the Fourth Station, where Jesus had encountered his mother, Mary. Directly across from it, before another knickknack shop, T-shirts swung like flags in the morning heat: “My Grandmother Went to Israel and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.” Under its canopy the Arab proprietor sipped tea, almost lost between high stacks of sheepskin booties, Bedouin headdresses and more smart-ass shirts: “I Climbed Masada,” and, over a picture of a jet fighter, “America, Don’t Worry—Israel Is Behind You.”

Abdul walked on up the street and put his hand into a palm-sized nook in a stone wall. This was Station Five. “Here, where Simon of Cyrene helped carry the cross, Greeks believe Simon put his hand,” Abdul said. With the proud presenting gesture of a used-car dealer, he patted the rock, polished smooth by many hands before his. The portable radio in the film-and-guidebook shop across the way played tinny heavy metal. Next door, in “Olivewood Workshop,” woodworkers lathed artifacts.

Where Via Dolorosa turned off a street called El Wad, amidst more shops, Abdul pointed down and announced, still in his guide’s voice, “Yesterday they kill one person right here. In the night. Jew? Arab? We do not know. They took it away, the body.” Another bit of chatty information, or misinformation. What did Abdul make of it? “Arab killing Arab. Gangs, not tourist.”

Beyond the spot was a fruit stall where women picked through stacks of oranges and almonds, scents mixing, and more stacks of gleaming carrots, and cabbages the size of goats’ heads. “Families live all around here,” Abdul said. “It is good. You don’t need $10,000 car, and vegetable is here. Live two, three family together.” Members of a large English delegation plodded past, their transit taking several minutes. Abdul waited a bit on the other side of the line and then moved far ahead. He seemed to know all the market men, nodding and chatting with a friend, then another farther along.

I walked past Station Six, where St. Veronica had wiped Jesus’s face, past Hubbly Bubbly Store and then past St. Veronica Gift Shop, whose window was full of graphic statuary of the sufferings of Jesus. A dog-eared sign said, in faded letters, “Sale 50%.” Jesus had fallen for the second time at Station Seven. A friend of Abdul’s ran a crucifix and rosary and Star of David stall that also sold benign “PEACE” T-shirts and also ones that read “Fighting for Peace Is Like Fucking for Virginity.” The adjacent stall sold interfaith diapers.

I chased Abdul past lamb carcasses hanging from a butcher’s stall. Out a shop window peered an Arabic teenager, veil drawn back, a wistful smile and tears on her cowled face. We passed, and declined to buy purses in piles, stacked copper pots, schools of salted fish. Coming out at the far end of the arched, packed street market, I jogged right and caught up with Abdul where Jesus had met the women of the city, at Station Eight.

We mounted ramp-like stairs at a large sign that said ZALTIMO SWEETS, clambered between children shooting marbles on the rough stone and climbed by the rear porch of a youth hostel called Tabasco, near Station Nine, where Jesus had fallen for the third time. Abdul gaped across at the European teenagers lounging shirtless on the hostel’s rear deck and muttered, “They drink beer there.”

A sign by the hostel read, “Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate.” We approached the prime real estate of Christianity—where a half-dozen sects eternally attended their faithful tasks, asprawl each other like old lovers. Their dominions intertwined, stacked and interwoven directly above the sacred ground of Calvary. An Ethiopian Orthodox Monastery lay atop the Holy Sepulchre Church. The nub of the great church dome stuck into their courtyard, a small cupola in the monastery yard. Far below, Coptic, Greek, Armenian and Roman sects had uneasily shared the cubic volume of Holy Proximity for centuries. Protestants had no place here, and their historians have asserted other locations for Christ’s tomb, a few kilometers away.

In the green and pleasant courtyard of the Ethiopians, priests smiled in the sunshine. Their round-shouldered plaster cells seemed serene, removed from the jumble of the Christian Quarter. A bony cat dragged a bag of chicken bones its own size through an archway into the adjacent Coptic courtyard.

Abdul led me down through a tiny Ethiopian chapel decorated with paintings of Solomon and Sheba, into the Coptic Sanctuary below, then curling down more stairs into the grand Holy Sepulchre Church itself. The final five stations of the cross were within this marbled maze, clustered, overlapping patches administered by contending orders.

At Station Ten, Roman soldiers had taken Jesus’s robe. Roman Catholic territory started here and included the Eleventh Station, a few feet away, where Christ had been nailed to the Cross. Just steps further along, the Greek Orthodox controlled Station Twelve, where the cross had stood, and Station Thirteen, where Christ had been taken down. The dimly lit church branched into side chambers everywhere. Fragrant, acrid pine incense wafted through everyone’s territory.

All over the dusky walls hung an overwhelming mishmash of sorrowful icons, of rose and tan and black and white marble panels, set above scrolled railings and mosaic floors, an accumulated decoration of wonderment.

“Do you want to touch the real Calvary, where it really happened?” Abdul asked.

I nodded. Abdul lifted the velvet skirt draped over a table of glimmering votive candles, lanterns, statues. In the dimness below, I made out, then touched with fingertips, a slit the width of my palm, opening through the marble floor. I squeezed my fingers down into it and felt the rough, cold stone of blessedness, Golgotha, the Place of Skulls, the quick beneath the ornament of the Church. In candlelight, I glimpsed the cold, sacred rock and recalled most of a verse from T.S. Eliot’s The Hippopotamus:

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

This was an obscure facility. I looked up. No one in the passing crowd glanced down. A tourist stopped Abdul, who appeared especially knowing here, and asked, “Is this where the REAL THING happened?”

“Yes, yes,” Abdul answered assuringly. The woman’s eyes glowed. Overhearing this, an elderly priest, perhaps Italian, slowly placed his hand over his mouth, seemingly astonished, then embarrassed by his own strong reaction. Throughout the stone chambers, cameras flashed, collecting memories.

A nun, eyes always averted, dutifully scraped from a marble shelf the wax of a thousand candles recently bought, placed, lit and spent, a thousand pleas for merciful intervention. By her side, an Orthodox priest in flowing robe offered to sell passersby more “virgin candles.” A Greek teenager in pink pedal-pushers and red sneakers whispered excitedly and giggled and pointed, arm in arm with her lean young man. Another tourist asked Abdul, “Afterwards, they washed His body on that rock?”

“Yes…”

“That actual rock?”

“It’s a tradition…” Abdul began to answer, then stopped and shrugged. He led me to the tomb, the Fourteenth Station, a tiny hut, an ornate, two-chambered mausoleum, free standing, far beneath the huge church dome and the Ethiopian goat pasture above. In the tiny anteroom of the hut rested the rock slab that had sealed, then come away from, the tomb where Jesus had lain. It was covered with a shield of thick plate glass.

An old couple, perhaps from the American Midwest, touched the glass, fingertips darting out then clenching back into pockets. A dark-robed Orthodox priest bent slowly down, as though savoring a beckoning lover, and kissed the glass, downright romanced it, stayed on it for one, then two whole minutes, holding up the line, his lips a snail glued to the sidewall of a fish tank. The line crowded up behind, but no one disturbed his quaint ecstasy. Two nuns placed their rosaries beside the priest’s cheeks, to capture proximate holiness.

We crouched and entered the inner chamber of the hut, the tomb itself. A deep-eyed, somber, cassocked priest attended the tiny room. He regarded Abdul—they must have encountered one another three or four times on a busy tourist day for years without end—and Abdul did his job, blending sects: “This is where our Lord is buried,” he said, “and you may light a candle…” We crouched and backed out, discreetly.

In the bright street, a choir of doleful brothers, at the end of Via Dolorosa, chanted plainsong. Their music was pure, beautiful, a modal, snaking, endless tune so like the call of the muezzin a block away announcing another prayer time from the minaret of the Dome of the Rock Mosque, and so like the muttered tuneful chants of the rabbis a block away at the Wailing Wall.

Abdul smiled and led me graciously past one final murder site and on to the Holy Sephulcre Gifte Shoppe, where he nodded to another friend and where crowns of thorns, in several hat sizes, went for two dollars apiece, then on to the Jaffa Gate, and on out through the wall to the New Jerusalem.

MARK KRAMER has written for The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside and other publications. His books include Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat and Money from the American Soil, Invasive Procedures: A Year in the World of Two Surgeons, and Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland. He co-edited the anthologies Literary Journalism and Telling True Stories: a writer’s guide to narrative nonfiction from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, published by Plume/Penguin in 2007 and adopted by many writing classes. He was, from 2001–2007, writer-in-residence and Founding Director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism. He was writer-in-residence and professor of journalism at Boston University from 1991–2001 and taught at Smith College for a decade before that. He lives near Boston and runs an ongoing workshop for mid-career writers with longform projects. See www.tellingtruestories.com for more.

Interview by Pauline Pechin and Bobby Dangerously

It’s the dead of winter and Reid Stowe invites us aboard the Anne, a 70-foot schooner he built by hand in 1978, and then broke the world record for consecutive days at sea without resupply by sailing it for 1,152 days. The boat is currently docked in New York City, where Stowe lives with his girlfriend, Soanya Ahmad, and their two-year-old son, Darshen.

Ahmad sailed with Stowe for the first 306 days (the record for the longest continuous sea voyage for a woman), until they realized that she was pregnant. She was then picked up by another boat off the coast of Australia. Stowe continued on and spent the next two years alone at sea.

In the course of his three-year voyage, Stowe covered approximately 55,670 nautical miles. His route, which he plotted according to currents and seasonal storms, generally tracked east. Stowe saw land only when he and Ahmad parted. They packed three years of food onboard before leaving, as well as first aid and supplies to repair the boat—which, by the time Stowe returned, had weathered several ripped sails and a collision with a freighter.

Stowe and Ahmad reunited after he landed in June 2010 and Stowe finally got to meet his son. Though joyful and fulfilling in many ways, the reception at home was not what he expected.

…

What inspired your trip?

RS: Our family built a beach cottage near the ocean. My dad and granddad built little boats, and I learned boat building from them. We got to go fishing and we grew up surfing; I just loved the ocean madly.

I went surfing in Hawaii. I was 19 and I met another teenager who had a boat. We spent a year sailing in the South Pacific. I had the idea there that I would go on my own long spiritual voyages. And that’s what I proceeded to do my whole life until I was in New Zealand on this schooner, which I had built myself ten years before, planning to go to Antarctica. I said, “What can I do next?” And the idea just came to me in 1986, to go to sea for 1,000 days without stopping.

How did you plan your route?

RS: We chose to sail around the world in the trade winds. In order to sail around the world, without stopping and to stay out of sight of land, you cannot go through the Panama Canal. So you have to go around Cape Horn. I wanted to plan the route so that when we sailed in those southern latitudes, the weather would be nicer; it would be summertime. Then I looked at the maps of the world and said here’s where all the hurricanes are. And they’re here for that month and that month. I made big circles of where they were. In that way, I avoided the worst storms of the world.

How did you prepare for three years at sea?

RS: It ended up taking me over twenty years to get what I needed, and to get this boat fixed right to go. In fact, by the time we got enough to go, last April 2007, Soanya and I had the boat loaded full of food. We got food donated for the boat fifteen years before we left. But already the sails were old and various things needed replacing.

SA: Packing food for three years is a real challenge, as you might imagine. He did shorter expeditions and learned how to pack food. We put it in plastic. We’d put the plastic in a box and then we’d wrap the box. Things are sometimes double and triple wrapped. And what we carried to eat was not canned goods, but mostly dried goods. So we had pasta, rice, pesto, dried nuts, dried fruit, and sprouted our beans. We had different kinds of beans; some we ate as sprout salads and some we boiled and ate with rice. We also caught fish. We didn’t have to catch fish, but it was something that we wanted to do. Most things kept really well for those three years at sea.

RS: We did our medical research and usually made friends with a doctor. I’ve been building my medical kit for twenty or thirty years or more. We always had needles and Lidocaine to numb a spot that needed to be stitched, if you were cut. We had needles that were in sterile packages with thread. We always had a variety of antibiotics that we could take for various reasons. So we had that medical kit and a couple of medical books that we built up over the years. After a while things got old and another doctor would say, “We’re throwing this away.”

What kind of things did you encounter throughout your journey?

RS: One of the photos that we sent back was Soanya and I with our ears pressed close to the big wooden main mast. We could hear the vibrations in the boat. This is an old-fashioned gaff, rig boat. They could have sailed [it] during the Civil War or hundreds of years ago. We purposely tried to tune into the sounds of the boat because they tell us a lot about what’s happening.

So that act of putting our ears to the mast is like putting our ears to the guitar while you strum it. Just like we use eyesight or smell. Always if something breaks, you would hope that you hear something as soon as possible. So you can fix it before it got worse. When a sail tears, you can hear it. Because it’s real loud.

The most dramatic time that it happened, we were approaching Australia. I was having so many difficulties with the boat. We were in stormy weather and the sails were worn out from being up for six months without taking them down and rubbing here and there. We had to sail close to Australia to drop Soanya off, so it was a time that wasn’t as happy. And the weather was gray and cold in the Southern Ocean. I remember coming in from the pilothouse and going down. It was dawn and I decided I’m going to get a little rest now. I laid in bed with Soanya and I heard this flapping. I got back up and I got outside. Our giant mainsail had ripped for thirty feet, the full length, and was blowing in the wind. Then it had blown up the back of the leech, right up to the top of the sail. It looked impossible to try to salvage it. There was an example of how sound called me to my duty to come outside. I wish I had tuned in closer when it first happened. Or, I wished I had looked more often and caught it. A giant tear started at one inch long, and as it got longer it started flapping and making more noise. As it got windy, I didn’t really hear it. It took me more than a month of sewing every day to fix that sail. But I fixed it and was able to keep using it.

Being at sea, you’ve heard of the Roaring 40s. And those are the latitudes, 40 degrees south of the Southern Ocean, that roars. There’s a roaring of the waves breaking and the winds. After the Roaring 40s, they named it the Screaming 50s (50 degrees latitude south). Then it’s the Screaming 60s. So it gets even worse.

We had winds in Antarctica that blew so hard you couldn’t do anything. They didn’t last that long, luckily. But when we were in the Roaring 40s, when the storm came, the wind was coming [at] 50 to 70 knots. I had some extra holes in the steelwork that I did from bolting the solar panels. When the wind starts blowing like that, I thought I was in a train station; I couldn’t stop the noise with pillows over my head. So definitely after that storm, I went out and stuffed rags in the holes that I could find anywhere. There is a lot of noise at sea but most of the time you have nice weather and soft, soothing sounds.

SA: On day fifteen of our voyage, it felt like we had just left, and [we] had had a collision with a freighter. The front part of the boat was damaged and I think that was the only time that either of us thought we wouldn’t make it. It was a makeshift job done at sea. The day that it happened and the morning after, we were looking at sails flapping in the wind, thinking, “Okay, are we going to have to go to port now? Are we going to have to fix this? With what money?” Because we spent everything before we left.

RS: When you’re at sea, nothing is more important than keeping the boat afloat. The first thing that would need to be tended to is water coming in the boat. Well, you hope that it doesn’t come in. But people, in all kinds of boats, sink before they know it. I’ve had it happen to friends, and I’m going, “But you’ve got a big, expensive boat. What happened?” And they say, “Suddenly, the water was up to our knees down in there. We couldn’t find the leak, and the boat sank.” They had to call in for help and get their life raft. That happens to people. You have to know where leaks could happen. You sail along, and you hear gurgle gurgle gurgle drip drip drip. And you have to know what’s gurgling and dripping.

I think Soanya caught a few drips on a few occasions where she called it to my attention.

I [said] “No, I think it’s okay.”

“No, I think I hear a gurgling.”

And we found things that were leaking.

It could be the stuffing box, where the propeller goes out at the back of the boat, or the stern gland, where the rudder goes out the back of the boat. It could be any seacocks to the toilets. You have to know what is in various rooms that are possibilities for leaking. And you have to trust that the boat isn’t leaking and all the gurgling and the bubbling of the water—even when it’s sounding like a faucet—all of that’s happening outside and not inside. You have to get your rest.

During those three years, I was up ten or twelve times a night. I would take some naps during the daytime, but I was living in the day and the night. I was constantly on call, working out, and I kept myself in shape through yoga, but I wore myself out just squeezing ropes so hard. Pulling, pulling so hard. When I wasn’t sailing, I was sewing ’til I had chronic pain in my hands. And I would fall asleep and the pain in my hands would wake me up.

So I called on God, [whom] I imagined as those great Italian paintings: a sixty-five-year-old, well-muscled, bald man with a long beard. I said, “God, tell Jesus to heal this arm.” And then I felt Jesus take my arm and start massaging it. I saw his soft, beautiful face. I said, “God, tell Buddha to heal this arm.” Then I saw Buddha come and take this arm, start massaging it and healing it. Then the three of them came closer to heal me together. And they bumped heads. They started laughing together, and Buddha looked at me and winked.  That’s an example of a vision I had. I didn’t make that up. But I started by calling on the forces that I knew, the forces of man, and started to lead it someplace. It was the healing vision that took care of me.

I had visions of things with my eyes wide open. I saw things while I was meditating, which was pretty incredible. And I felt illuminations also.

What kind of illuminations?

RS: A lot of times I saw energy and myself expand. Then I saw my body surrounding the pulsing energy of the environment. So I sent my energy out with love, and I tried to bring in all of the negative, the hurt and the bad energy of people, breathe it in and heal it with my being. And then breathe it back out.

How would you describe the wave conditions at sea?

RS: You’re out there in the ocean and you’re going up and down. In the Southern Ocean, the waves are the biggest in the world. It’s wide-open ocean. The wind is always blowing from the west to the east, and in a circle. The waves keep rolling, and by the time they get to Cape Horn, South America, which is the furthest south, there are big waves and it doesn’t take much wind and a storm. They look like mountains and you can see them far away. Especially when the sun is setting. They all have deep shadows. And you might think that they’re thirty, forty feet. Or you might think they’re as big as a six-story building. I don’t know how to judge that. The waves became dangerous when they start breaking. We were actually turned upside down by a wave.

The schooner had been knocked out before, in the North Atlantic in the middle of a snow blizzard. We think it was far enough that the mast went into the water. And of course the boat comes back up again. It was like a floating submarine with a ten-foot keel. We had forty-two thousand pounds of lead in the bottom of our keel, and our water tanks [and] food on top of that. Everything in the boat is secured for that eventuality. This one time I was in the galley cooking, and a wave hit the boat and slammed me against the wall. Which wasn’t very far away, thank goodness.

And I remember whiting out. The hatches in the boat have slides. They’re homemade and they’re not watertight. So if the boat’s going under water, water’s squirting in. [I] got completely drenched by the water, and the water woke me up. The boat came back up. I was cooking, so I reached outside, through a little hatch that I had, and turned off the gas bottle. [I] then turned and looked out of the forward window, and saw that the one sail that I had up in the storm was torn into shreds. Then I had to do what I had to do to survive for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until later, when I was cooking in the galley, that I looked above the stove and saw the lentils and rice stuck to the ceiling. I made a photograph of that and I said, “It looks to me like I turned one hundred eighty degrees upside down.” But I didn’t know [it] when it happened. I was just being tumbled. I didn’t know what happened.

So the wave that did that was a rogue wave. It might not have been the most gigantic wave, but the thing is, it was a wave with a sheer face, almost as if the bottom drops out of it. It caught the boat just right, and it tumbled her over. It didn’t come with a roar and a real hard bang. It just caught us and flipped us upside down. The deep keel on the boat with all the ballast turned us right back up and we just kept going. But luckily I was prepared for it.  I had the right boat with the right design. I had everything watertight and strong. So it wasn’t that bad of damage except the sail that broke.

What if you were tossed into the water? Would it have been possible to survive?

RS: There are some stories of people that have had that happen to them, and they’ve survived. When I went outside after that happened, I was very careful and I had two lifelines that attached me to the boat. Because I knew [if] that happened, I would be underwater.

How did you meet?

SA: I met Reid when I was a student at City College. I was studying photography and I decided that I wanted to take pictures of the waterfront. So I started visiting all the piers along the waterfronts of New York City and photographing them. At the time, Reid was docked on what was Pier 63 on the West Side of Manhattan. I walked onto that pier and I asked him, “Is this your boat?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Can I take pictures of your boat?” He said, “Sure.” So I took some pictures, along with a whole bunch of other things. And the next week I brought some prints back for him. He was just about to go sailing. He said, “Do you want to go sailing with us?” So I said, “Sure.” It was the first time that I had sailed a boat, and it was the first time I had been sailing on the Hudson River.

At that time I didn’t really talk much with him. But I met a lot of his friends, and I learned a lot about the project. I kept returning to the boat to see how it was going every month or two months. He kept saying that he would leave in two months, so I thought, “Okay, I’ll get there before he leaves to see him off.” But, you know, two months turned into three years. By that time I had gotten my photo degree [and was] still interested in the waterfront. I started another degree called Maritime Technology. It was basically a program designed to give you some familiarity with boats and to put you in the working New York City waterfront. I did that for a year and I said, “Okay, what along the waterfront can I do?” Because I wanted to be there.

And Reid was looking for people to go with him and I said, “This looks like a good thing.” So I told him I wanted to go with him for one thousand days. He didn’t really expect that, but he had said before, in various conversations, that he didn’t necessarily need someone with sailing experience. Since I fit that bill, I said, “Can I go?” And he said, “Well, okay, let’s talk about it.” He said yes, basically.

RS: When she made me believe that she could go with me, she said, “I trust you and I know you can do it.” When she told me that when [we] were only friends, I realized I had someone who was ready to go out and die with me. And I wanted to keep that trust. But what allowed her to abandon everything of the world, the safety of being on land, and turn her life over to an adventure so grand that no one ever conceived of it before? And have the courage to put herself in the right state of mind to be able to do it? Shortly after we were together, I got to know her better and I started to train her.

But what was able to make her do the voyage was what she had deep inside of her. Her strength and who she was. At one time she said, “I didn’t prepare to go to sea for a thousand days. I set off in preparation to go to eternity.” So she was living in an eternal, timeless space. So it’s not like, “Would we still be able to stay out at sea as we planned?” It was more like, “Can we still live on the sea? And it looks like we can.” Everything’s not leaking and we still have all of our food. And we’re still together. We still believe that we can do it. After we were hit by the ship, we drifted in the North Atlantic for almost a month while we worked together to fix the boat, to be able to go on with a disabled boat and chains wrapped around the bow of the boat, holding the mast and sails forward.

Can I ask you what it felt like when you found out you had to leave the boat?

SA: We were entering into the Southern Ocean and it was the Roaring 40s. And the boat started to be hit with a lot of wind and waves. I got seasick and the seasickness continued. After awhile, I began to notice that I was chronically seasick, even when we were becalmed. So being that I was so nauseous all the time and practically bedridden, I told Reid, “I have to get off.”

We were in the middle of nowhere. It took us two months to get to land. By that time, I had already suspected that I might be pregnant. And when I got to shore, it was confirmed that I was. It was hard to know for two months that I’d be leaving the boat, the project [and] Reid. Because by that time we had bonded. I spent 10 months at sea, which was 306 days, nonstop without seeing another person or seeing land. He was the only one around. I had made that commitment to do almost three years at sea, [and] it got cut short.

When we got to land, the nausea went away almost immediately. So I was quite happy in that respect. But then I had another set of issues to deal with. I had a new baby on the way and Reid was out at sea. Our communication was sparse, so I didn’t really know what was happening. I knew it’d be two years before I saw him again.

We arranged for a transfer with the Royal Perth Yacht Club from Australia, since Australia was the next bit of land that we were going to pass. We didn’t really know people in Australia. But we knew that the person who currently held the record for the longest time at sea (658 days), John Sanders, he was a member of the Royal Perth Yacht Club. He had made his record in 1987. He was triple circumnavigating and was still sailing. So we contacted the yacht club and we said, “Can you come out to sea, have me transferred onto another boat and I would go onto land?” And they said, “Yes.” So [John Sanders] came out in a boat, along with the general manager of the yacht club. I transferred onto that boat in Australia, and then from Australia, flew back to New York City.

RS: We knew we had to let Soanya off and we were both sad about that. We knew I had to go on. I remember wondering, “Well, what’s going to happen now? Will I be able to handle everything alone?”

How did you communicate?

SA: We had email and we had a satellite telephone. We did not have internet. And we would send small emails through our satellite telephone. And we communicated by email almost every day until his computers broke down three quarters of the way through the voyage. So for the last six months we spoke through the phone maybe once a week. Because satellite phone expenses were too high.

That must have been hard to have the baby while he was out at sea.

SA: By the time the baby came along, by the time I was ready to give birth, I was okay. I was in a better state of mind. I was ready to be a new mother. And I was more settled. I was more prepared for the baby. And after that, it was just a whirlwind, just having a newborn. All the days and months, I don’t know where they went. It was a whole new thing and it all worked out for the best.

Were you worried about Reid?

SA: To a certain extent, yeah, if you don’t hear from him for a couple days, you wonder, “Well, did he knock his head and nobody knew?” There were some of those thoughts, but at the same time, you kind of have to trust and hope for the best.

In reuniting, how has it been adjusting to life on land?

SA: Having Reid back has been great. He’s really bonded with his son. I don’t think Darshen even remembers that his father wasn’t there for the first two years of his life. For Darshen, Reid has always been there. As for how Reid has adjusted to life on land, I don’t think he’s any different than before he left. He didn’t have any major issues upon returning. He was talking about the one thousand days before he left, and after he got back, he’s still talking about the one thousand days. He’s still the same person.

How did the experience compare to your expectations?

RS: I was hoping that it would be a more meaningful thing to the world. The voyage into the void, away from all worldly things, is a voyage that we all have to take.  Eventually, we all have to leave everyone and everything behind. So I saw it as a metaphor as a voyage into death. In the Sixties, a man sailed from England to Australia. When he sailed from Australia to England, he was a national hero and was met by the Queen; he posed with the Queen from her balcony while the crowds filled the streets. And it was an inspirational thing for his country. He was never at sea for more than one hundred days.

Though when we got back we got media all over the world, most of the stories were really shallow. Or, they weren’t really looking at the depth of it. It was more of a story of our reuniting and [meeting] my son for the first time.

The French reporters that were there said, “You’re being ignored.” Because if you were French and you had come back to France, you would be a national hero. In fact, I was kicked out of New York City after one day.  It was almost like they didn’t want to have a hero. It was like they didn’t recognize me. We tried to get the New York Sports Commissioner to come because this was an athletic event. Athletes couldn’t comprehend what I did. Sailors haven’t really wanted to know how I did what I did. I can talk about it in an evolved way of how I accomplished it, but no one wanted to know these things.

And it is disappointing for me because I feel like we have a great story that gives people hope on many levels, but it’s not being promoted. If I were a tennis player, there would be all of these organizations that would gain from it. I would be promoted in the corporate world. But I’m so outside of all of that.

First of all, when I tried to get funding, no one knew what I was talking about. They didn’t think it was possible. People are more interested in their media and electronic gadgets than realizing another possible pathway to happiness, and getting to know themselves at a higher evolution of mankind.

How has your perspective of life and death evolved from your experience at sea?

RS: I always took chances and went further, so by the time we were ready to go on this voyage I had been very versed in that sort of thing.

I felt, by being totally isolated, that I was nourishing the subconscious. And there’s an awareness of that within our culture. If you’re going to plan to go to sea for three years, one of the more important things was how are you going to control your psychology? You have to realize that you’re in a dangerous environment; you can’t be rescued. So you have to have your psychology prepared for anything, and a very positive attitude.

Then you’re in an environment that’s nurturing you in a very special way, especially if you’re open. That sort of thing heals you. It was something that was important to me. It gave me solace during the voyage, and it made me not afraid to die.

When you live in a state of expanded meditation, you’re connected with the stars and you feel like that’s your whole body. I felt like I’m one with the ocean rippling around me. The fish swim and the birds flew through me.

What kind of interactions did you have with wildlife at sea?

SA: When I was on watch at night, I kept hearing this sound like a wave crashing against the boat. But it wasn’t quite a wave. It was kind of like, whish! You know?  And I thought, “Is that a whale? Or is that just a wave?” It happened on more than one night. That has to be a whale. That can’t be just a wave. So finally I went out. It was really dark. I actually saw a big, black shape right near the boat, going by. And I think the whale was just sleeping.

One time we saw a gray-colored whale. I’m not sure what kind of whale it was. It must have been a young one. It just seemed that way, and it splashed near the boat. The more we yelled—especially Reid, who was making all of this fuss about it, cheering it on—the more that it would do water acrobatics. And with so very little effort, it would flip on its belly and back, and swim around. Eventually, we started doing our usual things on deck. It kind of drifted off a bit. And when it was time to go, it came up to the boat and sprayed. Reid was very surprised by it. He looked up and it was right next to him, and it just swam away.

We also saw a giant squid that we accidentally caught on our fishing line, and it got away.

I don’t remember the sound that the squid made. I can’t reproduce it. It bit the line that we had trailing behind the back of the boat, and it made a very strange, inhuman sound. Like a deep moaning sound. It was a little freaky, especially in the middle of the night and ocean. We just got a glimpse of the squid with a flashlight before it jumped right off and into the ocean, which I’m glad for. We didn’t really need to catch anything like that.

What about sharks?

SA: Well, we did see sharks in the water. There was never any cause to worry about sharks if you’re not in the water with them. But sometimes Reid would go into the water to clean the bottom of the boat, and then we’d worry about sharks.

RS: I loved snorkeling and scuba diving all my life. One time I was swimming off the boat in a school of porpoises. Then I looked around and I didn’t see any porpoises. I looked directly below me and I saw a giant shark. It was an old shark because it had ragged, broken fins and scars on its body. So I swam like a porpoise back to [the] boat. And after that I was never comfortable swimming off of the boat at sea. Because how did that shark arrive under me in a few minutes? I figured [it] could feel my vibrations swimming in the water, know that I was something else, and could find me real fast.

But sometimes I have to go underwater to clean the bottom of the boat. I only do it in calm weather when I can see very well. I look in the water and [if] I don’t see any sharks as far as the eye can see, I go in the water without making a splash. I swim down to the bottom of the keel, and I get to work scrubbing the barnacles and gooseneck mussels that have grown on the boat. One time I had a shark come up right behind me. It kind of scared me. And after that I was even more afraid to go in, but I felt I had to go in to clean the bottom on these occasions. It was an amazing experience rounding Cape Horn. The water was crystal clear and I could fish in the ocean.

Later, up in the Atlantic, I got a lot more growth on the bottom of the boat. But then I got becalmed and triggerfish came. They’re these real funny fish. They have this thick, leathery side. They don’t swim like regular fish. They have a spike at the top of their trigger so that they’re safe from other fish. And they have buckteeth. A giant school of them swam up to the boat and they cleaned all the barnacles off the bottom of the boat. I have an underwater window and I could watch them while they were swimming. So for the last half of the voyage, I didn’t have to go in. The triggerfish kept the boat clean and I arrived with a very clean bottom. But now that I’ve been on the river for a few months, I’ve got the growth back on the bottom of the boat.

Tell me about your experience with the blue heron.

RS: When I was off the coast of Africa, that was a place where I found that I had calmer water and less wind and I needed to rest. I was tired. I had been at sea for over two years and I counted the waves and multiplied and realized I was riding thirty-one thousand waves a day, constantly being rocked, constantly having to hold off, either with my shoulder or with my hand.

And I wasn’t being swept toward the coast by the trade winds or the counter currents along the equator. I was in this spot where I was able to just forget about sailing and going anywhere. I had the greatest time. And every night I would fall asleep lying under the stars.

I was lying in the cockpit going to sleep and waking up during the night, and a big storm came. Lightning was flashing everywhere and way up at the top of the mast, I saw this specter of a thing. I didn’t know what it was because it was way bigger than any bird out on the sea. It was flashing in the lightning. It started to rain and I went inside. And the next morning at dawn, real early, I saw a great blue heron on the deck of the boat. And I thought this is very odd because they’re not ocean birds. And he flew off.

At the end of the day, he came flying back. And he landed on the cockpit table next to me. He looked many pounds lighter. He lost weight. His whole body was drooping. His mouth was open. His tongue was out and he was panting. You could just see his heart beating, and that he had just barely made it back to the boat. I knew that he was not going to leave the boat again.

Great blue herons have a long, sharp beak, and I didn’t really want to get too near to him. I didn’t want to get pecked by him. And I tried to give him water to drink, but he didn’t want to drink water. At this place where I was, I wasn’t catching any fish. There weren’t flying fish jumping on board, so I didn’t know what to feed him. I offered him some sprouts, thinking he might like to pick grass. I knew he was going to die, but it took almost a week. And he ended up making friends and coming into the pilothouse with me. He would always be getting in my way. He would hang out in the hatch and I couldn’t get by him. So I acted like a cow. And I thought, “Well, he’s probably seen cows before.” I moo like [a] cow and sort of push him out of my way like a big-old cow.

He went down and down until he died in a very noble way. He just kept his head up the whole time. And that was the end of the blue heron that became friends with me.

But a few days later, I saw a flock of about six white herons. And I said, “Oh no.” They flew around the boat and I thought, “Well, are six of them going to come here to die?” They flew around the boat and were wondering [if] they should land. Then they flew off. But they flew to the west, away from land. They were completely lost.

Would you attribute the disregard of your voyage to American culture?

RS: People are caught up in the media. That’s what they’re being fed. It also has a lot to do with being fearful to do as much as they can to make as much money as they can, to be secure in their lives. They’re busy chasing money instead of an eternal dream. America is the culture most caught up in that.

We were ridiculed and ignored throughout. What is the example of that? How does that help other people to follow their dreams if they know they’re not going to be received, and they’re going to be cast out? That is an example of what the culture is interested in and inspired by.

It’s a little bit sad for me, in a way. But at the same time, we’re determined to not give up. We want to share our story.

PAULINE PECHIN is a writer in New York. She has contributed to New York Magazine, the Village Voice, and NY Press. She also edits the blog “All That We’ve Met,” which features interviews with artists, underground influencers, and people with interesting stories. “All That We’ve Met” is also a column on the Nonsense list, Jeff Stark’s weekly newsletter of weird happenings in NYC. Pauline grew up in the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas. And the first thing that she remembers ever writing was in second grade: a Valentine’s Day poem in the style of Dr. Seuss.

When BOBBY “DANGEROUSLY” McGILLICUTTY is not hawking his “Heal-All Salves and Snake Oil Emporium,” he is hard at work creating soundscapes, producing venerable stories for radio and conjuring other intoxicating environments of sonorous delight. When his audial reserves have been spent, he can be found haphazardly wasting his days bringing to life kinetic sculptures, writing elaborate stories of other worlds, rescuing and rejuvenating dying plants from the trash and strategizing a green roof takeover of the super metropolis he resides in, complete with solar, bees, chickens and farmland covering NYC’s upper canopy of concrete and steel.

Dedicated to the musicians

Back then I was still young
I was barely sixteen but my childhood memories were gone
I was 48,000 miles away from where I was born
I was in Moscow, city of a thousand and three bell towers and seven

train stations

And the thousand and three towers and seven stations weren't enough

for me

Because I was such a hot and crazy teenager
That my heart was burning like the Temple of Ephesus or like Red

Square in Moscow

At sunset
And my eyes were shining down those old roads
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn't know how to take it all the way.

The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake
Iced with gold
With big blanched-almond cathedrals
And the honey gold of the bells . . .
An old monk was reading me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then all at once the pigeons of the Holy Ghost flew up over the square
And my hands flew up too, sounding like an albatross taking off
And, well, that's the last I remember of the last day
Of the very last trip
And of the sea.

Still, I was a really bad poet.
I didn't know how to take it all the way.
I was hungry
And all those days and all those women in all those cafes and all those

glasses

I wanted to drink them down and break them
And all those windows and all those streets
And all those houses and all those lives
And all those carriage wheels raising swirls from the broken pavement
I would have liked to have rammed them into a roaring furnace
And I would have liked to have ground up all their bones
And ripped out all those tongues
And liquefied all those big bodies naked and strange under clothes that

drive me mad . . .

I foresaw the coming of the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution . . .
And the sun was an ugly sore
Splitting apart like a red-hot coal.

Back then I was still quite young
I was barely sixteen but I'd already forgotten about where I was born
I was in Moscow wanting to wolf down flames
And there weren't enough of those towers and stations sparkling in

my eyes

In Siberia the artillery rumbled -- it was war
Hunger cold plague cholera
And the muddy waters of the Amur carrying along millions of corpses
In every station I watched the last trains leave
That's all: they weren't selling any more tickets
And the soldiers would far rather have stayed . . .
An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod.

Me, the bad poet who wanted to go nowhere, I could go anywhere
And of course the businessmen still had enough money
To go out and seek their fortunes.
Their train left every Friday morning.
It sounded like a lot of people were dying.
One guy took along a hundred cases of alarm clocks and cuckoo clocks

from the Black Forest

Another took hatboxes, stovepipes, and an assortment of Sheffield

corkscrews

Another, coffins from Malmo filled with canned goods and sardines

in oil

And there were a lot of women
Women with vacant thighs for hire
Who could also serve
Coffins
They were all licensed
It sounded like a lot of people were dying out there
The women traveled at a reduced fare
And they all had bank accounts.

Now, one Friday morning it was my turn to go
It was in December
And I left too, with a traveling jewel merchant on his way to Harbin
We had two compartments on the express and 34 boxes of jewelry from

Pforzheim

German junk "Made in Germany"
He had bought me some new clothes and I had lost a button getting on

the train

-- I remember, I remember, I've often thought about it since --

I slept on the jewels and felt great playing with the nickel-plated

Browning he had given me

I was very happy and careless

It was like Cops and Robbers
We had stolen the treasure of Golconda
And we were taking it on the Trans-Siberian to hide it on the other side

of the world

I had to guard it from the thieves in the Urals who had attacked the

circus caravan in Jules Verne

From the Khunkhuz, the Boxers of China
And the angry little Mongols of the Great Lama
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
And the followers of the terrible Old Man of the Mountain
And worst of all, the most modern
The cat burglars
And the specialists of the international express.
And still, and still
I was as sad as a little boy
The rhythms of the train
What American psychiatrists call "railroad nerves"
The noise of doors voices axles screeching along frozen rails
The golden thread of my future
My Browning the piano the swearing of the card players in the next

compartment

The terrific presence of Jeanne
The man in blue glasses nervously pacing up and down the corridor

and glancing in at me

Swishing of women
And the whistle blowing
And the eternal sound of the wheels wildly rolling along ruts in the sky
The windows frosted over
No nature!
And out there the Siberian plains the low sky the big shadows of the

Taciturns rising and falling

I'm asleep in a tartan
Plaid
Like my life
With my life keeping me no warmer than this Scotch
Shawl
And all of Europe seen through the wind-cutter of an express at top

speed

No richer than my life
My poor life
This shawl
Frayed on strongboxes full of gold
I roll along with
Dream
And smoke
And the only flame in the universe
Is a poor thought . . .

Tears rise from the bottom of my heart
If I think, O Love, of my mistress;
She is but a child, whom I found, so pale
And pure, in the back of a bordel.

She is but a fair child who laughs,
Is sad, doesn't smile, and never cries;
But the poet's flower, the silver lily, trembles
When she lets you see it in the depths of her eyes.

She is sweet, says nothing you can hear,
With a long, slow trembling when you draw near;
But when I come to her, from here, from there,
She takes a step and shuts her eyes -- and takes a step.

For she is my love and other women
Are but big bodies of flame sheathed in gold,
My poor friend is so alone
She is stark naked, has no body -- she's too poor.

She is but an innocent flower, all thin and delicate,
The poet's flower, a pathetic silver lily,
So cold, so alone, and so wilted now
That tears rise if I think of her heart.

And this night is like a hundred thousand others when a train slips

through the night

-- Comets fall --

And a man and a woman, no matter how young, enjoy making love.

The sky is like the torn tent of a rundown circus in a little fishing village
In Flanders
The sun like a smoking lamp
And way up on the trapeze a woman does a crescent moon
The clarinet the trumpet a shrill flute a beat-up drum
And here is my cradle
My cradle
It was always near the piano when my mother, like Madame Bovary,

played Beethoven's sonatas

I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon
Playing hooky, following the trains as they pulled out of the stations
Now I've made the trains follow me
Basel-Timbuktu
I've played the horses at tracks like Auteuil and Longchamps
Paris-New York
Now the trains run alongside me
Madrid-Stockholm
Lost it all at the gay pari-mutuel
Patagonia is what's left, Patagonia, which befits my immense sadness,

Patagonia and a trip to the South Seas

I'm on the road
I've always been on the road
I'm on the road with little Jeanne of France
The train does a somersault and lands on all fours
The train lands on its wheels
The train always lands on all its wheels

"Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

A long way, Jeanne, you've been rolling along for seven days
You're a long way from Montmartre, from the Butte that brought you

up, from the Sacré-Coeur you snuggled up to

Paris has disappeared with its enormous blaze
Everything gone except cinders flying back
The rain falling
The peat bogs swelling
Siberia turning
Heavy sheets of snow piling up
And the bell of madness that jingles like a final desire in the bluish air
The train throbs at the heart of the leaden horizon
And your desolation snickers . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Troubles
Forget your troubles
All the cracked and leaning stations along the way
The telegraph lines they hang from
The grimacing poles that reach out to strangle them
The world stretches out elongates and snaps back like an accordion in

the hands of a raging sadist

Wild locomotives fly through rips in the sky
And in the holes
The dizzying wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misery that bark at our heels
The demons are unleashed
Scrap iron
Everything clanks
Slightly off
The clickety-clack of the wheels
Lurches
Jerks
We are a storm in the skull of a deaf man . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Of course we are, stop bothering me, you know we are, a long way
An overheated madness bellows in the locomotive
Plague and cholera rise like burning embers around us
We disappear right into a tunnel of war
Hunger, that whore, clutches the clouds scattered across the sky and

craps on the battlefield piles of stinking corpses

Do what it does, do your job . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Yes, we are, we are
All the scapegoats have swollen up and collapsed in this desert
Listen to the cowbells of this mangy troop
Tomsk Chelyabinsk Kansk Ob' Tayshet Verkne-Udinsk Kurgan Samara

Penza-Tulun

Death in Manchuria
Is where we get off is our last stop
This trip is terrible
Yesterday morning
Ivan Ulitch's hair turned white
And Kolia Nikolai Ivanovitch has been biting his fingers for two

weeks . . .

Do what Death and Famine do, do your job
It costs one hundred sous -- in Trans-Siberian that's one hundred rubles
Fire up the seats and blush under the table
The devil is at the keyboard
His knotty fingers thrill all the women
Instinct
OK gals
Do your job
Until we get to Harbin . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

No, hey . . . Stop bothering me . . . Leave me alone
Your pelvis sticks out
Your belly's sour and you have the clap
The only thing Paris laid in your lap
And there's a little soul . . . because you're unhappy
I feel sorry for you come here to my heart
The wheels are windmills in the land of Cockaigne
And the windmills are crutches a beggar whirls over his head
We are the amputees of space
We move on our four wounds
Our wings have been clipped
The wings of our seven sins
And the trains are all the devil's toys
Chicken coop
The modern world
Speed is of no use
The modern world
The distances are too far away
And at the end of a trip it's horrible to be a man with a woman . . .

"Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

I feel so sorry for you come here I'm going to tell you a story
Come get in my bed
Put your head on my shoulder
I'm going to tell you a story . . .

Oh come on!

It's always spring in the Fijis
You lay around
The lovers swoon in the high grass and hot syphilis drifts among the

banana trees

Come to the lost islands of the Pacific!
Names like Phoenix, the Marquesas
Borneo and Java
And Celebes shaped like a cat

We can't go to Japan
Come to Mexico!
Tulip trees flourish on the high plateaus
Clinging vines hang down like hair from the sun
It's as if the brushes and palette of a painter
Had used colors stunning as gongs--
Rousseau was there
It dazzled him forever
It's a great bird country
The bird of paradise the lyre bird
The toucan the mockingbird
And the hummingbird nests in the heart of the black lily
Come!
We'll love each other in the majestic ruins of an Aztec temple
You'll be my idol
Splashed with color childish slightly ugly and really weird
Oh come!

If you want we'll take a plane and fly over the land of the thousand lakes
The nights there are outrageously long
The sound of the engine will scare our prehistoric ancestors
I'll land
And build a hangar out of mammoth fossils
The primitive fire will rekindle our poor love
Samovar
And we'll settle down like ordinary folks near the pole
Oh come!

Jeanne Jeannette my pet my pot my poot
My me mama poopoo Peru
Peepee cuckoo
Ding ding my dong
Sweet pea sweet flea sweet bumblebee
Chickadee beddy-bye
Little dove my love
Little cookie-nookie
Asleep.

She's asleep
And she hasn't taken in a thing the whole way
All those faces glimpsed in the stations
All the clocks
Paris time Berlin time Saint Petersburg time all those stations' times
And at Ufa the bloody face of the cannoneer
And the absurdly luminous dial at Grodno
And the train moving forward endlessly
Every morning you set your watch ahead
The train moves forward and the sun loses time It's no use! I hear the bells
The big bell at Notre-Dame
The sharp bell at the Louvre that rang on Saint Bartholomew's Day
The rusty carillons of Bruges-the-Dead
The electric bells of the New York Public Library
The campaniles of Venice
And the bells of Moscow ringing, the clock at Red Gate that kept time

for me when I was working in an office

And my memories
The train thunders into the roundhouse
The train rolls along
A gramophone blurts out a tinny Bohemian march
And the world, like the hands of the clock in the Jewish section of

Prague, turns wildly backwards.

Cast caution to the winds
Now the storm is raging
And the trains storm over tangled tracks
Infernal toys
There are trains that never meet
Others just get lost
The stationmasters play chess
Backgammon
Shoot pool
Carom shots
Parabolas
The railway system is a new geometry
Syracuse
Archimedes
And the soldiers who butchered him
And the galleys
And the warships
And the astounding engines he invented
And all that killing
Ancient history
Modern history
Vortex
Shipwreck
Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper
So many associations images I can't get into my poem
Because I'm still such a really bad poet
Because the universe rushes over me
And I didn't bother to insure myself against train wreck
Because I don't know how to take it all the way
And I'm scared.

I'm scared
I don't know how to take it all the way.
Like my friend Chagall I could do a series of irrational paintings
But I didn't take notes
"Forgive my ignorance
Pardon my forgetting how to play the ancient game of Verse"
As Guillaume Apollinaire says
If you want to know anything about the war read Kuropotkin's Memoirs
Or the Japanese newspapers with their ghastly illustrations
But why compile a bibliography
I give up
Bounce back into my leaping memory . . .

At Irkutsk the trip suddenly slows down
Really drags
We were the first train to wind around Lake Baikal
The locomotive was decked out with flags and lanterns
And we had left the station to the sad sound of "God Save the Czar."
If I were a painter I would splash lots of red and yellow over the end of

this trip

Because I think we were all slightly crazy
And that an overwhelming delirium brought blood to the exhausted

faces of my traveling companions

As we came closer to Mongolia
Which roared like a forest fire.
The train had slowed down
And in the perpetual screeching of wheels I heard
The insane sobbing and screaming
Of an eternal liturgy

I saw
I saw the silent trains the black trains returning from the Far East and

going by like phantoms

And my eyes, like taillights, are still trailing along behind those trains
At Talga 100,000 wounded were dying with no help coming
I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk
And at Khilok we met a long convoy of soldiers gone insane
I saw in quarantine gaping sores and wounds with blood gushing out
And the amputated limbs danced around or flew up in the raw air
Fire was in their faces and in their hearts
Idiot fingers drumming on all the windowpanes
And under the pressure of fear an expression would burst like an abcess
In all the stations they had set fire to all the cars
And I saw
I saw trains with 60 locomotives streaking away chased by hot horizons

and desperate crows

Disappearing
In the direction of Port Arthur.

At Chita we had a few days' rest
A five-day stop while they cleared the tracks
We stayed with Mr. Iankelevitch who wanted me to marry his only

daughter

Then it was time to go.
Now I was the one playing the piano and I had a toothache
And when I want I can see it all again those quiet rooms the store and

the eyes of the daughter who slept with me every night

Mussorgsky
And the lieder of Hugo Wolf
And the sands of the Gobi Desert
And at Khailar a caravan of white camels
I'd swear I was drunk for over 300 miles
But I was playing the piano -- it's all I saw
You should close your eyes on a trip
And sleep
I was dying to sleep

With my eyes closed I can smell what country I'm in
And I can hear what kind of train is going by
European trains are in 4/4 while the Asian ones are 5/4 or 7/4
Others go humming along are like lullabies
And there are some whose wheels' monotone reminds me of the heavy

prose of Maeterlinck

I deciphered all the garbled texts of the wheels and united the scattered

elements of a violent beauty

Which I possess
And which drives me

Tsitsihar and Harbin
That's as far as I go
The last station
I stepped off the train at Harbin a minute after they had set fire to the

Red Cross office.

O Paris

Great warm hearth with the intersecting embers of your streets and your

old houses leaning over them for warmth

Like grandmothers
And here are posters in red in green all colors like my past in a word

yellow

Yellow the proud color of the novels of France
In big cities I like to rub elbows with the buses as they go by
Those of the Saint-Germain-Montmartre line that carry me to the

assault of the Butte

The motors bellow like golden bulls
The cows of dusk graze on Sacré-Coeur
O Paris
Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness
Now only the paint store has a little light on its door
The International Pullman and Great European Express Company has

sent me its brochure

It's the most beautiful church in the world
I have friends who surround me like guardrails
They're afraid that when I leave I'll never come back

All the women I've ever known appear around me on the horizon
Holding out their arms and looking like sad lighthouses in the rain
Bella, Agnes, Catherine, and the mother of my son in Italy
And she who is the mother of my love in America
Sometimes the cry of a whistle tears me apart
Over in Manchuria a belly is still heaving, as if giving birth
I wish
I wish I'd never started traveling
Tonight a great love is driving me out of my mind
And I can't help thinking about little Jeanne of France.
It's through a sad night that I've written this poem in her honor
Jeanne
The little prostitute
I'm sad so sad
I'm going to the Lapin Agile to remember my lost youth again
Have a few drinks
And come back home alone

Paris

City of the incomparable Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel

Paris, 1913

Translated by Ron Padgett

RON PADGETT’s books include the poetry collections How Long, How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, Great Balls of Fire, and New & Selected Poems, as well as three memoirs, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan; Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers; and Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. Padgett is also the editor of The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms and World Poets. His translations include Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems (buy it here), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Poet Assassinated, Valery Larbaud’s Poems of A. O. Barnabooth (with Bill Zavatsky), and Flash Cards by Yu Jian (with Wang Ping). He has collaborated with artists such as Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Joe Brainard. Padgett has received Fulbright, NEA, Guggenheim, and Civitella Ranieri grants and fellowships, and was named Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2008 he was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He also received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com.

To Jean Genet

I was anxiously staring at the walls in a room with drawn dark curtains. Father lay on the bed, his blind eyes peering into the ceiling, his hands searching for the pillow beside him. When he didn’t find me there, he yelled my name. I rushed to him and lay beside him. He wrapped his arms round me and we both cried.

In the morning he insisted, “We haven’t slept together in one bed since you were forty days old.”

Later, without uttering a word, a guard came in and handed me a cup of tea and half a loaf of bread. Father was praying morning prayer, his face against the pillow.

Half an hour later, around noon, we were taken to see the investigating officer. The authorities had held us hostage hoping my brother would turn himself in, but now we were released without knowing if my brother had been captured or, upon hearing that his blind father was arrested, had lost his nerve and turned himself in.

*

A long time passed and we still had no news of my brother. Was he alive, dead, incarcerated, or free? Every day at dusk I would join Father in the sitting room. He would start his story in the usual way, with his famous sentence, “We haven’t slept together in one bed since you were forty days old.”

I would take advantage of the opportunity and tease the story out of him.

“And after the forty days, Haj, what happened?”

He would smile, taking his time with the unruffled passion of old age.

“On the forty-first day I bought you a wooden cradle, with bars on all four sides. Your mother dressed it in the hide of a sheep we had slaughtered for Eid. She breast-fed you, aided your burps, wrapped you tightly in a sheet, then a woolen cape and put you to sleep. How beautiful and satisfied you seemed, your cheeks pink, your eyes sleepy, your lips occasionally surprising us with a magical smile. We never tired of admiring you-we feared giving you an evil eye-and you never disturbed us. You only woke up crying when morning came, after we had had our blessed sleep.”

Mother entered with a bunch of fresh mint. We smiled and she smiled back, saying, “While picking the mint I got the hiccups. I am sure you were talking about me.”

“Yes, but only saying good things.”

“I know, but you have a cunning tongue; you were never as naive as your brother.”

Her eyes filled with tears. Father seemed to share her grief, but he didn’t cry. The only time I had ever seen him cry was during that night we were arrested, when he wrapped his arms round me, affectionately pulled me to his chest and wept.

*

I left them and went downtown. On my way I imagined them in each other’s arms, drinking mint tea, consoling one another with memories. I wasn’t worried for them. When I arrived at one of the pavement cafés, I slumped into a chair. I sipped my bitter espresso, smoking and talking to myself. Will grief return? And will happiness? And will forgetfulness? And will… and will… return? I sat frozen a long time listening to the news of the world till I got bored. Then I returned and found them calm.

Father was counting his agate prayer beads, Mother was peeling cloves of garlic and crushing them in the mortar before scraping the paste with a spoon into a boiling pot. I whispered to Father, “We haven’t slept in one bed since I was forty days old.”

“A year later your brother was born and we moved you to a bigger bed in the neighboring room. Then you grew and your brother grew and we grew with you, always obedient to God. And your sisters married, one after the other, then you left your room for the sitting room before moving to your flat on the second floor, then your brother moved into the sitting room, where he read and prayed. And here I am now, alone, in the sitting room, telling you what you can read into the wrinkles on my forehead.”

A delicious steam was rising above the pot of tomato and sun-dried lamb soup, fragrant with thyme and fenugreek seed. I poured lukewarm water over Father’s hands then handed him a clean towel. Mother was engrossed in shredding the clay oven-baked bread with burnt edges.

Nothing preoccupied my mind. Time has taught me to ignore sorrow till happy times have passed.

“Come, dinner is ready.”

Mother was used to eating alone. I can’t recall her ever eating with us. Even on Eid she would serve the grilled meat and leave to eat her share with my sisters and the women from next door. That evening I tried to break the custom and asked her to join us. She replied gracefully:

“Eat, don’t mind me. My share is in the pot. I’ll have it later.”

Father stopped chewing and swallowing, then whispered: “She won’t eat. Insist upon her, I beg you. She’s growing thinner, withering away. It has been ages since I heard her singing to herself while baking, sieving rice, or sweeping the floor. It is a sure sign of danger, when a woman falls silent.”

I kissed her forehead and whispered in her ear: “For my sake.” She promised she would eat as soon as she was finished with her night prayer.

*

What kind of life is this? Silence is killing me, tranquility is thrusting me into an annihilation of fire.

Patience presses against my chest till I tremble. Tedium unsettles me, making madness seem inevitable. I am exhausted of this life of waiting.

A piece of me is lost, amputated before my final slaughter. My wound is deep, fixed on not healing. Forgetting has failed. Keeping custody of one’s eyes has become a rare thing. Memory is an ivy sipping rain-when will the wall fall, when will you awake and dare-its roots piercing the nerve. Father aches. Mother aches. How will they depart without provisions?

They might have found him there, waiting. And they might have not. How will they ever return? All right then, I must follow. But I may not find them, nor find him, nor he us. They have vanished and vanished and vanished, all into eternal oblivion.

MOHAMMED AL-ASFAR’s writing has been described as an expression of the grief of living under dictatorship. In this way, his work describes the unsaid and unmentionable. His characters are a terrible expression of how coded and ambiguously allegorical art often is forced to become under state censorship. Translated from Arabic by Hisham Matar. “Mint Flavored Hiccups” was first published in Words Without Borders, tk. Copyright Mohammed Al-Asfar. Translation copyright Hisham Matar. All rights reserved. Full text here.

Since Communism’s collapse, almost every East European city has had its moment of glory, when the cross-pollination of global capitalism, fast-changing societies, and media hype, created the perfect storm of creative energies, cashish, and a freewheeling party culture. First it was bohemian Prague in the early 90s, widely celebrated as the heir to “Paris of the 20s,” then Moscow in the late 90s, as funny money, sexual insanity and a vast craving for the West turned the drab Soviet capital into a Klondike of greed & sensuality. During the naughties, various smaller capitals had their 15 minutes of fame, as trend-seekers ventured further afield for undiscovered creative meccas. Warsaw, Bratislava, Bucharest, Tallinn, Vilnius, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev and others experienced spikes of global hipster interest, before the hype subsided. Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, was even named “Party Capital of the Year” in 2006, by the venerable New York Times.

Yet, until Andrejsala’s zany technoheads began to transform Riga, Latvia’s capital city-dubbed the “Moscow on the Baltic” by local expats-seemed immune to the Dazed & Confused London vibes that had so transformed its neighbors. While Tallinn, just four hours drive to the north, boasted stylish house music clubs, industrial-chic curry houses, and summer techno festivals, Riga, whose population is more than fifty percent ethnic Russians, was a microcosmic version of Moscow of the 90s. Dodgy bars in the Swedish-built old town blared Russian pop, while tarts in red heels, shiny black tights and peroxide blond hair sauntered around on a bubblegum & cheap vodka high. Local chavs in Adidas tracksuits and chains seemed to lurk around every corner. There were a few hipster bars, but they were a dismal affair, unchanged since the mid 90s. Most of the nightlife & restaurants catered to the Russian upper-middle class who partied Moscow style, with glitz and glam. Having moved back to Estonia in early 2006, I visited Riga just once that first year, and all my former prejudices were confirmed.

Everything changed one wet spring evening, when we decided to spend a night in Andrejsala’s Singalong Hostel en route to Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. A man named Zagga had been emailing me for a while, saying that he’d picked up a copy of B.East (the provocative mag about Eastern Europe that I’ve published since 2005) and wanted us to check out the Riga scene. Having ignored his emails at first, I was intrigued after others mentioned a swath of docklands that artists had taken over and agreed to spend a night there.

We figured something was in the air as soon as we passed the gorgeous Art Deco buildings on Elizabetes Street and headed toward the river. Hipsters in hoodies and dirk bikes raced past us as we approached the waterfront and the streetlights dimmed. When Zagga, on a bicycle, finally found us, he guided us past the rotting hulks of cargo ships, over railway tracks and down a dark, bumpy road that ended on the freezing Daugava river, that encircles Latvia’s capital. He led us to the Buddha Room at the Singalong Hotel, with its giant gilded mural of the Buddha overlooking a spartan futon. A few  minutes after arriving, we were led to a Lithuanian fashion photographer’s show in an industrial gallery next door.

It was a wet, grey Thursday evening. The large unheated space was unwelcoming, to say the least, and I was exhausted from the journey—and from an all-night bender the previous day. Yet, I couldn’t help being swept up by the raw enthusiasm of Zagga and his crowd, whose eyes all burned with that same mad gleam. Between shots of vodka, they shared their passion for this anarchic “factory” that had sprung up in the abandoned docks of a forgotten port on the edge of the city. Eline, a petite blond with a cute upturned nose and punky blond hair, ran the zany Singalong Hostel, and reveled in its growing stature as an “artists” hotel for creative souls who floated through Riga from time to time. A Dutch couple biking through Europe occupied one room; a Latvian-American bohemian chick had taken up permanent residence in the Lenin Room; and some Russian DJs were spending the night before catching an EasyJet flight to Berlin. Zagga, meanwhile, was running a semi-illegal club in a former storage room, called Space Garage, that rocked all weekend to dirty electro and minimal techno beats. “You should stay till tomorrow,” he insisted, grabbing us by the arm. (I was traveling with an Estonian girlfriend ). “It’s wild, Dasha Rush is coming in from Paris, and there’ll be enough pills around to keep us smiling till Sunday.”

His suggestion was tempting: for the first time in a while, I was really digging the vibe. Even the photographs, which portrayed models trapped in a post-apocalytic Vilnius, were better than I expected: while girls in leotards played ping-pong in bombed-out swimming pools in one picture, a model in a billowing red chiffon dress flew over the ruins of Vilnius’ Parliament Square in another. The provocative images fit the mood of the gallery, and that of my magazine—which, apparently, had spawned a cultish fan base in Riga.

As others described their favorite B.East stories or fashion shoots, I felt like a rock star. Wasn’t that why I had started the magazine in the first place? But more than that, I was acutely aware that they were “living” the life I so cheekily hyped. B.East had created a buzz across Europe by hyping East Europe, a vast, chaotic swath of countries that most in the West knew very little about. With our slogan “Eat the West,” we declared that the West was boring and increasingly puritanical, while the East was where the party was. This was the message these crazy Latvians had seized upon and were using to justify the cultural primacy of their creative hedonism. The thick air in the warehouse space, laced with smoke from various joints, was intoxicating. Had the magazine been responsible for giving the scene its dynamism, or did we need this scene to continue being true to our spirit?

Whichever it was, I realized that night that I wanted more. The scene reminded me of freewheeling Estonia in the late 90s, or Prague in the early 90s—and I badly needed another dose. I had spent more than a year in straitlaced post-EU-accession Estonia, where capitalism and mainstream pop culture  had triumphed over the wild experimentation of the 90s. The madness of the 90s was now just fuel for amusing dinner party stories in Tallinn, and even the bohemians from the old days were more interested in paying their mortgage, and waking up in time for work, than having fun. Riga, it seemed, was where East Europe was still the beast, and hadn’t yet been defanged. That night, after some drunk Balts chanted “Beast, Be East, Beast, Be East” on the fringes of a cheesy launch party for Maxim Latvia, I knew I’d be back.

I returned sooner than expected. I’d mentioned Vilnius’s insane, sleazy electro DJ crew “Metal on Metal” (featured in our “Red” issue) to, Kirill, the Russian co-owner of the Space Garage, and he’d invited them—and me—to Riga for a B.East launch party. I was excited, relieved to escape straitlaced Estonia for the untrammeled hedonism of Andrejsala. Even though I came solo this time—on the bus even—I was given a rock star’s welcome. Kirill, whose trademark 90s Adidas tracksuit attire contrasted with the smart Lexus he drove, picked me up at the bus station. Elina, welcomed me with a shot of vodka before escorting me to their VIP Buddha room.

We met the “Metal on Metal” DJs – blond, alcoholic Manfredas and Vitas, more commonly known by his stagename Miss America, at a swank Latin-themed restaurant in Riga’s grand old town. A few mojitos and arroz con pollo later, we were already doing lines in the bathroom and revving up for the night ahead. It promised to be an epic evening, echoing the high-octane madness of Estonia & Moscow in the 90s. And, it certainly was. I was invited to warm up the crowd with my electro-clash DJ set, and then “Metal on Metal” went to work on the crowd—Manfredas swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels while he stood on the table and DJed their remix of Datarock’s “I used to dance with my Daddy.” The energy in the tiny storage room, zanily decorated with Soviet-era relics, threadbare couches Berlin-style, and arty photographs, was heaving and intense as the crowd—fuelled by vodka, speed, coke, ecstasy and goodness knows what else—went into overdrive.

Miss America pulled me aside at some point and said it was one of the best parties they’d ever DJ-ed. The floor was literally heaving to their hardcore electro beat, and unlike Berlin parties, there were beautiful women everywhere, dressed street-style as elsewhere in Europe but much more sensual than Berliners or Londoners. Gorgeous blondes kissed each other; the barmaids bared their breasts for the fun of it; while hipsters snorted lines in the back room and talked about Morocco, Moscow and everything else. At some point, Kirill gave me a pill with a Mitsubishi logo on it, and then everything became a blur. I remember Zagga hugging me and gifting a can of bottled water that the Soviets handed out in case of a nuclear attack, and then later, kissing a gorgeous Russian art student, Masha, who coyly admitted that she had decorated her bathroom with pages from B.East before dragging me onto an abandoned ship just paces away from the Space Garage.

I awoke at 3 pm the next afternoon to the sound of a thumping techno beat, and wandered outside, only to realize that the party had never stopped. It was Zagga’s 31^st birthday, and he was hiding behind shades, sprawled out on a couch in the bright June sun,  while somebody DJed in the background and someone else ran into town on a beer run. I was supposed to head back that day but was convinced to stay another night, and then another… When I finally made it back to Tallinn on Monday, I reflected that the past weekend had been one of the best of my life. It was like I’d stepped into the pages of my own magazine, was finally living the B.East life, instead of writing about it. I was 38 at the time, still single, and though many of my contemporaries were shucking the party life for responsible adulthood, I vowed not to go quietly into the night. It was June, and the glorious Baltic summer, was just weeks away, and, naturally, I decided to spend the bulk of July and August there. MINI, one of our main sponsors since the launch of the magazine, had agreed to lend me a cabriolet for the summer in return for doing some promotions in the Baltics, and I was going to rock it up, for real this time.

The summer was almost everything that I had expected it to be. It was like a sequel to Riga’s version of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I consumed even more drugs—ecstasy, Baltic bathtub speed, Afghan charas, MDMA powder—than I had in the spring, and organized a couple magazine bashes, including one on the abandoned cargo ship that abuts the Andrejsala port. Unlike the more mainstream clubs in old Riga that played Europop and commerical house, Andrejsala was a dirty electro paradise, with DJs spinning dirty beats long after the other clubs had closed. It’s hedonistic mix of hipster Russians and Williamsburgesque Latvians, along with some plugged-in visitors, helped create a vibe that was unforgettable.

I had a brief summer affair with a young hipster chick, who ran a Moroccan tea house and was obsessed with the Teremin and UFOs. One weekend we all packed into a camper van and headed to a former Soviet Air Force Base—much like the one used for Germany’s infamous Soviet-retro Fusion Festival—and camped in the rotting hangars for a night. On another, assorted Berlin friends of the Singalong crew showed up for a weekend of sausages, vodka, speed and a Future Shorts Film Festival. Hanging out in the Buddha Room for much of the summer, my life quickly merged with the other “permanent” residents of the hostel. There was Linnards, a flamboyant VJ, televsion presenter, interior decorator and mad partyer who lived behind the kitchen. There was bubbly Eline, of course, who seemed to be having an affair with the somewhat tortured Latvian-American photographer who was camped out in the Lenin Room. Zagga, lived elsewhere, but was almost always tinkering away in the Space Garage. Kirill took me on long drives into Riga’s Russian ghettos, where it seemed time had stopped since Communism’s collapse. There were still Soviet-era shops called “Bread” and “Alcohol.” Some of the houses in the area still had communal flats, with families living in one large apartment. Drunk men in shaved heads and Abibas (misspelling deliberate) hung out on the stoops, while old babushkas hawked dated cans of fish or a single pair of socks.

It was all too reminiscent of the Baltics in the early 90s, just after the freefall following Communism’s collapse. Once one of the great cities of the Russian empire, after Moscow and St. Petersburg, much of Riga had fallen into disrepair during the Soviet era. More than anything, the neighborhood reminded us of how much had changed in the rest of the city since then.

I bought a bike and careened around the city with the crew, stopping for joints on the banks of the Daugava. Sometimes I’d head to Jurmala, the charming coastal town an hour away from Riga, with its pastel-colored wooden houses, white sand beaches and Soviet-era sanitariums. Once we swung on ropes suspended from a tree into the river and pretended we were Tarzans for an entire day. Karin, a zany Russian photographer in Riga, had spent a winter in Brazil, had schemed it up. The joints, beer and topless blondes egging us on were the perfect combination for imagining we were actually in the Amazon.

It was a magical summer and I wouldn’t trade those few months in Riga for anything. The mistake, in retrospect, was returning for the fall, and the ensuing winter of discontent. I should have known from having lived through so many scenes in Eastern European cities that the good vibes and creative cohesiveness don’t last. I should have guessed that that summer was the high water mark of Andrejsala’s evolution, and gone back to Estonia to reflect on what had happened, or moved to a bigger city, like Berlin.

Instead, I chose to move to Riga, reasoning that I could benefit from having such a symbiotic relationship with the crew. Maybe we’d open a club together. Perhaps I could get funding from the Latvian government to open a B.East office in Riga. I could tell that the Singalong crew were a bit taken aback by my decision to rent a flat and move there permanently. Being paranoid, I thought that familiarity had bred contempt, and that they had begun to dislike me somewhat. Despite their protests that I’d be better off moving elsewhere, I found a flat, moved all my stuff down, and started a new life in Riga in the fall.

Almost immediately after settling down, I realized that something was amiss. The blissful anarchism of spring and summer had given way to something darker, something  more sinister. The government announced plans to privatize the port and gentrify the area, building modern office blocks, a Modern Art Museum and an underground parking lot. Singalong Hostel was given three months to find a new space and vacate the premises. Meanwhile, the rich Russians had gotten permission to build a chic nightclub at the entrance to Andrejsala, and they were pressuring the authorities to close down Space Garage. Police raided the place in October, and hauled away suspected drug users. It was closed after that and both Zagga and Kirill turned catatonic in the way Baltic people tend to when faced with misfortune. They’d come by my place and not speak for hours or mumble about opening another club, then leave suddenly.

Without Space Garage on the weekends, they felt their lives had lost meaning. Kirill disappeared to Moscow for long periods, trying to set up a record label or some other crazy venture. It was the fall of 2008, and the effects from the global financial meltdown were felt almost instantly. As easy credit dried up, the whole pyramid system of easy money that had fueled the past years’ lifestyle came crashing down. Less visitors came through as the crisis deepened, and with Space Garage shut, the crew started getting itchy feet. Zagga, Linnards, and others would take EasyJet weekends to Berlin and come back recharged and refreshed. In Riga, they were on the edges of society; in Berlin, though, they were in the mainstream. Unlike provincial Riga, Berlin prided itself on its underground culture, its embrace of Olstalgia and its free bohemian spirit. The contrast with materialistic Riga, where the artists were being hounded at every corner, couldn’t have been greater.

Linnards was the first to go, moving to Berlin with great fanfare in late fall, around November I believe. Then a gorgeous redhead photographer I had long fancied announced she was moving to Prague to study film. A few of the DJs upped and moved to Moscow where they could score better gigs. Eline fell in love with an American techno DJ based in London and decided to try her luck there, now that Singalong was closed. Come Christmas, I realized that Zagga and I were practically the last of the spring crew. Since Riga was so small, what takes ten years in New York had happened here in one. I celebrated New Year’s Eve with friends in a third floor apartment that had been decorated to look like the original Space Garage, with retro posters, red leather couches, catwalks for dancing and so on… The ones who were home from the bigger cities talked of the past, and the ones who remained behind also talked about the past. Riga, even for the ones who had stayed behind, had become a dead city, just a vessel for memories from a bygone era. I wondered what I was still doing there and realized that everyone else was also wondering the same thing. What had happened to the B.East? How come he hadn’t also unleashed his own personal B.East into the world? Two weeks later, I packed whatever I could fit into a Range Rover with an adventurous English friend of mine and drove to Kiev, Ukraine, to start a new life.

VIJAI MAHESHWARI is a nominal New Yorker, who did his bachelor’s at Columbia University in the early 90s, and then hung around the early Williamsburg scene for a few years before decamping for the lair of the Russian beast more than fifteen years ago. He was editor-in-chief of Russian Playboy, and has published a novel, White God Factor, loosely based on his heady experiences in high-octane Moscow. He now lives a more chilled existence in Ukraine, while publishing a pan-European attitude glossy about the East – B.East.

Please keep to the right.  I’m walking on the right. I’m trying to stay out of your way. Why are you veering into my path, brushing or even bumping my shoulder? There’s plenty of room for everybody. Stay on the right side, you fucking nimrod. You must be British or Japanese.

In the coffee shop I know the poppy music is for the waiters but what about the customers? Please turn it down. Actually turn it OFF. Please. Silence is good for peristalsis. At least make it Debussy or Satie or Faure or Chabrier or Hahn or Roussel or Duparc. I’m French. You must be Polish or American.

Don’t speak to me. Don’t speak. Put the thing in your hand down. Put it in this can. You must be new.

On my break at Music City I walk down to the Hollywood Ranch Market for fruit.  The stars are crawling all over the floor. Eddie Bracken, Bill Demarest, Lana Turner, Betty Lipski, they all go there on their breaks. I bring a peach back to work but the Wallach Brothers won’t let me eat it. “Fucking juice’ll get on the merchandise, you little shit.” Orson Welles wants to buy something by Bartok. We aren’t positive about who he (Orson) is. Later that week he takes me, Billy Hadley and Paula Something next door to Coffee Dan’s for date nut loaf with cream cheese and coffee. Now I remember. He’s making Touch of Evil and he must weigh in around 400 lbs. A peerless bon vivant and gourmand. A great regaler.

The double bill at The Hitching Post is Border Feud with Lash LaRue and Gunning for Justice (Johnny Mack Brown). I notice that the box office is FESTOONED with belts, holsters, cap guns, whips and spurs. Shooting caps inside the theater is streng verboten. I’m unarmed. Woody Woodruff and Melvin Holtzman resent having to check their air rifles. We notice Billy Beewinner (a paste eater) in the audience so we sit behind him and torment him until he has to move. Melvin’s mother (Phyllis) picks us up and takes us to Snowbird in Glendale for an Idiot’s Delight—one scoop of every flavor, bananas and syrups. If you finish one, you get another free. Okay.

Do you know Ub Iwerks? Urban Shocker? God Shammgod? Tim Spoonybarger?  Dizzy Trout? Boubacar Aw? Hillbilly Bildilli? Pussy Tebeau?  Memo Luna? Johnny Dickshot? Adolf Oliver Nipple?  Who doesn’t?  But names don’t tell you very much. I’ve never been to the Xanga Blogrings Summer Seminar in Vang Vieng but doubt that I’d miss it.

In Cincinnati for a weekend teaching gig. I’m waiting for my mostly teenage students. Two girls come in giggling. “Can we be in your class?” You probably can but you may. The room fills up. There’s some pushing and shoving. I decide to teach them some manners. “What are manners?” I ask. Here are some of the written answers:

writing things down in a book

looking nice

trouble

proud

singing a song?

special

so special that when you try something different it hurts the other person

You think I’m kidding? I explained that it means little brown dots on your face and arms. They weren’t sure about that. My favorite was a German guy in his 40s:

ice – like being cool – having manners

Cincinnati is nothing. The zoo, the botanical gardens, the art museum, the Reds Hall of Fame, Fountain Square, feh. Okay there’s a good Titian and a very good Kuan Yin in the museum.  And one good club, Mad Frog on East McMillan. Leave me alone.

For decades, I resisted going to China, fearful of slipping in ankle-deep spit. I gave in and wore my galoshes. I didn’t care much for Peking — too many staff, office workers and soldiers — but Shanghai’s Chinatown was a big surprise. I didn’t know they had one. It’s very near the Yuyuan Gardens. They have kosher skate wing and there’s even an underground tong. The rest of Shanghai was fun too. Shanghai Metro is the best. The Bund at night is dazzling. At the Grand Theatre in People’s Square we saw a rock opera version of Lady Windemere’s Fan starring  Shen Yun as Mrs. Erlynne and Lili Liu in the title role. We just missed Elvis Costello and his skiffle band, but we caught the last set of Bombasta! at Fillmore Far East.

LARRY FAGIN is of Hungarian-Russian-Polish stock. He has lived in Hollywood, Salzburg, Vienna, Wiesbaden, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and London. He edits Adventures in Poetry books and was the founder and artistic director of Danspace at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan. His latest book is Dig & Delve (Granary Books). He teaches privately. Prospective students go to larryfagin.com

This collection of stories was submitted anonymously by a copilot of a major U.S. airline. The accounts published here are edited for length and clarity only. A new submission runs with every issue.

Take a Picture. It’ll Last Longer.

DISCLAIMER: These events are true. Only the winds have been changed to protect fuel economy. I don’t actually watch Murder She Wrote. Anymore. In the event of a water landing, this trip is not approved as a flotation device.

Day 1

Wife and kids drop me lower level at the airport cause my piece of shit Volkswagon conjured deathbed symbology.

A word about my car: 2000 Jetta. Bought it on eBay in ’03. Picked it up in Memphis. Lease return. Spent a full week cleaning nicotine off every interior surface. (The seatbelts for crissakes!) Paint is scratched and etched with alien blood. The driver’s airbag is inop. There are lipstick and cigarette burns in the headliner. The cup holder fell out.

The gear shift knob cracked. I replaced the $200 factory part with what I thought was a simple $12 metal knob. Fucking thing lights up and chases round the top K.I.T.T style to no discernable purpose when you press the conspicuously useless button in the middle.

The windows are tinted Midnight Purple Awesome. (This may have contributed to me backing into my own fucking car in my own fucking driveway. Twice.) The driver’s window fell completely off the track. In my infinite manly-ness, I took the door apart to fish it out. Had to get my mechanic wife to put it back together (Less manly). A couple years back I crushed the pax side mirror backing out of my uber space-efficient garage. The interior plastiwood door trim escaped. (Or was deported.) But it’s paid off and it runs. Or did.

Anyhow, as I smooch occupants and stack my gear, a Quasi-feral Euroid emitting “where the fuck am I?” pheromones gangles toward me bass-like. Chin up. Mouth working. Befuddlement leaking out from behind wire frame glasses. I’m so sure he’s going to ask me where he should go that when he breaks right and heads back in the opposite direction, I’m fascinated. I assume he’s attracted to the shiny objects on my uniform.
I put on my hat and go in the really large, obvious (and only) door available. Eurobass falls in behind me. He’s tripping my proximity alarms down the whole 50 yards of empty hallway. If I stop I swear this guy is going blunder into me dick first. Then I’ll have to explain that I already have a boyfriend. Awkward.

I get to the ticketing level and realize I don’t know where to go. I pick people up all the time here, but this is the first I’ve come in this way. I go to the north employee entrance but it’s gone. A Blueberry (TSA Agent) tells me it’s now down by the admin area.

There’s a sign: “Employee Entrance To The Right Of Glass Wall.” I go down the right side. No door. I go back and read the sign again. I consider that maybe I don’t know my left from right. (This has happened before.) I consider that maybe the sign was supposed to face the other way. (Only you’d have to be coming OUT of the secure area to read it.)

I goldfish one last time down the glass wall to make sure I’m still hovering above the Gump line. Danica back to the sign. Picture some mouth-breathing, xray-absorbing securipod plugging individual letters into this sign and clapping his hands with glee as I go down the LEFT side of the wall, past the big “Do Not Enter” sign to the employee door.

One leg to LAX. The Capt. is a mild guy. Mid 50’s. Looks like Andy Worhol in blu-blockers. 4 1/2 hours of uneventful. At the hotel, I spend an hour at the gym warding off the bad habits juju. Now what? 22 hours to kill. Reward myself with a walk to “The Store.” I don’t know what it’s actually called. “Manny’s House of Hooch” maybe. Looks like the whole thing was airlifted cinder block by urine coated cinder block from Tijuana.

Rusted steel cage industrial floor fans. Security cameras and burned-in monitors on top of the fridge to show you they have security cameras. Scuffed faded checkerboard floor and bags of desiccated bad ideas you only get from leg-humping the border and only eat on a dare or after the spam runs out. I buy vodka and diet root beer.

Burrow in by the pool. I drag a couple chairs and a table into the shade to build a nest. I am already dark and furry. I do not need to work on my tan. It’s one in the afternoon.

As I mix a cocktail I’m struck by what I must look like to the other pool goers. A hulking ape-like figure fully dressed, lurking in the corner mixing sinister libations from a black plastic bag and mumbling to himself. I leave the root beer out to appear less creepy. I don’t think its working.

I read my book and try to shake the feeling that I might as well wear a trench coat and carry candy in my pockets. At one point, I look up and realize I’m the only guy and there are about 20 girls in various stages of rinse-burn-repeat. I tenaciously ignore the blonde hottie in the pink Hello Kitty bikini.

After a few hours I go back to my room. The time change and all that not lying in the sun has me sleepy by 1800. I fall asleep basking in the glow of the TV and my own awesomeness.

I wake the next morning. Only…it’s not the next morning. It’s 2330. ??!! <Fuuuuuuck.> I watch “Murder She Wrote” until about 0200.
Day 2

Up early to shore up my flab sub-structure in the gym. Getting ready for work I realize that for the first time in 10 years, I forgot to pack undershirts. No choice but to go Guido. The sensation of the wing backings rubbing on my nipples is not entirely unpleasant.

In the elevator, there are three girls. They ask if I’m a pilot. “Yes ma’am.” They ask me how many hours I can fly in a day and how many days off I get. I try to paint it without sounding like a math teacher expounding on the joy of fractions. I fail.

They ask if they can take a picture with me. “Of course.” I try to look competent. Most of my pictures come out like one of those “I knew it!” photos when the guy turns out to be a serial killer.

At the airport, a boy about six asks me what the three stripes on my shoulders mean. I explain that it means I’m the catcher. The pitcher is the dude over there with four stripes.

In the plane another boy comes into the cockpit. I give him my hat. Dad snaps a photo. They want a picture of me with the boy in the jetway. I oblige. Same photographic result. Flight to BWI is just under five hours. My ass goes numb.

Day 3

In the airport at MCO I see a guy with tattoo sleeves down both arms. Spider webs on his left elbow. Shaved head. Long goatee and thick BCGs. (Birth Control Glasses.) He’s pushing an infant stroller with his SigOt humping all the support gear.

He’s wearing a tight black t-shirt that says PARKING ENFORCEMENT big and yellow on the back. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be funny or if he takes his authority a little seriously, but I enjoy it. The eye glasses case and phone clipped to his belt tilt the scale toward not kidding.

Coming into SJU, on the topic of duty free bargains, the Capt. drops this bomb: “We don’t drink alcohol in my house. So I wouldn’t know.” I see now that he is a dangerous unstable man. Not to be trusted.

I go to Duty Free. Drop my purchases in the cockpit and go out for the walkaround. Gate agents have to open the jetway door to outside with a key. After the walk-around, the bad man leaves me out in the heat for 10 minutes. I start to wilt. My Guido-city is now clearly evident.

When I finally get back in the cockpit, evil Andy lays this on me: ”Did you see the other crew?”

“No.”

“They said there’s a level six outbreak of swine flu here. That’s why there are so many people with masks. That’s about as bad as it gets. Scheduling gave those guys masks and rubber gloves for the overnight.”

I wad this information up and jam it in the orifice marked “Shit I Would Like To Have Known Before Wandering Around The Terminal.”

The flight back to MCO is again uneventful. On arrival, a chubby little boy heads into the cockpit. Evil Andy gives him some wings. Dad wants to take a picture with me and the food-stained boy. On the jetway, I kneel down behind the boy and put my arm around his shoulder. As dad snaps the picture, the gelatinous little scamp ducks his head and sneezes on my hand. This is not awesome. I excuse myself and smear swine flu around with airplane soap and non-potable water.

I go to the hotel to wait for symptoms. On reflection, this is all probably part of that devious Warhol’s master plan. Decide to dedicate myself to licking all his stuff when he’s not looking. (Not really. I’m pretty sure he has cooties).

Day 4

As we’re doing the preflight, Capt. Cultural Icon grills me about my coffee. “So you’re pretty particular about your coffee huh? That why you always go to Starbucks?”

“No. As long as it’s got 4-6 shots of espresso in it, I’ll buy it from that twitchy guy with the lisp in the men’s room at Sears. Ray. You know Ray? Nice smile? Soft hands? No?”

On our way to BWI the FA calls up, “Are you, uh, pusheeng de ah metal to de ah floor?”

“What?”

“It sounds like we are goeeng faster.” Her accent could be Russian or Spanish. I’m pretty shitty with accents.

“Oh. We’re climbing. We gotta add power to do that.”

“Oh. Ohkaee. I thought maybee you were racing each other up there.”

“No problem. Thanks for the call. If you hear anything else, be sure to let us know.”

In BWI, as I wander the concourse trolling for lunch, a man stops me. “Hey. I got a question.”

“Of course.”

“If I make a long distance call from a payphone, does it cost the same as a regular call?”

“…No I think it will tell you: please deposit 35 cents or something like that.”

“Oh. So I can just get some change from one of these shops and make the call?”

“I would think so, yes.”

In 2010, American artist Swoon co-founded Konbit Shelter to bring sustainable home construction to Haiti following the catastrophic 7.0 earthquake that shook the country earlier that year. She and a crew spent two months that summer building a community center in the village of Bigones, Barriere Jeudi. The crew returned later to build a one-family house using the same technique.

Day 1   Arrive. Make plans. Take it easy.

Day 2 7 a.m., go to Barriere Jeudi. Devise a plan to hire everyone who applies. Start digging. There aren’t enough tools. The kids make zombie faces at my camera. I put honey pea flowers behind their ears.

Day 3 The river rose, then we got stuck in it. Then some other guys got stuck in it. Then a really angry man brought a machete, started screaming and swinging it at another man, who got a machete too. Everyone held them back. Then Harry grabbed the angry man’s machete and we hopped on a backhoe that drove us down the river and all the way through town, where all the kids jumped up and down and waved at us like we were in the Mardi Gras parade.

Day 4 Two giant tarantulas, at least as big as my hand, hiding in dark places. Still digging. I found out why my name is so funny to people: it sounds like calezonio courez, which means, in some nonsense way, peeling onions while running.

Day 5 I’m thinking today was all about spontaneous detachment. First, without a breeze stirring, a huge tree limb popped clean off of its trunk, ejecting itself onto Raul, who was walking by with a wheelbarrow, and also entangling the little girl I call Mack Truck. The Mack truck was fine, but it dislocated Raul’s shoulder. Then the tire flew off of Fritz’s truck on the highway, and he and Tod had to put it back on in the rain. Then KT broke her toe. I guess she’s lucky it stayed on.

Day 6 I mull over the value of what we are doing here. So far, all I can say for sure is that we have created thirty jobs for four weeks, and for that, people seem happy. We started, of course, wanting so much more. We’ll see.

Day 7 Found another tarantula in the woodpile. Two bulls started fighting and then charged a man. Then one bull ran off with his mouth wide open and his tongue sticking way out of his mouth straight as a Popsicle stick, screaming a low wheezy scream at the top of his lungs in a show of frustration that I was helpless but to find totally hilarious. There was a turning today. A warming up as we become more able to communicate what we will create. People seem excited. The rubble started arriving from the three broken houses we are demolishing down the hill.

Day 8 The little black-and-red magic seeds from my childhood are all over the ground here and every rope is a snake. Fritz and Kanep say that no Haitian likes a snake, but what about Damballah-Wedo,  the pinnacle of the voodoo Loa, who has a snake as his maidservant and symbol? And what about Santa Maria la Dominadora, with her wild hair and her fistfuls of snakes looking for all the world like Kali?

Day 9 I made a karate-chop sound as I was hoeing away at the rocky dirt, and Annuncio said, “Why did you do that? What does it mean?” “It’s just a joke,” I said. “Like I’m in a karate movie, kicking ass.” “Oh” he said. “Why does your friend never joke with us? We are only people, working so hard; we need her to laugh with us.”

Day 10 Whoever invented this day-off thing was a fucking genius. I have a whole new perspective on what it means to do manual labor and how, in some way, it changes you. Building and digging day after day these last months, when I get home my ideas are gone. Drained right out of me.

Day 11 No comment.

Day 12 Chickens picking through rubble.

Day 13 This funny thing happened where we aren’t allowed to use tools anymore. As soon as the digging stopped and the building started and the work got interesting, we became completely superfluous—couldn’t get our hands on a tool or a job if we tried, and started making sweet outfits out of the polypropylene tubing just to keep busy.

Day 14 Stayed up all night making door forms out of what must be cut-down palm trees and imported plywood, with a two-man 1850s push-pull saw by headlamps.

Day 15 We all four have the malaise. How do people here do it? In this crumbled, beautiful place, no one seems held down. I know this is absurd to say, but since I never saw Haiti before the quake, and since the everyday bustle and intense insistence of life have returned in such full force—people living in and around broken city blocks, tent on the roof, goods for sale on the fractured balcony—there are slivers of moments when it looks to me like it’s always been this way. Like it’s a page from Italo Calvino, a city where every building’s foundation is poured then crushed, slabs are laid on at angles that will topple in the next strong wind and chickens for centuries have had dominion over the heaping piles of rocks at the sides of the highways. In some ways the tension of living life this way is shoved down so deep you can barely even see it.

Day 16 There is a huge, beautiful brown snake that lives and suns itself on the same tree every day, right along our path. And today I found this, the voodoo creation story:

Day 17 Sick.

Day 18 I think Jean Gaudi told that guy to kill the snake that lives in the tree every day. Could that be?

Day 19 I just don’t know if we are in the right place. It’s nice what we are building, it’s nice what we are doing, but in no way does it get to the heart of the problem, and more and more that’s starting to bother me.

Day 20 One birth, one death. I didn’t even know Monique was that pregnant. She just came around on hiring day with little Mack Truck in tow and said, “I’m pregnant with no one to take care of me. Please give me a job.” Then, last night, a baby girl.

Ben said he saw her squatting behind Fritz’s Grandpa’s crumbled house yesterday and wondered if that was her water breaking. Did she stay at work after her water broke? She is two years younger than me. It amazes me, when I look into her face; I feel like a child compared to her. What’s that look that mothers have? Ferocious tenderness. Worry and troubled sweetness. Then the death: one of the little pigs, run clean over. I haven’t told Ben yet.

Day 21 I wonder what Cheoline meant when she said that Monique wanted to give us the baby. I hope she didn’t mean give us the baby.

Day 22 Mud. Mud. Mud.

Day 22 OK, so everyone said we had to build a public structure first. When we were here the first time—to introduce a new style of architecture, they said, you must first give everyone space to own it and be a part of it. It’s working, and I love that, and I love being here. The pressure of the need that surrounds us is so much, though. Here we are, working in this community whose structure is essentially intact, building a brand-new building that no one will live in, when there are thousands and thousands of transplanted people in camps just down in Léogâne. I know that we are just four people with some money we raised ourselves and a mission we could fit our hands around, but I feel it down in my bones that there is a deeper need that we can’t even touch, and it aches and aches.

Day 23 Fishy spaghetti. Puke breakfast.

Day 24

Day 25

Day 26

Day 27

Day 28

Day 29 So then what? It got really dark. My arms were falling asleep all day, every day. I wanted to throw up. Couldn’t think, couldn’t want, stopped writing it down.

Day 30 They didn’t kill the snake and Ben didn’t run over the pig (though the pig is dead). We are just the kings and queens of misunderstanding Jean Gaudi. Today in the tree, not one snake but two. A he snake and a lady snake, says Jean Gaudi.

Day 31 A puppy showed up. So little she can squeeze through the space around any door. She hides under the bed and pays us no mind. Harry got really drunk and started crying. I wonder why the cement mixers insist on wearing a hard hat but no respirator. Sure, everything is broken, and we run out of everything every day, but all things considered this is nothing. It’s working.

Day 32 Herbi started putting the little black-and-red magic seeds in his mouth. I got him to spit them out, and then brought them to Ducken, always having suspected them of being poison. I asked, explaining that Herbi had had them in his mouth. “No,” he said, “don’t let him eat those, and be careful where you plant them in the ground. You don’t know what will come up.” The vine that produces this seed is everywhere around here, though; what could this mean, “You don’t know what will come up?”

Day 34 Not going home yet. So much for four weeks. So much for those non-negotiable plane-ticket vouchers.

Day 33 Her name is Pop Tart now, the little puppy. She has ears like a bat. Huge. Like to fly with. Everyone laughs at us for snuggling and playing with her, just points and laughs and laughs. It’s a good thing I’ve never had anything against being laughed at; life would be a lot harder here.

Day 35 KT called me a sucker at breakfast today. I didn’t take it well at all. There is nothing wrong with being nice to people, and I am holding a lot of tension around that subject besides. I do wonder how it came to be this way, though, that anytime someone wants something they come to me. The baby needs milk, the cousin wants a job; always, since day one, they ask me. Is it some look that I wear on my face that says, “Got a problem? Step right up, saying no breaks my heart!”  Why was that so clear from the get-go?

Day 36 Tired tired tired. We’re falling apart a little. All the skin is peeling off my hands. I want to cry most of the time. My arms won’t stop falling asleep. KT’s whole leg is infected. A blistering heat rash has taken up residency in my armpit. Whatever the hell is going on on Ben’s foot is just scary.

Day 37 I have to get out of here. I just do.

Day 38 Really.

Day 39 You know, all I want to do is snorkel. We can’t leave. We can’t go anywhere, but sometimes, just for an hour on Sundays, with the mask that Heather sent me, I can become weightless and float through another world. It’s the closest thing I get to escape.

And that fisherman who took us out the first day. He said that he went to Miami in a tiny little homemade sailboat like the one we were on. And do you know what I said? I said, “Oh, you’ve been to Miami?” like I forgot what fucking planet we’re on. Like a Haitian man in a homemade sunfish just up and sails to Miami for vacation. And he says, “No, I only made it to Guantanamo. I sailed for ten days. Just offshore from Miami they torpedoed my boat and took me to Guantanamo; now I’m back.” How do I get to be such an idiot sometimes?

Day 39 Gibson, Ducken and really the whole Exod dynasty are experts now. They are gods to us at this point. Bigones is so rich with this family. And Walki, I’m sure when I get home I will draw Walki, just to try and figure out what it is in his face. He’s a naughty ten year old just like every other naughty, rascally, prank-playing ten year old, but at almost any given moment his face looks like a basin filled up with the light of the world—drinking it in and radiating it back outward. To be honest it makes no sense to me. In the most irrational recesses of my mind I imagine that if I imitate it by drawing it, I can find out where it comes from. Like if I could make my mind and my hand move like the light moves, I’ll meet it there, at its source.

Day 39 Harry says that Fritz’s grandpa could heal anyone, and could see the future, and that’s why that family has so much land, and that’s why we can build what we are building on his land.

Day 40 I think we are gonna go home. The building isn’t finished, but it’s so, so close, and all that is left are parts that people work rings around us doing; we have nothing left to teach. They will finish it without us. This in itself is a small triumph, I guess.

Day 41 So the old man who makes the smoke behind the tiny house, the ancient one who never, ever acknowledges me no matter how many times I say hi to him, not even when I tried to sit with him one day while he made the smoke—today Fritz said that he was his grandfather’s right-hand man, and he’s the only one who still knows all of his secrets. The old man told him about the tree limb that fell on Raul; he said that he had intervened on Raul’s behalf, that if it wasn’t for his temperance the tree would have killed Raul. He said that after the quake, Raul became a Christian and started slandering the spirits of the trees on the land where we were building. “If you are so powerful, why did you let the earthquake happen?” he had been demanding, saying they had no power after all.

Day 33 OK, fine, I admit it: it was the snakes and those seeds that felt so much like clues that this was the place we should build the first time we visited—that stitched me right into certainty that this is where we would begin. All summer I had been dreaming of snakes and seeing their movements out of the corners of my eyes. Then that vision under the sea, about an undulating movement, a snake with a dozen heads rising up from the bottom of the sea to shake the land. On our first visit to Bigones, I couldn’t believe it when I looked down and in the riverbed was a single seed—red and black, the kind my dad used to keep one of wrapped in a clean white handkerchief next to the teeny baby from the king cake, and which he would hover ceremoniously over our boo-boos to cure what ailed us. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and we followed that trail up the hill to meet the old couple who minds the temple. I was staring intently at the post outside the temple, which held up the shade structure, though I couldn’t quite make out why, when Fritz said, “You see it? It’s a snake.” And there it was, painted, plain as day. I got goose bumps all over. Later, at dinner, Fritz began describing how the earthquake had been like a snake, undulating through the land, and I felt how sometimes there is a language below language, a set of dreaming symbols that I find myself following even while I’m awake.

Day 42 I’m gonna miss Pop Tart and Sleepy Eyes the most. Sometimes I think this will only have mattered if we can come back and build houses. I’m probably just being negative in those moments, though.

Day 45 Home. The baby is named Bessie. I named her, sort of by accident, after an American queen. When I ride through Brooklyn I can’t help but transpose the damage of Port au Prince and Léogâne onto New York City. Every other building flattened. Brownstone after brownstone, factories, warehouses, apartment buildings, the Williamsburgh clock tower, the Bushwick dorms, rubble, rubble, rubble. Would people carry on amid the rubble the same way? There is no kind of tenacity like the one I’ve just seen. I want to build a house for Monique and Bessie and the Mack Truck. Ben wants to build a house for the old couple who minds the voodoo temple and can’t much walk. Funny thing is that their house never fell down; it just leaned over real bad and then somebody pushed it back up for them, and now they get rained on all night. Thing is that if you are really poor, your house was never built out of materials that crumble; it was built out of sticks and slats. It’s true that this was not our mission, building structures with people who never lost their houses. We were shaken by the earthquake, by the lunacy of the cosmic unfairness that a place that had received so many blows could possibly absorb such a ghastly tragedy. That five hundred miles of the coast of my home state made these folks my neighbors and that maybe we were ready and able to help, because, by the pictures, no one could be expected to deal with that alone.

What happened instead, I guess, is a bond with this one place, Bigones, a tiny little niche inside a tiny little fold, across two rivers and up the mountain. Stone carvers and farmers who hoe their fields in the most beautiful unison and have known each other their whole lives. The teenagers teaching themselves Spanish and English and everything they can do to participate in the world outside of Bigones. Ben and I left New York wanting to help Haiti in general; now we feel committed to these people. It’s hard still to understand precisely where your energies are best focused. It feels right in my gut, it’s just my mind (never shuts up), which has been arguing since the beginning and is still arguing for some larger contribution than a few structures in one small village.  Screaming and hollering, really—“But what about those grueling camps, where will they go?! Nothing is happening! When?! Women are getting raped in the bathroom lines, and the floods are coming!” Take a deep breath, little one. You can only do what you can do.  I do feel so lucky to be home and resting. I do. I know it.

SWOON is an American artist known for her life-size portraits of family, friends and people she meets on her travels. Inspired by historical and folk sources ranging from German Expressionist wood-block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, she is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of the experience of the streets. Swoon is a founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada art collective and her work has been shown at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Deitch Projects, Art Basel, MOMA and the Brooklyn Museum.

Author’s Note: Two major obstacles to happiness remain constant throughout the history of Haitian society: social and economic injustice, and totalitarian tendencies. Poverty can be as cruel as dictatorship in its effect on the individual. When the two join forces against the human spirit, the choices are limited: violence and madness, hopelessness and revolt. Because even in the depths of madness, revolt can lie dormant, only to erupt, savagely and uncontrollably, against those who govern without attending to the common good. Against those who profit from the system without regard for the fate of others, those smug in the comfort of their good fortune who never bother to question prejudices or inequalities. Revolt against an unjust system that long ago abandoned the majority of the population to a life in which each day is a struggle to preserve dignity and humanity. Even when one must beg to survive.

I was born in the shade of the almond tree, halfway between nothingness and the unattainable light.

I have no age. I carry my years without submitting to the regimen of time and its chronology of dates and seasons. I recognize myself living, hands outstretched, in the shade of the almond tree, with white hair and staring eyes unconcerned with the passing hours. My tree and I have entwined our ages in the absurdity of the days. I stride from chapel to chapel between masses when silence prevails and the flames of the candles flicker beneath penitents’ tears. I kneel each morning before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, but I don’t pray. I find refuge there from the filthiness of existence. I imagine lives never exposed to the flavors of ripe mangoes and cherries in June, or to mild, starry nights and clear mornings, or to moments dissolving like hot, tender walnuts under the tongue.

Yet I have no memories except those of this bark that is the color of revealed time. No one ever lulled me to sleep with stories or tales. All by myself I invented a yearning for the myths and legends behind the featureless face of the one who brought me into the world and then left before I could settle accounts with her. “Why doesn’t your mother come back to look for you,” constantly asked the woman who took responsibility for keeping me alive through a pure reflex of basic preservation, just like the empty bottles and plastic sacks she accumulated until her death. I survived with just enough nourishment to avoid dying from malnutrition, just enough hygiene to avoid succumbing to dysentery, typhoid and other infections that fill the space around us, just enough breath to not find myself six feet under. I have no memory of the belly I came from. Still, from childhood to adolescence, I let myself be carried along by an unusual need for gentleness and the dread of my hand and heart being snatched by a loving mother from beyond the grave. The only prayer I was able to murmur came to me from the very depths of hunger, when the urge to live was reduced to the next mouthful and the primal sensation of food inside my mouth after a period of aching deprivation. Why didn’t you come back to find me and take me away with you, deceased mother, prisoner of my counterfeit memory?

My name hardly matters. It bears the imprint of my hand outstretched at the crossroad of the four seasons. The branches of the almond tree have colored my life green or autumnal red, with a velvety or grainy texture, a life irrevocably destined to hurtle brutally into the ground with a rapid and capricious momentum. Even as a little girl, I knew how to position my begging arm to reach out, draw back or move in parallel with the passerby. I learned to beg before I could form sentences. At least that’s what the woman who kept me alive told me. The only quality allowed to me was my ability to lie and take advantage, with my grimy palm upturned and my eyes staring at the purse or wallet. I had an unfailing capacity to recognize the guilt ready to submit, the naïve happiness derived from generosity and charity, and to pressure them on all sides with my subtly accusatory look. In the shade of my almond tree, I observed the contortions of this poor humanity. I recognized moral decay in all its guises. I have seen fine young ladies drawing the trains of their white dresses with the sprightliness of tinkling bells and satisfied ambitions. Ding dong, a living room with rattan furniture to dazzle the neighbors, ding dong, an apartment paid for in American dollars to brag about while pretending to complain, ding, dong, a dear little fetus to accelerate the wedding march, ding, dong, the ring on the finger and the pockets in a twirl.

Governments replaced one another without disrupting my mode of living. I never received an invitation to their ceremonies. The tree bark and I shared the scratches equitably. My skin was fissured from abuses and blows. Boots and bullets have scarred our roots, and for a long time my almond tree and I have intertwined our crossed arms. My hand has been covered with spittle, with kicks, sometimes with coins, and less frequently with new or threadbare currency. In the shade of my almond tree, among the distended stomachs in cramped lofts overflowing with mouths to feed, I have witnessed misery garbed in gruffness and insults, liberally sewing discord for mere trifles.

I have had my allowance of little buttered rolls and hot coffee, thanks to the feast days of patron saints and voodoo spirits, all according to the services provided by jealous or envious old women, or by fathers of families unable to find a solution to the anguish of their lives except by kneeling with their heads bowed in the glow of a whale deity. From Saint Anthony to Saint Michael, I succeeded in unraveling the realm of intervention of each heavenly power. While still little, I tracked the results of countless prayers to determine whether the Virgin or her son had the greater potency. Even when it was unacknowledged, I divined the presence of the voodoo spirits in the curve of the upraised arms and the inclination of the imploring heads. “Have mercy, Virgin, on my son who is about to leave and on whom rests the family’s future. Have mercy for the $25,000 Haitian dollars that I paid for his American visa, as false as the name on the passport, have mercy for the $10,000 dollars more to be paid for his voyage. Close the eyes of the American immigration officer so that the forgery will go unnoticed. Don’t be angry, Virgin, if I have prayed just as much to others in these circumstances, don’t be angry because you know well that it is above all to you that I entrust my son since your power is immense. But it is not prudent to antagonize the mysterious powers. Amen.” I saw in front of me a procession of jute religious articles, striped scarves and secondhand symbols of piety. Before the statue of the Virgin, all sorts of insincere mimicry paraded by in quest of a winning lottery number, or against a badly intentioned neighbor, for a money transfer coming from Miami for the little girl’s First Communion. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, I beseech you, cure my daughter of the terrible sickness that they sent her because they’re jealous of the little business I started with my husband. You know well that my daughter is a nice young girl, how could she have caught that plague reserved for perverts and libertines? Holy Mary, Mother of God, send back where it came from this deadly AIDS that haunts my daughter and return her to me as pure and virginal as I brought her into the world. Amen.”

I have not studied history. All I know of it is the scarlet marks that it places on birds’ wings and the mud-spatterings that it casts on the faces of statues. In the shade of my almond tree, little schoolchildren and bored older students have set down their burdens of memory, creating large gashes in the blue sky. Often, a whiff of sorrow rises from their schoolbags and their fatigued pace. The vehicles of death roar past us. Once again, they detest the young people for questioning their arrogance. The glare of their headlights tries to freeze our movements. The dictatorship vainly changes its outward aspect, but if you ever bump into its darkness, you will encounter there the blindfolds, the snarling of hateful dogs, and the brutal convulsions of unshakeable convictions. But my almond tree and I never have the slightest impulse to flee. Prisoners of our own disarray, we have woven our fears and distress into fearsome and innumerable vines that stretch into our innards and twist themselves into the ground.

My almond tree and I are not always aware of being part of the world and its patterns. We don’t know where to situate our street bounded by immense ditches, forgotten by the Public Works Ministry, or where to place our old church that tilts its walls and its holy statues toward the sea. How do we insert this stinkpot of latrines and muck into the world’s luminous and perverse framework of digital communications, capital cities, and missiles? Since words are exhausted, I can only use trickery in the face of dogma, even when it dresses up in glitter. My outstretched hands have learned to pry open the clamshells and to distinguish the unleavened bread. The downpours I’ve endured in the shade of my almond tree have covered me with tenacity and patience. My clear-sightedness arises from a long past of suffering, and it does not tolerate any inclination to chase after slogans or sing praises. I have put in my bag of tricks a wariness toward the fickleness of crowds and the murkiness of speeches.

At the far end of my memory, the lifeless bodies that I confuse with my own file past in silhouette. Dry, withered breasts, a mouth forever unsated, ungenerous loins, cruel eyes that learned early to look away, unobliging genitals. Each with an identically empty heart. I don’t know, then, how the dream has been able to reach me. And to implant itself despite all my mistrust. A dream of love and of white flowers low to the ground, like a long streak of happiness that seemed to lead all the way to the sea, a phantasm of foam and light. All blue, without the aroma of fancy toilet water or the color of starched taffetas, but limpid and painful to see, like that child’s smile I will never know, an incurable little wound, with softness at the corner of the eyes.

My clandestine dream of the Milky Way led me to the gleaming foam. My handsome almond tree became very old. I did not cry for the shade that had become more and more sparse, or for the breeze that had become less and less gentle, but I regretted that our intimacy had departed at the whim of the fallen leaves. Street noises invaded our secrets. Misery displayed itself irrevocably and assiduously. Then, one day I crossed the gray zone to plunge myself in the bedazzlement of renewal. Madness sometimes takes on a heroic aspect. My hand, exhausted from so much begging, calmly picked up a stone. I chose a very shiny one, with no cracks or unsightly gouges. Of a serviceable size, neither minuscule nor enormous. Just the size suitable to strike high and hard. It seemed to me to show on its surface the unknown features of a woman dead from having brought me into the world, along with the faces of phantom children claiming their share of laughter and the rainbow. I kept it for the necessary time in the crux of my rage. Then, on a morning of great ceremony, I took it from its hiding place. In the shadow of my almond tree eaten away by vermin, I cleaned it with the spit of several years of odious practices. On a morning of great pomp and fanfare, I launched it with all the strength of my arms tired out by unworthy gestures. Overcome by a fury that had for too long been stifled, I threw the stone against the howling sirens and the triumphant vehicles. The shattering window glass brought forth a spurt of bright, red blood. The boots dashed in my direction and shackled me in the agitated silence of the crowd.

I stopped begging on the first of January in a year lost in insanity.

Since then, my almond tree and I have followed a rhythm that is out of tempo with the surrounding chaos. Our bloody and denuded roots have glided over their dark subterranean asylum to pause halfway between the barricades and the stars. I think I’m a little closer to the light that waits to be born. Between the roots and the sunlight.

ÉVELYNE TROUILLOT was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She lives and works in her country as a university professor of French and pedagogy. She divides most of her time between writing and teaching. Since her first book of short stories, La chambre interdite (1996), Trouillot has published two other books of short stories, tales and stories for children, two books of poems (in French and Creole), and an essay on human rights and childhood in Haiti. Her most recent novel is La Memoire Aux Abois, published in May 2010. (Buy it here.) Her first novel, Rosalie l’infâme (2003), received the Prix Soroptimist de la Romancière francophone for 2004 and second place for the Prix Carbet des Lycéens also in 2004. In 2005, her play Le bleu de l’ile received first prize for the Prix Beaumarchais de la Caraibe and was read at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris in April 2005. Her most recent books are a collection of Creole poetry, Plidetwal, and her second novel, L’oeil-totem. “In the Shade of the Almond Tree” was first published in Words without Borders, April 2007. Copyright Evelyne Trouillot. Translation copyright 2007 Paul Curtis Daw. All rights reserved. Full text here.