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Category: Excerpt

  • Harry recovers

    Harry lay in the hospital for two days waiting for his brother the attorney to visit. A young woman arrived instead, unannounced in the afternoon, rushed and terse. 

    My brother sent a lackey, Harry said. 

    Your brother is very busy and it’s Sunday, she said. I’m Elizabeth. 

    I remember you, Harry said. He invited me to your wedding a few years ago. I couldn’t make it. 

    Couldn’t or didn’t want to?

    Didn’t want to. 

    She reached into her shoulder bag and ruffled papers, extracting one. 

    This is from your brother, she said.

    Elizabeth read: The Premier Grande Hotel in New York City is in the process of filing a lawsuit against you for extensive damages to the property. They knew to notify me from your previous outburst there. I am currently trying to negotiate with them on your behalf. 

    My behalf!

    Elizabeth read: The hotel states that you will no longer be welcome on its property. Two destructive incidents in the last two years have forced them into this position. 

    Fuck them! [cough]

    Elizabeth read: To quote the hotel’s general manager, “For the safety of our guests and our staff, Mr. Gannett is no longer allowed on or near hotel grounds.”

    Harry shifted his weight on the hospital bed and winced. 

    Elizabeth read: I am concerned for you, Harry. I’ve done everything I can for you up to this point. It’s time for you to pull yourself together and get the help you need. 

    Harry looked up at the ceiling. Checkered panels, air vents, fluorescent light tubes. Uninspiring and disgusting, all of it, he thought.

    Elizabeth tucked the paper neatly into her bag and sighed, looking at Harry.

    Your brother wants to know if you need anything, she said.

    My brother wants to bury me, he said.

    That’s not true. 

    We want to bury each other. It’s a race to the shovel.

    Stop it, Harry. 

    Listen to me, dummy, he said. 

    How dare you. 

    I’ve known you just a few minutes and I already hate you.

    Your brother wants you to call him. 

    Tell him to come make me. 

    Grow up, Harry. 

    I bet you’re already divorced.

    What?

    Thanks for stopping by, Amanda.

    Fuck you, Harry. 

    Pardon me, said a nurse. 

    Elizabeth turned toward the doorway and looked at the nurse. 

    Please don’t speak like that to the patient, said the nurse. 

    Elizabeth stammered and reddened. 

    Are you related to this patient, ma’am? asked the nurse. 

    I’m out of here, Elizabeth said, and walked past the nurse out the door.

    Harry smiled and coughed.

    Are you okay, young man? asked the nurse.

  • Renzi on translations

    A detective novel is always good for the first twenty pages because that is where the author presents the world in which the intrigue will develop: for example, let’s say, the Japanese laundromats in Buenos Aires. […] One wonders why it is that the Japanese population in Buenos Aires opens laundromats. After that question is answered, a crime appears, and, from that point onward, the bad novels respond to the mystery with predictable schemes. Only the best writers are able to add something extra to the construction of the intrigue, going beyond simple suspense or simple solutions to the problem. A writer who is able to write something beyond the simple plot is one who achieves a novel that is worthy of translation. 

    Piglia, Ricardo, trans. by Robert Croll. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years. Restless Books, New York, 2018: 185.

  • Crowded park dream

    Strolling a city park at dusk amid adults waving flags. I absorb the gauntlet with the focus of their spectacle onstage behind me. I’m slapped and smacked by whipping fabric, then safely on the other side at an ornamental water fountain on a small lawn. I rinse my hands in the fountain, aware of people and birds. No interviewers with cameras ask how I was able to overcome the challenge. 

    Onto sidewalks soiled and grimy, down darkened alleys. Dripping pipes and huddled itinerants. Postcards still find this place. The mayor holds a candle and greets me. I’m just making the rounds, he says. I trade my iPhone for his candle, which I struggle to keep aflame as we walk. The bridge is a marvel and we cross it, gaining a retinue of locals in our aligned pursuit to conquer land and water.

    Outdoor museums by moonlight on the tongues of ghosts. Traffic exhaust in our clothes. The cemeteries in this city vary widely by style. Buried dead in the east salvage no rest from the highway noise. Out west everyone’s dead and nothing can be done. Only away from here can one sleep peacefully, as with all places.

    Dogs run wild at night. The people wish they were dogs. Bats dart soundlessly about tree canopies, disappearing into the moon. Somewhere the dead regain form and slither atop fallen autumn leaves toward fates unknown.

  • Harry’s curse

    The young woman who found him in the bath would later be identified in the news as Rosalea Montero, 20, of Monterrey, Mexico. She waited one hour after check-out and knocked four times on the hotel room door, as always, each knock twenty seconds apart, before slowly entering and announcing herself. The suite was bright from window light and she wheeled her cart of supplies in to notice a chaotic mess. 

    It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, she said to a reporter via translator. 

    Visibly distraught in the hotel lobby, trembling and hugging herself, she described room 3210 as littered with broken glass and furniture with blood on the walls and tile and blood on the hotel’s trademark white fur rugs. Instinct urged her to run before something terrible happened but instead she followed the blood trail tiptoeing into the sprawling bathroom where she found the man unmoving and unresponsive and almost fully submerged in a giant stone tub filled with pink-red water.

    She screamed and notified hotel security, then sprinted from the room. Security confirmed what Rosalea told them and they contacted the police, who confirmed what security told them. The police requested paramedics, one of whom reached out a gloved hand to check the soaking man’s pulse at his neck, waking him. A moment of stunned silence hung about the room before the man screamed, wide-eyed and delirious, thrashing water at the group gathered in his hotel bathroom, all of them startled, the gloved paramedic slipping backward on the wet tile, injuring herself.

    The authorities quickly identified the man as Harry Gannett, 33, of Middletown, New York. He’d been attacked with a knife and badly beaten, sustaining two broken ribs and a shattered left shoulder. Bruises covered his body. He slept deeply behind thin hospital curtains as police waited to speak to him.

    *

    Harry believed it all to be a dream. He last remembered lunging head-first over the second-floor railing onto the tile below and then crawling concussed and bleeding to the nearby elevator up to his suite on the 32nd floor.

    How far back must be this instinct of survival to slither wormlike unto the next stupid moment, he thought. 

    *

    Orange County — A local man is in serious condition after falling from an escalator at the Premier Grande Hotel in Manhattan’s Midtown yesterday afternoon, according to police. 

    Harry Gannett, son of the late media magnate Michael Gannett, was rushed to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital on East 34th Street after police were called to investigate an unresponsive male in an upper-floor room. 

    “Officers were dispatched to the hotel where they found the patient in immediate distress,” said Sergeant Nathan Kapler, NYPD, Station 54.

    “The patient had been injured and was transported to the hospital without any further harm or impact to the hotel guests or employees.”

    Gannett is expected to make a full recovery.[1]

    *

    Mr. Gannett, said a voice. Mr. Gannett. Mr. Gannett.

    No name on this Earth matters or has mattered, he thought. No name will matter. 

    He wondered if he was dead and hoped he was. It didn’t seem like death but what is to seem? He hated what it meant to seem.

    Mr. Gannett, can you hear me? Mr. Gannett?

    No longer is any voice on this Earth recognizable, he thought. I’ve buried them all. I’ve buried the living and the dead and I’ve buried their gods and I will bury myself.

    Mr. Gannett. Mr. Gannett.  

    He inhaled and said: Curse all of you in this room. 

    An audible gasp. 

    Oh, boy, said a voice. 

    [cough]

    Mr. Gannett? Shit. Mr. Gannett. Mr. Gannett. 

    Curse your bodies and your morals.

    [cough]

    Mr. Gannett? Sir? Sir. Can you hear me?

    [cough]

    [1] Caffen, Willa. “Local Heir Plunges at Premier Grande, Will Survive.” New York Herald, Nov. 11, 2023, p. 1. 

  • Sun and Skull, by Roberto Bolaño

    The other day I was at the beach and I thought I saw a dead body. I was sitting on one of the benches along Blanes’ Paseo Marítimo, brushing the sand off my feet, waiting for my son to brush the sand off his feet so we could go home, when I thought I saw a dead body. I got up and looked again: an old woman was sitting under a beach umbrella reading a book and next to her was a man, the same age or maybe a few years older, in a tiny bathing suit, lying in the sun. This man’s head was like a skull. I saw him and I said to myself that he would soon be dead. And I realized that his old wife, reading peacefully, knew it too. She was sitting in a beach chair with a blue canvas back. A small but comfortable chair. He was stretched out on the sand, only his head in the shade. On his face I thought I glimpsed a frown of contentment, or maybe he was just sleeping while his wife read. He was very tan. Skeletal but tan. They were tourists from up north. Possibly German or English. Maybe Dutch or Belgian. It doesn’t really matter. As the seconds went by, his face looked more and more skull-like. And only then did I realize how eagerly, how recklessly, he was exposing himself to the sun. He wasn’t using sunscreen. And he knew he was dying and he was lying in the sun on purpose like a person saying goodbye to someone very dear. The old tourist was bidding farewell to the sun and to his own body and to his old wife sitting beside him. It was a sight to see, something to admire. It wasn’t a dead body lying there on the sand, but a man. And what courage, what gallantry.

    Bolaño, Roberto, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998—2003. Trans by Natasha Wimmer. New Directions Books, New York, 2011: 157.

  • The Hidden Span, by Eliot Weinberger

    The Taoist universe is an infinity of nested cycles of time, each revolving at a different pace, and those who are not mere mortals pertain to different cycles. Certain teachings take four hundred years to transmit from sage to student; others, four thousand; others, forty thousand. It is said that Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, spent eighty-one years in the womb. 

    Taoist ritual begins with the construction of an altar that is a calendar and a map of this universe. At its perimeter, twenty-four pickets, the Twenty-Four Energy Nodes, each representing fifteen days, form a year of 360 days. Within, a proliferation of markers for the Two Principles (yin and yang), the Three Energies, the Three Irrational Powers, the Five Elements, the Five Tones, the Six Rectors, the Eight Trigrams, and Sixty-Four Hexagrams of the I Ching, the Nine Palaces and the Nine Halls, the Ten Stems of the Twelve Branches…Each is a supernatural being, a gate, a direction, a part of the body, a measurement of time, a philosophical concept, an alchemical substance. As Lao Tzu said, “The Tao created one, one gave birth to two, two to three, and three to the ten thousand things.”

    Typically of Taoism, this system has an inherent flaw: a hole in time called the Irrational Opening. If, at a certain moment, which is always changing, one walks backward through the various gates in a certain order, one can escape time and enter the Hidden Span. In this other time beyond all the other times, one finds oneself in the holy mountains; there one can gather healing herbs, magic mushrooms, and elixirs that bring immortality. 

    The technique was first taught to the Yellow Emperor by the six calendrical Jade Maidens, who in turn learned it from the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens, also known as the Lady of the Ultimate Yin. Its most famous practitioner was a very real military strategist, Chu-ko Liang (181-234). To repel an invading army, he placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the enemy troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape.

    Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing, New Directions Books, New York, 2007: 56-57. 

  • The Consumption of Zagreus

    Zeus secretly begot his son Zagreus with Persephone before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. One midnight, The Titans, Zeus’ enemies, lured young Zagreus away with toys. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and he undertook several transformations in attempts to delude them. He became Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw. 

    Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’ heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she breathed life; so that Zagreus became immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.

    Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths. Folio Society, London, 1960, re-published 1996: 118.

  • The Night Gardener, Pt. II, by Benjamín Labatut

    I met him in the mountains, in a small town where few people live save during the summer months. I was walking at night and I saw him, in his garden, digging. My dog crawled under the bushes, ran towards him in the dark, a short white flash in the moonlight. The man bent over, rubbed my dog’s head, went down on one knee as she offered her belly. I apologized, he said it was okay, that he loved dogs. I asked him if he was gardening at night. “Yes,” he said, “it’s the best time for it. The plants are asleep and they don’t feel as much, they suffer less when moved around, like a patient etherized. We should be wary of plants.” When he was a boy, there was a giant oak of which he had always been afraid. His grandmother hanged herself from one of its branches. Back then, he told me, it had been a healthy tree, strong and vigorous, while now, some sixty years later, its huge bulk was was ridden with parasites and rotting from the inside, so much so that he knew it would soon have to be removed, as it towered above his house and threatened to crush it if it came down. And yet he could not bring himself to fell the gargantuan thing, for it was one of the few remaining specimens of what used to be an old-growth forest that covered the land where his house and the whole town now stood, dark, foreboding and beautiful. He pointed at the tree, but in the dark I could see nothing save its massive shadow. 

    It was half dead, he said, rotten, yet still alive and growing. Bats nested inside its trunk and hummingbirds fed on the ruby red flowers of the parasitic plant that crowned its highest branches, the hermaphrodite Tristerix corymbosus, known locally as quintral, cutre or ñipe, which his grandmother used to cut back every year, only to see it regrow with stronger, denser blooms. “Why she killed herself I still don’t know. They never told me she had committed suicide, it was a family secret, I was young, no more than five or six at the time, but later, decades later, when my daughter was born, my nana, my nanny, the woman who raised me while my own mother went to work, told me, ‘Your grandmother,’ she said, ‘she hanged herself from that branch at night. It was awful, terrible, we could not cut her down until the police arrived, at least that is what they told us—“Don’t cut her down, leave her there”—but your father could not leave her hanging like that, he climbed the tree, higher and higher—no one understood how she had climbed so high—and removed the noose from her neck. She fell through the branches, landed with a thud. Your father started hacking away at the trunk with his axe, but his father, your granddaddy, would not let him. He said that she had loved that tree, she always had. She had seen it grow, tended and nurtured it, pruned and watered it, and fussed over every tiny detail. So it stayed there and it’s still here, though it’s going to have to come down, sooner rather than later.”

    Labatut, Benjamín, from The Night Gardener, Part II, in When we Cease to Understand the World, trans. by Adrian Nathan West. The New York Review of Books, New York, 2020: 176.