Fifty Contemporary Writers Read online

  Mr. Carmichael passed the icy-cold beer bottle to me, and I managed to swallow a mouthful without choking. Hesitantly I tried the name: “‘Luther.’” Biting my lower lip to keep from laughing, for wasn’t “Luther” a comic-strip name?—then I did begin to cough, and a trickle of beer ran down inside my left nostril that I wiped away on my hand, hoping Mr. Carmichael wouldn’t notice.

  Another time I wanted to ask Mr. Carmichael who he’d been visiting at the hospital, and where his family was, but didn’t dare. Against a wall was an upright piano with stacks of books and sheet music on its top. I could imagine a girl of my age sitting there, dutifully playing her scales. The living room looked out upon the vast front yard now overgrown with tall grasses and yellow and white wildflowers. The walls were covered in faded once-elegant wallpaper and in this room too was sculpted molding in the ceiling. On the coffee table near the sofa were ashtrays heaped with butts and ashes. I resolved, if Mr. Carmichael lit another cigarette, I would ask if I could have a “drag” from it as girls were always doing with older boys they hoped to impress. Mr. Carmichael took back the beer bottle from me and drank again thirstily and asked me which year of high school I would be in, in the fall, and I told him that I was just starting high school: I would be in tenth grade. “That sounds young,” Mr. Carmichael said, frowning. “I thought you were older.”

  To this I had no ready reply. I wondered if I should apologize.

  “You were my student years ago, not recently. How’s it happen you’re just going into tenth grade?”

  Our math teacher’s displeasure showed itself in a quick furrow of Mr. Carmichael’s forehead and a crinkling of his nose as if he were smelling something bad—and who was to blame? He asked if I had a boyfriend and when I said no, the bad-smell look deepened. Stammering, I said, “People say—I have an ‘old’ soul. Like maybe—I’ve lived many times before.”

  This desperate nonsense came to me out of nowhere: it was something my grandmother had told me when I’d been a little girl, to make me feel important, I suppose, or to make herself feel important.

  Still frowning, Mr. Carmichael said suddenly, “The Stoics had the right goddamn idea. If I was born a long time ago, that’s what I was—‘Stoic.’ Y’know who the Stoics were? No? Philosophers who lived a long time ago. Marcus Aurelius—name ring a bell? ‘In all that you say or do recall that the power of exiting this life is yours at any time.’”

  “You mean—kill yourself?” I laughed uncertainly. This didn’t sound so good.

  Mr. Carmichael was in a brooding mood so I asked him if he thought there might be memory pools that collected in certain places like the hospital, the way puddles collect after rain; in places where people have had to wait, and have been worried, and frightened; if there were places where you left your trace, without knowing it. Mr. Carmichael seemed to consider this. At least, he did not snort in derision. He said, “‘Memory pools.’ Why not. Like ghosts. Everywhere, the air is charged with ghosts. Hospitals have got to be the worst, teeming with ghosts like germs. Can’t hardly draw a deep breath, you suck in a ghost.” Mr. Carmichael made a sneezing-comical noise that set us both laughing. “Could be, I am a ghost. You’re a sweet trusting girl, coming out here with a ghost. Or maybe you’re a ghost yourself—joke’s on me. Some future time like the next century there’ll be explorers looking back to now, to 1959—what’s called ‘lookback time’—y’know what ‘lookback time’ is? No?” Mr. Carmichael’s teacherly manner emerged, though as he spoke he tapped my wrist with his forefinger. “‘Lookback time’ is what you’d call an astronomical figure of speech. It means, if you gaze up into the night sky—and you have the look of a girl eager to learn the constellations—what you see isn’t what is there. What you see is only just light—‘starlight.’ The actual star has moved on, or is extinct. What you are looking into is ‘lookback time’—the distant past. It’s only an ignorant—innocent—eye that thinks it is looking at an actual star. If our sun exploded, and disappeared, here on earth we wouldn’t know the grim news for eight minutes.” Now Mr. Carmichael was circling my wrist with his thumb and forefinger, gently tugging at me to come closer to him on the sofa. “Eight minutes is a hell of a long time, to not know that you are dead.”

  I shuddered. Then I laughed, this was meant to be funny.

  Somehow, we began arm wrestling. Before I knew it, with a gleeful chortle, Mr. Carmichael had kicked off his moccasins, worn without socks, slouched down on the sofa, and lifted me above him, to straddle his stomach. “Giddyup, li’l horsie! Giddyup.” My khaki shorts rode up my thighs, Mr. Carmichael’s belt buckle chafed my skin. Beneath the Rangers T-shirt he ran his hard quick hands where my skin was clammy-damp; he took hold of my small, bare breasts, squeezing and kneading, running his thumbs across the nipples, and I slapped at him, shrieking in protest. Suddenly then Mr. Carmichael rolled me over onto the sofa, pinned me with his forearms, and gripped my thighs, between my legs he brought his hot, rock-hard face, his sucking mouth, against the damp crotch of my shorts and my panties inside my shorts, an act so astonishing to me, I could not believe that it was happening. Like a big dog Mr. Carmichael was growling, sucking, and nipping at me. “Lie still. Be still. You’ll like this. L’il bitch goddamn.” Wildly I’d begun to laugh, I kicked frantically at him, scrambled out of his grasp on my hands and knees—on the floor now, on a carpet littered with pizza crusts, dumped ashtrays, and empty beer bottles. Cursing me now, Mr. Carmichael grabbed hold of my ankle and pinned me again, mashing his mouth against mine, his mouth and angry teeth tearing at my lips as if to pry them open. By this time I’d become panicked, terrified. No boy or man had ever kissed me like this, or touched me like this, so roughly—“Why’d you come here with me? What did you think this was—seventh grade? You’re a hell of a lot older than you let on. Hot li’l bitch.” With each syllable of hot l’il bitch Mr. Carmichael struck the back of my head against the carpet, his fingers closed around my throat. Fumbling, he tried to insert his knee between my thighs, he pressed the palm of his hand hard against my mouth to quiet me, I struggled, desperate to free myself like a fish impaled on a hook desperate to free itself at any cost, I would have torn open my flesh to be free of Mr. Carmichael’s weight on me. Now he lurched above me, grunted and fumbled, unzipped his trousers, I had a glimpse of his thick engorged penis being rammed against my thighs, another time Mr. Carmichael grunted, and shuddered, and fell heavily on me; for a long stunned moment we lay unmoving; then he allowed me to extricate myself from him, to crawl away whimpering.

  Somehow next I was in a bathroom, and I was vomiting into a sink. Must’ve been, Mr. Carmichael had led me here. In this sweltering-hot little room, which was very dirty—shower stall, toilet, linoleum floor—I ran water from both faucets to wash away my vomit, desperate to wash all evidence away. I could not bring myself to look into the mirror above the sink, I knew my mouth was swollen, my face burned and throbbed. On the front of my T-shirt were coin-sized splotches of blood. (Was my nose bleeding? Always in school I’d been in terror of my nose suddenly beginning to bleed, and the stares of my classmates.) With shaking hands I washed away the sticky semen on my thighs, which was colorless and odorless. Outside the bathroom Mr. Carmichael was saying, in an encouraging voice: “You’ll be fine, Maddie. We’ll take you back. We should leave soon.” Yet the thought came to me He could kill me now. He is thinking this. When I come out of here. No one will know. But when I opened the bathroom door Mr. Carmichael was nowhere in sight. I heard him in the kitchen, he was speaking on the phone, pleading, and then silence, the harsh laughter, and the slamming down of a telephone receiver. A man’s raw aggrieved voice—“Fuck it. What’s the difference … .”

  When Mr. Carmichael came for me, his mood had shifted yet again. In the kitchen he too had been washing up: his flushed face was made to appear affable, his disheveled hair had been dampened. His badly soiled sport shirt was tucked into his trousers, and his trousers were zipped up. The moccasins were back on his feet. It was w
ith a genial-teacher smile that Mr. Carmichael greeted me: “Madelyn! Time to head back, I said we wouldn’t stay long.”

  In the Dodge station wagon, in late-afternoon traffic on Route 31 East, Mr. Carmichael lapsed into silence. He’d forgotten about driving me home, there was no question but that we were returning to Sparta Memorial Hospital. From time to time Mr. Carmichael glanced anxiously at me as I huddled far from him in the passenger’s seat, trying to stop my nose from bleeding by pinching the nostrils and tilting my head back. So distracted and disoriented was Mr. Carmichael, as we passed beneath the railroad trestle bridge, he nearly sideswiped a pickup truck in the left-hand lane of the highway; behind the wheel of the pickup was a contractor friend of my father’s. He saw me, and he saw Mr. Carmichael at the wheel beside me, not knowing who Mr. Carmichael was but knowing that it was very wrong for a fourteen-year-old girl to be with him, this flush-faced adult man in his mid- or late thirties. I thought, He sees us, he knows. With the inexorable logic of a dream it would happen then: my father’s friend would telephone my mother that evening, that very night Luther Carmichael would be arrested in the cobblestone house on Old Mill Road. Mr. Carmichael would be dismissed from his teaching position because of me, of what he’d done to me; because of this—having been seen with me, in the Dodge station wagon this afternoon. And now, telling this story, I remember: Mr. Carmichael hadn’t yet been dismissed from his teaching job, as I’d said. All that lay ahead of him. The remainder of his foreshortened life lay ahead of him. He would be arrested, he would be charged with sexual assault of a minor, providing alcohol to a minor; he would be charged with the forcible abduction of a minor, and with kidnapping. He would be charged with keeping me in his house against my will. Some of these charges would be dropped but still Luther Carmichael would kill himself in the ugly cobblestone house on Old Mill Road, hanging from a makeshift noose slung over a rafter in the smelly earthen-floored cellar.

  All this had not happened yet. There was no way to accurately foretell it. All I knew was, I had to return to my father’s bedside. I was desperate to return to my father’s bedside. Before Mr. Carmichael brought the station wagon to a full stop in the parking lot, I had jumped out, I was making my way into the chill of the hospital that never changes, taking the stairs two at a time to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor, avoiding the elevator out of a morbid fear that, at this crucial time, the elevator might stall between floors, now breathless from the stairs and my heart pounding in my chest as if it might burst—

  Still alive! From the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

  Why Does the World Out There Seem

  Peter Cole

  I.

  Why does the natural feel unnatural?

  Why does the world out there seem

  so utterly foreign to these poems?

  It isn’t strange, and hardly hostile,

  to the heart and eye behind their lines:

  dirt exploding into spring,

  leaves climbing the pipe to the screen,

  the morning glory’s funnel of blue,

  the sap of it all coursing through

  every fiber of all those veins.

  Why does the natural feel so strained

  when set beside the abstract figures

  of speech’s discourse linking us?

  Poems, as Williams wrote, are machines.

  II.

  But maybe the natural’s not what I mean,

  so much as experience of the natural

  merged with that which men have made.

  No, not that. It’s registration

  of things one feels have already been

  established as facts by eyes and mind.

  Once is plenty. And that’s the sacred.

  Why the need to return to the scene

  of each epiphany? Why the craving

  for that halo? A kind of greed?

  Natural lines on a piece of paper

  are revelation enough for now,

  as are speaking and listening to

  you and what these words might say.

  III.

  Extending beyond information, but also

  observation of that natural

  world that observation reveals

  as a miracle. Or not beyond—

  beside. Maybe even beneath.

  Or breached. That’s the thread leading

  back and possibly out or through:

  to what or whom? Him? You?

  I’m here, almost against my will,

  having been led, as though by the nose,

  by language. And in this abstract picture

  I’m asking you to bear with me.

  Reader. Readers. Reading.

  We are in this instant’s chain together.

  IV.

  A chain partaking of enchantment,

  mystics have written, implying song,

  and maybe the poem. Or just a spell.

  Which might as easily be a hell-

  ish hall of echoes or mirrored images

  mixing in the hungry mind.

  Or, diversion that doesn’t feed

  and draws one further from, not toward,

  the pool of pleasure wisdom is.

  Depending on the poem’s design.

  Strange how I’ve become a modern

  poet of a medieval kind—

  making poems for a different diversion,

  as they point toward what’s divine.

  V.

  Amusement derives from the animal’s mouth

  and snout, stuck there in the air,

  as it stares, struck by words

  it heard. In a manner of speaking

  it muzzles as in what’s not fair,

  or wonder. And in the illogical moment

  of what it means and how it works,

  while the mouth is closed, nourishment—

  if it’s serious—enters through it.

  And in a nutshell that’s the sentence

  and solace that sweet Chaucer meant.

  The poem’s gesture, changing, survives

  in generations of aspiration,

  leading us on … or into our lives.

  Edge Boys

  Charles McLeod

  BOUGHT IN MOTEL ROOMS, in public park bathrooms, the edge boys have highlighted their hair. The boxes of Clairol are plucked stolen from shelves and tucked into boxer-brief waistbands. The store clerks are busy asking for price checks. The edge boys have very white teeth. They stride the linoleum, smiles shining out. The clerks think: no one that pretty would take things. The doors whoosh to open; here is the sun, here is the blacktop, shimmering. The edge boys wear shorts that go past their knees. The edge boys wear oversized T-shirts. They buy gum at gas stations and pace the grass strips between pump bays and street intersections. When cars slow in passing, the edge boys blow bubbles. Tucked in their anklets are prepackaged condoms. They have earrings in both of their ears. Last week was the last week of their high-school semesters. The edge boys are ready to earn. In parentless houses, the kitchen tap running, they work water down to their scalps. Blond with red streaks or brown with blond streaks or black transformed to white blond. They wrap the dyed locks in lengths of tinfoil and wait, watching game-show reruns. Their yearbooks, in backpacks, sit signed and forgotten: have a great summer, i’ll see you in autumn, thanks for being such a good friend. The edge boys are gay. The edge boys have girlfriends, meek girls with glasses or cheeks stained with acne, who hide their girth under loose batik skirts, girls who ask less per their subpar aesthetic and thus function as near-perfect foils, the edge boys needing only to take them to movies, to malls, to infrequently dine them at some neoned franchise and then later take their clothes off, this last part disliked but understood as essential, as requisite for the upkeep of hetero visage, mandatory for avoiding all manner of bullshit in locker-walled, fluorescent-lit halls, so these girls’ hands held in hig
h-ceilinged lunchrooms, these girls taken to prom, their taffeta dresses like bright shiny sacks, their matching sling backs rubbing their fat ankles raw, and the edge boys make clear on spring nights in late April that it has been fun but just not enough, that it’s in both parties’ best interests to move on from each other, to let summer heal wounds and meet up in fall, and by the week after finals the edge boys are working, are putting in hours, are taking their knocks, have had their foreheads put hard against corners of nightstands, have been bruised by closed fists, have been robbed, have been taken to dark lonely lots off the parkways, the mood changing, the date going wrong, and sometimes the edge boys flee into nighttime, hoping their sneakers don’t scuff, as the body in youth will start itself over, can reset with nearly no flaws, but the shoes are expensive, were purchased, must last, possess sharp lines and clean looks, traits that the edge boys must also possess so the skin tanned in backyards on slow afternoons, the teeth brushed and whitened and flossed, the hair kept to flawless, shampooed and then sculpted, the back tightly tapered, sharp as the bristles on a brush—their image rechecked in the bathrooms of Chevrons as the day turns itself into dusk, and when the dye fades the edge boys repeat the process of dyeing, and when cars stop the edge boys lean through the frames of car windows, asking for rides to some other place, asking how much and for what.

  And here the edge cities, the car-fervent boomburbs, Levittown’s sprawling kempt spawn, more jobs than bedrooms, the streets dead by evening, the office parks sleeping it off; here the coiffed glow of postindustrial society, the middle class outsourced, the farmlands paved over, gone, practical know-how no longer important so goodbye to Pittsburgh’s Steelworkers Union, goodbye to Baltimore’s docks, the stevedores half starved from nothing exported, the labor halls places of rot, production supplanted by codified knowledge, the making of goods replaced by the selling thereof, the old urban centers unwanted, not needed, high crime and high rent, the drug-addled dozing at bus stops, so development set down in between freeways, acreage near airports bought cheap and built up, and from this Bethesda and Scottsdale and Reston; Irving, Texas, and White Plains, New York; here Costa Mesa in LA’s choked basin; here Downers Grove and Ogden, Utah, here the midlevel skyscraper of mixed office/retail, the arterial road ten miles long, where sidewalks are largely parachronistic as sidewalks are places of sloth, made for the beggar and stroller, the uncertain, the person too full of free thought, for the edge cities are kingdoms of the action efficient, progress optimized, apologism constantly scoffed—realms of the stem cell, the spreadsheet, the lepton, where the hum of the lathe has never been heard, where absent is the din of the die caster’s punch, these sounds replaced by the light constant clacking of flesh on computer keyboards, the new assembly lines well-lit partitioned desk cubicles one floor up from the whir of juice bars, and rolled out from these factories datum not item, patent not part, as the things we make now are not things at all, are service or research, advice or idea, theory mapped out or thought up—here Science unbridled, here plugs cords and wires, here bits bytes and pixels replacing the orchards, all produce imported by plane and then truck, here nanotech labs with federal contracts, here the cybernetics startup, here green even sod between rows of parked cars outside of the Mall of America; here wetlands demolished, here cell towers erected, here all the bees dying off, here bigger and faster and smaller and brighter, here the twenty-screen Cineplex showing ten action titles, teens texting on hand-helds through all the slow parts, here drive-thru windows on pharmacy walls, here Zoloft and Lustral passed out like fast food, here tax breaks enormous for new corporate tenants, here regional outlets inside megacenters, here firms expert in hedge-fund investment and intellectual property law; here unclassified research in the hills east of Berkeley, Houston’s Sugarland, Denver’s Aurora, here Cool Springs between Memphis and Nashville, here Clearwater due west of Tampa, each place a nexus of postwar success, these cities we fought for, these cities we won.