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I wasn’t going to post this. I wrote it yesterday to relieve some tension, but I figured what the heck. …
———-
I hate politics. I just have to say that every now and then.
Forget the money spent on all those Acme products in hopes of catching The Roadrunner, or the millions spent to catch Roger, Barry and Lance. We’ll never get it back.
What stands out the most to me in the stumbling, bumbling, fumbling effort by the government to slap a face onto its “War Against Steroids” is that we the people walked away with one lousy conviction for obstruction of justice.
That one went to Barry Bonds, whose sentence for his alleged crime was 30 days “mansion” arrest. And even that is under appeal.
Remember my rant about that one? As ego-free as I am, it was one of my better ones.
It was short and sweet. Warning: This one won’t be short, because it’s a long flight from D.C. to Houston, and it won’t be sweet, because I just spent a week in D.C.
Lets hope we can now put the steroids investigations behind us. I know they have been a pain in my butt for far too long.
Politics.
Why isn’t that a four-letter word?
I thought baseball needed to do something about steroids, so I didn’t have a huge problem with Congress holding hearings about steroids use in the sport.
My thought was that at least for a day or two those idiots on Capitol Hill would be distracted from messing up something else.
Plus I figured if Congress called out Major League Baseball, its brain-dead commissioner and the sleazy owners who were raking in the profits from the home-run derby the game had become, something would be done to stop the madness.
But, as they tend to do, these clowns took it too far.
The first dumb thing they did was ignore the owners. Congress subpoenaed a group of players, forcing them under threat of being cited and tried for contempt of Congress if they didn’t show up, but the politicians didn’t demand even one owner show up to talk about their role in the Steroids Era.
Do you want to know why? Come on, that’s a clown question, bro. You know why.
But to be fair, here is the coachspeak from Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, gave to that question before the 2005 hearings.
“We’re just trying to set a framework here,” he said on Meet the Press. “What we’d like baseball to do is admit they have a problem, show what they are doing to fix it, and make sure that we can set the record straight for young people. This is bad. This is bad for their health and it’s bad for the kids.”
You wanted baseball to admit it had a problem, yet you didn’t force any team owners (AKA campaign contributors) to sit down and testify that they didn’t know what was going on? How convenient.
Oh, and don’t get me started on that crap about doing it for the kids.
Even at the end of the Clemens fiasco the government was still running that tired, fake, false line that the gullible public falls for almost every time. It’s for the kids.
They tried to tell the jury that because of Clemens kids were thinking about getting on steroids.
Give me a freaking break. Before Congress got involved, kids weren’t sitting around middle schools thinking they need to get on HGH because Roger Clemens used the stuff. Talk about a crock.
You people will fall for anything won’t you?
If Clemens was doing television commercials touting the benefits of HGH, then I could imagine Little Johnny saying, “I gotta get me some of that Clemens juice.”
But you know darn well that wasn’t happening. Until the government got involved nobody on the planet knew about or even admits to hearing about Clemens and performance-enhancing drugs except for Brian McNamee, one of the worst witnesses in the history of bad witnesses.
Yet, this was for the kids?
Y’all fall for that so easily that a few years ago you let the weasels in Texas government throw a few million dollars away to drug test all these steroid-using high school athletes.
Remember that mess?
What were the numbers? A whopping 21 positives out of more than 51,600 tests, which is a 0.0004 positive result rate.
Hell, we might as well start giving high school boys pregnancy tests. Back then, the uninformed legislator who pushed that “for the kids” crap upon you called me out like I was the crazy one for questioning his waste of taxpayer money.
I wrote that it was ridiculous to start a testing program for something so few were doing. We have bigger problems in our high schools than steroid use among athletes (hello … KIDS CAN’T READ), and as much as steroid use is bad for children, education is a better way to stop it than drug testing.
Regardless, since he had no idea how many high school athletes were using steroids, it was obvious to me that it was a waste of money.
His response:
“It is true, I don’t know (how many athletes are using steroids). That is precisely the reason I authored the bill creating a testing program. A primary benefit of the testing is to get a handle on our problem and see exactly what its scope is, along with deterring potential use.”
Yeah, $3-4 million to “get a handle” on our “problem.” No, politicians are our damn problem.
Yeah, I’m rambling. I’m rambling because politicians make me sick. And this stupid United airplane doesn’t have DirecTv, or a movie, or the Internet, or any magazines, or pillows, or one LOUSY DATGUM BLANKET, and I’m freezing.
Just the word politics pisses me off. It’s a four-letter word that elicits four-letter word responses from me.
Put an “ician” on the end of it and my one-word response gets longer too, 12 letters long, if you know what I mean and it starts with an M. Yeah, manipulation or maybe manslaughter. What dirty word were y’all thinking?
I tried to interview several of the Congressmen who were part of the Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, but, as you might imagine, they’re not exactly talking to people like me these days.
One had his spokesperson, who didn’t want to be quoted, send me an email to inform me that the Congressman was referring me to Waxman, because “it was HIS investigation.”
Three others said they couldn’t comment because of the judge’s gag order. I informed them the judge lifted the gag order. I guess it is a coincidence that all of their email and phone systems have suddenly shut down since then, because I haven’t heard back from any of them.
Waxman’s spokesperson told me he was traveling last week and unavailable. What about this week? He would probably be unavailable this week too. What about next week? He might not be available next week either, but he would make sure to include me on the email list when the verdict comes out so I could get his statement. Then, it was he only said he “may” have a statement after the verdict. I’m waiting.
You get where I’m going here? You don’t think that had Clemens been found guilty of all charges these rascals would have been holding live press conferences all over the place?
If I covered politics I’d be looking for these slimy scoundrels beneath the rock under which they hide. But did I mention that I hate politics? Oh, I did?
I love covering sports, because there is so much joy and triumph to cover. Politics is one big dirty mess. Always has been, always will be.
If you have family and friends who are politicians, tell those miscreations (another 12-letter M word for your Scrabble board) to stay the hell away from sports and I’ll stay the hell away from them.
And when did all airline food start coming in a box? This ain’t food. This is the stuff you buy at the zoo to feed the animals.
I’d better put this laptop away before the flight attendant has me arrested upon arrival.
As it is, my testy emails to several congressmen the last few days are subject to get me audited and put on the no-fly list. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
A YouTube star from Morocco was sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday for "insulting the king" during a live video stream, according to his lawyer.
Mohamed Sekkaki, who goes by "Moul Kaskita" on YouTube, was sentenced in the city of Settat, about 100 miles south of the country’s capital, Rabat, Mohamed Ziane told AFP.
Sekkaki, whose channel has nearly 350,000 subscribers, was arrested earlier this month after posting a video during which he allegedly called his fellow Moroccans “donkeys” and criticized King Mohammed VI, according to AFP.
Per Morocco’s criminal code, “insulting magistrates” carries a prison term of between one month and one year.
Ziane says he plans to appeal the decision on behalf of his client.
MOROCCAN KING PARDONS JOURNALIST IMPRISONED FOR EXTRAMARITAL SEX, ABORTION, AFTER OUTCRY
Sekkaki’s case comes after other similarly harsh measures against activists and journalists who have spoken out against the government.
A 33-year-old journalist, Omar Radi, is currently being prosecuted for a 9-month-old tweet that criticized a judge, AFP reported.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
In July, the Moroccan Human Rights Association deplored what it regarded as an “escalation of violations of human rights and public and individual freedoms.” | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
This June, I’m thrilled to be part of a massive young adult scavenger hunt sponsored by the Alliance of Young Adult Authors . This is a chance to meet some new authors, grab a bunch of free books, and sign up to win a whole bunch of epic prizes!
In addition to the $500 grand prize, each author will be giving away lots of free books and cool stuff. Over on this blog I’ll be giving away a set of audio books of P.A.W.S. (narrated by Priscilla Finch) and the upcoming audio book of Argentum (narrated by the ever awesome George Sirois.)
When the scavenger hunt begins (June 1st) all you have to do is visit each site below in order and write down the special word to reconstruct the story. You can enter any of the giveaways or offers on anybody’s site, or just grab the special word and move on…
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About paws4puzzles
I'm a writer and puzzle maker. I am the author of a YA fantasy series, P.A.W.S. and my puzzles have been published in many magazines from Dell and Penny Press and on the walls of the Eltana cafe in Seattle. My most recent release is a book of logic problems, Paws4Logic which I wrote together with my son, Joey. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Q:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
I am currently getting an ArrayDeque class def not found error when testing my app on my phone(version 2.2) however i dont get the error when run in an emulator (2.3.3)
Heres the Error:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java.util.ArrayDeque
Any help would be hugely appreciated.
A:
ArrayDeque class is added in API level 9 so you can't use it in Android 2.2
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | StackExchange |
Evaluation of the prescription and utilization patterns of statins in an Italian local health unit during the period 1994-2003.
The prescription pattern of statins in the Local Health Unit (LHU) of Treviso (northern Italy) over a 10-year period was evaluated, with the aim of evaluating the persistence with and adherence to therapy. Data on 21,393 subjects who received at least one prescription for statins during the period between January 1, 1994 and December 31, 2003 were retrieved from the LHU database in order to track the pharmacological history of individual patients. The data included age, sex, drug formulation, strength, number of drug packages prescribed, and prescription date. The adopted indicators for drug utilization included the Defined Daily Dose (DDD), the Received Daily Dose (RDD), and a surrogated Prescribed Daily Dose (sPDD), extrapolated from available prescription data. An Adherence to Therapy Index (ATI) was calculated from the ratio between the amount of drug actually prescribed and the amount of sPDD. Based on the ATI, patients were grouped into non-adherent, poor-adherent, and good-adherent groups. The distribution of adherence level among patient-age classes and statin-prescribed patients in primary or secondary prevention was evaluated. All drug-utilization indicators showed an increase in statin use over the study period in terms of both the number of prescribed patients and the sPDD. Persistence with and adherence to therapy remained low, with a 50% discontinuation rate in the first year, and persistent patients did not follow the therapy regularly. Patients in secondary prevention were the most adherent to their drug regimen, although only 41% of these had a good compliance. Our findings suggest an increase in statin use which is, however, accompanied by poor patient persistence with and adherence to statin therapy. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
Stigmella alba
Stigmella alba is a moth of the family Nepticulidae. In North America it has been recorded from Arizona and British Columbia.
External links
A taxonomic revision of the North American species of Stigmella (Lepidoptera: Nepticulidae)
Category:Nepticulidae
Category:Moths of North America | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
Got a question?
If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer here on the blog (even if you think it’s a beginner one!) hit the button below and send me an email. I obviously can’t do them all, but if I think enough people will benefit from a longer-form answer I’d be happy to do it.
You could also do things like leave your website URL when you leave comments (like this one). Most importantly, however, is to write less for your own blog and more for other people’s blogs as a way to get your name out there.
But hey, you’ve mentioned some truthful and practical points out there. So ‘one post idea’ seems valid to me. Agreed!
However, the number of posts surely creates a perception which make the ordinary blog look BIG. On the other hand, a loyal readership doesn’t mind the number of posts maybe.
That’s variable – based on a lot of things.
In what cases do you think several articles should be published at once? Or are on the side of always starting with just one post?
Just asking.
Ramsay
Hey mate.
How are you?
I think the only time that I’d want to put up more articles at launch is if I had some kind of niche/brand where I needed to cover many topics. For example, if my website was like Anatomy Tyrant I’d want to make sure I had more than one article about the little toe!
Mostly, however, I think it’s just best to get started and get people excited for more.
I like your whole jump in with both feet approach to blogging. Start with one and build. I have a question about archived posts though — on my site http://www.chumplady.com I’ve got a link to the archives, and I’ve learned from commentators that people read the WHOLE THING. Like over a thousand posts! I did go to the trouble awhile back of organizing them by subject matter (and you can search that way) — but I mean people read backwards through the thing.
So, I wonder as useful as readers seem to find it, does this hinder my ability to recycle or build the blog? (I do about once a week repost an old article). Maybe less is more if you’re trying to build a newsletter/email list? (I suck on that front, btw.)
Thanks
Ramsay
Tracy, your blog is going so well I would just keep doing whatever you are doing.
I never post old articles to the front page, so maybe could learn a few things from you.
The only thing I’d suggest is to maybe hire someone to go back through your old posts and fix up any things that need updating. For example, you might want to link to some newer posts, or perhaps there are like 5-10 of your best focus articles that you want to push a bit harder in the archives.
Great post, Ramsay–and at the perfect time! I’m launching in two weeks.
A question about the type of first post. If you start off with an expert roundup post with little of your own writing, would that still suffice? My thought was that I should have some articles of my own when launching so people could see I actually thought for myself and didn’t just quote experts. 😉
Cheers!
Ramsay
That’s a good point, I hadn’t actually thought about it. I imagine it would still be fine as long as there is some sense of something coming up soon, and as long as you still have a very good mailing list offer.
Hi, thanks for the good reading. Agree, starting with a post by post is better. This is what I did for my drug discovery blog covering startups in biotech and pharmaceutical industry. My question, though is this: I tend to publish long-form articles, which take a lot of work to produce (and time). So I am able to post, like, once per month at best. Since it takes a real research work to provide quality content in drug discovery. Is it sensible to “dilute” such posts with a short and brief “shallow” posts? Like just a half-page brief on a recent news etc? What is your opinion? Thanks
Ramsay
I’m the same here. Most of the posts are 3,000+ words and take me a while to write. This one was a shorter one which I did as a test and it seems to have gone pretty well. I think all blogs are different but there’s no harm in testing.
This makes a lot of sense! However, I was drawn to read this post because I was wondering if I should have some articles stocked up, not to launch on my blog immediately, but to schedule for later.
I have been working on my first article, turns out it is a welcome article. (Face down. But I think that it will be interesting because it goes a little bit into the development of the website and inviting readers to transform the community of the blog. What do you think?)
Anywho, back on topic. I have been working on this article for about a month. I took your advice from a previous article and am trying to make it 3,500 words long. My concern is if writing articles takes me this long, then maybe I should have a few more for back up.
As far as launching goes, the site is already up so I guess I’m too late there. Hopefully the fact that my first post is not up isn’t hurting me.
Ramsay
As long as it’s valuable and distinctive it doesn’t seem to matter how long you take in between posts. Glen from ViperChill only posts a few times a year but people fall over themselves to read anything new.
I did this completely by accident, so it’s validating to find out it was the recommended approach anyway! I went live about a month ago with only two posts, but pretty epic ones. I’ve had about 50,000 views and over 1000 subscribers already, which completely exceeded my expectations.
Totally feel you on the small details thing too – perfect is the enemy of good. It took me forever to get the blog up and running, because I was obsessing over everything. There are still heaps of tweaks to make, but I realised I can do them as I go.
Thanks for running a great blog man, looking forward to reading through more of your stuff.
Richard, I am launching very soon, and am working on a couple of posts to launch with my 8,000+ word subscriber eBook. I’m curious to know if you did anything particular to get those 50,000 views and 1,000 subscribers. Did you do any marketing to draw readers to your launch posts? What do you think worked for you?
Hey Rick, mostly it was good luck to be honest (although the two pieces were pretty compelling). For one article, a couple of news websites got in touch after I sent the link out on my personal social feeds. For the other, I messaged someone influential within the niche because I thought he’d enjoy it, and I’d spoken to him previously. He shared it to his (much larger) following, and it went pretty nuts on Facebook. All the best with your launch!
I agree that the number you start with isn’t as important as starting on a high note. Like that article where you contributed your thoughts about how to write great content (Thanks again for participating BTW). It has driven a ton of traffic and converts pretty well.
For me, long form works. I mean, I won’t even write a post under 1500 words these days due to the nature of topics I like to cover.
One long form article I wrote on focus (flow state) has generated 450 subscribers since I published it and it’s still going strong and the rankings are constantly improving.
It wasn’t one of my first articles, but has since become a pillar and it’s opened many doors that would have otherwise been shut.
PS I didn’t see that case study about 17000 subs in 6 weeks you mentioned in your email…..
I just launched a new music site which took me 4 months to build. I could have done it faster but I had to do almost everything – writing the content, creating images, writing an ebook as incentive for people to sign up to my list, SEO, link building, and all other technical things. I say almost because I did purchase some services on Fiverr but for the most part I did everything. It’s been a stressful last few months to say the least BUT I learned a TON along the way.
I did plan on writing only a couple of reviews before launching the site but I kept on pushing the launch date back and wrote a few more articles until I finally got to a number I am now happy with.
Anyway, now I am working on my next website and thanks to all the new knowledge I’ve picked up whilst working on my first site (and your very helpful post!), I can safely say I can finish the new one in less than a month.
Keep rocking and inspiring new bloggers!
Ramsay
I’m so glad you’ve found this site useful! Thanks for the great comment.
It’s nice to hear that simply diving in is the way to go. But it took me almost a year to figure out what to write about. Many of my first pieces were personal narratives. I recently just published another one, but mostly, I keep my topics to information that helps people solve a problem or answer a question. I think it’s reasonable to expect traffic to take longer in this case. I didn’t know about keywords until I found your blog, either. And I had already been publishing for six months.
I recently read about a blogger who took six years to work it all out. she’s making a living with blogging, now. So, I think it’s important to remember that blogging isn’t a race, but a journey, instead. Some people take off like rabbits. Others, like me, may need longer.
Ramsay
Yeah it takes time. Took me years to figure out what I wanted to do with it all.
Thanks so much Ramsay, this is exactly the kick in the pants I need. I’ve gotten a bit stuck on my lead magnet and building the beautiful branded website, but it’s time to get moving. I’ve got one big post already trying to burst out between technical details, so I’m going to get on it and get things moving!
I agree. I used a free wordpress theme until this past summer. Switching over to genesis sped up my site, which is important. Mind you, I learned that here on Blog Tyrant, too. Many successful bloggers used free themes for much longer, though. I agree with Ramsay about jumping in and getting started. But if you have the money to spring for the genesis framework along with a studiopress theme, I would say, go for it.
Ramsay
Agree with all of this but would add that if you’re truly terrible at it and it’s taking ages then just spend a bit of money and pay someone to set it up for you. It’s worth it.
Hi Ramsay, nice post, perhaps I have failed to put a subscribe box in my blog, not for not knowing how but for not having serial mails to send out. Should I wait until having those serial emails?
BTW awesome blog, greetings from Colombia.
Ramsay
Nah it’s a good idea to have an option up for people to at least get notifications for when you publish a new blog article.
Simon
hey, Ramsay.
This is a question I’ve asked myself and have researched about.
I am currently doing all necessary preparations to kick off my blog (it’s 5 months now).
I planned to launch the blog with at least 15 wonderful articles.
Well, If I were to be asked, I would say, take your time to plan a good number of wonderful articles before launching your blog.
Doing this has really helped my articles in so many ways and one of them is that you get enough time (as you can see, mine is 5 months + and counting) to edit, format and add new and fresh ideas that weren’t there at the point of writing. I devoted specific time to read through them every two days. I have added new ideas and corrected both tiny and huge errors just by doing this.
This really works; I am saying this out of my little experience…
Literally, I would advise any new blogger (like me) to take his or her time to create articles; then create time to read through them (usually loudly) before launching the blog.
I hope this helps someone.
cheers.
Ramsay
Hi Simon.
I’m glad this process is helping you with your writing but I would gently suggest that perhaps this is too long to spend on blog articles. I think it would be more beneficial to start publishing as opposed to trying to get it perfect.
Thanks for commenting!
Charity
This was one of the many big questions I’ve been wondering about as I’ve been preparing to launch my first blog. I’ve still got a lot of exploring options to do first, but you’re posts have helped me incredibly. This one particularly felt like you were talking directly to me about it not needing to be perfect. Thanks for sharing awesome content as always!
Ramsay
Glad it helped. Know that feeling!
Kirsten Toyne
I think many of us wait to make a blog or other things in life everything we want because we feel a pressure to be perfect. thanks for sharing this.
You’re right to the point again. When I’ve started my fitness blog https://www.sportchezsoi.com (that’s French!) I only had 1 article written + about page. I think it’s important for people to know about you while they discover your 1st post.
I found it a better idea to post articles one by one, because I could learn progressivly about my mistakes. I could also understand step by step what is working for me and my readers.
If you star writing a lot before posting, you can finally discover (and later than needed) that it was a waste of time because you were going in the wrong direction.
I hope my comment is clear enough to help someone.
Thank you for your wonderful work, Ramsay!
Ramsay
That’s a great point. Hadn’t really considered that.
Jaclyn
Ramsay,
I love your blog! It has helped me so much as I prepare to launch my own website/business. Before reading this, I planned on publishing several posts before promoting, but now I can see the importance of growing a community alongside the number of articles.
Quick question though– If I plan to categorize my posts by topic (natural remedies, recipes, DIY, etc.), should I have a post available for each category? Or still just the one welcome post? The main menu on my homepage will have the different categories listed, and I fear that if nothing is published under a specific topic, it could deter potential subscribers if they’re only interested in that one area. Catch my drift?
Above all, thank you for the countless pieces of advice you’ve shared. Your website has quickly become my go-to-place for any blogging related questions.
Ramsay
If you really emphasize the different categories in your site design then it might be a good idea to do something for each one, yes.
Carolyn Crossley
Hi Ramsey and Marina,
Great case study and as always from you, Ramsey the go-to blog advisor on the net, fantastic content!
Your post is so freeing. Ours is a travel blog – http://www.blog.MakeItJamaica.com. I started with one post but had about 4 in the pending file when I launched about a year ago. That allowed me to post once per week and keep writing ahead of schedule. It made it a little less stressful. I find I am such a perfectionist that I keep making the tiniest tweaks and editing and re-editing that I am sure in the long run didn’t make a bit of difference because it’s not as though I am getting much traffic anyway. Plus it wastes so much time! I made the mistake of not collecting the emails upfront and now I am trying to do that. I created a free e-book to give away but not many takers so have to come up with a more enticing or exciting product.
Thanks so much for your blog. I have learnt a lot. I’m off to reading more about growing my list. That I think is my next most important step
Hi Ramsay,
I would say that It is better to have more posts than one post because it will help the readers to understand how good the writer of the blog is and secondly it can help you to get a good bounce rate.
Absolutely agree with every word of this. I’m in a bunch of blogger groups on FB, and I just want to cry at all the new bloggers I see who are spending a ton of money on having a blog designed for them, custom themes, logos, color palettes, and writing 10-15 posts all to have before they go live. I saw one woman saying she’d had her blog for over 6 months, and was “almost ready” to go live!! It makes me want to weep.
I just did a total redesign on my blog – new theme, slightly rebranding (although I kept my name/url). I shut my blog down for 2 days, just so I could get all the images on the front redone to fit the theme – if it wasn’t going to show on the front, I wasn’t really that worried about it. Everything else that needs to be done (new optins etc) can be done while I’m live.
My opinion is it’s way better to have a live blog than a “waiting to be perfect” one.
This has been my blogging downfall for the nearly two full years I’ve been blogging. I wanted everything to be so perfect that I let a lot of good stuff slide because I was too busy trying to tweak this or install that. I even made the mistake of DELETING my old site to create one from scratch… because I thought it would make it better. *shakes head* Does it make it better if I say I learned my lesson?
Good post, it’s reassuring that everything doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect right away, and I am guilty of combing through a 1100-word post for 10 hours proofing.
While I haven’t had an actual launch I have built a small archive of writing samples, and I will soon add contact pages, which I understand make a big difference so that potential clients know your availability.
I am working for a website http://magsstore.com from past 4 months and and I am also from the field of online marketing. I have done almost all on page activities on it and get over then 200+ baclinks which also have more then 100+ high pr and da pa domains. Still my website is not ranking with most of keywords even traffic is to less. Please take a overview and tell me what can we do to get organic traffic and whats the flaws we have in this website. one of our competitor have good rank from some keywords even the website have only 38 backlinks with it and those link dont have high DA PA. competitors website: subscribe-renew[.] com my website https://www.magsstore.com. I checked it with similerweb its showing website have 9k traffic in a month.
This reminds me of a quote I heard, “you don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it started”. I have a question from one of your other posts (closed comments) mentioning that you use AWeber for you mailing lists. Would you recommend that over Mail Chimp or Campaign Monitor?
Ramsay
At the moment I would but I’m looking a lot at Get Response these days as they have a few more features that I like. More on this soon.
I’m a big fan of your blog. I’m about 4 months in since starting my blog and I’m still not able to grow my viewership. I’ve recently tried publishing some of my post on social media and I’m not getting any traction. I’ve spent some time redesigning my blog in the last month trying to speed up on my learning curve.
It’s amazing to see how different people can be. In the comments, some people said they wait a long time before they launch their new blog. For my part, every time I start a new project, I just can’t wait to go live! I could never wait to write 20 blog posts before I publish a new blog, because I get too excited.
Procrastination and hurriedness are both to be avoided, and we should all strike a balance between the two.
From my point of view,it depends on the type of blog you are starting,if your blog is tips or just articles you can star posting from he first day,but if you want to build a community of followers,then you need to save your best posts for the best time.
Great article !! I have started reading your blog some time back. It is very addictive and very useful you will keep on reading one article after another article.
To add to your point I am still confused whether I should share my posts in my Facebook wall to promote my website or not. As, Facebook started charging to promote any article.
Any suggestion on promoting the blog?
Ramsay
Check out my guide on getting 100,000 visitors from Google in the Best Of section.
Thanks Ramsey for the article really I want to start a new blog and this comes to me and now I understand the solution.
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Bootflat: Open Source Flat UI Kit based on Twitter Bootstrap 3 - jalan
http://bootflat.github.io/documentation.html
======
noir_lord
This looks very nice.
As a primarily backend guy I appreciate all the work people do on this stuff a
lot (even if I don't use it I often refer to it for both inspiration and ideas
on _how_ to do stuff).
Thanks for sharing.
EDIT: For example I'm already "borrowing" the colours from the notification
dialogs, they look much nicer than the stock ones :).
~~~
swah
Same thing here, though in the moment I'm having a hard time finding U[I|X]
solutions/patterns for the webapp I'm designing, which is much harder than a
theme (for me). In the sense that "now, this is organized from a database
point of view, how do I make users consume and interact with it?"...
(Just looking at Facebook blows my mind when you start realizing how many tiny
patterns they have for displaying more information on the screen. Things like
"Jack and 13 more like your link" w/ click to expand)
~~~
dm2
[http://bootsnipp.com/](http://bootsnipp.com/) is nice, doesn't have
everything but can speed up prototyping dramatically.
~~~
notastartup
that's an awesome site, wonder if there is anything more like it
~~~
dm2
There are tons of them.
Below is a good list of them that has been around for a while, enjoy.
[http://bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-
boot...](http://bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-bootstrap-
resources)
------
dm2
Another flat CSS theme for bootstrap? How many minutes did that take you? The
layout on the site does look nice though.
[http://flathemes.com/](http://flathemes.com/) is your main website, it has a
link to download version 1.0.1 (even though github says version 2.0.0 is the
latest), then when I click download it says that I have to Like with Facebook
or Twitter to download my "free gift" of your BootFlat theme, that rubs me the
wrong way.
~~~
oskarth
Stop the hating, please. It has a hugely negative effect on HN in general and
on creators specifically. Don't use it if you don't like it.
_Whenever I come across people who really hate me and my work it takes every
ounce of energy to try and ignore them and move on. So hard._ \--John Resig,
creator of jQuery
([https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/425483930918060032](https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/425483930918060032))
~~~
steerj92
This is such a silly comment.
If people can't show their opinions of things, whats the point of even having
HN. I didn't realise that everyone had to love everything posted on this site.
~~~
philmcc
I think it's a question of the tone with which he "didn't love."
There's a difference between:
"Another flat CSS theme for bootstrap? How many minutes did that take you?"
and
"There have been a number of flat CSS themes presented on this site, so I find
it hard for any one of them to really distinguish themselves. Have you
considered [the idea that OP thinks is better or more original or more
useful]?
\---
The reason it's less than ideal to weigh in with such disdain is that it
discourages other people for whom creating something like that would be a
MASSIVE undertaking.
Imagine a beginning designer who doesn't know anything about CSS or graphic
design, so, for their initial project, they want to create a flat CSS theme.
It's ambitious for them, and they're anxious to start and they log into HN
and...oh. Wow. That person just made something better than I could ever make
and got BLASTED.
What's the point of trying?
Comment #2 encourages them and points them towards a better suggestion.
Comment #1 adds nothing.
~~~
dm2
Reason #1 for the harsh tone was the requirement of a social media Like before
the download.
Reason #2 was that I was disappointed that a CSS file with a few colors
changed passes as an HN article these days.
Humility is a valuable lesson to learn. I see no reason to lie to the person
and pretend that they provide any real value to anyone actually using
Bootstrap.
The point of trying is not to show off, it should be for self-growth. If the
article said, "this is my first project as a web-developer, what do you
think", then I would have been much more polite, instead this guy just wants
as many Facebook likes as possible so that he can eventually make money off of
you.
~~~
lowboy
Did the page change in the past 15 hours? You can download the theme as a
zip[0] without any social bullshit, or install using bower.
[0]
[https://github.com/bootflat/bootflat.github.io/archive/maste...](https://github.com/bootflat/bootflat.github.io/archive/master.zip)
~~~
dm2
Yes, yes it did. Possibly because of my comment. Either way, good job on the
changes OP.
------
archildress
This looks really nice, thanks for creating it.
I'm looking to use it for a small redesign project this week, and I had a
quick concern - when I load the sample files on my OS X 10.9.2 in Chrome, the
text won't show. Once I "inspect element" in Chrome, it pops in. Strange error
for sure - just me or anyone else?
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/kkwjt7prm5a4xuh/Screenshot%202014-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/kkwjt7prm5a4xuh/Screenshot%202014-03-15%2009.15.45.png)
~~~
dbond
Theres currently a bug in chrome 33/34 where web fonts won't render until you
force a repaint.
[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=336476](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=336476)
------
oneeyedpigeon
.list-group-item warning has color #ffbf21, background-color #ffce54. This is
almost impossible to read.
~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Also, I'm not sure SPAN is a requirement for the .active element in a
.breadcrumb, but your .breadcrumb-arrow requires one.
~~~
vanderZwan
I think your constructive criticism has more chance of being heard at the
github repo:
[https://github.com/bootflat/bootflat.github.io](https://github.com/bootflat/bootflat.github.io)
~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I toyed with the idea of logging these as issues, but thought they might not
quite qualify, and assumed the author would be reading this thread. Maybe I'll
go log them there after all ...
------
mcintyre1994
Nexus 7, Chrome, portrait, dropdown menus don't expand.
------
rjfarley
This is a great looking theme, really like it. Nice work.
------
cheshire137
Arrgh, does this not bother anyone else?
[http://imgur.com/X9kZZ5w](http://imgur.com/X9kZZ5w) There's more space below
the text than there is to the sides or above, because there's a bottom margin
on the paragraph within the popover and that gets added to the padding within
the popover.
------
colinramsay
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of nay-saying here but I have to say I
think this looks fantastic. I'm trying to reskin
[https://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/](https://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/) and
I wonder if I can use this to bring it a bit more up-to-date.
------
bite
I've used bootflat for a previous project, prior to bootstrap 3, but have
since switched. It looks great, but it's just a slight modification in colour
scheme now, whereas before it was a huge difference. Bootstrap's hosted on a
CDN too, which is nice.
~~~
juliob
Hmm, that was a bit confusing. It's not clear what your prepositions "it" are
referring to.
------
AYBABTME
Thank God for bootstrap and bootstrap kits. I've got no skills in design and
all, but still can make acceptable UIs for my servers by hammering bootstrap
all over the place.
------
daGrevis
I'm not an expert, but isn't shadows and rounded corners like anti-flat?
~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Why on earth would rounded corners be anti-flat? Shadows, I give you.
~~~
daGrevis
I think I read it somewhere. Maybe I was mistaken.
------
steerj92
This is not nearly as good as Designmodo's Flat UI. Seems that people are just
going to keep making Flat design kits because they are easy.
------
Edmond
Love it.
------
BenjaminN
How many of those do we need?
~~~
RyanZAG
Law of building - anything easy to make will be made over and over again.
Anything difficult to make will be made once and complained about forever.
~~~
swah
Seems true at first, but then shouldn't text editors be difficult?
~~~
dm2
What do you mean? There are tons of text editors.
Source:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=text+editor](https://www.google.com/search?q=text+editor)
------
puppetmaster3
I think HN has jumped the shark.
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Gowd Kahluyeh
Gowd Kahluyeh (, also Romanized as Gowd Kahlūyeh; also known as Gowd Kahleh) is a village in Par Zeytun Rural District, Meymand District, Firuzabad County, Fars Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 105, in 23 families.
References
Category:Populated places in Firuzabad County | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
Episode notes
When old Eden becomes a bore, the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery follow a stellar signal and jump to a new planet with a radiation problem. But when humans are also found to be on new Eden, It’s time for Pike, Burnham, and Owosekun to beam down and investigate. Will (s)Tilly stop the acid rain? Has Burnham learned to tell the truth? Can someone dim the lights in this church?
It’s the episode that let’s you jump, but only if the authorities give you the ok.
Produced by Rob Schulte.
Theme music by Adam Regusea,
Follow Adam, Ben, and Rob on twitter, and discuss the show using the hashtag #GreatestDiscovery! | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
When you're enduring a lopsided loss by the Oilers (as OilersNation did today) it's important to remember that this team has a tremendous future. The three kids up front in Edmonton will soon be joined by a group of defensemen with varying skills and ability. In a very real way, the timing of the Oilers progress at the NHL level will depend heavily on the development of the blue in Oklahoma City.
The Barons have a nice mixture of experience and prospects in OKC. In fact, the veterans (mostly Shawn Belle and Richard Petiot, although Jake Taylor plays when healthy) may beat the kids to the NHL in the short term. The future on the farm (on D) is represented by Jeff Petry, Taylor Chorney, Alex Plante and Johan Motin and it's these players I'm going to look at in this post.
Over the past 10 games, the OKC Barons are 7-3 (I'm not counting all the goofy stuff, just the straight up result). Here's how the group of four performed in those games:
Jeff Petry 10gp, 1-6-7 -7.Performed in difficult circumstances, as he has been paired with Shawn Belle on what looks like the tough minutes pairing for the Barons. He played against the Marlies in back to back weekends when Kadri was playing like a magician and had another tough game in there against the Griffins. Still, I think he's exactly where he should be and would hope the coach would consider giving him softer minutes if the minus numbers continue to grow. I remain convinced he's going to be similar to Tom Gilbert in style.
Alex Plante 10gp, 1-2-3 +2. He's had a nice run on what looks like the 2nd pairing (with Chorney). Some PP minutes, but his main job is to defend and then help with the toughness (41PIMS leads the team). Mobility gets mentioned a lot when discussing Plante, but he looked capable last season during his callup and the Oilers have a couple of guys you can time by sundial right now. I suspect Plante is faster than Vandermeer, as an example.
Taylor Chorney 10gp, 0-2-2 +2. Clearly not part of the PP for OKC, Chorney's main skill when he turned pro (offense from the blue) is no longer in the discussion. That's the trouble with offensive-defensemen, their main strength is unlikely to be utilized as they move along. In Chorney's case, the combination of better options and the organization's desire for him to do his defensive homework have him staying away from the fun stuff. Had no disaster during this 10-game stretch and seems to be settling in nicely. Seems to play with Alex Plante a lot.
Johan Motin 9gp, 1-2-3 +4. Has the most impressive stat line in the group over these 10 games. His +4 stands out but he appears to get a lot of time with a veteran (Petiot) pairing partner and some easier minutes (I think that's the 3rd pairing). Since he signed with the Oilers and turned pro, I've gotten the feeling he's below the others in terms of the organization's ranking. You never know, but that's how it looks at this time. He did have a wonderful game on November 5th (1 assist and a +3).
Now a few questions.
Are any of those 4 ahead of Belle or Petiot for the next callup? I'll suggest Plante. With Theo Peckham's status a little bit in question (there's some worry he came off the bench for today's melee), Plante would be the most obvious replacement if they're looking for a player to match Peckham's style.
Would you be surprised if any of the 4 got the call? Yes. I'd be very surprised if Petry was recalled now because he's clearly adjusting to the pro game and doing it well. If we've endured the sundial blue this long at the NHL level, for heaven sakes continue the education. Also Motin. I don't think the organization is convinced of him. By that I mean they seem to be using him as a replacement level player, not forcing him up the depth chart when opportunitty arises. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe all these kids are passing him the old fashioned way. But I think he's in danger of getting the Danny Syvret-Cody Wild treatment at some point.
So they should callup Belle or Petiot? Probably. I think Plante is ready for an extended look at the big league level but that can happen any time this season or early next. I believe he'll push for a big league job fall 2011, and if that's what the organization is thinking then maybe a 10-game stretch now is a nice prelude to 2011-12.
You don't really like Petry, do you? I like him plenty, more now than a few years ago. He's got size, foot speed and some puck moving ability. I'm comparing him to Tom Gilbert and I think Gilbert is a good defenseman.
How can you say that after today? Easy. Defense is damn difficult and when you make a bad play there's nowhere to hide. That's why Oiler fans use to boo Paul Coffey so much back in the day.
They never booed Coffey. You're making it up. They sure did, I was there. Absolutely true.
Which of the 4 has the best upside? I don't really know what "upside" means, but if everyone delivers on their promise then Petry should be the best man of the four. The only thing I'd mention is that Plante appears to be doing a lot of good things and that could have an impact on the final result. Plante has the best draft pedigree, put it that way. You never want to close the book on a prospect at this early stage. He could end up being this generation's Jason Smith for the Edmonton Oilers.
Petry's a new pro, Plante has been around awhile. How can you say Plante will be better? I'm not saying he WILL be better, just that it could happen. Put another way, the outer marker for Petry imo is a solid top 4 defender with size, speed and the ability to move the puck. A Tom Gilbert-type. A really valuable player. Plante's outer marker is a different type of player. Less PP, fewer points every year. However, he could be a heart and soul player on the Oilers for a decade if he continues to develop the defensive side of the game. More a Jason Smith-Steve Staios type player.
Gilbert's more valuable than Jason Smith ever was. You're sure about that? Defense is still more about keeping the puck out of your net than anything you can do at the other end of the rink.
You're saying Plante's upside is Jason Smith? I'm saying he is a similar player type. There's a lot of luck, sweat and work involved in getting to that point as a player. He could get hurt, or he could lose interest or the Oilers could lose interest in him. New Jersey and Toronto shipped Smith away, and he was just about ready to be Jason Smith when he arrived in Edmonton.
How old was Smith when he got to Edmonton? 25.
How old is Plante? 21. There's a long way to go, but he does have a nice range of defensive skills.
Lowetide has been one of the Oilogosphere's shining lights for over a century. You can check him out here at OilersNation and at lowetide.ca. He is also the host of Lowdown with Lowetide weekday mornings 10-noon on TSN 1260.
Horcsky: I would say that I'm usually positive about prospects overall. However, this group of players (led by the three kids at forward playing for the Oilers) are a different item than we've seen in a long time.
This is going to be a lot of fun in the next few years. Starting maybe 2012 fall.
Don't look now but Oilers are on pace to finish with 6 less points this season then last. Many fans are saying that's great...we get another 1st/2nd overall pick next summer to go along with the young talent we already have. Does that apply for the next season as well? And the one after? And the one after? Is the draft lottery the new playoffs and #1 overall the new Stanley Cup?
I completely understand the idea of a rebuild, I understand that the Oilers have lots of talent at the junior level, etc. But the rebuild isn't looking too great through my eyes as of right now.
Lowetide has just written an article talking about our 4 d prospects at the AHL level and kind of given an idea of where they could fit into the oilers lineup in the future. But that is the OILERS lineup. Those 4 dmen would be considered very weak prospects in most other team's depth charts. The reality is, bar Marincin (who looks early on to be a steal), the Oilers have NO dmen right now in their system (aside from maybe Whitney, whose contract will run out before the oil make the playoffs again) who would even have a sniff of being in the top 6 d of a Stanley Cup winning hockey team. The Oilers whole rebuild is based on offense, minus a potential #1 centerman, and last time I checked, all good hockey teams build from the net out.
Get that #1 centerman next summer? Very unlikely. You've got a Sean Couturier whose numbers have dropped off from his 16 year old season in by far the easiest of the 3 CHL leagues. You've got a Ryan Nugent-Hopkins who is skilled with the puck but is small and can't score goals. Get a good d prospect in Adam Larsson then? His numbers have dropped off hugely from last season. After putting up 17 pts as a 16 yr old last year, you'd like to see his numbers be around 25-30 pts for this season. Instead he has 3 pts in 17 games and is on pace for 8 on the season.
Why are the OKC Barons doing so well? Because they have a core of young players surrounded by numerous AHL veterans on 1 year contracts (eg. Belle, Petiot, Giroux) who the Oilers have no long-term commitments to past this season. Why couldn't that be done with the Oilers? Why couldn't our youngsters be surrounded by guys like Guerin/Nolan/other unsigned UFA's, players with tons of experience in this league and players who could make the rebuild bearable while the fans wait for the kids to develop. Didn't the Oilers wonder why Phoenix were buying out Vandermeer? Does Strudwick's great personality and hard work in the community make him any faster on the ice? If MacIntyre couldn't play hockey last year, was he going to be able to this year? Is there a reason Fraser only played a couple games for Chicago in the playoffs?
I'm a huge Oilers fan and I hope the rebuild is successful. However, unless it is the Oilers plan to finish in last place for the next 3-4 years, thus ridding players like Eberle/Hall of remembering what it takes to win hockey games and have success, then the man at the top (Steve Tambellini), is not doing a very good job at all. He got rid of dead wood last summer, and then he brought in dead wood. He doesn't contemplate trades. He doesn't call players up unless injuries force him to. He cuts players who outplayed others in training camp (Petiot/Omark/Plante).
I love the Oilers. I could deal with exciting last place hockey. But to me, watching my favorite team lose their last 4 games by a combined score of 26-10 and slump to a record which will be lower than last season's surely unbeatable low, is not in the least bit exciting.
Petry is exactly like Gilbert, right down to the p*ssy factor. Big players who refuse to utilize their size irk me to no end. I figured you'd like Gilbert, Lowetide. The math must love him despite the fact that he carries a purse.
Alex Plante is what a defenceman should be: big, physical, and mean. I like the comparison to Gator.
Petry is exactly like Gilbert, right down to the p*ssy factor. Big players who refuse to utilize their size irk me to no end. I figured you'd like Gilbert, Lowetide. The math must love him despite the fact that he carries a purse.
Alex Plante is what a defenceman should be: big, physical, and mean. I like the comparison to Gator.
agree completely. i'm also high on Martin Marincin, but he's a few years away at the very least.
With regard to Smith-Plante, it's so hard to see those guys coming but man are they valuable. In 00-01, Smith played 21 minutes a night (4 on the PK, none on the PP) blocked a ton of shots, got 10 major penalties and finished +14.
That's what this team needs, and Plante was drafted in the same general area (but was considered a raw player).
Strongly agree with John4. Please dont bring up Coffey´s name in a comparison.
Didn't bring him up as a comparison. Brought him up as an example of the Oilers fanbase. It's not much different now than it was then, although a little angrier. I'm satisfied with using Coffey as an example in this case.
I've probably come off as a pessimist, but i'm not. I'm a realist. If anything, you want your defensive prospects to be older than your forward prospects, because dmen take more time to develop. Compared to the rest of the NHL, the Oilers d prospects are very very weak, and that is not the proper recipe for a rebuild. Drafting some in the next couple of years would be a start, but it will be a long time before the develop, more time than most fans would be willing to wait for this rebuild to come good.
Call me an armchair GM, but if my team badly needs high end d prospects in their system, and guys like Fowler and Gormley (rated in the top 5) are still available at #12, I am doing everything in my power to grab one of those picks. The cost of trading up to the 12-15 area is not remotely close to what it costs a team to trade up to the top 5.
Alas, it's too late for this conversation. Thus I will just sit back and agree that the waiting (will be) the hardest part.
Sorry, I realize the current d prospects in the AHL are older than the kids up front. But I meant in terms of winning a cup in 5-7 years time, the Oilers are going to need TOP END d prospects. It is unlikely that any of the current OKC dmen become top end d prospects, at least they don't project that way at all. And it is unlikely any dman we draft in the coming few years will become a Pronger/Keith/Seabrook/Lidstrom/Gonchar/Niedermayer kind of cup winning quarterback/shutdown man within their first couple years of entering the league. I just think we get to a stage where Hall/Eberle/MPS are 24-26 and the cupboards are still pretty bare in the back end in terms of high end or potential high end prospects. And I don't feel I'm looking too far ahead as virtually all dmen who are considered stars become so after the age of 25 (of course there is the odd example that proves otherwise) which is a long ways away for guys like an Adam Larsson, or a Martin Marincin.
I won't be convinced these are a decent group of D prospects until some of them start turning out. The Oilers have really only produced Greene and possibly Peckham in the last 150 seasons.
It's not the end of the world if the Oilers are unable to draft some stud denfencemen though. Solid veteran defencemen are surprisingly available every season through trade or free agency. If even just a couple of their defencive prospects turn out alright they can probably flip some of their excess forwards for something half decent to fill in the remaining holes on the backend.
You are way too optimistic, this team is at least 2 franchise players in the right positions away from being a contender. Hopefully my guy will make it 1.
But until then?
I don't have confidence in our g.m. He's too afraid of pulling the trigger. He thinks accumulating a bunch of assets regardless of position will = a contender, it doesn't work like that. Holy @#$%&*?+!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nice article with perspective, LT. A team needs a nice balance of puck movers, stay at home guys, and pp shooters. That's why we shouldnt run Gilbert out of town. Tell Brownlee we used to boo Paul Coffey. Maybe he will change his mind on Gilbert. Not every defenseman can be Jason Smith, or you would never score a goal.
Remember when, on the right hand side of the Oilersnation homepage, it said Oilers 2-7 Ducks for nearly 6 months, and we all thought to ourselves "man I can't wait for the new season to start so that graphic will go away". Now it says 8-2...we're still the 2:(
I will agree with one thing. I wish Tambi would make a damn decision once in a while.
There are 20 positions on a team. In 3 years, only 6-7 players on the NHL team are probably still part of the picture (Gagner, MP, Hall, Eberle, Horcoff, Peckham, Hemsky). That is 13 positions that Tamby is still assessing**.
You can add in Whitney and Smid for sure, with Penner, Brule, Dubnyk, Gilbert, and Cogliano being possibilities. That's not bad at all considering how much personnel typically turns over during a rebuild. The NHL team has some solid pieces on it. It's the support that's making things so gruesome on the ice recently.
I will agree with one thing. I wish Tambi would make a damn decision once in a while.
There are 20 positions on a team. In 3 years, only 6-7 players on the NHL team are probably still part of the picture (Gagner, MP, Hall, Eberle, Horcoff, Peckham, Hemsky). That is 13 positions that Tamby is still assessing**.
This team is far from being a contender, let alone competitive.
**: Shudders
Pretty close to what I think. The only other I would add is Whitney. We need a stud 1st line center and big mean 4th line center. 2 bangers and crashers in the top 9 players, and 2 tough guys on the 4th line. 1 stud dman and toughness on the back end.
Pretty close to what I think. The only other I would add is Whitney. We need a stud 1st line center and big mean 4th line center. 2 bangers and crashers in the top 9 players, and 2 tough guys on the 4th line. 1 stud dman and toughness on the back end.
Geez looking at our needs, we may need ELPH for 2 more years.
Could we potentially have a couple of those in the system?
Stud # 1 centre: No one, unless Pitlick surprises
Big 4th line centre: Ryan O'Marra: 6'2 220
2 4th line tough guys: Cameron Abney: 6'5 200 (19 y/o); others who have less information about them like Bigos and Benfield.
2 bangers and crashers in top 9: Hartikainen 6'1 215. Allegedly likes to play gritty and get his hands dirty; Curtis Hamilton 6'2 205;
1 stud d-man: No one yet, unless Petry or Marancin become develop at an alarming rate.
back end toughness: Peckham, Hopefully Plante.
Lots would have to go right for all this to happen; the prospects are there for a couple spots to be filled though.
As almost always I love your stuff LT. I do have a hard time agreeing with the Gilbert stuff but let's skip that for awhile.
I think most of you guys are underestimating Johan Motin. The guy had 3 years with the best team in the Sweidish Elite League and I've seen him for in I don't know how many games.. Sure, he doesn't score many point and he sometimes has to work on his quickness and hitting ability but from what I've seen so far of him this season, he's done just that. He might not ever be a #1 D-pairing due to his inability to score points but I have no doubt in my mind he will be an awesome 2nd pairing D-man in the Oilers if trusted upon. He's a steady D-man and he moves the puck better then what I've seen many of the current Oilers D-man do (though, they obviously play in a higher league).
Either way, future blueline is looking great. Belle, Peckham, Smid, Plante, Petry, Motin, Marincin, Blain, Davidson and perhaps Chorney. That's 10 great prospects, a good mix of players and we'll sure as hell get to see some good stuff from at least 5-6 of them.
why are you such a stat whore? do you actually watch or listen to any barons games or do you just cut and paste? Tender Tom Gilbert is terrible and only you and klowe/tambo are wearing the goggles. oh and nice questions to yourself, good to know the "refurbish" is taking tolls on all of us.
Sorry, I realize the current d prospects in the AHL are older than the kids up front. But I meant in terms of winning a cup in 5-7 years time, the Oilers are going to need TOP END d prospects.
Or in two or three years they have a core of say Gilbert, Plante, Petry, Marincin and Peckham and then add a #1 guy through trade or FA. Add in a Larson or two, and suddenly there is tons of depth.
Or they can trade from their surplus of forward prospects for a D prospect.
As the name of this thread implies, Patience is required.
my thoughts exactly, though i don't know if Gilbert will be here in 2 or 3 years time. i would think that there is a market for him, as well as Whitney, Penner and Hemsky. if the right deal comes along then some of these players or perhaps even all could be gone by then.
OPPOSIT EFFECT . Bringing more toughness into our team this year has made things worse for our overload of diminutive forwards . It has also made our defence much weaker . Odd , but true ! Hard for opposition not to run the Oilers off the game they'd prefer to play . No matter what Oiler you hit on forwards of Oilers your not hitting much size or nastiness - thus making it easy and advantageous for opposition to keep doing it to us physically . Defensively we are unable to play effective shutdown or offensively with the minutes they are expected to play .
Plante should help , but we have to do a lot of hard decisions letting a majority of our diminutive forwards go and that includes those currently on farm .
The emphasis on trying to protect the small forwards has made our ability to play the type of game we hoped to play even more difficult and led to more blowouts , etc.. Sad , but very evident ! I can see keeping Gagner and Eberle and maybe one more dimnutive player in the near future , but we have got to change the pressing size and toughness issue up front while revamping a decent defence . We don't have to wait till end of season to do so either - not if they recognize now .
Is Renney the coach to lead this mess ? Maybe not , as i believe his record in NHL has only one winning season in his resume . The hand he has been dealt however , is far from being strong one to begin with .
I remember when Tom Poti was run out of Edmonton - Oiler fans were horrible, piling on, name-calling and ignorant. He's pretty happy where he is now, has produced consistently over the past 8 years (pretty much the same numbers that enraged the locals). I don't think he misses you folks.
Tom Gilbert is off to a bad start - and he's playing on weak defensive squad where his theoretical role is offence. While I agree that both he and Penner need to get meaner, it's just not the dominant part of their game.
I also think it's time to give Dubnyk a few games in a row before Khabby gets used to letting in a half-dozen a game.
I can't believe that Smid fell for Avery's ruse. I'm guessing that doesn't happen again.
Gilbert reminds me a lot of Tom Poti. Skillset of a potential star but just too laid back to get it done. Gilbert will evenutally leave the Oilers and go on to have a reasonably successful career with a better team but will never hit the highs that we thought he was capable of. On a weak team like the Oilers his lack of intestinal fortitude is a glaring weakness.
Give me a Peckham any day on this team over Gilbert. Bring up Belle and retire Strudwick. I'd even say Vandermeer deserves some more ice time. At least he gives whatever he's got. Man, I miss Matt Greene. A Greene and Peckham duo would have been a lot of fun in that game yesterday.
The year before we* booed him off the ice Poti scored 12 goals. He was a minus player, but at least he was scoring goals.
The year he was finally jettisoned he had a single goal and was -6 (he would finish the year -10). He stopped bringing the thing that kept his wacky defensive coverage acceptable.
To your claim that he's been puting up the same numbers in Washington, no. No he has not. His offensive numbers look like they're similar to his final year, but he hasnt had a minus season in a Capitals uniform. In fact, last season he was +26. There is no way that the Oil would have traded him away if he was on pace for a +26 season in Oiler silks.
It took Poti until he was in his late 20's to figure out the defensive game and to stop bleeding goals. Gilbert is now in his late 20's. When does he learn how to stop bleeding goals?
The way a lot of people talk on here, it's as if the Oilers cannot make trades nor free agent signings in the coming years. Our entire roster is not going to be filled with prospects coming up and making the team. When it's time to start contending, Tambellini can/will augment the younger players with solid veterans and role players that can help the team win.
I remember when Tom Poti was run out of Edmonton - Oiler fans were horrible, piling on, name-calling and ignorant. He's pretty happy where he is now, has produced consistently over the past 8 years (pretty much the same numbers that enraged the locals). I don't think he misses you folks.
Tom Gilbert is off to a bad start - and he's playing on weak defensive squad where his theoretical role is offence. While I agree that both he and Penner need to get meaner, it's just not the dominant part of their game.
I also think it's time to give Dubnyk a few games in a row before Khabby gets used to letting in a half-dozen a game.
I can't believe that Smid fell for Avery's ruse. I'm guessing that doesn't happen again.
I would also like to believe that Smid will smarten up after Avery's sucker-punch. However, Smid has consistently shown that he will either put his head down, turn his back, or refuse to get his stick up, any of which could protect him in certain situations. I keep waiting for the Ladislav Smid that will actually protect himself, but it never seems to happen.
Side note, don't ask Avery to fight. Give him some lumber on the legs and/or a glove in the face.
The year before we* booed him off the ice Poti scored 12 goals. He was a minus player, but at least he was scoring goals.
The year he was finally jettisoned he had a single goal and was -6 (he would finish the year -10). He stopped bringing the thing that kept his wacky defensive coverage acceptable.
To your claim that he's been puting up the same numbers in Washington, no. No he has not. His offensive numbers look like they're similar to his final year, but he hasnt had a minus season in a Capitals uniform. In fact, last season he was +26. There is no way that the Oil would have traded him away if he was on pace for a +26 season in Oiler silks.
It took Poti until he was in his late 20's to figure out the defensive game and to stop bleeding goals. Gilbert is now in his late 20's. When does he learn how to stop bleeding goals?
*I used we because I actively participated in booing Poti
Jeff Schultz was +55 last year (or around there)
and yes, the question is "Who the hell is Jeff Schultz"
Its a chicken and egg thing. If Poti was +26 here, we're a President Trophy team, and could give two sh%ts about his defensive play.
+/-, atleast the way the NHL records it, is as much about the other 11 guys on the ice at any given moment.
Statistic say that you are 9% in control of your own plus/minus, all things being equal. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
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Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston's a year long marriage in on the verge of divorce. The star from Zoolander, Justin, tied the knot with actress wife on August 5, 2015.
The couple maybe hugging and smiling on the outside, but the reports reveal some inside misunderstandings going on between the two famous actors. Reports have been critical about the situation to reach a conclusion that Aniston might be on a verge of a patch up with her ex-husband Brad Pitt.
This would affect Pitt’s marriage with Angelina Jolie, which is also in controversy of being in divorce phase. What do Pitt and Aniston want to show, if both the rumors are true?
Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston had wonderful pre-celebration of anniversary in the Bahamas
Justin and Jennifer started the relationship in May 2011 and they jointly bought a home in Bel-Air worth USD 22 million in early 2012. They got engaged on 10 August of the same year and married three years later.
A year before the two wedded, Justin was captured in a video where he blushingly described how happy he was to be with then future wife Jennifer Aniston. The video was shot on the red carpet of The Leftovers's premiere at the NYC.
The outlets say that the rumors might have been spread in the market after the low-key anniversary celebration of Aniston and Theroux which wasn’t what Aniston was hoping for. The sources reserve the information that Aniston seemed to have been unhappy about the low profile celebration.
Does she have to be unhappy about this? Maybe not. A month prior to the actual anniversary date, the couple was spotted in the Bahamas celebrating their anniversary in advance.
Justin Theroux's whopping networth
Though an established actor, Theroux’s net worth is far less than that of his wife. Justin takes away $75,000 per episode from HBO’s The Leftovers. All of his life’s work grosses to around $20 million, while Aniston stays at the margin of $150 million; Aniston was reportedly being paid a whopping $1 million per episode for ninth and tenth seasons of the series Friends.
While the couple’s net worth seems to be enough for a luxurious life ahead, the rumor on the table might be a lot of headaches. Anyway, the stars have remained silent about the rumors and are busy with their respective productions. Both Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston seem to be giving more attention on their career than their personal lives, at present. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
---
abstract: 'This paper presents a Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q) approach to improving the effectiveness and robustness of Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ), a recently proposed framework that extends the Dyna-Q algorithm to integrate planning for task-completion dialogue policy learning. To obviate DDQ’s high dependency on the quality of simulated experiences, we incorporate an RNN-based discriminator in D3Q to differentiate simulated experience from real user experience in order to control the quality of training data. Experiments show that D3Q significantly outperforms DDQ by controlling the quality of simulated experience used for planning. The effectiveness and robustness of D3Q is further demonstrated in a domain extension setting, where the agent’s capability of adapting to a changing environment is tested.[^1]'
author:
- |
Shang-Yu Su$^{\star}$Xiujun Li$^{\dagger}$Jianfeng Gao$^{\dagger}$Jingjing Liu$^{\dagger}$Yun-Nung Chen$^{\star}$\
$^{\dagger}$Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA\
$^{\star}$National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan\
[$^\star$f05921117@ntu.edu.tw$^\star$y.v.chen@ieee.org]{}\
[$^\dagger${xiul,jfgao,jingjl}@microsoft.com]{}
bibliography:
- 'emnlp2018.bib'
title: |
Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q: Robust Planning\
for Dialogue Policy Learning
---
Introduction
============
There are many virtual assistants commercially available today, such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Home, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Echo. With a well-designed dialogue system as an intelligent assistant, people can accomplish tasks via natural language interactions. Recent advance in deep learning has also inspired many studies in neural dialogue systems [@wen2017network; @bordes2017learning; @dhingra2017towards; @li2017end].
A key component in such task-completion dialogue systems is *dialogue policy*, which is often formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem [@levin1997learning; @young2013pomdp]. However, learning dialogue policy via RL from the scratch in real-world systems is very challenging, due to the inevitable dependency on the environment from which a learner acquires knowledge and receives rewards. In a dialogue scenario, real users act as the environment in the RL framework, and the system communicates with real users constantly to learn dialogue policy. Such process is very time-consuming and expensive for online learning.
One plausible strategy is to leverage user simulators trained on human conversational data [@schatzmann2007agenda; @li2016user], which allows the agent to learn dialogue policy by interacting with the simulator instead of real users. The user simulator can provide infinite simulated experiences without additional cost, and the trained system can be deployed and then fine-tuned through interactions with real users [@su2016continuously; @lipton2016efficient; @zhao2016towards; @williams2017hybrid; @dhingra2017towards; @li2017end; @liu2017iterative; @peng2017composite; @budzianowski2017sub; @peng2017adversarial; @tang2018subgoal].
However, due to the complexity of real conversations and biases in the design of user simulators, there always exists the discrepancy between real users and simulated users. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, there is no universally accepted metric for evaluating user simulators for dialogue purpose [@pietquin2013survey]. Therefore, it remains controversial whether training task-completion dialogue agent via simulated users is a valid and effective approach.
A previous study, called Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ) [@peng2018integrating], proposed a new strategy to learn dialogue policies with real users by combining the Dyna-Q framework [@sutton1990integrated] with deep learning models. This framework incorporates a learnable environment model (*world model*) into the dialogue policy learning pipeline, which simulates dynamics of the environment and generates simulated user behaviors to supplement the limited amount of real user experience. In DDQ, real user experiences play two pivotal roles: 1) directly improve the dialogue policy via RL; 2) improve the world model via supervised learning to make it behave more human-like. The former is referred to as *direct reinforcement learning*, and the latter *world model learning*. Respectively, the policy model is trained via real experiences collected by interacting with real users (*direct reinforcement learning*), and simulated experiences collected by interacting with the learned world model (*planning* or *indirect reinforcement learning*).
However, the effectiveness of DDQ depends upon the quality of simulated experiences used in planning. As pointed out in [@peng2018integrating], although at the early stages of dialogue training it is helpful to perform planning aggressively with large amounts of simulated experiences regardless their quality, in the late stages when the dialogue agent has been significantly improved, low-quality simulated experiences often hurt the performance badly. Since there is no established method of evaluating the world model which generates simulated experiences, @peng2018integrating resorts to heuristics to mitigate the negative impact of low-quality simulated experiments, e.g., reducing the planning steps in the late stage of training. These heuristics need to be tweaked empirically, thus limit DDQ’s applicability in real-world tasks.
![Proposed D3Q for dialogue policy learning.[]{data-label="fig:d3q"}](figures/d3q.pdf){width="\linewidth"}
To improve the effectiveness of planning without relying on heuristics, this paper proposes Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q), a new framework inspired by generative adversarial network (GAN) that incorporates a discriminator into the planning process. The discriminator is trained to differentiate simulated experiences from real user experiences. As illustrated in Figure \[fig:d3q\], all simulated experiences generated by the world model need to be *judged* by the discriminator, only the high-quality ones, which cannot be easily detected by the discriminator as being simulated, are used for planning. During the course of dialogue training, both the world model and discriminator are refined using the real experiences. So, the quality threshold held by the discriminator goes up with the world model and dialogue agent, especially in the late stage of training.
By employing the world model for planning and a discriminator for controlling the quality of simulated experiences, the proposed D3Q framework can be viewed as a model-based RL approach, which is generic and can be easily extended to other RL problems. In contrast, most model-based RL methods [@tamar2016value; @silver2016predictron; @gu2016continuous; @racaniere2017imagination] are developed for simulation-based, synthetic problems (e.g., games), not for real-world problems. In summary, our main contributions in this work are two-fold:
The proposed Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q approach is capable of controlling the quality of simulated experiences generated by the world model in the planning phase, which enables effective and robust dialogue policy learning.
The proposed model is verified by experiments including simulation, human evaluation, and domain-extension settings, where all results show better sample efficiency over the DDQ baselines.
Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q)
================================
As illustrated in Figure \[fig:framework\], the D3Q framework consists of six modules: (1) an LSTM-based natural language understanding (NLU) module [@hakkani-tur2016multi] for identifying user intents and extracting associated slots; (2) a state tracker [@mrkvsic2017neural] for tracking dialogue states; (3) a dialogue policy that selects next action based on the current state; (4) a model-based natural language generation (NLG) module for generating natural language response [@wen2015semantically]; (5) a world model for generating simulated user actions and simulated rewards; and (6) an RNN-based discriminator for controlling the quality of simulated experience. Note that the controlled planning phase is realized through the world model and the discriminator, which are not included in traditional framework of dialogue systems.
![Illustration of the proposed D3Q dialogue system framework.[]{data-label="fig:framework"}](figures/framework.pdf){width="\linewidth"}
Figure \[fig:d3q\] illustrates the whole process: starting with an initial dialogue policy and an initial world model (both are trained with pre-collected human conversational data), D3Q training consists of four stages: (1) *direct reinforcement learning*: the agent interacts with real users, collects real experiences and improves dialogue policy; (2) *world model learning*: the world model is learned and refined using real experience; (3) *discriminator learning*: the discriminator is learned and refined to differentiate simulated experience from real experience; and (4) *controlled planning*: the agent improves the dialogue policy using the high-quality simulated experience generated by the world model and the discriminator.
Direct Reinforcement Learning
-----------------------------
In this stage, we use the vanilla deep Q-network (DQN) method [@mnih2015human] to learn the dialogue policy based on real experience. We consider task-completion dialogue as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the agent interacts with a user through a sequence of actions to accomplish a specific user goal.
At each step, the agent observes the dialogue state $s$, and chooses an action $a$ to execute, using an $\epsilon$-greedy policy that selects a random action with probability $\epsilon$ or otherwise follows the greedy policy $a=\text{argmax}_{a'} Q(s,a';\theta_{Q})$. $Q(s,a;\theta_{Q})$ which is the approximated value function, implemented as a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) parameterized by $\theta_{Q}$. The agent then receives reward $r$, observes next user response, and updates the state to $s'$. Finally, we store the experience tuple $(s, a, r, s')$ in the replay buffer $B^u$. This cycle continues until the dialogue terminates.
We improve the value function $Q(s,a;\theta_{Q})$ by adjusting $\theta_{Q}$ to minimize the mean-squared loss function as follows: $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:dqn}
\mathcal{L}(\theta_{Q})&=&\mathbb{E}_{(s,a,r,s')\sim B^u}[(y_i - Q(s, a;\theta_{Q}))^2], \nonumber \\
y_i&=&r +\gamma \max_{a'}Q'(s', a';\theta_{Q'}),\end{aligned}$$ where $\gamma \in [0,1]$ is a discount factor, and $Q'(.)$ is the target value function that is only periodically updated (i.e., fixed-target). The dialogue policy can be optimized through $\nabla_{\theta_{Q}}\mathcal{L}(\theta_{Q})$ by mini-batch deep Q-learning.
World Model Learning
--------------------
{width="\linewidth"}
To enable planning, we use a world model to generate simulated experiences that can be used to improve dialogue policy. In each turn of a dialogue, the world model takes the current dialogue state $s$ and the last system action $a$ (represented as an one-hot vector) as the input, and generates the corresponding user response $o$, reward $r$, and a binary variable $t$ (indicating if the dialogue terminates). The world model $G(s, a; \theta_{G})$ is trained using a multi-task deep neural network [@liu2015representation] to generate the simulated experiences. The model contains two classification tasks for simulating user responses $o$ and generating terminal signals $t$, and one regression task for generating the reward $r$. The lower encoding layers are shared across all three tasks, while the upper layers are task-specific. $G(s,a;\theta_{G})$ is optimized to mimic human behaviors by leveraging real experiences in the replay buffer $B^u$. The model architecture is illustrated in the left part of Figure \[fig:planner\_arch\]. $$\begin{aligned}
h &=& \tanh(W_{h} (s, a) + b_h),\\
r &=& W_r h + b_r, \\
o &=& \texttt{softmax} (W_a h + b_a), \\
t &=& \texttt{sigmoid} (W_t h + b_t),\end{aligned}$$ where $(s,a)$ is the concatenation of $s$ and $a$, and all $W$ and $b$ are weight matrices and bias vectors, respectively.
Discriminator Learning
----------------------
The discriminator, denoted by $D$, is used to differentiate simulated experience from real experience. $D$ is a neural network model with its architecture illustrated in the right part of Figure \[fig:planner\_arch\]. $D$ employs an LSTM to encode a dialogue as a feature vector, and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to map the vector to a probability indicating whether the dialogue looks like being generated by real users.
$D$ is trained using the simulated experience generated by the world model $G$ and the collected real experience $x$. We use the objective function as $$\label{eq:discriminator_objective}
\mathbb{E}_{real}[\log D(x)] + \mathbb{E}_{simu}[\log(1-D(G(.)))].$$ Practically, we use the mini-batch training and the objective function can be rewritten as $$\label{eq:batch_discriminator_objective}
\frac{1}{m} \sum^{m}_{i=1}[\log D(x^{(i)})+\log(1-D(G(.)^{(i)}))],$$ where $m$ represents the batch size.
Controlled Planning {#subsec:controlled_planning}
-------------------
In this stage, we apply the world model $G$ and the discriminator $D$ to generate high-quality simulated experience to improve dialogue policy. The D3Q method uses three replay buffers, $B^u$ for storing real experience, $B^s$ for simulated experience generated by $G$, and $B^h$ for high-quality simulated experience generated by $G$ and $D$. Learning and planning are implemented by the same DQN algorithm, operating on real experience in $B^u$ for learning and on simulated experience in $B^h$ for planning. Here we only describe how the high-quality simulated experience is generated.
At the beginning of each dialogue session, we uniformly draw a user goal $(C,R)$ [@schatzmann2007agenda], where $C$ is a set of constraints and $R$ is a set of requests. For example, in movie-ticket booking dialogue, *constraints* are the slots with specified values, such as the name, the date of the movie and the number of tickets to buy. And *requests* can contain slots which the user plans to acquire the values for, such as the start time of the movie. The first user action $o_1$ can be either a `request` or an `inform` dialogue act. A request dialogue act consists of a request slot, multiple constraint slots and the corresponding values, uniformly sampled from $R$ and $C$. For example, `request(theater; moviename=avergers3)`. An inform dialogue act contains constraint-slots only. Semantic frames can also be transformed into natural language via NLG component, e.g., “*which theater will play the movie avergers3?*”
For each dialogue episode with a sampled user goal, the agent interacts with world model $G(s, a; \theta_{G})$ to generate a simulated dialogue session, which is a sequence of simulated experience tuples $(s,a,r,s')$. We always store the $G$-generated session in $B^s$, but only store it in $B^h$ if it is selected by discriminator $D$. We repeat the process until $K$ simulated dialogue sessions are added in $B^h$, where $K$ is a pre-defined planning step size. This can be viewed as a sampling process. In theory if the world model $G$ is not well-trained this process could take forever to generate $K$ high-quality samples accepted by $D$. Fortunately, this never happened in our experiments because $D$ is trained using the simulated experience generated by $G$ and $D$ is updated whenever $G$ is refined.
Now, we compare controlled planning in D3Q with the planning process in the original DDQ [@peng2018integrating]. In DDQ, after each step of direct reinforcement learning, the agent improves its policy via $K$ steps of planning. A larger planning step means that more simulated experiences generated by $G$ are used for planning. Theoretically, larger amounts of *high-quality* simulated experiences can boost the performance of the dialogue policy more quickly. However, the world model by no means perfectly reflects real human behavior, and the generated experiences, if of low quality, can have negative impact on dialogue policy learning. Prior work resorts to heuristics to mitigate the impact. For example, @peng2018integrating proposed to reduce planning steps at the late stage of policy learning, thus forcing all DDQ agents to converge to the same one trained with a small number of planning steps.
Figure \[fig:ddq\_ps\_2\_3\_5\_10\_15\] shows the performance of DDQ agents with different planning steps without heuristics. It is observable that the performance is unstable, especially for larger planning steps, which indicates that the quality of simulated experience is becoming more pivotal as the number of planning steps increases.
![The learning curves of DDQ($K$) agents where $(K-1)$ is the number of planning steps.[]{data-label="fig:ddq_ps_2_3_5_10_15"}](figures/ddq_ps_2_3_5_10_15.pdf){width="1.0\linewidth"}
D3Q resolves this issue by introducing a discriminator and allows only high-quality simulated experience, judged by the discriminator, to be used for planning. In the next section, we will show that D3Q does not suffer from the problem of DDQ and the D3Q training is quite stable even with large sizes of planning steps.
Experiments
===========
We evaluate D3Q on the movie-ticket booking task with both simulated users and real users in two settings: full domain and domain extension.
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Dataset {#sec:dataset}
-------
Raw conversational data in a movie-ticket booking scenario was collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The dataset has been manually labeled based on a schema defined by domain experts, as shown in Table \[tab:data\_schema\], consisting of 11 intents and 16 slots in the full domain setting, while there are 18 slots in the domain extension setting. Most of these slots can be both “inform slots” and “request slots”, except for a few. For example, the slot `number_of_people` is categorized as an inform slot but not a request slot, because arguably the user always knows how many tickets she/he wants. In total, the dataset contains 280 annotated dialogues, the average length of which is approximately 11 turns.
Baselines {#sec:baselines}
---------
To verify the effectiveness of D3Q, we developed different versions of task-completion dialogue agents as baselines to compare with.
- A **DQN** agent is implemented with only direct reinforcement learning in each episode.
- The **DQN($K$)** has $K$ times more real experiences than the DQN agent. The performance of DQN($K$) can be viewed as the upper bound of DDQ($K$) and D3Q($K$) with the same number of planning steps ($K-1$), as these models have the same training settings and the same amount of training samples during the entire learning process.
- The **DDQ($K$)** agents are learned with an initial world model pre-trained on human conversational data, with $(K-1)$ as the number of planning steps. These agents store the simulated experience without being judged by the discriminator.
#### Proposed D3Q
- The **D3Q($K$)** agents are learned through the process described in Section \[subsec:controlled\_planning\].
- The **D3Q($K$, fixed $\theta_D$)** agents are learned as described in Section \[subsec:controlled\_planning\] without training discriminator. The D3Q($K$, fixed $\theta_D$) agents are only evaluated in the simulation setting.
Implementation {#sec: implementation}
--------------
#### Settings and Hyper-parameters
$\epsilon$-greedy is always applied for exploration. We set the discount factor $\gamma$ = 0.9. The buffer size of $B^u$ and $B^h$ is set to 2000 and 2000 $\times K$ *planning steps*, respectively. The batch size is 16, and the learning rate is 0.001. To prevent gradient explosion, we applied gradient clipping on all the model parameters to maximum norm = 1. All the NN models are randomly initialized. The high-quality simulated experience buffer $B^h$ and the simulated experience buffer $B^s$ are initialized as empty. The target network is updated at the beginning of each training episode. The optimizer for all the neural networks is RMSProp [@hinton2012neural]. The maximum length of a simulated dialogue is 40. If exceeding the maximum length, the dialogue fails. To make dialogue training efficient, we also applied a variant of imitation learning, called Reply Buffer Spiking (RBS) [@lipton2016efficient], by building a simple and straightforward rule-based agent based on human conversational dataset. We then pre-filled the real experience replay buffer $B^u$ with experiences of 50 dialogues, before training for all the variants of models. The batch size for collecting experiences is 10, which means if the running agent is DDQ/D3Q($K$), 10 real experience tuples and 10 $\times$ ($K-1$) simulated experience tuples are stored into the buffers at every episode.
#### Agents
For all the models (DQN, DDQ, and D3Q) and their variants, the value networks $Q(.)$ are MLPs with one hidden layer of size 80 and ReLU activation.
#### World Model
For all the models (DDQ and D3Q) and their variants, the world models $M(.)$ are MLPs with one shared hidden layer of size 160, hyperbolic-tangent activation, and one encoding layer of hidden size 80 for each state and action input.
#### Discriminator
In the proposed D3Q framework, the LSTM cell is utilized, the hidden size is 128. The encoding layer for the current state and output layer are MLPs with single hidden layer of size 80. The threshold interval is set to range between 0.45 and 0.55, i.e., only when $0.45 \leq D(x) \leq 0.55$ that $x$ would be stored into the buffer $B^h$.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
**Success & **Reward & **Turns & **Success & **Reward & **Turns & **Success & **Reward & **Turns\
DQN & .4467 & 2.993 & 23.21 & .7000 & 36.08 & 17.84 & .7867 & 48.45 & 13.91\
DDQ(5) & .5467 & 16.57 & 20.07 & **.7133 & **39.23 & **14.73 & **.8067 & **50.73 & 14.13\
DDQ(5, rand-init $\theta_G$) & .6067 & 23.55 & 20.49 & .6267 & 26.30 & 19.80 & .6667 & 32.92 & 16.16\
DDQ(5, fixed $\theta_G$) & .5867 & 20.62 & 21.56 & .1667 & -33.71 & 29.41 & .2267 & -22.68 & 21.76\
D3Q(5) & **.7467 & **43.59 & **14.03 & .6800 & 34.64 & 15.92 & .7200 & 40.85 & **13.11\
D3Q(5, fixed $\theta_D$) & .6800 & 33.86 & 17.48 & .7000 & 36.57 & 16.85 & .6933 & 35.67 & 17.06\
DQN(5) & *.7400* & *42.19* & *15.23* & *.8533* & *57.76* & *11.28* & *.7667* & *46.56* & *12.88*\
DDQ(10) & .5733 & 24.00 & **11.60 & .5533 & 19.89 & 15.01 & .4800 & 10.04 & 17.12\
DDQ(10, rand-init $\theta_G$) & .5000 & 12.79 & 16.41 & .5333 & 17.71 & **14.57 & .6000 & 24.98 & 16.04\
DDQ(10, fixed $\theta_G$) & .3467 & -10.25 & 25.69 & .2400 & -23.38 & 26.36 & .0000 & -55.53 & 33.07\
D3Q(10) & .6333 & 28.99 & 16.01 & .7000 & 37.24 & 15.52 & .6667 & 33.09 & 15.83\
D3Q(10, fixed $\theta_D$) & **.7133 & **36.36 & 20.48 & **.8400 & **54.87 & 20.48 & **.7400 & **42.89 & **13.81\
DQN(10) & *.8333* & *55.5* & *11.00* & *.7733* & *47.99* & *11.61* & *.7733* & *47.68* & *12.24*\
******************************************************
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Simulation Evaluation {#subsec:simulation_evaluation}
---------------------
In this setting, the dialogue agents are optimized by interacting with the user simulators instead of with real users. In another word, the world model is trained to mimic user simulators. In spite of the discrepancy between simulators and real users, this setting endows us with the flexibility to perform a detailed analysis of models without much cost, and to reproduce experimental results easily.
#### User Simulator
We used an open-sourced task-oriented user simulator [@li2016user] in our simulated evaluation experiments (Appendix \[app:user\_sim\] for more details). The simulator provides the agent with a simulated user response in each dialogue turn along with a reward signal at the end of the dialogue. A dialogue is considered successful if and only if a movie ticket is booked successfully, and the information provided by the agent satisfies all the constraints of the sampled user goal. At the end of each dialogue, the agent receives a positive reward $2*L$ for success, or a negative reward $-L$ for failure, where $L$ is the maximum number of turns in each dialogue, and is set to $40$ in our experiments. Furthermore, in each turn, a reward $-1$ is provided to encourage shorter dialogues.
![The learning curves of agents (DQN, DDQ, and D3Q) under the full domain setting.[]{data-label="fig:dqn_ddq_d3q"}](figures/dqn_ddq_d3q.pdf){width="1.0\linewidth"}
![The learning curves of D3Q(K) agents which (K-1) is the number of planning steps (K = 2, 3, 5, 10, 15).[]{data-label="fig:d3q_ps_2_3_5_10_15"}](figures/d3q_ps_2_3_5_10_15.pdf){width="1.0\linewidth"}
![The learning curves of D3Q, DDQ(5), DDQ(5) [@peng2018integrating], and D3Q fixed $\theta_D$ agents.[]{data-label="fig:d3q_ddq_ddq_old_d3q_fixedD"}](figures/d3q_ddq_ddq_old_d3q_fixedD.pdf){width="1.0\linewidth"}
#### Full Domain
The learning curves of the models in the full domain setting are depicted in the figure \[fig:dqn\_ddq\_d3q\]. The results show that the proposed D3Q agent (the pink curve) significantly outperforms the baselines DQN and DDQ(5), and has similar training efficiency to DQN(5). Note that here the planning steps of D3Q is 4, which means D3Q (pink) and DDQ(5) (purple) use the same amount of training samples (both real and simulated experiences) to update the agent throughout the whole training process. The difference between these two agents is that D3Q employs a discriminator as a quality judge. The experimental result shows that our proposed framework could boost the learning efficiency even without any pre-training on the discriminator. Furthermore, D3Q (pink) uses the same amount of training samples as DQN(5) (green), while the proposed model uses only 20% of real experience from human. The efficacy and feasibility of D3Q is hereby justly verified.
As mentioned in the previous section, a large number of planning steps means leveraging a large amount of simulated experience to train the agents. The experimental result (Figure \[fig:ddq\_ps\_2\_3\_5\_10\_15\]) shows that the DDQ agents are highly sensitive to the quality of simulated experience. In contrast, the proposed D3Q framework demonstrates robustness to the number of planning steps (Figure \[fig:d3q\_ps\_2\_3\_5\_10\_15\]). Figure \[fig:d3q\_ddq\_ddq\_old\_d3q\_fixedD\] shows that D3Q also outperforms DDQ original setting [@peng2018integrating] and D3Q without training discriminator. The performance detail including success rate, reward, an number of turns is shown in Table \[tab:test\_results\]. From the table, with fewer simulated experiences, the difference between DDQ and D3Q may not be significant, where DDQ agents achieve about 50%-60% success rate and D3Q agents achieve higher than 68% success rate after 100 epochs. However, when the number of planning steps increases, more fake experiences significantly degrade the performance for DDQ agents, where DDQ(10, fixed $\theta_G$) suffers from bad simulated experiences after 300 epochs and achieves $0\%$ success rate.
![The learning curves of agents (DQN, DDQ, and D3Q) under the domain extension setting.[]{data-label="fig:de"}](figures/de.pdf){width="\linewidth"}
#### Domain Extension
In the domain extension experiments, more complicated user goals are adopted. Moreover, we narrow down the action space into a small subspace instead of that used in full-domain setting, and gradually introduce more complex user goals and expand the action space as the training proceeds. Specifically, we start from a set of necessary slots and actions to accomplish most of the user goals, and then extend the action space and complexity of user goals once every 20 epoch (after epoch 50). Note that the domain will keep extending and become full-domain after epoch 130. Such experimental setting makes the training environment more complicated and unstable than the previous full-domain one.
The results summarized in Figure \[fig:de\] show that D3Q significantly outperforms the baseline methods, demonstrating its robustness. Furthermore, D3Q shows remarkable learning efficiency while extending the domain, which even outperforms DQN(5). A potential reason might be that the world model could improve exploration in such unstable and noisy environment.
Human Evaluation
----------------
In the human evaluation experiments, real users interact with different models without knowing which agent is behind the system. At the beginning of each dialogue session, one of the agents was randomly picked to converse with the user. The user was instructed to converse with the agent to complete a task given a user goal sampled from the corpus. The user can abandon the task and terminate the dialogue at any time, if she or he believes that the dialogue was unlikely to succeed, or simply because the dialogue drags on for too many turns. In such cases, the dialogue session is considered as failure.
![The human evaluation results of D3Q, DDQ(5), and D3Q in the full domain setting, the number of test dialogues indicated on each bar, and the p-values from a two-sided permutation test (difference in mean is significant with $p<0.05$).[]{data-label="fig:he_full"}](figures/he_full2.pdf){width="1.0\linewidth"}
![The human evaluation results of DQN, DDQ(5), and D3Q in the domain extension setting, the number of test dialogues indicated on each bar. The prefix ’b-’ implies that the trained models are picked before the environment extends to full domain, while the prefix ’a-’ indicates that the trained models are picked after the environment becomes full domain (difference in mean is significant with $p<0.05$).[]{data-label="fig:he_de"}](figures/he_de2.pdf){width="1.0\linewidth"}
#### Full Domain
Three agents (DQN, DDQ(5), and D3Q) trained in the full domain setting (Figure \[fig:dqn\_ddq\_d3q\]) at epoch 100 are selected for testing. As illustrated in Figure \[fig:he\_full\], the results of human evaluation are consistent with those in the simulation evaluation (Section \[subsec:simulation\_evaluation\]), and the proposed D3Q significantly outperforms other agents.
#### Domain Extension
To test the adaptation capability of the agents to the complicated, dynamically changing environment, we selected three trained agents (DQN, DDQ(5), and D3Q) at epoch 100 before the environment extends to full domain, and another three agents trained at epoch 200 after the environment becomes full domain. Figure \[fig:he\_de\] shows that the results are consistent with those in the simulation evaluation (Figure \[fig:de\]), and the proposed D3Q significantly outperforms other agents in both stages.
Conclusions
===========
This paper proposes a new framework, Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q), for task-completion dialogue policy learning. With a discriminator as judge, the proposed approach is capable of controlling the quality of simulated experience generated in the planning phase, which enables efficient and robust dialogue policy learning. Furthermore, D3Q can be viewed as a generic model-based RL approach easily-extensible to other RL problems.
We validate the D3Q-trained dialogue agent on a movie-ticket-booking task in the simulation, human evaluation, and domain-extension settings. Our results show that the D3Q agent significantly outperforms the agents trained using other state-of-the-art methods including DQN and DDQ.
Acknowledgments {#acknowledgments .unnumbered}
===============
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on the work. We would like to acknowledge the volunteers from Microsoft for participating the human evaluation experiments. Shang-Yu Su and Yun-Nung Chen are supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan and MediaTek Inc.
User Simulator {#app:user_sim}
==============
In the task-completion dialogue setting, the entire conversation is around a user goal implicitly, but the agent knows nothing about the user goal explicitly and its objective is to help the user to accomplish this goal. Generally, the definition of user goal contains two parts:
*inform\_slots* contain a number of slot-value pairs which serve as constraints from the user.
*request\_slots* contain a set of slots that user has no information about the values, but wants to get the values from the agent during the conversation. is a default slot which always appears in the *request\_slots* part of user goal.
To make the user goal more realistic, we add some constraints in the user goal: slots are split into two groups. Some of slots must appear in the user goal, we called these elements as *Required slots*. In the movie-booking scenario, it includes ; the rest slots are *Optional slots*, for example, etc.
We generated the user goals from the labeled dataset using two mechanisms. One mechanism is to extract all the slots (known and unknown) from the first user turns (excluding the greeting user turn) in the data, since usually the first turn contains some or all the required information from user. The other mechanism is to extract all the slots (known and unknown) that first appear in all the user turns, and then aggregate them into one user goal. We dump these user goals into a file as the user-goal database. Every time when running a dialogue, we randomly sample one user goal from this user goal database.
[^1]: The source code is available at <https://github.com/MiuLab/D3Q>.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | ArXiv |
Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid as a signaling molecule in brain.
Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid was synthesized 35 years ago to obtain a GABAergic substance that penetrates the brain freely. Since then, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid has been used in human beings for its sedative and anesthetic properties when administered at high doses, and most of the studies on gamma-hydroxybutyric acid have focused on its pharmacological effects. However, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid is also an endogenous substance, which is synthesized and released in the brain by specific neuronal pathways, implicated in the control of the GABAergic, dopaminergic, and opioid systems. This control is mediated by specific gamma-hydroxybutyric acid receptors with a unique distribution in brain and a specific ontogenesis and pharmacology. Stimulation of these receptors induces specific cellular responses. Taken together, these results suggest that gamma-hydroxybutyric acid possesses most of the properties required of a neurotransmitter/neuromodulator in the brain. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
TUMI has been manufacturing the finest bags, cases, and accessories since 1975, with the company's commitment to quality and innovation keeping it at the forefront of the premium luggage industry. In fact, TUMI's attention to detail and product design have become firm favorites among both business travelers and holidaymakers alike, striking a fine balance between form and function. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
The US sent troops into Syria this summer on a secret mission to rescue Americans, including journalist James Foley, held by the Islamic State group.
Officials said the rescue mission was authorised after intelligence agencies believed they had identified the location inside Syria where the hostages were being held.
"This operation involved air and ground components ... Unfortunately, the mission was not successful because the hostages were not present at the targeted location. A US defence department statement
"This operation involved air and ground components and was focused on a particular captor network within ISIL," a US defence department statement said, referencing the former name of the Islamic State."Unfortunately, the mission was not successful because the hostages were not present at the targeted location."
A number of the IS fighters, but no Americans, were killed as a battle broke out, officials said. The US did not say specifically when or where the operation took place.
The Islamic State on Tuesday posted online a video of the beheading of Foley, saying his death was a response to US attacks on its fighters in Syria. The US says it believes the video is genuine.
The US president Barack Obama on Wednesday vowed that the US would not stop its air strikes against the Islamic State, stating the murder of Foley, was proof that the fighters stand for no religion.
He called the group a "cancer" with a bankrupt ideology.
"The US will continue to do what we must do to protect our people," Obama said. "We will be vigilant and we will be relentless. When people harm Americans, anywhere, we do what's necessary to see that justice is done."
Hunt for British killer
Obama said the fighters had rampaged across cities and villages, abducted women and children and subjected them to torture and rape and killed Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, by the thousands.
Earlier, the British prime minister David Cameron interrupted his holiday held an emergency meeting about the threat the Islamic State group posed.
The video showing Foley's killing featured a man speaking in what appeared to be a British accent.
"We have not identified the individual responsible on the video but from what we've seen it looks increasingly likely that it is a British citizen. Now this is deeply shocking," Cameron said on Wednesday.
Foley, 41, was contributing videos and stories to the AFP news agency for the media company GlobalPost before he was kidnapped on November 22, 2012 by unidentified gunmen. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
TAIPEI -- Taiwan, which hosts one of Asia's largest Pride parades every autumn, has long been known for its progressive attitudes toward LGBT communities.
But now that the island has legalized same-sex marriage, it might come to be known for a conservative backlash against the gay community.
Since May, when Taiwan became the first in Asia to grant marriage equality, conservative groups have been targeting the Gender Equity Education Act of 2004, which originally called for upholding human dignity and gender equality but in recent years has also been used to implement anti-discrimination and LGBT sex education courses.
As a result, LGBT rights activists, who spent years campaigning for marriage equality and were still celebrating their court-mandated victory, have had to campaign for unity all over again.
In late September, more than 500 people, some hoisting large rainbow flags, marched in Hualien, about 120 km south of Taipei. The parade, in its ninth year, is meant to show that Taiwan has LGBT brothers and sisters far away from the capital, too.
The theme of this year's parade -- "We were originally grown from the same root" -- is a verse by Cao Zhi, a poet of China's Three Kingdoms period (220 AD to 280 AD). The poem it came from was Cao Zhi's answer to his jealous brother Cao Pi, who feared the popular Cao Zhi had designs on his throne. Cao Pi ordered Cao Zhi to use poetry to prove otherwise. Cao Zhi did so, using simple but descriptive metaphors for the brothers' biological relationship.
Yang Yong-qing, a 20-year-old college student who served as a secretary of the parade's organizing group, said discrimination against the island's LGBT communities is intensifying.
In May 2017, Taiwan's constitutional court ruled that not allowing same-sex marriage violates constitutional articles pertaining to equality and freedom to marry. It gave the island's legislature two years to legalize same-sex marriage.
That is when the backlash reared up, with some conservatives arguing that traditional families might feel threatened and that gay partners' rights should be guaranteed by a special law, not by revising civil law.
In a referendum last November, conservatives' proposals won 72% of the vote. Then, six months later, President Tsai Ing-wen's administration followed through by enacting a special law legalizing same-sex marriage but falling short of altering the civil law's existing definition of marriage.
The name of the new law does not even include the word "marriage," out of consideration to conservatives and in recognition that voting for Taiwan's president, vice president and legislators takes place in January.
With an eye on upcoming elections, Taiwan's government in May legalized same-sex marriage but stopped short of altering the civil law definition of marriage.
Indeed, there is reason for Taiwan's incumbent politicians to worry. Rather than be mollified by the compromises, the conservative forces are pushing to roll back the LGBT communities' gains.
Lai Shyh-bao, a lawmaker of the Kuomintang, Taiwan's main opposition party, has vowed to repeal the new law if the KMT takes back the presidency in January.
Also, the anti-LGBT Stability of Power party in September announced it will field 10 candidates in the legislative elections (the legislative Yuan has 113 seats). A party official said it wants to gain enough political leverage to have one of its members named minister of education. From that perch, it would peck away at education policies aimed at deepening students' understanding of LGBT citizens.
But few expect conservative groups' extreme views to prevail. Many Taiwanese, particularly young people, are fine with their LGBT friends' desire for equality.
Still, the anti-gay movement is having a profound impact on teachers and others. Liu Ke-ting, who participated in the Hualien parade, volunteers for a counseling hotline for LGBT youths. Every time news organizations cover the conservative backlash, the hotline is flooded with calls from teens fearing there might be something wrong with them or that they are not wanted by society, Liu said.
And a 36-year-old teacher in the midwestern county of Yunlin said many teachers are becoming increasingly cautious about teaching LGBT sex education courses. He said they fear the ire of vocal parents who accuse them of turning their kids gay.
Taiwan began charting a progressive course after 1987, when it emerged from 38 years of Kuomintang-maintained martial law. Ever since, it has been enacting laws to protect not only its democracy, now one of Asia's strongest, but also human rights.
Yet this progressive democracy is still new to many, said Chen Yi-chien, a professor at Shih Hsin University in Taipei.
Lin Xuan, a 31-year-old resident of Taipei, married his partner on May 24, the first day the government allowed same-sex couples to register their unions. Although the island's LGBT communities have taken a big step forward, Lin said many challenges lie ahead.
He and his husband own a bakery that is famous for its wedding and special event cakes. They have made friends with many people through the shop as well as outside of work, and many of these friends, gay and straight, joined the newlyweds for a lavish wedding reception in June.
Lin thinks it might take time but eventually more Taiwanese will come to accept and respect one another regardless of sexual orientation.
In fact, Taiwan has been sending this message of inclusion throughout Asia every fall since 2003, when Taipei began hosting what has grown into a major Pride parade. This year's event, on Oct. 26, will be about being good neighbors. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a drive mechanism/transmission mechanism for a bicycle.
Background
Bicycles commonly use roller chain transmissions, with multiple chain wheels and sprockets together with derailleur shifting mechanisms, to connect the pedals to a wheel. Roller chains wear and stretch in use and the sprockets, with which they engage, wear until they break, slip or otherwise fail, requiring expensive replacement. To minimize wear the mechanism needs regular cleaning and lubrication. This is especially the case for bicycles used off-road where contamination by abrasive matter is unavoidable. Roller chain mechanisms also suffer from a number of other problems, for example, the chain can contaminate and snag the rider's clothing, the chain can become dislodged from the sprockets, shifting cannot readily take place when stationary and the shifting mechanism itself is prone to contamination and vulnerable to damage. Also the externally lubricated chain of a folding bicycle is likely to contaminate the user's clothing when the folded bicycle is carried.
The large pitch of roller chains, and the resulting small number of teeth on each sprocket, results in inconsistent ratio changes. This gives an inconsistent feel to shifting and requires a greater number of sprockets to be used to cover a given range of ratios while maintaining close ratio shifts.
The crank shaft carrying the pedals of a roller chain transmission bicycle must be mounted on the frame of the bicycle in front of the rear wheel so as not to interfere with the wheel's rotation. This, combined with the circular motion of the pedals, results in a pedaling action where the downward portion of motion of the pedal is short in comparison with the full motion, and occurs some distance in front of the rider's center of mass. Roller chain transmission bicycles with a short wheel base, as used in racing, suffer from toe overlap, where the rider's feet can interfere with the front wheel when steering.
Bicycles often incorporate suspension systems to improve riding on rough terrain. For a roller chain bicycle, the pivot point for the rear suspension on the frame must be substantially at the center of the crank shaft, to minimize variations in the center distance between the chain wheel on the crank shaft, and the sprockets on the rear wheel, as the suspension operates. The need to co-locate the crank shaft and suspension pivot mounting points, both of which require high strength and stiffness, can result in additional complexity, cost and weight.
Early bicycles, generally predating roller chain bicycles, used a variety of treadle mechanisms. One example used a pair of levers mounted on cranks connected to the steering, front, wheel with a link to the forks at their forward ends and a pedal at their rear ends. This mechanism does not have the same disadvantages as a roller chain transmission, but has a number of other disadvantages. This bicycle had no gearing, with the driven wheel rotating at the same frequency as the pedals thus limiting speed for a given wheel size. This bicycle did not have a free wheel mechanism so the rider was unable to rest his legs when moving, and it was not possible to set the position of a pedal to assist starting to ride. As the pedal and drive mechanism was mounted to the front wheel, forces from the rider's legs would interfere with the steering of the bicycle.
It is an object of the present invention to address the above problems. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | USPTO Backgrounds |
Sintered ceramic materials are used in a wide variety of electronic and optical components including capacitors, magnetic devices such as transformers and inductors, and optoelectronic devices. As these components become smaller, maintaining compositional integrity becomes increasingly important. This is particularly true with respect to metal-containing constituents which tend to volatilize in the sintering process. Magnetic devices such as transformers and inductors illustrate the problem to which the invention is directed. Such devices are essential elements in a wide variety of circuits requiring energy storage and conversion, impedance matching, filtering, EMI suppression, voltage and current transformation, and resonance. As historically constructed, these devices tended to be bulky, heavy and expensive as compared with other circuit components. Manual operations such as winding conductive wire around magnetic cores dominated production costs.
A new approach to the fabrication of such devices was described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/695653 entitled "Multilayer Monolithic Magnetic Components and Method of Making Same" filed by Grader et al on May 2, 1991, and assigned to applicants' assignee. In the Grader et al approach ceramic powders are mixed with organic binders to form magnetic and insulating (non-magnetic) green ceramic tapes, respectively. A magnetic device is made by forming layers having suitable two-dimensional patterns of magnetic and insulating regions and stacking the layers to form a structure with well-defined magnetic and insulating regions. Conductors are printed on (or inserted into) the insulating regions as needed, and the resulting structure is laminated under low pressure in the range 500-3000 psi at a temperature of 60.degree.-80.degree. C. The laminated structure is fired at a temperature between 800.degree. to 1400.degree. C. to form a co-tired composite structure.
A variation of this approach was described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/818669 entitled "Improved Method For Making Multilayer Magnetic Components" filed by Fleming et al. on Jan. 9, 1992, and assigned to applicants' assignee. In accordance with Fleming et al., cracking and magnetic degradation is reduced by forming green ceramic layers having patterns of magnetic and insulating (non-magnetic) regions separated by regions that are removable during sintering. When the green layers are stacked, layers of removable material are disposed between magnetic regions and insulating regions so as to produce upon sintering a magnetic core within an insulating body wherein the core is substantially completely surrounded by a thin layer of free space. In either approach, the preferred materials for the magnetic layers are metal-containing ferrites such as MnZn ferrites. The insulating (non-magnetic) material can be a compatible insulating ceramic material such as Ni ferrite or alumina.
A difficulty that arises in the fabrication of these devices is the tendency of metal or metal oxide constituents in the magnetic material to volatilize during sintering, thereby degrading the magnetic properties of the sintered material. Such loss of metal or metal oxide will be referred to as "metal loss". The conventional method of minimizing metal loss in ceramics is to fire the parts in the presence of sufficient quantity of the self-same material so that volatilization is inhibited and compensated. Applicants discovered, however, that this conventional method is of little value in fabricating small multilayer magnetic components where a layer of insulating material typically surrounds the magnetic core. This is because external metal vapor typically cannot penetrate the insulating material to reach the magnetic core. Moreover, because these components are typically small (a fraction of a cubic cm), the surface to volume ratio is large, aggravating the rate of metal loss. While it was initially believed that metal loss would be limited because the magnetic cores were housed within hermetic boxes of insulating materials, in reality the insulating materials acted as sinks for the metal and aggravated the loss. Accordingly, there is a need for a new way of minimizing metal loss during the fabrication of multilayer ceramic components. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | USPTO Backgrounds |
La 628-E8
La 628-E8 is a novel by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, published by Fasquelle in 1907. Part travelogue, part fantasy, part cultural commentary and critique, Mirbeau's book highlights its own unclassifiability: "Is it a diary?”, the narrator wonders. "Is it even the account of a trip?”
Plot
Titled after the number of Mirbeau's licence plate, La 628-E8 begins by recounting Mirbeau’s travels to Belgium, whose colonial exploitation of Belgian Congo rubber and abuse of the indigenous people Mirbeau excoriates. The book then proceeds to the Netherlands, where he finds remembrances of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and also Claude Monet. It is during his sojourn in this country that Mirbeau encounters his old friend, the deranged speculator Weil-See, whose reflections on mathematics and metaphysics are among Mirbeau’s most colorful pages. Mirbeau's fictional car trip then takes him to Germany, whose industry, cleanliness, and order stand in contrast to what Mirbeau regarded as the slovenliness and laxity of his own countrymen.
Commentary
To Mirbeau, the automobile represents an ideal instrument for combatting ethnocentrism and xenophobia. The novel’s most electrifying descriptions recreate in readers the speeding motorist’s dazed disorientation as the missile of his vehicle carries him past epileptic telegraph poles and blurred animals along the roadside.
In an incongruous final section underscoring the novel’s fractured structure, Mirbeau appends a scandalous account of La Mort de Balzac (The Death of Balzac), relating the author’s death agonies while, in an adjoining room, his wife, Mme Hanska, engaged in sexual frolicking with painter Jean Gigoux. One can only surmise the controversial episode constituted another instance of the kind of iconoclastic writing that Mirbeau was inclined to engage in.
An English translation, not complete, has been published : Sketches of a journey, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard.
Further reading
Kinda Mubaideen and Lolo, Un aller simple pour l'Octavie, Société Octave Mirbeau, Angers, 2007, 62 pages.
Éléonore Reverzy - Guy Ducrey, L'Europe en automobile - Octave Mirbeau, écrivain voyageur, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2009, 320 pages.
External links
Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, Éditions du Boucher, 2003.
Octave Mirbeau, La Mort de Balzac.
Pierre Michel's foreword.
Category:1907 French novels
Category:Novels by Octave Mirbeau
Category:Travelogues
Category:French travel books | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
Outcome of twin birth. Review of 1,636 children born in twin birth.
During the five-year period 1964-68 96 733 births were registered in the 28 hospitals equipped with maternity facilities in the Uppsala hospital region. Of these babies, 1 636 were born in 818 twin deliveries. Data on gestational age, sex, weight and length at birth, birth order, hospital type, congenital malformations and perinatal mortality are analysed. Altogether 17.3 per 1 000 of the children born during this period were born in multiple births. The perinatal mortality for the twin babies was 64 per 1 000 born, with the mortality higher in the less specialized hospitals than the others. Twin no. 1 suffered perinatal death in 67 cases per 1 000 and twin no. 2 in 60 cases per 1 000. For twins of primiparae the losses were 92 per 1 000 children and for twins born to multiparae 51 per 1 000. Altogether 72 per 1 000 male twins died perinatally compared to 52 per 1 000 female twins. The most heavy losses occurred among the low-weight premature twins and in these cases both twins often suffered perinatal death. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
128MB 100 pin SODIMM C9121A (ABO)
128MB 100 pin SODIMM C9121A (ABO)
Proper module and good price, 1/31/2010
Reviewer: Ray Feldman (, )
After a printer is discontinued by the manufacturer, it is difficult to find additional memory for it that both assuredly fits the specifications and is a reasonable price.
This memory module met both of these requirements for my HP 2605 dn color laser printer.
Printer Memory Upgrade, 10/26/2009
Reviewer: Michael Miller (, )
The order was processed rapidly and the part worked as advertised without problems.
Didn't Work, 6/17/2009
Reviewer: Lowell Lacy (, )
I ordered this for my HP Color LaserJet 2605dn printer. The site said this was right for my printer, however, upon receipt the Printer would not recognize the ram module. However, OEMPCWorld is an excellent Company, and I will continue to do business with them as needed. They refunded my purchase with no hassel, the RMA was issued immediately after filling in their form on their web site.
Printer memory, 5/1/2009
Reviewer: Robert C. (, )
This was the only place that had the memory i needed for my Samsung CLP-510, except for Samsung. The price was 10 times less than Samsung listed the memory for. The chip installed with no problems and works great.
Samsung CLP-500 Printer Memory, 12/7/2008
Reviewer: mike brodbeck (, )
works great, one fifth the cost from Samsung or other online vendors,I was amazed how cheap it was I though for sure it not going to work,the product was ezcellant and so was the service and shipping.I wpould buy from theses guys againn I highly recommend them | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
View our best practice community engagement information hub ‘Community Invasives Action‘ to enhance community involvement in your invasive species management programs | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Monday, January 10, 2011
When I checked my twitter account 4 days ago (@beforecrisis) I had 48 followers.
I mainly checked my timeline twice a day to check out some news and that odd rant from a weird cousin.
As I was drifting along, several people mentioned a Kenneth Tong. The name wasn't familiar, either was his ugly face, but his message rang more bells than Sunday morning mass.
"The Size Zero Pill"
But it wasn't that he was advertising a diet pill to help people lose weight..there was no catchy tweet to install confidence. No. I did However read:
"Kenneth Tong: taking away your undeserved confidence. Reminding you not everyone is beautiful, that's just what they tell fat & ugly people."
Wow... a little "what the fuck?" even slipped through my lips...
I was stunned as I read on.
"Size Zero", "Controlled Anorexia"..
I was even more shocked to see this man had 12,000 followers.
(he now has 20,000)
I Quickly tweeted to my 48 strong population. And almost all of them replied back. With anger, frustration, and hurt. I had no access to a laptop at the time, and still don't right now (Thanks to sugar free Ribena - ugh..)
But i knew what I had to do.
I went and bought €40 credit for my iPhone, and went on a mission.
(A mission that costs me €10 a day)
I created a new twitter page to show support for people affected, and to rant my rage at
this vile...devious...well, prick.
48 hours later the page had almost 500 followers, who I refer to as "Supporters". Don't get me wrong, I don't care for lots of followers, I talk nonsense anyways.. but I am slightly angry/baffled that not ONE celebrity or news outlet, despite being BEGGED by hundreds of people, has even so much as ReTweeted, followed, or showed support.
I contacted Gordon Ramsay, the worlds best chef (his scrambled eggs would even bring Kenneth to his knees), Holly Willoughby (pregnant, beautiful, and personally attacked by Tong on her body image) Davina McCall, Dawn Porter, Rihanna, The Kardashians, Sky News, BBC News, Star Mag and about 30 others.
Not one reply. One of these people could help is know Tong off his perch and raise an Anti Movement.
However, I am not deterred, as the people who have supported so far have take time out to sign petitions, retweet, reply, follow and spread the word.
I thank each and every one of you.
For the last 3 nights I've stayed on Twitter for over 15 hours straight, and it costs me around €10-15 per night to operate. So believe me it's not a "fame game" I'm playing.
I will not stop until the word is out and we have more support than Tong.
Some people say what I do is gaining him more attention. I beg to differ.
I believe 500 people standing up for 499 other peoples belief, is worth more than 20,000 following one Man twisted vision.
"The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered"
Kenneth Tongs's Size 0 pills are made of Clenbuterol Hydrocholoride, also known as just Clenbuterol or Clen. Clenbuterol is a steroid-like chemical, initially developed to alleviate asthma symptoms in horses by relaxing the muscles in the airways. When used by humans the effects are an accelerated heart rate and an increase in the body’s temperature for extended periods. This rise in body temperature allows the body to burn fat even when not exercising.
You must be aware that Clenbuterol is not designed nor meant for human consumption. That’s why, in most countries in Europe, Clenbuterol is forbidden for use in animals that will enter the food chain. In Spain in 1994, 140 people were hospitalized after they consumed meat tainted with the drug and suffered dizziness, heart palpitations, breathing difficulties, shakes and headaches.
Just over a year ago, the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily reported that 336 people in Shanghai had been poisoned after eating pork tainted with Clenbuterol. Clenbuterol is banned in China as well.
Situation is similar in the U.K. One Home Office spokesman told The Independent: “Clenbuterol is a hormone growth stimulant and a Class C drug. It is an offence to supply or have intent to supply Clenbuterol. There is no possession offence – although obviously if somebody had so much that they seemed to be intending to supply, they may be prosecuted. It carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.”
Size Zero Pills Side Effects
The negative effects of size zero pill are that the increase in body’s temperature can raise blood pressure and heart rate, raising the risk of arrhythmia and stroke.
Other side effects are tremors, headaches, insomnia and anxiety.
A person also risks developing cardiac problems since long-term use of this pill can lead to a clogging of the heart with collagen, which stiffens the muscle wall ( cardiac-cell degeneration ). | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Brahmasthram (2010 film)
Brahmastram is a 2010 Indian Malayalam-language film directed by V. Somanath and starring Saiju Kurup and Maidhili.
Plot
Brahmasthram tells the story of a boatman, whose only daughter Sindhu is the victim of ragging and rape by some rich recalcitrant students in medical college. No one supports Sindhu as the culprits are from very rich families. Due to pressure from Sindhu and her father, Superintendent of Police Indrajith is appointed to investigate the case. How he wins the case in court forms the rest of the film.
Cast
Saiju Kurup
Mythili Roy
Jagathy Sreekumar
Rajan P. Dev
Vijayaraghavan
Suraj Venjaramood
Dhanya Madhavan
Kanakalatha
Abu Salim
Soundtrack
References
External links
http://www.nowrunning.com/movie/5105/malayalam/brahmasthram/index.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20090602065028/http://popcorn.oneindia.in/title/1522/brahmastram.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20100410042721/http://www.mallumovies.org/movie/brahmasthram
Category:2010 films
Category:Indian films
Category:2010s Malayalam-language films | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
Author, columnist, broadcaster, funny bird.
Mail today…eeeek.
So, I’ve written a piece for the Daily Mail which is out today.
This feels a bit like putting my head in the stocks and sending a global email to everyone I’ve never met, saying, ‘Hey guys – please come and throw rotten tomatoes (and worse) at me! Come on! Have go! I’m here for a bashing! Enjoy yourselves – have a beer while you’re here! First one’s on the house!’
It’s lots of fun, really.
It’s also causing a certain degree of panic and obsessive page-refreshing behaviour. Thus:
9am. Have my first peek at the article. God, what is that photograph?? I look like a second-rate model in a homewares catalogue who was drafted in because the first person they hired came down with diarrhoea. And what’s with the sickly smile, Ms Fraser?? I don’t even recognise myself. Luckily this means nobody I know will recognise me either. Sorted.
(I bet you didn’t know that the Mail has a ‘dress code’ for pics, did you? Well, neither did I until the photographer arrived. Turns out there’s a ‘no denim, no trainers, no bedhead hair or generally looking at all like you normally do’ policy. This is a shame, as all I ever wear is jeans – skinny, boyfriend, bootcut…anything so long as it’s jeans! – long-sleeved Ts, flats or Converse and ponytail hair. You know…like most people. So off I went to find a skirt, pretty top and hair brush. I drew the line at heels and was allowed my ballet pumps. Still, it’s a look you’ll never, ever see me sporting anywhere else, so enjoy it…and then erase it from your mind.)
9.05am. Now it’s up to 21. Eeek. Are they nice? Dare I look?
I dare not. make a cup of tea instead.
9.07am. OK, this i silly. I dare. Can’t be that bad. Scroll, read.
Well whaddayaknow, some comments are actually nice. Very nice. Women who understand what I’m on about are saying thank you for the piece. Hurrah! Some people out there ‘get it’. I am not a complete laughing stock after all. Just a little bit of one.
There are other comments, of course, saying charming things like, “Oh, get over yourself, stupid woman!” (par for the course, really) and ‘what is this vacuous moron whingeing about – pregnancy has been making women fat and miserable for Centuries. What’s the big deal?’ (most of these, I notice, are written by a men, who haven’t expelled human beings from their Holiest of Holies and leaked breastmilk while shagging. If they had, they’d know it is actually quite a big deal. But hey ho. Onwards…)
The point is, I suppose, that everyone is different: some women give birth and feel sexier than they’ve ever felt before. Being in bone-crushing pain for 30 hours makes them feel stronger and more powerful and more…womanly. They are sexy, confident mothers from the moment the placenta hits the delivery room floor and I’d say ‘Yeah! You go girl!’ if it didn’t sound a bit too Oprah for me. I do pats on the back instead.
But by far the majority of mothers I’ve interviewed over the years of writing my books, or mum friends that I’ve chatted with over a few too may bottles of vino, say that there was a period after they had each baby where they didn’t feel like a sexual being AT ALL. That their bodies were temporarily rented out to a small, crying, puking child who needed it for nourishment, comfort and love; that they felt more functional than sexual, and that this became a mental state of mind, a habit, that was hard to break for a number of years, not weeks.
In short, that they found it hard to play two roles with one body. (no, that’s not French Maid and Nurse, before you ask. It’s Mummy and Sexy Lady. Geeez, what are you like?)
It happens to many women, and it can really rock your sense of identity and confidence.
Luckily for us and our partners, there seems to come a day when, without fanfare or warning, we suddenly get our mojo back again. A day when sex – for our own pleasure, and not because we feel we really ought to in case he runs off with Sue from Accounts, if you know what I mean – is on the menu once more. We are no longer milking machines or baby factories or tied 24/7 by invisible but darned strong apron strings to people who need us to wipe their noses for them.
We are sexy WOMEN in our all glorious guises – are far sexier than we’ve ever been before. Just a little bit less pert in places…
And just knowing that this is a common thing that many mothers experience will, hopefully, make mums worry less that they are failures, be more open about it and try to take steps to keep their Sexy Mamma side in check.
So, read the piece (unless you’re pregnant, in which case avoid it like the plague and read my books instead ; -)), ignore the photos and vomit-worthy captions – actually, do read those. They’re hilarious – and make your own mind up about it.
It’s meant to provoke debate, get people talking and help. I think it’s certainly doing that already! xx | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
I
II
III
IV
More from Andrew Sean Greer
Praise for The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
For Bill Clegg
Love... , ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.
—MARCEL PROUST
I
APRIL 25, 1930
We are each the love of someone's life.
I wanted to put that down in case I am discovered and unable to complete these pages, in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder. I would not blame you. So many things stand in the way of anyone ever hearing my story. There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for. So I will get to the end first and tell you we are each the love of someone's life.
I sit here on a lovely April day. It keeps changing all around me; the sun alternates between throwing deep shadows behind the children and trees and then sweeping them back up again the moment a cloud crosses the sky. The grass fills with gold, then falls to nothing. The whole school yard is being inked with sun and blotted, glowing and reaching a point of great beauty, and I am breathless to be in the audience. No one else notices. The little girls sit in a circle, dresses crackling with starch and conspiracy, and the boys are on the baseball field or in the trees, hanging upside down. Above, an airplane astounds me with its roar and schoolmarm line of chalk. An airplane; it's not the sky I once knew.
And I sit in a sandbox, a man of almost sixty. The chill air has made the sand a bit too tough for the smaller kids to dig; besides, the field's changing sunlight is too tempting, so everyone else is out there charging at shadows, and I'm left to myself.
We begin with apologies:
For the soft notebook pages you hold in your hands, a sad reliquary for my story and apt to rip, but the best I could steal. For stealing, both the notebooks and the beautiful lever-fed pen I'm writing with, which I have admired for so many months on my teacher's desk and simply had to take. For the sand stuck between the pages, something I could not avoid. There are more serious sins, of course, a lost family, a betrayal, and all the lies that have brought me to this sandbox, but I ask you to forgive me one last thing: my childish handwriting.
We all hate what we become. I'm not the only one; I have seen women staring at themselves in restaurant mirrors while their husbands are away, women under their own spell as they see someone they do not recognize. I have seen men back from war, squinting at themselves in shopwindows as they feel their skull beneath their skin. They thought they would shed the worst of youth and gain the best of age, but time drifted over them, sand burying their old hopes. Mine is a very different story, but it all turns out the same.
One of the reasons I sit here in the sand, hating what I've become, is the boy. Such a long time, such a long search, lying to clerks and parish priests to get the names of children living in the town and suburbs, making up ridiculous aliases, then crying in a motel room and wondering if I would ever find you. You were so well hidden. The way the young prince in fairy tales is hidden from the ogre: in a trunk, in a thorny grove, in a dull place of meager enchantment. Little hidden Sammy. But the ogre always finds the child, doesn't he? For here you are.
If you are reading this, dear Sammy, don't despise me. I am a poor old man; I never meant you any harm. Don't remember me just as a childhood demon, though I have been that. I have lain in your room at night and heard your breathing roughen the air. I have whispered in your ear when you were dreaming. I am what my father always said I was—I am a freak, a monster—and even as I write this (forgive me) I am watching you.
You are the one playing baseball with your friends as the sunlight comes and goes through your golden hair. The sunburned one, clearly the boss, the one the other boys resent but love; it's good to see how much they love you. You are up to bat but hold out your hand because something has annoyed you; an itch, perhaps, as just now your hand scratches wildly at the base of your blond skull, and after this sudden dervish, you shout and return to the game. Boys, you don't mean to be wonders, but you are.
You haven't noticed me. Why would you? To you I am just the friend in the sandbox, scribbling away. Let's try an experiment: I'll wave my hand to you. There, see, you just put down your bat to wave back at me, a smile cocked across your freckled face, arrogant but innocent of everything around you. All the years and trouble it took for me to be here. You know nothing, fear nothing. When you look at me, you see another little boy like you.
A boy, yes, that's me. I have so much to explain, but first you must believe:
Inside this wretched body, I grow old. But outside—in every part of me but my mind and soul—I grow young.
There is no name for what I am. Doctors do not understand me; my very cells wriggle the wrong way in the slides, divide and echo back their ignorance. But I think of myself as having an ancient curse. The one that Hamlet put upon Polonius before he punctured the old man like a balloon:
That, like a crab, I go backwards.
For even now as I write, I look to be a boy of twelve. At nearly sixty, there is sand in my knickers and mud across the brim of my cap. I have a smile like the core of an apple. Yet once I seemed a handsome man of twenty-two with a gun and a gas mask. And before that, a man in his thirties, trying to find his lover in an earthquake. And a hardworking forty, and a terrified fifty, and older and older as we approach my birth.
"Anyone can grow old," my father always said through the bouquet of his cigar smoke. But I burst into the world as if from the other end of life, and the days since then have been ones of physical reversion, of erasing the wrinkles around my eyes, darkening the white and then the gray in my hair, bringing younger muscle to my arms and dew to my skin, growing tall and then shrinking into the hairless, harmless boy who scrawls this pale confession.
A mooncalf, a changeling; a thing so out of joint with the human race that I have stood in the street and hated every man in love, every widow in her long weeds, every child dragged along by a loving dog. Drunk on gin, I have sworn and spat at passing strangers who took me for the opposite of what I was inside—an adult when I was a child, a boy now that I am an old man. I have learned compassion since then, and pity passersby a little, as I, more than anyone, know what they have yet to live through.
I was born in San Francisco in September 1871. My mother was from a wealthy Carolina family, raised in the genteel area of South Park, originally planned for Southern gentry, but, with the loss of the war, open to anyone with enough wealth to throw an oyster supper. By then, the distinction among people in my city was no longer money—the blue silver clay of the Comstock had made too many beggars into fat, rich men—so society became divided into two classes: the chivalry and the shovelry. My mother was of the first, my father of the wretched second.
No surprise that when they met in the swimming pool of the Del Monte hotel, staring at each other through the fine net that separated the sexes, they fell in love. They met again that very night, on the balcony, away from her chaperones, and I am told my mother wore the latest Paris fashion: a live beetle, iridescently winged, attached to her dress with a golden chain. "I'll kiss you," my father whispered to her, shivering with love. The beetle, green and metal, scampered on her bare shoulder, then tried to take flight. "I'll do it, I'll kiss you this moment," he insisted, but did nothing, so she took him by the handles of his muttonchops and brought his lips to hers. The beetle tugged at its leash and landed in her hair. Her heart exploded.
Throughout the autumn of 1870, the Dane and the debutante met on the sly, finding secluded spots in the new Golden Gate Park to kiss and grope, the nearby bison grumbling in their corrals. But like a clambering vine, lust must lead somewhere or wither, and so it led to this: the detonation of Blossom Rock. It was a city celebration, and Mother somehow slipped away from Grandmother and South Park to meet her Danish lover, her Asgar, and watch the great event. It was to be the greatest explosion yet in the city's history—the dynamiting of Blossom Rock, a shoal in the Golden Gate that had been shattering hulls for a century—and while optimistic fishermen prepared for what they assumed would be the best catch of the century, pessimistic scientists warned of a great "earth wave" that would roll across the continent, wreaking havoc on every standing structure; the populace should flee. Did they flee? Only to the highest hills, for the best view of the end of the world.
So my parents found themselves among the thousands on Telegraph Hill, and afraid of being recognized, they rushed inside the old heliograph station for privacy. I imagine my mother sitting in her pink silk dress in the old operator's chair, pressing her finger against the window and clearing an oval from the window's dust. There, she saw the crowds in their black wool looking out to sea. Even as she felt my father's fingers upon her lace she saw the young boys chucking oyster shells at the tallest of the stovepipe hats. "My love," her lover whispered, undoing her rows of buttons. She did not turn to take his kisses but shivered at the sensation of her skin. She had rarely been naked since the day she was born, not even in the bath, having always worn a long white nightgown into the warm water. As my father-to-be shucked her like a rare oyster, she wriggled like one, too, chilled and weeping now not just with love—"mine dyr, mine dyr," he whispered—but with relief at what she was about to lose.
At 1:28 a warning shot came from Alcatraz and that is the exact moment that my mother's technical girlhood ended. A little gasp in the cold air, a glare from the heliographic plates across the room, and my father was shuddering into her ear, whispering things he could not possibly mean and that no one but an angry parent would ever hold him to. Mother was calm, watching the cheering boys outside the grimed window. The crowd was restless but excited. And Mother—who knows what mothers feel when fathers first possess them?
And then—at 2:05 exactly (well endured, my young and eager father)—her lover cried out in ecstasy as a great rumbling seized the air. To her right, through the window, she witnessed the most extraordinary sight of her lost girlhood: a column of water two hundred feet in diameter, black as jet, rising into the crisp air of the Golden Gate. At the top floated great hunks of the dissipated Blossom Rock, and it looked for all the world like the conquering fist of a Titan punching at the clouds. So huge, so menacing. The world around her shouted so loudly she could barely hear her young man's cries. Steamers whistled; guns fired by the hundreds into the skies. The dark column fell back into the water and then, to her gasping surprise, another column heaved into the air—just as her lover's moans were rising once again—and fell back in boiling blackness into great circular wells of bay water that lashed at every fishing boat at sea.
The young man calmed at last, mumbled something foreign and ecstatic into her collarbone. "Yes, my love," she replied, and for the first time looked back upon her lover. He mewled like a child on her breast. She touched the hot gold of his hair and he whimpered, his strong hands moving spastically in the froth of her ripped lacework. Like the shining beetle on the night of their first kiss, he lay chained and happy on her shoulder. In that moment, she panicked a little, remembering the girls who had made mistakes in her neighborhood and had disappeared. She could hear in her lover's sighs how little he was thinking of the future.
And somewhere in the postcoital pawing and fussing, somewhere in the softening swells of the blackened Golden Gate, as bits of rock fell through the sooty waters to rest forever on the deep bottom, somewhere in the weeping sorrow of the glaziers and fishermen who found none of the booty they had hoped for, somewhere in the cheers and gun salutes and steam-whistling of the hysterical hat-tossing crowds, somewhere in that chivaree, I came into being.
But the question is: Was the crazed explosion of Blossom Rock enough to jolt my cells into a backwards growth? Was my mother so shocked by the sound, or so saddened by herself, that she distorted what little existed of me? It seems ludicrous, but my mother fretted until her death over the price she paid for love.
On the morning I was born, according to my mother, the midwife handed me down in my flannel wrap and whispered, You should probably let him go, the doctor says he's a little wrong. I was not much to look at. Wrinkled, palsied, opening my blind, clouded eyes as I wailed into the room, I'm sure my mother was horrified. I believe she might even have screamed. But in the corner stood my father; arms crossed, smoking his ever-present Sweet Caporals, he looked at me and expressed no horror. Father came close, squinting through his pince-nez, and saw a mythical creature from his Danish boyhood:
"Aha!" he cried aloud, laughing, smoking again as my terrified mother looked on, as the midwife held me away. "He is a Nisse!"
"Asgar..."
"He is a Nisse! He is lucky, darling." He leaned down to kiss her forehead and then my own, which was falsely lined with decades of worry. He smiled at his wife and then spoke sternly to the midwife: "He is ours, we will not let him go."
It was untrue; I was not lucky. But what he meant was that I looked like those little old men who lived beneath the Danish countryside. I looked like a gnome. A monster. And aren't I?
I didn't smell like a baby. My mother said she noticed this as I suckled at her breast, and though she could never be brought to speak unkindly of me and always bathed my liver-spotted arms as if they were the tenderest baby's skin, she admitted that my scent was wonderful but not like any infant she'd ever held. Something more like a book, musty and lovely but wrong. And my proportions were unusual: skinny torso and small head, long arms and legs, and a surprisingly sharp nose that must have been the cause of at least one chloroformed cry from the birthing room. Babies have no noses—anybody will tell you this—but I had one. And a chin. And a face reupholstered in elephant's skin, buttoned with the clouded, sad blue eyes of the blind.
"What's wrong with him, suh?" Grandmother whispered in her Carolina accent. She was dressed in the black bombazine and veils that encrust her in my memory.
The doctor tested me with everything in his bag—a leather tube to hear my heart, doses of castor, jalap, and calomel, plasters across my body—but came away shaking his head. "It isn't clear yet, Leona," he said.
"The royal curse?" she whispered, meaning Mongolism.
He pushed the idea away with a jab of his hand. "He's rhinocerine," he said, a word I'm convinced he made up that very moment, but Grandmother accepted it as at least something to whisper to God in her prayers.
Later on, I was able to pass myself off (in a gaslit room) as a man in his early fifties while being a terrified seventeen, but during my first few years it was not at all obvious what I was, or what I might become. So can you blame my poor maid, Mary, for whispering her Irish prayers, dropping her tears onto my head as she bathed me—thrice daily—in cream, soaking me over and over like a strip of salt cod? Can you blame my mother and grandmother for their careful preparations on calling days—the second and fourth Fridays of the month—when, fearing a prominent lady visitor, they delicately daubed my mother's breast with laudanum and fed me so gently and intoxicatingly that I stayed in drugged slumber upstairs, unwailing, while they sat on the settees in long striped skirts? I take it as the best compliment I can: that I was unlike anything they had ever seen among the elms, the rich stone houses, the lacy parasols of their Christian Confederate world.
As the years passed, I changed as startlingly as a normal child, but my condition made it seem as if my body aged in reverse, grew younger, as it were. Born a wizened creature of seemingly great age, I soon became an infant with the thick white hair of a man in his sixties, curls of which my mother cut to place in her hair album. But I was not an old man; I was a child. I aged backwards only in what I seemed. I looked like a creature out of myth, but underneath I was the same as any boy—just as now I look like a boy in knickers and a cap, though inside I'm the same as any regretful old man.
Doctors may read this; I should be more precise. In physical appearance, I have aged exactly opposite the world. Strangely, my real age and the age I appear to be always add up to seventy. So when I was twenty years old, I met fifty-year-old women who flirted with me as if I were their contemporary; when I was fifty at last, young women on streets were snapping their gum at me. Aged when I was young, and youthful now that I am old. I offer no explanations; that is for you, dear doctors of the future. I offer merely my life.
I am a rare thing. I have gone through centuries of medical history and found only a few like me in all the world, and even those, sadly, not like enough.
The first time-altered creatures in the literature are the Frabboniere twins, born in 1250 in a small village in the viscounty of Béarn. Named Aveline and Fleur, they were born with the illfortuned physical appearance of old women. As babies, they were brought to the kings of England and France, as well as to the pope, for they were judged to be not demonic children but signs from God that Christ was to come again. Pilgrims came to touch the children and listen to their babbling, hoping somewhere in there was a prophecy of the coming end. Their appearance, unlike my own, stayed the same while they aged, and as soon as they grew convincingly tall, they were treated as old peasant women and forgotten. Only doctors and the religious wanted to pay them visits. As soon as Aveline and Fleur reached the age they appeared to be, they both lay down in their common bed, holding hands, and died. There is a grotesque woodcut of this scene. It used to hang above my own bed.
Another set of twins, Ling and Ho, famous through a series of eighteenth-century antisyphilis pamphlets, led lives that more closely resembled my own. Actually, only one of them did: poor, cursed Ho. They were born the children of a Shanghai prostitute (so the pamphlet read), and while Ling was an ordinary, drooling, pink baby, Ho was born much as I was: from the other end of life. So while Ling grew to crawl and giggle, Ho began to reverse. Our mutual disease, however, had crippled Ho from birth. He was always a kind of mummy in his bed. Even when he appeared to be more youthful, more ordinary, he still lay stiff and stupid, able to drink only beef tea, while seething at his brother's good fortune. Eventually, nearing thirty, the brothers approached the same visual age. It was then that Ho was able, at last, to thaw the life that had been frozen in him for so long. Ling left his village, wife, and children to meet his brother on their birthday. When he came into his brother's room and leaned over the bed to kiss him, Ho brought down the knife he had been hiding and, after letting his twin fall to the floor, turned it on himself. Lying in their sticky blood, the twins had at last become identical, and as no one could tell them apart, they were buried in a common tomb with the inscription that one man was blessed and the other a devil, but which was which could not be told.
The last I have found is a more recent man: Edgar Hauer. It's a curious case that even my grandmother remembered. Son of a Viennese merchant, Edgar lived until the age of thirty before any of his symptoms manifested. It was only then that his appearance began to reverse, as mine has, and he led the rest of his life seeming to become younger and younger. I read his case carefully, hoping for a clue to his death (a major preoccupation for me now that the end is so near), but fortunately for him, he died of influenza before his fiftieth birthday, and his wife was left weeping on the bed, holding what appeared to be the body of a ten-year-old boy in her arms.
And that is all. These are not lucky stories.
I should explain this disguise of mine. It's no excuse to say that I pretend to be a boy of twelve simply because I look like one, but the fact is that I do. I am small and freckled and lonely; I have patches on my knickers and frogs in every pocket. Only a careful observer would notice that I have too many faded scars for a child of twelve, too mean a squint, and that I sometimes stroke my soft chin as if I'd worn a beard. But no one looks that closely. I know it seems hard to believe, but the world is wholly convinced that I am what I claim to be, and not merely because I'm so good an imitator after all these awful years. It's because nobody notices little ill-dressed boys. We simply disappear into the dirt.
As far as anybody in this town knows, I am an orphan. According to the local gossip, I lost my father nearly two months ago, lost him in the spring lake-mist, and I was left here absolutely on my own. I was staying at the house of a boy in town and I fell upon the mercy of his mother to take me in. That boy was you, Sammy, my unwitting accomplice. That mother was your mother, Mrs. Ramsey, a local artist. I have lived here ever since.
Ah, now you recognize me, don't you, Sammy? The sad blond orphan forced to share the bedroom of your boyhood. The odd child in the bunk below whose snore, I'm sure, you've memorized by now. If you are reading this, you are older yourself, and perhaps you will forgive me.
To play out this disguise, however, I have to walk to school each day and sit in idiotic classes. Today, for instance, was the Geography of America, during which we were told all manner of lies, including the fact that California (my native state) contains every possible kind of terrain. I had to bite my best Ticonderoga to keep from speaking. Volcano? Steppe? Tundra? But twelve-year-olds would never know these words, and I must keep my cover above all else.
But why pretend to be a boy? Why not just enter the town, like any malformed midget, on the back of a circus elephant? Why not wear the crumpled hat and coat of the old man I really am? There are two reasons. The first, which I will get to shortly, is the Rule. The second, dear Sammy, is you. I have had time enough to consider how to find you, how to make my way into your life, how to slip into the bunk below yours and listen to the dog-yelps of your dreams.
I am told that the first person to realize my condition was not a doctor at all but our maid Mary. Much fun had been made of Mary in our household—Grandmother liked to tell visitors that, having been used to descending farm ladders, the poor young woman still walked backwards down the stairs—but the truth of it was she was a fragile and neurotic girl, given to fits of jealousy and tears, and to giggles at any flattery or praise, a ripe thing for any clever man's picking. And just as in any Irish ballad, she went astray. I was still a baby when Mary was sent away—and sent away she was, because the unnamed lover left poor Mary with only a stillborn baby, a thistle pendant, and a broken promise. She was replaced with a girl remarkably similar—red-haired and simple Maggie—and was never mentioned again except by Father, enjoying a cigar with the men, and then as a different kind of joke. And so Mary was erased from the books at 90 South Park Avenue.
But she returned several years later, got in through the back door and reached the upstairs hall before Grandmother spotted her.
"Mary!" the old woman exclaimed, clutching her jet brooch.
"Mrs. Arnold, I—"
"How did you get in here?"
She no longer looked the part of a young woman. Her face was still attractive, but with the hardness of unripe fruit, and her eyes, which used to puppy-leap about the room, had been leashed and trained by the necessity of the streets. Her clothes were good, if a little flashy, but a closer look revealed how faded they were, as if she wore and washed them daily. Her hands were lined with the soot of the city, the ash that snowed from factories. Back then, all good women wore gloves, and why? Because the world was filth. But Mary had no gloves and here she was, fighting against the filth but no longer a maid; that was clear. Mary had fallen.
She smiled as she never would have when she lived here. "John let me in," meaning John Chinaman, our name for the cook. "It's a little thing, just a—"
"I am sorry, Mary," Grandmother answered furiously, "but you have made your bed..." She launched into her usual speech about linens and destiny, but just then my nurse was bringing me from my mother's room on my morning visit. Though I was nearly three, Nurse was still carrying me in her arms. Judging from the few photos taken of me then, I was in my most hideous stage, and all alather in lace when I caught sight of Mary. Permanently in purdah, it wasn't often I saw anyone but my grandmother, mother, and nurse. I must have squealed in delight.
"Ah, look at him!" Mary exclaimed to Grandmother's horror. The old lady cast an arm into the hallway to stop her, but Mary walked towards me and touched my raisin's face. "Why," she said, astounded, facing Grandmother squarely. "He looks like me pa, and he's lost his white hair!"
Grandmother became stern. "Mary, I must ask that you turn out your pockets."
"Mum, he's growing younger."
Both Nurse and Grandmother looked. It took a pair of eyes that had been away from me that could compare my gnarled baby self to this new, smoother form. The addled Irish girl was quickly whisked out of the house (what had her purpose been: to steal, to beg, to haunt?) but no one could deny her effect on the household. What legions of doctors had failed to notice, a scarlet woman saw in an instant.
"I'm afraid," the doctor told Grandmother when she called for him with the offer of old brandy, "that she's right." He sat in the upstairs parlor, sipping the brandy and looking about the room as if he planned to inherit it. "For what he is, he's healthy as a pig."
It was Grandmother who raised me. She directed my feeding and care, opened the windows to let in the chill city fog she hoped would cure me. My mother later told me that the old woman barred her from the nursery because she was sure I would be a source of grief, just a little headstone in a month or so, as with most children, but I like to think Grandmother kept me to herself in that high, bare room because she was lonely, and she hoped to love me a little: one last old man for her life.
Grandmother was an odd woman, and is only a faint memory for me, but I loved her. I loved peering at her rubbery nose and the roman candle of vessels that spread outwards from it across her cheeks; I loved the weird lace Regina bonnet she wore, and how its tight ribbon cut into her slack jowls, forming long pink welts when she removed it. I loved her because she was my only companion and because we grow to love the ones beside us.
I bet you've done the arithmetic. A boy born in 1871, seeming to be seventy, how long would he expect to live? Seventy years, of course. And if, like my grandmother, you sat above my cradle and worked at your pearl necklace like an abacus, you would take this expected age and arrive at the next obvious conclusion: the year of my death. This is what Grandmother did, standing at the open window in her furs and studying my cooing form overflowing from my cradle with the warm, wrinkled skin of a pudding.
When Grandmother had calculated the date, she brought my mother in and commanded her to run an errand of such extravagance that poor Mama gasped with the bit of her still left to breathe above her corset. You would think it was an errand run for a prince in a fairy tale; you would almost think the old woman loved me above all else, and gathered these numbers like blankets to tuck around me in my fragile youth. But it was God she loved. Like the Fox sisters in their drafty mansion, she listened for the rappings of His spirit on my body's wooden hull. So the gold pendant she had shaped and hammered at great expense was not for me; it was for Him, to show, as it hung around my hideous neck, that she had not been blind; she had seen Him at last.
I wept the day she was buried. I was not allowed to attend the funeral, but I remember very clearly a carriage pulling up in front of the house and my family standing at the front door, utterly veiled, wreathed, and enshrouded in black. Mother leaned down to explain that I was not to come and handed me, in consolation, her black-bordered handkerchief, dampened by her tears. Father waved to me and took her by the shoulder as they left, and I slipped from Nurse's grip to climb the box ottoman and press my face against the window. I wiped Mother's handkerchief against the glass, cleaning it of fireplace soot, and watched, weeping, as they rode away. The horses were plumed; the carriages were lacquered and plate-glass. The procession turned slowly around the elms of South Park and vanished behind the window's filmy panes as it went on, as everything always did, without me.
I keep the pendant still. I have lost all the things I've loved—they have been sold or taken or burned—but this glittering collar, which I have hated all my life, has never left. Angels desert you; devils are constant fiends. Here, on this page, I have made a rubbing. Remembering the date at the top of this diary, you may see for yourself the fate Grandmother gilt for me:
I have told you of my birth, and of my certain death. It's time at last for my life.
My writing was interrupted by a boy. It was you, Sammy.
You came over in your usual flurry of action, as if you were ten boys all running together, and stopped short of me in the sad dust of this school yard. In the trees, birds or girls were twittering. Your usual newsboy cap was jettisoned in some bush where you would later be sent, petulant, by the yard-nag to find it, but now your hair blasted freely into the wind, twisting and glinting like a bright idea; your knickers were unbuckled and rolled high; your stockings' elastics had snapped and were rolled low; your vest, your pants, your shirt, everything about you was smeared in dust as a roll is smeared in butter, and you arrived before me more alive than I, surely, have ever been.
"Wanna play ball?"
"Can I be second base?" I asked. I was asking for a high honor.
"We need right field."
"Oh."
"Can you play?" you asked, impatient now.
"No," I said. "I'm writing. Here, write something," I added, ripping a sheet from the notebook, "something for your mom." To which you laughed girlishly and flew off because you are a monkey, Sammy, you are a monkey that approaches on all fours and screams and screams, but when anybody reaches to you, you leap into the branches, howling. When I reach to you. For I am a sham boy, a counterfeit, and like a foraging animal you can smell the truth, born with blood that shivers at a stinking beast no matter how boy-shaped he may be, so today you ran away from me towards a group of wrestling boys, who now lay spent and dazzled in a cloud of dust, lifting their heads eagerly as you shouted to them: true boys.
Let it rest. The recess hag has appeared at the door, piping furiously away. I have to stash these pages for another day; the times tables await me.
My life's story really begins with Alice, when my deformity is at its worst, but in order to understand Alice, and why I needed so badly to fall in love, you must hear about Woodward's Gardens, and Hughie. But, first, you must understand the Rule.
It happened one winter evening, not long after Grandmother's death. I awoke to the piff of the gaslight in my room and saw, as its fluttering magic brightened, my parents sitting near my bed in their opera clothes, rustling with silk and starch. I don't know what had happened to them that evening, what tragedy they had witnessed or which famous hypnotist they had confessed their case to, but they had the expressions of repentant murderers who have called their victim up in a seance, and as Father turned the key of the lamp to fill my room with rosy light and a bitter smell, Mother kneeled close to my tired face and told me the Rule. She offered no explanation, but simply repeated it so that I would know this was a lesson we were learning, and no dream; this was a spell she was casting, and if I was a dutiful son I would let her weave her charmed circle. My father stood by the lamp, his eyes closed in holy dread. And then I fell asleep and remember nothing else. The Rule has dictated my actions throughout most of my life. It has allowed me to relax all great decisions before its simplicity, and has therefore taken me further than I ever would have gone, all the way from my home city to the cold sandbox that now immerses my naked toes.
"Be what they think you are," my mother whispered to me that evening, a tear at the corner of each eye. "Be what they think you are. Be what they think you are."
I have tried, Mother. It has brought me heartache, but it has also brought me here.
In those days after Grandmother's death, everything began to change for me. We moved to a smaller but more stylish house high on the new Nob Hill. South Park had "gone down," as mother ruefully acknowledged; the newer houses around the park were being built of wood rather than stone, divided into flats, and merchants and newly married couples began to replace the rich old Virginians who used to promenade with their black sunshades and ribboned bonnets. We turned the old house into flats and rented the upper floor to a married couple, the lower to a Jewish widow and her little daughter. Then we left, with the rest of the rich, for Nob Hill's promise of a view, which was nearly always wrapped in thick ermine fog.
And I was freed. I had gone outside a few times with Mother, to the market or the park. Mostly, though, my adventures were confined to the narrow view I had from the nursery—a crowd of geese with goslings, an open carriage with a picnic party inside, the milkman passing with a wetted carpet thrown over his cans to keep them cool on hot autumn days, and any dog or cat that passed and sniffed and looked up gave me the same thrill an astronomer might have seeing the creatures on the moon turn to smile at him.
So it was something like an annunciation when Mother told me, one morning at her vanity, that I was being taken to Woodward's Gardens. I was six years old, slightly larger than a child but looking nothing like one. She sat holding a hairpin over a candle, heating it to curl her lashes, and I was engaged in pulling the hair from her brush and feeding it to the ceramic hair receiver. I loved the way the thick and wondrous dead stuff knotted and clumped so evilly; I loved feeling the long strands of her hair, so fine and airy as I plucked them from the brush and fed them to the receiver, so dark and twisted in those porcelain guts. Mother used to take the hair and weave it. She made a bracelet from Grandfather's hair that Grandmother still wears in her grave, and, later, another with my father's hair and a green ribbon. It hung on Mother's wrist, with a small enamel portrait of him, long after he was gone.
"What's Woodward's Gardens?" I asked, pressed beside her.
She smiled sadly and took my hand. "It's a park. Outside."
"Oh."
"I should warn you, there will be children there."
Not "other children," just "children."
"Oh."
"Little bear," she said softly; I was always her "little bear." I fed the last of her hair into the little hole and looked at her nervously. She was so young then, with the shimmering beauty of a sky after a rain.
"Don't you want to go?" she asked me in that young, sweet voice.
Sammy, more than anything in the world.
WOODWARD'S GARDENS
THE EDEN OF THE WEST!
Unequaled and Unrivaled on the American Continent
NATURE, ART AND SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED
Education, Recreation and Amusement the Aim
Admission, 25 cts. Children, 10 cts.
Performance Free
SKATING EVERY DAY.
There are still people alive who remember Woodward's Gardens, and the May Days when Woodward, rich from the famous What Cheer House down at Meigg's Wharf, would pay for all the children, hordes and hordes of the city's youth, to come to his backyard and play.
The rows of small and furry dromedaries, dried brown tears streaking from their eyes, bearing children and teenage men in derbies; a lake with an Oriental bridge and pavilion; a racetrack; a maypole; pools full of bellowing sea lions; a Rotary Boat shaped like a doughnut within its little pool, which kids could row endlessly; fantastic inventions of all sorts including the zoographicon, orchestrion, and Edison's talking machine; an aviary where young couples hid among the ferns and spooned beneath a cloud of birds; herds of emus, ostriches, cassowaries; a "Happy Family House" where the monkeys would sit and mimic the humans by hugging and kissing each other; but what I remember most from that day were two events marvelous to behold, one by looking down, the other by looking up. Those and, of course, meeting Hughie.
As our neat two-in-hand drew closer to the great hedgework wall on Thirteenth and Mission, I could barely breathe. "There's seals," Father told me through his whiskers, which, like cupped hands, gave his words the hush and excitement of a secret, "and parrots and cockatoos." Of course he loved the gardens; hadn't he changed his own name in memory of a playland like this? On his voyage from Denmark, Asgar Van Daler had remembered a place long ago where the swans cried out like Loreleis from the lily ponds and, believing his own name unsuitable for this new land of Smiths and Blacks and Joneses, christened himself after that old candle-glittering park—his Tivoli.
"Swans!" he shouted to me, grinning. "A famous performing bear!"
"Like me? A bear like me?"
"Like you!"
And before I knew it, we were already inside. I had been so distracted by his descriptions, so entranced also by the schools of children lined up behind their schoolmistresses, the prams and crowds and stuffed ibises and flamingos posed before me in the bushes, I did not even notice a small and sad detail. At the very moment that I began to run through the grass, Father was pocketing three red ticket stubs. He had paid for three adults.
I was not even a very convincing old man in those days, of course—beardless, too short for an adult, too large for a boy—but people stared only briefly before letting me pass by. There was so much else to see. As I was trying to take in the wonders around me, a bell rang and a man announced that Splitnose Jim was to perform in the bear pit. I looked at my parents, pleading with my eyes, and Mother, tightening the veil beneath her chin, nodded approval. Within minutes we were sitting on a pine board in an amphitheater full of children and well-dressed couples, smelling the neverchanging popcorn-and-dust odor of childhood. A man appeared in the ring below and announced the arrival of "a terrifying bear who used to dance for an Italian on the streets of our city, but who one day, in rage, tore the ring from his nose and lunged at his master! Too dangerous for the sidewalks, Mr. Woodward brought him here for your enjoyment." And out he shambled, Splitnose Jim.
An old bear is not too exciting for those of you who met lions and hyenas at the circus as a child, but I had never seen such an enormous creature in my life. I screamed twice, once in fear, then again in delight, to see old Jim lean back on his haunches and sniff the air, nodding repeatedly at us like a gentleman entering a restaurant where he is known.
He did a few miserable tricks for a peanut, and climbed up poles to rest dolefully on the platforms high above us. Each time, as the trainer shouted out how dangerous Jim had been wandering through the parklands of Yellowstone, how he was captured, and what marvelous thing he would do for us now, we applauded. As we clapped, Jim sat back against a rail, the peanut balanced on the tip of that dusty split nose, and daydreamed like any workman until the boss snapped his whip and it was time to earn the wage again. I loved old Jim, and I pitied him a little. I understood full well that he lived in a cage, lonely, confused, with just his keepers as his friends. Children, however, can sustain pity only so long. It burns; it itches; and we imagine a quick cure to the oppressed: ourselves. And so in my slippery boyhood mind I saved old Jim by bringing him home with me, making him live again within the fortress of Nob Hill, hide in the staircase ferns, crawl into the dumbwaiter and thereby sneak into the cellar where we kept the potatoes and old wines, watch over me with those tired eyes as I slept, and in general imbue my life with the very terror and adventure they had caged him for. I would save Jim and he, grateful and loving, licking my forehead with his tongue as black and big as a boot, would save me.
After the bear pit, my father wanted us all to go roller-skating, but Mother thought this was too risque. Instead, we followed the signs to the aerial ascension, something even Mother, dabbing beads of perspiration from her hairline, could not resist.
The balloon drew sighs and a big smile from my father, who stood arms akimbo, staring up at its great silvery magnificence. He loved invention and technology, especially anything electrical, and our house would have been one of the first with a telephone had my mother not pointed out that, besides its being extraordinarily expensive, there would only be three thousand other people in the country to call, and that all of them, family histories unknown, could call us. He was forbidden to indulge his technological urges, but I remember one night years after Woodward's Gardens when—driven by either his love for my mother or his love of the new—he presented her with an electrical jewel fitted into a scarf pin. He inserted the tiny battery and clipped it to her lapel, where it shone with an eerie beauty. She smiled while Father explained its principles, telling us it was the newest fashion. Then Mother turned to him with a look of pity and said, "Asgar, thank you, but I can't," informing him that, as with French dresses, one always lets others try the newest fashion.
That was the last of Father's transgressions, but not the first. By the time of my outing he had already been relegated to concealing his beloved wonders—such as the clear, pointed filament bulbs I discovered hidden in his study's hollow globe one day, resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard—or resigning himself to public marvels like the one before us.
"Look at that, old man," my father said to me in his odd accent. "Look at that!"
High above the grounds, above the wooden corral of onlookers, dwarfing even the great striped Arabian tent of the aviary beside it, rose the shimmering quilted silver of Professor Martin's balloon. Enormous and swaying silently in the breeze, as a barker announced its wonders to the crowds below and the professor prepared for his ascension, the balloon seemed to exist in some opposite dimension, hanging from the earth in a huge reversed raindrop that trembled towards the sky.
"Man alive!" I heard beside me in a chirping voice. This wasn't something my parents would have said; it was a phrase I'd only heard from Nurse. "Man alive, what is it?"
That was exactly what I was asking myself. In all the excitement of the gardens, I had not paid any attention to the crowds. And there, standing beside me, was the most extraordinary exhibit of them all: an ordinary boy.
I knew I was different. Father had sat me down in his dark parlor and explained, through the forest of his cigar smoke, that my doctor's frequent visits were unusual, but it was only because I was, as he put it, "somewhat enchanted." Mother, whose terms of endearment included "old man" and "little bear," explained one morning as she applied her magnolia balm that I was unlike anyone else in the world, not like any boy, or even my father as a boy, not like the servants or the cook or anyone. But all children are told these things; we are great, we are special, we are rare. I only knew I was truly different because servants whisper too much and once, as I lay hidden in the root cellar, crammed against the boards, eavesdropping, I heard Maggie telling Nurse how sorry she felt for me that I was born "so sweet but so wrong."
But here, squinting amiably through the dust, was the thing I was not. It was a little copper-headed boy dressed, as was the fashion, like a little man in a tiny-brimmed black soft hat and suit which must have come off during the day because it was done up all wrong, like a crooked smile, with burrs and woolly fluff caught in the nap of the velvet. He glared with fresh blue eyes and wrinkled his strawberry nose, a souvenir of yesterday's too-tempting sun. What he thought of me I cannot say. But I thought him the strangest thing I had ever seen. I knew that other little boys looked like this—I saw them from my window every day, sitting primly on a bench or hooting scandalously to a friend—but I had never learned, close up, how deformed they were. While I was solid bone and made floorboards creak and hammocks sway, this boy seemed like a bird, or a bag of twigs, his limbs bending impossibly like those Oriental boxes that fold and unfold endlessly upon their cleverly ribboned hinges. I was stunned and mute.
Impatient, he asked again, "What is it?" because he wanted to know and here I was, an adult.
I stammered for a moment. My parents had begun to argue in whispers—I learned later that it was about whether it would be too much for Father to buy me something so exotic as a banana wrapped in foil—and so weren't paying attention to my predicament. I had mixed so easily with the other children that day only because my self-consciousness had evaporated in the joy of discovery, but here, in this pause as the professor fiddled with his ropes and his flames, I could feel it beading up again inside my cooled heart.
"I...I don't know."
"You do," he insisted, then squinted and looked at me more carefully. "Are you a midget?"
"What's that?"
"I saw one in a museum once and he got married to a lady midget, and there was, there was the tallest man in the world who married them."
This meaningless information passed through me like a gamma ray. Upset and confused on my first outing, I forgot the commands my parents had given me, and for the first of three times in my life, I broke the Rule. I told him the truth:
"I'm a boy."
"You're not. You're a midget. You're from Europe." Apparently, that's where he thought midgets were from.
"I'm a boy."
He smiled broadly, showing a gap in his white teeth. "You're teasing."
"I'm not. I'm six."
He held up both hands and made that number. "I'm six!" he announced, and suddenly the idea of this, the newness of himself, overshadowed any further curiosity about me. "I can count to a hundred because my dad's a tutor and he taught me."
"I can count to fifty." This was the amount Grandmother found decent for my age.
Hughie considered this and seemed to find it adequate. He looked up at the people wandering around us in their thick black clothes. He seemed to be watching them intently; later, I was to learn he considered himself to have magical powers and could, if asked politely, cause the trees to sway just so across a field. Then he looked at me with the face of a man who has made a decision.
"I eat paper."
"You do?"
He nodded, growing in pride. "I eat it all the time."
I won't bore you with the rest of the conversation. Like the tribesmen you hear of in the Southeast seas who, upon meeting a stranger, go through long and ritualized recitations of their ancestors, we enacted the childhood ceremonies in which two boys agree they will be friends and not enemies. Just like the tribesmen, in fact, we ended it with a spitting contest that, since I won, put me in a place of love in Hughie's mind that would endure, despite any intervening unkindnesses, all the fifty-odd years of our friendship.
"It's time!" the barker shouted from his spiral tower.
And the miracle occurred.
Professor Martin threw his weights onto the sand below and the balloon, quivering, began to rise into the air. The little man, hoisted on his quicksilver moon, kept feeding the roaring fire at its base, lifting them even higher—though the ropes still dangled, held at each end by a strong man to prevent the professor from floating away—and then he turned and opened a bag of rose petals over the cheering crowd. When the clouds of roses cleared, we saw he was even higher, releasing great colored streamers that we reached to catch. And still it rose, the marvel. It was like nothing else on earth; it had no parallel in any animal I had read of, any fairy tale or fable; it had no precedent even in my dreams. This was the human mind made real, overshadowing even the birds in its longing to be free. Are we the only animals that must escape ourselves? Because, seeing that balloon, I could imagine my own soul, trapped in the dusty acreage of my old body, burning with a flame like this and lifting away from me, just as silvered, just as new.
I felt a prod and was handed a phallus in foil.
"Little bear, this is a banana."
Many years later, when we were both getting tired and forgetful, I reminded Hughie about the afternoon at Woodward's Gardens when we first met below Professor Martin's marvelous balloon. We were sitting in a roadside diner at the time, and I was getting hungrier while Hughie read the sports page of a local paper, grinning at the high school teams, his glasses down on the tip of his nose. He put down the paper and frowned.
"Balloon?" he asked. "I don't think so."
"Yes, it was an enormous silver balloon and you asked me what it was."
He considered it. We were both in our late fifties, and Hughie had lost his beautiful red hair by then and gotten a bad knee that never ceased to bother him. "No, we met when my father was your tutor."
"You're forgetting things, Hughie. You're an old man."
"So are you," he pointed out. He was right, of course, but old for me meant I looked like a small, freckled boy. I grinned my stupid grin and went back to my milk shake.
"A balloon. That's how we became friends."
"No, I showed you a card trick on the stairs."
"I don't remember you doing card tricks."
He removed his glasses. "I came in with my father. You were trying to hide behind a door like a baby, even though you looked like Senator Roosevelt in a sailor suit. You were ridiculous. I made the queen of spades appear from the fern and you have admired me ever since."
"Well."
"Well."
We both looked out the window to the parking lot, bored and restless on our travels, hoping to see something familiar out there. We went back to the paper and the growling stomach and did not speak for another hour. That is what it means to have an old friend.
We did hire his father as my tutor. I think it must have come from a conversation beneath that amazing balloon at Woodward's Gardens. Mr. Dempsey arrived every weekday, and the most surprising part, looking back, is that Hughie came with him. I think my mother felt a child of wealth deserved undistracted tutelage, but my father finally persuaded her that I would never be an ordinary child of wealth, and that to enjoy life I would need more than one kind of tutelage. Education, yes, and language and the arts. But perhaps I also needed to learn how to be a little boy.
Hughie had figured it out without a single lesson. He arrived in his little suit and hat, smiling politely, but the moment I appeared in the hall, my books in hand, he immediately transformed into a raging bull and headed shoulder-first into my side, knocking me over and spilling papers all along the polished floors. "Man overboard!" he would cry in delight, "man overboard!" then go about picking up the papers and asking me about my day. All this was a surprise to me, and I could never think of any better response than to bean him on the head with a book of poetry and whip his arm with a book strap. Of course I was larger, stronger, capable of lifting him above my head and dropping him over our back fence and into the pastiche little Oriental garden in the house behind ours, where I was always careful to drop him on a pillow of wild grasses. Oh how he would laugh and scream, then scamper back with a water lily behind his ear. Yet I always thought of him as the stronger. Throughout that time, I strove to impress him, to be as clever or as wild, and though I ran faster than he ever could for years, still I could never quite keep up.
You'll say I'm lucky to have found him as a friend, a boy so willing to accept an ogre as his companion, but of course that's the only person I would have found. A sort of crazed child. But I wonder why Hughie accepted me so quickly. It could be that he had his own oddities, of course, a clumsy sense of reality, or even a boyish self-absorption so immense that it towered over even my hulking, hound-eyed self. Perhaps he thought himself lucky to have found me, too.
But what did he think I was?
"Oh you were Max," he told me several times over the years. "I don't know, just Max, the way Mama was Mama and nobody else. Who knows? You were never a thing, you know. Like a toy or a dog. I knew you were a person, but not like a kid, and not like a grownup. Something else, who knows what, I didn't care. You're still just Max, you idiot, now give me a cigar. No, one of the nice ones."
Childhood is remembered in the marrow, not the mind. I can't tell you for sure what happened one day or the next, which birthday it was when Hughie wrapped a frog in ribbons and set it loose across the tea set, causing Maggie to drop the milk, screaming, or what age I was when Mother refused to change from a dress too low-cut for Father's taste and, seeing that he would not win, he took the sugar bowl and emptied it into her décolletage, forcing her to laugh. Or when Father took me to Meigg's Wharf and we saw our old maid Mary, in bright makeup, holding an iris, and she ran up to us and cooed over how much younger I was growing. "You don't look so old now, you wait, dear, your time will come." My father made us move on without a hello. I remember how Mary stared as we left her, how she dropped the iris and it looked, there on the sidewalk, like a frozen kiss.
I could never write a true history of my childhood, because everything happened before I knew what time was, the point in my life when a promise to pick berries on Saturday would cause me to ask every few minutes, "Is it Saturday yet?" Life had no before and after, was not yet strung upon a thread, and thus cannot be brought out from the drawer intact.
So my memories of that time are of Mr. Dempsey visiting and Hughie drawing with chalk across his shoes; Maggie and Nurse gossiping in the hall; a series of turtles in the terrarium who lived and died just inches from my glass-pressed nose; the vegetable man banging on the back door each morning; the song of the grinder's cart—"Any old knives to grind, any old knives to grind?"; fountains of smoke rising from the side-wheel steamers in the harbor; the flies and acrid odor of the horses, how pained they looked and how sorry I felt for them as they rested in the carriage house; the wet-wool smell of my bathing suit drying in my room; the old women on the street dressed from eras past in frightful wigs and hoopskirts; Mother and her balms; the rasp of Father stroking his whiskers; the smell of the gas which was the smell of the night. These were the Years Before Alice.
I want to note that I am no longer sleeping well.
The bunk below yours, Sammy, could accommodate a little boy's nightmares and late night reading of cowboy books, but not this old man. And the odd little night-light in the corner, besides being a waste of electricity, reminds me too much of the electric gem my father tried to add to my mother's jewelry box, glittering so falsely from the baseboard. The whole house, so modern and efficient, so slick and wallpaperless and fine in the daytime, loses every one of its charms at night and leaves me feeling lonely beneath the dry husk of its walls. It could be, too, that all this writing of the past, like scratching a bite, prolongs the pain. So I am not sleeping.
One night a few weeks ago, I got out of bed, careful not to wake you, and crept into the bathroom where a window opens onto the sky. I climbed onto the toilet and stood there, staring at the stars and trying to make out their patterns one by one as my father taught me. I found Orion; one can always find Orion. I found the Dipper. And bloodshot Mars. I tried to convince myself that, even though my hands had shrunk into tender starfish, the stars were unchanged, and their light pulsing across the universe was the same as ever, and that if I stared unblinking and let it pool into my eyes, I might close them and keep that same light, like a mouthful of milk, trapped inside me for a moment. Then I might feel the way I used to feel, full of this same light. But this was not the sky I once knew; there was a new planet out there with a new light. Pluto, I think they've called it, the planet of the underworld. And if I closed my eyes, that would be in there as well, a drop of violet poison clouding all the rest.
"Hello?" The light came on.
I turned and saw my mother.
No, it was your mother, Sammy. It was Mrs. Ramsey with her hand upon the switch, but the light fell over her so unnaturally that it showed every line on her face with the harshness of a rival who does not forget. She stood and stared at me with the face of an insomniac, and for a moment I was afraid somehow she'd caught me, seen an expression on my face that no child of twelve could have. Instantly, though, I saw that it wasn't discovery in her face, and it wasn't pity for an odd child who couldn't sleep. It was grief. For here was another burden in her life, the burden of a little boy standing on the toilet to look out at the sky, on top of all the other burdens she had carried. A woman in her mid-fifties, nearly my own age, wandering the midnight halls in grief; I understand her better than she can ever guess.
"I'm sorry," was all I said.
Mrs. Ramsey smiled; the look was broken. "What are you up to?"
"I don't know." The answer I knew a child would give.
"That makes two of us."
Mrs. Ramsey shifted her weight in the doorway and looked out at the stars herself. Her dressing gown fell open at the neck and showed a constellation of heckles across her breast. "Want some milk?" she asked. I nodded and took her hand.
The day that Father disappeared, long ago in San Francisco, I awoke from my unmade bed to find another, formed in snow outside my window. Like a health-crazed mother who feeds you on a steady diet of grains and crackers but one morning produces a sugared white cake just because she's missed it for too long, the world had happily shrugged off all expectations and given me a snowy day. I had read about it, and heard my father's recollections of the castles and dragons carved from the banks of creamy Danish snow, how he and the other boys would slide on wooden boards all the way to Prussia, but I was not prepared for the real thing. I thought it would be like a toy left in the yard; I was not prepared for snow to erase the world entirely and leave a crisp, blank page. I stared out at the mansions that were not there, the horses, the surreys, the work-bound men I was so used to seeing. There was no sky; there was no city. I gasped as we always do at the unnatural.
I was not a child anymore. I was sixteen and a little sullen, full of self-pity for my dreadful fate, forced to wear old-fashioned clothes so I would pass more convincingly as a man of fifty-four. Hughie, of course, wore anything he liked: a sack coat, loose pants, wild paisley. All I could be proud of was a beard as thick and luscious as any poet's. I had it shaved and clipped just under my chin; each night I stroked it in the mirror like a pet. It was even losing its gray at last (through the help of some dye my barber happily suggested). I was, however, no closer to being a real boy.
But despite my appearance, I was merely sixteen, and, bookish and lonely as I was, I felt the thrill of the day's change as much as anyone; maybe more so. It seemed, somehow, as if it had leveled the world; from my window I could see men in frock coats and ladies in bonnets throwing heaps of snow at one another. Magically, a carriage came by done up with boards to reproduce a sleigh, and couples were lying inside, laughing under a layer of fur. I dressed in my shabbiest clothes, kissed a bewildered mother as she stood holding the curtain back, and was let out into a world turned deaf and blind to what it was before. Children were being led, dazed, through the haunted paths of a dead and crystal world, but older boys (more my own age but grown into wild, handsome lads) were drawing on boyhood novels to produce snowballs that, correctly aimed, were knocking down the top hats of old Nob Hill swells. It was no world, that morning, to be old and tired.
And I, for once, was not; with the grin and dyed-brown beard of a young man, I was no target for young rascals. I was able to con a sled ride from some boys who had nailed old skate boots to a crate, and found myself sailing to the bottom of California Street where the streetcars were running on their tracks as usual, having already kicked a morning of snowfall into slush and dung.
They say some young men, older than I, put stones in their snowballs and aimed them at politicians, Supreme Court justices, even our dear Mayor Pond. They say the tax collector and assessor's offices went to snowy war in the corridors of City Hall. They say Chinese who were caught outside of Chinatown were pelted with rocky snowballs and that, in retaliation, all whites sneaking through Chinatown's alleys looking for a smoke or a crib-girl were thrashed with bamboo. They say the buffalo in Golden Gate Park finally looked at home with powdered-wig hides, but I saw none of this. I only know that I found Hughie sledding through the cemetery near the old Mission Dolores, skipping his schoolwork just as I was, and that together—old man and young boy—we bruised our legs into bouquets of violet and gold, scarified the clean white hill, and yelled our voices raw with joy.
They say the most that fell that day was a foot of snow in Golden Gate. About three inches fell in the city itself. I have since learned in my travels, especially during a hip-high whopper in Colorado, that this is nothing; this is a mere extravagance of frost. But for us it was as thick and bright as luck.
When I came home that night, trudging through a wet and sodden twilight because most of the snow had melted downhill and Out into the bay, I found a house of dimmed gaslights and worried looks. Mother sat in a shawl in the back parlor, doing her needlepoint. A canary cage sat behind her, empty as a winter tree.
"Max," she said as I stepped in, "we don't know where your father is. He hasn't come home."
"He's late at work," I offered.
"We sent a boy, he's not there." Her face was one of infinite patience, an expression she had readied hours ago just for my return. I saw a spot of blood on the flesh of her thumb; she had pricked herself just before I came in.
"I'm sure he's okay, it's the snow," she informed me.
The image of Woodward's Gardens came to me, and Father walking among the snow-powdered dromedaries, searching for the great silver balloon he'd loved so much. But I knew it was ridiculous.
Mother took my hand. "Don't you worry," she said. "John has dinner out for you, and do your lessons for Mr. Dempsey because he'll be able to come tomorrow..."
"What if it snows?"
"It's already melted," she told me evenly. I saw the pinprick welling, now a red pearl catching the light, quivering on her skin; she did nothing and only looked at me. "And Father will be home later, but don't you wait up."
"Mother."
"You need sleep, dear boy."
"Mother."
"Kiss me," she whispered. I did, catching some of her powder in my beard. And after I left the parlor for the dim light of the hall, I thought I heard the clatter of needles falling to the floor, and then the soft noise of a thumb pressed against a sucking mouth.
But he did not come home, ever again.
For the first few months, we had the frozen hearts of people kept alive on hope. But all the police ever found corroborated what they'd known at the outset: that Father had never gone to work the day he vanished, that he had worn his black wool suit and top hat but not taken his cane, that he had bought a fine cigar from his favorite store on Clay, had a whiskey at the Bank Exchange on Stockton and enjoyed a free lunch, tipped his hat to a judge outside the Main Library, and was never seen again. The dotted line connecting all these witnesses with our own house led nowhere convincing at all; it led in a straight line out of San Francisco and directly into the water. No body was found, nor was there any evidence to show it might be, and I remember thinking it strange that on the one day a father might leave a trail of bootprints through the snow, mine had not left one.
After a half a year, however, the visits from our accountants outnumbered the visits from the police. They sat with Mother and myself in the parlor, where the coal fireplace caused their middle-class brows to dampen with sweat. Mother, dressed in the deep purple of uncertain mourning, listened while I tapped a pen nib on the table (they took me for a freeloading in-law). "Things are complex, Mrs. Tivoli," they told her. Father apparently liked to run his finances with an element of risk, and so everything he made always became tied up in some new venture; very little was saved. Without Father at the helm, the fleet of these astounding little projects was floating wide of its goal and a few had sunk to the bottom. Add to this the lack of income after the brief pension from his business had run out, the missing body that gave insurance no reason to pay, and thus, the accountants told us over greasy spectacles, "the books grant you one year to live as you are doing, in this house, and then there will be nothing." They told us to sell the house for what we could.
"We will speak plainly, Max," Mother told me once they had left. "They're right." I would not look at her; I sat in what doctors now would call an adolescent anguish. I rested my head against the plasterwork, feeling the raised outline of a poppy on my temple. She continued, her hair escaping from her pins in cheroot-smoke curls: "We'll sell the house. We'll sell the love seat and the gentleman's chair of the second parlor, the clocks, the lamps. Some furniture in your father's study, the desk, the chairs, the moth collection. Maybe the geode. The duplicate silver. We'll keep Maggie, I think, if she wants to live in South Park again."
"South Park?"
"Where else are we going to live? Besides, I need to be at home." For a moment, as if the word were the planchette of a Ouija board, moving without her power, she took on the lilting strangeness of my father's voice: "We will speak plainly, Max."
She explained the plans to me in phrases that seemed to come from a distant star, so bright and clear but already old. Someone had to fix them, our new plans, as calm, real, and undesperate as we could make them. You see, a phoenix was rising within my mother, or, as the good mothers of this small town might put it, a miracle. Sammy, I'll use your gross twentieth-century term: she was pregnant.
"I like you better poor," Hughie said when he arrived on moving day.
"We're not poor."
I could hardly talk to him. I was so ashamed at our change in station. I stood among the old ornamental iron dogs of the yard, and Mother stood at the upstairs window looking down. For we were to live upstairs this time, with another fatherless family—the Levys—living a quiet life in the flat below. I faced away from South Park itself; it had changed so much. The little wall and fence around the park were gone, leaving it a stamped green oval among houses that no longer even resembled the beautiful old ones such as ours. The trees in the park seemed to be different as well, less maple and elm and more eucalyptus, following the recent misplaced craze for the trees that left the city smelling like a medicine chest. In fact, it had even lost its old name; some of the new people were grimly calling it Tar Flats.
Hughie smiled. "Well, anyway, like you used to be. Nob Hill didn't suit you. You were starting to look like a bank president, old man."
"You look like a music hall singer."
That made him laugh. He was done up in lavender and gray, with the dandyish ill taste of a seventeen-year-old with some pocket money, wearing—just to spite me—a velvet vest that I had told him time and again made him look like an organ-grinder. Hughie never cared.
I noticed a movement in the downstairs apartment; the white flash of a dress, but in a moment it was gone. I hoped our neighbors would not come outside until we were moved. Those firstfloor renters were the last people I wanted to meet. I noticed a wasp's nest had formed under the eaves since I'd been gone.
I said, "You know what Mother's telling everybody?"
"No."
"That I'm her brother-in-law."
"But that's stupid! So she's your brother's wife?"
"That I'm her brother-in-law come over from the East to help her run the household. Now that Dad's gone."
"But that's stupid. You used to live here. Won't people recognize you? I mean, the little freak?"
"Nobody recognizes me. When I left here, I was five feet tall with white hair. Now look at me." Newly seventeen, nearly six feet, with a full head of brown hair and a gorgeous streaked beard, I looked positively presidential, but dressed in Dad's old clothes, I felt I took on some of his European glamour and held my thumbs in my waistcoat pockets, preening. I said, "I think I've improved."
He winked. "I think so, too, Max. Soon you'll be a handsome old man."
"And you'll be an ugly one."
Hughie swatted at a passing wasp and then turned to where Mother looked out from the window. The wasp flew on. "Hello, Mrs. Tivoli!" he yelled.
"Don't shout, you plug-ugly," I told him.
"I ain't ugly," he informed me, smoothing his vest.
Mother shook from stillness at her post, held one hand to her hair, and waved with the other.
"How is she?" he asked, still looking up at my mother while she smoothed her best black dress, the one she wore to present herself to her old home the way one dresses for a dinner knowing an old lover will be there. She disappeared into the darkness of the upper room.
"Pagan," I said.
Now he was interested. "How so?"
I kicked the dry grass. "She's reading tarot cards. She's burning a spirit lamp all night in her room."
"I guess she still has a lot to say to your dad."
"Oh she doesn't talk. She's listening."
"What does he say?"
"Nothing," I said firmly. "He's not dead."
He nodded and looked back out at the park, arms crossed. "I agree."
We had come up with our own idea (not shared by the police) that what happened to Father was happening to men all the time in those days. We were convinced he had wandered into a bar on the Barbary Coast, drunk down a mickeyed beer, and, fallen into a drugged stupor, been dropped through a false plank in the floor onto a waiting Whitehall boat. There, he was taken out in darkest night to a clipper waiting outside the Golden Gate, the fees exchanged, and awoke to find himself headed on the sunny ocean towards the East, part of a whaling crew. A captain would be shouting orders into the prevailing wind, and pigtailed, tattooed crewmen would be shuffling by, eyeing their new mate. A trip backwards into his own salt-rimed youth. In other words, he'd been shanghaied.
But what I secretly thought had happened was even more obscene, fantastic. I imagined some Norse enchantment that had trapped my father so he was unable to reach us; I thought of some old ghost come round Cape Horn to haunt him and how, like Merlin locked by Nimue inside the rings of an oak, Father sat in a green coil of fire, waiting for me to speak the exact phrase to break his spell. What would it be?
"hap!"
The sound came from behind us. A girl nearly my age had just come out of the first-story door but now lay anguished in the grass. I could not imagine what she was doing. She was all in white lace and held her hand to her neck, waiting, almost listening to the seconds passing, and we stared at each other in the wake of her odd cry. Then, slowly, in terror, she removed her hand, showing me first: a bright kiss of pain on her neck; and second: rolling in her outstretched palm, the gold-black liquid body of a wasp.
Alice, are you reading this? It's you!
I had seen girls before, of course. Not only from that nursery window where I watched them in their little-lady dresses pointing at the birds, but, later, I saw the girls of Nob Hill on their way to school, kicking pebbles at each other and laughing; I saw young ladies coming home past curfew in their beaus' phaetons; I even spotted some kissing in the parks until the couples, noticing a leery old man, took off for thicker bushes. And I had fallen in love with the everyday girls: the girl at the newsstand with a shine above her lip, the girl with sad eyes selling pineapples stacked up in a pyramid, and the German butcher's daughter who came with him to our back door and translated. But I never said a word to them. I merely nodded from the kitchen, or tried to hide my nervous sweat by tossing down my coins and rushing away. It was a thrill, an agony.
I hadn't yet met a proper girl. All boys are primed at seventeen, ready for love. And I, imprisoned in that awful body, was sure to fall for the first one to meet my eye.
"I've been stung!"
And so had I, Alice, seeing you for the first time. Worst luck of my life: I was struck dumb by my heart.
Hughie ran to her. "Are you all right?"
She blinked as the pustule at her neck began to swell. "I've never been stung before," was what she said.
"You'll be all right," Hughie told her. "Lie down."
She refused, sitting there and looking at the poisoner in her palm. "It hurts."
"Well..."
"More than I expected. Mother got stung once and I thought she was making too big a deal of it, but... oh, it hurts."
"It's swelling, too."
Now she turned those soft brown eyes, those ageless eyes, on me. "Sir, your son is very kind."
I tried to speak but nothing happened. I was a mute old man and she looked away.
"Mother!" she yelled, then looked again at the wasp. "Poor little thing."
"Hmm," Hughie said, getting up.
"You're going to leave me here?" she said.
At that moment, I was opening my mouth to say the words I'd been trying to speak for almost a minute. She seemed to notice and looked right at me. I blinked. There, they came out at last:
"He's...he's not my son."
But the words were drowned out by a shout from the side of the house. I looked and it was merely a woman, a mother. Alice, you turned away and never heard me.
I would like to call it fate, but I should call it chance, that put you in my yard at the time my heart was at its most tender. I suppose I'm lucky it was you and not someone crueler. Still, if it had been anyone but you, Alice, I would have loved again, and plenty, before this ripe age. Cursed by your eyes, however, I never have.
"Mr. Tivoli!"
Her mother rushed out of the house and kneeled at her daughter's feet. She held a cloth against the girl's taut neck, pressing against that tender skin with the casual efficiency of a nurse. She was a fine woman, moving so naturally with her sticks-and-bones daughter as the girl hissed and struggled. Mrs. Levy wore clothes from the final years of widowhood, and she had the careful beauty of an older woman. She dressed for her face, with a collar of pearls, and for the things that do not age: a discreet folding bustle for her womanly silhouette, and a creased shirtwaist for her impressive bust. I am not good at age; what was she, Alice? Forty-five or -six? She had a dark-complected face shaped like a hazelnut, with a bow hairline and uncolored lips. She smiled and scolded as, she daubed the girl, but she was not looking at her. She was looking, with those deep brown feminine eyes, straight at me: "Mr. Tivoli, it's wonderful to meet you at last, don't flinch, Alice, it's not that cold."
Alice! I had her name, and now she was twice the girl I'd known before.
"I hope you're happy with your brother's old home, we just love it here, don't we, what were you doing, you foolish girl? You slap them, they sting you, ah well, I hope it won't swell, and if it does it will remind you, won't it? Alice, sit still. Now you've got your dress wet, and we'll have to air it. I met your sister-in-law, Mr. Tivoli, and she's a charming lady, so sad, so sad."
Hughie snickered. "That's right, Mr. Tivoli, your lovely sister-in-law."
It was all a scene that Alice's mother was directing. Every moment that I stood there, seeing Alice, the girl was growing ever clearer to me, ever larger; I watched her blinking her tears away, red with anger, and sighing as her mother held her hair. Yet Mrs. Levy was pulling me in the opposite direction, taking away my right to have a schoolboy's heart, replacing it with the leather flaps of an old man, someone whom stung-Alice could never love.
"Alice, be quiet, this is your landlord, Mr. Tivoli. He is old South Park, aren't you, Mr. Tivoli?"
She was crumbling me before her daughter's eyes. My hat felt far too tight and it occurred to me that it wasn't mine; I must have picked up the wrong one at some party.
"Not old at all, Mrs. Levy," I said, then, "Hello, Alice," which had no effect on the girl, who was staring elsewhere with a riveted gaze, but which made the older woman laugh in a downward, separating scale like a string of pearls.
Alice turned to me at last. "I hope you don't make noise upstairs like the last couple. They sounded like cattle."
Mrs. Levy attacked her daughter with a reptilian noise. "Besides, Mr. Tivoli," the widow added, "I noticed the beautiful rugs you've brought from your old home on Nob Hill. What a soft, lovely household you'll have!"
Mrs. Levy had a charming way with conversation, and I was a child of seventeen, so I could only follow where she led. I spoke of rugs, Brussels rugs, their color and feel, and I could almost taste them on my tongue as I kept up this dusty, woolen conversation while all the time I could have been asking Alice about her schooling, her piano, her travels; I could have been hearing Alice's voice. Instead, I had to watch the sweet girl staring off beside me and falling ever further into her own thoughts. The pain of the sting must have subsided under her mother's care or the dull growl of my voice, and dear young Alice was dropping, dropping into some imaginary life I longed to share.
"...I think, I think it's nice to have rugs around."
Alice: "Ugh."
"And damask love seats, I saw them too," Mrs. Levy said, as proud as if they were her own. "I'm impressed, Mr. Tivoli. You seem quite taken with the household, for a man."
But I'm not a man! I wanted to say, but she had already paused politely and then asked about the person beside me, whom I had completely forgotten.
"I'm Mr. Hughie Dempsey," Hughie said with all smoothness, tipping his hat to Mrs. Levy and her blinking, dreambound daughter.
"Ah, Hughie," Alice repeated.
"He is a close friend of the family," I said.
Mrs. Levy was gathering her daughter together by the waist, as one carries cut flowers to a vase. "Wonderful, wonderful. I should get poor Alice in and treat her neck. I hope to see you visiting, Mr. Dempsey. And of course, Mr. Tivoli, we will have you and your sister-in-law over for dinner soon."
Bows, nods, smiles, and as the girl was carried into the house, worrying once again about the sting's poison, I stood as still as any of our ornamental iron dogs. Some people were making a commotion in the park behind me, and through my haze I could make out a man walking along, waving a flag of caution as a steam-powered carriage made its exhibitory circle to general shouts and jeers, but the wonder of it was lost on me, for I was working to think how I could get into our lower story without my mother, find Alice alone, and convince her of what I truly was.
Beside me Hughie's amused voice: "Mr. Tivoli, I believe you are wearing my hat."
All of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass. There was no moment when I did not feel the pain of Alice's presence underfoot, and sometimes when I stood in the parlor listening to Mother's explanation of our accounts, or weary recitation of her night beside the spirit lamp, I stepped to different places on the carpet, wondering, Is Alice underneath me now? Or now? And so I would move across the parlor like a knight on a chessboard, hoping that when I reached the point above Alice, when I stood in shivering alignment, I would feel the warmth of her body, the scent of her hair rising upwards through the house.
Hughie thought I was acting like a fool. "Don't think about her," he said. "She's fourteen. She wears her hair down and probably still plays with dolls. She doesn't know about love." Then he would flip another card into his hat across the room, intimating that he knew—as we often do at seventeen—all about the matters of the heart.
But I could not be stopped. She swam like a mermaid in the swamp-tank of my dreams. I lay in bed with the window open, hoping I would hear the sound of her voice screaming at her mother from the kitchen—"I'm going crazy in this house!"—and it would enter like a sweet poison into my ear. Or I would hear faint footsteps, and I'd picture my girl in her black stockings and white dress dipping her finger into a fresh-baked chocolate cake and then trying to cover her crime. I plotted all sorts of ruses in those weeks and months as I listened to her below me, singing to herself like a phantom lady, or waking from a nightmare with a shout. I thought perhaps I'd come up with some household repair that needed doing. Normally, of course, we got some local men to help with the house, but maybe I could convince Mother that I was the one to do it. Hughie shrugged his shoulders at this, sniffing to say it just might work. Some minor task, a peek behind the wainscoting for mice, a paint touch-up. Anything so I could be near her.
Not that things went well when I did get close. I charted her movements with the science of an astrologer, and knew she went to Mrs. Grimmel's Girls' Academy each morning at exactly eight with a bow in her hair and cake crumbs impastoed on her lips, and returned each afternoon at two; sometimes she did not come until much later, in another family's yellow surrey in the company of two other girls with wine-dark hair and glasses. It was only on those occasions with her friends that I saw my Alice truly happy, waving her arms to part the waters for her story, because after she yelled goodbye on the dark stones of 90 South Park, she always turned to face the house with the jaded expression of late childhood and the loathing step of a golem. I often tried to put myself in the garden just as she might be coming home, but I could never time it right and Mother was always calling me inside for some chore.
I did place myself correctly once, pretending to fix the iron gate. I had just returned from a job interview at Bancroft's—a job that would keep me for over twenty years, filing documents for a thirty-volume History of the West that Mr. Bancroft was publishing—and I looked down the street to see moody Alice stomping along the two-bit boards of the sidewalk. The light went whitewash for a moment.
"Hello, Mr. Tivoli."
"Hi, Alice. How was school?"
My eyes had cleared enough to see she wore my favorite hairdo: barley-sugar curls with a floating lily. She pinched a sly corner of a smile.
"Idiotic, Mr. Tivoli," she said. "As always."
"I'm...I'm sorry."
"But I did decide never to marry."
"What...never?"
She shook her head, sighing. "Never. We were reading Shakespeare, and I think The Taming of the Shrew is a real tragedy. There's a waste of a good woman."
"Yep," I said. I hadn't read this one.
"Miss Sodov didn't agree. I had to rewrite my essay. How crazy! Now there's a shrew." Suddenly her tone became conspiratorial: "Mr. Tivoli, I wanted to ask you about—"
"Max!" my mother said from the doorway. "What are you doing there? The gate is fine. Hello, Alice, don't dawdle with Max there. I think your mother especially wants to talk to you."
Alice rolled her eyes and moaned, then lumbered into my house. Mother stood there, smiling without an idea of what she'd done. For a moment, I plotted matricide.
There is a little lie in here. I have made my heart into a camellia floating in a bowl of clear, pure water when in fact it was a dark and bloated thing. It was absolute pain to watch my Alice pass under my window every morning and never once look up in curiosity or tenderness at the gargoyle perched above her. And it was not with stars set in her hair that I pictured her while I lay in bed each night. No, my thoughts obsessively recalled a single base moment.
It was late in the evening, after supper, and I had slipped out into a corner of the back garden because I couldn't read my book, or think, and had to go to the rosebushes there and crush a little flower in my fist. I had been weeping for a while when you arrived. Alice, you were in your chemise and pantaloons. I think you were worried you had dropped something earlier in the day, a valuable pin or brooch your mother would scold you for, and so you slid through the back door, closing it carefully, and hurried into the darkness of the grass, whispering, searching every blade, heedless of how you looked. I stood unbreathing in my dark corner. On your knees, cat-stretching your arms into the yard, I could see through the neck of your loose cotton chemise a pink landscape of skin. You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine. I saw your legs stretching and tensing as you hunted and jerked your body in hope; women's pantaloons were devious things in those days, split down the crotch with overlapping fabric, and once you shifted just carelessly enough to allow the veil to part and I glimpsed the vulnerable blue veins of your thighs. A cat leaped in the yard; you froze, the chemise settling off one shoulder. Then, abandoning yourself to fate, surely imagining a lie that might save you, you ran to the back door, opening it to make a bright square and then, closing it behind you, a dark one. I spent all night looking for your jewel, darling, but found only a hairpin, a bird's egg, and two battered coils of grass where your knees had been.
The agony that one night caused me! The blueness of those veins colored everything in sight, and every night I had to rid the world of you just to sleep, just to survive another day. Sammy, close your ears. I did this in the most obvious, the most boyish of ways. I'm sure you think no one was ever like you in the world, and that young men in my day, adrown in love, secured their wrists in wolfman-chains until the dawn. No, we succumbed like all young men. Forgive my crudeness, Alice, but I was crude, and I hope you'll find it flattering, now that you are old as well, to think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.
I did not climb down the trellis to peek into her window; I did not hang a mirror discreetly from a tree so I could see every holy one of the nightly hundred brushes of her sweet hair as she stared bored into the looking glass; I did not sneak into the carriage house to touch the seat from which she had just descended, feeling the startling warmth my fidgeting girl had made there. I imagined all these things but did none of them. No, I was left standing on the carpet and trying to feel her soul's vibration (damn those Brussels rugs) and holding the memory of what I considered to be the closest I would ever get to love.
"Don't go on so much," Hughie told me when we went out on our bone-shaking bicycles. "You'll get love. You'll get better love than she has to offer, I can tell you. I've got some books you can read, but don't keep them too long. I think my father knows I took them."
I read the books. They had nothing to do with love, but they kept me up very late night after night. One, perhaps acquired for the collection by Mr. Dempsey to convince himself this was a form of study, turned out to be a tract on spermatorrhea and terrified me for almost a week, but the others were a source of great knowledge and fascination. I especially enjoyed the pictures. I returned them all to Hughie and we did not speak of them, just exchanged an understanding flick of the eyes. I had been distracted, at least, but I still was no nearer to love.
The opportunity I was looking for came through Mrs. Levy herself. Desperate, heartaching, red and ugly from lack of sleep, I decided I had to take a chance; I had to have another photograph to fondle in my bedroom. I rashly decided on the house-repair idea and went downstairs in shirtsleeves, a badly tied cravat, and with a yetunformed idea about needing to examine a leak in her daughter's room.
"Mr. Tivoli!"
Mrs. Levy stood at the open door, smiling only faintly and touching her hair, which was middle-parted and done up with surprising sloppiness in puffs on either side of her head. A few presses of her experienced hand put things in place, and she stood slightly away from the door, embarrassed or signaling me that I was welcome. The sun pinkened her face. She was in unwidowlike green and wore an old-style bustle high at the back of her skirt. Mrs. Levy seemed conscious of her artificiality and straightened herself slightly. She made these small but profound adjustments in the first moments I saw her in the doorway, distracting me from her maneuvers by light, intelligent conversation:
"...something about the evening positively Shakespearean, don't you think? Something about being in a grove of trees, like Arden? I wonder if that feeling will ever change. I wonder if a hundred years from now people will be standing at their doorways looking at the trees with that comical sensation of being in love."
She had transformed herself into the old Mrs. Levy again and gave a light rendition of her laugh—that descending string of pearls. "I'm being stupid. Please come in, Mr. Tivoli. I'm sure Alice would love to see you, too."
"I've come to check the paint," I began, but found I was already inside the house, inside my own old hallways repainted in dimmer colors and sectioned by various wallpapers, dadoes, and friezes so that it was like coming upon an old friend done up for some event—a state dinner or a chowder party—looking so unlike themselves that you blink awkwardly and turn away, kindly refusing to recognize this strange person attached to a beloved face. I found no scent of my childhood here. This was not like walking through a pyramid tomb of the past, knocking against my old relics; this felt very new; someone else had cracked and repaired that porcelain figure; it was a museum of Alice. For there she was.
"Alice, Mr. Tivoli is here to check... the paint you said? Say hello, dear girl, and maybe wipe your hands, thank you."
Alice's deep brown hair was up; she looked like a woman. She stood up from the settee and set down her book (From the Earth to the Moon, the distance between us in that room, my dear).
"Well, gee, hi there, Mr. Tivoli," she said mockingly as she smiled and shook my hand. These were the most ordinary gestures, given to me as she gave them to all others. I searched desperately for some sign that something dear was hidden for me in this routine, but very quickly she was sitting back on the couch, lifting her book. She wore the strangest dress of gossamer satin, which had a sheen of age about it that had probably gone unnoticed in candlelight. Some hairs clung to the fabric, burnished gold hanging on a sleeve. The light was ribboned throughout her hair, which was parted and coiled elaborately around her head as it might be for a dinner party. These were not the costumes Mother and I had seen them wearing that morning on their way to temple. They had been playing in the closet, and they had done each other's hair. So this was what lonely women did the whole Sabbath day long.
"You both look nice," I said, and grimaced, trying to shake the burlap from my tongue.
Mrs. Levy smiled conspiratorially at Alice, who finally turned human in my presence: she blushed. She touched her hair, sighing and looking everywhere but at me and her mother, as if searching for some escape from the room in which she had been caught playing dress-up with her old mother. I had done this; I had made a little flame under her skin. I took the moment—snip—and coiled it in the enamel locket of my heart.
Mrs. Levy sat, motioning for me to sit as well. She turned to her burning daughter. "You know, Alice, a cup of tea would really hit the spot right now, wouldn't it?"
Alice said, "Ugh," then stared angrily at her book.
Mrs. Levy looked warmly at me. She sat perfectly motionless and lovely, knees to the side so that her dress could fit in the chair, and I saw she had already loosened her bustle so that it lay more naturally. It must have been an old dress, something from her courtship with Mr. Levy long ago in Philadelphia, a shimmering vestige of girlhood and vanity.
And she continued to look at me, signaling something from deep inside her eyes. I looked back to Alice, who sulked in the settee, then to her mother and that mysterious smile.
"Where's Tillie?" I asked, referring to their maid.
Mrs. Levy shook her head. "A family emergency. Somebody's died, I think, or is going to die. In Sonoma, so we're all alone."
A tilt of her head, a blink of the eyes. What was she trying to tell me?
"Shall I make tea?" I ventured.
The room released its breath. Mrs. Levy laughed again and Alice let out a little snort of amusement, shaking the ebony wreaths of her hair, twisting the ribbons of light all over.
"Wouldn't that be wonderful, Alice?"
"Oh, absolutely wonderful, Mother. Stunning."
Her mother shot her a mean look. "I appreciate it, Mr. Tivoli."
I went into the kitchen, utterly perplexed. There, the tea things were already set out on a silver platter. I lit the gas of the stove in that old kitchen where I used to sit beside John Chinaman as he haggled with the bread and fish vendors who came to this back door. I boiled the water and made the tea while Mrs. Levy stood there in the room with me, humming something under her breath. And then, with no help from her at all, nothing but the encouragement of her pearl-drop eyes, I arranged the tea things in the parlor directly in front of Alice, who gave me a little breath of gratitude before setting at the cherry cake. I sat back. I realized they had been sitting in the parlor all afternoon, distracting themselves with hair and costumes, weary, thirsty, and half starved.
I was a fool; I had seen so little of the world that I didn't know what the Jewish Sabbath might mean to the Levys. Hughie, who had somehow heard of these things, informed me that my Levys had to get gentiles to do for them what they could not do for themselves. Heating or even serving tea for themselves was forbidden, he said, shrugging his shoulders. Another boy of Hughie's acquaintance knew even more, earning his pocket money by working at Temple Beth El as their "Shabbos goy," as he called it. "They pay me to put out the candles," he said, smiling. "Or take tickets. It's crazy. And they don't even pay me, they leave the money in a little pile, like they forgot it there." This boy (redhaired, skinny, whom Hughie liked but whose name I have forgotten) told me their holy book forbade my Levys from even enjoying a candle that one of us had lit unless we lit it for our own pleasure before they entered the room. I imagined Alice waiting in her dark bedroom for me to enter, pretending I had lit the candle for myself. There she would sit, gauging my own pleasure at the flame before enjoying it herself—would this be nothing less than love? It was as close as I dared get.
In reality, I did very few of these tasks for the Levys. Their maid, Tillie, though Irish Catholic, was a veritable clairvoyant in their household, understanding the least squint or shiver to mean the fire must be built again or the gaslights brought up a little. She knew which sighs meant tea, which tosses of the hair meant bathwater should be run, and though sometimes I heard the furious shouts as Mrs. Levy caught her stirring beef gravy with a milk spoon, and watched as the angry mother stomped out back to bury the defiled object, Tillie kept the Levys in the same great middle-class comfort that we, upstairs, Protestantly free to boil Saturday tea, were enjoying. I wonder, though, how devout they really were; I've learned since that some of their practices were unusually lax, and that neither of them really believed in God. But they did keep up this Sabbath ritual, even if, in truth, they rarely needed me to aid them.
But memory reverses, sometimes. The things we did every day diminish into specks and unequaled events, chance encounters, bloom like ink spots on the page. So while the Levys only needed me on rare occasions, these are the times I remember from those months at South Park when they lived below us. I usually brought Hughie along for reassurance, and once he even came with Mother, on one of her few outings in the months before my sister was born, to a meal at the Levys. We all dressed carefully and had a few sips of sherry before we made our way down, and I had the time of my life because, somehow, with joke-cracking Hughie to distract the mothers, Alice at last began to notice me. Seated between me and my friend, she paid no attention to the younger man but kept drawing letters in her potatoes that I tried to mimic in my own, and while I knew this was a childish game we were playing, I pretended that these were messages for me, and that if I paid attention she might spell out some urgent call for love.
"Alice! What are you doing! And Mr. Tivoli, I'm ashamed of you. A man of your age. But you're forgiven as long as you tell us the story of that chain around your neck."
Alice leaned forward and touched my necklace. "Nineteen forty-one. What does it mean?"
"Nothing."
"The year the world's gonna end?"
Hughie broke in and said it was the number of stagecoaches I'd robbed as Black Bart, which made the women laugh and forget my little golden tombstone, which I now hid under my cravat. I looked away from the conversation. Mirrors were set between the windows of the room and so gave me a view alternating between a scene of the backyard—in which an orange cat crawled across the lawn—and each of our reflections:
There was Mother, in her pearls and a jacketed charcoal dress that she had altered following a pattern in Godey's Lady's Book. She had an air of such elegant patience in the lustred light of the room that, rather than looking like a woman on hard times, she seemed like a duchess fleeing from her country in the costume of her maid. There in the window was the cat, padding through the grass. There was Mrs. Levy in curled Roman hairdo, canted forward with her head on her gathered hands, touching everybody with her intelligent eyes, as in a ritual. Now she looked at me with those light-catching girandole eyes, now she turned them on my mother. There, in the next window, the burning tail of the cat on its quest. Hughie, florid and sweating a little, was dressed all in butternut as if he were a Rebel soldier or a man heading out to picnic, touching and adjusting his oddly small-knotted bow tie in a gesture that might have been uncertainty or pride. In the window, the cat was on the fence, hovering, considering a leap into the darkness of the next yard. And there was Alice. Plainly dressed, neck long as a plume, hair up and womanly, she fondled her borrowed earrings with polished fingers, turned away from Hughie's joking as if from a burning thing. I froze and tried not to let her know I saw: there was Alice, sideways in the mirror, looking at me at last. The cat leapt out of sight, a flame off to another hell.
I should explain the wetted ink; these are not tears. Last night we had a thunderstorm.
We never had these in my San Francisco, so I hope I am not revealing my location too much by saying the hills east of this flat town act as nets, bagging us eel-swarms of electricity. I am unused to storms, and tend to bark and huddle like the family dog. In a way, this is useful, since it keeps my childish cover, but I don't want to be this sort of child. I want to be your sort, Sammy, the shouting kind, the brave kind. But there I am under the bed with Buster, both of us bristling and shivering away until the woman of the house comes to flick on the lights. Is it old-fashioned of me to abhor the electric?
Last night it burglarized the middle of a dream. I was with Alice again, in love again. I won't give you the details, doctors. All I will say is it was a lily pond of Alices, old and young, in aprons and dresses and pearls, and I was happy in my dream until it was bloodied by a stab of thunder.
"Alice?" I cried without thinking.
"Shut up," Sammy called from his bunk above me, and went back to sleep.
Light bloomed across the ceiling. The dog and I froze, awaiting the end of the world. A wait, a wait, you can never be ready enough, then it comes on—gotcha!—fresh as hate.
I must have screamed a little. Sammy groaned and called me a filthy name.
Buster was in my bed now, skinny and quivering like a tuning fork, staring at me with his little-girl eyes. He smelled of garbage but I could not put him out, so I pulled him towards me. He was operatically grateful but got nervous, lost his footing, and fell on top of me so doggishly that we both yelped and, embarrassed, scuttled in the sheets before the next blast of the fox hunt. A flash, a roar. We were a pile of fools.
A light went on in the hall; at least the current was still on. "You boys okay?" came your mother's voice.
"Yes!" I said.
Sammy: "Duckbrain's pissing his pants."
She came to me and held me. She smelled of sleep and cream and singed electric bed warmer. She cooed a boy's name in my ear. Then she patted my arm three times and left, taking tremulous Buster with her, and I felt, for once, as if it might have all been worth it.
"Jesus Christ," came your voice, Sammy, from above. You sighed, fell back asleep in the snore I know so well. The thunder made a long, dull quake in me.
I will keep writing. These are not tears, these are not tears.
Mrs. Levy always let me know when Tillie would be gone. She had all kinds of ways, but mostly she left a card with a corner torn, and every Saturday when we returned and went through the silver card receiver in the front hall, I longed to find her little message there. The moment I found the card, I went downstairs and, often as not, discovered the two of them in some kind of desperate situation that needed the slightest help from a gentile's hand to set aright.
One Friday evening, for instance, after I had been dining with Hughie on Market Street, where we'd glimpsed Mammie Pleasant, the voodoo witch, Maggie opened the door for me and showed me the card receiver, knowing I was always eager to find a message; I think she knew it had to do with a girl. I found the card with some excitement, but first I went to Mother in the sewing room and exchanged versions of our days while her sewing bird held another golden gown so recently dyed widow-black. I listened and nodded and finally withdrew and raced to the Levys' door, but no one answered. I rang a few times, and was about to give up when I heard a gleaming voice coming from around the side of the house: "Mr. Tivoli! We're out back!"
And there they were, sitting in the chill of the San Francisco summer night, in their warmest clothes. It was a sad scene: they had dragged their parlor's tête-à-tête out into the yard and were sitting on it doing embroidery by the light of the moon. Mrs. Levy wore beautiful furs I had never seen before, one of those enormous hats that ladies wore in the eighties, a dark tornado of feathers, and pale suede gloves that did not match. Alice was also in fur, a thin sealskin much too large for her, and a fur cap that made her eyes, in moonlight, seem like precious things brought round the Horn. They dropped their threads and laughed to see me. I discovered later they had been like this for hours.
It was unclear what had gone wrong; they knew Tillie was away visiting a dying relative, so Alice had lit the gaslights just before sunset and they had sat down to a good briskety Sabbath meal. Then—perhaps the gas cut out, or an open window brought a breeze—every light went out and they were thrust into cold and darkness; they had not even built a fire. So here they were, too tired to go and visit friends but too bored to sit in a dark room, talking to the taciturn ghosts of my grandparents through the walls. They had gathered their warmest family furs, carried the tête-à-tête into the moonbright yard, and continued their evening's activities, laughing and telling stories to each other in the brisk night air.
"I think I'll light your gas again," I said, having learned the way to phrase this thing.
"Oh no!" Mrs. Levy objected, this time more seriously than usual. "No, it's lovely like this. Bring a coat, Mr. Tivoli. And wouldn't a cup of hot coffee be wonderful, Alice?"
"Yes, oh yes," Alice panted through her skins.
I went upstairs and found my best frock coat with buttonholes of twisted black silk I thought might shine in moonlight. I boiled coffee and poured it into the electroplated Oriental samovar set on the table. Outside, I saw that Mrs. Levy had moved from the sofa to stand in a spotlight from the moon where her fur seemed to bristle with the instinct of its animal past.
"How gorgeous you look, Mr. Tivoli," she said, leaning against a tree and smiling as if about to start an aria. I poured the coffee into the queer glass cups they owned, and the ladies dipped down with eerily identical flower-plucking gestures and began to sip. I made some mmm's of pleasure and they laughed again, free to love the coffee they had both been craving. Mrs. Levy motioned ghostily: "Please sit beside Alice, she's a ball of warmth."
"I couldn't..."
"This coat itches," Alice explained.
"Please sit, Mr. Tivoli, you've worked all day and now all night."
I don't think people own these tête-à-têtes anymore. Some minor god must have been punished for bringing them down to us. A tête-à-tête such as the one I found wet with moonlight that evening was a sofa shaped like an S, made of two armchairs facing in opposite directions but sharing a middle arm. You must picture it: a couple sitting ear-to-ear, glove-to-elbow. So when I began to take my place as Mrs. Levy instructed, and looked straight at my befurred and itching Alice, I was closer to her than I'd ever been. The wind blew and a hair floated out from her hat, stretched into the air, and landed on my lower lip, sticking there like a fishing line. I felt the hook bleeding into my mouth. Alice did not seem to care or notice but merely smiled.
Mrs. Levy was posing against the tree, her fur falling open to reveal her scarlet departure from widowhood, which had taken place in the last few weeks. Jasmine bloomed around her. "Shakespearean again, isn't it, Mr. Tivoli?"
I dared not move or speak but stared straight at the mother, blinking. I noticed it was a full moon tonight and her movements cast shadows along the grass as if it were bright day. It occurred to me, as she talked, that she stood directly over her buried spoons.
Then luck broke over me. There was a sound from the front of the house and Mrs. Levy bowed theatrically before doing the unthinkable: leaving her daughter alone with the neighbor, this kindly, elderly man.
Alice said, "I think maybe I was born in the wrong time."
"What?" I tried to speak softly, not wanting to detach the hair from my lip.
She stared away from me to where the moon was cresting the trees. Then she said, "Tonight, for instance. I love it tonight."
"Well, yes..."
"Nothing modern. No kerosene lamps smelling things up, or gaslight. Hurts your eyes. No groups of people crowded around a stereoscope, or a piano singing another round of 'Grandfather Clock' for heck's sake. I wish every night was just starlight and candles and nothing to do. We would have so much time."
I was afraid any minute she might turn around and the hair would fall away, uncoupling us. I wanted to say something to keep her talking, looking at the moon, traveling back to her simpler age, but I could say nothing. I just kept still, looking into her eyes.
She continued in her slightly hoarse voice: "It's hard to imagine such a different life. We'd think about light all the time. You know that when it got dark in winter and there wasn't much light, you would have to do everything before sundown, well, there weren't any streetlights on country roads back then, were there? How frightening. And you couldn't read at night except by candlelight, and you probably saved your candles very carefully. Not like us. You made your own, they were everything to you, if you read books. And you had to read, what else was there to do? They had so few nice clothes they never went out. They didn't have parlors or nonsense like Wardian cases and kaleidoscopes or watching magic lantern shows. There wasn't any of that to do. There were just...people. Think of it."
Alice lay silent and I worked my nerve up to say something: "They went to balls."
She shook her head, still facing the moon. "I mean a long time ago. I mean before kerosene lamps, and I don't mean special evenings like balls, I mean evenings like this. Ones we like to kill with a parlor game." Then my young love looked at me at last and my chest went cold with fear: "How could anyone fall in love by gaslight, I ask you?"
"And yet they do," came a voice behind us. Her mother was back.
Alice was still looking at me. "Was it like that, Mr. Tivoli? Candles and long hours in the evening? When you were a boy?"
"No," I said softly.
"Mr. Tivoli isn't that old, Alice! Really! We had kerosene lamps when I was a girl, you know. And pianos."
Alice blinked for a moment and faced the moon again. "Too bad. I'm in the wrong time. I want all my nights to be like this."
Mrs. Levy seemed to be smiling. "I do like the moonlight."
Alice considered this. "The dark, too, and the cold," she said. "And the silence."
The last word came almost as a command; we were silent. Alice closed her eyes and breathed in the night air, and this action, just the contraction of her shoulders under the oily gleam of sealskin, detached the invisible hair. I was alone again. Mrs. Levy stood before me against a tree. She was looking up at the stars; you could just see her breath forming in the chill air before her face, a ghost mask. We were all breathing, all wearing these masks. It was like a play of some kind, with the bright moon and the furs and hats and the little audience of spoons below us; I did not know what it meant. I saw Mrs. Levy lower her head and smile; I saw Alice breathing openmouthed up to the stars, her cheeks webbed with color; I saw my old hand resting against her sleeve, desperate to tap a code of some kind to her. I saw how the moon had dropped into her cup of coffee. It struggled there like a moth. Then I saw her lean forward, her mouth in a silent kiss, and as she blew on the furrowed surface to cool it, I saw the moon explode.
Later that night, after I had lit the gaslights, carried in the tête-à-tête, and started a fire in the Levy house, after I had lit the shortburning candles in their rooms, I went upstairs to find Maggie standing like the sewing bird with a sealed note in her grip:
Max: It's more than I can bear. Come to the garden at midnight.
—the girl downstairs
Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like memory. So I didn't hesitate. I took the note from Maggie and threw it on the fire. I changed my clothes to finer things and blackened a wet handkerchief by wiping the day's soot from my face. I remembered the moon in a cup of coffee.
She was there in the garden. The moon had set; I could only see the glow of white showing from under furs. She was sitting on a bench beneath the trees. The twigs cracked under my feet in the dark garden and she stood, silently watching me approach. Off far away a fire engine sang in steam. A night-blooming cactus in the yard was on full show for no one in particular. I came closer and I could hear her gasp; I could see her holding her hands together and then, when I was close enough for her to see me clearly, she took my arm and whispered something before she kissed me. I was still and quiet and shocked. Seeing my frightened eyes, the widow was unable to hold in her laugh; she leaned back her head and out it came, that string of pearls. Reader, I was seventeen years old.
Dear Mrs. Levy is dead now, buried south of San Francisco in the Jewish part of Colma. She died in her seventies, after a prolonged illness in Pasadena, where her good daughter tended to her almost daily. Her skin became spotted and pale and she allowed no visitors in her last years; she took to wearing her old widow's veil when her lawyers would come with documents for her to sign. She died without a penny to her name, and I picture an older Alice weeping by her mother's bed, holding a hand so thin that the rings no longer fit her fingers. The cold hand of my first lover.
I will be discreet. We must be gentle with the dead; the dead can say nothing for themselves. I will only tell you she was kind and generous with me over the weeks we spent together in the darkness of the garden and, more than once, in the midnight dangers of our South Park. She was confused and touched by the innocence of old Mr. Tivoli, and I think she took my trembling and moodiness for love, because after we were done and I lay shivering and gasping on the ground, Mrs. Levy would stare at me and, just for a little while, her eyes would star over in tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and though she had often been lonely, our nights were not desperate ones for her. They were simply "a little honey for my heart," as she always whispered in my ear. Mrs. Levy, you never said it but you probably loved me. You were kind to me and I treated you badly and in some hell you are all smiles today, measuring my private seat of fire.
Why did I do it? Why, when my poor eyes squinted into the garden and saw not my sweet Alice's face among the fuchsia but her mother's, did I not step back into the house? No one would have been hurt; it could easily have been construed as nerves or, better still, propriety calling for nothing further to be said of women in dark gardens. And nothing magic happened; the strands of starlight did not bind me to the spot; I could have left at any moment. But I was young. She thought I was an old businessman with a butterfly heart, but I was an ordinary boy of seventeen who had never known what it was to smell a woman's hair that close, or feel a hand brushing his skin, or see a face unlatched with longing. It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window and not your own heart. Brave or carefree people will not understand. You, Sammy. But for some of us, the young or old or lonely, it might seem a palatable substitute and better than we have. We are not in love, but we are with someone in love, and the spare dreams of their days are all for us.
Think of it: I had never been kissed. And I had no sense, from my life as an old man, that I would ever be touched or loved by a woman. I was unprepared for my own body; Hughie's books had taught me what was what, but not what I might feel, and it all happened quicker than my dull mind could handle. From the moment Mrs. Levy took my arm under those trees, she moved without doubt—my very presence there meant I was willing—and I, heavy with doubt, could not keep up with her hands and kisses and her little whispers like folded birds placed in my ears. I could not keep up with the heat under my skin, or the scrape of her nails as she undid my shirt buttons and I was bare to the night. The body, that pale spider, stuns the mind; it wraps it up in silk and hangs it from a corner so that the body is free to go about its business. I awoke to find myself lying in the phlox, hardly able to breathe, while Mrs. Levy sat above me, glad-eyed; lunarly barebosomed, stroking my hair and whispering: You're a good man, Max, don't worry, you haven't touched a woman in a while, have you? Max, you good, good man.
I was Mr. Tivoli on the steps and in the mail, but I was Max in her arms, dear Max, handsome Max, strong and eager Max. I had never heard my name said so many times, in so many ways, all of them tender and good, as if that name—which always tasted of hard tack in my mouth—were so rich it could only be indulged in quietly, carefully, within the secret antechamber of my ear. It was the first and one of the last times I heard my name said like that, because though women have gasped a name into my ear, it has seldom been Max. Sammy, have you heard it yet? You have had so many Sammys said to you—the "Get in here" Sammy, the "Aren't you a laugh?" Sammy, the "Come out and play" Sammy, the "Don't bother me" Sammy—but are you old enough, reading this, to have heard the very different and surprising Sammy that comes from a girl in love? For once, someone is not calling you or informing you or addressing you at all; it is not talk. She is saying it for her own pleasure, because though you are there before her, saying your name calls forth not the past Sammys she has held, but a future Sammy she imagines still kissing her like this. So Mrs. Levy conjured up a future Max, a strong man always lying in the phlox and breathing hard, and I was so unused to the feeling that I accepted him; I became him for a while, for I still answered her notes and, after a time, recognized the signal of shades in her window: one up, one down. A wink in the night; for young men in old bodies, my God, isn't that reason enough?
Of course I didn't forget my Alice. It took everything I had not to let the ah-hiss of her name escape into Mrs. Levy's ear, and I considered it a kind of tribute that Alice's face often played fairy-lamp-style in my mind while I trembled in her mother's embrace. Also, my situation allowed me greater access to the household below, and Hughie and I (complicitous Dempsey always came) spent many an evening carving at a fat, hard roast and surviving the older Levy's version of "Listen to the Mockingbird" in order to delight in the pleasures of the younger Levy's piano renditions of Civil War marching songs. Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! we would sing. Alice stuck her tongue into the air as she pounded the piano, Hughie would bellow along and punch the air to break his boredom, Mrs. Levy blew every word like a kiss to me, and dear old page-turning Mr. Tivoli harmonized with a smile. I had one hand on the music and one pressed decorously against Alice's lacy back, where I felt the buttons of her spine beneath the buttons of her dress and, on every blessed Pea!, the sweet convulsion of her frame.
Mother did not come to these events; she was laid up the last weeks of her pregnancy and took daily doses of whiskey to keep her from the dangers of hysteria. Before my evenings at the Levys I would bring her dinner up to her and tell her, as always, about my day at work in the belly of Bancroft's brick whale, how the funny white-haired hatless man sold me the Call and I read about the three Haymarket Square anarchists still waiting to be hanged. Together, as always, we went through the cards from the receiver. She told my tarot. I read to her from a Cosmopolitan magazine that she was perfectly capable of reading herself, but she always closed her eyes and listened. Later, after the parlor entertainment and before the tumble in the phlox, I came upstairs to kiss her lips and snuff out the smoking candle beside her.
I was sent out of the house when she began to go into labor, and Hughie and I found ourselves in an old banker's bar drinking growler after growler of ale. From the ceiling sprang a Hindu serpent of paper, endlessly writhing down into a basket, and men picked it up from time to time to read the latest world events. Hughie wore a new mustache and was all in black; it was his uniform at the Conservatory of Flowers, the park's greenhouse where he worked.
"Have you seen the Victoria Regina?" was his new line with girls, referring to the popular name for the gargantuan water lily he tended, and they always blushed. You see, Sammy, in those days this was a racy thing to say.
"How's the Leviathan?" Hughie asked that evening, as always using his filthy term for my good neighbor.
"Oh come now..."
"The boys at the conservatory want to know if it's true about Jewesses."
"You told the boys?"
"Oh not the details. But are they the hottest?"
"Hughie, I don't know any other girls. In fact, I don't know girls at all. Mrs. Levy is a woman."
"You don't still call her Mrs. Levy."
"I wish I called her Alice."
"Not that now. Think of nice things. Tell me about your Mrs. Levy..."
I was wracked with guilt. I might pretend that this was all a way to bring myself closer to Alice, but every time I saw her on the lawn pulling weeds from her wilted helianthus, every time she turned that worry-pleated face to me, I went hollow. I was betraying the very thing I meant to save. I was unraveling from one end everything I wove from another. "How Greek," Hughie would say. I suppose it was an oft-told tale; I suppose I was not the first to make a mess of love, but it never matters, does it?
I told Hughie all the things I cannot tell you, not from bragging, not from adolescent pride, but because I dared not keep a diary in my mother's house; I had to scrawl my memories in him. For instance how Mrs. Levy prepared for our evenings by wearing a kind of sponge with a long thread for removal, how she eventually produced a pig-gut device for my own use. Hughie was fascinated. He was my great companion, after all, as mystified by everything as I. All we knew of sex was in his father's books, and I now realized they were mostly aberrations. Of course, what was I? Would my Mrs. Levy ever have loosened her corset for a boy of seventeen? It was my deformity that drew her, my mild monsterhood. Yes, Hughie always knew the whole of my life. Well, almost the whole.
The men at the ticker tape muttered and growled over news of a dam break back east, covering a town in thirty feet of water, killing thousands. The bartender asked if I wanted another for my son and myself.
I began: "He's not my—"
"Dad needs another," Hughie broke in, grinning, then said to me: "Drink it down, Dad. I have to tell you something."
Off in her high room, that instant, my sister was being born. I am glad to report that no one screamed except the newborn girl and nothing was smothered except a mother's worry; red gleaming Mina was lifted into the world gulping like a lungfish, coughing, and then as the cord was severed and she was made as lonely as any of us, she sang out and Mother could see through the green mist of the chloroform pills that here was her baby. Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pearls to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.
And I myself was growing a little older as I listened to Hughie's story. What he told me loosed a loneliness I had not expected. Hughie sat all in black, a grave man telling a grave thing, pausing only to accept his steam ale and to blow the foam from the top, turning back to me with the soft eyes of a temple cat. "Don't be angry," he kept insisting, tapping his nail on the bar just below a carved insanity of hearts and thorned initials. "It's nothing to me, I swear, it's nothing." From above, the smoke-trail of paper floated down into the basket, as if returning to its burning source, as if something other than myself were running backwards in the world. But nothing else does; the world falls forward when it falls apart.
They were a few brief words. A cluster of glass. You see, while I was romping with Mrs. Levy in the corner garden, my Alice had fallen in love. Simply, brutally, in love. With whom? With Hughie, of course. Who else?
Doctors, an update:
I have survived an examination just this afternoon. I avoid physicians as much as I can, and especially since I have become a little boy, but the thunderstorm of the other night has given me a sore throat. I tried to hide it with lozenges and smiles, but swallowing Mrs. Ramsey's cooking has gone from a small torture to an impossibility. All I can do is moan and grimace. The dog is terrified of me. And you, Sammy, have been teasing me mercilessly. So I have been taken to a little bungalow in the nice part of town, a windowless place with movie posters and a spool of gauze to play with. Mrs. Ramsey, that kind woman, bathed me in her concern, gave me a dry kiss, and said she would be back. So for almost an hour it was just me and the gauze and the movie-poster nurse. I have memorized the snowy battlements of her cap.
Dr. Harper turned out to be a jokey fellow with the stainedwood look of a Hollywood leading man. He stared into my throat and squinted for a while before he spoke to me.
"You don't feel well?"
"I'm fine. It's a sore throat."
He shook his head and took some notes. "It isn't. It's something very different. I've never seen anything like it." A little laugh.
Was it possible? That half a century of doctors, who had bled me, blistered me, purged, sweated, and electrocuted me, could not discover what this man caught in an instant? I have withstood Rushians and Thomsonians, Grahamites and Fletcherizers and Freudians—so had I become an old lake bass that, lazy with slipping so many barbed nooses, gets landed by a schoolboy? I am an old man; I do not understand the world as it is, and it seems entirely possible that the new century has found an X, Y, or Z ray to sound out a man like me. Still, in this small hamlet on the plains? I calmed my impulse to confess; I sat still as a child.
"I need some measurements, old man," he said, smiling mysteriously.
I shivered, then he took my height, my weight, the length of various bones, peered into my ears and eyes and listened thoughtfully to the off-key radio of my heart. I noted the numbers myself, but knew he could not tell that I had shrunk two inches in the past year, lost a proportional amount of weight, and now owned only a tight snail-wad of genitals. I lied about my medical history, giving myself an infant hernia operation, chronic bronchitis, and a handful of allergies, just to handicap his game. Throughout, he tried to interest me in little jokes, but I was elsewhere, floating above, terrified that my choking swallow was that clue, in boys' detective stories, that always reveals our young hero to his foe.
"It's all very clear, old man. Let's find your mom and dad."
"She isn't my mother. And my dad's dead."
"Oh," he said, startled for the first time.
"What are you going to tell her?"
He grinned and tousled my hair. "I'm going to tell her everything about you."
They spent a good ten minutes in his office while I waited in the outer room again, dead or dying of something, thinking how to interrupt their conference, perhaps counterfeit a yellow fever attack, and realizing with a dull laugh that I was showing my age after all: the disease had been wiped out by 1900. That very moment, I heard the movie-reel sound of adult laughter in the hallway and there they emerged, my Mrs. Ramsey looking so young, amused, and aglow. I was handed a green candy wrapped in paper; Mrs. Ramsey wrote down the name of a novel she recommended; Dr. Harper took the note, then gave a wink and a serious wave before departing again; and before I knew it we were out into the always-fresh sun of my new hometown. I put the candy in my pocket beside the pills I had carefully pilfered from the exam room. Then she told me my lot.
With men like Dr. Harper around, I will be forever safe. It turns out I showed early stages of what doctors call parotitis. That is to say: the mumps. A child's disease. If the quack proves to be right, I have swollen glands to look forward to and days of fever in my bedroom. But he is certain to be wrong. Have you ever heard of mumps in a man of nearly sixty?
Mrs. Ramsey took me to the drugstore and bought me a chocolate bar, a pair of roller skates and a silver toy army pistol much like one Hughie used to own. For you, Sammy, she bought the Ruf-Nek chewing gum you love. For herself, she browsed the cosmetics aisle and laughed and giggled over the potions before choosing an erotic shade of lipstick and two kinds of eyebrow pencil. She examined the scents, frowning, and finally learned from a pink-eyed clerk that her favorite cologne had gone out of style and had to be specially ordered. I asked her what it was. "Rediviva," Mrs. Ramsey replied with a sigh. I produced the doctor's prescription, which I had enhanced with my own forgery, and she took it dutifully. Then it was an easy trip to the pharmacy counter, where this little soldier became the proud owner of potassium, quinine, and a lovely blue bottle of morphine. We live in a golden age.
It was almost a week before I had him break her heart. Your heart, Alice, your bruised-peach of a heart. I did not do it out of spite; I did it because it was absolutely necessary. Now, looking back, it would have been far wiser to have Hughie run into her arms and bedevil her with cheap diamonds and carnations, and whisper sticky things into her ears; nothing turns a girl like an amateur's heart. She would have dropped him in a fortnight, I think, and not because she was stupid or fickle, but because sometimes we are frightened when the bomb we're planting goes off in our own hands. And if I had done this, what would have come of it? She would have hated Hughie, and probably me through association; she would have fallen for the next handsome boy she saw, at one of those dances she loathed attending, gone out with him, and, finding herself waiting on a foggy corner one afternoon, her heart would have been broken after all. At least this way it was managed by someone who cared.
Hughie agreed to do just as I said. He was to meet her at the Conservatory of Flowers, where she had taken to visiting him after school, and break her little heart with the sharp crack one employs to split a geode. He was to be gentle but firm and leave no tatters of love hanging in her chest; she was to be cleansed of this ridiculous sensation and thus find herself open to, even grateful for, the love of an apparently older, more considerate man. Hughie wondered at the plan; he thought it was remarkably cruel to such a pretty girl. "Pretty?" I asked, suspicious. "Did you... did you do something to make her feel this way?" He denied it and agreed to the task. At first I was going to hide behind a fern to watch my bit of theater, but he said this would make him nervous and he'd probably foul it up. So I was sent home and there I waited for word from Hughie that he'd cleared the brush for my arrival. I sat in the parlor and tried unsuccessfully to read; I set out a card game for myself but kept losing. I ended up finding one of my father's whatnots—a monkey's head encased in glass—and stared at it for over an hour, finding in its grotesquery a brief escape from my own.
At four o'clock, the front doorbell rang and I heard Maggie speaking to someone in the hall. I had told her I would be in for anyone except those calling on my mother. Presently there was a knock at the parlor door: Maggie, telling me there was urgent news. I waved my hand and poured a glass of whiskey for myself and one for Hughie. I steadied myself, looked out the window to where two squirrels were at war. I heard a wretched voice:
"Mr. Tivoli, I need your advice."
It was Alice.
We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world—the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has—it will not sacrifice itself. It is not a heart, at seventeen. It is a fat queen murmuring in her hive. I wish I'd had it in me, when Alice stepped into the room looking so drowned and desperate, when she fell to her knees and sobbed so hotly into the wool of my pants, to send her back to Hughie. To stroke her hair (though I did that) and cup her chin in my rough hand (that too) and tell her he would kiss her in an instant; he was a boy, after all, and she was a thicket of beauty. To say "He'll love you" and "There are ways" and turn into the tilted light of the room as she wiped her face and blinked and readied herself for another battle. To let her go. But there was no heart in me. When do we grow one? Twenty, thirty years after we need it?
Instead, I looked at the head shuddering on my knees; I stared at the pale furrow between her braids as if searching for the source of a lost river. I waited until it was time to touch her, and then I did, and she did not shake my arm from her shoulder or my hand from her head but emptied herself even more into my lap. Without knowing it, she and I were conjuring her father, and we each played our parts—Alice weeping unashamedly, Mr. Tivoli hushing and shushing her—until her sniffs and gasps meant it was almost over.
She began to speak: "It's Hughie, Mr. Tivoli." I slipped my finger into the loop of her hair ribbon.
"I know," I said, then added too silently for her to hear: "Call me Max."
"He was a monster, a monster, he said..."
"What did he say?" With a tug from my finger, her ribbon fell out of its knot; I shivered; she did not notice.
"He said...he said he wanted us to be friendly. Idiot. He said he didn't want to spoil a sweet moment."
I sipped my whiskey nervously. Hughie had improvised from the script; he had treated my Alice like any girl he met on the street. "Where were you?" I asked quietly, wondering what else he had added.
She sniffed and sat back, letting my hand fall from her; the spell was undone. "It was at the Victoria Regina, like always. I always meet him there. He can usually get away for a minute and it's quiet there and you can just stare at the lilies. I was...I thought I'd be brave and ask him when he was going to take me out. And he said...oh, he said I was just fourteen. And that he wasn't interested in girls like me. At fourteen. Not that way. Girls like me? Are there really other girls like me?"
This was a little off the script, but close. I imagined Hughie getting a little stage fright, there in his uniform beside the enormous lily pads, and whispering whatever came into his head; possibly, he was truer than I'd intended. "What else?"
Some memory cut her and she winced in grief. "He said he loved me like a sister. I'm not an idiot, Mr. Tivoli."
"Max. You're not, no, no, Alice..."
"I know what he was saying. He was saying he can't ever love me. Wasn't he? Or... was he maybe..."
"No, no, Alice, sit here beside me..."
"I don't understand," she murmured.
I touched her shoulder again. Then I made a mistake: "Just forget him, Alice."
She pulled away and I saw that she hated me. It happened so quickly; one minute I was an understanding friend, a father almost, and then the next I was an old man who knew nothing of love, nothing of passion, a man who could offer only his own sad poison. But to see that hatred in her eyes; it felt as if she was gone forever and no plan of mine would ever bring her back. Hughie might wreck her heart a hundred times, but if I told my Alice to forget him, to find a sweet and loving boy nearby (perhaps nearer than she ever imagined), she would send me out of her life. She would turn again into the sullen downstairs girl who never thought of me. Those eyes, threaded with hate like opals, burning off the tears; I would have done anything to change them. So I sputtered as she looked on. And then I discovered what she had come to hear:
"I'll talk to him, I'll tell him... I'll mention you..."
"You will?"
"I'll tell him how beautiful you are."
"Does he think I'm beautiful?"
"He does. He thinks you're the most lovely girl."
"Oh my."
"Yes, the most lovely girl he's ever seen."
"The most lovely girl..." she repeated.
Alice left my parlor happier than when she entered it; she left with all these stupid promises of mine, done just to keep her in the room, just to force one more occasion for us to talk and to make a secret between us, for this was to be kept from her mother at all costs. I nodded, pursing my lips. When she left, she kissed my forehead, and as I smelled the soft cotton at her throat, I thought of how I was more than a confidant to her, more than the sharer of a secret; I was her only route to love. As she had once depended on me to light a Sabbath fire, so now she depended on me to bring some word to warm her heart. And though I knew the smile faintly forming on her face as she left was not for me, and the sleepless night she would spend was not over my bearded face, still I was there in it somewhere. I was a houseboy of her heart. When we are very young, we try to live on what can never be enough.
Alice, what are you thinking, reading this, now that you are old? You know where this is leading and I'm sure you have a different story. One, perhaps, in which you are more lost and innocent, a little piece of Alice-glass chiming in the window, or one full of details I can never know: how Hughie laughed at your cleverness; the thick, erotic pads of the Victoria Regina; the angry way you missed your father; the weird sensation of that old man undoing the ribbon in your hair. While in my version Hughie is just the man who happened to block the light, in your memory I'm sure you loved him for specific reasons, as we think we do; you still warm your hands over the ember of that early love; you could never be convinced, in your old age, that it was only chance.
I told your mother—did you know? Of course I did. I told her, as a secret between us, that you were in love with Hughie and that he did not deserve you. This was not a lie, but it was cruel; it was meant to make her huff and sigh if you ever mentioned Hughie. Looking back, this could only have made you love him more.
One night, you were different. You will remember this. One night, Maggie let you in and you were a stone daughter striding into the room. You didn't sit on the rug and blush; there was no blood in you that night. You chose my father's old chair, arranged your braid, then stared at me and said, with no accusation in your voice: "He doesn't love me." You waved away every one of my words, wincing just a little, and kept repeating what you were now too smart not to see. He didn't love you; no, of course he didn't. It had been clear from the beginning. You wore a gaudy young girl's necklace and cheap shoes that fell from your heels. You produced a cigarette from a reticule and it was as if you said: I am now a woman who does these things. At fourteen, a woman who does these things. I stopped talking and let you build this other woman from smoke, breathe her into being there in the room. There was silence while she turned, all hair and tendons, in the slant of moonlight. When she was gone, I was the one who fell to the floor at your knees and wept; I can't say why. You were the one who touched my hair and said soft things that gave, as always, little comfort.
Then I heard you murmur something I cannot forget. You said, "I feel so old."
I lifted my face. "What?"
You shook your head, latching the thought back in.
"You can't feel old," I said.
You just rocked a little in your chair, your hand on my head as you lit another cigarette. The room held you in the curve of some shadow. You looked as old as you would ever be. You said, "Like I'm floating above my body. And I watch myself and my little stupid movements, how I put the kettle on for tea or brush the dust from the braid on my dress, complaining how it gets so filthy, sitting with Mother and reading the visiting cards. It takes so little to be myself, and I've done it for so long, being so little, doing such little things. But most of me is floating above, watching. As if it weren't my body. Part of me knows something that it can't bear to tell the rest."
I sat, stunned, feeling the burn of your words. A woman whose body wasn't hers, floating outside her life; you would understand, I thought. You would know what life was like for the sick, timetwisted boy who was in love with you. I watched you smoking, as if the smoke could keep the coldness in your face.
"I want to tell you something, Alice."
"I don't want to talk."
But it was too late; I had begun to say the thing my mother taught me never to say. It felt like the first words of a spell, though, the kinds of words that try to lift a curse. "I have to tell you. Listen to me. You don't have to talk. Just listen."
You took your eyes down from the gaslight and they were alive again, for a moment, and I think you hoped I was going to say something about Hughie; I think that even after this last no, still it was not beyond belief that there would be a yes.
"I'm not... what you think I am, it's not what I am. I know what I look like." I was speaking roughly, between hard breaths. My throat was gagging on this foolish thing, but I went on: "Alice, I'm... I'm seventeen. Do you see? Alice. I'm just a boy."
I felt a little rapture when your looks broke open. I think you had never considered me to be another person in the room; here I was, listening all this time, the messenger of renounced love; here I was, kneeling before you on the carpet; and all this time I had been as wretched as you.
"I'm just a boy."
I saw a sadness beating at the back of your eyes, an insect dying behind a screen.
"Do you believe me?"
"Yes."
You will remember: you held my face with both hands and, thumbs out, wiped the tears from my cheeks. There was blood in your face again; your eyes were moist like my own; you were my old Alice thinking, Let's one of us be happy. There in the parlor you saw through me and knew how young I was, younger than you; you gripped my face and were the soothsayer for both of us, pursing your lips over something bitter, then nodding your head in slow degrees before you kissed me. You will remember: it was you who kissed me that evening in the parlor. I tasted that last coil of smoke held in your mouth; it tasted like a word, like a yes. From some other room we heard a baby's undulating oh. You kissed me and did not pull away or change your mind; you drank from me like a thirsty girl. I was the first to say he loved you. You will remember.
I wanted to see her first thing in the morning; I could not wait. It's true I had not slept since she whispered, Mr. Tivoli, Mr. Tivoli, and stood to rearrange her hair and calm her swarming breath (I did cause something there, at least) before leaving me. I sat in my chair as my sister wailed into the night, and of course in my imagination I continued that evening with Alice as far as a moral man could, and then I set the cylinder back in its cradle and replayed each moment in the music box of my mind.
As I lay in bed, I went over the scene I had been rehearsing since dawn: what I would say to Alice. I had an addict's rage against himself, the rage of a reformed man waking to the evidence of his night—a scorched pipe of opium, a cold and beaded vial of ether—but feeling inside him, gnawing past his first reproach, the love of those long-desired objects; his arm is already reaching across the bed. I had to see her. Why had I told her I loved her? It might have cost me everything. But no, I rationalized, no, she needed to hear about love; everyone does. Don't they? Didn't she? Oh God, and I had said I was just a boy; she had believed me. Had she? Perhaps it was sweet, or perhaps for her it was just as it seemed: an old man wetting her face with his gross kisses. But as much as I tried to search the details of her face in the gaslight of the evening, I lost her more and more. The past had its back already turned; there was no speaking with it.
I plotted as well as I could. I would smile and laugh and pretend the night was nothing in particular; that I, like her, was baffled by tangled human moments like ours. I would apologize; no, that would give me away. I would pretend it was a private joke of ours. The old man, the old neighbor, a private joke. Unless, of course, unless I could make out on the surface of her face some ripple of hope. I got out of bed, eager to see her as soon as possible, if only to know of my fate.
"Mr. Tivoli?" Maggie's voice came from the door.
"Yes?"
"I have your coffee and a note."
On custard stationery on the silver tray, beside the toast. One edge of it was dark with spilled coffee; I glared at Maggie and she left. A note from Alice, I thought, and felt relieved. What a coward I was. Now I would not have to confront her; I could know, in a few lines, what that first kiss had meant for both of us. Here is how it began:
Max,
You are a monster of the lowest kind. You are a false, betraying criminal. You are a sick, blackened, evil old man and I cannot believe I ever cared for you. To have betrayed me is nothing. To have seduced the mother is nothing, used me up, is nothing. You may toss aside my old broken heart, it doesn't matter. But Max. You have touched my girl, my Alice. And if this mother ever sees you again, I am sure to tear your eyes out.
It was only much later, of course, that I pieced together what must have happened. Alice, late at night, arriving home in a teary whirlwind of confessions. And Mrs. Levy, sitting in a black nightgown, listening, feeling her heart fall to pieces inside her. She saw only an old man, her lover, pawing her daughter with reechy kisses. She could not have understood it was a boy of seventeen, like in a song, stealing a kiss.
But I was thinking of none of that. I was reading quickly, trying to figure out what I'd do now. Maybe a full confession, disease and all, with Mother as a witness. Maybe have Hughie talk to Alice once again. And Mrs. Levy; well, perhaps she was still in my thrall. A few perfect words and I might be saved. So I read on.
More hateful, overwritten stuff, pulled from the deepest well of a mother's rage. Some upsetting parts about the police, immediately retracted. And then a final bit that chilled me:
Enclosed is a check for our last rent. Our furniture is all taken care of, but there is nothing to reveal where we are going. Oh, Max, this much I will ensure: you will never see Alice again. Nor me, my moonlight love.
Overwritten, yes, but I could tell at last what I had done. To have peeled her clothes off in the garden, night after night, and listened to her giggling in my ear. Her moonlight love. I had never thought about her, in all my worrying over Alice; she was an adult, of a different world, and I'd never considered she might be just as fragile as her daughter. And yet it seems quite clear that I shattered poor Mrs. Levy. That I took perhaps the last love in her old heart.
I heard horses breathing and battling their reins out front. A panic seized me, and I ran in my nightclothes to the window. That childhood sound of hooves and springs and leather, that old carriage noise, and below me I watched a hired two-in-hand clattering away. Black and dull, it rattled slowly across the light, the isinglass unrolled so I could see two faces in the window. There she was. My love, my sweet girl, shaking in the cage of the carriage, in traveling clothes, a bag on her lap, eyes closed against the dust cloud of her future. That was the end of the first time I loved Alice.
Sammy: this is a letter from the front lines; I write this with you in the room. With you asleep beside me in this bed, muttering through some shallow dream just as Buster twitches through his own there on the floor. My writing may be shaky, for it turns out Dr. Harper's right, after all:
At nearly sixty, I have caught the mumps. And you, poor Sammy, have caught them as well.
At first Mrs. Ramsey, feeling my improbably swollen gills, sent me alone to the "sewing room," as she calls it, to suffer in solitude among the scraps of her unfinished dresses—I can see fabrics of cherries and corals and reclining geishas; or are these perhaps my fever's inventions? I have been so sad in my sickroom, writing in my journal, burning in and out of my fever like a lighthouse. But today I awoke to find a brightly opened door and another little boy being shoved inside.
"Better get it over with," your mother said as she dragged you to the bed, poor Sammy.
"Jeez, not with the duckbrain!" you shouted.
"With the duckbrain. In you go," she said, and folded you, still complaining, into these sheets warm from my sickness. That old folk wisdom, that it's better to catch it as a child than as a man—well, everything's reversed in me, I guess. I remember fifty years ago when my mother took me for a carriage ride and I was thrown into a goose-down bed with hot, irritable Hughie. Mumps again, but that time I was no child; I did not catch it. I remember Hughie's moans and mutterings made it impossible for me to read my Boys' Life in peace, and I lay for a week beside my best friend until he reached a level of sanity to throw me, perfectly healthy, from his bed. You, Sammy, burn brighter.
You lie asleep in the bed beside me, in an equal fever. Earlier today, after another throat-probing from chuckling Dr. Harper, we stared at the ceiling and tried to name the shadows we found there. We like to guess from sounds in the hall what your mother is up to, and from sounds outside what the ridiculous neighbors are arguing about, and you make up fantastic stories to soothe our hot brains. We are forbidden sour things, and so eat gruel night and day until we are fairly sick of it. I am your friend again, Sammy, the only other boat on this particular sea, but I am worried. When I wake from a hot sleep, I find you watching me curiously. I hope I have not been mumbling. I hope that in my fever I have not given too much away.
But what a lucky chance this virus turned out to be. To lie so close beside you, Sammy; to time each breath to yours. Fathers have traveled this far for less; dying fathers, we have traveled across the world for less, for glimpses, for the carried voices of our sons.
II
MAY 30, 1930
Forgive the gap in these pages; I have finally recovered from my illness and have found myself, once again, in school.
It is a humiliation, to say the least, to recite my times tables with this Midwestern crowd of children—five times twelve is sixty—but the hardest part is to keep my voice as quiet as I can, my profile low, so that the teacher (a woman exactly my age) won't notice that odd boy in the corner scribbling his life's confession. I'm not the only child who hides this way. Some of the poorer students, with cardboard shoes and nits in their hair, sit in the back with me and glare out the window, or at the wall where seven chromolithographed presidents stare down, each with his signature hairdo. We try to fade into the plasterwork; we are the classroom ghosts. "What's the capital of China?" the teacher will ask one of us loudly, and we will quake and pause and answer, predictably: "France." A smirk from the adult, a laugh from the good kids up front, including my own dear son, and we move on to history. In a moment, I will move on with my own.
But first, Sammy, let me put down that you love me. Something in your long fever must have burned away your doubts and, after the gauntlet of the hotbed, I am once again your bosom friend. You pass me notes while our forefathers dump tea into a Boston bay; you blink and feign narcolepsy while redcoats march in lines across distant states; you allow me to see your pencil art—the automotive wonders you would produce, all bristling tubes and fold-down gadgetry—as Valley Forge swallows its frozen victims. This morning you were the ink monitor and soberly filled our clay inkwells to their brims before gaily dropping a tiny frog into mine. Until it perished, gagging on the lampblack, the creature left a leaping pattern across my lesson book so exquisite—a hail of dark roses falling from the sky—that I will try to place it here in this memoir as the only evidence that I am not lying, Sammy. Your father was beside you all along, grubby lad. And you did sometimes love him.
Onward.
I was a dead thing after Alice.
I turned eighteen, nineteen, twenty, entering the first chill of adulthood, losing the last of my gray hair. I went to work each morning at Bancroft's, I coughed at the dust of books and came home late each night, the man of my own family. I took care of Mother, little sister Mina, and the receipts and details of 90 South Park Ave no. 2. I was also in charge of no. 1, that ghost-rapping flat below us, dealing with the new renters; they were gentile and I was never called down on Fridays to pour a forgotten cup of tea or light an untended fire. Instead, I was the dispenser of paint and polish, the boss of the chimney sweep.
Alice's departure led to a maniacal obsession with the trivia of their escape and the discovery of their trail. I spoke with other Shabbos goys I had run into, badgering them until they agreed to ask around the Jewish homes, and the temple the Levys frequented on their well-dressed Saturdays. I had Hughie stalk the dress shops where the elder Levy bought her clothes, dropping flirtatious hints about his missing aunt, her lovely girl; I found myself prying open the floorboards in the bedroom, convinced I had heard the creak of a hiding place; in short, I lost my mind. But there was no trace.
Hughie tried to help me. He took me to see Lotta Crabtree perform her leather-lunged parodies of Jenny Lind, all burnt cork and fright wigs; he bought me tamales on Market, strawberry sodas at Slaven's, milk baths at Anna Held's in the Baldwin, and a nickel peek at the grand full moon one drunken night on O'Farrell.
But Hughie had his own concerns. By twenty, he was no longer the lanky custodian of the great Victoria Regina, dusting that vegetable vulva with a long-feathered mop, but had become something else entirely. He now sipped brandy in warm libraries and sang foul choruses of "Goober Peas!" in arm-over-shoulder quartets; he sewed initials into his old bright blouses and bought new ones, brighter but finer, and new collars, stays, and spats and various tweedy, glittering things. Hughie took up a clever and cruelly argumentative style of talking, a handsome sideways grin, and a few phrases—"Ye gods!" and "I swan!" and "exflunctication"—that confused the rest of us. He had all the excitement of someone newly allowed into a great country, all the tics and warts of pride, and the glow of someone happy and relieved. You see, without a word to anyone, a mention of any hopes or applications, Hughie had landed at Berkeley on scholarship, and now he had become that rare thing in my South Park: a college man.
A neat fold in fate, I think, for Hughie to climb from tutor's son to starry student while I, the once-rich monster, burrowed ever further into the honeyed Bancroft warrens. But as a dear soothsayer told me once: every face card looks back underneath.
My beard turned an autumnal chinchilla blond and I wept when Hughie told me to shave it off. "You have to decide," he said, "whether to be old or young, and I think you've been old long enough." It was a disaster. The beard, it's true, had made girls turn away from my grandfatherly face, but the mustache I kept made them laugh; I seemed too much like those widowers who brush hair over their bald heads and dye their skin a summer's bronze in winter. An antique gigolo; a joke. My waist was thinning with the receding tide of my twenties and I looked less and less like a burgermeister in a Brueghel, but these changes seemed impossible, artificial to anyone who knew me more than a year. Does he wear a corset? I could hear them snickering at my workplace, so I had myself reassigned, and spent the rest of my career at Bancroft's in solitude, hidden by old books. Hughie's taste in dressing me was hopeless, and after stepping out proudly one sunny day in one of his inventions—shirtsleeves, a cap, and white belt-looped trousers—I soon realized I looked more like a tightrope-walker than a gent. Mother, of course, agreed; her wordless face repeated: Be what they think you are, be what they think you are. I went back to my frock coats and opera hats and hid, once again, in the anonymity of old men. I would be old until I was young, no sooner.
As the years passed, my only companions were my sister, my mother, and Hughie. I was the priest of Alice, keeping the sacred embers glowing until her return, and then, when I could learn nothing of her whereabouts and as the years passed on without her, I became the widow to my own hopes. Like many men before me—like my missing father, I believe, and perhaps like my dear Hughie—I numbed myself to life.
And there was Mina, my beautiful and ordinary sister. At six, seven, eight, she never wavered from the charts of typical height and weight, had as much talent at the pianoforte as any young girl should have (none!) and, in short, was never precocious or particularly bright. The only thing she could draw with skill was our carriage horse (shivering Mack); any other subject became a bristling slide of paramecia. She was polite to a point, but also liked to scream in a rage before bed. In fact, her moods were not recognizably adult in any way and seemed more like the facets of a con man's dice—gorgeous piety, prim respect, bitter tears, wild lava-spouting ire—that could be weighted to fall wherever most suited her. My point at last: she was not a real person. True children never are. She was a fraud striving to be human and was, therefore, simply (and printer please put this in your plainest type) a regular girl.
Despite this blessing on our house, I was not allowed to be a regular man. Remember that to the rest of South Park I was still Mrs. Tivoli's brother-in-law, living out the last years of his bachelorhood in plodding duty. Mother decided very quickly that no chances could be taken with a child—especially not chatty Mina—and so I was introduced to my own sister as Uncle Max. "Mina, give your Uncle Max a kiss before he leaves, no, don't pout, dear girl, that's it." She didn't call me Uncle Max, of course, because from some odd church lesson she felt that, like Adam, she should give every man and animal her own proper name. She began buy calling me Uncle Bean, and through a series of edits, I became Beano, then Beanhead, and eventually my final name: Beebee. She would shout it with joy in the morning—"Beebee!"—and the same way at night when I returned, with attention-getting volume at dinner when she wanted the gravy, with sorrow when I took a vase from her shattering hands, and last of all with wistful remembrance at night when I pulled the counterpane to her chin and sang to her, which she used to love.
I was envious of her youth. You can't imagine what it was like to hear girls screech at her from across the park and find that same, bloodlusting shriek coming from my sister's lips—and to realize with a shock what childhood was for her: belonging. So new to the world, she was already a part of it. To be so favored by nature; to know of no reason why anyone would not love her—in fact, to have no suspicion that one single person in the world did not love another—made her into a creature so enviable that, at times, I hated her. Each morning, I would stand in the doorway of her room watching as her eyes blinked at a day as standard and blessed as the last. As with so much else, of course, I hid these occasional splinters of hate within my flesh. "Good morning, little one," I whispered.
"Oh Beebee!"
I am a kindly monster, of course; I do not deny the world its lovely things. Its Minas.
Mother had changed, too, over the years. She had been brought up carefully, trained to be loved, so I could never have blamed her for practicing her birthright. Men came by now and then: a banker, a saloon owner with a gold cane and vulcanized rubber fillings in his smile, an actor who wore a wig. They were not so bad, but they did not stay. Instead of turning to a man, the last of which had abandoned her so ruthlessly, she turned to her daughter. Mina became the purpose of my mother's life, and that, of course, meant money. So Mother went to work.
For a while she kept her occupation secret. It wasn't seemly for a woman to work, and the career she had chosen was out of the ordinary. Her clients usually came when I was at work and Mina was at one of her dance classes, but nothing can ever be secret for long in San Francisco. The first clues were feathers left in the front parlor from very expensive hats belonging to ladies far richer than Mother was used to seeing. And then, one morning, a strange woman appeared at the front door and told me she had an appointment.
"With whom?"
She wore an expensive outfit of fur tails. "Madame Tivoli."
"Madame..." I repeated.
Mother was already rushing to the door, saying, "You're early, you're early!" and quickly got rid of the woman. She walked back into the parlor and it was there that I confronted her.
"Mother, what is going on?"
"Nothing, little bear."
But I was the man of the house. "Tell me now."
She did. In a voice so drained of life that it implied an anger too great to be expressed, she explained exactly why a rich woman would stop by so mysteriously in the morning, and why another was due this afternoon. She said this, handed me her card as proof, and then told me: "Now don't ever talk to me that way again. And I don't want to hear that you are embarrassed, upset, ashamed. This has nothing to do with you. This is about Mina. Take this tea into the kitchen and wake your sister or she'll be grouchy all day." She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty. The women who sat this way are all dead now.
Her calling card said it all, as strange and simple as electric light: "Madame Flora Tivoli, clairvoyant." After so many years in the sewing room trying to speak with the past—her lost husband, lost girlhood, her son growing backwards in time—now, for the sake of her good, beautiful, ordinary girl, she would make money in commune with the future.
As for Hughie, he and I were closer than ever, and had our own adventures. We were young men, no matter what my looks might have implied, and we did live near one of the crudest, filthiest, liveliest places on earth: San Francisco's Barbary Coast. It was located east of Chinatown, where the old town square used to be, just close enough to the docks for sailors to stagger off their boats, spend all their dough on drinks and whores, and stagger back by daybreak. The kind of place where bars offered any man a twenty if he spotted a waitress wearing underpants. Our parents had warned us against it since we were boys, at church the preachers spoke in low tones about the vice that went on over there, and local leaders were always making up curfews to keep young boys away. Of course we went as soon as we could.
Our first couple of times down at the Coast were innocent failures. We were young dupes, of course, and when a beautiful blond waitress offered us her house key to visit her after work hours, we gladly accepted. "Shall I trust you, sirs?" she asked, biting the lipstick from her lips, and we nodded our innocence. "Well, I can't have you keeping my key, so what will you give me to show trust?" We offered a little money, finally settled on twenty dollars, and she smiled and dropped the key onto the table with a whisper of her address. Hughie and I were all giggles and liquor when we made our way to that boardinghouse at around two in the morning, but by two-thirty we were sober and solemn. The key did not fit any lock of the building, and we were halfway around the block, trying every door we could, when people began to yell from their windows and we realized we had been taken. Later, on our way back from drinking, we would see young men like ourselves trying keys in doorways all across the city, and by then it was our turn to laugh at youthful lust and folly.
I do remember one detail from those drunken days that drove me mad: in every bar, every deadfall tavern, I saw advertisements for Klondike suppliers for the new gold rush: Cooper & Levy. Levy, Levy—that name, blazing at me nightly. I took it as an emblem of my own insanity, a concoction of the chemicals of my brain. How maddening: I could not forget her, still, even here!
One night, Hughie's college friends (who thought I was his uncle) took us to an actual brothel. I cannot remember what the outside looked like; they were all the same. You rang the bell and some sweet Negro woman answered and led you into a parlor which opened wide onto your left and there—it was always the same—the room was decorated so richly and gaudily you would think you were among the wealthy on Nob Hill who, by coincidence of their taste and budget, bought at the same furniture shops as the madams of Pacific Street. There in that parlor the lady of the house would greet you. They were always lovely in the way women used to be—not slender and breakable, Sammy, as you seem to admire—and always blond.
"Gentlemen, what would your pleasure be this evening?" she asked. She was in a long yellow gown covered in a fine black netting on which were sewn, as if plastered there during a storm, large silhouetted leaves. A thistle pendant lay between her quivering breasts. She was as stout as a bottle but had a pleasant lightness in her movements, especially the way her hand kept brushing at her cheek at if performing some private spell under her ear. Her eyes picked every one of our pockets and I seemed to sense a relief in her; here were a few boys who would be easy to please.
"Perhaps a virgin?" she offered slyly. "We have a sweet girl staying with us, she's in the bath now, so it will be a moment. She is of course much more..."
"No thank you," Hughie said sharply. We had all heard this ruse before.
She blinked and smiled; his whipcrack of defiance seemed to amuse her. No, that's wrong; it touched her; it softened her. She gave us a new, lower voice with the boozy grin: "Then, boys, maybe you'd like a better deal. I've got viewing holes in her room. A country gentleman has just joined her, he's quite excited and may not last long, so I'll give you a very good deal."
Hughie's good friend Oscar, a tall dragoon of a fellow, thanked her and declined for us all, though Hughie seemed nervously intrigued. The woman tried to interest us in bottle beer and half pints of liquor at bad prices, and then showed us the intriguing automatic harp on the sideboard, which took only pennies and nickels. This was another way to lose money in a brothel and we had enough only for one thing. Hughie said what one always said in these places: "May we see our choices?"
To which the woman—Madame Dupont was her name—turned and shouted out what madams have shouted in San Francisco for all time:
"Company, girls!"
The other boys had their heads bent back to watch the girls descending the rainbow of the stairs, but I was oddly captivated by Madame Dupont. As she looked up at her harlots, pleased by her collection of youth, the shadow they cast on her thinned her face, darkened her salon-treated hair, and in an instant I recognized her. The thistle pendant. I must have made a noise; she turned towards me, her face warped by time as through a quizzing glass, and I nearly laughed aloud to think who this proud and powdered woman used to be.
"So, Max, you've been in love!" Mary remarked, for surely you've guessed it was my old gossiping maid, who, accent shifted slightly south to French, hair bleached "back to its natural color" as she said, now went by the name Madame Dupont.
"I what?"
The boys were already upstairs, having taken their time in choosing among the girls who—in this particular house—all wore satin negligees to just below the hip and little stocking caps as if awakened from their sultry beds. I waited for the last ring of the register before revealing myself to my old servant. Her maquillage crumbled for an instant and the old Irish servant rose like a Gaelic witch from a lake, but soon Madame returned and took my face in her hands, kissing me in leopard spots across my forehead. I was given a free bottle of champagne (quite an honor; these were her most lucrative goods) and she informed me I had been in love.
"How old are you now, Max?"
"I'm twenty."
"Twenty, God, you still look...I mean, it's something. If I didn't know I'd think you were a man my own age." She blushed, a finger to her nose, "Which ain't much more than twenty, a course." There was the old accent, springing up like wild thistle.
"No, I'm really twenty."
She lifted her neck and my old maid was gone; she was once again a woman with an unbreakable heart. Her pearls dropped into the rolls of her neck, those signs of beauty that we used to call rings of Venus. "Should I envy you, Max?"
"What?"
"You should have been a woman," she said, looking at me intently as I imagine she must have examined every one of the girls upstairs, the girls who, like her, had fled from bad domestic jobs, or men, or families. "I know, I can tell you. A woman, all she has is her youth, and if she's smart she invests in it, gets all the jewels it can earn her. I have a sapphire from a prince, Max, and I got it when I was twenty-six. That's right, when I was working for your family. When your parents went to the Del Monte hotel for the weekend, I used to have men up to my room to make a little money. Don't be shocked. Every girl does it, even maids in good families."
I tried to turn the conversation my way. "When did you stop being a maid, Mary?"
"A maid, what a question! Ha! Oh, you mean a servant. After your grandmother threw me out."
"But I saw you at Meigg's Wharf."
She cocked her head. "Was I wearing a servant's dress?"
"You don't remember? I was with my father, and you had an iris—"
"That's an old trick, Max. I earned a lot more pretending to be a servant girl than I ever did being one. Rich men, they liked to pick me up. That was a little gig I did for a while before I got in a house. And then I got this one when Madame Dupont died. But we were talking about you."
"You've had a hard life, Mary?"
She slapped me down with a stare. "You don't get to talk about my life. Whatever it is, it's all I could make of what your family left me."
"I wasn't—"
"Your grandmother's dead?"
I nodded and told her my father was gone as well, that Mother and I lived in changed fortunes in the old South Park house. "I guess you wouldn't know. We live in different worlds..."
"We don't. You're in this parlor, I'm in this parlor. That seems like the same world to me."
"I...well..."
And then she changed again. "More champagne, dear?" she asked, smiling. It was like this the whole time, with old gay Mary coming into view and fading like the streetlights we had seen along Pacific that very evening, glowing and dispersing in the gusts of fog. Perhaps this was what she had become: a trick portrait flickering among the women she might have been. "I was saying you'd have been better as a woman. You'd have been ugly when you were young."
"I was ugly."
"You're still young, too, but for a girl it'd be lucky. I wish I'd been ugly. Ugly girls never have to worry about marriage or children, not unless they get desperate. And you wouldn't get desperate, Max, because you'd know your best beauty was before you. That you'd be lovely when you're old and wise. To be beautiful and happy at the same time."
"I'm not either one."
"Way of the world, boy. Should I envy you?"
Her stare, sharpened by the scattered light of her pendant diamonds, was broken by the arrival of a strange character in the parlor. At first it appeared to be a stooped-over old cleaning woman, but I quickly realized it was a man in a plaid woman's dress, scarf, apron, and cap, entering the room with a feather duster and an ashcan. Madame Dupont rose, unsurprised, and kissed the man on both cheeks, then began to give explicit instructions on which rooms needed the most attention. She treated him like a beloved servant, and the creature, who seemed as bland and mustachioed as any man on Market Street, nodded faithfully as she talked. When she was done, he handed her a gold coin and left the room. The coin barely caught the light; she slipped it into her pocket with the swiftness of a stage magician. Then she returned to me, smiling but businesslike.
"Yes, Max, now people pay me to be my maid. Things change, boy." She did not sit down with me again. She just gathered our empty glasses and said: "Don't ever come back here."
She was tidying her parlor without a glance to me. The awful baubles and whatnots of her professional life were being put back in their sad places; the automatic harp was relieved of a fingerprint on its gilt back. And within Madame Dupont, the bars were going back on the windows, prepared for the next ringing bell, the next entrance of the Negro maid and some covey of snickering men. She spoke and she arranged the room: "A woman like me enjoys believing she was always the way she is. And when I'm legitimate, I'll believe I was always that. Don't come back here."
I wordlessly took my hat from the post. I fit it onto my old man's head and—I can't explain it to you—I began to cry. Monsters will do this. Mary softened at once.
"I'm too rough," she said, frowning, touching my arm. "It's because of how you look, like a policeman trying to strike a deal. Oh, don't take it that hard. Look how unhappy you are. Did she love you back? Of course she didn't. Not you, not any of us, they never do. Oh all right, I'll get you a girl, not that it ever helps, Max. And next time you pay like everybody else." She was true to her word, of course; I paid each one of the many times I visited her house over the years.
Within a moment I was at the stairs, being directed towards the landing where a young woman waited with a smile and jaguar eyes. I don't recall her very specifically; she held a long feather and kept waving it lazily through the air; her hand appeared and she crooked a finger towards me. I do remember I was magically drawn to her, for I was still young and sad and eager for comfort. "Max," I heard behind me, and I looked back down at Mary. Curiously sad, the old blond gal, and who knows why? Perhaps it was the wasted opportunity of my condition, the poverty of advancing age, or maybe just the sad gold-dusted air around her.
"You know I'm glad you came," my old maid said at last, chin lifted in the gaslight. "All my life I thought time was not on anybody's side."
My writing has been interrupted by fortune, and I must write it down. Sammy, it's wonderful news: I may soon be your brother.
Mrs. Ramsey, the lovely lady, has said nothing yet, but during one of my long sleepless nights (old age does not reward all the frankfurters I am fed) I decided to rifle through her desk. Don't think this was the first time it occurred to me—I long ago became a juvenile delinquent—but I only recently discovered where she keeps her key. Have you found it yet, Sammy? Or are you one of those boys, those happy boys, who are incurious to all the secrets hidden around them? If so, it explains how I have managed to keep this journal for so long. In any case, you may find the key in the linen drawer beneath the Christmas cloths. That is where I found it last night, with Buster as my companion, and he dutifully padded downstairs beside me to the study.
There, in her desk, I found something astonishing: a set of adoption papers. She had filled them in only as far as printing my name in her formal Victorian hand. I believe my date of birth must have stumped her; there is only a scratch of ink as if she were thinking and let the pen's weight fall onto the page. I will try to let my birthday slip—I am supposedly thirteen in September. I held the pages to Buster's nose and he sniffed them with admiration in the moonlight. "It's going to happen, Buster," I whispered to him, rubbing between his eyes so that he closed them in delight. "I'm going to be with my son." A little groan of pleasure from the dog.
Brothers! Would you like that, Sammy? Sharing your knee pants? Breaking your sled? Doing your homework for you on the brisk walk through the February slush? There is no use asking you, even in the privacy of our room, even as we lie submarined in the zebra-striped midnight. You are the kind of boy—you are, Sammy, you are—the kind who will break any heart he's handed.
So tonight, I celebrated a little; a mistake. Having cased this house thoroughly in my midnight tours, I knew the hiding place of the bootleg gin and mixed myself a tiny little Martinez (their proper name in San Francisco, where they were originally made with maraschino, an ingredient that seems to have been lost along with the z). I sipped it out of a juice glass while Mother prepared dinner. Now why did I do such a thing, I who had not had a drop of booze in some time? I don't know, my nagging Reader. Perhaps the old man was weary.
The liquor made me warm and kind. All through dinner, I silently smiled and found myself staring too deeply into my future mother's eyes. I kept thinking of those papers, the possibility of a family, a home. Mrs. Ramsey squinted, concerned, and smiled back. When you started telling jokes, Sammy, I laughed with your mother, but for some reason both of you looked at me strangely. I discovered myself to be sitting with my feet on the table, juice glass raised high, giggling as hysterically as a harlot in a pub. Reader, I was blotto. I quieted, pulled myself into a more sober position, but I was disturbed. Clearly this new body of mine had never heard of a Martinez.
Luckily, Mrs. Ramsey went to get the ice cream and, when she returned, opened up the topic of my stay with them. I was overjoyed when she turned to me, saying, "Hey, kiddo, you've been with us awhile now. Hasn't he, Sammy?"
"He sure has," he growled, mushing up his ice cream with a spoon.
"You getting along, you heathens? Staying up late whispering? You know I hear you."
"He's the one whispering. In his sleep. A complete freak."
Mrs. Ramsey: "Sammy, hush it."
"What do I say?" I shouted. Too loudly, I think.
Sammy spooned some of his cream, slurped it down, and became an astonishing mimic-mask of my face: "Please stay, oh stay, stay!"
The ice cream coiled like a cold snake in my intestine. I decided it would be best to laugh but I lost control and became a chattering hyena.
Sammy snickered: "What's up with you, duckbrain?"
Mrs. Ramsey stared at me with sharp interest, then gave out a bemused little laugh. "Oh my Lord, he's drunk."
My glass was found and in it she smelled her old friends, gin and vermouth; Sammy launched into his own fit of hysterics; I was taken to the sink and given a short speech and a tablespoon of black pepper to coat my wretched tongue and now here I am. "Grounded" for a week.
It's no great punishment—this duckbrain rarely ventures out—but it was a fall from grace, and worst, worst of all, was the look in her eyes: the thick thunder of doubt. Not at my behavior but at her own, for even considering taking this feral thing into her life. Oh, Mrs. Ramsey, reconsider. You do not understand how far I've come.
I must stop writing. Obviously I am still drunk.
Morning. Slight hangover; not everything grows young along with me. Sammy, oddly enough, seems wary of me and, perhaps, impressed that I found the gin. No, I won't let you know its hiding place. Let me scribble out a little history before this headache does me in.
"We've gotta go, old man," Hughie told me one evening over beers. "I mean one last time."
Years had passed, and both of us were changed—older, younger, respectively. We sat in a bar near my friend's bachelor apartment, blowing the foam from our steam ales; it was where we often met, in those years before we grew apart, but that evening Hughie had a purpose. He pulled out the newspaper, and though by then he was a man, there was something boyishly anguished in Hughie's face when he showed me an item on the third page. "We've gotta go," he said, blinking and wincing at memory. It was a former Hughie, a young and strawberry-nosed Hughie, who informed me they were tearing down our Woodward's Gardens.
The place had been closed for years. Professor Martin had sailed his last ascension long before, lifting into the air in his weightless metal droplet to the awe of those last children, tossing his last paper roses into the last leaping crowd as some stillunknown misfortune popped the dimpled fabric of his ship and sent him, a fluttering scrap of glitter, to his crumpled death on the ground. No other balloonist took his place. Nor did any new monkeys replace those in the Family House who, after years of heckling the proud Victorians with their heathen commedia dell'arte, were found one morning on the floor of their cage wrapped in each other's dead embrace. Woodward himself died in the late eighties and it was only the furious infighting of his daughters that kept the place open for a few last acrobats and flame-eaters, last visitors to the dromedary whose hump had gone tonsorially bald. So this was the last event, an auctioning of every piece of plaster, and what they called "the removal of the animals."
I knew what this meant: it was my last chance to see him before he was led away, old Splitnose Jim, the imagined savior of my such-as-it-was boyhood.
We arrived just in time to see the coyote cowering in the threecornered amphitheater. Men lined the stands, suffering the soft streamers of rain, and Hughie and I took our seats and watched as a young man holding a dog's muzzle approached the lean and mud-streaked animal. "The removal of the animals" was mostly a rodeo, of sorts; we had all come to see our favorite wild animals roped, corralled, and penned for their new homes. To our surprise, the coyote made no move; it just stood there as the man inched closer. Every moment we thought it would hear the pack howling in its blood, but it never did. It shivered in the rain and sniffed a stone. It bent its head to be muzzled and was led off through the stands, licking its new owner's hand. We were not pleased. Next came the lioness, which had been sold at auction to a Chinese highbinder (whom you would call a "mobster," Sammy, and admire as a hero). The lioness and the Oriental entered the ring together, as if in some odd Roman ritual, and I was surprised to see both the poor girl's lazy walk and the object that the highbinder produced from his suit pocket: a pistol. He brought it to the animal's soft, squinting face and fired only once before she fell in thumping misery to the dirt. He did the same with the jaguar and hyena, the latter giving just a little chase and gargled song before submitting in a heap against the wall. Hughie and I sat steel cold with shock.
"Oh my God it's a slaughter."
"Hughie..."
"They're just killing them one by one."
"Maybe just the wild ones," I said, watching the tall Chinese man ordering the hyena dragged out by its legs, its spotted hide covered now in dust. "Maybe to keep us out of danger." But another minute proved me wrong; they had brought out Splitnose Jim.
I did not want my bear to be that slow or old. I did not want to see him roll his feet across the wooden planks as he entered from the grate; I did not want to see him sway with sniffing, senile pleasure at the meal set out before him—enough carrots and soup meat for a den of bears—or see into his mouth as he stared out at us and yawned, showing how his old man's teeth had worn down almost to the gums. I did not want to see him blinking as the sun came out, licking at the air until he decided to lean back against a fake stone and enjoy the warmth. His keeper had thrown a piece of rope into the pen and Jim kept glancing over at it while he tried to doze, finally deciding it was worth investigating, but I did not want to see the way he swatted at the knotted hemp, curious, until submitting to some long-bred playful urge, sitting on his rump and batting it back and forth as if this were any day of his life. I could not tell what kind of pity to feel for Splitnose Jim; he, at least, did not know if he was young or old. He was merely a paw with a rope. Liver was set out in a silver bowl but he ignored it. The sun arrived again and brightened his fur. Moments later, the German stepped out with the gun.
The crowd began to scream. Hughie and I were pounding the air with our voices, trying to stop him, but the rest of the men shouted advice: "Get him closer!" "Move the liver!" "Shoot for the head, the head!" "Get his legs!" This did nothing to Jim, who was used to crowds of all kinds, but the German got nervous. He was a butcher from North Beach and planned to sell Jim's meat to specialty restaurants at a hefty profit. With his beard and chapped hands, he would have looked more at home in a back room with a bloodstained mop than beneath five tiers of half-drunk onlookers. He stood wide-legged in the arena and glared out at us with his gun by his side.
"Be quiet, you! I know all about it!" he shouted to the mob in a thick accent. "I don't need no advice! I shim him right in the butt of the seat!"
And this was what he did, just as Jim dropped. his dainty tongue into the liver bowl. The butcher cocked his gun, shaking nervously, and after a fast exhalation of air, fired off a shot that hit Jim somewhere in his haunches. The old boy gave a long, rough bellow, turning around and around, coughing and grunting. Blood smeared the planks in a flourish. The German watched, startled, while the crowd shouted gaily to the bear the way people do to poor women standing on the ledges of high buildings, urging something to happen, something terrible, anything to happen. Jim noticed the crowd now, and barked at us like a seal; some men laughed. Then, picking up his rope in his jaws, my old friend made off towards the entrance to his cave and slipped inside. Across the stage, he had left a long rubrication in blood.
Now the crowd went crazy with advice. The bear was gone, hibernating from death; the German stood frozen except for a nervous lip-twitch; the hour of battle was passing and the audience would have none of it. "Scare him out!" they shouted, or "Let him sleep!" or "He's dead, go get him!" One man yelled out, "Sing 'Oh, Dem Golden Slippers'!" which made the crowd spew laughter, since this was what audiences commonly shouted to dull minstrel performers. But no one moved in the pit below us.
Years later, when talking over this memory in a tent somewhere in Nebraska, Hughie bald and gray-templed and myself boyishly blond, we agreed that the image that stayed with us was not of Jim roaring out of his cave a minute later, terrifying the poor gunhappy German and staggering blindly around the perimeter of the stage. It was not my bear shitting the floor as a new hail of bullets pelted him, or how he fell in a whining, terrified mound. It was not the ten minutes or so we spent watching his gore trickle across the wood, damming up in a clump of leaves before soaking them and running on towards the wall, that stinking eternity it took for Jim to bleed to death. We best remembered the stage before his reentrance, empty except for a hunter and a shining flourish of blood. A scene from a children's opera. How the sun spotlighted the very sawdust point where Jim would make his curtain call. How we all shouted for him. The straw, the beer, the hopeful wait for the star. The thrill when his shadow hit the floor where he would die.
We left while Jim lay on the floor in the pile of his own blood and shit; I could not bear to watch. I only heard the German shouting and shouting, and the crowd applauding, and I imagine they must have dragged my old Jim out of the bear pit where the creature had performed for twenty years. I'm sure he died in confusion; I'm sure he could remember nothing of his youth in Yellowstone or wherever he was born, or his life on the streets with a ring in his nose. I'm sure he did not know he had grown old or that nobody loved him anymore. He died in plain confusion, perhaps thinking that all this would go away if he performed his old tricks for the audience, balancing a peanut on his nose or roaring to the sky, but he was surely tired; or perhaps he thought that when he opened his weary eyes, he might be in a forest full of trees and creeks of salmon, buzzing bees, and roaming bears. For I am sure he had not seen another bear for thirty years or more.
Hughie was married in January of 1898 and went to war three months later. It was a sweet and informal ceremony at the bride's parents' home in the Fillmore; the time was half past three. Hughie and I wore frock coats, striped cashmere trousers, patent leather boots, and tan kid gloves—as well as top hats, of course; I can hear you snickering, Sammy—and in his buttonhole he wore an enormous sprig of stephanotis in the accidental shape of Prussia, which, like that dead nation, threatened to invade the rest of his coat. The bride was a plump-cheeked beauty with the strained eyes of a devoted reader; the daughter of a newspaper editor, the young woman, like those strange creatures who exist only at the salt point where freshwater meets the ocean, dressed and walked like a society girl but nudged and guffawed like a seamstress. She wore a white dress and a bonnet, not a veil, because soon after the ceremony the couple departed in a coach bound for a destination known only to me. I went ahead to handle the luggage and pay the porters, and when Hughie and his new wife arrived, they seemed in awe of themselves as if they had done something never before accomplished. The coachman said that the wedding guests had thrown slippers and one had landed inside: good luck. A left shoe, the bride informed me, was even better. The coachman produced the item: left indeed. There were kisses, solemn promises, and with an exhalation of steam, my youth departed.
Why did he marry? I don't know; for love, I suppose, or something like it. Young men do marry, after all. But there was something hard won about Hughie's marriage, almost as if he were closing his eyes and diving backwards from his life. Something sad, you see? I can't describe it. All I can give you is a small moment I remember, one of many from the blizzard of days, a night of no importance at the time.
I was drunk and angry. It had begun earlier in the evening, when I came home from a miserable day at Bancroft's—walked home, in fact, to save on money—to find a piano recital in full flower within my parlor, all ladies in taffeta and stiff aigretted hats and a corps of girls in lace berthas. Some confident child was at her instrument, tearing Mozart all to shreds, and I watched her whitegold curls wriggling in the electric light before I realized this was my Mina. Happy, beloved, ignorant of life: my Mina. I felt a presence beside me; it was an ugly woman in heavy brocade. She looked over my thin clerk's clothes, then said, "Here, man, get some more cake for the girls," and stepped away. I did not know her at all, but I knew the tone: it was that of a woman used to talking to servants such as me. I was twenty-five.
I fled to Hughie's. He was a lawyer by then and owned a building so ridiculously small and fairy-tale that I referred to it as "the Pumpkin." The streets were dark, as was his house, so I rapped lightly on the door. No answer. As his best friend, I had a copy of the key, so I let myself in. I thought maybe I'd help myself to his sherry and a snack. "Hughie?" I called, and there was no response.
Then I saw light glimmering from the library—the light of a fireplace, wavering like water in the hallway—and I wondered if he was simply asleep. And so I stormed down the hall and into the room. I was so selfish a young man it never occurred to me that Hughie might not be alone.
He was not; there was a letter. He held it before the fire with two hands as if it were the tiny dead body of a lover, and he stared at it as if some new breath might bring it back to life. A simple letter; a page. Hughie was dressed in just his suit pants, shirtsleeves, and an undone cravat, leaning into the sphinx-headed arm of his ridiculously Egyptian chair with the posture of something firming up against collapse. The fire sent its apprehensive light over the room, polishing and tarnishing the objects around us. A noise came from the chair as if my friend were gently choking. I admit I see these details only in retrospect; at the time, I had nothing on my mind but the sherry in his cabinet.
"Ah, Hughie, got a drink for your pal?"
He shook, startled, and I was such a fool that I laughed. But he was not facing me; he was facing the fire now, and just as he might drop it into a mail slot, the letter went neatly into the flames. He jerked back when he had done it and almost immediately his hand went out again to catch it. But the letter was buffeted by the waterfall of fire, and except for one small fragment, it burned into a kind of fragile film that floated up the chimney in one piece.
"Hey, what was that? Ain't got a log?"
I heard him laughing now. "Get us a drink, old man," he said.
"Who's the host here?"
"You are for once. I'm dead tired. Hey, I'll find us some H and we'll have a little party. I feel like a little party."
We had one. By the time I was back with the whiskey (I had changed my mind, as always) Hughie was up and dressed again, bearing in his hand a vial of his wicked hashish and two pipes which lay bedded together in their velvet like the beginning of a grand quotation. He was all aglow from the fire. He found us some cold beef and potatoes, then entertained me late with his liquor and his pipe. At first, the smoke was pleasant enough to send us both into a calm stupor. I looked up into my skull and it was as plain as the interior of a parasol, as full of indistinct shadows. We both lay there in solitude, together, as friends will, but soon we were restless. We set up a game, but as the hours filled with whiskey, as the cards were dealt and foolishly laid down, I fell once more into my own worries.
"I'm unhappy, Hughie."
"So am I," he said without looking up.
I fiddled with the pipe lying there on the table. "No you're not. You've got a lucky life. I want your life."
He spoke in bitter tones: "You may have it."
I did not notice his voice. I never thought of Hughie as unhappy for a moment, and it would have annoyed me, I think, for him to take on such a new role so late in our friendship. Melancholy was my birthright, not his. I lifted my hands into the darkness above the globe of lamplight. I said, "I want this stupid house, and your stupid girls." I waved towards him, saying, "I want your young looks. I want nice clothes that people my age wear instead of... my God, look at me, I'm still wearing my dad's pantaloons!"
He smoked without expression. "I don't want to talk about your clothes."
"You get along so fine. Most of us mope around about some woman or another our whole lives, nothing can make us happy." I fell into a momentary pause as I considered what I meant by this. I looked back at him and said, "But you're happy even if nobody loves you."
Oh, he looked up now.
"Shut up, Max," he said.
I laughed. "I mean who would love you? Your Pumpkin House. Imagine some woman in here yelling at you to get rid of your smokes. Get your feet off that ottoman! Where's your good coat? Not here. You don't need it," I said, coming out of my dark haze and smiling. "Who could love you? You're inhuman."
He said nothing but just looked away from me, down to where the one unburnt scrap of letter lay on the hearth as white as youth.
"I'm wrecked. Can I sleep here tonight? I won't vomit this time."
"No," he said, standing up and going to the scrap of paper. I could have read what was on it if I'd wanted, but I didn't care back then. I was too concerned with myself. The scrap went into the flames, unnoticed, and Hughie stood with his back to me, staring at the fire. He said, "The maid comes in the morning and she gossips with the neighbors. She already thinks I'm a lowlife. I don't need drunks on my sofa." I heard him laughing now. "And you will vomit. I'll call you a cab."
"It's Alice I miss."
"I know."
"It's Alice."
"Okay, Max."
"Thanks, Hughie, I love you."
I could see his whole body outlined by the lightning flashes of the fire. He did not move for a while and neither did I, intent to sleep there in my chair where I was happy. The fire spoke, chattering like a madman, and then quieted again in a helix of sparks. My friend, so still and copper-outlined in the dark, said something so softly that I cannot, even more than thirty years later, hear what it was.
It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.
In the morning, I would remember very little of that night, and Hughie never mentioned it to me; I'm sure he had heard many stupid rants from drugged and drunken friends in his days, and forgave me, of course.
And that first afternoon of his husbandhood, he waved to me gaily from the window of the train. I suppose he married for love, a little, but largely he married for fear, as most men do. But it is not for me to describe Hughie's heart. He met his bride within months of our chat, took her out in streetcars and carriages all over town, ate Chicken in Cockleshells at that old great San Francisco restaurant, the Poodle Dog, and asked her to marry him within a year. I was not consulted on any of this except the color of his gloves (tan, as I told you). But how funny it is with men: they will beg you loudly not to leave them at the pub, but they will go off and marry without a word, as if it did not concern you in the least.
Hughie took his commission right after the wedding and headed to the Philippines, where his captain took Guam from the Spanish in a single afternoon. Meanwhile, Mother's business did well, mostly because she had the brilliant idea (or vision, as she put it) to become a specialist in Civil War dead. Women in old lace caps came by the hundreds, sitting in our darkened parlor while Mother summoned up the horrors of Cold Harbor: "There's dead men a-lyin' in over five acres here, and I'm among them, Mama...I ain't got no legs." She gave it in such detail that the stunned women often forgot to pay and had to be reminded by post the next day.
By the time I was twenty-five, I seemed to be in my mid-forties: plump and elegant with waxed mustaches. I looked like my mother's generation. In 1895, in fact, we appeared to meet each other's age and, nodding as we passed, continued in our opposite directions towards age and youth, respectively.
What I did not realize was that, as Mother and Mina were growing older—the former with her graying chignon and the latter with her flirtatious laugh—I was getting closer and closer to my real age. While at twenty I had been far off the map of youth, now that I was nearly thirty I looked nearly right. Perhaps not quite in the bloom of youth, but approaching it in my ogreish way, and I began to get more than my usual share of glances from ladies who peered like fascinated children out of carriages, streetcars, and shopwindows. Because I saw the world only as a bored audience eager to hear the joke of my life, I thought these girls were just eyeing my odd clothes, and that their pink-orchid smiles were just amusement at my ugliness. I did not understand these women were speaking to me in silence. I did not understand that my glands, like those fine tubules that twine down a silkworm's back, were spinning from my ugliness a face both young and fine. The century turned, the seasons changed, but little changed for me until a lucky and terrible disaster.
What a hidden blessing to be grounded, Mrs. Ramsey, for now I have the time to put this down just as it happened:
It was in March of 1906, on the three-penny planks of Fillmore Street. The morning was a surprise to me; so warm and fogless for March, so lovely that people floated almost in a daze through Golden Gate Park, carriage tops down, and one could see women on the promenade in the palest of summer dresses, never worn before or since, women grinning in the glory of light fabric but stilt—cautious girls—carrying a fur wrap in case this miracle should turn on them. A bright, hot sunny morning in San Francisco! Imagine! The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.
A street scene like any other, though, of course, from a time that now seems forever lost. There were dray horses hauling goods to the rich folks up the hill; there were Chinese lugging vegetables across their shoulders, traveling the back alleys and shouting to the cooks in the kitchens; there were men and women by the score out on that gorgeous day. Another great change in me that year: I had shaved my beard at last. I walked along dressed in a plaid bow tie and a porkpie hat, looking every bit a man in his mid-thirties and glad of it because, for this brief moment of my life, I was the age I seemed.
There came a scream from the street. I turned my head so quickly I lost my hat: there before me was a carriage piled full with a picnicking family, and coming towards it down the hill hurried a brakeless gasoline automobile. I remember how the little girl in the carriage stood up, pointing at the beast that would kill her: some monster from a dream, a book, from the flickering gibberish of a magic lantern show. I remember how the ribbons in her straw hat coiled back in the wind like snakes about to strike, how the family stood in mute tableau, the horse twisted eyes-white to the death machine, how the car driver slumped, jerking in the spasms of his stroke while his shirtwaisted passenger climbed over him in a frankly sexual way and fought with the controls. One could make out the mother in the carriage grabbing her girl's waist, about to throw her towards the sidewalk. The father, thrusting one defiant palm to stop the oncoming machine. I did not see the awful moment; or perhaps our brains erase these things for us. I recall a sound that I do not have the heart to describe.
But it is not of the accident that I want to tell. I have seen worse human horrors than these, and more than my share. What's important about that sunny afternoon of death was that I turned away, and this choice to turn has made my life what it is. I turned away from this awful sight, towards the hot, bright, impossible sky, and there, silhouetted so crisply, I saw a hot, bright, impossible sight:
An eye. A clear brown eye on whose surface was reflected the scene of death itself. The star-lashed eye of a woman.
Who? Oh Reader. Oh careless, careless Reader.
It was Alice. Time, that unfaithful friend, had changed her.
Not cruelly, as you're thinking, but in the most ordinary of ways. Standing on the street beside me: taller, hair darker. Shoulders broad, neck long with a little softness under the chin, face full and clear, unmuddied by the baby fat of fourteen. Faint lines around her eyes, as expected, tracing every expression I'd known in girlhood. Unexpectedly pale and powdered, yet a drop of sweat sat on the wing of her nose like the jewel of an Indian bride. The girl I remembered was not there. The face so soft and full, incapable of any hardness no matter how strongly she hissed or hated, it was not there. The cheeks so soft with down, the clean eye blinking in wet fronds of lashes, the restless breastless body; all that was gone: the softness, the pink, the girl.
And yet. She was both more faded and sharper all at once; the dreaminess of the eyes was lost, but a clarity that was dormant at fourteen had come into gradual focus, giving her a new kind of beauty. This was no girl of fourteen, breathing a curl of smoke into my mouth; this was a woman over thirty.
"My God!" we both shouted, and for a moment I thought we were both gasping at this reunion. I realized, of course, that she was speaking of the little carriage girl, now entombed in rubber and splintered wood. I turned and saw men running to pull metal aside. The car passenger was already on the street, alive enough to accept a young man's coat and wrap it over her tattered skirt. The horse, now in the last hours of its life, nodded its head hopelessly from its place beneath the wreckage. I could not make out who else could be saved. A tire and a wheel rolled together for a few feet before falling in endless spirals to the road. There was no sound to be heard above the noise of panic. Well, perhaps one sound: an inhuman heart rejoicing.
"Come," I said, and offered my hand, which, in the atmosphere of disaster, I knew would not be rejected. I was right; Alice stared at me, squinting, then took my hand in her gloved palm and ran with me. I had not yet had time to feel my luck, that I had found her at last; after all, true believers are not amazed by miracles.
But look at this unexpected fortune: she did not know who I was!
This was the witching hour of my life—the only time when I was exactly what I seemed to be—and God had brought me, at this golden time, the prize I wanted most. I found a little tea shop for us, something with red "flock" walls and café curtains pulled shut so that the shadows of passersby formed a kind of Balinese shadow play on the yellow fabric. Somehow, as we took our seats and ordered, I was so stunned by my good fortune that I could say nothing. Here it was, the prize. To sit across from Alice one last time. To hear her sigh when the tea arrived in an opium-cloud of steam. To see her eyes close voluptuously when she took a bite of cake. To notice a spot near her ear where she had failed to powder and the skin—that old pink, glorious skin—showed through. We chatted and I was grateful. If fate had handed me a body always in disguise, and if disguise alone would let me be near my love, then I would accept it. She would never need to know. She could not love me, you see. I had noticed the golden ring on her finger.
"I didn't expect to see someone die today," she told me quite plainly, after we had finished our strangers' chatter and settled for a moment in silence.
"No one could."
"I expected a totally ordinary day," she said, then smiled with that old glow. "Excuse me, I can tell I'm going to babble, but it's just nerves. I came out here to buy a camera. I spent an hour looking at all the different kinds, and the man, who'd been so nice, he became concerned when I told him it was for myself. He said, 'Oh miss, ladies can't use these, their fingers are too small.' I got so angry. I stormed out of there. I was furious over this ridiculous man... this stupid comment. That's what I was doing when we saw the accident. Fuming. Making a whole speech to him in my head. And then. Well."
"I was eating a pickle."
"Was it good?"
"It was."
"See, isn't it extraordinary these little things? How you wake up in the morning and think everything's going to be fine."
"Yes."
"I mean, you don't look in the mirror and think, Okay, get ready, just in case you see something horrible today."
"No."
We both stared into the cups, at their tidal pools of bits and leaves; I had learned enough from my mother to tell a lover's fortune in that cup, but said nothing of what I saw. I poured out the tea. After all, to my beloved Alice I was nothing more than a stranger.
She took a breath, leaned back, looking around her. "Well this is very strange and awkward. You know what, I'm going to go, thank you."
A panic. She couldn't go, not yet. Alice was married; she could never link her life to mine; I could not even hope to have her as a friend; but it was not enough just to see her and know that so little had changed. Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.
"You should stay a little bit. You're pale. You nearly fainted, you know."
"You saw that?"
"No, well I..."
Alice smiled and met my eyes—ah the tea leaves there! "It's terrible when you realize what you've become. So I'm this. I'm a woman who faints." Laughter, brilliant as water.
"No," I said. "That's not what you seem like."
"I've become something I used to despise. A heroine in a bad novel." She spread her hands, laughing again, as if her fate were now complete. She looked like no such heroine: my Alice was dressed all in black, shirtwaist and skirt, bright white cravat, hair pulled into a very masculine driving cap. At her throat she wore an old-fashioned brooch that I recognized as her mother's; I knew it contained a lock of Mr. Levy's hair. But she also wore some kind of jacket I had never seen before: wide-lapelled, fitted, embroidered in Oriental coils and arabesques. It wasn't really that it was too fashionable; it was simply bizarre. Other women in the shop were staring, whispering, perturbed. Alice did not seem to notice. She knocked against the table with a fist, saying, "But I shouldn't faint! I shouldn't be that kind of woman! I've seen people die before."
"Don't think about that. Drink your tea."
Her eyes were off in the corner of the room and she herself was far away: "In Turkey—I traveled to Asia years ago—I saw a man stumbling, poisoned, through the streets and he collapsed onto a carpet, dead, just a few feet from me. His face was curled up in... well, in anguish, I guess. The Mohammedan women were wailing in that way, you know." She did a startling imitation, dovelike and plaintive. "I didn't faint then."
"You traveled to Asia?"
"With my husband," she said, touching on the sad fact at last. I have no idea why she stayed and drank her tea with me, why she told all this to a stranger, but she went on: "That poisoned man, I sometimes wonder if he did it himself, put arsenic in his own mint tea. Over love, I guess. That he didn't suspect poison would be so painful, so awful, so stupid and unromantic. The moral is: it pays to do your research." Another laugh, full of chimes, and then—oh wonderful thing—she blushed.
What I wanted from Alice was modest and easy. Not to have her love me—I had no hopes of that—but to answer one question that had maddened me for years after her disappearance. Like the audience member who watches a magician take his silver dollar and make it vanish into a handkerchief, I did not need it back. I only wanted to know how she did it. I wanted to know where Alice had been all of these secret, hidden years.
She was still talking: "You know, I don't think I want this tea. It's not enough of a vice. Now's the time to indulge in a vice, don't you think? After something horrible."
"I don't have many vices."
"That's because you're a man. Everything is a vice for a woman. They don't have wine here, do they?" She raised an arm and caught a waiter, demanding a glass of wine. They did not serve wine; it was a tea shop and, besides (his face seemed to say) she was a lady, and it was only the afternoon. Alice seemed annoyed.
I said, "We can go somewhere else."
Her eyebrows worked in a private fury. "No, forget it. Since no one knows me here, and since you're a complete stranger, I'm going to have a cigarette. Don't be scandalized, I'd think less of you. And don't tell my mother."
"I don't know your mother, so I won't."
"You're sweet," she said, and I lit her cigarette. It was then she noticed my lighter, something Hughie had given me long ago, and its engraving of a lily pad. "Is that from the Conservatory of Flowers?"
I fidgeted with the lighter and slipped it into my vest. "I—I suppose so. It was a gift."
"Hmm, the old conservatory. Do you know, is the Victoria Regina still alive? Does it still bloom?"
"I haven't been in a while."
Alice looked into her tea and her expression stilled completely. She said, very quietly, absolutely to herself, "I've been gone so long..." Then she retreated into a place in her mind where I could not follow. With that look on her face, she was indeed a stranger.
I was not saddened by how Alice had changed. Any of her former lovers might have looked at this beauty grown from fourteen to thirty-two, full of such strange and pensive expressions as this one, and felt a watery sadness at what was lost. But I felt no sadness; I was different. I knew more than the easy aspects—her eyes, her voice, her joy—that time leaches from the body: I knew the ominous little cough she gave when she was bored; I knew the smell of the anise seed she used to cover her cigarettes; I knew the tremble of her three visible vertebrae when an idea stirred her; I knew the flutter in her eyelids that meant annoyance at some stupidity; I knew the tears that came to her eyes the instant before an outburst of laughter; I knew her quivering night-cries, her bathtub operetta voice, her bitten fingers, and her snore. The things I knew, the Alice I knew, could not be touched by time.
"It's strange. You're very familiar," she said. "Are you from here?"
"I've lived here my whole life."
Her eyes widened. "Don't tell me it was South Park..."
"Not South Park," I lied. "The Mission."
With no forethought at all, some part of my brain had decided to erase South Park, Grandmother, Father and Mother and Mina and the rest of it. I did it instantly, with no regret. In fact, it was with great relief that I murdered Max Tivoli. It was my first homicide. Alice, of course, did not notice a thing, not even the bloodied hands clasped so calmly before her on the table. Instead, her face brightened at my words.
"The Mission! Did you know a boy named Hughie Dempsey?"
"Not that I recall."
There, my best friend was gone as well. Corpses were amassing at our feet.
"Oh." She sniffed and shook her head. "Well, I didn't go to the Mission much, so I don't think it was there."
Alice, you were always so bright and careful in your dealings with the human race. Didn't you recognize that old neighborman who smiled at you each afternoon as you came back from school? The old fraud who made you Sabbath tea? The bearded humbug who held you to him one night and who tasted, I would guess, like tobacco and rum? I suppose that, for all you knew, the old horrible man was dead or dying in his room in South Park. Before you in the tearoom was no one at all.
"And yet you seem so..." she continued dreamily.
"You said you'd been gone so long. You used to live here?"
"I was born here."
"But you moved away."
"Yes," she said, holding her cup gently, as if to protect it. "We moved away when I was fourteen."
"Fourteen, that's young," I said.
A little chuckle. "Yes, it was."
"Where did you go?"
"Pardon?"
I could feel the pulse of my heart in my neck. "Where did you go?"
Alice seemed to notice my too-loud voice. All these questions, from this oddly familiar stranger. Then, because of course it could not possibly matter, she told me.
But all I said was: "Ah, Seattle!"
"Maybe that's how I know you. It's a small town."
"No, I've never been farther than Oakland. I've always been intrigued by Seattle."
This amused her. "Intrigued by Seattle?"
"Why did you go there?"
She considered this and held her fingers tightly under her chin. There was a stain of longing in her face that she blotted in an instant. "Family," she said. "My uncle ran a supply business. We ran all the supplies for the Klondikers, maybe you've heard of us. Cooper & Levy."
Cooper & Levy. Did she even realize that her hiding place was posted in every opera house and evil bar for her foul villain to see? And I had seen it. I had noticed that maddening name Levy shouting at men nightly along the Barbary Coast, but I'd ignored it. Only in the tea shop did I see that I'd been given—plastered before my very eyes—the one great clue I sought. I had merely been too sad to see it.
I said simply: "I've heard the name."
She smiled and shook her head. "Well that was us." Eyes on her tea.
"Tell me more."
Alice plucked another cigarette from her reticule and put it to her lips haughtily. She examined my face as I held out a flame. She said, "I'll tell you for as long as this cigarette lasts, and then I'll have to go." She put her lips to the cigarette, the cigarette to the flame, and when she was done she told me all that had happened in the years she spent without me:
"I went to Seattle with my mother. The boat pulled up and the town was smoking. Just tents and scorched buildings, most of the place had burned down a week before—it's that kind of town. My uncle's shop was fine, and we bought into his business just in time for the Alaska gold rush. Let's see if I can still do it." Then her tone descended into a standard shopkeeper's recitation: "Cornmeal, dried whole peas, lentils, lanterns, lye, summer sausage, and sleds for sale."
"No dogs?"
She laughed. "No, they had to find their own dogs. Thousands of men gave up their lives to come there, ready to dig up some gold, all those dreams, it was... well, it was boring. I used to hide in the back on the grain sacks and read, or I'd sneak out with my best friend, the two of us on one of those bone-shaker bicycles—one time we came across a cougar down from the hills! Green feathers in his mouth like he'd eaten someone's pet parrot. I remember thinking, That poor parrot, still he's seen more of the world than I have. Mostly it was dull, though, rainy and dull. I was lucky to meet my husband, that's when I stopped working at the shop. A few years ago we sold the business to the Bon Marché and Mother and I came back."
The cigarette was a third gone now, faintly crackling. I noticed a detail she had left out. "What about your husband?" I asked.
"He didn't come."
"Why not?"
"He's been dead five years now."
"You're a widow. I'm sorry."
She fingered her mother's brooch and I saw what I had been too blind to notice—the black skirt, black-bordered handkerchief, jet earrings—that she was a widow many years out of mourning. My heart came alive within my chest.
"He was a professor at the university. Because of him, I saw a little of the world. Turkey, China. And I went to college."
"You've been to college?"
All of a sudden her entire face tensed angrily and she drew back. "You think no woman ever went to college?"
"No, it's wonderful!"
Coldly: "My cigarette's almost out."
I smiled humbly and urged her to talk again, in this brief time while I had her. "Tell me about your husband before it's out, tell me, please."
She said it was tuberculosis that killed him. Professor Calhoun, her mustachioed husband, respected anthropologist, dead by the age of forty. There was an ordinariness about the way she said this that shocked me, gave me a sick hope, but then I realized it was something she had been saying almost every day for five years. She wore his hair in that brooch on her lapel; she prayed for him at temple; she was still his loving widow, but time had at least taken the tremble from her voice.
"He used to take long walks in just his shirtsleeves," was her answer to my unasked question.
"He couldn't have known." I pictured poor Professor Calhoun being taken in a carriage down to the stables, taking the common cure for his consumption: hot blood sipped from a tin cup. I pictured the doctors and their illusionist devices, their purges and plasters. I'm sure bedbound Calhoun looked up at his young wife and despised himself for his deadly cold-weather walks, and for dying so quickly and losing so many days lit by the lantern of her face. We waste so much time within ourselves. Alice's hand must have smoothed the hair on his brow as he breathed through his rough lungs. The second man to die before her eyes.
"The saddest part is I have no child to remember him by," she told me. "I was ready to leave Seattle. Mother was ready, too."
"Did you miss your old life here?"
Something odd appeared in her eyes. She stubbed out her cigarette. "It went out a while ago, and I've been so boring. Thank you for the tea." Alice stood up and gathered her A&P bag and parasol. "I must be going."
One minute later, she had left my life forever.
I mean, such were the thoughts in my head as it spun in panicked circles, trying to find some way to stop her. Alice was standing oddly, looking at the shadows of the people passing by. A particular profile now appeared against the curtain; a man in an odd hat. Alice seemed rapt. I was speaking this whole time, excusing my presence in her day, mentioning the coming chill outdoors, or the police scene she might want to avoid, anything to keep her there, but something kept her there already, and it had nothing to do with me. She was not even listening to me. Then, carefully, she slid the curtain back on the rod and daylight dissolved her face.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
She smiled at the view before her; it was just a young man in an old-fashioned derby, chatting up a threesome of "hello girls" coming home from the phone exchange. She turned from that ordinary scene of youth.
"The world's haunted," she said, and winked at me mischievously. "Don't you think?" Laughter, more laughter; I loved her. She produced a glove and spread her fingers to put it on. "You don't have to sputter. You can see me again if you want to. Except you've been rude."
"What? Really?"
Cleverness was on her face. "Well, what's my name?"
"Alice."
That startled her and I realized my mistake at once, but it was too late. She studied me, saying, "I was going to say you'd never asked, but... now how did you know that?"
"You said your husband called you Alice."
She blinked. I sat in that anxious silence like a man in a waiting room, hoping he will be received into the house. It took only a moment for the answer: "Oh. And what do they call you?"
We were assaulted at that moment by the very "hello girls" whose shadows had played before my Alice's eyes so intriguingly a moment before; now, having escaped the masher on the street, they were babbling and laughing and full of the kind of life I don't remember having at their age. I might have been annoyed by their noise, but they bought me a little time with their loud stories. Some murderer; I had devised no alibi, no alias. Alice seemed irritated and captivated by their dither over ribbons and diets, but they finally settled their identical-shirtwaists-and-skirts into a booth and quieted over the menu. And that supposed stranger, my life's love, turned her eyes again to mine.
"I'm Asgar. Asgar Van Daler."
She laughed impolitely, then sobered as she slipped a card into my hand: Alice Levy Calhoun. "Goodbye, Asgar," she said, then turned to leave.
"Goodbye, Alice."
The door caught the sunlight as it opened, blinding me in a flash, and she vanished, leaving the room just as it had been before, scented with sassafras and hair tonic. But everything was different in me, because not only had I found my beautiful, wandering Jewess at last, but now I could see her again and again for as many days as I might wish—my wild heart played this into infinity—and she would never know that I was the same monster who'd loved her so badly before.
As for that new identity, Asgar Van Daler. Well, I was no stranger to playing a part that did not belong to me. A father, for instance, my young father standing fresh and smiling in the pleasure gardens of his youth, watching the girls and tossing rye bread to the swans, my Danish father in those happy years before he changed his name. Asgar Van Daler. This inheritance was always mine to claim. After all, I do live life as backwards as a saint; like all the beatified, I consider it my duty to restore the world its losses.
I was at last the luckiest man alive. For who else in the history of time has ever had this opportunity: a second chance at love? It was like something from an Arabian tale; masked by my body, I could approach my old love—who would never accept me if she knew who I was—and I could try again. Unrecognized, better than before, I could use everything I knew to win her. Her card said she was in on Wednesdays and Fridays, and how endless the hours seemed until that Wednesday. This time, it would be different. This time, I would make her love me.
The address on Widow Alice's card was easy to find but a bit of a shock. She told me about her family's Klondike wealth, but I had not expected a two-story mansion on Van Ness, especially one so bedizened with ornament. It was a sort of collection of vertical forms, all white, tied with frippery and bows at every quoin and window, and capped with what architects inaccurately call a "belvedere." I stood hat in hand on the street for a little while; I thought I had seen every side of my old Alice, and that nothing could surprise me, but something about her house saddened me. Was this really what a rich Alice would buy? I'm not a snob, but I'd believed our home together in South Park would have seemed like a lost dreamland to her, created by my grandfather in that old elegance of early San Francisco that we have never seen again. A house of stone and modest curves. I could not imagine my Alice living like a Jonah in the belly of this whale. I had thought that, like the daughter of an impoverished duchess, she would work to buy back what had been pawned in childhood: the silver, the settings, the art. That, like any of us with a broken life, she would try to resurrect the dead.
I had to search among the medieval carvings of the door to find the electric bell—there it was, posing as a saint's head. After a bit of waiting, a stout Negress appeared with a face as wide open as someone who has just been slapped.
"Yes?"
"Is the widow in?"
"The who?"
"The widow."
She told me to wait and then left me alone in the hall. I sat on the bench, quickly going through the card receiver to see who had been there before me—some names of Jewish women, nothing more. So at least I would not sit on a chair recently warmed by some other gentlemen, handsomer, richer, and more easily loved. I at least had this advantage. Then I had the luxury of looking around the place; it was calmer on the inside, although strangely at war with itself; old, ratty books had been crammed behind glass-fronted cabinets, and though the chandelier above me was clearly electric, the hall was lighted (extraordinary, now that I look back on it) by rose-colored kerosene lamps. The maid came back through a different door and stared at me, motioning for me to enter. I smiled and nodded.
With the quick little motions of the body that we all learn in order to make ourselves as handsome as we can, I went over my posture, my cuffs, my coat and shoes, and entered the parlor to find the second shock of the day. There, sitting in a chair with a bit of lace pinned to her head, was my first lover, Widow Levy.
"Have you come from the club?"
"I'm sorry?"
"I told them I'd only pay half the dues. I don't play tennis, for heaven's sake, or swim. Can you imagine? Old ladies bobbing about like pickles in a barrel. I only go to monthly dinners and I only eat the soup and fish."
"I'm not from the club."
Mrs. Levy smiled slyly and touched a finger to her cheek. "It's too bad. They need more handsome young men like you."
She was old. Her hair was quite white and done up high on her head in rich curls, some of which were whiter than others and surely false, and over this was pinned the piece of antique lace that ladies wore to signal they had retired from the trials of beauty. She wore no corset, either, and her bodice flounced generously to cover a frame much altered from the one I'd held in the garden so many moonlit nights ago. She clearly enjoyed the privileges of age and now ate what she desired without a worry. A high pearled collar covered her neck, and over it fell two fleshy lappets; her earlobes, as well, drooped with heavy jewelry like an African queen's. Her face was broader than I'd remembered, colored an artificial pink, perhaps merely from habit, her eyes hard and dark, her lips so thin I could scarcely find in there a memory of those whispers she had given so tenderly to my young ear. I admit I was repulsed; there was no beauty in her. Mrs. Levy had dressed perfectly for her age in South Park, but now she seemed to have tired of prudent fashion, to have become almost a parody—part haggard courtesan, part countess. I realized that this queer house was her choosing, her taste. Perhaps all of us reach an age when we come to the end of our imagination.
"Are you Alice's mother?"
She said, "Ah, you got the wrong widow, didn't you? We're all widows in this house, even Bitsy, bless her soul, is a widow five years now, she lost her husband to a mining accident in Georgia. An astounding woman."
"This is a lovely house you have."
"No it is not, but I love the rooms, I barely leave it, so I never have to see the outside. Don't worry, young man, you won't have to chat up the old lady for long, Alice will be here any moment. I sent her up to change for gentlemen visitors."
"I'm delighted to talk to you."
"The gorgeous boy is delighted! My heart is fluttering. Positively Shakespearean." I could hardly breathe, watching her flirt with me like this, her lashes flicking their paint hopefully against her cheeks. But no, I was safe; she didn't recognize me at all. "What's your name?" she asked.
"Asgar Van Daler," I told her.
"Vander..."
"Van Daler."
"Vadollar."
"Van Daler."
"My dear man, I don't care a fig for families. Do I recognize you? Anyways, I will speak frankly before Alice comes."
"Of course."
"First of all, Alice is Jewish on both sides. I don't want you to get involved and then drop things for some blood reason."
"It's of no importance to me."
"Also, all of my money is going to the Jewish Educational Alliance. This is Alice's wish. She believes very strongly in the settlement houses, and I have to say I do too. I am being very honest with you, Mr. Dollar. Alice will only get the jewelry I am wearing on my person."
"It's very lovely."
"My person? Why, thank you," she cooed. "But if you are searching for wealth, you're on the wrong trail."
Then I made a terrible error. I was feeling the airy heart of a shoplifter and, careless, I said, "I should tell you, I'm not wealthy, either, Mrs. Levy. I'm merely a clerk at Bancroft's."
Her mood of jovial flirtation was over. Instead, she wore the old face of a brokenhearted widow writing a poisoned letter to her lover twenty years before. "Bancroft's?" she repeated. Sorrow pooled in every wrinkle of her face, but there was something alive within her eyes as well, either a buried rage or a kind of hope, one that I of all people knew too well. I was shocked to see how little dies in us. She chose her words carefully: "I knew a man who worked there. It would have been before your time."
"And who was that?"
"Mr. Tivoli. Mr. Max Tivoli."
"Max Tivoli," I repeated.
"Have you heard of him?"
I almost told her, I swear it. I almost revealed myself so that I could be forgiven, and perhaps if I had done that, I might have been kept from all the other misdeeds that followed. Instead, I was generous in another way. I gave her the lie she wanted to hear: "He died before I came."
"Ah."
"There's a rumor it was murder."
I saw the tremor of a smile on her lips: "Pity."
Then her old cheerful expression sprang back like a rubber band. "I must shut up now, my daughter's here. Keep our confidence." She turned away from me, the woman who took such pleasure at my death, to shout:
"Alice, what on earth are you wearing now?"
I wish I could remember all the details of that morning. I know we all sat in the parlor for a little while talking politics, which got Alice very worked up, and that her mother turned to her at last and said, "Widow Calhoun, get out of this house, you don't need a chaperone." Alice smiled and said, "Widow Levy, you'll be all alone." The old woman shook her head, saying, "I'm happiest alone, Widow Calhoun." They spoke to each other in this odd way, joking almost morbidly about their widowhood, and it reminded me of the nights when I came to light the fires for them and found them trying on dress-up clothes, or in the midst of charades, or painting the other's portrait. I felt intensely jealous for a moment, realizing that there was a part of Alice I might never get to know, the part devoted to her mother, and that while they had indeed left San Francisco out of love, it was only love for each other, and never for me.
"Did you get the camera?" I asked her once we were outside.
"What?"
"You were going to buy a camera before I met you. The old man said your fingers were too small."
She smiled slyly. "I guess they were big enough to hand him the money."
"You bought it?"
"Yes, I did."
"What do you take pictures of?"
"Whatever I like. Let's walk up this way, there's a hidden stairway to Franklin and I think when the roses are in bloom it's so mysterious." She put her arm in mine and, talking now and then about the subjects on her mind, led me to her secret bower.
It would be nice to tell you that she fell in love with me. There, as we took our walk among the mansions and carriages of Van Ness, the hedges that had been planted to keep us from the flower gardens, the vulgar rockwork and cast-iron fountains shaped like children—that she found the sunlight too dazzling to defy and kissed me under the rare and giant flower of a century plant. But you know better, I think; we were strangers, brought together by an accident, and once we had exhausted all conversation on cars and death and our own shock, we walked for a long time in uncomfortable silence. I tried to think of all I secretly knew of Alice, and led her now and then into topics I knew would get her talking, but mostly I think I bored her.
And I would like to tell you that she was just as perfect as I'd remembered her, but she wasn't. The tea shop had made me mad with hope, believing that everything true about her could never change for me; she had emerged from the grave of memory as perfectly preserved as love could ever be. But daylight and the lack of disaster made a difference. Alice was still my beautiful girl, even in the bright tailored suit of her "at home" clothes, the odd little toque that seemed almost like a turban; so much about her was exactly the same. But some habits of a girl are not as lovely in a woman. Her private furies, for instance, which had always seemed like a sign of character and independence, had altered a bit, becoming more hilarious from the mouth of a thirty-two-year-old, but also more sour, even petulant. How the mailman mangled her letters. The fog, the rich and stupid neighbors, their dogs. As if every annoyance of the world were meant for her.
As the time passed, I found other changes I had not expected.
"Am I still familiar to you?" I asked her.
She examined my face for a moment. I still could not believe that nothing of old Max could be found there.
"No," she said.
"Not at all?"
"I was wrong. I was a little emotional on Saturday."
She pronounced it "Satuhday." Nothing had ever flattened the vowels of my young Alice, but I suppose a life and marriage in the Northwest will do it. So there was that, and her furies; they were changes so minor that you could ignore them if you liked. After all, when listening to a symphony, we don't insist that the composer strike one chord over and over; we enjoy his skill at variation. And I had thought I'd known her so completely that I would love every variation in my Alice, every major and minor scale, because, as in a symphony, the very depths of her would never change. But there was a flaw in that thinking: the Alice I loved would never age, it's true, but still she might change. She had suffered a burning town and a dying husband and who knows what else; we cannot blame all our scars on time. Perhaps something shifted in Alice, something I hadn't noticed in the ecstasy of the tea shop.
We reached the house again and stood within the oval curve of the entrance, framed by a glazed tempest of woodwork. I was in an odd sort of panic, like a climber losing his grip on crumbling shale, not only because I had bored her so, and was not even familiar to her, but because the object I had loved so eagerly all these years had changed, ever so slightly, and I could not decide if this change meant nothing or everything to me. No one yet had ever died from not-being-in-love, but I might, if it came to that. I was still examining my heart when she spoke to me very seriously.
"All right, Asgar, tell me."
"What do you mean?"
"You've got some kind of secret. It's all over you, you're terrified to tell me, it's all you can think about. I tell you, it's a bore to be around someone with a secret. Sorry, I know I don't always put things the right way."
"I—"
"Please just tell me and get it over with."
"But there's nothing to tell."
She stared at me and called my true name: "Max Tivoli." This stopped me dead. There was a single oxygenless moment before she continued: "Did I hear you talking about him downstairs? What did my mother say? You couldn't have known him, he'd be so old. She probably didn't tell you this, but she was a little in love with him."
I found my breath at last, a lucky thief. "I'm sorry, no, I didn't really know him."
"He broke her heart. I was a little girl, there was an incident with him and we had to leave. He's a bit of a villain in our house, and we never talk about him."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
"Why are you sorry? I just wanted to explain. You asked me once why we left San Francisco, and that's why. So now you know." She searched me carefully, as with a scene one is asked to memorize; that is, as if she might never see me again. "Thank you for a pleasant walk, Asgar."
"It was pleasant."
"Yes."
"I'm grateful you could come, Alice."
"It's been nice."
Dull, ordinary words for people who want the moment to die. And perhaps I did. It was too awful to think that I had preserved my heart so long ago and that now, years later, I had stuck it in my chest, smelling of formaldehyde, and found it too sorry and shriveled to work. But it's a common tale. Isn't there a statue, in Shakespeare, of a long-dead queen who comes to life before the eyes of her mourning king? The king rejoices and repents, but what does he do the next day? Does he remember how she sang off-key as she brushed her hair, how she screeched at servants? Perhaps it felt easier, in the doorway, to fall sleepily into my old life of memory and sorrow than to face my real, live girl.
We smiled tightly to each other and I saw I'd propped my walking cane beside her. Confused, hardly breathing, I nodded goodbye to her and reached out for my cane.
Alice's face turned a peculiar color, her hand went out to support herself against a column, and her eyes looked directly into mine. I had never seen that expression on her before. She stared at me for an instant—a sharp, improbable instant—then turned and saw the cane in my hand. Her face collapsed. I didn't understand any of it, the stare, the clumsy blush on her cheek. And then I realized: poor woman! She thought I was going to kiss her!
Alice closed her eyes, whispered a goodbye, and made her way awkwardly into the house. I just stood there. The network of veins vibrated through my body, harp-thrummed by the impossible. Could I be wrong? That I'd seen in her eyes the same carnality I'd always hidden in mine? Alice, you will forgive my crudity, but I knew then that my luck had doubled over the years: I had become a man too handsome to resist, and you, a widow longing to be merry, had walked all those long blocks just hoping to be touched. Admit it, now that I am dead: you wanted me to kiss you. And you still did, inside the house, leaning breathless against the shut door, your heart pulsing as fast as the glands of a snake emptying itself of venom; you still saw my face inside your lids.
No braceleted ankle or can-can leg was ever as erotic as the shame you showed me in that doorway, darling. And with a great relief, everything was just as it had been before, or greater, because all at once it came rushing back—the ice in the heart, the bell in the brain—the terror of wanting you.
Now the astute reader will be wondering how I ever thought I would get away with this. It's one thing to disguise oneself for an afternoon tea or carriage ride; it's quite another to keep a lie for the length of an affair or, more improbably, for the lifetime that I hoped to be with Alice. I might change my looks and words to suit her, but how could she really love me when my truest self was buried under the floorboards? And yet, I've heard of long and happy marriages where the wife never knew of his second family, or the husband never learned that her blond hair that he so valued could be bought at any druggist's. Maybe lies are necessary for love, a little; certainly, I wouldn't be the first to create a false persona just to seduce a woman. Of course, none of this crossed my mind in the following weeks of my courtship—the visits to the House of Widows, the at homes with Alice and her mother, smiling in their ignorance—never did I consider that I might wear this false mustache for life. The heart plans nothing, does it? No, the only obstacle I ever considered was Hughie.
He was not sad in marriage; he was stable. I have to assume this made him happy, in a way; perhaps marriage was a weight, a paperweight, keeping the heart from flying across the room at every breeze. Of course we never went out to the Barbary Coast—he was married, and the place was nearing its final days—but we never went out together at all. Instead, I was invited to dinner parties hosted by Hughie and his wife. They had bought a new house on O'Farrell, something more appropriate than the Pumpkin, and I would find myself at a table of handsome, rich, and clever people who intimidated me with their clothes and their wit until I discovered they had no imaginations, that their opinions and fashions were copied from magazines they all had read. Hughie seemed perfectly at home in this crowd, but I was always nervous and drank too much. I couldn't play their games, but what saddened me the most was seeing these glittering bores lean across the wineglasses to whisper into Hughie's ear, hearing their private laughter, knowing they had supplanted me in his confidence. At least it took a crowd of them to do it.
It was only right, though, that his wife would take over all the parts I was used to playing, and she was a kind young woman, bright and pretty and never pretending to be more clever or fashionable than she really was. She was good to me, and yet we were rarely together; she always found reasons to leave the room or tend to someone else. It wasn't, as she said, because Hughie and I should be alone; I think, somehow, I scared her. In any case, by the time Alice came back into my life, I was seeing little of either Hughie or his wife; their lives were taken over by their family. Yes, shortly after the turn of the century, little Hughie Dempsey had a son.
At the time, I could not understand how the soft look on my old friend's face, which used to come only after several belts of whiskey and buttermilk, appeared so easily as he stroked his young boy's face. I couldn't see how this clever man could listen to his wife speaking of her "angel from heaven" and keep his willing smile; I couldn't fathom Hughie's belief that his son would accomplish wonders in the world, as if other worthy children, equally full of promise, were not born every minute, and failed, and turned into men just like us, who would lay onto the next generation the same hopes, infinitely deferred.
But I was not a father then. I did not know, Sammy, what happens to us in the presence of our sons. Today, for instance, when you and I built a fort among the honeysuckle and the blackberry, using an old refrigerator crate with Coldspot branded on the side. We shared no secrets in our little house. Instead, we lay side by side, barely fitting, our heads on the long cool grass of the forest. I felt the prick of the grass on my face and, beneath it, the moist earth coming through, smelling of blood. A strong breeze blew over a leaf, revealing the tiny husk of an insect. A drab butterfly, headed the wrong way, was being blown ceaselessly away from his goal. "Jeez, it's boring," you said, then smiled and did not speak for half an hour. Sound of desperate birds. Why would this make a father weep?
We have no right to keep our friends from being happy, and if it seemed to me that Hughie, like a man searching for a religion, had found a life that had been led before, I never took him aside and scolded him for it. He was an extraordinary man, I'd always thought, and deserved an extraordinary life. But perhaps it's the average men who need the extraordinary lives; the rest of us need the comfort of the common. He'd had fun with me, but I saw now that he'd always been unhappy, and terribly alone, even in my company. So I did not trouble his new world. I suppose in some way I envied it.
The problem of Hughie, therefore, was not his life. I could not change that. The problem was merely that Alice might come across us together, realize we were friends, and discover my true identity.
I did tell him about Alice, and my old friend was stunned and happy. I gave him all the details of our meeting, her unfading beauty, and how I had worked my way into becoming a regular at the House of Widows despite the terrifying presence of Mrs. Levy. He laughed at the foolishness of my life, and had a plain and happy expression on his face, perhaps remembering how in our youth the least important things were filled with an intensity he had forgotten.
"My God, Max, really? Alice?"
"Yes, Alice."
"Well, she can't be the same. I mean, I guess what I mean is you can't feel the same."
"I do, that's what I'm telling you. It's so strange, but I never forgot. And now here she is, thirty-two and a widow, but it's like I'm seventeen."
"You're a grown man, Max. And you hardly know her."
"It's as if she's something I've wanted since I was a boy. You can't know what it's like. I mean, first love." We sipped our drinks and sat in silence for a moment before I finally told him what I wanted of him.
He looked at me for a while with a look of sadness. "No," he said. "I can't, Max."
"Come on, I need your help."
"You can't do this. A lie like this, it'll wear you out."
"You just have to forget you know me. Forget all about me. It's easy. If you see Alice and me together, just say hello to her and ask to be introduced to me. It's simple."
"It's not simple at all. We're not seventeen. It's idiotic."
"Please."
His mood changed. "Max, you have to tell her," he said at last.
"You know what will happen."
He looked down at his plate because he did know.
"Please, Hughie," I told him, startling him by taking his hands. "I don't have anyone."
It was a month before it happened, but as I'd predicted, Alice and I did eventually run into Hughie. We were walking in the park to see the newly imported kangaroo, and she was telling me about a photography contest she had entered, pretending to be a man; she had anagrammed her married name and come up with the outrageous alter ego "Alan Liecouch." I was walking along and watching our shadows together on the grass when I noticed that hers had stiffened where it lay beside, a stone. She had stopped laughing and I could hear the bamboo rattling in her parasol; her hands were trembling, but when I looked at her face she was smiling faintly, as if amused by her own reaction. I saw Hughie and his family coming towards us on the path. He must have seen us just moments before, because he was distracting his wife by pointing off towards the conservatory, leaning over to whisper in her ear before leading her off across the grass to follow what will-o'-the-wisp he had invented to save me.
"I know that man," Alice said.
"You do?" She rarely spoke of her life before Seattle.
"Yes, I was a girl."
"Really."
"I used to visit him at the Conservatory of Flowers."
"Oh, that's not far from here."
But she was not listening to me. She laughed a little. "I was so young."
Just then, Hughie made a mistake. He looked back, and hooked our eyes with his own: bright blue. His boater was tipped far back on his head. What I read in those eyes was an intense sadness, the kind I had only seen before that night when I got so drunk in his apartment. This was not the first time, I guess, that he had been called upon to forget someone he loved, but who can say. At the time, I was merely grateful that he had done this simple thing, this crucial thing, to make me happy.
Alice said, "He saw us!"
"Oh."
He turned away with a bitter tenseness to his mouth but Alice continued to watch him. She held her hand to the ruffles of her blouse, as if checking her own heartbeat for this reunion that I think she had been imagining for as long as I'd imagined ours. Her smile opened out and she seemed pleased, embarrassed, amazed. She said, almost in wonder, "He's avoiding me."
"Maybe he didn't recognize you."
"He's grown old," she said.
Hughie was far off now, chatting with his bundled son. I remembered our tea together, how she stared at a derbied shadow on the curtain, afraid. It had been his shadow that she thought she'd seen. I tried to laugh, saying, "Love of your life?"
"What kind of question is that?" she said, smiling playfully at me with eyes surrounded by the creases that I loved. Age will tell you what a woman is; if she has never been happy, you will know it from her eyes. Alice's eyes were full of private joys, and though I had caused none of them, still it didn't matter; I loved what they had made of her. Now she lifted her parasol again and we watched Hughie's family disappear behind a parade of orange ice sellers and begging children. What kind of question, Alice? Simply one that, years later, I am still asking.
It was a week after that event, I think, that I received an interesting letter. As I opened the custardy envelope, I smelled its faint cologne, recognized the handwriting, and was brought back to an awful morning when I lost the girl I loved:
April 15, 1906
Mr. Asgar Van Daler,
My daughter and I are leaving this Tuesday for the Del Monte and we would be pleased if you escorted us for our stay through Sunday. Alice says you are busy with work, and that I am old-fashioned and a fool, but we have no male relatives in the area and it is always helpful, when traveling, to have a man.
Mrs. David Levy
I'm sure the Del Monte hotel looked exactly the same as it did nearly forty years before, when my young parents met there: the long avenue of cypresses that cut the sun in stripes across our carriage (the Widow Levy would not take a car), the great ship of the hotel itself, barnacled with green shutters and balconies, the flagsnapping spires, the veranda of wicker chairs where a band in whiteblue military suits played waltzes, the interchangeability of the parasols and the table umbrellas, the ladies and the peacocks, the people and the statues. I'm sure society editors still scribbled as they watched the arrivals, and brothel madams passed as baronesses, and shopgirls as debutantes, but all I noticed was the practiced calm, learned from its guests, of a place that knew its luck would never end.
"Are we here?" Alice asked as I opened the door for her. Her hat had slid off to one side and she struggled with it, squinting at the building.
"You know," I said, helping her from the carriage, "my parents met in this hotel."
"What a funny place to fall in love."
"In the pool, there used to be a net separating the men and women, like a veil, that's where they met. Strange, isn't it?"
She considered me as their servant, Bitsy, chatted with the driver. "Strange, yes, that's the word for you, Asgar."
"What do you mean?" I asked quietly.
She blinked at me in the strong sunlight, smiling mysteriously, then looked up at the hotel. "Lord, isn't it ugly."
"Alice!" her mother whispered, then stepped forward and took my arm. "It's positively Shakespearean, don't you think, Mr. Van Daler? A summer house of the Capulets, before all the trouble of course, all the old families with their young daughters, a masked ball and everything." My old lover gave me a wink. Masked ball indeed!
She let go of my arm, saying, "I need to lie down after that awful carriage ride, the bouncing, I swear I don't see why we didn't take an automobile. Alice, we'll dress. Mr. Van Daler, we'll see you at supper and I hope you can recommend a book from the library as I don't know anybody anymore, and I'm bound to be bored. Bitsy, do you have my sleeping drops?"
"Uh-huh."
As the other two made for the hotel, Alice stood there on the drive, passing a glove from one hand to the other, watching her mother. The look on my love's face was that of someone solving a math equation or, perhaps, plotting a murder.
"Your mother's fascinating," I said, coming up beside her.
Her eyes shifted towards me. "I've lived with her almost all my life."
"That must be nice."
"Hmm. I can't even really see her anymore," she said, looking back at her mother.
"Well, I love her," I said, and felt a blush of shame for saying so carelessly something that would have made all the difference nearly twenty years before.
Alice said something very quietly.
"Pardon?"
The Widow Levy's voice pounded through the spring air: "Alice! Stop mooning over that handsome young man! I need your help up here."
Alice turned to me with her eyes blazing in the sun. What message was encoded in that brown-white semaphore? She only said, "You better tip the driver, handsome young man," and then was off, picking up her skirt to climb the stairs, one hand keeping firm hold of her wayward straw hat with its trim as pink as ribbon candy. A peacock made its bored way across the sidewalk, dragging its gorgeous and filthy ballgown of a tail. It made a shimmering noise. I saw Alice turn back to look at me.
She was going to love me.
Even as she was stepping into the hotel, I felt the realization warming me like a new sun: she was going to love me. I looked up at the battlements and balconies of the Del Monte and realized, as the flags lashed in the bright sun, that it would be here, in the very building where another woman had loved another Asgar. Perhaps tomorrow night, in the ballroom with Ballenberg's waltzes playing, on the same balcony, with the same tolling Mission bells and the sound of the sea, the smell of Sweet Caporals. Or on the veranda, very quietly, as we sipped lemonade and watched the old maids chirping at their croquet, perhaps in that white wicker chair where I would take her hand and hear her sigh and know she loved me. Or in her room, as she sat by the window staring out at the lawns and pines that led onto the ocean, as she cranked the glass open and let the salt air into the room and began to weep. After all these years, it would happen here. Who would have guessed it? In one of these rooms, I would take her face in my hands and kiss both cheeks, then whisper to her as I undid the buttons of her jacket, of her shirtwaist, of all the unnecessary, ridiculous garments widows wear. Her look on the stairs told me everything I needed to know, and honeyed hope—the same hope of my seventeen-year-old self, bottled and stored so carefully on that high shelf—now broke and leaked down through my body.
But how to do it? I could tell—from that look on the stairs—that Alice was lonely with her mother, and that death and time had wearied her, so that she could almost love strange, handsome Asgar who stood overtipping the chauffeur. The next few days required a delicacy of spirit that my life had rarely needed. As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to do anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness, and that was how I had to treat this time with Alice. To listen to her, smile and woo her, treat her not like the goddess I'd met at seventeen, but like a bright, sad woman in her thirties, too wise to be fooled by flattery. I had to be careful. I had to coax the thorns of my life into the spirals of her heart.
You're thinking: This doesn't sound like love. Whatever happened to the wrinkled boy who listened for his downstairs neighbor, tears in his eyes? The one who lit her fires? The innocent, pure love of his so-called youth? You're thinking: This sounds like a wretchedly broken heart. This sounds like revenge.
Perhaps. But, my readers, you people of the future, have some pity. My body may move backwards, but my heart ages just like yours, and while my simple and youthful longing had its place when she was just a girl, simple and youthful herself, a more intricate woman must be more intricately loved. Real love always has something hidden—some loss or boredom or tiny hate that we would never tell a soul. Those among you who have been rejected or ignored, you'll know what I mean. Because when she comes to you at last, though joy may burst in wet seeds inside you, still there's a bitterness that it took so long. Why did she wait? You can never quite forgive. And when she is in your arms at last, when she is murmuring your name, kissing your neck with a passion you once thought impossible, you don't feel just one thing. There is relief, of course, relief that all you imagined has come true, but there is also triumph. You have won her heart—and not from any rivals. You have won it from her.
Revenge, no, not quite. But not exactly love, either. These are confessions, so I confess everything in my heart. I do this for my penance and for my forgiveness. I do not claim to be proud.
Dinner was at eight, and hoping for more luck than I deserved, I wore my favorite pearly waistcoat with my tuxedo. As I awaited the arrival of the Levys, I sat in the lobby's four-person circular ottoman—greenish, tufted, and topped in the center with a fern fountain—pretending to read the San Jose Evening News. I think there was a story about a Mardi Gras masquerade, a skating party, Caruso's arrival in San Francisco to perform a portly Carmen—it all seems petty now. But I only pretended to read. For in that setting I had my sole moment of doubt.
I watched the couples descending the staircase, prompt for dinner, the men carved from solid black, the women ruffled as sea dragons. It occurred to me that this was the scene, in those Gothic novels, where the hunchback snatches his maiden. Here with the chandelier, the glow from the newel lamp, the diamonds and the bare flesh. This was the monster's moment. Having trailed her, tricked her, now I was about to steal her—giving her nothing in return but my poisoned life, my warted lips. It was a moment of clarity. Hughie had said a lie like this would wear me out, but I saw that it would wear out everything I touched. As the clock began to strike, I had a surprisingly unselfish thought: I could leave. I could get an auto and catch a late train, have my bags sent to me. I could write her a note, and save a number of lives tonight. I actually rose from my seat, as if in a dream, considering whether to head for the door, and who knows what kind of story this might be if I had made it?
Then I turned and the thought vanished. She was there, in the middle of the staircase. She was watching me.
Alice, it took no more time than the tick of a clock, but let me play with time a little; after all, it has played with me. You wore a long white gown, drizzled with embroidery and lace, the sleeves mere veils for your arms, some kind of silver belt coming to a point below your waist, and the long train falling behind you on the stairs in a glittering coil; a dress that clung to you the way the delicate germ clings to its pale seed. There was nothing around your neck, nothing at all, just your pale skin rippling like a river as you swallowed—I learned later you had taken a belt of whiskey just before—as you looked down at me beneath a pompadour that I knew would smell of lavender, with the grandeur of a woman over thirty, no worries of youth, no confusions or fluttering eyes, a woman of passion on those stairs with one hand on the banister. Alice, there were stars in your hair.
"Asgar, Mother isn't feeling well."
"She isn't?"
"That cold of hers, you know." You held a little feather fan and tapped it on the stair rail.
"Typical."
You laughed. The net on your shoulders fell down an inch; the belt winked in silver. More fan-tapping. Beautiful, more beautiful.
"Come down here," I told you.
You looked at a glossy set of women making their way past. "Why?" you asked. "I like it up here."
"Come down and have dinner with me."
"I'm not sure I'm hungry."
"Come down!" I shouted happily.
You leaned back your head and laughed, every bell within you ringing. The rotund clock chimed four, five, eight thousand times. Alice, I pity everyone who has not known you.
That night, we sat together on a little velvet couch, side by side, and the waiter winked as he pushed the linened table over our laps, trapping us together just as one is trapped inside a roller coaster out at Funland-by-the-Sea. We drank a bottle of wine, unchaperoned, and chewed on the tender bones of ortolans, which I had never tasted before, and when at one point she picked up the wrong glass, I was left with hers through the rest of dinner, imprinted with the pink lunar mark of her lip on the rim. All evening I kept lifting it to my mouth, my lips to hers. And on my Alice drank, laughing more freely, staring around the room as if the golden ceiling were hers, all hers, a spot of color appearing on her left cheek like the tinted heart of a white rose. After dinner, she stood up and said we were going outside to the little stone balcony, where I sputtered into a dull and meandering story before she cut me short, asking about my first kiss.
"Oh no, I'd much rather hear about you," I said, risking the great danger of hearing your life told to you by another.
"Hmm. It wasn't my husband," she said. "Maybe it's a sad story."
"I'd like to hear it."
"As long as you tell me yours." Her smile was made more erotic by the half-closed orchids of her eyes. Then she began: "Actually, you know this story. It was Max Tivoli who debauched me, your old colleague."
"I never knew him..."
She laughed, only teasing; I was not caught. "He lived above us. He was an old man but he tried to act younger. He was sweet, actually, or was he really? I can't decide, it's all mixed up for me. I was fourteen. I remember he wore funny clothes, dyed his hair, spoke in a funny voice, was so strange, he told me he was really a boy inside. Not an old man but a child, like me. I was a mess that night—I was in love. I'd had my heart broken, and I went to him because—well, sort of as a father and sort of, honestly, because I knew he liked me. He watched me all the time. And I was so lonely that night and I'd never kissed a man before and I wanted it to be over with, forget love, or what mothers teach us. So I chose Max Tivoli." Alice chuckled, remembering. "He smelled like an adult, like whiskey, and shoe leather. But he tasted, you know he did taste like a boy. Like oranges. He was trembling. I think—even at fourteen you know these things—that he was in love with me, in his strange way. Ugly old coot. So that was it. My first kiss. I think it's kind of sad, don't you?"
She brought her eyes back to me and they were calm; the thought of that pitiful kiss was not so awful, after all.
"So who was yours?" she asked.
"Just a girl."
"Just a girl," she repeated. Her eyes traveled in a triangle around my face. "That poor girl, what would she think if she heard that?"
"A girl I knew. She loved somebody else."
"You knew that?"
"Oh I knew."
There was that crooked little smile. She said, "You evil little man. You seduced her, didn't you?"
I could smell the jasmine from the vine, and the pine trees, and her perfume. I could think of nothing to say. For the first time, I wondered if she might be drunk. "Well, but... well, I loved her."
Her eyes softened in sympathy. "You really did, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"How old were you?"
"I was seventeen."
She walked a little bit away from me, as if the memory of these old loves of ours, these antique statues, had to be left behind for us to continue. "People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don't know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life." Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. "You think about nobody, nothing else, you don't eat or sleep, you just think about this... it's overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you're young and you think it's marvelous, just so elegant, and you don't know, you don't know anything... because, you've never tasted anything better. You're fourteen."
It was no time for lying. "I think it's love."
"You do?"
"I think maybe it's the only true love."
She was about to say something, and stopped herself. I'd surprised her, I suppose. "How sad if you're right," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. "Because we never end up with them. How sad and stupid if that's how it works."
"Don't be sad."
"What?"
"Don't be sad, Alice."
That was when I kissed her. It happened quite naturally—after all, I had been kissing her glass all night—and afterwards it occurred to me that this was Max's second time with Alice, but only Asgar's first, so it had the thrill of an impossible moment as well as the comfort of something that had returned to me at last. I'm not sure how I did it—it makes no difference what a man does at this point; it is either going to happen or it isn't—but somehow I found my sweet girl in my arms and I tasted the wine all over again.
She grabbed the lapels of my waistcoat and I felt, in the haze of my memory and delight, the bite of her teeth on my lips—oh Alice, let no one say that you were timid in your youth. That you did not take what you wanted. I stood with my eyes wide open at this miracle, but yours were closed, rose-powdered, your knowledgeable widow-fingers everywhere, touching, searching, and I was like one of those ridiculous machines that swallow a nickel and quiver deliciously for exactly two minutes. Hell, I was like anything you can think of: an aspen, a thundering timpani, a locomotive boiler about to blow his gust of steam.
But so brief. A moment later she was across the balcony, flushcheeked, hand on her glowing breast, a look in her eyes as if she had overheard a terrible secret.
Was it possible? That my bargain with time had undone me and Alice had recognized me at last, had tasted in our kiss the Max I used to be?
"Alice, I..."
She shook her head. I could see some complicated equation moving behind her eyes. She gave a little smile and told me she had to see her mother. I asked her to stay; I said I had impetuously ordered another bottle and now it would go to waste. Her cheek flushed again, and I saw now that it wasn't the wine at all but her heart, beating too fast for her own blood. That little factory working overtime within her breast. Oh darling, you didn't recognize a thing; you didn't mind my mouth at all, did you? Though you would hate to hear it, you were like your mother before you, a woman in white in the dark, body all abloom, and you had to decide what to do with me now.
"Alice, I'm sorry, I thought you—"
She laughed. "Don't, Asgar."
"I understand."
"No you don't."
I did not know what to do; I could not explain that I did understand, that in fact I was the only one who ever would, but I said nothing. I watched her breast go sunset-pink. I knew this was not love here, not exactly, and besides, I am no Casanova; I could never convince a woman that life is too short to walk away from moonlit balconies.
"Tomorrow morning," I said.
She touched my face gently and said nothing. She bent down, hooked her finger into the cloth loop of her train, and walked away from me into the dining room, stumbling through the chairs and tables because, of course, she'd belted whiskey to keep her nerves up that night. My sweet Alice, she had wanted to be charming and alive. For me, you see.
I finished the wine and treated myself, in the gentlemen's bar, to a drink or four. I remember staggering back to my room, hearing the dogs barking from the lawn, and a milk horse whinnying in distress as he made his early rounds. I recall thinking that the world was restless and sad, and after that, I remember nothing of my waking life.
Sammy, these are dull facts, but I give them because they are my only excuse. The distance from my city, the solid bedrock of the Del Monte, the thick soup of my dreams—my only excuse for why I missed what happened next.
I awoke to a hail of splinters—the door to my hotel room being burst open at its lock.
"Mr. Dollar?"
I can sleep almost anywhere—a train, a car, and perhaps an airplane although I have never been on one—but I can't awaken anywhere. I open my eyes, unsure of where I am, and I grow briefly afraid. I am used to waking up in a strange body, but strange rooms terrify me. You will remember, Sammy, how my first week here I bumped my head on your bunk each morning, then cried out like a maiden; you never knew that I thought I was a thousand miles away, a century before, in old South Park, Maggie's sausages frying on the stove, only to discover myself in a miniature bed in the plain, plaid Midwest.
So, that morning at the Del Monte, it took me nearly a minute to register, first of all, that I was in a hotel room and had somehow ended up on the floor, cocooned in quilts, and, second, that Bitsy stood above me in a dazzle of morning light.
"Mr. Dollar?"
A bellboy was beside her, and I later discovered it was he, and not the powerful Levy maid, who had broken the door. I was terrified, as I've said, and a brief tenderness broke the hardness of that woman's face, and I swear she almost reached out to comfort me, but her hand went back to her thick waist and she shouted: "He's alive!"
"What's going on?"
She looked over me appraisingly. "You okay? Looks like you got thrown out of bed."
"Well, I've been known to sleepwalk..."
"Why didn't you answer?"
"Answer what?"
Bitsy gave her head that cockatoo tilt. "I been calling you."
"What's happened?"
She grinned a little and nudged the bellboy. "He wants to know what's happened. Huh."
"Bitsy, could you hand me my robe?"
She ignored my command and instead turned to the bellboy, who held my robe for me. "You got that paper? Give him that. I'm downstairs packing, Mr. Dollar. Off to friends in Pasadena if we can, and we won't be back."
I put on my robe as she left. A shout came from down the hall, and the bellboy quickly handed me the paper. It was an early edition of the San Jose Evening News, sparsely laid out and full of typos:
Stanford University buildings badly wrecked, with heavy loss of life.
Santa Cruz badly shaken, loss of life heavy; all important buildings destroyed.
No trains from north or south had arrived at 8 o'clock.
The wires being down the reports could not be verified.
A man is reported to have arrived from San Francisco, in an auto, reporting that the disaster there is worse than in San Jose.
Late—Thousands of people reported killed in San Francisco.
"What happened?" I whispered. "What happened?"
The answer came: a careless roll of the earth. It felt like a maid making a bed and flicking the sheet until it lies flat, a roll that seemed to come across the room towards me, sending me down face-first. I tasted dust. It was perhaps the fourth aftershock that morning, but the first that I had felt. Earthquake, of course.
It will seem brave or heartless to you, but it simply never occurred to me that Mother and Mina might be dead. I think it came from the childish notion that family is too permanent to die, or that God, knowing I had lost a grandmother and a father, would not be so wicked as to take every other lovely thing from my life. This was my hope as I lay there, my heart buzzing and oozing like a shaken hive, and I came to learn it was a common one. In the following weeks, after the fire had burned its last, you could still see sad handbills—for instance, "Missing: Mrs. Bessie O. Steele, age 33, dark hair, slender, who was to be at the Rex Hotel"—and every one of us understood it was a stupid hope, but a good one. We could not tear them down.
Of all luck, I actually heard from old Hughie two days later and learned that all of them survived. His note was delivered very formally by a member of the U.S. Post Office, and you will not believe it when I tell you it came in the form of a detachable shirt collar! As I later learned, he had been sitting in a park in Chinatown, no paper at hand, and had simply written a message on his collar and handed it to a passing postal worker. Hundreds of such items were mailed from San Francisco in the days after the fire—collars, scraps of paper, empty envelopes, cards, and bits of metal—anything to let their loved ones know they were okay. The post office delivered them all, no postage required. On one side of the collar he had written my name and the Del Monte, and on the other I read in that familiar, awful writing:
All OK, your mom as well, though your house is gone. Good riddance! Come down and watch the fire with me! We'll eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow we may have to move to Oakland! Love, Hughie
I like to think that it was while I lay there, listening to the murmurs of people in the hall and the clank of broken china, that a small part of that disaster took place. It would have happened at City Hall, which had lost its walls in the quake and, due to an early morning fire, was now smoldering, room by room. I like to think that the Hall of Records caught fire as I lifted myself off the floor, that the letter Tblazed on as I dressed, dazed, and the birth records of Max Tivoli began to smolder in the box.
That's how I felt, at least. The end of Max; goodbye, old pal, it's only Asgar now. I stood up and my body seemed as light as Dr. Martin's balloon, drifting like a teardrop through the rubble and away.
Downstairs, people sat in the stuffed chairs and ottomans of the lobby, stunned as hunted animals, waiting for someone to produce coffee despite shattered china and a broken water main.
It was almost an amusing sight. People who had been awakened by the 5:13 tremor had dressed in the dark, and so most of the elegant men and ladies of the Del Monte wore what we later referred to as "earthquake clothes." If I had only taken photographs for blackmail now! Exclusive heiresses, trawling for husbands, sat stupefied in evening gowns, riding jackets, and men's derbies, their bland un-made-up faces set off by their best jewels hanging from their necks and ears. Senators and millionaires sat whispering to each other in opera hats, smoking jackets, pantaloons, and slippers. One financier's widow sat in opera black, her face still masked with Le Paris night cream. Everyone looked stunned and worried; perhaps they knew that their fortunes lay in bank vaults that, while fireproof, had been so overheated in the blaze that they could not be opened for weeks for fear that the cash would burst into flames. I was staring at people who would soon have no homes and no money. It seems an excellent joke that they had dressed themselves not for the Del Monte, but for a vaudeville version of their lives.
There were rumors everywhere: a fat gentleman in a velvet suit was saying that some ghoulish man was going around San Francisco biting off the fingers of dead women to steal their rings, and that mobs had collected at the U.S. Mint, about to storm the place ahead of the fire and steal millions in gold bullion. One woman, hiding a yapping dog under her quilted robe, told me that regulars deputized as soldiers were walking among the ruins of the city, executing anyone they took for a looter. Children caught stealing were to be beaten, a sign hung around their necks reading THIEF.
"Can you even believe it?" she whispered, and naturally, I could not. I thought once again how stunned and sad and crazy we had become. Executions, indeed. It would turn out, of course, that she was right.
"Ah, your friends managed to get a car, I see," she told me, smiling.
"What's that?"
She motioned towards the window. A simple, ordinary car sat in the driveway, engine idling.
"I suppose they're not going to the city," she added.
I said nothing as I watched. A wedding-cake of luggage slipped into the trunk, a soundless slam, a chauffeur dusting off his hands. The crank went into the auto's silvered yap. I could barely see inside: a picture hat, a feathered fedora. I no longer thought of Hughie, the earthquake, of anyone but myself. Mr. Dollar. For in my panic, my stupidity, I had not listened to Bitsy's parting words. Pasadena. I watched the car as it began to vibrate, silently coughing, and then made its slow, unsteady movement down the drive and away.
The thought of losing Alice was terrible and petty but it was too much for my monster's heart. Others around me were chattering and laughing and making plans to find an auto and drive south, loading it with the idiotic junk of their idiotic lives, but I was the King of Fools because I did not want to save a single coin, not a single life; all I wanted was to keep Alice from escaping again. To keep her imprisoned within the mossy walls of my mossy life. Don't you see? She was not sitting somewhere in the hotel, thinking of Asgar who had kissed her. She was headed down to Pasadena. She was headed away from me, as she had once before, and for all I knew our city had burned to the ground and we would all be scattered across the continent or further and it would take years for me to find her again. A disaster had brought us together again, and a disaster would now tear us apart. I was a greedy goblin who could not let his maiden go.
I stood and ran through the lobby. You see; I did not have years to find her. Three, perhaps, or five. But not twenty like before, not even ten; it would be too late. My condition would betray me. Because imagine if Alice and her mother fled to Pasadena, then to relatives in Kentucky or Utah, and it took ten years—imagine it!—to find her, it would all be in vain. This was the thought in my head as I pushed aside a musician hugging a viola. Of course in ten years Alice herself might be faded into her forties, in birdlike glasses, stout and unnaturally blond and married with two children toddling by her pinkies, and I would still love her. Of course I would love her! I would still arrive at her door and bow and whisper her name and wait for the blush to cross her breast as it always did. That wasn't the problem. The problem would be that when she opened that door, it wouldn't be a man in his mid-forties, bat-mustached, grinning in her doorway. It would be a boy. A boy in his early twenties smiling in his bronze-sun of a face, stretching his sinews within his white tennis shirt. It would be too late; we would be too different. I might seduce her, of course—I might even lure her away from her husband for a weekend in a hotel, days of unspeakable passion—but it would be too late for love. Women don't lose their hearts to boys. She would drink down my youth and one morning she would pick up her smudged glasses from the bedside table and leave me forever in that rented room, thinking, He'll recover, he's young. But I would never recover. No, if I lost her now, I thought as I struggled with the crystal knob of the front door, my chances would die a little more each year as I grew younger. Oh Mary, I remember thinking in my madness, Mary, you were wrong. Time was never on my side.
Mrs. Ramsey, my would-be mother, is in the room with me while supper cooks. Grounded as I am, wings clipped, I am still brazen enough to keep writing while she polishes the piano just a few feet away. Easily irritated by housework, now and then she lifts the lid and plunks out an old melody, and when she does this, she lets out a merry laugh and glances over at me. Oh, Mrs. Ramsey. There is so much I need to tell you, but not yet, of course. Not until I am nearly done.
It's death to stay so quiet. You don't know how close you've come to hearing it all, Mrs. Ramsey, for my silence nearly falls away from me twenty times a day or more. For instance: when I am reading too late into the night and that voice comes through the half-closed door, telling me in singsong to go right to sleep. When I am ill and you feed me, face-to-worried-face, those bright orange alcohols from your secret cabinet. When we stumble across each other, late at night, and I'm afraid you see through me at last, but you just whisper that you could not sleep yourself and are a little happy for the company. When you burn your awful meat casseroles, announce it will be "breakfast for dinner!" and we boys erupt in applause. When you yell in a motherly rage. When I catch you dancing all alone to the Victrola. When I watch your rapt radio-face, the wrinkles erased and the worry gone just as it was all those years ago. When I see that name on every piece of mail, Mrs. Ramsey, that name a third husband gave you to hide in, Mrs. Ramsey, Mrs. Alice Ramsey.
You cannot hide. I will always recognize you, Alice. I will always find your hiding places, darling. Don't you know that perfume gives you away?
III
AUGUST 2, 1930
I am called to supper.
From what I can smell, Alice Ramsey, you have been cooking Italian again, and waiting for me is the macaroni pie my old wife used to make. The smell of butter and cream, the bowl like a girl's head of golden curls—a dreamworld of memories. I can hear Sammy already leaping down the stairs; I know for a fact he hasn't washed his hands. Alice, I hear you speaking with him. Ah, there: the sound of Sammy trudging back again. You are an excellent parent to our son.
So I only have a moment. Not long ago, you stuck your head into the room to see what I was working on and, thinking it a school project of some sort, you gave that raucous laugh of yours. I'm glad I amuse you, Alice. Can you tell that your adopted son is at his happiest, hidden here with you and Sammy? Can you tell there is no more beautiful sight—no moon more full—than your face leaning in from the hall, the skin grown a little soft and gray, webbed with pink across one cheek, the hair now dyed, but the same bright face I knew, laughing at this ridiculous schoolboy who bites his tongue in concentration? At night, when I dream, it's of that face. You, Alice, grown old in this plain bungalow. In my dreams, though, you are lit by gaslight.
And why do you never mention the earthquake, what happened to you there? I asked you the other day at dinner, and Sammy's head popped up from the roast, intrigued, but you picked up your plate, shaking your head. "I'm not the one to ask," you said.
"But weren't you there? Didn't you feel it?" I tried to sound as much like a boy as I could.
You stood, the plate tilted so that it caught the flash of the electric light. "Yes."
"What did you do?"
"We weren't in the city. We were in a hotel."
"Did you leave? Where did you go?"
Alice, you simply nodded your head, smiling, and patted me on the head. "Oh Lord, leave it for the history books," you told me. "Now let's get this cleaned up before the radio."
I think I know your secret, Mrs. Ramsey. You cannot tell any stories about the fire, any stories about the Del Monte at all, because, like the blue threads woven into paper money to stop counterfeiters, there is something so integral that it cannot be removed without suspicion. He is part of every earthquake story you have, but you must leave him out, of course. You must be sure that no one can trace you back to this sweet town where you have hidden yourself and your son; you must give no scent for him to sniff you out. It's me, isn't it, Alice? I am your secret; I am your blue thread. How sorry I am that I've poisoned your stories so completely, like a well you can no longer draw from. Especially when it is so foolish, so useless, to hide anymore.
Were there still stars in your hair, that morning long ago? When I stepped onto the porte cochere, desperate to catch you? When I yelled to the automobile snorting and chattering along the drive, already too far away to reach, too set in its ways along the carriage ruts of the Del Monte? To my own surprise, I let out a little sob and slumped against a column, watching that gleaming green car leave me behind for Pasadena, dustily speeding through the cypress-stripes of shadow, a little hopeless pathetic sob. Alice, slipped away from me, again. My heart was picked clean at last, like a bony skull. I turned to face the white-bright sky with its crowds of clouds, its pilgrim birds, its coming locusts, and I looked away, back to the hotel, and there you were. Oh, Alice. Standing there all the time, grinning in your dust hood, lipstick perfectly applied even in the dark of the morning, waiting. Not for coffee, or luggage, or mother. For me.
You said, "Alone at last."
So plainly, as if you didn't love me. And then that dear immortal laugh, you prankster.
Weren't there stars in your hair?
I am called to supper now by two voices: careful Alice and reckless, impatient Sammy. Macaroni pie, a pleasure for an old man in his youth, remembering. I have only a moment to get this down: Alice in the shadow of the arch, willows behind her, laughing, goggles dangling from her fingers. Just waiting in the dustdry air. The shock of that lovely, that priceless face, the one person who did not wish me dead; she had sent her mother to safety. She had stayed for me. At that very moment, her house was being dynamited by soldiers, her small fortune dying in its vault. She did not know it, giving me a flickering grin, holding out her hand. Her friends were all leaving the city, never to return; her mother was already nursing a sickness that would keep her on her deathbed for years. She did not know it. There, on the porch, pulling me towards her with a wink. Alice, whispering nonsense in my ear.
Reader, she married me. Of course she did; I was all she had in the world.
We were wed in May of 1908 and I knew every inch of ecstasy. Picture me on that wonderful day two years after the quake: a black Prince Albert coat, flared at the knee, top hat, pocket watch (hidden) ticking away the minutes until I would have my Alice, a soft smile on my face, cheeks somewhat inflamed from a departing cold but also, I suspect, from the frightened pleasure of someone about to pull off a heist. Above: the sun moving through the fog like a luminous deep-sea fish. Behind: the ruins of our City Hall, still uncleared, just the coiling staircase of the dome remaining now, the black spine of a dragon. My fiancée stood whispering with the witness—the Widow Levy, all in mauve and feathers—and I stood fretting, crushing my pocket handkerchief into a damp ball. Picture my happy heart pinned to my lapel: a bloody boutonniere.
And Alice, oh picture her, please. A seemingly plain green tunic that revealed, when she took a wide step, the shocking Turkish pants that she wore underneath. Something white in her bouquet (we are not botanists, we men in love), and on her head—my quaint and funny Alice—a tricornered hat all trimmed in lace. I can't seem to pillage my memory for any image of her face; it has been smudged from too much handling. But I imagine a clever smile bent, at one corner, into something tender.
And picture my city, with banners of celebration still fluttering from the new rooftops and church spires of San Francisco—for only a month before had marked the two-year anniversary of our so-called destruction. An adolescent, impatient town, we rebuilt as quickly as we could, exactly as before, and made all the same impulsive, glittering mistakes of a young man eager to prove he is alive. It was not just rubble that surrounded us. Besides the staircase of City Hall, the world around us looked much as it had before, but this time with new paint, modern electricity, and garages for automobiles. We were not that old San Francisco of gilt-edged gas lamps and velvet walls. We longed—as young men always do—to be modern.
I heard my bride whispering as the judge approached: "I'm so lucky, Asgar, so lucky to have found you..." The rest was drowned out by the black rush of blood in my ears.
I suppose Alice was lucky, in her way, to have her Asgar. I'm sure her mother, smiling beside us, thought so: he was dependable and kind; he was handsome in an eerie Nordic way; he had been a steady rock through all their troubles; and—most important to Mrs. Levy—Mr. Dollar had an income. It was not a small concern. You see, fate had dealt me one final heart to complete my flush: because of the earthquake, the widows had lost their fortune.
Only six major insurance companies honored their policies in full. The Levys had insured their house with a particular German company that, upon hearing of the earthquake, quickly closed all their business with America and never paid a cent. This was a common story. One German business even posted notices in New York proudly stating they had paid their clients in full when in fact the poor San Franciscans had to settle for a twenty-five percent discount on their losses, as if disaster meant a bulk price. I don't think Alice missed the house—it was always the elder Levy's taste—or the land she was forced to sell, but life is different for a woman. They are never as free as my Alice was before the earthquake. Think of it: wealthy, widowed, working at a charity of her own choosing. It was hard for her to realize that she had to depend on a man. That, like any poor and beautiful woman, she had to marry.
But the marvelous part, the part that warms my worst nights, is this: Alice, with a world to pick from, chose to marry me.
"We'll begin," the judge said, coming towards us with fluttering Mikado sleeves. He patted his pockets as if in search of glasses. To my horror, he approached the Widow Levy. "You are the bride?"
"No!" I shouted, perhaps too loudly.
Our witness laughed, as did her daughter. "Dear me, oh no. No, I'm the mother of the bride."
"It's me," said Alice, perfectly serious now, taking my hand.
"I see. Please stand before me. Dearly beloved..."
I was secretly happy that Alice wanted a plain wedding, with no guests. After all, there was nobody to come. She had no family except in far Seattle (all of whom she was sick of, anyway) and I had told her I had no one. She was extremely curious about me, and I eventually had to make up a story about a merchant father who had disappeared and an opera-singing mother who, on a wild trip back from the East, was lost on a sea voyage.
What besides death could keep Mother from my wedding? Here was the impossible—a bride for the hunchback—and I'm sure, if she could have, she would have canceled her life and spent it embroidering napkins and cloths and sheets for our bed, come and counseled Alice on her dress and hat (Mother never would have allowed that bud-green shade) and all the intricacies of married life that my sweet widow, of course, knew all too well. But she did not come. Because I simply never told her.
The greatest cruelties happen slowly. It was easy at first to keep Mother and Mina from my new life: after all, they had settled now in Oakland, an ocean away. Claiming a bad back from dragging her silver through the fire, Mother decided never to make the trip to San Francisco. She said she liked her house in the hills, and could live comfortably on the insurance from our burned and buried South Park. It was more than that, of course. She had loved her old town. She had been born there and seen the gold miners coming down from the hills, the Italians pressing their grapes into Chianti high in North Beach, the maids beating carpets as they sang; she had seen it grow to beauty, and she had seen it fall. So can you blame her if, a witness to death, she did not want to see the bright new life that had taken its place?
By the time I married Alice, Mina had refused to see me. We had told her, back in 1900, the true nature of her Uncle Beebee. She was twelve at the time and had stared at me, fiddling with her bows, not comprehending. "Is he going to die?" she asked, to which Mother replied, "Well, as much as any of us," and then my sweet sister looked at me with tense black eyes and said, "We can't tell anyone, don't tell, please Beebee, don't tell." I knew what she meant. She made me swear it many times over the years. Mina meant that this kind of deformity would reflect badly on the family, especially on her. She cried for her old Beebee. But the creature had to stay in the attic.
What happened, though, was not her fault. Whispering to love-struck admirers, dancing the daring polka at balls in town, no, Mina was not to blame. Nor Mother, staying in her house across the bay, speaking to her spirits. The fault was entirely mine. For I did more than hide my marriage from them. Over a few years, I ceased to return their letters or calls; I made excuses for why I could not join them for holidays or birthdays; I tapered off my visits to brief lunches or walks and then, by the end, to nothing at all. Because I did not want them to break my secret, to destroy the love I had worked so hard to win, I hid my life. I hid myself. I am not the first to do this. Like my father before me, I simply vanished in the snow.
So I was all alone on my wedding day. I came with just my hat, my suit, my heart full of honey. Friendless, orphaned, her Asgar offered himself completely when he slid that ring onto her finger and whispered those little words.
"Well I do too," said Alice. Our witness wept.
The judge pronounced us wed. Birds, sleeping in the spirals of the ruined stairs, flowed out into the sky above us. Alice's hand was cold as February.
"Asgar, are you crying?"
"No, no."
"Oh you are ridiculous. Kiss me."
I was. I did. For there was nobody left in my life but you, dear Alice. I had sent them all away.
What do we abandon to claim our heart's desire? What do we become?
As for the wedding night, well. Prurient reader. My son may be reading this, and he will blush, so I must open a peacock screen across the page. Behind it, imagine what you will: fog air beading a body. Phlox-perfumed memory, a teenage prayer answered at twice that age, the whisper of a beloved name, a false one. An exaltation of swallows. And so on.
Much later, in our older years traveling together in an automobile, Hughie asked me why I never asked him to the wedding.
"Are you insane?" I said. "You would have blown the whole thing."
"Max, I would've come in disguise. A false beard and a cape. A parasol. Come on, I would have hidden behind a tree."
"There were no trees left."
"Behind a stout woman. I would have watched over you as a witness."
"It's ridiculous."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"We weren't close then, were we? There were all sorts of things we didn't tell."
"True."
And he drove on past a lake of aquamarine, shadowed by one solitary cloud, the air through the open window making its syllable sound. I pointed out three boys, loud as crows, jumping from a dock; he smiled. Ah, old Hughie.
But back to married life.
It is a wolfish world, but she relieved it. Somehow, on our meager funds, Alice made a rich and lovely life. In those expensive postearthquake days, she produced feasts of rice in aromatic spices, talked wealthy friends out of their opera tickets, redid our bedcovers from old dress material, and all so effortlessly—as if it were perfectly natural to melt used candles into multicolored tapers. Did you know you can reuse broken earthquake china to tile your kitchen walls? My wife somehow did. She hired a neighbor boy and had my shoddy kitchen all redone in priceless cracked porcelain some friends were throwing out. She even had a broken teacup set in there with all the fine Limoges—imagine that, a teacup sticking out of the wall, handle and everything—and in it she always kept the fresh blossoms that I gave her.
What my wife and I ate for breakfast: Weetabix from the box. What we learned together, laughing in the privacy of our parlor, but never performed: the turkey trot. What she smelled of in the evening when she stepped smiling into the parlor where I waited: Rediviva.
Tell me: What is the proper wine for rapture? What is the proper fork?
Curse me if you want to, Alice, but say I was no miser. In fact, I gave you everything I could—gowns that I had seen you admire, far beyond our means, that I would buy and hang in the closet for you to discover; and of course the books that you would never have bought, all shipped from New York so you did not have to leave the house to find them—all these I gave you, and more. I even slipped a few dollars into your shoes for you to spend as you wished. I wanted more than anything to make you happy, to see that hard-won shock of joy when you pulled a leather book out of an unexpected parcel. My one luxury was the purchase of that smile, that quick laugh. Gothic villains keep their maidens in sewers, or high in foreign castles, sipping their blood like cordials. Jealous husbands are different, but still, we know that it is not enough to have them love us. We have to make a life they cannot leave. Too good to leave. Oh Alice, I did it so you would stay.
And isn't that what Sammy has heard me shouting in my sleep? When the summer lightning slits the sky's throat and Buster shivers in the sheets? Oh stay, Alice, please stay, please stay, oh stay, stay.
You're thinking that, having carved her name like a whaler into my very bones so that even my skin bore a faint trace of those five letters, having sailed around the world in my mind in search of her, and having found her, captured her, held her, old Max would soon tire of her. We are restless beasts, after all, and even paradise becomes too plain a prison. It did annoy me, now and then, that her housekeeping was not of the best quality. Shoes somehow propagated under settees. The bathroom, still resounding from her tub-singing, was always as wet as a marsh. And her whims were shortsighted; a harmless prank such as wearing the chandelier-drops as earrings was amusing, but somehow they never found their way back to their proper home, and I always had to set things aright in the end. I recall, as well, how trying it was when Alice would become entranced by some idea—for instance that we would have a mountain picnic—and become so firmly set that when these schemes dissolved, from rain or cost or whatever, it would take her hours to recover from her childlike disappointment. But none of this mattered. Not for more than a minute, two minutes, and I forgave her. With kisses that she accepted along her shoulder. With fingers spread beneath her scented hair, touching the landscape of her scalp like something beneath the sea. With words in her ear that made her whisper, "You're a fool." I forgave and forgave her. Of course I never grew tired. You see, I loved her.
You're wondering: Did she notice? That particular quirk of my body, did she sense it in the early mornings? When she accepted all those kisses of mine, through the years, the lips that grew slightly smoother? The hair that brightened just a little, the lines that faded from my eyes? While she gave up bread to take the voluptuous weight from her thighs (little realizing how I loved each dimple), did she notice that my pants had been taken in to fit a shrinking waist? By our sixth year, when she was forty, could she tell that the man who begged for an embrace before she left—the man who could not seem to get enough of her—did it with the desperation of a youth of twenty-seven?
I did my best to hide it. As I once had worked to cover my age with careful dyes at the barber's, now I came up with other tricks, countercurses. I bought a pair of uncorrected glasses, for instance, in old-fashioned ovals that made me just a little middle-aged. No longer interested in fashion as I once had been when nothing fit me, I chose to dress as old men do, in drab or antique styles, as if I had lost touch with a passing world. I even had my trusted barber put a little gray into my temples—yet when I looked in the mirror, it had come out even blonder, and I saw before me a blinking sun-touched boy whom Alice could never love. We took the color down a few shades, approaching the dull and dusty brown of books. Every day of my life, time was tricking me, embellishing my body with new leanness, long muscles, a rose in each cheek, and each day I did my best to burn the evidence. A telltale heart was beating beneath the floorboards of my skin, the heart of the man I'd buried, and I tried to forget—for love teaches us to forget—that one morning I would find her staring at me, a young stranger, the spell worn off at last.
But I was lucky. What she noticed were her own body's changes, and I often heard low sighs from the bedroom. She joked about her wrinkles and her chin, her new gray hairs (which disappeared at the salon), the bruises that took too long to heal, the aches of her back, her feet. She said these things lightly, as if she didn't care, and I told her over and over that she was lovely. You see, I wanted to see her old. Perhaps it was a product of deformity, but it excited me to think of her body moving through time, her breasts full and low, her neck ringed with folds. By our final years, when she could no longer hide the lines around her mouth, I desired her more than ever. Not the girl I'd met at stung-fourteen, but every variation of that girl. How luscious to see my Alice grow broad and then thin again, frail and gray, pleating her face with laughter! This is what my sacrifice was for: to have her ripen until her death within my arms.
One cool morning, just after we had finished the dreamlike act of love—something I had pictured so often as a youth, and which in those early years was given to me eagerly, daily—my new wife turned to me and said, "You're not enough for me, Asgar. I need another man." She arranged the bedclothes happily around her and then looked back at me, smiling impishly. "Why do you look like that? Did you bruise something? A son, sweet man. I think we need a son."
You, Sammy, it was you she needed. Alice spoke of you so merrily that morning, full of hopeful plans, almost as if you were a treasure buried long ago within her life and here she was, returned to find you. She knew you in every detail—your clever laugh, your school pranks, your underwater face in the morning, your stunned rapture in the midst of a Jules Verne novel, how you can stand on your head, sing, and whistle through your nose, swim farther on the river than any of your friends—and how is it mothers know these things? Are their dreams built into you, cell by cell, even before you are born? Or do they have some mystic clue to you, a pirate map folded in their heads?
In that first year of our marriage, she talked about you brightly, always when we'd just finished our conjugal embrace and I lay back on the bedsheets, dazed and happy. It was still so fresh and pure, the impossibility that my little Alice, whom I had loved since she was in barley-sugar curls and princess hats, could kiss me so hotly, tear at me with her nails as if she might rip me to shreds. Like a druidess, every morning she burned me to ashes. Our house was ever in fog, but I picture the window stuffed with sun, and a long diamond of light across our bodies. As I lay in my private bliss, your mother curled my hair around her finger and told me how soon you would be coming now, how she could feel you impearling in the nacre of her womb.
The second year, it became an occupation: the thought of you, the implication of you, there between us in the bed. "Don't be so shy, Asgar," she used to whisper, crawling towards me with dark cat-eyes. "Just do exactly as I tell you." I did, dutifully; no teacher was ever better. But those jewel-bright impossible mornings of the first year were gone; instead, we had a job before us, like a crew searching for an uncharted island, and she sometimes batted away my tickling fingers, my whispering kisses, intent only on the necessary parts of love.
The third year was a ghost story. She would put down her book sometimes and stare into a corner, as if she could see you there, barely visible, padding through the hallway. She was not sleeping well and would get up at night, go to the kitchen, where I could swear I heard the faint sound of singing. Alice tried to lift her spirits with her photography and went on long outings during the day. She returned from these outings with images of our city in its rebuilding, of the new Chinatown with its broader streets to keep out rats, its pagoda buildings, its lines of children holding on to each other's pigtails. Boys in the park, mothers gathered in white ruffles on a park bench. She developed these in our bathroom, and many of the pictures she tore to pieces. Was she looking for an image of you? And sometimes I came home to find her in a satin dress and paste diamonds; my Alice, dressed to cheer herself up, just as she had in the old days of South Park. I would find her sitting by the window, glittering, laughing, saying, "I'm feeling grand, darling!" But my heart would drop. What longing was hidden there? What secret? I would laugh and pour a drink, hoping tomorrow would be different. For we hate what is half seen.
Our tangle in the bedroom became less frequent, but more intense again: a seance, calling forth the one spirit who would not come. "I think I felt something that time," she'd whisper, worried, "Or no, no maybe not," and she would lie in silence, sheets wrapped up to her chin, nose red from the cold air. I fell into a quiet despair. You see, as with any lover, I was never sure that she was mine entirely. I knew she could vanish in an instant. But with a son, my son, if she somehow (God forbid) ever stopped loving me, she would love you forever, and it would still be enough. You could have saved my life. And yet—I admit I was also a little anxious. For what kind of creature would come from my incubus loins? Half human, half gorgon, with snaky hair and cockatrice eyes? Or, like myth, immortal?
But you are beautiful, Sammy, you are. I sit here writing on our little shared desk, and you are sprawled out like a dead soldier on your bunk, napping, your mouth agape with wonder at your dreams, the sun lighting your right ear so it glows coral-pink. One cheek is raw from rubbing on the sheet. Your left hand hangs at a crazy angle, soft and hopeless, and your lids pulse with the frenzy of your sleeping eyes. My son, you are beautiful, although you came too late.
A brief intrusion; forgive the dust. These scribblings are from the attic. I've finally found the little doorway leading here—Wonderland-sized—and it is indeed a dreamlike kingdom of broken chairs and dead insects and boxed-up memory. I have to pause here to write about the view from this smudgy window; it is sublime. It is of you, Alice, far below me.
You are stooped in yellow in the rows, your skirt tied in two calfknots as Roman women used to do, your arms half reddened by the sun and air of summer as you pluck and prune with such decision. You move as unhesitatingly as a card dealer, either absolutely sure of what's a weed and what isn't or, perhaps, immune to regret in this one place. You don't sing or talk or clench your face in worry. You are tender with each dahlia and approach it as if it were the loveliest, the only flower in the world, but once you move on it is forgotten. Ah, there's a bee following your every move.
It's hot up here, Alice. It's full of motherly rubbish and lover's loot. I'm thrilled and exhausted from going through all of Sammy's artwork from his early scribblings—mostly cave drawings that look like spidery heads speared on thin stakes—to recent portraiture of our little family that emphasizes his hands, your hairdo, and my chin. I think I love most the race car drawings he has made for me, and the scribbled inventions that he hopes will make him a fortune. These are what a father hoards—secrets his son shared only with him.
But that is not what I have come to find. Like any great museum, you keep your greatest, most controversial treasures stored away forever, but here they are, all leaning in a row like skeletons in a catacomb: your photographs. All the things you made in the years you spent without me, the years before I found you this last time. Yes, here it is: a self-portrait of you floating in a pond. I love it; I am thrilled by its passion; it intimates a private world of storm clouds, floodwaters, scattered petals, and broken glass. What do our lovers see when they close their eyes? What comes to them in daydreams? Only those who love artists will ever know, though it breaks our hearts to find it's never us.
I must keep an eye on you, Alice Ramsey, if I am to look through your things. But now that I've begun spying on you, I hardly know how to stop. I can't sit in this stuffy room and search for some bit of the past because here you are! What I've searched for so long is below me in the garden. You kneel, and your calves spread out between the hairy curled fists of the poppies, your skin bruised just faintly from when I tagged you in a game the other day; I have made my mark. Those legs, falling out of the skirt. And I picture a little girl like this, searching in the dark grass for a pin, her bloomers rising up her thighs like this. The bee is in the air above you, dipping towards your hair, but you don't notice. You lean back and wipe the sweat from your face with the edge of your elbow, a peasant gesture. The bee, the sun, the air circle around you. So lovely in the garden. Old men and little boys will always love you, Alice Ramsey. Beware.
It was in December of 1912, and I had been happily married to Alice for more than four years, when our lives endured a slight alteration. Her mother, the Widow Levy, who had been living in Pasadena since our marriage, took ill. The doctors never learned the true cause, but as I recall she broke out in a rash of telegrams, delivered weekly to our doorstep until Alice took me aside one night and said it was really very serious.
"How serious, darling?"
"Well, I'm going to have to help."
I considered this for a moment. If I'd had a pipe, I would have smoked it. I posed like a husband in a Sears catalog, in a sweater coat, considered how brief is the life of a rose, and said all right then, her mother could come and live with us.
"Ugh, you don't want that," she said, then added, "Besides, Mama can't travel. I'm going to have to stay with her."
In other words, they had to operate; they had to remove Alice from my life—I would rather they'd cut out a lung! My wife left the room to fill her trunk half with old dresses, half with new books and her cameras. She would be gone for three weeks, back for one, down again for three, and so on until her mother got better. Alice came back into the room and saw my face and sorrow shimmered in her eyes; she came and held my ears in her warm hands, kissed the nexus of my brow. "Oh, honey, it'll only be a few months." My heart brightened; was her mother so near the end? "No, Asgar," she told me, studying my eyes. "No, a few months before she's well."
She was wrong; the woman did not get well. And it took five years.
Her absences destroyed me. Like Demeter, I made my world a winter without her. Clothes piled up, wineglasses stood in a redstained battalion on the kitchen table, and every night I slept with my arms coiled around a sofa cushion. Sometimes, when I awoke, smiling, joints creaking, whispering good morning to my lover, and found my arms full only of stuffing and fog, I wept real tears.
We talked in letters, which was romantic. I told her about the stupid happenings of our living room, where I had last heard the scuttlings of our local mouse, what hinge or drawer I had fixed, and any change in the view. I read about her mother's pain and sadness, her lost beauty, her selfish nature in full bloom at last. I read that Alice had joined a photographic club and was apprenticing in a local artist's studio. In fact, she sent me a beautiful picture of herself in an orange grove, smiling at the camera with sly love (at her husband, that is, since the photo was made specifically for me), and it was embossed with the silver VR of the studio. I kept the photo by my bed, and when I thought of my distant wife, it began to take the place of my own memory.
I became as jealous as Bluebeard. Meeting her at the Oakland station with a bunch of flowers or some ornament for her hair—something that would win a smile and then, unworn, a place in her Chinese box—I would catch her chatting with a man, frequently mustached and indistinct, letting him help her down from the train before she caught my eye and shot him a quick goodbye. He exited behind the scenery, the steam and boxes. Her smile went on like a filament bulb.
"What was his name?" I'd ask once she'd admired my present.
"Who? What? Oh, Asgar."
"I don't want you talking to any men outside your photographic club."
"Asgar, I'm exhausted. Mother's been making me read romance novels to her, it's pretty shocking how boring those things are, and how explicit, really. Every possible act of love, it's in there. You'd never guess it, but my mother is quite a sex fiend..."
"His name."
"It's Cyril, and he sells lumber and I love him. Oh, don't be so typical. I'd never leave you for a Cyril. Now get me somewhere where you can kiss me," she'd say, and I'd hurry her into the car, wondering all the while if I was warming my hands over the fire lit by another. Cyril, or Frank, or Bob; oh the images that emerged nightly in the chemical bath of my skull!
But it all faded. When she was with me, for that one week each month, my life took on the heightened colors of a tinted photograph, and even Alice's bad housekeeping, the socks and shoes found under the sofas, the scattered opened envelopes she left everywhere, came to be adored—they were the sign of my continued luck. My life's hope had come true, and I instructed the maid to keep a sock or two lying around even when the mistress was gone, a hairbrush stocked with glossy brown hair, just to prove to myself I was not dreaming.
It was about two years into her mother's illness that our fortunes changed yet again. One week when Alice was in San Francisco, I came home from work to find her in our little parlor reading. I made a noise and Alice looked up at me with a lively expression.
"What is it, darling?"
Mischief fluttered across her face and departed. She said nothing and picked a card from the china bowl: Gerald Lassiter, Esq. Fairmont Hotel. A corner of it had been turned down to reveal the word Affaires. Business of some sort.
"Oh, what's this?"
"Make a guess."
"How on earth am I... ?"
She said, "Okay, I'll give you three hints. Top hat. Oiled raincoat. Haunted eyes. That's all I'm saying."
"My bastard son."
Her eyes widened in amusement. "Wouldn't that be fun? No, an old man. Very odd and irritated. Walked with two ivory-tipped canes."
"I'm assuming it's not a fellow clerk? Nothing as boring as that?"
"No, no, nothing as boring as that. Come on, guess, Asgar!"
"I give up. William Howard Taft."
She sighed. "You're terrible at this. He wouldn't tell me anything. He just asked for the man of the house. He said it concerned you and another."
"Mrs. Taft."
Her eyes came alive again and she leaned forward in her chair. "Asgar, I think it must be your father!"
I went the very next morning to the Fairmont Hotel and managed to be allowed in, though it was not a place for a poor clerk, even in what passed as my best suit. I had the concierge call up to Mr. Gerald Lassiter, Esq., and I waited a long time on a piercecarved couch beside an explosion of tulips.
The concierge returned, his buttons sparking in the lobby air. He waved a hand and from behind him emerged a man in a greatcoat, trim gray beard, his left eye clouded, blind, and his nose barnacled with spots. Alice's powerful imagination had doubled the canes; there was only one, with a carved ivory head. I stood up. The cane was handed to the concierge and the man stared at me with a shuddering intake of breath.
"Father?" I ventured.
"What?" he asked.
Deaf, deaf and hobbling, I thought. "I don't know what to say."
"Say?"
Louder: "You are, you are..."
"Mr. Tivoli, I am a lawyer," he said with a hissing throat. "I am here as executor and would have been here long before had you not been so goddamned hard to find. I assumed you did not want your wife to know your real identity. Asgar Van Daler indeed. You are a fool and your father is dead."
It was perfectly simple: my father's footsteps through the snow had led straight to the harbor, as we always knew, and not because he had been stolen out to sea. He had simply walked away from his life and never returned.
He had arrived in Alaska a month after he disappeared from San Francisco and there, with the money he had managed to take with him, bought a small supply store and began a little business in the remotest possible region of America. Who knows what pleasure he had sought there in the lonely cold, the sun a mere gray star? Surely some shivering joy. Perhaps the sudden snow had shown him a vision, a reminder of his long-lost homeland in the north. The shop grew into two, and three, and that was when my father began investing in real estate and mining ventures, which brought him even more profit—in copper, not in gold—and so on in a dull and spiraling accumulation of wealth and stature.
"He did marry," the executor informed me. "A half-Indian woman named Sarah Howard, but she gave him no children and had no family. Of no fiscal importance here. I believe she died in an influenza outbreak near the end of the last century." There was no more to be known of Sarah Howard. I picture her, of course, in buckskins and a bonnet, tending a woodstove and making johnnycakes for scribbling Dad. Except of course they were wealthy: a maid to tend the stove, to serve the drinks. Indian Sarah would be sewing in the parlor. No buckskins, no bonnet. Silk dress and wearing bustles years after they had gone out of style, her black Aleutian hair lit by the never-setting sun. Poor dead Sarah. Of no fiscal importance, but he loved her.
He lived a decade without her, his mines failing a little, his cannery prospering. The houses were slowly repaired and rented, the business turned over to more willing hands. He got gray and weary of the world and died. There is no deathbed scene, no dying phrase. How could there be? My father had already left without a word.
"A satisfactory life, as your inheritance proves."
This was the life he wanted? A cold and happy, far-off life? He left his house and clothes, he left us, in our famous city? It seemed impossible. Raucous, beautiful San Francisco always seemed to me like the favored daughter of a merchant, whom every man adores, gorgeous and perfumed and gay, and yet there will always be a man who finds her charms too shrill. One who prefers a whisperer with a mole and a sable brow, a chilly smile. There is always my father to choose the wrong, wrong life.
Why do they leave us? Why?
Twelve copper mines in various locations in Alaska and Montana, three sawmills, two steamers, a fishery, a cannery, one dozen pairs of men's shoes, size 10 (my size, too, Dad, until my feet began to shrink), two dozen silk ties and cravats in a Turkish bazaar of hues, a kinetoscope with slides of China, India, and various bathing beauties, a collection of grotesque farmyard majolica, cuff links in jet and lava, a female hand carved from bog oak, a startling and ingenious variety of electrical items meant to mix, grind, drill, illumine, project, mesmerize, and cure (none of which worked), a gold pocket watch engraved "for my love Asgar" which I did not remember, a silver ring which I did (bringing back a sudden memory of the mark it left when he removed it, a double welt in pink), various pieces of rental property, and a check from the estate which embodied not my father's account (which was all wisely invested) but the proceeds from the sale of four houses in Fairbanks, one in Anchorage, furniture, paintings, and other items too lacking in sentiment for Father to itemize as mine, including, apparently, a cast-iron fountain portraying a boy beneath an umbrella.
And that is all I ever got from my father.
That evening, I told Alice and her face became electric.
"What do you mean?"
We were rich, I said, not grossly rich like bankers or railroad men she'd known, but still beautifully and comfortably rich just as she had been before, as I had been as a child; the wheel had come around for us again. I said I loved our life, the wild kitchen with its rose-filled teacup, the miracles she could make from her modest grocery list, the lace she bought by the yard to retrim old dresses, our pure and perfect life in this pure and perfect room. I said we should be careful not to change a life we loved. And yet. "And yet I'll give you anything, Alice. Any desire in your heart."
My fantasy was that we should take one of the new cruise ships around the world. No earthquake could tumble us; no war could reach us. I could make my dream come true; I could buy a gilded island. Is there not a people, in some desert place, who are promised this in heaven? The waves themselves would hypnotize her, insominate her, keep her sleeping where I could watch her, gazing at her dreams, my wave-borne Alice under a porthole filled with sun, perhaps forever.
I told her this (or some abridged version) and she listened, leaning against the mantel with her cheap earrings jingling faintly with the movements of her head.
"No. No. That's not what I want."
"Then what? Alice, tell me."
She held the thought in her mouth, like a cupped bird. Her eyes searched the wallpaper, as if something were written there, some message from her future self. When she spoke at last, it was like a direct current: "I want my own business, a photography studio, and space besides for my own work, yes, yes, oh I want..."
You wanted freedom. It's what we always wish for, and I should have known it. I'm surprised, looking back, Mrs. Ramsey, that you didn't leave me long before, that I didn't return to the rooms soon after our marriage and find them empty, or full of everything but you and your favorite dress—the red. Why did you stay so long?
"We'll see, Alice."
A laugh, a fountain of joy. "Oh what a chance! Asgar, what a chance!"
"We'll see."
She began to dance and then caught my reflection in the mirror and winked at me. "Asgar, I think we should celebrate," she said with her timeless smile. "Kiss me right here on my neck. Yes." With the scent of her so willingly given to me, the young parts of me began to burn. I heard her whisper: "Asgar, take this damned dress off of me."
Oh I did, with hot and grateful hands I did. I pulled the wings from the moth. And she got her shop.
"You need to touch up your hair color, Max," Hughie mumbled through his new scimitar mustache.
"What?"
"You look like a paperboy. You could be my son."
"My worst nightmare, Hughie."
We sat in Hughie's club, one that I had been invited to join because of my newfound wealth. So once more I found myself alongside Hughie almost every night in a leather chair carbuncled with upholstery tacks, reading a newspaper still warm from the butler's iron. With Alice gone so often, I was grateful for those evenings with Hughie.
"I like you better rich, Max."
"You idiot, you used to say you liked me better poor."
"I did?"
"You did."
He considered this. "Well, that's because I was poor. But the least you can do is buy a decent haircut."
"Hand me my drink."
"Are you enjoying it, at least? I mean, all this sudden wealth? And Alice? Seems like you're the luckiest man alive."
I was. Alice and I, after years in that stuffy apartment, now had a broad-shouldered house on Green with a chilly view of Alcatraz, a modern garage to hold our Oldsmobile, as well as all the new and foolish things that people have when they come back into money, the trinkets and indulgences we missed so much—the clothes and food and miraculous habits—and which are never half as pleasing. Of course, with this new house, I had to find new hiding places for the evidence of my secret, a few letters and the pendant and chain Grandmother made for me. While it had been easy to keep it in its old grave among my shoes, now I was afraid no hiding place would be good enough; servants will go through everything. Eventually, I slipped it with the letters into a locked box in my dresser and told the maid not to dust it.
I didn't worry about Alice, prying as she was; my wife was hardly ever there. When she did come up to see me, I lavished her as best I could, and she enjoyed it, I think, laughing at the ludicrous jewels I brought to her in little velvet boxes, screaming at the new car when I drove it in front of the house for the first time, but she never wore the jewels and she never drove the car. In fact, with money behind her, she dressed in her same eccentric, inexpensive clothes—and sometimes those pants, underneath, when she could get away with it—and concentrated only on her business plan, on that studio of hers, the one I'd sworn to buy her. I longed to travel back in time and pluck that promise from my lips. But how could I have known? My only hint came too late: on the morning when she stepped from the train, kissed me flutteringly, and, like a magician producing a handkerchief, pulled a piece of paper from her coat: the lease she had just signed. She was so happy; that night she practically melted in my arms. The photography business she had dreamed of. A little studio on an up-and-coming corner. Of course it was in Pasadena.
"She's got to be near her mother," I explained to Hughie when he raised an eyebrow. "They're closer than I realized. Like those fig and cypress trees that grow inside each other in Eastern gardens, it's unexpected. And her business partner, he's down there. She apprenticed with him, he was once quite a famous artist and she says, well, she says she's his muse. He's got clients and experience." An old friend of her mother's, old Victor. I liked to think of him with long white mustaches, brows singed off from flash-powder burns.
"You're taking this pretty well, Max."
I said. "It's what she wants. When you love someone, don't you want their dreams to come true? If you can help them? And she has to be down there anyway. I see her when I can. That's enough, isn't it? When you really love someone."
"I guess," he said quietly.
"So things are good, Hughie."
"Are they?"
"Oh yes."
He stared at me with those blue eyes, fringed by albino lashes. Then he shook his head and touched my sleeve. "You've got to tell her, Max," he said. "You'll lose her."
"I don't want to talk about this."
"It's idiotic," he hissed. Other men looked and smiled at the noise of our argument. "Dying your hair, and I hear you've got a cane now. I'm sure you don't think she's stupid. You'll lose her."
I looked at him, at his ridiculous mustache, as sober and stupid as a bad disguise. "Shut up, Hughie," I snapped. "I don't know why you give advice. Everyone knows you're no good at love."
What I meant, I suppose (must we explain what alcohol makes us say?), was that he was no good at marriage. I had gone to his house one afternoon to deliver an invitation and the maid made me wait for Abigail, who arrived in a long brocade gown with a hallucinated look, her blond hair dull as dust. Shouts from her son rang from the upper stories. "He's not here," she said, and gave me her old social smile. "He's attending to our old property, he's staying there while he makes repairs."
"What old property?"
She winced. "The Pumpkin."
My first thought—and hers, I assume—was a mistress housed quite fairy-like in a pumpkin shell. Of course I ran over as soon as I could, only to find nothing more than rooms of Oriental carpets and lamps, bookcases filled with gleaming new books, a new manservant, and Hughie in shirtsleeves. Simple enough: a masculine retreat. Hughie explained quite innocently that he could not get his reading done in the house with his wife's shouting and her headaches, the child and the numerous cats they had collected. I saw he had covered the walls with army portraits that Abigail would never have allowed, men who were strangers to me, smiling with touched-up faces. Then his man brought in a pipe and—as in the old days—we smoked hashish until we were giggling on the floor. I remember thinking in my state that the manservant, Teddy, was as young as I looked, with slick black hair and red cheeks, but with an almost frightened look of youth that I could never reproduce. Teddy propped my head on a pillow and lay a blanket over me without a word. "Thank you, Teddy," I said.
"It's nothing, sir."
Hughie sighed and repeated, "Thank you, Teddy," and fell promptly asleep, snoring, on his sofa. I'd known him with girls, with Alice, in college and in marriage, and here he was, ever the same. Alone again in his bachelor house, with a manservant and mustache, a wife off somewhere putting a child to bed, singing a song he could not hear. No good at love; he knew what I meant.
I have to put down these pages for a moment. The house has been remade for a cocktail party—a quite illegal affair, darling, but I won't tell—and you are in your bedroom, Alice, shouting for someone to zip up your dress. I've got to run. I must get there. before Sammy.
Now let us pick up a dropped detail: the invitation I had brought to Hughie's house. It was not just to one of our normal club events, the numerous dull evenings that rich men must attend; this was something unexpected. His invitation had come slipped into my own—I guess the hostess only kept track of me—and I delivered it because I needed him to come along. For memory, for history. To a ball, given by none other than my old maid, Mary.
It will not surprise even my youngest reader, I hope, that before the earthquake, every senator and merchant plunked coins in her mechanical jukebox and sat for a bottle of champagne with the woman, and more than a few had peepholes reserved for them within the scented walls of the "Virgin Room." Madame Dupont had even opened a male brothel with a secret entrance for female customers, who wore satin masks so they would not be recognized, and a harem of men who supposedly worked as volunteers. All that was over by the teens, of course. Church pressure, legislation, the death of our dearly corrupted government, all brought Madame Dupont to close her houses. She had done well—broker clients had helped her to invest well, and stock tips were easy to hear in her flocked parlors. But it was not the last we heard of her, for she had often told me, a few glasses into the evening, that her dearest dream had never been to be a success. "I want to be a lady," she'd said, adjusting her blond wig. "Damn it, I deserve it. I've worked as hard as any wife for those men. I want to be at a dinner party with a Vanderbilt and have him turn to me and say, 'Madame, it's been a pleasure."' So that was why, years after her brothel had shut its doors, and long after most had forsworn the vices she represented, after most of us had forgotten her, each important man in San Francisco received an invitation:
Mr. & Mrs.————
A Spring Ball
March 20, 1914
8 P.M.
at the home of Marie Dupont
You cannot stop a whore from making money, and money would buy anything in our city, so we found ourselves at an elegant white house sitting between the residences of a railroad baron and a Spanish count. Night-blooming jasmine, juniper, columns arcing in a Teddy Roosevelt grin. I imagined Mary had spent every cent on this house, chosen not for the comfort of her later years, but for this very night. The approach of glimmering gaslight—not electric—the noise of an orchestra coming like a distant waterfall from the open door; all planned, or hoped for at least when she laid down her million. I picture old Mary wandering through the empty rooms, clasping and unclasping her hands, imagining this party when all her sons and fathers and lovers would gather to claim her, this occasion for her best jewels, best jokes, this evening made, like all reunions, of memories best forgotten.
There was an Englishman, and not a Negro maid, to show us inside, but Madame was there all the same, standing at the newel of the stairs and laughing. I could see almost nothing of her except the abnormality of her thinness, her slight hunch that could only be age, and the expensive blond of her wig. The sexes come to resemble each other in childhood and old age, and she stood hands on her hips in the manner of a sergeant. She must have been seventy.
"Mr. Dempsey! I knew you would come," she said, approaching Hughie with an outstretched hand that shook slightly under the weight of her rings. "And you're looking so handsome and well."
"Madame," he said, kissing those rings. So thin, when did she get so thin?
"No Mrs. Dempsey?" she asked, tensing her port-wine lips.
"I'm sorry, no, we don't go out together these days."
She stared hard—the old procuress stare—but it became a sharp dazzle as she looked on me. "But you've found a beautiful young man, I'm charmed." A low laugh of old thrills.
Something of youth comes back with age. Although it was clear at a glance that nothing could restore her body's beauty, my old Mary, wrapped in her straight black gown, a long egret feather set across and away from her brow, held out her hand and flirted as if love affairs were all before her.
Immediately, though, the hand was withdrawn in a golden jangle. "Well fuck!" she yelled, then a pure yawp of joy. "My God, it's Max!"
"Now wasn't there a girl?" she stage-whispered as I helped her into her ballroom. "Some girl you were in love with, poor Max. Have you seen her since you've gotten so young?"
"Her name was Alice," I told her with tenderness. "And Madame, I married her." I think if she could have cried, she would have. But like a colored gourd, she merely rattled with a sigh, for age and hardness had dried up everything inside her.
"And how's Hughie?" she asked. Hughie was off at the bar getting a glass of champagne, nodding at the few gathered men. He looked as uncomfortable as any of us among our fellow whoremongers.
"He's happy, I think."
"No. His type isn't ever likely to be happy," she said, then turned to me and examined me thoroughly with the eye of a slaveholder. "I have to tell you something, Max, you haven't turned out at all as I expected. When I knew you as a little boy, I mean."
"No?"
"No, when I first saw you, oh, dear, you were the ugliest thing in the world. What could be sadder than a child in an old man's skin? I thought, God, here's something nobody will ever love. That's the truth. I felt so bad for you, God knows why, the rich little creature. I was so happy to see you'd changed. And you keep changing. I can't tell you what it's like to be a woman of my age, and to be so ugly. A gigantic lizard in silk. And now, you see, we've switched places. Tonight some man will look at me as he's drinking my wine and dancing to my band and think, God, here's something nobody will ever love. Serves me right, doesn't it? But I'm legitimate at last. I'm a lady, Max. So don't you tell them I was ever your maid. Don't you tell them I was ever anything but a lady."
"You are a lady."
"You've grown handsome, Max. Are you surprised? Try not to get younger. Stay just like this and your wife will love you forever."
I saw that the old girl was a little drunk. So I told her the simple truth: "I can't."
To that, she just laid the back of her hand against my cheek.
It did not take more than half an hour. More men from the club gathered in the ballroom and library, smoking cigars and raising eyebrows meaningfully at one another. I recognized one old fellow as the man who once had paid Mary to be her maid. The orchestra had lit once more into Blue Danube in the everhopeful expectation of bandleaders that some couple will be taken by the spirit and start a craze of dancing that will last until the early morning. There were no couples, however. I could hear Madame Dupont in the other room as more guests arrived:
"But your wife, where is she?"
"I'm sorry, Madame, but she couldn't make it this evening."
"Not make it?"
"You have a lovely house."
It happened time after time.
"I'm bored to tears, Max," Hughie moaned to me. "Since when did Madame Dupont's parties get so boring? Blue Danube, Jesus I could scream. And these rotten men who I'm sure I'd recognize better with their trousers around their ankles, sipping champagne in her bordello, all dressed up. It's such a bore."
"It's nice for Madame Dupont."
"It's blackmail. I don't owe her any favors. I paid for everything I got."
"Well, I owe her."
"I'm smashed. Hold my drink. I'll be back."
He was gone for a long time, and in a panic that he had abandoned me, I walked outside to see if the car was still here.
I was relieved to see it parked obliquely on the drive; inside Hughie and the driver were quietly arguing. It was cold out, and I suddenly wanted to go home. I walked down the wet grass and tried to listen to the argument, but some other chauffeur began to crank his engine and I could only watch my friend and his servant, Teddy, mouthing their complaints, the one in a glistening top hat and the other in a Scotch cap banded with goggles. It was a kind of silent feature playing before me; even the night fog rendered them colorless as I watched. I wondered how I had been so careless not to have seen it before.
I pulled back behind a century plant and nearly cut my hand. Another waltz had started from the ballroom. Hughie was wincing as he listened to the shouting young man, pressing one finger against his own temple, giving a soft reply, the young man blinking coldly. Gloves crushed in a fist. Harsh words becoming fog in the air. You, my more sophisticated reader, have known for ages what I first allowed myself to recognize here. A letter burned and thrown into a grate. Friends from college, beloved and then suddenly forgotten. A wife left to her house, a home with Teddy. The hurt in Hughie's eyes—what other heartbreaks had I missed? I was enraged, watching these men together. I had never guessed. But people do not keep their secrets because they are so clever or discreet; love is never discreet. They keep them because we don't care enough to notice.
It all happened so quickly, I can't remember my true emotions at the time—repulsion, I assume, shock and disgust—but thinking back on it, I feel only gratitude. I watched the lovers as they sat silently and, not smiling, took each other's hand by the fingertips. Teddy's face was all sorrow and regret, and I suppose he loved my friend as best he could, and almost enough. A moment later Hughie whispered something in the young man's ear, brushed his lips against his cheek, and kissed it. What an unexpected scene, so perverse and sad. And what wonderful luck. I write this now, after having known Hughie for over fifty years, and I ask you: what better companion could I have had all my twisted life, what greater friend for this friendless beast, than old Hughie—a secret monster just like me?
Back inside the party, when I retreated, the mood had changed. The liquor had lasted, and now the men were gathered into groups, giggling. A few had made it onto the dance floor, waltzing with one another as in the old days in the diggings, when there were no women to be partners and the world was only men. I would say nothing to Hughie, later. What was there to say? That the heart has more chambers than we can see?
Someone came over and saved me, smiling and whispering.
"What's that?" I asked.
He winked at me; he'd known me once, but didn't recognize me. "I said isn't it awful? Isn't it delicious?"
"The drink's not bad."
He grew quickly annoyed. "No, the wives."
"What about them?"
"You're married, young man, you should know. She's shunned."
"Who?"
"Dupont, the old whore. The wives aren't coming."
From the other room, we heard another man making his excuses: "I'm sorry, she couldn't make it this evening." We all turned around—perhaps the entire room turned—as Madame Dupont, with a friendless smile, entered her own ballroom and graciously accepted another glass of champagne. Her body was hunched slightly, and this willful woman seemed to disappear for once beneath the glitter of her jewels and her dress. She had at last understood the terms of this evening. It was like a wish granted by a genie: she had conjured up the most important society men in town, but it all meant nothing. She must have realized that men were not the goal, not the key to society; the acceptance of a woman, after all, is all that matters to another. And the wives would never accept old Mary.
I cannot describe the desperate, animal hate in her eyes. She stood and stared at the crowd of her customers with the gaze of someone wrongfully imprisoned, who has studied the walls for years until, at last, she picked the lock and slipped through and only found, in us, another wall. She had not gotten away with poverty, and hard luck, after all; she had not gotten away with youth, as we had. For look at us: in our celluloid collars and club rings and fat bellies. Each of us had dressed that evening knowing what would happen. Each of us, whom she had entertained in the orangesoda light of her parlor, had tied our ties and shrugged into the mirror, laughing at the awful trick we were going to play on Dupont, the old whore. We had convinced ourselves, I guess, that youth is something to be forgotten. And that, to forget it, one must not simply refuse to remember; one must destroy the woman who made the memories.
"All men tonight, is it?" she asked in a crystal voice.
There came a cheer from the crowd. Old Mary, we were shouting for old Mary, and our cheer meant: We won't let you change.
"Drink up, gentlemen."
The conductor looked away from his band for a moment, expecting, perhaps, a gesture from the hostess. One slash of a finger to stop the music and send them home, her boys, her sons, who had betrayed their old mother.
Then she lifted her head, briefly gay again the way she used to be. "Fuck, boys, somebody step up and dance with me!"
A cheer. Somebody did. I put down my drink and left through the laughing crowd.
It was 1917 and Alice was up in San Francisco for a few days. Her visits had become shorter as business picked up down south, and I remember the sensation of opening the closet one morning to realize that most of her dresses were gone. I helped nothing by responding with fearful jealousy. I would accuse her of ignoring her marriage, and then, when her eyes softened into something like the truth, I would grow too bold and name her accomplice. "Lawrence!" I might yell, referring to a young train attendant, and she'd examine me oh so very much amused. Oh, Alice. You were right to think I was absurd, because I never understood that the form my nemesis would take was not that of a blond, celluloid boy. Hell, you could have had me if you wanted; I was becoming more like one each day.
We had gone, that evening, to see a Mozart opera, and it was during a thrilling soprano aria that Alice began to fumble in her seat, warming her hands against each other like Lady Macbeth trying to rinse away a spot of blood. She leaned forward, wincing, and while at first I whispered for her to calm herself, she gave me one of her hands and it was ice. Then I noticed, upon her bare back, a firebird of fever. A dowager behind us coughed. Alice stared at me and whispered for me to save her—or that's what I heard under the coloratura. We waited until the aria was done and then, draping my wife in a shawl and my frock coat, I led her out into a taxi and, from there, home to bed. How tenderly I unwrapped her. My shivering beauty, with the fever glowing from her loins, between her breasts up to her neck, where it seemed to strangle her as she sighed. All through the night I wet her brow and listened to her breath. Watched her eyelids flicker and stare, flicker and stare. I did not sleep, waiting for her secrets. She gave none. By morning, of course, I was sicker than she.
Our deathbeds were in the same room, and all I can remember are warped and colored scenes and moments, unrelated, and revealed to me as an electric storm reveals the edges of a house:
There was the time, past midnight, I assume, when I awoke with an aching throat and looked across to Alice, who lay watching me with sad, adoring eyes. The room, in my memory, is all streaks of lavender and black, with a stripe of color from the upstairs hall, and Alice was pale from her sickness and probably hallucinating. "Go to sleep, Mother," she said, unblinking, and very dutifully I did.
Many hours later: myself trapped in hot sheets, the room bright despite drawn curtains, our maid giving a glass of water to Alice, who sat on the edge of her bed in a white lawn ruffled slip. A stray bit of sunlight caught the water in the glass and the world seemed to explode. I must have made a noise because the next thing I knew they were both looking at me. "Alice, I need to tell you," I said. She looked at me expectantly, holding herself up with the bedpost. The maid had vanished. "Alice, I need to tell you." She looked confused, pale, and scared, and, for a moment, like my grandmother when she rose from her sickbed. The maid returned and I was given a scarlet pill. Painful swallow. The water flashed again and I blacked out.
Late at night: opening my eyes, hoping days had passed and that I would be well again, only to feel my dull brain wriggling like a sea lion in its hot chamber. Immediately I noticed Alice, fully clothed in black and white satin, standing in the doorway, one hand on the knob. Her eyes were different, stern. I knew enough to feign sleep and it was some minutes before I heard her close the door and walk away. Why was my dresser open? The moon came into the room, old lover, and slept in her empty bed.
It was morning when it happened, I think, a mother-of-pearl morning when, feeling no better but somehow able to walk, I made my way to the chamber pot again and, squatting like a king, gave a grateful piss. The room teetered like a boat. I noticed my box of secrets on the bed, lock broken to splinters. I heard her behind me.
"Asgar, explain."
I craned my neck and saw something gold glinting in her hands. The light was painful to me and the position cramped. "What?"
"Where did you get this?"
She dumped it on the floor, where the chain coiled into an S and the numbers flashed against the wood: 1941.
I thought of Grandmother in her bonnet. I thought of Father holding me naked from the bath. Dead, buried, gone. I thought of a dinner long ago, Alice touching those numbers one by one, laughing at me.
"I've never seen it before."
"It's yours. I found it in your dresser. Tell me why."
I explained that the room was turning and I could not think.
She showed me a torn envelope with some cursive writing. "And I found this." She tossed it on the floor and I saw it was from Hughie to a certain Max Tivoli.
"I can't think," I repeated.
"Asgar, explain."
"Didn't your mother know him? They must be hers."
"They're not."
"Perhaps at Bancroft's, yes now I remember..."
"Asgar, you're lying. Explain."
We are not ourselves when we are sick. We function at the most basic level, are ugly, miserable, and all our ordinary charms that seem to come so naturally to us fall away, and more than anything else we resemble either ourselves as children, crying for a drink of water, or our parents on their deathbeds, mumbling a prayer. Too weary to keep up the brittle artifice of our self, we shed it, like the locust, and become, in public, the sad and inconsolable adult that we so often are in private, which is to say: our true self. Illness always made me dazzled and weak, and this is the only reason I have for why—rather than concoct a more logical excuse, for though she suspected something, surely Alice never suspected the real reason—I told her. For the third time, I broke the Rule. Softly, carefully, as if she were a cobra that might strike, in a hoarse voice that did not belong to me, but with a relief and regret that did, stopped only now and then by gusts of nausea and black spots, I told her the thing I swore I never would: the truth.
You sat on the edge of the bed, Alice, and you looked at me in a way you never had before, not in all the years I knew you, as semichildren, as semistrangers, as husband and wife. You looked at me as if I mattered. As if I were a precious vase you had knocked carelessly against, and time had slowed just enough for you to see its hopeless fall towards the stone floor. As if you cared, at last, too late, to save me. "Oh no," you said. I suppose I began to cry—I was hopeless, and ill, and broken in so many ways—but I only remember you, dressed in white, the kiss of your lips on those words—"Oh no"—and your eyes with a small and tortured Max in each one. Then, with your next words, I was skinned alive.
"Oh no. You're simply insane."
My mind began to flash with nausea, and I could not stop you from leaving the room because just then I lost what little I had in my stomach and began to heave, like a dog, dryly onto Hughie's fallen letter. I saw my own name blotched with bile. A nurse came in and took me to the bed, and I could not speak because a pill was thrust between my lips. I saw your pale back moving down the hallway. You carried your face in your hands; they closed the door.
I awoke, terrified to find myself in the middle of a conversation. It was early evening, still light, and the curtains were open. Alice lay on the other bed, fully clothed in violet plissé crepe, net frill at her neckline, gloves on her stomach as if she had spent the day out. Her coat and hat lay on the foot of the bed. Whiskey on the table, two glasses, both nearly empty; apparently I had been drinking. I came to and she was talking:
"I don't want anything that's here."
"No," I said automatically.
"Things don't matter to me, the rugs and china don't matter. I don't want them. That will be an old life to me soon, my life's been in Pasadena for a long time now, Asgar. You've known that. Everything is down there now. I'll take just some books and some little things you gave me."
"Yes."
"The girl can send everything else to Victor. I'll give her the address."
"Of course. Who's Victor?"
She looked at me quite pitilessly. She was not anyone I recognized. I could feel something dark and hard building behind my eyes. She said, "Asgar. Asgar, you have to listen. I know this is hard."
"Max, I'm Max."
"Stop it. Stop with that."
"Alice, I'm Max!"
Her eyes went to the doorway, where a sea-hag nurse stood with a pill. I nodded and fell back against the pillow and the door closed on her. There was a kind of blur around the edge of my vision, a watery swirl as if we lived at the bottom of something. "Who's Victor?" I asked again, quietly.
"Oh you...we've gone through this. Victor Ramsey. I told you. Now I'm going to head downstairs in a minute, I don't want you to come down. You're sick, you'll make a scene. Promise me."
"Okay. Is he a doctor?"
"Asgar, are you even listening? I'm leaving for the train. I'm going down to Pasadena for good now. For good." Victor Ramsey, VR, yes, the clouds were parting from my brain and I recognized that old friend of her mother's, the photographer, her business partner. Him? How impossible. But she was talking: "Asgar, please listen. Please listen. You and I are saying goodbye." Then, more kindly, she added: "No, don't cry."
I could not stop it. You'll think I am so simple a creature that I wept because I was denied a thing I wanted, especially this, my life's goal. A child, a madman, wailing. But it isn't true. I wept because I loved her and because, no matter how she had faded to a visitor in our marriage, a cameo performer with few scenes, still I loved every one. To hear that sigh, Alice, from your dressing room as you tried to fit into an old dress. To find another of your favorite books, ruined by a careless drop into the bathtub, pressed under the dictionary to save it from swelling. To discover, coiled behind a chair, one of your snake-shed stockings, a sign that you were still in my world. Your kitchen singing voice. Your laugh. That foolish sound. Oh Alice, I had to save it.
"Alice," I said. "I'm not myself today. There's something I could say right now that would make all the difference, isn't there? You would stay if I said it, Alice. But I'm not thinking well, I'm in a kind of cloud, so you have to think of it. Help me, Alice, what could I say? Let's think. I know it's about ten words, and not big ones. What are they?"
Your hand was on your hat. "We are strangers, Asgar. There's nothing to say."
"There is, there is, Alice. I have to try. Life is very short." I left my bed, almost sweet with sickness, and sat beside you. Did you flinch? I think you were listening for the first time. "Alice, when I'm well, I will take you away from this house and this city and old Max. You're right, I'm not Max, I was in a fever, forgive me, Alice. Or don't forgive me. Or love me, either, forget all that. We'll travel around the world. You are the whole point of my life. Do you hear that? Not quite the words I want, but close. Alice, you will never meet anyone like me, and you know it. Don't you?"
She said it sadly: "Yes, Asgar, I do."
"You see? Alice, you have to stay."
"No. Here's the truth. I don't...I don't know who you are anymore."
"Of course you do! It's me, Alice."
She shook her head and I saw little tears forming there.
The darkness was pressing on my eyes. I leaned forward, talking softly now. "You have to stay, I'll die, you have no idea, do you?"
"Asgar, move away..."
Something awful was happening, but I was too much in a fever to stop it. I can hear myself whispering, "Stay, Alice, please stay, oh stay, stay." Throb of blackness, bubble of tar—more lost seconds—then I was kissing her. I remember thinking I felt a little love for me there still, some last desire for her young husband, and my fevered brain realized there is no final form to the universe, that we might change it if we cared enough, and I ravished her, in our bed, my face inches from hers, panting Stay, stay, stay until my hot tears splashed into her open eyes.
I warned you. I am a monster.
She said nothing afterwards, when she sat on the bed and buttoned her dress, nor when she put on her coat and looked into the mirror. One pinkie fixed her lips. One hand drove a deadly pin through her hat.
I said, "Alice."
She said, "Don't ever try to find me. Don't ever try to see me again."
"Alice."
She simply stood there facing the door. In my nightmares, I work endlessly on a statue of my wife in just that pose, her back to me. I will never get to carve her face. Then, without turning, she walked out the door to meet her new life, and I had lost her forever this time.
Not quite forever, of course. I have twisted fate, for here she is: lying in the sun beside me in her white skirted bathing suit and sighing to a radio. She has just turned over in the lounge chair and there are welts all along the untanned regions of her womanly thighs, the heart-shaped cutout of her back, and I want to touch them all with my hand and take away the pinkness, wipe them from my lovely Alice. She is sweating slightly in the heat. She is thinner in her fifties than she ever was at forty.
"Sammy, hand me my drink," she says, but Sammy is too high in a tree to help her. "Mom," he yells, "look!" His little father looks and smiles; his mother adjusts her sun hat, squinting. The radio sings: Button up your overcoat! When the wind blows free!
Alice, you sing: "Take good care of yourself!"
I join in, boy soprano: "You belong to me!"
Do you know what I did after you left me, Alice? Do you know why it is such a miracle that I sit here beside you with my comic books and gum? Because I wanted to die and, seeking my death, I pretended to be a boy of twenty-two and joined the army. I did, Alice, me, a man in his mid-forties, not knowing his son was growing secretly in his vanished wife. I drilled until my mind was dull. Then, one month later, I got my wish and tasted death. I went to war.
Alice, your glass is here beside me, hoar-frosted gin. "I'll get it," I say, and hand you the cold thing, jingling with ice.
"Thanks, hon."
You take it and leave my fingers wet. A sip and you sigh, wink at me, return to your sun-sleep. Later, I imagine, when the sun has fallen, you will remove the bathing suit before the mirror and admire your new tan line—that salt point of your kissable skin.
"Cold," you say, and hand the glass to me again. I open my chest and place it where my heart should be.
IV
SEPTEMBER 1, 1930
Sammy, I write this by moonlight and firefly-light, far from our home and its eccentric, modern noises, far from Buster (who must be howling), far from the housebound boredom of summer. I write this on the banks of a gurgling river. White witch of a moon. My family is nearby, asleep; my wife and son, mother and brother, and another. Now, my boy-face is weeping and I have to wait for it to stop. There. We have gone camping.
When Alice mentioned the idea a few weeks ago, I was overjoyed. It seemed like another opportunity—perhaps my last—to huddle in the cave-comforts of my family. I imagined building a fire together, singing songs and roasting sausages on long whittled sticks, squinting when the smoke blew towards us, laughing, whispering when we thought—we city slickers—we heard the rustle of a bear (extinct in this safe state). I thought of a dark night in a tent, giggling as we tried to fall asleep, the three of us. And in the dark, I thought I could almost pretend I was a man again, a father, lying there beside my wife and son, owls hunting silently overhead, toads yodeling, moon lying like a stain upon the tent roof. In the dark, we can almost have the life we long for.
It did not happen this way.
"Rodney's coming," Sammy told me the night before, as we were packing for our trip. Our little-boy underwear bore our names in pen, by Alice's hand. I stroked those six black bleeding letters with my thumb.
"Who?"
He glared with the annoyance he often shows with me. "Rodney. Your doctor, duckbrain."
"He's not!"
"He is. He's driving. This is his whole duck-brained idea and I think it stinks like heck."
I should have noticed a certain affection growing between you, Alice, and my Dr. Harper—you remember the harmless quack who read my bones—but I'd been too distracted with these pages, and with finding as much time as I could with my restless son, to see it. There have been, of course, times when you left the house for hours and we were left in the charge of a neighbor. I now look back and realize you spent these evenings out with Dr. Harper. It was for him you worried over your outfits, dyed your sky-gray hair, practiced a winning smile.
The biggest clue, of course, was that cocktail party you had. I had the luck to help you with that zipper of yours (my hands quaking religiously), and then I watched as you applied those toodark shadows and lipsticks and became too modern a woman for my tastes. Sammy and I were sent to bed, so the rest I saw only through the bars of the stairway: neighbors arriving in a bouquet of gay noise, then some muttering retired teachers, and then Dr. Harper with his cigar-store-Indian face, who brought a bouquet of roses and a small stuffed bear and kissed you on my favorite cheek. You had forgotten to start the Victrola, and a neighborly man was put to work. Dance music, not to my taste. But I saw him whispering to you beneath the stairs, my Dr. Harper. I saw how you laughed, blinked, touched his tie. Once, long ago, you wanted me like that.
So Dr. Harper arrived early in the morning in an Oldsmobile packed with outdoor equipment—I gather he's a fan of this sort of thing—and an old-fashioned horn that went bawowzah, bawow zah. I was put in the back with my son, and the adults sat up front, talking about books and art in voices too soft for me to hear, and I pouted all the sunny miles until we arrived at the camp. Then I announced that I wanted Mother to sleep with Sammy and me.
"Oh Jeez!" said Sammy.
Harper: "I think she might want her own tent, don't you, Alice?"
Alice, you smiled and tugged at your diamond bracelet—were you unconsciously remembering who gave it to you, one hopeful anniversary? "I'd like that," you said.
Harper: "You boys will have fun together, don't you think?"
Sammy: "Not if duckbrain wets the bed."
Oh, be kind to old men.
Harper: "Fellas, let's get your tent up. See those stakes? I need you to count them out for me there, buster, that's right. And Sammy, pull out those rocks."
The day that followed was atrocious. First there was a picnic lunch—withheld until the two "boys" gathered enough dry firewood for a wintering homesteader—and then about four hours of fishing. I suppose this was well meant, and peaceful and summergreen, but there was something positively sick about sitting on a riverbank and listening to my pediatrician give fishing advice to my own son. What made it worse, of course, was that Harper was an excellent fisher and I, a city boy and a freak, was as helpless as if I'd really been a boy of twelve. After half an hour, Harper came over to help me.
"How's it going there?"
"The fish and I have made peace."
"What's that?"
"Nothing."
"Now here, try this. You've got it in the shallowest—how about over there? That's good. You're doing great. There's no trick to it. It's only patience, patience."
I looked up at his great kind and rocky face and thought, I know more about patience than you will ever know.
He put his large hand on my head and I felt its weight, its warmth. There was a comfort in this that I tried to ignore.
"Why you're a natural," he said quietly. "Your father ever take you fishing?"
"No, Doctor."
"Alice says he was a good man."
"He was."
"I wanted to tell you I'm so sorry about what happened."
I nodded and stared at the river, silver, rolling like a cylinder in its music box.
"I wanted to tell you that Alice, she's very fond of you," he said. Something in his tone reminded me of old Hughie; I wondered if Alice ever noticed this. "She thinks of you as a son, you know. A son just like Sammy."
"She does?" I could not hide the grain of hope in my voice, so like the boyish character I was portraying.
"Alice loves you very much."
My line in the water was making endless loops of light. Alice loves you. Something I have waited half my life to hear, given to me by her next lover.
Later, after charred meatballs cooked in foil and potatoes that were still hard at the center, Harper told us antique ghost stories that raised the downy hair on Sammy's arms, and Alice had us sing some favorite songs of hers—good old Goober Peas! at the top of my tiny voice, to show you I knew all the words—and then we stared into the flame-palaces of the fire, and it was time for sleep.
"Good night, sweet boys," Alice said to us, smiling, as she looked into our tent. The glow of the fire was still behind her, and in the crevices of her eyes. She kissed our foreheads with her feathery lips—my eyes fluttered in a fever—then left, zipping the door into a glowing triangle. There was a little silence as we listened to Alice and the doctor laughing around the flames, uncorking something, whispering. The fire barked and growled and grew still.
"What do you think of Harper?" I whispered, desperate.
Sammy, you lay there a little while in the darkness, the light from the moon and fire coming through the trees in long coils of blurry light. I could hear the funny boy-noise of your breathing and the sick, sick as you scratched a finger against the canvas of the tent.
"I don't know," you said.
"Think he's a duckbrain?"
"Naw. I don't know. I don't like doctors much."
Sharp taste of hope. I said, "Pshaw, I don't like them at all."
You laughed. "Pshaw! Pshaw!" you said, in high-pitched imitation of me. "Just like an old man. You're the duckbrain."
"No, you are the duckbrain," I said, and hit you with the firstaid kit.
Your bloody-murder shriek of joy.
From outside the tent, my ex-wife's voice: "What's going on in there, boys?"
Later, after a muffled, giggling quiet, I heard your breath begin to jerk its way into sleep, and though the father in me wanted to hear you sleeping, the sound of your breath which is the shadow of your dreams, I had to take this moment. Time was against me; I might never be able to whisper, lips-to-freckled-ear, again.
"Sammy?"
"What?"
"What was your father like?"
"I don't know. I never met him."
"I mean what's your mom say?"
"Well, she talks about Ramsey like he's my real dad, you never met him, he was with us for I think four years or something. I kind of remember him, Mom says he taught me how to swim. I don't know. But we left there when I was little. He's not my real dad, anyway. He was just some man she married."
I was so glad to hear this; it made her betrayal of me so small, if Victor Ramsey was just "some man" instead of the one who ended my marriage. "So who's your real dad?"
"I just know his name. I'm not supposed to talk about him."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. I think maybe she's afraid of him," you said, your sweet voice in the darkness. Then your tone became quick and bright: "Or I think maybe—see, maybe he's got a different name now. Maybe he's someone famous, maybe a movie star or something, I saw The Iron Mask, last year it's got Douglas Fairbanks and this scene with swords in a castle, did you see it? I saw that and I think maybe he's my dad. Only he's too famous for people to know. So Mom's trying to be quiet, or maybe because someday he's going to come and find me, you know, take me to Hollywood and give me lots of money. Only they're trying to keep it a little secret. 'Cause of how famous he is."
We sat in the dappled silence of the forest. Finally, I said, "You think so?"
"Oh yeah, I just know my dad's a great guy," you told me hastily. Then you added: "Not like Ramsey."
There was some laughter from outside the tent, the snap of fire.
"Or Harper," I said.
"Yeah, I guess."
"What if your dad came and got you?"
There was no response for a little while. "I don't know."
"What if he did this, went camping with you?"
"Jeez."
I could not see you, but we were so close, that night, that I could smell you under the smoke and charred potato: all milk and green-apple sweat. You were shifting uncomfortably and I wanted to reach across that little space of darkness, take your shoulder, and say, I'm here, I've come, it's all right. "Sammy, what if he turned up right now?"
"Shut up," you said loudly. "Duckbrain, you shut up." There was the sound of rough breathing and I knew I had gone too far. I said nothing more, but like any animal caring for its young, I sniffed the thick air. Sammy, I could smell your tears.
I came out here beside the river a little while after I knew you were asleep—after I heard the mumbles and sighs you always make in your dog-dreams. The fire was long dead, faintly glowing under its shroud of ashes, the adults gone, leaving just the evidence of Alice's slippers, an illicit bottle of booze, and mismatched glasses. I saw a deer come down with moon-iced antlers and sip at the water. I heard the splash of an insomniac fish. Then, as I sat staring at the sky and wondering how I could be a father to my son, how I could suck the poison from his snakebit life, I saw another movement in the night that robbed my breath. It was a man, slipping out from the parallelogram of his tent. Dr. Harper in his nightclothes.
A stumble, a curse, then a shuffling movement towards the farther tent, my Alice's. Sammy, you still slept while the doctor unzipped that flimsy door and whispered, when that old girlish laughter rang through the air, when his back straightened with confidence as he stepped inside and closed the tent. You slept through all your mother's indiscretions. But I, the old loving husband, had to listen to every laugh and whisper under that hex of a moon. And I wept.
This is a love story, so I will spare you the bombs and broken skulls. There is nothing to tell of war. At the conscription office, I was convincing as a young man and, because I was not afraid to die, I was even mistaken for brave. I was sent to France with the first troops, and it is proof of a godless world that every young man I met there, every poor ordinary boy, had his life mutilated or lost in those fields while I—devil in the trenches—came out with only the scars that, these days, I try to pass as chicken pox. Mist, and burning eyes, and boys screaming from jawless faces. There is nothing to say of war. When it was over and I was shockingly alive, intact, blood thick as gasoline, I lay in a London ward and received a note from Hughie, who had sad news to tell. In California, thousands were dead from a flu epidemic, among them his son, Bobby, and my own mother.
How do we forgive ourselves? Our parents watch us so carefully when we're children, desperate not to miss a first scream, a first step, a first word, never taking their eyes off us. Yet we do not watch them. They near the end in solitude—even those who live beside us die in solitude—and rarely do we catch their own milestones: the last scream before the morphine settles in, last step before they cannot walk, last word before the throat seals.
Still I can feel it, the sudden drop of the heart—that I would crack the world open if I could, that I would sell my bones to have her back—for though she held me as a child, my mother never got to see me as a boy.
My mother's death was the end of my sanity. I went into a private tornado and the army returned me to my country only to imprison me, for two years, in a veterans' asylum called Goldforest House. It was perhaps the coziest place for me on the planet. The inmates there called me "the Old Man" and unhesitatingly believed my life's story, but the doctors did not and cast me back out into the world. My father's fortune allowed me to travel the globe at last, but eventually, bored, I returned once more to my country. I tried to pass myself off as nineteen and went to a Rhode Island college, but I found it brutish and illiterate—I was paddled twice for not wearing my freshman "dink"—and I did not graduate. I found my way back to San Francisco and rented a room in a cheap flophouse where no one would find me or bother me. I grew young and blond, but my heart never healed. A finned beast lying at the bottom of a black lake, waiting to die; the last of its kind. That was how Hughie found me in 1929.
Poor Hughie, picking through the trash and blown-paper streets where I finally landed—Woodward's Gardens—situated, of course, in the Irish neighborhood where my old playland used to stand. Nothing grand or green about it now; just a wasteland of apartment houses and laundry hanging on the line, some supper clubs that didn't serve liquor, one downstairs joint that did, and streetcars full of people heading to the Old Rec Park to watch a game. I had chosen it because, of all the places I could live, I wanted to be in the old wooden pit once again, where Splitnose Jim used to climb a pole for a peanut and scratch his dusty hide for me. Sometimes, in my postwar dreams, it seemed that it was me, and not Jim, who came out of his cave one morning to find a German with a gun.
I heard "Max!" shouted a few times and then an indecipherable conversation behind the door before the crystal sound of keys meant my landlady Mrs. Connor, her chest too scrawny for a heart, had betrayed me.
Feeble scratching, crack of the door. Muttering (paying of a bribe, I assume) and the sound of kicking over bottles—no no, things were not as bad as you imagine. I kept my igloo clean and the only gin of the house slept, warm as a pet, in bed with me, where I lay doing the crossword. That morning, I had drunk it from a coffee cup, which lay on a table; I am a tidy wino. Stomp of boots; in came my best friend.
"Well at least you're not dead," he said, standing skinny and bald in a long tweed coat.
"Hughie, get out."
He came over to me. "I thought all that travel and, well, Turkey, that would kill you for sure, I thought you'd get shot, but, well. Apparently this is where you want to die."
"It is."
"Max, this is stupid."
"Get out. I have a lady coming."
"Do you?"
In fact I did. Don't be jealous, Alice, but there was a likable girl in those days who used to pal around with me, surprisingly clever and well dressed, with celluloid legs and a laugh like a cougar. I would give her an alias here except I'm fairly certain she isn't alive; despite her many charms, she was a part-time hophead and the skin between her toes was tattooed with needle-pricks. Sabina liked to stop by around noon to help me with the crossword, maybe lift me out of bed to dance a little, but usually by two she would be weepy over her parents—I understood she had a wealthy father whose heart she broke—and had to go out and find a fix. I would usually not see her again for days, sometimes a week. I gave her a little money. She was young and never believed my true age. "Ha! Why you're almost a child!" she'd croak, borrowing a cigarette. "I should get arrested, baby!" She didn't love me, though. She was too broken.
I said, "Actually, you'd like her."
He laughed and then threw himself onto the bed beside me. From the window, we could hear a crowd cheering. A Seals game at the Old Rec Park. He said, "Give me some of that gin."
"It's coffee."
"The bottle." I handed it to him; he kicked off his shoes and took a slug.
His remaining hair was ginger and gray, and no longer seemed to belong to his pale face, but here was the lucky thing about Hughie: since he was born with no particular grace, no exceptional features, time could do almost nothing to him. While what we remember of beautiful people is their skin, their eyes—and why we gasp when, at sixty, they have all dried to sand—what I recognized as Hughie was none of these in particular, but simply the way he used them. The explosion of lines on his forehead was much the same whether those lines were permanent now or not, and the thoughtful smacking of his lips sounded just as irritating as it had when we were boys, even though his lips were thinning every day. Age is kind, at least, to the unlovely.
"Where'd you get this stuff?" he asked, handing me the bottle.
"I made it. Potato alcohol from the bootlegger, comes in a tin. A gallon and a half of distilled water, juniper berries, and a secret ingredient. All right, ginger. Let it steep. That's my humble recipe."
"Ugh, it's awful."
"You're right, it's no good. Oh, I have a story to tell you, Hughie."
But he didn't hear me. "You know I'm retired, Max?"
"That's crazy. You're too young."
"I'm not too young. I'm done with it, that's all. Abigail's gone back to her mother's, it was a relief after Bobby's death. I have nothing to hold me anymore. I think I'm going to get a farmhouse maybe north of here. With chickens. I think that sounds nice."
"Chickens? I never heard about this."
"I haven't seen you in years, Max."
"Well."
"Mary's dead," Hughie told me.
"Old Mary?"
"Madame Dupont herself."
"It never occurred to me. Of course she'd be dead."
"Yes, well, she lived to be eighty, they say."
"She always claimed she was sixty-four."
"Good old Mary."
"You know what she said to me?" I told him, then tried to imitate her toadish voice: "'I thought time was not on anybody's side.' That's what she said."
"Not on hers, at least. We've got to get you out of here," he told me.
We could hear people murmuring in the next room, and very suddenly, with the scrape of a chair, it became an argument of round, indecipherable vowels, then just as suddenly faded to the flow of water. Hughie and I chatted for a while about other old things, other changes in the world. Then I said, "I've got a story for you, Hughie. A girl I met in Spain. You'll never believe this."
"What. Tell me."
"I saw her, it was in this little village. This little village and I stayed in an inn. Had a kind of American bar, I guess, and nobody in it but this little girl. Browned, in braids, with a strawberry mouth. I mean little, maybe twelve years old."
"This is recently?"
I was talking quietly, almost whispering. "This is a while ago. Twelve-year-old girl, and she was drinking a shot of something at the bar, and you know what I thought?"
"What?"
"When she looked at me. Kind of cased me out, not like a whore, but like an old woman. And I thought: She's like me."
"Max..."
"No really, I thought, It's another one like me. Here in this village. From the way she looked, I can't describe it, like a little speck of hate in her eyes. And I think she knew what I was. I'm sure of it. She must have been sixty or so."
"Did you talk to her?"
"I tried. Would you believe she bought me a drink? But I didn't speak whatever she spoke, not Spanish, and she didn't know English. The bartender treated her funny, with respect but as if he was scared of her. I think they knew about her in that town, I imagined this idea that they'd seen her grow from an old woman into a little girl. That she was the local witch. You know, like me, but a witch. And she just kept staring at me so sad, like: Don't grow old like me, don't grow old like me."
"Max, I don't know."
"Then we'd had a few drinks but of course couldn't talk, and she said something. I think she wanted to come up to my room. And I felt so bad for her, because here I was, I looked like a young man, and there she was in her sixties and who knows the last time some man had loved her, or ever would again. Who'd love the witch in a superstitious Catholic village like that? Is this what's going to happen to me? I felt awful. I felt as if I should save her."
"You didn't, old man, come now..."
"Sex, no. I didn't. What if she really was a twelve-year-old whore? I got up and left, it was so sad. Except that look, I can't forget it. You know, Don't grow old like me."
"I'll get you out of here, Max."
"You will?"
"I will."
There was the bumblebee drone of a plane. Two radios competed from open windows—a sorrowful colored woman and an optimistic brass band—then conjoined miraculously with one identical, slightly overlapping advertisement for soap: "Zog does not scratch, scratch." The sun shone on two men in our late fifties sipping gin. It felt very much like the end of our lives. And so it might have been, or at least the end of our story, if it had not been for Hughie.
He said, "Max, I brought this for you."
Out of his pocket came a little envelope; he threw it onto my chest. It was square and white, torn open and slightly soiled at the corners. I noted a nameless address in Massachusetts and a date nearly a year old.
Dear Hughie,
Hello, old friend. You haven't heard from me in a long time. Perhaps you won't even remember me. I've been thinking about people from the past (old folks do this) and how it's rotten I've lost touch with so many. It happens when you move around as much as I have. I heard you were married and had a son; in fact, I saw you and your wife in the park years ago while I was out walking with my husband-to-be. You seemed very happy. Good. I am happy, too. I've had three husbands and can't say much for them, but each love gets you somewhere, doesn't it? From my marriage to Asgar, for instance, I got myself a wonderful son. What a miracle, at my age. Isn't it funny to think of, Hughie, each of us with a son?
I know it sounds odd, but I nearly named him after you. I always wanted a Hughie. But there was another in the family and I wanted to save confusion, so he's Sammy. And I am happy, all on my own after my mother died, after I left my third husband and moved to Massachusetts. Please write to me. I have such grand memories of our time in South Park and the Conservatory of Flowers. It all seems impossibly perfumed with roses, doesn't it? Maybe I'm old and sentimental. Well, we are both old, aren't we? I hope you are still redheaded and smiling. Life is short and friends are few, so write to me.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Victor Ramsey (Alice Levy)
It took only an hour of carefully poured gin and sober argument to talk Hughie into it. After all, hadn't he come to Mrs. Connor's with this very idea? Hadn't he said he would get me out? He lay on the bed while I paced the room, opening curtains and gesturing to a sun that was also shining over miraculous Massachusetts. The Massachusetts of the letter. I spoke of human frailty. I mentioned the passage of time. A son, a secret son named Sammy, and because my body was young and quick and light, I leaped around the room like a faun, explaining that life had very few joys. The country could wait. The chickens could wait. From this very window one could see, calmly parked, a Chrysler the color of blue compacted stars, well cared for, tires in good condition. A home could be made there for a little while. The Nevada sun would bristle on its surface like a prickly pear. I reminded him that the driving age in states between here and Massachusetts was unreasonably low. Consider love, Hughie. Consider lonely old men like us.
The Chrysler was serviced lovingly, its rooms and compartments cleaned until they sparkled, the pipes and tubes legally liquored with its favorite fluids, the undercarriage greased until it dripped a shadow of itself on the concrete, and it was treated like a grand hotel now open for the season. Hughie and I had our hats reblocked according to the latest styles. We brought out of storage my old wicker suitcases. Travel clothes and camping equipment were purchased. The glove compartment was armed in case of highwaymen (a gun: Teddy's army issue, forgotten when he left Hughie at last). A quiet case of booze was placed like a gangster's body in the trunk. We shaved and perfumed ourselves—automobiling was a gentlemanly art back then—and sat in the larded leather of the seats. Fog descended in a dew and evaporated from the engine.
"Ha, Max, this is it!" We were off.
We were very bad travelers, Hughie and I. We often ran out of food or gas or were so charmed by the larch-lit forests of Montana that we put off finding lodging until a dangerously twilit hour, when nothing seemed to move in the darkness except the bugbears of our imagination. We never had enough water. We always had too many cigarettes (although, midway, clerks refused to sell them to me, saying they would "stunt my growth"). We always had too many inquisitive widows, who would appear in cherry-red dresses at drinking fountains, flirting horribly with Hughie and asking him about his darling son, who would smile and pull out that shocking cigarette. Too much coffee, not enough liquor. Too much sleep, not enough photographs (no photographs, in fact). No trace of Alice, or of Sammy.
At first, with masculine optimism, we camped out in fallow fields. It was lovely, and rustic, with the campfire snapping and popping, which I said reminded me of how Hughie cracked his knuckles every hour (on the blessed hour!) as he drove, and which he said reminded him of my loud breathing when I slept. But the dirt was tough to sleep on, and we would awaken early in the morning to a thick and starless darkness that terrified us both. I had yet to join the Cub Scouts and knew nothing of the noises of the forest, and every falling leaf seemed to be a bear or a hunter. And Hughie always awoke stiff and sad; he said he was too old. So we began to use the little traveler's cabins newly built along the road, most of them bare and smelling of insecticide, the shared bed overly soft, but we slept dreamlessly as if at sea.
He told me I had nightmares. I learned this a week into our journey, at the north end of Skull Valley, Utah, after a long day of driving through hot auburn brush and cracked blue skies. He said I shouted as I slept, and cried; he said it always sounded the same, and must have been the war. I can't say. My mind has spared me; it seems I remember this particular horror only when I am sleeping. He told me I always wept until he held me, stroking my hair, and then I would go limp like the dead.
We found the Massachusetts house but there was no Alice there. A pretty Germanic woman opened the door of the little place (new, white, straight out of an old Sears catalog) and said they had left a while ago. "Funny Mrs. Ramsey," the woman said, smiling, gesturing at the impossibly dark interior, "I guess she put in all these bookshelves." She said she saw her only once, as Mrs. Ramsey was moving out. A boy named Sammy, boxes of books, and framed photographs of nude women. "Pretty crazy gal," the woman told me, taking a drag on her cigarette.
"Do you know where she went?"
She blocked the door with her leg so the cat wouldn't get out. The poor thing undulated back into the house. "Mmm-mmm." That meant no. Nearby, an oriole flew from tree to tree.
As I walked away, under the shadow of overgrown wisteria, I noticed an old wooden toy in the weeds of the front lawn. I picked it up; an unamused wooden duck with wheels, darkened by more than one season in the snow. Left there by local boys? By one particular local boy?
When I got back into the car, I told Hughie I wasn't going to give up. You seemed so close, Sammy, so terribly close. "We're not going home," I insisted, and my friend put his hand on my shoulder, laughing, and asked where was home for us, anyway?
Nobody in nearby towns had ever heard of you or your mother; she had left Ramsey, then she had left Massachusetts, and there was only the rest of the wide world to hide in. And still—still I was convinced I could hear your shout! Or sometimes, when I leaned out the window on a sultry evening, that I could smell your mother's Rediviva on the wind. Like my mother before me, I could swear there were more senses than the ones we knew, and also like her, I fell into the grace of self-deception.
I found you almost every week or so. In Hopkinsville, Ky., on the fourth-grade school roster, when I spotted a Ramsey, S., and ran, with the secretary in limping pursuit, to find only a towheaded girl in a classroom spelling bee, reciting "O-B-S-E-S-S-H-U-N" with the confidence of the truly dense. Or on the banks of Lake Erie, where I found an Alice Levy in the records of a synagogue, and waited through a perplexing and exotic Hebrew service only to find a gray-haired lady in furs and a wig; she smiled at me and gave me a quarter, sweet girl. An A. Van Daler in Minnesota was no Alice but turned out to be an actual cousin of mine. And so on. City Hall documents, church records, ladies' auxiliary minutes, Scout troop lists, Junior Leagues, and local associations of every kind. So many times I thought I'd found you, of course, just as any true believer will search the Bible and see signs of his particular life. But like the feast of fairies, these pleasures lasted only for the few hours I believed them. Their names were nowhere. I would not find them. America would not reveal its secrets.
I think I would have given up much sooner had not Hughie had a purpose of his own. It was to taste roadside lemonade from Maryland to Missouri and write down on a special pad of paper who had won (Georgia, as expected). Similar contests were announced for diner coffee, meat loaf specials, spaghetti, and a particular favorite of Hughie's called "pandowdy" (only three entries, all of them soggy), as well as more informal competitions for Best Scottish Rites Temple, Most Humorous Barbers, Fattest Policemen, Loudest Swing Sets, and Best Misspelled Cinema Marquee (which went to the Aztec, Greenville, S.C., for THE JAZZ SIGNER, no talkie after all, I guess). I remember the year crammed with these points and scribbles, and with laughter, and I am comforted. I suspect, though, that memory has contracted with the chill of time and mostly the drive was long tiresome stretches of farmland, no longer quaint or fresh, windows rolled up against manure and skunk-scent, radio hissing for days until we reached another station. And it was the radio, Alice, that gave you away in the end.
By Georgia, the thrill of driving had vanished from Hughie's life—policemen had begun to pull me over when I was at the wheel, drawling, "Son, best your daddy teach you to drive somewheres else," so Hughie had all the burden—and while we were getting the Chrysler serviced for an alarming ululation, Hughie shouted out: "Can you attach a radio to that thing?"
"A what?"
"A radio. I can get one in town."
"You mean a cabinet radio?"
The mechanic was young and skinny, friendly, with a falling curl of yellow hair, and looking back, I think we got our beloved radio because Hughie liked to watch his tanned muscles in the Alabama sun. No more than that—nothing obscene or desperate—just an admiration of youth. Hughie and I did go into town, and he chose a gleaming Philco shaped like a small confessional, with those classic mesh panels. Our young man hauled it to the backseat and began, with a smile, to do the wiring. This was no simple job. Strips of antenna were laid across the roof. A long discussion of tubes and batteries and conversions took place, and the poor dashboard had to be drilled, but Hughie patiently watched the shining movement of the boy's arms, and at last he turned a wooden knob and the sounds of the Happy-Go-Lucky Hour appeared in the air. My friend tipped him a crisp five dollars and gave a sigh as we drove away.
"A radio, Hughie?"
"Shut up. Turn up the volume."
Well, that was always a problem; the noise of the car and the wind was always louder than the radio, and we had to come close to a stop to hear anything in particular of the news. Music did better, so we tried to find it whenever we could, and since the pickings in the middle of the country were fairly slim—few transmitters, and what few listeners there were used wind-powered radios—we learned to appreciate the ugly, modern clatterings that young people seemed to adore. I know they adored it because when we stopped in small towns, girls in pinafores and boys in Ucanttear knickers would huddle around us, listening, fascinated as Pacific Islanders. One or two sometimes knew an obscene dance to go with it. This was often stopped by elders and we were encouraged to move on. Still, it was nice to be popular, and it would have been a great way to meet women had I not looked a pimply thirteen.
Endless stretches of static nearly drove us home, but every time we grew disgusted with that empty ocean sound, Hughie would tell me to "try it one more time" and some precious local program would appear, first as a phantom, then materializing in full color. For the entire, stunningly dull length of Texas, we grew fond of a particular mystery serial set on an ocean liner ("Bang! Crash! What was that? The telegraph, oh God, the telegraph!"), and almost turned around when, in Deaf Smith County, the whole cast drowned under a wave of crackling sound. Fanny Brice followed us everywhere with her annoying "Baby Snooks," and on mountaintops we could hear the opening words of "The Fat Man": "He's stepping on the scales now. Weight"—a pause for the scale to settle—"three-sixty. Who? The Fat Man!" "Yowsah yowsah yowsah," the maestro Ben Bernie used to whisper to us, and "Au revoir, pleasant dreams." And advertisements, of course, an interesting insight into the obsessions of the middle class: "If you want your teeth to shine like pearls, buy Dr. Straaska's Toothpaste." I admit it; I bought some. In the Southwest, we became fans of an amusing cooking show where the woman (surely a man in falsetto) would tell listeners, "Now get a pad and pencil, I'm waiting, go get it, this one's a good one," then pause, humming, before she went on to recite the most ludicrous recipe you could imagine. I swear some "specials" in local restaurants must have been made by listening suckers.
I have carried this unlikely love of radio with me. You, Sammy, have taught me your favorite programs and on certain Radio Evenings nights, we sit with Alice in awe of orphan-and-pirate adventures, complete with loud footsteps and slamming doors, utterly fake thunder, and hair-raising silences as harrowing as if the lights had all gone out. I remember when I first got here and the radio was broken. Alice stood up to turn the dials but it would not speak. Sammy, you put on a good face—"Wadder we gonna to do now?"—but you were as broken as an Aztec who has learned his god is dead. After my long travels with Hughie, I understand too well.
Still, the best gift of the radio was news. Traveling for so long, we had become accustomed to living outside of time, outside of the world, and petty details like a wasp's nest in our bathroom, or my (apparently annoying) habit of reading aloud from billboards, took on the significance of world events. With the news read to us, though, we were humbled. Gangster massacres. Stockbrokers in a panic. The South Pole crossed by some flyboy. We heard it usually at night, as we paused beneath a black fringe of pine, and listened to the distant news of riots, earthquakes, fires, and death. Some man's soft, rumpled voice. Some father telling us the nation would prosper and stocks would rise again, and still the world was bad. In the dark night with a halfhearted patter of rain over our heads. Some father telling us we were too far from home.
Not long after we acquired the radio, when we passed through Austin, Hughie, very trickily, led me along a twisting route through the suburbs, claiming he wanted to show me a botanical garden with an orchid named after his mother (why would I be interested?) and then abandoned that mission when he suddenly parked the car and made us rush into a restaurant. It was one of those friendly places whose name—for instance, the Swedish House—meant nothing, since they served the same food everywhere. Hughie was very distracted, mooning out the window, and ordered something I can't imagine he wanted—chicken fried steak—which even the waitress found hard to believe. I had a bowl of chili and it was excellent. Hughie was still staring out the window when I finished, and only then did I bother to follow his gaze. There, across the street, framed by an office window and talking on the phone, was a man with dead-black hair and a handsomely broken nose. A moment passed before I realized it was his old love Teddy.
We sat for a while in silence, as people do when they are watching a sunset. Our subject soundlessly talked, laughing and leaning back in his chair. He had gained weight, but otherwise looked the same. My friend glanced at me and smiled.
He said, "Isn't it funny? There's my old servant."
"What a coincidence." It occurred to me to lock the glove compartment when we got into the car, in case Hughie wanted to return the gun to Teddy (so to speak).
"I sent him a letter of reference. So I knew he lived here. I thought maybe we'd stop by, say hello."
"You haven't eaten a bite."
"It's awful. It's chicken fried steak," he said. "On second thought, maybe we won't say hello."
"Hughie. I know all about Teddy."
My friend rested his head in his hand. He looked at me and he seemed so old, so worn and tired. He said, "I know you do, old man."
Poor old friend. Staring at lost love as if, by the mere magnification of hope, you can make it burst into flame. My God, the old queer; he had become exactly like me.
Somewhere in the mountains of America, while we dallied for weeks in an endless talcum snow, my body betrayed me at last. In the last few years, I had noticed a definite shift in things; my muscles lost their form, my shoes became too big, and, most astonishing of all, the world began to rise around me. Mirrors, windowsills, drawer pulls—through the months they ascended without my noticing until the day when, extending an arm to open a door, I found my knuckles bloodying themselves an inch or two below the knob. I was shrinking. I began to knock over water glasses (a telescoped arm) and trip over the curb (a shortened leg). Hughie was amused, especially by my new voice, which sounded like an orchestra tuning up, and though I laughed with him, and though the cheap cinema tickets were nice, it worried me. It was never going to be safe in my body again; I would be stumbling until I died. I was becoming a child.
It was difficult to realize that the young women who had always honked their horns on our journeys, smiling and laughing at the teenage boy and his father, the girls who stared at me on the street while Hughie bought me an ice cream cone—they no longer saw me. I had passed beneath the surface of some lake, and had become invisible. I grew weaker, smaller, like something falling out of sight. But the worst, of course, was when my body paused for a moment in its decline, took a breath, and silently unsexed me.
There was no particular day. It was just somewhere in the dust-storm of snow that mild winter, among the dozen coffee shops with tired waitresses, and cowboys, and desperately poor people staring at Hughie's watch, while the radio and the sky were equally static, that I stopped being a man. Hairless as a pup, shriveled below into a sleek little snail. I tried to manipulate it into life, and it still worked for a while, but eventually grew forever soft, rubbery, good only for peeing long distances on the side of the road. I felt a terrible shame. I hid it from Hughie, but as we lived together constantly, it was only a matter of time before he saw me, one morning, getting out of the tub, and realized what a eunuch I had become.
Later, in the car, he grew silent. I knew he'd been shocked by my changed body. At last, he asked if we shouldn't maybe find a good town, perhaps the one we were approaching, and just settle down until the end of our days. Billboards called to us—the Howdy Hut, Reinhardt Bakery, A and V Photography—and budded apple branches brushed the windows. As good a town as any.
"We're never going to find them, Max. Not if we lived forever."
"Settle down?"
Telephone poles passed us one by one, each with a gust of sound. We went through downtown, more stores than expected, a crowd at church, a town that any two monsters could live in and be happy, then we passed through to the other side. The road stretched flat and endless, disappearing in a bluish blur before us, which could have been a mountain, but was only a distant thundercloud, raining on a distant town.
"We'll never find them. It's no fun anymore to try. We could turn around," he said softly. This was his idea, to save the shriveled child he'd seen in the bathroom. "You've got money, we could buy a house today. Come on, it's not a bad idea. We could go back to that town, what's it called? Back there, buy a house. Probably a mansion in this part of the country. With a porch and a yard and a dog out back. Don't you want a dog? Aren't you sick of this car? I mean, really. Really, we can just turn around."
I went along with it; it was a pleasant thought. After all, we were no closer to my son than before. "You could open a law practice."
"I could. I'd have to pass the bar, or I could fake it."
"I could go to grammar school."
"A sort of family. We could live here. Really, I mean, really. We could turn around."
I saw the gravity in his eyes. I think, now, that although he had cared, and worried, and laughed with me over the ridiculous state of my body, he had been so close to my life that he had never bothered to imagine it. Just as we do not think of our grandmother as old; she is merely Grandma, forever, until we visit her one day and realize that, despite her smiles and kisses, she is going blind and will die. I had always been merely Max. I noticed him thinking, and glancing over, and what he saw there was not Max anymore—not that old, lumbering bear, the cub of Splitnose Jim—but a fidgeting boy of twelve, picking at a scab, crinkling his sunburned nose in disgust. Hughie had begun to mourn my death.
"Well, Hughie, old friend, perhaps—"
And then a miracle:
"Come and take your Easter photos," came a deep voice from the radio. "Crisp and clear, always on time. Alice and Victor Photography, Eighth and Main."
Hughie said, "Well, let's—"
"Hush!"
"Memories forever. I'm Victor Ramsey and I guarantee it."
The birds all scattered when the Chrysler came to a stop, and they watched warily from the trees as it swerved, too fast, in a rough, squealing semicircle back towards town.
Ramsey's store wasn't hard to find. A quaint two-story brick building with black iron numbers near the top: 1871. Flower boxes sat empty under the windows, and a trumpet vine had taken charge of a pot originally meant for roses, of which one white bloom remained. A brass spittoon, turned into an umbrella stand, signaled a bygone era. A sign said they were closed on Sundays; the floating choir song from the nearby church reminded me of the day.
Hughie wasn't with me; after much arguing, he had agreed to stay in the car, but he kept a wary eye on me on that newly painted porch; he was not sure what I would do. I wasn't sure myself. I could see Ramsey's shape moving deep in the interior, like a beast in dark water, arranging frames or carrying boxes. I could not, however, see him.
A second miracle: the door was open.
The place smelled of vinegar and smoke. Large, striking photographs of ocean waves filled one entire wall, and the other was all billowing wheat, but otherwise the pictures on little stands were of weddings, family groups, babies. A broom leaned exhausted against a wall, a counter and cash register filled the far corner, and two doors were open beyond: one to darkness, the other to wavering light. The waver was the movement of a shadow.
All of a sudden, there he was, standing in the room with me. A tall man, and old, a puff of white hair with bulging eyes and an intellectual's tapering nose. How could she have loved him? Tall, with rolled-up shirtsleeves and large, bony hands. Ordinary, utterly ordinary, but can you tell a villain when you meet him? He stared at me. It began to rain once more against the windows, tear-streaked. He seemed more stunned than I expected.
"Sammy?" he stammered.
It took me a moment to realize I looked exactly like my son.
"No, no I'm Tim."
"Well, Tim, I don't give to the Scouts," he said. British accent, unexpected. He smiled and gave a comical salute. "Military training, it's horrible."
"You're Victor Ramsey?"
"Yes."
"Alice and Victor Photography. Your wife?"
"She was. Still has a share in the shop."
"But she no longer lives here. Where did she go?"
He stared at me curiously. "Tim, let me make some guesses about you. I've been reading detective fiction. Let's see, you came from California."
"She had a son."
"I'll tell you, I knew from the license plate. Not very sophisticated, I know."
"Alice and Sammy."
He waved that aside. "Yes yes, Alice and Sammy, but that's not very current stuff, Tim. Are you writing a report for school? I hate to tell you I'm not a very famous man. Not in this town, not since before you were born, those pictures on the wall are all I'm remembered for, but only in New York, not here. Look at them, take your time. You've done your research, though. Well done, it's swell to meet you, is that what teenagers say? I try to be modern. Just swell. Come again, Tim. Goodbye." And before I knew it he had vanished into the other room. I followed him.
"I have a question."
"Could you hand me my little brush?" he asked. I had emerged into a sun-dappled glen—one of his photography sets—a gorgeous illusion of falling leaves, a summer haze in the distant sky, an unmended fence. My enemy stood on a ladder, painting a leaf on a tree. What did I want from Victor Ramsey? To kill him? There was Teddy's gun in the car; no one would have heard the shot—the nearby choir was bellowing "Rock of Ages," heavy on the soprano. Nor, if I had pushed the old ladder and sent Victor Ramsey flailing into his painted glen, would anyone have found his knotted bones for days. I could have murdered Victor Ramsey in a thousand awful ways, but you see the thought never occurred to me. In that room, an old man and a little boy among the autumn leaves, we were not rivals. We were both lost husbands, jilted lovers; we were both members of the same religion, that Sunday. No, I found I wanted more even than an address: I wanted words from someone who had also lost his muse.
"Victor Ramsey, did you love her?"
"Who?"
"Alice. Did you love her?"
"No." He worked at the leaf, effortlessly creating it, moving on to the next. He did not seem to think anything of a boy asking about love; I was discovering that he was unlike any other old man I'd known. An artist, I guess, also as if he, too, were a child. "Not the way men seem to love their wives in this town, now I don't know your mom and dad, but not like that." Closer, I could see the ugly wings of his nose. "I worshipped her, Tim. She was like no one you will ever meet. Strong, independent. I never took her for granted for a moment, or pretended I understood her, and when she wanted to go I let her go, because she was art and she was music." He made another leaf, another, each turning precisely in the breeze that he imagined. "You won't understand. I can't express things. Look behind the door, there's a photograph."
There was. Alice at the age of fifty or so, lying in a pool of floating duckweed like a bathing girl; she was naked. Her arms were soft and dimpled, her breasts lopsided under the water, the nipples large and pale, and she gazed grinning up at a sky that had, through some trick of exposure I will never understand, become a lake-surface pitted with rain. She was not beautiful. Not the way I had preserved her in my memory, all symmetry and wet lips, fast asleep. Silt rose around her in tiny particles, and that smile rose above the water. How mystifying: my Alice, old, but lovely in some new way, floating happy and free.
Students of art, you may recognize this portrait from its brief and minor fame, or so I'm told. If you do, keep quiet. Let my love live out her life in peace.
"She did that one," Ramsey said. It did not seem to cross his mind that old men should not be showing nude portraits to little boys. "I taught her the basics, but she was really something, she became a new person behind the camera. Most of these are hers."
I looked around and realized there were portraits of her everywhere, leaning against the walls: Alice eating figs with an amused expression, Alice nearly nude behind a clothesline with the sun in her squinting eyes, Alice asleep the way she always looked, Alice older and older in every frame. All the photographs that you grew up with, Sammy. A catalog of the years without me. I kept staring at this woman whom I guess I never really knew.
From behind me, the quiet voice of my fellow man: "She made me younger, year by year."
"Where did she go?" I asked at last.
He mentioned the name of a village, two days' drive from here. I didn't dare ask for an address.
"You met her in California?"
He nodded, closing his eyes as he contemplated the next color he would choose. "In Pasadena. I knew her mother, and invited her to work with me. It was such a gift that she arrived."
"Why?"
"Hmm?"
My voice came out too harsh: "Why did she go?"
I meant me, why did she leave me? But Victor didn't hear it that way. He looked at me with no pity for himself or for anyone. "Well, my boy, she didn't love me."
"I see."
"Could you hold the ladder?"
"Sure."
He grinned again, so impossibly innocent. Instantly I was able to picture him with his bride: Alice fussing clumsily with baby Sammy, old Victor mumbling and smiling as she filled the room with laughter. Tulip tree in the window, macaroni pie in the oven, Rediviva floating in the air. What a lovely life he'd lost. He said, "I have a theory about my wife. Since you seem interested, though I can't think why. Like all women before her, she couldn't change except by marrying. She wanted to change all the time, be a new woman, so she kept marrying, first Calhoun, he let her be brilliant, and then Van Daler, he let her be beautiful, and gave her a child. I... well. I taught her the skills with which she could leave me. I wouldn't be surprised if she's married again, who knows what she'll be next? She didn't love me, but I understand. I do. Sentimental girl. There was only one, I think, she ever really loved." And I knew from his expression that it wasn't him or me.
Forgive this last interruption, Sammy, but I have heard bad news. Just yesterday, my wife and son and I visited a friend of Dr. Harper's who lives by a lake. A fat man, happy and generous; also a psychoanalyst, which terrified me. But he gave me no more than one probing glance—that of a botanist identifying a pleasant, common flower—before making us all play a baffling new kind of board game. Both Alice and I lost instantly and she announced we were going for a walk. Lucky me you've always been such a bad sport, Alice. Outside, night birds sang in the moist air, and it was after we walked and listened that she told me.
We stopped by the lake (no moon, but a bright phosphorescence in the clouds) and sat in the shimmering darkness, the lampless darkness she'd said she loved as a girl, the darkness of olden times. There was a distant splash; she said maybe some monster lived in the water. I said I was cold, but luckily she had a sweater with her (good mother), so she had me lift my arms in surrender while she lowered the pullover onto my body. It smelled of my son. We threw some rocks—I was a terrible throw with these shrinking hands—and she laughed, and I tried to laugh, but I was a nervous child in love with an older woman he could never have. At last she told me that Harper had asked her to marry him and she had accepted and that you, Sammy, already knew.
I stared at her like a rabbit in a garden.
"What do you think?"
I said, "Marry Harper?"
"Yes, Dr. Harper. He makes me happy. He says he'll take us all on a trip around the world, imagine that! Any place you ever dreamed of going? I've dreamed of so many."
Alice, you wore your hair down like a girl, and I felt it made a mockery of the girl you used to be, someone who needed no sunburned doctor to take her on trips. Did I invent that girl? Or had she hidden herself decades ago, and lived now only in my memory?
I asked her if her other husbands had made her happy.
"Of course they did."
I am insane; my mind was burning and I could not control it. I have not yet found your diary, Alice, if you have one, so I am forced to ask these things out loud. "Then why'd you leave? Sammy's father, why'd you leave him? Didn't you love him?"
For a moment the old intelligence, cruel and exciting, arose in her like a magic sign, and I thought she was going to say something one should never say to a child. My heart shuddered, terrified that she'd seen through me, and my skin shrank on my bones. Then, like a swan shaking its feathers into the water, she smoothed away her memory and looked at my pure, childish face.
She said, "That was all a long time ago."
"I'm sure you'll be happy together."
A chuckle. "Thanks."
With a whisper of love that surprised her, I fell into her lap.
If Harper ever finds these pages, I'm sure he'll show them to his psychoanalyst friend, and, oh, what a thrill for the old boy! I can hear his pencil chattering away. Let me imagine the notes: "Subject attempts intercourse with mother"—oh, not with my miniaturized equipment, Doctor, but I'm sure you mean something symbolic. Though is it exactly Oedipal if I married the mother before becoming the son? Is there some other myth with a better correlation? No, I am too twisted a knot. There is no untying me, Doctor. To release me, you must cut me in two.
We had the address through a trick at the library, and with the help of a map posted near City Hall, the old Chrysler was humming homeward within an hour.
"What are you thinking, old man?" Hughie asked me.
We had turned the radio off and the only sounds were lingering birds and the rumble of a motorcycle on some adjacent, invisible street. "That I just want to see my son."
"Just him?"
"And her."
"And then what?"
"I don't know."
A green strip of land appeared beside us: Lincoln Park, where you play your baseball, Sammy. Hughie drove on slowly—too slowly for the car behind, which passed us, radio blaring. He said in that voice I hated: "I know you. We've come too far. You're not just going to peek through a window and come back into the car, are you?"
"I thought we'd knock on the door."
He laughed. "That's stupid. She may recognize me."
"I know. That's all right. Say you're passing through town. And I'm your son."
His hand smoothed over his scalp, an old gesture, searching for hair that had been gone now for years, then lay once again on the gearshift. With the smell of rubbing metal, he shifted into the right gear. Then I told him.
I told him what I had planned in Ramsey's chemical-smelling studio. No, we were not just going to knock on the door. Or take a mental picture. I told him my final dream; a poem, really, a work of art. What I wanted from this place, and from Alice, and Sammy. And him. It was a great thing to ask of someone, too great a thing, I guess. But I took his silence for agreement, because he had said it himself: we had come too far.
"Are you going to tell?" he asked at last.
"No. I think now I won't ever tell her."
"I mean Sammy."
"He wouldn't believe me."
"Will he believe you're just a little boy?"
"Everyone else does."
"Well, what do you want me to say your name is?"
I looked out at the road and saw a baby staring at me from its pram, as wary as a woman in an opera box.
"Hughie, of course. Little Hughie. After my father."
He laughed.
But there we were, 11402 Stonewood, and Hughie parked noisily before the car went silent, revealing a quiet barking from behind the house. A plain house, yellow and black, decorative window on the door and the slightly askew woodwork of an added second story, done on the cheap. Church spire above the trees. A side fence opened, and out slipped the cagey dog itself, and there was old Buster, golden as a cake, woofing from a corner of the lawn. Then he paused, turning his head to the doorway. His owner stood there, chewing gum like a maniac. A little boy who looked like me.
"Did your mother make this pie?"
Hughie sat in the glow of the kitchen lamp, smiling and holding out a forkful of apple pie. I could not eat mine; I had already had to visit the bathroom to empty my stomach and sigh into the mirror. Now I could only stare at the boy who blinked at us and tossed a baseball from one hand to the other. He shrugged.
"Well it's very good," Hughie said.
"I guess."
"And you're very kind to let us wait here for your mother."
Another shrug and Sammy stared into the backyard, where Buster made stupid loops around the old hemlock tree, terrorizing a squirrel. A moth was trapped behind the back screen door and nobody, nobody would set it free.
"You're in school now, Sammy?"
Pause, as if this were a trick. "I'm at Benjamin Harrison. I'm in fifth grade. I've got Mrs. McFall and she's been sick so we didn't have any homework for a week last week."
"Do you like her?"
"She's all right. Next year I'll have Mrs. Stevens and I hear she's a..." You stopped there before you said some crude word, then you looked at me and smiled. My brain filled with black stars.
Victor Ramsey had prepared me for your looks—not a spitting image of your diminutive father, but alike enough, with enormous ears and blond hair in a cowlicked swirl—but you mangled your dad's face beyond any recognition. It was never still: you elongated it in boredom, or crunched it up in thought; your restless eyes rolled and narrowed and snapped shut as if what Hughie said might put you to sleep; and your lips, God, smack, smack, smacking with the gum you chewed like a betel nut. One elbow was freshly scraped and oozing a little yellow fruit-juice; the other was bruised and blue. You bit your nails even as we sat there. You leaped out of your chair from time to time to yell out the window at Buster, who was doing nothing particularly interesting, but who I suppose was the best friend of your life (and whom I never truly replaced). You were polite to a point (inviting us in when you heard we were old friends) but bossed us around, making us sit in particular chairs and telling us, "Don't eat all the pie 'cause I'm saving it for later." There was no sign, in all of this, that you loved a girl named Rachel. Or that you sat alone in your room and prayed for your mother. That you then imagined awful deaths of teachers and schoolmates, or that these dreams made you fear the devil. That you were like me, a little, in the end. I saw none of it then; I only saw a champion baseballer, a cowboy fan, a runt who thought that everything he said was so brand new and brilliant that he smiled at his own words. A perfect, maddening little boy.
"We're studying Asia," you said.
"Sounds good."
Your face collapsed in disgust at the entire continent. "The swell place has about a million swell little people on it, and about a hundred swell little nations, all of them exactly the same and can't say their names even, except there's China, you know, whose main export is tea. No, silk. No, rice. One of those. And Japan. Would you like to hear my haiku?"
"Yes."
He arranged his head very sternly beneath the light and recited this masterpiece:
A little sandwich
Sweetly singing to itself
"Tunafish salad."
He added, "That's because I was pretty much starving when I wrote it. I got an A, though. I get all A's."
Hughie said, "Now you're twelve years old, right?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well that's the same age as little Hughie here! Isn't it? Isn't it, son?" My old friend looked at me so strangely—almost angrily, or as if he were going to cry—and I recognized, crazily, my dead mother's face: Be what they think you are.
"Yes, Dad." I said in my sad, hiccupy little voice. "I am twelve."
"You got a gun?" Sammy asked me, and I wondered what kind of child my old wife had raised.
But Sammy didn't wait for an answer. "My mom won't let me have one. She doesn't know anything about it, she never had one, my dad would let me have one, I'm sure of it. Danny Shane down the street's got a BB with a double pump but it busts up sometimes and his dad screams at him like heck, and Billy Easton's got a Daisy." All of a sudden, with remarkable joy, he shouted the advertising line: "It's a Daisy!" Buster ran to the screen door barking and Sammy teased him until he jogged away.
"I knew your mother when she was a little girl," Hughie said, eating more pie. Too much cinnamon, melting in the air.
"It's a Daisy!" my son yelled again.
"You look just like her. Do people say that?" A shrug. "You have her mouth. She was pretty and outspoken and she drove her mother crazy. You never knew your grandmother, did you? She was a wonderful woman. Always funny and kind, imaginative. A... a friend of mine said she and your mother used to dress up in old clothes and sit in front of the fire playing chess. Imagine your mother, in crinolines and a Civil War hat! A witty girl. And sharp. She wasn't like other kids. I admired her."
My son laughed. "She told me when she was a girl, she saw a cougar on the street, it had eaten someone's parrot."
"I don't know that story."
"Did you know my father?"
Hughie looked down at the table. "I'm not sure. What's his name?"
I felt nauseated again.
"Van Daler," Sammy said. "That's Danish."
"Is it? Van Daler." Hughie sneaked a look at me. It seemed impossible, but she had told him. Alice, you kind soul, you had kept me alive for our son. "Van Daler," Hughie said again. "No. No, I don't think I knew him."
"Ah well."
"What did your mother tell you about him?"
"Nothing."
"I've got a gun," I said at last.
"You do?" my son asked, thrilled.
"Yes. I do."
"Can I see it?"
Then someone else entered the conversation. Someone in the other room, shouting from the open front door, and all three of us turned to the empty hallway. A throaty laugh, a miracle, a strangled imitation of old memory, the third time I had first heard her voice: "Hey Sammy, I'm home, you're not going to believe what I saw..."
She stepped into the room. Black stars, black stars. So many years, so many miles. I began to breathe eccentrically and could focus only on the threaded brown of her irises, how they bled a little into the white. Was it really you? Mid-fifties, eyebrows plucked to commas, hair in an unlikely bun. Wide, oh, still lovely face, and yes, of course it was you. My little paper girl, crumpled in a pocket for half a century, unfolded now before me in the kitchen. Those eyes, starkly wide with hope and shock. They were not looking at me.
"Hi, Alice," Hughie said, smile across his plain, old face.
Her hand went to her heart. We are each the love of someone's life.
We stayed for dinner and, in the low conversation of old people that followed, it was decided that we would stay the night.
"Hotel? Absolutely not," Alice said, shaking her head and frowning.
"Well but it's ridiculous, Alice. We can't stay here."
"You're an old friend."
"The neighbors..."
Alice laughed. "I don't give a damn what the neighbors think!" And then, of all miracles, she turned to me. "Don't listen to your father. My house is yours, little Hughie." A touch on my head, a kind glance down into my eyes; no remembrance, none.
I was bunked in Sammy's room and we were told to look at comics while the adults sat out on the porch to watch the sun fall from the trees. We did not look at comics, of course; we looked at Sammy's meager collection of dirty pictures. He was so proud, and I was properly astounded, and then he laid out before me, in the tenderest tableau you can imagine, all the treasured objects of his life: two dozen ordinary stamps in a book, a perfectly round stone, a tin sarcophagus of King Tut, a mechanical bank in which a clown catapulted a coin into a lion's mouth (demonstrated with my own penny), three rose-colored scallop shells, a baseball, a glove, and a photograph of Clara Bow cut from a magazine. We sat and rearranged and stared at these wonders for about ten minutes. Then my son asked if I wanted to play with his Erector set and the treasures were left, abandoned, while he filled the bed with clanking metal.
I claimed I'd never seen an Erector set, and he gave a frogfaced expression of amazement. I recognized his face and gasped: it was Alice's, as a girl. What a strange little haunting in this strange little room. I wondered, if I waited long enough, might I see a fleeting gesture of my own? But I heard faint voices from the open window. I went over and listened through a veil of climbing ivy. Two voices, quiet ones, floating up from the garden below:
"A four-in-hand coach," said the man.
The woman: "A bit. Two bits."
"Gaslight."
"Of course." She laughed. "And bustles."
"Woodward's Gardens."
It was my old friend and my old love, sitting in the twilight. They were playing a sad game. They were naming what was gone forever. I was overcome by my luck, that I could sneak into my son's life and see his treasures, and the face that wanted so much for me to approve; the luck to be a boy with him! But I also mourned the fact that I couldn't be down below, with the old people, pawing through the attic of the past. Hughie in a velvet suit, Alice in a princess hat, old man Max in a mirror. And all of us as we used to be.
"Do you miss it, Alice?"
I could not hear the rest. I leaned out the window.
Sammy was tugging at my sleeve: "All right, I'm gonna make a boat, see, and you've got to make a boat and we'll race them on the bed, which is the river, see."
I did see. There below me, couched in the yellow blossoms of a forsythia fooled by this warm weather, two old people sat on an iron bench, looking just as I would have looked had time gone right for me.
When Hughie came into his room, I was waiting.
"How is she?"
Sammy had long since gone to bed and I, too old for early bedtimes, had waited until I heard the sighs of his dreams before I slipped out. I had first listened to the murmur of the adults, but unable to make anything out, I had come here to the sewing room, where Hughie was to sleep. Fabric for new curtains lay on the table, and a finished apron.
My friend smiled and took off his coat. We did not turn on the lamp; the moon was in the window. He said, "Hi, Max. I thought you'd be asleep with Sammy."
"He fell asleep hours ago."
"How was it, seeing him?" We were whispering.
I clasped my hands in my pajama-lap as Hughie began to disrobe. I said, "Strange. Amazing. I don't know. I'll have to get used to it. He has an idea that he's going to be the greatest something in the world, he doesn't know what yet, but he'll be the greatest. He's not what I thought a little boy would be like. Not like I used to be."
"You were never a little boy, Max."
"I'm trying. Tell me about Alice. Is she the same?"
"I don't know. I knew her when she was, was it, was she sixteen?"
"Fourteen."
"God, that was a long time ago."
"Is she the same?"
"I remember her as being, I don't know, talking all the time about what was in her head, asking me questions and then, well, she wouldn't really wait for the answer. She'd be off talking about something else. She's a bit like that. But a little dreamy, stares off at the sky and her mind is traveling, who knows where."
"Yes. She's just the same." So I hadn't destroyed her, after all. "Did you talk about me?"
"I didn't tell her..."
"I mean about me as her husband. Or me as her old landlord. What did she say?"
"I talked about you as my son. I said you're a rascal. Selfcentered and clever, you are, you know, smarter than any of the other kids. I said you never really fit in, that you like to spend your time with me. We play stupid word games in the kitchen and drink watered-down coffee. I told her about our trip and how you liked to pick the bed closest to the bathroom, in case robbers came in and you had to escape. And that you hate beef jerky. I said I tried to teach you to drive and you broke off the side mirror."
"I told Sammy about that. I said you whipped me good."
"I should have. I said girls in school had crushes on you. That you loved books. I said she would love you."
"Thank you."
Grin. "Well."
Hughie faced away from me as he slipped off his drawers. Nude, old man's body of shivering skin. How many years since he had known his brand of passion? He stepped into cotton pajamas, stumbling. The house was quiet, absolutely quiet, and the sky through the window was bright around the moon and starless. I thought it was time.
I told him what he already knew. That he would have to leave me soon.
Without turning, he said, "I told her you didn't like beets, and she said neither did Sammy."
"Hughie."
"I don't want to talk about it now. I'm so tired."
I said I had been thinking about it, and he should go in the morning.
"Let's not do this now."
"Before they wake up. I already put some money in your bag. It's wrapped up in a sock, don't lose it."
"Not tomorrow, Max. I can't."
"We talked about all this."
"I can't do it."
"You promised me."
He explained how there was a better way. That we could both leave. Right now; we could take our things and get into the Chryster—it was just across the street, sleeping—and silently start it up, and silently leave this awful place. "We could do what we said, we could find a little town and live there. That's the best thing. Doesn't that sound like the best thing?"
I said he had forgotten one thing. That I was dying.
Staring at me, hands on his hips, pajama top unbuttoned so it showed the wisps of gray in the center of his chest. "Don't be dramatic. You've got almost twelve years."
But I didn't, and he knew it. Those twelve years would not be withering and going gray and falling asleep one night, in that town he imagined, letting my heart stop in the first hour of my seventieth birthday, in 1941. Perhaps he might die that way. But I was under a different curse: my last years would be a nightmare of the body. Shrinking, gaining baby fat, losing my mind and memories, my speech, until I could only crawl across the floor, staring at this father with eyes that begged him to kill me. We both knew I'd have to end it long before all that.
"Oh God, Max," he said, shaking his head. "Listen, listen what happens a year from now? When you're two inches shorter? And what about me?"
"They won't notice."
"That your clothes are getting looser?"
"It won't come to that."
"It's stupid. It's selfish is what it is. It's what you've always been, Max, it's selfish. Think about it, just think about it for a second. Haven't you done enough to her? You have to trick her again? And your son? And do this to me?"
"This isn't about you, Hughie."
"Oh, I—"
"Let me stay here. My wife and son are here."
"You can't be a husband! You can't be a father!"
"Hush. I'll be a son. For a little while."
Or something like that. I don't remember the actual words of that conversation, but I remember how it sounded, his final face, and what the light was like, how the room smelled of dust and oil, so I have colored it in from these, as one restores a damaged work of art.
I said, "You can find that little town and live there. I gave you enough money for a long time."
"I don't want your money."
"It's a lot. You could buy a house and a lot of land. With a dog and a woman who comes in at five each night to cook your dinner." I drew a picture he knew well, of a farm with a long drive through cypress trees, a barn, his goddamned chickens, all of it. I said that, if he wanted, he could get another Teddy. No one cares what rich men do. He could love someone.
He was silent for a moment, and turned to face me.
"Someone," he said, and the way he looked at me made me afraid.
There are things we can say only once, and the words I could see forming on his lips he had already said. Years before, decades before in the parlor of his house where I lay, stupefied by hashish, on the sofa as a fire crackled in the hearth. He had looked at me this way, and faced the fire, and muttered something that the snap of flames had covered. I could pretend I hadn't heard it; pretend we were just the way I wanted, and the fire was too loud, or the throb of blood in my ears; I could imagine he was drunk, and I could forget. But over thirty years had passed, and there were his blue eyes, and he had not forgotten. I saw the words arranging themselves, but there are things that we can say only once. He began to button his top. From the way his hands were shaking, I knew that life had gone terribly wrong for both of us.
"Hughie, hand me the whiskey."
"You're too young."
"I'm not likely to get another drink. Hand it over."
"I won't go, Max," he said, though he looked so tired of arguing.
"You will, I know you will."
"I'm stubborn. You remember, don't you? When we were little? You were, God, you were about a foot taller than me and still I'd wrestle you to the ground. I didn't care. I was half your size and I'd beat you."
"This isn't like that."
"Was there anything as good as that? Those lessons together in the mornings? And my dad would unfold a map upside down and start pointing at it like it was a new continent in the world? And later, you'd lift me up and throw me into the grass. Remember, Max?"
"There was never anything as good."
We talked for another hour or so about old things. The smell of chalk as we erased it from the slate, and frogs we hid in the pantry to frighten Maggie and John Chinaman, and the terror of sneaking into my father's parlor and holding each of the wonderful forbidden objects on his whatnot (and how we chipped the monkey's head in glass and blamed it on the chimney sweep). Jokes that would make no sense to anyone but us. Old childhood secrets. A sled ride in snow among the gravestones. By then, the moon had set and I could hear from his soft voice how drowsy he had become. I said that maybe it was time for bed.
He whispered, "No, no..."
"It's time to go."
"Sleep here tonight."
"All right, but I'll leave before morning."
"One last thing."
"It's time to go, Hughie."
His voice intensified, one last time, the last energy he had left for this: "Tell me. You won't come with me? Right now? Or wait a few days, we'll leave then. Or I'll go and you can take a bus. Be with your family, then take a bus, or have them drive you to meet your dad. Tell me you'll do it. Come live with me on the farm. It would make me so happy. You'll come, you will, you'll grow old there. You'll... you'll become a little boy, a baby, you're afraid of that, but I'm not afraid. I'll be there. I'll take care of you until you die. I will. Oh Max, come with me."
There were sheep on his pajamas. "No, Hughie."
"No," he repeated, and what he heard was Never.
"Goodbye," I said.
Quietly: "I won't say goodbye. I won't leave."
"You'll know what to do. When you wake up, you'll decide."
"Sleep here tonight," he said, not looking at me.
"Oh, Hughie."
"Sleep here." I did. I held him in my little-boy arms for a while until his leg gave one jerk and I heard his breathing slow to a dead tide. His face was knotted as if he were concentrating on his dreams, making them better than life, and his mouth lay open. He began to snore softly. That is how I think of him—and I think of him all the time—mouth open not like a child but like an old man, dreaming of the past. I kissed him and crawled out of the sheets, made my way back to my son's room, and fell asleep in that small bed. I was so tired.
I should write that it is my birthday today, and we have had a picnic. I write now barefoot in the grass. It spreads out for acres, the grass, a dozen shades of green among the gravestones, not very carefully trimmed so that here and there are little meadows with tiny birds chattering and fighting in them, and buzzing bees, and clustered green seeds waving in the wind. It's quite beautiful. The September air is cool despite the bright sun, and many of the trees down by the river have jumped the gun and are already falling to yellow. There are very few people here today; just a couple of old widows replacing dead flowers, and two young women doing rubbings from the facets of an obelisk. And Alice, of course, down at the other end. I can see her red scarf floating in the breeze. Somewhere behind her is Sammy.
There is a blanket spread out on the grass, and scraps from our lunch of egg salad sandwiches, tomato soup, a few peach pits, and an orange cake stuck with thirteen melted candles. The ants are already at work. There is also the wrapping paper from my presents, crumpled balls of sky blue. Sammy was very happy with my Erector set, which Alice said "could fit with the other one," but bored by the collection of books—Irving and Blackmore and Joel Chandler Harris—from another century, and quite out of fashion. "I used to love those when I was a girl," Alice told me. I remember, darling. You sent Sammy off to find a grave from the Civil War, and we were left alone.
"I have another present," you told me. You wore a long dress embroidered in red and a little white cloche, and your camera lay like a pet beside you.
"You do?"
You handed it to me. An ordinary envelope. Inside, a card from the government regarding my change of name. No longer just little Hughie. No longer just the son of your old friend who left me in your care. I was now Hughie Harper. You and the doctor have adopted me, in expectation of your own marriage, in expectation of a final form to life.
"You're part of the family, Hughie," you said, laughing at your little prank.
"That's right," I said.
It is not precisely what I'd hoped for, but it is enough. Now, Sammy, you will get your inheritance, your grandfather's fortune, with no legal troubles at all. And as for my new mother: it is as close as I will ever get, dear Alice, to crawling into your womb to die.
"Chin up," you said, and raised the camera. I smiled; ecstatic flash of light. So there will be a photograph of the creature for the doctors to delight in; perhaps a frontispiece to a study. She lay her camera down again.
"Are you happy?" Alice asked me.
How can anyone answer this, at any moment?
She's left now to join Sammy out among the graves. And here I am, avoiding the next part as long as I can. Ants crawl across the page. You know how it goes, don't you? When you sit at midnight, and ask something terrible of someone? You know what happens in the morning.
When I awoke that first morning, the morning after I'd left Hughie's room, the world was bright and cold. I could hear a radio downstairs, and someone singing along, and I saw that the other bed was empty and that I'd thrown my own bedclothes on the floor. I was all alone. The goldfish swam in their Precambrian tank. Through some extrasensory perception, Buster had figured out I was awake and came leaping into the room, ears flying, to lick my face before I could ward him off. He jumped onto the bed and took hold of a stuffed animal by the neck—a tiger—giving a good fight before dropping it, licking me again, and darting back downstairs. More voices. I should join them. But I waited a moment. This would never come again. The sun through the shades in an early morning blue; it would never come again. Whatever had happened, whatever Hughie decided to do, it was done—and nothing would be the same after this morning. And that sun. I had seen it years before, on another morning, when I awoke to find my world utterly changed, once before, covered in a film of snow. The same silence in my heart. The same light in the air, bright as luck.
Out in the hall, I passed the sewing room, but the door was closed.
I could smell waffles from the stairs, and I stopped again. Waffles, and something else frying; it smelled astounding. The radio was playing "The Best Things in Life Are Free" and I could hear Sammy mock-crooning to it, padding around the slick floor in his little slippers, probably singing to the microphone of a whisk. Buster's nails made tap-dance noises; I imagined he was following Sammy, probably begging for scraps. And Alice in her bathrobe, stirring the eggs—for it must be eggs. The green bathrobe, the one she bought a month before she left me. Her hair in a kerchief. The dreamy eyes of someone who has had just one sip of coffee.
"Hey there, late sleeper!" she said when I came in. Old smile, old Alice. Just the two of them.
"What's for breakfast?" I said.
"Duckbrains," my son told me, then whispered something in Buster's ear.
Just the two of them.
My old wife tapped Sammy with a spoon. Yellow robe, ponytail; no matter. "Eggs and waffles and toast. Duckbrains are extra." She turned to me. "Where's your daddy, little Hughie?"
"I don't know. Still sleeping, I guess."
"Not in his room," she said. "He took his car."
"Maybe he went out for more duckbrains," Sammy offered.
She crouched down and squinted at our son: "Maybe he did! Duckbrains!"
"Ha!" said Sammy.
As I sat down and Alice poured me some orange juice, I tried to remember every detail of the moment. The ribbon sewn into the curtains, and the tea-stain of light across the bottom. The smell of waffles and burned toast; the sound of Alice scraping the black bits into the garbage. Her plain face, and how, in the part of her hair, where I had first kissed her back in another century, gray roots showed beneath the dye. How the radio was slightly off its station, and some news report could be heard like a ghost under the new song it was playing.
Alice's brown eyes brightened. "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye!" she sang, tapping her feet, turning up the radio, then she hit Sammy with the spatula and he joined in. "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, don't cry!"
It was going to be this way as long as I wanted. Hughie had made it happen. I was going to be here with my wife and son, singing to the radio, half a year, perhaps, before I was too far gone. Was there any luck like mine, anytime in history? And what if the best happened; what if my curse somehow came undone, reversed itself, and instead of slowly dying, melting into a child's body, I would begin—today, this morning, in this kitchen—to grow forward? There are stranger miracles. Every few weeks, Sammy and I would stand against that kitchen door for measurement, and there it would be: an inch, two inches. Older and bigger like all the other boys, regaining the hands and fingers I used to have—and the handwriting as well, dear Reader—and the eyes, the laugh, all of it. A new chance, a new life. Then there would come a day when I was visiting old Mom—me and Sammy, back for Christmas—a day fifteen years in the future when I would be in my twenties and handsome again, and she would look at me, quite old herself and feeble, and wonder if it was age, or just the prickings of memory, that reminded her of an old husband, old Asgar, as young as he looked the evening she left him.
"Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye!"
Where would Hughie be about now? Oh, somewhere past Eppers, fiddling with the dials of the radio to get Amos'n' Andy to come in clear. I guessed he'd stop at some service station and have all the fluids replaced, the fabric cleaned, remove all trace of the time spent on the road with a beastly betrayer, and a messy one. A new chance, a new life. Lean against a water tank and pull out the map—where to now, pal? Could a man live out his years in Missoula, Montana, in a small house near the center of town, and buy his groceries at the Saturday market where he could eye the men lifting cargo onto the railroad cars? Or a city life, in New York, with an apartment high above the park and a doorman who appreciated it when you asked about his kids? Or even, in the last decades of this life, back to San Francisco? Back across a ferry into the fog. A house out on the edge of a cliff, with a view of the Golden Gate, the sounds of foghorns lulling an old man to sleep at night. A country to pick from. A new love, somewhere, hidden. And years to find it.
"I'm so happy you and your dad came," Alice said. "I haven't been so happy in—"
"Let's not wait for him, though," I said. "He's probably on one of his morning walks."
"I'm starving!" Sammy revealed.
"You sure?" she asked.
"Let's eat."
I was home. Finally, home. And the sad, the hopelessly sweet and sad part of it was that, in knowing this, I would always be alone.
It was three hours before the policeman came to the door. By then, Sammy and I had finished the dishes and Alice had us already involved in her project of pulling out all her books to dust the bookshelves. They were spread out on the floor around us, an ocean of pages, adored by my old wife through all the dull, happy, and awful moments of her private life—for books are selfish things, unshareable, and every tome I dusted made me think of time she had not spent with me. I recognized so many of them. Then the doorbell rang and Alice had to step gingerly over her Dickens to answer it. Sammy's weary sighs. A policeman's voice, a wail from my old wife. Yes, yes, at last. I had used up the luck of the world.
A fisherman found the car in Indian Lake, five miles from town, and it was pure chance that he was there that morning and had noticed the fender gleaming in the muddy water. All doors were locked and the money was still in the sock, soggy but intact, and I applaud this county's police department, and its dredging crew, for their small-town honesty. The car had not sunk immediately; apparently, as heavy as it appeared, the Chrysler had drowned as far as its windows and then begun to float. At that point, according to the coroner's report, the driver had taken an old army gun out of the glove compartment (left open) and shot himself once through the mouth. It was probably ten minutes before the rest of the car began to sink, and then, with all that metal and the weight of the unusual radio, it would have gone down quickly. Maybe three minutes, maybe less. Of course, the driver was already dead. No shot had been heard, but then it was early morning and roosters were crowing, and anyway, no one lives near Indian Lake since the factory closed in'24.
You know, Alice, what happened, and Sammy, you remember. The policeman who explained all this in the parlor and how I fell into the sea of books and drowned and your mother stood crumpled against the wall, howling. Something has happened to your father, little boy. To whom? To your father, Hughie Dempsey. You remember how I wept the whole night in the bunk below yours, and Buster whined to hear me; how it must have confused you. To hear a boy whispering those curses, and damning your beloved God, and standing in the stark moonlight like a man escaped from a madhouse.
On such occasions, in a small town, there is a newspaper article, a sermon in church, and a funeral. We had all these things. The article was just about what I've just written, with a fisherman interview, a police comment ("We're stunned"), and a little report about me, the son abandoned in the swamp of this death. There was a tone of fright and anger to the article. How dare he do this, to the boy, and here, in this golden town! We cannot understand. We are not like this. The sermon was similar. The funeral was widely attended, swelling with music and curious people, though no one but Alice had ever met the man.
I can't quite remember any of it. I know I developed a twitch in one eye that took a week to go away. I think I ate all the time, and wept at night, and would not change my clothes. Even in my stunned state, even with my goblin's blood starving every bit of me that was human, I tried to do good; I found Hughie's wife out in Nevada and called her. This was in the funeral home, when they had left me alone for a little while with the casket (oak and bronze, lid kindly closed, old friend). I found a phone in a corner of the office, among some musty-smelling silk orchids. "Abigail?" I whispered when a woman answered.
"Yes?"
"This is Max Tivoli. You remember me, a friend of Hughie's. I have some bad news. Hughie's dead."
"Who are you, young man?"
"Abigail, it's Max. Hughie's dead."
The operator came on to tell me that the call was finished. I tried again, but this time nobody answered. I looked at the phone and wondered why I had bothered. I suppose it was her right to take him, but I hadn't wanted her to. Or for Teddy to take him, for that matter. I was glad to keep him forever with me now. I went back into the parlor, where they were all waiting for me, a bouquet of eyes staring at me because, of course, they assumed I was a broken little boy.
Alice made us stay in the house. This was all the Levy that was left in her: to sit shivah for the dead. She never went to synagogue (there was no synagogue, of course), observed no holidays, ate bacon and shrimp when it pleased her, turned on the radio on Saturdays to hear The Goldbergs, and as far as I knew did not believe in God, but when it came to death, she was a Jew. A little Levy girl. She had to be. Death makes children of us all; I learned this in the war.
And it did not even make sense, if you thought about it: who was she to Hughie? Not family, of course. Not anyone. They hadn't seen each other properly in forty years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in the park. But the town treated her like a widow, and came by with casseroles and stews and roast meats. I was reminded all at once of Mother and me, in Nob Hill, fighting off the ladies in veils. They asked me about my father, and I always said, "He was a good man, and he loved me," and they left in a hurry from the spectacle of Jews in mourning. We wore black; we covered the windows; we rent the fabric over our hearts. We kept kosher. We separated the silver as her mother used to, nearly half a century ago. It was absolute madness, but it was all that Alice had.
I'd never seen her cry before. Not in my whole life. When you squeezed her tender heart, she usually oozed anger, but Alice cried over her Hughie, yes she did. Sitting there in her black silk, staring at the wall, she let the tears trickle as her eyes smoldered in some private fire. Late at night, I heard her moaning. And I could not sleep. After all, I was the one who had given her life this final grief, after all the others.
It took her a long time to ask me. By then, none of my family had been found and I was part of the house, deep in a life I have described to you in these pages. I'd refused to live in the sewing room—"my dad's old room," I called it—and was already semi-permanently bunked with Sammy; I was already enrolled in Mrs. McFall's class, already Sammy's "duckbrain." It was the night I've described to you: two insomniacs staring at the sky. My Alice in her nightgown, soft and shapeless and old in the night, inviting me downstairs for milk. We sat at the table, with Buster at our feet. She poured little moon-white glasses. Then, in a voice broken by grief, she asked me at last:
"Why did he do it to us?"
Old Alice, old irretrievable Alice. But somewhere inside that body: a wife, a woman, a girl, all of them, nesting in there like a Russian doll.
She said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I asked that."
"No, it's okay."
"My God, though, I can't sleep. I know you can't either. I hear you walking around at night. Tonight. It's because we can't ever know, isn't it?"
"I suppose not."
"He brought you to me. I'm happy about that. I guess he wanted you to be loved somewhere."
"I guess."
"But it's too much of a burden for you. I get so angry with him sometimes!"
"No, please, don't be angry with him."
"I'm sorry. I'm not really. I loved him so much, you see."
"I know why he did it."
Your eyes, those old Darjeeling eyes. I saw them once in waspstung pain, and once on a street in San Francisco, full of horror and death. I don't know if I ever saw them in love. I could tell you, darling. I could sit here while the milk makes white shadows in its glass, while darkness mutters behind the window, and wait for a tear to show itself in the creased canthus of your eye. You would weep then, my love. Why did he do it? As simple as this: Because I told him to. Because he loved someone his whole life—he loved me his whole life—and all he wanted was to be near me, and I sent him away. I told him never to come back. And he never did, not ever. Why did he do it? Because he thought no one loved him.
And here you are, the reason for it. The prize I get for murder. You, Alice, and Sammy, for a little while, at least. But no more Hughie now, forever. I cannot live with it, but I have to. We each have an awful bargain in our lives.
"Yes?" you said.
I couldn't tell you the truth. It was too late. So I told you something like the truth, something kind, and what you longed to hear, anyway: "I think it was old love."
You sniffed and looked down into your milk. You heard what you hoped for. You could sleep now, I think.
"Can I kiss you?" I said.
I had done nothing to hide my voice. Your face sharpened; your mouth tensed. Did you know? It didn't matter anymore.
"Mom? Alice?"
"Yes, Hughie?"
"Can I kiss you?"
A pause, eyes searching me in the blank light. "Well, okay."
Forgive me if I held on longer than a good son should. Think of lifelong loves, and a boyish fear of the dark. Think of sad goodbyes.
The very next day, I stole a pen from my teacher. I stole a pile of notebooks. And on that April day, in a sandbox, sniffling, I began to write out all that you have read.
Sometimes I think of the wasp. The one that stung my Alice. Blond and banded like a tiger's eye, living out its life in a hanging hive in South Park. Dead now, of course; squashed forty years ago. But I like to think that, while it lived, it watched sweet Alice through the parlor window. Day after day, it buzzed and murmured in its chamber, observing my girl as she read her bad novels, or did her hair, or sang aloud to the pier glass. It made no honey; it built no comb; it had no earthly purpose except to annoy, and should have been killed months ago, had the landlords been attentive. A worthless bug, but it loved her. It lived to watch her. And in its last days—for life is short for wasps—it closed up its home, stepped out from its lantern porch, dipped twice into the air, and fell at last into her life. It died, of course. A smear of brownish blood. It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.
So I have confessed it all. Nothing has been said wrong, but as I try to read it over, I realize that nothing is quite right, either. I have left out a mole on Alice's neck. And a scene of me and my wife in our new Oldsmobile, driving in the spray out by the ocean and laughing. And Hughie out in Kentucky, ringing a farmhouse bell to buy country ham, the clang of it resounding, and him standing there, delighted, surrounded by the echo of the endless hills. But let it be. I've put down as much life as I can bear.
Which leads us, at last, to the end. Here on his grave, scribbling out a few last words. Alice and Sammy are off in the tombstones, and now it is just the grass, and me, and the ants, and the man I murdered. By all rights, he should be buried in Colma beside his family, his son, but I wanted him to be buried here, and here he is, among the suicides and heathens and the clover. I'm sure he wouldn't mind.
I know what I did. Every night I think of him—the first ordinary boy I ever saw, a son to me, a father, an old friend, the one person who loved me my whole life—every night I think of him. And when I do, the nerves are pulled from my body: a weed ripped out by its roots.
You may visit his headstone, if you wish. Far to the left, past the crowd of local Doones and an angel statue, in black granite. Hubert Alfred Dempsey. Navy lieutenant, Spanish-American War. Then his birth and death and the phrase: "A good friend here lies." It does not say that once, when he was a boy, he used to eat paper.
It's time to go. Dr. Harper's prescription pad has gotten me an encouraging supply of pills, all blues and mauves, and while it's still my birthday, and before I sink too badly into the mire of my particular curse, I think I should end things in indigo. Probably tonight, if I finish this. I plan to hide these pages in the attic, in a box that's labeled "Max." I plan to sneak out to the local creek and slip into a tin canoe. There, I'll take my dose of gin and violets. It is my birthday wish to do this.
I can see my wife and son, wandering among the graves of the Civil War dead. How my mother would have loved to lead her grandson there! Grasshoppers are jumping in the tombstone weeds, maple seeds are twittering towards the river, and, most surprising of all, in the bright sky I can see the faint dandelion of the moon. From somewhere I can hear a birdlike sound that I have decided is a group of children, somewhere in the neighborhood, playing a blindfolded game, their crazed voices brought to me only in bits and pieces, softly, on the wind. They will shout and yell like this, carried on the breeze, until they are too old for it, but by then there will be more children, glad and ignorant and wild, and so on, but among them there will never be another one like me.
Sammy is waving to me. He's shouting something I can't hear. I think he's found an old soldier. Bye, Sammy. And Alice, there you are, looking at me in the shade of your hand. Remember this always: there was no moment in my life I didn't love you.
Tomorrow, you will probably be awakened by a phone call. It will be too early in the morning to understand, and you'll grope for your glasses as if they could help you hear, but what the man will say is that they have found a body. Your newest son, lying dead in a boat among the reeds. It will just be light, and you will be frozen for a while as you dress in your haphazard clothes, pull on a sweater, and stumble out to the car. The police will give you coffee at the station, and they will talk softly. It will not make any more sense than it did in the bleary light of morning. You will be given a bag of my belongings. Then you will be shown a body under a sheet. They will remove the sheet. There I will be, as naked as on our wedding night, bloated with water, my skin bruised with blue flowers. Don't be sad. Life is short, and full of sorrows, and I loved it. Who can say why? Don't look at me too long; I will make you think of Hughie, and it will start all over again, the old grief along with this new one. Turn away from me, Alice. Look in the little bag they gave you; there should be a necklace there. 1941. You will understand then. Don't be sad.
One day, you will find these pages. I suspect you will not be cleaning out the attic; I think you'll just be searching for something from your early life to show your new husband. You will move aside the photo albums and there it will be, the box labeled "Max" in my boyish hand. You will pull out the yellow pages, stuck with sand and grass, and some rush will overcome you—sudden hatred, or tenderness, or something for the old man. I expect, someday, you will show them to Sammy and a little mystery will be blotted from his childhood: that odd boy, his brief brother, whom you buried so quickly and never spoke of again. Just as you never spoke of his father. If they fall into the hands of Dr. Harper, as I suspect they will, I'm sure he will dismiss me as a madman, claiming these are not the writings of a little boy but a forgery, certainly by your ex-husband but not by any magical being. Impossible. Perhaps he will publish them in collaboration with Goldforest House, my old asylum, as a study of that delusion: everlasting love.
It's time to go.
Grow old and wise, my love. Raise our son to be a good Cub Scout, and a faithful lover; teach him to use his new wealth wisely, start a foundation, and do not let him go to war. Let your hair turn white, and let your hips broaden across the chair, and let your breasts fall on your chest, and let this husband, who loves you, be your last. Do not be alone. It does no good to be alone.
They may not find my body, after all. Water is unpredictable that way. I may drink my poison, kick off from the dock, and never come back to shore. I will lie back on a pillow so I can see the stars. I plan on there being stars; the sky must comply, this once. I expect it to take a full half hour for the drugs to take effect, and if I have measured out my death correctly, and don't simply vomit into the black water, the constellations will brighten and slide above me, and I won't weep, not for all the dead, or because I miss the world. If I am lucky, I will be like the Lady of Shalott in that poem. I will float down the current until it meets the river, slowly, over weeks, for I will just be sleeping, still alive, growing younger every hour, as the river takes me along its swelling center, a boy, a child, ever younger until I am at last a little baby floating under the stars, a shivering baby, dreaming of no particular thing—borne into the dark womb of the sea.
Max Tivoli
1930
Praise for The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
"Enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov... . Max writes, 'Life is short, and full of sorrows, and I loved it.' His poignantly awry existence, set out with such a wealth of verbal flourishes and gilded touches, serves as a heightened version of the strangeness, the muted disharmony, of being human."
—John Updike, The New Yorker
"Max may be a monster, but he is a profoundly human one, a creature whose unusual disorder, far from making him a freak to be wondered at, simply magnifies his normal and recognizable emotions, sharpening their poignancy."
—The New York Times Book Review
"There's something wonderfully clean and old-fashioned in the way Greer's elegant and graceful style meshes perfectly with the period. He is an agile, inventive storyteller who intelligently examines deep and unsettled feelings about so-called monsters: do they deserve happiness? And aren't we all in some way monsters in matters of the heart?"
—Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald
"Heartrending... beautifully written... this is a rich and mesmerizing fable. Time will not reverse its impact."
—Joe Heim, People (four stars, critic's choice)
"[Greer] has an eerie maturity not often found in young novelists. His prose, incantatory but not overheated, idles along with a tophatted, almost courtly elegance... . A fable of surpassing gravity and beauty, The Confessions of Max Tivoli returns Andrew Sean Greer to the central concerns of his first novel: how time ravages love, and how love takes its revenge."
—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"The Confessions of Max Tivoli leaves its readers in much the same state as its narrator: bewildered by the sheer unlikely strangeness of life and feeling somehow both younger and wiser on that account."
—The Washington Post
"[Max] refers to himself as a 'monster,' and indeed he inspires the same strange pity elicited by Dracula or Frankenstein's monster. Racked by their own insatiable desires, these earthly creatures remind us of our own pitiable yearnings. That startling sense of sympathy for Max's bizarre situation is perhaps the novel's greatest accomplishment. It's just the shock we need to fracture old attitudes about age and love."
—The Christian Science Monitor
"Heartbreakingly beautiful... It is a pleasure simply to follow Mr. Greer's sentences and to explore the turn-of-the-century San Francisco that he conjures."
—The New York Sun
"Greer's prose gleams with a persistent inner light... . One of the sheer joys of Max Tivoli is its meticulous re-creation of a bygone San Francisco... . There is a visceral, old-fashioned charm to Greer's rendering of the park, as there is to the novel, which purports to be a memoir."
—East Bay Express
"Tender and tragic... This book can be summed up with one of its own lines, 'all of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass.' A+"
—On the Town
"The most distinctive book you can read this year... . The writing is beautiful in its Victorian tone, and it has a classical feel to it... . Even if he stopped writing now, the story of Max Tivoli would guarantee his reputation as a great writer."
—Deseret News
"The best authors of such work, from Shakespeare to Katka, leave the reader with a greater perspective of his own world after having ventured into that of the writer's. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer's remarkable second novel, is very much a part of the tradition of exceptional supernatural works that function dually as serious literature... . Extraordinarily well written."
—Stop Smiling
"Greer (The Path of Minor Planets) writes marvelously nuanced prose; with its turn-of-the-century lilt and poetic flashes, it is the perfect medium for this weird, mesmerizing, and heartbreaking tale."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"The Confessions of Max Tivoli is that rare delight—a second novel that doesn't just exceed your expectations, it quietly explodes them. Andrew Sean Greer is a delicate and merciless chronicler of the heart, of the painful and hilarious ways in which we blunder through love. His narrative skills are on a par with Ford Maddox Ford, and his limitless imagination seems genuinely his own... . The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a thing of beauty." —Neil LaBute, director and screenwriter, In the Company of
Men and Your Friends and Neighbors
"A hugely ambitious and extraordinarily beautiful book... The book is ostensibly about love, but really Greer tackles an array of weighty topics with a skill that is always a joy to behold... . There will be few, if any, better novels published this year."
—The List (five stars)
"The Confessions of Max Tivoli unfolds as a mythic, Proustian romance. Greer's achievement is to show how extraordinary creatures like Max may touch us in the most ordinary and moving ways. Despite time warps and cellular impossibilities, The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a brilliant story about the simplest of brief encounters, the encounter with life."
—The Times (U.K.)
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
This work is reprinted almost exactly as it was found in an attic in 1947. Some errors, such as spelling and punctuation, have been corrected, some illegible words (such as in the thunderstorm passage) have been deduced from context, but errors of history, geography, and medicine have been allowed to remain. Printed by permission of the Samuel Harper Foundation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for the memoirs, diaries, and letters I was allowed to search through, as well as to the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library. This book would not have been possible without the generosity of the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies and their benefactors. Thanks also to Jonathan Galassi, Carla Cohen, Susan Mitchell, Spenser Lee, and Jessica Craig and to my friends and family and everyone at FSG, Picador, and Burnes & Clegg. Of course to Bill Clegg himself, to whom this is dedicated. Best thanks of all to Frances Coady, who tended Max and transfused him with her very blood. And to David Ross, who never had any doubts.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the story collection How It Was for Me and the novel The Path of Minor Planets. He lives in San Francisco.
THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI. Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Sean Greer.
All rights reserved.
For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.
For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department as St. Martin's Press.
Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763
Fax: 212-677-7456
E-mail: trademarketing@stmartins.com
Designed by Debbie Glasserman
eISBN 9780374706302
First eBook Edition : February 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greer, Andrew Sean.
The confessions of Max Tivoli / Andrew Sean Greer.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42381-0
EAN 978-0312-42381-0
1. Triangles (Interpersonal rotations)—Fiction. 2. Immortalism—Fiction. 3. Aging—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.R3987C66 2004
n—
813'.54—dc21
2003054737
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Books3 |
Q:
PHP How to access all elements of multidimensional array if no indexes are known?
I used a modified version of the code here Determining what classes are defined in a PHP class file to create a multidimensional array of classes and functions from a specific list of files. What I ended up with is this (I know the names are messed up but I was goofing off and would have to go back and change class names and functions names in 3 different files so lets assume these were legitimate class names and function names),
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[namethis_whatever_I_want] => Array
(
[0] => another_function
[1] => whatever_function
)
)
[1] => Array
(
[tc_class_simplevar] => Array
(
[0] => set_var_test
[1] => get_var_test
)
)
[2] => Array
(
[another_freekin_class] => Array
(
[0] => some_function
[1] => another_crazy_function
)
)
)
So now I need to be able to access the class names and the function names under each class without knowing what the index is for any of them. I've tried for loops, foreach, and using counters like $i and $ii to access them by there numerical index but nothing I try will print out anything but garbage or errors.
I was thinking something like embedded foreach statements
$i = 0;
foreach($array as $class){
echo $class[$i];
$ii = 0;
foreach($class as $val){
echo $val[$ii];
$ii++;
}
$i++;
}
But no luck with that.
Also trying to access $array[$i][$i]; or $array[$i][$ii]; throws an error bad offset 0
I'm sure there will be an issue with the class array index actually being named the class name but I was thinking I could still use the numerical index for that.
Basically I am totally confused about how to access the data and could use a point in the right direction.
I will need to be able to get a class name and then get all of the function names that are under that class and will need to be able to access them at different points throughout my program by retrieving them from the array.
Thank you
I hate answering my own question just minutes after asking others for help. I feel as though I wasted your time.
You guys are right about the foreach but this was a tricky one. Asking the question was kinda helpful in talking myself through what I needed to find so it dawned on me where the problem was.
There are 3 layers to this array. There's an array containing 3 arrays and each of them has a string instead of numerical for it's index. Each of them containing there own elements.
So I had to iterate through arrays 1,2,3 getting the string index's of each of their elements and then use that string element along with numerical elements to get the inner elements of the inner most arrays. Ok that confused me but here's the code that worked for me, using echo's and some slight formatting so I could see it working.
$size = sizeof($objectList);
for($i = 0; $i < $size; $i++){
foreach($objectList[$i] as $key => $val){
$className = $key;
echo $className . ": <br/>";
foreach($objectList[$i][$className] as $val){
$functionName = $val;
echo $functionName . " , ";
}
echo "<br/><br/>";
}
}
Resulted in
namethis_whatever_I_want:
another_function , whatever_function ,
tc_class_simplevar:
set_var_test , get_var_test ,
another_freekin_class:
some_function , another_crazy_function ,
For anyone else in case it helps, here's Marks version with my arrays and variable names to compare. I'd say this way is the cleanest and it cuts out a couple lines of code.
foreach($objectList as $objects){
foreach($objects as $classname => $functions){
$cn = $classname;
foreach($functions as $functionname){
$fn = $functionname;
}
}
}
Thank you for your help :-)
A:
foreach also allows you to specify a key portion of the iterator, so you can loop through associative arrays as:
foreach($array as $key => $val){
echo $array[$key]; // prints $val
}
So, in your case:
foreach($rootarray as $classarray){
foreach($classarray as $classname => $functions){
// $classname contains the name of the class
foreach($functions as $functionname){
// $functionname contains the name of the function
}
}
}
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | StackExchange |
Q:
Populate a region of memory with random data
I am trying to populate a region of data with randomness using rand cross-platform in an efficient way. Here is what I have so far:
/**********************************************\
* Useful macro by Glen Ragen *
* https://stackoverflow.com/a/39920811/5223757 *
\**********************************************/
#if 1 /* So that the IDE minifies it */
#define NEEDS_BIT(N, B) (((unsigned long)N >> B) > 0)
#define BITS_TO_REPRESENT(N) \
(NEEDS_BIT(N, 0) + NEEDS_BIT(N, 1) + \
NEEDS_BIT(N, 2) + NEEDS_BIT(N, 3) + \
...
NEEDS_BIT(N, 60) + NEEDS_BIT(N, 61) + \
NEEDS_BIT(N, 62) + NEEDS_BIT(N, 63) \
)
#endif /* So that the IDE minifies it */
typedef struct {
size_t size; /* Size in bytes */
void *pointer;
} data;
void fill_data_with_randomness(const data data) {
for (size_t biti = 0; biti < data.size * 8; biti += BITS_TO_REPRESENT(RAND_MAX)) {
/* Fill data.pointer with bits from rand() */
}
}
As RAND_MAX is a compile-time constant, BITS_TO_REPRESENT(RAND_MAX) also should be. As data is of type const data, data.size * 8 should be able to be optimised to a call-time constant and not evaluated every iteration of the for loop.
However, bit manipulation is quite slow and the fill_data_with_randomness function will be called very frequently. This function should compile for and run correctly on systems with any value of RAND_MAX of form 2^n-1. What fill_data_with_randomness function can quickly fill this region of memory with rand()mness without wasting bits?
A:
RAND_MAX is guaranteed to be at least 215−1 so there is no problem filling an entire byte with randomness with a single call to rand(), unless your architecture has bytes larger than 15 bits (in which case your hard-coded multiplication by 8 will also be problematic).
Doing the generation byte by byte is straight-forward and requires no bit-hacking cleverness.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about "wasting bits" from a call to rand(); the bits produced by that standard library function aren't worth much on most implementations. The real problem is to decide which bits to throw away so that the remaining ones are reasonably well-distributed. If possible, to cope with the range of inferior PRNGs generally used, you should go for the middle bits.
A better solution might be to simply provide your own PRNG; portable source code implementations exist, and some are well studied.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | StackExchange |
Last updated on .From the section Scottish Premiership
Rangers climbed above Aberdeen into second place with their third win in eight weeks against the Pittodrie side.
Alfredo Morelos opened the scoring in the first half, converting James Tavernier's cross for his 13th goal of the season.
Rangers were awarded a penalty after the break when Anthony O'Connor and Joe Lewis combined to foul Josh Windass.
Lewis was stretchered off and replaced by Danny Rogers before Tavernier converted from the spot.
Rangers defender James Tavernier converts his side's second goal from the penalty spot
The victory, following two wins in four days across November and December, moved Rangers above Aberdeen on goal difference, and 11 points behind leaders Celtic.
Rangers manager Graeme Murty's new-look side showed Aberdeen manager Derek McInnes what he might have been working with, after rejecting the chance to replace Pedro Caixinha in December.
Against an Ibrox side containing debutants Sean Goss, Jamie Murphy and Russell Martin - with Jason Cummings appearing off the bench in the second half - Aberdeen found themselves out-gunned.
Rangers had limped into the winter break with a mounting injury list ,but the time off seemed to do them good and they started brightly, coming close 12 minutes in.
Hull City manager Nigel Adkins, left, was an interested spectator at Ibrox
Goss' corner was laid back by Martin for Windass, whose strike took a nick on its way through before hitting the post and bouncing into Lewis' grasp.
The Dons were fortunate again in the 20th minute, when Morelos somehow failed to head home from Daniel Candeias' back-post cross.
Aberdeen finally moved themselves into shooting territory moments later, as Kenny McLean drove through the Rangers midfield before slipping in Gary Mackay-Steven, but Ibrox goalkeeper Wes Foderingham raced from his line to cut the angle and produce a crucial block.
The importance of that save was underlined three minutes later as Rangers took the lead. Candeias and Tavernier were proving a handful for the Pittodrie men and combined again, with Tavernier's cross finding Morelos lurking and this time the Premiership's top scorer made no mistake as he nodded home.
Rangers defender Russell Martin was one of four players to make his debut for the Ibrox side
The lead was almost cancelled out immediately as switched off to allow McLean in but again Foderingham was well-placed to rescue his side.
Lewis had to be alert at the start of the second period as he denied Morelos a second goal after the striker managed to beat Anthony O'Connor before spinning to shoot.
But again Morelos was guilty of a bad miss on 58 minutes. Martin released Declan John with a superb ball in behind the Dons defence, Lewis could only flap at the full-back's cross and with the goal gaping, the striker sliced into the side-netting.
Cummings got his introduction on 70 minutes as he was treated to a deafening roar after replacing Morelos, and the home support were cheering again on 75 minutes as Rangers won a penalty.
South Africa-based Rangers chairman Dave King was in Glasgow to watch the team in action against Aberdeen
Tavernier slipped Windass in on goal but just as he looked to pull the trigger he was clattered into by Lewis. The keeper came off worse but referee Bobby Madden still pointed to the spot.
There was a five-minute delay as Lewis was stretchered off, but Tavernier kept his cool to fire past understudy stopper Danny Rogers.
Aberdeen poured forward hoping to salvage something but found themselves up against a keeper in unbeatable form, as Foderingham pulled off four great saves in the final 10 minutes to deny Adam Rooney twice, Dom Ball and then Graeme Shinnie. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
While we hope that you will love every purchase, if you are not completely satisfied with your goods we will happily offer you a full refund or exchange.You are entitled to a refund or an exchange if you contact Jules B within 14 days of receipt to acknowledge the return.You then need to return your item(s) within a further 14 days in a perfect, resalable condition with all labels and tags attached.Please contact customercare@julesb.co.uk with your return tracking number, so we are aware you have returned your order and avoid any delays in processing your request.You can return your items in the post or at one of our stores.For more information on our returns policy click here.
The United Nude Rico sandals are an easy to wear option and will add a stylish finishing touch to any summer outfit. In the label's signature quirky style, these shoes feature contrasting prints and a bright red accent detail to the strap, as well as a thick platform with metallic silver trim. The straps are crafted from elasticated fabric and leather with a mix of textures for a unique look.
Elasticated and leather uppers
Leather insole
Peep toe
Silver trim on platform
Platform heel
Synthetic textured outer soles
Measurements
Heel measures 2.6"/ 6.5cm
Size Conversion Chart
Please use the chart below to convert between standard size formats
UNITED NUDE
UK
2.5
3.5
4
5
6
7
7.5
8
US
5
6
6.5
7.5
8.5
9
10
11
EU
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
221mm/8.7"
229mm/9"
234mm/9.2"
247mm/9.7"
253mm/10"
259mm/10.2"
265mm/10.4"
271mm/10.7"
Additional Information
If you require any additional help or information, please do not hesitate to contact our dedicated customer care team, Monday to Saturday 9:00am – 5:00pm (GMT). | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Q:
Update to already published game on Google Play giving error with SHA1 key
I have a problem with my already published game at Google Play Store.
In my first published game I have not used any Google APIs.
But in my next update I have used Google Play Game Services.
Now I have uploaded updated APK for Alpha testing. When I have downloaded my app I get
"The application is incorrectly configured. Check that the package name and signing certificate match the client ID created in Developer console.
Also if the application...."
I have Googled it everywhere. And I got to know its SHA Key1 or Game key from the Google error.
I have checked the SHA1 key that is available in
Eclipse -Windows > Preferences > Android > Build = SHA1
This SHA1 key and the SHA1 key that I have given for OAuth 2.0 at Google API are the same.
But when I export my apk file to upload on Google Play, the SHA1 key generated at last is different than the one I have got in eclipse.
Can anybody help me solve the problem with the SHA1 keys?
A:
When you upload an apk to play store then for any api that require SHA1 must use SHA1 that was generated during signing process. Not the SHA1 that eclipse provide.
Try it.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | StackExchange |
Stakeholders back global review of future agriculture
Shares
A broad coalition of organisations — ranging from multinational corporations and international agencies to environmental activists and farmers rights groups — have agreed to participate in the largest-ever global dialogue on how to meet the world’s future food needs.
Meeting in Budapest last week, representatives of such organisations committed to taking part in a two-and-a-half year review of how science and technology can be used to increase food production in ways that are both socially acceptable and environmentally sustainable.
The review, which it is estimated would cost US$15 million to prepare, is planned to be carried out by an intergovernmental body administered by a multi-stakeholder bureau. Planning is being co-ordinated by Robert Watson, the chief scientist at the World Bank.
Funding is now being sought from the bank and other UN agencies. According to Watson, if this fundraising is successful, the review could start operating early next year.
The multi-stakeholder approach being adopted is similar to that used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which Watson headed from 2000 until 2002.
The hope is that, as with the experience of the IPCC, this approach will reduce the conflict that surrounds much of the current debate about future food production, particularly in areas such as the role that should be played by genetically modified crops in the developing world.
“Our goal is develop a consensus on what is known and unknown, explain different points of view, and identify the uncertainties," says Watson.
Unlike the work of the IPCC, however, which has at its core the desire to find a scientific consensus on the nature of the hazards presented by global warming, the new assessment will have a greater emphasis on more value-driven topics, such as the relative contributions of traditional and modern knowledge to agricultural practice.
Part of this, however, will — as with the IPCC — be an attempt to reach agreement between all stakeholders on the basic parameters of the debate on future food production.
"This is a first and unique chance for a global bottom-up check on what is really needed and what is not, to ensure food sovereignty for all, and the survival of the planet," says Benedikt Haerlin of Greenpeace International.
The proposed assessment has been welcomed by Mohamed Hassan, executive director of the Third World Academy of Sciences, who says that it will "help the scientific communities in their efforts to find innovative science-based solutions to the problems of hunger, poverty, and food insecurity". | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Erotic Massage in Karachi
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You are about to Enter a Website that may contain content of an adult nature.These pages are designed for Adults only and may include pictures and materials that some viewers may find offensive. If you are under the age of 18, if such material offends you or if it is illegal to view such material in Pakistan, Please Exit Now | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Follow-up evaluation of dissecting aneurysms of the vertebrobasilar circulation by using gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging.
The authors assessed the reliability of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging contrast enhancement for the detection and follow-up evaluation of dissecting aneurysms of the vertebrobasilar circulation. Twenty consecutively admitted patients who underwent both gadolinium-enhanced MR imaging and conventional angiography were reviewed. Enhancement of the dissecting aneurysm was seen in all but one of the 20 patients, including 10 (71%) of 14 patients examined in the chronic phases, when the T1-hyperintensity signal that corresponded to the intramural hematoma was unrecognizable. The enhanced area corresponded to the "pearl sign" or aneurysm dilation noted on the comparable angiogram. On follow-up MR studies enhancement had spontaneously disappeared in four patients at a time when comparable vertebral angiograms revealed disappearance of the aneurysm dilation. The enhancement persisted in five of nine patients examined more than 24 weeks after symptom onset; in all five patients the aneurysm dilation remained on comparable angiograms. Dynamic MR studies showed rapid and remarkable enhancements with their peaks during the immediate dynamic phase after injection of the contrast material. The authors conclude that gadolinium-enhanced MR imaging is useful for the detection and follow-up evaluation of dissecting aneurysms of the vertebrobasilar circulation. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
Karma Rx – Karma’s First Camping Fuck Trip, Day 1
http://nitroflare.com/view/99ACFF6F5BFF718/679b64112d9b6.mp4
Camping tends to be a whole lot of fun, but it’s even better when you’re camping with a pornstar. This week Karma Rx and hear boyfriend went out for a weekend camping trip. However, this isn’t some run of the mill camping experience. They decided to try and get freaky as much as possible and where ever possible. They documented the entire experience for your enjoyment. Watch Karma as she does all the fun camping activities like sucking dick on a hike trail, walking through the woods completely naked, and even sucking and fucking. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
September Multi-Consignor Auction
Items in this sale have been consigned to us to sell to the highest bidder without reserve.
If you are interested in consigning items in one of our upcoming auctions, please contact us.
All sales are final. All items are SOLD AS-IS. We strongly encourage all bidders to visit us and preview the auction prior to bidding.
• All sales are subject to an 18% buyer’s premium and CT sales Tax of 6.35%
• If items are being purchased for resale, please submit your Sales Tax information so we can have it on file.
• Winning bidders must pick up purchased items on announced pickup dates. All items not picked up will incur a storage fee of $25 per week per auction, After 30 days items will be considered abandoned by bidder and subsequently sold in a future auction.
• Shipping services are available for the cost of shipping and materials plus a packing fee of $10 for the first item and $5 for each additional item, unless otherwise indicated in the listing. We will not ship items that are hazardous or otherwise prohibited to ship by UPS or FedEx or items we feel are to fragile to properly package. All items must fit in a box measuring no more than 24” x 24” x 24” including protective fill.
• Items that cannot be properly shipped in a box measuring less than 24” x 24” x 24” or weighs more than 100 pounds can be placed on a pallet for a $40 fee and buyer will be responsible to arrange for truck transportation. We do not offer crating services.
• For Complete Auction Terms, Click here | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Introduction
============
Schistosomiasis is water borne disease and it is estimated to affect 200 million people in 76 countries and approximately 600 million people have been estimated to be at risk of infection \[[@b1-ijerph-04-00101]\]. *Schistosoma haematobium* is spread through contact by uninfected persons with fresh water, which is contaminated with the urine of infected persons. The disease continues to spread and intensify with the expanding water resource projects, which are needed to meet the increasing food demands in Cameroon. Schistomiasis is a public health problem in Cameroon and contributes to a third of the morbidity among school-age children in Kumba.
The southwest Province of Cameroon has an Equatorial climate, with a 9-months rainy season and a 3 months dry season each year. Rainfall is very heavy 1500--2000mm/year. The snail hosts of the schistosome parasites of man are scare throughout the area \[[@b2-ijerph-04-00101]\] and only a few isolated foci of *schistosoma haematobium* are found \[[@b3-ijerph-04-00101]\].
Kumba, an administrative and commercial centre with a population of 80 000, lies in the South-West Province, on the banks of the Kumba River. Since its inhabitants come from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and socio-economic groups, a study of the effects of these factors on several tropical diseases is ideal. Dombeu and collaborators reported the existence of a focus of *S. haematobium* in Kumba \[[@b4-ijerph-04-00101]\]. This is possibly the first reported even though the population has been well studied in earlier years. The aims of the present study, conducted in Kumba, were to quantify the potential risk of schistosome infection from the activities involving water contact and schistosome infection and to identify any behavioural or socio-cultural factors that increased the risk of the infection.
Materials and Methods
=====================
A preliminary survey was carried out to identify the areas of Kumba town where the prevalence of *S. haematobium* infection in the population was \>10%. A complete census of all housing units was then carried out in these areas and urine samples were collected in 50-ml tubes from all members of each household who were aged ≥1 year. Urine was collected between 11.00 and 14.00 hours, the period of peak intensity of infection in the sample \[unpublished\], preserved with sodium azide and examined using sedimentation. Sedimentation appears to be as sensitive a method as centrifugation or filtration \[[@b5-ijerph-04-00101]\].
The data collected from each household included the occupation, ethnic group and religion of each member and objective data used to calculate a socio-economic index. A questionnaire was administered to sub-sample of 665 individuals, to gather information on their level of domestic, recreational and occupational water contact, and their level of knowledge about schistosomiasis transmission. The main water-contact activities were bathing, laundry, food preparation, dishwashing, playing, fishing, and wading. A coefficient indicating the risk of each activity, based on the average duration of the water contact and the proportion of the body exposed \[both measured by direct observation\], the use of soap and the location where the activity occurred, was calculated. [Table 1](#t1-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table"} presents the activity coefficients used to quantify risk behaviours.
A water-contact index was then calculated for each subject by multiplying the water-contact coefficient for each activity by the number of times the individual performed the activity each week and then summing the results for all activities. Indices of \[0, 1--9, 10--25, and 26--53\] indicated no, low, medium and high levels of contact, respectively.
Knowledge about schistosomiasis was evaluated by asking five simple questions, each subject being given a point for each correct answer, giving scores of 0--5. The questions explored knowledge about the cause, clinical symptoms, and availability of treatment, transmission and prevention of schistosomiasis.
All subjects found to be infected with schistosomes were given a single oral dose of 40 mg praziquantel/kg, which was well tolerated.
Results
=======
Population
----------
The census in area with \>10% schistosomiasis prevalence involved 171 households with 1025 residents. Most of the subjects were young 60% \<20 years, 31% 20--44 years and only 9% \>45 years with a slight preponderance of females 55%. On average each household comprised six individuals range 1--2, usually an extended family. Although the subjects belonged to 27 ethnic groups they could be classified in five main categories: Bakundus from the Douala coast; Bamileke from the western, hill region; Hausa Foulbe, Fulani and Hausa from northern Cameroon; and Nigerians and Tikaris from the north-western, hill region. Hausas were predominantly Muslims, the Bamileke Roman Catholics and the Bakundus, Tikaris and Nigerians Protestants. Two thirds of the population 65% were from the lower socioeconomic group \[labourers and unskilled workers\], 30% from the middle (semi-skilled or skilled workers) and 5% from the high professionals.
Prevalence and Intensity of Infection
-------------------------------------
The prevalence and intensity of infection are presented in [Table 2](#t2-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table"}, and graphically illustrated in [Figure 1](#f1-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="fig"} and [Figure 2](#f2-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="fig"}. The prevalence rates were relatively high in the 10--14 and 15--19 age groups compared to the 5--9, 20--44 and \>44 age groups. The overall infection rates were 42.5, 54.1, 46.5, 15.8, and 10.0% in the 5--9, 10--14, 15--19, 20--44 and \>44 age group, respectively. In the male subjects, the intensities of infection were 55, 60, 44, 42 and 28 eggs per 10 ml urine, respectively in the 5--9, 10--14, 15--19, 20--44 and \>44 age group. In the female subjects, infection intensities of 50, 52, 45, 51 and 25 eggs per 10 ml urine, were recorded for the 5--9, 10--14, 15--19, 20--44 and \>44 age group respectively.
Water-contact Behaviours
------------------------
Although water contact occurred at the fountains, river, streams and wells, only the river and streams are potential sources of schistosome infection. Domestic activities accounted for the majority of reported water contacts. Although every subject interviewed reported that they bathed, most did so with fountain water, either at home 33% or at the fountains 39%; only 20% said they bathed in the river. Similarly, most laundry was done with fountains at home 20% or at the fountain 31%; 25% said they did not do any laundry.
Only 25% of the respondents came into contact with water as the result of food (cassava or manioc) preparation or dishwashing and only a few of these used the river; most used fountain water. Those washing vegetables in the river do so kneeling in the water with their upper and lower limbs exposed to the water. Soap is not usually used for dishwashing. Almost all-drinking and cooking water was collected at the fountains or from wells; only 4% used surface-water sources.
Although only 20% of the respondents swam or played and 17% fished in the river or stream, these activities exposed a large body area to the water and were of relatively long duration. Most fishing is done with a line, standing waist deep in the water.
Knowledge about Schistosomiasis
-------------------------------
Most respondents 68% knew that haematuria was the main sign of schistosomiasis, half (50%) knew that a drug was available to treat it, 42% knew that the cause was a worm, 36% knew that urinating in water was the main mode of transmission and only 25% knew that avoiding contact with certain water bodies was the best preventive action. Scores of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were achieved by 8%, 16%, 26%, 19%, 16% and 14% of respondents, respectively. Those aged 15--19 years had the highest mean score and those aged \>44 the lowest, with male having significantly higher level of knowledge than females. The Nigerian had the highest water-contact levels and the lowest knowledge scores. [Table 3](#t3-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table"} presents the intensity of reported surface water contact by age group and sex.
Multi-factorial Analysis
------------------------
In order to determine the factors that were associated with infection, the data was first analysed in a hierarchical log-linear model after categorization of the variables. From this first step it appeared that occupation, housing and socio-economic status were not important. The more significant variables of age, sex, ethnic group, religion, knowledge and reported water-contact were then analysed by step-wise logistics regression [table 4](#t4-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table"}. All age groups had a relative risk, RR\> 1; those aged 10--19 years having the highest RR 3.6. Nigerians had a relatively high RR 2.2; all other ethnic groups having RR of about 1. In terms of water contact, only the high-contact group were at increased risk of infection. Paradoxically, better knowledge about schistosomiasis was associated with a higher relative risk of being infected. [Table 4](#t4-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table"} presents the stepwise logistic regression of predictors of schistosomiasis.
Discussion
==========
Although clean water is available at numerous fountains throughout Kumba, many inhabitants still use surface water for their domestic activities. Unless sufficient clean water is readily available in a house itself or nearby, its inhabitants will use surface water to carry out their domestic chores.
Age, as expected and as observed in most schistosomiasis surveys, was a major determinant of schistosomiasis infection in Kumba; middle age children being at the highest risk of infection. At similar levels of exposure, children are more susceptible to schistosomiasis, probably because they lack the immunity built up in adults as the result of previous infections \[[@b6-ijerph-04-00101]\].
Only a very intense level of contact with surface water could be related to high relative risk of infection, possibly because the estimation of water contact from interview data is not very accurate. Although a significant association between risk of infection, and the number and duration of water contact with infected waters has often been reported \[[@b7-ijerph-04-00101], [@b8-ijerph-04-00101]\], it appears that the respective roles of age and intensity of water contact need to be considered together \[[@b9-ijerph-04-00101], [@b10-ijerph-04-00101]\].
Most surface-water contact by the children, the group most affected by schistosomiasis, occurs during playing and swimming and it is likely that health education would have a significant impact on these recreational activities. The positive association between knowledge and schistosomiasis was initially surprising. After all, the aim of health-education programmes is to teach people about disease so that they can take preventive action. It may be that individuals with high-risk behaviours have been infected in the past and having gone for treatment, learned more about the disease through their contact with health professionals. If this is so, their experience was not sufficient to trigger the changes in their behaviour that would reduce their risk of infection, as many have been re-infected.
The reasons why ethnic group should be a significant determinant of infection in Kumba are not clearly understood. It may be that the specific behaviours and attitudes of particular ethnic groups lead to levels of surface-water contact that differ from those of other groups. Further interviews are required to elucidate this problem.
There are several ways in which the Kumba focus may be controlled. It is obvious that, although clean water is available, it is not close enough to many households; it should be made easier for all households to obtain clean water than surface water. Given the large population in Kumba, the low cost of unskilled labour and the limited areas where the intermediate host occurs, it should also be possible to reduce infection risk by regularly clearing the snail-infested sites on the stream and river banks. It is probably unrealistic to believe that health education of the children or their parents would stop them playing or swimming in surface water; those most at risk, the middle age children, are little parental control. Health education should not only improve local knowledge about the risk of surface water contact but encourage long-term changes in behaviour and rapid treatment as soon as the symptoms of schistosomiasis develop.
This research was financially supported by the United State Agency for International Development \[USAID\] Project Grant No 631-0408.1 The Schistosomiasis Research Programme Cameroon.
{#f1-ijerph-04-00101}
{#f2-ijerph-04-00101}
######
Coefficient used to quantify behaviors
*Activity* *Mean duration (Min)* *% of body in water* *Soap used* *Coefficient for activity*
------------------ ----------------------- ---------------------- ------------- ---------------------------- ----
Bathing/washing 20 60 Yes 3 1
Laundry 45 30 Yes 3 1
Food preparation 30 30 No 2 1
Dish washing 20 20 No 2 1
Playing/swimming 40 90 No 4 \-
Fishing 90 50 No 4 \-
Crossing, wading 5 10 No 1 \-
######
Prevalence and intensity of S. haematobium infection
*Age (Years)* *No. and (%) Males* *No. and (%) females* *No. and (%) overall* *Mean intensity (Egg/10ml urine)*
--------------- --------------------- ----------------------- ----------------------- ----------------------------------- ----- ------------ ---- ----
5--9 29 12 (41.3) 20 9 (45.0) 49 21 (42.8) 55 50
10--14 85 53 (62.3) 96 45 (46.9) 181 98 (54.1) 60 52
15--19 31 12 (38.7) 68 34 (50.0) 99 46 (46.5) 44 45
20--44 101 12 (11.8) 165 30 (18.2) 266 42 (15.8) 42 51
\> 44 39 4 (10.2) 31 3 (9.7) 70 7 (10.0) 28 25
Total 285 93 (32.6) 380 121 (31.8) 665 214 (32.1) 46 45
######
Intensity of reported surface-water contact by age group and gender
*Age (Years)* *N* *% with water contact level* *Mid* *High* *Water contact index*
--------------- ----- ------------------------------ ------- -------- ----------------------- -------------
5--9 49 8.2 32.7 32.7 26.5 15.7 ± 13.3
10--14 181 14.3 33.7 36.5 15.5 12.9 ± 11.1
15--19 99 30.3 27.3 32.3 10.1 9.6 ± 10.3
20--44 266 39.5 40.6 17.7 2.3 4.6 ± 7.6
\>44 70 42.9 35.7 21.4 0.0 4.5 ± 6.9
All males 285 29.8 30.9 27.7 11.6 9.6 ± 11.6
All females 380 28.9 39.2 25.5 6.3 7.5 ± 9.3
Totals 665 29.3 35.6 26.0 8.6 \-
######
Stepwise logistic regression of predictors of schistosomiasis
*Parameter* *Degree of freedom* *X^2^* *p-value* *Coeff[^1^](#tfn1-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table-fn"}* *SE[^2^](#tfn2-ijerph-04-00101){ref-type="table-fn"}* *RR^3^*
----------------- --------------------- -------- ----------- ---------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ---------
*Age* 3 103.2 0.000
5--9
10--19 0.55 0.338 3.6
20--44 −1.00 0.367 2.8
45+ −1.69 0.532 1.5
*Ethnic group* 4 14.5 0.043
Bakudu
Bamileke 0.64 0.316 1.2
Hausa 1.05 0.744 1.4
Nigerian 1.61 0.277 2.2
Tikari 0.91 0.244 1.3
*Water contact* 4 50.5 0.000
None 1.34 0.825 0.3
Minimum 2.30 0.720 0.4
Low 2.63 0.684 0.8
High 3.34 0.220 1.5
*Knowledge* 2 12.2 0.002
Low
Average 0.51 0.276 1.9
High 0.75 0.249 3.0
*Sex* 1 0.02 0.902
*Religion* 6 5.86 0.439
Coeff= Coefficient; it is a measure of the spread of a distribution relative to the mean of the distribution.
SE = Standard Error; it is the square root of the variance of the sampling distribution SE đ = \[Var(d)\]^½^
RR = Relative Risk; it is a population estimate denoted to the attribute.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Central |
Previously, ESPN’s policy encouraged sports journalist to refrain from “political editorializing, personal attacks or ‘drive-by’ comments” directed at then-Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But 3once Trump was officially sworn in 3-months later, the policy was adjusted to allow commentators like Hill to express their views “if the topic is related to a current issue impacting sports.”
Hill’s tweets come at a time when news sites — most recently Politico — have spoken out about potential job-candidates’ political opinions on social media. Politico says they throw-out “dozens” of potential hires because of “partisan or puerile tweets” they feel are “revealing insight into how people write” and cover stories. However, Politico is pretty damn bias if you ask ANYONE!
ESPN has since distanced itself from Hill’s tweets, condemning the SportsCenter co-anchor’s tweets with this statement:
“The comments on Twitter from Jemele Hill regarding the president do not represent the position of ESPN,” the network tweeted Tuesday from its public relations department’s account. “We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate.”
Back in June, Hill claimed mixing sports and politics is unavoidable in the current political climate saying:
“Sports have always been political. The athletes are dragging us here… I didn’t ask Colin Kaepernick to kneel. He did it on his own. So, was I supposed to act like he didn’t?”
Many Twitter users called for Hill to be fired, but Disney-owned ESPN hasn’t elaborated on any possible punishment for Hill. On Tuesday night’s “SportsCenter” broadcast, Hill was co-anchoring like nothing happened! Unemployed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick expressed his support tweeting:
“We are with you @jemelehill.”
Let me remind you of all the others at ESPN who were fired for what they’ve said against the liberal agenda:
ESPN has fired people over social media comments before like when it famously canned Curt Schilling, after he shared on Facebook a lewd cartoon criticizing North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill,” that would have required transgender individuals to use public bathrooms that corresponded to the sex they were assigned at birth. Schilling now works at Breitbart.
Now Schilling never insulted a politician, but according to ESPN, the country’s ENTIRE transgender population, who could have been ESPN viewers saying, “ESPN is an inclusive company.”
The network also saw some major backlash after it awarded Caitlyn Jenner its Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2015 ESPYs.
The network even saw political backlash earlier this year, after it laid off dozens of employees, including former reporter Britt McHenry, who says her conservative politics played into why she was targeted.
Here’s some word to the UNWISE ESPN, whose ratings and viewership is plummeting… STAY IN YOUR LANE! Keep politics out of sports, and stick with what you know.
Share this if you’re sick of ESPN pushing it’s liberal narrative… and help boycott ESPN!
is a news aggregation and opinion site and contains commentary on news stories from around the internet. We strive to bring our readers a balanced content, however our writers and articles are selected because of their Conservative political and social leanings. We make no claim to be impartial. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Name of Division or Subsidiary:Advanced Antivibration Components, divisions of Designatronics, Inc.
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PERIOD OF LIMITATIONS: An action for breach of this contract, including breach of the limited warranty set forth above, or any other action relating to goods shipped by Seller or ordered by Buyer, must be commenced within one (1) year after the cause of action accrued.
MISCELLANEOUS: All orders placed with Seller after March 31, 2006, constitute acceptance of these Terms and Conditions. All conflicting, inconsistent and additional terms and conditions are rejected unless contained in writing and signed by an officer of Seller. Buyer may not assign any rights or remedies under this contract without Seller’s prior written consent. If any part or provision of these Terms and Conditions is held to be invalid or unenforceable, such part or provision shall be deemed omitted, and that shall not affect the validity or enforceability of any other part or provision hereof. These Terms and Conditions may be found at http://www.vibrationmounts.comTerms and Conditions. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Responses of cultured adult monkey trigeminal ganglion neurons to capsaicin.
The sensitivity of adult primate (Macaca mulatta) trigeminal ganglion neurons to capsaicin was studied using whole-cell recording techniques. Neurons responding to capsaicin (9 out of 14) generated inward currents of up to 3.0 nA (median = 0.23 nA; interquartile range = 1.19 nA) upon drug application measured at -60 mV. Capsaicin-sensitive neurons had longer action potential (AP) durations than capsaicin-insensitive neurons. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
Am I the only one around here who didn't read snoop lion's ama
112 shares | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
A non-volatile memory system may be implemented as a plurality of dies. At least one of the dies may be configured as a memory die, which includes memory cells that store data in the memory system. Another of the dies may be configured to function as a controller that controls or otherwise manages the storage of the data in the memory system. Other types of dies may be possible, such as those that deliver power, perform routing or switching operations to communicate signals between the controller die and the memory dies, or those that include volatile memory for temporary storage of data or other information. The dies in the memory system other than the memory dies may be collectively referred to as accessory or auxiliary dies.
Design specifications for next-generation memory systems continually require an increase in storage capacity, and more memory dies may be needed in order to meet these requirements. As more memory dies are needed, more accessory dies may also be needed.
One way a plurality of memory dies can be integrated together is by orienting them in a planar fashion, such as by mounting each of them on a respective portion of a surface of a substrate. Integrating memory dies in this manner continually increases the surface area as more and more dies are added to the memory system. Another way a plurality of memory dies can be integrated together is by stacking the memory dies on top of one another. Stacking the memory dies instead of mounting them adjacent to each other on a substrate surface may reduce or minimize the increase in surface area as more memory dies are added to the memory system.
In addition, one way memory dies may be electrically connected to accessory dies is through wire bonding. A signal path formed via wire bonding may couple die capacitance of a plurality of memory dies in parallel. As a result, increasing the number of memory dies may increase an overall capacitance of the signal path, which in turn may limit the number of memory dies that can be included in the system.
Also, the memory dies and the accessory dies may be packaged together in various ways. In some example configurations, a memory die stack may be mounted on one portion of a surface of a substrate, one or more accessory dies may be mounted on another portion of the substrate surface and wire bonded to the memory die stack, and the memory die stack and the accessory dies may be encapsulated together. The substrate carrying the memory die stack and the accessory dies may, in turn, be mounted on a second or main substrate, which may also have mounted to it other substrates carrying other memory die stacks and/or additional accessory dies, such as a controller die and a volatile memory die. The components mounted on the second substrate may be encapsulated together via a second encapsulation process. Although such a configuration is able to contain all of the components of a non-volatile memory system, it may have undesirably large dimensions (length, height, and width) due to having multiple components separately mounted to different portions of a surface of a main substrate. Also, since wire bonding may be used, the number of memory dies that may be included in a single stack may be limited. If such a number is less than the total number of memory dies needed to meet the storage capacity requirements, multiple separately-encapsulated memory die stacks may be included, which is another factor that contributes to the relatively large dimensions of the memory system.
To reduce the overall size of the memory system while increasing its storage capacity, a design or configuration that increases the number of memory dies within a single encapsulated stack, decreases the number of substrates needed to carry the memory dies, and minimizes the number of components mounted on the main substrate may be desirable. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | USPTO Backgrounds |
What happens to people’s personal relationships – and, more specifically, their sexual lives – in a time of conflict? In the Donbass region of east Ukraine, fighting began in 2014 and has smouldered on to this day. The towns all contain temporary military populations, made up of young men and women living in close proximity to death, far from routine and families. These “heroes” have followings on Facebook. Women want their babies. Underage girls go with the garrisoned soldiers, although in these areas allegiances are mixed and some get in trouble for befriending Ukrainian soldiers.
This is territory few writers have covered, particularly from a woman’s point of view. In Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s new play, Bad Roads, teenagers sleep with the garrisoned soldiers because it makes their drab, war-torn lives more glamorous. A paramedic drives the body of her soldier-lover along wild, bad roads to his wife. The most harrowing of all is the portrayal of the relationship between a hostage-taker and his female victim, which moves unnervingly between sadism, abuse and something approaching human warmth.
An acquaintance of the playwright was held hostage in Donbass by separatists. In the first years of war this happened frequently: journalists and a theatre director were among those who stumbled into imprisonment and torture and were released after months of suffering. Natal’ya uses records of kidnappings to fashion a scene of such horror and abuse it was both terrible to translate and even more terrible to think of her writing it. A threat of violence hangs over the scene, but in the end it is the power relationship between the young woman and the separatist soldier that shocks: the hostage’s instinctive attempts to humanise, to befriend, to reach out to a man brutalised by war without herself being brutalised. The dialogue is written with such force and nuance that we can instantly imagine ourselves in that situation. The potential of Stockholm syndrome is extended to all of us.
Bad Roads is composed of such documentary stories about the war, carefully wound into a fictional, episodic and impressionistic study. The play tells the story of the inhabitants of the region and the combatants on both sides. It opens with the monologue of a young woman who has fallen in love with a soldier and travels to the front line with him. It’s a poignant and vulnerable monologue: after desiring the soldier for days, she finds that PTSD has left him impotent and sex is impossible, but she reflects ironically that she earns her medal, the patriotic Ukrainian pendant he fastens around her neck, by performing oral sex on him: “Conviction is contagious, did you know – you can catch it through oral sex?”
Vicky Featherstone directing rehearsals for Bad Roads at the Royal Court. Photograph: Helen Murray
The war began in Donbass soon after the 2013 pro-European, anti-government, Maidan uprising in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Natal’ya, along with her fellow Kievans, spent days on Maidan Square, helping feed, clothe and arm protesters. She took recordings of testimony from protesters, together with other theatre practitioners, and edited the material into a verbatim-style piece of theatre, which the Royal Court produced as a reading in 2014.
Already clear in this earlier work was her commitment to real stories, told by the real protagonists, and from the start this documentary approach has had political importance: as relations between Ukraine and Russia soured, Russia’s use of propaganda and fake news to shape opinion and recast history has been monolithic and constant. Natal’ya’s commitment to oral history as drama has, as a result, become a political act of vital importance in the information war.
Over the last couple of years Natal’ya has worked on various cultural projects in the ATO (the “anti-terrorist operation zone”), the area re-taken by the Ukrainian army during the war. These include a project with local teenagers and a script for a film about the siege of Donetsk airport. Much of the material for Bad Roads comes from these documentary projects, including harrowing accounts by Ukrainian soldiers under siege at Donetsk airport. One of the characters retells how a group of Ukrainian soldiers sat out the night and waited for the separatists to begin their final bombardment at dawn. There was a rumour they were going to use the powerful Soviet Buratino multiple rocket launcher, and the Ukrainians under siege knew that they had no hope of surviving the attack if they did: the Buratino is a weapon of mass destruction, laying waste to everything in the area. So they sat and waited, washing with wet wipes and phoning their wives and families. One soldier sat on the phone to his daughter on the other side of Ukraine, helping her with her homework. When dawn came the separatists attacked in tanks and without Buratino and the men were ecstatic; their lives were saved.
Natal’ya travelled to towns in the area to work on theatre projects with schools. She asked teenagers to write and deliver short monologues about their lives and many of these voices have found their way into Bad Roads, including the poignant tale of a child in a basement during the bombardment of a town in the Donbass region: the family spent a lot of time in the basement during air raids, and to calm their little girl they told her the explosions were fireworks. Every time the little girl heard an explosion she would shout “Yay!”.
Powerful perspective … Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s new play, Bad Roads, looks at war from a woman’s point of view. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Donbass is a modern war: Ukrainians crowdfunded for uniforms and Kevlar helmets for their sons and relatives, military heroes reported back on Facebook to their large followings of admirers, soldiers watch TV on plasma screens in their temporary barracks. But it is an ancient war, too: bloody and cruel, affecting no one more than the communities in the east who have endured bombs, rockets and weeks hiding in basements, whose basic desire is to survive and to have some form of human life again: children, vegetable gardens, community. For whom politics is a baleful word and all governments are now hateful.
By stressing the sexual and the female in her study of war, Natal’ya haunts us all with the power of conflict to warp modern society. War, as she explained in the rehearsal room, returns us to the most intense feelings of hate and love. Love in war happens against a backdrop of bombs falling, deaths and mutilations, and desire comes inappropriately, when the pity of war is supposed to be uppermost in the mind. Sex in war cares nothing for the taste, the niceties of civilisation, it makes us feel sick to hear of body fluids spilled in sex in such close proximity to body fluids spilled in death. As the central character in the play says of her soldier love, “You’re all jealous, but at the same time you’re cringing”. It’s raw and dark, like the grief of a woman who has lost her man and who drinks and propositions another male comrade “just as a man might”. It reverses sexual roles and takes strange expression in the brutalised mind, which relieves itself in sexual force, but also longs for solace. The extremes of desire in war are equal only to the extremes of bloodlust and depravity.
What is unique about this play is that it is written by a woman, from the point of view of the sexual “object”, and it unflinchingly describes the situation of women at war. It charts a careful line round notions of victimhood and complicity. Hardly anyone writes from this point of view. In its combination of documentary and fiction and its point of view it reminds me of the work of Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. The writings of women from this region should be attended to, because they are carefully documenting a terrible reality in the face of increasingly artful fakery.
Translating the play has brought home just how little separates us from these people at war, just how frail our civilisation is. I’ve been working on the play with Natal’ya and with the Royal Court for more than a year and in that time in the UK we have lived through a referendum and an increase in hate crime and violence. While translating a rewrite of the hostage scene, I found the kidnapper’s voice coming more fluently to me, I could feel him in English in a way I hadn’t done previously: “Democracy is a cunning God, those fucking snowflakes thought it up.” | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Jillian Janson hasn’t been fucked in over two months and her booty has an urge that needs to be filled. What a shame too, because girls like Jillian should always have a hard cock nearby. After getting all lubed-up and giving a quick blowjob, Jillian spreads her cheeks wide open for an assfuck and gape session that she’ll never forget!
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
[Pseudohypoparathyroidism: genetic aspects].
The review of literature details the issues of genetics, the specific features of inheritance, the clinical picture and treatment of pseudohypoparathyroidisms (PHPT). In practice, clinicians more frequently deal with type 1 PHPT and the diagnosis of this type creates no significant problems. However, despite the low prevalence of the other types of PHPT - 1b, 1c, and 2, the diseases may run with noticeably clinical symptoms and present a significant problem in the context of diagnosis and treatment. This review may be of concern to both clinicians and geneticists who are interested in this problem. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
OPINION
No. 04-10-00890-CV
CITY OF LAREDO,
Appellant
v.
Gilbert BUENROSTRO,
Appellee
From the 49th Judicial District Court, Webb County, Texas
Trial Court No. 2009-CVQ-000813-D1
Honorable Jose A. Lopez, Judge Presiding
Opinion by: Sandee Bryan Marion, Justice
Sitting: Karen Angelini, Justice
Sandee Bryan Marion, Justice
Steven C. Hilbig, Justice
Delivered and Filed: October 26, 2011
REVERSED AND RENDERED
Appellee Gilbert Buenrostro was employed by The City of Laredo for fifteen years as a
police officer in the Laredo Police Department. The City terminated appellee’s employment, and
following an administrative hearing before the Firefighters’ and Police Officers’ Civil Service
Commission (the “Commission”), the Commission upheld the City’s decision. Appellee
appealed to the district court and later moved for a traditional summary judgment on two
grounds: (1) evidence admitted against him at the hearing before the Commission should have
04-10-00890-CV
been excluded as violative of his rights under the Fourth Amendment and (2) no substantial
evidence supports the Commission’s findings. The trial court rendered summary judgment in
favor of appellee, ordered that appellee be reinstated to the position or class of service from
which he was suspended, and ordered the City to pay appellee all wages and benefits lost as a
result of his suspension. The City now appeals. For the reasons stated below, we reverse the
trial court’s judgment and render judgment affirming the Commission’s order.
BACKGROUND
The following background is taken from the transcript of the hearing before the
Commission. During his employment by the City as a patrol officer, appellee was married to
Raquel Buenrostro. Raquel had worked for the Laredo Police Department as a dispatcher until
2000. Early in the evening of November 15, 2008, Raquel took her husband’s workplace keys
without his knowledge or consent, entered the police substation, and found a cell phone used by
her husband. Sometime between 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. on that same evening, appellee and
Raquel argued after she confronted him about his possession of the cell phone, which had been
given to him by his mistress Fannie Garcia. The telephone was registered in Garcia’s name. The
phone contained photos of a sexual nature of appellant and Garcia, semi-nude photos of Garcia,
and a video of Garcia and appellee engaged in sexual activities. Appellee later told Garcia his
wife had found the phone, and the next day, Garcia reported the phone as stolen.
After the argument of November 15, appellee left his house and parked in the lot of a
Target. Realizing he did not have a charger for his other cell phone, appellee decided to return to
his house to retrieve the charger and the phone Garcia gave him. The door to his house was
barricaded by a wooden 2x4 plank because the lock was broken. According to appellee, he did
not want to talk to Raquel, ask her any favors, or frighten or intimidate her. So, he decided to
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“force the door open.” As he was attempting to open the door, Raquel refused him entry and
called 911. Appellee kicked in two doors, but then realizing he had inflicted “too much”
damage, he left “because his charger was not worth all the trouble.” Raquel cancelled the call to
the police; however, a police sergeant came to the house and spoke with her. After the officer
left, Raquel asked the officer to return so she could give him appellee’s uniform, service
equipment, and clothing because she did not want her husband back in the house.
The next morning, appellee returned to his house and knocked on the door. Raquel asked
appellee to leave, he refused, and she called 911. Officer Michael Botello arrived at the house at
about 7:55 a.m. and saw appellee sitting on a box reading the newspaper. Botello testified
appellee had bloodshot eyes, and appellee said he had been drinking all night long. Botello
asked appellee to speak with his partner, Officer Sanchez, while Botello spoke with Raquel.
Botello said Raquel was crying, shaking, and scared. She told him appellee was kicking the door
and trying to get inside the house. Botello said he heard children crying in the background.
After about twenty minutes, the police officers decided it was in everyone’s best interest
if appellee left the premises to sober up. The officers allowed appellee to rest inside his truck.
After the officers left, appellee pulled his truck into the driveway, got out of the truck, and closed
and locked both the drive-in and walk-in gates. He then proceeded to drive his truck forward and
backwards, crashing into the fence. Raquel again called 911. This time, when the police arrived,
they arrested appellee for assault, but later changed the charge to making terroristic threats.
On November 18, 2008, Raquel called Deputy City Manager Cynthia Collazo1 stating
she had a complaint against a police officer and that she had something to show Collazo.
Because Raquel said she was caring for her infant and was “concerned for herself,” Collazo
1
Collazo oversees the Laredo Police Department, as well as other City departments.
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04-10-00890-CV
agreed to meet Raquel at Raquel’s house. The next day, Collazo and Assistant Police Chief
Gilberto Navarro met with Raquel, who appeared nervous and upset. Raquel said she had a cell
phone with pictures and a hand-written transcript of text messages from the phone. Raquel
showed Collazo some photos on the cell phone that depicted a man wearing a Laredo Police
Department uniform and a woman engaging in oral sex and other photos of a woman who was
partially clothed. Raquel told her that the incidents depicted in the photos occurred during the
man’s working hours. At this time, Collazo was not aware the phone had been reported as
stolen.
Navarro contacted Laredo Police Department Internal Affairs investigator Gilbert
Magana, who came to Raquel’s house. Raquel expressed her concern that the images on the
phone would be erased or tampered with. Navarro handed the phone to Magana and instructed
him to take the phone to the police station and download the pictures. At the police station,
Magana examined the photos and downloaded them. When he realized the date and time stamp
on the photos were not being copied, he photographed the images on the phone that included
imprinted dates and times, which he believed reflected the moment the images were created or
taken. The phone also contained a video file of appellee wearing his police uniform and
engaging in oral sex with Garcia. During his review of the video, Magana heard background
noise that included a dispatcher’s voice transmitting over appellee’s mobile radio. After
examining appellee’s work attendance records, Magana confirmed the video and several of the
photos of appellee and Garcia were taken during appellee’s on-duty hours. Some of the photos
were taken inside the police station, including the restroom, lounge area, and by a staircase.
During a pre-termination interview with the Chief of Police, appellee reviewed the photos, but
said he could not recall whether he was on-duty or off-duty when they were taken.
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04-10-00890-CV
Appellee was charged with several violations of the Rules and Regulations of the
Firefighters’ and Police Officers’ Civil Service Commission of the City of Laredo. After the
police department terminated appellee’s employment, he appealed the decision to the
Commission.2 Chief of Police Maldonado testified at the hearing before the Commission that
the photos alone may not have warranted termination; however, the terroristic threats charge
alone would have. The Chief stated that the totality of the circumstances led him to decide
appellee’s employment should be terminated. At the hearing before the Commission, appellee
testified he occasionally used the cell phone during work hours and while on patrol but during
his twenty-minute break time. He said he took his breaks in the police department building or at
Garcia’s house. He said the photos and video were transferred from one phone to another during
his breaks. After hearing all the evidence, the Commission determined that just cause existed for
appellee’s termination and ordered that appellee “be suspended without pay as a classified
employee of the [Laredo Police Department], for an indefinite period, effective the date of the
order to that effect by Police Chief Carlos R. Maldonado.”
In his motion for summary judgment before the district court, appellee argued the
standard set forth in O’Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709 (1987), regarding the “reasonableness”
of an employer’s search of an employee’s property was not satisfied. Appellant contends the
City’s search of his cell phone was unreasonable under O’Connor and, therefore, illegal. Absent
consideration of the photos and video downloaded from the phone, 3 appellant concludes the
City’s decision to terminate his employment was not supported by substantial evidence. The
City asserts appellee did not preserve this particular Fourth Amendment argument because he
2
Less than two hours after appellee received notice of his termination, the District Attorney decided not to prosecute
the terroristic threat offense because Raquel withdrew her charge against appellee.
3
Although Collazo said she was shown only six or eight photos while at Raquel’s house, the letter of termination
listed fifteen images, with date and time stamps, and one “movie,” also with a date and time stamp.
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04-10-00890-CV
failed to raise it at the hearing before the Commission. The trial court granted appellee’s motion
for summary judgment. On appeal, we do not consider whether appellant’s Fourth Amendment
argument was preserved because, as discussed further below, even without the photos and video
there was substantial evidence to support the Commission’s decision.
SUBSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
A decision by the Commission is appealable to a district court for trial de novo. TEX.
LOC. GOV’T CODE ANN. § 143.015(b) (West 2008). Trial de novo means review is limited to
whether the Commission’s decision is free of the taint of illegality and supported by substantial
evidence. See Firemen’s & Policemen’s Civil Serv. Comm’n v. Brinkmeyer, 662 S.W.2d 953,
955-56 (Tex. 1984). The reviewing court must inquire whether the evidence introduced before it
shows facts in existence at the time of the administrative decision that reasonably support the
decision. Id. at 956. Substantial evidence review is a limited standard of review, requiring “only
more than a mere scintilla,” to support the Commission’s determination. R.R. Comm’n of Tex. v.
Torch Operating Co., 912 S.W.2d 790, 792–93 (Tex. 1995).
Although the trial court must hear and consider evidence to determine whether reasonable
support for the administrative order exists, the Commission itself is the primary fact-finding
body, and the question to be determined by the trial court is strictly one of law. Id. Accordingly,
the reviewing court may not substitute its judgment for that of the agency on controverted issues
of fact. Id. When substantial evidence supports either affirmative or negative findings the
administrative order must stand, notwithstanding the Commission “may have struck a balance
with which the court might differ.” Id. The trial court may not set aside an administrative order
merely because testimony was conflicting or disputed or because it did not compel the result
reached by the Commission. Id. “Resolution of factual conflicts and ambiguities is the province
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04-10-00890-CV
of the administrative body and it is the aim of the substantial evidence rule to protect that
function.” Id. The reviewing court is concerned only with the reasonableness of the
administrative order, not its correctness. Id. If there is substantial evidence that supports the
order, the court is bound to follow the discretion of the administrative body. Id. Appellee had
the burden of demonstrating that the Commission’s order was not supported by substantial
evidence. Id.
As its basis for terminating appellee’s employment, the City alleged the following:
(1) Violations of the Rules and Regulations of the Firefighters’ and Police
Officers’ Civil Service Commission: conduct prejudicial to good order and
violation of an applicable fire or police department rule or special order;
(2) Violations of Professional Conduct that require (a) obedience to any law;
agency policy, rule, or procedure; and all lawful orders; and (b) all officers to not
engage in conduct or activities on-duty or off-duty that reflect discredit on the
officers, tend to bring the agency into disrepute, or impair its efficient and
effective operation;
(3) Violations of the Laredo Police Department Rules or Special Orders that (a)
require reports and written communications to reflect the truth; (b) require the on-
duty and off-duty conduct and behavior of members to be governed by ordinary
rules of good conduct and behavior; (c) prohibit public intoxication either on-duty
or off-duty and prohibit driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of
alcohol; (d) require members, while on sick leave, to remain at their place of
residence unless it is necessary to go to the doctor, a pharmacy, or the hospital;
and (e) require members to be attentive to their duties; not leave their beats or
assigned areas except in the line of duty, upon a supervisor’s authorization, or at
the end of a scheduled tour of duty; and not devote any of their on-duty time to
any activity other than that which relates to their duty assignment.
(4) Violation of the Texas Criminal Law Manual: terroristic threat.
The Chief of Police stated his decision to terminate appellee’s employment was based on the
unanimous recommendation to terminate made by the Laredo Police Department Disciplinary
Review Board, whose report found terroristic threats, conduct unbecoming an officer, violations
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04-10-00890-CV
of restrictions on activities while on sick leave, lack of truthfulness, and lack of attentiveness to
duties.
The evidence before the Commission in support of this decision established the
following. Appellee was granted sick leave for the purpose of caring for a sick child, but
although the child was at home with a minor cold, appellee did not stay home to care for her
because he “left the residence only to return later irate and kicking at the two doors to the
residence.” When he was given the chance later to change his leave from “sick leave” to “annual
leave,” he did not do so.4 A police officer responding to Raquel’s 911 call detected alcohol on
appellee’s breath, noticed his blood shot eyes, and noticed his slurred and “broken” speech.
Appellee disobeyed the officer’s orders to stay inside his truck and off the property to sleep off
the effects of the alcohol by operating his vehicle from the street into the driveway. Once in the
driveway, appellee’s “behavior was erratic as [he] kept driving forwards and backwards in the
driveway” and crashed into the fence as he backed his truck up against the house. Appellee was
arrested for terroristic threats. Appellee said he was not threatening his wife with his truck; he
was only trying to position the truck under a tree so he could sleep in the shade. He admitted he
had one or two beers, but denied he was intoxicated.
Although some of the evidence was conflicting, resolution of factual conflicts and
ambiguities was within the province of the Commission, not the trial court. We conclude that
even absent consideration of the cell phone photos and video, the record contains “more than a
scintilla” of evidence to support findings that appellee violated various departmental
4
Appellee explained he did not change the records because he thought his sergeant would not give him “annual
leave.”
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04-10-00890-CV
requirements, rules, and regulations. Therefore, the trial court erred in rendering summary
judgment in favor of appellee. 5
CONCLUSION
For the reasons stated above, we reverse the trial court’s order and render judgment
affirming the Commission’s order.
Sandee Bryan Marion, Justice
5
The City’s remaining issues on appeal do not need to be addressed because they are not dispositive. See TEX. R.
APP. P. 47.1.
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| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | FreeLaw |
New Zealand
Being my third time in NZ, I was keen to see parts of it I had not seen before. I did Milford Sound and the Routeburn tracks about nine years ago, straight out of high school (it makes me cringe to say that – almost time for a school reunion). We joined a tour group with Hiking New Zealand. One of our first walks was a short part of the Routeburn track, the hike up to Key Summit, and I was glad to see it still looked exactly the same as in 2001. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Writer’s Note: Part three of The Cup was published originally in Jump Point 1.10. Before reading the final chapter, check out Part One and Part Two.
Recovering from her disappointing start in the Cup series, Darring has worked her way back to the front of the pack. She is on her way to victory in the Sorrow Sea — the Boneyard — when her ship explosively overheats . . .
Darring awoke in a quiet, sanitized room of white walls and beeping monitors. She lay in a medbay tub containing a pale, viscous gel. There were monitoring nodes on her neck and chest. She lifted her arm out of the fluid and tried sitting up. A strong hand kept her from doing so.
“Not yet,” the voice said. “Not until the doctor says it’s okay.”
She laid her head back against the tub wall and blinked repeatedly until the figure above her came into focus. “Zogat,” she said, her voice cracking, her throat dry and pasty. “Where — where —”
“Carrier infirmary,” he said, “in orbit above Ellis VIII.”
She tried sitting up again and felt a deep pain in her shoulder as she moved her arms. She reached across her chest and felt a layer of burnt skin, soft and supple due to the fluid, but still present. Terrifying memories flooded back. “My ship?”
Guul nodded. “Unsalvageable. It’s now a part of the Sorrow Sea.”
Darring massaged her sore shoulder. “What happened?”
“They do not know for certain. But your ship went through a rapid temperature increase that ignited the power plant. It’s a wonder it didn’t explode while you were still strapped in.”
“Do they know what caused it?”
“They couldn’t recover enough of the fuselage and its monitoring equipment to know the exact cause. But . . .” He paused, letting the word linger there in the space between them. “Remisk has confessed.”
“What?”
“He’s confessed to it. Went mad, in fact, attacked a reporter, nearly ripped off her face. He says he put some kind of capsule into your tank; or rather, hired someone on your crew to do it, which, by the way, has been scrubbed. He even confessed to sending those thugs against us.”
She nodded, feeling a moment of relief. “Then Mo‘tak is finished as well.”
Guul cast his eyes down. He shook his head. “No, Hypatia. Mo‘tak has confessed nothing, nor has Remisk implicated anyone else. He’s gone catatonic, can’t speak, can’t move. He’s on something, but it can’t be detected. They fear he’ll die before he’s interrogated. He’s out, but Mo‘tak is still in and has condemned Remisk publicly in the most powerful words. The race has been suspended for a few days so that all remaining crews can conduct a mandatory check of their ships. Then it will resume.” He shook his head. “There are three things certain in the galaxy, as you Humans might say: Death, taxes and the MCR. The race will go on.”
Darring closed her eyes and laid her head back once again. She fought tears. “Yes, but it’s over for me.”
A pause, then, “Not yet.”
She tried asking how, but on cue, the room door opened and in walked Mo‘tak, straight and proud, wearing a fresh jumpsuit of gold and purple. Three reporters followed in his wake, one with a camera. He pulled his mouth back and said in a sincere voice, “Ah, I am so glad to see you awake. You had us all worried.”
I bet. She wanted to say those very words, but the strong pressure that Guul placed on her arm with his hand recommended otherwise. She forced her anger down and tried to smile. “It seems as if the Fates are on my side.”
Mo‘tak nodded. “Indeed. And it would also seem that Lady Luck has granted you favor as well. With my gift, you can now return to the race.”
“What gift?”
Mo‘tak seemed surprised, “Your friend hasn’t told you?”
“I was just about to,” Guul said.
“Well, then let me say it proudly for all to hear.” Mo‘tak adjusted his position among the reporters, giving them time to ready.
The Xi’an cleared his throat. “I and the Xu.oa family corporation want to again strenuously condemn Ykonde Remisk’s actions. His cowardly assaults are inconsistent with what I and the MCR are all about. The integrity of the race must be maintained. Thus, as a gesture of good will and healthy competition, I have donated my personal M50 so that Hypatia Darring can return to the race.”
It took a moment for the announcement to register in her mind. To help drive the point home, a vid screen activated to reveal a clean, gold-and-purple trimmed M50. It was brilliant, beautiful. Darring loved it, but worried about Mo‘tak’s motivation.
“No way,” she barked, pulling herself up in the tub. “I’m not putting one toe into that —”
Guul applied pressure to her arm once again. “What Ms. Darring is saying is that she would be honored to accept your gift and looks forward to further competition in the days ahead.”
“Hey,” she said, pulling her arm away. “Don’t answer for me. I’m not a child, dammit!”
“Well, let’s leave Ms. Darring and Mr. Guul alone,” Mo‘tak said. “Clearly, they have much to discuss.” He leaned over Darring’s tub and stared into her eyes, his mouth inches from her face. “I’m so glad to see you well. Please do accept my offer. It would be a shame to lose one with so much talent.”
They scurried out, but left the image of the M50 on the vid screen. When the door closed, she rounded on Guul. “You don’t answer for me.”
Guul shook his head. “If you refuse this offer from Mo‘tak, he will have won thrice: by getting rid of Remisk, by getting rid of you, and by further damaging your reputation. Racing is as much about your public image as it is about skill. You already have a bad reputation. Don’t damage it further by being ungracious.”
“But it’s his ship!” she said, pointing to the vid screen. “He’s done something to it, I’m sure.”
Guul shook his head. “No, he’s not that stupid. There’s too much light on the competition now, too much that’s transpired. He can’t afford to offer this gift and then sabotage it. He’s done all he can do. It’s a matter of who’s the best now. There’s plenty of racing left, Hypatia. Go out there and prove to everyone, prove to Mo‘tak, that you will not be stopped, that you are the best.”
Despite the logic in his words, Darring wanted to refuse Mo‘tak’s gift. On the other hand, to beat Mo‘tak with his own ship would be so lovely. But it wasn’t just a matter of getting up and strapping into the cockpit. Every M50 had its own quirks, its own personality. There were always balancing issues, thrust issues, drift issues that needed to be identified and learned. The cockpit displays would need to be configured to her own preferences, which would take time to sort out. And it could take weeks for her to get comfortable on the stick and throttle. She had maybe 48 hours to make it all work. Her burns were healing in this goo around her, but her flesh was tight and still stung beneath her movements. Mo‘tak was setting her up to fail. He didn’t need to sabotage the ship, she realized. Her current condition was enough to slow her down.
And now Guul was taking advantage of their new friendship. He had no right to interrupt her and speak for her publicly. Guul may admire me, she thought as she pulled herself up and sat on the edge of the tub. Now, he needs to respect me.
“Okay, Zogat,” she said, looking around for a towel. “You win. I’ll accept his offer. I’ll show him I’m the best, but more importantly . . . I’ll show you.”
* * *
Hello again, and welcome to another GSN Spectrum broadcast of the Murray Cup Race. After the tragedy rising from the Sorrow Sea, Darring’s near death experience, and Remisk’s shocking confession, the competition has gotten back on track and has settled into a sweet groove. From the midway checkpoint and out all the way to Ellis XII, the top racers have pushed their craft to the limit. Hypatia Darring has come back with a vengeance, accepting Mo‘tak’s M50 and taking two of the last three stages through the asteroid belt and back to the final checkpoint at Ellis VIII. The competition around Ellis IX, in particular, proved raucous, as Darring slowed to allow Mo‘tak to gain the lead while dogging Guul’s Hornet, forcing him to flirt with the Eye’s crushing tidal forces. No love was lost between those two during the following press conference. But now the Tevarin veteran has surprised everyone once again by taking the final obstacle course in the outer asteroid belt, showing a refinement that proves he will go down in history as one of the finest pilots ever to race The Cup. Now, the competition enters its final leg with only 65 racers remaining, and the top three positions held by Mo‘tak, Darring and Guul. Can these three power-houses hold out, or will someone else fly past and beat them all?
The final leg awaits. Let’s kick it back to Mike Crenshaw who’s in the thick of it. What’s the mood on the carrier, Mike?
* * *
Raw.
That’s what Darring was. Just a raw nerve, always ready to spark if given a chance. Guul had hoped to share with her a little of his experience, teach her some wisdom, in a sport just as rough on the spirit as it was on the body and mind. And perhaps she had learned a little.
She was racing better, maneuvering better, taking to heart his philosophy . . . speed is life. But looking across the carrier bay floor at her as she ran a cloth across the belly of her borrowed M50, Zogat Guul could not tell if Darring’s improvement was motivated by skill or anger. Did it really matter? In the end, if she blew across the finish line in first place, it would all boil down to victory. And that was the ultimate goal of everyone in the race. Go home a winner . . . or just go home.
“Hypatia Darring has it out for you, doesn’t she?”
Crenshaw’s face was all perky as if he had just said something infinitely clever and devious.
Guul did not take the bait. “She is a tough competitor. Like a Tevarin, she shows her enemy no mercy.”
“But she held back around The Eye just to force you to lose. That’s the move of someone bearing a grudge. What did you do?”
What indeed. Perhaps he had come on too strong. Was it when he interrupted her and spoke for her publicly at the hospital? She would not say when he asked; instead, she would change the subject or walk away. But direct action, direct speech was his way. Surely she realized he was right. She had to compete. She had to accept Mo‘tak’s offer and finish the race. Not just for herself, but for the honor of her family. Surely she did not blame him for pointing that out.
“Scurry away, bug.”
Mo‘tak appeared, alone this time, and flicked his fingers at Crenshaw as if he were swatting a fly. “The Tevarin warrior will not condescend to answer such a silly question. Shoo! Go bother someone else.”
Crenshaw pulled a rueful face but retreated nonetheless.
When he was gone, Mo‘tak closed on Guul and offered his hand. “Good luck,” he said.
“You want to break my hand like you tried to break Hypatia’s?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, my friend. I merely want to wish you a safe final course. This is your last, isn’t it?”
Guul nodded. “Perhaps.”
“And you are braced to win it all and be remembered as the greatest racer in the history of the sport. For that, I wish you good luck.”
Guul took the handshake reluctantly. Mo‘tak’s fingers were firm but not vise-like. He moved until he was beside the Tevarin. Mo‘tak placed his free hand on Guul’s back.
“Look at it all one last time, Zogat. All of it. The bay, the racers, the media, the hustle and bustle of the crews. You will miss it. But I think you will miss that young lady right there most of all.”
Before Guul had a chance to speak, Mo‘tak pushed his hand hard against the Tevarin’s neck.
Guul felt a slight pinch and jerked away. A warm flush spread across his skin. “What did you do?”
Mo‘tak maintained his composure and kept looking forward as if they were having a pleasant conversation. “To win against racers as skilled as yourself and Darring will be quite the honor,” he said, as the media crowded around once more. “Good luck out there, old friend.”
Guul rubbed his neck. The Xi’an had done something to him, but Mo’tak had again done his scheming in such a way that left very little evidence. Perhaps if Guul called the MCR authorities over now, they could find something, but more likely his accusations would prove to be unfounded. He looked out at everyone suiting up, strapping in, readying for the final course. He could choose not to race. If Mo’tak had drugged him as he suspected, then it would be quite dangerous to climb into his cockpit. But he quickly shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t get out now, not when the end was so close. It wasn’t in him. He had to take his own advice. He had to finish the race.
He looked across the bay floor, toward Darring. She was putting on her helmet, getting ready to climb into her cockpit. He tried catching her attention with a wave. She did not see him, or she was ignoring him. Whatever the reason, he was grateful that he had had an opportunity in the twilight of his career to race against such a warrior, such a competitor as she.
Speed is life, he thought as he put on his helmet with shaking hands. But as always, speed also might mean death.
* * *
Guul was just ahead of her, Mo‘tak at her six. She was perfectly placed to take advantage of the Tevarin’s erratic behavior. He had been speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, as if unsure what to do. Or perhaps he was playing with her, working to sap her resolve, force her to slow down and deal with his uncharacteristic movements, thus giving the lead away to Mo‘tak. But that was silly. Guul did not want the ruthless Xi’an to win any more than she did. So, what was his game?
They raced in high orbit above Ellis VIII. The final stretch was a long, loping crazy-eight of rings that flashed brilliant reds and greens and whites, keeping a tempo with the natural flow of the racers as they shot past one another near the intersect. It was a dangerous place, for racers coming out of those rings could slam into one another and ricochet into space. Even if your ship survived, the time it would take to recover from such a collision would be race-ending.
Two orbital grandstands just outside the course held spectators and prominent dignitaries that had come out to see and share in the glory of the winner. The MCR allowed the energy and excitement of the crowds to be broadcast into the cockpits of each racer as GSN announcers gave the minute-by-minute account of the final laps. Some racers thrived on the energy of the crowds. Some reveled in the noise. Darring muted it all, preferring instead to concentrate on the racers around her.
She maneuvered her M50 to the right of Guul, taking advantage of the loop. He swung his Hornet out a touch too far, and she slipped right in beside him. His wing grazed the invisible walls of the ring course, letting the tip of it cut through the barrier like a shark’s fin cresting a wave. He’d lose time for that, but he didn’t seem to care, keeping his craft pressed against the loop to ride it all the way around. He’s getting old, she thought, letting a smile slip across her lips. Can’t handle the rigors of such a sharp turn anymore. Then she thought better of gloating. She wanted to beat him, to make him see her as a racer, an equal, not as a puppy dog to counsel. But she didn’t want him to leave the race. There was still plenty of track left, plenty of twists and turns, and Mo‘tak was right on them.
The Xi’an thrust his 350r down to run right below her belly, preventing an interloper behind him in a souped-up Avenger from making a move. Darring banked to the right and felt the tug of strong G’s despite being held tightly in the chair. Her skin had healed well and there was a little pain in her shoulders, but such a move reminded her of the frailty of flesh and her own mortality. Bank too strongly, and you could pass out.
“You’re not winning this one, Mo‘tak,” she said into her comm. Only her crew chief could hear it, but he shared her sentiment. He gave her directions which she accepted and moved her craft to the left as they cleared the loop and headed for the final intersect.
Guul came up to her side again, but he was still moving oddly, letting his wings wobble on the rebalance. She shook her head and focused on Mo‘tak, who had gunned his engine, showing significant burn out of his exhaust nozzles. He wouldn’t dare cross her cockpit now, not with the MCR looking on so intently. In fact, Mo‘tak had acted reasonably well since his vanity display at the hospital. He’d let his racing skills speak for themselves. So perhaps he wasn’t such a rotten son-of-a bitch after all. But she wouldn’t be keeping his gift after the race.
Red blips danced on her radar, showing hazards as she crossed the intersect.
She drifted up in the lane, taking the traditional approach for a right-side cross. Mo‘tak followed, but Guul struggled to drift up, taking too long, letting his craft fall behind once more. She fought the urge to link into his comm. Mo‘tak tried to force her down. She gripped her stick and moved with him, not letting him gain advantage. The blips on the screen grew brighter. She keyed her focus, thrust her M50 forward and sailed into the intersect.
Lagging ships flew past her at the right angle, trying desperately to keep up with the pack. One nearly clipped her wing. She banked left just in time. She tried finding Guul and Mo‘tak in the flurry of crimson blips on her screen. It was impossible. She banked left, right, left again, swirling through screaming racers.
Darring flew out of the intersect, righted her ship once more, and prepared for the final run. She checked her radar. The madness there settled to show those that had gotten through and were in pursuit. Damn! Mo‘tak settled again beside her, and Guul was not far behind, though struggling still. Why can’t I shake these bastards?
Finally, Guul made the move she was expecting. The Tevarin thrust his Hornet forward, clipping between her and Mo‘tak at such velocity that he was nothing but a blur. Her heart raced alongside him. She gunned her engine, falling just behind him, watching as the blips on her radar were replaced by the long green pulsing line of the final straightaway. She could hardly contain her excitement. She, Hypatia Darring, in second place on the final lap around Ellis VIII. The perfect position to make a final move and win it all. And there was Zogat Guul, the master, egging her on, forcing her to put away her silly feud and chase him, chase him for glory, for fame, for personal fulfillment. A laugh of pure joy escape her lips.
Speed is life.
They hit the final stretch together. One full lap around rocky Ellis VIII. Full bore speed. There was nothing like it in the galaxy. She could not contain her excitement. She screamed into her comm. Mo‘tak tried to muscle his way into her space. She refused him. He tried again. She pushed her M50 even faster, keeping pace with Guul, letting the green lights of the radar draw her forward.
Guul slowed, fell alongside her, slowed again, letting her take the lead. Bullshit, she thought, frustration growing as she punched a panel and said to him, “What the hell are you doing?”
She was greeted with coughing, spitting and moans. Something was terribly wrong. “I’m glad to speak to you once more, Hypatia.”
“Do you remember what you told me? What you made me promise? If I were in a position to win, I’d win. And now here you are, about to win, and you’re falling back. Explain.”
Guul coughed. It sounded thick, bloody. “It isn’t important that I win, Hypatia. I’ve won enough in my life. It’s time for others to shine. It’s time for you to shine. Now, go beat him. And remember what I told you.”
He cut their link. Darring shouted, but he was gone. Guul fell back, and back, until she could not see him anymore.
Mo‘tak pounced and took the lead. Shit! She gunned it, moved down in the lane, set her craft just below Mo‘tak’s. The sleek, long body of his 350r shadowing her smaller M50. There was no doubt his craft had the endurance; in a rough and tumble, he’d prevail. She had to get out from his shadow, his influence. The only way to do that . . .
She tried pushing her plant, thumbed the throttle hard, but it did not register. She tried again. Her dashboard controls blinked, once, twice, then resettled with different settings, measurements, displays. What the —
“How’s my ship?”
Darring’s heart sank. “Mo‘tak!”
“It is indeed,” he said, his voice fuzzy over the comm, “and now that I have your undivided attention, I will reclaim what is mine.”
Nothing she did registered. She tapped panels, flicked switches, tried raising an MCR official over the comm. Everything was null, but her ship responded quickly to Mo‘tak’s remote commands. He banked to the left; she did the same. He banked right, she followed. The Xi’an finally settled his 350r beside her, waved smugly at her through his cockpit window, commanded her ship to move slightly ahead, then said, “I’ll let you take the lead for a little while, my dear, then I’ll dramatically pull forward at the last minute, flying on to victory, while you spiral out of control, hitting the royal grandstand and killing dozens. You’ll be remembered as the Butcher of Ellis.”
She pushed and prodded at the stick, banged at the dashboard. She even struck the eject controls. Nothing. “I’ll kill you first, you sorry son of a bitch.”
“And how will you do that, my dear? You have no control over anything . . . and your Tevarin is gone.”
As if on cue, a bright streak soared past them both, a flush of red and gold nozzle fire. It was burning, its power plant pushed beyond integrity. Darring squinted to see who it was. She recognized the blue Tevarin lettering on the hull.
Guul.
His Hornet barreled ahead, all flame and fury. Darring could hear Mo‘tak curse beneath his breath. She tried again to take control of her stick. Nothing. She tried calling out to Guul, but all she could hear was Mo‘tak’s agitated mumblings as he commanded her ship to move up and ahead of him. Darring watched intently as Guul flipped his burning craft around, shifted it to align perfectly with her own, and headed straight for her.
Her comm crackled with another voice. “Move!” it said, ragged, faint. “Dive! Dive!”
“I can’t!” she screamed back, but there was no response. Only Mo‘tak’s maddening cackle could be heard. “Say to him whatever you wish. He cannot hear you.”
Guul banked left. Darring’s ship moved to shadow the Hornet. He banked right; she banked in kind. Guul’s weakening voice continued pleading for her to get out of the way. Tears streamed down her face; her voice broke from exertion. Mo‘tak laughed and laughed.
Her ship spun like a cork-screw on its long axis. She closed her eyes, waited for impact, whispering softly to Guul, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”
Then she remembered.
Beneath the dashboard of every M50 lay a panel, and inside it, a power cut-off valve independent of the main electrical and command systems. Could Mo‘tak have forgotten it? He might have, so foolishly overconfident in his scheming and backstabbing, and spending too much time in his 350r to remember all the systems of his secondary ship. But it might be: A mistake . . . finally.
Through the dizzying haze of her spinning, she reached beneath the dash, found the panel with shaking fingers, ripped it open, and pulled the valve.
“You lose, Mo‘tak!”
The power plant died, and with that sudden lack of propulsion her ship spun to port. Zogat Guul slipped right past her, hitting Mo‘tak’s ship square in the front, exploding on impact, and sending their shattered, burning hulls into the void.
The cockpit came alive, her stick again responsive. She pulled her ship out of spin, reignited the plant, and blew across the finish line ahead of all others.
Her pit crew went wild, matching her own screaming, but for different reasons. They were joyous, elated, happy that their racer — the youngest Human to ever win the MCR — had just done so, and in a blaze of glory. They were happy, and they deserved to be.
She was not. Oh, she was happy to have won, to have taken the Cup, to have proven to her father that her choice in career was not foolish. She laid her head back into her chair and cried. Cried joyous tears for Guul. She understood fully now his words, echoing loudly in her mind. Speed is life, and there was no life without speed. She understood that now.
The Cup was just one race in a thousand that lay ahead of her, and there would be no true happiness until she had raced them all and chased down that beast that lay in front of her, that lay in front of all racers. In his fiery death, Zogat Guul had finally caught the beast. Now, it was her turn to chase it, and she would do so for him, for Guul . . . forever.
Beyond the finish line, beyond the grandstands, beyond the accolades and cheering fans, Hypatia Darring gunned her power plant and kept racing. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
I asked him if he wanted a midnight snack He told me to get fritos and the fake caramel sauce that you dip apples in
354 shares | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Adult Disciplinary Procedures, 2010
Adult Disciplinary Procedures, 2010
Level One Offences
• Abuse of cricket equipment or clothing, ground equipment or fixtures/ fittings
• Showing dissent of an umpire’s decision by action or verbal abuse
• Using language that is obscene or insulting or making obscene gestures
• Public criticism of, or an inappropriate comment on a match related incident or match official
• Where facts of an alleged incident are not adequately covered by any of the above, conduct that is contrary to the spirit of the game, which brings the game into disrepute or brings the Hills CC into disrepute
Level Two Offences
• Repeat of any Level One offence within 12 months or committing 2 or more Level One Offences in the same match
• Showing serious dissent at an umpire’s decision by action or verbal abuse
• Inappropriate and deliberate physical contact between players in the course of a game
• Charging towards an umpire in an aggressive manner
• Deliberate or malicious obstruction on the field of play
• Throwing the ball at or near a player, umpire or official in an inappropriate or dangerous manner
• Infringement of the Spirit of Cricket by a Captain
• Where facts of an alleged incident are not adequately covered by any of the above, conduct that is contrary to the spirit of the game, which brings the game into disrepute or brings the Hills CC into disrepute
Level Three Offences
• Repeat of any Level Two offence within 12 months or committing 2 or more Level Two Offences in the same match
• Intimidation of an umpire by gesture or language
• Using language that offends, insults or disparages another person on the basis of race, colour, descent or national origin
• Threat of assault on another player, umpire, official or spectator
• Violent conduct in the clubhouse or grounds
Level Four Offences
• Repeat of any Level Three offence within 12 months or committing 2 or more Level Three Offences in the same match
• Threat of an assault on an umpire
• Physical assault on another player, umpire, official or spectator
• Violent conduct in the clubhouse or grounds
Sanctions
Level One
A reprimand and /or written warning
Level Two
One or Two suspension points (these can be matches or time-related)
Level Three
Four to six suspension points (matches or time-related)
Level Four
From eight suspension points to a time-related penalty (matches or ban of a minimum of 1 month’s duration)
Procedures
• When offence has been reported to the Executive of the Hills CC, the Chairman will establish a disciplinary sub-committee.
• This sub-committee will consist of 3 members.
• The accused person will have the right to be accompanied to the disciplinary hearing
• The accused person will have the right of appeal
• Members of the original sub-committee cannot sit on the appeals committee
Adopted By The Executive Committee 26th April 2010
Permanent link to this article: http://thehillscricketclub.ie/club-policies/adult-disciplinary-procedures-2010/ | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
FILE - In this May 27, 2017 file photo, a man takes pictures of blood stains of victims after masked gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery in Maghagha, about 220 kilometers (140 miles) south of Cairo, Egypt. Its strongholds in Iraq and Syria slipping from its grasp, the Islamic State group threatened to make this year’s Ramadan a bloody one at home and abroad. With attacks in Egypt, Britain and Iran among others and a land-grab in the Philippines, the group is trying to divert attention from its losses and win over supporters around the world in the twisted competition for jihadi recruits. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil, File)
FILE - In this May 27, 2017 file photo, a man takes pictures of blood stains of victims after masked gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery in Maghagha, about 220 kilometers (140 miles) south of Cairo, Egypt. Its strongholds in Iraq and Syria slipping from its grasp, the Islamic State group threatened to make this year’s Ramadan a bloody one at home and abroad. With attacks in Egypt, Britain and Iran among others and a land-grab in the Philippines, the group is trying to divert attention from its losses and win over supporters around the world in the twisted competition for jihadi recruits. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil, File)
Its strongholds in Iraq and Syria slipping from its grasp, the Islamic State group threatened to make this year’s Ramadan a bloody one at home and abroad. With attacks in Egypt, Britain and Iran among others and a land-grab in the Philippines, the group is trying to divert attention from its losses and win over supporters around the world in the twisted competition for jihadi recruits during the Muslim holy month.
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The militants insisted in their English language magazine this week that losing territory has only made it work that much harder to kill. The attacks since Ramadan’s beginning on May 26 show the sweep of the group’s ambition — from attacking the West, to expanding in the Philippines, to targeting Shiite powerhouse Iran — something al-Qaida itself never risked.
“They can say here is something that al-Qaida has refrained to do,” said Assaf Moghadam, an author and analyst of jihadi groups. “From their perspective it’s been a great Ramadan so far.”
But a powerful counter-message is emerging in recent days. With the month of fasting also a time of high television ratings in the Arab world, the telecommunications company Zain has launched a commercial that begins with footage of a man fabricating a suicide bomb. By the end, faced with bloodied victims and survivors of extremist attacks, the man stumbles and fails in his mission. “Let’s bomb delusion with the truth,” a man sings. The ad has been viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube. “We will counter their attacks of hatred with songs of love,” it ends.
IRAN
The attack on Iran marked a new stage for the Islamic State group, which had threatened the Shiite-majority state repeatedly without actually striking it.
Five Islamic State group extremists battle-tested in strongholds Mosul and Raqqa simultaneously targeted the country’s parliament and shrine of late founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing 17 people. More than any of the other Ramadan attacks, the bloodshed in Iran shows the group’s violent attempts to persuade potential recruits it has the staying power to endure beyond the loss of its two major strongholds.
IS and al-Qaida, both radical Sunni groups, are competing for recruits in the global jihadi movement. Al-Qaida, however, has never attacked Iran. Founder Osama bin Laden had put the Persian state off-limits, citing and the country’s role as a conduit for arms and money.
LONDON BRIDGE
Three men armed with knives plowed a rented van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then slashed their way through the evening crowd at Borough Market on June 3, killing eight people.
The man believed to be the group’s ringleader, Khuram Butt, had appeared in a documentary last year called “The Jihadis Next Door” and his neighbors said he was recruiting young people to join Islamic State. It was the third attack in Britain in three months claimed by the extremists.
PHILIPPINES SIEGE
Islamic militants in the Philippines aligned with the Islamic State group two weeks ago assaulted the southern lakeside city of Marawi, parts of which they occupy to this day, in a plot that they sketched in chilling detail on the back of a paper calendar. Among those at the table for the secret meeting was the purported leader of the Islamic State group’s Southeast Asia branch, Isnilon Hapilon, who is on Washington’s list of most-wanted terrorists and has a $5 million bounty on his head.
EGYPTIAN CHRISTIANS
Masked Islamic State gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery south of Cairo on May 26, killing 29 people on the eve of Ramadan. The group has singled out Egyptian Christians with ferocity, carrying out four attacks since December and warning of more to come. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
It is no secret that men are basically genetically modified women - the female being the fall-back developmental pathway for any foetus. The evolution of the two sexes could indeed be regarded as a long-running GM experiment.
Its legacy has been to endow men and women with different, and often conflicting, sets of genetic interests, and to ignite a powerful evolutionary struggle, which has accentuated the differences between the two sexes. In several respects, the experiment that gave us men is not going too well just now. Though it is a weary lament to lay most acts of violence and aggression, from the strictly local to the truly global, squarely at the feet of men, the association is strong, consistent and undeniable. Women very rarely commit violent crimes, become tyrants or start wars.
The experiment has created two irreconciliable genetic combatants. On the female side is mitochondrial DNA, which can only be passed down the maternal line. On the male side is the Y-chromosome, which is always passed from father to son. But while mitochondrial DNA is a model of slimmed-down efficiency, the Y-chromosome is a shambles, battered by mutation and going downhill fast, before it eventually disappears altogether. On this chromosome resides the single genetic switch (SRY) which, when flicked to "on", prevents human embryos from developing into baby girls and turns them into boys instead. Also spread out on this dying chromosome are the handful of other genes that men need to make fully operational sperm.
But why is this ultimate symbol of male machismo in such a mess? Originally the Y-chromosome was a perfectly respectable chromosome with a collection of genes doing all sorts of useful things - much like the X-chromosome today. But its fate was sealed when it took on the mantle of creating males. This probably happened in the early ancestors of mammals, perhaps 100m years ago when a mutation on the ancestor of the Y-chromosome suddenly, and quite by chance, enabled it to switch on the embryonic pathway to male development. Once this happened, the chromosome was doomed. It slowly lost contact with other chromosomes, thus missing out on the interaction that normally allows the shuffling of genes and so unable to properly heal the wounds inflicted by mutations. One by one, its thousands of useful genes were lost until now only 27 remain - and they are under constant threat.
Of all our chromosomes, it is the only one that is permanently locked into the germ cells of men, where the frenzy of cell division and error-prone DNA copying required to keep up the daily output of 150m sperm creates the ideal conditions for mutation. And it shows. Seven per cent of men are infertile or sub-fertile and in roughly a quarter of cases the problem is traceable to new Y-chromosome mutations, not present in their fathers, which disable one or other of the few remaining genes. This is an astonishigly high figure, and there is no reason to think things will improve in the future - quite the reverse in fact. One by one, Y-chromosomes will disappear, eliminated by the relentless onslaught of irreparable mutation, until only one is left. When that chromosome finally succumbs, men will become extinct.
But when? I estimate that, at the current rate, male fertility caused by Y-chromosome decay will decline to 1% of its present level within 5,000 generations - roughly 125,000 years. Not exactly the day after tomorrow - but equally, not an unimaginably long time ahead. Unless something changes in the way we breed, women will vanish too and Homo sapiens will disappear in the next 1-200,000 years. But is extinction inevitable?
Plenty of species a lot older than our own are still going, so how is it that they are not vulnerable to extinction by the same process of Y-chromosome decay? They will all eventually face the same challenge and I suspect that many species have already gone under for this very reason. Some, however, have found a way round their death sentence.
One strategy is to recruit genes on other chromosomes to take over the job of male development. It is a race against time. Can a species get all the genes it needs off the Y-chromosome, or recreate them elsewhere, before the chromosome finally vanishes? Always the last gene to go will be SRY, the male master switch itself. We know it is capable of smuggling itself onto another chromosome - the evidence lies in the rare cases of males who have no Y-chromosome.
Lots of species may have tried variations on this theme to avoid extinction, but it seemed that none succeeded until, in 1995, researchers found a mammal that had managed to escape this fate. When they looked at the chromosomes of a small burrowing rodent called the mole vole, Ellobius lutescens, which lives in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, they discovered that the male voles didn't have a Y-chromosome. Neither, it transpired, did they have a master SRY gene either. This inconspicuous little rodent has managed to activate a gene relay one or two stages down the line from SRY. And only just in time. The mole vole Y-chromosome has now completely disappeared. The vole is now safe from Y-chromosome-driven extinction, the only mammal species known to have succeeded in getting itself out of danger.
But one thing distinguishes Homo sapiens - we are at least capable of being aware of our impending demise. So do we need men? They are still required for breeding, if nothing else. But for how much longer?
The wide application of Intra-Cellular Sperm Injection (ICSI), the fertilisation of eggs by injecting sperm, could delay the extinction but it would still not prevent the progressive deterioration of the Y-chromosome. Other remedies have yet to be proved effective, but if men are to be retained they are at least worth considering. For instance, could we deliberately engineer the solution so fortuitously arrived at by the mole vole? The human Y-chromosome could be left to decay, but men would be reprieved. We now know the 27 genes that are present and necessary on today's Y-chromosome to make a man in full working order. It would be easy to cut them out of the wreckage of the Y-chromosome and re-assemble them into a compact genetic package. From there, it would be relatively straightforward to insert the package into another chromosome, where it would probably work straight away.
The purpose of all this effort and ingenuity is to avoid the extinction of men, and with them our entire species. However, one radical solution to save the species is also the most genetically straightforward - to abandon men altogether. Though this sounds impossible, very little stands in its way from the genetic point of view. When sperm meets egg, it brings with it a set of nuclear chromosomes from the father, which, after fertilisation, mixes with a set of nuclear chromosomes from the mother. But there is nothing fundamental preventing the nuclear chromosomes coming not from a sperm but from another egg. We know from ICSI that sperm can be injected into eggs, and there is nothing to stop the nucleus from a second egg being injected instead.
But would it develop normally? At the moment the answer is no, but it is short-sighted to say that it is fundamentally impossible. Once the technical snags have been overcome - and I put the difficulties no higher than that - these embryos would grow into perfectly normal babies. The only difference from any other birth is that the sex is always predictable. The baby is always going to be a girl. The entire process has been accomplished without sperm, without Y-chromosomes and without men.
Importantly, the baby girls will not be clones. They are the same mixture of their parents' genes, shuffled just as thoroughly as any of today's children and they have two biological parents, not just one. Their only difference from any other child is that instead of a father and mother, these girls have two mothers. From a genetic point of view, they are completely normal, indistinguishable from any little girls around today and just as capable of having children with men (while they are still around).
Lesbian couples already enlist the help of a man to donate his set of chromosomes, packaged in a sperm, to fertilise the eggs of one of them. How much more attractive for these couples to have a baby to whom both, rather than just one, were parents. It is almost certain to happen and, unlike human cloning, I doubt there would be serious ethical objections. Men are now on notice. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
As daughter of a man in charge of the CIA, Gemma knew her father was overprotective. She just never thought he would assign a man she couldn't stand to be her bodyguard under the rouse of a fake marriage.
It's not easy to pretend you're in love for the sake of teenagers and housewives across the country but top footballer Lucas Goodspeed and shy, romantic Isobel Saunders soon discover that convincing themselves that they're not in love might be even harder. **Removed and now available on Amazon and Smashwords!**
Attracting, repelling, and colliding; their chemistry, to say the least, was explosive. Strangely enough, it wasn't with Tess's would-be boyfriend, but his asshole of a best friend, who is intent on keeping them apart. REMOVED
Determined to put the fear of God into the racist homophobe who messed up her best friend, mild-mannered Jane Hazelton resorts to hiring a thug to do the job. Trouble is, said thug isn’t interested in money, he’s interested in her. **COMPLETED**
-slash- Joni is sure that he can get any guy he wants, it should be obvious with his looks, but what happens when Misha; the older, gay brother of his friend doesn't seem to notice him? Joni intends to change that, but who will really master this game?
Damien is sent to live in a Catholic boys school for his own protection after he's attacked for being 'flaming gay'. What happens when a night in drag & an unplanned kiss attracts his heterosexual roommate's attention? Male/Male Slash
mxm, slash Ben is a triplet who must take care of his psychologically challenged brothers, from love lives, to auditions, to tetris addictions, while also coping with his own disorder: inanimate objects talk to him.
She didn't believe in vampires...he didn't believe in love. After saving a vampire, Liz is thrust into the world of darkness. Pure Born is Liz's story from being alone to in love, from safety to in danger. RATED M for all the right reasons...
Meet Angel-She's been a mute ever since her boyfriend died. Meet Ryan- He's the new bad boy in town with a painful past. What brings them together? Well, the Matchmaker seems to think they're soul mates... Can anyone say drama?
[COMPLETE] If you think high school is tough, try spy school. And why not throw in being the only female student? No biggy, right? Uh, no. Big biggy. Things start getting complicated and things start heating up. Tch. And you think high school's full of crap.
When Holly Samuels finds a journal belonging to a depressed, insanely in love seventeen year old boy, all she wants is to find someone like the writer to love. Certainly not someone like Sterling, her temperamental, charming, good-looking Biology partner.
/HIATUS/How did I end up pushed against a wall with sexy arrogant Devon Remmington whispering seductively in my ear? And tell me how I ended up with an ache in my back and a bed 20 mattresses high? Plus that stupid Happy Bunny underwear, this is disaster
slash Nate may be Mr. Popular of Bethlehem, Kansas, but he’s not entirely sure that’s saying much, since no one quite knows where Bethlehem is. He wants to use Jesse Jones for his connections. Or, he thinks so. So why did the CIA get caught up in it all?
Moved to a new town to live with my Dad. Went to a party. Got a tad bit drunk. Hooked up with some guy, only to find out that my Dad happens to be his football coach and he just happens to practically live at my house...Problem? Yes. -Will re-write soon!-
REMOVED. Brian has been trying to win my heart since kindergarten, when he handed me a valentine with a worm inside. Too bad he doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'no.' 13 years later he's still trying, but I'm standing my ground. Or trying to.
Esquirella & jma collaborate! Yaoi! MxM Toby is lonely in school and at home. Sariphan is a sexy cat-man just passing through our galaxy. Fate conspires to make their two worlds collide, and now Sariphan is determined to claim Toby for himself. Forever!
If there were groups for this, I know exactly what I’d say. “My name is Thom Oliver, and I’m addicted. It’s been six months, 3 days, 14 hours since my last one night stand. Please keep Evan Llewellyn away from me. I think I’m going to rape him.” Slash.
REMOVED She's your "ordinary" teenager and he's the school's new psychotic jackass. They both live to kill and kill to live...kind of. But you know it's love when it's midnight and they're together, mixing a cyanide solution by candlelight.
The first time I met him, he called me 'Ducky'. The second time, I was left completely bewildered by his wiles. But by the third time, I'm pretty sure that I was hopelessly in love with him. If only it could be that simple. This should be interesting...
She’s been dumped by her boring boyfriend, well, ex boyfriend for another girl. And now, she was wants revenge. How? Well, she’s going to seduce the other girl. There’s only one snag, his hot older brother. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Influence of osteon area fraction and degree of orientation of HAp crystals on mechanical properties in bovine femur.
Cortical bone has a hierarchical structure, spanning from the macrostructure at several millimeters or whole bone level, the microstructure at several hundred micrometers level, to the nanostructure at hydroxyapatite (HAp) crystals and collagen fibrils levels. The aim of the study is to understand the relationship between the HAp crystal orientation and the elastic modulus and the relationship between the osteon area fraction and the deformation behavior of HAp crystals in cortical bone. In the experiments, five strip specimens (40×2×1mm(3)) aligned with the bone axis were taken from the cortical bone of a bovine femur. The degree of c-axis orientation of HAp crystals in the specimens was measured with the X-ray diffraction technique with the imaging plate. To measure the deformation behavior of HAp crystals in the specimens, tensile tests under X-ray irradiation were conducted. The specimens were cut at the X-ray measurement positions and osteon area fraction and porosity at the transverse cross-sections were observed. Further, the volume fraction of HAp of the specimens was measured. Results showed the degree of c-axis orientation of HAp crystals was positively correlated with the elastic modulus of the specimens (r=0.94). The volume fraction of HAp and the porosity showed no statistical correlation with the elastic modulus and the tensile strength. The HAp crystal strain ε(H) increased linearly with the bone tissue strain ε. The average value of ε(H)/ε was 0.69±0.13 and there was no correlation between the osteon area fraction and ε(H)/ε (r=-0.27, p=0.33). The results suggest that the degree of c-axis orientation of HAp crystals affects the elastic modulus and the magnitude of HAp crystal strain does not depend on the osteon area fraction. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
Deulgaon Dhudhate
Deulgaon, commonly known as "Deulgaon Dhudhate" is a village located in Purna taluka of Parbhani district, in state of Maharashtra.
Demographics
As per 2011 census:
Deulgaon Dhudhate has 690 families residing. The village has population of 3355.
Out of the population of 3355, 1722 are males while 1633 are females.
Literacy rate of the village is 66.15%.
Average sex ratio of the village is 948 females to 1000 males. Average sex ratio of Maharashtra state is 929.
Geography, and transport
Distance between Deulgaon Dhudhate, and district headquarter Parbhani is .
References
Category:Villages in Parbhani district | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
A memorial service has taken place in New York City for Mark Carson, a gay man who was shot dead earlier this month.
The service took place yesterday in Harlem.
Radio host Alonzo B, a friend of the deceased for more than 20 years, said homosexuality was “a taboo” subject in their Bronx neighbourhood, but that Carson was never threatened or bullied growing up.
His family accepted his sexuality, said Karen Grant, who knew Carson’s mother since they were both pregnant together. “Your family is your family,” Ms Grant said. “They all loved him.”
One friend, Jonathan Smith, said Carson had been trying to change his life in the last year and was attending Jehovah’s Witnesses’ classes.
Mr Smith added: “He knew it was a contradiction that he was an open homosexual, but he knew he had to not practice that to please God. He was working on that.”
Carson was fatally shot on 18 May by a man who allegedly shouted anti-gay slurs at him in Greenwich Village, the city’s iconic LGBT district.
Elliot Morales faces second-degree murder and has been charged with committing a hate crime.
Before pulling the trigger, Morales was heard to ask Carson: “Do you want to die here?” and “What are you, gay wrestlers?” | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
George William Bulmer
Captain George William Bulmer (1 September 1898 – 5 April 1987) was an American-born Canadian flying ace in World War I. He was credited with nine aerial victories.
Early life
George William Bulmer was born in Dixon, Illinois, USA on 1 September 1898. His parents were British. He worked as an accountant before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in Toronto, Canada in 1917.
World War I
By early 1918, Bulmer had completed training and been posted to 22 Squadron. He scored his first aerial victory on 6 March 1918, and continued to win through 9 July 1918. His exploits earned him a Military Cross, which was gazetted on 16 September 1918:
List of aerial victories
Post World War I
There is no reliable account of his later years, although it is known that he died in San Diego, California, USA on 5 April 1987.
Endnotes
Reference
Category:Canadian World War I flying aces
Category:1898 births
Category:1987 deaths | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
Britain's fattest five-year-old has been taken into care after weighing in at more than 143 pounds, or at least three times the weight of what is expected of a healthy child.
Child protection experts told the Sunday Times the case was "a tragedy", expressing disbelief that action was not taken sooner by the local council.
The newspaper says the girl was seized in Newport, south Wales, in August last year weighing approximately 145 pounds – heavier than any 5-year-old of either sex recorded in an English school since 2008. Typically, girls that age weigh about 42 pounds.
Newport city council said the decision was made purely because of the girl’s obesity.
Click for more from news.com.au. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Image copyright Getty Images
Protesters in South Africa and now Oxford have demanded the destruction of memorials to Cecil Rhodes, a man whose behaviour and beliefs they say are unacceptable in the modern world. But Adam Gopnik asks if our 21st Century ways will look acceptable to future generations.
Like many of you, I suspect, I've been following the fight over that statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford. Since Rhodes, once seen as a hero of Empire, now looks like a racist and an imperialist - both bad things - the notion is that he should not be honoured in an institution of knowledge.
Should we tear his statue down? The French have a nice all-purpose idiom to cover the destruction of things of the past in pursuit of the values of the present. "Il faut bruler" they say - it must burn. But must we burn down Sartre or Louis XIV or Victor Hugo over a big thing they got wrong?
I row no boat for Rhodes - though I do think this kind of inquiry can easily become an inquisition. We can rummage through the past of any historical figure and find something obnoxious by the standards of 2016. Even so saintly a character and prescient a man as the philosopher John Stuart Mill - who with Harriet Taylor invented modern feminism - can be shown to have been insufficiently attentive to the very real sufferings of the Irish in Ireland or the Indians in India.
My own standard is simple - what were the moral positions broadly articulated at the time, and where does the historical figure stand within those? Not too many, but some, saw just how wrong slavery in the American south was in 1860, and Mill was one of them. Not too many people thought imperialism evil in and of itself, and Mill was one of those, too.
Image copyright Getty Images
But more to the point, we should use these inquiries not as a moment of moral arraignment of others but as moral instruction to ourselves. What attitudes and practices that we accept blithely now as just part of the necessary arrangement of the world will seem horrific to the future? What will we be morally arraigned for tolerating by our more pristine descendants? I've arrived at a tentative list of four such horrors.
I don't say that this is the right or complete list - or even that we ought actually to "bruler" these things - just that these are the things that morally curious people with an eye to the future might to be curious about now.
The first is mass cruelty to animals in the pursuit of food. The industrial farm, the industrialised slaughterhouse - for all that we have been told of these things, we still effectively hide away this truth from ourselves and from our sight. The conditions of animals - chickens forced to spend their lives motionless, pigs, such sentient and feeling beings, crowded in pens and slaughtered on assembly lines of panic - may seem to our descendants as unspeakable as that of the slaves in the middle passage seem to us.
Inside the chicken farms
Image copyright ALAMY
94% of chickens bought for meat are intensively reared
750 million broilers are slaughtered annually in the UK
There are 116 million broilers in the UK, and 29 million laying hens
Free-range egg sales make up half of the UK market for domestic egg use
Do people know where their chickens come from? (Oct 2014)
That we blithely sit down to eat veal chops at conferences on ethics (I did, once) may well seem to them as brutally hypocritical as American slaveholders praising liberty. My own view, articulated at numbing length in my book about eating, The Table Comes First, is that since we would always eat scavenged beasts, the real issues involve the treatment of animals, not just their consumption. An animal raised kindly and slaughtered painlessly seems to me fairly harvested - though I am in the minority in my own pescatarian family and may, someday soon, convert.
The next moral outrage the future may condemn is cruelty to children in schooling. This may seem like much the lesser sin - certainly not getting any schooling at all, like so many girls in Islamic countries, is far worse. But the Western school day and school regimen we accept uncritically, are, on the whole, remnants of an earlier time, living symptoms of the regimentation of life in the 19th Century that also brought us mass conscription and military drill.
We've outgrown mass conscription, but we still too often teach our children to a military timetable. We take it for granted that long school days, and much homework, will benefit them, though there is not a scrap of evidence that this is true, and a large body of evidence that it is false.
We take it for granted that waking teenagers in the early morning, then having them sit still and listen to lectures for eight hours, and then doing three or four more hours of homework at home, is essential and profitable.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Steve Jobs said he discovered Shakespeare away from the classroom
All the evidence suggests that this is the worst possible way of educating anybody, much less a 15-year-old in need of much sleep, freedom of mind, and abundant creative escape-time - of the kind that John and Paul found by skipping school to play guitars in the front room, or that Steve Jobs found when, in a California high school, he tells us he discovered Shakespeare and got stoned, at the same time and presumably in equal measure.
We are taught that the over-regimented Asian societies with their tiger mothers will overtake us, but it is Apple, invented by that stoned Shakespearean high schooler, that sends its phones to be made in China, not the other way round. Genuine entrepreneurial advance comes from strange people and places. In the future, when kids arrive at school in the late morning, and we teach math the way we now teach sports, as an open-ended, self-regulating group activity, we may well recognise that each mind bends its own peculiar way, and our current method of teaching, I think, will seem quite mad.
Find out more A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 GMT and repeated Sundays, 08:50 GMT
Adam Gopnik has lived in Paris and wrote the book Paris to the Moon Or listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer BBC Podcasts - A Point of View
The third moral outrage I imagine the future espying is our cruelty to the ill and aged in our fetish for surgical intervention. Modern scientific medicine is a mostly unmixed blessing, and anyone who longs for the metaphysical certainties of medieval times should be compelled to have medieval medicine for his family. But no blessing is entirely unmixed, and I suspect that our insistence on massive interventions for late-arriving ills - our appetite for heart valves and knee replacements, artificial hips and endlessly retuned pacemakers - will seem to our descendants as fetishistic and bewildering as the medieval appetite for bleeding and cupping and leeching looks to us now.
Yes, of course, we all know people whose lives have been blessedly extended and improved by artificial joints and by those wi-fi pacemakers. But our health system is designed to make doctors see the benefits of intervention far more clearly than their costs. Not long ago I was reading these words from a doctor about the seemingly benign practice of angioplasty procedures for heart patients: "It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day, let alone 10 years - and it's done a million times a year in this country." Every age puts up a fight with mortality - and every subsequent age looks back, and shudders at the weapons the past ones used.
Finally, I suspect the future will frown on any form of sexual rule-making, aside from ones based entirely on the abuse of power. Gay and straight or bi or trans - numbers and kinds and kinks - all that really matters is the empowered consent of two people capable of being empowered and informed.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Oscar Wilde - saint of gay liberation or exploiter of underage sex workers?
When Oscar Wilde was condemned by society more than a century ago in London for having sex with underage male prostitutes, he became a figure of evil, his life and career destroyed. Within half a century this persecution seemed to us intolerable - and for most of the second half of the 20th Century Oscar was seen as a saint of gay liberation. Yet a scant 20 years later, the table has turned again - exactly because it is not homosexuality but rather the exploitation of younger teenagers for sexual purposes that we now rightly, I think, realise is among the blackest of all possible sins. I suspect that the future will be even more tolerant of sexual variety, and even more censorious of the exploitation of the powerless.
And that perhaps is the central point. Morality does clarify over time - only not to the wrong willing partner or the wrong way of eating or the wrong way of thinking, but into what's fair and isn't in a relationship of power.
If we want a simple moral rule to take through the centuries it might be - see who's helpless, and help them. That always looks good in retrospect. Meanwhile, moral curiosity needs to separate itself from moral hysteria, and even as we condemn our moral ancestors, we need to hold our ears to the wind, and listen for the faint sounds of our descendants telling their melancholy truths about us.
More from the Magazine
Image copyright Getty Images
Protesters have attacked statues of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa and England. Why does this once-lauded diamond trader and patron of education inspire such strong reactions?
When is it right to remove a statue? (Dec 2015)
Why is Cecil Rhodes such a controversial figure? (April 2015)
A Point of View is broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays 08:50 BST
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
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Seven Times Six Our eBay Store About Us Contact Us Add to Favorite Sellers Pretty In Pink The List Throw Pillow White 16X16 Pretty In Pink is the story of poor girl must choose between the affections of her doting childhood sweetheart and a rich but sensitive playboy. Andie(played by Molly Ringwald is a not-so-popular girls in high school that is star of the show. Product Details Officially Licensed Made in the USA Spun Polyester - Light Weight Cotton Canvas Look and Feel Comes in Sizes 26x26, 20x20, 18x18, 16x16, 14x14 Blown and Closed - Two Sided Print This officially licensed special order item cannot be cancelled once purchased. However,upon arrival the item may be returned for a refund per our return policy.
Prices are provided by the merchants. We assume no responsibility for accuracy of price information provided by merchants. Please alert us to any pricing discrepancies and we will alert the merchant. Sales taxes are estimated at the zip code level. Shipping costs are estimates. Please check store for exact shipping costs. To learn more about why certain stores are listed on the site, click here
Product specifications are obtained from third parties, and while we make every effort to assure the accuracy of product information, we do not assume any liability for inaccuracies. Store ratings and product reviews are written and submitted by online shoppers to assist you as you shop. They do not reflect our opinions. We take no responsibility for the content of ratings and reviews submitted by users. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Q:
Joint distribution by independent distributions
We have $N$ independent discrete finite random variables (RVs) $X_1,\dots,X_i,\dots,X_N$ where RV $X_i$ has $M_i$ finite number of elements. We are free to choose any distribution $f_i$ for RV $X_i$ $\forall i=\{1,\dots,N\}$. Then consider the product set $Y = X_1\times\dots\times X_i\times\dots\times X_N$ and say we are interested in a particular distribution $f_Y$, which is in the set of all possible distributions on $Y$. Note $f_Y$ is not the product of $f_i$s.
How close can we come to $f_Y$ by manipulating the independent distributions $f_i$ $\forall i=\{1,\dots,N\}$ ? Which I believe (not sure) is same as asking how close is $\prod_i^Nf_i$ to $f_Y$?
There is a set of real numbers $\boldsymbol{a}=\{a(y)\}_{y\in Y}$. The objective is to make the expectation of the set $\boldsymbol{a}$ over $f_i$s as close as possible to the expectation of $\boldsymbol{a}$ over $f_Y$.
I tried writing an optimization problem to minimize $\mid \sum_{y\in Y}[\prod_i^Nf_i(y)-f_Y(y)]a(y)\mid$, but it is non convex. And I am not sure if this is the optimization problem I should solve.
What does it mean to be "close" when we have two distributions?
Note that just expectations being close is not sufficient, the probability $\prod_i^Nf_i(y)$ has to be close to the true probability $f_Y(y)$ $\forall y \in Y$.
The question Distance between the product of marginal distributions and the joint distribution is bit similar but in there marginals come from the joint but in my question no marginals are compared.
Would be very grateful for any clue. Thanks.
PS. Not homework. Part of research work.
A:
(This is discussion rather than answer)
Measures of distribution distance do exist - Kullback-Leibler divergence (or "relative entropy") and Hellinger distance are just two that come immediately to mind.
But from what you write, you seek to minimize the distance between two expected values - the "true" expected value, that is taken with respect to the true joint probability mass function $p(Y)$ of non-independent random variables, and some approximation of it, which uses a joint probability mass function $q(Y)$ which assumes independence, something like
$$d = \left|E_p\left[a(Y)\right] - E_q\left[a(Y)\right]\right| = \left|\sum_{S_Y}a(y)p(y) - \sum_{S_Y}a(y)q(y) \right|$$
or square or ..., where the $y$ is an $N$-dimensional vector and sums are to be understood as appropriately multiple.
It may seem that your problem falls into the field of "density estimation", but it doesn't: density estimation methods start with a sample and try to estimate from this sample the density that best describes it. Your problem on the other hand does not include a sample of realizations of the random variables involved. It's an abstract theoretical problem. Perhaps this is why you phrase it in mathematical rather than in statistical terms.
For example you write about "manipulation of the individual densities". This could mean anything, not just the use of a joint distribution of independent variables (=product of individual densities) -it could mean any combination of the individual densities (a weighted sum, whatever), viewed as a mathematical approximation of the true joint distribution -and not as a stochastic estimation (this answer of mine deals to some degree with the differences between the two although in another context).
So it appears that there are two important aspects that perhaps need distinguishing and deciding upon: First, are you after "minimizing distance from true distribution" or "minimizing estimation error of true expected value"? Two, are you going to attempt it in a mathematical approximation framework (where anything goes), or in a statistical framework, where your approximation function should be a proper density?
I hope these comments are useful to you.
ADDENDUM (following discussion with the OP in comments).
it would be interesting to apply a measure of "distribution distance" to the expected value. Assume you are using the Hellinger distance. So, you choose $q(y)$ so that
$$q(y): H(a(y)p(y),a(y)q(y)) = \frac {1}{\sqrt 2} \left(\sum_i\left[\sqrt {a(y_i)p(y_i)}-\sqrt {a(y_i)q(y_i)}\right]^2\right)^\frac 12 =\min$$
$$\Rightarrow \frac {1}{\sqrt 2} \left(\sum_ia(y_i)\left[\sqrt {p(y_i)}-\sqrt {q(y_i)}\right]^2\right)^\frac 12 =\min $$
One should explore the properties of such a measure.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | StackExchange |
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the conceptual model and set of communications protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP because the foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). During its development, versions of it were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the development of the networking method was funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA. Its implementation is a protocol stack.
The Internet protocol suite provides end-to-end data communication specifying how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received. This functionality is organized into four abstraction layers, which classify all related protocols according to the scope of networking involved. From lowest to highest, the layers are the link layer, containing communication methods for data that remains within a single network segment (link); the internet layer, providing internetworking between independent networks; the transport layer, handling host-to-host communication; and the application layer, providing process-to-process data exchange for applications.
The technical standards underlying the Internet protocol suite and its constituent protocols are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The Internet protocol suite predates the OSI model, a more comprehensive reference framework for general networking systems.
History
Early research
The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late 1960s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. In 1972, Robert E. Kahn joined the DARPA Information Processing Technology Office, where he worked on both satellite packet networks and ground-based radio packet networks, and recognized the value of being able to communicate across both. In the spring of 1973, Vinton Cerf, who helped develop the existing ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) protocol, joined Kahn to work on open-architecture interconnection models with the goal of designing the next protocol generation for the ARPANET. They drew on the experience from the ARPANET research community and the International Networking Working Group, which Cerf chaired.
By the summer of 1973, Kahn and Cerf had worked out a fundamental reformulation, in which the differences between local network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and, instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the existing ARPANET protocols, this function was delegated to the hosts. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmermann and Louis Pouzin, designer of the CYCLADES network, with important influences on this design. The new protocol was implemented as the Transmission Control Program in 1974.
Initially, the Transmission Control Program managed both datagram transmissions and routing, but as experience with the protocol grew, collaborators recommended division of functionality into layers of distinct protocols. Advocates included Jonathan Postel of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, who edited the Request for Comments (RFCs), the technical and strategic document series that has both documented and catalyzed Internet development, and the research group of Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. Postel stated, "We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering." Encapsulation of different mechanisms was intended to create an environment where the upper layers could access only what was needed from the lower layers. A monolithic design would be inflexible and lead to scalability issues. In version 3 of TCP, written in 1978, the Transmission Control Program was split into two distinct protocols, the Internet Protocol as connectionless layer and the Transmission Control Protocol as a reliable connection-oriented service.
The design of the network included the recognition that it should provide only the functions of efficiently transmitting and routing traffic between end nodes and that all other intelligence should be located at the edge of the network, in the end nodes. This design is known as the end-to-end principle. Using this design, it became possible to connect other networks to the ARPANET that used the same principle, irrespective of other local characteristics, thereby solving Kahn's initial internetworking problem. A popular expression is that TCP/IP, the eventual product of Cerf and Kahn's work, can run over "two tin cans and a string." Years later, as a joke, the IP over Avian Carriers formal protocol specification was created and successfully tested.
DARPA contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University, and the University College London to develop operational versions of the protocol on several hardware platforms. During development of the protocol the version number of the packet routing layer progressed from version 1 to version 4, the latter of which was installed in the ARPANET in 1983. It became known as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) as the protocol that is still in use in the Internet, alongside its current successor, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
Early implementation
In 1975, a two-network TCP/IP communications test was performed between Stanford and University College London. In November 1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between sites in the US, the UK, and Norway. Several other TCP/IP prototypes were developed at multiple research centers between 1978 and 1983.
A computer called a router is provided with an interface to each network. It forwards network packets back and forth between them. Originally a router was called gateway, but the term was changed to avoid confusion with other types of gateways.
Adoption
In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking. In the same year, Peter T. Kirstein's research group at University College London adopted the protocol.
The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed on flag day January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated.
In 1985, the Internet Advisory Board (later Internet Architecture Board) held a three-day TCP/IP workshop for the computer industry, attended by 250 vendor representatives, promoting the protocol and leading to its increasing commercial use. In 1985, the first Interop conference focused on network interoperability by broader adoption of TCP/IP. The conference was founded by Dan Lynch, an early Internet activist. From the beginning, large corporations, such as IBM and DEC, attended the meeting.
IBM, AT&T and DEC were the first major corporations to adopt TCP/IP, this despite having competing proprietary protocols. In IBM, from 1984, Barry Appelman's group did TCP/IP development. They navigated the corporate politics to get a stream of TCP/IP products for various IBM systems, including MVS, VM, and OS/2. At the same time, several smaller companies, such as FTP Software and the Wollongong Group, began offering TCP/IP stacks for DOS and Microsoft Windows. The first VM/CMS TCP/IP stack came from the University of Wisconsin.
Some of the early TCP/IP stacks were written single-handedly by a few programmers. Jay Elinsky and of IBM Research wrote TCP/IP stacks for VM/CMS and OS/2, respectively. In 1984 Donald Gillies at MIT wrote a ntcp multi-connection TCP which ran atop the IP/PacketDriver layer maintained by John Romkey at MIT in 1983–4. Romkey leveraged this TCP in 1986 when FTP Software was founded. Starting in 1985, Phil Karn created a multi-connection TCP application for ham radio systems (KA9Q TCP).
The spread of TCP/IP was fueled further in June 1989, when the University of California, Berkeley agreed to place the TCP/IP code developed for BSD UNIX into the public domain. Various corporate vendors, including IBM, included this code in commercial TCP/IP software releases. Microsoft released a native TCP/IP stack in Windows 95. This event helped cement TCP/IP's dominance over other protocols on Microsoft-based networks, which included IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA), and on other platforms such as Digital Equipment Corporation's DECnet, Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), and Xerox Network Systems (XNS).
CERN purchased UNIX machines with TCP/IP for their intranet between 1984 and 1988. The British academic network JANET and the pan-European backbone, EuropaNet, began to use TCP/IP in 1991.
For a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks.
Formal specification and standards
The technical standards underlying the Internet protocol suite and its constituent protocols have been delegated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The characteristic architecture of the Internet Protocol Suite is its broad division into operating scopes for the protocols that constitute its core functionality. The defining specification of the suite is RFC 1122, which broadly outlines four abstraction layers. These have stood the test of time, as the IETF has never modified this structure. As such a model of networking, the Internet Protocol Suite predates the OSI model, a more comprehensive reference framework for general networking systems.
Key architectural principles
The end-to-end principle has evolved over time. Its original expression put the maintenance of state and overall intelligence at the edges, and assumed the Internet that connected the edges retained no state and concentrated on speed and simplicity. Real-world needs for firewalls, network address translators, web content caches and the like have forced changes in this principle.
The robustness principle states: "In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. That is, it must be careful to send well-formed datagrams, but must accept any datagram that it can interpret (e.g., not object to technical errors where the meaning is still clear)." "The second part of the principle is almost as important: software on other hosts may contain deficiencies that make it unwise to exploit legal but obscure protocol features."
Encapsulation is used to provide abstraction of protocols and services. Encapsulation is usually aligned with the division of the protocol suite into layers of general functionality. In general, an application (the highest level of the model) uses a set of protocols to send its data down the layers. The data is further encapsulated at each level.
An early architectural document, , emphasizes architectural principles over layering. RFC 1122, titled Host Requirements, is structured in paragraphs referring to layers, but the document refers to many other architectural principles and does not emphasize layering. It loosely defines a four-layer model, with the layers having names, not numbers, as follows:
The application layer is the scope within which applications, or processes, create user data and communicate this data to other applications on another or the same host. The applications make use of the services provided by the underlying lower layers, especially the transport layer which provides reliable or unreliable pipes to other processes. The communications partners are characterized by the application architecture, such as the client-server model and peer-to-peer networking. This is the layer in which all application protocols, such as SMTP, FTP, SSH, HTTP, operate. Processes are addressed via ports which essentially represent services.
The transport layer performs host-to-host communications on either the local network or remote networks separated by routers. It provides a channel for the communication needs of applications. UDP is the basic transport layer protocol, providing an unreliable connectionless datagram service. The Transmission Control Protocol provides flow-control, connection establishment, and reliable transmission of data.
The internet layer exchanges datagrams across network boundaries. It provides a uniform networking interface that hides the actual topology (layout) of the underlying network connections. It is therefore also the layer that establishes internetworking. Indeed, it defines and establishes the Internet. This layer defines the addressing and routing structures used for the TCP/IP protocol suite. The primary protocol in this scope is the Internet Protocol, which defines IP addresses. Its function in routing is to transport datagrams to the next host, functioning as an IP router, that has the connectivity to a network closer to the final data destination.
The link layer defines the networking methods within the scope of the local network link on which hosts communicate without intervening routers. This layer includes the protocols used to describe the local network topology and the interfaces needed to affect the transmission of Internet layer datagrams to next-neighbor hosts.
Link layer
The protocols of the link layer operate within the scope of the local network connection to which a host is attached. This regime is called the link in TCP/IP parlance and is the lowest component layer of the suite. The link includes all hosts accessible without traversing a router. The size of the link is therefore determined by the networking hardware design. In principle, TCP/IP is designed to be hardware independent and may be implemented on top of virtually any link-layer technology. This includes not only hardware implementations, but also virtual link layers such as virtual private networks and networking tunnels.
The link layer is used to move packets between the Internet layer interfaces of two different hosts on the same link. The processes of transmitting and receiving packets on the link can be controlled both in the device driver for the network card, as well as in firmware or by specialized chipsets. These perform functions, such as framing, to prepare the Internet layer packets for transmission, and finally transmit the frames to the physical layer and over a transmission medium. The TCP/IP model includes specifications for translating the network addressing methods used in the Internet Protocol to link-layer addresses, such as media access control (MAC) addresses. All other aspects below that level, however, are implicitly assumed to exist, and are not explicitly defined in the TCP/IP model.
The link layer in the TCP/IP model has corresponding functions in Layer 2 of the OSI model.
Internet layer
The internet layer has the responsibility of sending packets across potentially multiple networks. Internetworking requires sending data from the source network to the destination network. This process is called routing.
The Internet Protocol performs two basic functions:
Host addressing and identification: This is accomplished with a hierarchical IP addressing system.
Packet routing: This is the basic task of sending packets of data (datagrams) from source to destination by forwarding them to the next network router closer to the final destination.
The internet layer is not only agnostic of data structures at the transport layer, but it also does not distinguish between operation of the various transport layer protocols. IP carries data for a variety of different upper layer protocols. These protocols are each identified by a unique protocol number: for example, Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) are protocols 1 and 2, respectively.
Some of the protocols carried by IP, such as ICMP which is used to transmit diagnostic information, and IGMP which is used to manage IP Multicast data, are layered on top of IP but perform internetworking functions. This illustrates the differences in the architecture of the TCP/IP stack of the Internet and the OSI model. The TCP/IP model's internet layer corresponds to layer three of the OSI model, where it is referred to as the network layer.
The internet layer provides an unreliable datagram transmission facility between hosts located on potentially different IP networks by forwarding the transport layer datagrams to an appropriate next-hop router for further relaying to its destination. With this functionality, the internet layer makes possible internetworking, the interworking of different IP networks, and it essentially establishes the Internet. The Internet Protocol is the principal component of the internet layer, and it defines two addressing systems to identify network hosts' computers, and to locate them on the network. The original address system of the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet, is Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). It uses a 32-bit IP address and is therefore capable of identifying approximately four billion hosts. This limitation was eliminated in 1998 by the standardization of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) which uses 128-bit addresses. IPv6 production implementations emerged in approximately 2006.
Transport layer
The transport layer establishes basic data channels that applications use for task-specific data exchange. The layer establishes host-to-host connectivity, meaning it provides end-to-end message transfer services that are independent of the structure of user data and the logistics of exchanging information for any particular specific purpose and independent of the underlying network. The protocols in this layer may provide error control, segmentation, flow control, congestion control, and application addressing (port numbers). End-to-end message transmission or connecting applications at the transport layer can be categorized as either connection-oriented, implemented in TCP, or connectionless, implemented in UDP.
For the purpose of providing process-specific transmission channels for applications, the layer establishes the concept of the network port. This is a numbered logical construct allocated specifically for each of the communication channels an application needs. For many types of services, these port numbers have been standardized so that client computers may address specific services of a server computer without the involvement of service announcements or directory services.
Because IP provides only a best effort delivery, some transport layer protocols offer reliability. However, IP can run over a reliable data link protocol such as the High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC).
For example, the TCP is a connection-oriented protocol that addresses numerous reliability issues in providing a reliable byte stream:
data arrives in-order
data has minimal error (i.e., correctness)
duplicate data is discarded
lost or discarded packets are resent
includes traffic congestion control
The newer Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is also a reliable, connection-oriented transport mechanism. It is message-stream-oriented—not byte-stream-oriented like TCP—and provides multiple streams multiplexed over a single connection. It also provides multi-homing support, in which a connection end can be represented by multiple IP addresses (representing multiple physical interfaces), such that if one fails, the connection is not interrupted. It was developed initially for telephony applications (to transport SS7 over IP), but can also be used for other applications.
The User Datagram Protocol is a connectionless datagram protocol. Like IP, it is a best effort, "unreliable" protocol. Reliability is addressed through error detection using a weak checksum algorithm. UDP is typically used for applications such as streaming media (audio, video, Voice over IP etc.) where on-time arrival is more important than reliability, or for simple query/response applications like DNS lookups, where the overhead of setting up a reliable connection is disproportionately large. Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is a datagram protocol that is designed for real-time data such as streaming audio and video.
The applications at any given network address are distinguished by their TCP or UDP port. By convention certain well known ports are associated with specific applications.
The TCP/IP model's transport or host-to-host layer corresponds roughly to the fourth layer in the OSI model, also called the transport layer.
Application layer
The application layer includes the protocols used by most applications for providing user services or exchanging application data over the network connections established by the lower level protocols. This may include some basic network support services such as protocols for routing and host configuration. Examples of application layer protocols include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Data coded according to application layer protocols are encapsulated into transport layer protocol units (such as TCP or UDP messages), which in turn use lower layer protocols to effect actual data transfer.
The TCP/IP model does not consider the specifics of formatting and presenting data, and does not define additional layers between the application and transport layers as in the OSI model (presentation and session layers). Such functions are the realm of libraries and application programming interfaces.
Application layer protocols generally treat the transport layer (and lower) protocols as black boxes which provide a stable network connection across which to communicate, although the applications are usually aware of key qualities of the transport layer connection such as the end point IP addresses and port numbers. Application layer protocols are often associated with particular client-server applications, and common services have well-known port numbers reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). For example, the HyperText Transfer Protocol uses server port 80 and Telnet uses server port 23. Clients connecting to a service usually use ephemeral ports, i.e., port numbers assigned only for the duration of the transaction at random or from a specific range configured in the application.
The transport layer and lower-level layers are unconcerned with the specifics of application layer protocols. Routers and switches do not typically examine the encapsulated traffic, rather they just provide a conduit for it. However, some firewall and bandwidth throttling applications must interpret application data. An example is the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP). It is also sometimes necessary for network address translator (NAT) traversal to consider the application payload.
The application layer in the TCP/IP model is often compared as equivalent to a combination of the fifth (Session), sixth (Presentation), and the seventh (Application) layers of the OSI model.
Furthermore, the TCP/IP model distinguishes between user protocols and support protocols. Support protocols provide services to a system of network infrastructure. User protocols are used for actual user applications. For example, FTP is a user protocol and DNS is a support protocol.
Layer names and number of layers in the literature
The following table shows various networking models. The number of layers varies between three and seven.
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! style="background:#adb" | RFC 1122, Internet STD 3 (1989)
! style="background:#adb" | Cisco Academy
! style="background:#adb" | Kurose, Forouzan
! style="background:#adb" | Comer, Kozierok
! style="background:#adb" | Stallings
! style="background:#adb" | Tanenbaum
! style="background:#adb" | Arpanet Reference Model (RFC 871)
! style="background:#adb" | OSI model
|-
| style="background:#cfc" | Four layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Four layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Five layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Four+one layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Five layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Five layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Three layers
| style="background:#cfc" | Seven layers
|-
| style="background:#cfc" | "Internet model"
| style="background:#cfc" | "Internet model"
| style="background:#cfc" | "Five-layer Internet model" or "TCP/IP protocol suite"
| style="background:#cfc" | "TCP/IP 5-layer reference model"
| style="background:#cfc" | "TCP/IP model"
| style="background:#cfc" | "TCP/IP 5-layer reference model"
| style="background:#cfc" | "Arpanet reference model"
| style="background:#cfc" | OSI model
|-
| rowspan="3"| Application
| rowspan="3"| Application
| rowspan="3"| Application
| rowspan="3"| Application
| rowspan="3"| Application
| rowspan="3"| Application
| rowspan="3"| Application/Process
| Application
|-
| Presentation
|-
| Session
|-
| Transport
| Transport
| Transport
| Transport
| Host-to-host or transport
| Transport
| rowspan="2"| Host-to-host
| Transport
|-
| Internet
| Internetwork
| Network
| Internet
| Internet
| Internet
| Network
|-
|| Link
|| Network interface
| Data link
| Data link (Network interface)
| Network access
|| Data link
|| Network interface
| Data link
|-
| '|
| Physical
| (Hardware)
| Physical
| Physical
|
| Physical
|}
Some of the networking models are from textbooks, which are secondary sources that may conflict with the intent of RFC 1122 and other IETF primary sources.
Comparison of TCP/IP and OSI layering
The three top layers in the OSI model, i.e. the application layer, the presentation layer and the session layer, are not distinguished separately in the TCP/IP model which only has an application layer above the transport layer. While some pure OSI protocol applications, such as X.400, also combined them, there is no requirement that a TCP/IP protocol stack must impose monolithic architecture above the transport layer. For example, the NFS application protocol runs over the eXternal Data Representation (XDR) presentation protocol, which, in turn, runs over a protocol called Remote Procedure Call (RPC). RPC provides reliable record transmission, so it can safely use the best-effort UDP transport.
Different authors have interpreted the TCP/IP model differently, and disagree whether the link layer, or the entire TCP/IP model, covers OSI layer 1 (physical layer) issues, or whether a hardware layer is assumed below the link layer.
Several authors have attempted to incorporate the OSI model's layers 1 and 2 into the TCP/IP model, since these are commonly referred to in modern standards (for example, by IEEE and ITU). This often results in a model with five layers, where the link layer or network access layer is split into the OSI model's layers 1 and 2.
The IETF protocol development effort is not concerned with strict layering. Some of its protocols may not fit cleanly into the OSI model, although RFCs sometimes refer to it and often use the old OSI layer numbers. The IETF has repeatedly stated that Internet protocol and architecture development is not intended to be OSI-compliant. RFC 3439, addressing Internet architecture, contains a section entitled: "Layering Considered Harmful".
For example, the session and presentation layers of the OSI suite are considered to be included to the application layer of the TCP/IP suite. The functionality of the session layer can be found in protocols like HTTP and SMTP and is more evident in protocols like Telnet and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Session layer functionality is also realized with the port numbering of the TCP and UDP protocols, which cover the transport layer in the TCP/IP suite. Functions of the presentation layer are realized in the TCP/IP applications with the MIME standard in data exchange.
Conflicts are apparent also in the original OSI model, ISO 7498, when not considering the annexes to this model, e.g., the ISO 7498/4 Management Framework, or the ISO 8648 Internal Organization of the Network layer (IONL). When the IONL and Management Framework documents are considered, the ICMP and IGMP are defined as layer management protocols for the network layer. In like manner, the IONL provides a structure for "subnetwork dependent convergence facilities" such as ARP and RARP.
IETF protocols can be encapsulated recursively, as demonstrated by tunneling protocols such as Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE). GRE uses the same mechanism that OSI uses for tunneling at the network layer.
Implementations
The Internet protocol suite does not presume any specific hardware or software environment. It only requires that hardware and a software layer exists that is capable of sending and receiving packets on a computer network. As a result, the suite has been implemented on essentially every computing platform. A minimal implementation of TCP/IP includes the following: Internet Protocol (IP), Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). In addition to IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, Internet Protocol version 6 requires Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP), ICMPv6, and IGMPv6 and is often accompanied by an integrated IPSec security layer.
Application programmers are typically concerned only with interfaces in the application layer and often also in the transport layer, while the layers below are services provided by the TCP/IP stack in the operating system. Most IP implementations are accessible to programmers through sockets and APIs.
Unique implementations include Lightweight TCP/IP, an open source stack designed for embedded systems, and KA9Q NOS, a stack and associated protocols for amateur packet radio systems and personal computers connected via serial lines.
Microcontroller firmware in the network adapter typically handles link issues, supported by driver software in the operating system. Non-programmable analog and digital electronics are normally in charge of the physical components below the link layer, typically using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chipset for each network interface or other physical standard. High-performance routers are to a large extent based on fast non-programmable digital electronics, carrying out link level switching.
See also
BBN Report 1822
FLIP (protocol) (fast local Internet protocol stack)
List of automation protocols
List of information technology acronyms
List of IP protocol numbers
List of network protocols
List of TCP and UDP port numbers
Bibliography
Douglas E. Comer. Internetworking with TCP/IP – Principles, Protocols and Architecture.
Joseph G. Davies and Thomas F. Lee. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 TCP/IP Protocols and Services.
Craig Hunt TCP/IP Network Administration. O'Reilly (1998)
Ian McLean. Windows(R) 2000 TCP/IP Black Book.
Ajit Mungale Pro .NET 1.1 Network Programming.
W. Richard Stevens. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols.
W. Richard Stevens and Gary R. Wright. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2: The Implementation.
W. Richard Stevens. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX Domain Protocols.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Computer Networks''.
References
External links
Internet History – Pages on Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and TCP/IP (reviewed by Cerf and Kahn).
RFC 675 – Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974 Version
RFC 1180 A TCP/IP Tutorial – from the Internet Engineering Task Force (January 1991)
TCP/IP FAQ
The TCP/IP Guide – A comprehensive look at the protocols and the procedures/processes involved
A Study of the ARPANET TCP/IP Digest
TCP/IP Sequence Diagrams
Daryl's TCP/IP Primer – Intro to TCP/IP LAN administration, conversational style
Introduction to TCP/IP
A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication, Cerf & Kahn, IEEE Trans on Comms, Vol Com-22, No 5 May 1974
Category:History of the Internet
Category:Network architecture
Category:Reference models | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
Evidence of oestradiol-induced changes in gonadotrophin secretion in men with feminizing Leydig cell tumours.
To study the sex steroid-gonadotrophin relationship, plasma oestradiol (E2), testosterone and gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH)-induced (100 micrograms iv) gonadotrophin response were measured in 42 male partners of infertile couples with normal sperm count (group I) and in 21 men with Leydig cell tumour (LCT, group II) in which a basal evaluation was repeated after tumour removal. Plasma free alpha-subunit (FAS), immunoreactive alpha-inhibin and luteinizing hormone (LH) pulse analysis were assessed in 10 LCT before and in six of them after surgery. Testosterone was significantly (p < 0.01) lower whereas E2 was significantly (p < 0.001) higher in group II than in group I. Gonadotrophin data were similar in both groups. The mean FAS was higher in group II than in group I and alpha-inhibin was higher than the normal range in 6/10 LCT. In group II, E2 levels were significantly (p < 0.01) and negatively correlated with testosterone, FSH, GnRH-induced gonadotrophin rise and LH pulse amplitude but not frequency. Significant (p < 0.001) changes were observed after surgery: E2 and alpha-inhibin fell; testosterone, LH and FSH rose; whereas FAS did not change significantly. The LH pulse amplitude but not frequency increased significantly (p < 0.05). In conclusion E2 oversecreted by LCT decreased LH and testosterone levels concomitantly. The GnRH-induced gonadotrophin level rose and the LH pulse amplitude decreased when the plasma E2 level rose, whereas the pulse frequency remained unaffected. A concomitant increase in alpha-inhibin and E2 is likely to be responsible for the drop in plasma FSH levels. These data support an action of excessive amounts of E2 at pituitary level, perhaps by decreasing the sensitivity of gonadotrophs to GnRH. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
30 of the Most Family-Friendly Houston Patios
Spring is officially in full swing in Houston which means we might have about 6 more weeks until the scorching heat sequesters us into air conditioning until Thanksgiving. Just kidding. {But not really.} Take your allergy meds, brave the pollen, and bring the kiddos along to some of our favorite family-friendly Houston patios around town. While there are many patios in Houston, we’ve found these to be the best compromise for both adults and children: food and bevs for everybody and play for the kids. Read Also :: You won’t get the side-eye from other patrons for having children acting appropriate for their age {LOUD} at a restaurant because, GASP, you want to continue living a normal life.
Multiple Locations
Lupe Tortilla :: Great play areas in most locations. I-10 & HWY 6 restaurant has a play area and a place for adults to enjoy patio drinks. Katy has a giant sandbox and play area.
Willie’s Grill & Icehouse :: A popular place to take the kids thanks to the great outdoor area and proximity to many families in Sugar Land, Katy, Cypress, Tomball, and closer into town too.
Jimmy Changas :: Members of our contributing team like that there’s a great patio where the kids can play on the playscape in both Katy and Pearland.
Uberrito :: The former Mission Burrito has a few places around town. The most famous location is the one off of West Alabama with a generous space for kids to play outdoors.
Red River BBQ :: They have a League City and a Katy location. Both have a large covered patio with a huge sandbox.
Red River BBQ – Katy
Central
Little Matt’s – Rice Village :: Free/donation-based alcohol for adults. Whaaaaat. They also have a stocked candy bar, Icee machine, ice cream, and a game room.
Punks Simple Southern Food – Rice Village :: While they don’t have a playground, per se, their outdoor seating is adjacent to a big courtyard which allows kiddos to run around.
Jenni’s Noodle House – The Heights :: The small patio in the back has a huge concrete cylinder turned on its side which makes a free-standing tunnel for kids to run through and also draw on the walls with sidewalk chalk.
Gelazzi – The Heights :: The benches behind Gelazzi are a great place to enjoy both the ice cream as well as the “Greetings from Houston” mural. Bring a camera!
Gelazzi – Heights
Cedar Creek – The Heights :: Lots of outdoor patio seating, fire pits, and a great selection of craft beer on tap. Kids love the creek that surrounds the restaurant and the bridge that crosses from one side to the other.
Crisp – The Heights :: With a great outdoor space, complete with a fountain, a ping pong table, and cornhole, this place is made for families. Their menu features gourmet hand-tossed pizzas for the kids, and parents can pair their steak and lobster with a glass of cabernet.
Axelrad / Luigi’s Pizzeria – Midtown :: This is probably one of my favorite spots in Houston. While Axelrad is technically a beer garden, it’s friendly for kids since they have a huge lot of hammocks on site, a friendly staff, and gravel. Kids love gravel. Luigi’s Pizzeria shares the same dining space, and various food vendors take their turns popping-up. There’s often live music, so it’s fun seeing people of all ages grooving to the beat.
The Patio on Richmond – Montrose :: The experts recommend grabbing some BBQ next door at The Pit Room, then coming over to The Patio on Richmond for some great rocks for the kids to play, open spaces for running, and entertaining washer stations.
8th Wonder Brewery – EaDo :: You can bring food or get it delivered. You can also bring your own non-alcoholic drinks. Kids will love the rocks on the ground, so bring the dump trucks, buckets, and pails so that they can enjoy while you enjoy a cold one with Downtown Houston as a backdrop.
Last Concert Cafe – Downtown / Near Northside :: Last Concert Cafe isn’t necessarily the fanciest place, but hey, you kind of concede to that fact if you want to maintain sanity after having kids. They serve up Tex Mex, and there’s a court of sand in front of the live music stage and hula hoops.
Niko Niko’s Market Square – Downtown :: Located in Houston’s original town center and Market Square Park, Niko Niko’s Market Square is a unique experience. Order food from the small kiosk, and either enjoy it on the patio furniture or picnic on the urban green space. There’s plenty of art surrounding the area including the “Houston is Inspired, Hip, Tasty, Funky, Savvy” mural.
Mia’s Table – Upper Kirby :: FREE. SOFT. SERVE. ICE CREAM. And amazing cookies. The kids can watch the kitchen through the window, and there’s step stools in the restroom.
West
The Del – Memorial Villages :: This new-ish place offers cornhole and huge Jenga on the patio. They offer daily happy hour from 3:00pm – 6:30pm — perfect for those of us with 7pm bedtimes!
Ruggles Green / Red Mango – Memorial :: The patios are located next to the focal point of City Centre Houston, the astroturf-fountain-accented plaza. Ruggles Green has dairy-free options which is a relief given the surge of food allergies these days. Hop by on the weekend for live music.
Ruggles Green – City Centre
Dish Society – Katy :: Their patio is on the play area at La Centerra and perfect for the kids to run around while you enjoy a special treat. They serve local foods and operate with a farm-to-table concept.
Texas Borders – Richmond :: This casual eatery has the best of both worlds – great food for the whole family and a fenced in playground for the kid’s entertainment.
South
MOD Pizza – Pearland :: They have a great playground with outdoor covered tables.
North
Sharky’s Waterfront Grill – Kingwood :: This Lake Houston spot is particularly popular with families as things start to heat up. There’s an outside fountain where the kids can play, and you can’t beat the sunsets over the water.
Woodson’s – Conroe :: Touting their priority of sourcing locally, this new location offers up beers on tap as well as a patio equipped with games.
Please Note :: While we make every effort to crosscheck current links and various business details on our guides, we always encourage you to do the same before making final plans. If details are missing or incorrect, please let us know so that we can make every attempt to correct them. And if you know of any other great patios, include them in the comments to continue the list too!
About Kristine H
Kristine grew up in Houston where she met her husband Richard. The high school sweethearts welcomed their daughter Kara {2014} after naturally overcoming infertility. Sixteen months later, their son Ray {2015} joined their family. She balances the allergy mom life as well as a full-time job at an oil & gas supermajor where she is the queen of PowerPoint. Her Houston roots run deep with her Bachelors degree from the University of Houston and MBA from Rice University. Kristine loves traveling, good food, and experiencing all things H-town with family and friends, especially drinks {bars, breweries, boutique coffee shops!}, museums, and of course, BEYONCÉ. You can follow her adventures on vu hu life, Instagram and Twitter {@vuhulife}. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
VULNERABLE AUSTRALIANS STRUGGLING TO RENT UNDER TURNBULL GOVERNMENT INACTION ON HOUSING AFFORDABILITY
Posted by Katy Gallagher179.40sc on April 21, 2016
The Abbott-Turnbull Government’s lack of action on addressing housing affordability is leaving lower income Australians in every state and territory struggling to secure rental housing that they can afford.
Young people and single parents with dependent children are particularly disadvantaged when it comes to finding affordable rental properties with the report finding that less than 5% of the 75,410 rental properties on the market surveyed would be accessible to single people with children, those on the aged pension or young people on New Start payments.
The Abbott-Turnbull Government has had three ministers for housing this term and has not released any plans or strategies to deal with the growing affordability problem with housing.
ABS data reports that there are 657,000 low income households across Australia living in rental stress and 318,000 low income households in mortgage stress in 2013-2014. At the same time 185,000 households remain on waiting lists for public or community housing across the country.
On census night 105,000 Australians were homeless.
Instead of coming up with a way to deal with this problem the government has instead chosen to reduce homelessness funding by $132m, cut funding to organisations that work to support those in housing stress and abolish schemes designed specifically to increase the supply of affordable rental properties in Australia like the National Rental Affordability Scheme, introduced by the Labor Government in 2008.
It is an indictment on Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Social Services Christian Porter that they have failed to respond to an issue that is affecting more and more Australians, both in the cities and in the regions.
When it comes to the regions of the 18,103 properties analysed, there was not one property suitable for a single person on Youth Allowance, only 15 properties for singles on New Start and just 164 properties for a single parent on New Start across the entire country.
Today’s report is just the latest in a long line of concerning reports on this issue confirming that the time for action is now. Malcolm Turnbull must follow Labor’s lead and outline its plans to deal with the problem of rental and housing affordability. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
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TV makes a comeback
The year’s best week for the range of quality film choice features half-a-dozen films today alone that were in contention for best film of the week, including two Westerns, one new, one old (*Django Unchained, 2.25 pm HBO, Once Upon a Time in the West, 1 pm TCM), an American animal documentary that is very powerful without being even slightly sentimental (Chimpanzee, 8.45 am HBOF), a simultaneously blood-boiling/heartbreaking Palestinian documentary (5 Broken Cameras, 4.10 pm Max), today’s choice itself and the only Frank Sinatra movie that could be mentioned in their company (Von Ryan’s Express, 4.10 pm TCM). It’s a particularly good week for Westerns, with two chances in the week to watch one of the best, even if it didn’t make the cut (The Culpepper Cattle Company, 8 pm tomorrow and again 9.45 pm Thursday, Enc3), a great Scorsese/De Niro remake of a Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum classic film noir (Cape Fear, 10 pm Tuesday TCM) and one of Spike Lee’s most perfectly realised films (25th Hour, 8.15 pm Thursday MaxW). Take a bow, Flow, DirecTV.
Today’s best film: Hard Candy (David Slade/2005/USA/Drama-Thriller/103 mins/Rated R for disturbing violent and aberrant sexual content involving a teen and for language) 2.15 pm Max West. Watch this if you liked Little Children, The Paperboy or The Lives of Others. One of the (relatively) minor awards Hard Candy won was the Phoenix Film Critics Society “Overlooked Film of the Year.” It sums up the film’s unfortunate history—but what else can you expect with a film centred on paedophilia and under-age sex? There are a couple of bumps in story, direction and pacing but, otherwise the film is first rate—and in any case, it is one you watch for the performances, particularly from the young actress, which are so overwhelming that the film really needs nothing more; that it packs in quite a handful of twists is icing on the cake. Long after you forget the plot details, though, Ellen Page’s lead role will haunt you. Almost as rewarding as it is disturbing.
Rest of the week: Scarface (Brian De Palma/1978 Drama-Thriller-Unintentional Comedy/USA/170 mins/R) 10 pm Wednesday Turner Classic Movies. Watch this if liked Goodfellas, Carlito’s Way or The Godfather. For Al Pacino’s Cuban “acceng” alone, Scarface is worthwhile. Treated as an excessively violent cartoon about the cocaine trade in Florida, it’s terrific and offers some of the most quotable dialogue of all time. “Look at you now!” “Fly, pelly-cong, fly!” Sadly, young people—and the director 30 years ago, and still—treat it seriously. As pure escapism, it’s hard to top, though. Say hello to his little freng.
The Ox-Bow Incident (William A Wellman/1943/USA/Western-Crime-Drama/75 mins/Unrated but unsuitable for younger children) 8 pm Friday Turner Classic Movies BEST FILM OF THE WEEK. Watch this if you liked High Noon, Bad Day at Black Rock or Hombre. Though there are limitations modern audiences spoilt by computer-generated special effects might find difficult to overlook, such as the most important scene—the lynching—clearly being shot in a studio, this is one of the great American Westerns. Its many strengths include a great script (based on a true story), superb direction and a magnificent performance from Henry Fonda (and an almost-as-good supporting cast featuring Anthony Quinn). Not so much for the crowd that requires their Westerns to be riddled with bullets as for those who like to leave a film riddled with doubt.
Best of the rest: Mon: Marvel’s The Avengers, 9 pm HBO; Tues: Trouble with the Curve, 6 pm HBO; Wed: Out of Africa, 2.50 pm TCM; Thurs: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 9 pm HBOC; Fri: Major Dundee, 9.20 pm Enc3; Sat: Angel Dog, 6.4 5am HBOF. *Starred films have been chosen in the last three months. Scheduled Internet times often vary on the day, particularly around month-end. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
My wife tells me she's about to cum, but I pull the toy off at the last second and ruin her orgasm. She holds her pussy spread so you can watch her frustrated contractions.
Published by tehdrizzle123 | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Hypostilbia
Hypostilbia is a genus of moths of the family Noctuidae.
References
Natural History Museum Lepidoptera genus database
Category:Hadeninae | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
I truly believe that we will see a prequel and a sequel in the future for the Kill Bill movie. The biggest problem I have with this sequel talk isn’t thefact that QT is thinking of making one, because I would welcome a sequel to this awesome movie but rather people online calling it Kill Bill Volume III. Both Volume I and II are apart of the same movie and make only make up one film. That movie “Kill Bill” is over and there is no such thing as a Volume III because Bill is in fact dead. I truly believe that if QT does go ahead with a sequel the name Bill will not be found in it’s title, maybe will see Kill Bea, or Kill Beatrix.
A prequel would be a whole lot better in my opinion because we’ve seen Bea’s story and getting to see Bill’s would make this movie that much better. How he came to be the man that he was in the Kill Bill movie would be great, and telling the story of his father figures is just a great bonus. Maybe the prequel would have Bill in the title, Bill: A Prequel to the Kill Volume 1, and for each of the father figures there be a different Volume, so all in all there be 3 prequel stories. I personally love the title I’ve come up with, and hopefully I’ll get to see it one day.
I just think that the retro thing about Budd and his relationship to B and Bill would be the Killer story. His character had the most depth in the shortest time and everything about him was the tip of the iceberg and also indicative of alot of stuff happening. Besides, Michael Madsen rocks.
Well if you think about it, it’s not really Volume III. Volume 1 and II are both one and the same, they belong to one movie. The next installment will stand on it’s own. For now let’s call it ‘Kill Beatrix’ because that is what it really is. I still believe that QT should go with my idea of bringing in another assassin to aid Elle Driver, because Beatrix has her companion in B.B. and Sophie has Nikki. I was thinking about it today and it makes senses that this showdown if it goes down like this three way I’m thinking about then this would mean we would get to see not 1, not 2, but 3 Hanzo swords all at once. Beatrix has hers, Sophie would have Bill’s, and Elle would have Budd’s.
I believe that this would make for one hella of a showdown. I believe that when we get to this point when we do see Budd’s sword again Elle would have scratched the inscription right off and all that would remain would be Bill’s name. I myself can’t wait to see what QT does come up with.
This is my first post. I agree with what you are saying. I like that concept. And I too have always wondered why people would call the sequel volume 3; volume 1 and 2 were merely two parts of one movie. There can NEVER be a “Volume 3” as “Volume 2” concludes the “Kill Bill” story. There can be, however, an entirely new movie: Either Kill Bill 2 (notice there’s no “Volume” in there) or, like the Man with No Name trilogy, it could be a totally different name like “The Blind and the Limbless” or “Nikki’s Revenge”. Kill Bill itself is a spinoff of Pulp Fiction; It’s the Pilot from Pulp Fiction, as was mentioned by Mia Wallace. The Fox Force 5 = The Deadly Viper Assasination squad. They merely took out the French one who’s specialty is sex and replaced her with Budd (although i’m guessing Sofie Fatale was the french chick, as she’s said to be “another of Bill’s protege”). So, why are those of you that are so pissed about sequels and whatnot not pissed that Kill Bill is a spin-off of Pulp Fiction? I see the “sequel” to Kill Bill being a spinoff in the way that Kill Bill is a spin-off of Pulp Fiction. Can it really be considered a sequel if the entire premise of the movie is turned upside down; the avenger becoming the avenged? I also like the idea of the prequel, and I too think it should be an Animatrix type affair, rather than a feature film.
[quote=“zeppelincheetah”]Well if you think about it, it’s not really Volume III. Volume 1 and II are both one and the same, they belong to one movie. The next installment will stand on it’s own. For now let’s call it ‘Kill Beatrix’ because that is what it really is. I still believe that QT should go with my idea of bringing in another assassin to aid Elle Driver, because Beatrix has her companion in B.B. and Sophie has Nikki. I was thinking about it today and it makes senses that this showdown if it goes down like this three way I’m thinking about then this would mean we would get to see not 1, not 2, but 3 Hanzo swords all at once. Beatrix has hers, Sophie would have Bill’s, and Elle would have Budd’s.
I believe that this would make for one hella of a showdown. I believe that when we get to this point when we do see Budd’s sword again Elle would have scratched the inscription right off and all that would remain would be Bill’s name. I myself can’t wait to see what QT does come up with.
This is my first post. I agree with what you are saying. I like that concept. And I too have always wondered why people would call the sequel volume 3; volume 1 and 2 were merely two parts of one movie. There can NEVER be a “Volume 3” as “Volume 2” concludes the “Kill Bill” story. There can be, however, an entirely new movie: Either Kill Bill 2 (notice there’s no “Volume” in there) or, like the Man with No Name trilogy, it could be a totally different name like “The Blind and the Limbless” or “Nikki’s Revenge”. Kill Bill itself is a spinoff of Pulp Fiction; It’s the Pilot from Pulp Fiction, as was mentioned by Mia Wallace. The Fox Force 5 = The Deadly Viper Assasination squad. They merely took out the French one who’s specialty is sex and replaced her with Budd (although i’m guessing Sofie Fatale was the french chick, as she’s said to be “another of Bill’s protege”). So, why are those of you that are so pissed about sequels and whatnot not pissed that Kill Bill is a spin-off of Pulp Fiction? I see the “sequel” to Kill Bill being a spinoff in the way that Kill Bill is a spin-off of Pulp Fiction. Can it really be considered a sequel if the entire premise of the movie is turned upside down; the avenger becoming the avenged? I also like the idea of the prequel, and I too think it should be an Animatrix type affair, rather than a feature film.
[/quote]
Woah woah, hold your horses there buddy. Kill Bill IS NOT a spin-off of Pulp Fiction. The Fox Force Five and Deadly Viper Assassination Squad are quite similar, but one cannot call Kill Bill a spin-off solely because of that. Your deductive logic is interesting, but it is false. Furthermore, Kill Bill is in a different universe to Pulp Fiction. Therefore, in no way are these two films related, apart from in ways outside of the actual film e.g. trunk shots, long shots, pop culture dialogue.
I have said it before and I will say it again, I think the idea of another part to Kill Bill is ridiculous. Hopefully, QT has got that out of his system, and I don’t want to see any more Kill Bill stuff for another 15 years. If he makes the other part in 15 years as he has claimed, fair enough. But at the moment, I want him to concentrate on his WWII epic and anything else he may have in the pipeline (Grind House (Grind) etc.)
I’m sure this is way off, and it’s most likely been covered by other people on some other forum, but (and correct me if I’m wrong) isn’t the Sheriff from Vol. 1 the same Sheriff that the Gecko brothers smoked in “From dusk till Dawn”? If so, it’s not a “unique world” unto itself…
The fact that he played the sheriff is irrevelant. QT uses the same actors and actresses in most of his films. What are you going to say next - that Uma Thurman plays a human being with a vagina in Pulp Fiction and in Kill Bill?
That’s cool. I don’t think that the question about him playing the exact same character from another movie was in any way similar to the statement “that Uma Thurman plays a human being with a vagina in Pulp Fiction and in Kill Bill”. Were it that I had said that Michael Madsen Played a guy species and he played a guy in kill bill vol. 2 and somehow that’s the same character, then you’d have warrent to give me shit. But I didn’t. So you don’t.
Also, I asked a question. Didn’t make a statement.
Hence the question mark.
But, according to iMDB, Michael Parks plays Texas Ranger Earl McGraw in both FDtD and KBv1.
what!!! what am I reading? I don’t understand… First of all where’s the option on the poll that says “YES! PRETTY PLEASE WITH A FUCKING CHERRY ON TOP!” ????? Because that’s my choice. Kill Bill 3 would be fucking awsome… only, I donno what it could be about considering Bill is dead (unless it was like a zombie movie then it’d be totally bad ass… zombies with ninja skill at fancy swords woooo)… But, I’ll eat any fuckin’ thing up where cute bitches beat the crap out of each other. ;D | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
December 28, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the rainy, windy and rather mild island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this 28th day of December, 2014, hoping that everyone out in the land had a nice Christmas, Hanukkah or ye ‘ole Festivis for the rest of US– many probably eating a McDonald’s hamburger for their holiday meal or just putting one together via the local food bank..
It has been quite a year–2014–and you are almost no more, alas we only just got to know ye! It began with U.S. President Barack Obama stating loud and clear that ‘this would be the year for ACTION’, believing there may just be some ‘bipartisan’ agreement that this year of 2014 has been nothing but that verb known to all who live and breathe on this little blue rock we all call home for a moment.
Yes, at times it seemed like the world was spinning off it’s axis. There was that overused manipulation of FEAR by corporate media (to boost ratings by chance?), that helped with the hysteria of events that again, seemed to be cataclysmic (taking our minds off of what IS, i.e. Global Warming), such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, culminating in a ‘Chicken Little sky is falling’ overture by FOX and other corporate bull horns. The only case that ended in a U.S. casualty from the disease came in the form of a POOR Liberian man, Mr. Duncan, who had just got off the plane in Dallas, where he was about to be married. Seeing that he was POOR, the hospital gave him two aspirins and instructed him ‘to call them in the morning’ if it got worse. It did. But to those who had top shelf care, the heroic efforts of health care workers for example, they were spared, taking that dreaded dis-EASE and putting it on a shelf to be used another day–’ye ‘ole fear mongering of ‘yore, matey, by whomever needs to use it for whatever purposes corporate media moguls wish to use it for, mostly to manipulate ignorant, fat, lazy Americans who have already pledged alliance to the NRA and the United States ofExxonMobil.
ISIL–the vicious group of maniacal, jihad killers in the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq and Syria, spilling over into some other areas as well–created a fire storm over the summer, with many fearing another 9/11 style attack. The whole of ‘hard fought victories’ in Iraq gone, with that territory now under control of this so called Caliphate, or new Islamic State that harkens back to the days of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Turning the whole of Syria into just that, a big pile of rock, rubble and dust, with that country’s people fleeing by the millions, leaving a giant hole where there was once life. This too was overplayed by the media, and with the constant flow of video of the horrible be-headings of U.S. and Ally citizens. None so high profile as that of one American journalist James Foley (along with several others killed, in highly publicized, high profile killings, slick social media hype by the killers designed to strike fear in the hearts of people in the West, recruit young, disillusioned youth world wide, as well as dissuading journalists from doing their jobs), overplayed because that is what this radical new jihadist group wanted most--media exposure!
The midterm elections were this year, lest we forget, and what fun that was! Yes? No, it wasn’t. Although it turned out well for Republicans, for they won back control of the U.S. Senate, adding to their already solid majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mitch, “the mouse”, McConnell is now, by default, the new so called ‘leader’ of the U.S. Senate, sorry I think I just spit something up there, what is that Kale?, where was I? Ah, leader McConnell, you have a drink with that guy, says the President and man! Cheers! I am sure he is still thinking that same sentiment as he enjoys some beach time in Hawaii.
For all of that darkness that we ‘consumed’ over the course of a year that almost was, 2014, (via our I-phones, tablets, TV’s, computers, satellites, or whatever else you may be using ‘to get your news’), over that long, dusty, dirty and dangerous course of these past 12 months, there were three distinct rays of LIGHT that made all of that just kind of ‘go away’… One, a giant deal brokered by Obama and China over the climate. A climate that Sea Cape Cod has spoken of from ‘time to time’…
A climate that will–if we don’t act soon on reducing OUR spewing of Carbon Dioxide, Methane and other green house gases into the atmosphere–change radically very soon, with effects already being felt world wide even as I write these words. It was ten years ago yesterday when a Tsunami crushed Indonesia and 14 other counties with giant waves that killed over 200,000 people, prompting questions about the safety of people living too close to an ocean that is only rising (the actual SEA level), because the WE are making the earth warmer. Green house gasses like a blanket around the earth, as the polar ice caps melt, polar bears go to Heaven and the mass migrations begin in earnest. All while oil and gas company’s continue making record profits, PROFIT over people… Although THAT will change quickly as the people of planet earth begin to wake up to the FACT we are not going to have a planet to ’spend money in’ if it does not exist. Comprende?
The second ray of sun light came from putting an end to a stupid 50 year old embargo of a beautiful country 90 miles off the coast of Florida--Cuba! Normalizing relations with that island nation will put and end to the decades long ‘Cold War’ for good, even as Russia counties rattling a saber–Vladimir Putin’s regime under pressure as his economic ‘plan’ falls victim to intense and crippling sanctions imposed by the U.S. and her allies for Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, legally still part of Ukraine. For as a ‘gas station economy’ goes, Russia has no real relief ahead with gas prices continuing to fall, putting the quasi-kleptocrat in a rather odd position. Eventually exposing himself to what he has done, like Fox “news” in this country, the willful act of pulling the wool over the Russian people’s eyes about well, anything of substance. And when it comes to his activities for “Mother Russia” and all, not really for the vast majority of Russian peoples…
The third ray of light came in the form of ACTION on the growing U.S. problem of immigration. a problem you might think we would have a pretty good handle on by now, seeing that we are a nation of immigrants, some German/Irish, some African-American, some Asian-American, but all American by gosh, by golly! The ‘action’ that got such an uproar in Washington (action was taken by President Obama just before Thanksgiving), is really quite simple and quite HUMANE! It gives protection from deportation and a temporary work permit to over 5 million undocumented (and very dangerous illegal aliens!) people living in this country, effectively living under the shadows. People living lives in fear that they, their mom, their dad, their sister, or their brother would be deported, thus breaking up the family unit and for what? A few bloviated political points Mitch and John? This overdue move by Obama was long over due and a great Christmas present that starts the ball rolling for a more permanent and comprehensive immigration bill that will tackle this issue once and for all. WE don’t need more security ‘on the border’ (according to people working the border!), and we don’t need more laws that keep families apart, making it hard for them to eek out a living.
The very smart, brave and human action taken by ourvery fine President Barack Obama is just getting warmed up. For he is NOT your lame duck president, no sir! Like he said, “…I am not going to waste a minute in these next two years getting things done for the American people,” and I believe him. It is quite clear to anyone with eyes that the much of OUR “system”, such as the U.S. JUSTICE system, is rigged in favor of the white, wealthy majority and that must change if we plan to keep this country a democracy with a little letter ‘d’. The killings of mostly poor, African-American males under 30 in this nation by police will be addressed in the coming months via the President’s task force whose report is due out soon, and will outline what MUST be done to keep these horrible crimes to a minimum. Making sure that what happened to Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, (as well as the NYPD officers killed in the line of duty, may they rest in peace), does not happen again.
‘Creating a more perfect Union’ begins at the grass roots level, therefore there again must be some kind of peace between peace officers and black youth across this great land of OURS. A black youth who are disenfranchised and disillusioned by a future America that does not seem to include them, in fact, an America that goes out of it’s way (society) to shun these young men. Young men who are just as human and just as worthy of LOVE, LIGHT and DIVINITY as you or I.
So, on a rather wet day here at the Hyannis/Hyannis Port Waterfront, I bid you a fine and fair adieu! May you and yours enjoy the last days of 2014, and “Welcome in 2015″ with a bang! I pray that it is a “kinder, gentler” (credit George H.W. Bush, get well sir!), year for US all, hoping against hope that this new Republican majority has learned some lessons from their witch hunts with Benghazi, “Obamacare”, the IRS, and any number of other ‘outrages’ this ‘Emperor’, the KING OBAMA, has wrought upon an unsuspecting nation, none so bad as his caring action on immigration that kept millions of kids in their mom and dad’s loving arms on Christmas Day!…what could be more wonderful than that? So put your egos on hold 114th U.S. Congress and roll up your collective sleeves, consider actually getting something done for the average American for a change! As opposed to what you were hired to do…doing the bidding for special interest/corporate agendas that are kept in the dark and sprung upon ‘the American people’, via hidden quietly in “must pass” appropriations bills no one is paying attention to ‘this time of year’, thus leaving a giant risk unattended on Wall Street’s dark cavern…
Leaving no one living on that spooky and secretive street losing any sleep’, for they know ‘they are too big to fail’ and if anything goes wrong with their little “credit default swaps” in this new and improved casino called Wall Street, those ‘American people’ the GOP keeps talking about as if they really cared about said “American people”, will bail them out once again, even as they lose trillions (once again) in their collective 401(k)’s. All while the rich get richer and richer, the .0001 percent baby! As the Dow Jones Industrial hitting new highs yesterday, all time highs of 18,054! And the GDP, meaning almost nothing to the average American any more, hitting a healthy 5 percent! Who is the President right now Mitch? That’s right, and don’t you forget it! Gas prices below 2 bucks? Give it up for President Barack Obama Man! He is the man!
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!
PRESERVE THAT WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 25, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the rain, windy island of Nantucket! Merry Christmas to one and all, keeping perhaps this unknown poem of ‘yore part of a kind of ‘road map’ for the next century or two…hope you all have a great day and rest of the holiday season!
Desiderata
‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there maybe in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant, they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you become vain and bitter; for their will always be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for all the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly to the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond and wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees or the stars;you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life,
keep pace with your soul.
With all its sham drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
Be careful.
Strive to be happy.
~Unknown
Happy New Year!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 24, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the dark and stormy; brightly lit island of Nantucket! Great to be with ye on this holy night in most of the world, Christmas Eve, the night before Jesus was born roughly 2014 years ago? Not really quite sure on the math, nor is anyone else really, but what the hey, it’s Christmas Eve!
And a Happy and Merry Christmas to you and yours, even if you don’t celebrate it, perhaps opting for ‘A Festivis for the rest of us’, via an old Seinfeld reference that I am sure we are all quite tired of by now.
Whatever one’s belief, or complete absence of one to begin with, or maybe that ‘void’ is a recent thing, whatever ‘it’ is, one thing is for sure–the reality of a season, be it Christmas, Hanaka, or any number of other faiths that value love, family, joy and peace as much as ‘the rest of us’, like the one we are in right now–seems to bring out the best in people. (or the worst in people, to wit you have the power to avoid and completely disregard as the insanity that ‘it’ is after all).
Giving a person a smile as opposed to a frown. Opening a door instead of closing one in anger. Sending a card when you could have sent an email instead. Making ‘time’ by giving someone yours unconditionally. Turning that time into LOVE. More than just a sentiment, a Force, that travels faster than the speed of light to the power of infinity, brighter than a thousand suns…
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Sea Cape Cod everybody!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 23, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the rainy, raw, windy island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this 23rd day of December, just about time for Santa to come down the chimney, but, hey, hold on a moment! It’s also Hanuka! “The Season of Lights”–(p.s. “full disclosure”, did I say that right?, I and all of the people I know, give thanks, praise and above all full and honored credit for possibly illegally using CBS’ image of candle seen by above on what I assume is an image of a CBS owned TV, I hope you don’t mind, thanks a bunch CBS, you’re the best!)–where a candle is lit as a symbol of a miracle that happened a long, long time ago, it’s a long story that someone better than a one time summer camp counselor at Camp Tel Noar in New Hampshire, lifeguard, bike instructor/guide, can tell you! I believe it’s something about a candle that never really went out, a true symbol of gratitude and the fact miracles happen everyday; it’s just that many of us, including this reporter, miss so many of them along this journey we call LIFE, one we all take together and get to share in, hopefully not too consumed by the glow of the fake light of an I pad, I pod, I am?
Yes, that’s right ‘all ye merry gentlemen it’s Hanaka once again, or nearing the end of it for this year anyway…Perhaps not a holiday that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison celebrated, but would have , as they truly embraced the notion of religious freedom and the freedom of peaceful expression of said religious convictions. Yes, Hanaka...a celebration of eight days of gift giving, thanks and celebration for all of the bounty we truly have in this beautiful world we all share as one race…the human race. (although, some have a whole lot more than others, so to those I hope there is bounty as well)
The weather is stormy across the northern parts of the United States this Tuesday morning, as busy traffic streams past my office window here at the Hyannis/Hyannis Port Waterfront. The lights of this village, as well as the rest of villages, towns, suburbs and cities, not only in Massachusetts, but Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, all six New England states, really do Christmas up right. I mean, take Nantucket’s Christmas Stroll every year as an example of greatness. Norman Rockwell in 2014, would still have been a very busy painter to be sure; a rather odd and almost divine perspective on small town life. An eye comprehending just how beautiful this country, indeed it’s people, really are. From the dogs and cats, children and old style garb, harkens one back to the days when things were just a little less complicated, less fraught with anger, rage, doubt, pity, outrage, injustice, more injustice, revenge, violence, oppression, suppression, ah, the list goes on ad infinite.
However, there is a word that we all want to embrace with all of our collective hearts, and that word is peace. May ALL victims of violence, whomever, wherever, or whatever they are, may those who have been wronged be healed, be somehow given the light you see above and in that light be at peace with the Force that isLOVE.
Forgiveness is a hard nut to crack, I know, but I hope this Nation, and the good people who live in it, find it in their hearts to forgive their ‘enemies’; because in and by doing that, you not only set yourself free, you free them as well. Kind of a win-win. A Happy Holiday for everyone concerned…
Have a nice day!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 22, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the partly sunny, showery, mild island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Monday morning, the 22nd day of December, 2014. A bright early morning here on Cape, the calm before the storm as it were, and I just thought I might just add a little holiday cheer (or maybe not) to your hopefully shortened work week, seeing that it is Christmas on Thursday after all–I’m looking at you Walmart! Walmart, “always slave wages” who make our employees work every holiday known to mankind! Blessings to all the Walton Family! Cheers!
That’s right folks, it’s America’s favorite family, ‘The Waltons’? If only it were that TV family of yesteryear (1970’s), as opposed to the richest family in America today and most scrooge like corporation this world may have ever seen, save ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Chevron, IBM, ah, the list is as long as the hundreds of college bowl games named after these ‘kind’ and ‘generous‘ organizations that are hell bent on making as much money as they can, giving very little back to the community of employees they that nickle and dime to death everyday…
“Hey Michael, where’s the Christmas spirit? You had yesterday, filled with love and compassion?” I don’t know, if you find it let me know. I suppose I am sad that one of my favorite people on the planet earth, entertainer that is, Craig Ferguson, former host of the “Late, Late, Show” (on CBS), had his last show on Friday night, well at least it aired on Friday, with a great song sung by his many friends in the Hollywood scene. “Beat you own drum” was the theme as my favorite “fake” horse, robot and Rhino, band (that exists only on a digital board) and a host that reminds me of my days living in Great Britain, where I spent a lot my time in Edinburgh. where as we all know by now, “…if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” It is the year of the horse, and good luck to that whole cast and crew and I hope that horse of Craig’s is put on to pasture with some really nice looking fillies in say Kentucky; stocked to the brim with premium oats, fertile blue grass and clean drinking water. Far, far away from any of mankind’s folly of fracking our way into destroying God’s green earth–namely our vital, precious and irreplaceable WATER supply!
This new 114th Congress that will roll on into Washington D.C. in a few weeks will most likely be a JOKE, just like the 113th. And why wouldn’t it be? Nothing has changed in this coming plutocratic takeover of OUR democracy with that little letter ‘d’! Republicans (who work for billionaires vowing to become Oligarchs like those living in Vladimir Country(s)), have no plans in helping out the nearly 315 million people now living in this torn country. A country that has seemingly lost it’s way, for the word Capitalism has overtaken most people’s souls, i.e. black Friday and the like, never understanding that rampant GREED and EGO have no place in public service–many with those with an “R” next to their name, no good in the slightest.
The only time one truly receives LOVE is when it is given freely—without some political ‘Angle’.
The Grinch will rear his ugly head in this new U.S. Congress come January 2015, mark my words, and without the help of great U.S. Senators’ like Massachusetts Senator extraordinaire, Elizabeth Warren to break us out of our collective stupor, such as allowing big banks to do the same thing again (using YOUR money to bet against you on risky ventures called ‘credit default swaps”--still going on like gang busters on Wall Street– ‘derivatives’ some call them (the REASON for the big crash that hurt so many people–to the tune of trillions lost in American family 401(k)’s)–big banks will now KNOWINGLY (because they know they will be bailed out again because they are deemed ‘too big to fail’), continue to gamble with YOUR money and, like they did in 2000?-2008, perhaps once again CRASH the whole of the U.S. and world economies. Hurting them not in the slightest, not at all, only billions of the ‘little’ people (the 99 percent!), while they make billions, lo, trillions of dollars from your misfortune of TRUSTING a Republican in this 21st Century America. It’s your choice people, not mine, but do you really want to see them get away with it again?
If that happened again, taking this country back to those dark days of Bush and Cheney, taking us back to fear mongering and blatant financial criminality to wit NO bank executive went to jail! Holding America hostage once again almost to the point of no return if the American tax payer did not bail them all out. When that happens again, WE, the ‘little people’, will once again be on the hook for their GREED, and like Dr. Seuss’ the “Grinch”, could not give a rats ass about it. Laughing all the way to the bank they OWN, getting 0 percent interest to ‘rebuild the house of cards once again’, while giving Mr. and Mrs. America a loan at say 20 percent? Sounds like a loan shark deal to me old Mitt buddy. “…old pal of mine from the ‘Bailey Savings and Loan’, I mean BANE Capital! (not misspelling by the way)… I just love this Corporation that hurts the little people so much, while it touts itself as a person…I’m giving the BANE some of my plasma for Christmas, how ‘about you?
As the now all white, I mean all Republican and mostly male U.S. Congress attempts to bully our very fine President Barack Obama, in the coming year–who is presently enjoying a well DESERVED vacation in Hawaii–I hope they take a good long look in the mirror and ask the question, “…what do Ireally stand for?”. Or, better yet, am I really a Christian or just a big, fat hypocrite of the highest order? A vacation from this grouping of men and women (puppets with strings), will be a blessing and I pray he gets some R&R by gosh, by golly! I mean come on! A break from these tiny minded wipers of other people’s bottoms’, men and women who work for U.S. plutocrats at present. Mental patients some, or what they like to be called, ‘members of Congress’, ladies and gentlemen of the U.S. Senate who have gone out of their way to make sure the wealthiest among US, the top .001 percent, the only reason for their job and/or existence on planet earth. Lying to themselves and their constituents of the 80’s voodoo economics of the ghost of former President Ronald Reagan’s trickle down theory that was nonsense to begin with save some of that ‘trickling down’ to the top say 10 percent if they’re lucky and really good at kissing someone’s behind. Yes, as the President enjoys some golf, surfing, hiking, and perhaps reading a good book or viewing some great movies that Hollywood does not seem to make any more, such as Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, starring the late, greats, Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart, I hope he and his family find some peace and serenity in world that has seemingly gone quite mad indeed…
Yes, perhaps this very good man–history books, the real ones, will prove–may just take a break from Sony Pictures for a while and let the rats handle this one… For although their lawyers took a rather mouse like approach because of $ fears, perhaps losing billions in now far more important markets of China and the like, always about the bottom line in America eh?, so who really cares? If they take out the Kennedy Memorial (God Forbid) let me know, I will sign up and fight in a heart beat!
So take a break from said Republican a$$holes in D.C., you know who you are deep down in your bones!, they’ll be there when you get back! Take a break from the fence jumpers, and a Secret Service that needs a big overhaul. Take a break from Vladimir Putin and his giant EGO. Take a break from the well, let’s just say the INSANITY that now defines Washington, D.C., where it is now all too clear that we live in two separate countries. One that caters to mostly white, affluent Americans, and one that does not. I mean that, so much so they are not even invited into that previous sentence. Nor will most of them ever know that TRUTH because many don’t even have water (see Detroit), let alone broadband Internet access. The big providers attempting to keep America as much in the dark as possible, so there is not a revolution or a transfer of wealth like there is right now in the U.S. with the deregulation of the energy sector…i.e. ‘natural gas’ and other drilling practices that are wiping out species after species!!! SHAME on YOU ALL!
My only wish for Christmas besides world peace, is a world awakened to the fact we are all in this together. Waking up to the FACT the planet is melting at an exponential pace all due to our own ignorance/stupidity/GREED, as we allow these monstrous oil and gas international conglomerates to destroy planet earth for their PROFIT! Not only in this next generation, but for every future generation that comes after it. A corporate takeover resulting in greed even Jesus would blush at. A ‘mission statement’ from hell that Alfred Hitchcock could not have written any better. A corporate agenda of all out greed, coupled with a political coup that will kill every living creature in it’s path (it already is as 50 percent of plant/animal species have gone extinct in the past 40 years due only to MAN), before all is said and done.
IF WE DON’T FIGHT BACK!
“…I’m dreaming of a White Christmas…”, so am I Bing Crosby, so am I! God Bless you all and have a nice Christmas if I don’t SEA you before that. And even if you don’t believe in some supreme intelligence, GOD if you will; he may just believe in you! We will all miss you Craig Ferguson, you drunken donkey! and most of all, I will miss the horse! God Bless US EVERYONE! Even you Charles and David Koch!
May you think long and hard about what your grand kids world (environment) will look like fifty years from this ChristmasDAY!….
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 21, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the cool, cloudy. gracefully illuminated island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Saturday morning on Cape, the 21st day of December, 2014–a quiet start to the day here on this little sand bar created 11,500 years ago by the Last Great Ice Age. Although with the forecast ‘in these here parts’ (and most of the country), travelers now educating themselves presently about the fact that weather is about to change–in a big way. Two major storm systems are going to impact holiday travel, one of the Pacific Northwest variety, six inches in Seattle for example (as we speak), while a deep upper level low (creating major weather events), will bring a white Christmas to the good folks in the Midwest, while the much of the eastern seaboard, especially the Cape & Islands, expecting torrential downpours and strong winds on Christmas Eve… So I hope Santa packed his Patagonia and Timberland boots, or is it L.L. Bean “mighty duck” foul weather footwear and a nice North Face parka?…
You be the judge!
Yesterday, late afternoon, in New York City (Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant District), a man armed with a gun walked up to a squad car and killed two of New York City’s finest–“assassinated”, shot in the head, executed (words Police Chief/NYPD), in cold blood–truly good men, good policemen just doing their job. A real tragedy that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that again, ‘…two wrongs don’t make a right’.
The Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio condemned the act of senseless violence (even when the police turned their collective backs on a man just trying to make his city whole again). So did the many black family members whose children were also victims of violence by the police no less. The very definition of empathy and forgiveness finally coming forward to quell the ongoing chasm between law enforcement and black community at large. The murder condemned by most of the African-American community across the Nation as well, not to mention so many great and prominent black leaders in America today, such as Reverend Al Sharpton here in New York and Reverend Barber (NAACP; North Carolina), calling the act “unspeakable” and “abhorrent”. Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s families echoing that sentiment. Lo, all who have a heart, an ounce on humanity and simple common decency doing the same, as we all know by now, I will state again, that two wrongs do not make a right. May Divine Grace be with those slain officer’s families–especially that 13 year old boy who lost his Dad–devastated by the fact his father will never again be coming home from his shift. Keeping us ever aware of the fact MOST officers sworn to “protect and serve” do just that, some in an extraordinary way, like the Seattle police officers Sea Cape Cod spoke of a few months back.
Just like Eric Garner’s wife will not be seeing her husband for Christmas, or little Tamir Rice’s mother, or that mother who spoke about that horrible hanging that took place recently in the heart of the country that got little to NO press; a modern day lynching that most of the press and police have ignored to this point; save the F.B.I.. May they find out the TRUTH from those responsible for yet another crime against humanity, a modern day lynching by what appears to a a very disturbed racist community. In this day and age of the video camera at everyone’s disposal, we are all movie stars, directors, producers, actors, techies, and vulnerable to that spotlight on OUR behavior towards our fellow man–who might just turn out to be not your ‘enemy’, rather your friend in the end.
The question all are asking this holiday season is simply, “…when does all of this madness stop?”. When does a big mouth ‘leader’ of the police union for the NYPD just shut his big yapper–his belligerent, ignorant and I am sure racist makeup and voice is “not helping” matters. In fact, they are inflaming them, making them much worse. As he said yesterday at a big press conference in New York, and I quote, “the death and blood of these two officers leads to the steps of City Hall and to the Mayor himself.” A real piece of work that Patrick Lynch.
It’s Christmas people!
However, that did not stop the continued protests against what has become an epidemic of anti-police bullying and harassment, violence and coverup against mostly poor minority communities. Shutting down that “Largest Mall in America” for all intents and purposes yesterday for example. People once again taking sides. Siding against “I can’t breathe” tee-shirts, opting instead for shirts, wristbands and the like all reading, “I can breathe” (tee-shirts worn by police?, to combat the vast majority opinion in the U.S.? Smart, very smart!), good for you! I just wish I could say the same for Eric Garner, Tamir Rice or Michael Brown.
The police union in New York on the side of indifference to what is really going on in our American society in this late year of 2014, claiming they ‘couldn’t get all their shopping done’, and ‘it disrupted the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree…”: really? Is that all you have to say in what will turn out to be the beginning of a giant spotlight put on policing in this 21st Century split (haves and have nots) America?
Stay tuned, moreover, informed/educated by credible non-biased sources (such as the programming Sea Cape Cod suggested in previous ‘blogs’), and for God’s sakes, not FOX “News”. Making up one’s own mind about this growing problem of a “US v. them” mentality is disturbing to say the least. However, in reality, the real reality, we are ALL NOW connected in the world of social media and truly one collective soul experiencing this life subjectively. We should be LIVING every moment of this blessed season of LOVE, LIGHT and DIVINITY in our hearts, minds and souls. Forgiving the past and embracing the future. One that can be attained in this country if there is a shift in conscienceness from hate to LOVE, one we could SEA in our lifetimes if you all pull together as a team, a team of loving human beings not hell bent on killing one another. The choice, FREE WILL, is up to you.
It is up to us, individually, to hate, or to love. No one else can make that decision for you. Hate hurts not only it’s victims, but hurts it’s perpetrator much more in the ‘end’. Not one person on this planet has lost any of those traits, those God given eternal blessings from above and forever. Tragically, most of that is hidden and stored away for a variety of reasons only you can truly know. Thus, we should all act accordingly–offering KINDNESS to strangers…remembering words stated by the man whose birthday we are celebrating in a few hours, ‘When someone asks for your coat, offer him your tunic as well…”.
The gift of giving LOVE to those in need, such as the simple act of giving a blanket, a sandwich or some crumpled up dollar bills you may have in you pocket to a homeless person is a good start (not being so high and mighty as to say to those you don’t give anything to (and have NOTHING but despair and desolation in their ‘lives’), “get a job!” or my favorite, “they will only spend it on booze or drugs”, perhaps the only Christmas relief they may get in a life that may not last for much longer, many homeless freezing to death or dying of malnutrion or a myriad of diseases that are wrought upon them because they live on the street and lack health care or love of any kind, only cold sarcasm and snark from men in 1000 dollar suits! Good luck in the after life with that one Mr. Goldman Sachs!
You never know just how far that act of random KINDNESS will take you, but more to the point–THEM. That ‘them’ that could be YOU someday, remembering that it truly is, at least for this cowboy, “…but for the Grace of God go I”. Grace and whatever you perceive ‘God’ to be; a POWER much greater than “me” or you MItt!
Arrogance is ugly; Humility is beautiful, desired by both receiver and recipient equally…
There is no, “at the end of the day”, ‘an us and them’, no sir! Only one human race, one Collective Conscience, and contrary to popular belief, it’s not money that makes the world go round, rather LOVE.
LOVE, after all, was BORN on Christmas Day!
Our thoughts and prayers go out to those slain officers families as well as the families suffering through these painful holidays without their loved ones’ who were also gunned down brutally. May the spirit of forgiveness and mercy follow you and yours the rest of your days, bringing your peace and perhaps JOY someday. It is what your fallen family members would have wanted for you and any other victim out there in this rather insane world we are all living in now. Catching glimpses though, from ‘time’ to ‘time’, of heroism, charity, mercy, kindness and above all LOVE.
Have a wonderful Sunday and “May the Force Be with You” all. A Force (LOVE) that our friend Jesus–whom this whole season of Christmas is based upon, stated over 2000 years ago will, if you allow it, transform your hate back into that natural state aforementioned. And if you give that LOVE away, it only multiplies exponentially across the unseen universe we all really live in. Take care and be well my friends, be WELL!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 19, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the cool, partly cloudy and festive island of Nantucket! Great to be with you early on a Friday morning, the 19th day of December, 2014. A good day to be alive on this wonderful planet of ours wouldn’t you agree?
There is never a dull moment, that I will give you. If you can handle all of the deceit, political horse hockey, racial tensions, economic inequality, rigged systems, global warming, and the occasional international hack of a major motion picture operation, well, you are doing just fine young lad, just fine. Who said 24 hour cable news would be easy?
The whole world, it seems, has gone quite mad. No one really knowing what the hell they are doing, including this reporter, just ‘phoning it in’ today, as I feel like being entertained all of a sudden at this five a.m. hour (only fifteen minutes ’till “Morning Joe”, only on MSNBC!). That’s right, this ‘Free Bird’ (credit Ari Melber, co-host of “The Cycle”, weekdays at three p.m. sharp), has had his fill of 24/7 coverage of the historic lifting of isolation and embargo on that poor island nation of Cuba, our neighbor 90 miles south of Florida. ‘May the force be with those islanders whose cars harken back to another era in this country–the 1950’s. A time of relative peace and stability in the world–we all remember the great U.S. President Eisenhower don’t we?, McFly?–none so much as right here in the good ‘ole US of A.
Even with all of it’s social insanity, gender/racial repression, i.e. “Mad Men”, art imitating life, showcasing some of the very worst character flaws in the American male makeup, and rather backward political thinking by the ‘powers that were’, e.g. ‘The Red Scare’, McCarthy and the rampant paranoia that gripped the Nation at the time, apart from all that, that decade is repeated and pined for more than one might think in this 21st Century America…
But is that not what makes this country great in the first place? The fact that it keeps reinventing itself decade after young decade? We are never stale, this UnitedStates of America, recalling that it is clearly our diversity that makes this so. We take the good from every decade, leaving the ‘bad’ behind. (unless you are Bill O’Reilly of FOX). With every step forward–be it police body cameras or lifting a fifty year old embargo on spare parts for a ‘car’ that was long overdue for a tune up–this country becomes more of that BEACON it was born to be, namely an example to the world, and we should never forget that as a country. Leaders concerned with human beings just trying to live, love, laugh, cry on occasion, eventually giving back to the people who make it all happen…our community. A righteous cycle indeed.
Community is inclusive, not exclusive. When we look at the TV and see our brothers and sisters in Cuba driving around in a 1957 Chevy, hundreds of them, Fords too, driving around on an island that looks as if ‘time’ stood still, taking in images of John F. Kennedy, remembering those horrific 13 days when we did not know if there was going to be a ‘tomorrow’ (please Google “Cuban Missal Crisis, October 22, 1962), we should be grateful this country has turned out as good as it really has, even with all it’s faults, it is still a great Nation. As the silent horse states at 12:30 a.m. every night on CBS, ‘…Your future’s just tomorrow, yesterday!’ (credit “The Late, Late Show” with outgoing host Craig Ferguson, well done sir!).
That ‘tomorrow’ looks like it does outside of your own window this early a.m., quite different than it did in 1957, and for that, this reporter is eternally grateful. For we all complain about ‘the state of the world’, none so much as those filthy, dirty, hippies; the ‘tree huggin’ types, you know who you are, present company included. But for all that complaining, deep down is gratitude. At least we live in a country where we can make a movie about a little dictator in a little country that is also frozen in ‘time’, North Korea, and even if it did not ‘work out’ for Sony, I’m sure all of the ‘uproar’ in Hollywood about ‘taking a stand’ against, what are we taking a stand against? Oppression? No? Censorship and terrorism? I see. Even though we will eventually find the ‘right answer’ to this outrageous hacking of information in the world of cyberspace, a journey that goes nowhere save away from true love and redwoods, at least you can sit back and real eyes that you do not live in either Cuba or North Korea. That you and yours can enjoy this beautiful Christmas season, ooops, “Holiday Season” rather, in a wealthy country called the United States. And know you really are quite safe in the universe, taking a break from all the ‘outrage’ and violence on the TV machine, taking in some eggnog instead. I mean come on! It’s not all a drag. There’s always NASCAR if you get really bored!
Have a great week end and enjoy the LIGHT of the season, perhaps sending some to those darkened corners of the world that need it the most. Knowing that we are all connected somehow and that darkness is just an illusion, a fact illuminated by that very illumination.
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 18, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the cool, overcast, misty island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Thursday morning, the 18th day of December, 2014, just a few days before the big day where kids ranging in age from two to ninety-two await what may be in Santa’s Sleigh… Who knows?
I am just grateful that I watched Ari Melber filling in for Chris Hayes’ on MSNBC’s “All IN” last night– (weeknights at eight sharp, followed by “TRMS” at nine and “The Last Word”, with Lawrence O’Donnell at ten p.m., eastern… not a paid AD, rather a plug for these venerable shows, as they offer what the old Mike Wallace style “60 Minutes” offered it’s audience–THE TRUTH), informed of not only the historic move by President Obama late yesterday,normalizing relations with the island nation of Cuba (first time since Fidel Castro staged a coup, laying claim to the Cuban government in 1959. Relations decimated in 1961 with President Jack Kennedy’s attempted overthrow of the Cuban dictator, via a covert CIA backed rebel operation that became known as “The Bay of Pigs”. An exercise that failed on a world wide stage as Castro called to the former Soviet Union’s Premier Khrushchev for help, fearing after the “Mongoose” raids Cuba was ripe for a hostile occupation by the U.S.. The ship only to be righted, if you will, on October 22, 1962 (13 days of a very real nuclear standoff, the nation and world in stark fear), when President Kennedy and his brother Bobby stood tall against the naked aggression of the then Soviet Union, attempting to deliver those nuclear missals to that island state, the whole world truly watching in a state of paralytic fear…
In fact, if it were not for the heroic efforts of then President John F. Kennedy, there is a very distinct possibility none of us would be here right now, and not that unlike the very gutsy move by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who stood up for the scientists by stating he was not one when it came to the age old question of whether precious ‘jobs’ and PROFIT (that come from dirty, polluting fracking practices), are more important than public health and the environment. Governor Cuomo chose the latter.
You may ask, “…what do these two events really have in common?”. Plenty. The oil and gas industry per OUR elected government–for at least the past decade, especially when it comes to this horrible FRACKING for ‘natural gas’ (Methane)–have been putting the burden of proof (whether FRACKING is destroying the air, water and soil; ruining people’s health, the health of the animals that share this planet with us–the overall environment itself for future generations), on it’s citizens, not those corporations who heretofore have been writing the legislation via A.L.E.C. (please Google at your convenience!). Like the Soviets back in the early sixties attempting to place a nuclear threat at the foot of this great country of ours, the big oil and gas companies have been running rough shod over the ordinary citizens who unbeknownst to them, have been hoodwinked into believing that ‘natural gas’ is the ‘way to go’, being wicked clean and all. Hor$e$hit! Ask the good people of Rifle, Colorado! They’ll tell ya how ’safe’ the water is, lighting up the lovely remodeled bathroom’s boudoir with a cool blue flame if you put a match anywhere near it!
The State of New York has effectively BANNED fracking, ushering in an historic day for environmental movements all across this great country of ours, a true GRASS ROOTS movement designed to keep WATER at the forefront of OUR collective consciousness, demanding that WE do the right thing for our children and our children’s children. Allowing them to grow up in a world where there kitchen sink does not represent a circus trick; a bad joke lighting up when you put a lighter to it. Methane being very flammable and toxic to any living thing if breathed in for an extended period of ‘time’.
Stay tuned, for FRACKING is not going away anytime soon. However, yesterday the paradigm shifted–BIG TIME. No longer is the burden of proof, the epic responsibility, laid at the feet of ordinary citizens to stand up to billion dollar corporations when it comes to how much pollution is REALLY poisoning our air, water and soil. Since 2008–certainly since this all started with former U.S. VPDick Cheney’s “Halliburton Loophole of 2005″ (opening up public land in Wyoming to hydraulic fracturing of shale rock to attain the methane trapped within said rock, the beginning of the fracking boom)–there has been scant to no peer reviewed papers on this subject of fracking, let alone any real look see into what those 700 or so fracking chemicals really are (and how they interact with the overall environment) all about.
What’s with all the secrecy ExxonMobil? and the rest of ‘the fracking brotherhood’?
As of today, according to the great environmentalist/documentary artist Josh Fox, creator of the must see HBO film(s), “Gasland and Gasland II”, there is a peer reviewed paper produced–about fracking and it’s impact on the overall environment–about once a day now, with over 400 written thus far, creating a REAL force that WILL change this industry forever, cleaning up this whole fracking mess before ALL of this nations’ water supplies are tainted beyond ‘repair’–WATER=LIFE morons, got it?
…Stay tuned! Same bat time, same bat channel my friends!
So there you have it folks! A good day to be an American! Chalk one up for the good guys! Sea Cape Cod salutes you and wishes you and yours a very Happy Holiday indeed. And thank you Ari Melber, fill in host of the year at MSNBC, I hope you get your own show someday soon, Merry Christmas!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 17, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the drizzly, foggy and mild island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this Wednesday, the 17th day of December, 2014, another rain event on Cape, with three storms expected over the next week or so, keeping shoppers and carolers alike in need of some quality foul weather gear, especially if ye be going out on the yacht today,small craft advisory and all matey.
Hollywood is still all a flutter this morning over the hacking of Sony Pictures, moreover, the controversy and cancellation of one of it’s new releases, “The Interview”, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, both celebrity and movie being put on hold for the moment, with safety concerns getting top billing at present.
This has, of course, evoked memories of the old Bush Administration “threat level” alerts, going from crazy orange to crazier red in a Texas minute, you betcha!, as the group responsible for the attacks “Guardians of the Peace”, evoked the phrase, “…September 11″, threatening that if Sony released the picture world wide, it may come with possible attacks on U.S. theaters playing the film–a threat discounted by Homeland Security–which of course has everybody saying, “…we are not going to cower to terrorists”, ironically the premise of the comedy in the first place, in fact, the premise being one of ‘taking out’ the leader of North Korea, joking of course. Poking fun at the rather ridiculous baby leader of a very Orwellian like nation, North Korea, who I am sure is just starving for some attention seeing that there are no more American hostages in that dark, depressing and very paranoid nation state. Former Detroit Piston and international deliverer of Jack Daniels and other top shelf liquors, Dennis Rodman, opting out of seeing his old buddy Kim Jong-un, claiming he’s busy catching some ‘killer waves’ at ‘the Wedge’ in Newport Beach, way to busy decorating the beach house for Christmas to get all caught up in this little misunderstanding between Sony Pictures and the People’s Republic of North Korea… Good call Dennis.
The film’s release on Christmas day, along with the premier (and all press junkets for the stars of the film), have been cancelled, begging the question in this day and age of in your face digital reality, a reality that is stripping the walls from the seeming separateness that exists between human beings, who’s next?
For it truly is a brave new world, where even the police will be under some kind of camera ’surveillance’… Assuming the good police officers don’t turn off the newly approved police body cameras and public defenders have equal access to the content, UN-edited content mind you. This IS a brave new world of transparency, so we all better get used to it.
Very little will be kept in secret in the coming years, with no one in the clear, no one truly unaffected. Just like Global Warming, this security will be challenging and thus, keep everyone on their collective toes, perhaps realizing that we are really all in this together and that kind words go a whole lot further than damaging ones do. So unplug America and start writing like many of us still do! The old fashioned way, with a pen and paper. Write a someone you love a Christmas card on recycled paper of course, perhaps lonely old Kim Jong-un? Merry Christmas dear leader, Merry Christmas!
Emails, Facebook, Twitter, Insta-Gram, My Space? All now privy to curious eyes with nothing better to do, the NSA?, who apparently can read this blog with no problem as I write it, just kidding, ?, but have no idea who hacked Sony, a company now reeling from embarrassing executive commentary to the actual cancellation of a much anticipated film, even if that film is probably noton par with say an “Out of Africa”.
So there you have it folks! Good luck to all crooked politicians, bankers, polluters and bushwhackers out there in this Wild, Wild West we all seem to be living in at present. Everyone running around in sixth gear, rarely stopping long enough to smell the pine scent of that tree adorning your home, the very symbol of Peace, Joy and Love that this season is all about. Even if that moment is short, take it anyway. It will grow in ‘time’ and eventually become the reality that it is, pealing back the curtain of the illusion many of us still cling to, illusions of our own making. Illusions being the bread and butter of FOX “news”…
Art imitating life once again, or is it the other way around?
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 15, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the sunny, seasonal and slum free island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this gorgeous Monday morning, with that bright light in the sky blazing full on the lovely Hyannis Harbor,‘and as you can SEA above matey, ’tis going to be fair sailin’ day; what with the good ship lollypop continuing on down the credit swap road to bust the road we (the United States/World Economies) were all on before…, but don’t ye worry thine little head about it ‘at ‘tal, for the streets of Wall never lie, nor do they sleep, knowing very little of the spirit of Christmas that all men secretly seek, ever fearing the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present or Christmas Future…
The U.S. Senate did pass that bill, “Cromnibus”, a 1.1 Trillion dollar spending bill that keeps the lights on ’till next Christmas basically, what they call an appropriations bill with a whole lot of gravy on board for big banks, big campaign donors and I suppose those THC types who live, work, play? in D.C., shooting down another right the ‘citizens’ of that district apparently are not afforded like other citizens who have the right to VOTE and have their collective WILLS acted upon accordingly.
This reflects the new normal when the word ‘compromise’ is used. Things are so far out of whack that when the ‘means’ justify the ‘ends’ (see torture/Dick Cheney/Iraq war/black site prisons/more torture/lying to Congress/lying to American people/The Hague, The Netherlands), and almost fifty percent of ‘the American people’ buy into that horrible reality of what happened in our name during those lovely Bush years, yes, a true testament to the power of a Fox (no offense to real foxes living right here on Cape). If those same American people were actually privy to the vile details of the 6.3 million document, 6000 page report on “EIT’s” or ‘enhanced interrogation techniques, created in a span of five years, yes, if they actually looked into that I imagine they would come to a much different conclusion than they do on FOX “news”.
There is the age old question now circulating among people who have half a brain, yes, questioning WHY was Dick Cheney, a former U.S. Vice President and current war criminal, on the“Meet the Press”, just this past Sunday? “Meet” the press, only on NBC–please stop with the dog stories already Brian, how ’bout some more stories on how SPAM is not only a healthy meal, but is just delicious? Just kidding, Merry Christmas to you and to all at NBC–I mean come on! This guy has been old news for how long? I just did the math, yeah, it’s six years plus, ago, hello! “…I’d do again in a minute”, snarled the former VP and I am sure he means what he says.
Good Luck with that one up at the Pearly Gates my man! REPENT? Never!
Last but not least, I would like to point out that “every day people” (311 million STRONG!) is WHY we have a democracy called ‘the United States of America’ (with a little letter ‘d’), and if we, collectively, don’t want that any more, than why not just come out and say so. The 120 or so cities that protested this past Saturday and Sunday the untimely and some would say criminal/homicidal ending of the lives of 12 year old Tamir Rice, 18 year old Michael Brown, and 43 year old Eric Garner–eulogized with so many more–all beginning with Trayvon Martin only a few years back, were all duly noted by the national media. As in really no coverage whatsoever.
In fact, it only received a few seconds on ABC, a mere ‘well, more protests again in…’, but NBC actually adding some value by adding three real voices (perspectives) to the problem of policing and black youth in this 21st Century America. There are so many socioeconomic factors that must be addressed before any solution is found, but none so much as the central question of “do we want a democracy anymore?”. If we don’t, I’m looking at you creators of this ‘fake grass roots party!’ You know who you are!
The ‘men behind the curtain’…
Or should we just throw in the towel and let the winning plutocrat of the decade rule our lives, taking all the good from this country, while giving nothing back. Lo, destroying it’s natural wonder one fracking well head at a time. Profiting the few.
Leaving the rest of US twisting in the ever growing (in power, scope, intensity and speed) WINDS! That is what pirates do sir! It’s called high stakes/high brow LOOTING! PLUNDERING? PROFIT over people? All of the above!
The country is rigged, evidenced by that aforementioned vote in Congress over the week end, a vote written and manipulated into LAW by the big banks–CITIgroupand JP Morgan,Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. I don’t blame President Obama, he knew this was the best chance to get a deal before the blood thirsty Ted Cruz’s get into power come January. Again, Merry Christmas Mr. President!
There are no more heroes in Washington anymore. Save one perhaps. We shall SEA. Have a great day everybody, remembering those ‘everyday people’ when you are out and about this busy holiday season. Perhaps throwing a buck or TWO into a homeless person’s hat. You would be heartbroken if you really KNEW what they may have gone through to get to that lowly point. BE safe, be well and be good, for goodness sakes!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 12, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the sunny, cold and very happy island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this 12th day of Christmas, I mean December, 2014, a beautiful day here at the Hyannis/Hyannis Port Waterfront(s), taking in what nature is giving by golly, for the sun has made an appearance, at least for a little while this early Friday morning, with most of this little sand bar and the region not seen much in the way of that big, fiery ball in the sky for quite some time, as we brace for more unsettling weather to come…
But who cares right? Wall Street and the big banks won the day yesterday and proved that this ’system’ is rigged, democracy with a little letter ‘d’ dying a slow, painful death? And favors, lo, cows to the wealthy and their desires, to the tune of a 1.1 Trillion dollar (spending) “Cromnibus” bill that will fund the government through September of next year. The President lobbied for it’s passage, as they know the new U.S. Congress, “the fightin’ 114th!” (credit Stephen Colbert–bon chance sir!), will be even more ‘conservative’, thereby more apt to want to ’shrink that government down to the size where they could drown it in a bathtub’ (credit GOP tax henchman Grover, “fuck the poor”, Norquist), thus, will not likely help President Barack Obama do much of anything unless it helps out the overlords that are driving that fancy King Lear Jet GOP bus these days…
You see, it seems hostage taking has taken on a whole new level (the “American people” seemingly caught up in a modern day, Orwellian like Stockholm Syndrome, where it’s victims feel sorry for their abusers, captors, ‘friends’ in Washington…, ever voting against their own best interests, please Google), a new look as it were, changing into the wolves they already are, seductively exposing themselves by placing a ‘rider’ in an appropriations bill (spending bill), such as the little provision that will effectively insure them again if they gamble with ‘them credit default swaps’, all by way of gutting the financial reform law put in place (Dodd-Frank) to stop what happened in 2008, namely the giant U.S. stock crash, credit freeze world wide and the overall meltdown of big. bad investment banks who bet the farm on the whole ‘concept’ of sub-prime mortgages, what could go wrong there?, all bundled up crap that they told their ‘investors’ was ‘really good stuff’ AAA!, all while betting against the hor$e$hit, along with the infinite number of fancy ‘derivatives’ or ‘credit default swaps’, effectively turning Wall Street into Vegas. A meltdown that drained trillions out of everyday American’s 401(k)’s, robbed pension funds and almost destroyed the U.S. and world economies. The escalation of deregulation, coming on the heals of the elimination (by then President Bill Clinton), of the Glass-Steagall Act (credit our late, great U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, circa 1933), which before it’s repeal in 1999, kept banks and investment banks separate, thus keeping the public safe from risky and unorthodox banking practices. Not to mention giant tax payer bailouts! Bailouts that make the problem worse, not better!
Keeping all that in mind, the lack of regulation on the stock market during the Bush years was evident for all to see. So it came as no surprise when investment firms came to the Federal government for help in Autumn of 2008. WE, the American tax payer, bailed those greedy bastards out, to the tune of 800 billion dollars. Money that was paid back, big deal, anyone could pay back money if you can get a loan for .001 percent interest, turn around and lend it at 20! Genius, where do I sign up? But Wall Street and it’s class have made out like bandits in the past 40 years, with incomes going up by at least 278 percent. The little man on Main Street however, has seen his or her wages go up by maybe a one, two, maybe three percent, while the ratio between CEO pay and the little man is only growing wider. The microcosm of the macro-cosmic GRAND CANYON GAP between the haves and the have nots. Unsustainable for a democracy in the long term baby!
The reason our great Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was so upset yesterday (and still is I imagine)–almost pulling it off, screaming at her colleagues to stop that horrible spending bill from passing into law, a bill that was held hostage once again by the plutocrats who are clearly running the show…(chalk full of other giveaways to the GOP, such as increasing the donation maximum one can give to well over 300,000 dollars, ten times what it is now, leaving those not considered part of ‘the donor class’ SOL. Their voices not really all that relevant now are they? Kinda like the Israeli Army versus Gaza peasants fighting with rocks and sticks, no?)–is simple. ‘Tis a bill that will keep the American tax payer on the hook for any and all risky behavior going on in and around the dark and shadow filled corners of Wall Street, for many, many years to come…
Bail outs for Wall Street good, bailouts for Main Street bad. Speaker only pawn in game of life…
In other words this move–a bill WRITTEN by CITI, via A.L.E.C.–will make bank, if you will pardon the pun. For those big banks will begin betting against it’s own clients, just like Goldman Sachs famously did back in well, most of their investment banking career?, most notably getting busted for it in 2008, and when another man made crisis happens, and it most certainly will, when something blows up because of these little men and their never ending greed, never ending LUST for money, the REAL root of all evil, yes, when all that crap goes down, the poor man and woman, slaving away for $7.25 an hour, will be working off the next bail out say two bucks out of that seven. What say you senior analyst at the corporate McDonald’s in New Jersey? Do you think that is a TRUE Republican position? An insurance policy; a set up for another tax payer bailout? Good boy!
Have a nice week end folks and “be safe out there amongst the English!” (credit the film “Witness”, starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, circa 1985).
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 10, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the still misty, foggy and unsettled island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Wednesday morning, the 10th day of December, 2014, drying out a bit from what winter storm (named by Al Roker?) “Damon” dished out yesterday, with the Hyannis/Hyannis PortWaterfront experiencing 60 plus mile-per-hour gusts along with drenching rains, as the eye of the winter hurricane passed right over head, sun splashing down from the Heavens as dark clouds encircled the quickly fading light; heavy sheets of water raining down once again with authority…
An apropos weather day all along the eastern seaboard, what with the releasing of the much anticipated U.S. Senate report on CIA secrets, lies, torture, black sight prisons and, oh yeah, more torture back during the ‘good old days’ of the Bush Administration, circa 2001-2009. It seems old Dick Cheney, former U.S. Vice President under then President George W. Bush, had the whole torture thing pretty wired, hence the man size safe in his office in D.C., opening up this great nation to torturing it’s prisoners like, well, take your historical pick. Genghis Khan?
George Tenet, former CIA Director (during the “enhanced interrogation methods” commenced after the attacks on September 11th, 2001, sometime in 2002), professed profusely to CBS’ “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley that it, the torture, was not torture and that it was vital for ‘keeping people from coming to kill your family’. A sentiment echoed by President Bush in 2006, where he said the same thing to NBC’s Matt Lauer, stating, “…hey Matt, I know you have a family, this torture thing see, did I say torture? I mean ‘enhanced interrogation’, yeah, you see, I can’t get into the specifics, but it was told to me that all this stuff we are not doing, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, is legal see, Cheney, I mean Tenet told me as much, and gosh darn it, look at the time, have you had lunch Matt?’…
And so it went right up until Bush left office in 2009, and after the Senate found out that the CIA had LIED on a whole myriad of topics–none so high as the fact they, the Senate, was being spied on while investigating the CIA in 2014–a bipartisan effort was put forward to investigate what had become more than just another government agency, it had become the government. With Dick Cheney calling the shots. Of course, the bipartisan committee investigating the whole sordid affair was not authorized to investigate the White House, because the Republicans would not allow it, thus, producing this six million plus document behemoth–chalk full of fun torture facts that would blow your socks off. Although I would highly recommend viewing before eating anything, the content will make you physically sick to your stomach.
Safe to say ‘the CIA has no leg to stand on’ and that the release of this report makes this a good day for America. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), the chair on this oversight committee of our nation’s spy agency, the CIA, should be congratulated for her efforts to expose this sort of horrible behavior on the part of OUR government, while simultaneously implementing new rules (hopefully LAWS someday soon), that will prevent this from happening again. To the people who say we should torture our prisoners to ‘keep American safe’, and that it ‘works’, I say look at the report and the FACTS before blowing your horn. I say that very act of torture makes us just as bad as our ‘enemies’–many defined by that term erroneously, just ordinary people caught up in some illegal war game the Bush/Cheney Administration cooked up to what? Bolster Dick’s retirement coffers via kick backs from Halliburton (defense contractor where Dick Cheney was CEO prior to W.’s rise to glory)?, is that it? Or was it personal on Bush’s part? Or were they just bored plutocrats out to make some trouble and a ‘name’ for themselves as what, “Liberators”?
Who knows and who cares! The real history books, written by scholars, will show beyond the shadow of a CIA doubt, that the combination of the folly of the illegal Iraq War, the black sight prisons all over the world–not to mention the fact none of this crap was paid for, all put on ‘the credit card of the American people to the tune of 4.1 Trillion when all is said and done in both Afghanistan and Iraq; oh, and all of that blood, both American and Iraqi/Afghan, that was spilled–and the disgusting, prominent, rampant torture by CIA operatives, all under the constant, watchful eye of the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, yes, the real history books will PROVE that the ‘winners’ in this story were not those washed up politicians aforementioned, or their LYING chief operatives at the CIA like George Tenet, no sir, the real winners are the Americanpeople today. They have been given the gift of nature’s best disinfectant, SUNSHINE, for they will now know what we are capable of as a country, hence, be an ever vigilant LIGHT shining on the wheels of government, checking the people in power at present… Making sure those wheels don’t fly off and do what they wish to, thinking that they (people like Dick Cheney and George Tenant) have absolute power. When in fact that power was given to them by the American public to wit those history books will prove you betrayed that TRUST, broke it in half rather…
Colonel Jack Wilkerson, former top aide to great General Colin Powell, the 65th U.S. Secretary of State, under the Bush Administration, stated on “All IN”,with Chris Hayes (weeknights’ eight p.m. eastern, only on MSNBC) last night, “…George Tenant flat out lied! They ALL lied about the secret CIA program(s), going all the way up to the top, to Richard B. Cheney”. And he should know, he was in on the ground floor of this whole dirty debacle in the early 2000’s… A decade that many, including this reporter, would like to forget.
Have a nice day folks, steering clear of the fracking fluid they are serving over at FOX & Friends this a.m.. It’s not only glowing, but it is chalk full of over 700 deadly chemicals that don’t cause cancer. So drink up America and pull up a chair at your own risk… Steve Ducey and that insane gang has got some bat $hit crazy stories to tell ya! HO, HO, HO!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 8, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the cold, calm, soon to be stormy once again island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this 8th day of December, 2014, a Monday to be sure, as the Nantucket Christmas Stroll wrapped up for another year; thousands taking the journey from Cape Cod’s hub of Hyannis–30 nautical miles south/southeast–to a fairy tale island that time forgot. To a quaint little place where all is forever forgiven–fabulously rich beyond one’s wildest imagination…
New data just out on Friday indicates that this year, 2014, is the best year for jobs numbers since the heady days of the go go 90’s, the days of Bill Clinton. After taking over in January 2009, dusting the country off what was deemed as the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression that began with ‘the Crash of 1929′, a young newly elected Senator now President began to climb upward and onward… 1929 fall from grace was the great economic and social spiral that took this country down a path of wicked austerity and blight for the next seven plus years. The late, great former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt taking control, not only turning the tide, but reforming the nation as well, making it ‘a more perfect union’ for the average person…
Yes, after taking over from President George W. Bush in 2009, American jobs hemorrhaging at the clip of 700,000 per week, newly elected President Barack Obama began the ascent back to the top of the MOUNTAIN, and as of this past week it seems that more jobs have been created this year than in any year of the Bush one or Bush two presidencies. AP just wrote, “…job gains put U.S. on pace for best growth since 1999.”
“Boom like numbers!”
The Washington Post added, “…this is what a real recovery looks like.” The New York Times headlining, “These are the best numbers in months, maybe years“, going on to state in an article, “…Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from your friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics!”, adding in another “…more jobs and higher wages, U.S. recovery hits home.” Quoting a Wall Street executive saying, “…in one line, spectacular!”.
So before you send Obama some negative energy this Christmas season, here is a ten fold list of ‘nice’ things our very fine 44th U.S. President has done for this great country of OURS, none so high as the fact we are not engaged in any horrible land war at present, nor are we going to be any time soon. “Praise be to God!”…
1. 10 months in a row of job growth with 200,000 or more jobs created.
2. Big picture: AP states, “…the 321,000 jobs added in November, most in three years, is the latest evidence that the United States is out performing other economies throughout the developed world.
3. the price of gas is at a five year low, many U.S. gas stations coming in at less than $2 a gallon! Helping the average American consumer with a savings of over $600 in the coming year alone!
4. Actual wages are going up, not down, as well as corporate earnings and executive compensation– (CEO/average employee salary ratio still far out of wack, but hey, it’s progress no?–the Dow Jones Industrial Average poised to hit 18,000 for first time in it’s history (fingers crossed Goldman Sachs, you know I’m rooting for ya!)…
5. Health care spending (once out of control and unsustainable) in the U.S. (in 2013) grew slower than in any time in more than 50 years! Unheard of and one of those non-sexy details of “Obamacare”, or what it really IS, the AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, now LAW in the U.S. for good, by gosh by golly! “…the number of uninsured non-elderly adults fell by an estimated 10.6 million people, between September 2013 and September 2014, a drop of 30.1 percent in the uninsured rate.
Beyond the U.S. Economy…
these are the other checks off the ‘to do list’ President Obama has accomplished just since the election…
6. Obama negotiated (in secret for months) an HISTORIC signing of a far reaching, ‘huge’, and quite unexpected Climate Change deal with the now largest emitter of green house gasses, China, with far reaching (hopefully) consequences (good ones) for our very fragile and last time I checked, ONE, environment.
7. Secret mission to North Korea to free the last remaining U.S. hostage being held prisoner by that 1984 Orwellian nightmare of a country, just ask James Franco and Seth Rogen, they’ll tell ya! Kim Jong Un, (spelling?), you so crazy!
8. The ‘horrible scourge of Benghazi’, another Obama Waterloo if you will, was quietly and deliberately put out of it’s misery late on Friday’s news dump of the day, and if you listen really hard you can hear the sound of Darrell Issa playing taps on his lonely bugle…as the ‘committee’ on the “scandal” that the tragedy of the deaths of four Americans, including a U.S. Ambassador, decided that it was just that stating, “…second, the committee finds that there was no intelligence failure prior to the attack”. Adding in a private scribbling, “…sorry we did not spend all those millions upon millions of tax payer dollars on feeding some of this country’s poor.” We are the GOP and we don’t care though, so there’s that…
9. Obama has freed 5 million human beings from living in the shadows, fearing deportation every time they step out of the family’s door, therefore, because of Obama’s Executive Action, when Congress would not act, those five million plus families will have a much nicer Christmas than they would have if that cloud was still hovering over them. Another example of the GOP being out to lunch on so many issues. Case in point, another Senator from Oklahoma who will remain nameless, stating to press after the decision a day or two after the midterms, telling the USA Today, “…GOP Senator warns of violence after immigration order.” Wrong again Senator, wrong again.
10. Obama has managed to turn this whole ‘losing the midterms’ into his benefit, going on the offensive for a change, as the GOP’s schizophrenia goes into overdrive. The truly crazy periodical? “Red State”, is it a blog? Is it a website? Is it a gift from God? “I thought you said it was a gift from God?” “That was when you were my son!” (credit the film, “Flirting with Disaster”, circa 1996, starring Ben Stiller,Tea Leoni), anyway, whatever “that” is, wrote an article the other day that pretty much sums up this schism between what the plutocrats want their puppets to do (i.e. Ted Cruz and the like) and what actual independent thinking GOP members want to do for this country for a change. “…The Republicans in Congress hate the American people. Just like the Democrats.” Going on to say, “…Representative John Boehner hate your guts people! You are neither a lobbyist, nor a cigarette, so you have no use for him.“ Ouch.
The fake grass roots tea party nut jobs like Senator Ted Cruz of the great state of Texas and about 30-40 other puppets will attempt to shut this U.S. government down in five days. As Rachel Maddow (host of the great TRMS, weeknights at 9 p.m. eastern, only on MSNBC), put it on her show, “…watch this space.” Thanks for all of that information too Rachel, and a Merry Christmas to you and yours! That goes for all who speak for the ‘little people’ in this great land of ours, one that must be watched constantly, lest we lose that little letter ‘d’ at the beginning of that word democracy, a society where one man (or one woman) equals one VOTE! And a land where all are EQUAL under the LAW.
No one being above it, especially those sworn to ‘protect and serve’…
Have a wonderful week ahead folks and ‘May the Force be with you’ as you get ready for the upcoming holiday energies! Don’t let those negative ones get in the way of the true meaning of the word Noel.
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 6, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the soon to be stormy island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Saturday morning, the 6th day of December, 2014, a quiet morning here at the Hyannis/Hyannis PortWaterfront(s), but that will change soon, as the rains and snows begin to blow in from the west, adding to the charm that is this week end’s “Nantucket Christmas Stroll” where you can enjoy a cocktail or two whilst singing some carols and perhaps having a conversation with a talking tree. But, please, leave your backpack at home, won’t you?
‘The instigators of the original Nantucket Christmas Stroll were merely trying to prevent islanders from escaping to Cape Cod, 30 miles across the Sound, to do their holiday shopping. Rewind to the year 1973, a year when local merchants, in an effort to boost the islands holiday purse, kept shops open late the first Friday in December, inviting locals to holiday shop on-island. That initial stroll, christened by merchants as a “Christmas Shoppers Stroll” (the first black Friday?), a mere three hours in duration, was proclaimed a huge success. Shopkeepers entertained shoppers with wine, hot chocolate, tea, mulled cider, fruitcake, and holiday cookies while they perused crafts, books, clothes and wares, and other holiday gift items. In subsequent years, the event grew exponentially, drawing larger crowds until it became a nationally-and then internationally-renowned holiday event. This years Nantucket Christmas Stroll, with a theme of “A Victorian Christmas”, will feature 160 seven-foot-decorated holiday trees (sporting new, energy saving LED lights sponsored by ReMain Nantucket, not a paid Ad by the way!) mounted throughout the downtown area (right next to the security cameras!). Local artists Deb Sosebee and Donna Elle will decorate the 20-foot “Talking Tree” (Saturday 1-3 p.m., so don’t miss your chance to ask some questions OK?), at the top of Main Street with homemade Victorian-style ornaments. Visitors are encouraged to participate in a Victorian Costume Contest, and winners will be awarded ribbons on the Main Street Stage just before 2 p.m.
I think the statement by “Yesterday’s Island, Today’s Nantucket” speaks for itself. “Tis the season to dress up like Queen Victoria of 19th Century England by golly! Ho, Ho, Ho! Merry Christmas Nantucket! I do love thee so… Although, I will be there today to speak with that marvelous tree, asking some points of parliamentary procedure, such as, “…why are you celebrating the “Victorians”, circa 1837-1901? Is it a mirror to the present in 21st Century America? As the Victorian period in Britain was one of huge industrial and technological change, shocking divisions between the rich and poor, sensational crimes, spectacular entertainments for the masses, like you, you ‘talking tree’ you, and grand attempts to combat squalor and disease… Thank you for making it all so clear “Talking Tree”, I hope you too have a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, both you and the rest of the natural world!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 5, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the starry, cool island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Friday morning, the 5th day of December, 2014, expecting another beautiful morning before the rains/snows come in once again. Quite an active weather pattern don’t you think Mr. Inhofe? I should think you will do a splendid job come January, Chairing the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee and all, we are so proud in Oklahoma! Especially ’cause your not “one of them unreasonable radical, left wing, liberal, dirty, filthy, hippy agitators” (credit the film “The Graduate”, circa 1967), believing in that global warmin’ crap and all,no sir!
You are one of us, the truly ignorant, uninformed Rush Limbaugh hater/listener, who has been instructed to not believe his or her own eyes (nor the many voices in his head), while viewing the news last night on corporate owned TV news station, coast to coast, with the head of the NYPD police union (what’s his name?) spouting off about the ‘fact’ that there was no choke hold on the late Eric Garner, no, ‘that was one of them fancy college wrestling moves the perp, I mean cop learned from his brother who attended Princeton’.
Yep, it’s Christmas season! Ho, Ho, Ho! You can tell because the past couple of nights in New York City has been just crazy! In fact the reaction to the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree, an 84 foot Norwegian Blue Spruce, was really up this year, I mean with all of those people running around malls saying they can’t breathe and something about ‘NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE’, really, I thought the whole off Broadway show was a bit much for the kids who were just trying to catch a glimpse of the tree, but hey, at least it was spirited. I too had a hard time catching my breath after the shopping spree at Bloomingdale’s, don’t even get me started on Macy’s…’
You can’t force someone to change their heart. No more than you can change the weather. If a comet were hurtling towards earth at this precise moment, there would be room for some concern, no? But 400 parts per million of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere now (not that high since the days of ‘The Flintstones’, you know, roughly 6000 years ago Mitch?!), that little cataclysmic FACT can be ignored. Even though it may be tough to book a room for the next Winter Olympics. But denial is everywhere these days is it not?
The fact that the NYPD’s union went on TV last night telling us all (with their collective lack of a neck), that there ‘is nothing to see here folks’, that your eyes don’t work so good and you should have your head examined for even thinking about questioning one of our ‘model’ (their exact words) police officers who went above and beyond the call of duty by taking out that…oh, we’re not doing that? But we rehearsed it at the station? OK, I get it, it’s Christmas time, OK. What I was saying is that I am very proud of our boys in blue. America’s finest and no matter what that De Blasio says, we don’t use choke holds no more (thousands of complaints in New York City this year alone regarding these deadly choke holds banned in 1993 by the NYPD–unbeknownst to them apparently), we get it. And we will try to be more, what’s that words? Oh yeah, sensitive and compassionate about people’s feelings and such, especially during this mourning period of major loss for the African-American community, not only in New York, but in Ferguson and all across this great land of ours, bringing us together in peace, community and a common purpose of living and thriving in the greatest city in the world.” How was that? Do you think they bought it? I hope so, because I worked on that speech all day. Forget about it….
May you all have a beautiful week end, hopefully turning off all of this unrest in this wonderful country of ours; praying to a bowl of oatmeal if you have to that somehow we must all learn to live with one another without killing one another. Really, not that hard of a bar to clear…
All of the lesser angels of our makeup as human beings—anger, rage, hate, jealousy, revenge, despair and hopelessness… Embracing those feelings and championing those sentiments is not what this experience on this little blue rock called Earth is all about. Quite the opposite really. Love, Joy, Peace are all attributes we all have within us and represent the higher angels of our nature. Those very virtues, real gifts from a greater force than you or I could ever define in words or any other form of communication, are the very things we hide when things get tough. Peaceful protests, over time, like the Colorado River, will cut a deep Grand Canyon through that nasty ignorance, hate, racism and fear. For what is racism anyway but ignorant fear turned inward on itself, coming out in ways of violence such as what we ALL witnessed with our OWN EYES once again in the case of that 43 year old Staten Island man, Eric Garner, may he rest in peace, who left behind a family (that is just as important as Officer fill in the blank’s), who will not be with him on Christmas morning…all because of a 50 cent cigarette?
‘Tis true that every officer of the law should be able to go home at the end of his shift, safely and in one piece, Amen, Amen I say unto you Amen. But so too should the average citizen in this here US of A. The call to arms against our own citizens is insane and will result in another Michael Brown, Tamir Rice or Eric Garner, may they all rest in peace. We must look within and guard against the easy way out–VIOLENCE & HATE.
The answer always was and always will be LOVE. Love takes work and work takes LOVE. When those two words are synonymous, well then, you might be on to something.
Again, have a great week end everybody and get out and enjoy NATURE BABY!
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 4, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the starry, cool, soon to be sunny island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Thursday morning, the 4th day of December, 2014, a little before the six a.m. hour. The stars still shining en masse upon this little sand bar created 11,500 years ago by the Last Great Ice Age, and like many in this country–well, those who actually care about these kinds of things– tossed and turned most of the night, as the images of what happened to another African-American male in the United States of America, in this 21st Century America, kept haunting my slumber…
For yesterday, the world found out what American JUSTICE is rapidly becoming–A JOKE. Especially for African-American males, mostly under the age of 30. But in the case of Eric Garner, he was a grandfather and a father of six. You see about six months ago, a jolly forty year old black man was being harassed once again by some of NYPD’s finest, many of them are just that, allegedly selling ‘loosies’ (loose cigarettes) on a lonely street corner in one of New York City’s five boroughs, Staten Island. As the initial shakedown began, a random passerby videotaped the whole sordid affair, much to the chagrin of said NYPD.
What that video taped revealed to the world was that grandfather being taken down by an illegal (banned in 1993) choke hold by one of the officer’s in the arrest, one of nine on the scene, a choke hold that killed Eric Garner on the spot. The coroner would conclude that FACT later in the official autopsy.
The world watched that video in horror and was sure that the grand jury of 23 would find a ‘true bill’ to at least find probable cause to indict the police officer for any one of a number of crimes, especially considering that they had both a damning video and the fact that the coroner deemed the death a homicide.
Apparently there are two different sets of laws in this country–one for police officers who kill people and one for everyone else.
That IS the bottom line here folks. Please don’t you think twice about it, they don’t… Out in Cleveland–the scene of another horrible police on black crime, where a cop with glaringly bad review from his superiors (Google it if you don’t believe me!), gunned down a 12 year old boy playing with a toy gun by himself in a park, a young boy who was eulogized just yesterday as being “…full life”, hope there are a lot of snow balls in Heaven Tamir Rice! May you rest in peace!–they just buried that little boy yesterday and it has been just a little over a week since the Michael Brown ‘verdict’ out in Ferguson. Now this fiasco on ‘Static’ island.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio made a statement yesterday in New York that went a whole lot farther than ‘ole Governor Jay Nixon’s did out in St. Louis, hopefully keeping the ever growing protests as peaceful as possible. For it does no good to burn down buildings, destroy other people’s property or hurt innocent bystanders. The only way to really change things is through an all out community effort, shining a bright LIGHT from sea to shining sea, reigning in some of these out of date police force practices and policies that have turned regular urban (and some rural) settings into militarized zones, many U.S. citizens feeling as though they are captives of their own neighborhoods. Potential new victims in the town where they live, love, work and play, oh, and also pay their oppressors’ salaries. Feeling like when they step outside, it could be the last thing they do.
If we are going to keep militarizing our police forces then they should act like the military; acting honorably with a code of conduct, a code of ethics, a code of brotherhood and sisterhood-a ‘true bill’ feeling that we are all in this together, whether they like it or not.
And if they don’t–there’s the door!
Feeling like a captive and being in fear all the time is one hell of a way to feel. It truly is hell to live in fear, I should know. Citizens feeling sorry for their captors (Stockholm Syndrome) must stop. This police brutality and shooting first, asking questions later must also stop– NOW! This kind of behavior is almost Nazi like is it not?
How many more of OUR citizens must die before WE address this ongoing and ever growing problem in our society? Assuming we still want to have a society. Perhaps that is really the message here folks“…you know the score pal, if you’re not a cop, you’re one of the little people”– a line taken fromthe film “Blade Runner”, circa 1982. A ’science fiction’ movie set in future Los Angeles, where it seems Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” never got the memo because only the wealthy can afford to stay out of the elements that seem to have taken a turn for the worse…
If police are afforded the right to kill at will, with no repercussions, then what’s next? It is a slippery slope when local police forces are more powerful than the U.S. Justice Department, as they continue getting tanks, anti-aircraft missals, sub-machine guns, highly explosive, rubber bullet and chemically laden grenades and more! from that same Federal Government. All sent to these police forces setting up shop as if we are about to be invaded by Russia.
“Nothing to see here folks!!”… just another black man killed on the streets of 21st Century America. A country where the value of some piece of crap Sony “Picture” is worth so much more than the life of a poor African-American man or boy–‘one’ just playing in the park by himself on a snowy day in Cleveland, or ‘one’ standing on a corner doing something ‘illegal’ (Garner had no ‘loosies’ on him when he died), or ‘one’ just walking down the street in the sleepy little town of Ferguson, Missouri, gunned down by a ‘man just doing his job’. Hor$e$hit! This question is one for the entire nation, and one that has not been addressed to this degree since the days of Bobby Kennedy in the middle part of the tumultuous decade known as the crazy 1960’s.
Bobby Kennedy spoke out strong regarding race relationships in this country. Speaking out in a time, much like today, when it was unpopular to do so. At least among many of his white ‘brethren’ at that time. In fact, after his assassination, one of the darkest days this country has ever felt or seen, his body was transported via rail car from New York to Washington. On that sad day, all along that railroad route for a thousand miles, were people of all races, creeds, colors, religions and persuasions. Yes sir, blacks and whites lined up to say their goodbyes to a man who stood up for them, for those who could not be heard, tears overflowing for the man, much like Martin Luther King, Jr., who made it his mission to protect and speak for those who did not have a voice. Those who were vulnerable, those in needof a champion.
Perhaps someday this country will WAKE UP and smell the roses. We have, collectively, so much as a people and for the most part we all get along pretty well most will tell you on this day in early December. But for most African-Americans, that is not so. WE have a responsibility to stand up to aggression of any kind. We have to become more transparent as a country. We must make sure the people we place in positions of power do not abuse said power, and make sure the police in this nation are policed themselves, becoming more responsible with the power we bestow and can take away.
WE the People becoming more intelligent and informed about how that POWER is doled out and to who.
May the Forces of LIGHT & LOVE come upon this great, diverse and thus strong nation and heal it. Bringing it closer to some kind of understanding of what a leader is and what a leader most certainly is NOT. For if you want history to look kindly upon your life, you know, ‘at the end of the day’, take a good look in the mirror and be honest with yourself. For peace begins and ends with ‘the man in the mirror’ and nobody else.
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 3, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the soggy, and once again rather gloomy island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this warm, damp Wednesday morning, feeling the effects of a back door warm front pushing temperatures back up into the fifties, shirtsleeve weather out on the Hyannis/Hyannis PortWaterfront this 3rd day of December, 2014–trying to really get in that holiday spirit…
On Monday night’s “Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell” (weeknights on MSNBC, ten p.m. sharp, eastern), Lawrence exposed what many might find rather interesting, namely assistant prosecutor Kathy Alizadeh of the St. Louis Country Prosecuting Office. Who, under lead St. Louis County prosecutor “We’ll talk to Bob” McCullough, provided the grand jury responsible for not bringing charges against Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9th shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in what has become known around the world as “FERGUSON”, with the wrong law many believe was meant to sway the jury into not gaining the nine votes needed for an indictment of any kind against the officer who 16 witnesses claim shot the boy in cold blood.
Yes, it seems that the plan all along was to “data dump” all of the evidence, truly a mountain of evidence, in front of a jury (looking at more than one case I might add) that, because of that action by prosecution (very rare indeed), were begging for some kind of direction in ‘The State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson’. But to make it even more air tight for the prosecution ironically on the side of the defendant, or not if you consider the close police ties to McCullough, the assistant prosecutor, Ms. Alizadeh, initially gave the jurors a law, or a statute, that had been rescinded back in 1985, i.e. Missouri law enforcement personal free to shoot fleeing suspects.
That’s right folks, the good people at the St. Louis County Prosecutors Office used that old, outdated version of the law right up until the end, when Kathy decided to slip in the update of what the law really states today, prompting one of the jurors on that famous grand jury to utter, “…um, does the Supreme Court & Federal Court override Missouri statutes?”, to wit Alizadeh replied, and I quote, “…oh, don’t worry about that, we don’t want to get into a law class.” Really, assistant prosecutor? I think the Federal Government and the American People might be interested in that little detail–
underhanded as it is and all.
Lawrence O’Donnell in his genius decided to send a letter to the St. Louis Prosecuting Office with three simple question regarding this epic case, many are calling the CIVIL RIGHTS’
case of our times…
So without further adieu, here are the questions that you too may find interesting. Please enjoy and have a pleasant day!
1. How many times has Ms. Alizadeh submitted the wrong law to a grand jury as it’s legal framework for an investigation?
2. How many times has the District Attorney’s Office (all of them, collectively) submitted the wrong law to a grand jury as it’s legal framework for it’s investigation?
3. Is the Michael Brown case the first time the District Attorney’s Office submitted the wrong law to a grand jury as the legal framework for it’s investigation? (the sound of crickets in the background…).
December 2, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the grey, cold, festive island of Nantucket! Great to be with you once again on this Tuesday morning, the 2nd day of December, 2014, a day much cooler than yesterday, with temperatures more in line with the season they are normally attributed to, namely, this upcoming season of Christmas and Hanukkah for many in the U.S.. A Season of Lights, this season of giving, giving hopefully less in the way of anger and more in the way of LOVE.
President Barack Obama,OUR very fine 44th President of the United States of America (history books will prove, well, those written by real historians will…), announced yesterday at the White House–after concluding a mini-summit with people intimately involved in what some are calling ‘the Civil Rights case of our times’, i.e. “Ferguson” (or what many call the lack of Justice in the shooting death of unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, on August 9th of this year, a horrible act carried out by Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department, resigned, now a racial flash point sparking protests from sea to shining sea, gaining world wide attention…)–that he is putting together a special task force made up of law enforcement, community activists, clergy and other officials to deal with the problems facing everyday communities when it comes to the people and the police they, the police, are sworn to ‘protect and serve’ or is it the other way around? Many claiming that they have become the victims of quite the opposite of that sentiment, thus, braving the status quo and calling out for JUSTICE of some kind to triumph over what other might consider Gestapo like tactics–excessive force and police brutality being one of them.
The President is asking for 263 million dollars for a number of items to help in this crisis. For starters, lets get transparent, let’s get responsible, let’s get accountable! Let’s implement 50,000 body cameras that police departments nation wide will be required to wear, preventing abuse on either side as statistics in cities who already use this technology prove beyond a shadow of a doubt works like a charm. Second, there will an extensive review of all the new toys these police departments have receive–thanks to the blank checkformer President George W. Bush gave “Homeland Security”, via the “Patriot Act”–i.e. tanks, sub-machine guns, spare hand grenades with crowd dispersing chemicals, rubber bullets, who knows what else–yeah, taking a good look at that overreachthat hasmilitarizedour police forces to the point that they look like invading armies. At least it did to people with REAL EYES watching it all go down in Ferguson.
Three, Attorney General Eric Holder will address this issue of the very real threat of violence that exists between young black males in this country and the police, somehow finding solutions and how that sad, aforementioned fact can be overcome. Holder will be tasked with personally going to communities nationwide, for this is clearly not just a Ferguson, Missouri story, hence the overwhelming popular outcry from Seattle to New York, San Francisco to Boston, as young and old, black and white, stand up and say ‘hands up, don’t shoot’!
For that is what is has come down to for many young, black men today–simple survival. “…Please don’t kill me officer because I am a black man,” is not ‘going too far Joe’, because since July we have had case after case of black males being gunned down, ‘by accident?’, in at least six high profile national cases, and it does not seem like the problem is being addressed let alone solved by anyone who has any real authority, save President Barack Obama, God Bless you sir! And Bravo to the St. Louis Rams! They have a right to claim their own lives and a right to be safe in said lives Roger!
Couple those three points with better training of young officers nationwide, i.e. less gun violence, and perhaps we might get a better handle on what our society needs more than anything right now– TRUST. The simple fact that Ferguson is mostly African-American and 94 percent of the Ferguson Police Department is white, gaining most of their revenue from ‘traffic stops’ must tell you that that there is something wrong with this picture. For real policing, in and of itself, should not be a problem for anyone, especially and including the police! For it seems that policing in this 21st Century should not be ‘all about the money’, rather, should focus on what makes us all the same, being a peace loving people. Always focusing on those similarities--like that famous hug of a little boy and a police officer of Ferguson–as opposed to what makes us different, i.e. the color of our skin, a subtle difference as deep as the skin itself and just as meaningless.
Have a nice day everybody and may we find that elusive sense of peace in Ferguson, for if we can find it there, we can find it anywhere, isn’t that the song, no?
PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
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December 1, 2014
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the grey, gloomy and rather mild island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this December 1st, 2014–a warm Monday morning, grey too at the Hyannis/Hyannis PortWaterfront–with temperatures well into the fifties at this six a.m. hour. Apparently diving back down into the single digits soon, as that “Polar Plunge” makes it’s way eastward; ever creating havoc with these extreme whacky weather patterns (that are not patterns at all), representing a new normal that 7 billion plus people living on this little blue rock we all call Earth are just going to have to get used to. All happening as the so called ‘leaders’ in the U.S. Congress continue claiming that it’s all a big misunderstanding, a ‘hoax’ if you will. Their “logic” concluding that no one single weather event has anything to do with the empirical science surrounding the FACT Global Warming is not only REAL but it is here NOW.
And it is here to stay…
That’s right, it’s just a big misunderstanding like the under reported story of a little 12 year boy who was shot to death by another officer of the law, this time in Cleveland late last week. A little black boy (imagine if he was white “Morning Joe!”), who was all by himself playing with what amounts now to a toy gun. A boy just being a little boy in a park. Until, after a call and a botched 911 dispatch, the officers arrived on the ’scene’ and in less than 2 seconds jump out of the car, guns blazing, shooting the little boy in the chest– killing him instantly.
Never even trying to revive him.
The Sunday talk shows all covered the Ferguson case with little meat or real substance. Namely, calling it out for what it really is–a giant miscarriage of JUSTICE! Yes, putting that ‘verdict’ by the tainted grand jury of St. Louis County aside for a moment, let us call out our collective brain trust, the non biased national media, for their recent coverage of these inter-related tragedies, all involving black American males under the age of 30. Are you proud of the white wash thus far FOX “NEWS”, ABC and dare I say NBC, never mind CBS or CNN? When does the madness stop? Do black lives matter? How can society effectively change the systemic problems that contributed to the gunning down of Michael Brown on August 9th of this year?
Or better yet, WHEN?
A society never lasts long when there is too much wealth at the top. Especially in a democracy. A democracy with a little letter ‘d’. These young boys (and girls), who just happen to have skin that is a different color than their fellow ‘pale’ human beings–brothers and sisters in reality–have lost their collective childhoods’, if they ever experienced one in the first place, and are constantly in fear of the police thus, causing a vicious cycle with authority figures and a never ending pattern of violence that offers the community nothing--save the polar oppositeof peace.
In fact, most African-American males under the age of 30 most likely live in greater haunting fear than those same young people living in the war torn Gaza Strip. At least those kids are not hounded by a police presence everyday as they just try and go about becoming young men and women, you know, kids being kids. Discovering their own talents and worth, unencumbered by an ‘authority’ that is seemingly not on their side, in fact to many, looking as if they actually wish them harm.
There is a centuries old myth in this country that black males are somehow not subjected to the same feelings white people have, i.e. pain, and thus, not only are police officers but staff at hospitals brainwashed into thinking ‘these people’ don’t feel that pain the way ‘you or I do’… Therefore, treat African-American males as if they are immune to gun shot wounds and such. These “demons” (Officer Wilson’s words), are somehow superhuman when it comes to locomotives or bullets (to say nothing of skyscrapers!), as they “bulk up and get mad, running right through said bullets…”. Hogwash. These young men feel just as much as you or I do Officer Wilson, in fact, they might feel more pain than you could possibly imagine. For what is more painful that seeing your mother for one dinner a week, perhaps a few hours, while you attempt to finish grade school? Never seeing her because she is working for that big $7.25 an hour 24/7/365 just to keep the lights on (that’s before taxes! Try living on that Mitch McConnell, you knucklehead!), all while shelling most of that hard earned cash out to keep her baby in a day care (below par daycare I might add), only to come home and find out her other baby, her 12 year old boy, was shot to death by a trigger happy cop! God help this country!
Watching Officer Wilson on ABC this week end put me right off my fresh fried lobster, as he “…resigned because he was worried about other officers’ safety and the safety of the community (that his gun ripped apart), but moreover, tendering that resignation would offer that community a chance to heal.’” Are you for real Officer, “I was just doing my job”, Wilson? You better be looking for a different line of work son, perhaps the clergy?
Have a nice week ahead folks and just keep in mind that the corporate owned media mega egos out in this crazy world do not want you or yours to THINKfor yourselves, and are certainly not going to help you out in any way by offering you credible, factual information the way journalism was once offered to the American public. Case in point, the era of the late, great Walter Cronkite, whose house still resides a few miles from my own on the sleepy little island of Martha’s Vineyard–high atop a cliff in Edgartown–where, if you listen really hard, you can still hear Walter saying, | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
5 Squat Variations You Need To Try
Squats are one of the most beneficial exercises around: They work your entire lower body, toning and strengthening quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calf muscles, and give you a cardio boost to boot. If you’re looking for new ways to do squats, here are five fresh variations to liven up your routine and give you great results.
However, before you attempt to change up your squat variations, be sure you’ve mastered the basic, bodyweight squat.
Feet: Weight should be on balls and heels, leaving toes free to wiggle throughout the entire movement.
Knees: Should line up with the middle toe.
Hamstrings: Should touch calves at the bottom of the squat.
Hips: Hip joint should sink lower than knees.
Core: Should be tight.
Back: Keep your spine neutral and back straight, with chest up and shoulders back.
Eyes: Gaze straight ahead, not looking up or down.
Try to stay as upright as possible throughout the entire exercise. If the basic squat is too challenging, you can always try squatting down and sitting on a box, using the same movements to lower and rise.
Pistol Squat
Begin by standing with your feet just slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Stand tall with your spine neutral, and look straight ahead. Inhale, pressing your hips and butt backwards while lowering and bending at the knees until your hip joint is lower than your knees. Exhale, lifting your left leg straight out in front of you and your arms reaching straight out. Inhale, sitting deeper into your squat on the right leg until your butt is almost touching your heel. Exhale, pressing the floor away from you with your right leg, leaving your left leg fully extended in front of you. Keep a tight core to maintain balance. Repeat on the other side.
Plie Squats On Tippy Toes
Stand with your feet wider than hip-width apart. There should be roughly a 1.5-2 foot distance between both feet, and your toes should be pointed outwards. To begin the movement, slowly lower yourself down into a sitting position such that your thighs are parallel to the ground. Your chest should be upright and your bottom back. Hold this for a second before pressing through your feet and bringing your hips back up to the start. Perform this movement from start-to-finish while standing on your tippy toes.
One-Legged Squat
Begin by standing with your feet just slightly wider than shoulder-width. Stand tall with your spine neutral, and look straight ahead. Inhale, pressing your hips and butt backwards while lowering and bending at the knees until your hip joint is lower than your knees. As you stand back up, lift your right bent leg up and across your body as you crunch forward with your abs, touching your right knee to your left elbow. Because this is across between a crunch and a squat, be sure to keep your abs contracted.
Squat Jump
Begin by standing with your feet just slightly wider than shoulder-width. Stand tall with your spine neutral, and look straight ahead. Inhale, pressing your hips and butt backwards while lowering about halfway into your squat. Exhale, jumping explosively into the air and then landing in a standing beginning position.
Goblet Squat
Begin by holding a dumbbell or kettlebell in your hands at chest height. Stand with your feet slightly wider than shoulder-width apart and your core engaged. Inhale, pressing your hips and butt backwards into a full squat. Hold the squat while keeping the weight close to your chest. Press through the floor with your heels, sending your hips up and squeezing your glutes and hamstrings to rise to your starting position, maintaining a tight core throughout the exercise.
Squat benefits go beyond just toning your lower body. Squats can improve your core strength and balance, and increase the range of motion in your hips and ankles, leading to better flexibility. Squats also strengthen connective tissue and can improve knee health. If you’re worried about knee injuries, remember to master the basic squat, and always sink to the full squat position with hip joints lower than knees, since a half-squat will be more harmful to your knees. The next time you want to breathe new life into your workout routine, try one of the fun squat variations on for size. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
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Careers in Services and Consulting
Technical Account Manager
Staines-upon-Thames, United Kingdom
VMware
Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs.
Our culture is one of possibilities where everyone is empowered to achieve success on their own terms. Together we are helping customers in crafting the future of their business in a digital world.
Are you a dynamic, individual who counts ownership, accountability, hard work and tenacity among your strengths? If teamwork, customer focus, excellent communication, thinking-out-of-the box and problem solving is your forte then the role of TAM will stretch and utilise all of these attributes.
TheRole–TechnicalAccountManager(TAM)
As a Technical Account Manager, you will build and maintain relationships with VMware's largest and most complex customers. These customers are typically adopting VMware’s software portfolio across their data-centers.
At those customers you will be the focal point for everything that is related to VMware, for different teams and levels, from the most technical to the most senior executive. You will collaborate and guide them in their journey to be market leaders by using the newest and most advanced solutions in information technologies.
You will also play a key part in representing your customers in VMware, sharing their experience and wishes with the account teams, support and product managers, helping to draw the shape of our products and contribute your point of view for our shared success.
EqualOpportunitiesStatement
We truly believe in the Power of Human Difference. At VMware, we celebrate our people from a wide variety of dynamic backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We deliver transformative IT solutions by building a community that is inclusive and diverse. The passion and collaboration you will find in joining the team is what makes this opportunity one of the most attractive in the market.
VMware is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Prohibits Discrimination and Harassment of Any Kind: VMware is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at VMware are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV Status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. VMware will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. VMware encourages applicants of all ages. VMware will provide reasonable accommodation to employees who have protected disabilities consistent with local law.
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VMware is a recognised global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware's industry-leading compute, cloud, mobility, networking and security offerings, our solutions deliver a new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application
With revenues of $7.92 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers, more than 75,000 partners, and 19,000+ employees in 120+ locations around the world. At the core of what we do are our people who believe in our EPIC2 values - execution, passion, integrity, customers, and community.
We are commited to providing access to our careers site and job applications for all applicants. If you are vision-impaired or have some other disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act or a similar law, and you would like to talk about potential accommodations related to applying for employment at VMware, please contact us at Applicant-Assistance@groups.vmware.com or +1 (650)-846-1911.
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VMware is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Prohibits Discrimination and Harassment of Any Kind: VMware is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at VMware are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV Status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. VMware will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. VMware encourages applicants of all ages. Vmware will provide reasonable accommodation to employees who have protected disabilities consistent with local law. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
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He Took A Selfie Every Day From When He Was 12 To His Wedding Day.
From the age of 12, Hugo Cornellier decided that he would take a photo every day until the day he got married, and he never missed a single day. It might not seem like a lot, but the process was a major undertaking that required a lot of dedication in order to make his photo project work. Nine years later, the results were absolutely fantastic. You'll be saying "Wow!" This took discipline. So, make sure and check out his journey and then take a look at the video to witness the amazing transformation through thousands of photos. Your jaw will absolutely drop!
When Hugo Cornellier was 12 years old, he decided to do something wonderful.
On February 2008, he started taking a photo of himself every day, and he had no intention of stopping until his wedding day, which wouldn't come for another nine years. Yes, he married young. Get over it.
Hugo Cornellier
He took these photos in different areas of the house, but one thing remained the same.
It didn't matter whether he took the pictures in his parents' kitchen, living room, or by the computer, there was always one thing that he made sure would look the same, and that was his facial appearance.
Hugo Cornellier
To get the effect to work, Hugo stabilized each photo manually.
The results were the same face throughout the next 9 years, with several wardrobe changes, karate outfits, and of course, various haircuts.
Hugo Cornellier
Along the way, other people made guest appearances in some of his shots.
You might see one of his siblings or even his dad photobombing Hugo, but this guy's face remained stoic like a statue. Now that's what we call dedication.
Hugo Cornellier
Hugo took over 2500 photos over the years and piled them all together.
As the number of photos he took grew, so did he, and his beard. In what might seem like a blink of an eye to us, Hugo was undergoing a transformation from a 12-year-old to a teenager, and eventually, a young man.
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Surveillance video captures a brazen and fast-moving thief steal a woman's purse from her car in Temecula.
The victim now wants to warn people to be more vigilant since the crime was done in broad daylight at a gas station.
In the video, the thief gets out of a car on the right side of your screen, walks up to the victim's truck, opens the passenger side door, grabs her purse, slowly closes the door and then scurries back to his car.
The victim, Amber Winbury, said she didn't even realize it had happened until someone else came up to her and told her they believed someone stole something from her car.
"I was in shock, honestly. It made me really upset that just somebody would want to do that, let alone do it to a female who's just there by herself," she said.
Winbury filed a police report. The incident happened at a gas station at Temecula Parkway and Pechanga Parkway. Winbury said there isn't much to go on because the guy appeared to use some kind of cloth to keep from leaving any fingerprints on the truck.
She said the car, which appears to be a dark green Toyota Camry, had its plates covered.
Winbury said there are a couple of things both she and others should take from the crime.
"Honestly, be more aware. That's what I learned from this. It can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone," she said.
Winbury said her wallet was somewhere else so the guy did not get away with much, just a cellphone charger, pocket knife and some medicine. But she said that's not the point.
"He didn't get something really important, but he still had the nerve to go after something that he could have. He could have gotten my identity. That's broad daylight. It was 11 o'clock in the morning, pretty much. It was just really scary," she said. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
As an avid fan of tabletop RPGs who never really gets to play them, I have a growing list of games that I want to try out but probably won’t get to in the foreseeable future. One of the games on that list is Apocalypse World, an RPG by Vincent Baker with such an enjoyable core mechanic and gaming philosophy that it inspired a cornucopia of hacks and spinoffs. My favorite tabletop RPG Dungeon World drew its inspiration from this game, and while I typically don’t enjoy the post-apocalypse genre I would love to explore Apocalypse World regardless.
What drew me initially to Apocalypse World, what inspired me to want to play it despite my love of Dungeon World, is that AW feels more modern. Dungeon World feels modern compared to something like Dungeons and Dragons but because it borrows mechanics from that very game, it falls somewhere in between when it comes to being a streamlined experience. With its simple barter system and gritty way of measuring harm, Apocalypse World feels even more like a game where the focus is on narrative. And boy do I love narrative!If you’re not at all familiar with the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) genre of games, this game is their namesake and introduced the core mechanic that they all rely on. You describe your character’s actions in the narrative, and when those actions constitute a move, you trigger that move. This typically involves rolling dice, in which case you roll 2d6 and add an appropriate stat. On a 10+, you do what you intended with little trouble. On a 7-9, you still get what you want but it will cost you something or have unintended consequences. On a 6-, something happens and you are not going to like it.
The whole idea of something happening on a failed roll is a big part of what drew me to PbtA in the first place. Games I’d played previously did not feature that sort of thing (unless you had a GM with experience and good instincts, and since I was the GM – well, we didn’t have that). I hated failing a roll and having effectively wasted my turn. It was boring. In Apocalypse World, a failed roll doesn’t mean nothing happens – it means something happens that propels the action forward, and it will likely be very unpleasant.
Speaking of, when it comes to turn offs to Apocalypse World part of what has kept me from playing this game so far is the general atmosphere of unpleasantness. It comes with the territory – this is the post-apocalypse, after all, a genre that is as gritty as they come. The end of the world supposedly will bring out the worst in humanity, so subject matter can get seriously sickening in a setting like this. It’s important to establish boundaries in the beginning so everyone can be comfortable in the game environment. Call me a “casual,” but I wouldn’t have a good time at the table if subject matter got into the territory of pretty much anything awful happening to children, so I’d need to play with a group that avoided that. Sexual violence would also be a barrier for me.
Still, I find this game to be really compelling and I think I could have a good time with it when playing with a solid group of people. I have ideas both of what I would want to do if I were playing a character in the game, and what I would want to do as the Master of Ceremonies (MC) of the game.
As a player, I am most drawn to the Brainer class. These guys or gals (or whatever in-between you can imagine) are truly disturbing. Their psychic powers make them frightening and unknowable, and everyone is creeped out by them at least a little bit. Brainers have cool powers like being able to affect people across a distance by using only their mind, reading other people’s minds, and planting suggestions in their heads to get them to do things. In their description, the game describes brainers as having “eyes like broken things,” and that line is particular jumps out at me as compelling. I picture being stared at by someone with those sort of eyes and shivers run down my spine. I normally play characters that are pretty four-colored in nature, so this would be an awesome way to break that mold a bit and play something more disturbing.
Of course, I have other classes I am interested in. The Maestro d’, a new playbook to the second edition of Apocalypse World, actually seems like a lot of fun. This class controls a key location like a bar or bordello and offers a “service” that other people want. The Maestro d’ has connections that he or she can utilize to get information or to accomplish more insidious goals. I’d also be interested in playing the Skinner, a playbook focused on beauty and art that can mesmerize people with their craft – or by getting naked. Whichever. There’s this one Skinner move where you simply whisper someone’s name into the psychic maelstrom and that person will find themselves inexplicably guided to you – that power is so cool to me.
As the MC of the game, I’d want to run the Fallen Empires version of Apocalypse World. This setting is a fantasy post-apocalypse rather than a modern one, and I could get behind that idea a little more. It’s less overdone, I think. Whenever I think post-apocalypse, my mind immediately goes to things like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us and it all feels like I’ve seen it a million times. The end of the fantasy world, though – that’s something different that I could work with.
Apocalypse World is interesting in that you play the game around the characters that the players have created. It takes multiple sessions to build up because the game is all about stories and connections. That approach makes it difficult as the MC to plan ahead for a campaign – the story I tell would be completely based on the characters in my game. If I could choose, though, I’d love to do a story focused around a specific hardhold (or stronghold in the Fallen Empires version) rather than constantly traveling around between locations. I’m intrigued by the concept of a group of people working together to survive the harsh conditions of the world, and wouldn’t care quite as much about pitting characters against each other. I’d prefer for conflict to arise from outside forces rather than having a ton of internal strife. Not that internal strife is bad – I would certainly want that present, particularly as political struggles are key elements of characters like the Hardholder. I wouldn’t want to end up with a scenario where all of my players want to kill each other, though.That’s gonna be it for me today, adventurers. Hopefully sometime in the future I will get to play this game – in the meantime, I might just try and see if I can find some livestreams or Let’s Plays showing it off. If you have any exciting experiences with Apocalypse World, feel free to share them in the comments and make me jealous. And if you enjoyed today’s post, check back here on Adventure Rules every Tuesday for even more tabletop shenanigans!
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Published by Robert Ian Shepard
Robert Ian Shepard is a husband, father, and aspiring writer. If you need a good laugh, check out his blog Adventure Rules, the Essential Companion of Heroic Adventurers!
View all posts by Robert Ian Shepard | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Tiger I was able to photograph on a visit in Florida. Done | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Metabolic positron emission tomography parameters predict failure patterns in early non-small-cell lung cancer treated with stereotactic body radiation therapy: a single institution experience.
The prognostic value of metabolic parameters using 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (FDG PET/CT) has not been established for early non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Accordingly, the authors investigated the prognostic value of metabolic parameters in terms of failure patterns in patients with early NSCLC who underwent stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT). Data from 35 patients with Stage I NSCLC who underwent SBRT using CyberKnife and received pretreatment FDG PET/CT between 2008 and 2016 were retrospectively reviewed. Maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume, and total lesion glycolysis were measured. The significance of these parameters with regard to failure patterns was assessed. The median follow-up was 23 months for all patients and 34 months for living patients. Ten patients experienced recurrence: three local failures, five regional failures (RF), and eight distant failures (DF). Three-year local, regional and distant control rates were 96.7%, 86.4% and 71.1%, respectively. High SUVmax (<9 vs. ≥9) was an independent predictive factor associated with increased RF (P = 0.027) and DF (P = 0.008). Furthermore, SUVmax was indicative of both progression-free (P = 0.015) and overall (P = 0.034) survival. High SUVmax was a significant metabolic parameter associated with increased RF and DF in patients with early NSCLC who received SBRT, having a high propensity for dissemination. These results suggest that adjuvant treatment in conjunction with SBRT may be considered in patients with early NSCLC and high SUVmax. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
Introduction
============
Electromyostimulation (EMS) has been used to complement rehabilitation programs for many years. Lately, EMS is increasingly combined with strength training in high performance sports. Modern whole-body EMS (WB-EMS) systems (e.g., miha bodytec, Augsburg, and Germany) allow athletes to simultaneously stimulate several muscle groups, to train a whole muscle chain and thus to dynamically train specific movements, e.g., jumping movement. A recent study with professional soccer players revealed an increase in maximal strength, jumping, and sprinting ability after WB-EMS training ([@B10]). The study further showed that two sessions of dynamic WB-EMS a week can be sufficient to significantly influence the functional parameters of the red blood cells (RBC) ([@B11]).
Within the body, RBC deliver oxygen to the muscle tissues via the blood flow through the vessel system. To do so, RBC have to deform their shape in order to pass the smallest capillaries of the microcirculation. This RBC deformability is a unique cell characteristic and is, among others, influenced by nitric oxide (NO) ([@B6]; [@B32]; [@B18]). In RBC, NO is actively produced by RBC-NO synthase (RBC-NOS) ([@B23]; [@B18]). The phosphorylation status of RBC-NOS has been used as a marker of enzyme activation. Activation occurs through different stimuli such as inflammatory cytokines, growth factors, and hormones, etc ([@B12]) or exercise induced shear stress through activation of Akt kinase ([@B32]). Biomechanical stimulation in the form of increased shear stress stimulates the phosphorylation of the RBC-NOS epitopes serine 1177 (Serine^1177^) via the PI3 Kinase/Akt Kinase pathway ([@B9]; [@B32]). The activated RBC-NOS generates NO, which is a precondition for increasing RBC deformability ([@B32]; [@B18]). In contrast, phosphorylation of RBC-NOS residues threonine 495 (Thr^495^) or serine 114 (Ser^114^) were associated to decreased RBC-NOS activation ([@B17]). RBC-NOS produced NO binds to reactive cysteine thiols, a reaction termed S-nitrosylation. [@B18] identified α- and β-spectrin as potential targets for S-nitrosylation in the RBC with increasing S-nitrosylation of the spectrins being associated to increased RBC deformability.
[@B8] indicated that increased RBC deformability might improve the blood oxygen content due to an increased oxygen diffusion from alveoli to pulmonary capillaries. This might suggest that an increase in RBC deformability might favour performance capacity.
Soccer match play is characterized by high intensity repeated sprint actions that require a high muscle oxygenation. Higher muscle oxygen-level can positively influence the re-oxygenation of the muscles and thus phosphocreatine re-synthesis for a faster recovery. Due to the high demand of muscle oxygenation during match play, improved RBC deformability could be advantageous for the specific endurance capacity of soccer players such as repeated sprint ability (c.f. [@B7]).
An increase in RBC deformability after WB-EMS stimulation was associated -- at least after acute application -- via RBC-NOS activation and increased NO production, respectively ([@B11]). However, the observed chronic increase in RBC deformability occurred in the absence of a further RBC-NOS activation and it was speculated whether WB-EMS might affect RBC turnover. RBC are a heterogeneous cell population consisting of RBC of different ages. RBC aging was associated to a progressive decrease in RBC deformability, paralleled by increasing RBC-NOS activation and NO production ([@B3]).
The purpose of the present study thus was to investigate whether a 7 week dynamic WB-EMS program affects RBC deformability through shift in RBC age distribution, and to examine whether these changes are sustained 3 weeks after the last intervention session. Further, it is unknown if an increased RBC deformability through WB-EMS-Training can positively influence the endurance capacity which was thus also aim of the present study.
Materials and Methods {#s1}
=====================
Participants
------------
Only healthy participants were included which means no cardiovascular or metabolic diseases and no preinjury in the tested muscle groups. Participants needed to compete on a national level for the last 3 years and train 2--4 session per week and play one soccer match per week. Experience in strength training was mandatory. Thirty soccer players were randomly assigned into three different groups. The EMS groups (EG, *n* = 10) performed dynamic whole-body strength training with EMS twice a week accompanied by 3 × 10 squat jumps in addition to the daily soccer routine over a period of 7 weeks. To differentiate between the effects caused by EMS and by the squat jumps and soccer training, respectively, two control groups were included. A jump training group (TG, *n* = 10) performed the same number of squat jumps without EMS stimulus on the same days as the EG and a control group (CG, *n* = 10) that only performed the daily soccer routine.
Basal anthropometric parameters of the participants are presented in [Table 1](#T1){ref-type="table"}. All subjects abstained from alcohol consumption for 24 h prior to and during the training intervention and were non-smokers.
######
Anthropometric data (mean ± SD) and total training load (arbitrary units) during the 7-week intervention period calculated by Polar Team-2 Software according to training time spent in defined heart rates (see section "Materials and Methods").
Group Age (Year) Height (m) Weight (kg) Bodyfat (%) relVO~2~peak (ml/kg^∗^min^-1^) Sessions/week Total training load (a.u)
-------- ------------ ------------- ------------- ------------- -------------------------------- --------------- ---------------------------
**EG** 24.4 ± 4.2 1.82 ± 0.03 81.4 ± 5.3 12.9 ± 2.1 52.1 ± 3.4 3.4 ± 1.2 3430.6 ± 910.7
**TG** 21.1 ± 1.9 1.83 ± 0.06 79.7 ± 5.5 10.8 ± 2.8 56.3 ± 5.7 3.4 ± 1.3 3478.6 ± 1722.8
**CG** 23.6 ± 3.9 1.82 ± 0.05 79.7 ± 7.5 14.1 ± 3.6 54.3 ± 7.2 2.6 ± 0.7 2644.4 ± 1437.3
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Ethics Committee of the German Sports University Cologne. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the German Sports University Cologne \[06-02-2014\].
Definition of Daily Soccer Routine
----------------------------------
The participants were soccer players and performed 3.2 ± 1.0 training sessions per week and competed once a week in the championships. The standard training sessions lasted approximately 90 min including technical skill activities, offensive and defensive tactics, athletic components with various intensities, small-sided game plays, and continuous play. In a normal training week during season with a match on Sunday training was scheduled on Tuesdays, Wednesdays (optional), Thursdays, and Fridays. Number of training sessions and the training days varied according to the game schedule playing Sunday-Sunday or Sunday-Saturday. The number of training sessions and the total training minutes were documented. The training load was measured according to the training time spent in defined heart rate zones during soccer training or match via Polar Team-2 Software (Polar Electro, Büttelborn, Germany) (see [Table 1](#T1){ref-type="table"}). The training load provided by the Polar-Software aims to determine internal training load based on background variables \[sex, training history, metabolic thresholds, and maximal oxygen consumption (VO~2~max)\] and parameters measured during training sessions (exercise mode, and energy expenditure) (c.f. [@B31]). The heart rate zones (100--90%, 89--80%, 79--70%, 69--60%, and 59--50%) were defined according to the individual maximum heart rate measured in the maximal ramp test (see endurance test).
The players were asked to maintain their usual food intake und hydration according to the recommendations for soccer players ([@B13]) and no nutrition supplementation was used. Additional strength training was not allowed during the study.
All players had a constant training volume during the first half of the season (July till December) and were in a well-trained condition with a relative VO~2~peak of 54.2 ± 5.9 ml/kg^∗^min^-1^. All players regularly conducted strength training during first half of the season and had experience in strength training of 5.4 ± 3.9 years. The intervention period started after the 3 week mid-season break from end of December till mid of January. During these 3 weeks the training load was relatively low (moderate endurance training twice per week) in order to maintain fitness level and not negatively affect baseline testing.
Exercise Protocol
-----------------
Whole-body electrostimulation training was conducted on Tuesdays and Fridays in order to obtain a rest interval of 48 h between the two sessions and the championship game on Sunday. The WB-EMS training was conducted using a WB-EMS-system by "*miha bodytec*" (Augsburg, Germany). WB-EMS was applied with an electrode vest to the upper body including the chest, upper and lower back, latissimus, and the abdominals and with a belt system to the lower body including the muscles of the glutes, thighs, and calves. Biphasic rectangular wave pulsed currents (80 Hz) were used with an impulse width of 350 μs (c.f. [@B10]). The stimulation design has been shown to be effective for enhancing strength and performance parameters and to also positively influence RBC deformability ([@B11], [@B10]). The squat jumps were only included to integrate specific movement patterns to support strength transfer into jumping and sprinting ability ([@B30]) and for a better regulation of stimulation intensity to a sub-maximal level. The stimulation intensity (0--120 mA) was determined and set separately for each muscle group by using a Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion (c.f. [@B33]). The training intensity was defined for each players in a familiarization session 2 weeks before and set at a sub-maximal level that still assures a clean dynamic jump movement (RPE 16--19 "hard to very hard") and was saved on a personalized chip card. The EG performed 3 × 10 maximal squat jumps with a set pause of 60 s (no currents) per session. Every impulse for a single jump lasted for 4 s (range of motion: 2 s eccentric from standing position to an knee angle of 90° -- 1 s isometric -- 0.1 s explosive concentric -- 1 s landing and stabilization) followed by a rest period of 10 s (duty cycle approx. 28%). The players started with a 2--3 min standardized warm-up with movement preparations including squats, skipping and jumps in different variations (squat jumps, jumps out of skipping, or double jumps) at a light to moderate stimulation intensity. The players were told to slowly increase the intensity every few impulses. The training started when the players reached the defined training intensity that was saved on the chip card from the last session according to the RPE 16--19 ("hard to very hard"). The stimulation intensity was constantly increased individually every week (Tuesdays) controlled by the coaches in order to maintain a high stimulation intensity. The intensity was increased after the warm-up during the first and the second set of 10 squat jumps starting from calves up to the chest electrodes.
The TG conducted the same standardized warm-up and performed the same amount of jumps with identical interval and conduction twice per week without EMS. The CG only performed the 2--4 soccer training session plus one match per week.
Experimental Protocol
---------------------
### Endurance Test
For determination of relative maximum oxygen uptake (VO~2~ peak), spirometry was performed on a WOODWAY treadmill (Woodway GmbH, Weil am Rhein, Germany) 1 week before (Baseline) and within 7 days after the 7-weeks intervention period (Posttest) and again after a detrain period of 3 weeks (Retest) ([Figure 1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}). Endurance tests were conducted three days after the soccer match to assure adequate recovery and not negatively influence performance. Spirometry was analyzed with the ZAN600-System and ZAN-Software GPI 3.xx (ZAN Austria e.U., Steyr-Dietach, Austria). To calibrate the device, a gas mixture consisting of 5% CO~2~, 16% O~2~, and rest nitrogen was used (*Praxair Deutschland GmbH*, Düsseldorf, Germany). To measure VO~2~ peak, the subjects performed an endurance ramp test according to a protocol of the Institute of Cardiovascular Research and Sports Medicine (German Sport University Cologne).
{#F1}
The players performed a warmup with moderate speed (3 m/s) at 1% incline for 3 min. In the last 30 s the incline was increased to 2.5%. Running speed was then increased every 30 s by 0.3 m/s till subjective exhaustion. Heart rate was documented in the last 10 s of a ramp stage. The VO~2~peak was determined as average maximum oxygen uptake of the first 20 s after completion of the test. Additionally, maximum heart rate (HF~max~), time to exertion (TTE), maximum lactate production and respiratory quotient (RQ = V CO~2~/V O~2~) was documented by the ZAN-system.
### Blood Sampling
At Baseline and at wk-7, blood samples were taken from the vena mediana cubiti of EG and TG before (Pre), 15--30 min after (Post) and 24 h after the interventions (24 h Post), respectively. Blood samples of the CG were taken at the same day time as the intervention groups. For CG samples were only taken before (Pre) because no training sessions were performed between pre and 24 h post sampling ([Figure 1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}). A third sampling was scheduled 3 weeks after the end of the intervention period (Retest). Blood was anticoagulated using ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) vacutainer (BD, United States) to measure basal blood parameters or using sodium heparin vacutainer (BD, United States) to measure RBC deformability of RBC in general and of RBC separated according to RBC age (young, main fraction, old, and very old) and related RBC-NOS/NO parameters such as S-nitrosylation and nitrite.
### Basal Blood Parameters
Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid anticoagulated blood was used for the determination of reticulocytes and basal blood parameters (RBC count, white blood cell count, platelet count, hemoglobin concentration, hematocrit, mean cellular volume, mean cellular hemoglobin, and mean cellular hemoglobin concentration). Reticulocytes were analyzed by laboratory Dr. Wisplinghoff, Cologne, Germany. Determination of the hematological profile was obtained using hematology analyzer Sysmex Digitana KX-21N (Sysmex, Horgen, Switzerland).
### RBC Subpopulation
Red blood cell were isolated and fractioned to separate young, main fraction old and very old RBC using percoll density centrifugation according to a modified protocol of [@B3].
Whole blood samples were centrifuged for 1 min at 3500 g at room temperature and plasma and buffy coat were removed. Isolated RBC were washed 10:1 with GASP-buffer (9 mmol/L Na~2~HPO~4~,~1.3~ mmol/L NaH~2~PO~4~, 140 mmol/L NaCl, 5.5 mmol/L glucose, 0.8 g/L BSA) and centrifuged as described above. The supernatant was discarded and RBC were diluted 1:1 with SAH-buffer (26.3 g/L BSA, 132 mmol/L NaCl, 4.6 mmol/L KCl, 10 mmol/L HEPES).
Percoll solutions with a density of 1.064, 1.066, 1.068, 1.072, and 1.076 g/mL in SAH buffer (Amersham Biosciences, Sweden) were prepared from a Percoll stock solution (1.131 g/mL; VWR). Solutions were layered into a 15 ml tube one on top of the other with the densest layer being right at the bottom. 600 μl of washed and diluted RBC were cautiously given on top of the layers centrifuged at 3000 rpm for 25 min at room temperature to receive young (1.064 g/ml), main fraction (1.065--1.068 g/ml), old (1.072 g/ml), and very old (1.076+ g/ml) RBC. RBC fractions were washed 1:1 with GASP and centrifuged as described above. The supernatant was discarded and the RBC fractions were used for deformability and age distribution analysis. The proportion of each fraction was determined and expressed as percentage of whole RBC.
### RBC Deformability
Red blood cell deformability was directly measured after blood sampling and after separation of RBC according to cell age by ektacytometry using the Laser-assisted-optical-rotational cell analyzer (LORCA; RR Mechatronics, Netherlands) described in detail by [@B19]. Briefly, 10 μl of RBC were solved in 2.5 ml of isotonic 0.14 mM polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) (osmolarity 300 mOsmol/L, viscosity 28.7 mPa^∗^sec at 37°C). The samples were sheared in a Couette system at nine shear stresses between 0.3 and 50 Pa. A laser beam was directed through the samples and deformation of RBC affected diffraction pattern of the laser beam. The LORCA software used and width (W) and length (L) of the diffraction pattern to calculate an elongation index (EI): EI = (L-W)/(L+W) for the nine shear stresses. EI~max~, representing maximal deformability at infinite shear stress, and SS ½, representing shear stress necessary for one-half of EImax, were calculated from the curves according to [@B40]. Finally, the ratio of SS1/2:EImax was calculated as described by [@B2].
### Immunohistochemistry
For immunohistochemistical staining, RBC was fixed with 4% formaldehyde in a 1:2 ratio for 20 min at room temperature and washed using 0.1 M PBS. Washed RBC were dispersed on a slide and heat fixed. Immunostaining was performed according to the detailed protocols of [@B18] and [@B3] with primary antibody dilutions of 1:150 for Rabbit anti -- phospho-eNOSSerine^1177^ (Merck, Darmstadt, Germany, 07--428), 1:500 for Rabbit anti-phospho-eNOS Serine^116^ (Merck, Darmstadt, Germany, 07--357), 1:400 for Rabbit anti-phospho-eNOS Threonine^495^ (Cell Signaling, Leiden, Netherland, 9574S), 1:700 for Rabbit anti eNOS (BD Biosciences, NJ, United States, 610299), 1:500 for Rabbit anti Human AKT1/ PKBα (Merck, Darmstadt, Germany, 07--416), 1:500 for Rabbit anti-phospho AKTSerine^473^ (Cell Signaling, Leiden, Netherlands, 9271). Primary antibody was incubated for 1 h (for Serine^1177^: overnight at 4°C). A control area, located on the same slide, was incubated in the absence of primary antibodies. After rinsing with TBS and an incubation step with 3% Normal Goat Serum (Dako Agilent Technologies, Germany), both areas were incubated with the secondary goat-anti-rabbit antibody (biotinylated, dilution 1:400; Dako Agilent Technologies, Germany) for 1 h at RT. A streptavidin-horseradish-peroxidase complex (Sigma-Aldrich, United States) was applied as detection system (dilution 1:400) for 30 min at room temperature. The staining was developed using 3,3-diaminobenzidine-tetrahydrochloride solution (Sigma-Aldrich, United States) in 0.1 mol/L TBS.
The stained slides were dehydrated in raising alcohol solutions, mounted with Entellan^®^ (Merck, Darmstadt, Germany) and covered.
Pictures were taken using a Leica microscope coupled to a CCD-camera (DXC-1850P, Sony, Germany) with a magnification of 400-fold. Gray value determination was used for staining intensity analysis. The mean gray values of the edge of 50 RBC on at least 4 different visual fields of the test area and 10 RBC on at least 2 visual fields of the control area were measured with the software "Image J" (National Institutes of Health, United States).
Total immunostaining intensity was calculated as the mean of measuring RBC gray value minus mean background gray value which was obtained on three different cell free areas of the slide. Mean gray values of the control area were subtracted from mean gray values of the test area to yield net gray value representing staining of the RBC.
### RBC S-Nitrosylation
For S-nitrosylation analysis of α- and β-spectrin, whole blood was separated by centrifugation (5000 g, 1 min, 4°C). Plasma was removed, RBC pellet was washed using 0.1 mol PBS and again centrifuged. RBC pellet was stored at -20°C until measurement.
S-nitrosylation was determined using S-Nitrosylated Protein Detection Kit (Cayman Chemicals, Ann Arbor, United States) which employs the Biotin-Switch Assay after [@B21]. The protocol has been described in detail elsewhere ([@B18]). Using the kit buffer and solutions, RBCs were first lysed. Then, free thiol groups were blocked and S-nitrosothiols were cleaved. The newly formed thiols were biotinylated. The samples were then separated by gelelectrophoresis using 4--12% Bis-Tris gel (BioRad, Munich, Germany) and appropriate 1 × MOPS running buffer (BioRad). 60 μg of total protein were separated for 1 h under constant 90 mA and transferred to a polyvinylidene fluoride membrane (0.45 mm pore size). The background of the membrane was blocked in 2% bovine serum albumin (in 1 × TBS with 0.1% Tween 20) overnight at 4°C and incubated with a horseradish peroxidase (dilution 1:2000). The reaction was developed using an enhanced chemiluminescence kit containing peroxidase substrate (Thermo Fisher Scientific). S-nitrosylated protein bands at 240 and 220 kDa, previously identified as α-spectrin and β-spectrin, respectively ([@B18]), were examined for different "Integrated densities" using the (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States) software ([@B18]).
### Nitrite Measurement
Whole blood was centrifuged (1000 g, 4°C, 10 min) and plasma samples were stored at -80°C for nitrite analysis.
For RBC nitrite determination, RBC were immediately mixed with preservation solution (800 mM K~3~\[Fe(CN)~6~\], 100 mM NEM, 10 V-% Igepal, 90 V-% aqua dest) in a 5:1 ratio and stored at -80°C until measurement ([@B29]). For plasma nitrite measurements, samples were thawed on ice and directly measured. For measurement of RBC nitrite, frozen samples were thawed on iced while mixed with methanol in a 1:2 ratio for protein precipitation and centrifuged at 21000 g for 10 min at 4°C. The supernatant was collected in new reaction tubes. Plasma nitrite, nitrite of the supernatant (=RBC nitrite) and nitrite levels of prepared standards were determined using an ozone-based chemiluminescence NO detector (CLD 88e, EcoPhysics, Switzerland) as described by [@B16]. Samples (100 μl) were injected into an acidified tri-iodide solution that reduces nitrite to NO gas at 60°C. The reduction solution was gas-flushed using helium as NO inert gas. The Helium-NO mix was purged in a NaOH trap and NO concentration of the samples was analyzed by the CLD system. The Chart FIA software (EcoPhysics, Switzerland) was used to analyze the area under the curve and the nitrite/NO concentrations of the samples and standards were calculated. All samples were measured in triplicate. Plasma nitrite concentrations did not require correction. Total RBC nitrite concentration of the sample was corrected for nitrite levels of methanol and preservation solution ([@B29]).
Statistical Analysis
--------------------
All descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS 25^®^ (IBM^®^, Armonk, NY, United States). To determine the effect of the training interventions on RBC deformability, endurance parameters, and nitrite parameters, a separate 3 × 3 (time^∗^group) mixed ANOVA with repeated measures was conducted. ANOVA assumption of homogenous variances was tested using Maulchy-test of Sphericity. Greenhouse-Geisser correction was used when a violation of Mauchly's test was observed. Partial eta-square (η^2^~p~) values are reported as effect size estimates. If 3 × 3 mixed ANOVA revealed a significant time-point^∗^treatment or time^∗^group interaction effect on any variable, this effect was further investigated carrying out Bonferroni corrected *post hoc* pairwise comparison. Due to a lower number of samples (*n* \< 10), the effect of the training interventions on RBC-NOS activation and S-Nitrosylation and the acute effect (pre, post, 24 h post) on RBC deformability was determined with the help of a student t-test or Wilcoxon test for dependent variables. Kolgomorov-smirnov test was applied to test for normal distribution.
Group differences were determined by a one-way ANOVA. Bonferroni *post hoc*-test was used to calculate significant differences between the tested groups.
For all inferential statistical analyses, significance was defined as p-value less than 0.05. Results were presented as means and standard deviations (SDs). Figures were created with Prism 6 (La Jolla, United States).
Results
=======
Endurance Capacity
------------------
Relative VO~2~peak did not differ between the groups nor was a within group^∗^time effect observed ([Figure 2](#F2){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F2}
Basal Blood Parameters
----------------------
The analysis of the training based influences on basal blood parameters revealed a significant acute increase in the number of reticulocytes from pre to 24 h post at wk-7. Group comparison showed scattered differences between the three groups. However, the differences cannot be attributed to an effect of the training interventions ([Table 2](#T2){ref-type="table"}).
######
Basal blood parameters (mean ± SD).
Baseline Wk-7 Retest
------------------- ---- --------------- ---------------- --------------- ------------------ ------------------ ---------------- ----------------
**Erythrocytes** EG 5 ± 0.25 4.98 ± 0.25 5.06 ± 0.26 5.09 ± 0.23 5.03 ± 0.25 4.97 ± 0.29 4.97 ± 0.24
(10^6^/μl) TG 5.19 ± 0.61 5.10 ± 0.59 5.19 ± 0.66 5.31 ± 0.58 4.83 ± 1.15 5.18 ± 0.66 5.16 ± 0.47
CG 5.2 ± 0.37 5.19 ± 0.27 5.18 ± 0.35
**Thrombocytes** EG 253.2 ± 56.7 258.8 ± 52.6 253.75 ± 55.9 258.67 ± 49.5 266.78 ± 44.2 257.67 ± 54.8 262.7 ± 46.4
(10^3^/μl) TG 217.5 ± 42.3 219.5 ± 46.4\# 223.8 ± 44.7 218.4 ± 40.4\# 209.9 ± 40.9\#\# 216.3 ± 43.5\# 212.5 ± 47.2\#
CG 256.3 ± 63.5 255.44 ± 59.8 271.0 ± 63.4
**Leukocytes** EG 5.9 ± 1.7 6.14 ± 2.46 6.39 ± 1.81 6.26 ± 1.85 5.87 ± 1.57 5.77 ± 1.49 6.23 ± 1.41
\[10^3^/μl\] TG 5.64 ± 1.28 5.2 ± 0.94 5.81 ± 1.29 6.13 ± 1.28 5.46 ± 1.41 5.67 ± 1.48 5.4 ± 1.21\#
CG 7.57 ± 2.24\# 6.74 ± 1.48 6.46 ± 1.62
**Reticulocytes** EG 9.36 ± 2.94 9.91 ± 3.14 9.65 ± 3.59 8.14 ± 2.18 8.59 ± 2.31 10.01 ± 2.03\* 8.39 ± 1.45
(%o) TG 12.47 ± 4.64 11.94 ± 5.0\# 12.09 ± 4.67 11.75 ± 4.13\#\# 9.73 ± 2.67 13.11 ± 3.67 10.15 ± 5.37
CG 10.87 ± 3.01 9.81 ± 2.55\# 9.63 ± 2.04
**Hemoglobin** EG 14.86 ± 0.67 14.78 ± 0.66 15.01 ± 0.73 15.11 ± 1.03 14.91 ± 0.90 14.61 ± 0.91 14.69 ± 0.86
(g/dl) TG 14.56 ± 0.96 14.38 ± 1.09 14.71 ± 1.03 14.96 ± 1.13 14.29 ± 1.11 14.49 ± 1.11 14.645 ± 1.07
CG 15.27 ± 1.05 15.05 ± 0.89 15.11 ± 1.0
**Hematocrit** EG 43.44 ± 1.94 43.22 ± 1.98 44.13 ± 1.80 44.56 ± 2.60 43.78 ± 2.11 43.89 ± 2.42 43.11 ± 2.32
\[%\] TG 42.73 ± 2.28 42.18 ± 2.52 43.18 ± 2.89 43.9 ± 3.07 42.4 ± 2.59 43.4 ± 2.99 42.91 ± 2.63
CG 45.00 ± 2.96 44.75 ± 1.49 44.57 ± 2.64 44.44 ± 2.74
**MCV** EG 87.11 ± 3.69 86.89 ± 4.04 87.00 ± 3.51 87.44 ± 3.68 87.33 ± 3.57 87.89 ± 3.44 87.22 ± 3.7
(fl) TG 83.74 ± 8.21 82.82 ± 7.65 83.81 ± 8.16 83.8 ± 8.64 83.1 ± 8.5 84.4 ± 8.49 83.55 ± 8.17
CG 86.56 ± 2.74 86.78 ± 2.33 86.22 ± 2.22
**MCH** EG 29.89 ± 1.69 29.78 ± 1.56 29.43 ± 1.81 29.67 ± 1.66 29.67 ± 1.66 29.56 ± 1.59 29.67 ± 1.66
(pg) TG 28.45 ± 3.08 28.36 ± 3.07 28.73 ± 3.10 28.4 ± 2.24 28.1 ± 3.11 28.3 ± 3.23 28.64 ± 3.17
CG 29.33 ± 0.87 29.22 ± 0.83 29.33 ± 0.87
**MCHC** EG 34.22 ± 0.83 34.33 ± 1.00 34.29 ± 1.25 34.0 ± 0.87 34.33 ± 0.71 33.67 ± 0.87 34.0 ± 0.71
(g/dl) TG 33.91 ± 0.83 34.27 ± 0.9 34.09 ± 0.83 33.8 ± 0.79 33.4 ± 1.65 33.0 ± 1.25 34.18 ± 1.17
CG 33.78 ± 0.67 33.78 ± 1.09 34.0 ± 0.71
∗
P
\< 0.05 vs. Pre;
\#P
\< 0.05 vs. EG;
\#\#P
\< 0.01 vs. EG.
RBC Proportion
--------------
Analysis of the proportion of young RBC, main fraction, old RBC and very old RBC of EG, TG and CG during the study period revealed a slight increase in young RBC in EG from Baseline to Retest. In parallel, proportion of main fraction decreased from Baseline to Retest in EG. No changes were observed for the old and very old RBC fraction of this study group. In TG and CG, RBC proportion remained unaltered during the study period ([Figure 3](#F3){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F3}
RBC Deformability
-----------------
### Total RBC
The analysis of the acute effects of WB-EMS on RBC deformability revealed a significant decrease in deformability Ratio for TG from pre to 24 h post (*p* = 0.005) and from post to 24 h post (*p* = 0.028). No significant changes were shown at wk-7 within the groups ([Figure 4](#F4){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F4}
The 3 × 3 mixed ANOVA on total RBC pre-values revealed a significant main effect over time (F = 8.420, d = 2, *p* = 0.001, η^2^~p~ = 0.260) but no time^∗^group effect. Significant interaction effect on total RBC deformability Ratio was further analyzed by *post hoc* comparisons revealing a significant decrease of the Ratio from Baseline to Retest for EG (*p* = 0.019) and for CG (*p* = 0.017), and for TG from Baseline to wk-7 (*p* = 0.033).
Group comparison showed no differences between the three groups within the study period.
### Young RBC
At Baseline, statistical analysis revealed no acute changes between pre, post, and 24 h post in the RBC deformability Ratio of young RBC and no difference between the groups. At wk-7, Ratio significantly decreased from post to 24 h post in TG (*p* = 0.028). Data remained unaltered in EG and TG, respectively ([Figure 5](#F5){ref-type="fig"}). Pre value comparisons revealed no significant time or time^∗^group effects.
{#F5}
### Main Fraction
At Baseline and wk-7, Ratio showed no significant differences between the three tested groups. Analysis of pre-values revealed a significant main effect over time for the three groups (*F* = 15.807; *d* = 1,324, *p* \< 0.001, η^2^~p~ = 0.397) but no group^∗^time effect. A significant chronic decrease in RBC deformability Ratio was observed in the TG (*p* = 0.005) from Baseline to Retest and for CG from Baseline to Retest (*p* \> 0.001) and from wk-7 to Retest (*p* = 0.05), respectively ([Figure 5](#F5){ref-type="fig"}).
### Old RBC
Red blood cell deformability Ratio of old RBC showed no differences between the groups at Baseline. At wk-7, Ratio significantly decreased from pre to 24 h post in EG (*p* = 0.015). Comparison of pre values of the three time points showed a significant time effect from Baseline to Retest (*F* = 30.521, *d* = 2, *p* \< 0.001, η^2^~p~ = 0.560) and a significant time^∗^group effect (*F* = 3.612, *d* = 4, *p* = 0.012, η^2^~p~ = 0.231). *Post hoc* analysis showed a significant decrease from Baseline to Retest for EG (*p* = 0.001) and TG (*p* \< 0.001) and a significant decrease in all three groups from wk-7 to Retest (EG: *p* = 0.004; TG: *p* = 0.002; CG: *p* = 0.019), respectively. Values did not significantly differ between the groups at the different tests and time points ([Figure 5](#F5){ref-type="fig"}).
### Very Old RBC
Red blood cells deformability ratio remained unaffected during intervention, time or time^∗^group effect were not observed ([Figure 5](#F5){ref-type="fig"}).
RBC Protein Activation State
----------------------------
### Akt Kinase
#### Total Akt kinase
Statistical analysis revealed a significant decrease in total Akt at Baseline for EG from pre to 24 h post (*p* = 0.02). Values significantly decreased in EG from Baseline to wk-7 (*p* = 0.006) and for TG from Baseline to Retest (*p* = 0.022). No changes were observed for CG. Group comparison showed no differences between the groups over time ([Figure 6](#F6){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F6}
#### pAkt threonine^473^
Staining intensity did not differ between pre, post, or 24 h post test of Baseline and wk-7 in each of the tested groups. The comparison of the pre values over time showed a significant decrease for EG from wk-7 to Retest (*p* = 0.02). No group differences were detected at the different tests nor within the study period ([Figure 6](#F6){ref-type="fig"}).
### RBC-NOS Phosphorylation Sites
#### Total RBC-NOS
Total RBC-NOS showed no acute alternation in EG and TG at Baseline or wk-7, respectively. Also, total RBC-NOS signal remained unchanged during the study groups for each of the tested groups ([Figure 7](#F7){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F7}
#### RBC-NOS serine^1177^
Statistical analysis revealed a significant increase in RBC-NOS serine 1177 staining intensity of EG at Baseline from pre to post (*p* = 0.04) and pre to 24 h post (*p* = 0.003) and of TG from pre to 24 h post (*p* = 0.007), respectively. At wk-7, RBC-NOS serine 1177 signal increased in EG from pre to post (*p* = 0.048). A significant increase in staining intensity was observed for EG from Baseline to Retest (*p* = 0.034). No chronic changes were shown for TG or CG ([Figure 7](#F7){ref-type="fig"}).
#### RBC-NOS threonine^495^
Statistical analysis revealed no significant acute effects at Baseline and wk-7 for EG and TG. Comparison of pre-values over time revealed a significant increase in EG from Baseline to wk-7 (*p* = 0.014) but not for TG or CG, respectively. Group comparison revealed significant differences in the pre-values at Retest between EG and TG (*p* = 0.009), and between EG and CG (*p* = 0.004), respectively ([Figure 6](#F6){ref-type="fig"}).
#### RBC-NOS serine^114^
Red blood cell nitric oxide synthase serine 114 signal remained unchanged at Baseline and wk-7 for EG and TG, respectively. Comparison of pre values suggest a significant increase in RBC-NOS serine 114 signal in EG from Baseline to wk-7 (*p* = 0.043). Group comparison revealed significant differences between the pre-values (*p* = 0.025) and 24 h post values (*p* = 0.0001) of EG and TG at Baseline ([Figure 7](#F7){ref-type="fig"}).
RBC Nitrite
-----------
The 3 × 3 mixed ANOVA on RBC nitrite revealed no acute effects within subjects factor time or group^∗^time effect at Baseline or wk-7, respectively. Regarding the chronic effects, the analysis of the pre-values showed a significant effect within subjects factor time (*F* = 35.728, df = 1.60, *p* \< 0.001, η^2^~p~ = 0.608) and a significant group^∗^time effect (*F* = 4.373, df = 3.20, *p* = 0.009, η^2^~p~ = 0.276). The *post hoc* analysis showed a significant increase in RBC nitrite from Baseline to Retest for TG (*p* = 0.022) and CG (*p* = 0.006), respectively and from wk-7 to Retest for CG (*p* = 0.004). Group comparison revealed a significant difference at Retest between CG and EG (*p* = 0.043) and CG and TG (*p* = 0.009), respectively ([Figure 8](#F8){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F8}
### S-Nitrosylation
#### α-spectrin (240 kDa)
Students *t*-test revealed no significant acute effects for α-spectrin at Baseline and wk-7 in EG and TG, respectively. Group comparison revealed significantly lower α-spectrin S-nitrosylation for CG at Retest compared to EG (*p* = 0.04) ([Figure 9](#F9){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F9}
#### β-spectrin (220 kDa)
Similar to α-spectrin, S-nitrosylation of ß-spectrin showed no significant acute changes at Baseline and wk-7. A significant decrease in β-spectrin S-nitrosylation was observed in all three groups at Retest compared to Baseline (EG, *p* \< 0.001; TG, *p* = 0.001; CG, *p* = 0.003) ([Figure 9](#F9){ref-type="fig"}).
Discussion
==========
The aim of the present study was to investigate whether WB-EMS affects RBC turnover which might affect overall deformability of circulating RBC by rejuvenation of the RBC population and if this might be related to improved endurance capacity. The key findings of the investigation indicate an increase in young RBC in the EG group along with improved overall RBC deformability, represented by decreased SS1/2:EImax ratio. Detailed observation of the different RBC subfractions revealed improved RBC deformability of old RBC during study period. This improvement was not only observed in the EG but also in TG and CG. Changes in RBC deformability were not associated to altered S-nitrosylation of the spectrins. Endurance capacity remained unchanged during study period.
RBC deformability changes have been associated to influence endurance capacity ([@B24]) and WB-EMS in turn has been described to affect RBC deformability. Thus, it was assumed that WB-EMS derived improvement in RBC deformability might affect endurance capacity. The results presented herein do not reflect this assumption and are thus in contrast to the findings by [@B1] who describe a positive effect of WB-EMS application on runner's VO~2~max. All tested participants were experienced soccer players and performed on a competitive level. Training volume and training intensity were not significantly altered during the intervention period and all participants showed a comparable training status to the runners (VO~2~max: 53 ml/kg^∗-1^) described by [@B1]. This might be explained by differences in current frequency, higher training duration and higher intensities of exercises with superimposed EMS in the cited study ([@B1]).
Red blood cell deformability is an important cell characteristic allowing RBC to pass the microcirculation for gas exchange. RBC deformability has been shown to be affected by a variety of factors with NO being one of them ([@B23]; [@B18]). Within RBC, NO availability depends on RBC-NOS activity ([@B23]) under normoxic conditions and nitrite reduction by deoxygenated hemoglobin under hypoxic conditions ([@B14]; [@B15]). RBC-NOS dependent NO generation was described to be affected by shear stress conditions, e.g., exercise, through activation of PI3-Akt kinase pathway ([@B32]) or pharmacological stimuli such as insulin ([@B23]; [@B18]). RBC NO reaction routes include the oxidation to nitrite and nitrate, binding to hemoglobin or active cysteine thiol groups also referred to as S-nitrosylation ([@B28]). RBC-NOS generated NO was shown to increase S-nitrosylation of the cytoskeletal proteins α- and β-spectrin which was associated to increased RBC deformability ([@B18]). These reaction routes are well described for mechanical stimulation ([@B38], [@B37]; [@B25]), endurance sports ([@B32]; [@B24]; [@B35]; [@B5]), but also other types of sport were shown to affect RBC-NOS/NO pathway and RBC deformability ([@B4]). The impact of WB-EMS stimuli on the RBC-NOS/NO signaling pathway has been first shown by [@B11] suggesting that WB-EMS affects RBC deformability with acute changes being explained by increased RBC-NOS activation while chronic changes in RBC deformability did not involve RBC-NOS activation. Thus, it was hypothesized for the recent study that WB-EMS affects RBC turnover and that an increase of the proportion of young RBC affects overall RBC deformability. The results of the study in part confirm the hypothesis. Proportion of young RBC increased by trend from Baseline to Retest by 65% (*p* = 0.07) while an increase of young RBC was not observed in the other tested groups. In parallel, proportion of main fraction decreased in EG by 13% (*p* \< 0.05) and proportion of very old RBC increased by 30% from Baseline to Retest. Similar changes were not detected in CG and TG. The described changes were not related to possible changes of the measured blood parameters because number of measured blood cells and also RBC associated parameters, e.g., hemoglobin concentration, MCV, MCH and MCHC, remained unaltered throughout the study period. RBC deformability has been shown to be affected by RBC age with old RBC showing lowest RBC deformability values ([@B3]). A shift in RBC age distribution thus affects RBC deformability of overall circulating RBC pool. A recent study indicated that WB-EMS positively affects RBC deformability of professional soccer players ([@B11]). The recent findings indicate no acute effect of WB-EMS on RBC deformability but a significant improvement of overall circulating RBC deformability during the study period. However, an increase in overall RBC deformability was also detectable in TG and CG suggesting that the start of training and competition phase accompanied with higher training load and volume might be responsible for the changes in RBC deformability ([@B26]; [@B34]). These data are thus in contrast to the findings of [@B11].
Compared to the study by [@B11] the soccer players in the present study had a significantly lower training volume (2--4 vs. 6--7 session/week) per week and thus had a lower fitness level. Studies have shown that moderate exercise increases deformability ([@B36]), but intensive exercise can reduce it ([@B39]). As in previous studies shown EMS can be a very intense training method that can produce high metabolic and muscular stress ([@B22]; [@B27]; [@B10]). The applied WB-EMS stimulus might have been too intense for the players due to a lower level of fitness. Furthermore, [@B11] suggested that the combination of WB-EMS stimulus and soccer specific endurance training load positively affected deformability. Accordingly, the results reveal that the training volume of only 2--4 sessions per week might have been too low to positively influence RBC deformability with two WB-EMS sessions per week.
Red Blood Cells deformability of the sub-fractions support data of the literature that RBC deformability decreases with increasing RBC age ([@B3]). RBC deformability of the RBC sub-fractions remained unaltered at Baseline which supports data of overall RBC suggesting that WB-EMS does not acutely affect RBC deformability. RBC deformability of the main fraction and very old RBC remained unaltered in all three study groups while RBC deformability of old RBC increased during study period. This increase was observed for all three study groups and might thus explain increased RBC deformability of overall circulating RBC. RBC-NOS activation state and RBC-NOS dependent NO production were shown to affect RBC deformability through S-nitrosylation of cytoskeletal spectrins ([@B18]). Thereby, RBC-NOS activation is affected by Akt kinase activation ([@B32]). Total Akt kinase and activation of Akt kinase remained unaffected by the intervention. Total RBC-NOS content was not affected by the intervention but RBC-NOS phosphorylation at its activate residue serine 1177 increased from pre to post WB-EMS and thus support findings of [@B11]. Acute increases in RBC-NOS serine 1177 phosphorylation were also observed at wk-7 and comparisons of pre values suggests that WB-EMS increases RBC-NOS activation. These findings are in contrast to published data of [@B11]. Given the high heterogeneity of the data, it is speculated whether the documented statistical significances would have a physiological effect. Similar findings were observed for RBC-NOS phosphorylation sites serine 114 and threonine 495 which were associated to decreased RBC-NOS activation ([@B32]; [@B20]). Values remained unaltered during the study. RBC NO production showed no acute changes at Baseline or at wk-7. But comparisons of pre values revealed increasing values in TG and CG at wk-7 and Retest compared to Baseline, respectively. Since alterations were not found in EG, it seems unlikely that the applied WB-EMS program affects RBC-NO levels. In accordance, S-nitrosylation of the spectrins also remained unaffected.
Limitations of the present study include the lower training volume compared to our previous investigation with professional soccer players ([@B11]). This might have a major influence on deformability because RBC deformability is affected by exercise with increasing training load resulting in increased deformability. Thus, the results of the two studies are difficult to compare. Regarding training load in soccer, the differences in playing time, high intensity running, and/or sprint distances during soccer match and training might show high deviations between the players that might affect adaptive processes. Further, the players were only advised to maintain usual food intake but nutrition was not controlled. An unbalance diet of some players also could have influenced adaptations or performance.
In summary, the effect of WB-EMS on RBC physiology seems to be rather low and results are only in part comparable to previous findings ([@B11]). Because performance parameters also remained unaltered in the recent study, it can be speculated that the combination of WB-EMS and soccer specific training load were lower compared to previous studies and thus too low to induce changes in RBC physiology.
Data Availability
=================
The datasets for this manuscript are not publicly available because of legal reasons. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to the corresponding author.
Ethics Statement
================
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Ethics Committee of the German Sports University Cologne. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the German Sports University Cologne \[06-02-2014\].
Author Contributions
====================
AF, MG, and WB conceived and designed the research. AF conducted the experiments. DB and FT prepared, processed, and measured the parameters. AF and MG analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. DB, FT, and WB revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.
Conflict of Interest Statement
==============================
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
**Funding.** This study was funded by the Bundesministerium für Sportwissenschaft (BISp: ZMVI4-070101_16-17) and supported by the German Sport University Cologne.
The authors would like to thank Bianca Collins, Anika Voß, Benedikt Seeger, and Thomas Dietz for their excellent technical assistance.
[^1]: Edited by: Wolfgang Kemmler, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
[^2]: Reviewed by: Francisco J. Amaro-Gahete, University of Granada, Spain; Marc Teschler, Institute for Rehabilitation Research Norderney, Germany
[^3]: This article was submitted to Exercise Physiology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Physiology
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Central |
Introduction {#s1}
============
*In vivo* panning of phage libraries in tumor-bearing animals has proved useful for selecting peptides able to interact with proteins expressed within tumor-associated vessels and to home to neoplastic tissues [@pone.0037132-Arap1]. Among the targeting probes identified thus far, a peptide containing the NGR motif is an aminopeptidase N (CD13) ligand that targets tumor vasculature [@pone.0037132-Pasqualini1].
Numerous studies have focused on the use of the NGR motif for ligand-directed delivery of various drugs and particles to tumor vessels [@pone.0037132-Corti1], such as tumor necrosis factor α (TNF α) [@pone.0037132-Curnis1], doxorubicin [@pone.0037132-vanHensbergen1], proapoptotic peptides [@pone.0037132-Ellerby1], liposome [@pone.0037132-Pastorino1] and tissue factor [@pone.0037132-Kessler1]--[@pone.0037132-Schwoppe1]. For example, the antitumor activity of NGR-TNF α in animal models was 10--30 times stronger than that of wild-type TNF α, whereas their toxicities were similar [@pone.0037132-Curnis1]. It has also been reported that NGR modification of antiangiogenic molecules, such as endostatin, could improve tumor localization and, in consequence, effectively inhibited ovarian carcinoma growth in athymic nude mice [@pone.0037132-Yokoyama1], indicating that addition of a vascular targeting sequence NGR could enhance the biological activity of an antitumor or antiangiogenic molecule.
Antiangiogenic therapy for solid tumors clearly destroys tumor vasculature and reduces tumor growth [@pone.0037132-Cao1]. Extensive research has led to the identification and isolation of several regulators of angiogenesis, some of which represent therapeutic targets [@pone.0037132-Cao1], [@pone.0037132-Cao2]. Human plasminogen kringle 5 (hPK5), a proteolytic fragment of plasminogen, is an endogenous angiogenic inhibitor [@pone.0037132-Cao1]--[@pone.0037132-GonzalezGronow1]. Recombinant hPK5 displays the most potent inhibitory activity to endothelial cell proliferation and migration [@pone.0037132-GonzalezGronow1]--[@pone.0037132-Ji1] among naturally occurring angiogenesis inhibitors. A recombinant hPK5 has also been shown to induce apoptosis in proliferating endothelial cells and tumor cells [@pone.0037132-Davidson1], [@pone.0037132-BuiNguyen1]. Because of its high efficacy, cell type selectivity, and small molecular weight, hPK5 has considerable potential in the treatment of neovascular diseases involving solid tumors [@pone.0037132-Cao1], [@pone.0037132-Cao2], [@pone.0037132-Soff1]. A number of earlier studies have suggested that tumor suppression by hPK5 depends on its antiangiogenic activity and hPK5 could have therapeutic potential in hepatocellular carcinoma [@pone.0037132-Yang1]--[@pone.0037132-Yang2], lung cancer [@pone.0037132-Schmitz1], [@pone.0037132-Li1], glioblastoma [@pone.0037132-Perri1], [@pone.0037132-McFarland1] and ovarian cancer [@pone.0037132-BuiNguyen2]. Moreover, several reports including our previous investigation have also indicated that combination of hPK5 with other therapeutic agents, such as ionizing radiation [@pone.0037132-McFarland1], [@pone.0037132-Jin1] and matrix metalloproteinase [@pone.0037132-Zou1] could remarkably enhance the antiangiogenic effect during tumor formation. These findings prompted us to deliver hPK5 to the tumor by a vascular-targeting approach.
To determine whether an additional NGR sequence could improve endothelial cell homing and biological activity, hPK5 was modified genetically to introduce an NGR motif and was expressed in the yeast host strain GS115. Our studies showed that NGR-hPK5 was localized to tumor tissues at a higher level than wild-type hPK5 (approximately 3-fold). Increased accumulation of NGR-hPK5 was correlated with stronger antiangiogenic effects *in vivo*, and only one-fifth the dose of NGR-hPK5 was needed for a similar antitumor effect produced by wild-type hPK5. These studies suggested that the antiangiogenic activity of hPK5 could be further improved by addition of an NGR motif.
Materials and Methods {#s2}
=====================
Cell Culture {#s2a}
------------
Mouse Lewis lung carcinoma (LLC) cells, human colorectal adenocarcinoma (Colo 205) cells and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were purchased from the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC, Philadelphia, PA, USA). LLC and Colo 205 cells were grown in Dulbecco\'s modified Eagle\'s medium (DMEM) (HyClone, Logan, UT, USA) supplemented with 10% (v/v) fetal bovine serum (HyClone, Logan, UT, USA) and 1% penicillin-streptomycin (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA). HUVECs were grown in Medium 200 (Cascade Biologics, Portland, OR, USA) supplemented with Low Serum Growth Supplement (LSGS). All cells were cultured in a humidified CO~2~ incubator at 37°C.
Cloning of NGR-hPK5 Yeast Expression Plasmid {#s2b}
--------------------------------------------
The plasmid pPIC9K-hPK5 for the expression of human plaminogen kringle 5 was constructed previously in our laboratory [@pone.0037132-Jin1]. The Pichia pastoris yeast expression system was purchased from Invitrogen (Carlsbad, CA, USA). Restriction enzymes and Taq DNA polymerase were purchased from TaKaRa (Dalian, China). This clone was further modified to incorporate the CNGRC sequence at the amino terminus. The following sets of primers were used to modify hPK5 by PCR. NGR-hPK5 upper primer: 5′ CG CTCGAG AAA AGA TGC AAT GGT CGT TGC GGT GGT GGT GGT GTC CTG CTT CCA GAT GTA G 3′; lower primer: 5′ GC GAATTC TAG GCC GCA CAC TGA GGG AC 3′. Amplified fragments were purified by a DNA extraction kit, digested with Xho I and EcoR I, and then cloned into pPIC9K vector. Plasmid DNA was linearized at the Sac I site and used for homologous recombination into the yeast host strain GS115 (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA) by electroporation.
Expression and Purification of Recombinant NGR-hPK5 in Pichia Pastoris {#s2c}
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pichia clones were cultured in baffled shaker flasks and induced by methanol as described previously [@pone.0037132-Jin1]. Methanol was supplemented daily to a final concentration of 0.5% during the post-culture period and cultured at 30°C for another 2 days with vigorous shaking. The clarified supernatant was collected and concentrated using ammonium sulfate precipitation (70% saturation), then dissolved in buffer A (20 mM Tris-HCl, 1 mM EDTA, 0.5 mM PMSF, pH 8.0), and finally dialyzed against the same buffer at 4°C. Proteins were purified by DEAE-Sepharose Fast Flow column (Pharmacia, Piscataway NJ, USA). After loading the sample, the column was washed with buffer B (20 mM Tris-HCl, 1 mM EDTA, pH 8.0) and eluted stepwisely with 0.1 M NaCl, 0.5 M NaCl in buffer B. The eluted protein fraction was analyzed by Tricine-SDS-PAGE (5% stacking gel and 16.5% separating gel). Protein concentration was determined by the Bradford assay (BioRad, Hercules, CA, USA).
Cell Proliferation Assay {#s2d}
------------------------
The effects of hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 on endothelial cell proliferation were assessed by the MTT assay. HUVECs in the exponential growth phase were seeded into a 96-well plate at a density of 5000 cells per well. After 24 h, hPK5 or NGR--hPK5 was added to a final concentration of 1, 5, 10 or 25 µg/ml respectively. The cells were incubated at 37°C for 48 h, then the cell viability was determined by the colorimetric MTT \[3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyl-2H-tetrazolium bromide\] assay at wavelength 570 nm by TECAN Safire Fluorescence Absorbance and Luminescence Reader (Vienna, VA, USA). The cell viability was calculated according to the formula: Cell viability (%) = average A~570\ nm~ of treated group/average A~570\ nm~ of control group×100%.
Cell Migration Assay {#s2e}
--------------------
The effects of hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 on endothelial cell migration were assessed by the transwell assay and the wound healing assay. The cell migration assay was performed using transwell inserts (8.0 mm pore size, Millipore, Billerica, MA, USA) as described previously [@pone.0037132-Li2]. Before the experiment, HUVECs had been cultured in serum-free medium with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 (PBS used as buffer control) at a concentration of 5 µg/ml for 16 h. Then the cells were harvested and re-suspended in the same medium. 1×10^5^ cells in a volume of 0.1 ml were added to the upper chamber, and the lower chamber was filled with 0.6 ml of 20% FBS supplemented medium. After incubation at 37°C for 9 h, cells on the upper surface of the membrane were removed. The migrant cells attached to the lower surface were fixed in 10% formalin at room temperature for 30 min, and stained for 20 min with a solution containing 1% crystal violet and 2% ethanol in 100 mM borate buffer (pH 9.0). The number of cells migrating to the lower surface of the membrane was counted in five fields under a microscope with a magnification of ×100. The wound healing assay was also performed as described previously [@pone.0037132-Li2]. Briefly, HUVECs plated onto fibronectin-coated (10 mg/ml) 24-well plates were serum-starved overnight, then wounded with a 200 ml pipette tip, washed with PBS, and incubated in the medium containing 10% FBS with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 (PBS used as buffer control) at a concentration of 5 µg/ml for 20 h. The migration of the wounded cells was visualized and quantified under a microscope with a magnification of ×100. All groups of experiments were conducted in triplicate, and the cell number was counted by Image-Pro Plus 6.0 software.
Cord Morphogenesis Assay {#s2f}
------------------------
Matrigel (BD Biosciences, Bedford, MA, USA) was thawed at 4°C overnight and placed in a 96-well culture plate at 37°C for 1 h to allow gel formation. Before the experiment, HUVECs had been cultured in the medium with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 (PBS used as buffer control) at a concentration of 10 µg/ml for 16 h. Then the cells were harvested, re-suspended in the same medium and seeded (45000 cells/cm^2^) on top of the solidified Matrigel. After incubation for 8 h at 37°C, the networks of cords were photographed in five fields under a microscope with a magnification of ×100. The total length of the cord structures in each photograph was measured by AxioVision 3.1 software (Carl Zeiss, Oberkochen, Germany). All groups of experiments were conducted in triplicate.
Chick Embryo Chorioallantoic Membrane (CAM) Assay {#s2g}
-------------------------------------------------
The CAM assay was performed as described with slight modifications [@pone.0037132-Sun1], [@pone.0037132-Crawford1]. Fertilized White Leghorn chicken eggs were placed in an incubator as soon as embryogenesis started and were kept under constant humidity at 37°C. Briefly, on day 8 the eggs were candled using a hand-held egg candler at the blunt end of the egg to identify the air sac and prominent blood vessels. Using a Dremel model drill (Dremel Racine, WI, USA), the CAM was separated from the shell by making a shallow burr hole at the blunt end of the egg. A solution of cortisone acetate (100 µg/disk, Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA) was added to all disks in order to prevent an inflammatory response. Next, different concentrations of hPK5, NGR-hPK5 or buffer control were pipetted onto filter disks respectively, and the disk was then placed on the CAM in an avascular area. The window was sealed with sterile Scotch tape and the egg was returned to the incubator. After additional 2-day incubation, the possible antiangiogenic response was evaluated. CAM tissue directly below the filter disk was fixed with the mixture of methanol and acetone (1∶1) for 15 min. Tissues were washed 3 times with PBS and images were acquired using a stereomicroscope with photo-digital attachment. The response was scored as positive when CAM treated with the sample showed an avascular zone (≥5 mm in diameter) with very few vessels compared with the control group, and was calculated as the percentage of positive eggs relative to the total number of the eggs tested. Ten eggs were used for each group, and the data was reported as Mean ± SD based on results from three independent experiments.
Ethics Statements {#s2h}
-----------------
Six-week-old female C57BL/6J and athymic nude mice, which were purchased from the Vitalriver Animal Center (Vitalriver, Beijing, China), were housed in environmentally controlled conditions (22°C, a 12-h light/dark cycle with the light cycle from 6:00 to 18:00 and the dark cycle from 18:00 to 6:00) and maintained on standard laboratory chow. Animal welfare and treatment were carried out in strict accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (The Ministry of Science and Technology of China, 2006) and all experimental protocols were approved under animal protocol number SYXK(Su)2009-0017 by the Animal Care and Use Committee of College of Life Sciences, Nanjing University.
*In Vivo* Animal Tumor Model Experiment {#s2i}
---------------------------------------
Female C57BL/6J and athymic nude mice (age 6 weeks) were obtained from the Vitalriver Animal Center and were acclimatized to local conditions for 1 week. Logarithmically growing mouse LLC and human Colo 205 cells were harvested by trypsinization and suspended in PBS at a density of 1×10^7^ cells/ml. Then, 100 µl of the single-cell suspension were injected subcutaneously into the right dorsum of C57BL/6J and nude mice. All tumor-bearing mice were divided randomly into groups of 8--10, and treatment was initiated on day 10 when the volume of tumor reached about 40--50 mm^3^. The mice were injected intraperitoneally (i.p.) with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 daily. Tumor measurements were converted to tumor volume (V) as follows: L×W^2^×0.52, where L and W are the length and width, respectively. Measurements were taken by the Vernier caliper. All procedures followed approval of the Institutional Animal Care Committee. In a separate experiment cisplatin treatment was carried out in a regimen as described in results. Tumor sizes were shown as Mean ± SE and compared among groups using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). To determine whether hPK5/NGR-hPK5 in combination with cisplatin worked synergistically, the combination index (CI) was calculated as follows: CI = AB/(A×B). According to the tumor volume of each group, AB is the ratio of the combination group to the control group; A or B is the ratio of the single agent group to the control group. Thus a CI value less than, equal to or greater than 1 indicates that the drugs are synergistic, additive or antagonistic, respectively. A CI less than 0.7 indicates that the drugs are significantly synergistic.
Tumor Localization {#s2j}
------------------
The uptakes in tumor of hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 were detected and compared by planar imaging and biodistribution studies. 1×10^6^ LLC cells were injected subcutaneously in the right front flank of female C57BL/6J mice (age 7 weeks). The mice were subjected to planar imaging and biodistribution studies when the tumor volume had reached 300--400 mm^3^ (2--3 weeks after inoculation).
### Technetium-99 m labeling {#s2j1}
Na^99\ m^TcO~4~ solution (2.0 ml, \>10 mCi/ml) was added to a lyophilized vial containing 0.455924 mg of NaH~2~PO~4~, 2.299752 mg of Na~2~HPO~4~, 40 µg of SnCl~2~, 10 µl of vitamin C, and 10 µg of hPK5 (or NGR-hPK5). The vial was placed into the lead pig and was allowed to stand at room temperature for 30 min. A sample of the resulting solution was analyzed by radio-HPLC. The radiochemical purity (RCP) was \>95% for both ^99\ m^Tc-hPK5 and ^99\ m^Tc-NGR-hPK5 with a very small amount (\<0.5%) of \[^99\ m^Tc\] colloid.
### Planar imaging {#s2j2}
Ten tumor-bearing mice were randomly divided into two groups. Each mouse was administered with 500 µCi of ^99\ m^Tc-hPK5 or ^99\ m^Tc-NGR-hPK5 in 0.1 ml saline via tail vein and then anesthetized with isoflurane. The mice were placed prone on the pinhole collimator gamma camera (SIEMENS, symbia T6, Germany). Static images were acquired at 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 hours post-injection. The data were stored digitally in a 256×256 matrix, and the acquisition count limits were set at 300 sec. For data analysis, ROIs (regions of interest) were drawn over the tumor and the contralateral normal tissue. The SUVs (standardized uptake value) were acquired automatically by measuring the radioactivity in the region of interest and corrected for body weight and injected dose. The tumor-to-contralateral normal tissue (T/NT) ratios were calculated from the ROI analysis as Mean ± SD based on results from five tumor-bearing mice for each group.
### Biodistribution studies {#s2j3}
Thirty-six tumor-bearing mice were randomly divided into two groups. Each mouse was administered with 500 µCi of ^99\ m^Tc-hPK5 or ^99\ m^Tc-NGR-hPK5 in 0.1 ml saline via tail vein. Three mice of each group were sacrificed per time point at 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 hours post-injection, respectively. Blood samples were withdrawn with a syringe from the heart. The tumor and normal organs (heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidney, stomach, intestine, pancreas, brain, bone and muscle) were excised, washed with saline and weighed. The radioactivity was measured on a 1480 Wizard gamma counter (Perkin-Elmer). The organ uptake was calculated as the percentage of injected dose per gram of organ tissue (%ID/g). All radioactivity measurements were corrected for decay. The biodistribution data and T/NT (tumor-to-normal tissue) ratios were reported as Mean ± SD based on results from three tumor-bearing mice at each time point.
Determination of Vessel Density {#s2k}
-------------------------------
To determine the effect of the treatments on vessel density, immunofluorescence analysis was performed to visualize CD31-positive endothelial cells. LLC tumors for light microscopy were surgically resected and snap frozen. Frozen tumor sections (5 µm in thickness) were prepared according to standard protocols. Tumor sections (3 sections per mouse, totally 3 mice per group) were fixed in cold acetone (4°C) for 20 min, air dried, and blocked with 10% goat serum containing 1% BSA in PBS at room temperature for 30 min. Then the rat anti-mouse CD31 monoclonal antibody (BD Pharmingen, Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA) with a 1∶100 dilution was applied and incubated at 4°C overnight. Sections were rinsed in PBS 3 times for 5 min each. DyLight 594 goat anti-rat IgG (Jackson ImmunoResearch, West Grove, PA) secondary antibody with a 1∶500 dilution was applied at 37°C for 45 min in the dark. 4′, 6-Diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, USA) counterstain was used to visualize nuclear detail. Images were acquired and processed by AxioVision 3.1 software on Carl Zeiss Axioplan 2. The number of microvessels in the field with the highest vessel density ('hot spots') was quantified according to the method as previously described [@pone.0037132-Vermeulen1]. Three fields with the highest vessel density per section were counted (with a magnification of ×200). Microvessel density was determined by averaging the number of microvessels in the counted fields.
Data Analysis and Statistics {#s2l}
----------------------------
Values were presented as Mean ± SD or ± SE. For paired data, statistical analyses were performed using two-tailed Student\'s *t*-tests. For multiple comparisons, statistical analyses were performed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with a Tukey post-test. For all analyses, *p*\<0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results {#s3}
=======
Expression and Purification of NGR-hPK5 {#s3a}
---------------------------------------
The expression plasmid pPIC9K-NGR-hPK5, containing the cDNA encoding NGR-hPK5, was transfected into Pichia pastoris yeast strain GS115. The protein was purified by DEAE-Sepharose Fast Flow column. Purified protein was then analyzed by Tricine-SDS-PAGE and stained with Coomassie Blue ([Fig. 1 A](#pone-0037132-g001){ref-type="fig"}). The elution fraction was further examined by western blot using anti-human plasminogen antibody. As shown in [Fig. 1 B](#pone-0037132-g001){ref-type="fig"}, NGR-hPK5 migrated at 15 kDa as expected and no degradation was observed.
{#pone-0037132-g001}
Characterization of the Biological Activity of NGR-hPK5 {#s3b}
-------------------------------------------------------
In order to assess the effect of NGR-hPK5 on angiogenesis *in vitro*, endothelial cell proliferation, migration and cord morphogenesis assays were performed. As shown in the MTT assay ([Fig. 2 A](#pone-0037132-g002){ref-type="fig"}), both hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 displayed a dose-dependent inhibitory effect on HUVEC proliferation, and NGR-hPK5 showed a more potent inhibitory effect than hPK5 (*p*\<0.05). The concentration of hPK5 was about 25 µg/ml when inhibiting 50% HUVEC proliferation, while for NGR-hPK5 the ED~50~ was approximately 10 µg/ml. In addition to the anti-proliferation effect, NGR-hPK5 also showed more inhibitory effect on endothelial cell migration. Serum stimulated haptotaxis motility, measured by the transwell motility chamber assay, was used to examine the effect of NGR-hPK5 on HUVEC migration. The cells migrating to the lower membrane were stained and quantified as shown in [Fig. 2 B&C](#pone-0037132-g002){ref-type="fig"}. At the same dose, NGR-hPK5 showed more significant inhibition of cell migration than wild-type hPK5 (*p*\<0.05, 5 µg/ml dose), which reduced the migration of HUVECs by 71.75% and 48.68% compared with control PBS group and hPK5 group, respectively. Meanwhile, the wound-healing scratch motility assay ([Fig. 2 D&E](#pone-0037132-g002){ref-type="fig"}) also revealed that, after 20 h healing period, NGR-hPK5 greatly reduced the migration of HUVECs as compared with hPK5 treated group or control PBS group at the same dose (5 µg/ml). The cells migrating into the wound area were counted. NGR-hPK5 treated group decreased the migrating cells by 59.34% compared with the control group, and 40.32% compared with hPK5 (*p*\<0.05). Next, the effect of NGR-hPK5 on cord formation of endothelial cell was examined. HUVECs incubated on Matrigel for 8 h formed an extensive and enclosed capillarylike structure. hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 (both at 10 µg/ml dose) impaired the ability of HUVECs to form this structure, resulting in an incomplete and sparse cord network ([Fig. 2 F&G](#pone-0037132-g002){ref-type="fig"}). NGR-hPK5 treated group showed more significant inhibition than hPK5 group, the cord formation in NGR-hPK5 group was decreased by 73.88% compared with control PBS group, and 47.25% compared with hPK5 group (*p*\<0.05). Subsequently, chick embryo CAM model was used to evaluate the antiangiogenic activity of NGR-hPK5 *in vivo*. Dried filter disks, adsorbed with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 at 0.8, 1.6 and 3.2 µg/embryo doses, were implanted on the top of growing CAMs. Two days later, hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 induced a strong antiangiogenic response in the CAM tissues in a dose dependent manner ([Fig. 2 H&I](#pone-0037132-g002){ref-type="fig"}), as shown by the decreased number of branching vessels in the center of the filter disk. At the same dose, NGR-hPK5 showed increased antiangiogenic activity compared with the wild-type hPK5 (*p*\<0.05). In sum, these data suggested that an additional NGR modification to hPK5 could improve its biological activity of antiangiogenesis *in vitro* and *in vivo*.
{#pone-0037132-g002}
Inhibition of Tumor Growth {#s3c}
--------------------------
To determine whether NGR-hPK5 could improve the antitumor activity of hPK5, we used two tumor model systems. The first model system used the mouse Lewis lung carcinoma (LLC) cell line ([Fig. 3 A](#pone-0037132-g003){ref-type="fig"}). From day 0 on, the mice were injected i.p. daily for 5 days with NGR-hPK5 at 0.25, 1.25 and 2.5 mg/kg/day dose, or with hPK5 at 1.25 mg/kg/day dose. Both hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 significantly inhibited the growth of LLC solid tumors (on day 3--12, *p*\<0.05, compared with control). On day 12, the mean volume of tumor was 336.17±69.15 mm^3^, with 35.52% inhibition when using hPK5 at 1.25 mg/kg/day dose. Treatment with NGR-hPK5 resulted in dose-dependent inhibition of tumor growth, with 30.30%, 55.68% and 68.10% inhibition observed at 0.25, 1.25 and 2.5 mg/kg/day dose respectively. At the same dose NGR-hPK5 resulted in more significant inhibition of tumor growth than wild-type hPK5 (*p*\<0.05, compared with wild-type hPK5 at 1.25 mg/kg/day dose), while the antitumor activity of NGR-hPK5 at 0.25 mg/kg/day dose was similar to that of hPK5 at 5-fold excess, i.e., hPK5-treated group at 1.25 mg/kg/day dose. The second model used the human colorectal adenocarcinoma cell line, Colo 205, in athymic nude mice ([Fig. 3 B](#pone-0037132-g003){ref-type="fig"}). NGR-hPK5 and hPK5 were administered i.p. daily for 5 days at 2.5 mg/kg/day dose. In this model system, i.p. injection of wild-type hPK5 inhibited tumor growth by 33.75% on day 12 (595.76±119.10 mm^3^). Under similar conditions, NGR-hPK5 treatment showed 54.76% inhibition (on day 9 and 12, *p*\<0.05, compared with wild-type hPK5).
{#pone-0037132-g003}
Increased Tumor Localization of NGR-hPK5 {#s3d}
----------------------------------------
To assess whether the improved endothelial cell binding *in vitro* could translate into enhanced tumor homing *in vivo*, tumor localization studies were performed. ^99\ m^Tc-labeled hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 was injected i.v. into LLC grafting C57BL/6J mice. Planar images were acquired at 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 hours post-injection. As shown in [Fig. 4 A](#pone-0037132-g004){ref-type="fig"}, NGR-hPK5 exhibited an obviously higher accumulation in tumors than hPK5 did at each time point. The uptake in the tumor and its contralateral normal tissue was measured from the ROI analysis and shown in [Fig. 4 B](#pone-0037132-g004){ref-type="fig"}, the tumor-to-normal tissue (T/NT) ratios of NGR-hPK5 was 3.0--4.0, while the ratios of hPK5 was 1.3--1.7. Subsequently, the biodistribution studies of ^99\ m^Tc- NGR-hPK5 and ^99\ m^Tc-hPK5 were performed. Tumor, blood and major organs were collected, weighed and counted on a gamma counter at the same time schedule as described in planar imaging. The data was presented as the percentage injected dose per gram of tissue (%ID/g) in [Fig. 5A](#pone-0037132-g005){ref-type="fig"}, the tumor uptake of NGR-hPK5 was from 5.11±0.46%ID/g to 3.58±0.31%ID/g during 0.5 h to 6 h post-injection, while the tumor uptake of hPK5 was from 1.77±0.28%ID/g to 1.15±0.06%ID/g. Consistent with the results of planar imaging, the *in vivo* NGR-hPK5 tumor uptake was significantly higher than that of hPK5 (approximately 3-fold). Both of the proteins were excreted mainly through the kidneys, the levels of NGR-hPK5 and hPK5 in kidneys were similar from 0.5 h to 4 h post-injection, but the level of NGR-hPK5 (10.06±2.98%ID/g) was lower than that of hPK5 (15.65±2.13%ID/g) by the end of 6 h. No statistically significant difference has been found for their respective distribution in blood, lung, heart, liver, spleen, stomach, intestine, pancreas, brain, bone or muscle. The tumor-to-normal tissue ratios of NGR-hPK5 and hPK5 from the data of biodistribution studies were calculated and compared in [Fig. 5 B](#pone-0037132-g005){ref-type="fig"}. The tumor/blood, tumor/lung, tumor/heart, tumor/liver, tumor/spleen, tumor/kidney, tumor/stomach, tumor/intestine, tumor/pancreas, tumor/brain, tumor/bone and tumor/muscle ratios of NGR-hPK5 were all significantly higher (*p*\<0.05) than those of hPK5 at 1 h and 6 h. Taken together, NGR-hPK5 showed selective targeting in the LLC tumor and did not lead to nonspecific accumulation in other tissues.
{#pone-0037132-g004}
{#pone-0037132-g005}
Suppression of Tumor Neovascularization {#s3e}
---------------------------------------
To determine the effects of treatment on early tumor neovascularization, we examined blood vessel density in tissue sections from LLC tumor using anti-mouse CD31 antibody and standard immunofluorescence techniques. LLC tumor-bearing C57BL6/J mice were systemically treated with control saline or with 2.5 mg/kg/day of hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 daily for 5 days, and primary tumors were resected on day 1 after post-treatment. The microvessel density (MVD) was estimated by the mean of CD31-positive endothelial cells from three most vascular areas ('hot spots') within the tumor section. [Fig. 6](#pone-0037132-g006){ref-type="fig"} showed that wild-type and NGR modified hPK5 treatment resulted in reduced microvessel density by 26.34% and 51.85% compared with control respectively (*p*\<0.05). The NGR motif enhanced the antiangiogenic effect of hPK5 on the density of blood vessels significantly, which reduced microvessel density by 34.62% in comparison with wild-type hPK5 (*p*\<0.05).
{#pone-0037132-g006}
Combination of Cisplatin and hPK5/NGR-hPK5 Inhibits Tumor Growth Synergistically {#s3f}
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To determine whether hPK5/NGR-hPK5 could improve the antitumor activity of cisplatin chemotherapy, we used the LLC tumor model system. From day 0 on, the mice were injected i.p. every two days with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 at 1.25 mg/kg/day dose (on days 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10). On the following day after each injection with the proteins, different doses of cisplatin were administered i.p. to the mice (on days 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11). On day 18, a significant antitumor response was observed with 66.00% inhibition when mice received cisplatin alone at a high dose (2 mg/kg/day) (*p*\<0.05, compared with control), while the effect of hPK5 plus cisplatin ([Fig. 7 A](#pone-0037132-g007){ref-type="fig"}) resulted in 67.83% inhibition of tumor growth compared with control, which had no statistically significant difference from that of cisplatin alone (*p*\>0.05). However, as shown in [Fig. 7 B](#pone-0037132-g007){ref-type="fig"}, NGR-hPK5 could enhance the antitumor effect of cisplatin at the same dose. On day 18, the mean tumor size in combination therapy group was significantly reduced to 11.34% of the control group and 33.45% of the cisplatin-treated group (*p*\<0.05, compared with cisplatin). The combination index (CI) was 0.636, which indicated that the drugs were significantly synergistic. Cisplatin using at a low dose (0.5 mg/kg/day) induced border or marginal effect, but the antitumor effect of recombinant protein plus cisplatin was stronger than that of protein alone or cisplatin alone. As shown in [Fig. 7 C](#pone-0037132-g007){ref-type="fig"}, on day 21, cisplatin or hPK5 alone therapy group resulted in 20.04% and 31.89% inhibition of tumor growth compared with the control group, while combination therapy of hPK5 and cisplatin resulted in 55.46% and 59.92% inhibition of tumor growth compared with the control group and cisplatin-treated group (*p*\<0.05). NGR-hPK5 therapy alone showed 44.65% inhibition of tumor growth compared with control on day 21 ([Fig. 7 D](#pone-0037132-g007){ref-type="fig"}). NGR-hPK5 in combination with cisplatin produced strong antitumor response with 64.52% and 68.94% inhibition compared with the control group and cisplatin-treated group (*p*\<0.05). The CI value of hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 combination with cisplatin (at a low dose of 0.5 mg/kg/day) was 0.818 and 0.802 respectively, which indicated that they all had a synergistic effect.
{#pone-0037132-g007}
To investigate whether the combination therapeutic activity occurred at the expense of additional toxicity, C57BL/6J mice were injected i.p. with either PBS or cisplatin, recombinant protein alone or a combination of both recombinant protein and cisplatin. As shown in [Fig. 8](#pone-0037132-g008){ref-type="fig"}, treatment with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 was well tolerated at the dose tested, whereas treatment with cisplatin at a high dose (2 mg/kg/day) 6 times and 12 times caused 22.62% and 40.60% weight loss respectively compared with the control group. Cisplatin exhibited antitumor activity *in vivo*, but weight loss was also observed. Combination therapy of recombinant protein (hPK5 or NGR-hPK5) and cisplatin did not result in additional weight loss compared with cisplatin treatment. These results suggested that hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 could enhance antitumor effects of cisplatin without causing significant weight loss.
{#pone-0037132-g008}
Discussion {#s4}
==========
Angiogenesis plays a key role in tumor progression [@pone.0037132-Folkman1]. It was hypothesized that inhibition of angiogenesis would be an effective strategy to treat human cancer, and an active search for angiogenesis inducers and inhibitors began in 1971 [@pone.0037132-Folkman1]. Several endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors are protein fragments derived from extracellular matrix [@pone.0037132-DeClerck1] or hemostatic system proteins [@pone.0037132-Browder1]. Plasminogen is a blood protein that is proteolysed into potent angiogenesis inhibitors, such as angiostatin (kringles 1--4), kringles 1--5, kringles 1--3, and kringle 5 [@pone.0037132-Cao1]. Among them, K5 displays the most potent inhibitory activity to endothelial cell proliferation and migration [@pone.0037132-Lu1], [@pone.0037132-Ji1] among known naturally occurring angiogenesis inhibitors. Several reports have shown that hPK5 has a potential therapeutic effect in angiogenesis-related diseases, including solid tumors. For instance, Perri et al observed that in a nude mouse orthotopic brain cancer model tumor-targeted hPK5 expression was capable of effectively suppressing glioma growth and promoting significant long-term survival (\>120 days) of test animals [@pone.0037132-Perri1]. The hPK5 induced a marked reduction in blood vessel formation and significantly suppressed the recruitment of tumor-infiltrating CD45^+^ Mac3^+^ Gr1^−^ macrophages [@pone.0037132-Perri1]. Successive studies have suggested that hPK5 could have therapeutic potential in hepatocellular carcinoma [@pone.0037132-Yang1]--[@pone.0037132-Yang2], lung cancer [@pone.0037132-Schmitz1], [@pone.0037132-Li1], glioblastoma [@pone.0037132-Perri1], [@pone.0037132-McFarland1], ovarian cancer [@pone.0037132-BuiNguyen2] etc. In our previous study, we explored the therapeutic alliance of radiotherapy and hPK5 to inhibit the LLC tumor growth in tumor-bearing animals [@pone.0037132-Jin1]. The results indicated that there was a significant synergistic effect between radiotherapy and hPK5 antiangiogenesis treatment, compared with each single treatment method. The mechanism of synergy might be due to that hPK5 increased the sensibility of both LLC and vascular endothelial cells to ionizing radiation. It has been suggested that hPK5 acts as a novel anti-cancer agent, resulting in a potent, clinically relevant antitumor effect.
In the current study, coupling hPK5 with NGR peptide improved its antineoplastic activity and only low doses of NGR-hPK5 were needed for effective therapy by the vascular targeting strategy. Because the function of NGR peptide is dependent on its conformational characteristics, we simulated the three-dimension structure of hPK5 using Cn3D 4.1 program to determine the spatial positions of amino and carboxyl terminus. Both amino and carboxyl terminus were localized at the surface of the molecular structure (data not shown). Therefore NGR peptide being fused to NH~2~- or -COOH terminus of hPK5 could not have a great effect on its binding activity to CD13.
Giorgio et al [@pone.0037132-Colombo1] investigated the structure and tumor-homing properties of cyclic CNGRC-TNF α (containing disulfide bridge) and linear GNGRG-TNF α conjugates, and compared their antitumor activity. Experiments carried out in animal models showed that both linear GNGRG and cyclic CNGRC could target TNF α to tumors. However, the antitumor activity of CNGRC-TNF α was over 10 times higher than that of GNGRG-TNF α. The molecular dynamic simulation showed that the NGR motif had a strong propensity to form β-turn (Gly^3^-Arg^4^) in linear peptides, and the disulfide bridge constraint was critical for stabilizing the bent conformation and for increasing the tumor targeting efficiency. In the present study, cyclic CNGRC was selected to modify hPK5 at its amino terminus via a Gly~4~ linker to ensure that the function of NGR peptide and hPK5 could not influence each other.
APN expresses at a high level in tumor vasculature and plays an important role in angiogenesis [@pone.0037132-Pasqualini1]. APN is up-regulated in response to hypoxia and to angiogenic growth factors, such as basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and its signals regulate capillary tube formation during angiogenesis [@pone.0037132-Bhagwat1]. Moreover, studies have revealed that APN/CD13 is a marker for semiquiescent cancer stem cells (CSCs), and its elevated expression correlates with tumor metastasis and unfavorable prognosis [@pone.0037132-Haraguchi1]--[@pone.0037132-Fujii1]. Antibodies and functional inhibitors to APN blocked retinal neovascularization, chorioallantoic membrane angiogenesis, and tumor growth [@pone.0037132-Pasqualini1]. The addition of an NGR-sequence at the amino terminus of endostatin resulted in strong binding and inhibition of endothelial cell APN [@pone.0037132-Yokoyama1]. Yokoyama et al reported that NGR-endostatin showed increased binding to endothelial cells and had higher tumor localization than the native protein, and increased binding of endostatin also coincided with improved antiangiogenic properties of endostatin [@pone.0037132-Yokoyama1].
Therefore, addition of a peptide that contains NGR could promote both NGR-dependent and -independent signaling via APN/CD13, resulting in potent antiangiogenic activity of hPK5. In this study, hPK5 was genetically modified to introduce an NGR motif (NGR-hPK5) and was expressed in GS115. The effect of NGR-hPK5 treatment on early tumor neovascularization was examined by measurement of microvessel density ([Fig. 6](#pone-0037132-g006){ref-type="fig"}). Hlatky et al [@pone.0037132-Hlatky1] caution that although microvessel density is a useful prognostic marker, it is not, by itself, an indicator of therapeutic efficacy. Microvessel density alone is insufficient to distinguish between an angiogenic activity that is directly disrupting pathways governing vessel growth and an activity that alters the metabolic burden of the supported tumor cells. Thus additional assays for evaluating the antiangiogenic efficacy of NGR-hPK5 were included. The biological activity of NGR-hPK5 was assessed and compared with that of hPK5 by endothelial cell proliferation, migration, cord morphogenesis assays and CAM assay ([Fig. 2](#pone-0037132-g002){ref-type="fig"}). NGR-hPK5 exhibited directly increased antiangiogenic activity *in vitro* and *in vivo*. Our data ([Fig. 4](#pone-0037132-g004){ref-type="fig"} and [Fig. 5](#pone-0037132-g005){ref-type="fig"}) also showed that NGR-hPK5 was localized to tumor tissues at a higher level than wild-type hPK5. ^99\ m^Tc-labeled hPK5 and NGR-hPK5 were determined in tumor and major organs by planar imaging and biodistribution studies from 0.5 h to 6 h post-injection. The tumor uptake of NGR-hPK5 was significantly higher than that of hPK5 at each time point (approximately 3-fold). Increased accumulation of NGR-hPK5 correlated with stronger antiangiogenic effects *in vivo*. Only one-fifth the dose of NGR-hPK5 was needed for a similar antitumor effect produced by wild-type hPK5. These studies indicated that NGR modification could enhance antiangiogenesis activity of hPK5 by targeted delivery to the tumor vasculature and improved the antitumor activity of hPK5.
Preclinical studies have shown that *in vivo* frequently protracted administration of low dosages of conventional chemotherapeutic drugs on a metronomic or antiangiogenic schedule could also damage or kill the endothelial cells of tumor neovasculature and delay acquired resistance to these chemotherapeutic drugs [@pone.0037132-Bocci1]--[@pone.0037132-Merchan1]. Tan et al [@pone.0037132-Tan1] explored the efficacy of a strategy combining low-dose cisplatin and a recombinant xenogeneic endoglin as an antiangiogenic protein vaccine. The combination therapy resulted in not only significant antiangiogenic effects but also additional promotion of tumor cell apoptosis and inhibition of tumor cell proliferation, without any ensuing increase in host toxicity during treatment. In addition, the combination demonstrated a synergistic relationship, which was shown in all of the synergistic indexes, i.e., tumor volume, angiogenesis, apoptosis and proliferation. Other findings have also suggested that vascular targeting could increase vascular permeability, alter tumor barriers and increase the penetration of chemotherapeutic drugs [@pone.0037132-Pham1], [@pone.0037132-Corti2]. Cisplatin is widely used in the treatment of human tumors [@pone.0037132-Jeyapalan1]. However, the potential for tumor control with cisplatin chemotherapy must always be carefully balanced with the risk for normal tissue damage [@pone.0037132-Polycarpe1], [@pone.0037132-Jiang1]. In the current study, though cisplatin at a high dose could produce a significant antitumor response, significant systemic toxicity such as weight loss was observed. Cisplatin at a low dose exerted modest antitumor effect with decreased toxicity, whereas cisplatin in combination with hPK5 or NGR-hPK5 significantly enhanced the therapeutic effect. At the same dose, combination therapy with NGR-modified hPK5 and cisplatin resulted in a stronger inhibition of tumor growth than the combination therapy with hPK5 and cisplatin. It indicated that vascular targeting could be a novel strategy for increasing the therapeutic index of chemotherapeutic drugs.
In our studies, we successfully expressed NGR-hPK5 in yeast and purified the new protein. *In vitro* and *in vivo* NGR-hPK5 had stronger antiangiogenesis activity than wild-type hPK5, which indicated that NGR modification of antiangiogenic molecules, such as hPK5, could be used to improve their therapeutic efficacy.
We thank Wenhui Jiang at Nanjing Stomatological Hospital and Wei Tian at Nanjing First Hospital for their assistance with the frozen section and the tail vein injection.
**Competing Interests:**The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
**Funding:**This study was supported, in part, by grants from the National Key Basic Research Project from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (2012CB967004, 2011CB933502), the Chinese National Nature Sciences Foundation (81121062, 50973046, J1103512, 31071196, 31070706), the Jiangsu Provincial Nature Science Foundation (BZ2010074, BZ2011048, BK2011228, BK2011573), the Bureau of Science and Technology of Changzhou (CZ20100008, CE20115034, CZ20110028, CJ20115006), and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China (NO. 2007J0114). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
[^1]: Conceived and designed the experiments: WWJ GHJ ZCH. Performed the experiments: WWJ GHJ DYM FW TF XC XWC KZJ FMM. Analyzed the data: WWJ GHJ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: ZCH. Wrote the paper: WWJ GHJ ZCH.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Central |
Interactions of BCNU, low pH, glucose and hyperthermia in cultured RIF cells.
The interactions of BCNU (1,3-bis[2-chloroethyl]-1-nitrosourea) with low pH, glucose and hyperthermia were studied in cultured RIF tumor cells. The effect of a mild heat treatment of 43 degrees C, 1 h at pH 7.4 on cell killing [surviving fraction (S) = 0.27 +/- 0.05, standard error of the mean (S.E.)] was significantly enhanced by pH 6.5 (S = 0.11 +/- 0.02, S.E.) and 50 mM D-glucose (S = 0.14 +/- 0.01, S.E.). When heat (43 degrees C, 1 h) was added to BCNU, cytotoxicity was increased approximately 14-fold over BCNU alone. Moreover, pH 6.5 increased killing with BCNU and heat by an additional factor of 28. The presence of glucose at 37 degrees C at either pH 6.5 or 7.4 reduced BCNU toxicity in a dose dependent fashion. However, the presence of glucose did not reduce cell killing by BCNU at 43 degrees C. As a result BCNU cytotoxicity was enhanced by approximately 2 orders of magnitude when tumor cell acidification (glucose and low pH) was combined with BCNU and heat. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
INTRODUCTION
============
Periodontal disease caused by anaerobic Gram-negative bacteria causes inflammation of the gingiva, damage to the periodontal ligament and adjacent tissues, and destruction of alveolar bone. It has recently been discovered that periodontal inflammation is closely associated with systemic disease through the spread of inflammatory factors \[[@B1]\]; the associated systemic diseases include cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and premature delivery \[[@B2][@B3]\]. Regarding the causal relationship between periodontal disease and systemic disease, many recent studies have investigated bacteria and inflammatory cytokines as mutual risk factors \[[@B4]\].
The general biological mechanism by which periodontal disease influences systemic disease involves the entry of bacteria into the bloodstream through a periodontal pocket. The bacteria that can promote and worsen cardiovascular disease via periodontal disease include anaerobic Gram-negative *Porphyromonas gingivalis*. These bacteria, along with *Prevotella intermedia*, have been found in atherosclerotic plaques that give rise to atherosclerosis \[[@B5][@B6]\]. This suggests that periodontal pathogens are associated with the formation of atherosclerotic plaques after reaching the heart via the bloodstream.
Cytokines and prostaglandins have been reported to be elevated in patients with periodontal disease \[[@B7][@B8]\], and the presence of this condition before delivery could cause early uterine contractions and cervical ripening, leading to premature birth \[[@B9]\].
While periodontal disease is related to cardiovascular disease, low-birthweight babies, and other systemic diseases, few studies have investigated the varying degrees of impact of periodontal disease on systemic disease or the relevance of the severity of periodontal disease. Previous studies have measured the inflammatory area affected by periodontitis in order to understand the impact of periodontal disease on systemic disease \[[@B10][@B11]\], but their methods of measurement and results were not accurate and varied depending on the skill of the practitioner. More widespread periodontal disease promotes blood-mediated reactions to bacteria, symptoms of systemic diseases, and cross-reactivity.
Therefore, evaluating periodontal disease as a risk factor for systemic diseases requires measurement of the affected area of periodontal tissue in order to quantify the inflammatory burden. The inflamed periodontal surface area reflects the surface area of the bleeding-pocket epithelium, and hence it can be used to quantify the inflammatory burden of periodontal disease \[[@B12]\].
Surface measurements of an inflamed area can be useful for establishing the causal relationship between periodontal and systemic disease, and can also provide insight into the biological mechanisms of periodontal disease as a risk factor for systemic disease. In addition, the inflamed area can be an important marker when determining the prognosis and treatment plan for teeth. Numerous recent studies have been performed to quantify the inflamed surface area, but their measurement methods lacked accuracy and precision. One study used micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to overcome these shortcomings, and also measured the root surface areas (RSAs) using 3-dimensional (3D) data from extracted teeth \[[@B13]\].
Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is a useful nondestructive method for 3D reconstruction that can be used to visualize and measure the morphological structures of teeth. The 3D models reconstructed from CBCT and tomographic images can display the precise anatomical structure of teeth. This 3D technology can be used to establish databases of 3D teeth models for widespread research or educational applications. In addition, CBCT is useful for making real-time clinical diagnoses of patients and developing surgical plans. Combining 3D models obtained from CBCT with 3D printing technology has proven useful in various types of clinical surgery, including orthodontics, teeth strengthening, and reconstruction \[[@B14]\]. Programs that accurately measure the complex structures of 3D models mathematically are available, but no previous studies have attempted to measure the RSA using CBCT technology.
This study used CBCT to obtain 3D data of the teeth of 33 patients in order to measure the inflamed RSA, as well as to obtain measurements of the surface area between the cementoenamel junction (CEJ) and 6 mm below the junction, in the presence of moderate periodontal infection. The results obtained in this study can be used as materials for basic research investigating the relationship between periodontal inflammatory burden and systemic disease.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
=====================
Material and subjects
---------------------
The CBCT data of 33 patients used in this study were obtained from the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology at Dankook University Dental Hospital. The study was conducted after receiving approval (DUDH IRB 2015-12-022) from the Institutional Review Board of Dankook University Dental Hospital. In total, 924 teeth were used in the study. The selected CBCT images included data from 17 men (51.5%) and 16 women (48.5%) aged from 20 to 35 years, with a mean age of 24.4 years. CBCT data were selected based on whether the anatomical structures between the CEJ and the root apex were intact, but not on teeth length, circumference, or shape. Because the third molars of the maxilla and mandible have a high deformation rate and were absent in some patients, they were excluded from the study. Data from CBCT images that were unclear to the naked eye due to artifacts and where certain teeth were cropped out due to inadequate area settings were also excluded.
The CBCT data were saved as Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) files (.dcm) using a CBCT scanner (Alphard 3030, Asahi, Kyoto, Japan). The following parameters were used in CBCT scanning: slice increment=0.6 mm, slice thickness=0.6 mm, and matrix=512×512 pixels. DICOM files were imported from the Mimics software (Materialise, Leuven, Belgium) and included images of the maxilla and mandible structures that contained 28 teeth.
3D reconstruction from CBCT
---------------------------
In Mimics, the CBCT images had predefined thresholds (from a minimum of 2,224 to a maximum of 4,095) that were set to correspond to tooth density and the designated area for 3D reconstructions. The images were then reconstructed into 3D structures through smoothing of the calculated 3D parameters (one iteration with a smoothing factor of 1.0).
In each CBCT slide, the teeth were separated from the jaw bone using the region-growing method in the Mimics software. The remaining parts (i.e., other than the teeth) were removed ([Figure 1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}). Twenty-eight teeth were 3-dimensionally reconstructed and grouped in a crisscross manner for easier measurement and separation ([Figure 2](#F2){ref-type="fig"}).
{#F1}
{#F2}
Design and separation of 3D tooth data
--------------------------------------
In Mimics, the crown and root of the 3-dimensionally reconstructed teeth were separated; the 3D models were converted into STL files and imported into the 3-Matic program (version 9.0, Materialise) in order to measure the area from the root. The 3-Matic software was used to accurately measure the surface area of the 3D models. The reference point, which was 6 mm below the CEJ, was set based on the diagnostic criterion for periodontal inflammation of a clinical attachment level (CAL) of 6 mm ([Figure 3](#F3){ref-type="fig"}). After identifying and drawing the CEJ using a curve creation method (smooth curve, attract curve, or attach curve in 3-Matic), the crown and the root were separated through surface cutting and the crown was removed ([Figure 4](#F4){ref-type="fig"}). Due to limited CBCT resolution, it was difficult to clearly identify the CEJ in this study; therefore, 2 evaluators who were knowledgeable in dental morphology were asked to identify the junction based on consensus.
{#F3}
{#F4}
Because each tooth has a CEJ with a different curvature, a cutting plane that divided the surface area into 2 was automatically produced by calculating the average curvature. However, this was different for cases such as molar teeth and double-rooted teeth, where the curvature widened into a radial form as it projected toward the lower part of the root from the CEJ. In these cases, the surface area of the cutting plane was produced based on tangentially extending the CEJ. In order to move the area that now extended 6 mm below the CEJ, the extended area was moved 6 mm vertically from the apex of the root. The cut area and extended/moved area were parallel to each other and were processed using interactive translation in the Mimics software, with the screen coordinate system and the snapping step value set at 6.0. After moving the extended area, the RSA that remained after the separation of the root and the crown was halved by the extended surface area. Any surface that was more than 6 mm from the root was removed.
Measurement of designed 3D data
-------------------------------
The 3-Matic software can measure the overall area or the area of a particular surface of a 3D model. All the 3D models of the teeth were reconstructed in Mimics using the same method. The RSA at 6 mm below the CEJ was separated by the cutting plane that extended to 6 mm below the CEJ. Lastly, the RSA at 6 mm below the CEJ was measured with 3-Matic.
Statistical analysis
--------------------
The collected data were statistically processed using SPSS software version 12.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA), and are presented here as mean±standard deviation values. The Mann-Whitney nonparametric statistical test was applied, and the cutoff for statistical significance was set at *P*\<0.05.
RESULTS
=======
The following values were obtained after using CBCT to reconstruct, modify, and measure the 3D models. Twenty-eight teeth from each patient were converted into 3D models. The roots and the crowns were first separated, and the roots were then separated at 6 mm below the CEJ. The crown was removed and the surface area at 6 mm above the CEJ was removed. The surface area that corresponded to 6 mm below the CEJ was then measured by a computer.
The size of the incisor teeth decreased in the following order: maxillary central incisor \>maxillary lateral incisor \>mandibular lateral incisor \>mandibular central incisor. The surface area of the maxillary left central incisor was the largest (129.58±24.28 mm^2^) and that of the mandibular left central incisor was the smallest (96.87±16.65 mm^2^). Among the molars, the surface area of the maxillary first molar was the largest (right: 227.81±32.01 mm^2^; left: 232.87±31.48 mm^2^) and that of the mandibular second molar was the smallest (right: 185.47±31.31 mm^2^; left: 189.58±36.41 mm^2^). In addition, a comparison of the mean surface area at 6 mm below the CEJ for all 28 teeth showed that the mean surface area of the left first maxillary molar was the largest (232.87 mm^2^) and that of the mandibular left central incisor was the smallest (96.87 mm^2^) ([Table 1](#T1){ref-type="table"}).
###### Mean remaining RSA at 6 mm in 33 patients
Variables RSA (mm^2^)
----------- ----------------- -------- ------- -------- -------
Maxilla
Central incisor 126.76 22.09 129.58 24.28
Lateral incisor 117.02 22.60 115.03 21.28
Canine 138.20 24.51 136.59 22.08
First premolar 136.32 19.68 133.00 16.01
Second premolar 124.40 13.74 126.23 15.89
First molar 227.81 32.01 232.87 31.48
Second molar 199.31 27.72 198.92 30.87
Mandible
Central incisor 98.33 18.41 96.87 16.65
Lateral incisor 107.35 17.09 107.19 16.81
Canine 132.22 20.57 131.85 21.06
First premolar 116.27 16.49 115.86 15.79
Second premolar 113.32 14.37 113.26 14.45
First molar 227.16 29.65 223.82 30.54
Second molar 185.47 31.31 189.58 36.41
RSA: root surface area, SD: standard deviation.
The mean RSA for all teeth was larger in men than in women. There were remarkable differences in the surface areas of particular teeth between men and women. The mean surface area of the maxillary right first molar differed by 29.91 mm^2^ between men (242.31 mm^2^) and women (212.40 mm^2^), while that of the mandibular left second molar differed by 27.80 mm^2^ (203.06 vs. 175.26 mm^2^). The sex difference in surface areas was markedly smaller for the maxillary right second premolar (7.39 mm^2^: 127.98 mm^2^ in men and 120.59 mm^2^ in women) and the mandibular first premolar (3.69 mm^2^: 118.06 mm^2^ in men and 114.37 mm^2^ in women) ([Table 2](#T2){ref-type="table"}).
###### Comparison of mean RSA at 6 mm for each tooth type
Variables RSA (mm^2^)
----------- ----------------- -------- ------- -------- ------- -------- ------- -------- -------
Maxilla
Central incisor 132.88 24.38 136.87 27.27 120.27 17.87 121.84 18.45
Lateral incisor 122.82 23.80 121.43 22.45 110.86 20.16 108.24 18.23
Canine 147.66 26.20 144.58 23.76 128.16 18.45 128.10 16.99
First premolar 144.22 22.21 139.62 17.02 127.92 12.40 125.97 11.62
Second premolar 127.98 14.39 132.66 16.72 120.59 12.33 119.40 11.98
First molar 242.31 31.91 242.55 30.22 212.40 24.67 222.58 30.36
Second molar 207.40 25.77 210.09 30.53 190.72 27.88 187.04 27.33
Mandible
Central incisor 102.04 19.76 101.14 17.79 94.39 16.58 92.33 14.53
Lateral incisor 109.70 18.39 110.15 16.71 104.94 15.79 104.04 16.88
Canine 138.82 19.71 139.79 20.73 125.21 19.66 123.42 18.45
First premolar 118.06 16.55 118.41 15.36 114.37 16.75 113.15 16.27
Second premolar 116.96 14.70 118.52 14.38 109.46 13.38 107.67 12.66
First molar 235.67 28.67 228.98 27.17 218.12 28.79 218.33 33.76
Second molar 192.60 30.89 203.06 41.18 177.89 30.89 175.26 24.37
RSA: root surface area, SD: standard deviation.
The mean surface areas at 6 mm below the CEJ in the teeth of 33 patients were also calculated for men and women separately. The surface area appeared to be largest for the first molar in both the maxilla (right: 242.31±31.91 mm^2^ in men and 212.40±24.67 mm^2^ in women; left: 242.55±30.22 mm^2^ and 222.58±30.36 mm^2^ in women) and the mandible (right: 235.67±28.67 mm^2^ in men and 218.12±28.79 mm^2^ in women; left: 228.98±27.17 mm^2^ in men and 218.33±33.76 mm^2^ in women) ([Table 2](#T2){ref-type="table"}).
The inflammatory burden in the maxilla was significantly higher in men than in women (Mann-Whitney *U*=78.00, *P*=0.003) ([Table 3](#T3){ref-type="table"}).
###### Statistical analysis
Variables RSA (mm^2^) Mann-Whitney *U* *P* value
------------ ------------- ------------------ ----------- -------- ------- -----------
Maxilla 160.934 21.422 144.578 14.357 78.00 0.037^a)^
Mandible 145.278 18.285 134.178 16.744 88.00 0.084
Total 153.106 19.554 139.378 15.158 82.00 0.052
RSA: root surface area, SD: standard deviation.
^a)^Statistically significant difference compared to the baseline.
DISCUSSION
==========
Since 2 Finnish studies found that periodontal inflammation was associated with myocardial and cerebral infarction, there have been numerous studies investigating the sources of periodontal infections \[[@B15][@B16]\]. Low-grade chronic systemic infections and inflammation associated with periodontal infection have been found to worsen conditions such as cardiovascular disease \[[@B17][@B18]\], and diabetes \[[@B19][@B20]\]. Circulating oral bacteria can cause inflammation and induce systemic infections beyond the oral area \[[@B21][@B22][@B23]\]. Moreover, a medium produced by a local infected region directly causes inflammation in periodontal infection \[[@B24][@B25]\]. Nesse et al. \[[@B12]\] reported that a larger amount of inflamed periodontal tissue increased the likelihood of bacteremia, systemic inflammatory responses, and cross-reactivity. Classifying periodontal infections, which can be a risk factor for other diseases, requires measuring the inflammatory burden, and hence quantifying the inflamed periodontal tissue. The measurement methods used in previous studies were not accurate, as their results varied with the skill of the practitioner. We therefore used CBCT and 3D data to obtain more accurate and precise measurements of the inflamed surface area of teeth and then quantified the inflammatory burden.
The symptoms of periodontal infection include gingival redness, bleeding, foul breath, and pain, with loss of teeth occurring in extreme cases. Periodontal infection occurs when plaque settles beneath the gingiva \[[@B26][@B27]\]. The flaws of the tools used to classify periodontal conditions and to assess the inflammatory burden are shortcomings of the studies that have attempted to investigate the interaction between periodontal infection and systemic disease. The present study aimed to objectively measure the severity of periodontal disease, which acts as a risk factor for other diseases, and to express it as a numerical value. The inflammatory burden as quantified in this study can allow definitive conclusions to be made about the risk of periodontal diseases affecting other systems. In addition, the inflammatory burden can be calculated retroactively using existing research materials, including the CAL, recession, and bleeding-on-probing measurements. Since periodontal infection is a 3D inflammatory process that extends to the connective tissue surrounding the roots of teeth, this study measured the surface area of inflamed roots in 3 dimensions. While it remains unclear how accurate this approach is for quantifying inflamed tissues, the 3D measurement method used in this study can still be considered a tool that measures the quantity of infected tissues more accurately and precisely than previous methods.
Mimics converts 2-dimensional image data stacked after image segmentation into 3D models. 3D models obtained from CBCT data can be accurately measured, and since they are noninvasive, they are useful in the clinical setting and for successful treatment planning \[[@B28][@B29]\]. The present study demonstrated that the RSA could be measured conveniently by producing 3D models of teeth using CBCT and the Mimics software. The CEJ, which divides the crown and the root, is a dividing line that needs to be determined when measuring the surface area of the root, rather than the whole tooth. It is important that the selected contour line precisely corresponds to the CEJ. The surface area of 3-dimensionally reconstructed models, namely the RSA value, is influenced by the contour line. Previous studies have also used CBCT data to create 3D models, but the low resolution of CBCT made it difficult to adjust the contour-line setting \[[@B30]\]. One study measured the surface area by horizontally orienting the CEJ and placing the cutting plane below and parallel to the CEJ \[[@B31]\]. However, this method did not take into account the curved shape of the CEJ, and hence could not accurately measure the RSA. More accurate surface area measurements can be made by precisely setting a contour line that separates the crown and the root based on the CEJ as a boundary, and lowering the contour line while maintaining the curvature of the CEJ. Although the measurements may vary depending on factors such as the CEJ setting according to users, errors that occur during conversion into 3D models, smoothing values, and, more importantly, the CBCT resolution, it can be concluded that Mimics is still the best tool for measuring the RSA.
Accurate measurements require high-resolution 3D models produced using scan data with small intervals. Micro-CT meets these requirements, and is widely used for various kinds of measurements, whereas the resolution of CBCT is lower \[[@B32]\].
During the process of conversion into a 3D model, the size of the model increases slightly due to the voxel size \[[@B33]\]. Micro-CT enables accurate observations of tooth shapes as well as accurate surface area measurements \[[@B13][@B34]\]. However, it is not appropriate for clinical use because it involves higher levels of radiation than CBCT \[[@B35]\]. CBCT is easy to apply for clinical diagnoses, and higher-resolution images can be obtained by applying CBCT separately to each tooth (rather than all the teeth), performing 3D reconstruction on individual teeth, and then connecting the 28 individual teeth together.
This study aimed to perform an accurate analysis of 3D teeth models obtained from CBCT data by utilizing the excellent 3D virtual simulation and high degree of precision of the Mimics software. We obtained 3D data from CBCT image stacks in Mimics, modified and designed the 3D models in detail using 3-Matic, and precisely measured the dental RSAs of all teeth. In addition, unlike previous studies in which teeth were extracted for performing RSA measurements, our study did not involve any tooth extractions. We found that the RSA at 6 mm below the virtual CEJ in patients affected by moderate periodontal inflammation was larger in men than in women. However, such area measurements may differ depending on the age and skeletal type of patients.
Since inflammation in chronic periodontitis patients is spread out not only on the surface of the root, but also extends to surrounding tissues, bone, and other connective tissues, the amount of inflammation cannot be quantified only by root area measurement. Therefore, there is a limit to the precision of the measurement of the amount of inflammation that occurs in periodontitis using only the root surface measurement method outlined in this study. However, we measured surface areas below the CEJ through 3D measurements of the RSA, which is more accurate and simpler than previous methods. In addition, the 3D teeth models used in this study were saved on a computer so that they can be utilized for sectional area measurements and as research material for future studies.
**Funding:** This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2016R1D1A1B01008853).
**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization: Jong-Tae Park; Formal analysis: Sa-Beom Park, So-Youn An; Investigation: Sa-Beom Park, So-Youn An, Jong-Tae Park; Methodology: Sa-Beom Park, Won-Jeong Han, Jong-Tae Park; Project administration: Jong-Tae Park; Writing - original draft: Sa-Beom Park, So-Youn An, Won-Jeong Han, Jong-Tae Park; Writing - review & editing: Jong-Tae Park.
**Conflict of Interest:** No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.
[^1]: ^†^Sa-Beom Park and So-Youn An contributed equally to this work.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Central |
Mega City 1
Prog 3 Patrol
Going Underground
8
JAN/14
Returning to the sector house the clones were notified by Tech Division that the surveillance the freight zoom train that had been behaving erratically at the time of the radiation warning at the Tech Bazaar, has been attempting to contact the frequencies being monitored in trying to trace the financing for the sniper attack on the Chief Judge.
Data seems to show that the calls are being routed through Bermuda and the residence of Valentina Vasiliev and through a Hondo Cit finance company on Luna 1, Andrea Carretero Sierra being the name that was flagged up.
Further surveillance of Sierra is requested by the Chief Judge and Luna 1 judges are put on the case, and at your disposal.
Meanwhile, the final destination of the comms is back here in MC1, but still unable to pinpoint the location. Tech Division seem to be convinced that the interference on the line is dimensional in nature, if anything, the final destination may not even be in this reality.
All that leaves, is an investigation of the zoom itself.
The clones board a hov wagon, and speed out of the city, en-route, information trickles through that there was some sort of fire fight at the junk yard, the final stop for the zoom, the train started back up, and heading back to the city.
The H-wagon matches the speed of the zoom, and lowers the judges onto the roof of the rear carriage, and they cut their way into the carriage, moments before it enters the first set of tunnels under the Great Salt Beds of old Chi town, only an hour or so before it is due at Penn & Teller station.
Even as the Judges cut their way into the train, something rocks the train further forward, and as the light disappears at the tunnel mouth behind them, a shock-wave rumbles through the earth, and a burst of static over their comms. Seconds later, as Liefield kicks the door in, the first horrific reports of a bomb attack against Cursed Earth Iso Block 23 begin to trickle through.
Judge Von Simian pauses for a moment to tackle the onboard computers, trying to light up their way, and is physically thrown from the computer – this is something physical that has taken over the train, and no skill of his can wrest the control from whoever is now driving this train. With no control over the zoom, all that is clear, is that there is a strong atomic signal coming from the front of the train – all they had to do was get there.
Training kicked in for the street judges, and they swept quickly up the carriage, covering each other, Judge Foe taking point, silence falling over them, just the rumble of the zoom, the whoosh of the mag lev track below them, and a steady pounding from further up, which indicated that the zoom may have taken damage during the fire fight.
It was in pausing to determine where this may be, that the first scuttling sounds came from the darkness ahead. Out of the shadow, small robotic spiders sprang forth, dozens of them, crawling over the floors, walls and ceilings, chittering to themselves and eachother, probing, targeting, and heading straight for the clones.
Void was first to her lawgiver, and blew the first droid to pieces. Bliss did the same, while they targeted the next droids, the first targets began to audible tick – and self destructed, taking another passing droid with it. Another wave of the spiders crawled from the shadows.
The judges just opened up, firing at any target, and seconds later had dealt with all twenty four of the things. Von Simian maaged to grab one, and momentarily pause the self destruct, and sent it back the way it had come, and into the path of six war droids.
The war droids were more heavily armoured, but were only firing slugs. One or two shots got through the judges armour, but even the war droids posed little risk. It wasn’t until they got to the third carriage, and the plasma shooting mark three droids rolled out of the shadows, that the clones broke out into a sweat.
Judge Void snapped first, and fired off two hi-ex shots, taking out the droids, but tearing large holes in the carriage too. The force field holding the zoom together, and preventing anything loose in the tunnels from hitting it, pulsed purple below their feet, and the last of the droids in this carriage slipped into the hole, and bounced noisily along the base of the carriage until it exploded somewhere behind them.
Then the sirens and the strobe lights started, and a calm, mechanical voice anoouced that this car had been comprimised and was being disconnected. The judges leaped across the deadly gap and ran for the next compartment, Von Simian and Liefield barely making it, and sliding under the compartnment door as it slammed shut, leaving them on what should be the second last compartment. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Kenya has banned protests in three major city centres following weeks of demonstrations by opposition supporters.
Fred Matiangi, acting internal security minister, said rallies are banned in the central business districts of the capital, Nairobi, the country's second city - Mombasa and the opposition stronghold of Kisumu.
"Protecting the lives and properties of the people of Kenya is not negotiable," Matiangi told a press conference in Nairobi on Thursday.
"We have noted with great concern the escalation of lawlessness, breach of peace and public order during demonstrations organised by NASA," Matiangi said.
The National Super Alliance, NASA, is the coalition opposition.
{articleGUID}
"Due to the clear present and imminent danger of breach of peace and public order as witnessed in recent demonstrations, the government notifies the public that, for the time being, we will not allow demonstrations within central business districts of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu," Matiangi said.
The East African country has been gripped by protests after President Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner of the August 8 election.
Last month, the country's Supreme Court annulled the vote and called for a rerun of the poll.
But opposition leader Raila Odinga, Kenyatta's main challenger, pulled out of the race this week after claiming his demands were not met. Announcing his withdrawal on Tuesday, Odinga said: "All indications are that the election scheduled for 26 October will be worse than the previous one."
The opposition had requested that some of the electoral officials in charge of the last poll should be replaced, calling for daily protests until their demands were met.
Those daily protests should start next week, the opposition has said.
Kenyatta, for his part, insists that the election rerun must go ahead.
Philip Zeal Chebunet, a lecturer and political communication expert at University of Eldoret, told Al Jazeera the government had no choice but to ban protests in central business districts.
"The government had to put in place everything to ensure the properties and the people of Kenya are safe. It appears they are handling the situation based on the Constitution. And I believe in the next few days everything will be in order and back to normal," Chebunet said.
Kenya's parliament passed an election law amendment on Wednesday stating that if one candidate withdrew from the rerun vote, the remaining one would automatically win. The vote was boycotted by opposition legislators.
The law aimed to ensure Kenyatta could be declared president if he faced no challengers. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Glutathione S-transferase pi expression in nasopharyngeal cancer.
Glutathione S-transferase pi (GST-pi) is an enzyme that catalyzes the conjugation of electrophilic substrates and prevents oxidative damage. Although GST-pi expression has been analyzed in many cancers, the significance of GST-pi expression in nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC), a tumor with a high treatment failure rate, is still unclear. To elucidate the significance of GST-pi expression in NPC. Evaluation of GST-pi expression in NPC tissue specimens and determination of its relationship with tissue iron (a pro-oxidant) and clinicopathological factors in NPC. Immunohistochemical expression of GST-pi was carried out in 55 NPC and 4 normal nasopharyngeal tissue sections. Eleven nasopharyngeal biopsy specimens (4 normal and 7 NPC) were analyzed for tissue iron levels. The expression of GST-pi in NPC was correlated with corresponding tissue iron levels. The relationships between GST-pi expression with sex, race, tumor stage, cervical nodal status, and clinical staging were also analyzed. Glutathione S-transferase pi immunoreactivity was observed in all NPC sections, with the percentage of immunopositive cells ranging from 1.0% to 72.0%. Tissue iron levels were significantly higher in the NPC tissues compared with normal tissues (P =.001). A direct correlation was observed between GST-pi expression and total and nuclear iron levels in NPC (P =.01 and P =.047, respectively). A significant association was also observed between GST-pi expression and cervical nodal disease (P =.007). Nasopharyngeal tumor cells may respond to pro-oxidant conditions by modulating intracellular antioxidant defense. Glutathione S-transferase pi expression appears to be associated with lymphogenous metastasis in NPC. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
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It's really painful how stupid customers can be...
Most people who don't work in a helpdesk, they think its really funny... but its not.... Originally it is.... but after a while, it really starts to be quite a drain...
Explaining that the monitor is not the CPU..
Trying to get them to right click on my computer..
Asking them to type in something...
All these amazingly simple things, when repeated 500 times, causes your brain to melt.... And that's only supporting basic things...
when you get into more involved support, you can literally go crazy just listening to the people whinge about how this doesn't work, and its all your fault or telling you that they've done something that, no matter how you look at it, would place them as runners up in the Darwin Awards.....
Yes, I admit it.. it's my fault that you keep your red hat server next to the deep fryer, and its causing the PC to overheat...
Yes, its my fault that the cables for all your registers are faulty, I should've known that you would've been stupid enough to squash the cables under the registers....
Oh, its our fault that your reports aren't working??? Our shitty software...
Strange, when did you get this order of -500 boxes in....
To fix it, all you have to do is run this.... no, I'll spell it for you... what does that say... Command not found.. did you type it how I asked you to?? Yes.. okay, read it to me.... WHAT?!? That's nothing like what I told you to type!!!! ARHGHHHHHH!!!!
-Disclaimer-
I'm having a bad day.
-Matty_Cross
\"Isn\'t sanity just a one trick pony anyway? I mean, all you get is one trick. Rational Thinking.
But when you\'re good and crazy, hehe, the skies the limit!!\"
Second one was where someone called and said their computer isn't working somehow and suspected that it might be because of his new GeForce-video card because their house is so old and the video card eats a lot of power and because the house is old the electricity system is old and it might not be able to run the card.
Yeah, how could they know 100 years ago that we are going to have *this* powerful video cards...
We have school teachers telling our kids that the Monitor is the CPU and the System Case/Tower is the Hard-drive/CD-ROM.. What hope for our kids?
A local primary school has an average of 1 workstation per 5 to 8 students.. great hey..
Same school, the childeren who have computers at home are expected to allow the "less fortunate" to use the schools computers.. two students were failed by the IT teacher because both couldn't use IE 5 successfuly.. one used Netscape at home the other Mozilla ... The teacher was asked to sit the same test using Opera, then Mozilla HE failed..
and what has this to do with tech support... This teacher rang me on the first day of school in 2000 (late January in Aus) he needed help fixing the damage the Y2K bug had caused a couple of computers... CMOS Batterys had failed over the holidays...
Talking to a customer about Digital Still Camera's.. his enquiry about cost and battery life and ease of use.. I chirped in with convienience and ability to share images with friends and relitives over the internet, or on cd..
His closing question.. And where do you get the Memory cards developed?
Cheers
"Consumer technology now exceeds the average persons ability to comprehend how to use it..give up hope of them being able to understand how it works." - Me http://www.cybercrypt.co.nr | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
The Basics of Sound Government
It might seem strange that the Legislature is considering action to declare Idaho’s sovereignty under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. State sovereignty should be a given.
Yet, it isn’t. “Change” is the latest buzzword in politics; that’s what President Obama campaigned for when he ran for office and since he took office in January. He wants “change” in the political climate in Washington and “change” in how business is conducted.
Don’t get me wrong, change isn’t all bad. We go through constant changes in our personal lives and change is often good in politics. But when it comes to states’ rights and upholding something as sacred as the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, then the kind of “change” the president is talking about is not healthy.
In my view, we need to get back to the basics of sound government – the blueprint put together by George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and other framers of our Constitution.
That’s why I am sponsoring a joint memorial before the Legislature. Idaho must send a strong message to the president and Congress reminding our national leaders that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states. Unfortunately, over the years the states have become agents of the federal government. We are seeing those dynamics in the form of the Endangered Species Act, the management of wolves and other wildlife, No Child Left Behind, regulation of air quality and other measures.
It’s time for the federal government to back off and it’s high time for states to control their destiny. Idahoans are perfectly capable of solving Idaho problems. I totally resist the thinking that the president, the Congress and federal agencies somehow possess greater wisdom on issues as they affect states. I am opposed to the federal government’s practice of mandating certain actions by states under the threat of civil or criminal penalties, or loss of funding. The memorial seeks to stop that practice.
As legislators, we need to keep fundamental states’ rights in mind as we consider the federal stimulus package that recently was approved by Congress and signed by the president. Here are two big problems I have:
This package appears to be to be an outright assault on state sovereignty under the 10th Amendment.
I cannot figure out how the nation can spend its way out of a recession. Part of the problem is extended credit, and the president wants to solve the problem by granting more credit. I don’t know of many people in District 2 who see that as a winning formula.
Idaho is scheduled to receive about $1 billion in federal stimulus money and the governor and others are trying to figure how much of that money can be used – and what kind of strings are attached with those federal funds. If the federal funds help plug some holes in the state budget, or delays larger-than-expected budget cuts in programs such as education, transportation or Medicaid, fine. But I’ll say “no thanks” if the money goes to federally mandated programs that Idaho does not need or want. I’ll say “no thanks” if receipt of those federal funds compromises states’ rights, or the provisions under the 10th Amendment.
11 thoughts on “The Basics of Sound Government”
Mr. Harwood,
You stated, that “If the federal funds help plug some holes in the state budget, or delays larger-than-expected budget cuts in programs such as education, transportation or Medicaid, fine.” Are you not aware that he who pays the piper calls the tune?
If we truly want freedom from federal interference then we have to refuse all federal funds unless they are to provide for constitutionally acceptable purposes as specifically defined in Article 1, Section 8. The three items you note are not included. They are usually supported by the bureaucracrats under unconstitutionally broad applications of the interstate commerce of general welfare clauses. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments have clearly stated that powers or authorities that aren’t specifically allowed “… are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Picking and choosing “acceptable poison” will still lead to the death of our Constitutional Republic. So either take a stand or lay down to the federal bureaucrats. You can’t do both!
The timing of this is interesting, as I was just discussing the topic of states’ rights versus federal authority with a friend of mind as it affects education. My friend and his wife are both teachers. I was taking the position of states’ rights.
He made the valid point that we have not taught a ‘state first’ curriculum in generations. You learn about your state, but the focus is on American history, and American politics. The news covers national politics more than local. Politicians talk about their ‘fellow Americans’. We can discuss how this came to be, but it remains true. It is symptomatic of a larger truth that our government and our culture in general has changed greatly in 222 years.
The law says arms can’t be restrained, yet nuclear weapons are arms. The law says we can’t have a standing army, yet we have hundreds of bases around the world. The law says Congress must print the money, yet they don’t. And the law says the federal government has no powers not specifically given to it, yet here we are with a 1 trillion dollar stimulus package.
We find ourselves caught between the rule of law and the de facto nature of our nation. But a nation that disobeys its own laws for convenience is not a nation so much as an organized crime syndicate.
This is why I believe we need to enact the clause in article 5 which allows for the calling of a convention for amending the Constitution. Enough states have requested one since the 1970s, for one reason or another, to qualify. A convention to pass a bill of amendments to update the Constitution to the modern era, and reaffirm its jurisdiction as the law of the land.
Amend the Constitution? The Law of the Constitution is not obeyed (by Local, State and Federal governments) now so what amendment could be added that would be honored?
The Constitution does not need to be amended; it needs to be “enforced†and many existing amendments repealed. Seems the People do not comprehend They are the Enforcer nor do They understand the power of enforcement delegated to Them by the Constitution; Article I, Section 2.
Allen, I agree that talk about amendments is foolhardy when the federal government doesn’t even follow it as it stands now. We need adherence to the constitution, or I think we’d be best off without this beast of a federal government.
Amend the Constitution by whom the powers that be today? no thanks I think it is just fine just the way it is. If we honored the Constitution we would not be in the shape we are in now it’s pure common sence something that has been lost in translation in todays times.
Thanks for your input but would you consider revising, or defining, your words a bit? We, as the People, are not the same as we, the government. As a matter of fact “Weâ€, the People, are not the government.
Those persons serving in government positions are the people who are required to take an Oath to support the Constitution; reference the last paragraph of Article VI, and we, the Citizenry, are obligated to “enforce†the Constitution on those persons serving us in government elected positions. The Citizenry is the Employer (Boss) of elected government personnel and the only Entity with the constitutional power to hire them; reference Article I, Section 2. However, the Citizenry is the Boss (Employer) of government only as to who is elected and in no other way the Boss over government.
The elected take an Oath to support (obey) the Constitution, therefore, the Constitution is the Boss over government acts or actions. Ah, but why doesn’t government obey (honor) the Constitution (Oath of Office)? Simply because We, the People, fail our Duty in Citizenship to “Enforce†the Constitution. No law enforces itself.
No problem here, I think I understood your meaning. The opposition to a constitutional America is winning the war for the mind of Americans with words. However, you are correct “if†government would honor the Oath of Office. It is clear to me that government never has wholly honored the Oath, even in George Washington’s time. Government gets away with dishonoring the Oath simply because the People will not “enforce†the Oath by voting to NOT reelect Lawmakers that dishonor it.
The maintenance of Constitutional America is the obligation of, not government, but the People and is as simple as stated above – do not reelect known criminals to legislate (make law).
More simple done than said; Incumbent Lawmakers of the last 100 years, or so, have dishonored the Oath of Office, simply quit voting to reelect Incumbents. No Voter is obligated in any way to vote for anyone, pick a name from the phonebook and write it in on the ballot.
A vote cast for any reason other than the candidate honor the Oath of Office is a wasted vote. That’s not my idea but it is the idea of the Founders and written in the Constitution in Article VI last paragraph*. Only the People (Voters) can hire, elect, Lawmakers to the House of Congress and do so every two years; Article I, Section 2.
The People not electing Lawmakers for the proper (constitutional) reason is precisely why we have an unconstitutional government created Democracy. Whether Voters will ever wise up or not is not my argument – maybe Voters love their government created Democracy that is what they/we have today anyway.
Are we better off in this Democracy, you know with two cars (economy)? I think if government tended to its business and left the People alone Americans would have three cars.
The idea that government has created America’s prosperity doesn’t ring true to me. I think the formula of people willing to work and freedom and free enterprise created America’s prosperity – Labor creates Capital and Capital creates wealth.
Allan
*P.S. the last paragraph of Article VI requires all elected Officials and all Judges to take an Oath to support the Constitution and Voters cannot change or amend the Constitution. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Q:
Simple T-SQL function to convert date to displayable format
I have a strange bug that I cannot resolve (with a one line function).
This code works:
DECLARE @TestDate datetime = '2013-05-01 23:15:11'
select IsNull(convert(varchar(max), @TestDate, 120), 'null') as 'test1'
Displays: 2013-05-01 23:15:11
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[DateOrNullToChar] (@InputDate date)
RETURNS VARCHAR(40)
BEGIN
return ISNULL(convert(varchar(40),@InputDate, 120),'null');
END
select dbo.DateOrNullToChar('2013-05-01 23:15:11') as 'result'
Returns: 2013-05-01 (no time)
I have also tried varchar(max).
The purpose of the function is for something like this:
Set @ErrorMessage = ' @ArrivalDate=' + dbo.DateOrNullToChar(@ArrivalDate) +
' @DepartureDate=' + dbo.DateOrNullToChar(@DepartureDate);
If any one value is null, the whole value becomes null. So I want to see the string 'null' when a date has a null value.
A:
@InputDate should be datetime or datetime2 if you want time to be shown
The clues are in the code...
@TestDate datetime
@InputDate date
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | StackExchange |
Produced by David Widger
TESSA
By Louis Becke
Unwin Brothers 1901
CHAPTER I
A small, squat and dirty-looking trading steamer, with the name
_Motutapu_ painted in yellow letters on her bows and stern, lay at
anchor off the native village of Utiroa on Drummond's Island in the
Equatorial Pacific. She was about 800 tons burden, and her stained and
rusty sides made her appear as if she had been out of port for two years
instead of scarcely four months.
At this present moment four of her five boats were alongside, each one
piled high over the gunwales with bags of copra, which the steam winch
was hoisting in as quickly as possible, for night was drawing on and
Captain Louis Hendry, who was then ashore, had given orders to the
mate, a burly Yorkshireman named Oliver, to be ready to heave up at six
o'clock.
The day had been intensely hot and windless, the sea lay sweltering,
leaden-hued and misty, and the smoke from the native houses in Utiroa
village hung low down amid the groves of coco-palms which encompassed it
on three sides.
On the after-deck of the steamer, under the awning, a man was lying on
a bed of mats, with a water-bottle and a plate of bananas beside him.
Seated cross-legged beside him was a native boy, about fifteen years of
age, who kept fanning his master's face, and driving away the pestering
flies. It was easy to see that the man was suffering from fever. His
deeply-bronzed cheeks had yellowed and were thin and hollow, and his
eyes dull and apathetic. He looked like a man of fifty, though he was in
reality not more than thirty-two. Every now and then he drank, then lay
back again with a groan of pain. Piled up on the skylight was a heap
of rugs and blankets, for use when the violent chilling attack of ague
would follow on the burning, bone-racking heat of fever.
Presently the mate, accompanied by the chief engineer, came aft. Both
men were very hot and very dirty, and their faces were streaming with
perspiration. They sat down on deck-chairs beside the sick man, called
to the steward for a bottle of beer, and asked him how he felt.
Carr made a sudden effort and sat up.
"D---- bad, Oliver! I have about six hundred and forty-nine pains all
over me, and no two of them in the same place. I've swilled enough water
to float a battleship; and, look here! you must give me some beer: a
bottle--two bottles--a gallon--a cask! Beer I will have if I perish
like a beast in the field. I can't drink water like that-it's as hot as
-----"
Morrison, the Scotch engineer, smiled. "Don't swear, Carr. Ye shall
have just one long drink of beer. 'Twill do ye no great harm on such a
roasting day as this."
The steward brought two bottles of lager beer, and Carr eagerly extended
his thin, brown hand for the creamy, tempting liquid poured out for him
by the mate. He drank it off and then laid down again.
"When are we getting out of this beastly hole, Oliver?" he asked.
"To night, I expect-that is, if the skipper comes aboard fairly sober.
He doesn't often get too much grog aboard, but this island is one of the
places where he is bound to get loaded up. The two traders ashore are
countrymen of his, I believe, though they call themselves Britishers."
Carr nodded. "Dutchmen of some kind, eh?"
"Yes, like himself. He's a Dane, though if you told him so he'd get
nasty over it."
"He's a nasty brute, anyway," said Carr wearily. "I don't like that
shifty eye of his. And I think he's a bit of a sneak."
"You needn't _think_ it; you can be sure of it. I'll prove it to you in
a minute," said the mate. "Both he and that fat beast of a supercargo
are a pair of sneaks, and they hate you like poison. What have you done
to offend them?"
"Nothing that I know of. But I have always suspected that neither of
them are too fond of me. Hendry I consider a low-lived scoundrel. I met
his wife and daughters in Sydney a year ago--went to his house with
him. They think he's a perfect saint, and at the time I thought so too,
considering he's been in the island trade for ten years. But I know what
he is pretty well by now. He's not fit to be married to a decent white
woman and have children."
The mate assented. "You're right, Carr. He's a double-faced swab, and
a thundering hypocrite as well. There's only one good point about
him--he's a rattling good sailor man. As for Sam Chard, he's simply
a drunken bully. I shall be glad to be quit of this hooker. I'm not a
paragon of virtue, but this ship is a bit too rocky for me. Now I will
show you what I meant just now when I said I'll prove that both Hendry
and Chard are sneaks, and have their knives into you."
He disappeared below for a few seconds, and then returned carrying a
letter-book.
"Now, Carr, my boy," he said, seating himself beside the sick
trader again, "just cock your ears and listen. This is our esteemed
supercargo's letter-book. I had to go into his cabin yesterday to look
for the list of ship's stores, and I saw this letter-book lying on his
table, opened at this particular page. I caught your name, and took the
liberty of reading the letter. It is addressed to the owners in Sydney,
and is dated May 5, 1889."
"That was two days after you and the skipper and Chard had the row about
those flash Samoan girls coming aboard at Vavau," put in Morrison, "and
he and Chard started to knock the hands about."
"I remember," said Carr, as a grim smile flitted across his yellow face;
"go on, Oliver."
The mate began:--
"'SS. _Motutapu_. Niafu Harbour,
"'Vavau, Tonga Islands,
"'May 5, 1889.
"'Dear Sirs,--As the barque _Metaris_ leaves to-day for
Sydney, I take the opportunity of writing you to report
progress of cruise of the _Motutapu_ up to date.'"
Then followed an account of the various trading operations in which the
steamer had been engaged from the time she left Sydney up to her arrival
at the Friendly Islands. Then--
"'In pursuance of your instructions, we called at Kabaira
Bay, New Britain, to remove Mr. Harvey Carr from there to a
more healthy location. We found Mr. Carr's station in a
satisfactory state, and his accounts were correct. But
both Captain Hendry and myself are of the opinion that Mr.
Carr was on altogether too friendly terms with the manager
of the German firm at Blanche Bay, and we believe that your
firm's interest has greatly suffered thereby. He certainly
was ill, but we do not think his illness has been caused by
fever, of which we could see no traces, but by his availing
himself of the too lavish hospitality of the manager of the
German firm. He had also, I learnt, become very thick with
the Wesleyan missionaries at Port Hunter, and seems to have
been continually visiting them under the pretext of getting
medical attendance from the Rev. Dr. Bowen, who, as you are
well aware, is a determined opponent of your firm in New
Britain, and has made several adverse reports upon our
manner of trading with the natives to the commander of H.M.
ships.'"
"What do you think of that?" inquired the engineer wrathfully, striking
his clenched hand upon his knee; "and the fellow is a Scotsman, too."
Carr laughed. "Don't get angry, Morrison. He's one of the wrong sort
of Scotsmen. Give me some beer. I'm a drunken beast, aren't I? Go on,
Oliver."
"'In fact Mr. Carr seems to have thoroughly ingratiated
himself with the missionaries as well as with the Germans,
and I think it is my duty to mention this to you at the
earliest opportunity. I proposed to him that he should take
charge of one of your stations in the New Hebrides, but he
declined to remain in Melanesia, alleging that he is
suffering from fever, and insisting on being given a station
in the Caroline Islands. I pointed out to him that it would
be to the firm's advantage for him to remain in the vicinity
of New Britain, whereupon he was grossly insulting, and said
that the firm could go to hell, that he studied his own
health as much as anything. Furthermore, he made the direct
statement that he was not anxious to continue in the service
of a firm that resorted to shady and illegal practices, such
as sly grog-selling, and other blackguardly things. These
words he uttered to myself and Captain Hendry. On Sunday
last, the 3rd inst., myself and the captain had occasion to
exercise our authority over our native crew, who were making
a noise on deck. Mr. Carr--who was violently excited from
the effects of liquor--at once interfered and took the part
of the crew, who not only threatened both myself and Captain
Hendry with personal violence, but committed an assault on
us. I consider that the firm will be wise to terminate their
connection with Mr. Carr. His presence on board is a
continual source of trouble, and I shall be glad to have
authority from you to dismiss him. Captain Hendry bears me
out in these statements, and herewith attaches his signature
to mine.
"'I am, dear Sir,
"'Yours very obediently,
"'Samuel Chard, supercargo.
"'Louis Hendry, master. "'Messrs. Hillingdon & McFreeland,
"'Sydney.'"
"What do you think of that, Carr?" "It doesn't astonish me, Oliver,
for Chard, with all his seeming _bonhomie_, is as big a black-guard as
Hendry. And there is a certain amount of truth in his letter--I did
say that the firm of Hillingdon and McFreeland were guilty of shady and
illegal practices, and that the High Commissioner in Fiji would bring
them up with a round turn some day. But, as you know, all the rest is
false--downright lies."
The mate slapped him on the shoulder. "Lies! Of course they are! Now
just listen to what I have written in my own private log."
He stepped along to the deck-house, entered his cabin, and came back
with the private log aforesaid.
"Here, listen to this:--
"'Vavau, Tonga Islands, May 3, 1889.--This evening Captain
Hendry and Mr. Chard, the supercargo, came on board at six
o'clock, accompanied by several white men and a number of
loose Samoan women. They were all more or less under the
influence of drink. As is usual, our native crew were seated
on the fore-hatch, holding their evening service, when Mr.
Chard went for'ard, and with considerable foul language
desired them to stop their damned psalm-singing. He then
offered them two bottles of Hollands gin. The native seamen
refused to accept the liquor, whereupon Mr. Chard struck one
of them and knocked him down. Then Captain Hendry, who was
much the worse for drink, came for'ard, and calling on me to
follow and assist him, attacked the crew, who were very-
excited (but offered no violence), with an iron belaying-
pin. He stunned three of them before the second mate, the
chief engineer, and myself could restrain him, and he
threatened to shoot what he called "the ringleaders of a
mutiny." He had a revolver belted round his waist. The
native crew then came aft and made a complaint to. Mr.
Harvey Carr, the trader, who was lying ill with fever in his
berth. He came on deck, and speaking in Samoan to the crew
and to the women who had been brought on board by Captain
Hendry and the supercargo, urged the women to go on shore,
as it was Sunday. This they at once did, and getting into a
canoe, paddled away. Thereupon Captain Hendry, Mr. Sam
Chard, and the white traders became very insulting to Mr.
Carr, who, although he was so ill, kept his temper, until
Mr. Chard called him a "missionary crawler." This
expression made Mr. Carr lose control of himself, and he
used very strong language to Captain Hendry and the
supercargo upon the gross impropriety of their conduct. He
certainly used expressions that he should not have employed,
but under the circumstances, and bearing in mind the fact
that the native crew were ready for mutiny, and that mutiny
was only averted by Mr. Carr's influence over the native
crew, I and my fellow officers, whose names are attached,
desire to record the facts of the case.
"'Then Captain Hendry and Mr. Sam Chard used very foul
language to Mr. Carr, who again lost his temper and called
the former a damned stock-fish eating Dutchman, who had no
right to sail under British colours as an Englishman, and
ought to be kicked off the deck of a British ship. He
(Mr. Carr) then, being greatly excited, added that Captain
Hendry, being a married man with a large family, was little
better than a brute beast in his mode of life, else he would
not have brought half a dozen native harlots on board--women
whose very presence insulted even his native crew. Mr. Chard
then advanced towards Mr. Carr in a threatening manner,
whereupon the whole native crew, headed by a white stoker
named Cleaver, rushed the after-deck, seized Captain Hendry
and Mr. Chard, and threw them below into the saloon.
"'Mr. Carr then addressed the crew in their own several
languages, and explained to them the danger of laying hands
upon the captain or an officer of the ship; also he
explained to them his own position as a passenger. They
listened to him quietly, and promised to follow his
directions. At six o'clock Captain Hendry and Mr. Sam Chard
came on deck, and in my presence and in that of the second
officer and Felix Latour, the steward, apologised to Mr.
Carr. Mr. Carr, who was very exhausted with fever, shook
hands with them both, and the matter has ended. I have
briefly entered these occurrences in the ship's log, which
Captain Hendry refuses to sign. But this statement of mine
is signed as follows:--
"'James Oliver, Chief Officer.
"'Jos. Atkins, Second Officer.
"'Felix Latour, Steward.
"'Tom Cleaver, Fireman."
The trader held out his hand, "Thank you, Oliver. But I'm afraid that
the firm of Hillingdon and McFreeland will be glad to get rid of a man
like me. I'm not the sort of trader they want. I took service with them
under the impression that they were straight people. They are
not--they are simply unmitigated sweeps. Hillingdon, with his solemn,
stone-jug-like face, I _know_ to be a most infernal rogue. He fakes the
firm's accounts to the detriment of the London people who are paying the
piper, and who are really the firm. As for Sam Chard and this measly,
sneaking, Danish skipper, they are merely minor thieves. But I didn't do
so badly with them, did I, Oliver?"
The mate laughed loudly. "No, indeed. You settled them that time. But
you must be careful. Hendry especially is a dangerous man. I believe
that he wouldn't stick at murder if it could be done without any fear of
detection. And he hates you like poison. Chard, too, is a scoundrel, but
wouldn't do anything worse than he has done, which is bad enough,
for the fat blackguard always keeps up the appearance of a jolly,
good-natured fellow. But be careful of Hendry. Don't lean on the rail
on a dark night when he's on deck. He'd give you a hoist overboard in a
second if you gave him a chance and no one was about."
"I'll watch him, Oliver. And when I get better, I'll take it out of him.
But I'm not going to let him and Chard drive me out of the ship. I am
under a two years' engagement to this rascally firm, and have only three
more months to put in. I'll settle in the Carolines, and start trading
there on my own account. I'm sick of this filthy old tub."
"So is Morrison, and so am I," said the mate, as he rose to go for'ard
again. "Hallo, here is the skipper coming at last."
A quarter of an hour later the captain's boat, came alongside, and
Hendry and his supercargo came aft under the awning, and with much
solicitude asked Carr how he was feeling. He replied civilly to their
inquiries, but excused himself when Chard asked him to have a small
bottle of lager. They were accompanied by two respectable-looking white
men, who were resident traders on Drummond's Island.
"I have some news for you, Mr. Carr," said the supercargo genially;
"there's an old friend of yours here, a trader named Remington."
Carr raised himself with an expression of pleasure lighting up in his
worn, thin face. "Old Jack Remington! Where is he? I _shall_ be glad to
see him again."
"He'll be aboard here in another hour. He has a station at the north end
of the island. The moment we mentioned your name he said he would come
and see you. His daughter is going on to the Carolines with us, and
he has just now gone off to his station to bring her on board, as the
captain wants to get away at daylight in the morning." Then with a
pleasant nod he moved his chair some little distance away, and began
talking business with the two traders.
Carr, lying on his side with half-closed eyes, apparently was trying
to sleep, in reality he was studying the supercargo's face. It was a
handsome, "taking" sort of face, rather full and a bit coarse perhaps,
deeply browned by tropic suns, and lit up by a pair of jet black eyes,
which, when the possessor was in a good temper and laughed, seemed to
dance in unison. Yet they were eyes that in a moment could narrow and
show an ugly gleam, that boded ill for the object of their owner's
resentment. His curly hair and beard were jet black also, save here and
there where they were streaked with grey, and his figure, stout, but
close and well-knit together, showed him to be a man of great strength
and activity.
From the face of the supercargo Carr let his glance light upon the
figure of Captain Louis Hendry, who was standing at the break of the
poop talking to the chief mate. He was a small, slightly-built man of
about fifty years of age, with regular features, and wore a flowing grey
beard trimmed to a point. His eyes were those of the true Scandinavian,
a bright steely blue, though at the present moment the whites were
bloodshot and angry-looking. As he talked he kept stroking his beard,
and directing sullen glances at the crew, who were still working hard at
hoisting in the bags of copra. It was not a pleasant face to look at--a
sullen ill-humour seemed to glower forth from under the bushy grey
eyebrows, and vie with a nervous, sneaking apprehensiveness, as if he
every moment feared to be struck from behind. That he was a bit of a
dandy was very evident, for although his navy serge coat and cap were
soiled and dirty, they were both heavily trimmed with gold lace--a most
unusual adornment for the master of an island trading steamer. Like his
supercargo, he carried a revolver at his side, and at this Carr looked
with a contemptuous smile, for neither of the two traders, who actually
lived on the island, thought it necessary to carry arms, though the
natives of Taputeauea, as Drummond's Island was called, had a bad
reputation.
An hour after sunset, and whilst supper was proceeding in the saloon,
a smart whaleboat, manned by a crew of half-naked natives of Pleasant
Island, came alongside, and an old white-haired man of past sixty
stepped on deck. He was accompanied by a fair-skinned, dark-haired girl
of about twenty. The boatswain conducted them aft to where Carr, now
shaking with a violent attack of ague, was lying.
"My dear boy," cried the old man, kneeling beside the trader, and
looking into his face with intense sympathy. "I am so glad to meet you
again, though sorry to see you so ill."
Carr, with chattering teeth, held out an icy-cold hand.
"How are you, Remington? And you, Tessa? I'll be all right in another
ten minutes, and then we can talk."
Tessa Remington slipped down on the deck into a sitting posture beside
him, and placed her soft, warm hand on his forehead.
"Don't talk any more just now, Mr. Carr. There, let me tuck you in
properly," and she wrapped the rugs more closely around him. "I know
exactly what to do, don't I, father?"
CHAPTER II
From his boyhood Harvey Carr had been a wanderer among the islands of
the Southern Seas. Before he was sixteen his father, who was owner and
master of a Hobart Town whaleship, had perished at sea in one of the
ship's boats after the loss of his vessel upon an uncharted reef in the
South Pacific. And though another sixteen years had almost passed since
that dreadful time of agony and hunger, and thirst and madness, when men
looked at each other with a horrid meaning in their wolfish eyes, the
boy had never forgotten his dying father's words, spoken to the lad when
the grey shadow of the end had deepened upon the old seaman's rugged
face--
"I'm done for, Harvey. Try to keep up the men's courage. Rain will fall
before morning. I know it is coming, though I shall never feel it. Stick
to your two little sisters, boy; you must be their mainstay when I am
gone. Lead a clean life, Harvey. You can do it if you think of your
dead mother and of me.... And tell the men to stick steady to an
east-southeast course. They'll feel fresh and strong when the rain
comes. Drop me over the side the moment I'm gone, lad, won't you? Don't
let any one of them touch me. Goodbye, my son."
Those awful days of horror had helped to strengthen Harvey Carr's
natural resolution and steadfastness of purpose in life. When the
famished and hideous-looking survivors of the crew of the _City of Hope_
were picked up two days later the orphaned sailor lad made a vow to
devote himself to his sisters and "live clean." And he had kept his vow,
though for many years he had lived as trader, mate, or supercargo, among
people and in places where loose living was customary with white men,
and where any departure from the general practice was looked upon
with either contemptuous pity or open scorn. Yet no one, not even the
roughest and most dissolute beachcomber in the two Pacifics, would
have dared to "chaff" Harvey Carr upon his eccentricity, for he had an
unpleasant manner when aroused which meant danger to the man who was so
wanting in judgment. Yet some men _had_ "chaffed" him, and found out to
their cost that they had picked upon the wrong sort of man; for if he
was slow with his tongue he was quick with his hands, and knew how to
use them in a manner which had given intense pleasure to numerous gentry
who, in South Sea ports, delight to witness a "mill" in default of being
able to take part in it themselves.
And so the years had slipped by with Harvey Carr, wandering from one
island to another either as trader or seaman. Of such money as he made
he sent the greater portion to his sisters in the Colonies, retaining
only enough for himself to enable him to live decently. He was not an
ascetic, he drank fairly with his rough companions, gambled occasionally
in a moderate manner with them, swore when the exigences of seafaring
life demanded it, but no one had ever heard his name coupled with that
of a woman, white or brown, though he was essentially a favourite with
the latter; for at the end of fifteen years' experience in the South
Seas, from Easter Island to the far Bonins, he was one of the few white
men who thoroughly understood the character and disposition of the
various peoples among whom he had lived. Had he been a man of education
his knowledge of native languages, thought and mode of life generally,
might have brought him some money, fame, and distinction in the world
beyond, but he took no thought of such things; for to him the world
beyond was an unknown quantity, only associated in his mind with his
sisters, who had sometimes talked to him of their hopes and aspirations.
They would, when he had made plenty of money, go to England, to France,
to Italy. They would, with him, see the quaint old church on the sands
of Devon where their mother, and her mother too, had been christened so
long, long ago. And Harvey had only shaken his head and smiled. They,
he said, might go, but he had no care for such things; and he would
work hard and make money for them until they married and wanted him no
longer.
And then after a brief stay in the quiet little Australian country
town where his sisters lived, he would again sail out to seek the
ever-fleeting City of Fortune that has always tempted men like him into
the South Seas, never to return to the world of civilisation, but with
an intense, eager desire to leave it again as quickly as possible.
To him the daily round of conventional existence, the visitings, the
theatres, the church-goings, the talkings with well-dressed and highly
cultured men and women, whose thoughts and life seemed to him to be
deadly dull and uninteresting when contrasted with his own exciting
life in the South Seas, palled upon and bored him to the verge of
desperation. From his boyhood--from the time of his father's death he
had moved among rough men--men who held their lives cheaply, but whose
adventurous natures were akin to his own; men "who never had 'listed,"
but who traded and sailed, and fought and died from bullet, or club,
or deadly fever in the murderous Solomons or New Hebrides; men whose
pioneering instinct and unrecorded daring has done so much for their
country's flag and their country's prestige, but whose very names are
forgotten by the time the quick-growing creeper and vine of the hot
tropic jungle has hidden their graves from even the keen eye of the
savage aboriginal. Go through a file of Australian newspapers from the
year 1806 to the year 1900 and you will see how unknown Englishmen have
died, and are dying, in those wild islands, and how as they die, by
club, or spear, or bullet, or fever, how easily the young hot blood of
other men of English race impels them to step into the vacant places.
And it is well that it is so the wild wide world over, else would
Britain be, not the mistress of the seas, but only a sharer of its
sovereignty with France and Germany.
*****
About five years previous to his entering the service of Hillingdon
and McFreeland, Carr had been mate of a trading vessel whose
cruising-grounds were that vast chain of islands known as the Caroline
Group, in the North-West Pacific, and there he had made the acquaintance
of old John Remington and his family, an acquaintance that in the course
of two or three years had deepened into a sincere friendship. The
old trader was a man of means, and owned, in addition to his numerous
trading stations throughout the North Pacific, a very smart schooner, of
which eventually Carr took command, and sailed her for him for a
couple of years. Then Remington, who, old as he was, was of an eager,
adventurous disposition, decided to seek new fields for his enterprise
among the low-lying equatorial islands to the south, and Carr and he
parted, the former resuming his wanderings among the wild and murderous
peoples of New Britain and the Solomon Archipelago. Since then they had
never met, though the young man had heard that Remington, accompanied
by one or more of his children, had opened up a trading business in the
Gilbert Islands.
Exhausted with the violence of the fit of ague, Carr had dropped off
into a broken slumber, from which he did not awaken till eight bells
were struck, and the steward came to ask him to try and eat a little.
Chard, Hendry and the two traders were below in the saloon, drinking,
smoking, and talking business; Remington and his daughter, who had
declined to join them at supper, were still on deck waiting for Carr to
awaken; Malua, Carr's native servant, still sat beside his master, from
whom he was never long absent, and from the main deck came the murmur of
voices from the native crew, who were lying on their mats enjoying the
cool breath of the evening land breeze.
The moment the young trader opened his eyes Tessa's father came over to
him and they began to talk.
"I was delighted beyond words to learn you were on board, Harvey," said
the old man. "I didn't care about the idea of letting Tess go away under
the care of strangers; but now I shall know that she will be well looked
after, and that she will be in Ponape in less than a month."
Carr heard him in silence, then he said frankly, "And I shall be
delighted too; but, at the same time, I wish she were leaving you by
any other ship than this. Cannot you keep her with you until one of
the German ships come along? Is it necessary she must go home by this
steamer?"
"Time is everything, Harvey. Her mother is ill, and wrote to me a few
months ago, begging me, if I could not return myself, to at least try
and send Tess home. The two other girls are married, as you know, and
my two boys are both away--one is second mate on the _Jacinta_, of New
Bedford, and the other is in California. And I can't leave Drummond's
Island for another four months or so. I have made a good business here
and throughout the group, and to leave it now to the care of any one
else would mean a heavy loss to me. Then, you see, this steamer will
land Tess at home in less than a month. If she waits for one of the
German ships to call she may have to wait three or four months. And her
mother wants her badly."
Again Carr was silent. He knew that Mrs. Remington had always been more
or less of an invalid for many years. She was a Portuguese of Macao, and
though her three daughters and two sons were strong and robust, she had
always struck him as being of a delicate physique--the very antithesis
of her husband, whose fame as an athlete was known from one end of the
Pacific to the other. Presently Carr sat up.
"Do you mind going away, Tessa, for a few minutes?" he said. "I want to
talk to your father on some business matters."
A vivid flush spread over Tessa's pale cheeks. "Oh, I'm so sorry,
Harvey."
She rose and walked aft to where the mate was standing, and began to
talk to him, her heart beating double quick time the while, for she had
never forgotten Harvey Carr, though he had never spoken a word of love
to her in the olden days when she was a girl of sixteen, and he was the
master of her father's schooner.
And now, and now, she thought, they would be together for nearly a
month. And what were the "business matters," she wondered, about which
he wanted to speak to her father. Perhaps he was coming to them again!
How hollow-cheeked, yellow, and dreadful he looked, except for his eyes,
which were always kind and soft! She was nineteen, and was no longer the
child she was three years ago, when, with her gun on her shoulder, she
used to accompany Harvey Carr and her brothers out pigeon-shooting in
the dark, silent mountain forest of Ponape. And then, too, she knew she
was beautiful; not so beautiful, perhaps, as her two sisters, Carmela
and Librada, whom she had heard Harvey say were the handsomest girls
he had ever seen. But yet--and again a pleasant flush tinged her pale
cheeks--he had always liked to talk to her most, although she was only a
girl of sixteen, just returned from school in California.
She sighed softly to herself, and then looking up suddenly saw the
kindly-faced mate regarding her with a smile in his honest grey eyes,
for she was answering his questions at random, and he guessed that her
thoughts were with the sick trader.
As soon as she was out of hearing Carr spoke hurriedly, for he every
moment expected to see either Chard or the captain appear on deck.
"Jack," he said, speaking in the familiar manner borne out of their past
comradeship, "you know that I would do anything for you, don't you? But
while I shall take good care of Tessa, I would rather she was going back
home to Ponape by any other ship than the _Motutapu_."
"What is wrong with the ship, Harvey?"
"Nothing. But the captain and supercargo are a pair of unmitigated
scoundrels. I have seen a good deal of them since I came on board at
New Britain, and I hate the idea of Tessa even having to sit at the same
table with them. If I were free of this cursed fever, I wouldn't mind a
bit, for I could protect her. But I'm no better than a helpless <DW36>
most of the time, and one or the other, or both, of these fellows are
bound to insult her, especially if they begin drinking."
Old Remington put his hand on Carr's shoulder. "You're a good boy,
Harvey, and I know what you say of Chard at least, is true But have no
fear for Tessa. She can take good care of herself at any time, and I
have no fear for her. Just let me call her for a moment."
"Tessa," he called, "come here." Then speaking in Portuguese, he added,
"Show Harvey what you have in the bosom of your dress."
The girl smiled a little wonderingly, and then putting her hand in
the bosom of her yellow silk blouse, drew out a small Smith and Wesson
revolver.
"Don't worry about Tessa, Harvey," added her father; "she has not
travelled around the Pacific with me for nothing, and if either that
rat-faced Danish skipper or the fat supercargo meddles with her, she
will do what I would do. So have no fear. And she is as anxious as I am
myself to get home to her mother."
Harvey was satisfied. "Perhaps I am doing these two fellows an
injustice, Jack. When a man has fever he always takes a black view of
everything. And then I should remember that Malua here, and the mate,
and nearly all the crew, will see that Tessa is not interfered with.
I am sorry, however, that I shall not be with Tessa all the way to
Ponape--I am going ashore at the Mortlocks. There is a good opening
there----"
"Don't be in too much of a hurry, Harvey. Now, listen to me. Go on to
Ponape. Leave this employ, and come in with me again."
Harvey promised to think it over during the next few days; but the
old man could see, to his regret, that the Mortlocks group of islands
possessed a strong fascination for his young friend.
Remington remained on board for the night; and then at daylight he bade
Tessa and Harvey farewell and went ashore, and half an hour later
the steamer had left the island, and was heading north-west for the
Carolines.
CHAPTER III
Five days out from Drummond's Island Carr had so much improved in health
that he was able to take his seat at the saloon table for breakfast,
much to the annoyance of Chard, who had been making the best of his time
in trying to produce a favourable impression upon Tessa Remington.
He pretended, however, to be delighted to see the trader mending so
rapidly, and was most effusive in his congratulations; and Hendry, of
course, followed suit. Harvey responded civilly enough, while Tessa,
who had learned from the chief mate of the treacherous part they were
playing towards her friend, could not repress a scornful curl of her lip
as she listened to Chard's jocular admonition to Harvey, "to hurry up
and put on some flesh, if only for the reputation of the cook of the
_Motutapu_."
Immediately after breakfast Carr went on deck again, and began to pace
to and fro, enjoying the bright tropic sunshine and the cool breath of
the trade wind. In a few minutes Tessa, accompanied by her native woman
servant, appeared, followed by Chard and Captain Hendry.
"Won't you come on the bridge, Miss Remington?" said Chard, "I'll take a
chair up for you."
"No, thank you," she replied, "I would rather sit here under the
awning."
The supercargo and Hendry went up on the bridge together, where
they could talk freely. The man at the wheel was a thick-set, rather
stupid-looking native from Niue (Savage Island), who took no notice of
their remarks, or at least appeared not to do so. But Huka was not such
a fool as he looked.
"_You'll_ stand little chance with her," said Hendry presently, in his
usual low but sneering tones as he tugged viciously at his beard.
The supercargo's black eyes contracted, "Wait and see, before you talk.
I tell you that I mean to make that girl marry me."
"_Marry_ you!"
"Yes, marry me. The old man will leave her pretty well everything
he has, and he has a lot. I've been making inquiries, and am quite
satisfied."
"How are you going to do it?"
"Don't know just yet. Must think it out. But I never yet knew the woman
whom I could not work my own way with--by fair means or foul, as the
penny novelists say."
"It strikes me that she likes that damned fellow. Look round presently
and see for yourself. She's reading to him."
"Bah! That's nothing. He used to sail one of the old man's schooners,
and of course they have a good deal to talk about. I'll settle _him_ as
far as she is concerned. Wait till I get a chance to talk to her a bit,"
and taking off his cap the supercargo passed his brawny hand through his
curly hair with a smile of satisfaction. "She'll be tired of talking to
him before the day is out."
"Where is he going to land? Has he told you?"
"Yes. He wants to be put ashore at the Mortlocks Islands. We have no
trader there, and he has lived there before."
"I'd like to see him go over the side in some new canvas, with a couple
of fire bars slung to his heels," snarled Hendry viciously.
"So would I," said Chard meditatively.
At four bells the wheel was relieved, and Huka the Niue native trotted
off, and immediately sent a message to Carr's servant Malua to come
for'ard. The boy did as requested, and remained away for about ten
minutes. When he returned he seated himself as usual near his master.
Hendry was in his cabin on deck, Chard was below in the trade room, and
only Tessa, Harvey, and himself were on the after-deck.
"Master," he said in Fijian, to Harvey, "listen to what Huka, the man
of Niue, has told me. The captain and the supercargo have been talking
about thee and the lady." Then he repeated all that which Huka had
heard.
"The infernal scoundrels!" Harvey could not help exclaiming. "But they
won't get rid of me as easily as they think."
"What is it, Harvey?" asked Tessa, anxiously bending forward to him.
The trader thought a moment or two before speaking. Then he decided to
tell her what he had just heard.
She laughed contemptuously. "_His_ wife! _His_ wife!" she repeated
scornfully. "If he knew what my father knows of him, and how I hate and
despise him, he would not have said that. Does he think that because my
mother was a Portuguese, I am no better than some native slave girl whom
he could buy from her master?"
Harvey smiled gravely as he looked into her flashing eyes, and saw her
clench her hands angrily. Then he said--
"He is a dangerous man though, Tessa. And now listen to me. When I came
on board this steamer I intended to land at the Mortlocks Islands. But I
think now that I will go on to Ponape."
"Do not change your plans, Harvey, on my account. I am not afraid of
this man. He dare not insult me, for fear my father would hear of it."
"I know him too well, Tessa. He and the skipper are, I fear, a pair of
cunning, treacherous villains. And so I am going on to Ponape. And I
will stay there until your father returns. I daresay," he added with a
smile, "that he will give me a berth as a trader somewhere."
A sudden joy illumined the girl's face. "I _am_ so glad, Harvey. And
mother, too, will be overjoyed to see you again; father has never ceased
to talk about you since you left him. Oh, Harvey, we shall have all the
old, old delightful days over again. But," she added artlessly, "there
will be but you and I now to go fishing and shooting together. Carmela
and her husband are living in the Ladrones, and Librada and her husband,
though they are still on Ponape, are ten miles away from mother and I.
Then Jack is in California, and Ned is away on a whaling cruise."
A quick emotion stirred his bosom as he looked into her now joyous
face. "I don't think you and I can go out shooting and fishing together,
Tessa, as we did in what you call 'the old, old days.'"
"Can't we, Harvey?" she asked wonderingly.
He shook his head, and then mused.
"Tessa, I wish you could meet my sisters."
She clasped her hands together. "Ah, so do I, Harvey. I should love to
meet them. Do you think they would like me?"
"I am sure they would."
They were silent for a while, the girl with her head bent and her long
lashes hiding her eyes from him as she sat in the deck-chair, and he
thinking of what his sisters would really say if he wrote and told them
that he thought he had at last found a woman he would wish to make his
wife.
"Tessa."
"Yes, Harvey."
She did not look at him, only bent her head still lower.
"_Tessa!_"
"Yes, Harvey."
Her hands were trembling, and her courage was gone, for there was
something in his voice that filled her with delight.
"Tessa," he said, speaking softly, as he drew nearer to her, and tried
to make her look at him; "do you know that you are a very beautiful
woman?"
"I am glad you think so, Harvey," she whispered. "You used to tell
father that Carmela and Librada were the most beautiful women you had
ever seen."
"So they were. But you are quite as beautiful. And, Tessa----"
"Yes, Harvey"--this in the faintest whisper.
"Could you care for me at all, Tessa? I do not mean as a friend. I am
only a poor trader, but if I thought you could love-me, I----"
She took a quick glance around the deck, and bent towards him. "I have
always loved you, Harvey; always, always." Then she pressed her lips to
his, and in another moment was gone.
*****
Harvey, with a sense of elation in his heart, walked for'ard to where
Morrison was standing in the waist.
"Why, man, ye look as if ye could take the best man aboard on for four
rounds," said the engineer, with a smile.
"I do feel pretty fit, Morrison," laughed the trader; "have you anything
to drink in your cabin?"
"Some real Loch Dhu, _not_ made in Sydney. Man, your eye is as bright as
a boy's."
*****
Just before eight bells were struck Chard came on deck. He was
carefully dressed in shining, well-starched white duck, and his dark,
coarsely-handsome face was aglow with satisfaction; he meant to "rub
it in" to Carr, and was only awaiting till Tessa Remington and Captain
Hendry were present to hear him do it. He knew she would be on deck in
a minute or so, and Hendry he could see was sitting at his cabin table
with his chart before him. Harvey was strolling about on the main deck,
smoking his first pipe for many weeks.
Presently Tessa appeared with her woman attendant. She, too, had dressed
in white, and for the time had discarded the wide Panama hat she usually
wore. Her face was radiant with happiness as she took the deck-chair
which Chard brought, and disposed herself comfortably, book in hand. She
had seen Harvey on the main deck, and knew she would at least have him
with her for a few minutes before dinner.
Hendry stepped out from his cabin.
"Ha, Miss Remington. You give an atmosphere of coolness to the whole
ship. Mr. Chard, big as he is, is only a minor reflection of your
dazzling whiteness."
"Thank you, Captain Hendry. I am quite sure that my father will be
astonished to learn that I have been paid so many compliments on board
the _Motutapu_. Had he known that you and Mr. Chard were such flatterers
he would not have let me come away."
Neither Chard nor Hendry could detect the ring of mockery in her tones.
They drew their chairs up near to that in which she was sitting and lit
their cigars, and she, impatient for Harvey, talked and laughed with
them, and wished them far away. Less than two hours before she had felt
an intense hatred of them, now she had but a quiet contempt for both
the handsome, "good-natured" supercargo and his sneaking, grey-bearded
jackal.
Eight bells struck, and presently Carr ascended the poop deck, took in
the little group on the starboard side of the skylight, and went over
to his own lounge, beside which his watchful servant was seated. He knew
that Tessa would be alone in a few minutes, and he was quite satisfied
to wait till Chard and the Dane left her free.
He lay back in the lounge, and lazily conversed with Malua. Then Chard,
who had been watching him keenly, rose from his seat.
"Pray excuse me for a few minutes, Miss Remington. Even _your_ charming
society must not make me forget business."
He spoke so loudly that Carr could not fail to hear him, but he was
quite prepared, and indeed had been on the alert.
Chard walked up to within a few feet of the trader.
"I want you to come below, Mr. Carr, and pick out your trade goods for
the Mortlocks."
Harvey leant back in his lounge. "I don't think I shall require any
goods for the Mortlocks Islands, Mr. Chard."
"What do you mean?" and Chard's face flushed with anger.
"I mean exactly what I say," replied Carr nonchalantly. "I say that I
shall not want any trade goods for the Mortlocks Islands. I have decided
not to take another station from the firm of Hillingdon and McFreeland.
I have had enough of them--and enough of you."
Chard took a threatening step towards him.
"Stand back, Mr. Chard. I am not a man to be threatened."
Something in his eyes warned the supercargo, whose temper, however, was
rapidly taking possession of him.
"Very well, Mr. Carr," he said sneeringly; "do I understand you to say
that you refuse to continue your engagement with our firm?"
"I do refuse."
"Then, by God, I'll dump you ashore at the first island we sight. The
firm will be glad to be rid of you."
"I don't doubt the latter part of your assertion; but their satisfaction
will be nothing to equal mine," he said with cutting irony. "But you'll
not 'dump' me ashore anywhere. I am going to land at Ponape, and
nowhere else."
Again Chard took a step nearer, his face purpling with rage; and then,
as Hendry came to his side with scowling eyes, Tessa quickly slipped
past them, and stood near her lover.
"You'll land at Ponape, will you?" sneered the supercargo, "It's lucky
for you we are not in port now, for I'd kick you ashore right-away."
The insult had the desired effect, for, weak as he was, Harvey sprang
forward and struck Chard full upon the mouth, but almost at the same
moment the captain, who had quietly possessed himself of a brass
belaying-pin, dealt him a blow on the back of the neck which felled him
to the deck, and then bending on one knee, he would have repeated the
blow on Harvey's upturned face, when Tessa sprang at him like a tigress,
and struck him again and again on the temple with her revolver. He fell
back, bleeding and half stunned.
"You cowards--you pair of miserable curs!" she cried to Chard, who was
standing with his handkerchief to his lips, glaring savagely at the
prostrate figure of Harvey. "Stand back," and she covered him with her
weapon, as he made a step towards her, "stand back, or I will shoot you
dead." Then as the second mate, Huka, and another native appeared on the
poop, she sank on her knees beside Harvey, and called for water.
Hendry, whose face was streaming with blood, though he was but little
hurt, rose to his feet and addressed the second mate.
"Mr. Atkins, put that man in irons," and he pointed to Harvey, who was
now sitting up, with Tessa holding a glass of water to his lips.
The second mate eyed his captain sullenly. "He is scarcely conscious
yet, sir."
"Do you refuse to obey me? Quick, answer me. Where is the mate? Mr.
Chard, I call on you to support my authority."
Harvey looked at the second mate, whose features were working curiously.
He rose and pressed Tessa's hand.
"You must obey him, Atkins," he said. "If you don't he'll break you.
He's a spiteful hound."
Atkins, with a sorrowful face, went to his cabin and returned with a
pair of handcuffs, just as the chief officer appeared. As he stepped
on the poop he was followed by half-a-dozen of the native crew, who
advanced towards Hendry and the supercargo with threatening glances.
"Go for'ard, you swine!" shouted Chard, who saw that they meant a
rescue. He darted into Hendry's cabin, and reappeared with the captain's
revolvers, one of which he handed to him.
Harvey looked contemptuously at the supercargo, then turning to the
natives he spoke to them in Samoan, and earnestly besought them to
go for'ard, telling them of the penalties they would suffer if they
disputed the captain's authority. They obeyed him with reluctance,
and left the poop. Then he held out his hands to the second mate, who
snapped the handcuffs on his wrists.
"Take him to the for'ard deck-house," snarled Hendry viciously.
"I protest against this, sir," said Oliver respectfully. "I beg of you
to beware of what you are doing."
Hendry gave him a furious glance, but his rage choked his utterance.
Tessa Remington followed the prisoner to the break of the poop and
whispered to him ere he descended the ladder. He nodded and smiled. Then
she turned and faced Chard and the captain.
"Perhaps you would like to put me in irons too, gentlemen," she said
mockingly. "I am not very strong, though stronger than Mr. Carr has been
for many months."
The captain eyed her with sudden malevolence; Chard, bully as he was,
with a secret admiration as she stood before them, still holding her
revolver in her hand. She faced them in an attitude of defiance for a
second or two, and then with a scornful laugh swept by them and went
below to her cabin.
CHAPTER IV
At six o'clock that evening the _Motutapu_ was plunging into a heavy
head sea, for the wind had suddenly hauled round to the northeast and
raised a mountainous swell. Chard and his jackal were seated in the
latter's cabin on deck. A half-emptied bottle of brandy was on the
table, and both men's faces were flushed with drink, for this was the
second bottle since noon. Hendry did not present a pleasant appearance,
for Tessa's pistol had cut deeply into his thin, tough face, which was
liberally adorned with strips of plaster. The liquor he had taken had
also turned his naturally red face into a purple hue, and his steely
blue eyes seemed to have dilated to twice their size, as he listened
with venomous interest to Chard. "Now, look here, Louis," said the
latter, "both you and I want to get even with him, don't we?"
It was only when the supercargo was planning some especial piece
of villainy that he addressed his _confrere_ by his Christian name.
Secretly he despised him as a "damned Dutchman," to his face he
flattered him; for he was a useful and willing tool, and during the
three or four years they had sailed together had materially assisted the
"good-natured, jovial" supercargo in his course of steady peculation.
Yet neither trusted the other.
"You bet I do," replied Hendry; "but I'd like to get even with that
spiteful little half-bred Portuguese devil----"
"Steady, Louis, steady," said Chard, with a half-drunken leer; "you must
remember that she is to be Mrs. Samuel Chard."
"Don't think you have the ghost of a chance, as I said before. She's in
love with that fellow."
"Then she must get out of love with him. I tell you, Louis"--here he
struck his fist on the table--"that I mean to make her marry me. And
she'll be _glad_ to marry me before we get to Ponape. And if you stick
to me and help to pull me through, it's a hundred quid for you."
"How are you going to do it?" and the captain bent forward his foxy face
and grinned in anticipation.
"Same old way as with that Raratongan girl last year. She'll go to sleep
after supper, and I can open any door in the saloon, as you know, don't
you, old man?" and he laughed coarsely. "Dear, dear, what times we have
had together, Louis, my esteemed churchwarden of Darling Point, Sydney!"
The Dane tugged at his beard, and then poured out some brandy for
himself and his fellow scoundrel. "We have, we have, Sam," he said,
uneasily. "But what about the native woman who sleeps with her?"
"The native woman, when _she_ awakes, my Christian friend, will find
herself in the trade-room in the company of Mr. Tim Donnelly, one of the
firemen. And Mr. Tim Donnelly, to whom I have given two sovereigns,
will bear me out, if necessary, that 'the woman tempted him, and he did
fall.' Also he will be prepared to swear that this native woman, Maoni,
told him that her mistress expected a visit from Mr. Chard, and had
asked her to be out of the way."
"Well, after that."
"After that, my dear Christian friend, with the rudely executed diagrams
in sticking-plaster on the facial cuticle, my pious churchwarden with
the large family of interesting girls--after that, Miss Tessa Remington
will be glad to marry Mr. Samuel Chard, inasmuch as when _she_ awakes it
will be under the same improper conditions as those of the dissolute
Tim Donnelly and the flighty Miss Maoni; for the beauteous Tessa will
be fortuitously discovered by Captain Louis Hendry and several other
persons on board, in such circumstances that an immediate marriage of
the indiscreet lovers by one of the American missionaries at Ponape
will present the only solution of what would otherwise be a 'terrible
scandal.'"
"And what will you do with this fellow Carr?"
"Chuck him ashore at the Mortlocks," replied Chard with an oath; "we'll
be there in a couple of days, and I'll kick him over the side if he
turns rusty. Hillingdon doesn't like him, so we are quite safe."
"When is the love-making to come off?" asked Hendry, with a fiend-like
grin.
"As soon as we are clear of Carr--or sooner; to-night maybe. We must log
it that he was continually trying to cause the native crew to mutiny,
and that for the safety of the ship we got rid of him. Hillingdon will
back us up."
*****
Tessa did not appear at supper. She kept to her cabin with Maoni, her
dear Maoni, who, though but little older than herself, was as a mother
to her; for the native girl had been brought up with her and her sisters
from their infancy. And as Tessa lay back with her dark head pillowed
against the bosom of the native girl, and sobbed as she thought of her
lover lying in the deck-house with the handcuffs on his wrists, Maoni
pressed her lips to those of her mistress.
"Lie there, little one, lay thy head on my bosom," she said; "'tis a bad
day for thee, but yet all will be well soon. These sailor men with the
brown skins will not let thy lover be hurt. That much do I know already.
Speak but one word, and the captain and the big fat man with the black
eyes will be dead men."
Tessa smiled through her tears. "Nay, Maoni, that must not be; I desire
no man's death. But yet if he be not set free to-morrow trouble will
come of it, for he hath done nothing wrong; and the brown men, as thou
sayest, have a strong friendship for him."
"He shall be set free to-morrow," said Maoni, with quiet emphasis. "The
brown sailor men have talked together over this thing, and they say that
they are ready at thy word to make captive the captain, the big fat man,
and all those white men who tend the great fires in the belly of the
ship."
Tessa knew that the half-dozen of white firemen and stokers were on
bad terms with the native crew. They were a ruffianly, drunken set of
scoundrels, and their leader, a powerfully built man named Donnelly,
had grossly insulted both the first and second mates. He was an especial
_protege_ of the supercargo, who, as well as the captain, secretly
encouraged him and his fellows to annoy and exasperate the two officers
and the chief engineer.
They remained in their cabin talking together in low tones and without
a light till they heard eight bells strike; and ten minutes afterwards,
just as they were going on deck, some one tapped at the cabin door.
"It is me, Miss Remington," said the voice of Oliver; "please let me
come in for a moment. Be quick, please, as I don't want the captain to
know I am here."
Tessa at once opened the door. "Come in Mr. Oliver. But we have no
light."
"Never mind that, miss," he said in a low voice, carefully closing the
door and then bolting it, "I cannot stay long. I came to warn you that
there is likely to be trouble tonight about Mr. Carr, and you had better
not come on deck. Keep to your cabin, and don't open your door to any
one except myself, the second mate, or the steward. The native crew are
in a dangerous state of excitement, and I am sure they will attempt to
liberate Mr. Carr before morning. Both the captain and Chard are more
than half-drunk; and the chief engineer tells me that for some reason
they have given liquor to the firemen and stokers, who have set him at
defiance. I fear, I fear greatly, miss, that some calamity may occur on
board this ship to-night. Therefore I beg of you to keep to your cabin."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Oliver. We certainly did intend to go on deck
and remain some hours, but shall not do so now. But tell me, please,
have you seen Mr. Carr? Is he well?"
"Quite well. I saw him a few minutes ago, and he bade me tell you to
have no fear for him. I am now again going to Captain Hendry to ask him,
for his own and the ship's safety, to set Mr. Carr free. If he refuses I
cannot say what will happen."
Tessa put her little hand upon the mate's huge, rough paw, and looked
into his honest, troubled eyes through the darkness.
"It is good of you," she whispered. "Oh, do try, Mr. Oliver, try your
best to make the captain set him at liberty."
"Indeed I will, miss," replied the mate earnestly, as he pressed her
hand, and went softly out into the main cabin. He stood by the table for
a minute or two, thinking with wrinkled brow of the best way to approach
the captain and bring him to reason. Presently he sat down, took his
pipe from his pocket, filled it, and began to smoke.
A heavy step sounded on the companion steps, and Chard descended
somewhat unsteadily, and calling for the second steward--who was in the
pantry--to come to him, brushed past the chief officer, and went into
his own cabin.
The second steward--a dirty, evil-faced little cockney named Jessop,
whom Oliver and his fellow officers particularly abhorred--at once
followed the supercargo in to his cabin, which was immediately closed.
In less than five minutes it opened again, and Jessop came out and
returned to the pantry, and presently Oliver heard the rattle of cups
and saucers as the man made preparations for the coffee which was always
served to Hendry, Chard, Carr, and Tessa and her attendant, and the
officer on watch at nine o'clock every evening.
"Would you like a cup of coffee, sir, as you have not turned in?"
It was Jessop who was speaking, and Oliver looked up in some wonder,
for the man knew that he disliked him, and indeed he (Oliver) had once
smartly cuffed him for creating a disturbance for'ard with the native
crew.
Most fortunately for himself, Oliver did not want any coffee, so merely
giving the man a gruff "No, thank you," he rose and went on deck.
The moment he was out of the cabin Chard appeared, and looked
inquiringly at the second steward.
"'E won't 'ave any, blarst him!" said the man, speaking in a whisper,
for Latour, the chief steward, was in his cabin, which was abreast the
trade-room.
Chard uttered a curse. "Never mind him, then. Sling it out of the port
or you'll be giving it to me instead perhaps. Are the other two cups
ready?"
The man nodded. "All ready, but it's a bit early yet."
"That doesn't matter. Pour it out and take it to them--the sooner the
better."
Chard, whose dark face was deeply flushed, sat down at the table, lit
a cigar, and watched his villainous accomplice place the two cups of
coffee with some biscuits on a tray, take it to Miss Remington's door
and knock.
"Coffee, ma'am."
"Thank you, steward," he heard Tessa's soft voice reply as Maoni opened
the door and took the tray from Jessop.
The supercargo rose from his seat with a smile of satisfaction. The
crime he meditated seemed no crime to his base and vicious heart.
He merely regarded it as a clever trick; dangerous perhaps, but not
dangerous to him; for deeply steeped as he was in numerous villainies
he had never yet been called to account for any one of his misdeeds,
and long immunity had rendered him utterly hardened and callous to any
sentiment of pity or remorse.
He went on deck and walked leisurely for'ard till he came abreast of the
funnel. A big swarthy-faced man who was standing near the ash-hoist was
awaiting him.
"Are you sober enough, Tim, not to make any mistakes?" asked Chard,
leaning forward and looking eagerly into the man's face.
"Just as sober as you are," was the reply, given with insolent
familiarity. "I've kept my head pretty clear, as clear as yours and the
skipper's, anyway."
The two conversed for a few minutes, and then separated, the supercargo
going up on the bridge to join his jackal. Half-way up the ladder he
heard the sound of angry voices. Hendry was quarrelling with his chief
officer.
"Go and keep your watch below," said the captain furiously, his
bloodshot eyes glaring fiercely upon the mate. "I tell you that I'll
keep the beggar in irons till he rots in them, or until Mr. Chard kicks
him ashore."
"Very well, sir," said Oliver quietly, placing his hand on the bridge
rail to steady himself, for the _Motutapu_ was now plunging and
labouring in the heavy head sea, and Hendry was staggering about all
over the bridge--"very well. But I call on Mr. Atkins here to witness
that I now tell you that you are putting the ship into great danger."
"Say another word to me, and by God I'll put you with your friend
Carr to keep him company!" shouted Hendry, who had now completely lost
control of himself.
Oliver smiled contemptuously, but made no answer. He at once descended
the bridge, and in the starboard alleyway met the chief engineer.
"This is a nice state of affairs, Oliver. Those blackguards of mine are
half-drunk, and unless I get some assistance from the captain I can't
keep up steam. They won't work and are saucy as well."
The mate shook his head. "You'll get no help from the captain. He and I
have just had a flare-up. He's half-drunk himself, and threatened to
put me in irons. And none of the native crew will go into the stokehole,
that's certain."
"Well then, something serious will happen. I can keep her going at four
or five knots for another hour or so, and that is all I can do. The
second engineer and myself are dead-beat. She'll broach-to presently,
and then you will see a pretty mess."
"I can't help it, Morrison," said the mate gloomily, as he went to his
cabin.
Up on the bridge Hendry and Chard were talking and looking out ahead.
The second mate, a young, muscular man, was standing by the wheel, and
giving a word of warning now and then to the native helmsman, who was
Huka. Although it was not blowing hard the sea had increased greatly,
and every now and then the steamer would make a plunge into a mighty
valley of darkness, and only struggle up out of it with difficulty.
Careful steering was a necessity, for the ship was not steaming more
than four knots, and the least inattention might result in serious
consequences.
"Look out for'ard!" Atkins shouted, as he saw a particularly loose,
knobby sea rise suddenly up over the starboard bow. His warning was
just given in time, for in another moment down dropped the black mass
of water on the well deck with a thundering crash, burying the steamer
completely from the bridge to foc'scle head. She rose slowly, very
slowly.
Hendry lurched up towards the helmsman.
"You damned, red-hided kanaka! Couldn't you see that coming?" and he
struck the man a violent blow on the mouth. In an instant Huka let go
the wheel, swung himself over the rail on to the deck, and ran for'ard.
Atkins looked at his captain with suppressed rage as he seized the
wheel, and then began to watch for the next sea.
Five minutes passed, and then a dozen dark figures made a sudden rush
towards the deckhouse in which Carr lay in irons. Then came the sound
of smashing blows as the door was burst open with an axe, and in a few
seconds Carr was brought out upon the main deck and quickly freed from
his irons by Malua, to whom a duplicate key had been given by the second
mate.
At first Chard and Hendry scarcely comprehended what had happened, so
sudden was the onslaught, but when they saw Carr standing free on the
main hatch they both made a rush aft towards Hendry's deck cabin. This
they gained without opposition, and seizing two loaded Winchesters which
lay in the captain's berth they darted out again, and began firing into
the group of excited native seamen ten paces away. Three men at once
dropped, either killed or wounded; but the rest, nothing daunted at
this, made a rush towards the two men, knives in hand, bore them down
to the deck by sheer weight, and in a few seconds would have ended their
lives had not Carr, Oliver, and Latour the steward flung themselves into
the fray.
"For God's sake, stop!" cried Oliver, "the ship is on fire!"
And then seizing Hendry by the throat, he lifted him to his feet, and
shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. "You damned, drunken villain! You
are not in a fit state to take charge. Lie there, you brute, and let
better men try to save the ship."
He swung Hendry's slight figure to and fro, and then sent him reeling,
to fall like a log on the deck.
"Men," he cried, "we are in great danger, the trade-room is on fire!
Atkins, for God's sake try to keep us head to wind. Mr. Carr, you and
some of the hands see to the boats. There are over fifty cases of powder
in the for'ard end of the trade-room, and we can't shift them; but only
the after part is burning so far. Steward, see to Miss Remington. Her
cabin is locked, and I cannot make her hear. She and her maid must be
awakened at once. Pass the word to Mr. Morrison to get the fire hose
aft. Some of you cut a hole here in the deck on the port side, just
abreast of that bollard. Smart's the word and quick's the action, or
we shall all be blown to hell in ten minutes if we can't flood the
trade-room."
He stopped to give a brief scrutiny to the prone figure of Mr. Samuel
Chard, who had been struck a smashing blow on the head from the butt of
his own Winchester, which Huka had wrested from him.
"Put this beast into one of the boats, Mr. Carr. We must not leave the
blackguard here, as he is not dead, and we can't save the ship, I fear.
Now then, hurry along that hose."
CHAPTER V
Whilst the chief mate, aided by the now willing crew, ran aft the hose
and set to work to flood the trade-room, Latour the steward, a smart
little Frenchman, taking a man with him, jumped below and knocked loudly
at the door of Tessa's cabin, which was the foremost but one of five
on the starboard side, the intervening one separating it from the
trade-room. There was no answer to his repeated cries and knocking. Then
he and the native sailor each tried to force the door, but it defied
their efforts, and then, as they paused for a moment, they heard the
crackling sound of fire within a few feet of them.
The native seaman, a big, square-shouldered Manhikian, looked around the
main cabin for a second; then he darted into the second mate's cabin,
and returned with a carpenter's broad axe. One smashing blow with the
back of the tool started the lock, and a second sent the door flying
open.
The lamp was burning brightly, but both Tessa and Maoni were sunk in a
heavy slumber, and although Latour called loudly to them to arise, they
made no answer, though Tessa tried to sit up, and her lips moved as she
muttered incoherently, only to fall back again with closed eyelids.
There was no time to lose. Latour lifted Tessa out of her berth,
and followed by the native, who carried Maoni, they hurried up the
companion-way, and laid the two girls down upon the quarter-deck, where
Malua took charge of them.
For nearly ten minutes the mate and crew worked hard to subdue the fire,
and all might have gone well had there been a sufficient head of steam
to keep the ship head to wind and the donkey-engine going, but at the
first alarm the drunken, cowardly firemen had refused duty and tried to
rush one of the boats, and amidst the curses and blows which Carr
and Atkins were showering upon them another mighty sea tumbled aboard
for'ard, and the _Motutapu_ was half-smothered again.
Morrison crawled up exhaustedly on the deck from the engine-room.
"It's a case as far as steaming goes, Mr. Atkins. I'm done up. Send some
one down into the stokehole for Mr. Studdert. He dropped a minute
ago. But if you'll give me a couple of your men I can keep the engines
going."
"It's no use, Morrison. None of my men would go into the stokehole
to work, but they'll bring Mr. Studdert up quick enough. The ship is
doomed, so don't bother. We'll have to take to the boats."
The _Motutapu_ was indeed doomed, for, despite the frantic efforts of
Oliver and the native crew, the fire had gained complete possession of
the saloon, though every opening on deck had been battened down and all
cabin ports had been closed. Most fortunately, however, the fore part
of the trade-room, where the powder was stowed, had been thoroughly
saturated, and both Oliver and Atkins felt assured that no danger need
be apprehended from that source.
In a few minutes the engines ceased to work, but the donkey-engine on
deck, with its furnace filled with cotton waste soaked in kerosene, kept
the hose going, and sent a steady stream of water through the hole cut
in the after-deck. Meanwhile Harvey and the second mate, aided by the
energetic little French steward, had made good progress with the
boats, all three of which were ready for lowering, and contained some
provisions and water. Such fore and aft canvas as the steamer carried
was set, so as to keep her to the wind as much as possible, and help to
steady her. Then, seeing that the flames were bursting through the sides
of the saloon skylight, and that the ship would scarcely answer her helm
under such miserable canvas, Oliver abandoned all hope of saving her.
"All ready, sir?" replied Atkins.
And then before they could be stopped the firemen made a rush for the
best boat of the three, a fine new whaler, hanging in davits just abaft
the bridge. Four of them jumped into her, the remaining two cast off the
falls, and began to lower away hastily.
"You cowardly dogs!" shouted the second mate, rushing up to the nearest
man, tearing the after-fall out of his hands, and making it fast
again round the cleet, and then springing at the other man, who paused
irresolutely, intimidated by Atkin's threatening visage. But though he
paused but momentarily, it was fatal, for the instant the mate's back
was turned the first man, with an oath of drunken defiance, cast off the
fall and let it go with a run, just as the _Motutapu_ was heaved up by a
lofty sea, and rolled heavily to port.
A cry of terror burst from the four doomed men in the boat, as they fell
headlong into the sea, and she hung by the for'ard fall, straight up and
down.
"Let them drown!" roared Atkins to some native seamen who sprang to his
assistance, "overboard two or three of you, and save the boat. She'll
be smashed to matchwood in a minute, the after-fall has unshipped;" then
whipping a knife from the belt of one of them he severed the remaining
fall, and saw the boat plunge down sternwards and outwards from the side
just in time; another half-minute and she would have disappeared under
the steamer's bottom to be hopelessly stove in. And with cries of
encouragement to each other, four natives leapt over the side, swam
after her, clambered in and then shouted that they were all right,
and would come alongside and stand by, for although the oars and other
fittings had been lost, there were half a dozen canoe paddles lashed
under the thwarts, and these were quickly brought into use.
All this happened in a few minutes, and as Atkins ran to assist Harvey
with the two quarter boats which had been lowered, and were now standing
by alongside, there came a sudden crashing of glass, as the flames in
the saloon burst through the sides of the skylight, and drove every one
to the main deck.
"That settles the matter," said Oliver quietly to Harvey, as a sudden
gust of flame leapt from the lee side of the skylight, and caught the
fore and aft mainsail, which was quickly destroyed; then the steamer at
once fell off, and the flames began to travel for'ard.
With all possible speed, but without excitement, Tessa and Maoni, who
were still under the influence of the drugged coffee, and unable to
stand, or even utter a word, were placed in the first boat, of which
Atkins took charge for the time, with four natives as a crew. The second
quarter boat, in which Hendry and Chard had been placed, then came
alongside, and the two surviving firemen, now thoroughly cowed and
trembling, and terrified into a mechanical sobriety, were brought to the
gangway and told to jump.
"Jump, you rotten beggars, jump," said Morrison; "over you go into the
water if you want to save your useless lives. The men in the boat will
pick you up. We are not going to risk bringing her alongside for the
sake of swine like you. Over you go," and then seizing one of them by
the collar of his shirt and the belt, he sent him flying over the side,
the other man jumping over to avoid rougher treatment from the native
seamen, who were disgusted at their cowardice. Then Morrison, Studdert,
and three natives followed, and the boat pulled away clear of the ship,
and stood by.
"Pull up, boys!" cried Oliver to the men in the third boat--the one
which the firemen had rushed. Then turning to Latour, who was standing
near him with a sack half full of heavy articles--firearms, ammunition,
the ship's books, etc.--he bade him go first.
Disdaining to wait for the boat to come alongside the little Frenchman
sprang over the side and swam to the boat; then the bag--its contents
too precious to be wetted--was adroitly lowered and caught by one of the
hands. Jessop, the second steward, whose limbs were shaking with terror,
was told to jump, but pleaded that he could not swim.
"You miserable hound!" cried Oliver fiercely, and he raised his hand to
strike him; then a scornful pity took the place of anger, and he ordered
the boat to come alongside so that he could get in.
"Now's your chance, you dirty little cur," he said, as the boat's bow
came within a foot of the steamer's side.
The fear-stricken man jumped, fell short, and in an instant disappeared
under the ship, as she rolled suddenly to starboard. When he came to the
surface again it was at the stern, with several broken ribs, he having
struck against the propeller. He was, however, soon rescued and placed
in safety, and then but three natives and Harvey and Oliver remained
on board. The natives went first, the white men quickly followed, and
clambered into the boat, which at once joined the two others, and then
all three lay to, and their occupants watched the _Motutapu_ drifting
before the wind, with the red flames enveloping her from stern to stem.
*****
Ordering the other boats to remain close to him until further orders,
but to steer W. by N. if anything should part them from him during the
night, Oliver and Harvey, as they watched the burning steamer lighting
up the heaving sea for miles around, discussed their future plans, and
quickly resolved upon a certain course of action to be followed in the
morning.
Towards midnight the wind died away entirely, and an hour later the
heavy, lumpy sea changed into a long, sweeping swell. A mile to leeward
the _Motutafu_ still blazed fiercely, and sent up vast volumes of smoke
and flame from her forehold, where some hundreds of cases of kerosene
were stowed.
The three boats were pretty close together, and Harvey, exhausted by the
events of the day, and knowing that Tessa was safe with the second mate,
was just dozing off into a "monkey's sleep" when he was awakened by a
hail from Atkins.
"What's the matter, Atkins?" cried Oliver.
"We're all right, sir; but Miss Remington has just come to, and is
asking for Mr. Carr, so I said I'd hail you just to show her that he is
with you. Better let me come alongside."
Oliver looked at Harvey with something like a smile in his eyes.
"All right, Atkins," he replied, and then to Harvey, "Here, wake up
young-fellow-my-lad, and get into the other boat with your sweetheart. I
don't want you here. What's the use of you if you haven't even a bit of
tobacco to give me?"
The second mate's boat drew alongside, and in another minute Harvey was
seated in the stern sheets with Tessa's cheek against his own, and her
arms round his neck.
"Any of you fellows got any tobacco, and a pipe to spare?" said the
prosaic Oliver. "If you haven't, sheer off."
"Lashings of everything," said Atkins.
"Here you are: two pipes, matches, bottle of Jimmy Hennessy, and some
water and biscuits. What more can you want? Who wouldn't sell a farm and
go to sea?"
CHAPTER VI
At sunrise the three boats were all within a half-mile of each other,
floating upon a smooth sea of the deepest blue. Overhead the vault of
heaven was unflecked by a single cloud, though far away on the eastern
sea-rim a faintly curling bank gave promise of a breeze before the sun
rose much higher.
At a signal from Oliver the second mate pulled up, and he, Harvey, and
the chief mate again held a brief consultation. Then Harvey went back to
Oliver, and both boats came together, rowing in company alongside
that of the captain's, no one speaking, and all feeling that sense of
something impending, born of a sudden silence.
The captain's boat was steered by Huka, the Savage Islander; Hendry
himself was sitting beside Chard in the stern sheets, Morrison and
Studdert amidships amidst the native crew, whose faces were sullen and
lowering, for in the bottom of the boat one of their number, who had
been shot in the stomach by either the captain or Chard, was dying.
Hendry's always forbidding face was even more lowering than usual as his
eyes turned upon the chief officer. Chard, whose head was bound up in
a bloodstained handkerchief, smiled in his frank, jovial manner as
he rose, lifted his cap to Tessa, and nodded pleasantly to Oliver and
Harvey.
"What are your orders, sir?" asked the chief mate addressing the
captain.
Hendry gave him a look of murderous hatred, and his utterance almost
choked him as he replied--
"I shall give my orders presently. But where are the other firemen--five
of them are missing."
"Six of them rushed this boat," answered the mate quietly; "two of
them--those scoundrels there," and he pointed to the two in Hendry's
boat, "let the after fall go by the run, and drowned the others."
"I hold you responsible for the death of those men," said Hendry
vindictively.
"Very well, sir," answered the mate, "but this is not the time nor place
to talk about it."
"No," broke in Atkins fiercely; "no more is it the time or place to
charge you, Captain Hendry, and you, Mr. Chard, with the murder of the
two native seamen whose bodies we saw lying on the main hatch."
Hendry's face paled, and even Chard, self-possessed as he always was,
caught his breath.
"We fired on those men to suppress a mutiny----" began Hendry, when
Oliver stopped him with an oath.
"What are your orders, I ask you for the second time?" and from the
natives there came a hissing sound, expressive of their hatred.
Chard muttered under his breath, "Be careful, Louis, be careful."
Suddenly the second steward raised himself from the bottom of Oliver's
boat, where he had been lying, groaning in agony, and pointed a shaking
finger at Chard.
"That's the man who caused it all," he half sobbed, half screamed. "'E
told me to let Tim Donnelly go into the trade-room, and it was Donnelly
who upset the lamp and set the ship afire. 'E sent Donnelly to 'ell,
and 'e's sending me there, too, curse 'im! But I'm goin' to make a clean
breast of it all, I am, so help me Gawd. 'E made me give the young lady
and the girl the drugged coffee, 'e did, curse 'im! I'll put you away
before I die, you----"
He sank back with a moan of agony and bloodstained lips as Chard, with
clenched hands and set teeth, glared at him savagely.
A dead silence ensued as Harvey picked up a loaded Winchester, and
covered the supercargo.
"You infernal scoundrel!" he said, "it is hard for me to resist sending
a bullet through you. But I hope to see you hanged for murder."
"You'll answer to me for this----" began Chard, when Oliver again
interrupted.
"This is no time for quarrelling. Once more, Captain Hendry--what are
your orders?"
Hendry consulted with Chard in low tones, then desired first of all that
the wounded native should be taken into Oliver's boat.
The mate obeyed under protest. "I already have a badly injured man in my
boat, sir; and that native cannot possibly live many hours longer."
Hendry made no answer, but gave the officer one of his shifty, sullen
glances as the dying man was lifted out and put into Oliver's boat.
Then he asked Oliver if the ship's papers, chronometer, charts, and his
(Hendry's) nautical instruments had been saved.
"Here they are," and all that he had asked for was passed over to him by
Harvey.
"Did you save any firearms?" was Hendry's next question.
"Yes," replied Harvey; "two Winchesters, a Snider carbine, and all the
cartridges we could find in your cabin."
"Give them to me, then," said Hendry.
Harvey passed them over to the captain, together with some hundreds of
cartridges tied up in a handkerchief. Hendry and Chard took them with
ill-concealed satisfaction, little knowing that Harvey had carefully
hidden away the remainder of the firearms in Atkins's boat, and
therefore did not much mind obeying Hendry's demand.
When Hendry next spoke he did so in a sullenly, authoritative manner.
"Miss Remington, you and your servant must come into my boat. Mr.
Morrison, you and the second engineer can take their places in the
mate's boat."
The two engineers at once, at a meaning glance from Oliver, stepped out
of the captain's boat, and took their seats in that of the mate. Neither
Tessa nor Maoni moved.
"Make haste, please, Miss Remington," said Hendry, not looking at her as
he spoke, but straight before him.
"I prefer to remain in Mr. Atkins's boat," replied Tessa decisively.
"And I tell you that you must come with me," said the captain, with
subdued fury. "Mr. Atkins has no compass, and I am responsible for your
safety."
"Thank you, Captain Hendry," was the mocking reply, "I relieve you of
all responsibility for my safety. And I absolutely refuse to leave Mr.
Atkins, except to go with Mr. Oliver."
For a moment Hendry was unable to speak through passion, for he had
determined that Tessa should come with them. Then he addressed the
second mate. "Mr. Atkins, I order you to come alongside and put Miss
Remington and that native girl into my boat."
"You can go to hell, you Dutch hog!" was the laconic rejoinder from
Atkins, as he leant upon his steer-oar and surveyed the captain and
Chard with an air of studied insolence. "I'll take no orders from a swab
like you. If Miss Remington wants to stay in my boat she _shall_ stay."
Then turning to Tessa he said so loudly that both Chard and captain
could hear, "Never fear, miss; compass or no compass, you are safer with
us than with those two." And as Tessa looked up into his face and smiled
her thanks to the sturdy young officer, Chard ground his teeth with
rage, though he tried to look unconcerned and indifferent.
"It's no use, Louis," he muttered, "we can do nothing now; time enough
later on. Give your orders, and don't look so infernally white about the
gills."
The taunt went home, and Hendry pulled himself together. The violence
with which he had been thrown down upon the deck the previous evening
by the angered mate, and his present passion combined had certainly, as
Chard said, made him look white about the gills.
"Very well, Miss Remington," he said, "if you refuse to come with me I
cannot help it. Mr. Oliver, is your boat compass all right?"
"Yes," was the curt answer.
"Then our course is north-north-west for Ponape. You, Mr. Atkins, as
you have no compass, had better keep close to me, as if we get a squally
night with heavy rain, which is very likely, we may lose sight of each
other. You, Mr. Oliver, can use your own judgment. We are now five
hundred miles from Ponape." Then, true seaman as he was, for all his
villainy, he ascertained what provisions were in Atkins's boat, told
him to put half into Oliver's, and also overhauled what was in his own.
There was an ample supply for two or three weeks, and of water there
were two breakers, one in his own the other in the second mate's boat.
That which had been in the mate's boat had been lost when she was rushed
by the firemen, and had hung stern down by the for'ard fall.
"I'll see that Mr. Oliver's boat has all the water she wants to-day,"
said Atkins. "She won't want any to-night. We'll get more than we shall
like. It'll rain like forty thousand cats."
Hendry nodded a sullen assent to this, and turned to take the steer-oar
from Huka, who, with the other native seamen, had been listening to the
discussion between the captain and his officers.
Huka gave up the oar, and then telling the other natives in their own
tongue to follow him, quietly slipped overboard, and swam towards the
second mate's boat. They leapt after him instantly.
Hendry whipped up one of the Winchesters, and was about to stand up and
fire at the swimming men when Chard tore the carbine from his grasp.
"Let them go, you blarsted fool! Let them go! It will be all the better
for us," he said with savage earnestness, but speaking low so that the
two firemen could not overhear him; "we can send the whole lot of them
to hell together before we get to Ponape. Sit down, you blithering Dutch
idiot, and let them go! They are playing into our hands," and then he
whispered something in the captain's ears.
Hendry looked into the supercargo's face with half-terrified,
half-savage eyes.
"I'm with you, Sam. Better that than be hanged for shooting a couple of
<DW65>s."
"Just so, Louis. Now make a protest to Oliver and Atkins, and ask them
to send those three natives back. They won't do it, of course, but be
quick about it. Say that you have only the two firemen and myself--who
are not seamen--to help you to take the boat to Ponape."
Hendry took his cue quickly enough, and hailed the two other boats.
"Mr. Oliver, and you, Mr. Atkins. My crew have deserted me. I do not
want to resort to force to make them return, but call upon you to come
alongside, and put those three men back into my boat."
Oliver made no answer for the moment. He, Harvey, Atkins, and Huka
talked earnestly together for a few minutes, and then the mate stood up
and spoke.
"The native crew refuse to obey your orders Captain Hendry. They accuse
you and Mr. Chard of murdering three of their shipmates. And I, and
every one in these two boats, know that you and Mr. Chard _did_ murder
them, and I'm not going to make these three men return to you. You
have a good boat, with mast, mainsail and jib, and more provisions than
either the second mate or myself. We have, in this boat of mine, only
six canoe paddles and no sail; the second mate has oars, but no sail.
You could reach Ponape long before we do if you want to leave us in the
lurch."
"And we'll be damned glad to be quit of your company," shouted Atkins.
"Hoist your sail, you goat-faced, sneaking Schneider, and get along!
When we are ashore at Ponape I'll take it out of _you_ captain, and Mr.
Carr will settle up differences with _you_ Mr. Chard--you black-faced
scoundrel! And, please God, you'll both swing in Fiji after we have done
with you."
Hendry made no answer to the second mate's remarks, which were
accompanied by a considerable number of oaths and much vigorous
blasphemy; for the honest-hearted Atkins detested both his captain and
the supercargo most fervently, as a pair of thoroughpaced villains.
But for very particular reasons Captain Hendry and Mr. Samuel Chard
did not wish to part company with the other two boats, and therefore
Atkins's gibes and threats were passed over in silence, and Oliver
acceded to Hendry's request to let him tow his boat, as with the gentle
breeze, and with the six canoe paddles helping her along, the two could
travel quite as fast as the second mate with his six oars.
And so with a glorious sky of blue above, and over a now smooth and
placid sea, just beginning to ripple under the breath of a gentle
breeze, the boat voyage began.
CHAPTER VII
All that day the three boats made excellent progress, for though the
wind was but light, the sea was very smooth, and a strong northerly
current helped them materially.
As night approached heavy white clouds appeared on the eastern
horizon--the precursors of a series of heavy rain squalls, which in
those latitudes, and at that season of the year--November to March--are
met with almost nightly, especially in the vicinity of the low-lying
islands of the Marshall and Caroline Groups.
Then, as the sun set, the plan of murder that was in the hearts of
the captain and supercargo began to work. During the day they had
been unable to converse freely, for fear of being overheard by the two
firemen, but now the time had come for them to act.
In all the boats' lockers Harvey and Latour had placed a two gallon
wicker-covered jar of rum, and presently Hendry hailed Oliver, whose
boat was still towing astern. It was the first time that he had taken
any notice of the occupants of the other boats since the morning.
"You can give your men some grog if you like, Mr. Oliver," he said, "and
you might as well hail the second mate, and tell him to do the same. I
shall have to cast you off presently, as the first rain squall will
be down on us, and each boat will have to take care of herself. We
are bound to part company until the morning, but I rely on you and the
second mate to keep head to wind during the squalls, and stick to the
course I have given you between times."
"Very well, sir."
Chard took out the rum and filled a half-pint pannikin to the brim.
"Here you are, boys," said he pleasantly to the two firemen, who looked
gloatingly at the liquor; "this will warm you up for the drenching you
will get presently."
The unsuspecting, unfortunate men drank it off eagerly without troubling
to add water, and then Chard, who feared that Hendry sober would be too
great a coward for the murderous work that was to follow, poured out
a stiff dose into another pannikin, and passed it to him. Then he took
some himself.
"Pass along that pannikin, boys," he said; "you might as well have a
skinful while you are about it."
The men obeyed the treacherous scoundrel with alacrity. Like their
shipmates who had perished the previous night, they were thoroughly
intemperate men, and were only too delighted to be able to get drunk so
quickly.
Filling their pannikin, which held a pint, to the brim, Chard poured
half of it into his own empty tin, and then passed them both to the men.
They sat down together on the bottom boards amidships, and then raised
the pannikins.
"Here's good luck to you, Mr. Chard, and you, skipper."
"Good luck, men," replied Hendry, watching them keenly as they swallowed
mouthful after mouthful of the fiery stuff, which from its strength
was known to the crew of the _Motutapu_ as "hell boiled down to a small
half-pint."
Ten minutes passed, and then as the darkness encompassed the three
boats, a sudden puff of wind came from the eastward. Hendry hailed the
mate.
"Here's a squall coming, Mr. Oliver; haul in your painter."
He cast off the tow line, and Chard lowered the mainsail and jib, the
two firemen taking not the slightest notice as they continued to swallow
the rum.
In another five minutes the white wall of the hissing rain squall was
upon them, and everything was hidden from view. Hendry swung his boat's
head round, and let her drive before it. The other boats, he knew, would
keep head on to the squall, and in half an hour he would be a couple of
miles away from them.
The captain's boat drove steadily before the rushing wind, and the
stinging, torrential rain soon covered the bottom boards with half a
foot of water. Chard took the bailer, and began to bail out, taking no
heed of the firemen, who were lying in the water in a drunken stupor,
overcome by the rum.
At last the rain ceased, and the sky cleared as if by magic, though but
few stars were visible. Chard went on bailing steadily. Presently he
rose, came aft, took a seat beside Hendry and looked stealthily into his
face.
"Well?" muttered the captain inquiringly, as if he were afraid that
the two poor wretches who but a few feet away lay like dead men might
awaken.
For the moment Chard made no answer, but putting out his hand he gripped
Hendry by the arm.
"Did you hear what Carr and Atkins said?" he asked in a fierce whisper.
Hendry's sullen eyes gleamed vindictively as he nodded assent.
"Well, they mean it--if we are fools enough to give them the chance of
doing it. And by God, Louis, I tell you that it means hanging for us
both; if not hanging, imprisonment for life in Darlinghurst Gaol.
We shot the <DW65>s, right enough, and every man of the crew of the
_Motutapu_, from Oliver down to Carr's servant, will go dead against
us."
He paused a moment. "This has happened at a bad time for us, Louis. Two
years ago Thorne, the skipper of the _Trustful_, labour schooner, his
mate, second mate, boatswain and four hands were cast for death for
firing into native canoes in the New Hebrides. And although none of them
were hanged they are rotting in prison now, and will die in prison."
"I know," answered the captain in a whisper. "Thorne was reprieved and
got a life-sentence, the other chaps got twenty-one years."
"And I tell you, Louis, that if you and I face a jury we shall stand a
worse chance than Jim Thorne and his crowd did. The whole crew will go
dead against us, and swear there was no attempt to mutiny--that girl and
her servant too, and Jessop as well. Jessop would give us away in any
case over the cause of the fire, if he said nothing else. It's their
lives or ours."
"What is it to be?" muttered Hendry, drawing the steer oar inboard, and
putting his eager, cruel eyes close to Chard's face.
"This is what it must be. You and I, Louis, will be _'the only survivors
of the "Motutapu" which took fire at sea. All hands escaped in the
three boats, but only the captain's boat, containing himself and the
supercargo, succeeded in reaching Ponape after terrible hardships.
The mate's and second mate's boats, with all their occupants, have
undoubtedly been lost._' That is what the newspapers will say, Louis,
and it will be quite true, as all those in the other boats will perish.
By sunrise tomorrow none of the ship's company but you and I must be
alive."
"How are we going to do it?"
"Wait till nearly daylight, and then we can get within range of them,
and pick them off one by one, if there is a good breeze. If there is no
wind and we cannot keep going, we must put it off for the time.
There's two hundred and thirty Winchester and Snider cartridges in that
handkerchief--I've counted them--and we can make short work of them."
"What about these fellows?" said Hendry, inclining his head towards the
drunken firemen.
"They go first. They must go overboard in the next squall, which will be
upon us in a few minutes. Take another drink, Louis, and don't shake
so, or--" and Chard grasped Hendry by the collar and spoke with sudden
fury--"or by God, I'll settle _you_ first, and do the whole thing
myself!"
"I'll do it, Sam; I'll do it."
Again the hissing rain and the hum of the squall was upon them as the
ocean was blotted out from view.
"Now," said Chard--"quick." They sprang forward together, lifted the
unconscious men one by one, and threw them over the side.
"Run up the jib," said Hendry hoarsely; "let us get further away."
"You rotten-hearted Dutch cur," and Chard seized the captain by the
beard with his left hand and clenched his right threateningly, "brace
yourself up, or I'll ring your neck like a fowl's, and send you
overboard after them. Think of your wife and family--and of the
hangman's noose dangling between you and them."
*****
Throughout the night the rain squalls swept the ocean at almost hourly
intervals, with more or less violence, but were never of long enough
duration to raise more than a short, lumpy sea, which quickly subsided.
About an hour before dawn, however, a more than usually heavy bank
formed to windward, and Harvey, with Huka and the other natives, could
see that there was more wind in it than would be safe for the mate's
boat, which was deep in the water, owing to the number of people in her.
Oliver agreed with them that they should tranship three or four of their
number into the second mate's boat.
"Better be sure than sorry, Carr," he said; "can any one of you see Mr.
Atkin's boat?"
Nothing could be seen or heard of her until a boat lantern was hoisted
on an oar by Oliver, and a few seconds after was responded to by Atkins
soaking a piece of woollen cloth in rum, wrapping it round the point of
a boathook, and setting it alight. Its flash revealed him half a mile
away to leeward. Hendry and Chard, who by this time were quite three
miles distant, saw the blazing light, and the latter wondered what it
meant.
"They have parted company, I think," said Hendry, "and as the mate's
boat is too deep I daresay he wants Atkins to take some of his people
before this big squall comes down. It's going to be an ugly fellow
this, and we'll have to drive again. I wish it would swamp 'em both. The
sharks would save us a lot of trouble then."
As quickly as possible Oliver paddled down to Atkins, and Harvey,
Latour, Huka, and another native got into the second mate's boat.
"We'll have to run before this, Atkins," said the mate, alluding to the
approaching squall; "it will last a couple of hours or more by the look
of it. Are you very wet, Miss Remington?"
"Very, Mr. Oliver," answered the girl, with a laugh; "but I don't mind
it a bit, as the rain is not cold. I am too old a 'sailor man' to mind
a wetting. Are you all quite well? I can't see your face, Mr. Studdert,
nor yours, Mr. Morrison, it is so dark. Oh, Mr. Studdert, I wish I had
one of your cigarettes to smoke."
"I wish I had one to give you, miss," answered the pale-faced young
engineer. "A pipe is no to my liking, but I fear me I'll have to tackle
one in the morning."
Alas, poor Studdert, little did he know that the morning, now so near,
was to be his last.
"Goodbye for the present, Miss Remington," called out Oliver as the
boats again separated. "Take good care of her, Harvey, and of yoursels
too. He'll be getting an attack of the shakes in the morning, miss,
after all this wetting. Give him plenty of rum, my dear, whether he
likes it or not. You're a plucky little lady, and next to having you in
my own boat I am glad to see you with Atkins. Cheer up, lads, one and
all; we'll have the sun out in another hour."
Half an hour later both boats were driving before the fury of the
squall, and the crews had to keep constantly bailing, for this time the
violence of the wind was such that, despite the most careful steering
of the two officers, large bodies of water came over amidships, and
threatened to swamp the boats.
When dawn came the sky was again as clear as it had been on the previous
morning, and Atkins stood up and looked for the captain's and mate's
boats.
"There they are, Harvey," and he pointed to the westward; "the skipper
is under sail, and making back towards Oliver. Well, that's one thing
about him, dog as he is--he's a thorough sailor man, and is standing
back to take Oliver in tow again."
At this time the captain's boat was about three miles distant from that
of the second mate, and Oliver's between the two, but much nearer to
Hendry and Chard's than to Atkins's. She was under both mainsail and
jib, and as the sea was again very smooth was slipping through the water
very quickly under a now steady breeze, as she stood towards the mate's
boat.
As the red sun burst from the ocean Atkins told the crew to cease
pulling for a few minutes and get something to eat. The men were all in
good humour, though they yet meant to wreak their vengeance on Chard and
Hendry for the murder of their shipmates. The wounded man who had been
put in Oliver's boat they knew had also died, and this had still further
inflamed them. But for the present they said nothing, but ate their
biscuit and tinned beef in cheerful silence, after waiting for Tessa
and Maoni to begin. Huka, their recognised leader, and Malua, Harvey's
servant, had both assured them that the captain and Chard would be
brought to punishment, but this assurance was not satisfactory to the
majority of them. One of them, the big Manhikian who had helped Latour
to rescue Tessa and Maoni from their cabin, was a brother of the man who
had just died from his wounds in Oliver's boat, and he had, during the
night, promised his shipmates to take his own and give them their _utu_
(revenge) before the boats reached Ponape.
"Turn to again, boys," said Atkins presently, as soon as the men had
satisfied their hunger; "we must catch up to the others now."
The natives bent to their oars again, and sent the boat along at a great
rate, when suddenly Harvey heard the sound of firearms. He stood up and
looked ahead.
"Good God!" he cried, "look there, Atkins! The captain and Chard are
firing into Oliver's boat!"
Even as he spoke the repeated crackling of Winchester rifles could be
heard, and the mate's boat seemed to be in great confusion, and her
occupants were paddling away from their assailants, who, however, were
following them up closely at a distance of about fifty yards.
"Pull, men, pull! For God's sake, lay into it! The captain and firemen
are murdering Mr. Oliver and his party."
The seamen uttered a shout of rage, and made the boat leap through the
water as now, in addition to the sharp crackle of the Winchesters, they
heard the heavier report of a Snider, and Harvey, jumping up on the
after whaleback, and steadying himself with one hand on Atkins's
shoulder, saw that only two or three of Oliver's crew were now
paddling--the rest had been shot down.
"We'll never get there in time, Atkins," he cried, "unless we can hit
those who are firing. It's Chard and the skipper! Let Huka steer."
In a few seconds the change was effected. Huka took the steer-oar,
two of the after-oars were double-banked, and Atkins and Harvey sprang
forward with their Sniders, and began firing at the captain's boat,
though at a range which gave them little chance of hitting her. Every
moment, however, the distance was decreasing, and the two men fired
steadily and carefully. But the Winchesters still cracked for another
five minutes. Then the fire from the captain's boat ceased as a shot
from Atkins's rifle smashed into her amidships. She was suddenly put
before the wind, and then Chard came aft, and began firing at the
approaching boat with his Snider, in the hope of disabling her, so that
he and his fellow-murderer (now that their plan of utterly destroying
all the occupants of both boats had been so unexpectedly frustrated)
might escape.
But the work of slaughter in which he had just been engaged and the
rolling of the boat, together with the continuous hum of bullets
overhead, made his aim wild, and neither the second mate's boat nor any
of its people were hit, and she swept along to the rescue.
CHAPTER VIII
An exclamation of horror burst from Harvey as the boat, with its panting
crew, dashed up alongside that of the chief mate.
"For God's sake, Tessa, do not look!" he cried hoarsely.
For the half-sunken boat was a shambles, and of her nine occupants
only three were alive--the second steward Jessop, Morrison, and Oliver
himself. The latter lay in the stern sheets with a bullet hole through
his chest, and a smashed hip; he had but just time to raise his hand in
mute farewell to Harvey and Atkins, and then breathed his last.
Morrison, whose spine was broken by a Winchester bullet, but who was
perfectly conscious, was at once lifted out and placed in Atkins's boat,
and Tessa, with the tears streaming down her pale face, and trying hard
to restrain her sobs, pillowed his old, grey head upon Atkins's coat.
Then Jessop, who was evidently still in agony from his broken ribs,
one of which, so Morrison said in a faint voice, had, he thought, been
driven into his lungs, was placed beside him.
Poor Studdert and the five native seamen were dead, some of them having
received as many as five or six bullet wounds. Studdert himself had been
shot through the head, and lay for'ard with his pale face upturned to
the sky, and his eyes closed as if in a peaceful sleep.
The boat had been pierced in several places below the water-line by
Snider bullets, and by the time Morrison and Jessop had been removed,
and Harvey and Atkins had satisfied themselves that the other seven men
in her were dead, she was nearly full of water--not the clear, bright
water of the ocean alone, but water deeply stained with the blood of the
murdered men.
"We must cast off," said Atkins in a low voice, "we can do no more."
As he spoke a bullet from Chard's Snider struck the water about thirty
yards away, and springing up, he seized his own rifle again.
Huka placed his hand on the officer's arm, and then turned to Harvey
and spoke in Samoan, gravely and with solemn emphasis, though his brown
cheeks were wetted with tears.
"Let us take no heed of the bullets that come. Here be six dead men
whose souls have gone to God for judgment. Let us pray for them."
Atkins, his blazing eyes fixed on the captain's boat, from which every
few seconds a bullet came humming overhead, or striking the water within
a few yards, laid down the rifle and took off his cap.
"Go ahead, Huka. You're a better Christian than me. Sling out a prayer
for these poor chaps as quick as you can. We can't bury them in a
decent, shipshape fashion."
Two men stepped into the sinking, shot-torn boat, and then Huka stood
up amidships among his comrades, with bowed head, and his hands crossed
upon his great naked chest. He prayed in Samoan.
"_O Jehovah, who holdeth the great sea in the hollow of Thy hand, we
commit to its depths these the bodies of our shipmates who have been
slain. O Father', most just and most merciful, let them become of Thy
kingdom. Amen_."
Then, one by one, the bodies of Studdert and of the five natives were
dropped overboard by the two seamen as reverently as circumstances
permitted, and in silence broken only by the suppressed sobbing of the
two girls.
Such stores as were in poor Oliver's boat were next taken out, and then
the wrecked and bloodstained craft was cast adrift and left to fill.
As the second mate grasped the haft of the steer-oar again another shot
from the captain's boat fell some distance ahead.
"He's running away from us as fast as he can," said Harvey; "look, he's
hauled up a couple of points!"
"Ay, so he has. And our short Sniders won't carry any further than the
one he's firing with, so we have no chance of hitting him, I'm afraid.
However, just let us try. How many Sniders have we?"
"Seven."
"Avast pulling, lads. We'll give him a parting shot together. Maybe we
might drop a bullet into him. Get out the other five Sniders, Harvey;
the Winchesters are no use at such a range."
The boat was swung broadside on, and the two white men and five natives
fired a volley together. Tessa stood up on the after-thwart, and watched
through Atkin's glasses; the heavy bullets all fell short.
"Never mind, lads," said Atkins. "God Almighty ain't going to let those
two men escape. Now, Harvey, what about ourselves? What is it to be?
Ponape, or the nearest land?"
"The nearest land, tor Gawd's sake," sobbed Jessop. "I ain't got long to
live, and for Christ's sake don't chuck me overboard to be chawed up by
the sharks like a piece o' dead meat."
"Man," said a faint voice beside him, "ye're ower particular, I'm
thinking. And it would be a verra hungry shark that wad hae the
indecency to eat such a puir chicken-hearted creature as yourself, ye
miserable cur! Are ye no ashamed to be whining before the two lasses?"
It was the dying Morrison who spoke. Tessa bent over him. "Do not be
angry with him," she whispered, "he is in great agony."
"Ay, I hae no doubt he's in verra great pain; but ye see, my dear, I'm
auld and crotchety, and the creature's verra annoying wi' his whining
and moaning and fearsome blasphemy."
Tessa, who knew as well as the brave old man knew himself that he was
dying, placed her soft hand on his rugged brow in silent sympathy; he
looked up at her with a cheerful smile.
Harvey and Atkins consulted. Ponape was between four and five hundred
miles distant, a long voyage for a deeply-laden boat without a sail. Two
hundred miles to the westward was Pikirami Atoll (the "Greenwich Island"
of the charts), and a hundred and eighty miles north of that was Nukuor,
the most southerly of the vast archipelago of the Caroline Islands.
"I don't know what is best for us to do, Atkins," said the trader. "At
this time of the year we can count upon every night being such as it was
last night, perhaps a great deal worse; and we must either turn tail
to the squalls or put out a sea anchor and drift. This means that
we'll make no headway at all at night time, and be set steadily to the
westward, and out of our course for Ponape. If we had a sail it would
be right enough, as we could lay up for there--within a couple of points
anyway. But we have no sail, and willing as the men are to pull, it will
be terribly exhausting."
Atkins nodded. "Just so, Mr. Carr. If, as you say, we had a sail it
would be different. Without one it may take us a fortnight or more to
get to Ponape."
"Quite. Now on the other hand, Pikirami Lagoon lies less than a hundred
and fifty miles dead to leeward of us. It is low, but I don't think we
shall miss it if we steer W. by S., as on the south end there is a coral
mound about a hundred feet high. If we do miss it we can steer south for
New Ireland; we can't miss _that_ if we tried to, and would get there
sooner than we could reach Ponape. Then there is another advantage in
our making for Pikirami--we can run before the night squalls, and the
harder they blow the better it will be for us--we'll get there all the
sooner."
Then Harvey went on to say that at Piki-rami--which he knew well--they
would meet with a friendly reception from the few natives who inhabited
two islets out of the thirty which formed the atoll. Twice every year
the place was visited by a small German trading schooner from Blanche
Bay, in New Britain, and possibly, he thought, they might either find
her there loading a cargo of copra; or, if not, they could wait for her.
In the latter case he would on Tessa's behalf charter the vessel to take
them all to Ponape, for her father's name and credit were well known
from one end of the Pacific to the other, and there would be no
difficulty in making terms with the master.
Atkins agreed willingly to Harvey's suggestions, for he well knew the
great risks that would attend the attempt to reach Ponape under such
circumstances as were theirs; and the native crew, much as they wished
to pursue the captain and wreak their vengeance upon him and the
supercargo, readily acquiesced in Harvey's plan of steering for Pikirami
Lagoon in when he pointed out to them the difficulties and dangers that
lay before them by making for Ponape, or, indeed, any other island of
the Caroline Group.
"And those men there," said Harvey, speaking in Samoan, and pointing
to the captain's boat, which was now more than a mile distant, "cannot
escape punishment for their crimes; for is not this the word of God:
'Thou shalt do no murder'? And those two men have done murder, and God
will call them to account."
Roka, the big Manhikian native, whose brother had been killed, answered
for himself and his comrades in the same tongue.
"Ay, that is true. But yet it is hard that I, whose brother's blood is
before my eyes and the smell of it in my nostrils, cannot see these men
die. How can we tell, master, that men will judge them for their crimes?
They are sailing away, and may reach some country far distant, and so be
safe."
Harvey partly assented. "They may escape for a time, Roka, but not for
long. Rest assured of that."
Then a tot of rum was served out to each man, and the boat's head put
W. by S. for Pikirami Lagoon, while Tessa and Maoni set to work under
Atkins's directions to sew together some odd pieces of calico and navy
blue print, which Latour the steward had fortunately thrust into the
sack containing the firearms. When it was completed it made a fairly
sized squaresail, which could always be used during light winds.
The captain's boat had disappeared from view, when Jessop the second
steward beckoned to Harvey to come to him.
"Ask the young lady to go for'ard, mister, will you?" he said, turning
his haggard eyes upon the trader's face. "I feel as 'ow I'm goin', an' I
said I would make a clean breast of it. But I don't want 'er to 'ear; do
ye twig, mister, though I'll tell you and Mr. Hatkins?"
Harvey nodded, and whispered to Tessa to go for'ard. "The poor little
beggar is dying, Tessa, and has something to tell me."
Tessa and Maoni went for'ard and sat down under the shade of the
newly-made mainsail, which was hoisted upon an oar with a bamboo yard.
There they were quite out of hearing of the vile confession of Jessop's
complicity with Chard and the captain made by the wretched man, who
was now sinking fast, and knew that his hours were numbered, for, as
Morrison had surmised, one of his lungs was fatally injured. And when he
had finished the low-spoken tale of his villainy even the rough-natured
Atkins was filled with pity when he saw how the poor wretch was
suffering, both physically and mentally.
"You've done right, Jessop, in telling us this; it'll be all the better
for you when you have to stand before the Almighty, won't it, Mr. Carr?"
"Yes, indeed, Jessop," said Harvey kindly; "and I wish we could do
something to alleviate your pain, poor fellow!"
"Never mind, sir. You're a gent if ever there was one, and you 'as taken
away a lot o' the pain I've 'ad in me 'eart by forgivin' me. And perhaps
the young lady will just let me tell 'er I'm sorry, and give me 'er 'and
before I go."
Atkins beckoned to Tessa, who came quickly aft and knelt beside the
dying man, who looked into her soft, sympathetic face longingly yet
fearfully.
"I'm a bad lot, miss, as Mr. Carr will tell you when I'm dead. It was
me that give you and Monny the drugged coffee, and I want you to forgive
me, an' give me your 'and."
Tessa looked wonderingly at Harvey, who bent towards her and whispered a
few words. In an instant she took Jessop's hand between both of hers.
"Poor Jessop," she said softly, "I forgive you freely, and I do hope you
will get better soon."
He looked at her with dimmed, wistful eyes. "Thank you, miss. You're
very kind to a cove like me. Will you 'old me 'and a bit longer,
please."
Early in the afternoon, as the boat slipped lazily over the gentle ocean
swell, he died. And though Atkins and Harvey would have liked to have
acceded to his last wishes to be buried on shore, stern necessity
forbade them so doing, for they knew not how long it would be ere they
reached Pikirami; and so at sunset his body was consigned to the deep.
*****
For the rest of that day, and during the night, when the white rain
squalls came with a droning, angry hum from the eastward and drenched
the people with a furious downpour, flattening the heaving swell with
its weight, the boat kept steadily on her course; and, but for the
shadow of death which hourly grew darker over poor Morrison, the
voyagers would have talked and laughed and made light of their sodden
and miserable surroundings. Morrison himself was the most cheerful man
in the boat, and when Atkins and Harvey rigged an oilskin coat over him
to keep the rain from his face at least he protested as vigorously as
he could, saying that he did not mind the rain a bit, and urging them
to use it to protect "the two lassies" from the blinding and deafening
downpour.
*****
Dawn at last.
The misty sea haze lifted and scattered before the first breath of the
gentle breeze, a blood-red sun leapt from the shimmering water-line to
windward; a frigate bird and his mate swept swiftly through the air
from the westward to view the dark spot upon the ocean two thousand feet
below, and day had come again.
Tessa had the engineer's old, grey head pillowed on her lap. Harvey held
his right hand, and Atkins, who knew that the end was near, had taken
off his soddened cap, and bent his face low over the haft of the
steer-oar.
"Do you feel any pain, Mr. Morrison?" asked Tessa, as she stroked the
old man's face, and tried to hide her tears.
"Well, I wouldna be for saying no, and I wouldna be for saying yes, my
dearie," replied the brave old fellow; "I'm no complaining aboot mysel',
but I'd like to see ye 'saft and warm,' as we Scots say, instead of
sitting here wi' my auld, greasy head in your lap, and your ain puir
body shivering wi' cauld. Gie me your hand, Harvey Carr... and yours
too, Miss Remington.... May God guide ye both together; and you too,
Atkins, for ye are a guid sailor man, and a honest one, too. And if ye
can get to this lagoon in time--ye know what I mean--ye'll pit my auld
bones under God's earth and no cast me overboard?"
Atkins was beside him in a moment. "Brace up, Morrison, old man, you're
a long way off dead yet," he said, with rough sympathy.
"Nay, Atkins, I'm verra near... verra near. But I hae no fear. I'm no
afraid of what is to come; because I hae a clean sheet o' my life to
show to the Almighty--I'm no like that puir devil Jessop. Harvey man,
listen to me. Long, long ago, when I was a bairn at my mother's knee, I
read a vairse of poetry which has never come to my mind till now, when
I'm verra near my Maker, I canna repeat the exact words, but I think it
goes like this," he whispered,
"'He who, from zone to zone,
Guides o'er the trackless main the sea-bird's flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone
Will guide my steps aright.'"
"May God guide us all as He guides the sea-bird, and as He has guided
you," said Tessa sobbingly, as she pressed her lips to his cheek.
Morrison took her hand and held it tightly,
"God help and bless ye, lassie. May ye and Harvey never see the shadow
of a sorrow in your lives. Atkins, ye'll tak' guid care to remember that
there is a hundred and sixty-three pounds due to me frae Hillingdon and
MacFreeland, and that if ye do not care to take it yoursel', it must go
to auld John Cameron, the sailors' parson in Sydney. Ye hae ony amount
of witnesses to hear what I'm now telling ye. I'm no for being long wi'
ye, and I dinna want yoursel' nor auld Jock Cameron to be robbed."
"I'll see that the old parson gets it, Morrison," said Atkins huskily;
"he'll do more good with it than a man like me."
"Man," said the old engineer, as he lifted his kindly grey eyes to the
second mate, "ye're welcome to it. I wish it were a thousand, for ye're
a grand sailor man, wi' a big heart, and maybe ye hae some good woman
waiting for ye; and a hunner and sixty pound is no sma' help to----"
His voice failed, but his lips were smiling still as he gave his last
sigh; and then his head lay still in Tessa's arms.
CHAPTER IX
All that day over a gently heaving sea the boat sped steadily onward
before the soft breath of the dying trade wind, and when night fell
Harvey and Atkins reckoned that they could not be more than twenty miles
from Pikirami. About midnight, therefore, the sail was lowered, and the
boat allowed to drift, as otherwise she might have run past the island
in the darkness. Two of the natives were placed on the look-out for
indications of the land, and the rest of the people, except Harvey, laid
down and slept, for after one or two rain squalls early in the evening
the night had turned out fine and dry.
Poor Morrison's body had been covered up and placed under the for'ard
thwarts; amidships lay Atkins, who had fallen asleep with his pipe in
his mouth and his head pillowed on the naked chest of one of the native
sailors; aft, in the stern sheets, Tessa and Maoni slept with their arms
around each other, Tessa's pale cheek lying upon the soft, rounded bosom
of the native girl. Still further aft, on the whale-back, Harvey sat,
cross-legged, contentedly smoking a stumpy clay pipe lent to him by
Huka, and looking, now at the glorious, myriad-starred sky above, and
now at the beautiful face just beneath him, and musing upon the events
of the past few days. Then as his eye rested for a moment or two on the
stiffened form of the dead engineer, his face hardened, and he thought
of Chard and the captain. Where were they now? Making for Ponape,
no doubt, with all possible speed, so that they might escape in some
passing whale-ship or vessel bound China-wards. But where could they
go? What civilised country would afford protection to such fiendish
and cruel murderers? Neither of them dare dream of ever putting foot on
Australian soil again if a single one of the survivors of the _Motutapu_
reached there before them. Then he thought of Hendry's wife and three
fair daughters.
"Poor things," he muttered, "the story of their father's crime will
break their hearts, and make life desolate to them. Better for them if
the Almighty, in His mercy, took them before this frightful tale is told
to wreck their lives."
An hour passed, and then Roka, who was one of the look-outs, came aft,
stepping softly so as not to awaken the sleepers.
"What is it, Roka?"
"Listen," whispered the native, "dost hear the call of the _kanapu_?
There be many of them about us in the air; so this land of Pikirami must
be near."
Harvey nodded and listened, and though his ear was not so quick as that
of the sailor, he soon caught the low, hoarse notes of the _kanapu_,
a large bird of the booby species, which among the islands of the
North-West Pacific fishes at night-time and sleeps most of the day; its
principal food being flying-fish and _atulti_ or young bonito, which,
always swimming on the surface, fall an easy prey to the keen-eyed,
sharp, blue-beaked bird.
"Ay, Roka," said the trader, "we be near the land, for the _kanapu_
never wandereth far from the shore."
Low as he spoke, Tessa heard him, for she slumbered but lightly. She
rose and sat up, deftly winding her loosened hair about her head.
"Is it land, Harvey?"
"Land is near, Tessa. We can hear the _kanapu_ calling to each other."
"I am so glad, Harvey; for it would be terribly hard upon the men if we
missed Pikirami and had to make for New Britain."
"Ay, it would indeed. So far we have been very lucky, however, yet, even
if we had missed it, we should have no cause to fear. We have a fine
boat, provisions and water, a good crew, and one of the best sailor men
that ever trod a deck in command," and he pointed to the sleeping second
mate.
Then as they sat together, listening to the cries of the sea-birds, and
waiting for the dawn, Harvey re-told to Tessa, for Roka's benefit, the
story of that dreadful boat voyage sixteen years before, in which his
father and five others had perished from hunger and thirst.
"I was but fourteen years of age then, and people wondered how a boy
like me survived when strong men had died. They did not know that every
one of those thirteen men, unasked by my father, had put aside some
portion of their miserable allowance for me, and I, God forgive me for
doing so, took it. One man, a big Norwegian, was so fearful of going mad
with the agonies of thirst, that he knelt down and offered up a prayer,
then he shook hands with us all--my father was already dead--and jumped
overboard. We were all too weak to try and save him. And less than an
hour afterwards God's rain came, as my father had said it would come
just before he died."
Atkins, with a last mighty snore, awoke, sat up, and filled his pipe
again.
"What, awake, miss!" he said with rough good-humour to Tessa. "How goes
it, Mr. Carr?"
"Bully, old man. We're near the land; we can hear some _kanapu_ about
us, so we can't be more than five or six miles away."
"The land is there," said Roka to Harvey, pointing to a dark shadow
abeam of the boat, "and we could see it but for the rain-clouds which
hide it from us."
Harvey grasped the steer oar, the crew were aroused, and in another few
minutes the boat was under way again, heading for the sombre cloud to
the westward under which Roka said the land lay.
And he was right. For as the dawn broke there came to the listening ears
in the boat the low hum of the surf upon the coral reef; and then,
as the rain-cloud dissolved and vanished to leeward, a long line of
coco-palms stood up from the sea three miles away, and the bright golden
rays of the rising sun shone upon a beach of snow-white sand, between
which and the curling breakers that fell upon the barrier reef there lay
a belt of pale green water as smooth as a mountain lake.
"Up with the sail, boys," cried Harvey, with sparkling eyes, turning to
Atkins as he spoke; "the passage into the lagoon is on the south side,
just round that high mound of coral, and the native village is on the
first islet on this side of the passage. Keep her going, my lads; we
shall be drinking young coconuts and stretching our legs in another half
an hour."
The sail was hoisted, and, with five oars assisting, the boat was kept
away two or three points, till the entrance to the lagoon was opened
out, and the weary voyagers saw before them a scene of quiet beauty
and repose that filled their hearts with thankfulness. Nestling under
a grove of coco-palms was a village of not more than a dozen thatched
houses, whose people had but just awakened to another day of easy
labour--labour that was never a task. As Harvey steered the boat in
between the coral walls of the narrow passage, two or three thin columns
of pale blue smoke ascended from the palm grove, and presently some
women and children, clad only in their thick girdles of grass, came out
from the houses and walked towards the beach for their morning bathe.
Then the _click-clack_ of the oars in the rowlocks made them look
seaward, to utter a scream of astonishment at the strange sight of the
crowded boat so suddenly appearing before them. In another ten seconds
every man, woman, and child in the village--about fifty people all
told--were clustered together on the beach, shouting and gesticulating
in the most frantic excitement, some of the men rushing into the water,
and calling out to the white men to steer clear of several submerged
coral boulders which lay directly in the boat's track.
But their astonishment was intensified when Harvey answered them in
their own tongue.
"I thank ye, friends, but I have been to this land of thine many times.
Have ye all forgotten me so soon?"
That they had not forgotten was quickly evident, for his name was
shouted again and again with eager, welcoming cries as the boat was
run up on to the hard, white sand of the shining beach, and he, Atkins,
Tessa, and their companions were literally pounced upon by the delighted
people and carried up to the headman's house. Ten minutes later every
family was busy preparing food for their unexpected visitors; and pigs,
fowls, and ducks were being slaughtered throughout the islet, whilst
Tessa and her faithful Maoni were simply overwhelmed with caresses from
the women and children, who were anxious to hear the story of their
adventures from the time of the burning of the steamer to the moment of
their arrival in the lagoon.
Calling the head-man apart Harvey pointed to the body of Morrison, which
was then being carried up from the boat.
"Ere we eat and drink, let us think of the dead," he said.
The kindly-hearted and sympathetic natives at once set to work to dig
out a grave beneath a wide-spreading pandanus palm, which grew on the
side of the coral mound overlooking the waters of the placid lagoon;
whilst some of the women brought Atkins and Harvey clean new mats to
serve as a shroud for their dead shipmate.
Then mustering the hands together, Atkins, with Harvey, Roka, and Huka,
carried the body to its last resting-place, and Huka, as Latour the
steward dropped a handful of the sandy soil into the grave, prayed as he
had prayed over the bodies of those who had been buried at sea--simply,
yet touchingly--and then the party returned along the narrow palm-shaded
path to the village.
Much to Harvey's satisfaction, the head-man informed him that a trading
schooner was expected to reach Pikirami within two or three weeks, as
nearly six months had passed since her last visit, and she always came
twice a year.
"That will suit us well," said Harvey to Tessa and Atkins, as they
sat in the head-man's cool, shady house and ate the food that had been
brought to them. "We can well wait here for two or three weeks; and the
skipper of the _Sikiana_ will be glad enough to earn five or six hundred
dollars by giving us a passage to Ponape. I know him very well; he's
a decent little Dutchman named Westphalen, who has sailed so long in
English and American ships that he's civilised. He was with me, Tessa,
when I was sailing the _Belle Brandon_ for your father."
Soon after noon the crew, after having had a good rest, set to work to
overhaul the boat in a large canoe shed, for quite possibly they
might have to put to sea in her again, if anything should prevent the
_Sikiana_ from calling at the island in a reasonable time.
CHAPTER X
That night as the second mate and his companions were sleeping
peacefully under the thatched roofs of the little native village, with
nought to disturb their slumbers but the gentle lapping of the waters
of the lagoon on the sandy beach, and the ceaseless call of the reef
beyond, Hendry and his companion in crime were sitting in their boat
talking earnestly.
The captain was steering; Chard sat on the after-thwart, facing him.
"I tell you that I don't care much what we do, Louis," said the
supercargo, with a reckless laugh, as he looked into the captain's
sullen face. "We've made a damned mess of it, and I don't see how we are
to get out of it by going to Ponape."
"Then what are we to do?" asked Hendry in a curious, husky voice, for
Chard's mocking, careless manner filled him with a savage hatred, which
only his fear of the man made him restrain.
"Let us talk it over quietly, Louis. But take a drink first," and
he handed the captain some rum-and-water. Hendry drank it in gloomy
silence, and waited till the supercargo had taken some himself.
"Now, Louis, here is the position. We _can't_ go to Ponape, for Atkins
will very likely get there as soon as we could, for with light winds
such as we have had to-day he would soon pass us with six oars, deep as
he is in the water. And even if we got there a week before him, we might
not find a ship bound to Sydney or anywhere else."
"But there is a chance of finding one."
"True, there _is_ a chance. But there is also a chance of Atkins's boat
being picked up at sea this very day, or the next, or a month hence, and
he and his crowd reaching Sydney long before us. And _I_ don't want to
run my neck into the noose that will be waiting there. Neither do you, I
suppose?"
"Why in the name of hell do you keep on talking about _that?_" burst
from the captain; "don't I know it as well as you?"
"Very well, I won't allude to such an unpleasant possibility--I _should_
say certainty--again," replied Chard coolly. "But as I was saying, the
chances are against us. If we kept on for Ponape we should either be
collared the moment we put foot ashore, or before we get away from
there to China or any other place, for Atkins is bound to turn up there,
unless, by a stroke of good luck for us, he meets with bad weather, and
they all go to the bottom. That's one chance in our favour."
"His boat is certainly very deep," said Hendry musingly, as he nervously
stroked his long beard.
"She is; but then she has a kanaka crew, and I never yet heard of a
drowned kanaka, any more than I've heard of a dead donkey. With a
white crew she would stand to run some heavy risks in bad weather, with
kanakas she'd keep afloat anyhow."
Hendry uttered an oath, and tugged at his beard savagely. "Go on, go on,
then. Don't keep harping on the pros and cons."
"Take another drink, man. Don't behave like a fretful child. Curse it
all! To think of us being euchred so easily by Carr and Atkins! Why,
they must have half a boat load of Winchester and Sniders, judging by
the way they were firing.... There, drink that, Louis. Oh, if we had
had but a couple of those long trade Sniders out of the trade-room!" He
struck his clenched fist upon the thwart. "We could have kept our own
distance from the second mate, and finished him and his crowd as easily
as we did the others."
"Well, we didn't have them," said the captain gloomily; "and if we had
thought of getting them, we were neither of us able to stand on our feet
after the mauling we got on board."
Chard drank some more rum, and went on smoking in silence for a few
moments; then he resumed:
"You have a wife and family and property in Sydney, and I feel sorry
for you, Louis, by God, I do. But for you to think of going there again
means certain death, as certain for you as it is for me. But this is
what we _can_ do. We have a good boat, and well found, and can steer
for the Admiralty Group, where we are dead sure to meet with some of the
sperm whalers. From there we can get a passage to Manila, and at Manila
you can write to your wife and fix up your future. Get her to sell your
house and property quietly, and come and join you there. I daresay," he
laughed mockingly, "she'll know by the time she gets your letter that
you're not likely to go to Sydney to bring her. And then of course none
of her and your friends will think it strange that she should leave
Sydney, where your name and mine will be pretty notorious. There's two
Dutch mail boats running to Manila from Sydney--the _Atjeh_ and the
_Generaal Pel_. In six months' time, after Atkins and Carr get to
Sydney, the _Motutapu_ affair will be forgotten, and you and your family
can settle down under a new name in some other part of the world. That
is what I mean to do, anyway."
Hendry listened with the closest attention, and something like a sigh
escaped from his over-burdened bosom. "I suppose it's the best thing,
Sam."
"It is the _only_ thing."
The captain bent down and looked at the compass and thought for a
moment.
"About S.W. will be the course for tonight. To-morrow I can tell better
when I get the sun and a look at the chart. Anyway, S.W. is within a
point or less of a good course for the Admiralty Group."
He wore the boat's head round, as Chard eased off the main-sheet in
silence, and for the rest of the night they took turn and turn about at
the steer-oar.
In the morning a light breeze set in, and the whaleboat slipped over the
sunlit sea like a snow-white bird, with the water bubbling and hissing
under her clean-cut stem. Then Hendry examined his chart.
"We'll sight nothing between here and the Admiralty Group, except
Greenwich Island, which is right athwart our course."
"Do you know it?"
"No; but I've heard that there is a passage into the lagoon. We might
put in and spell there for a day or two; or, if we don't go inside, we
could land anywhere on one of the lee-side islands, and get some young
coconuts and a turtle or two."
"Any natives there?"
"Not any, as far as I know, though I've heard that there were a few
there about twenty years ago. I expect they have either died out or
emigrated to the northward. And if there are any there, and they don't
want us to land, we can go on and leave them alone. We have plenty of
provisions for a month, and will get more water than we want every night
as long as we are in this cursed rainy belt. What we do want is wind.
This breeze has no heart in it, and it looks like a calm before noon, or
else it will haul round to the wrong quarter."
His former surmise proved correct, for about midday the boat was
becalmed on an oily, steamy sea under a fierce, brazen sun. This lasted
for the remainder of the day, and then was followed by the usual squally
night.
And so for three days they sailed, making but little progress during the
daytime, for the wind was light and baffling, but doing much better at
night.
On the evening of the third day they sighted the northernmost islet
of Pikirami lagoon, and stood by under its lee till daylight, little
dreaming that those whose life-blood they would so eagerly have shed
were sleeping calmly and peacefully in the native village fifteen miles
away.
With the dawn came a sudden terrific downpour of rain, which lasted
but for a few minutes, and both Chard and Hendry knew, from their own
experience and from the appearance of the sky, that such outbursts
were likely to continue for at least five or six days, with but brief
intervals of cessation.
"We might as well get ashore somewhere about here," said Hendry; "this
is the tail-end of the rainy season, and we can expect heavy rain and
nasty squalls for a week at least. It's come on a bit earlier than I
expected, and I think we'll be better ashore than boxing about at sea.
Can you see the land to the south'ard?"
Chard stood up and shielded his eyes from the still falling rain, but it
was too thick for him to discern anything but the misty outline of the
palm-fringed shore immediately near them.
"We'll wait a bit till it's a little clearer, and then we'll run in over
the reef just abreast of us," said Hendry; "it's about high water,
and as there is no surf we can cross over into the lagoon without any
trouble, and pick out a camping-place somewhere on the inner beach."
They lowered the sail and mast, took out their oars, and waited till
they could see clearly before them. A few minutes later they were
pulling over the reef, on which there was no break, and in another
half a mile they reached the shore of the most northern of the chain of
islets encompassing the lagoon, and made the boat's painter fast to the
serried roots of a pandanus palm growing at the edge of the water.
Then they sought rest and shelter from the next downpour beneath the
overhanging summits of some huge, creeper-clad boulders of coral rock,
which lay piled together in the midst of the dense scrub, just beyond
high-water mark.
Bringing their arms and some provisions from the boat, they placed them
on the dry sandy soil under one of the boulders, ate their breakfast,
and then slept the sleep of men mentally and physically exhausted.
When they awoke the rain had cleared off, and the sun was shining
brightly. By the captain's watch it was a little past one o'clock, and
after looking at the boat, which was high and dry on the beach; for the
tide was now dead low, Chard suggested that they should make a
brief examination of the islet, and get come young drinking and some
fully-grown coconuts for use in the boat.
"Very likely we'll find some turtle eggs too," he added; "this and next
month is the season. We are bound to get a turtle or two, anyway, if we
watch to-night on the beach."
Returning to the camp, they picked up their loaded Winchesters and
started off, walking along the beach on the inner side of the lagoon,
and going in a northerly direction. The islet, although less than a mile
and a half in circumference, was densely wooded and highly fertile, for
in addition to the countless coco-palms which were laden with nuts in
all stages of growth, and fringed the shore in an unbroken circle, there
were great numbers of pandanus and jackfruit-trees growing further back.
Here and there were to be seen traces of former inhabitants--depressions
of an acre or so in extent, surrounded by high banks of soil, now
thickly clothed with verdure, and which Chard, who had had a fair
experience of the South Seas, knew were once plantations of _puraka_,
the gigantic _taro_ plant of the low-lying islands of the South and
North Pacific.
"It must be a hundred years or more since any one worked at these
_puraka_ patches," he said to Hendry, as he sat upon the top of a bank
and looked down. "Look at the big trees growing all around us on the
banks. There can't be natives living anywhere on the atoll now, so I
don't think we need to keep a night watch as long as we stop here."
But had Harvey Carr or any one of the native crew sat there on the bank,
_they_ would have quickly discovered many evidences of the spot having
been visited very recently--the broken branch of a tree, a leaf basket
lying flattened and rotting, and half covered by the sandy soil; a
necklace of withered berries thrown aside by a native girl, and the
crinkled and yellowed husks of some young coconuts which had been drunk
not many weeks before by a fishing party.
At the extreme northern point of the islet there stood a mound of coral
slab, piled up by the action of the sea, and similar to the much
larger one fifteen miles away at the other end of the lagoon. With some
difficulty the two men succeeded in gaining the summit, and from there,
at a height of fifty feet, they had a view of the greater portion of the
atoll, and of some of the green chain of islands it enclosed. On no one
of them could they discern signs of human occupancy, only long, long
lines of cocos, with graceful slender boles leaning westward to the sea,
and whose waving crowns of plumes cast their shadows upon the white sand
beneath. From the beach itself to the barrier reef, a mile or two away,
the water was a clear, pale green, unblemished in its purity except by
an occasional patch of growing coral, which changed its colours from
grey to purple and from purple to jetty black as a passing cloud for
a brief space dimmed the lustre of the tropic sun. Beyond the line
of green the great curving sweep of reef, with the snow-white,
ever-breaking, murmuring surf churning and frothing upon it; and, just
beyond that, the deep, deep blue of the Pacific.
"There's no natives here, Louis," said Chard confidently, as his keen,
black eyes traversed the scene before them; "we can see a clear seven or
eight miles along the beaches, and there's not a canoe to be seen on any
one of them. We'll spell here for a day or two, or more, if the weather
has not settled."
Hendry nodded in his usual sullen manner. "All right. We want a day to
overhaul the boat thoroughly; the mainsail wants looking to as well."
"Well, let us get back, and then we'll have a look over the next islet
to this one before dark. We may come across some turtle tracks and get a
nest of eggs."
They descended the mound, and set out along the outer beach on their way
back to the camp.
Had they remained but a few minutes longer they would have seen two
canoes come into view about three miles to the southward, paddling
leisurely towards the northernmost islet.
CHAPTER XI
The two canoes were manned by some of the crew of the _Motutapu_
together with six natives of Pikirami; one was steered by Harvey, the
other by Huka the Savage Islander; and as they paddled along within
a few feet of each other the crews laughed and jested in the manner
inherent to all the Malayo-Polynesians when intent on pleasure.
That morning Harvey, tiring of the inaction of the past three days, had
eagerly assented to a proposal made by Huka that they should make a trip
round the lagoon, and spend a day or two away from the village, fishing
and shooting. Several young Pikirami natives at once launched two of
their best canoes, and placed them at Harvey's and Atkins's service, and
offered to go with the party and do all the paddling, cooking, etc.
"Ay," said Nena the head-man, a little wizen-faced but kindly-eyed old
fellow, whose body was so deeply tatooed in broad vertical bands that
scarcely a strip of brown skin could be seen--"ay, ye must take my
young men; for are ye not our guests, ye, and the brown sailor men as
well? and they shall tend on ye all. That is our custom to strangers who
have come to us as friends."
Preparations were at once made for a start, and Harvey went to tell
Tessa, whom he found in the house allotted to her, listening to Atkins,
who was planning some improvements in the interior so as to add to her
comfort.
"I wish I could go with you, Harvey," said Tessa with a bright smile;
"it would be like the old days in Ponape, with you and my brothers. How
long will you be away?"
"Perhaps two days. Will you come, Atkins?"
"Not me! The less salt water I see and the less rain-water I feel for
another week the better I'll like it. Besides, I'm going to do a bit of
carpentering work for Miss Remington. We may have to hang out here for a
month before that Dutch schooner comes along, and I'm just going to set
to work and make Miss Remington comfy. And if you had any sense, Harvey,
you'd stay under shelter instead of trying to get another dose of shakes
by going out and fooling around in a canoe."
Harvey laughed. "There's no more fever for me, Atkins. I'm clear of it.
That little boat trip of ours has knocked it clean out of my bones, and
if you don't believe me, I'm willing to prove it by getting to the top
of that coconut-tree outside there in ten seconds' quicker time than you
can do it."
The boat voyage had certainly done him good, and although he had by
no means thoroughly recovered his strength, his cheeks had lost their
yellow, haggard look, and his eyes were bright with returning health.
Atkins, who knew that Tessa was to become his wife, looked first at him
and then at her with sly humour twinkling in his honest grey eyes. Then
he took his pipe out of his pocket and put it in his mouth.
"Well, I'll come back by and by. Two is company, and three is none.
The sooner _I_ go, the better you'll like it, and the sooner _you_ go,
Harvey, the sooner I can get to work;" and so saying he walked out.
Tessa's dark eyes danced with fun as she walked backwards from Harvey,
and leaning against the thatched side of the house, put her finger to
her lips. "What a _beautiful_ sensible man he is, isn't he, Harvey?"
"He's a man after my own heart, Tessa," and then Maoni, who sat smoking
a cigarette in a corner of the room, discreetly turned her back as
certain sibilant sounds were frequently repeated for a minute or two.
"Harvey, you sinner," she whispered, "I don't like you a bit. Really and
truly I don't.... Now,_ now_, no more.... Maoni can hear you, I'm sure.
The _idea_ of your going away for two days--two whole days--and marching
calmly up to me and telling me of it in such a rude, matter-of-fact
manner. You _are_ unkind.... _Don't_.... I don't like you, Harvey...
I'll tell father that you went away and left me for two whole days--to
go fishing and pig-shooting, and poor Mr. Atkins had to look after me,
and... oh, Harvey, Harvey, isn't it lovely! Father will be so glad, and
so will Carmela and Jack, and Librada and Ned. Harvey dear, I do hope
your sisters will like me. Perhaps they will think I am only a native
girl.... Oh, _do_ be careful, I can see Maoni's back shaking. She
_knows_ you're kissing me, I'm sure."
"Don't care if she does; don't care if she sees me kissing you, like
this, and this, _and_ this; don't care if Atkins sees us."
Her low, happy laugh sounded like the trill of a bird. "Harvey dear, do
you remember the day when we went to Roan Kiti in Ponape--when you were
sailing the _Belle Brandon_ for father?"
Harvey didn't remember, but, like a sensible lover, said he did, and
emphasised his remembrance in a proper manner.
"Well, now, listen... Oh, you horrid fellow, why do you look at me as if
I were a baby! Now, I shan't tell you anything at all.... There, don't
pretend to be sorry, for you know... oh, Harvey dear, I _must_ tell
you."
"Tell me, dearest."
"That's a good boy, a good would-be-climbing-a-coconut-tree youth, who
wanted to show off before poor Atkins who told me just now that you were
'the whitest man in the South Seas.' He did really."
"Atkins is 'an excellent good man,' and you are the sweetest and most
beautiful girl in _all_ the wide, wide Pacific. Come, tell me what it is
that you _must_ tell me."
"I'll tell you if you don't kiss me any more. Maoni's eyes can see round
her shoulders, I believe. I _do wish_ she wasn't here.... Well, that day
when you and I were climbing up the mountain-path you let a branch
swing back--you careless thing--and it hit me in the face and hurt me
terribly, and you took me up in your arms and kissed me. Oh, Harvey,
don't you remember? Kissed me, just because I was crying like a baby.
Harvey dear, I was only fourteen then, but I loved you then--that was
the real, _very_ beginning of it all, I think. And then I went away to
school to San Francisco, and _you_ went away--and I suppose you never
thought one little bit about me again."
"Indeed I did, Tess" (here was a silent but well-employed interlude); "I
often thought of you, dear, but not as a lover thinks. For in those days
you were to me only a sweet child (if Maoni wasn't here I'd pick you up
and nurse you), a sweet, sweet little comrade whose dear, soft eyes used
to smile into mine whenever I stepped into your father's house, and----"
"Oh, Harvey, Harvey! I have never, never forgotten you. _There!_ and
_there!_ and _there!_ I don't care if Maoni, or any one, or all the
world sees me," and she flung her soft arms round his neck and kissed
him again and again in the sheer abandonment of her innocent happiness.
"But you really _love_ me now, Harvey, don't you? And oh, Harvey dear,
where shall we live? And your sisters... if they don't like me?"
Harvey stroked her soft hair, and pressed his lips to her cheeks.
"They won't _like_ you, Tess. They'll just love you--and they'll make me
jealous."
Again her happy laugh trilled out. "How lovely!... Harvey dear?"
"Yes, Tess."
"I want to tell you something--something that only mother knows,
something about me--and a man."
Harvey looked smilingly into her deep, tender eyes, half-suffused with
tears.
"Go ahead, dear."
"Go ahead, indeed! You rough, rude sailor! Any one would think I was a
man by the way you speak to me... But, Harvey dear, listen... there was
a man who wanted to marry me."
Harvey was all attention at once. "Sit down here, little woman, and tell
me who the------"
"Sh! Don't swear, or I won't tell you anything, not _anything at all_,
about it.... Harvey dear, why do you want to go away fishing? Stay here,
and help poor Mr. Atkins."
"Who was the man, Tess?"
"Are you really, really going away for two whole days?"
"I am, sweet."
"Harvey dear, I'll tell you all about it. You won't be angry?"
"All depends. Who was the man?"
His laughing eyes belied his assumed sternness of visage, for in her
eyes there shone a light so serenely pure that he knew he had naught to
dread.
"A very, _very_ nice man, sir. Now try and guess who it was?"
"Old Schuler, the fat German trader at Yap."
"Oh, you wretch, Harvey! He's been married three times, and has dozens
and dozens of all sorts of <DW52> children.... Now there! Guess again
or I'll twist this side of your moustache until I make you cry....
Harvey dear, who was the girl whose photograph was over your bunk in
father's schooner?"
"I forget. Most likely it was my sister Kate," was the prompt reply.
"I don't believe you, Mr. Harvey Carr. But I'll find out all about _you_
by and by. You'll have to just tell me _everything_. Now guess again."
"The captain of the _Lafayette_. He asked each of your sisters to marry
him, I know, and I suppose you followed in turn as soon as you began to
wear long dresses."
"That horrible man! We all hated him. No, indeed, it was somebody better
than the captain of a whaler."
"Don't be so superior, Tess. Your brother Ned hopes to be skipper of a
whaler some day."
"But Ned is very good-looking, and----"
"So was old Ayton before he lost his teeth, and one eye, and began 'ter
chaw terbacker' and drink Bourbon by the gallon.... Beauty is only skin
deep, my child."
"Oh, you, you--I don't know what to call you, but I do know that I have
a round turn of your moustache in my hand, and could make you go on your
knees if I liked. Now guess again; you're getting 'warmer,' because
it--_he_ I mean--is a captain. Quick, and don't struggle so. I mean to
keep you here just as long as I please."
"Well, then, old Freeman. He's a captain, or was one about a hundred
years ago, when he was much younger than he is now." (Freeman was a
nonogenerian settler on Ponape and a neighbour of Tessa's father.)
"Don't be so silly! I've a great mind not to tell you at all, but as
you haven't whimpered when I pulled your moustache I _shall_ tell
you--it--he, I mean--was Captain Reade, of the United States ship
_Narrangansett_. Now!"
Then all her raillery vanished in a moment. "He was a great friend of
father's, you know, Harvey; and first he asked father, and father said
I was too young, and then when I was leaving school in San Francisco to
come home he wrote to me and asked me if he could come and see me. And
he did come, and asked me to marry him."
"And you really didn't care for him, Tessa?"
"Not a bit. How could I? Harvey, I never, never thought about anybody in
the world but you," and she looked into his face with swimming eyes as
he pressed his lips to hers. "There, I'll let you go now, dear. I can
hear Huka and the others coming for you. But Harvey dear, don't stay
away for two whole days."
*****
An hour after leaving the village the canoes turned aside into a small
narrow bay on one of the larger islands. The water was of great depth,
from sixty to seventy fathoms, though the bay itself was in no part
wider than a hundred yards. A solid wall of coral enclosed it on three
sides, rising sheer up from the deep blue, and its surface was now bared
and drying fast under the rays of the sun, for the rain had cleared off,
and the sky was a vault of unflecked blue once more.
The natives had told Harvey and Roka that this bay was a spot famed as
the haunt of a huge species of rock-cod called _pura_, some of which,
they said, "took two strong men to lift," and they were greatly pleased
when they found that both the white man and Roka knew the _pura_ well,
and had eagerly assented to Harvey's proposition that they should spend
an hour or two in the place, and try and get one or two of the gigantic
fish; as they had the necessary tackle--thick, six-plaited lines of coir
fibre, with heavy wooden hooks such as are used for shark-fishing by the
natives of the equatorial and north-west islands of the Pacific.
*****
Had Harvey and his companions been ten minutes later in turning aside
to enter the bay they would have been seen by Chard and Hendry ere they
descended the coral mound at the north end of the lagoon, and much
of this tale would not have been told. For had the destroyers of poor
Oliver and his crew discovered the canoes they probably would at
once have launched their boat again, and have put to sea, or at least
prepared themselves for an attack. But great events so often come of
small things.
For nearly an hour Harvey, Roka, and Huka fished for _pura_ from the
coral ledges, but without success. They had baited their hooks with
flying-fish, as was the practice of the Pikirami people.
"Master," said Roka presently to Harvey, "never have I had good luck
with flying-fish when fishing for _pura_ in mine own land of Manhiki.
'Tis a _feke_{*} that the pura loveth."
* Octopus.
"Ay, Roka, _feke_ is a good bait for the _pura_ and all those great fish
which live deep down in their _fale amu_" (houses of coral). "Let us
seek for one on the outer reef. Then we shall return here. It is in my
heart to show these our good friends of Pikirami that there is one white
man who can catch a _pura_."
Roka showed his white teeth in an approving smile. "Thou art a clever
white man, and can do all those things that we brown men can do. Malua
hath told me that there is no one like thee in all the world for skill
in fishing and many things. Let us go seek _feke_."
The rest of their party--the men from the _Motutapu_ and the Pikirami
people--were busily employed in preparations for cooking, some making
ready an oven of red-hot stones, others putting up fish and chickens
in leaf wrappers, and Malua and two Pikirami youths of his own age were
husking numbers of young drinking-nuts.
Telling his native friends that he would return in an hour or two, or as
soon as he had caught some _feke_. Harvey set off, accompanied by Roka
and Huka, the latter carrying a heavy turtle-spear, about five feet in
length from the tip of its wide arrow-headed point to the end of the
pole of ironwood.
Turning to the eastward, they struck into the cool shade of the narrow
strip of forest which clothed the island from the inner lagoon beach to
the outer or weather side, and Harvey at once began to search among the
small pools on the reef for an octopus, Huka with Roka going on ahead
with his turtle-spear. In the course of a quarter of an hour they were
out of sight of each other.
For some time Harvey, armed with a light wooden fish-spear, carefully
examined the shallow pools as he walked along over the reef, and
after he had progressed about a mile he at last saw one of the hideous
creatures he sought lying on the white sandy bottom of a circular hole
in the reef, its green malevolent eyes looking upward at the intruder.
In an instant he thrust the spear through its horrible marbled head, and
drew it out upon the rocks, where he proceeded to kill it, a task which
took him longer than he anticipated; then carrying it back to the shore,
he threw the still quivering monster upon a prominent rock and set out
again in search of another, intending to follow his native comrades, who
were in hopes of striking a turtle.
As he tramped over the reef, crushing the living, many- coral
under his booted feet, his eyes were arrested by some objects lying
on the bottom of a deep pool. He bent down and looked carefully--five
magnificent orange cowries were clinging closely together upon a large
white and sea-worn slab of dead coral.
An exclamation ot pleasure escaped from him as he saw the great size and
rich colouring of these rare and beautiful shells.
"What a lovely present for Tessa!" he thought; and taking off his shirt
he dived into the clear water and brought them up one by one. Then with
almost boyish delight he placed them beside him on the reef, and looked
at them admiringly.
"Oh you beauties!" he said, passing his hand over their glossy backs;
"how delighted Tessa will be! No one else has ever had the luck to
find five such shells together. I'm a _tagata manuia lava_,{*} as Malua
says."
* A man with extraordinary good luck.
He picked the shells up carefully, put them into his wide-brimmed leaf
hat, which he then tied up in his shirt, and taking his spear again
made towards the shore, too pleased at his good fortune to trouble any
further about another _feke_ and only anxious to let Roka and Huka see
his prizes.
Half-way to the shore he paused and looked along the curving line
of beach to see if either of them were in sight; then from behind a
vine-covered boulder not fifty yards away a rifle cracked, and he fell
forward on his face without a cry.
CHAPTER XII
Soon after they had left Harvey the Manhikian and Huka parted, each
preferring to take his own way, Roka laughingly telling his comrade that
although he, Roka, had no spear, he would bring back a turtle.
"In my land of Manihiki we trouble not about spears. We dive after the
turtle and drag them ashore."
"Thou boaster," replied the Savage Islander good-naturedly, as he
stepped briskly down the hard, white sand towards the water, his sturdy,
reddish-brown body naked to the waist, and his brawny right arm twirling
the heavy turtle-spear about his head as if it were a bamboo wand. "I go
into the lagoon, whither goest thou?"
Roka pointed ahead. "Along the beach towards the islet with the high
trees. May we both be lucky in our fishing."
In a few minutes he was out of sight and hearing of his shipmate, for
the beach took a sudden curve round a low, densely-verdured point, on
the other side of which it ran in an almost straight line for a mile.
Suddenly he paused and shaded his eyes with his hand as he caught sight
of a dark object lying on the sand.
"'Tis a boat," he muttered, and in another moment he was speeding
towards it. When within a few hundred yards he stopped and then crouched
upon his hands and knees, his dark eyes gleaming with excitement.
"It is the captain's boat," he said to himself, as lying flat upon his
stomach he dragged himself over the sand into the shelter of the low
thicket scrub which fringed the bank at high-water mark. Once there,
he stood up, and watched carefully. Then stripping off his clothes and
throwing them aside, he sped swiftly along an old native path, which ran
parallel to the beach, till he was abreast of the boat. Then he crouched
down again and listened. No sound broke the silence except the call of
the sea-birds and the drone of the surf upon the reef.
He waited patiently, his keen eyes searching and his quick ear
listening; then creeping softly along on his hands and knees again, he
examined the sandy soil. In a few minutes his search was rewarded, for
he came across the footmarks of Chard and the captain, leading to the
vine-covered boulders under the shelter of which they had made their
camp. Following these up, he was soon at the place itself, and examining
the various articles lying upon the ground--provisions, clothing, the
roll of charts, sextant. Leaning against the rocky wall was a Snider
carbine. He seized it quickly, opened the breach, and saw that it was
loaded; then he made a hurried search for more cartridges, and found
nearly a dozen tied up in a handkerchief with about fifty Winchesters.
These latter he quickly buried in the sand, and then with his eyes
alight with the joy of savage expectancy of revenge, he again sought and
found the tracks of the two men, which led in the very direction from
which he had come.
To a man like Roka there was no difficulty in following the line which
Hendry and the supercargo had taken; their footsteps showed deep in the
soft, sandy soil, rendered the more impressionable by the heavy downfall
of rain a few hours before. And even had they left no traces underfoot
of their progress, the countless broken branches and vines which they
had pushed or torn aside on their way through the forest were a sure
guide to one of Nature's children, whose pursuit was quickened by
his desire for vengeance upon the murderers of his brother and his
shipmates.
Pushing his way through a dense strip of the tough, thorny scrub called
_ngiia_, he suddenly emerged into the open once more--on the weather
side of the island. First his eye ran along the sand to discover which
way the footsteps trended; they led southwards towards a low, rugged
boulder whose sides and summit were thickly clothed with a thick,
fleshy-leaved creeper. Beyond that lay the bare expanse of reef, along
which he saw Harvey Carr was walking towards the shore, unconscious of
danger. And right in his line of vision he saw Chard, who, kneeling
amid the foliage of the boulder, was covering Harvey with his rifle; in
another instant the supercargo had fired, Roka dropped on one knee and
raised his Snider carbine, just as Sam Chard turned to Hendry with a
smile upon his handsome, evil face, and waved his hand mockingly towards
the prone figure of Harvey.
"That's one more to the good, Louis----" he began, when Roka's carbine
rang out, and the supercargo spun round, staggering, and then fell upon
his hands and knees, with the blood gushing in torrents from his mouth.
Hendry, taking no heed of anything but his own safety, dashed into the
undergrowth and disappeared.
Running past Chard, rifle in hand, the Manhikian launched a curse at the
groaning man, who heard him not in his agony. Leaping from pool to pool
over the rough, jagged coral, which cut and tore his feet and legs, the
seaman sprang to Harvey's aid, and a hoarse sob of joy burst from him
when he saw that he was not dead.
"My thigh is broken, Roka. Carry me to the shore quickly, and then
haste, haste, good Roka, and warn the others. These men of Pikirami are
traitors. Haste thee, dear friend, if ye be a good man and true, and
help to save the woman who is dear to me."
Tearing off the sleeves of Harvey's shirt, Roka, as he answered, bound
them tightly over the wound to stay the flow of blood. "Nay, master,
'tis not the men of Pikirami. 'Tis the captain and the _tuhi tuhi_{*}
who have done this to thee. Nay, question me no more... so, gently, let
me lift thee."
He raised Harvey up in his mighty arms as if he were a child, his right
hand still grasping the Snider carbine, and carried him carefully to the
beach. There he laid him down for a while.
"Stay not here with me, Roka of Manhiki," said Harvey, trying hard
to speak calmly, though he was suffering the greatest agony from his
wound--"stay not here, but run, run quickly, so that there may be no
more murder done. Leave me here.... Tell the _sua alii_{**} to get the
people together and hunt and slay those two men. Give them no mercy."
* I.e., one who writes--a supercargo or clerk.
** The mate, chief officer--one next in command to a
captain.
"No mercy shall they have," said the Manhikian grimly; "so rest thee
content for a little while.... _Aue!_"
He sprang to his feet, carbine in hand, for from out the thickset jungle
there emerged a thing of horror to look upon.
Chard, leaning upon his Winchester, was staggering down to the beach,
with his lower jaw shot away. He came blindly on towards the man he had
sought to murder, gasping and groaning. Then he saw Roka, dropped his
Winchester, threw up his hands, and tried to speak.
Roka walked up to him.
"'Tis better for thee to die quickly," he said.
The supercargo swayed to and fro, and mutely held out both hands to
Harvey as if imploring help or forgiveness.
Roka drew back, and planted his left foot firmly in the sand, as he
placed the muzzle of his carbine against Chard's breast, and Chard,
grasping the barrel in his left hand to steady himself, bent his
dreadful face upon his chest.
*****
As the loud report reverberated through the leafy forest aisles there
came the sound of rushing feet, and Malua and the rest of the crew of
the Motutapu, together with the six Pikirami natives, burst through the
undergrowth, and gazed in wonder at the scene before them--Harvey lying
on the sand, Roka with his still-smoking rifle in his hand, standing
over the dead body of Chard.
Too weak from loss of blood to answer Malua's weeping inquiries, Harvey
yet managed to smile at him, and indicate Roka by a wave of his hand.
Then the Manhikian spoke.
"No time is there now to tell ye all. Run back, some of ye, to the _sua
alii_ Atkins, and tell him that I have killed the man Chard, but that
the captain hath escaped. Get thee each a rifle and follow him. He hath
fled towards his boat, which lieth on the little island with the high
trees. Follow, follow quickly, lest he drag the boat into the water
and sail away. Slay him. Let his blood run out. And tell the _sua alii_
Atkins and the white girl that Harfi hath been sorely hurt, but is well,
and will not die, for it is but a broken bone."
Five or six men darted off, while the rest, under Roka's directions,
quickly made a litter for Harvey, and placed him upon it.
"Art thou in pain, master?" asked the giant Manhikian tenderly, as the
bearers lifted the wounded man.
"Ay, but let me smoke so that the pain may go. And one of ye go to where
I fell on the reef and bring me the five pule,{*} lest when the tide
cometh in they be lost."
* Cowries.
Roka himself ran off, picked up the hat and shells and brought them
back; then he gave the word to march.
Half-way through the forest they were met by Atkins and Tessa, who were
accompanied by the entire population of the village, except those of the
young men who had set off in pursuit of Hendry.
"I'm all right, Tessa," said Harvey; "it's only a broken bone. Atkins,
old man, don't look so worried. You can set it easily enough. Good man,
you've brought some rum, I see, and 'I willna say no,' as poor Morrison
used to say."
Atkins, whose hand was shaking with excitement, for he thought that
perhaps Harvey was mortally wounded and was only assuming cheerfulness,
gave him a stiff tot of rum.
"Here's luck to you, Atkins. Tessa dear, don't cry. Atkins will fix me
up in a brace of shakes as soon as we get to the village. And look here,
Tess. See what I found upon the reef."
*****
Long before sunset Harvey was sleeping quietly in the head-man's house,
with Tessa and Maoni watching beside him. Atkins had carefully set
the broken limb with broad splints of coconut-spathe; and, proud and
satisfied with his work, was pacing to and fro outside the house,
smoking his pipe.
Presently Latour and Malua appeared, and the Frenchman beckoned to the
second mate.
"What is it, steward?"
"Huka has just come back, sir. He wants to see you. The captain is
dead."
"Thank God for that. Where did they get him?"
"Huka will tell you, sir. Here he is."
The Savage Islander stepped forward, and raised his hand in salute, with
a smile of pride upon his lips.
"I been kill him," he said in his broken English; "I was come along back
to meet Mr. Harvey, when I hear the guns. And then I see the captain
come, running quick. He have Winchester in his hand, and when he see
me he stop. He fire two, three times at me. Then I run up to him, and I
drive my turtle spear through him, and he fall down and I put my foot on
his mouth, and he die."
Atkins slapped him on the shoulder. "Good man you, Huka! Stay here a
moment, and I'll bring you a big drink of rum. Then we must go and bury
both the swine."
*****
Three weeks later the _Sikiana_ sailed into the lagoon, and the "good
little Dutch skipper," of whom Harvey had spoken, had him brought on
board and placed in his bunk for the voyage to Ponape.
"My tear Mees Tessa," he said, "Mr. Carr haf dold me dat your fader vill
gif me five hundred dollar ven ve get to Ponape. If der _Sikiana_ vas
mein own ship I vould dake you und Mr. Carr and der second mate und all
your natives to Ponape for nodings; for your fader vas a good man to me,
und Harvey Carr vas a good man to me ven I sailed mit him in the _Belle
Brandon_. But you must invide old Westphalen to the wedding."
"Indeed we shall, captain."
"And me too, miss?" asked Atkins, with a sly twinkle in his eye.
"And you too, of course, dear, dear Atkins, so good, brave, and true.
There, look, Harvey, I am going to kiss Mr. Atkins."
"God bless you both, miss," said the mate huskily.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tessa, by Louis Becke
*** | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Gutenberg (PG-19) |
Selective dorsal rhizotomy: an old treatment re-emerging.
Selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR) is a neurosurgical technique developed to reduce spasticity and improve mobility in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and lower extremity spasticity. It involves the selective division of lumbosacral afferent (sensory) rootlets at the conus or at the intervertebral foramina under intraoperative neurophysiological guidance. First described in 1908, early procedures were effective at reducing spasticity but were associated with significant morbidity. Technical advancements over the last two decades have reduced the invasiveness of the procedure, typically from a five-level laminoplasty to a single-level laminotomy at the conus. As practised today, SDR is an effective treatment for young patients with bilateral spastic CP who are rigorously selected for surgery and for whom realistic objectives are set. SDR has therefore re-emerged as a valuable management option for spastic CP. In this article, the authors review the single-level SDR technique and its role in the management of bilateral spastic CP, with particular emphasis on patient selection and outcomes. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | PubMed Abstracts |
The performance of computer systems continues to improve as the number of processing cores increases. However, this increase in the number of processors also requires a corresponding improvement in a system's interconnect bandwidth in order for the full performance advantage to be realized.
Fiber optic data links, when packaged close to a processor and/or a switch chip, provide dramatic improvements in interconnect bandwidth and enable high speed data communications over greater distances. Fiber optic data links are typically facilitated by the use of optical transceivers. Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP or QSFP+) optical transceivers are, for example, frequently utilized to interface switches, routers, media converters, and similar devices to optical fibers. The QSFP+ specification supports Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Infiniband, and other communication applications. Each of the four transceiver channels may operate at a data rate of 1 to 10.5 gigabits per second and support a reach of up to 100 meters. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | USPTO Backgrounds |
If shopping for digital goods instead of physical goods is how you prefer to spend your Black Friday, Google Play has you covered. Right now, until November 29, you can score some great deals on everything offered in Google Play including games, apps, books, movies, TV shows, comics and more.
If shopping for digital goods instead of physical goods is how you prefer to spend your Black Friday, Google Play has you covered. Right now, until November 29, you can score some great deals on everything offered in Google Play including games, apps, books, movies, TV shows, comics and more. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Article
Après la Gazzetta dello Sport, c'est un autre quotidien italien qui fait le point dans le dossier Bonucci : l'agent du joueur a bien rencontré le PSG il y a peu mais Paris ne fera une offre au Milan AC que la semaine prochaine.
Les journaux milanais se rejoignent concernant les bruits autour de Leonardo Bonucci, capitaine du Milan AC dont l'avenir est de plus en plus incertain dans la capitale lombarde. La Gazzetta dello Sport avait annoncé en début d'après-midi que l'agent du joueur Alessandro Lucci avait rencontré les dirigeants parisiens à Paris hier et le quotidien généraliste le Corriere della Sera confirme l'information. Le représentant a discuté ce mardi avec le directeur sportif du PSG Antero Henrique d'un éventuel contrat au PSG.
Les deux hommes sont en contacts de façon continue mais, pour l'heure, l'avenir de Bonucci reste encore à être écrit et il attend surtout d'en savoir plus sur l'avenir de son club actuel. Sa décision finale ne sera prise qu'en fin de semaine, au mieux. Le TAS doit donner sa réponse dans le litige qui oppose le Milan AC à l'UEFA concernant le fair-play financier et la sanction qui en a découlé dès demain tandis que le nouveau board du club est attendu samedi, deux décisions qui vont peser lourd pour le futur de Milan.
Mais selon le Corriere della Sera, le PSG est bien décidé à faire une offre au Milan AC et elle sera formulée au cours de la semaine prochaine, après que la situation du club aura été éclaircie. Du côté de Milan, il se murmure que le défenseur de 31 ans pourrait être sacrifié si le club devait vendre des joueurs, une rumeur qui a toujours été démentie par les dirigeants locaux. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
West Creek (Pennsylvania)
West Creek is a tributary of Fishing Creek, in Columbia County and Sullivan County, in Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is long and flows through Davidson Township in Sullivan County and Jackson Township, Sugarloaf Township, Benton Township, and Benton in Columbia County. The water temperature of the creek ranges from to . The discharge ranges from 0 to nearly 10 cubic meters per second. Rock formations in the watershed include the Trimmers Rock Formation, the Catskill Formation, and the Huntley Mountain Formation. The creek's watershed has an area of 16.6 square miles, most of which is agricultural, forested, or urban land. A small number of dams, mills, and schoolhouses were built on West Creek in the 19th and early 20th century. West Creek has the highest level of biodiversity of any stream in the upper Fishing Creek watershed.
Course
West Creek begins on Huckleberry Mountain in Davidson Township, Sullivan County. It flows east for several hundred feet before turning south-southeast for several tenths of a mile, exiting Sullivan County and entering Jackson Township, Columbia County. It then turns south-southwest for a short distance, reaching the base of Huckleberry Mountain and crossing Pennsylvania Route 118, before southeast for a few miles in a valley, receiving one unnamed tributary from the left and another from the right. The creek then enters Sugarloaf Township and receives another unnamed tributary from the left and turns south. For the next few miles, it flows alongside West Creek Road and receives another unnamed tributary from the right. It then crosses Pennsylvania Route 239 and receives York Hollow, its first named tributary, from the right. The creek then turns southeast for several miles, flowing alongside Pennsylvania Route 239 and receiving another unnamed tributary from the left and entering Benton Township. It turns south for more than a mile, still flowing alongside Pennsylvania Route 239 and crossing it several times. The creek then exits its valley and turns south-southwest, flowing along the edge of a plain. After several tenths of a mile, it receives Spencer Run, its second and final named tributary, from the right and then turns south for more than a mile, passing along the western border of Benton. The creek then turns south-southeast and exits Benton. A few tenths of a mile further downstream, it reaches its confluence with Fishing Creek.
West Creek joins Fishing Creek upstream of its mouth.
Hydrology
The water temperature in West Creek in the summer can be as high as , which is 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) higher than coldwater fish can tolerate. Between May 2010 and July 2011, it ranged from below in February and March 2011 to in August 2010.
Between May 2010 and July 2011, the concentration of dissolved oxygen in West Creek ranged from slightly under eight milligrams per liter in May 2010 to nearly seventeen milligrams per liter in late January 2011. This is well above the minimum required concentration of dissolved oxygen for optimal fish habitation.
West Creek is less affected by episodic acidification than most of the rest of the upper Fishing Creek watershed, with the exception of Coles Creek. The pH of West Creek is at its lowest in late winter and spring, when it is typically around 6.3. During the rest of the year, it is above 7.0. The entire pH range of the creek ranges from just over 6.0 to 7.2 or 7.3. The concentration of dissolved aluminum in West Creek is under 70 micrograms per liter, considerably less than the concentration needed to kill fish. The aluminum concentration is, in fact, usually approximately zero and is often under 40 micrograms per liter. However, early in 2011, the concentration was observed twice to be nearly 60 micrograms per liter.
The discharge of West Creek is usually less than two cubic meters per second. However, it sometimes is between two and five cubic meters per second and has occasionally been as high as nearly ten cubic meters per second. The conductance of the creek ranges from slightly over 40 to more than 60 micro-siemens per centimeter.
Geography and geology
The elevation near the mouth of West Creek is above sea level. The elevation of the creek's source is between above sea level.
The rock in the southern part of the watershed of West Creek is of the Trimmers Rock Formation. This consists of siltstone and shale and comes from the Devonian period. The northern part of the watershed has rock belonging to the Catskill Formation, which consists of sandstone and siltstone and also comes from the Devonian. The Huntley Mountain Formation can be found at the headwaters of the creek. This formation consists of sandstone and siltstone and comes from the Mississippian and Devonian periods.
Watershed
The watershed of West Creek has an area of . The creek's mouth is in the United States Geological Survey quadrangle of Benton. However, its source is in the quadrangle of Elk Grove.
There is significant agricultural activity done in the lower reaches of the watershed of West Creek and there are also some residential areas. Additionally, there are some agricultural lands in the upper reaches of the watershed. Much of the rest of the watershed is forested land. Some of the most downstream parts of the watershed are urban.
History and etymology
West Creek has been known by its current name since at least the late 1830s. The creek was entered into the Geographic Names Information System on August 2, 1979. Its identifier in the Geographic Names Information System is 1192054.
In 1799, a schoolhouse was constructed on West Creek near Benton. It was one of the first schoolhouses in the vicinity of Benton. During the 1864 elections, at least two Union soldiers were stationed on the creek, guarding the polling venues. A mill called the Thomas Mill was built on the creek in 1865 and remained operational in 1914, when it was owned by N.B. Cole. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was a timber-producing business on the creek, run by J. Harvey Creveling.
In 1881, J. J. McHenry constructed a queen truss covered bridge over West Creek for $348.00. The bridge was moved to South Branch Roaring Creek when it was sold to H. H. Knoebel in 1936. A two-span concrete tee beam bridge carrying Pennsylvania Route 239 was built over the creek in 1934. It is long and is located north of Benton. Another bridge of the same type, but with only a single, was built north of Benton in the same year. This bridge is long. A two-span steel stringer/multi-beam or girder bridge was constructed over the creek in Benton in 1951. It is long and carries State Route 4030. A bridge of the same time, was built north of Benton in 1958. It is long and carries T-720. A prestressed box beam or girders bridge carrying Pennsylvania Route 239 was built in 2004. It is located north of Benton and is long.
In 1914, the Benton Water Supply Company constructed a dam on West Creek upstream of Benton. A ten-acre private campground called the West Creek Gap Campgrounds was established at the headwaters of West Creek in 1979 by the wife of George Mikulski.
Biology
There are 41 macroinvertebrate taxa that have been observed in West Creek, more than have been observed in all of upper Fishing Creek. The number of macroinvertebrates per square meter in West Creek at the site WC1 (in the lower reaches of the creek) is nearly 900, which is far higher than the number of macroinvertebrates per square meter in any other site except the site WC2, in the middle reaches of the creek. Site WC2 has a macroinvertebrate density of 600 macroinvertebrates per square meter. Approximately 60% of the taxa are Ephemeroptera (mayflies), 10% each are Plecoptera (stoneflies), and approximately 5% are Trichoptera (caddisflies).
There are a total of eight species of wild fish in West Creek. Brook trout and brown trout both inhabit West Creek, although brook trout are slightly more common than brown trout, with nine brook trout and only seven brown trout being observed in a 2010 or 2011 electrofishing survey. Trout are more common upstream of the Pennsylvania Route 239 crossing of the creek than downstream of it. The most common fish in the creek are sculpin, eastern blacknose dace, and cutlips minnows. In the aforementioned electrofishing survey, a total of 81 sculpin, 34 black-nosed dace, and 17 cutlips minnows were observed. Other species of fish in the watershed include johnny darter, white sucker, and creek chub.
In 2011, the habitat quality of upper Fishing Creek and its tributaries were rated on a scale of 1 to 200 (with a higher rating indicating better habitability) by Point Park University and the Fishing Creek Sportsmans' Association. The headwaters of West Creek were given a rating of 192. The rating is significantly lower further downstream, with it being 175 downstream of the crossing of Pennsylvania Route 239. The rating averages 138 where the creek is in Benton and the lowest rating is 115. This rating occurred downstream of the Market Street bridge in Benton.
The Shannon Diversity Index, which is commonly used to measure the diversity of biological communities, of West Creek is slightly over 2.5. The Hilsenhoff Biotic Index, a measure of pollution-tolerant macroinvertebrates, on much of the creek ranges from 1.6 to 2.5, although an area of the creek near Benton ranges from 2.6 to 3.5. There is little riparian buffering along the sections of West Creek where agriculture is done.
See also
Coles Creek (Pennsylvania), next tributary of Fishing Creek going upstream
Culley Run, next tributary of Fishing Creek going upstream
List of tributaries of Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)
List of rivers of Pennsylvania
References
Category:Rivers of Columbia County, Pennsylvania
Category:Tributaries of Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River)
Category:Rivers of Pennsylvania | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Wikipedia (en) |
One of my worst character traits, and one that I manage to keep mostly under control, is a short temper that flares up at frustrations that are always ridiculous in hindsight. Fortunately I have learned to recognize the signs, and can usually get myself out of the situation that is making me see red BEFORE I wind up needing to apologize to people for being a jerk.
I bring this up because one of my more memorable and humiliating temper tantrums revolved around the last boss of Ys Book II, back in the glory days of the TurboDuo, who was a right bastard of a boss and made even worse by an unskippable and infuriating cutscene that played before every attempt.
I was NOT good at recognizing how angry this was making me at the time, and it was the closest I’ve ever come to breaking a controller in rage. I had barely enough self control to restrain myself to just turning off the console and walking away, never to put the disc back in the system again.
So, it’s been a sore spot for a couple of decades now. Not just because I’d gotten to the final fight of a long RPG and been stymied, but because there was so much personal embarrassment around how it had gotten under my skin.
Anyway, short version, I have recently found myself wanting to go back to the Ys games, give the first two-parter a new chance, and see if I’d be able to get through the things without losing my cool. Playing through all of the Souls games last year with no thrown controllers gave me some hope in this regard, and XSeed publishing the PC ports of the series on Steam gave me the opportunity (the TurboDuo is long since gone to a Canadian gentleman on eBay.)
I am not ashamed to admit that I set the difficulty level for both games to Easy, nor am I ashamed to resorting to a walkthrough to get through the maze-like Shrine of Solomon in the second game. I’m pretty sure it was designed to sell hint books back in the day, and I already made it through the maze without said hint books once…
…and I am glad to report that the rematch went much more in my favor this time around AND that I don’t have any new embarrassing outbursts to confess. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Joy Reid is a big marquee star for NBC News, a weekend anchor at MSNBC. She is also a bigoted homophobe and proven liar. Just how broken is the establishment media as a whole–and NBC News in particular? So broken that a serial-lying, gay-baiting, conspiracy theorist who believes the Jews should be cleansed from the Middle East still has a job at NBC News, a national news outlet.
I’m not calling on Reid to be fired. But it is certainly valid to point to Reid’s ongoing employment as a sign of just how dysfunctional and amoral our media have become due to Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The media continue to crybaby over Trump’s killing “norms” as they themselves annihilate every journalistic standard of truth, credibility, and human decency.
So here are the nine grotesque things Joy Reid, the big NBC News star, has said or done:
The worst thing Joy Reid has done, the most unforgivable act committed by this hateful woman, did not occur ten years ago. Nope, it happened just a couple of months ago when Reid lied to the world about being the victim of a hacker. According to Reid, a hacker went into her now-defunct blog and seeded it with the worst kind of homophobia as a means to frame her.
Reid’s team and NBC News even went so far as to tell us the FBI was involved, even though lying to the FBI is a crime, as is filing a false report.
Reid sent the entire media on a wild goose chase looking for a hacker she invented to cover up her homophobic past, and is STILL an anchor at an establishment media outlet.
In a post on the Reid Report dated July 16, 2006, Reid admonished CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for being too kind to Jews. Here is the excerpt:
Blitzer’s behavior is not only anti-journalistic, it’s irresponsible and transparantly (sic) ideological. If he wants to do an editorial program promoting the interests of a foreign government (Israel,) he should petition his bosses at the network to do just that. Otherwise, if he is purporting to do “news,” he should stick to the news, and put aside his AIPAC flak jacket. (Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha didn’t fare much better with MSNBC’s resident twitterbug Norah “Giggles” O’Donnell, who even managed to characterize the U.S. veto of a U.N. resultuion (sic) condemning Israel’s use of excessive force in Gaza as a repudiation of criticism of Israel by the Security Council…) Shame on CNN for allowing this spectacle to go on.
To sum up the below, Ahmadinejad is calling for Jews to be ethnically cleansed from Israel and the Middle East, to be sent back to Germany and Austria (preferably in boxcars?), and Reid thinks that’s a pretty sweet idea:
Iran’s pres strikes again Says “move Israel to Europe” … “You believe the Jews were oppressed, why should the Palestinian Muslims have to pay the price? You oppressed them, so give a part of Europe to the Zionist regime so they can establish any government they want. We would support it. So, Germany and Austria, come and give one, two or any number of your provinces to the Zionist regime so they can create a country there… and the problem will be solved at its root.” I hate to admit that Mr. Amadinejad has a point.
I’m old enough to remember when the media opposed eliminationist rhetoric.
Hey, CNN hired 9/11 Truther Van Jones.
Welcome to the media’s New Normal.
Reid said a hacker wrote this.
She lied:
Keeping it real … most straight men feel exactly the same way, and would have the exact same reaction to the idea of stripping naked in a sweaty locker room in close quarters with a gay teammate. Most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing… Most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch “Broke Back Mountain.” (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.) Does that make me homophobic? Probably. And I’m not exactly proud of it. But part of the intrinsic nature of “Straightness” is that the idea of homosexual sex is … well … gross … even if you think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals. For the record I’m sure gay people think straight sex is gross, too, it’s the that the nature of political correctness is that gay people are allowed to say straight sex is gross but the reverse is considered to be patently homophobic.
Hoping to destroy then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s political career, Reid repeatedly and falsely outed him as a homosexual, even after he married a woman.
Before they came out as gay, Reid also outed singer Clay Aiken and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, whom she mocked as “the gayest thing on TV” because she had it “on good authority that Cooper is totally gay.”
“Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie. Stop pretending, brother It’s okay that you don’t go for the ladies.”
“When a gay politician gets married, it usually indicates that he is highly ambitious, and desires to put himself in a position to move up the power ladder.”
“I can just see poor Charlie on the honeymoon, ogling the male waiters and thinking to himself, ‘god, do I actually have to see her naked…?’”
“Miss Charlie … would immediately start planning the state funeral down to the last flamingo-shaped napkin and get his decorator to the West Wing faster than you can say ‘George Takei!’”
Here is Reid trafficking in the worst kind of stereotypes:
And then there are the concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral… Ditto with gay rights groups that seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay.
—
It should be noted that Reid wrote numbers 2-9 on her now-defunct blog a decade or so ago. Nonetheless, during this time, she was not some young, immature college student enjoying the freedom of self-publishing and looking to build an audience through provocation; Reid was in her mid-to-late thirties, and during the latter part of this time, she co-hosted a morning radio show and wrote a political column for the Miami Herald.
But the lying — Reid and NBC News spreading the phony conspiracy theory that she had been hacked and even getting the FBI involved — that happened just a couple of months ago.
Nevertheless, Reid fits right in at a NBC that also employs homophobe Alec Baldwin, rape-denier Andrea Mitchell, abuse-enabler Mika Brzezinski, serial liar Brian Williams, accused stalker/groper Mike Tirico, and accused harassers Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | OpenWebText2 |
Zara Noor Abbas, daughter of Asma Abbas and niece of Bushra Ansari, who needs no introduction, is considered as one of the most promising actors of the current era. She started her career three years ago when she debuted in Fahim Burneys drama serial “Dharkan” but rose to fame after working in Hum TV drama ” Khamoshi” alongside singer Bilal Khan. Soon after, she married her fellow actor Asad Siddiqui, nephew of superstar Adnan Siddiqui. In 2019, Zara appeared in commercially successful films “Chalawa” and “Parey Hut Love”.Zara Noor Abbas, The Ehd e Wafa star is quite active on her social media accounts and recently shared the first teaser of her new drama serial “Zebaish”. Talking about her experience in the serial she quoted:A project close to my heart. It was shot at a very rough time of my life. This serial will always remain exceptionally special to me and it is a treat to my fans for their constant love and support.
Zara Noor Abbas in poster of Zebaish
Zara Noor Abbas will be sharing screen space beside her husband Asad Siddiqui, who is also excited about this upcoming project. Asad Siddiqui shared the picture, showing gratitude to the team, on and off camera from which he has learned a lot.“A project to keep in mind with all the celebrated artists and especially the people of the camera. So much to learn during the entire procedure. Lots of prayers to the team”.
Written by the maestro Bushra Ansari, directed by Iqbal Hussain, the airing date of the serial is yet to be revealed. The teaser looks promising, depicting the story of a clash between fame and fortune. | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Andrea
jsyn
this episode was fabulous, definitely making it into my list of fav RM episodes because of jackie chan and siwon. anyway that aside, does anyone know why they spilt the asia vietnam race episodes into alternate episodes and aired this one in the middle??? i know they sometimes split episodes but its usually consecutive, not alternated. just curious!!
tania
woah!! it's JACKIE CHAN!! DAEBAK!! he is playfull and warm hearted, makes me love him more :) all the members adore him so much, specially Haroro, I can see the sparkling in his eyes every time he look at Jackie, haha..
iloveMC
junebug
i love this episode, the only thing i didn't like was when jackie told kookie "you need this (pointed his head), you don't need this (pointed at his bicep). i dont know if it was just an innocent comment but it also sounded like jackie telling off kookie. well if he really knew running man he should know that kookie have the brawns and the brains as well.
Cinnamaroll
I believe he just did that cause Jong Kook was flexing his muscles as a way to show that he was a better option for his team. I think it was more a bit of wisdom, not an insult. If anything he's the best for picking Ji Hyo as a teammate when no other Korean guests ever pick her. You could see the real shock and joy she had on her face. She look like she had already resolved to not be picked, as usual. I was very happy for her.
assholes
HEY JUNEBUG ! achh! be gone! you small minded people! what jackie said is true. he can said whatever he want. it's depend on each person to accept it. jong kook is famous for his bulky muscles n his strong power. it's not like when jackie said that, he means that jong kook is an idiot. it's you that have a narrow mainded ugly brain that only think like that. shame on YOU!
TIMA
my first reaction when i saw jackie chan was DEABAK !!!!! i don't know why some comment here are not so enthousiastic about him come on guys it's JACKIE CHAN who doesn't know him and who doesn't love him in every movie !! when kwang soo climbed the wall to steal the blue team's masks i get imagining jackie chan jumping on poles and hanging on ropes and climbing faster than him to push him down
lola
SPOILER_ALERT
aussie
it seems like the runningman team expect JC to do some amazing action but he ended up doing just so-so :D anyway, i like him more after watch this. he's so playful, kind and funny. great memories with JC :)
Darkphoenix
He speaks korean because he had been working with a lot of korean actors before. Also he is working with a famous korean actor ( i forgot his name but he has been in a lot of dramas before) in the movie that he is promoting in this episode.
seira
Rmfan
seoGa-in
jackie has someone translating for him through his ear piece :) He's good at korean but sometimes it can be hard to understand when they talk too fast and some words sound the same, i have the same problem and im korean!! lol jackie oppa fighting! :D
Colonel-
Menia
I really don't get how they all say that Kwangsoo is so old.... he does not llok old at all. Well... he is awkwad looking (lol, but in a cute way :p) but that's it. I would have totally guessed his age at mid twenties.
jove
Cinnamaroll
I thought it would be obvious to people that it's just another running joke they have. If people recall on that episode when the soccer player had to take over being the MC when Jae Suk had to go back to Korea, he told him to make sure to Kwang Soo because he likes that. I think being bullied helps him with his character, even though a few of them can go a little to far at times imo.
c3485
JC-FAN4LIFE
i always remember being a young kid and a teacher asked me, "Who is your favourite hero", and i'd say "Jackie chan", then the teacher would say "who's that", Then i said "You must be stupid to not know who Jackie Chan is" ......getting 3 days detention for calling a teacher stupid for not knowing who jackie chan is, was totally worth it, even my Mom & Dad gave me a thumbs up lol :)
sassygirl989
durrr
plus if you look at the previous episodes there were comments made before yours.. also if you were the only one to know about running man i doubt the ratings would be good enough for it to last this many episodes lol | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
Survey of London: Volume 19, the Parish of St Pancras Part 2: Old St Pancras and Kentish Town
Chester Place XXXIVCHESTER PLACE Behind Cumberland Place and Chester Terrace runs a sloping roadway with an attractive terrace wall and cast-iron railings with lamp-overthrows adjoining Cumberland Place, and lined | tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | Pile-CC |
444 N.E.2d 332 (1983)
Christopher DEWEES, Petitioner-Appellant,
v.
STATE of Indiana, Respondent-Appellee.
No. 1-782A192.
Court of Appeals of Indiana, First District.
January 25, 1983.
Rehearing Denied March 3, 1983.
Susan K. Carpenter, Public Defender of Indiana, Paul Levy, Deputy Public Defender, Indianapolis, for petitioner-appellant.
Linley E. Pearson, Atty. Gen., Kathleen Ransom Radford, Deputy Atty. Gen., Indianapolis, for respondent-appellee.
NEAL, Judge.
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Defendant-appellant Christopher Dewees (Dewees) appeals the denial of his motion for presentence jail credit.
We affirm.
STATEMENT OF THE FACTS
Dewees was arrested by Henry County authorities and confined to jail on a theft charge on August 12, 1981. An information was filed on August 18, 1981. Dewees made bond on September 1, 1981, and remained free pursuant to the bond until September 3, 1981, when he was rearrested by Henry County authorities on new, unrelated theft and burglary charges. The bond under the earlier charge was never withdrawn, and Dewees remained in the Henry County jail until December 30, 1981, when, upon his plea of guilty pursuant to a written plea bargain, he was given a four-year executed sentence for the earlier theft charge. The later, unrelated burglary and theft charges were dismissed pursuant to the same plea bargain. The trial court credited Dewees with 21 days presentence jail time (apparently from August 12 to September 1).
ISSUE
The sole issue on appeal is whether Dewees is entitled to presentence jail credit against his sentence for theft under the earlier charge, in which he was bonded out, *333 for the time spent in jail because of his rearrest on the later charges, which were dismissed according to the plea bargain disposing of both cases.
DISCUSSION AND DECISION
This particular issue is one of first impression. The applicable statutes, enacted in 1976 and amended in 1977, are Ind. Code 35-50-6-4(a) and 35-50-6-3(a):
"XX-XX-X-X(a) Credit time assignments
... (a) A person imprisoned for a crime or imprisoned awaiting trial or sentencing is initially assigned to Class I."
"XX-XX-X-X(a) Credit time classes
... (a) A person assigned to Class I earns one (1) day of credit time for each day he is imprisoned for a crime or confined awaiting trial or sentencing."
The predecessor of these statutes was Ind. Code 35-8-2.5-1 (1976, Repealed) which provided that credit be given for days of presentence confinement,
"... as a result of the criminal charge for which sentence is imposed or as a result of the conduct on which such charge is based."
Ind. Code 35-8-2.5-2 (1976, Repealed) provided in substance that if the sentences ran concurrently, the credit would be applied to each sentence, and if the sentences ran consecutively the credit would be applied to the aggregate term of the sentences.
Franks v. State, (1975) 262 Ind. 649, 323 N.E.2d 221, decided under the old statute, held that when a defendant is awaiting two trials on different crimes during the same period and is convicted and sentenced separately but concurrently, he is entitled to presentence credit on each sentence. Brown v. State, (1975) 262 Ind. 629, 322 N.E.2d 708, discussed the constitutional and philosophical underpinnings for the old statute. The Supreme Court noted that the statute requiring credit for all presentence confinement attributable to the same offense, in addition to implementing Fifth Amendment double jeopardy protection,
"... responds to potential equal protection problems which would arise if presentence confinement were the result of the inability of a criminal defendant to post bail and thereby secure his release pending trial, resulting in different periods of total confinement being served by two prisoners who had been convicted of the same offense, solely because one had the money to post bail and the other did not. Law and procedures which discriminate against indigent defendants are inconsistent with the promise of equal treatment under law.
* * * * * *
... The law confines the use of pre-trial detention to only one end: namely, that the criminal defendant be present for trial. This limitation is implicit in the concept of bail. Art. 1, § 17, Indiana Constitution." (Citations omitted.)
Id. at 712, 322 N.E.2d 708. Owen v. State, (1979) Ind., 396 N.E.2d 376, followed the reasoning of Franks. Cooley v. State, (1977) 172 Ind. App. 199, 360 N.E.2d 29, held that the old statute applied only to time spent in confinement "as a result of the criminal charge for which sentence is imposed or as a result of the conduct on which such charge is based," and held that time spent on a different office in Illinois could not be so applied to an Indiana sentence. See also, Burnett v. State, (1982) Ind. App., 439 N.E.2d 174; Woodson v. State, (1978) Ind. App., 383 N.E.2d 1096.
In Dolan v. State, (1981) Ind. App., 420 N.E.2d 1364, Judge Staton made an exhaustive analysis of the above cases and the change in the statute. The Dolan court held at 1372 that Owen and Franks established the rule that,
"... a defendant is to be granted presentence time served credit for the time spent imprisoned from the date of arrest for a charge to the date of sentencing for that charge."
Dolan concluded that the new provisions, Ind. Code 35-50-6-4(a) and 3(a) merely continued the rule of Owen and Franks. The Dolan court stated that the omission of the "result of" phraseology found in the repealed provision worked no change.
*334 "The Legislature's omission of the `result of' phraseology creates a second problem. Seemingly, IC XX-XX-X-X has the less restrictive prerequisite for presentence credit. The defendant is credited for time `confined awaiting trial or sentencing.' One possible interpretation of this statute would allow a defendant convicted and sentenced for one offense credit toward that one sentence for time spent `awaiting trial or sentencing' for any offense. Such an interpretation and application of this legislation would be unreasonable and clearly violate the intent of the Legislature. This we will not do. See, Pryor v. State (1973), 260 Ind. 408, 296 N.E.2d 125; Marks v. State (1942), 220 Ind. 9, 40 N.E.2d 108; State v. Moles (1975), 166 Ind. App. 632, 337 N.E.2d 543.
Although IC XX-XX-X-X states a defendant is allowed credit for time `confined awaiting trial or sentencing,' we conclude the Legislature clearly intended the credit to apply only to the sentence for the offense for which the presentence time was served. Any other result would allow credit time for time served on wholly unrelated offenses. Under the criminal justice system, once convicted, the defendant must serve the sentence imposed for the offense committed. Credit time allowed by legislative grace toward a specific sentence clearly must be for time served for the offense for which that specific sentence was imposed.
Thus we offer the following guidelines for determining a defendant's presentence time served credit. The defendant establishes credit when his confinement prior to sentencing results from the offense for which the sentence is imposed. Where a defendant is confined during the same time period for multiple offenses and the offenses are tried separately, the defendant is entitled to a `full credit' for each offense for which he is sentenced. Each `full credit' is determined by the number of days the defendant spent in confinement for the offense for which the defendant is sentenced up to the date of sentencing for that offense. Ordinarily, the presentence time served credit whether the defendant is held on one or multiple offenses is determined by the same method. The credit will be the number of days the defendant spent in confinement from the date of arrest for the offense to the date of sentencing for that same offense."
Id. at 1373. Under the new statute the credit is imposed against the aggregate sentences where consecutive sentences are imposed, and not against each individual sentence. Simms v. State, (1981) Ind. App., 421 N.E.2d 698. Where a defendant is in jail on one charge and a second charge is filed, credit on the second charge begins to accrue at the date of the arrest and not the date of filing. Dolan, supra.
Here, Dewees was clearly not held more than 21 days on the charge for which he was sentenced. He is not entitled to any credit which may have accrued on a separate charge. The rule and the statute are based on the constitutional guarantees involving double jeopardy and equal protection. The end result is that a defendant, because of time spent in jail awaiting trial, will not serve more time than the statutory penalty for the offense, and will not serve more time than a defendant who has the good fortune to have bail money. However, if one defendant has committed other, different, and additional crimes and another has not, the equal protection considerations are not present. Likewise, if a defendant who has committed additional crimes receives additional penalties, double jeopardy considerations are not present.
For the above reasons, this cause is affirmed.
Affirmed.
ROBERTSON, P.J., and RATLIFF, J., concur.
| tomekkorbak/pile-curse-small | FreeLaw |
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