As the war droned on, my wife’s Saigon university finally paid her salary after we threatened a lawsuit, paying her all at once at the end of the school year in so many packets of devalued piasters that we had to carry it away in two suitcases, making our motorcycle trip back to our apartment…
We moved out here only five months ago, and I remain haunted by the feeling that the whole process was in some way too easy. Thirty-plus years brushed away, as if they had not been the key years of our family life. All that time had been given, had befallen us. The transition itself seemed…
Since I was a child, I’ve had nightmares of annihilation. Though they disappeared in my twenties, they resurfaced here and there in my thirties, and in my forties, they became frequent. Sometimes they were tied to world events; other times to stresses at work, in life. During that very long year, they involved being trapped…
So few souls …that’s what they called the serfsin 19th century Russia in all those booksyou saved but that in the end couldn’t save you back.I would have thought a better turnout,more like the Second Comingbut without the judgement, just the music:“the wind that sweeps the streets of heaven.”Among believers, and I’m not one,there’s disagreement…
You will never finish your lifethe way you intended.The bed you will never get up fromis not the one you wanted,by a lake or river’s edgewhere the light toucheseach bird awakeexcept the onethat kept watch all night.
It is like a long tunnel, the strange, shallow light of the hospital hallwayshining against all the stainless steel they always put around those kindsof places. The steel shines a dark, tunnelish light. A feeling of objectivitythey want to impart to you. Like, your baby has died. Objectively. I readonce that they change a person…
Remember the snowed-in highway, the saloon dressed up like a chalet, the auroral sunset falling minute by minute on that lonely desert town? And him watching me as I played dead in the snow— like a salt flat, the snow outside so bright even at dusk and midnight— until I opened my eyes and saw…
I hurt, my mother said over and over, and powerless to end her misery, we hurt in kind and never quite enough. I am sorry, I said. I say it still. I apologize for experience, aka the world, who could not be here today and sends her condolences. I am sorry, I say from a…
I am making a doll in the likeness of all that I am not. I know, I know. It is not possible. Wherever I go, I am where I was, as I am now, and everywhere I am not yet. One day I will join a mother, a father, the doll that was a cat…
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